When I was a little girl, we lived on West Golf Course Road in Midland, Texas, near my mother’s parents, my Pa and Grammee. Midland was a small town where nothing exciting ever happened. The town gossips had to content themselves with scandals involving tumbleweeds and dust tornadoes. But one day when Barbara and I were four years old, something incredible happened—in our own backyard.
Barbara and I were in the house playing hospital with a stuffed bear when out the window we saw a man cut through our backyard. The man was fleeing the police! The cops followed hot on his trail. To escape, the crook jumped over our fence. In the process, he tore his jeans and injured his leg.
The sight of the robber’s blood spattered on our wooden fence remains one of my earliest and, to this day, most vibrant recollections. It’s as clear a memory of something that took place thirty-four years ago can be, vivid to this day because it was by far the most dramatic thing that had ever happened to me (and I was a little girl dreaming of the dramatic!).
Barbara and I ran screaming to find our mother. In both of our memories of the event, at the time of the incident our mom was lounging in the tub. (Like many Baby Boomer parents, she did not helicopter!) She jumped out of the bath, threw on clothes, and called our father at work to tell him to come home immediately.
Soon our father and more police arrived. Having our dad at home, we could once again exhale. If he was around, we felt protected, and we saw by the way the police talked to him that they, too, respected his quiet authority. They even asked him to help them canvass the neighborhood, looking for the criminal. Our dad—the superhero!
To ensure we wouldn’t miss a thing, we stayed close the entire time the police were in our home. One of the policemen, while walking through the doorway out to the stone patio, patted little Barbara on the head and said, “Excuse me, little lady.”
“He said that like you’re a grown-up!” I marveled, envy dripping from my voice.
We remember every detail of that day, but the feeling Barbara and I recall most intensely is that reassurance our father gave us. When he was there, we felt safe.
The downside was that when he wasn’t there, I pined for him. The first time my parents traveled internationally without my sister and me, it was to Gambia; we were about nine years old. Pa and Grammee stayed with us, and for part of the time so did our first grade teacher (who bought us a BarNone and a Slurpee after school, something our mom never did). I was surrounded by loving, responsible adults. It didn’t matter. I lay distraught in my parents’ bed, imagining their deaths by flash flood, rhino stampede, and malaria. I fell asleep clutching a framed photograph of them. (As has already been established, I was slightly dramatic.)
The sense of safety we felt when we were close to our dad carried into our teenage years. Whenever Barbara and I got our hearts broken, he told us we could do better. And, more than anything else, he listened to us talk, asking questions and offering sympathetic insights. His protection was gentle—nothing like the stereotype you see of overprotective Texas fathers standing at the door waiting with a shotgun!
Once when I was fifteen my boyfriend and I were on the phone arguing late into the night. The house was dark. My parents and sister were sleeping. Finally my father, who had woken up and overheard enough of the commotion, walked in and said to me, “It’s time to go to bed.”
“Well, will you tell Blake it’s time to go to bed?” I said in a huff.
I’d said it rhetorically, but my father came over and calmly took the phone out of my hand. Into the receiver he said, “Blake, man, it’s time to go to bed. Don’t call back again tonight. You can talk tomorrow, okay? Good night.”
He hung up the phone, kissed my forehead, and turned out the light.
His intervention was so simple and efficient that as I lay there in the dark, I failed to remember what Blake and I were even fighting about; my father had ended it. I fell soundly asleep.
A couple of months later, when Blake decided at the last minute to disinvite me as his senior prom date, I cried from embarrassment and disappointment, and because, as a sophomore, I now wouldn’t get to wear my beautiful prom dress for who knew how long. “Go ahead and wear the dress now!” my father suggested.
He put on music, and when I emerged from my room in the dress, he danced me around the living room. It didn’t completely cure my teenage despair, but it did feel good to twirl in that dress and to laugh. And in retrospect it was a more memorable night than I was likely to have had at the prom.
IN THE MONTHS after September 11, Barbara and I had that same feeling of safety, knowing our father was leading our country. In public, he sometimes came across as having a bit of a swagger. When he said things like “We won’t let a thug bring this country down,” I was surprised, because at home he never spoke like that. (Our mother later told him she didn’t approve of the word thug, and he stopped using it.)
He was portrayed in public, we knew, as not particularly scholarly. At the 2005 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, he said, “I look forward to these dinners where I’m supposed to be funny . . . intentionally.” But we knew him as an avid reader, especially of history. His favorite books were biographies of other presidents and world leaders. He believed they helped keep him focused on the job at hand. Whenever people said in private conversations, “You’ve had it so tough!” as in the wake of the terror attacks, he offered counterexamples from the past: “What about Lincoln during the war? Look at FDR’s second term. I can’t imagine how it felt to be Washington . . .”
He believed that they had it harder—especially, he said, because he had certain advantages that many great men did not. One was the gift, he said, of being married to my mom, whose preternaturally calm nature gave him strength. He has since reflected that because he knew she was taking such good care of Barbara and me he was able to do his work without worrying about us.
While my father was president, there was a vast difference between our dad, the gentle protector, and the way we saw him depicted on TV. But I understood; it was impossible for strangers to know the dad I knew. In the public eye, you’re a two-dimensional character. Watching a Saturday Night Live parody, I searched for the real man, the one I knew. He wasn’t there. Of course not. No one else was there to witness him comfort me on prom night, or speed home from work in Midland, or accept our librarian mother’s wise counsel on word choice. Barbara and I understood, too, that in the wake of September 11 our father had to project power and decisiveness in a way that made Americans feel safe and that people around the world could understand. That was a terrible and terrifying time, and he did his best to lead us all through it.
IN THE SUMMER of 2002, I was living in D.C., working at a charter school, and I invited some girlfriends from college to Camp David for a visit. My mother was away on a hiking trip. The first evening, we had dinner together with my dad and then watched a movie. My father went to bed, and my friends and I stayed up late talking in our cabin. The next morning, very early, my dad rushed into our cabin. He had been up for hours but we were still asleep.
“Wake up, girls,” he said, adding to me, “Put on your glasses. There’s a plane flying overhead. The Secret Service needs to move us all right now. Quickly now, follow me.”
Instantly alert, we leaped up and followed him.
I couldn’t find my glasses, so he guided me across the way to a bunker under one of the other cabins—just as he had led my mom and their dog Barney, while carrying their cat Willard, following an alarm in the middle of the night on September 11. Now, in 2002, my friends and I sat there in the bunker, shivering in our pajamas, as our father reassured us. “It’s probably just a passenger jet in a no-fly zone,” he said. “Don’t worry.” (It would turn out that his guess was right.)
I nodded, not telling him what was on my mind—that I wasn’t worried because he was next to me.
AT MY GRANDFATHER’S funeral in 2018, my father’s presence soothed me yet again. Sitting in a pew of the National Cathedral, a place with such a storied history, I grew nervous knowing that I needed to walk up the stone steps to read a passage in front of more than 1,500 people, a number of powerful world leaders among them, in addition to all those at home watching on television. I would be speaking from the same pulpit from which my father spoke to the nation just three days after September 11.
On that day, he’d told the country,
We are here in the middle hour of our grief. So many have suffered so great a loss, and today we express our nation’s sorrow. . . .
God’s signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own.
Yet the prayers and private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral, are known and heard and understood. There are prayers that help us last through the day or endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers that give us strength for the journey. And there are prayers that yield our will to a will greater than our own. . . .
In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America because we are freedom’s home and defender. And the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time.
While giving that powerful speech, he did not look at his parents or his wife in the front row. He knew that if he did he would break down—and he believed that the last thing the nation needed in that moment was a sobbing president.
When my father returned to the pew after his speech, he continued to avoid the gaze of his family, but his father reached over and took his hand and held it for a second. My father looked back at his father, and they exchanged a glance of respect and resolve. My grandfather had traded seats with Bill Clinton, breaking with the traditional diplomatic order, so he could sit closer to his son. My Gampy, our father’s gentle protector, was more than an ex-president in that moment; he was a father comforting his son.
I can barely look at photographs of that moment without tearing up.
Now it was my turn to speak at the National Cathedral. I made my way down the aisle to the podium. As I passed the pew where he sat, my father whispered, “Go get ’em, Jen.”
When I walked back up the aisle a few minutes later, having kept my composure even while gently touching my grandfather’s casket, my father reached out and held my hand, just as his father had held his in this same place seventeen years earlier.
And to me that’s what my dad’s calm protection, which he inherited from his father, looks like: a hand holding yours while you cry, a voice telling you it’s time for bed because he can hear the fatigue in your words, a steady hand guiding you to a bunker, saying it will all be okay. When my babies were born, I loved passing them into his strong arms. He held them the way he’d held us—the way, emotionally, he still does. It has been a disappointment to me that the world didn’t always see the side of him that we did, but I’m grateful beyond measure that I do.