Mrs. Bush Addresses Senate

AP wire report

WASHINGTON — First lady Laura Bush, who was to make her policy debut before a Senate committee Tuesday, instead stepped grim-faced to news cameras and tried to reassure an anxious nation.

"Parents need to reassure their children everywhere in our country that they're safe," Mrs. Bush said after Sen. Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee, announced its hearing on early childhood learning was postponed by the chaos of terrorist attacks in New York.

Her face pinched, Mrs. Bush tried to speak in a soothing tone. "Our hearts and our prayers go out to the victims of this act of terrorism," she said.

Within moments, it became clear that Washington was also a target and the first lady, surrounded by nevous-looking Secret Service agents, joined the hundreds of congressional aides who evacuated the Russell Senate Office Building. Mrs. Bush was whisked by motorcade back to the White House.

Like Vice President Dick Cheney, the first lady was then taken to a "secure location" that White House spokespeople refused to identify.

Tuesday's unprecedented Senate hearing was to have put the current first lady and former first lady on opposite sides of the witness table, but on the same side of early education.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former first lady who now sits on Kennedy's committee, was still at her Embassy Row home as first reports came in from the plane crash into New York's World Trade Center.

New York's junior senator, Mrs. Clinton remained at home and did not attempt the trip to Capitol Hill, according to two aides locking her office and evacuating.

Kennedy, D-Mass., underscored that his hearing and Mrs. Bush's testimony was not canceled, only postponed. "We are not going to see the business of America deferred because of terrorism whether its in education or another area of public policy," Kennedy said.

Mrs. Bush will be the fourth sitting first lady - and the first Republican one - to testify before Congress.

It was three weeks shy of eight years ago that Mrs. Clinton famously made the grueling rounds of five House and Senate committees in three days, preparing to roll out her ambitious and ill-fated health care bill. Now she is a member of the Senate health committee.

Mrs. Bush's own aides say that, a year ago, they wouldn't have predicted their homebody boss would go before Congress. Now, they say it's entirely possible she will make a solo trip overseas much like Mrs. Clinton did several times when she was in the White House.

"This just shows that you don't rule anything out when it comes to Laura Bush," spokeswoman Noelia Rodriguez said.

Eleanor Roosevelt went before Congress to decry the conditions of Washington public schools and hospitals. Rosalynn Carter, amid a hostage crisis and her husband's doomed re-election campaign, testified for and won passage of the 1980 Mental Health Systems Act. Mrs. Clinton's brainy presentations on the minutiae of health policy won applause from both the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees.