First Ladies (50 page)

Even Bess Truman, who sometimes claimed to hate every minute of it, confessed to a secret attachment to those tumultuous years. I once asked her if she missed anything about the White House. She sighed and said: “All that help.”

—

O
N A SUNNY
O
CTOBER DAY IN 1982
, B
ESS
T
RUMAN WAS BURIED FROM
Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence. It was the same small, brick house of worship in which she had married Captain Harry Truman, just back from the Western Front, in 1919. Determined to keep the service as quiet and private as possible—the way I knew Mother wanted it—I limited the guest list to 150. Only a few personal friends went back to her Washington days. There were far more people from Independence.

But I also knew that history could not be excluded from the ceremony. In spite of her fierce clutch on privacy, Mother was still a former First Lady, and Nancy Reagan, wife of the incumbent President, was on the invitation list, along with Betty Ford, the former First Lady she liked best. In a gesture that surprised me, Rosalynn Carter also flew to Independence to express her own and her husband’s sympathy. Mother had declined to endorse Jimmy Carter in his run for reelection in 1980, although he and Rosalynn had kicked off their
campaign in Independence in yet another presidential attempt to borrow some Truman magic.

The three First Ladies sat in the front pew, and one of the news photographers hovering around us begged me for permission to take a picture. I had banned all photography inside the church. After some urging from my newsman husband, who could not tolerate my inclination to ignore a historic moment, I relented and the picture was taken.

Now I am glad Clifton talked me into that picture. It has become a sort of touchstone to which I have returned more than once while writing this book. The seed for this book was planted at that brief, quiet funeral service, attended by those three very different First Ladies. They personified the amazing variety of talents and personalities who had held this unique unelected office. Then and there I decided I wanted to tell their story.

Here is the picture that partly inspired this book. Nancy Reagan, Betty Ford, and Rosalynn Carter sit in a front pew at my mother’s funeral service
.
(Bettmann Archive)

Mother’s life of course evoked other thoughts. At ninety-seven, she had become the oldest First Lady in American history. I remembered teasing her when Mrs. Wilson died at eighty-nine. I wondered if there was something in the air of the Big White Jail that contributed to longevity, little knowing I was talking to the coming champion. I thought of the staggering sweep of history that Mother’s life encompassed. Born when Chester Arthur was in the White House, she had seen the nation through five wars and eighteen presidents.

Sitting there, listening to the hymns, I began to perceive in Mother’s life what has since become apparent as I studied the lives of other First Ladies—their story transcends the politics of the moment and deals with fundamental things, above all faith and love. For Bess Truman—and for so many other of these presidential wives—faith encompassed not only belief in a caring God, even when life stirred bitter doubts, but the faith to endure, to go on caring about the people in their lives.

It was the strength, the duration of Bess Truman’s caring that inspired affection in so many people. She shared that strength with her troubled mother, who never recovered from her husband’s suicide, her often troubled brothers, her occasionally troublesome daughter—and above all her husband, especially during those eight years in the White House when he carried the future of the free world on his shoulders.

For Mother, faith also included a basic confidence in the huge, complex, ever-evolving United States of America. Disappointments and difficulties, public or private, never daunted her bedrock mid-western sense of America’s immense potential, its endless capacity for change and renewal. Spiritually, psychologically, she remained close to those pioneer ancestors who had crossed the wide Missouri and gazed at the vast prairie’s seemingly infinite distance, its promise of abundance.

Each of the three First Ladies in the front pew had attempted in her own way to forge a similar faith and offer a similar caring strength to her presidential husband. At the same time they sought within the context of their individual lives a way to find the White House role
that best suited them as women. They recognized the symbolic power of the office of First Lady, and they struggled to cope with its multiple challenges—each choosing from a host of alternatives the ones that, in those wonderful words of Lady Bird Johnson, made her heart sing.

That last word may strike some people as a bit too extravagant for Bess Truman. For her, I would substitute “laugh.” Mother had a wonderful eye for the absurdities, the follies of politics and politicians in Washington. In public, she usually looked solemn. But in private, she could unleash one-liners and sarcastic asides that reduced us to helpless laughter, with hers the heartiest of all. It was a priceless asset for any President to have in his White House.

All her gifts—of laughter, of native shrewdness, of caring, of faith in America—Bess Truman offered freely to her presidential husband. The other First Ladies did the same thing. Betty Ford’s courageous candor, Nancy Reagan’s protective devotion, Rosalynn Carter’s fiercely energetic public partnership came with the same no-strings arrangement. That is where the faith that created these gifts crosses into love.

Love
is the word which makes First Ladies ultimately important in the national scheme of things. Love has never been much of an ingredient in the politics of men. The closest they come to it is loyalty, which is an admirable virtue. But love goes beyond the boundaries of friendship and party; it evokes realities that every American can share in the framework of his or her individual life.

Unquestionably, there is something to the idea that the First Lady speaks to the nation’s heart. A President has to do that too, but he represents other things—power, pride, policy—that can easily interfere with the unqualified caring the heart evokes. Simply by being there, creating, as Martha Washington did, the tone, the emotional aura of a President’s administration, the First Lady reminds us that American politics has been different from the start. It has always recognized the need to win hearts as well as minds.

Whether First Ladies attempt to define this caring dimension or simply choose to personify it with a minimum of words, as Bess Truman and Jacqueline Kennedy and Pat Nixon did, in their very different
ways, a loving woman is the ultimate role the First Lady plays before the American people. Thanks to the power of mass communication, she can now express many meanings of her love, she can reach out to a broad spectrum of causes and people. But she must remember—first, last, and always—she is the wife of a President who needs her strength and devotion as he struggles to lead America into an always unknown future.