WASHINGTON — This Christmas season, the country has been comforted by the strength of those most saddened by the tragedy of Sept. 11, Laura Bush said.

"All the people that we see on television, the widows, the widowers, the ones who are decorating a Christmas tree by themselves this year for their children, without their spouse, they comfort us," said the first lady. "They give us comfort in our country and strength when we see them."

Appearing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Bush spoke vividly of the aftermath of Sept. 11 and of her thoughts and actions after learning that terrorists had hijacked four jetliners and crashed two into the World Trade Center in New York, one in the Pentagon, and one into the Pennsylvania countryside.

Since then, "all of us have changed," she said. "Our lives have changed. What we expect has changed, and what we think about has changed, and the feeling that we have as Americans of not being vulnerable, you know, has changed."

On that morning, George W. Bush was on a presidential trip to Florida. His wife was scheduled to discuss the administration's education goals with Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H.

When a Secret Service agent told her that a plane had hit one of the twin towers in New York, she thought it was "a strange accident."

"On the drive to Capitol Hill, we heard about the second plane," she said. "So then we knew, of course, it was a terrorist attack."

The education discussion was canceled, but she spent most of that morning with Kennedy and Gregg. It was ironic and somehow comforting, she said, that she was there "since what I remembered as the most traumatic time in my childhood was the assassination of Senator Kennedy's brother when I was a senior in high school, and then to be with him on this most traumatic day for our country."

She talked on the phone to the president and then to their twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, who were at college.

"Then I called my mother, and I acted like I was calling her to reassure her, but the fact is I wanted her to reassure me," she said. "I wanted to hear her voice, and I think that's what happened all over the country, that people called their mothers or their children to talk to them and make sure they were safe and to reassure each other."

That night, the president and first lady were together and guarded by a Secret Service highly focused on security concerns.

"They wanted us to sleep downstairs in the bunker that's built below the White House on a fold-out couch, a hide-a-bed from 1950, I think," said Laura Bush.

But the president flatly refused, declaring that they would sleep upstairs in their own bed.

"We were, of course, exhausted, like everyone in the whole United States was," she recalled. "I went sound asleep. He didn't. He was still awake, I'm sure, worried and thinking about what had happened. But all of a sudden, we hear a Secret Service agent rushing into our room — I might add, breathing heavily, I guess, from running up the stairs, and saying, 'Mr. President, Mr. President, you have to get up, come downstairs.'

"I didn't have my contacts on, I was totally blind, but my husband was leading me down in my fluffy house slippers," she said.

The alarm was the result an unidentified plane flying into vulnerable airspace. However, it was quickly discovered to be a U.S. military jet.

"And we went back up to our own bed," said the first lady.

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She rejected the suggestion by "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert that her husband believes that the mission of responding to and recovering from Sept. 11 are "in an extraordinary way . . . why he was elected."

"That's almost like saying God picks the president, which he doesn't," she said.

She said that Bush is a "good fit" for these troubled times.

"In some ways he knows he has the characteristics that we need, that our country needs. He has a steadiness, a resolve," she said. "But I don't think he feels that it was meant to be."

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