First Ladies (44 page)

Here is Edith Roosevelt early in her White House career. She all but exudes the self-confidence that made her one of our most masterful First Ladies
(AP/Wide World Photos)
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Still another tactical triumph for this amazing First Lady was hiring the first White House social secretary, a shrewd Washingtonian named Belle Hagner, who dealt with the subtleties of guest lists and seating plans with an unerringly expert hand. Simultaneously, Edith took charge of yet another aspect of the social scene. Once a week, she met with the cabinet wives to coordinate their entertaining schedules. The goal was the avoidance of competition and/or duplication with White House events. It also was a discreet way of making sure the Roosevelts were at the center of the action all the time.

Unlike her successor, Helen Taft, who squirreled away a cool million and a half from her husband’s salary, Edith and Theodore never stinted while they were in the White House. Compared with the Rockefellers and other megamillionaires, the Roosevelts were far from rich. In fact, Edith had worried about Theodore’s plunge into politics because she feared they would go broke trying to keep up appearances for the benefit of the voters. But they both felt the President and his wife should put their best foot forward.

Ironically, the Roosevelts’ superlative style eventually attracted critics. One newspaper attacked the White House “yachts,” which now numbered three, the new presidential stables, which McKim had added to the grounds, and even the White House tennis court, which Edith had added to McKim’s renovation to try to keep Theodore’s weight down. Even harsher criticism was leveled at the lavish banquets. Edith toned things down a little while Theodore was running for election in his own right in 1904, and nothing came of the brouhaha. After they smashed the poor Democrats flat, Edith went right back to doing things as she pleased.

One of these things was the creation of a First Ladies’ gallery in the corridor just beyond the South Entrance on the ground floor of the White House. Some people complained that the portraits should have been placed somewhere on the first floor (they are now in the East Wing lobby and are among the first things a tourist sees), but the wife of a Texas congressman congratulated Edith for rescuing “these admirable females from oblivion.” I am happy to add my somewhat belated plaudits.

In her husband’s second term, Edith Roosevelt’s domestic management met a severe test. A crew of desperadoes took over the White House. They terrorized the staff, unnerved visitors, and even sabotaged the federal government. No one knew where they would strike next. The White House Gang, as they were called by insiders, were a rough bunch. They went by names like Slats and Sailor and Taffy. The leader was inclined to sign his name with a single, ominous letter: Q. He led them in swearing terrible oaths which always began: “By Buzzard!”

The leader, you may not be entirely surprised to learn, was Edith’s youngest son, her “fine little bad boy,” as she fondly called him—Quentin. He was, his father admitted, “a handful.” He explored the White House with complete disregard for his own safety, crawling out on the roof and squeezing under the eaves in the attic, where he came face to face with several rats almost as big as he was. He also scaled the magnolia tree by his mother’s window and wound streams of “official red tape” in and out among its boughs. He was equally unintimidated by reporters. One asked him for some details of how the President relaxed. “I see him sometimes,” Quentin replied. “But I know nothing of his family life.”

With (X in command, and Taffy (Charles Taft, son of William Howard Taft) as his right-hand man, nothing in the White House was safe. One of the gang’s early triumphs was a shower of spitballs on Andrew Jackson’s portrait, including a beautiful “gob” on the end of his nose. Another time, they used hand mirrors to flash sunlight into the windows of the State War Navy Building, completely disrupting two-thirds of the federal government until a sailor appeared on the roof and semaphored them to report to the President’s office without delay for “Y-O-U K-N-O-W W-H-A-T”

Edith encountered the gang when she entertained an Italian diplomat, complete with a monocle, in a second-floor sitting room. The junior fiends climbed onto a skylight to examine their quarry, and Quentin began speaking in what he thought was Italian. “Quentin!” Edith called, glaring up at the skylight. The diplomat followed her gaze and saw six small boys, each with a monocle (improvised from watch crystals) in his eye, staring down at him. The astonished envoy’s monocle popped out of his eye into his teacup.

Quentin collaborated with his older brother Archie for another coup against White House conformity. Eleven-year-old Archie was flat on his back, simultaneously stricken by measles and whooping cough, and mourning the death of his favorite animal, Jack Dog, a black and tan fox terrier. Quentin decided nothing would speed Archie’s recovery faster than the sight of his calico pony, Algonquin. With the cooperation of a White House footman, he coaxed the 350-pound
creature into the elevator and down the second-floor corridor to Archie’s bedroom. The invalid, it is claimed, made a miraculous recovery and was soon galloping around the grounds on Algonquin’s back.

Other resident pets made the Roosevelt White House an unnerving place to work or visit. The Speaker of the House, an imperious Illinoisan named “Uncle Joe” Cannon, had his ankle clawed by Tom Quartz, the family kitten, as he descended the grand staircase. Kermit’s kangaroo rat regularly came to the breakfast table and demanded lumps of sugar. Quentin wandered around with Emily Spinach, an emerald green snake, under his coat.

Edith’s toleration of these antics is the best possible proof that her management of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was infused with genuine maternity. Earle Looker, who later became the chronicler of the White House Gang’s exploits, opined she probably knew what they were up to almost every minute but let them get away with most of their dark deeds because she secretly enjoyed them. As the mother of four boys, I know exactly what Looker meant.

The offspring who put Edith’s management skills to their ultimate test was not the White House Gang but her stepdaughter, Alice. An unabashed rebel, Alice made a specialty of doing what she hoped would upset her father. She spent most of her time with the 1905 equivalent of the jet set—the sons and daughters of the ultraconservative multimillionaires whom TR denounced as “malefactors of great wealth.” With their encouragement, Alice smoked in public, bet on the horses, played poker, danced until dawn and slept until noon, and once raced an automobile from Newport to Boston unchaperoned. One member of her late mother’s family characterized her as “a young wild animal that has been put into good clothes.”

When someone complained to the President about his older daughter’s behavior, TR exploded. “I can run the country or control Alice,” he said. “I can’t do both.” Edith, keenly aware that she was only a stepmother, and that Alice was convinced her father did not care for her “one eighth as much as the other children,” made no attempt to play the disciplinarian. She let Theodore handle that role—which he
occasionally did in halfhearted fashion—while Edith persisted, in spite of frequent rebuffs, in being Alice’s friend.

Proof of her success is a touching scene that I could never have envisioned for Alice Roosevelt. When I knew her in the late 1940s, she was all acid wit and sarcasm, an utterly delightful grande dame. It is hard, even now, for me to realize she was once as young as I was in my White House years. One evening in the fall of 1905, Alice followed Edith into the bathroom, waited until the First Lady was brushing her teeth (so she would have a moment to think before saying anything), and told her she had become engaged to Nicholas Longworth, the. Republican congressman from Ohio.

Fifteen years older than Alice and already a bit bald, Nick Long-worth had a reputation as a womanizer. Alice had spent four weeks getting up the nerve to tell her parents. It is not insignificant that she told Edith first. To her immense relief, Edith warmly approved the match. She knew Alice would never be happy married to some businessman. Politics was in her blood, and Longworth was considered presidential timber. Edith confided her doubts to a discreet relative. Love, she said, had “softened” Alice wonderfully, but “I still tremble when I think of her face to face with the practical details of life.”

Alice’s White House wedding became another of Edith’s triumphs. Everyone who mattered sent presents and hoped for an invitation, but Edith limited the guest list to one thousand—coolly excluding some people who had hoped to buy their way into the ceremony with expensive gifts. One well-chosen guest was Nellie Grant Sartoris, who had been a White House bride herself thirty-two years earlier. Alice, resplendent in a princess-style gown, testified to her bond with Edith at the end of the ceremony. She walked over to her, arms outstretched, and kissed her twice.

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E
DITH
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OOSEVELT LEFT THE
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HITE
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OUSE IN
1909
ARGUABLY THE
most esteemed, beloved First Lady since Martha Washington. Eighty years later another First Lady, far more familiar to modern readers, duplicated many of her maternal triumphs, with a lot more irreverence
and fun. In some ways, Barbara Bush faced a far tougher challenge. She succeeded a bone-thin First Lady who had been the essence of chic—and a favorite press target—Nancy Reagan. Before her had come Rosalynn Carter, the public partner who had her own problems with the First Lady watchers. Would the scribes do a similar number on Mrs. Bush?

Not to worry. Like Edith Roosevelt before her, Barbara Bush had thought out the role of First Lady from studying her predecessors’ mistakes. No one would catch her playing uncrowned queen in the White House. Nor would she so much as hint at pretensions to being a coequal President. No, Barbara Bush decided she would just be herself, and that self flowed not only from her unique personality but from her age, her gray hair, her wrinkles, and her size 14 figure.

If Edith Roosevelt conquered the White House as everybody’s mother, Barbara Bush, with five children in their thirties and forties and twice that many grandchildren, became everybody’s grandmother. The role not only came naturally, it was shrewd, it was apt, it demonstrated once more the amazing range of choices available to First Ladies if they have the courage of their convictions—or, better, their predilections.

These days grandmother has more appeal than mother; grandmothers are those wonderful people who baby-sit for harried mothers and let the kids get away with murder. They are more lovable than mothers, who in my family at least are often regarded as the equivalent of Parris Island drill sergeants. Barbara Bush boldly made a virtue of her grandmotherly image. She not only declined to apologize for her gray hair and ample figure, she joked about these somewhat dubious assets.

The new First Lady said her mother told her she weighed a hundred pounds at birth. She grew up hearing her mother tell her sister Martha to eat up and then add “But not you, Barbara.” She dyed her prematurely gray hair until she decided the hell with it in 1970—and “George never noticed it,” she added acerbically, reporting on a phenomenon that sounded familiar to any number of wives.

Only in little flashes like these has the public gotten glimpses of Barbara Bush’s truly wicked wit. One friend tells of sitting next to her
at a rally in New Hampshire during the 1988 primary campaign while George Bush was on the podium taking questions. A woman asked him to explain his stand on abortion and added a virtual oration on her opinion of this thorny issue. Mrs. Bush leaned over to the friend and whispered in his ear: “Now there’s a b.s. question.”

Up on the podium, George Bush labored mightily to get on both sides of the dilemma with a series of convoluted on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand sentences. Mrs. Bush leaned over to the friend again and whispered: “And there’s a b.s. answer.”

When they were younger, Barbara Bush sometimes made her husband a target of her ego-deflating tongue—until one day he asked her in his offhand way to quit ridiculing him in public. She stopped, instantly and forever. She also did penance for another slip of her forked tongue in the 1984 campaign, when she remarked during the flap over Geraldine Ferraro’s tax returns that the Democratic vice presidential candidate not only was rich but could also be described by another word that rhymes with
rich
. That crack got into print, and Mrs. Bush admitted to a relative that she cried for twenty-four hours and called Ms. Ferraro to apologize.

Both stories make it clear that Barbara Bush is a sensitive, deeply caring woman. As First Lady, she was also a political partner in ways that Edith Roosevelt never tried to be. When George Bush considered running for President in 1980, his wife sat in on the briefing sessions and shared the final decision with him. Together, she and her husband became one of the smoothest functioning teams in the history of the White House.

This is not entirely surprising, if we pause for a backward look. Barbara Bush has been at George Bush’s side throughout his amazing Cook’s tour of the American government, which took him from congressman to UN. ambassador to CIA director to ambassador to China to vice president to president. If we combine these travels with his business career, which took him from the security of his upper-class Greenwich, Connecticut, world (and his bride from the nearby comfortable New York suburb of Rye) to the wilds of West Texas to learn the oil business, you get a woman who moved twenty-nine times in her forty-four years of marriage—and coped all the way.

Like Edith Roosevelt, Mrs. Bush has always been an impeccable hostess, who enjoys meeting new people and is unfazed by cultural and generational gaps. She especially liked George’s tour as UN. ambassador in New York City, where entertaining and diplomacy were closely intertwined. “I’d pay to have this job,” she told one reporter. In Beijing during George’s ambassadorship, she made a mighty effort to learn Chinese at the age of fifty so she could communicate with her hosts.