Between You and Me (6 page)

From the beginning, she was a vigorous missionary for her husband’s policies. She seemed to be constantly on the march across America, carrying the banner of the New Deal on her visits to factories and mine shafts and sharecropper farms. She traveled so much that she came to be known as the president’s eyes and ears, and because FDR was crippled with polio, she was oftensaid to be his legs as well.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence extended long beyond her reign as First Lady. After leaving the White House, she continued to dedicate her life to public service with her work at the United Nations, where, among other posts, she was chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights. By the time I interviewed her, she had achieved even more stature than she had enjoyed during her years in Washington.

She had become a moral force on the global stage, our special ambassador to the world, a woman respected even by our cold-war enemies in the Communist bloc.

But she still had her critics, and none more caustic than Westbrook Pegler, the hard-hitting columnist who was the conservative scourge of that era. Pegler had made almost a career out of bashing the Roosevelts, husband and wife, and in our 1957 interview, I

[ 40 ]

F I R S T C O U P L E S

asked for Mrs. Roosevelt’s reactionto some accusations I quoted from one of his columns. “This woman is a political force of enormous ambitions,” Pegler wrote. “I believe she is a menace, un-scrupulous as to truth, vain and cynical—all with a pretense of exaggerated kindness and human feeling which deceives millions of gullible persons.”

This was her response: “Well, it seems to me a little exaggerated, let us say. No one could be quite so bad as all that. And as far as political ambition goes, I think that rather answered itself, because I’ve never run for office and I’ve never asked for an office of any kind. So I can’t have much political ambition. . . . I thin k it must be terrible to hate as many things as Mr. Pegler hates. I would be unhappy, I think, and therefore I am afraid that he’s unhappy, and I’m sorry for him, because after all, we all grow older and we all have to live with ourselves, and I think that must sometimes be difficult for Mr. Pegler.”

Mrs. Roosevelt had her own newspaper forum, the “My Day” column she’d been writing since her White House years, and in it she did not hesitate to express her own opinions. Later in our conversation, I brought up a speculative column she had written about President Eisenhower’s eventual successor, in which she asserted that of all the likely Republican contenders, Vice President Richard Nixon

“would be the least attractive.” Not content to leave it at that, she went on, “Mr. Nixon’s presidency would worry me.”

When I asked Mrs. Roosevelt why she had singled out Nixon for special criticism, she replied, “I think that in great crisis, you need to have deep-rooted convictions, and I have a feeling from the kind of campaigns I have watched Mr. Nixon in, in the past, that his convictions are not very strong.”

Among her fellow Democrats, her big favorite in those days was

[ 41 ]

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

Adlai Stevenson, who had been the nominee in the two losing campaigns against Eisenhower. She had some misgivings about the rising young star in her party, Senator John F. Kennedy, and offered her own tart comment about Profiles in Courage. She didn’t challenge Kennedy’s authorship, as Drew Pearson had, but she did suggest in a mischievous way that the title was not altogether seemly.

Taking into account the senator’s movie-star looks and alleged timid-ity on such cutting-edge issues as McCarthyism and civil rights, Mrs. Roosevelt said she would feel more positive about “young Senator Kennedy if only he had a little less profile and a little more courage.”

But Mrs. Roosevelt eventually came to admire Kennedy, and when he emerged as the Democratic nominee in 1960, she actively supported his candidacy. Which is hardly surprising in view of the fact that JFK’s opponent that year was the man she regarded as the

“least attractive” Republican. Two years after Kennedy’s election, Eleanor Roosevelt died at the age of seventy-eight, and for those of us who lived through the years of crisis and triumph that defined FDR’s presidency, her passing truly marked the end of an era.

Yet there’s a postscript of sorts. Many years after Eleanor Roosevelt’s death, I met her grandson David Roosevelt. We had mutual friends, and through them he and I became friends. He was a member of the FDR Memorial Commission, and for years he had devoted much of his time to the long-stalled effort to erect a monument to his grandparents in Washington.

The Roosevelt Memorial Commission had been established in 1955, when David was a boy of thirteen, and four years later, land was set aside on the hallowed ground around the Tidal Basin, not far from the White House. Only three other presidents have been honored with memorials at that location, and their names are Wash-

[ 42 ]

F I R S T C O U P L E S

ington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Pretty strong company, to be sure, but in my view, Franklin D. Roosevelt deserves his place in that pantheon.

For a variety of reasons—the usual combination of red tape, iner-tia, and disagreements that had to be resolved—the memorial was not completed until 1997. The dedication was scheduled for May 2

of that year and, to my utter astonishment, David asked me to serve as master of ceremonies at the event. It was a glorious occasion, a historic milestone if ever there was one, and being invited to take part in it was an honor and a privilege I will always cherish. My only regret is that my parents were no longer around to see their boy Myron up there on the podium with President Clinton and the other big shots as we all paid tribute to the president and First Lady they so revered.

They would have beamed with pride and happiness.

J i m m y a n d Ro s a l y n n C a rt e r M O S T O F T H E F I R S T L A D I E S who followed Eleanor Roosevelt into the White House didn’t exactly follow in her footsteps. Her immediate successors, in particular, chose to revert to the traditional role of modest hostess. Bess Truman had such a retiring personality that her public appearances were confined largely to ceremonial functions that she felt obliged to attend, and she steadfastly refused to be drawn into discussions about policy issues or political disputes.

She left all that to Harry. Mamie Eisenhower was cut from similar cloth; after all, she had spent most of her adult life in a military culture, where the wives of officers were expected to know their subservient place. Jackie Kennedy, it’s true, had a far more visible

[ 43 ]

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

presence and was widely admired for her beauty and elegance and aesthetic sensibility. But the impact she had was almost entirely in style and tone (all that preening over Camelot); she, too, shied away from political conflicts and other quarrelsome matters. Lady Bird Johnson’s grand passion was her beautification program, and although her husband offered lip-service support to her efforts in that area, sprucing up the nation’s parks and highways was hardly a top priority on LBJ’s ambitious agenda for a Great Society, as he demonstrated on those rambunctious rides around his ranch.

In contrast to those examples (and others like them), we have the two-term reign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, by any conceivable measure, must be regarded as the most independent and politically active First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. Among other distinctions, Mrs. Clinton was the first presidential wife who came of age during the women’s movement, and she brought a keen feminist edge into the arena of a national election. Along with other controversial remarks she made in the course of her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton described herself as the kind of wife who would not be content to stay home and “bake cookies.” Such assertive candor was applauded by many Americans—especially women of her own generation—but many others were turned off by what they considered her pushy and arrogant attitude. As a result, she became as polarizing a figure in our politics as Eleanor Roosevelt had been, and she would continue to attract a steady barrage of both kudos and brickbats throughout her years in the White House.

But there was no denying her independence and professional status. Hillary Clinton came to Washington from a flourishing career as a lawyer, and no other First Lady ever brought to the post such impressive credentials. Like her husband, she was an indefatigable policy wonk, and from the moment she moved into the White House,

[ 44 ]

F I R S T C O U P L E S

she devoted her time and considerable energy to a variety of pet issues, from health care reform to equality for women and children’s rights.

Mrs. Clinton had another distinction that set her apart from her predecessors, though she would no doubt prefer that it not be cited.

She became the first First Lady to go through a long siege of exposure about her husband’s sexual peccadilloes, most notably the hanky-panky with Monica Lewinsky that led to his being impeached—

though not convicted—by Congress. Yet for Hillary Clinton, that scandal may have been a subtle blessing. As millions of Americans came to appreciate that even a tough lady can be wronged, she began to attract more sympathy and support than she had ever enjoyed before, and that helped to give her the boost she needed to pursue her own political ambitions. While still serving in the White House, she launched a campaign for major public office, a bold and radical step that no other First Lady—not even Eleanor Roosevelt—had dared to take. And following her 2000 election to the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton became the first former First Lady to be seriously touted as a future candidate for president.

Among the other First Ladies who have served during my lifetime, Rosalynn Carter is the one I would single out who came the closest to Eleanor Roosevelt’s and Hillary Clinton’s political activism.

I didn’t meet the Carters until March 1985, when I visited them in Plains, their small hometown in rural Georgia, and by then, four years had passed since they’d left the White House. During their time in Washington, most of my journalistic focus had been on the Middle East and on investigative pieces that exposed con men and other rogues. Hence, I never got around to doing a story on any aspect of the Carter administration. Nevertheless, I had been intrigued by Jimmy Carter’s unexpected rise to power. Unlike Lyndon Johnson,

[ 45 ]

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

he was from the Deep South—the heart of the Old Confederacy—

and until he made his triumphant 1976 run, I had shared the conventional wisdom that no politician from that region could ever be elected president. Carter managed to turn that time-honored maxim on its head, and that struck me as some kind of political miracle.

Yet the time was ripe for such a miracle. In 1976 millions of Americans were yearning for a change in political leadership, and one that went beyond the periodic shift in power from one party to another. The four presidents who had preceded Carter—Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford—had cut their political teeth on Capitol Hill and had used their seats in Congress as springboards to national office. To varying degrees, they were all creatures of the Washington establishment, the power elite, and it was generally assumed that without such inside-the-Beltway status, one could not hope to make a successful run for the White House.

But by 1976, Washington politicians had lost their luster, to put it mildly. Thanks to the double whammy of our ignominious failure in Vietnam, a disaster that drove a president out of office, and the Watergate scandal, which forced another to resign in disgrace, many Americans had become convinced that what was desperately needed in the White House was fresh leadership from someone who had not been tainted by the corruption and cynicism of the Washington power game. From the moment he announced his candidacy, Jimmy Carter brilliantly exploited that discontent. He presented himself as a rank outsider—a simple, no-frills peanut farmer with a “just folks”

personality—and he built his campaign around the modest promise that he would never “lie to the American people.” Because his down-home approach struck such a responsive chord, he became the first governor since FDR to capture the White House.

I was also intrigued by Rosalynn Carter and her determination to

[ 46 ]

F I R S T C O U P L E S

take on a prominent role in her husband’s presidency. She, too, asserted herself in ways that broke with tradition. Until she came along, no First Lady ever had the temerity to attend cabinet meetings, but with her husband’s blessing, Mrs. Carter occasionally sat in on them. She also represented the president at ceremonial events and even served as his official emissary on a diplomatic visit to seven countries in Latin America. In her tone and manner, Rosalynn Carter came across as a typically gracious southern belle; her voice was as soft and sweet as warm molasses. But beneath that mellow surface, she could be as hard as nails, and the Washington press corps routinely referred to her as “the Steel Magnolia.” In viewing Mrs. Carter from a distance, I didn’t see her that way. In fact, I found her to be most attractive and appealing.

The skill and success that Jimmy Carter brought to the campaign trail in 1976 did not carry over into the White House, in large part because he had the misfortune to be president during a deeply troubled time in our history. Thanks mainly to the dislocations set in mo-tionby the Arab oil boycott of the mid-1970s, he had to contend with soaring inflation and other economic woes. And during the last year of his presidency, he struggled invainto bring anend to the hostage crisis in Iran. Carter’s problems on the economic front and his failure to resolve the hostage crisis made him a vulnerable target whenhe ranfor reelectionin1980, and he was soundly trounced by his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan. Four years later, Reagan succeeded where Carter had failed and easily won his bid for a second term.