I’d like to thank HarperCollins for making me a tool of the Bush administration. Last week it fell to me to run a review of Jenna Bush’s book, Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope. It’s not a bad book, 
although I doubt it would be noticed, much less published, were it not for its White House author. But what needs to be said about Ana’s Story can’t be said fairly within a Publishers Weekly review. When the President’s relatives make news, there are always political ramifications. And when the President’s daughter writes a book, it’s a political act.
Ana is the pseudonym Jenna Bush assigns a luckless but determined (so far) 17-year-old she met while volunteering as an intern for UNICEF in a Latin American country. Ana, born HIV-positive, survives a childhood worse than anything Dickens dishes out and then, undereducated and unmarried, has a baby of her own (HIV-negative). Inspired by Ana’s resilience, Bush hopes to motivate young readers to volunteer to help causes like Ana’s; in an appendix, she suggests canned-food drives, becoming a pen-pal, tutoring, raising money for UNICEF. (Among dozens of ideas, writing to Congress or the White House does not figure.)
The book is moving and naïve. That’s all it would be, if the author’s father didn’t unilaterally block funds designed to help Ana. Because guess which President has refused to fund UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes family planning (abortions are excluded), prevention of AIDS and HIV, reproductive health, safe motherhood and gender equality in access to education? The United States helped 
found UNFPA almost 40 years ago. But in 2002, the Bush administration claimed that UNFPA funded coercive abortions in China, and despite an investigation by the State Department that refuted the allegation that same year, despite bipartisan protest, President Bush has since withheld $195 million allocated by Congress to UNFPA. (To put this in context, 180 countries contributed last year, led by the Netherlands which gave more than $75 million.) The President’s most recent decision to block the annual $34 million Congressional allocation was made this month –through a letter to Congress by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte dated September 6, 2007—the same month in which Ana’s Story appears in print.
Okay, accuse me of visiting the sins of the father on the daughter. Not my point, but I won’t contest it. You can’t separate White House relatives so neatly. Jenna wouldn’t have a book without W., nor would the media
otherwise be poised to cast its light so generously on her. (Prepare for Jenna on 20/20, Larry King Live, Today, etc., and in Newsweek, People, Time, Glamour and CosmoGirl.) But can we at least avoid visiting the virtues of the daughter on the father? And can we go further? Can we take up Ana’s story as a challenge to Bush to fund UNFPA? Because, really, who makes a better case than Jenna does for UNFPA’s initiatives?
Yes, get kids to volunteer out of empathy, not to gussy up their college applications. Yes, get them to trick-or-treat for UNICEF. But don’t kid us, and don’t tell our children that volunteerism is the answer to social injustice.
Please don’t let the womenfolk divert us from the President’s policies with their literary endeavors. (Remember back when Barbara Bush was First Lady, and the family dog “wrote” a picture book? Jenna and her mother have a picture book about the fun of reading due out next spring, in time to comment on No Child Left Behind.) Send Jenna to talk about Ana, and let’s get started on her father’s refusal to listen to Congress on all the Anas; all the empathy in the world won’t help Ana as much as decently funded family planning and HIV prevention programs would help Ana’s daughter.
