14 DAY TRIAL // Former First Lady Laura Bush is officially an author: her memoirs, “Spoken from the Heart” only come out next month, but excerpts from the book have already made their way online. As Times Online can confirm, they promise to make of the book a very entertaining read, with details of Prince Charles’ visit and his hidden flask of alcohol, and how she and Bush were poisoned on a trip to Germany.
Even if that part about Prince Charles is true, perhaps Mrs. Bush should have kept the story to herself, word in the blogosphere has it. According to the former First Lady, on a visit to Washington, both the Prince and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, came well equipped with a flask he kept hidden in his coat. This literally allowed them to ask for nothing but glasses the moment they set foot inside, because they had brought the drink with them.
“During the account of her rise from an oil town in Texas to the world stage, Mrs. Bush describes her unexpected encounters with global leaders and heads of state. Her meeting with the Prince and Duchess came in November 2005. ‘When Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, came to visit us,’ she wrote, ‘they requested glasses of ice before we began a long receiving line. The staff dutifully produced them, and the Prince removed a flask from his pocket and added to each a small splash of what I presume was straight gin, so that they might be fortified before the hour of shaking hands’,” Times writes, citing Mrs. Bush herself.
In the same book, she also recalls a visit to Germany of a while back, when both she and her husband fell ill from what could have very well been an attempt to poison them. “Mrs. Bush also suggested that the President and several members of staff might have been poisoned during a visit to the G8 summit in Germany in 2007. She said that Mr. Bush was confined to his bed for part of the trip and many aides were incapacitated, leading the Secret Service to investigate. Doctors eventually concluded that they had contracted a virus, but Mrs. Bush remained skeptical: ‘We never learnt if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one’,” the same publication says.
As noted above, “Spoken from the Heart” comes out next month but Mr. Bush is not to be outdone in this regard either, for he too has a book coming out a few months later. In her memoirs, Laura Bush also reveals details of her husband’s presidential campaign, what it felt like to be named the most fascinating person of 2002, and takes a shot at all those who had once made a habit of calling her husband names for what has come to be known as “Bushisms.”