Laura Bush's book comes out pretty soon. She, too, has had her stunned moments when just can't seem to own up to having done something godawful. When she also reveals that she and George think they were (intentionally) poisoned at a G-8 meeting (neither their doctors nor the Secret Service went along with it), you have to wonder how grown up and sane Laura (not to mention George) really is.
Wasn't she supposed to be the normal one?
Then there's that car crash when she was 17. She killed one of her classmates, then slept through the funeral having said nothing to the kid's parents, not even when she heard"sobs on the other side of that thin emergency room curtain." Apologies -- empathy! -- are so not done in the Bush circle.
On a November night in 1963, Ms. Bush and a girlfriend were hurrying to a drive-in theater when Ms. Bush, at the wheel of her father’s Chevy Impala, ran a stop sign on a small road and smashed into a car being driven by Mike Douglas, a star athlete and popular student at her school.
“In those awful seconds, the car door must have been flung open by the impact and my body rose in the air until gravity took over and I was pulled, hard and fast, back to earth,” she says. “The whole time,” she adds later, “I was praying that the person in the other car was alive. In my mind, I was calling ‘Please, God. Please, God. Please, God,’ over and over and over again.”
Ms. Bush concedes that she and her friend were chatting when she ran the stop sign. But she also suggests a host of factors beyond her control played a role — the pitch-black road, an unusually dangerous intersection, the small size of the stop sign, and the car the victim was driving.
“It was sporty and sleek, and it was also the car that Ralph Nader made famous in his book Unsafe at Any Speed,” she states. “He claimed the car was unstable and prone to rollover accidents. A few years later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration went so far as to investigate the Corvair’s handling, but it didn’t reach the same grim conclusions. I was driving my dad’s much larger and heavier Chevy Impala. But none of that would ever ease the night of November 6. Not for me, and never for the Douglases.”
Ms. Bush reveals that she was wracked by guilt for years after the crash, especially after not attending the funeral and for not reaching out to the parents of the dead teenager. Her parents did not want her to show up at the funeral, she states, and she ended up sleeping through it. ...NYT
