First Ladies (2 page)

When Ronald Reagan was seriously wounded by a would-be assassin in 1981, Nancy Reagan received a deeply compassionate letter from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who knew, better than any living former First Lady, the terror and grief and anguish such an experience evokes. Later, Jackie followed up the letter with a phone call. Nancy never forgot this spontaneous sympathy and expressed her enduring gratitude for it when Jackie died of cancer in 1994.

Along with friendship, many First Ladies have found a common bond with some of their predecessors who, on the surface at least, seem to have had drastically different styles. Hillary Clinton amazed me when she said Bess Truman was one of the First Ladies she most admired. I could not imagine two more different women. My mother would have required two divisions of Marines to drag her before a congressional committee to testify on health care or anything else.

But when Hillary began talking about the depth and intensity of Bess Truman’s behind-the-scenes political partnership with my father, I understood immediately. That kind of partnership has been the bedrock of Hillary’s relationship with Bill Clinton. In Hillary’s case it has been a publicly declared fact. In Bess Truman’s case it was a closely held secret. But for Hillary, the partnership was the important thing.

I was reminded of an almost as startling discovery about another First Lady: years ago a mutual friend told me Jacqueline Kennedy often said my mother was the First Lady she most admired. Then, too, I had to stifle my impulse to blink in disbelief. Jackie Kennedy, the quintessence of New York and Paris chic, admiring Bess Truman, with her sensible suits and flowered hats? Jackie, the woman who gave serious art and high culture a major niche in American consciousness, admiring down-to-earth Bess Truman, whose favorite reading was detective stories?

“What she admired,” the friend said, “is the way your mother defended her privacy.”

I nodded, much as I was to do later with Hillary Rodham Clinton, and thought: of course. A gentle, enormously sensitive woman like Jackie would understandably want to escape much of the pitiless public
gaze and the occasional public frenzies that are an inevitable part of the First Lady’s job.

There was another reason Jackie admired my mother, the friend said. “She brought a daughter to the White House at a very impressionable age and managed to get her through eight years without being spoiled.”

I am not sure my mother (or my husband) would completely agree with that compliment. But, again, I felt an instant sympathy as I recalled Jackie’s desire to raise Caroline and John in the White House without the distorting glare of publicity. She had learned that the American people tend to feel the First Family is public property, like the White House itself.

Hillary Clinton told me she did not discover this troublesome tendency until she and Bill enrolled their daughter, Chelsea, in the Sid-well Friends School. Suddenly they were under fire in a half dozen newspapers and on television for choosing a private rather than a public school.

The President and First Lady tried to explain that Sidwell was used to handling the children of VIPs and would not come to a dead stop when the Secret Service began issuing diktats about how things must be done to assure Chelsea’s safety. The Clintons did not want to disrupt the lives of several hundred public school kids merely to make a symbolic statement about their support for public education. It was a poor trade-off—not to mention the likelihood that it would turn Chelsea into an isolated, unhappy young woman.

The Clintons’ imbroglio reminded me of the virtual war that raged between the press and another First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, when she decided to let her daughter, Amy, come to state dinners—and bring a book to read to get through the boring adult conversation and speeches. As Mrs. Carter explained it to me, Amy had done this sort of thing when Jimmy was governor of Georgia without anyone making a fuss. The First Lady was hurt and not a little angry when the press constantly noted Amy’s presence and discussed it pro and con.

Like First Ladies before her, Rosalynn Carter was feeling her way. Like them she had to learn from harsh experience that reporters love
to write about the lifestyles of First Families. Frances Cleveland, Grover Cleveland’s wife, conducted a running war with the journalists of her era over their coverage of her family life. White House children, from Jesse Grant to Quentin Roosevelt to Margaret Wilson to Margaret Truman, have provided grist for columnists and commentators.

Speaking of state dinners brings up the First Lady’s role as a hostess. Until they got to the White House, most Presidents’ wives considered themselves hard-pressed if more than a dozen family members turned up for Thanksgiving dinner. Suddenly they find themselves confronted with entertaining hundreds of VIP guests on a regular basis. All these sophisticated people expect not only to be fed well but to be charmed by discovering friends—or people with mutual interests—among their tablemates. The ninety-person White House staff is there, of course, to assist and advise the First Lady in selecting menus and seating plans. But the buck stops at her desk if something goes wrong.

A good example of how a culinary disaster can undo the best-laid plans was a dinner to which the Kennedys invited Clifton and me and my parents in 1962. It was a night of toasts and tributes to the Truman administration—a wonderfully thoughtful thing to do. The meal was planned as an elegant French feast—a demonstration of how Jackie had revamped the White House’s humdrum kitchen.

Feast it was until we got to the main course, which was grouse (perfectly named, as it turned out). What the kitchen did to these birds remains a mystery. My knife glanced off mine as if the creature were titanium. On my left, Bobby Kennedy was sawing away with the ferocity of a man who never let anyone or anything, from corrupt labor leaders like Jimmy Hoffa to arrogant bureaucrats like J. Edgar Hoover, intimidate him. I leaned over and whispered in his ear: “These White House knives never could cut butter.” Bobby, who seldom so much as smiled in public, burst out laughing.

The President, who had been sawing just as hard, started chuckling, too. Suddenly another guest’s grouse sailed off his plate onto the floor—and a mortified Jackie ordered the rest removed. Fortunately, we were all old White House hands, and my parents told a few horror
stories from their early encounters with the awful Roosevelt kitchen that made the inedible fowl seem trivial.

Few First Ladies have approached Jackie’s sense of style when she wanted to be regal. Here she glitters at a dinner President Kennedy gave for my parents. My husband and I were among the guests.
(Truman Library)

Jacqueline Kennedy’s love affair with France and European culture reminds me of another flash point in the First Lady’s nonexistent job description. Jackie looked like a movie star, and she occasionally acted like one, gamboling on Mediterranean yachts with the jet set, who happened to be her friends. Some people criticized Jackie for those exotic vacations. That raises the intriguing question of how much a First Lady can be herself—pursuing and enjoying what comes naturally to her—and remain this public person, who has suddenly become a symbol of American womanhood in all its myriad guises. It is a dilemma which every modern First Lady has to face.

A painful example was one of Pat Nixon’s first remarks when she prepared to take over the White House in 1968. Understandably elated by her husband’s triumph, after his heartbreaking hairbreadth loss to Jack Kennedy in 1960, Pat declared that now the Executive
Mansion would be a place where ordinary people would be welcomed. “The guests won’t be limited to big shots!” she said.

Her just-elected husband jokingly—and perhaps nervously—reminded her that all their friends were big shots. Dick Nixon was not about to bar the White House door to the millionaire contributors to his war chest. Pat Nixon was being herself in those poignant words—reflecting her hardworking middle-class background. For a moment she had forgotten that she was also a politician’s wife.

Again and again, First Ladies, while being themselves or trying to be public symbols, have collided with harsh political realities—and with the public’s often unrealistic expectations of their roles. Betty Ford found this out when she voiced some frank personal opinions about abortion and premarital sex on the TV show
60 Minutes
. The firestorm of criticism looked for a while like it might trigger a political meltdown in the Ford White House. Barbara Bush confessed in her memoirs that her opinion on abortion differed from her husband’s conservative stance—but remembering Betty’s experience, she artfully concealed it during her White House years.

In both their private and public lives, which have become virtually indistinguishable, First Ladies have had to feel their way along an invisible boundary between aristocratic luxury and democratic simplicity. Criticism of a First Lady’s style did not begin with Nancy Reagan. It goes back to Martha Washington and has recurred with varying degrees of rancor throughout the following two hundred plus years.

Not long ago, journalist Barbara Matusow moderated a panel on First Ladies and the media at the Smithsonian Institution. She opened the discussion by stressing the importance of historical perspective in understanding First Ladies. Without naming her, Ms. Matusow described a First Lady who was incredibly superstitious and fearful for her husband’s safety and who loved elaborate gowns and spent so much money on them and on decorating the White House that the bills deeply embarrassed her husband. She also had a reputation for pushing her husband around politically so often some people called her the Associate President. A ripple of recognition ran
through the audience—until Ms. Matusow said: “It’s not Nancy Reagan. It’s Mary Lincoln.”

The disapproval both these First Ladies incurred for their supposed extravagance and political weight throwing underscores a fundamental point. The American people have always wanted a First Lady to be a traditional wife and mother first Any interests or activities beyond these spheres have frequently been greeted with criticism or distrust.

Not just from the public, I might add. Jack Kennedy was violently opposed, at first, to Jackie’s plans to redecorate the White House in 1961. It took a great deal of firmness on Jackie’s part to resist this presidential negativism and push ahead to the famous—and fabulously successful—redecoration. Other First Ladies, from Mary Lincoln to Pat Nixon to Nancy Reagan, have had to contend with powerful presidential aides, who saw them as competitors and were not averse to blackening their reputations.

There is another trip wire in the First Lady’s path if she enters the explosive world of real politics. Bess Truman’s instinct to remain behind the scenes as her husband’s political partner was in part the result of her personal reluctance to face reporters and congressional committees. It was also rooted in conclusions she drew from Eleanor Roosevelt’s overtly political activities. She felt that sometimes Mrs. Roosevelt’s good intentions, her desire to achieve instant justice and equality between the
sexes
and races in America, led her into situations which embarrassed her husband—and even forced him to disavow her opinions.

FDR, one of the most popular Presidents in American history, landslide winner of a second term in 1936, could tolerate these political differences, often with a smile. As a vice president catapulted into the White House by fate, Harry Truman had very little political capital to expend, so this too justified my mother’s covert style.

No one can top me (or my mother) in admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt. She was one of the great Americans of our century—and she expanded the First Lady’s role as no one before her. But she should not be a model against whom all other First Ladies must be measured.
Each First Lady has to deal with the particular political climate swirling around and through the White House when she arrives. Above all, she has to consider her individual, intensely personal relationship with her husband.

Living and working together in the same house, a President and his wife often see more of each other than they have in any previous era of their marriage. The First Lady is frequently more intimately involved in her husband’s political reactions and decisions than ever before. Betty Ford was one of several First Ladies who told me this in unvarnished terms. Lady Bird Johnson made it even clearer. “You and your husband suddenly look at each other and say: ‘It’s just you and me. Other people—our children, friends—will try to help. But in the end it’s the two of us who are going to succeed—or fail.’”

Another little-understood task which many First Ladies have assigned themselves is protector of their husbands from the killing pace of the job. One out of every five presidents has died in office, at an average age of fifty-seven. Almost as many died within five years of leaving office—and these too were comparatively young men—their average age sixty. While the life span of the average American rose throughout the nineteenth century, presidential longevity declined from an average of seventy-three for the Presidents before the Civil War to sixty-three for the Presidents who followed it. My mother considered safeguarding Harry Truman from his penchant for overwork one of the most important sides of her job. Again, Lady Bird Johnson said it best: “It’s up to you [the First Lady] to create a zone of peace, of comfort, within the White House where your husband can regain his equilibrium, restore his spirit.”