Laura Bush Says She, Former Pres. George W. Bush May Have Been Poisoned
Former First Lady Laura Bush is suggesting she, her husband, and several aides were poisoned during a 2007 visit to Germany for the G8 summit -- one of several new details in the former first lady's forthcoming memoir, "Spoken from the Heart."
Due to be released May 4 but acquired early by The New York Times, Mrs. Bush says she and former President George W. Bush became mysteriously sick on the Germany trip to such a degree that the president became bedridden. According to Mrs. Bush, doctors and the Secret Service investigated the possibility that a poisoning had occurred but were unable to make a definitive conclusion.
News reports filed during the event show that the White House did disclose that Bush missed a series of morning sessions at the summit because he had contracted an apparent virus, but White House officials did not provide further details at the time.
"We never learned if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one," Mrs. Bush writes in the new book, according to the New York Times excerpts.
The memoir also covers Mrs. Bush's involvement in a tragic 1963 car collision in Midland, Texas, that killed a schoolmate. The spotty details surrounding the accident became fodder for Bush's opponents during his first run for the White House, and Mrs. Bush rarely addressed the matter in public.
But Mrs. Bush covers the accident extensively in the new memoir, revealing that it occurred after she ran a stop sign in a rush to a drive-in theater. She was 17 years old when her car collided with that of Mike Douglas, who was pronounced dead when he arrived at a hospital.
"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 writes, according to the Times.
"The whole time ... 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," Bush also writes.
According to The New York Times, Mrs. Bush writes that she and her friends were talking when she ran the stop sign, but she also says the intersection was highly dangerous, the road was dark and the stop sign was small.
Bush says she was guilt-ridden and lost her faith for "many, many years."
"It was the first time that I had prayed to God for something, begged him for something, not the simple childhood wishing on a star but humbly begging for another human life. And it was as if no one heard. My begging, to my seventeen-year-old mind, had made no difference. The only answer was the sound of Mrs. Douglas's sobs on the other side of that thin emergency room curtain."
Mrs. Bush also takes aim at some of the former president's most vocal congressional critics, specifically Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Reid once called Bush a "loser," while Pelosi said he was an "incompetent leader."
"The comments were uncalled for and graceless," Bush writes. "While a president's political opponents, as well as his supporters, are entitled to make what they see as legitimate criticisms, and while our national debates should be spirited, these particular worlds revealed the petty and parochial nature of some who serve in Congress."
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Sources: ABC News, AP, CNN, Google Maps
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