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"  On a muggy July evening, Barbara Bush, the less well-known of the former president&amp;#039;s twin daughters\u2014the one who went to Yale and who not only often wears Proenza Schouler but worked for those boys in their Chinatown apartment early on when it doubled as their atelier\u2014hosted a cocktail party at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan, which was developed by her father&amp;#039;s former Yale fraternity brother Roland Betts. Betts&amp;#039; daughter Maggie is one of Barbara&amp;#039;s closest friends; they even live in the same New York apartment building. There was Gramercy Cellars cabernet, WhistlePig rye, Brooklyn Summer Ale, and a view of the Statue of Liberty. All of which might seem like predictable summertime socializing for a dynastic princess of the Republican Party, except that the party was in honor of Global Health Corps, her organization dedicated to the idea that &amp;quot;health care is a human right,&amp;quot; the sort of darn-near socialist notion that could easily lead to Obamacare. Or, if you&amp;#039;re a wary conservative, something far worse. Barbara has always been the more elusive Bush daughter. Her sister, Jenna Bush Hager, is the aw-shucks outgoing twin, the one who seemed to constantly be getting in trouble for having a fake ID at the University of Texas (truth be told, Barbara got caught drinking underage too) and who these days works as a correspondent on the Today show and as an editor-at-large at Southern Living. Barbara also has the rather unusual personal-branding conundrum of sharing a name with her tough-as-nails, pearl-bedecked 88-year-old grandmother. When I meet Barbara at a clattering lunch spot not far from her crowded, unglamorous Global Health Corps offices in a crowded, unglamorous part of midtown Manhattan, she is that evening scheduled to fly (coach, her sister tells me later) to Malaysia for a women&amp;#039;s-health conference. In person, she&amp;#039;s an absolute\u2014if conscientiously poised\u2014delight: curious, charismatic, and quick to laugh. Her blue-gray eyes are nearly hypnotic, but they&amp;#039;re also searching you out: Are you really seeing her, beyond her last name? After all, she&amp;#039;s been burned before. Most publicly, a friend of hers from Yale, whom she&amp;#039;d invited to dinner and movies with her family in the White House, wrote a derisive tell-all about those visits for Vanity Fair in which the president comes off as a shallow goofball. Then there was the time in college when a teaching assistant told her she wouldn&amp;#039;t get an A unless she instructed her father not to invade Iraq. This is Barbara&amp;#039;s balancing act: how to be true to herself and her family, with all of the perquisites and the prejudices her name and her clan invite. She lives in a glittery, all-access world but has chosen to dedicate herself to improving the lot of others, running GHC&amp;#039;s fellows program, which sends ambitious people who are interested (but not necessarily trained) in public health to work either overseas or in troubled American cities like Newark, New Jersey. From the beginning, Barbara has worked with the established Boston-based Partners in Health, which, in addition to providing conventional support, lends gravitas to her effort, as if to say: This is not a vanity project. Donna Barry, the advocacy and policy director for Partners in Health, says that among the things that &amp;quot;ex-cited&amp;quot; her about GHC was that not all of its fellows are American, but some of its locations were. (One fellow from Nigeria who has been working in Newark told me she was shocked by the difficulties poor people had getting appropriate care there.) &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a lot of opportunities for young Americans to do good around the world,&amp;quot; Barry says, &amp;quot;but to bring them here, it&amp;#039;s hugely important.&amp;quot;  Barbara will use her family name and connections in service of her cause\u2014but as discreetly as possible. And maybe, like a lot of us (and, say, Meghan McCain), she doesn&amp;#039;t quite see eye to eye with her more traditionalist parents on everything. Instead, in step with what poll after poll shows about her generation, she has less use for ideology than for pragmatic solutions\u2014&amp;quot;Our parents raised us to be open-minded,&amp;quot; says Jenna, on the phone from Kennebunkport, Maine, where she was visiting her parents with her newborn daughter, Mila. &amp;quot;Barbara and I both are not interested in traditional American politics, ironically, since we come from a political family. We&amp;#039;re interested more in policy.&amp;quot; (Of course, a &amp;quot;political family&amp;quot; is supposed to care about policy, too, but we&amp;#039;ll leave that quibble to the Bush haters.) Barbara is a fascinating amalgam\u2014a globe-trotting do-gooder Bush whose chosen habitat is Manhattan and whose chosen man is a the Panamanian artist/entrepreneur Miky F\u00E1brega, who, by the way, she manages to see only about every three weeks. Her friend the society writer Derek Blasberg describes her life this way: &amp;quot;I have invited her to many glamorous parties around the world, and she has sent her regrets because she is working with an educational charity in Botswana or Tanzania. Not a typical RSVP, I must say. But a convincing one.&amp;quot; Back in Austin, where she grew up, Barbara was homecoming queen; at Yale, she hung out with &amp;quot;a lot of international kids, fashion kids,&amp;quot; recalls one classmate. Another school friend remembers how she invited her fellow Yalies down to the White House for Halloween parties and the president would be there. &amp;quot;It was all these gay people tromping around in ridiculous costumes and he loved it,&amp;quot; says this friend. Yes, the Bushes knew and liked gay individuals, but for a while, as is true for many older people, they weren&amp;#039;t prepared to accept same-sex marriage. In his 2004 reelection campaign, her father endorsed a constitutional amendment to ban the right. Which is why it took some courage for Barbara, in 2011, to appear in a video in support of same-sex marriage. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m Barbara Bush, and I&amp;#039;m a New Yorker for marriage equality,&amp;quot; she said in the brief message, sponsored by an advocacy group. &amp;quot;New York is about fairness and equality. And everyone should have the right to marry the person that they love.&amp;quot; Her mother, Laura Bush, admits to me by phone that she&amp;#039;s come around on the issue herself, explaining that her daughters helped convince her that it was a &amp;quot;generational&amp;quot; hurdle she had to find her way over. Then, this August, Barbara boldly said that she thought Hillary Clinton should run for president in 2016\u2014though she wouldn&amp;#039;t commit to voting for her until she knew who the opponent would be (hear that, Uncle Jeb?). &amp;quot;What impressed me about [Barbara] is her kindness and intelligence,&amp;quot; says another friend, novelist and man-about-town Christopher Bollen, &amp;quot;and also when her father was president, and perhaps not so well liked by young Manhattanites, how she didn&amp;#039;t feel threatened by those who disagreed with him, nor did she feel the need to align her responses to the family line. And yet, rather gracefully, she still managed to make it clear how important family was to her, how much she loved her dad.&amp;quot; Repeatedly I was told that Barbara is a great storyteller, sarcastic and fun, but, as one admirer put it, &amp;quot;super private in such a way that she moves through people a little if she feels like they ask too many questions.&amp;quot;  Global Health Corps has been up and running for almost five years now, but it was in the summer of 2003 that Barbara first discovered her mission. Headed into her final year at Yale, she took some time off from her internship with Proenza Schouler&amp;#039;s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez\u2014whom she&amp;#039;d blind e-mailed, explaining that she could, among other things, sew\u2014to travel to Africa with her parents. The trip was to launch a program called the President&amp;#039;s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has become the most universally admired of his legacies. During a recent trip to Africa, Obama praised PEPFAR as one of his predecessor&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;crowning achievements.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Because of the commitment of the Bush administration and the American people,&amp;quot; he declared, &amp;quot;millions of people&amp;#039;s lives have been saved.&amp;quot; For Barbara, the grim tour of the continent&amp;#039;s AIDS hot spots was life-changing. &amp;quot;I mean seeing literally like thousands of people lining the street waiting for drugs that they needed to live, that we had in the United States, was something that was very hard for me to wrap my brain around,&amp;quot; she says while eating her grilled shrimp salad, shrimps first. &amp;quot;The lack of justice in that.&amp;quot; On a stop in Botswana, Barbara and Laura Bush met the mother of a terribly ill little girl who, hearing the American president was going to visit, had dressed up her daughter in her finest. The young girl &amp;quot;already,&amp;quot; as the former first lady put it in her memoir, looked &amp;quot;like an angel. The little girl lay on an examining table, so frail and sick but with her mother&amp;#039;s last hopes to make her beautiful.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t know what happened to the little girl,&amp;quot; Laura Bush told me. &amp;quot;Maybe she got right on the drugs and hopefully she is living a happy life. But it didn&amp;#039;t look like that was going to happen.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s not that Barbara previously had been oblivious to the world&amp;#039;s problems, but it&amp;#039;s one thing to know, another thing to see\u2014to feel, to experience them firsthand, even for a few days. Back at Yale, she decided to switch majors, from architecture to the humanities. &amp;quot;I was much more intrigued thinking about these issues and figuring out ways that you can make sure that that&amp;#039;s not the norm,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Part of it, looking back, was that I was really young and I did believe that you can change so much in the world.&amp;quot; Her parents seemed to approve the shift in direction. &amp;quot;She is really terrific in math,&amp;quot; Laura said, showing her maternal pride, &amp;quot;and I&amp;#039;m sure she would have made a great architect. But she also has a huge heart.&amp;quot; After Barbara graduated, because her father was president she was able get advice from people in the State Department about how to get involved in African health issues. A children&amp;#039;s hospital in Cape Town hired her to work with its doctors and psychologists. &amp;quot;I mean, the thing is, in South Africa, if someone&amp;#039;s child ends up in the hospital they&amp;#039;re in a bad state,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d see a lot of women who came from the rural areas who literally traveled for two days with their child.&amp;quot; Instead of feeling hopeless about the &amp;quot;broken systems,&amp;quot; she found the experience energizing. &amp;quot;People often think about global health issues as like these very daunting statistics that you can&amp;#039;t do anything about it,&amp;quot; she says. Back in New York, Barbara&amp;#039;s mission began to crystallize, thanks in part to the intervention of her sister, who had attended an AIDS conference at Google&amp;#039;s headquarters outside of San Francisco. &amp;quot;My sister met these two guys at a conference, one who was working for Google and one guy working for this advocacy organization called Face AIDS,&amp;quot; says Barbara. &amp;quot;She called me and basically was like we need to meet these guys.&amp;quot; When they got together, &amp;quot;we started brainstorming about global health issues and ended up talking about the fact that Teach for America had really been an amazing way to create a bigger dialogue around education issues and engaging young leaders to work in education.&amp;quot; Jenna puts it this way: &amp;quot;I knew that this was something I couldn&amp;#039;t take on. And I knew that it was something she could and would take on.&amp;quot; GHC was live in early 2009, with Barbara at the helm. That party in July was to welcome the latest class of 106 fellows, who&amp;#039;ll do everything from improving computer systems in health centers in Boston to designing hospital airflow systems in Rwanda to stop the spread of TB. Barbara&amp;#039;s father gives her fundraising advice, and the corps is expanding so quickly that they&amp;#039;ve outgrown their small offices, donated by Covenant House. The restaurant is clearing out, and it&amp;#039;s starting to rain. I&amp;#039;d asked Barbara earlier how she could be so optimistic, given how politicized and intractable our health-care system&amp;#039;s problems seemed to be. As Barry puts it, &amp;quot;there are no easy answers anywhere.&amp;quot; Barbara, ever demure when it comes to controversies that could cause her family trouble, wanted to talk in nonpartisan generalities, and deftly steered our talk away from a personal opinion of, say, Obamacare. And when I followed up about it through her spokesperson via e-mail, she never got back to me with an answer. But GHC&amp;#039;s mission statement may be answer enough: &amp;quot;The extreme disparity in health outcomes&amp;quot; between the world&amp;#039;s rich and poor is &amp;quot;unjust and unsustainable.&amp;quot; Again, to many those are partisan fighting words. Of course, Barbara doesn&amp;#039;t see it that way. &amp;quot;I mean essentially everyone, I hope, wants the same things when they&amp;#039;re working on health legislation. That is, for people to have access. I mean health shouldn&amp;#039;t be a political thing, like whether or not someone has access to what they need to live a healthy life. That&amp;#039;s not a political statement.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/interviews/a3/barbara-bush-profile/>