First Lady’s First 100 Days--She’s Not Bushed Yet

Just days after First Lady Barbara Bush moved into the White House, she summoned her staff to the living quarters to lay out a simple plan of action. “I want to do something every single day,” an aide says she told them. “Let’s try to do some good every day--it’s time to get serious.”

Barbara Bush might have exceeded her own goal were it not for an unexpected--and welcome-- hitch: The volume of mail generated from each of her 40 solo events was so overwhelming, she has said, that at times she felt forced to slow down in order to catch up.

In the past 100 days, the First Lady has received 35,000 pieces of mail.

If judgments on George Bush’s first 100 days are tentative, still reflecting a wait-and-see attitude, appraisals of the other Bush in the White House are hardly reserved. Barbara Bush seems to have swept into the nation’s collective consciousness like a “breath of fresh air,” a do-gooder, a down-home mama and the professional grandmother she just happens to be.

“Well, I think I’m a fraud,” she jokes in a telephone interview. “I’ve always been the same!”

In her first 100 days, she dished out food at a homeless shelter, held the hand of a little boy who said no white lady had ever touched him before, read to minority toddlers at the Library of Congress, kissed an AIDS baby and hugged an AIDS-infected adult, sent for drug czar Bill Bennett so she could offer to help and opened her home to hundreds of disadvantaged people who would underscore her special concerns.

Loved Every Minute of It

“It’s been wonderful,” she says. “You can’t believe--I have really loved every minute of it. Of course, I have always been one to think that you should love your life.”

And for a woman who never much cottoned to the spotlight, her aides says she has become particularly skilled at directing the glow to suit her own objectives.

“I think it has been an opportunity,” Mrs. Bush says, adding that she doesn’t make a “calculated effort to put the focus on anything. I don’t know that those things are going to generate attention. (But) I very carefully pick things that need help, and if it helps--that’s wonderful for me. I’m not there for self-aggrandizement. I’m there because they need help.”

“And don’t forget,” Mrs. Bush adds, “I don’t fool around in the U.S. government. I leave that to other people. This is the way I can help.”

Her press secretary, Anna Perez, says: “What she’s done here is figure out how to make lemonade from lemons.”

During the phone interview, the First Lady dismisses the liabilities of her new job. She says she hasn’t felt that her spontaneity has been stifled but conceded that it still was a bit early to judge. “I know it will come,” she says with a chuckle.

A Good Idea

She was asked if she was unsettled by the recent discussion at the White House (attended by the Bushes and Vice President Dan Quayle) that explored a transfer of power in the event her husband is disabled.

She says she was not.

“We thought it was a very good idea” to have the meeting, she says. “I think it made others uncomfortable. Let me put it this way: I would (have been) very uncomfortable if the Reagans had that meeting with me attending. You don’t want to think about it--but it’s very important to know the ground rules. You ought to talk about it.”

While few of any political stripe are willing to make on-the-record comparisons between them, the contrast between the White House styles of Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan are apparent almost daily. During Nancy Reagan’s first months in the White House, she was tagged as a conspicuous consumer who was more interested in $200,000 china and designer dresses than in social causes. Whether she attended a ladies’ tea or an anti-drug event, people often seemed focused on Mrs. Reagan’s physical appearance, from her cosmetics to her Adolfos.

By contrast, when Barbara Bush shows up at any number of events, men and women can be overheard applauding her personality.

A Breath of Fresh Air

“She’s the big hit of the Bush Administration,” says Larry Sabato, a political analyst and professor at the University of Virginia. “For one, Democrats see her as a breath of fresh air. . . . She’s less star-struck, more sincere--like Betty Ford in some ways. She doesn’t talk about herself personally--but she has the same directness. At some point in time, she may stay much more popular than (the President).”

“She really enhances him,” says Paul Costello, who worked for First Lady Rosalynn Carter in the White House, and last year was press aide for Kitty Dukakis, wife of the unsuccessful Massachusetts Democratic presidential candidate.

Phyllis Coelho, wife of House Majority Whip Tony Coelho (D-Calif.), says: “If you close your eyes and listen to her you’d almost think she was a Democrat. You just know she cares about the little people.”

If life seems satisfying for the First Lady these days, sources close to her say it hasn’t all been a rose garden. For one, her recently discovered thyroid condition has taken its toll. While she has insisted that she “never felt better,” she has allowed that it may be time for her to start pacing herself.

She recently told a group of reporters: “I’m lucky if I get through the day. I don’t mean I’m overextended. But I’m 63 years old and I need to be babied a bit.”

In the interview, she elaborates: “Nobody asks me to do all these things--I do them because I want to. But I have over-scheduled myself. I’m not going to go into retirement. I’m just not going to try to do 12 events in one day. That’s silly.”

Unrelenting Press Attention

Also, by her own admission, she has had to adjust to unrelenting press attention to her and her family, as well as the more structured aspects of her new life.

To her dismay, for example, the White House dispatched an advance aide to prepare for her various stops in Asia last February. When Mrs. Bush was told by an aide that an aide was en route to Asia, she had the person intercepted in Hawaii and brought back to Washington.

According to press reports, the unadvanced trip invited chaos. Reporters complained about not being properly directed, and at one celebrated stop, a Chinese security guard slammed the White House photographer against a wall as she tried to photograph Mrs. Bush.

Still, when questioned recently by reporters about whether her views on advance work had changed, she insisted they had not. “She does have this idea that she can do things the way she did them before,” a senior White House official says, “and it just can’t be.”

For the first 100 days, anyway, the First Lady has another view. “I do exactly what I want to do,” Mrs. Bush says.