RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
MEACHAM: "Mother and son needle each other to the end and in her final days when the 43rd president was visiting Mrs. Bush asked one of her doctors if she'd like to know why George W turned out the way she he had and she announced I smoked and drank while I was pregnant. She was a point of light. In 1989, when many Americans lived in ignorance about hiv/aids, Mrs. Bush went to a home for infected infants and hugged the children there, as well as an adult male patient. The images sent a powerful message, one of compassion, of love, and of acceptance. She believed literacy, a fundamental civil and human right and gave the cause her all. At a televised event commemorating the Constitution, Mrs. Bush met a man named JT Pace, the 63-year-old son of a former share cropper. Mr. Pace, who had only recently become literate, was scheduled to read the Constitution's preamble aloud. Back stage, he was nervous. Mrs. Bush asked if it would help if they read it together on the broadcast. Mr. Pace agreed. Soon the two of them stood on stage reading in unison. As Mr. Pace grew comfortable, Mrs. Bush lowered her voice and lowered it again, and then again, until at last JT Pace was reading entirely on his own. He wept and he read. Supported by Barbara Bush, who stood to his side, now silent. Her work was done when his voice spoke of the unending search for a more perfect union. Jt pace had found his voice, not least because Barbara Bush had lent him her heart. Just last summer on a sunny day on the bush's porch in Maine, talk turned to World War II and that terrible Saturday, September 2nd, 1944, when lieutenant junior gray, George Herbert walker bush were shot down on a bombing raid. Two of his crew mates didn't make it, becoming casualties of war. Lieutenant bush parachuted out of the bomber, plunged into the sea, came up to the surface, flopped onto a life raft and waited, scared and retching. Had young bush been captured by the Japanese, he would have been held captive on an island that was home to horrific war crimes, including cannibalism. Bar, he'd say in later years, I could have been a hors d'oeuvre. In truth, it had been the closest of calls. George, Mrs. Bush said in Maine last July in their great old age, lost in reminisce sense, you must have been saved for a reason. I know there had to be a reason. President Bush sat silently for the briefest of moments, then raised that big left hand and pointed his finger across the table at his wife. You, he said hoarsely, you were the reason."