First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (8 page)

Michelle Obama is surrounded by a team of women who insulate her from the press. It is easier for her handlers to go around traditional media and control the way she is perceived through posts on social media and selective interviews, often on late-night television. Her remove from her predecessors has been a source of frustration to the families of some of the women who came before her. Bob Bostock, who worked for the Nixons in the post-presidency and later worked for the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, was thrilled after the associate director of the library, Richard “Sandy” Quinn, met with a member of the First Lady’s staff about honoring the late Pat Nixon’s one-hundredth birthday in 2012 by dedicating the Spring 2012 Garden Tour in her honor. Pat had started the tradition of opening up the White House gardens to the public twice a year in 1972. He suggested a brief ceremony with Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Tricia Nixon Cox and their children, and a short dedication to Mrs. Nixon in the brochure. “Perhaps a photograph of Mrs. Nixon from that first spring tour could also be included,” Quinn offered. “I know that Mrs. Nixon’s daughters would be deeply gratified if you were to honor their mother in this way. They know, as few do, the enormous demands on the First Lady and on the President’s family.” A curt response from the First Lady’s deputy chief of staff, Melissa Winter, arrived two months later, thanking Quinn for the note and telling him that Mrs. Obama is “proud to continue the tradition of seasonal White House garden tours” but rejecting the idea of a ceremony. “It is not the practice of our office to dedicate
White House tours,” she said. “We appreciate the thoughtful nature of your request.” The Nixon Library staff felt completely blown off and deeply disappointed. It’s not known whether Michelle ever saw Quinn’s original request or Winter’s response.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, read voraciously about her predecessors, in whom Michelle had expressed limited interest. When she was working on health care she sought advice from Betty Ford, who had worked tirelessly to get more funding for addiction. She invited Betty to a meeting with her and Vice President Al Gore’s wife, Tipper. In a letter dated March 24, 1993, she thanked Betty for her advice and wrote that she hoped her health-care proposal would reflect “a new commitment to the problems of substance abuse.”

Hillary’s closest relationship was with Jackie Kennedy, but the stresses of the job make for unlikely allies. According to her White House press secretary, Neel Lattimore, Hillary, who does not have much in common with Nancy Reagan, told her staff that she thought it was unfair that Nancy had been criticized for spending $200,000 (in private donations) on a new set of china for the White House. Nancy’s image as an imperial first lady—she was referred to contemptuously in the press as “Queen Nancy”—was amplified by the purchase (and not helped by revelations that she spent $25,000 on her inaugural wardrobe and $10,000 on a single gown). But when the Clintons first came to the White House and Hillary had to decide what china to use for state dinners, the Reagan china was the only complete set available. (Nancy was unapologetic about her decision to purchase new china. “We haven’t got enough china to serve a state dinner so we got china. The White House had to have china for heaven’s sake.”) As a young lawyer Hillary had worked on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment investigation of President Nixon, and she began to
sympathize with the quiet suffering of Nixon’s wife, Pat, and the brave face she put on every day. Somebody on Hillary’s staff said something unkind about Pat when she passed away five months after the Clintons moved into the White House, and Hillary shot back, “That’s not true, you have to appreciate what Pat Nixon did in this White House.” (Neither Clinton, however, attended Pat’s funeral.) As first lady, Pat had created special tours for the blind and the disabled, so that blind visitors could touch some of the furniture, and she opened the White House to the public at night so that working people could visit more easily.

Hillary could identify with Pat’s humble childhood and her stoicism during her husband’s humiliating resignation. In a 1979 interview, Hillary made it clear that she empathized with political spouses and said, “I think that people who are married to politicians are under a tremendous strain, because unless you have a pretty strong sense of your own self-identity, it becomes very easy to be buffeted about by all the people who are around your husband. People who are advising him, people who want favors from him, people who want to do things with him, for him, or to him, and very often those people are not anxious to have the politician’s wife or family members around because that’s then competition for their time.”

Hillary’s friend and former speechwriter Lissa Muscatine says that Hillary believes strongly that women need to be given the freedom to make the right choices for their own lives, whether it’s working or staying home with their families. “She felt the same way about the first lady’s role, that the first ladies are different and they have different needs and interests and different experiences. They just need the freedom to be in that position in a way that works for them and their husbands and the presidency,” she said, adding, “This is not a defined job, so
let people define it the way that they need to define it.” After the 2000 election, Hillary advised Laura Bush not to let the responsibilities of her new role cloud her decision making. Hillary had once turned down an invitation from Jackie Kennedy to go to the ballet in New York with Chelsea because she said she was too busy. She had always regretted it because Jackie passed away just a few months later.

When Hillary gave Laura the customary tour of the residence, they stood together in the first lady’s dressing room and Hillary said, “Your mother-in-law stood right here and told me that from this window you can see straight down into the Rose Garden and also over to the Oval Office.” Eight years later, when Michelle Obama came for her first tour of the White House, Laura showed her the exact same spot where so many first ladies have stood discreetly in the shadows, watching their husbands at work.

Surprisingly, Michelle is closer to Laura than she is to Hillary. Even though they are on different sides of the political spectrum, Laura and Michelle have personalities that mesh. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Michelle was heavily criticized for a remark she made during a speech in Milwaukee. “For the first time in my adult life,” she said, “I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Though she didn’t plan to say it, it became the most-talked-about quote from her time on the campaign trail. Laura Bush defended Michelle in an interview four months later. She had flown all night from Afghanistan, where she was visiting U.S. troops, to Slovenia, where she was joining President Bush for an annual summit. When she got to Slovenia she and her aides had a couple of hours to sleep and shower before an interview with ABC News’s Jon Karl. Laura had not anticipated being asked about Michelle’s remarks from several months earlier, but she immediately came to
her defense. “I think she probably meant I’m ‘more proud,’ you know, is what she really meant,” she said sympathetically. “You have to be very careful in what you say. I mean, I know that, and that’s one of the things you learn and that’s one of the really difficult parts both of running for president and for being the spouse of the president, and that is, everything you say is looked at and in many cases misconstrued.”

A week later, in an interview on
The View
, Michelle said she was “touched” by what Laura said. “There’s a reason people like her,” she said. “It’s because she doesn’t, sort of, you know, add fuel to the fire.” Laura had grown accustomed to the rough-and-tumble world of presidential politics and remembered four years earlier when Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of then–presidential candidate John Kerry, told a newspaper that she didn’t know if Laura Bush had ever had “a real job,” forgetting that Laura had worked in Texas public schools as a librarian from 1968 to 1977. Michelle and Laura clearly had a rapport as they praised one another at a conference promoting women’s rights in September 2015. “I think it’s also a great example for the world to see that women of different political parties in the United States agree on so many issues,” Laura said. “We’re in the midst of a political campaign now, as everyone knows, a presidential race coming up and when you watch television you think that everyone in the United States disagrees with everybody else, but in fact we as Americans agree on so many more things than we disagree on.” Michelle added, “It has made my transition to this office so much easier having somebody like Laura and her team. . . . It’s not just Laura and I, it’s not just President Bush and President Obama, but it’s our staffs. My chief of staff continues to talk to Laura’s former chief of staff on a very regular basis and it’s that kind of sharing that prevents us from re-creating the wheel, allows us to build on
the things that are already working so that the country gains as we transition from one party to the next.”

Michelle’s first chief of staff, Jackie Norris, says that she will “never forget the intense camaraderie and loyalty that the first ladies and members of the first ladies’ staffs have for each other.” After President Obama’s election, Norris sat down in Laura Bush’s office with Laura’s East Wing team, including Laura’s chief of staff, Anita McBride. Michelle’s staff was given what amounted to a blueprint, as Laura’s staff told them what missteps they had made along the way, which parties and luncheons were important, and which could be safely skipped. “What they wanted was to completely set aside politics and to help us succeed and to help Michelle Obama succeed as first lady. They were all in this unique position to understand just how hard her role would be.” When Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, was running a nonprofit specializing in global women’s rights, she brought a group of Afghan women to meet Laura Bush. After their meeting, Laura escorted the women out through the Diplomatic Reception Room. But Verveer lagged behind them, lost in conversation with Laura’s chief of staff. Laura approached them. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Verveer said, realizing that she had to leave, “but we belong to a small club.” “I completely understand,” Laura said with a smile. “I belong to a small club, too.”

P
AT
N
IXON TOOK
Connie Stuart, her chief of staff and press secretary, aside on a quiet day in February 1971 and whispered, “Jackie is coming. Nobody is to know and I’m only telling a few people; she is coming tomorrow.” Pat had invited Jackie and her children, Caroline and John-John, to visit the White House for the official unveiling of the President’s and the former First Lady’s portraits
by Aaron Shikler. It was tradition for the former first family to attend such unveilings, but Jackie had not been back to the White House since her husband’s assassination. In response to an earlier invitation to return from Pat, she had told her that she wasn’t ready yet but that she knew that “time will make things easier, and that one day, when they and I are older, I must take Caroline and John back to the places where they lived with their father.” She had left the White House behind when she moved to New York shortly after the assassination, and she felt guilty about serving on the Committee for the Preservation of the White House and never showing up for meetings. “I’m still in mourning,” she told one reporter who asked for an interview a year after President Kennedy’s assassination. Jackie’s former social secretary and lifelong confidante Nancy Tuckerman sent her a memo on April 13, 1964, not yet five months after the assassination, asking her if she wanted to see a movie the navy had made of her husband’s funeral. “Could I wait a bit,” Jackie wrote at the bottom of the note. Jackie had been through so much pain in her life and Pat Nixon understood, telling her that she knew a public unveiling of the portraits would be too emotional. Pat promised that it would be absolutely private.

The Nixons and the Kennedys had known each other for years—the men’s offices were across the hall from each other when Richard Nixon was President Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president and John Kennedy was a senator. The Nixons were even invited to the Kennedys’ 1953 wedding (though they did not attend). After Pat wrote to Jackie that the portraits were ready to be hung in the White House, she must have been surprised by the letter she received, hand-delivered by Tuckerman. Jackie would come, but on her own terms. “I really do not have the courage to go through an official ceremony, and bring the children back
to the only home they both knew with their father under such traumatic conditions.” She wanted to keep the press out of “their little lives” but said she was open to the idea of a private viewing. Immediately, Pat asked Tuckerman to call Jackie and schedule a time. A week later Jackie set foot in the house she had so lovingly restored and in which she had spent so many happy days with her husband.

If Jackie had had even the slightest sense that the press knew about her visit, she would never have come. (Veteran United Press International White House correspondent Helen Thomas somehow found out about the visit, and when she threatened to write a story she was promised an exclusive interview with Pat if she agreed to keep quiet.) During the top-secret meeting, the White House was on lockdown. There was no traffic between the normally bustling corridors connecting the East and West Wings. Most people on the staff did not know who was coming because it wasn’t noted on the President’s and First Lady’s calendars. Even their social secretary, Lucy Winchester, didn’t know what was happening. Only four staffers were told about the visit, and they had to pledge absolute secrecy.