First Ladies

A great many people have given me advice, encouragement, and help for this book. Above all, I want to express my appreciation to the First Ladies who graciously answered my many questions about their White House years—Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Bush. Numerous people at the various presidential libraries have also been helpful. I would especially like to thank George H. Curtis of the Harry S Truman Library, Linda Hansen of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Herbert L. Pankratz of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Leesa Tobin of the Gerald Ford Library, Dale C. Mayer of the Herbert Hoover Library, as well as Susan O’Brien of the New York Society Library. My agent, Ted Chichak, and my editor, Samuel S. Vaughan, have been warmly supportive and astutely involved with achieving the best possible book on this complex subject. Finally, I would like to thank my friend and colleague, Thomas Fleming, for his invaluable research help and literary consultation.

—

A
FEW MONTHS AFTER
B
ILL AND
H
ILLARY
C
LINTON SETTLED INTO
the White House, they invited me and my husband, Clifton Daniel, down from New York to have dinner and stay overnight with them. I said we were perfectly willing to stay in a hotel. We did not want to intrude on the rare hours of relaxation a President and First Lady have in their hectic lives. “Nonsense,” Hillary replied in her direct way. “We
like
to have company.”

It was one of my most pleasant nights in that historic house, where my mother and father spent eight tumultuous years and where I alternated between being full-time and part-time boarder. We slept in the Queens’ Bedroom, with its majestic canopied bed, rose-tinted walls; and graceful eighteenth-century couches and chairs. A procession of reigning queens have stayed there, as well as Prime Minister Churchill and other heads of state. Its present elegance is light-years away from the run-down White House the Trumans inherited in the spring of 1945. I remember crying myself to sleep on my first night in the place,
it all looked so shabby and second rate. A cadre of creative First Ladies, starting with Jacqueline Kennedy, are responsible for this transformation.

Occasionally, when the pressure got to him, my father used to call the mansion “The Big White Jail.” I was amused to hear that Bill Clinton shares this salty sentiment. At one point during our evening of fine food and lively talk, he wryly suggested the place should be a line item in the budget as part of the federal penitentiary system.

Hillary smiled agreement at this presidential grousing, as Bess Truman had in her now distant days. This is the perfectly normal reaction of any two human beings who find themselves in what someone has called “eighteen acres under glass.” It does not imply any lack of affection for the President’s house. In fact, as we talked past midnight, I could see that Bill Clinton’s fascination with the history of the place equaled Harry Truman’s.

Living in the White House is a unique experience—a fantastic compound of excitement and tension and terror and pride and humility. Above all it is a historic experience. The spirit of the past is everywhere, reminding you of other men and women who have walked the corridors at midnight and morning, pondering—or regretting—large decisions.

But a President is also constantly reminded of his powers. I will never forget my awe, the first time I saw my mother and father descend the wide, red-carpeted grand staircase to lead their honored guests into the lofty State Dining Room. Dad always looked his best in white tie and tails. In an evening gown, Mother looked marvelously regal. The red-coated Marine Band blared “Hail to the Chief,” the stirring march from an old London musical which was selected to enhance the presidential presence by one of our most politically astute First Ladies, Sarah Polk.

You will note, however, that the march hails only the President. In the Constitution, he is designated the chief executive officer of the nation and commander in chief of the armed forces. In the West Wing of the White House, he presides over a staff of dozens of loyal followers in a web of offices surrounding his oval sanctum. About the First
Lady, on the other hand, the Constitution is silent. No trumpets blare when she enters the State Dining Room or any other room, unless she is with the President. In my mother’s day, fifty years ago, the President’s wife could count her staff on the fingers of one hand. A few decades earlier, a First Lady had no staff to count. The male politicians who put together the federal government seem never to have given a thought to what a First Lady might do, thereby encouraging Congress to pretend, until recently, that she did not exist when they voted a budget for the White House.

These days, as Hillary Rodham Clinton and other modern presidential wives have amply demonstrated, First Ladies are doing a lot. But the job remains undefined, frequently misunderstood, and subject to political attacks far nastier in some ways than those any President has ever faced. It has complications as mind-boggling from a psychological or political point of view as the conundrums faced by the double-domes in the State Department or the Pentagon.

For one thing, almost all the people in Washington, DC, are there because they want to be at the white-hot center of power. The ones with the most power, members of Congress and the President, have the added assurance that the American people have sent them there. That is particularly true of the President, the one politician who is elected by the vote of the entire nation. Few if any Presidents, including my father, did not want that unique job. Most of them have been like Bill Clinton; they have hungered and hankered for it most of their lives. Abraham Lincoln may have put it best when he said: “No man knows what that gnawing is until he has had it.”

On the other hand, a First Lady, as Lady Bird Johnson has noted in her gentle southern way, has been chosen by only one man—the President—and it is highly unlikely that he was thinking about her as First Lady when he proposed. No matter how different our First Ladies have been—and as individual women they have ranged from recluses to vibrant hostesses to political manipulators on a par with Machiavelli—they have all shared the unnerving experience of facing a job they did not choose. With few exceptions, they have also shared a determination to meet its multiple challenges.

Each of them has done the job differently—yet few of them have been openly critical of their predecessors (unlike Presidents, who tend to be ferociously judgmental of those who have preceded or followed them into the Oval Office). Instead, First Ladies have, to a startling degree considering the acrimonious political world they inhabit, reached out to one another. Many have even become friends.

By a somewhat eerie coincidence, I was in Austin, Texas, interviewing Lady Bird Johnson for this book on the night Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died. We were having drinks on the deck of Mrs. Johnson’s lovely home, overlooking the winding Colorado River, when one of her Secret Service men reported they had just received word that Mrs. Onassis would probably not live past midnight. Deeply moved, Lady Bird spoke in almost biblical cadences about how much she had come to love and admire Jackie for her bravery, her grace, her generosity of spirit. She talked of how magically Jackie had captured our hearts in those thousand days of soaring hope that distinguished John F. Kennedy’s administration. She discoursed even more eloquently on how Jackie’s courage had held the Kennedy family and the nation together during a time of almost unbearable tragedy.

A few days after the Trumans moved into the White House in 1945, my mother received one of the nicest letters of her life from Grace Coolidge. It was full of understanding and encouragement from someone who could really empathize with her situation. Grace’s husband, Calvin Coolidge, had been vice president when he was awakened at 2:30
A.M
. on August 2, 1923, to be informed that his President, Warren Harding, was dead and Coolidge was now the Chief Executive and his wife the First Lady.

Mrs. Coolidge asked Mother “to accept from one who has passed through a similar experience the heartfelt expression of best wishes.” She hoped Mother and Dad would be given three essentials for survival in the White House, “strength, good courage and abounding health.” It meant a lot to Mother, to know there was another woman out there who had been through it all and was rooting for her—even if she was a Republican!