On Sept. 11, 2001, President George Bush was reading “The Pet Goat” to a class of second-graders at Florida’s Emma E. Booker Elementary School when his White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card approached and whispered to him that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Not surprisingly for those who knew him, Bush was in the school that morning to promote reading and phonics.
Within this president, whom some mocked as a cowboy, was a man who loved reading. His wife Laura later wrote that even in their early years of marriage, Bush read every night in bed. A history major at Yale, he retained a particular interest in that subject throughout his two-term presidency.
