First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (2 page)

What first lady is understood? It’s the king. It’s not the queen.

—
C
ONNIE
S
TUART, CHIEF OF STAFF AND PRESS SECRETARY TO
F
IRST
L
ADY
P
AT
N
IXON

F
irst ladies are modern women with modern problems, joys, careers, doubts, insecurities, and crises. They are wives, working mothers, and political advisers who are transformed into international celebrities simply because of whom they chose to marry. They are often beloved, sometimes vilified, and they are almost always their husbands’ most trusted advisers. While it takes a nation to elect a president, “we were elected by one man,” Laura Bush says. Their position is not enshrined in the Constitution, and the role of the unpaid spouse seems incredibly anachronistic in today’s world, especially since these women helped get their husbands elected and are then confined to the East Wing. But Rosalynn Carter understood decades ago the covert power a first lady wields. “I have learned,” she said, “that you can do anything you want to.”

The title of first lady comes with a thorny combination of intense scrutiny, an incredible platform, and no official mandate. Yet
it is vital to the American presidency, and these women embody American womanhood and American motherhood. But they aren’t always happy about it. Martha Washington called herself a “state prisoner.” Jacqueline Kennedy proclaimed: “The one thing I do not want to be called is ‘First Lady.’ It sounds like a saddle horse.” And Michelle Obama says that living in the White House is like living in a “really nice prison.” Nancy Reagan, however, proudly put “First Lady” as her occupation on her income tax forms—she had worked hard for it. She told her press secretary, Sheila Tate, “I thought, well, my husband has been governor of the great big state of California. We’ve had a lot of experience, maybe being in the White House will be fifty times harder. You know what, it’s a thousand times harder.” They all cope with the singular pressure-filled position in their own ways, some more successfully than others. Some envy each other, some hate each other, and some help each other navigate life in the White House. Behind every great president there has been a great woman.

The relationships these women share with each other are complicated and often surprising, and they have much more to do with the personalities of the individual women than with the political parties or policies their names are identified with. There are unlikely rivalries, like that between Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, and surprising friendships, like the one between Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, and lifelong bonds, like the friendship forged between Lady Bird Johnson and Betty Ford. And there are relationships fraught with hurt feelings and resentment, like that between Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Looking through their private correspondence reveals the complexity of their relationships with each other: they commiserate about the deaths of their parents, their husbands, their friends, and even, in some particularly tragic situations, the loss of their own children. These women go
through the entire human experience while living in the fishbowl of the White House surrounded by a pack of intimidating men and women wearing earpieces and staring blankly ahead. “There is no way in the world to figure out what it’s like to live here,” Hillary Clinton said in a 1995 interview. It can be surprisingly claustrophobic. Betty Ford referred comically to the White House, a 132-room, six-floor building with two hidden mezzanine levels, as her “one-bedroom apartment” because she was essentially living on the second floor, where she worked out of a dressing room adjacent to the President and First Lady’s bedroom. Life changes quickly for these women. Rosalynn Carter remembers how startled she was when, shortly after she and her family moved in, she picked up the phone and asked a White House operator to be connected to “Jimmy.” There was a pause and the operator said, “Jimmy who?” From then on she had to remind herself to refer to her husband as “the President” in certain circumstances. Their lives had changed forever, and there was little time to adjust.

On April 12, 1945, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was hard at work back in Washington. When she learned of her husband’s death she immediately called their four sons, who were all on active military duty, and changed into a black mourning dress. It was Eleanor who told Vice President Harry Truman the news. “Harry,” she said calmly, “the President is dead.” Stricken, Truman asked her if there was anything he could do to help. She shook her head and said, “Is there anything we can do for
you
? For you are the one in trouble now.”

I
N THE NINETEENTH
century a woman’s name was to appear in writing on only three occasions: upon her birth, her marriage, and
her death. Originally, the president’s spouse was expected to be only a hostess, and the unofficial title was not even used until President James Buchanan’s niece, Harriet Lane, began accompanying him to events. Buchanan was the only lifelong bachelor to be president. In 1858,
Harper’s Weekly
referred to Lane as “Our Lady of the White House,” and two years later, in
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, her picture was printed with this caption: “The subject of our illustration . . . may be justly termed the first lady in the land.” By the time Mary Todd Lincoln moved into the White House in 1861, the term “first lady” was ensconced in the American lexicon. (She was sometimes called “Mrs. President” by her husband and his advisers.) When the Civil War hero General Ulysses S. Grant was elected president in 1868, women reporters were eager to cover his wife, Julia, even though many of them would write under a pen name because being a reporter was considered a highly unladylike occupation in the nineteenth century. (Julia loved to entertain—she threw twenty-nine-course dinners—but she came under blistering attacks for her appearance: she was cross-eyed and would pose for portraits in profile to try to disguise it.)

The president’s wife has always wielded a subtle but effective power. Mary Todd Lincoln made sure some of her allies were part of her husband’s Cabinet, and Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, President Woodrow Wilson’s second wife, is thought to have actually assumed many of the duties of the presidency after her husband’s stroke in 1919, eighteen months before he left the White House. For twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt challenged the expectations the public had of a first lady by working tirelessly as an activist for human rights and women’s rights. Eleanor was such a force that, veteran White House correspondent Sarah McClendon wrote, “she set a standard that all the first ladies who have followed her must measure themselves against.” Between
Eleanor and the glamorous Jackie Kennedy were Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower. Bess Truman hated Washington (she and her husband and daughter all called the White House the “Great White Jail”) and went back to their home in Independence, Missouri, as often as possible, and never gave interviews. She was terrified that the press would reveal her father’s suicide of many years earlier. When reporters tried to interview her, Bess replied, “You don’t need to know me. I’m only the President’s wife and the mother of his daughter.” Mamie Eisenhower was the embodiment of the charming 1950s housewife and loving mother, but she was aware of her influence. She had such an aversion to the controversial Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who became famous for his committee on un-American activities, that she made sure he was excluded from certain White House dinners. Her surreptitious use of power is fascinating given that her public comments about womanhood were so formal. “Being a wife is the best career life has to offer a woman,” she said, adding that she had “only one career, and his name is Ike.”

J
ACQUELINE
K
ENNEDY LIVED
in the White House for a little more than a thousand days, from January 20, 1961, until shortly after her husband’s assassination on November 22, 1963. John Kennedy was forty-three years old when he became president—the youngest man ever elected to the office. At thirty-one, Jackie was the third-youngest first lady in U.S. history and the first first lady to be the mother of a baby since the turn of the century. She transformed the role of first lady and became a global superstar. She undertook a massive restoration of the White House and became singularly focused on making it the “most perfect house” in the country. Jackie was a patrician woman who grew up in a
twenty-eight-room Victorian mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, and was educated at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. But she made an incredibly egalitarian decision when she opened up the White House to anyone who had access to a television during her tour of the mansion on February 14, 1962. The broadcast was watched by an unprecedented 56 million viewers and contributed to her celebrity status.

Jackie’s greatest legacy, however, was how bravely she mourned her husband’s death. As the years passed she came to resent being a vessel for the shared grief of Americans and desperately wanted to live a private life. When she returned to Washington to go to Arlington National Cemetery to visit her husband’s grave and the grave of their two young children—Patrick, who died two days after his premature birth; and their stillborn daughter, Arabella—she asked her driver to avoid getting near the White House, a house she had once so lovingly restored. She did not want to see the place that held so many bittersweet memories for her and her two young children, Caroline and John F. Kennedy Jr.

Lady Bird Johnson came into a White House in mourning, with black cloth hanging over chandeliers, windows, and doorways, and devastated Kennedy staffers walking shell-shocked through the mansion’s hallways. The last woman who had assumed the title of first lady under such dark circumstances was Theodore Roosevelt’s wife, Edith, who replaced Ida McKinley after President William McKinley’s assassination in 1901. But Ida, who was not often seen in public and who suffered from epileptic seizures, was no Jackie Kennedy, and Lady Bird was coming in at the dawn of the television era, when first ladies could no longer maintain the kind of relative privacy that someone like Ida McKinley enjoyed. Lady Bird worked hard to distinguish herself from her glamorous predecessor, but, she sighed, “People see the
living and wish for the dead.” Nonetheless, Lady Bird, who was almost two decades older than Jackie and who was not as glamorous, became a powerful first lady who was a critical part of her husband’s victory in the 1964 presidential election.

Pat Nixon was prepared to be a first lady in 1960, when her husband ran against Jack Kennedy and lost, but she had absolutely no desire for him to run again in 1968. By then she had seen Richard Nixon through seven political campaigns over more than twenty years. In the White House she was nicknamed “Plastic Pat” because she was simply exhausted playing the role of political wife. She stood by her husband through their most difficult years as the Watergate scandal brought down his presidency and he became the only president in history to resign. The day they left the White House in disgrace, the Nixons sat in silence in the helicopter as it took off from the South Lawn and began its journey over the National Mall. Pat murmured to herself, “It’s so sad. It’s so sad.” Her private suffering struck a nerve, and in 1990, sixteen years after she left the White House, she was number six on
Good Housekeeping
’s list of Most Admired Women, coming in right before the legendary actress Katharine Hepburn. It was her twentieth year in the top ten.

Betty Ford escorted her friend Pat to the helicopter on the Nixons’ last day in the White House. As the wife of Nixon’s Vice President, Gerald Ford, Betty had grown fond of Pat and felt deeply sorry for her. That day, Betty put her arm around her friend’s small waist. “My heavens, they’ve even rolled out the red carpet for us, isn’t that something,” Pat said to Betty ruefully. “You’ll see so many of those . . . you’ll get so you hate them.” While Pat was suffering, Betty was consumed with anxiety about her sudden ascendance to the White House. The night before, Betty and her husband held hands and prayed together. As they walked from the presidential helicopter, Marine One, back to the
White House after seeing the Nixons off, President Ford reached for his wife’s hand and whispered, “We can do it.”