Published: January 20, 2005

Laura Bush and her husband at "Celebration of Freedom ," a pre-inaugural event Wednesday in Washington.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 - She sits on a red damask settee in the White House Map Room, where Franklin D. Roosevelt plotted the Allied victory in World War II, stroking Miss Beazley, her new Scottie puppy, a tiny feminine form of Roosevelt's beloved Fala. Her gray pinstriped pantsuit is soft and perfectly put together, and so is she.


But even a brief visit with Laura Bush as she anticipates the second inauguration of the man she married on the promise she would never have to make a political speech reveals some of the complexity that ripples just beneath her surface calm.

The book on her night table these days? The "really, really wonderful" "Essays of E. B. White," that gentle liberal who wrote at the height of Eisenhower era conformity that "democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home."

Her favorite topic of campaign conversation with her mother-in-law last year? "We loved to complain about various media." Institutions or individuals? "All."

Does she keep a diary? "No, it's a huge mistake," because "it's very hard even to reconstruct the most dramatic moments." Did someone advise her against keeping a personal journal on legal grounds? Mrs. Bush fixed her questioner with a level gaze and the barest wisp of a smile and said, "I think I could write a diary that would not be subpoenaed."

Doubtless so. In her own careful way, she began revealing more of herself on the campaign trail last year, with results that only seemed to help her and President Bush. She said she did not find attacks on Senator John Kerry's record in Vietnam particularly unfair, dismissed questions about her husband's National Guard record as "obviously political" and let it be known that Karl Rove's role as a political guru was "definitely overstated."

In a 45-minute interview with reporters in Washington the other day, she continued the trend, allowing that she hates it when people suggest that her husband "doesn't like to read or, you know, whatever." She said the 41st president of the United States "is the sweetest man you've ever known" and a "wonderful grandfather to the girls," while his wife is a "terrific mother-in-law" but "more intimidating, maybe."

Mrs. Bush's twin daughters are fashion forward, and she has approved their inaugural dresses, perhaps mindful of Chelsea Clinton's unveiling midparade on Pennsylvania Avenue of a miniskirt eight years ago, a moment that Mrs. Bush called a "wardrobe malfunction."

And she confessed that on the last day of the fall campaign her daughter Jenna announced that she and her sister, Barbara, would be joining their parents in an Iowa town, Sioux City, which Jenna pronounced "Sigh-yocks City."

"Don't put that in!" Mrs. Bush said quickly, as her listeners exploded in laughter. "It was so funny. She was totally humiliated."

Mrs. Bush is not afraid to let her children - or for that matter her husband - make their own mistakes. It is an approach she seems to take with the public and press, which has sometimes caricatured her as too pretty, too perfect, too plastic to be true. So is she more complicated, interesting, opinionated than she is inclined to let the world see?

"That's true," she said, then adding, "No, I'm only kidding." I am reserved. I really am a reserved person. And I like privacy. I'm an only child, and I'm used to a more solitary life. Not that I don't have a whole lot of friends. Of course I do.

"And I think one reason I have so many friends, or made so many friends from first grade on, is because I was an only child, and I wanted to have friends that are like sisters to me, which I do. But I think that's really it. More than that I'm not trying to let people get to know me or whatever."

Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who has written several books about first ladies, predicted that over the next four years Mrs. Bush would be inclined to open up even more, as many predecessors did.

"Once the second election has been won, a more authentic vision of a first lady tends to emerge," Mr. Anthony said. "She can also walk a little easier, a little less on eggshells, without that constantly looming fear that she'll inadvertently say or do something that the news media will turn into a controversy that adversely affects the administration.

"During Eisenhower's second term, the seemingly traditional wife, Mamie, made no effort to hide the control she had over the president's schedule and life. And while it was not done to affect politics but to preserve his health, it had a political effect. According to then Vice President Nixon, it was she who prevented Ike from campaigning for him in 1960, a factor in his razor-thin loss."

Mrs. Bush said she intended to continue her efforts to promote books and reading; to focus on cardiac health, especially for women; and to be involved in programs to support adolescent boys, because schools and parents have placed special emphasis on the developmental needs of girls in the last three decades.

"We have this idea, this stereotype, that boys don't need the same nurturing that girls do, that boys can take care of themselves," she said. "And, of course, we all know that's not true, that boys need a lot of attention.

"Boys get in trouble more. They're adjudicated more. Fewer boys are going to college than girls. Boys drop out of school at a higher rate. Boys father children and aren't fathers - don't know how to be fathers."

Mrs. Bush has confounded stereotypes. "Not too many Republican wives from West Texas have made a point of reading the complete works of Truman Capote," Mr. Anthony said.

Two years ago, Mrs. Bush sponsored a White House conference on Western writers who are women that featured Edna Ferber, the author of "Giant." Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor at the University of Colorado and the author of a revisionist history of westward settlement, was asked to deliver the keynote address.

"When I started reading 'Giant,' " Professor Limerick recalled, "I thought to myself I am reading this book based on Laura Bush's assignment, and it is really making fun of rich Texans. It's not a little bit making fun. It's really tough.

"At one point, a character says, 'A man makes his money in oil in Texas and next thing you know, he thinks he ought to be governor, and then he thinks he ought to be president.' But when Mrs. Bush gave her opening remarks, it was perfectly clear she knew just what Edna Ferber had thought about Texas."

In the recent interview, Mrs. Bush said, "It took me a while to really realize what podium I had, as Lady Bird Johnson says." She said she did not dwell on what her own legacy might be, may or may not write her memoirs, looked forward to helping plan her husband's presidential library and hoped that she would remember this inauguration better than the whirlwind first. She knows that war and terrorism will pose unexpected challenges and has a greater appreciation of the work and struggles of preceding generations and of the families that preceded hers in the White House.

"But I also have this sense of our country," she said, "the big ship America, that might veer a little bit one way or the other way, but is very stable."