First Ladies (72 page)

When one young student queried her about her feelings on kitchen duty, now that she had a professional chef, she cheerfully admitted not missing cooking at all—the White House chef turned out “really good” food.
⁶¹
That same candor marked her comments about balancing work and mothering, as she confessed to one audience, “There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wonder or worry about whether I'm doing the right thing for myself, for my family, for the girls.”
⁶²

Such openness about private struggles was relatively new for a First Lady. Betty Ford had surprised reporters by releasing details of her breast cancer surgery, talking about her children's possible use of marijuana, and admitting she took “a Valium every day.”
⁶³
Like Ford, Michelle Obama gained many fans because of her honesty about day-to-day frustrations and adjustments. Her popularity soared in the early months, and the Pew Research Center reported in April 2009 that Republican women had raised their opinions of her considerably. Fewer than half had admitted a favorable view before the inauguration but now two-thirds liked what they saw.
⁶⁴
A
USA Today/
Gallup poll taken at about the same time reported that 79 percent of Americans approved of the way Michelle Obama was handling the job of First Lady while only 8 percent disapproved.
⁶⁵

Fashion and style media who covered the new First Lady found she had a mind of her own. Unlike her predecessors, Clinton and Bush, who had permitted media stylists to choose their clothes and supervise makeup for the photo shoots, Michelle Obama insisted on
controlling her image—with clothes out of her own closet.
⁶⁶
Her
Vogue
cover photo made her look like a smiling, innocent schoolgirl.
⁶⁷
The topics covered in her interviews—children, dogs, gardens, and healthy eating—sounded a lot like those favored by Barbara Bush or Mamie Eisenhower. Reporters' requests to talk with her about more substantial topics, such as health care reform, were politely turned down as the Obama team sought to turn the attorney/executive into a non-threatening, nonpartisan woman-next-door.
⁶⁸
She made a couple stops at federal agencies in early February to talk up the president's stimulus package but these were more cheerleading, goodwill missions than activist promotion of policy.

The
Vanity Fair
columnist Michael Wolff declared the Obama White House press operation “the most brilliant and successful and certainly calculated” of any he had observed.
⁶⁹
With a professional staff of fourteen in the press office and an additional forty-seven people working with them, the forty-fourth president employed a remarkably large PR machine. But its effectiveness had other explanations, according to Wolff: “It's more central than in any previous administration, and run more knowledgeably” with a press secretary “personally closer to the president than any press secretary in history.”
⁷⁰

This careful image management extended to the First Lady, according to Wolff, and although her omnipresent photos and print coverage gave an impression she was “everywhere,” in fact she appeared in public only about three days a week in carefully managed events. She gave her only commencement speech in spring 2009 at University of California, Merced, after students staged a lovefest to get her there. For the
New York Times
, Michelle Obama chose to unveil her White House garden, not typically front-page news and a rather unlikely project for a woman raised in a city apartment. After the smiling First Lady was shown wielding a shovel, one journalist wondered if Laura Bush would have made the front page had she started a garden. Wolff concluded the Obama press team operated “pretty much at the levels of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.”
⁷¹

Such management of the First Lady's image was a long time coming. Many of Michelle Obama's predecessors, having struggled unsuccessfully with the public's insatiable curiosity about them, would have marveled at how she did it.
⁷²
From the nation's founding, people have never seemed to get enough information about the chief executive's family, and it is fair to point to George Washington as making decisions that accommodated them. When he arranged for Martha to join him in New York, the nation's first capital city, he engaged the presidential barge and ordered a thirteen-gun salute as welcome. Then he
ensconced her in living quarters connected to his office and invited New Yorkers to social events over which she presided. Such mixing of family and business inevitably involved spouses in their husbands' jobs and, as more than one of the women pointed out, they could hardly avoid knowing something of the political maneuverings of the day.
⁷³

As early as 1789 one New Yorker, calling himself “Pro Republica,” grumbled about newspapers paying so much attention to the president's wife. If they did not mend their ways, he wrote to the New York
Gazette,
something like the following might appear about Mrs. Washington: “Her Serenity who was much indisposed last week by a pain in the third joint of the fourth finger of her left hand … is in a fair way of recovery [after catching a cold when she went out in] the Siberian fur lately delivered to her by the Russian Ambassador as a present from the Princess.”
⁷⁴

Remove the quaint language and Pro Republica had it right—First Ladies gradually became accustomed to having every detail of their private lives put out for public scrutiny. By 2009, Michelle Obama faced an extremely intrusive public—one intent on knowing how much she paid for her clothes and how she “worked out” those “bare” arms. In an interview with Oprah, she cheerfully answered a query about whether she was pregnant, using different language (“Not pregnant. Not planning on it”) than that employed about Mary Lincoln nearly a century and a half earlier when a national magazine informed readers: “The reports that Mrs. Lincoln was in an interesting condition are untrue.”
⁷⁵

Complaints against such invasions of privacy have never worked—as Abigail Adams learned. Thoroughly disgusted with newspapers revealing just how much her son earned and other family matters, she wrote her sister that she saw in the articles “the true spirit of Satan…. Lies, falshoods [
sic
], calumny [
sic
] and bitterness.”
⁷⁶

Nor did the threat of fines scare people off. In 1888, after President Grover Cleveland's young bride found her face gracing advertisements for perfumes and household products, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives making the unauthorized use of the “likeness or representation of any female living or dead, who is or was the wife, mother, daughter or sister of any citizen of the United States” a crime subject to a fine up to $5,000.
⁷⁷
But the bill failed to pass, and White House families had to come up with their own remedies. The Kennedy White House used pressure to keep their young children and Jackie out of ads,
⁷⁸
just as the Obamas in 2009 appealed to a manufacturer to stop producing “Marvelous Malia” and “Sweet Sasha” dolls.

The Obama daughters were bound to attract attention, and their parents had to consider carefully how to deal with that. A look back at other young White House occupants is instructive. When tourists started prowling White House grounds with cameras in the late nineteenth century, safety concerns led presidential families to call for restrictions. That led to angry outbursts from irate reporters and disappointed voters. Julia Grant (1869–1877) ordered the gates of the residence closed to protect her young children, then heard herself chastised as “exclusive,” a costly pejorative for an elected official's spouse. When Frances Cleveland (1886–1889, 1893–1897) decided to keep her very young children indoors and out of sight, retaliation came via rumors that they were “sick” and “deformed.” Caroline Harrison (1893–1897) gave reporters fuller rein, allowing her young grandson, “Baby McKee,” to appear in what later came to be called “photo opportunities,” and it was generally agreed that he became “the most photographed” child in America.

Edith Roosevelt (1901–1909) deserves credit for initiating more successful controls over what went out about her and her family, although her efforts seem positively quaint when compared to methods routinely used a century later. She employed a social secretary, a first for a president's wife, and then instructed her about what to tell reporters about the color of her dress or the menu for a state dinner. In those pre-television days, reporters and readers had little chance to check on the accuracy of what they were told, and the frugal Edith admitted she fibbed a bit, saying the same dress was blue on one night and green on another. She also arranged for the distribution of posed, formal pictures of her children so reporters did not have to camp out on the White House lawn waiting for their chance.

Michelle Obama faced a curious public far more ubiquitous and better equipped than that encountered by her predecessors. Large dailies like the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
assigned reporters full time to the First Lady, and dozens of blogs, some independent, some affiliated with mainstream publications, reported on her every move. The Internet made possible the nearly instant global sharing of images and words so that anyone from Maine to Honolulu could compare thoughts on the price of Michelle's sneakers and how she ate her hamburgers.

As annoying as such intrusions could be, they presented a more serious problem if the presidential family's image on the Internet did not mesh with West Wing objectives. Michelle Obama had already encountered considerable negative publicity during the campaign: critics charged she sounded angry in her Princeton thesis; she looked
combative on the
New Yorker
cover; and she seemed disrespectful describing her husband's stinky morning breath. Now a diligent press could shape an image of her as sweeter, more traditional, and less threatening.

Although the Ledbetter reception had been her first public event at the White House, Michelle's next few months featured a bipartisan First Lady far more attuned to fashion, family, and good works than to any substantive matter that might divide voters. The few interviews she did grant went to periodicals that underlined this image of a contented, traditional First Lady. She even tempered comments about her job, and after earlier complaining that it “doesn't pay much” she started describing it as the “best job in the world.” Her closest brush with controversy occurred when she was photographed with one arm casually looped around the Queen of England's waist. Whether this constituted a breach of royal etiquette remained unclear—some bloggers weighed in to say she might just have extended a supporting arm to a fragile, aging monarch in danger of falling.

Simply by taking her place in the White House private quarters, Michelle Obama signaled an important shift in American history. Her portrait would now join the dozens of white faces that made up the portrait gallery on the ground floor. What clearer sign could there be that the color of one's skin no longer disqualifies a person for occupancy of the White House? But the same election that took Michelle Obama to the executive mansion carried another equally powerful message—gender does not disqualify either.

That the first real contender to break this last glass ceiling came out of the ranks of First Ladies may seem remarkable to some. But it was unsurprising to those who had already seen presidential material in many of Hillary Clinton's predecessors—keen intelligence, enormous ambition, and a pronounced political streak.

1
. Edward T. James et al.,
Notable American Women,
3 vols. (Cambridge, 1971).

2
. Popular volumes on First Ladies include Laura Holloway,
Ladies of the White House
(Philadelphia, 1881); Margaret Bassett,
Profiles and Portraits of American Presidents and Their Wives
(Freeport, 1969); Sol Barzman,
The First Ladies
(New York, 1970); Amy La Follette Jensen,
The White House
(New York, 1962); Bess Furman,
White House Profile
(New York, 1951); Esther Singleton,
The Story of the White House,
2 vols. (New York, 1907); and Mary Ormsbee Whitton,
First First Ladies
(Freeport, 1948).

3
. Mary Clemmer Ames, “A Woman's Letter form Washington,”
The Independent,
March 15, 1877, p. 2.

4
. Marianne Means,
The Woman in the White House
(New York, 1963), p. 7.

5
. Emily Edson Briggs,
The Olivia Letters
(New York, 1906), p. 173, reprints an 1870 column by Briggs.

6
. William Howard Russell,
My Diary North and South
(Boston, 1863), p. 177.

7
. Merriam Webster's
New International Dictionary
did not include the term until the second edition (1934) when it meant the “wife of the President of the United States, [or … ] the woman he chooses to act as his official hostess.” By the 1960s, the phrase had taken on some weight of its own and moved outside government. “Hostess” did not entirely disappear from the definition in Webster's
Third
(1961) or in
The American Heritage Dictionary
(1969), but now there was a second meaning: “the leading woman representative or practitioner of any art or profession [as in … ] the first lady of the dance.”
The Random House Dictionary
(1966) avoided “hostess” entirely, defining “first lady” as either the wife of an important government official or a woman who had achieved “foremost” status on her own, as in “first lady of the American theater.”