First Ladies (15 page)

When Senator Henry Clay visited the White House, he told Sarah he might be a critic of her husband but he was an admirer of “her administration.” Sarah gallantly replied that of all the politicians in
America, he was the man she hoped would succeed her husband. Their powerful rival departed, Polk noted in his diary, “in an excellent humor.”

Sarah Polk combined brains and a somewhat austere beauty. With her at his side, President James Polk barely needed
a cabinet.
(White House Historical Society)

Sarah was far less agreeable toward another critic, Congressman John Van Buren, the son of former President Martin Van Buren. Flamboyant Prince John, as he was known, was an antislavery Democrat who denounced the annexation of Texas and almost everything else the Polks supported. Sarah banned him from the White House. The President, perhaps hoping to conciliate him, decided to invite the young firebrand to a reception. When Sarah came across the invitation, she destroyed it. In his diary, Polk merely found this “amusing”—and let his partner have her way.

In only one role did Sarah falter as a presidential partner-wife—protector. It was not for want of trying, at least in the early years of her marriage. Polk’s health was always fragile. Sarah’s letters to him are full of cautionary advice about getting some rest on the campaign trail, avoiding overexcitement. But in the White House, where work
was only a step away, both Polks seemed to have succumbed to their mutual appetite for politics, and the President literally worked himself to death.

Only on Sunday did the Polks pause for church services. The rest of the time they labored on affairs of state, Sarah toiling beside her husband as secretary and political counselor, frequently redrafting his speeches and letters. She also devoured stacks of newspapers and marked the stories she thought he should read. Polk freely admitted he almost never consulted his cabinet, and he had no circle of unofficial inside advisers, like Andrew Jackson’s kitchen cabinet. He and Sarah ran the government virtually alone.

Even Sarah’s White House entertaining had a political focus. At dinners, politics often dominated the First Lady’s conversation to the point of letting her food grow cold upon the plate. After dinner, when the ladies retired to a sitting room for coffee in the custom of the day, she frequently stayed behind at the table to hobnob with the men.

Sarah’s tactical skills had not a little to do with reducing congressional criticism of the Mexican War to an occasional speech from opposition congressmen such as Abraham Lincoln. This was no small feat. The South disliked the peace terms almost as much as New England disliked the war. Many southerners thought the United States should make Mexico a colony or state. But President Polk and his artful First Lady outmaneuvered both factions and kept control of a comfortable majority in Congress.

On July 4, 1848, James Polk signed the treaty of peace with Mexico in the White House, with a proud First Lady watching. Sarah later said she regarded the addition of 800,000 square miles of territory, making the United States a truly continental power, as “one of the most important events in the history of this country.” It would be hard to argue with her.

This immense political effort took a fearful toll on President Polk. He left the White House a victorious but exhausted man and died three months later. Like everything else in life, White House partnerships can get out of hand. Few have blended triumph with tragedy more poignantly than James and Sarah Polk’s bold alliance.

—

S
EVERAL OTHER
F
IRST
L
ADIES HAVE FUNCTIONED AS POLITICAL
partners, one by accident, the rest by design. It is ironic that the accidental one, Edith Boiling Gait Wilson, achieved more political power than any presidential wife, from Sarah Polk to Hillary Rodham Clinton, has ever dreamt of wielding. Edith’s reign must have been particularly galling to her predecessor, Helen Herron Taft, who had an unusual appetite for power—especially when it came wrapped in the presidency.

Helen Taft is one of the few First Ladies who wanted the job. In fact, she wanted it far more than her husband, William Howard Taft, wanted to be President. Will Taft is one of my favorite historic characters, even though his son Senator Robert Taft was one of my father’s chief Republican tormentors during the Truman years in the White House. A big (six foot two), easygoing man who frequently joked about his enormous girth, Will had only one ambition, to become a Supreme Court justice.

Unfortunately, this desire, which perfectly suited his laid-back temperament, clashed with Nellie Taft’s determination to become a First Lady. She had acquired a passion for politics from her father and grandfather, both of whom served in Congress. Her father had been Rutherford B. Hayes’s law partner, and at the age of seventeen Nellie visited the Hayeses’ White House. Some say her ambition to become First Lady was born the moment she set foot in the place. Fiercely intelligent and hypercharged with nervous energy, Nellie was a latter-day Abigail Adams, with a lot more willpower. She ran her amiable husband’s life, down to selecting his friends and his jobs.

Nellie also seems to have been driven by a burning determination to get out of Cincinnati. When Will Taft was offered the job of governing the newly acquired Philippine Islands, she started packing on the spot, ignoring the trepidations of relatives who fretted over tropical diseases and the real possibility of a native uprising.

From 1900 to 1904, Nellie was a well-publicized success as a minor-league First Lady in Manila. In her memoirs, she pronounced her Philippine years among the happiest of her life. She enjoyed presiding over dozens of servants in a palace where she entertained a stream of visiting congressmen, generals, and assorted other VIPs. She especially enjoyed a costume ball at which she and Will received guests dressed as the doge of Venice and his consort.

Once, when a typhoon hit the Philippines, toppling trees and smashing windows, Nellie was up all night, checking on damage to the governor’s residence and supervising mop squads. Taft slept through the howling wind and breaking glass. In the morning Nellie was understandably cross with her somnolent spouse. “How could you sleep?” she demanded.

“Now Nellie,” Taft said. “I knew you could handle it.”

Nellie could handle almost anything—but there were signs of trouble to come. A perfectionist, she fretted over minute details of housekeeping and protocol. She held herself to impossibly high standards of conduct; her diary is full of self-reproaches for minor social gaffes or for failing to produce witty comebacks. In spite of wall-to-wall
servants in Manila, she collapsed for several weeks with what was described as “nervous prostration.”

When President Theodore Roosevelt brought William Howard Taft back from Manila in 1904 and made him secretary of war, Nellie and her husband began dining regularly at the White House. Roosevelt grew fond of Taft; it was almost impossible to dislike him; he told funny stories and loved a good laugh. Someone described his smile as “a huge pan of sweet milk poured over [you].”

One night during dinner, Roosevelt pretended he was a swami having a vision. “I am the seventh son of a seventh daughter and I have clairvoyant powers. I see a man weighing 350 pounds. There is something hanging over his head. I cannot make out what it is…. At one point it looks like the presidency, then again it looks like the chief justiceship.”

“Make it the chief justiceship,” Taft said.

“Make it the presidency,” Nellie said.

She had an uphill fight converting Will into a candidate. As early as 1903, when he was still in the Philippines, he was telling friends: “Don’t sit up nights thinking about making me President. I have no ambition in that direction. Any party which would nominate me would make a great mistake.”

That last line would prove to be prophetic. But Nellie pressed on, fighting off another Roosevelt attempt to put Taft on the highest court by demanding a private meeting with the President at which she vehemently turned down the offer. “A half hour talk with your dear wife,” Roosevelt told Taft, convinced him it was not a good idea.

Although Taft remarked to friends that he could not believe he was “foolish enough to run for the presidency,” he was elected handily in 1908 with Roosevelt’s backing. Even before Nellie got to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she began paying a price for her ambition. When Ellen Maury Slayden, wife of a prominent Texas congressman, saw her at a White House dinner, she noted that Nellie “looked dreadful and spoke of not being well.” She confessed to Mrs. Slayden that she had been tormented throughout the campaign by a fear that someone
would kill her husband with a gun or a bomb. Only seven years before, an anarchist had assassinated William McKinley.

The Roosevelts invited the Tafts to spend the night before the inauguration at the White House. In another presage of trouble, Nellie lay awake until dawn, wondering “if this had been done, if that had been attended to”—petty details, she admitted in her memoirs, “with which I had no reason to be concerned.”

Nellie was jolted from two hours of restless predawn sleep by “cracking reports” just outside her window. In the gray light she saw that she had plenty to worry about. The sounds were caused by tree limbs snapping all around the White House. Washington was frozen solid in one of the worst snow and ice storms in its history. Downstairs she found Roosevelt and Taft joking about the foul weather. “I always said it would be a cold day [in hell] when I got to be President of the United States,” Will said.

Nellie was not amused. The inauguration parade had to be delayed, and the swearing-in ceremony was moved indoors to the U.S. Senate chamber. The First Lady’s white satin inaugural ball gown was sitting on a stalled train somewhere between Washington and New York. Nellie did not realize it, of course, but she and her husband had had a curse laid on them by Theodore Roosevelt’s rambunctious older daughter, Alice. She had taken a hate to Nellie almost on sight, perhaps because they were similar types. It would be a toss-up to decide who had more barbed wire in her temperament. Shortly before leaving the White House, Alice buried a voodoo doll on the lawn and called on the gods to visit woe on the new occupants.

I don’t actually believe in such things, but the series of disasters that soon struck Helen Taft is enough to make me wonder. At a reception the day before the inauguration, Nellie wore a small hat trimmed with a long white egret feather. As she chatted with well-wishers, the feather came in contact with a gas jet, and the hat and Nellie almost went up in flames. Undeterred, she wore the hat to the inauguration, with the feather “trimmed down some.”

After the ceremony, Nellie signaled her intention of being the new Chief Executive’s highly visible partner by riding back to the White
House with him in his limousine. Previously, the outgoing President had accompanied the new occupant to the Executive Mansion. Theodore Roosevelt, afraid that he would steal the spotlight from his friend, had left Washington as soon as the inaugural ended—and Nellie preempted his seat, all but trampling several dignitaries in the process.

“For me,” Nellie wrote in her memoirs, “the drive [to the White House] was the proudest and happiest event of Inauguration Day.” She confessed to “a little secret elation” because she was doing something no First Lady had done before. Some people criticized her for this conspicuous gesture, but Nellie brushed them off. She had never made a secret of her role as Will Taft’s political alter ego. A month before they entered the White House, an article in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
credited her with having the final say on every move Taft had ever made.

Like Eleanor Roosevelt and other political partners, Nellie issued disclaimers about her influence, but her actions spoke much louder than her words. At their first White House reception, Nellie ignored the protocol that the President enters the East Room first. She charged ahead of Will and had greeted a half dozen guests while he was still working on his first couple. Hostile White House watchers of the Alice Roosevelt camp wondered if Nellie thought she, not her husband, was the President. The First Lady attributed this gaffe to being “nervous and upset.” Again, no one suspected that this glimpse of her inner tension was another portent of coming grief.

In the White House, Nellie tried to take charge of everything in sight. But she soon discovered she and Will had tackled a very big job. Their intense involvement with each other and Nellie’s jealousy of potential rivals for the presidency had left them with few close friends from whom to seek advice. Instead of charming powerful congressmen and other Washington insiders in the style of shrewd Sarah Polk, Nellie had kept them at arm’s length. People were soon murmuring about the President’s indecision, as he took months to name a cabinet.

Nellie insisted on joining conferences in the President’s office on any and every subject. She claimed, believe it or not, that she was
needed to make sure her husband did not fall asleep! Eyewitnesses recall her berating Taft’s aides with a ferocity that made their teeth chatter. At receptions the sight of a politician in a private tê te-à-tê te with her husband brought the First Lady rushing over to make sure Will was not being inveigled into a policy she disapproved.