In Her Own Words,

Both images work well here. Your husband presumably has the most stressful job in the world. I can't imagine anyone being subjected to more pressures. How does that affect him?

He is very disciplined. He does a lot of things that keep him on an even keel. For instance, he works out. He has since he was 25, when he started running. That helps alleviate a lot of stress and relaxes him. We both, since we married, take care of our health. We go to bed early. We get up early. We eat well. Taking care of yourself physically really helps emotionally. People who get a lot of sleep, who do the things that relieve stress, can withstand a lot of stress.

And it is very stressful. But it helps to have good people around you, people who are also even-tempered and stable. My husband is very stable. I think that helps. But after something bad has happened, as with September 11, a few weeks later, he'll have a sort of pain in his neck from being tense. Literally. It usually doesn't come on until after things have relaxed.

I've read that he refers to you as a rock.

Yes, in some ways I'm very stable. I have a lot of strength. We wouldn't have ever won, or gotten to this point, if we weren't that way. Because of everything a presidential race requires-all the stress, all the criticism-it's difficult. And we never expected something like September 11 to happen. You expect a lot of things in this job. You know when your husband runs for president it's possible to be faced with putting our armed forces, young men and women, in harm's way. But no one expected-and certainly no one on my staff expected-to be told to run for her life. To literally run out of the White House because, they thought, the fourth plane was on its way.

September 11 seemed to mark a dramatic shift in your role, or at least in the way the public knows you.

There was a lot of coverage of my role after that. I had been working on the same things. On that day, I was on Capitol Hill, ready to brief the education committee on early-childhood development. But you are right: Both my role and my husband's role were magnified. Just like the roles of firemen and policemen and soldiers and teachers. There is a silver lining to the horrific happenings of September 11: Many Americans realized what is important. A lot of the things that we took for granted have new meaning-such as freedom and our open society. We want our society to be as open as it was on September 10, but it requires vigilance on everyone's part.

Do you envision your role expanding further? Will you be doing bolder things in the future?

I have done a lot of things concerning women, children and education in Afghanistan. I gave a speech in Paris, to the OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development], about how important education is worldwide. I didn't expect to be talking about children and women in Afghanistan. So I guess my role may expand.

I also have some questions concerning education. How can schools get more involvement from parents, especially in poorer communities?

This is going to sound very simple, but I wonder why teachers don't have telephones in their classrooms, like any other professional. It would be great if teachers could call parents any time. It's very important for schools to reach out as much as they can to parents. I know of a Head Start program in Austin [Texas], where the parents are of low income. To get the dads to come in and talk about ways to be better parents, the teachers thought of having a Monday Night Football party.

Are teachers getting the support they need in today's increasingly diverse classrooms?