U.S.: Laura Bush on the deadly crash from her teenage days
- 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. … 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.
- Former First Lady Laura Bush • Regarding the deadly crash which happened when she was 17 and living in Midland, Tx. She wrote about it in her new book, “Spoken From the Heart.” The 1963 crash, which happened when she and a friend were rushing to a drive-in theater, took the life of a star athlete at her school, Mike Douglas. Douglas was driving a Corvair, the car her husband’s future third-party presidential opponent, Ralph Nader, made the subject of “Unsafe at Any Speed.” Bush also notes that many things made the intersection a fairly unsafe one – including a small stop sign, which Bush ran, and a pitch-black road with a dangerous intersection. Still though, harrowing experience for the First Lady to go through, and probably one that had a deep effect on the rest of her life. source