Kati Marton (2 page)

WHEN WE ELECT
a president we are electing more than a man or—eventually—a woman. Presidential couples rise together, serve together and, sometimes, fall together. Although Hillary Clinton set new standards for the public role of a first lady, the Clintons were not the only presidential couple who blended the political and the personal in their marriage. In fact, the intense mingling of the public and private has been more the rule than the exception among presidential couples. His career is their career. As careful as the wives are about hiding this fact, they sometimes slip. “When we were President …” Barbara Bush has said more than once; every first lady thinks and sometimes talks the same way.

Most politicians are, almost by definition, performers. They are nearly always “on,” aiming to please whatever audience they are addressing. It is not easy to have an intimate relationship with anyone sustained by love of not one person but the many. Is it possible for the most famous person on the planet to have a “normal” marriage? Can anyone—even a spouse—speak frankly to someone the world flatters and fears? In healthy marriages, power is distributed evenly. One-sided adulation, self-pity, intense scrutiny and loss of privacy all mitigate against such a union. A public show of distress or disapproval by a wife can be fatal for the politician. Yet there have been some very strong presidential marriages in which husband and wife shared almost equally in rewards and sacrifices. The nation benefited from such solid partnerships. But in part because of a squeamishness about unelected power, Americans tend to undervalue or deride the role of the president’s spouse, even while subjecting her to the most relentless scrutiny and occasional adulation. Yet all but two of the first ladies discussed in this volume played a positive and consequential role in the presidency. And two saved their husband’s administrations.

Presidents need to be married. (Only one, James Buchanan, was not.) The public expects it. Even today, in our cynical, media-intense age, the country looks at the president and first lady as role models. Beyond public expectations, it is a fact that no man needs a strong partner
more than the president, isolated and cocooned as he is in what Truman called the Great White Prison. With the exception of Woodrow Wilson and his second wife, the presidential couples of the last century began their political ascent together. No one knew these presidents or understood their obsession better than their wives. “He might live longer if he didn’t run for president, and if he did [live longer], would it be worth it?” Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary in May 1964.

The quality of presidential marriages differs widely, of course, but they do have some things in common. The couples tend to be solid and middle-aged. (The most obvious exception was the Kennedys, whose youth was one of the animating factors of their special aura.) The extraordinary pressures and the sheer invasiveness of the modern presidency tend to draw couples closer. No divorces have followed tenure in the White House. If the relationship between the politician and his wife is inherently unequal, the presidency tends to balance it. “One thing that happens to a president is that his ties with the outside world are cut,” Jacqueline Kennedy noted, “and the people you really have are each other ….” Lady Bird agreed: “If you weren’t close before, you’d sure better get close now.” Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton, famous philanderers, leaned on their wives more in the White House than before, whether or not they still misbehaved. “The White House has been good for us,” Bill Clinton said near the end of his second term, and this despite the most sordid scandal in presidential history.

The presidency does not strengthen all couples. The White House did nothing for the Lincolns. At times during the Roosevelt years, the presidential home was divided into almost openly hostile “Franklin” and “Eleanor” camps. Eleanor Roosevelt may cast a shadow over her successors, but her marriage was dysfunctional. The saddest modern presidential story may well be that of the Nixons. Richard Nixon married the girl he thought he loved and then abandoned her for his real passion: politics. A strong, honest, clear-eyed partner who could have calmed his anger and given him the love he missed as the child of a cold, withholding mother would have benefited him enormously. Instead, he turned his back on Pat, and they both suffered from incurable loneliness and self-fulfilling paranoia.

First ladies form part of our national folklore. They conjure up a
specific time in our country’s life. Whether as soul mates, helpmates or those who are essential to their husbands’ political survival, all first ladies have played a part in history. Yet we often see them though a prism that oversimplifies the complexity of their roles. Bess Truman and Jacqueline Kennedy played more substantial roles in their husbands’ administrations than is usually recognized. For all her grumbling about being a prisoner of the White House, Bess kept her husband steady and anchored to their small-town values. Jackie put an indelible stamp on the Kennedys’ thousand days by inventing Camelot as a preemptive strike against historians only a few days after the assassination. John F. Kennedy, the supreme ironist, “would have been derisive of such a romantic idea,” according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., but Jackie’s image of a magic time and place endured. Nancy Reagan’s image as couture-obsessed would-be royalty obscured her generally constructive role in the Reagan presidency. In fact, Reagan could not have been elected without Nancy (she tried to set the record straight in a bitter memoir, revealingly entitled
My Turn).
Barbara Bush’s chosen image of herself as a mild, white-haired grandmother was deceptive; a sharper politician than her husband, she was his tart-tongued sounding board and his first line of defense in private and public. As controversial as any first lady, Hillary Clinton, at a critical moment, saved her husband’s presidency, then rewrote American political history by running and winning a Senate seat while still first lady—and evoking dreams for some of another Clinton in the White House.

CLEMENTINE CHURCHILL MIGHT HAVE SPOKEN
for many presidential spouses when she wrote Winston, without irony, “You took me from the straitened little by-path I was treading and took me with you into the life of color and jostle of the highway.” Lady Bird, wife to perhaps the most “devouring ego” of the American presidency, made a similar point. “Lyndon stretched me to the last limit of my capacity …. I did enjoy the opportunity of living in that House … with that man.”

Most men who win the presidency nurture that dream from an early age. Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton, for example, chose their partners with the final prize already somewhere in their
minds. The wisest chose partners who could tell them bad news when no one else dared. “There is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates,” Clementine wrote her husband on June 27, 1940, “because of your rough and sarcastic and overbearing manner … and you are not so kind as you used to be.” On another occasion, she wrote, “I beg you not to do anything without telling me first, and giving me time to give you my valuable opinion on it.” Many first ladies spoke in similar terms to their husbands. Roosevelt, Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Clinton married such partners. While their choice of wives did not guarantee success, it gave them an advantage over those presidents, such as Wilson and Nixon, whose wives could not deliver hard news. The less streamlined the politician—Carter and George Bush père come to mind—the more important his spouse’s ability to compensate for his shortcomings.

Presidents and first ladies are not always the best sources for their own history. Rarely departing from their “story line,” they fix their eyes firmly on their legacy, as well as on the day’s headlines. They are seldom interested in the confessional culture. From the second Mrs. Wilson’s sorry attempts to justify her bad judgment, to Nancy Reagan’s view of herself as “Ronnie’s lightning rod,” first ladies hold to their predetermined roles. For the story behind the image, aides, friends and Cabinet members are often more revealing than first couples.

Ironically, those presidential couples most cautious about revealing themselves—who have given the fewest interviews and have not published correspondence or diaries—have missed a chance to present their own version of themselves. The greatest love story of the modern presidency, that of Woodrow and Edith Wilson, is revealed in their extraordinary letters, which show clearly a passionate man underneath the stern Presbyterian moralist of the history books. Eleanor Roosevelt’s deeply moving expression of her need of intimacy, and her anguish at her husband’s inability to provide it, are both revealed in her letters. FDR, not a self-revealing man, left no such correspondence. When Harry Truman caught his wife burning their letters and protested, “Bess, think of history,” she replied dryly, “I am.” But in fact, she was wrong. Harry’s surviving letters to his wife reveal a human and vulnerable man, fearless about expressing his need for the gruff Bess. How endearing to read Truman’s
letter to his wife, written during the historic meetings with Stalin and Churchill in Potsdam. “No, your taste in hats is not screwy,” he reassures Bess, then apologizes for his inability to shop during the meetings: “I can’t get Chanel N° 5… not even on the black market ….” The senior George Bush also offered a moving self-portrait in his collection of letters to family and friends; he reveals a sweet nature that his politics often masked. The Clintons, probably the most scrutinized presidential couple in history, may never reveal themselves in letters or truly candid memoirs. However sound their reasons for discretion, their search for privacy will leave others to define this polarizing political couple.

The partnerships described in this book are both personally compelling and important for our time. Woodrow and Edith Wilson represent a stunning parable of the danger of true romance in the White House. Successful first ladies enlarge the president’s world. Edith, who embodied the hypocrisies of Victorian society, power veiled by the parasol and pearls of the antebellum South, shrank her husband’s world even before his stroke. With the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, no first lady today could behave as she did once Wilson was bedridden and isolated.

DESPITE EDITH WILSON’S ANTI-FEMINISM,
however, the Great War changed the role of women in American society. From munitions factories to universities, girls and women found their way into male bastions. Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, was now a member of Congress. In 1920, she helped the House pass the Nineteenth Amendment—for female suffrage—by a single vote.

After a taste of global engagement and social upheaval, the country’s conservatism reasserted itself. Between the two world wars, the United States turned toward a selfish insularity. There was a general fatigue with sacrificing for war, with Woodrow Wilson’s moral rebukes and with Europe’s blood feuds. While the Old World lay prostrate, America’s business was business. The booming new field of advertising targeted women not as citizens but as consumers. They were now bombarded with messages telling them that their home was the temple where they could best fulfill themselves. Women’s suffrage was cleverly translated into the right to shop. A 1930 ad for household products in the
Chicago
Tribune
cleverly merged the two, foreshadowing many later ad campaigns. “Today’s woman gets what she wants. The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom’s color scheme.” The march toward full equality for women would take many more twists and turns.