First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (29 page)

“Of course,” she said.

“Well then, whisper it in his ear every night.”

“I will, and I’ll also whisper it in your ear.” She wanted to make an impression that would get back to the Kremlin.

It was Nancy who was always looking for signs of disloyalty among her husband’s political aides, and it was Nancy who scanned the crowd as her husband spoke to see who was paying him the proper respect. At the Italian-American Federation dinner in Washington with Democratic rival Walter Mondale, Nancy said, “When it was Ronnie’s turn to speak, I noticed that Mondale didn’t applaud—not even once.” During his 1984 reelection campaign, Reagan had a disastrous debate with Mondale and Nancy demanded answers. When her husband told her that he’d felt “brutalized” by the grueling debate prep, which included a full-dress rehearsal in the Old Executive Office Building complete with lights and cameras and about thirty staffers pelting him with suggestions, she was furious. “I was upset because I thought they’d gone about it all wrong. And they had. They overloaded him.”

The Reagans’ son Ron said that his father was impossible not to like. “You can dislike his policies or something he said, but him personally, he was very, very difficult to dislike.” Nancy, on the other hand, was a “pricklier personality” and he watched as his mother became a magnet for criticism that should have been directed at his father. If people disagreed with the President they vented their frustration by labeling the First Lady as a ruthless, vapid, control freak. Ron said he’s not sure if his mother took on this burden consciously or not, but by doing so she shielded her husband from lots of pain and took it upon herself to be the
lightning rod for his administration. Ronald Reagan desperately wanted everyone to like him and, of course, everyone likes to be liked, but Nancy was willing to sacrifice that admiration to be her husband’s ultimate protector. And she paid the price: in a December 1981 Gallup poll, she had the highest disapproval rating—26 percent—of any modern first lady.

H
ILLARY
C
LINTON
’
S DEFINITION
of being a good wife was very different from her predecessors’, and was more transactional. She did not want to just sit in on Cabinet meetings—she wanted to speak up during Cabinet meetings. At first she wanted to be her husband’s domestic policy chief, but the President’s pollster, Stan Greenberg, convinced them that it would be disastrously unpopular. The President’s own secretary of health and human services, Donna Shalala, and Treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen, warned Clinton against appointing Hillary to head up the Task Force on National Health Care Reform to usher in the biggest social program since President Roosevelt’s creation of Social Security. Hillary led a massive, bureaucratic team to come up with a plan for a new health insurance system that would keep costs down and expand coverage. It would be her job to sell the plan to lawmakers and business leaders. Alarms sounded in the West Wing when the President announced his wife’s appointment just five days after the inauguration. But the President knew how badly she wanted to tackle the issue and he felt he had to give her the important assignment after she stood by him during the allegations that he had had an affair with Gennifer Flowers. (Flowers claimed she had a twelve-year affair with Clinton in Arkansas; years later he would admit to one occasion in 1977.)

Clearly his advisers were correct and Hillary’s interpretation
of the role of first lady was not meshing with what most Americans wanted. A Gallup poll found that after the 1993 inauguration Hillary was viewed favorably by 67 percent of Americans. By July 1994, only 48 percent rated her favorably, with a large number saying she had overstepped by having an office in the West Wing. She invited a group of female reporters to lunch at the White House and asked them how she could soften her image. “I am surprised at the way people seem to perceive me,” she said to the group, which included Marian Burros of the
New York Times
and Cindy Adams of the
New York Post
. “Sometimes I read stories and hear things about me and I go ‘ugh.’ I wouldn’t like her either. It’s so unlike what I think I am or what my friends think I am.” When Burros wrote a story—“Hillary Clinton Asks Help in Finding a Softer Image”—that appeared on the front page of the
New York Times
, Hillary was furious and demanded an apology, arguing that the lunch was supposed to be off the record. “I was dumbfounded,” Burros said. “There was nothing unflattering in that piece. On the contrary. I had taped the whole thing, including where she gave us permission to quote her.” Hillary’s need for control eclipsed the story and became late-night news fodder.

She wanted to play a major role in policy decisions, but when her health-care plan failed to get approval from Congress and Democrats suffered a disastrous loss in the 1994 midterm elections, she decided to leave Washington as often as she could. She had a “two-hundred-mile limit,” according to veteran ABC reporter Ann Compton, who covered the Clintons. In Washington Hillary was very unapproachable, but the farther out of town she got the more accessible she became. Hillary loved going on foreign trips, especially when she traveled with Chelsea. The press had lots of personal time with her on those trips when they sat around and really talked, almost always off the record. “The minute we
came home the political walls went back up,” Compton recalled. These glimpses of an unguarded Hillary were so sought after that reporters clamored to get on the foreign trips. On her first trip overseas, according to her then–press secretary, Neel Lattimore, there was so much interest that he had to bring reporters to the luggage compartment and ask them to take some of their things off the plane because the plane was too heavy. (The excess luggage was put on a separate support plane.)

While Hillary was still First Lady she decided to run for the Senate, and things were better around the White House as the fighting with Bill over the Monica Lewinsky affair subsided. “She would have hit him with a frying pan if one had been handed to her,” says Hillary’s friend Susan Thomases, “but I don’t think she ever in her mind imagined leaving him or divorcing him.” Members of Hillary’s inner circle say that the idea of running for the Senate came from New York congressman Charlie Rangel, but it’s clear that no matter who brought it up first she didn’t need much convincing. President Clinton was pushing her behind the scenes to run—he knew that he owed her that much at least. In a 1999 interview with
Talk
magazine Rangel said, “He [Clinton] was the one who asked the most questions about how she could win. You could see the guilt written all over his face. Any man would do anything to get out of the doghouse he was in.” When Hillary first told Thomases about her idea, her friend said that she did not want to see her battered in a campaign. “Then it became clear to me that this was something she really wanted to do, and she convinced me that it was very important for her that she herself have validation by the voters.” During those final months as First Lady, when she was looking at floral arrangements for formal dinners, Hillary’s mind was clearly elsewhere. “You could feel there was some disconnect. Sometimes she’d sigh, ‘I’ve got to hurry, I have
to be somewhere,’” said White House Florist Bob Scanlan. She was thinking of bigger things.

Hillary had fought for her husband during the Senate impeachment trial. She helped win him the support of the Democratic caucus by arguing before its members as dispassionately as possible that what he had done was wrong but not impeachable. “You all may be mad at Bill Clinton. Certainly, I’m not happy about what my husband did. But impeachment is not the answer,” she told them. “Too much is at stake here for us to be distracted from what really matters.” Some members left with tears in their eyes.

On the same day that the Senate was voting against impeachment, Hillary was meeting with New York politico Harold Ickes, who had been her husband’s deputy chief of staff, to plot her run for the Senate. She bristled at the thought of being known as the “former first lady” for the rest of her life. She had used her star power to help salvage her husband’s presidency under humiliating circumstances, and now it was her turn. “After eight years with a title but no portfolio,” she said, “I was now ‘senator-elect.’” Ironically, years later, Hillary was asked what TV show she enjoyed watching when she took a break from the presidential campaign. Her reply:
The Good Wife
.

When Michelle Obama views the Clintons, I don’t want to say she’s looking down her nose at them—but she kind of is.

—FORMER
O
BAMA ADMINISTRATION AIDE

D
uring the 1960 presidential election, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower supported Richard Nixon, his vice president, and made his aversion to the young John Kennedy clear when he derided him as “the boy.” When Kennedy won the election, Eisenhower took it as a personal blow. The enmity was mutual. Kennedy’s friend Charles Spalding said that Kennedy thought of Eisenhower as “being a nonpresident” who was not “totally aware of his powers.”

More than any other first lady—with the exception of Hillary Clinton—Mamie Eisenhower hated to leave the White House. She had never spent so much time with her husband as she had when he was President. He’d been the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II and was often overseas. And at age sixty-four Mamie resented her replacement, whom she sneeringly referred to as “the college girl.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s beauty and cutting-edge style would soon
eclipse the middle-class and ultrafeminine shirtwaist dresses, pearl chokers, and short bangs of Mrs. Eisenhower.

The outgoing first lady traditionally gives her successor a walk-through of the White House’s private living quarters on the second and third floors. The press was clamoring to find out the date when Jackie would get her private tour, just like the tour Lou Hoover had given Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bess Truman had given Mamie. Jackie had never seen the second floor, and as late as mid-November no one had any idea when she would get a look. Time was of the essence as Jackie was pregnant and her due date was fast approaching. During a November 22, 1960, press conference the Kennedys’ vivacious social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, told reporters, “The invitation has not been extended yet, but we hope it will be.”

Jackie had been told by the White House that she would be getting an invitation in mid-November, but Mamie clearly had no interest in making a big announcement or a show of public affection to her young and beautiful successor. Mamie was in control and she intended to relish her position. Finally, the invitation was formally extended through Mamie’s secretary to Jackie’s secretary for a visit on December 9. The call came a few days before November 25, when Jackie delivered her son John-John by C-section, and it was a much more formal invitation than the personal call Bess Truman had made inviting Mamie to the residence after the 1952 presidential election. The much-anticipated meeting was not revealed to reporters until five minutes after Jackie had arrived.

Before the visit, Jackie’s Secret Service agent called Chief Usher J. B. West, who ran the residence, advising him to have a wheelchair and a staffer to push it readily available, since Jackie was still weak from the C-section. When West told Mamie, she replied, “Oh, dear. I wanted to take her around alone.” Mamie suggested
that a wheelchair be ready but not made available unless Jackie asked for it.

Exhausted and pale, Jackie arrived alone at noon on the ninth, a little more than a month before her husband’s inauguration. She was dressed in a dark coat, black fur hat, and black gloves. West led her through the imposing Diplomatic Reception Room and into an elevator to the second-floor residence, where Mamie was standing regally in the hallway.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” West said, introducing the new First Lady. Mamie extended a cool hand toward Jackie but never stepped forward, forcing Jackie to walk slowly toward her. The First Lady was not going to make it easy for the woman who was dethroning her. “I turned and left them, and waited in my office for a call for the wheelchair,” West recalled. “A call that never came.” After some time, two buzzers rang in the Usher’s Office, the signal that Mamie and Jackie were coming down the elevator. The tour had lasted an hour and ten minutes, and Mamie showed Jackie some thirty rooms. As the First Lady walked over to a Chrysler limousine that would take her to her usual card game, Jackie slowly and quietly made her way to her three-year-old station wagon. “I saw pain darken her face,” West said. There had been no wheelchair, that much was clear. The next morning West and Maître d’ Charles Ficklin went to Mamie’s bedroom for their daily meeting. The First Lady sat, propped up by pillows against her pink headboard, picking at her breakfast. There was even a pink bow in her hair. She lowered her voice and said, “There certainly are going to be some changes made around here!”

After her White House tour, Jackie went to meet her family at the airport for a flight to the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach. Ever the politician, she lied to reporters and told them how kind Mamie had been to have a wheelchair available for her, but that she had chosen to walk. When a reporter asked Jackie what color
she planned to paint John-John’s nursery, she laughed: “Don’t ask such silly questions.” She had much more than the nursery on her mind. She was carrying copies of the entire White House floor plan and spent much of the planned vacation before the inauguration outlining how she wanted to change each and every room.

Two months later, when Jackie was comfortably installed as the new First Lady, she turned to West and asked, “Did you know that my doctor ordered a wheelchair the day I first went around the White House?”

“Yes, I did,” he replied.

She was puzzled. “Then why didn’t you have it for me? I was so exhausted after marching around the house for two hours that I had to go back to bed for two whole weeks!” West told her that Mamie had asked him to have it placed behind a closet door next to the elevator in case she needed it. But Mamie never mentioned it to her guest. Jackie laughed and said, “I was too scared of Mrs. Eisenhower to ask.”

P
AT
N
IXON WAS
so humiliated by her husband’s 1960 defeat to John Kennedy that she did not want him to concede the election too soon, and she even demanded a recount. There were hurt feelings on Jackie’s side as well. During the campaign, when Jackie was accused of spending thirty thousand dollars a year on her clothes and going on shopping sprees in Paris, she shot back, “I couldn’t spend that much unless I wore sable underwear.” She added cattily, “I’m sure I spend less than Mrs. Nixon on clothes.” Jackie later said that she was grateful that her husband didn’t make her “get a little frizzy permanent and be like Pat Nixon.”

Oddly enough, Pat and Jackie first met when Jackie was the “Inquiring Camera Girl” for the
Washington Times-Herald
before her
marriage to JFK. She was paid $42.50 per week and she lugged a ten-pound Graflex camera around Washington; her short columns featured chatty interviews. In one column, Jackie asked six housewives, “Do you think that Mamie Eisenhower’s bangs will become a nation-wide fad?” She asked Pat Nixon, when she was the wife of the vice president, “Who will be Washington’s No. 1 hostess now that the Republicans are back in power?” Pat shrewdly replied, “Why, Mrs. Eisenhower, of course.” Jackie even interviewed six-year-old Tricia Nixon for her column. Three days after Eisenhower was first elected, Jackie went to the new Vice President’s house on Tilden Street in Washington and asked Tricia, “What do you think of Senator Nixon now?” The little girl replied, heartbreakingly, “He’s always away. If he’s famous, why can’t he stay home?” Jackie’s boss at the newspaper teased her when she told him that she was quitting her job and getting married to then-Senator John Kennedy. “Don’t you think he’s a little too elderly for you?” Jackie was then twenty-four years old and Jack was thirty-six.

Because Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice president, the Kennedys had to come face-to-face with their defeated challengers the morning of the inauguration for the ceremonial coffee at the White House. “I remember,” Jackie recalled, “sitting on the sofa next to Mrs. Nixon, who looked really pretty that day. You could see she could really be rather New York chic when she wanted.” Mamie Eisenhower got one final dig in as she, Jackie, and New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges, who was responsible for part of the inaugural ceremony, waited in the car. President Eisenhower and President-elect Kennedy walked by in their black top hats and Mamie exclaimed, “Look at Ike in his top hat. He looks just like Paddy the Irishman!” Mamie no doubt referred to the caricature of an Irishman on purpose as the nation’s first Irish Catholic president was on his way to being inaugurated.

J
ACKIE AND HER
successor, Lady Bird Johnson, had a complicated relationship. When LBJ was her husband’s vice president she got to know Lady Bird well. Jackie said that she had never seen someone so eager to do her husband’s bidding. Lady Bird, she moaned, “would crawl down Pennsylvania Avenue over splintered glass for Lyndon.” In a conversation with her friend, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jackie compared Lady Bird to a “trained hunting dog” when she saw her taking notes for her husband. In her oral history for Johnson’s presidential library, Jackie recounts the same episode but with a different spin, saying how “impressed” she was with Lady Bird jotting down names of important people in the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port living room after Johnson was picked as Kennedy’s running mate. In this retelling, Lady Bird had a small spiral notepad balanced on her lap as she sat and chatted with Jackie and her sister, Lee, in one part of the living room as the men sat on the opposite side talking shop. LBJ would occasionally call out, “Bird, do you know so-and-so’s number?” She would always have it on hand. “Yet she would be sitting with us, looking so calm,” Jackie mused. “I was very impressed by that.”

Part of what complicated their relationship was the 1960 campaign, when Johnson and Kennedy were fighting for the Democratic nomination. In the heat of the campaign Jackie called Lyndon Johnson “Senator Cornpone” and Lady Bird “Mrs. Pork Chop.” Lady Bird, however, admired Jackie and was a bit threatened by her, and LBJ had a terrible relationship with Jackie’s brother-in-law Robert Kennedy. Johnson’s adviser Joe Califano says the Kennedys and the Johnsons were “street fighters on opposite sides of the street.” Johnson certainly felt that most of President Kennedy’s aides disliked him; he told Social Secretary Bess Abell, “I’ve got one friend in the White House and fortunately his
name is Jack Kennedy.” In a series of oral history interviews Jackie did after JFK’s assassination, she said that while her husband was not planning on dropping Johnson from the ticket in 1964, he told her, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” Shortly before his death, Kennedy had begun talking with his brother Robert about how to thwart Johnson from running for president in 1968.

In the White House, Jackie was mortified when Lady Bird told her that she didn’t know who Pablo Casals was. Jackie had invited Casals, who was widely regarded as the world’s greatest cellist, to perform at a state dinner. But Lady Bird never pretended to be anything other than what she was, the daughter of the most prominent man in their small East Texas town. “Goodness knows,” she laughed, “I didn’t know a fauteuil from a
bergère
.” The Johnsons were deeply hurt by the Kennedys’ treatment, and, after LBJ became president, the East Wing staff was self-conscious about organizing any event that would fit the stereotype. “I would have loved to have had a square dance in the East Room for a visitor from abroad—American folk dancing—but I just didn’t feel that we could get away with it,” Abell said, still remembering the strained atmosphere.

The nearly twenty-year age gap between Jackie and Lady Bird did not help. Lady Bird invited Jackie to meet about a dozen other senators’ wives after Kennedy was elected to Congress. At the small tea, Lady Bird recalled, Jackie struck her as a “bird of beautiful plumage among all of us little grey wrens.” Jackie was a source of fascination for Lady Bird, who would always remember how Jackie pronounced her name: “Lay-dee Bird.” But Lady Bird was often awkward around Jackie. She tried to comfort her on Air Force Once as they flew back from Dallas on November 22, 1963, but her immediate comment after the President’s
assassination was thoughtless. “I don’t know what to say,” Lady Bird told a shell-shocked Jackie. “What wounds me most of all is that this should happen in my beloved state of Texas.” Jackie did not respond but just sat there, motionless, caked in her husband’s blood. When Lady Bird offered to send someone into the private bedroom on Air Force One to help Jackie change out of her bloodstained suit, Jackie vehemently refused. “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.”