First Ladies (29 page)

For the Nixons, the real victory came in January, when the North Vietnamese finally accepted terms that ended the war. In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger tells of calling Nixon to congratulate him, and how pleased he was when Pat took the phone to congratulate Kissinger in return for his years of patient negotiation. Kissinger added a remarkable tribute to Pat—words that might, if fate had been kinder to Richard Nixon, served as a eulogy of her White House years: “What a gallant lady…. With pain and stoicism she had suffered the calumny and hatred that seemed to follow her husband…. Her fortitude had been awesome and not a little inspiring because one sensed it had been wrested from an essential gentleness.”

This pinnacle of success, as Mr. Kissinger dolefully noted at Richard Nixon’s funeral, suddenly turned into a precipice called
Watergate. As the President stonewalled and lied to cover up the facts of the Republican break-in at Democratic Party headquarters, Pat Nixon could only watch in mute horror. The gulf between them created by her loathing for politics became part of the abyss that swallowed Richard Nixon’s reputation. From a politician whose every calculation seemed uncannily apt, he became a blunderer who could not do anything right. When Pat discovered that he had been taping every conversation in the Oval Office, she was appalled and urged him to burn the tapes immediately. He ignored her and went his lonely, dogged way to political destruction.

In the end, after eighteen months of battering revelations and denunciations in the newspapers and on television, an exhausted, demoralized Richard Nixon became the first President to resign his great office. Once more, he ignored his wife’s advice. She wanted him to fight it out to the end in an impeachment trial—to drag out of the White House closets the skeletons of bugging and manipulation of the FBI by other Presidents, all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt. It was heroic advice—but I fear it sprang from Pat’s loathing for politics, from her desire to prove how vicious politicians could be, as much as from a desire to vindicate her husband.

To his credit, Richard Nixon preferred resignation. He saw that such a carnival of mudslinging could and probably would damage the presidency beyond repair. As it was, Watergate inflicted wounds from which the office has yet to recover.

So the Nixon presidency dwindled to that hot day in August 1974 when Richard and Pat Nixon and the man and woman who would replace them, Gerald and Betty Ford, walked to a waiting helicopter on the White House lawn. The ex-President gave a rambling, almost incoherent farewell speech in which he praised his mother, while Pat, standing behind him, fought back tears. Of his First Lady, Richard Nixon in that tormented farewell said not a word. Yet Julie Nixon, looking back on the eighteen-month ordeal, said it was Pat Nixon’s inner strength that had held her husband and the whole family together. His omission was one more mute witness to the gulf that had separated them since that trauma of abandonment and alienation in 1952.

In Pat Nixon’s final White House words, it was the old wounded loathing that spoke. Betty Ford, struggling to say something benign, remarked on the length of the red carpet that had been rolled across the lawn to the helicopter. Pat Nixon replied: “You’ll see so many of those, you’ll get to hate them.”

—

T
HE MORE
I
STUDIED
F
IRST
L
ADIES, THE MORE CONNECTIONS
I
SAW
between them. One of my better brain waves linked two who were separated in time by almost a century, Julia Dent Grant and Mamie Doud Eisenhower. Studied in isolation, they do not seem to have much in common, beyond being Republicans. But when you see them both as army wives, a whole world of associations comes to life—and with them a lot more understanding of how they handled the role of First Lady.

We have just finished reading about a First Lady who hated politics and barely managed to tolerate the White House, although she did a good job. There have been other First Ladies who hated the job so much they seldom came out of their bedrooms for their husbands’ entire terms. President Andrew Johnson’s wife, Eliza, was one of these recluses. Bewildered and horrified by her spouse’s all-out war with Congress over how to deal with the defeated South, which led to his near impeachment in 1868, she came downstairs to receive visitors only twice in four years.

Julia Grant and Mamie Eisenhower, on the other hand, liked being First Lady and managed many aspects of the job quite well. They were not their husbands’ political partners. But they ran the White House with flair and dispatch and did a better than average job of keeping their Presidents healthy and happy.

The secret of their success was their long careers as army wives. From the beginning of their marriages, they were expected to entertain their husbands’ fellow officers and their wives at dinner parties as soon as they arrived on a post. Meeting strangers and making small talk, a major part of the First Lady’s job, soon came naturally to them. As their husbands moved up in the Army, they acquired larger houses and more money, enabling them to give bigger and better parties—good training for White House receptions.

Finally, they had in common something rare in First Ladies. They were unfazed by the White House’s splendor. To some extent they felt they had it coming to them. They had put in their junior years of pinching pennies and cutting corners as wives of underpaid lieutenants and captains. Talent and luck had made their husbands generals—and then winning generals on a grand scale. When they contemplated the breadth of their husbands’ triumphs—Grant, the savior of the Union in the Civil War; Eisenhower, the savior of Europe in World War II—the White House seemed a perfectly logical and well-deserved next step.

That was unquestionably Julia Grant’s attitude. In fact, she was far more interested in living in the White House than her husband, who saw himself as a soldier with little concern and less aptitude for politics. The leitmotiv of the Grants’ tenure was struck on inauguration day in 1869. After he took the oath of office and gave his speech, the new President walked across the platform to his wife and whispered: “Well my dear, I hope you’re satisfied.”

In her memoirs, Julia downplayed her role as power broker but did portray Grant as a reluctant candidate. Their good friend General William Tecumseh Sherman may have had something to do with this stance. After the Republicans nominated Grant, Sherman warned Julia that now she would find out she was married to “a very bad man.”

Julia was indignant. “Why, General,” she exclaimed. “General Grant does all things well. He is brave, he is kind, he is just, he is true.”

“Oh my dear lady,” Sherman replied. “It is not what he has done but what
they will say
he has done…. You will be astonished to find out what a bad man you have for a husband.”

Recalling this story after she left the White House, Julia said: “I was astonished too, but I grew not to mind it.”

Having seen how attacks on their husbands caused other First Ladies so much pain and anguish, you may be surprised, as I was, by Julia Grant’s flippant dismissal of the critical slings and arrows that are an inevitable part of the presidency. To understand her attitude requires further recourse to her unique position as the wife of Ulysses S. Grant. These days Grant has faded from popular memory. His tomb on Riverside Drive in New York, once one of the major tourist attractions of the city, has been allowed to molder into a defaced, abandoned wreck, to the justified indignation of his descendants and the disgrace of the National Park Service, which is supposed to maintain it.

In 1868 Ulysses S. Grant was as close to a sacred figure as any American had come since the death of George Washington. Unassuming, reticent, he was another small
d
democrat in Republican clothing whose appeal cut across all parties and classes. No one completely understood how this stumpy, silent man had saved the Union as it teetered on the brink of defeat in the Civil War. But he had saved it—and the slogan he offered to the exhausted nation seemed heaven-sent: “Let us have peace.”

Another reason for Julia’s immunity to criticism of her husband was the simple fact that she adored him—and he adored her—with an extravagance seldom seen again in the White House until the Reagans arrived. The mansion has its share of touching love stories, but the Grants’ saga is the stuff of storybook romance. From the day she met him, Julia was convinced her laconic lieutenant was destined for “great things.” Her wealthy Missouri father did not think so—nor did Grant’s superiors in the U.S. Army, who handed him a series of deadend assignments that drove him to drink and finally to resignation
from the service. But Julia’s faith in him apparently never wavered, and she followed “Ulys” from one discouraging job to another with a resolution that was doubly amazing for a woman raised in a mansion. It was named, incidentally, White Haven, perhaps another reason why Julia felt at home in the White House.

The Grants had four children, and they added youthful good cheer to the aura of triumph the General and Julia brought to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Two older sons spent most of their time away at college, but thirteen-year-old Nellie was pretty and high-spirited like her mother. Ten-year-old Jesse was a hell-raiser who was constantly playing pranks and sneaking stories to reporters.

Julia doted on Jesse, who, she claimed, “had an answer for everything.” In her autobiography (the first by a First Lady) she told how smoothly the scamp could outwit his father. One day Jesse showed up late for breakfast, and Grant gave him the standard parental lecture. (As a chronic late sleeper, I heard the Truman variation more than once.) “Jess, how is this? Nine o’clock and you just down to breakfast? When I was your age I had to get up, feed four or five horses, cut wood for the family, take breakfast and be off to school by eight o’clock.”

Jesse smiled sweetly at his father and said: “But you did not have such a papa as I have.”

When the whole family was in residence, the Grants frequently assembled in Julia’s bedroom at the end of the day for a half hour of teasing and storytelling. In her autobiography, Julia wrote a charming description of the scene. She lay on her bed, one of the boys often stretched across the foot, and the President sat next to him smoking a cigar. Nellie sat in a cushioned chair, “radiant in the beauty of youth and a full dinner dress,” while jokes and gossip flew back and forth. “These half hours were the [White House] times we really enjoyed most,” Julia said.

Julia also thoroughly enjoyed taking charge of the White House. She was the first First Lady in decades to do something about its dilapidated condition. With a little help from her victorious General, she browbeat Congress into voting funds for a thorough overhaul. One of her innovations caused Congress to rumble and growl about
the First Lady wasting money on a newfangled idea: closets. The more things change, the more Congress remains the same.

The First Lady also took charge of the mansion’s servants with a firmness worthy of her military background. Discipline had disintegrated under the distracted Lincolns and Johnsons. Ushers, sweepers, and messengers hung around the north door, chatting with the doormen, smoking pipes, and heating their lunches as if they were on bivouac. Julia banned the hangers-on forthwith and ordered the doormen to start wearing black dress suits and white gloves. They were to stand at attention while on duty, and smoking was strictly forbidden.

The staff groused at first, but they soon learned that the First Lady practiced another army tradition: she cared about the welfare of the lower ranks. Warmhearted and kind, Julia seldom gave unreasonable orders. She fretted about their low pay and was always ready to help if anyone needed a loan because of a family illness or some other misfortune. Often she advised the staff to invest their spare cash in real estate, which was selling at bargain rates in the expanding capital. One of the black staffers, Henry Harris, declined to take this advice. Julia nagged and pestered him and finally
ordered
him to buy some land. When he died, his wife and children inherited a substantial estate.

Succeeding White House families were grateful for another change Julia Grant made in the mansion’s rules and regulations. In 1869 the grounds were still open to the public, as a sort of park. When the First Lady went for a stroll with one of her children, she was often followed by “a crowd of idle, curious loungers.” She persuaded Ulysses to close the gates and post guards at them. Passersby could still peer at the First Family sitting on the South Portico, but that was a major improvement over having John Q. Public literally breathing down their necks.

Along with launching major redecorations of the East Room, the Blue Room, and other state rooms downstairs, Julia Grant purchased new china, 587 pieces in an earth color called Grecian. In the center was a cluster of various American flowers, with no two plates exactly the same. Julia also strove to banish bureaucratic stuffiness and make the old house warm and cheery. She put bright silk tydie bows on the
backs of the parlor chairs and colorful pillows on the sofas. Lively prints decorated the walls.

To this stylish White House, Julia invited foreign diplomats, members of Congress, and permanent and temporary Washingtonians for glittering receptions and elegant twenty-nine-course dinners. She had spent enough time in Washington as a general’s wife to perceive that if the First Lady chose to be, she was the social leader of the city. Julia chose to be. She prevailed on the President to come to her receptions, which quadrupled their attendance; everyone wanted to get a close look at the nation’s hero. Soon there was scarcely a man or woman in Washington who was not panting for invitations to the White House.

Julia laid down strict rules for her guests, and she enforced them with military rigor. Ladies outside the Grant official family were expected to wear hats. In her autobiography, Julia wrote that sometimes a caller imposed upon her “good nature” by declining to wear
one. But this “little maneuver was never repeated by the same person.” Some guests encountered plainclothesmen Grant hired to make sure no one showed up with a gun or knife. Memories of Lincoln’s assassination still haunted the White House. These forerunners of the Secret Service were not above probing the contents of a lady’s purse or frisking surprised gentlemen.