First Ladies (49 page)

When I visited Betty Ford at her beautiful summer home in Colorado, she was still having a wonderful time being herself. She bubbled with opinions about the world around her, almost all of them positive. She was still deeply involved in fund-raising and other matters at the Betty Ford Center and repeatedly expressed her continuing concern for Americans struggling with addiction problems. She looks back on her twenty-eight months as First Lady without regret now, satisfied that she—and Jerry—have no reason to apologize for anything. They both take justifiable pride in having helped the nation recover from Watergate, our worse political crisis since the Civil War.

Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign to beautify America did not end with her departure from the White House. After LBJ’s death in 1973, she launched a program to plant wildflowers along hundreds of miles of Texas highways. She was also the prime mover in creating a beautiful park along the banks of Austin’s share of the Colorado River.

On her seventieth birthday in 1982, Lady Bird founded the National Wildflower Research Center outside Austin. Here a staff of horticulturists study how to preserve and restore our native wildflowers, almost a quarter of which are in danger of extinction. Thousands of tourists and schoolchildren come to the center each year to tour the sixty blooming acres, which feature a reconstructed prairie with nineteen species of native grasses and more than seventy-five species of wildflowers that greeted the Texas pioneers.

When I visited her in Austin, Lady Bird, at eighty-two, was continuing to maintain a schedule that would intimidate most forty-year-olds. She still goes anywhere and everywhere to preach the gospel of beautification. She sits on boards and committees that promote this unimpeachable cause. On a visit to New York, she raced through a packed day with her staff panting in her wake. At 5:00
P.M
. she confessed she was feeling a little tired. “Oh, to be seventy again!” she sighed.

Some First Ladies have preferred to emphasize the word
private
when they retired from public life. They not only avoided politics, they courted near invisibility. Frances Cleveland was one of these. She
moved to Princeton, New Jersey, with Grover Cleveland and devoted herself to raising their family, which eventually numbered five children. When Cleveland died in 1908, Frances was only forty-four. In 1913 she married Thomas Preston, a Wells College archaeologist who soon joined the Princeton faculty.

When I met her in 1946, she was a gracious, self-assured woman of eighty-two. We were all attending a fete commemorating the founding of Princeton University. My mother, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Edith Wilson completed the plethora of First Ladies present. Among the other luminaries was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike joined me and Mrs. Preston as we were discussing the renovation that the White House was undergoing at the time. Before I could introduce him, Ike turned to Mrs. Preston and asked: “Where did you live in Washington?”

“The same place Margaret is living now,” she replied sweetly.

Only then did I manage to inform Ike that he was talking to Mrs. Grover Cleveland. His response was “It’s time for lunch, Margaret.” When a general is embarrassed, no one is more expert at executing a rapid retreat. I suspect that later in the day, some hapless aide got chewed out for not briefing his boss on Mrs. Preston’s identity.

That sunniest of First Ladies, Grace Coolidge, also remained persistently nonpolitical—and virtually invisible—after her husband’s death in 1933. Returning from a trip to Europe in 1936, when every Republican in America was girding for a titanic effort to defeat FDR’s supposedly un-American New Deal, she was asked for a political comment. Grace coolly replied: “We are all interested in politics—we should be—but I am not actively interested.”

Grace stayed far away from Washington, DC, and generally eschewed the slightest attempt to get any mileage out of her previous fame. On the contrary, she did her utmost to disguise her identity whenever she traveled. One of her favorite stories concerned an incognito trip she took to Europe with a friend. Somehow the staff at one Swiss hotel learned she was the widow of an American President. While Grace was seeing to their luggage, the desk clerk asked her friend: “Would you sign the register for yourself and Mrs. Lincoln?”

Jacqueline Kennedy also largely eschewed politics—but she never courted invisibility. It would have been a waste of time. Thanks to TV and modern America’s craze for celebrities, she remained one of the most famous, instantly recognizable women in the world. Jackie’s post-White House years were divided into three oddly contradictory parts. For the first five years, she was a kind of secular saint, a status in which she willingly participated, building up the John F. Kennedy legend.

Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 brought this phase of Jackie’s life to a horrendous stop. Lady Bird Johnson told me that when she attended Bobby’s funeral service in New York, she offered Jackie her hand and Mrs. Kennedy looked right through her, as if Lady Bird were not there. Mrs. Johnson, in her usual generous, understanding way, attributed this lapse to shock and grief. But something much more profound was happening in Jackie’s soul. “I hate this country,” she told a friend not long after the funeral. “I want to get out.”

The result was a right-angle turn, from secular saint to fallen idol. Readers may remember that in the summer of 1963, Jackie had spent a controversial vacation aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht in the Mediterranean, while JFK fretted and fumed in the White House. She had continued to see this unsavory but utterly charming Greek shipping magnate, and even before Bobby’s death had toyed with marrying him. Now, the only Kennedy who might have stopped her was gone. Jackie accepted Onassis’s offer, after he reinforced it with a ruby “the size of an egg”—and a prenuptial contract that deposited five million dollars in her bank account.

The dismay was global. Swedish newspapers cried: HOW COULD YOU? Bewildered Americans said they felt almost as bad as they had on November 22, 1963. The Roman Catholic Church tut-tutted that Jackie would be living in sin, because Onassis was a divorced man. But Jackie knew exactly what she wanted: money. Her presidential widow’s pension of $50,000 and the $200,000 she received from a Kennedy trust fund were simply not enough to maintain her in the style she preferred—and perhaps felt she deserved. Occasionally she
was defiant. She said she liked making people—especially politicians—squirm when they heard the name Onassis.

As Mrs. Onassis, Jackie spent Greek drachmas, French francs, and American dollars on a scale that staggered even a tycoon who maintained a staff of seventy on his private island of Skorpios. This led to violent quarrels and a growing coolness, which was exacerbated by the death of Onassis’s son in a plane crash. Onassis began talking about a divorce so he could marry a younger woman and sire another male heir.

As one friend put it in a masterpiece of understatement, Onassis was “not kind” to Jackie in these later years. Another friend tells of watching him excoriate her for her sloppy clothes and unkempt hair when they went to lunch at the villa of one of his billionaire friends. Before he could subject her to the humiliation of a divorce, the golden Greek fell ill and died in a Paris hospital. His only heir, his daughter Christina, settled with Jackie for twenty-six million dollars.

Coming back to the United States, Jackie made another right-angle turn, into the sedate, respectable world of the very rich. Essentially, this was the milieu into which she had been born—but the Bouviers, their fortune shredded by the 1929 Wall Street crash, had found it anything but idyllic. Now Jackie triumphantly returned to it, her own woman, and concentrated on what mattered most to her—raising her children to be stable, intelligent adults.

This was the link that gradually enabled Jackie to regain her most admired status with American women. She lived on a scale beyond their dreams, with a fourteen-room Fifth Avenue apartment, a horse farm in New Jersey, and a 464-acre estate on Martha’s Vineyard. But on this crucial family value of putting one’s children first their lives and hers intersected.

In this most private phase of her public life, Jackie worked three to four days a week at a prominent New York publishing house, editing about a dozen books a year. The writers with whom she dealt testify unanimously to her intelligence, her wit, her remarkable breadth of knowledge about art and fashion and a host of other subjects that interested her. One fellow editor who knew her well has described
these last fifteen years as the “most satisfying” part of Jackie’s life: “It seems her happiness in that time quadrupled.”

For a companion, Jackie chose an affable, worldly diamond merchant, Maurice Tempelsman. She presided serenely over her children’s progression into adulthood. She loaned her name to various good causes, such as the preservation of Grand Central Terminal from the wrecker’s ball, and to numerous fund-raisers and festivals for the arts. When she died of cancer in the spring of 1994, the outpouring of grief demonstrated how totally she had recaptured the world’s admiration.

That other nonpolitical First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower, proclaimed herself a lost soul when Ike died in March 1969. Over the next ten years, however, Mamie showed more than a few signs of becoming a woman in her own right, outspoken and not in the least afraid of the limelight. She had no hesitation about comparing her home and mother lifestyle to the home and workplace of the feminists, and finding hers a better choice. She addressed the graduating class of Gettysburg College and paid several visits to the White House. On one of the last of these returns to Pennsylvania Avenue, she got on beautifully with Rosalynn Carter, the first of the public partner First Ladies. “I stayed busy all the time and loved being in the White House,” she told Rosalynn. “But I was never expected to do all the things you have to do.”

Some people see a sort of rueful confession in these words. I think they miss the basic satisfaction Mamie Eisenhower felt with her life. It seems to me she was telling Rosalynn, in a nice way, that if the First Partner wanted to work her head off and share the heart-palpitating heat generated by the Oval Office, that was perfectly fine—but you wouldn’t catch Mamie Eisenhower doing it! She was too polite, of course, to point out which of them stayed way up on the list of most admired women during their White House years.

In spite of all the brickbats thrown at her and her husband by the press and biographers, Nancy Reagan emanated a quiet, even a triumphant, satisfaction when we met at the Hotel Carlyle in New York to discuss her White House years. In presidential terms, she and Ronnie “did it all.” They won reelection, and Nancy left the White House
far more admired than she had been when she entered it. We talked several months before doctors diagnosed Ronald Reagan as suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. But I have no doubt that Nancy will face this challenge with courage and devotion. It will be one more task in the major mission of her life: the protection of Ronald Reagan.

When we met, the only negative in Nancy’s world was her continuing fear of an attempt on her husband’s life. If anyone has any doubts about ex-First Families needing Secret Service protection, they will be banished by a story Nancy told me. A year or so after the Reagans returned to California, Nancy happened to glance out a window of their Bel Air home and saw a stranger wearing a T-shirt and overalls walking down a glass-walled corridor that connects the two wings of the house.

Who in the world is that? Nancy wondered. As far as she knew, there was no work being done on any part of the house. Before she could pick up the phone and ask her husband, who was in the exercise room, two Secret Service agents charged into the corridor. One of them jammed his gun under the intruder’s chin. The man was a former mental patient who had scaled a wall and gotten into the house. He had no weapon. He planned to strangle Ronald Reagan.

For Barbara Bush, the most recent departee from the White House, life is still full of multiple satisfactions. When I talked with her at her summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, she was entertaining seven grandchildren. She was writing her memoirs and was still deeply involved in supporting literacy programs and other causes in which volunteers play a major role.

Mrs. Bush also spoke with glowing pride about her sons Jeb and George, who were running for governorships in Florida and Texas. “Whether they win or lose,” she said, “the mere fact that they have chosen to go into politics astounded me. It made me think maybe they didn’t resent all those hours George and I spent away from home pursuing his career.”

As for George losing the election to Bill Clinton, Mrs. Bush put it this way: “I didn’t like it. But having said that, I think I’ve put it behind
me. It’s not my style to brood over the past—especially when the future is full of good things.” Among the best of those things was the discovery when they returned to live in Houston that she could pick up with old friends after twenty years “without missing a beat.” She says she and George have “yet to say no” to any board or committee in Houston that has asked them for help. It is part of their continuing commitment to the “thousand points of light,” George’s call for a massive outpouring of volunteers to help improve American life. “I still feel that is one of the most important things he said while we were in the White House,” Mrs. Bush told me.

Her biggest surprise about her post-White House years was the discovery that “it doesn’t stop.” By “it” she meant being a public person. Her mail still runs to forty letters a day. Only a week before we talked, she had gone out for a sail with a grandson and stopped at a nearby town to pick up some groceries. People swarmed from all directions the moment she set foot on the dock. “We had to run a gauntlet from the boat to the store and back,” she said.

With a few exceptions, such as Mary Lincoln and Pat Nixon, First Ladies have seldom evinced any major regrets when they look back on their sometimes agonizing tours in the White House. “I loved every minute of it,” Barbara Bush told me. Rosalynn Carter said almost exactly the same thing. Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan, ditto.