First Ladies (45 page)

Pertinent as all this diplomacy undoubtedly was as a warm-up for the White House, it pales beside Mrs. Bush’s toils during her eight years as the vice president’s wife. She hosted a staggering 1,192 events at the handsome vice president’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue and attended another 1,132 as a guest, frequently the guest of honor. She and George traveled to sixty-eight countries and four territories,
racking up 1,330,000 miles on Air Force Two—the equivalent of fifty-four times around the world. By the time the Bushes reached the White House in 1989, they had met almost every political leader on the globe.

Barbara Bush proves she is a First Lady for all seasons, tossing out the first ball for the Texas Rangers
.
(AP / Wide World Photos)

This virtual on-the-job training may explain why Barbara Bush was probably our most unflappable First Lady. When reporters spotted her in slippers and bathrobe walking her dog, Millie, outside the family’s Kennebunkport, Maine, compound, she struck them dumb with a terse “Haven’t you ever seen an old lady walk a dog before?” Once Millie ran into the vice presidential residence with a saliva-drenched tennis ball in her mouth and tried to present it to Australian Prime Minister Robert Hawke. Mrs. Bush “gave her a clean one in honor of the PM,” and the meeting continued as if nothing had happened. During her first months in the White House, she coped without blanching when her supersociable husband invited twenty people for dinner on two hours’ notice and upped the count to forty the following night with the same amount of warning.

Some people have dismissed Barbara Bush’s smiling serenity as a dividend of a privileged, affluent life. They could not be more wrong. She has come through one of the most awful ordeals a mother can face in this world—the loss of a child. Her first daughter, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953 at the age of four. That was when Barbara’s hair turned prematurely gray. She sank into a depression in which, she “felt as if I could cry forever.” She credits George Bush’s optimism and energy and love for pulling her out of it.

Well before she got to the White House, Barbara Bush had decided to make children the focus of any cause she would adopt as First Lady. She soon refined this decision to focus on literacy and reading, partly because one of her sons had been dyslexic and she had seen firsthand the problems that a reading difficulty can cause. As the vice president’s wife, she attended or hosted 538 events related to literacy. As First Lady, with money from her bestselling book about (or, as it said on the cover, “by”) Millie, she created the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, which disbursed her royalties to institutions and experts involved in the fight to improve America’s reading skills.

Beyond literacy, Barbara Bush found time as First Lady to promote volunteerism in general. In Robin’s memory she had long made a point of visiting hospitals to bring chronically ill children gifts and hugs at Christmastime. As First Lady she put on an apron in a mobile soup kitchen and took valentines to patients at a Washington old-age home. At an assembly in a de facto segregated Washington, D.C., school during Black History Month, she delighted the students by singing from memory all eight verses of “We Shall Overcome.”

The Bushes liked living in the White House, in part for the historical setting. Mrs. Bush told me she particularly loved dining off the forty varieties of china now in the mansion’s collection. She and George would kid about eating off Grover Cleveland for lunch and Abe Lincoln for dinner. She found she could wave to George in his Oval Office from her own office in the southwest corner of the East Wing—and she made sure he glanced up from his desk now and then to respond to her high sign.

Another reason why they enjoyed the old place was the First Lady’s no-nonsense management style. When Nancy Reagan advised her not to let her children live in the White House, Barbara Bush crisply replied: “Don’t worry. I haven’t invited them.” When grandchildren came to visit, there were no Amy Carter-like appearances at state dinners. The kids dined separately and undoubtedly had a much better time. They saw enough of the White House to say “I was there,” but they never upstaged the adults. I am heartily in favor of this style of grandparenting.

On Mrs. Bush’s side of the White House, things went so smoothly, it is hard to find anything that can be called a crisis. Perhaps the closest to one was the Wellesley flap, when a cadre of students at that eminent college protested the First Lady as their commencement speaker, because she had supposedly never accomplished anything as an independent woman. At the commencement, Barbara Bush replied for the millions of American women who have devoted their lives to husbands and children and volunteer work. She praised careers for women but ably defended those who chose to stay home and raise their children. It was, as one reporter said, “a job Wellesley done.”

Most of the time, Mrs. Bush’s profile as a political partner remained so low, it was practically invisible. But many people gave her credit for nudging George Bush’s agenda toward a more caring administration. As someone else put it, she carried “the banner of compassion” in a presidency that was largely preoccupied with foreign affairs, from the invasion of Panama to the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Gulf War. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that Barbara Bush was sending the public the signals they wanted to hear from George. Honesty compels me to add that when I interviewed Mrs. Bush for this book, she vehemently rejected this description of her role, saying George Bush did not need anyone, including his spouse, to make him more compassionate.

Nevertheless, the presidential election of 1992 was fought almost entirely on domestic issues. It was a tribute to—but also a liability of—Barbara Bush’s determinedly nonpolitical style that in the final year of her husband’s presidency, when his poll numbers began to sink, she remained at a stratospheric eighty percent approval rating with the American public. Another poll found her to be the world’s most admired woman. But she was unable to transfer an iota of her amazing popularity to her husband.

Maybe that is a tribute to the good sense of the American people. For all the power and importance of First Ladies, nowhere in this book will you find me suggesting they should be on the ballot. The President is the man who is elected to the world’s greatest political office. The buck will always stop in the West Wing of the White House, not in the East Wing.

Barbara Bush’s White House success, like Edith Roosevelt’s, suggests the American people are a lot more liberal about their First Ladies than many of the commentators on the subject. They have no strong preconceptions about how a First Lady should look or act. She is free to sell herself to them on the open market, using her glamour, her brainpower, her passion for politics, her love of beauty—or her maternal self. That too is the way it should be.

—

W
HEN
I
TOLD MY HUSBAND
, C
LIFTON
D
ANIEL
, I
WAS ABOUT TO WRITE
this chapter, he smiled somewhat sardonically, as befits an all-wise former managing editor of
The New York Times
, and asked: “Which Hillary Rodham Clinton are you going to write about?”

“The one we met—and liked,” I replied.

Clifton’s question has more than a little point, however. By this time a lot of Americans are undoubtedly a bit bewildered by the incredible outpouring of print and photographs and TV coverage of the current First Lady. There have been articles depicting her as a religious mystic, Saint Hillary in pursuit of the “politics of meaning”; as a cool, calculating lawyer with a hidden political agenda; as a crude opportunist with shallow ethics when it comes to making money; as a bossy, lamp-throwing termagant who really runs the White House; and as a clotheshorse who has fallen in love with high style.

I cannot recognize the Hillary Clinton I met in any of these capsule descriptions. In the hours I spent with her shortly after she and Bill
moved into the White House, she was a warm, humorous, intelligent woman, completely at ease with her husband, keenly aware of her daughter’s needs, and obviously enjoying life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But I would be less than honest if I did not note that Mrs. Clinton’s first two years as First Lady have been fraught with controversy. When you view the verbiage from a historical perspective, however, a lot of it ranges from the same old stuff to downright silly.

Hillary is the real boss of the White House? People said the same thing about Abigail Adams, Sarah Polk, Helen Taft, Edith Wilson, and Nancy Reagan. The politics of meaning? Eleanor Roosevelt was repeatedly attacked for her crusades for social justice. A hidden political agenda? Rather like Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton has been forced to deny she has a major role in shaping White House policy, beyond the one large task the President assigned her—the preparation of a universal health-care bill.

I decided to cut through the nonsense and asked Hillary Rodham Clinton face to face how she saw herself as First Lady after twenty months in the White House. Her answer revealed a calm awareness of the complexity of her job. She said she was doing her best “to fulfill the many different parts of the role” of First Lady. She was occasionally troubled by the way the press tended to see conflicts between the several sides of the job, announcing when she turned her attention to entertaining or redecorating that she was abandoning politics. “I’ve enjoyed the entertaining and the chance to contribute something to the White House,” she said. “I’ve also enjoyed the chance I’ve been given to work with my husband on health care and other issues of interest to me.”

In short, Mrs. Clinton sees herself as both a political partner and a traditional First Lady. She says she has read everything she could find about First Ladies and has concluded that almost all of them played some sort of political role in their husbands’ presidencies. There is undoubtedly some truth to that observation. But emphasis is more important than mere numbers. A public political partnership is unquestionably the leading edge of the Clintons’ White House image. This widespread impression is not entirely accidental. When I asked
Mrs. Clinton to name her most pleasurable moments as First Lady so far, she replied: “The passage of the Brady Bill. And the ban on assault weapons.”

The Clintons were political partners long before they got to the White House. “My husband and I have always been each other’s sounding boards,” Hillary told me. “Even before our marriage, when we were students at Yale.” In their years after Yale, Hillary became a lot more than a sounding board. According to many sources, she rescued Bill Clinton’s career from collapse when he was defeated for reelection at the end of his first term as governor of Arkansas. She overhauled his entire political operation, got rid of do-nothing cronies, and put together the team that restored him to the statehouse and maintained the momentum that carried him to the presidency.

That is only the first of several large debts Bill Clinton owes his wife. During the 1992 primary campaign, a woman named Gennifer Flowers revealed that she and Bill had enjoyed a long-running affair. She had tapes of phone conversations in which Governor Clinton made some very compromising remarks. He was not the first presidential candidate to be embarrassed by such a story—Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt come readily to mind. But in the aftermath of the way a similar story had destroyed presidential hopeful Gary Hart in 1988, the prospects for Bill Clinton were not promising. Until he and Hillary went on the TV show
60 Minutes
and she defused the ticking bomb by admitting that the Clintons may have had problems in their marriage in the past but they had worked them out.

No other First Lady except Rosalynn Carter has come to the White House with the ability to remind her husband that without her he would not be sitting in the Oval Office. I do not think Hillary has to remind Bill Clinton of this fact. On the contrary, it is part of the warp and woof of their remarkable political partnership. Does this give Hillary behind-the-scenes influence? Of course it does. But it is not, as far as I can see, the kind of influence that trivializes that word, or her role as First Lady. On the contrary, it enhances it, because few First Ladies have been more qualified than this Wellesley and Yale Law School graduate to play a public partnership role.

How successful has Hillary Clinton been as a public partner? Here the story becomes inextricably entangled with the question of how successful Bill Clinton has been as President. It seems to be the fate of public partners to rise or fall together—one of the risks of the high-profile game they choose to play.

Unquestionably, Hillary Clinton can look back on some successful moments as First Lady She awed Congress with her command of the complexities of the health-care industry when she testified before them on the Clinton bill mandating universal care. A
New York Times
reporter cited her visit to Capitol Hill as “the official end of an era when Presidential wives pretended to know less than they did and to be advising less than they were.”