[Read the article in the Washington Post]

The first time I met Barbara Bush, I was wearing her bathing suit. I was terrified. She was gracious.

It was June 1993, and George H.W. Bush had invited several speechwriters to Kennebunkport, Maine, to work on a few post-presidential addresses. As noon approached, the president announced that we’d “go for a dip” in the icy Maine surf. Next thing I knew, he was handing me a bathing suit—a skirted one-piece—that belonged to his wife and announcing I had no excuse.

As we headed to the pool—the presidential plan had us stopping there to “get used to the water”—I spied the former first lady with several of her Texas friends. “Ladies!” called out the president. “You know my speechwriters, don’t you?” Not wanting her to think I had rifled through her closet and helped myself, I said, “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Bush. I hope you don’t mind that your husband loaned me your bathing suit.”

I gulped, waiting for a legendary Barbara Bush takedown. 

There was none. She simply laughed and said, “I’m so glad we had a suit for you—have fun!” And that was one of the first of many lessons I was to learn from Mrs. Bush: If you want to enjoy life, you’ve got to be able to roll with it. She always made room for all the long-lost friends, the unexpected dinner guests, the staffers needing bathing suits.

There was one lost soul she took in years ago, a near-deaf orphaned young man named Don Rhodes who volunteered for her husband’s 1964 Senate campaign. The Bushes kept him on their personal payroll until his death in his 70s; they were as generous to Don as they were quiet about it. Not many people knew about Don, to the point that if folks told me they were “very good friends” of the Bushes, I’d reply, “Oh, then you must know Don Rhodes?” If the answer was no, that told me all I needed to know.

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