First Ladies (21 page)

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N
OT LONG AFTER
J
IMMY AND
R
OSALYNN
C
ARTER TOOK OVER THE
White House, a reporter obtained an interview with both of them on the same day. The newsman headed for the mansion with visions of a front-page story dancing in his head. Maybe he could get the new President and his First Lady to disagree over some major issue. Instead, as the scribe shuttled from the Oval Office to the First Lady’s office in the East Wing, he found she and her husband agreed on everything—often down to giving the same answers, practically word for word! The bewildered would-be scooper reeled onto Pennsylvania Avenue and gasped to a friend: “I’ve just met two Jimmy Carters!”

Much of Rosalynn Carter’s effectiveness—let’s use the blunt word, her power—as First Lady derived from her unique relationship with her husband. She was the first First Lady to go forthrightly, fearlessly public in the role of partner-wife. Other Presidents may have listened to their spouses’ political advice behind the scenes, but Jimmy and Rosalynn made a point of their partnership. Not that anyone doubted it. They thought and spoke alike to an almost unnerving degree.

Rosalynn Carter was one of the few First Ladies who enjoyed the job from the moment she entered the White House. One reason may be that she started with a win. For years her friend Betty Bumpers, wife of Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, had been pushing a project to immunize children against measles. She had made very little progress in a discouraging struggle with red tape and federal bureaucracy. With the new First Lady behind her, Mrs. Bumpers soon had access to the wheels within wheels of the Department of Health Education and Welfare. “The results,” Rosalynn says, “were astounding.” In two years they immunized ninety percent of the children in the nation. By the time Rosalynn left the White House, measles had been virtually eliminated in the United States.

It was a stunning demonstration of the power of the First Lady in the era of big government and big television. Almost casually, Rosalynn mentions another factor in this tour de force—a direct order from President Jimmy Carter to the secretary of HEW Not many First Ladies could rely on such hands-on cooperation from the Oval Office.

Rosalynn had a solid claim to her almost coequal role. More than any other First Lady except Hillary Rodham Clinton, if push came to shove in the private quarters of the White House (I am sure it never did) Rosalynn could say: “Without me you wouldn’t be here!” For almost eighteen months before the Carters reached the White House, she had been out on the campaign trail, asking surprised Americans to vote for Jimmy Carter.

“Jimmy who?” was the early response. Seldom if ever has a candidate started so fat back on the list. Not even his own mother thought Jimmy could win. When he told Lillian Carter he was going to run for President, she reportedly said: “President of what?” In my talk with her, Rosalynn recalled, with a nostalgic smile, how Jimmy walked into their bedroom at the Georgia governor’s mansion and said: “I’m thinking of running for———-.”

“He couldn’t even say the word, the idea was so awesome,” Rosalynn said.

With only a single term (1971-1975) as governor of Georgia and two terms in the state senate on his political resume, Jimmy Carter
was the ultimate long shot In 1974, when he appeared on the TV show
What’s My Line
, he almost stumped the panel.

Rosalynn began her campaign with a staff of exactly one, a friend who drove with her to Florida in 1975 to begin buttonholing Democratic politicians. By the time the primary campaign ended, she had visited thirty states and played a crucial role in piling up the delegates who won Jimmy the Democratic nomination. In the general election against Gerald Ford, she went out on her own again, flying in a chartered Lear jet, speaking in over a hundred cities. “It was like having two candidates,” her son Jack said.

Even then reporters noticed something unusual about this small, smiling woman with the soft southern accent: she was tireless—eighteen-hour days seldom fazed her—and she was tough. She could handle any question from the floor, whether it was intelligent or just sarcastic. Very early in her campaign, she encountered a fair number of people who shared Eleanor Roosevelt’s opinion that it was “unseemly” for a wife to campaign for her husband and an even larger number of really old-fashioned traditionalists who thought she should be home taking care of her ten-year-old daughter, Amy.

“Do you like to cook?” asked one smarty.

“Yes, I like to cook,” Rosalynn replied. “But I’m not doing much of it this year. I’m trying to get Jimmy Carter elected President.”

When other questioners baited her about Jimmy’s admission in a
Playboy
interview that he had lusted after other women, she replied without a flicker of hesitation: “Jimmy talks too much but at least people know he’s honest.”

Later a reporter asked her if she had ever committed adultery. “If I had,” she replied, “I wouldn’t tell
you.”

One reporter called Rosalynn “a Sherman tank in a field of clover.” Another came up with a nickname that stuck—and hurt—“the steel magnolia.”

Rosalynn gamely tried to deal with these sideswipes. She claimed she did not mind being called tough—if the word meant “strong.” But she did not like the implication that she was insensitive, unfeminine, and determined always to have her own way. She did not see her partnership
with Jimmy Carter as a power struggle—and she had deep compassion for the poor and disadvantaged in America.

But Rosalynn did not deny she could often get her own way with her husband. At one point during the 1976 campaign, she promised that if Jimmy was elected, he would create a commission to do something about the deplorable treatment of America’s mentally ill. “Then,” she says with an almost devilish glint in her hazel eyes, “I went home and told Jimmy”

The Carter partnership had two components which made it unique. It was profoundly religious, and it was intensely ambitious. The religious component meant Rosalynn could simultaneously claim she had her own identity and freely submerge her personality and ideas in her husband’s. The ambition was lofted on both religious and secular idealism to an almost dizzying height. The Carters came to Washington with the heady conviction that they could and would change America and the world.

Mental health became a major item on Rosalynn’s program. But she did not hesitate to add Mrs. Bumpers’s immunization program as well as a concern for older Americans and a determination to do more for woman’s rights, including the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. On top of this load she piled the desire and/or determination to be the President’s political partner on almost everything that came across his desk in the Oval Office. It was an agenda that would have exhausted a superwoman. When she announced she was also going to tackle the decay of America’s inner cities, one reporter groaned: “She’s trying to take on all the problems we have!”

Within a few weeks of entering the White House, Jimmy asked Rosalynn to represent him on an unprecedented diplomatic mission to South America. She was to visit seven countries to explain the administration’s foreign policy and explore “substantive” issues with the head of state in each nation. In effect, the President was telling the leaders of these countries that they should listen to the First Lady as closely as they would have listened to him.

Here is how Rosalynn explained that expedition to me: “Every head of state in the world wanted to learn as much as possible about
Jimmy Carter. No one knew him. He couldn’t go everywhere. He had made several important speeches on South America, which I had heard and read and thoroughly understood. So we decided I could represent him down there.”

The substitution did not work very well. The macho males of Spanish America balked at taking advice and counsel from a woman. Through various back channels their governments communicated their unhappiness to the U.S. State Department, claiming that they found it impossible to evaluate the importance of the First Lady’s messages. The State Department was privately irked by Rosalynn upstaging them and leaked these complaints as well as negative comments in the South American press about her unappointed, unelected status.

In several countries Rosalynn’s appearance gave local politicians a chance to sound off about aspects of U.S. policy they disliked. Although she had been briefed by top administration officials before she left, Rosalynn was not prepared to debate these policies. All she could do was promise to report the complaints to the President and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when she returned. The State Department, supposedly trying to defend her against criticism in the American press, put a demeaning label on the trip when a spokesman said Rosalynn’s main task was “asking questions.”

Although a poll showed the public gave the First Lady’s mission a seventy percent approval rating, Rosalynn and Jimmy never again ventured into coequal diplomacy. The next several times she went overseas, it was in more traditional First Lady roles, to extend presidential sympathy at the funeral of Pope Paul VI, or to visit Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand. She returned from the latter trip appalled by the suffering of these victims of the fanatically Communist Pol Pot regime and announced she had another cause to support.

To keep up with the political problems of the Oval Office, Jimmy Carter made sure that Rosalynn was briefed regularly by his national security people, congressional liaison staff, and similar experts. Beginning in 1978, she also took the unprecedented step of sitting in on cabinet meetings. Rosalynn’s explanation makes sense in the context
of their partnership. “I was constantly asking Jimmy why he or a cabinet officer had made this or that decision,” she told me. “I tried to follow these things through the press and TV, but their reports were frequently misleading. Finally Jimmy got tired of explaining the reasons and background for decisions to me and suggested I sit in on the cabinet meetings so I could get the real facts.”

Although Rosalynn insists none of the cabinet members was troubled by her presence, a lot of nasty criticism surfaced in the press. Defensively, Rosalynn maintained she made no attempt whatsoever to exercise her coequal authority. She simply sat in the back of the room and took notes. But she learned the hard way that in Washington politics, appearances count for a lot.

Like other presidents, including Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter insisted that he found his First Lady an invaluable sounding board for ideas and issues. They met once a week for a “policy lunch” and spent several hours almost every night discussing their mutual jobs. Except for the Mental Health Act and a few other issues, it is almost impossible to detect Rosalynn’s stamp on any major bills or decisions. But that is hardly surprising, when two people think so much alike.

Perhaps the most visible evidence of Rosalynn’s coequal status was the size of her White House staff. Instead of the pathetic handful of typists plus a social secretary and an assistant serving my mother in the Truman White House, Rosalynn commanded a cadre of twenty-one, including a press secretary, a social secretary, and a chief of staff who was paid the same salary as the President’s chief of staff. Rosalynn’s office in the East Wing was another first. Previous First Ladies had operated from a semioffice or study on the second floor. But Rosalynn decided she wanted to keep that area of the White House completely private, a zone of total relaxation for the President and the rest of the family.

As a world-class late sleeper and eternal putter-offer, I can only express awe at this First Lady’s energy.
U.S. News and World Report
published the following summary of Rosalynn’s first year in the job: she visited sixteen foreign nations and twenty-one U.S. cities; put 250 hours into being the honorary chairperson of her mental health commission
as well as its roving spokesperson; presided at thirty-nine White House receptions, twenty congressional breakfasts, and eight state dinners; spent 210 hours learning Spanish and another 71 hours being briefed on problems foreign and domestic—and walked daughter Amy to her public school almost every morning!

The New York Times
called Rosalynn “the most influential First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt.” I was intrigued to discover that she was christened Eleanor Rosalynn but preferred the middle name. Once or twice, President Carter referred to her as
“my
Eleanor.” Unquestionably, there were similarities. At one point Jimmy remarked: “She never loses an argument. When I think an argument is over and I won it… a week or a month later it revives itself.”

But there were also differences, some obvious, some baffling. Unlike the Roosevelts’ tormented marriage, the Carter union was a powerful positive force in both their lives, enabling them to keep
quarrels to a minimum. In an interesting switch, Rosalynn admitted to me that she was “the politician” in their partnership. She wanted Jimmy to postpone until his second term some difficult decisions, such as the controversial treaty with Panama, which gave that nation eventual control of the canal. But he demurred, insisting on putting the national interest first. In another switch, it was she, not Jimmy, who needed protection from overwork. Jimmy seemed to have an inner voice that told him he had done enough for one day. Rosalynn often had to be pried out of her office for a jog, a game of tennis, or a swim in the White House pool.