First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (34 page)

Michelle Obama and Laura Bush are held to different standards than Hillary is, according to Hillary’s loyal staff. Laura Bush’s chief of staff, Andi Ball, worked closely with Hillary’s then–deputy chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, through the transition, and they’ve maintained a very good relationship over time. Shortly after 9/11, Laura Bush became the first first lady to deliver the weekly presidential radio address—she used it to draw attention to human rights abuses against Afghan women. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” she said, using the bully pulpit of the presidency to make the case. Verveer was one of the first people to call Ball after Laura’s radio address. “Hillary
never
could have done that,” she said. “If she had taken the microphone of the presidential podium to deliver an address all hell would have broken loose for Hillary. But people didn’t expect it out of Laura Bush.” That is probably because it was not something that she was naturally inclined to do. It was her husband’s idea and she looked at the statement and put it in her own words. She did not know the impact it would have.

The 2008 presidential campaign left deep and lasting scars on both the Clinton and the Obama camps, and they are still shockingly fresh. One Obama aide said that Michelle would have liked to see Vice President Joe Biden run against Hillary for the 2016 Democratic nomination. She is very close to the Bidens, especially Vice President Biden’s wife, Jill, whom she’s worked with to advocate for military families. Several high-level advisers in both camps expressed disdain for their former opponents and even shared stories that made the other side look bad. One of Hillary’s best friends, Susie Tompkins Buell, who describes herself as “an eddy in a wild river” for Hillary, was defensive when asked whether Hillary regretted having an office in the West Wing. Buell said, “Where is Michelle Obama’s office?” (Michelle’s office is in the East Wing.)

Working for a Clinton, or a Bush, or an Obama, is like working for a major corporation. Staffers come to identify themselves closely with the politician they serve. Some of these aides would lie down on a train track for the president and the first lady. They often hold grudges far longer than the president and first lady do. On the eve of the 2008 New Hampshire primary, after she finished third in the Iowa caucuses, Hillary was asked a question that almost brought her to tears: “How do you do it?” It was a “chick question,” said Marianne Pernold, the woman who asked her. She wanted to know how Hillary got up every morning and seemed so put together. Hillary paused for ten seconds and revealed a side of herself that few people ever see. “You know, I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don’t want to see us fall backwards, you know?” she said, her voice cracking. She added, “This is very personal for me. It’s not just political. It’s not just public. I see what’s happening, and we have to reverse it.” She became the first woman to win a presidential primary with her
victory in New Hampshire. Not everyone thought she was being sincere, however. Laura Bush’s chief of staff, Anita McBride, remembers watching Hillary answering Pernold’s question on the news from her office in the East Wing, and calling Laura in the residence to tell her to turn on the television. “You’ve
got
to see this,” she told her. Even while McBride and other staffers sat with their mouths agape, viewing Hillary’s sudden display of emotion as nothing more than a ploy, the sitting First Lady was convinced it was genuine. “You don’t understand,” Laura told them.

Ahead of the New Hampshire primary, Hillary had said that Martin Luther King Jr. needed President Johnson to pass the Civil Rights Act in order to begin to realize his dream of racial equality. “It took a president to get it done,” she said. Critics said she was downplaying King’s role in the passage of the legislation. She grew increasingly bitter as more and more of her friends, including Senator Ted Kennedy, who had been a mentor to her in the Senate and part of the family dynasty that she and her husband so revered, publicly expressed their support for Obama. The morning after the primary in South Carolina, where Obama won by twenty-eight points, President Clinton drew fire when, campaigning for his wife, he said, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.” Comparing Obama to Jackson was quickly condemned by African Americans in the state, including the influential former majority whip and key member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Jim Clyburn, who called the former president’s behavior “bizarre” and went on television to implore him to “chill.”

Bill Clinton’s overzealous campaigning for his wife is perhaps a symptom of his own guilt over having put her through so much, since the very start of their life together. Mary Ann Campbell, an
old friend of Hillary from Arkansas, remembers a charity roast of Hillary in Little Rock when the Clintons were in the Governor’s Mansion. Campbell was assigned the delicate task of roasting Hillary and she made some jokes about Hillary’s appearance. “Everybody laughed, except Bill. Hillary just barrel laughed. She knows I like her.” When Bill came onstage he said pointedly, glancing sideways at Campbell, “I
like
Hillary’s frizzy hair. I
like
her glasses. I
like
Hillary with no makeup.” Bill could not stand someone making fun of his wife, just as he could not stand to watch Obama criticize her during the campaign.

Michelle first met Hillary when Hillary was her husband’s rival for the 2008 Democratic nomination and, unlike Laura Bush, she would never be able to forget the things that Hillary said about her husband, especially how she mocked his message of hope and change. “I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified,” Hillary said sarcastically at a campaign stop in Ohio in February 2008. “The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect.”

The Obamas view the Clintons as a political dynasty that came before them. “There’s a work functionality to that relationship, not exactly a close personal bond,” said one former Obama aide. The Obamas consider themselves far less calculating. Even while Clinton staffers argue strongly that Hillary herself thinks that every first lady has to carve out the job in a way that works best for her and for her family, most of her confidantes say that Michelle Obama has not done enough as first lady. “She gave up a lot of gains,” said a former Clinton staffer in a hushed voice.

There is a reason why there were no couples dinners when Hillary was a frequent guest at the Obama White House as secretary
of state. By then Hillary was a former senator and fourth in line for the presidency. “I don’t think that she [Michelle] ever thought much of the Clintons,” says one former Obama adviser. “Even before the presidential race, even before we were really into it, I think that the Obamas’ view of the Clintons is that those years were an opportunity squandered. Big things could have been done but there was a lot of nibbling around the edges and a lot of it was consumed by President Clinton’s behavior.” In a 2007
Washington Post
story, Michelle refused to say whether she would vote for Hillary if her husband were not in the race. “I would be more concerned at this time with finding the best president for this time, and if it is a woman, that would be a great thing,” she said. “Would I naturally be a Hillary supporter if my husband weren’t running? I don’t know, I’d be looking at the race totally differently. And it’s hard for me to see beyond the wonders of my husband.”

Shortly before the Obamas moved into the White House, Laura Bush’s East Wing aides handed Michelle’s staff binders detailing which events were added by which first lady and the different programs Laura had worked on. Laura had been a strong supporter of Save America’s Treasures, a program started by Hillary Clinton to help preserve historic sites. Laura’s staff was sure that Michelle would feel obligated to support it because Hillary was going to be part of her husband’s Cabinet. But Michelle did not feel any such obligation and she did not prioritize the program, which has since lost its funding. In a 2015 interview on
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
, Colbert asked Michelle, if the next president is a woman, would she leave behind a letter of advice for her husband? Michelle said she would and gave what at first seemed like a safe, non-controversial answer: “I would say, ‘Follow your passion, just be you.’” Colbert said quickly, “I think he does,” and the audience burst into laughter, the implication
being that Bill Clinton has always followed his passions. “I think he would,” she replied, smiling broadly at Colbert. “I mean that in the best possible way,” Colbert said quickly. “I didn’t say . . . I’m just sitting here minding my business,” Michelle said, trying to distance herself, raising her hands in the air.

Recent charges of corruption and messy contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative, the family’s $2 billion foundation, fuel the animosity between the warring factions. “It fits into this narrative about the Clintons that they come off as just trying to claw their way towards success and money,” said a former Obama adviser with close personal knowledge of the dynamic between the two couples. “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.”

Even so, President Obama uses the Clintons’ popularity when necessary. It was hard to ignore the difference between the two presidents when they both appeared unexpectedly in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room in the late afternoon of December 10, 2010. A voice on the loudspeaker was piped into the reporters’ booths in the White House and gave a ten-minute warning—no one was prepared for former President Clinton to come out and stand onstage with President Obama. During a half-hour Q&A with reporters, the former president gleefully answered questions and defended President Obama’s compromise agreement reached with congressional Republicans to extend tax cuts and unemployment benefits. But Clinton was not about to relinquish the spotlight. “I’ve been keeping the First Lady waiting for about half an hour, so I’m going to take off,” Obama told reporters several minutes into the briefing. “I don’t want to make her mad,” Clinton said. “Please go,” and he stayed for another twenty-three minutes of questions. He seems to want to get back into the White House almost as badly as his wife does.

Oh my God, I think I’m going to throw up.

—
B
ETTY
F
ORD, BEFORE MAKING A CAMPAIGN SPEECH

H
igh office leads to high anxiety, and first families face enormous amounts of pressure. Former White House Maître d’ George Hannie remembers how mercurial President Obama could be. “One day he can talk you to death. The next day he can walk past you and he won’t say anything. That’s why his hair is turning gray, he’s having problems.” The same is true about the first ladies, he said; they can say hello as they pass staff in the hallway, or they can be so consumed with their own thoughts and private concerns that they keep their eyes fixed straight ahead and don’t say a thing. “You know their minds are on something else. It’s not them, they’re just thinking.” Hannie said Hillary Clinton was especially quiet when she was consumed with worry about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Gwen King, who worked in the Kennedy, Nixon, and Ford administrations, remembered Jackie Kennedy calling one day in a panic from
the residence because she had lost an eighteenth-century historical document that she had been given by a wealthy donor. King volunteered to go hunting for it and finally found it lodged in a cubbyhole in a conference room. “She [Jackie] was so grateful, you would have thought that I was her best friend the way she was graciously thanking me. The next day I passed her in the hall and she looked right through me. That was Jacqueline Kennedy.”

Lady Bird Johnson was soother-in-chief, spending much of her time smoothing feathers ruffled by her hot-tempered husband. She was an impeccably well-mannered southern lady whose husband regularly spoke to aides with the bathroom door open as he was sitting on the toilet. As a northeasterner, White House Curator Jim Ketchum, like most of the people working in the Kennedy White House, was not accustomed to the Johnsons’ Texas accent, and he was uncomfortable with the President’s brash personality and imposing physicality. “Nobody likes change,” he says.

Lady Bird worked hard to preserve her husband’s legacy, and she always regretted letting one taped conversation out into the public. In it, the President instructed his tailor to cut his pants so that he would have more room in the crotch, “down where your nuts hang,” as he put it. “Give me an inch that I can let out there because they cut me. They’re just like riding a wire fence.” During the 1960 campaign Bill Moyers was helping Johnson on the campaign trail—he would later become his press secretary when Johnson became president. During the exhausting months leading up to the election, he slept on the bed in the Johnsons’ basement when they returned from the road for sessions of the Senate. Moyers missed his wife and their six-month-old son, who were still in Texas, and Lady Bird could tell. “She would often come down two flights of stairs to ask if I was doing all right,”
he said. “One night, the Senator and I got home even later and he brought with him some unresolved dispute from the Senate cloakroom. At midnight I could still hear him carrying on as if he was about to purge the Democratic caucus. Pretty soon I heard her footsteps on the stair and I called out, ‘Mrs. Johnson, you don’t need to come down here, I’m all right.’ And she called back, ‘Well, I was just coming down to tell you, “I’m all right too.”’”

Lady Bird had to face criticism about her husband’s policies because the first lady is an easier, more accessible target than the president. On January 18, 1968, she invited a group of women for a luncheon at the White House to discuss how to reduce crime. On the guest list was the famous singer and actress Eartha Kitt, who was in a combative mood. Lady Bird noticed that Kitt did not touch her seafood bisque or her peppermint ice cream at the elegant lunch in the Old Family Dining Room. She did not applaud any of the speakers, either. When Lady Bird asked for questions from the audience, Kitt’s hand shot up. She walked toward Lady Bird, stared directly at her, and said, “We send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the streets. They take pot and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school, because they are going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.” Lady Bird looked back at Kitt, “stare for stare,” she later said. Then came the punch to the gut. With her finger pointed at Lady Bird, Kitt said, “You are a mother, too. . . . I have a baby and then you send him off to war.” The First Lady’s face had lost its color and her voice trembled as she replied, “I cannot identify as much as I should. I have not lived the background that you have, nor can I speak as passionately or as well, but we must keep our eyes and our hearts and our energies fixed on constructive areas and try to do something that will make this a happier, better-educated land.” She was not about to
raise her voice. Lady Bird, Chief Usher J. B. West noted, “seemed to grow calmer as the world around her became more furious.”

Lady Bird had come a long way from the shy Texas girl she once was. In 1959 she began taking speech classes with Hester Provensen at the Capital Speakers’ Club to get over her fear of public speaking. Provensen was an institution in Washington and taught two packed classes of wives of senators and congressmen. Class met once a week for nine months, and Lady Bird joined because, she said, “I got real annoyed with myself for being so shy and quiet, and never having anything to say when asked to speak.” At the beginning of her husband’s political career, Lady Bird hated even standing up and saying something as simple as “Thank you for inviting me to this barbecue.” Provensen told her that the people in the audience were just like her, and that helped ease her fears.

Before Provensen’s students graduated they had to make a three- to five-minute speech on a subject assigned to them. Topics ranged from “The Plight of the American Indian” to “What I Liked in the Congressional Cookbook.” Lady Bird was appropriately assigned “Why Texas Is the Lone Star State.” Whenever any of these well-heeled women stammered during their presentation, a penny was dropped into a tin cup. Later, when Lady Bird became first lady, Provensen would be called to the second floor of the White House to help if she was about to give a particularly difficult speech. “I don’t remember seeing her nervous, I just remember seeing her practicing and going over her speech cards,” Social Secretary Bess Abell said. Lady Bird would become known for her slow, sweet southern drawl, and the way she spoke, her friends and family say, was pure poetry.

Not all the pressures faced by the first ladies involve high policy or giving speeches; some of them are much more private
and personal. Nash Castro worked with Lady Bird on her signature beautification program and remembers getting calls from her at 5 p.m. most days asking him to join her on the Truman Balcony. “She would have half a glass of wine mixed with half a glass of water because she was forever watching her weight. I’d have a glass of Scotch and water and there would be a bowl of popcorn between us and we talked about everything.” Lady Bird was always on a diet and rarely allowed herself more than a few kernels of popcorn during these informal happy hours. She could not help being wounded by a 1964
Time
cover story that praised her skills on the campaign trail but said cuttingly, “Her nose is a bit too long, her mouth a bit too wide, her ankles a bit less than trim, and she is not outstanding at clothesmanship.” Even Jackie Kennedy, who seemed always to be aware of her beauty, worried that her own hips were too wide. Jackie was so disciplined about her weight—a mere 120 pounds—that if she gained two pounds she fasted for a day, then upped her exercise regimen and limited herself to fruit for days afterward. (Jackie also had an intense beauty regimen that included brushing her hair fifty to one hundred strokes every night and applying skin cream to her eyelashes.) Lady Bird told an aide that she wished she had gotten her nose fixed before she became first lady, but by the time she became a household name, and her appearance was being scrutinized, it would have been too obvious. She felt forever destined to be compared with her predecessor.

The
Time
story was right about one thing: it was true that Lady Bird did not care about high fashion. Bess Abell said she had to convince her to buy dresses that were not off the rack. Lady Bird demurred: “I don’t think clothes are that important.” She had a limit, however. Before one state dinner, the
Washington Post
’s Katharine Graham arrived wearing the same dress that
Lady Bird had on. Abell ran upstairs to tell the First Lady, who swiftly changed and came down wearing a different gown.

G
ENERAL
D
ON
H
UGHES,
who worked for the Nixons during the vice presidency, was having dinner with them when, almost nine months after Nixon’s resignation, the President first learned about the fall of Saigon that marked the end of the Vietnam War. “He showed a great remorse that night,” Hughes said. “He said, ‘If I had been there those SOBs would never have crossed the DMZ.’ He wasn’t crying, he was mad; he was mad at himself.” Hughes was used to the President’s intense flashes of anger, as was Pat. Hughes had been assigned to protect Pat during her husband’s 1960 presidential campaign, and though he had served in three wars, “nothing was as draining” as that campaign, he says.

Pat, who had already spent almost eight years as second lady, did not flinch when her husband pledged to campaign in fifty states in 1960. She was willing to do whatever it took, as she watched Democrat John Kennedy move into a two-point lead ahead of her husband. She was almost fifty but she refused to be intimidated by the young, regal Jackie. Richard Nixon was less calm. Once, when they were driving through Iowa, Nixon kicked the seat in front of him, where Hughes was sitting, so hard that Hughes smacked his head on the dashboard. Hughes had to leave the car to cool off. Both Nixons were exhausted after they visited twenty-five states in the two weeks leading up to the first televised presidential debate. Nixon had a 103-degree fever but Pat, who never admitted when she was not feeling well, soldiered on. She clenched her teeth when her husband flew into rages, exhausted because he could not sleep.

She had been through worse. In late November 1957, when
President Eisenhower had a mild stroke, Mamie asked Pat to fill in for her with increasing frequency. Pat was exhausted by the heavy workload, even though she would never allow herself to admit it. Even while Mamie relied on Pat to do her grunt work, just as Jackie would depend on Lady Bird, the Eisenhowers never invited the Nixons to the residence for a party. But they were happy to use them when they needed them.

President Eisenhower asked the Nixons to take an eighteen-day diplomatic trip to South America in the spring of 1958. The point of the trip was to celebrate the inauguration of Arturo Frondizi, the first democratically elected president in Argentina in two decades. The trip was going well until the Nixons arrived at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, where rocks were thrown at them by leftist demonstrators. But the most dramatic episode happened during their stop in Caracas, Venezuela, when the Nixons arrived at the airport and were greeted by protesters who spat on them and threw fruit and garbage at them. On the drive into Caracas, Pat was in the car with Hughes and the foreign minister’s wife. In front of them, in a separate car, were Vice President Nixon and the foreign minister. Protesters blocked their route with a vehicle and hundreds of them flooded the streets and attacked both cars, throwing rocks and pipes at them. Pat looked ahead at her husband’s car, not knowing if either of them would survive. The foreign minister’s wife was sitting next to Pat and began to panic. Pat tried to soothe her, cradling her in her arms like a baby. “I did what I could to help but Mrs. Nixon didn’t need it; she calmed her down and comforted her until we got to safety,” Hughes recalled, describing that day as the closest he had come to death. A rock struck the Vice President’s window and a piece of glass hit the foreign minister’s eye and he started to bleed. The demonstrators began rocking the Vice President’s car, trying
to overturn it. Secret Service agents did not want to draw their guns for fear that would cause more violence. After more than ten minutes, agents were able to use a press car to block traffic and give the Nixons’ motorcade a path to speed away and escape to the American Embassy.

The next day the press gathered around the cars, which Nixon insisted be left in full view so that their harrowing journey could be documented. Reporters burst into spontaneous applause when the Nixons left the embassy to attend a government luncheon. Tears welled up in the normally stoic Pat’s eyes. Before the Nixons left for home, the governing junta gave Hughes hand grenades for protection. When Pat climbed into the car, she had to delicately maneuver around a grenade that Hughes had accidentally left on the backseat. “I believe this belongs to you,” she said as she carefully handed it to him.

The Nixons were welcomed home as heroes. The Eisenhowers met them at Andrews Air Force Base, as did thousands of supporters, half of Congress, and the full Cabinet. Years later, when she was First Lady, Pat found herself surrounded by Soviet security agents at a large Moscow department store as members of the American press clamored to get closer to her and her hostess, the wife of the Soviet foreign minister. Traffic was closed off around the building and the Soviet police began shoving frustrated journalists aside. Pat was at the store’s ice cream counter when she noticed Associated Press reporter Saul Pett being pushed against a wall by a burly security guard. “He’s with me,” she told the guard. “Leave him alone.” A skilled politician with decades of training, she pulled Pett close to her and offered him a bite of her vanilla ice cream cone. Pett wrote her a note thanking her for the gesture. “You’ve been a heckuva good sport,” he wrote, “and the ice cream was especially good.”