First Lady Calls for Balance Amid Fears

CRAWFORD, Texas — First Lady Laura Bush says Americans are walking a tightrope of staying vigilant against a new terrorist attack while comforting their children during a time of heightened terrorism fears.

Asked whether America has recovered from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she said: “Not really.”

“Our world changed,” Bush said in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We still are always aware of that. The rawness of it and the shock of it is diminished with time.”

She spoke at a time when her husband’s administration has raised the nation’s terror threat level to “high.”

“We have to keep comforting our children, but we also have to be very vigilant as American citizens as we go about our work,” she said.

The first lady recalled a moment of personal anxiety last month when President Bush secretly flew to Baghdad to be with troops on Thanksgiving.

“I was very anxious ... when he first started taking about it,” she said. But by the time he and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice drove from the Bush ranch toward the airport, her fears had subsided. She was convinced that he would not make the trip if it were not safe.

With the president’s parents on the way to the ranch for a holiday meal, Laura Bush called the head of her Secret Service protective detail to ask about her husband’s whereabouts.

The agent told her the president was at the Texas ranch.

“I realized my detail didn’t know that he was” in Iraq, she said.