CORAL GABLES, Fla. — For 20 years, Columba Bush anticipated the day she would have to answer one big question: Would she support her husband, Jeb Bush, if he decided to run for president?
Last summer and fall, as she wrestled with whether to say yes, her sense of duty was mixed with dread.
Born in Mexico, she had married into a famously political American family and had always been an outsider: a prayerful Roman Catholic, a sensitive loner and lover of the arts who still speaks in heavily accented English. As Florida’s first lady, she had arranged Mass in the governor’s mansion and endured weeks of bad press for a European shopping spree. She blamed politics for friction in her marriage and as a factor in her daughter’s drug addiction. A run for the White House would expose her to the spotlight as never before.
“She knows the good and the bad of being around politics,” said Jim Towey, an official in the administration of President George W. Bush, Jeb’s brother, and a close friend to both Jeb and Columba. “It’s opened the door to extraordinary experiences for her. But she’s paid quite a price, as well.”
Over Thanksgiving, during a family vacation in Mexico, friends say, Mrs. Bush gave her approval — though not before winning her husband’s promise to spend some time every week with her and their children and grandchildren. A few weeks later, over salads by the bubbling fountain in the courtyard of the Biltmore Hotel here, she signaled her acquiescence, if not enthusiasm, to a friend, Bart Hudson, describing her husband with her highest form of praise. “You know,” Mr. Hudson recalled her saying of Mr. Bush, “he is an artist, and he is very good.”
Now, there is a new question confronting Mrs. Bush: What kind of candidate’s wife will she be? In a party looking to soften its image and expand its tent, the prospect of the nation’s first Latina first lady could be a powerful draw for Hispanic voters disenchanted with many Republicans’ hard-line stance on immigration. But Mrs. Bush, 61, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has never been an eager campaigner.
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Friends and associates asked about her political opinions say that more than anything, she believes her husband has a calling.
Or, as Mrs. Bush put it in a Spanish-language interview in 1991 with the Miami magazine Selecta: “I am a firm believer in destiny. I feel that what is important is written, and you do what you do.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Bush Outsider, Backing Jeb but Wary of Family Business. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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