First Ladies (7 page)

Betty Beale, one of Washington’s more astute journalists, has flatly called the Kennedy union a marriage of convenience. I think it was more complex than that, although there were times when it veered perilously close to such a loveless arrangement. I think Jackie was capable of accepting—or attempting to accept—Jack’s unfaithfulness without abandoning her love for him. Her father had not been a paragon of marital fidelity. It was one of the chief reasons why her mother divorced him. Jackie was hardly naive about the male tendency to wander.

What Jackie wanted in the White House—and to a surprising degree she began to get it—was her husband’s respect for her intelligence and judgment. This, as much as love of art and beauty, was the motive behind the ferocious energy she flung into renewing the Executive Mansion. The sensational success of that venture stunned JFK and his New Frontiersmen in the West Wing. The President was equally surprised by other demonstrations of his wife’s political astuteness. When Prime Minister Nehru came to visit, JFK had a horrible time with this aloof, pompous, humorless man. Jackie charmed him. Similarly, the President was never able to get on a relaxed footing with his UN. Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, the two-time loser in presidential runs against Dwight Eisenhower. Jackie took charge, and Adlai became one of her most devoted followers, inviting her to lunch at the United Nations, exchanging witty letters and drawings with her.

“Jack developed enormous respect for his wife’s political judgment,” says Florida’s former senator George Smathers. “His pride in her achievements grew stronger the longer he remained in office.” Smathers maintains that even on her nonofficial trips to Italy and Greece, as well as her overtly goodwill tours of India and South
America, her letters were full of shrewd political observations that the President found useful. By their third year in the White House, Jackie was reportedly playing a role in public policy. She consistently took a more liberal (versus hard-line) view of steps toward easing tensions with the Soviet Union, such as the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the controversial sales of American grain to bail out the collapsing Soviet collective farm program. Oleg Cassini may have put it a little too strongly, considering what we now know about Mary Pinchot Meyer and other women whom Jack continued to see, but there is probably some truth in his contention that “JFK… fell in love with his wife a second time when they reached the White House and she was able to demonstrate her gifts and abilities.”

What I get from all this is a profile of a courageous First Lady fighting for a place in her husband’s presidential life, as a wife, a woman, a person in her own right. This hidden drama of Jackie’s life as First Lady reached a sort of climax when she gave birth prematurely to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy in August 1963, while she was vacationing in Massachusetts. The little boy lived only three days, and this harsh reminder that no one is master of the universe seems to have chastened and sobered the President to a remarkable degree. Jackie reached out to him for solace. Suddenly they were united, not by the conventions of marriage and power and fame but by humbling sorrow.

A number of the Kennedys’ close friends, such as Bill Walton, noticed that in the weeks after Patrick’s death, Jack and Jackie were perceptibly closer. They embraced in public—something they had never done—they went sailing together, and JFK was more deferential, more considerate. He no longer barged through doors, leaving Jackie trailing ten feet behind him, as he did repeatedly in the early White House years.

In September, on their tenth wedding anniversary, JFK gave Jackie a catalog from one of New York’s most expensive jewelers and told her to select anything she wanted. She chose a simple bracelet. Jackie gave him a gold St. Christopher’s medal to replace the silver one he had put in little Patrick’s coffin. A wedding present from her, it had been attached to a money clip.

In the light of these gestures of affection, Jackie’s decision to vacation with Aristotle Onassis a few weeks later may have been a last testing of her husband’s readiness to trust her to go her own way but to return to him, genuinely committed now, an equal partner in the pursuit of a second term. That would seem to be a reasonable interpretation of her response to Jack’s wary request for her to join him on a trip to the politically troubled state of Texas in November: “Sure I will. I’ll campaign with you wherever you want.”

We all know what happened in Texas on November 22, 1963. No one will ever forget those gunshots in Dallas, a frantic Jackie reaching out to the Secret Service man over the rear of the presidential limousine, her terrible cry: “My God, they’ve killed Jack. They’ve killed my husband!”

In the next few unforgettable days, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy taught the nation the deeper meaning of aristocracy. An aristocrat may have some wayward, willful patches in his or her character. But by and large aristocrats also have a sense of their own stature, as well as life’s depths. They have been trained to speak and behave in a style that befits the occasion, no matter what their private feelings may be. Jackie’s previous three years, in which, behind her various masks, she had forged her own unique identity as First Lady, became a resource on which she drew to sustain not only herself but the American people in this tragic ordeal.

Imagine, for a moment, what might have happened if Jackie had simply collapsed, like wives of other assassinated Presidents. Mary Lincoln became hysterical and stayed that way for the rest of her life. Epileptic Ida McKinley was the least visible First Lady in our history and remained an absent blank when her husband was gunned down in 1901. Fortunately, there were strong men ready to take charge of the nation, without their help. But America
needed
Jackie Kennedy’s help in 1963.

Jackie’s dignity, her sense of history, enabled the nation to focus on its grief. The riderless horse with the reversed boots preceding the casket on its solemn cavalcade to the Capitol, the grace with which she greeted Charles de Gaulle and other heads of state, the serenity with
which she presided over the entire funeral with her children beside her, became a kind of catharsis, an antidote to thoughts of violence and revenge. The woman in the black veil became as much a part of Jackie’s mystery, her complex public persona, as the smiling, joyous advocate of beauty and art in the resplendent, festive White House.

If I am right, Jacqueline Kennedy’s struggle to become her own woman in the White House is one of the most important hidden dramas in American history. Her success was not only a personal triumph, it is a legacy that continues to live in the American soul.

—

M
OST
F
IRST
L
ADIES HAVE HAD NO TROUBLE EVADING THE PITFALLS OF
an aristocratic style, even though they often were several notches above their husbands in social standing (a little-known fact which suggests—but does not prove—that Presidents start aiming for the top at an early age). Until recently it was a basic part of a woman’s role to be agreeable and charming. Also, Presidents soon recognized the folly of offending the sensibilities of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Citizen with anything that smacked of highfalutin ways. A number of First Ladies have thus felt free to use the symbolic power of their office to do some quiet—and sometimes not so quiet—crusading to solve national problems or correct injustices in the American scheme of things.

The pioneer in this department is a First Lady I had smugly dismissed until I started writing this book: Lucy Webb Hayes. She was the wife of Rutherford B. Hayes, elected in 1876 thanks to the only stolen presidential election in American history. It was a contest shadowed by the million dead of the Civil War. The Democrats won the
White House by a hefty half million popular votes, but the Republicans, appalled at seeing the party of rebellion and secession returning to power, self-righteously purchased the electoral votes of several southern states which were still under military occupation, putting Hayes in the White House by a whisker—one electoral vote. For a while it looked as if we were going to have another civil war.

Although President Hayes himself seems to have had nothing to do with the moneybags that were highballed south in the night, he entered the White House as a President violently disliked by more than half the voters. That made First Lady Lucy Hayes loom large in the administration—and she seemed equipped for the challenge. Lucy was the first First Lady to have a college degree (from Cincinnati Wesleyan)—and according to some historians the first to be called the First Lady.

Today she is primarily remembered as the First Lady who banned liquor from the White House. Although the decision was as much her husband’s as her own, it has earned her the nickname Lemonade Lucy in the history books. That makes her sound like a puckered puritan without an iota of grace or charm. The real woman was the exact opposite of this libel—witty, intelligent, with sparkling hazel eyes and glistening dark hair. She was also a wonderful mother to her five children. The liquor ban was not a decision the Hayeses made casually, or on impulse. They knew it was going to cause them trouble. They made it because they feared America of 1877 was in danger of drowning in booze.

These days we laugh at the thought of Carry Nation and the other women who took axes to saloons and fought the lobbying power of the liquor interests. But in nineteenth-century America the number of homes and marriages destroyed by alcohol was astronomical. As governor of Ohio, Hayes told a columnist he had seen too many “noble minds rendered unfit to be trusted with public office because of drink.”

Washington, D.C., probably had more heavy drinkers per capita than any other city in the union in those days. (According to some reports it still holds that dubious title.) It took courage for Lucy Hayes to support her husband’s decision—and take most of the heat for it, as
White House hostess. But the President and his wife wanted to send a message to the nation about their opposition to alcohol—a message 1877 America needed as badly as it needed a strong stand against drugs in the nineteen eighties.

As an old White House hand, I was not surprised to discover that some of the staff managed to circumvent the ban for the topers who came through with a backstairs tip. About midway through the three-hour state dinners of the era, the stewards served a sherbet inside the frozen skin of an orange. A Massachusetts senator recalled that for those who needed it, “as much rum was crowded [into the sherbet] as it could contain without being altogether liquid.”

Officially designated Roman Punch, the course was known to the insiders as “the Life Saving Station.” The staff told the President the rum taste was only flavoring—and served him and Lucy and other temperance supporters a version so mild they apparently believed it. I suspect the Hayeses knew exactly what was going on, but being good politicians, they pretended to ignore it.

Although Lucy herself did not drink alcohol, she never objected to Rutherford downing a few steins with his fellow Civil War veterans. She often sent gifts of good vintages to friends who had wine cellars. These facts make it clearer than ever that the White House ban was a symbolic gesture for the sake of the nation’s mental and physical health.

As First Lady, Lucy Hayes stirred a great upheaval of hope in the minds and hearts of many women, who were beginning to resent their separate but not quite equal status in American life. They saw college-educated Lucy as the embodiment of the New Woman, who wanted the vote, equal pay for equal work, and the right to enter the professions and politics. Lucy had displayed some New Woman tendencies in her youth. Not long after they married, she had told her husband she favored “violent measures” to win better wages and other reforms for women.

At Hayes’s inauguration, Mary Clemmer Ames, one of Washington’s first women reporters, rhapsodized over Lucy’s “gentle and winning face,” her “bands of smooth dark hair with that tender light in the
eyes we have come to associate with the Madonna.” For some women, this First Lady was a creature with divine powers.

To the consternation of these true believers, in her four years in the White House (to survive the scandal of the stolen election, Hayes had to promise to serve only a single term) Lucy did not say a single word on behalf of women reformers. When Susan B. Anthony, the founder of the woman suffrage movement, and her colleague, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, visited the White House, President Hayes met with them and promised “sincere consideration” of their call for a constitutional amendment giving women the vote. Only after the meeting did he introduce them to Lucy, who showed them around the White House but carefully avoided saying a word in their favor.

Why? Because woman’s rights was an extremely unpopular issue in the late eighteen seventies, and Lucy Hayes was first, last, and always a politician’s wife. Only a tiny percentage of American women, and an invisible percentage of American men, supported Anthony’s lonely crusade. When the National Woman Suffrage Association met in the capital,
The Washington Post
felt free to refer to them as “unwomenly women who wished to change their condition” and their program as a “horrible reform.” Lucy never even became a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization whose militancy also won it numerous enemies. Politicians’ wives live in the present, not some theoretical future, and Lucy Hayes was acutely aware that her husband was in no position to tolerate a controversial wife.

Instead of joining the woman’s rights movement or the WCTU, Lucy became the honorary president of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society, an organization that campaigned to better the lives of the poor in the appalling slums of nineteenth-century America’s cities. This was a cause that was beyond criticism from all points of the political spectrum.

Proof of Lucy’s political astuteness was her tremendous popularity. Although President Hayes continued to receive brickbats from reporters, who referred to him as “Rutherfraud” and “His Fraudulence,” almost no one except the booze hounds of Washington, D.C., had a bad a word to say against Lucy. Advertisers printed her picture
on their household products. The big-name poets of the day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, praised her in verse. Old Washington press hand Ben Perley Moore declared Lucy was the most influential First Lady since Dolley Madison.