First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (3 page)

The residence may not have been draped in black as it had been after President Kennedy’s assassination, but the mood when the Fords moved in was almost as somber. Betty could not say anything to ease Pat’s pain and humiliation, but once she became a first lady she quickly discovered the power of her newfound celebrity. For the next two and a half years she weathered two assassination attempts on her husband, voiced her support for the Equal Rights Amendment, and helped to remove the stigma attached to breast cancer when she revealed her own diagnosis. She spoke more freely than any of her predecessors, and though she was a registered Republican, after her husband left office she sometimes voted Democrat. It was after she left the White House, however, that Betty made her greatest contribution with her stunning admission that she had an addiction to alcohol and prescription pills, a revelation that transformed her private pain into healing for so many others.

Rosalynn Carter was a shrewd politician whose syrupy southern drawl belied her personal ambition. During her four years in the White House, she sat in on Cabinet meetings and was a crucial player in the Camp David Accords, the first peace treaty between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors, which was agreed upon after a thirteen-day summit in 1978 at the presidential retreat. She helped her husband decide how to approach Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin when the deal seemed stalled. On the campaign trail she realized that she could interact with people in a way her husband could not. When he was running for governor of Georgia and later for president she would slip out of the crowd surrounding him and talk to supporters. People felt comfortable talking to her about their problems. “One of the roles that she played during
the campaign and played as first lady and continues to play now is as the eyes and ears for her husband,” said Rosalynn’s White House projects director, Katherine Cade. “She has a very warm and caring demeanor, and when she meets people they talk to her about what’s on their minds.” Aides say she was a better judge of character than her husband. During Jimmy Carter’s 1980 reelection campaign, Rosalynn came back from a solo campaign trip and updated her husband. “The governor’s really good, isn’t he?” the President asked her cheerfully.

“Why do you think he’s so good?” she shot back.

“Well, when I went there he really turned people out.”

“Right, when
you
come there, anybody can turn the people out,” she said. “He isn’t organized at all, I could tell. The event was no good.”

Rosalynn is still bitter about her husband’s loss to Ronald Reagan—nearly forty years later the stigma of a one-term presidency has stayed with her. When asked decades after leaving Washington what she misses most about living in the White House, she replied, “I miss having Jimmy in the Oval Office taking care of our country. I have never felt as safe as I did when he was there.” But President Carter has had the longest post–White House career of any president, and Rosalynn has been a crucial part of his success. She cofounded the Carter Center with her husband and has helped eradicate diseases and monitor elections around the world.

Nancy Reagan was first lady from 1981 to 1989. “She was the human resources department,” says Reagan political consultant Stuart Spencer, weighing in on Nancy’s involvement in deciding who would be in her husband’s Cabinet. Nancy was not particularly close with any of the other first ladies, and she was deeply traumatized by the assassination attempt during her husband’s first year in office, which brought him much closer to the brink of death than anyone knew at the time. She was a self-described worrier and
a perfectionist who sometimes made impossible demands of the residence staff at the White House. (She even assigned someone to guard her pink chiffon dress on the transatlantic flight to Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s 1981 wedding.) But she understood the symbolic power of the executive mansion in a way that no other first lady, with the exception of Jackie Kennedy, ever had. When Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, made their historic visit to Washington in 1987, Nancy made it clear to the residence staff that she wanted the White House to look its best. Her most lasting legacy is her deep devotion to her husband, whom she stood by in his last years as he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

Barbara Bush had been the wife of a vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush, for eight years before she became first lady. She had had a difficult relationship with Nancy Reagan, who barely mentions Barbara in her memoir and whom she says she never got to know. That might be because the Bushes were rarely invited to the second and third floors of the residence. When Barbara lived in the White House from 1989 to 1993, she was beloved by the butlers and maids who work there, but her cutting remarks sometimes offended presidential aides. She says that there is something wrong with a first lady if she does not embrace the “big opportunity” that’s handed to her to make a real difference in people’s lives. But even Barbara Bush recognizes how daunting the job is when she says, “I’d like to go back and live there [in the White House] and not have the responsibility.”

Hillary Clinton is the only first lady to run for office. She served as a senator and as secretary of state, and she is waging her second bid to get back in the White House. She was first lady from 1993 to 2001 and attempted unsuccessfully to redefine the role by having her office in the West Wing and by playing an active and unapologetic part in major policy decisions. Scandals swirled
around the Clintons during their entire eight years in the White House, and at a 1994 press conference Hillary was pelted with questions from reporters for more than an hour. The questions ranged from cattle futures trades that she made while her husband was Arkansas governor to their Whitewater real estate venture to suggestions that documents were removed from Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster’s office after Foster’s suicide. “I can’t really help it if some people get up every day wanting to destroy instead of build,” she said. In that same press conference she referred to herself as a “transition” figure who has worked her entire life and who was surprised by how uncomfortable people were with her ambitious approach to being first lady.

Hillary greatly admires Eleanor Roosevelt, and in the White House she had imaginary conversations with her “to try to figure out what she would do in my shoes,” she said. “She usually responds by telling me to buck up or at least to grow skin as thick as a rhinoceros.” In the wake of the failure of her health-care plan and after the Democrats lost the House and the Senate in the 1994 midterm elections, Hillary was walking by her office on a gray November morning. She had just finished meeting with her husband in the Oval Office, and a framed photograph of Eleanor she had displayed on a table caught her eye. She asked herself,
What would Eleanor do
? She loved living in the house where Eleanor had once lived. Hillary especially liked how much consternation Eleanor caused a member of FDR’s administration who said she should stay out of her husband’s business and “stick to her knitting.” Eleanor’s advice, Hillary thought, would be to press on and not get bogged down by setbacks. Hillary blamed herself for the failure of her health-care proposal and knew she played some role in the disastrous midterm election results. She had emboldened “the enemy,” she wrote in her memoir
Living History
.

Roosevelt’s great-granddaughter Anna Fierst, who as a young girl knew Eleanor and remembers her holding court at the dinner table at her cottage in New York’s Hudson Valley, does not think that Eleanor would naturally take to Hillary. “I think she’d be a little weary of Hillary Clinton. Hillary kind of has a hard edge to her, which is okay. It’s not a criticism, it’s just her personality.” Hillary concedes that she has a tough veneer and has said of herself, “I’m probably the most famous person you don’t really know.” Aides insist she can be “soulful” and “warm,” and when she was first lady, they say, there were many times when she was brought to tears visiting sick children in hospitals.

Hillary wanted to have more influence than Nancy Reagan or Eleanor Roosevelt; she wanted a seat at the table, and her husband was eager to give it to her. When she was first lady a large photograph of herself speaking at a podium hung in her West Wing office, with an inscription from her biggest booster: “You are so good, Love, Bill.” Hillary shared more than just ambition and intellect with Eleanor—she shared the painful bond of marriage to an unfaithful husband, a point that was ironically made by Monica Lewinsky herself. In a letter, Lewinsky, who had an affair with President Clinton when she was a twenty-one-year-old White House intern, wrote to him on September 30, 1997, and pleaded with the President to meet her. “Oh, and Handsome [her nickname for Clinton], remember FDR would never have turned down a visit with Lucy Mercer [President Roosevelt’s longtime mistress]!” In 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for his first term and unselfconsciously advertising himself and Hillary as “buy one, get one free,” he said that he saw Hillary playing a far greater role than her idol. “If I get elected president, it will be an unprecedented partnership, far more than Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor. They were two great people, but on different tracks. If I get elected, we’ll do things together like we always have.”

Laura Bush speaks in a sweet and thoughtful way and approached the role of first lady in a much more traditional manner than her predecessor. When asked about her relationship with her mother-in-law, Barbara, Laura says, “I think George and I had a huge advantage moving into the White House, having stayed there so many times with his parents and having seen them as President and First Lady; that was a huge advantage for us. The only other family that had that were John Quincy and Louisa Adams.” Barbara Bush has reason to like Laura. She famously got her son George W. to quit drinking, something that Barbara and her husband, George H. W. Bush, have always been grateful to her for. “I let him know that I thought he could be a better man,” Laura said. Laura’s chief of staff in the White House, Anita McBride, says the elder Bushes “look at Laura as somebody that they never really had to worry about.” She was so good for their son, and they knew that without her he could not have become president. Barbara says her daughter-in-law follows “a great philosophy in life—you can either like it or not, so you might as well like it.” But their relationship is more complicated than that. Once, when Barbara Bush was walking through the residence, she made a comment about new leopard-printed upholstery on a piece of furniture. “You had your time,” Laura told her. “This is my house now.”

After the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, Laura had the grim task of talking to victims’ families and serving as a symbol of hope in the wake of devastation. She found a new voice after 9/11 and turned her attention to the treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan and other parts of the world. But she left the White House under a dark cloud of criticism because of her husband’s handling of the Iraq War.

Michelle Obama occupies a unique place as the country’s first African American first lady. Growing up in a working-class
family on Chicago’s South Side, she struggled to find her identity at the predominantly white Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude in 1985, and at Harvard Law School, where she graduated three years later. In the White House, friends say, she feels that critics are waiting to pounce on her for one misstep. “She was a working mother, a professional mother. Hillary Clinton worked but she was also the governor’s wife. She had a huge infrastructure. Michelle Obama’s infrastructure was her mother,” says former White House communications director Anita Dunn.

Michelle has more closely followed in the footsteps of Laura Bush than of Hillary Clinton. She came into the White House describing herself as a J. Crew–wearing mom-in-chief, and her devotion to the Obamas’ two daughters has remained her top priority. “When people ask me how I’m doing,” Michelle says, “I say, ‘I’m only as good as my most sad child.’” She doesn’t enjoy politics; in fact she hates glad-handing and raising money. She does not wear her emotions on her sleeve, and her older brother and her mother both say that she has never once called them in tears. She is most comfortable in a room full of students from diverse backgrounds whom she views as reflections of herself and her husband. “Maybe you feel like your destiny was written the day you were born, and you ought to just rein in your hopes and scale back your dreams. But if any of you are thinking that way, I’m here to tell you, stop it. Don’t do that,” she told 158 seniors graduating from an Anacostia high school considered one of the worst schools in Washington, D.C. “Don’t ever scale back your dreams.” And she has a way of speaking to these mostly African American students, some of whom were raised in poverty or became parents as teenagers, with none of the saccharine qualities of politicians who insist that they can relate but obviously cannot. “You can’t just sit around,” she told them. “Don’t expect anybody to come and hand you anything. It
doesn’t work that way.” But the political climate in Washington and the constant demands of the presidency have made her battle-hardened. She thought a California college student summed up the role of first lady well when she called it “the balance between politics and sanity.” Again and again, Michelle has put her foot down in an effort to carve out some semblance of normalcy for herself and her daughters. The fight has been exhausting.

These women each faced the loss of privacy coupled with mounting personal and, oddly enough, financial pressure when they moved into the White House. Rosalynn Carter said she was stunned to learn that first families have to pay for their own food. She remembers when the chief usher, who runs the executive mansion, showed her her family’s food bill for their first month in the White House. “The bill was six hundred dollars, which doesn’t sound like very much, but that was enormous to me back then because this was 1976. We had a lot of company with my family, Jimmy’s family and friends, and then I got a six-hundred-dollar bill. I was shocked.” To save money, Rosalynn would ask the chef to serve leftovers some nights when it was just the family eating. Jackie Kennedy reorganized her staff and put someone new in charge of housekeeping because the food bill had gotten so high. Barbara Bush, however, had spent eight years as the wife of the Vice President and knew that her family would be expected to pay for their food and toiletries. “If they [other first ladies] were shocked, there’s something wrong with them,” she says sternly. “We had lots of guests, as did George W., and we paid for those private guests. But the bill would come and it would say, ‘One egg: eighteen cents.’ Mrs. So-and-So had an egg and a piece of toast. It’s cheaper to eat at the White House.”