HER BROTHERS UNDERSTOOD:

Nobody understood our relationship -- least of all us.

It was, admittedly, odd.

"I like you,'' the first President Bush wrote me once, after he was out of office. "Please don't tell anyone."

In decades of correspondence, he tried to figure out why we stayed in touch, beginning one note "Darn you Maureen Dowd" and mischievously observing in another, "Sometimes I found it better around my family to go 'Maureen who?'"

At times, typing on what he called "my little IBM,'' he signed off "Con afecto, GB,'' or if I was writing critically about his sons, "Con Afecto, still, just barely though! gb.'' Or "Love" scratched out and replaced with the handwritten rebuke, "not quite there yet." [...]

"We have a love-hate relationship,'' he told me when I ran into him in 2001 at a book party in Georgetown. "I talk to my shrink about it." He knew that I knew he was kidding; he avoided introspection at all costs, often ending debates in the White House by saying "I'm president and you're not."

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