First Ladies
Page 1
More praise for First Ladies
“Historical writing at its best… Fascinating characters, titillating anecdotes, little-remembered facts and comments on the scope of women’s lives.”
—Sunday Oklahoman
“Readers will relish this entertaining, thoughtful survey.”
—Booklist
“Lovingly-crafted, thoughtful… An innovative and revealing study of the First Ladies….[Truman’s] sense of humor makes this effort a page turner.”
—The Courier-Journal
“Sure to be a hit.”
—The Seattle Times
ALSO BY MARGARET TRUMAN
Bess W. Truman
Souvenir
Women of Courage
Harry S Truman
Letters from Father:
The Truman Family’s Personal Correspondences
Where the Buck Stops
White House Pets
IN THE CAPITAL CRIME SERIES
Murder on the Potomac
Murder at the Pentagon
Murder in the Smithsonian
Murder at the National Cathedral
Murder at the Kennedy Center
Murder in the CIA
Murder in Georgetown
Murder at the FBI
Murder on Embassy Raw
Murder in the Supreme Court
Murder on Capitol Hill
Murder in the White House
Murder in Havana
Murder in Foggy Bottom
I hope some day someone will
take time to evaluate the true role of
the wife of a President, and to assess
the many burdens she has to bear and
the contributions she makes.
HARRY S TRUMAN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A great many people have given me advice, encouragement, and help for this book. Above all, I want to express my appreciation to the First Ladies who graciously answered my many questions about their White House years—Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Bush. Numerous people at the various presidential libraries have also been helpful. I would especially like to thank George H. Curtis of the Harry S Truman Library, Linda Hansen of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Herbert L. Pankratz of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Leesa Tobin of the Gerald Ford Library, Dale C. Mayer of the Herbert Hoover Library, as well as Susan O’Brien of the New York Society Library. My agent, Ted Chichak, and my editor, Samuel S. Vaughan, have been warmly supportive and astutely involved with achieving the best possible book on this complex subject. Finally, I would like to thank my friend and colleague, Thomas Fleming, for his invaluable research help and literary consultation.
CONTENTS
1. The World’s Second Toughest Job
2. Democracy in Skirts
3. Woman of Mystery
4. Pioneer Crusaders
5. The Lost Companion
6. Partners in Private
7. The Perils of Partnership
8. The First Lady Who Wanted the Job
9. Partners in Love
10. The Most Candid Partner
11. Public Partner No. 1
12. The Most Protective Partner
13. The Almost Perfect First Lady
14. The First Lady Nobody Knew
15. The Generals’ Ladies
16. The Worst First Lady?
17. The (Probably) Worst First Lady
18. Danger: President at Work
19. Murder by Newsprint
20. Can Ambition Repay Such Sacrifices?
21. The Glamour Girls
22. Maternally Yours
23. Now Playing: Hillary and Bill
24. Is There Life After the White House?
25. Thoughts at My Mother’s Funeral
Chapter 1
—
THE WORLD’S
SECOND
TOUGHEST JOB
A FEW MONTHS AFTER BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON SETTLED INTO the White House, they invited me and my husband, Clifton Daniel, down from New York to have dinner and stay overnight with them. I said we were perfectly willing to stay in a hotel. We did not want to intrude on the rare hours of relaxation a President and First Lady have in their hectic lives. “Nonsense,” Hillary replied in her direct way. “We like to have company.”
It was one of my most pleasant nights in that historic house, where my mother and father spent eight tumultuous years and where I alternated between being full-time and part-time boarder. We slept in the Queens’ Bedroom, with its majestic canopied bed, rose-tinted walls; and graceful eighteenth-century couches and chairs. A procession of reigning queens have stayed there, as well as Prime Minister Churchill and other heads of state. Its present elegance is light-years away from the run-down White House the Trumans inherited in the spring of 1945. I remember crying myself to sleep on my first night in the place, it all looked so shabby and second rate. A cadre of creative First Ladies, starting with Jacqueline Kennedy, are responsible for this transformation.
Occasionally, when the pressure got to him, my father used to call the mansion “The Big White Jail.” I was amused to hear that Bill Clinton shares this salty sentiment. At one point during our evening of fine food and lively talk, he wryly suggested the place should be a line item in the budget as part of the federal penitentiary system.
Hillary smiled agreement at this presidential grousing, as Bess Truman had in her now distant days. This is the perfectly normal reaction of any two human beings who find themselves in what someone has called “eighteen acres under glass.” It does not imply any lack of affection for the President’s house. In fact, as we talked past midnight, I could see that Bill Clinton’s fascination with the history of the place equaled Harry Truman’s.
Living in the White House is a unique experience—a fantastic compound of excitement and tension and terror and pride and humility. Above all it is a historic experience. The spirit of the past is everywhere, reminding you of other men and women who have walked the corridors at midnight and morning, pondering—or regretting—large decisions.
But a President is also constantly reminded of his powers. I will never forget my awe, the first time I saw my mother and father descend the wide, red-carpeted grand staircase to lead their honored guests into the lofty State Dining Room. Dad always looked his best in white tie and tails. In an evening gown, Mother looked marvelously regal. The red-coated Marine Band blared “Hail to the Chief,” the stirring march from an old London musical which was selected to enhance the presidential presence by one of our most politically astute First Ladies, Sarah Polk.
You will note, however, that the march hails only the President. In the Constitution, he is designated the chief executive officer of the nation and commander in chief of the armed forces. In the West Wing of the White House, he presides over a staff of dozens of loyal followers in a web of offices surrounding his oval sanctum. About the First Lady, on the other hand, the Constitution is silent. No trumpets blare when she enters the State Dining Room or any other room, unless she is with the President. In my mother’s day, fifty years ago, the President’s wife could count her staff on the fingers of one hand. A few decades earlier, a First Lady had no staff to count. The male politicians who put together the federal government seem never to have given a thought to what a First Lady might do, thereby encouraging Congress to pretend, until recently, that she did not exist when they voted a budget for the White House.
These days, as Hillary Rodham Clinton and other modern presidential wives have amply demonstrated, First Ladies are doing a lot. But the job remains undefined, frequently misunderstood, and subject to political attacks far nastier in some ways than those any President has ever faced. It has complications as mind-boggling from a
psychological or political point of view as the conundrums faced by the double-domes in the State Department or the Pentagon.
For one thing, almost all the people in Washington, DC, are there because they want to be at the white-hot center of power. The ones with the most power, members of Congress and the President, have the added assurance that the American people have sent them there. That is particularly true of the President, the one politician who is elected by the vote of the entire nation. Few if any Presidents, including my father, did not want that unique job. Most of them have been like Bill Clinton; they have hungered and hankered for it most of their lives. Abraham Lincoln may have put it best when he said: “No man knows what that gnawing is until he has had it.”
On the other hand, a First Lady, as Lady Bird Johnson has noted in her gentle southern way, has been chosen by only one man—the President—and it is highly unlikely that he was thinking about her as First Lady when he proposed. No matter how different our First Ladies have been—and as individual women they have ranged from recluses to vibrant hostesses to political manipulators on a par with Machiavelli—they have all shared the unnerving experience of facing a job they did not choose. With few exceptions, they have also shared a determination to meet its multiple challenges.
Each of them has done the job differently—yet few of them have been openly critical of their predecessors (unlike Presidents, who tend to be ferociously judgmental of those who have preceded or followed them into the Oval Office). Instead, First Ladies have, to a startling degree considering the acrimonious political world they inhabit, reached out to one another. Many have even become friends.
By a somewhat eerie coincidence, I was in Austin, Texas, interviewing Lady Bird Johnson for this book on the night Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died. We were having drinks on the deck of Mrs. Johnson’s lovely home, overlooking the winding Colorado River, when one of her Secret Service men reported they had just received word that Mrs. Onassis would probably not live past midnight. Deeply moved, Lady Bird spoke in almost biblical cadences about how much she had come to love and admire Jackie for her bravery, her grace, her generosity of spirit. She talked of how magically Jackie had captured our hearts in those thousand days of soaring hope that distinguished John F. Kennedy’s administration. She discoursed even more eloquently on how Jackie’s courage had held the Kennedy family and the nation together during a time of almost unbearable tragedy.
A few days after the Trumans moved into the White House in 1945, my mother received one of the nicest letters of her life from Grace Coolidge. It was full of understanding and encouragement from someone who could really empathize with her situation. Grace’s husband, Calvin Coolidge, had been vice president when he was awakened at 2:30 A.M. on August 2, 1923, to be informed that his President, Warren Harding, was dead and Coolidge was now the Chief Executive and his wife the First Lady.
Mrs. Coolidge asked Mother “to accept from one who has passed through a similar experience the heartfelt expression of best wishes.” She hoped Mother and Dad would be given three essentials for survival in the White House, “strength, good courage and abounding health.” It meant a lot to Mother, to know there was another woman out there who had been through it all and was rooting for her—even if she was a Republican!
When Ronald Reagan was seriously wounded by a would-be assassin in 1981, Nancy Reagan received a deeply compassionate letter from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who knew, better than any living former First Lady, the terror and grief and anguish such an experience evokes. Later, Jackie followed up the letter with a phone call. Nancy never forgot this spontaneous sympathy and expressed her enduring gratitude for it when Jackie died of cancer in 1994.
Along with friendship, many First Ladies have found a common bond with some of their predecessors who, on the surface at least, seem to have had drastically different styles. Hillary Clinton amazed me when she said Bess Truman was one of the First Ladies she most admired. I could not imagine two more different women. My mother would have required two divisions of Marines to drag her before a congressional committee to testify on health care or anything else.
But when Hillary began talking about the depth and intensity of Bess Truman’s behind-the-scenes political partnership with my father, I understood immediately. That kind of partnership has been the bedrock of Hillary’s relationship with Bill Clinton. In Hillary’s case it has been a publicly declared fact. In Bess Truman’s case it was a closely held secret. But for Hillary, the partnership was the important thing.
I was reminded of an almost as startling discovery about another First Lady: years ago a mutual friend told me Jacqueline Kennedy often said my mother was the First Lady she most admired. Then, too, I had to stifle my impulse to blink in disbelief. Jackie Kennedy, the quintessence of New York and Paris chic, admiring Bess Truman, with her sensible suits and flowered hats? Jackie, the woman who gave serious art and high culture a major niche in American consciousness, admiring down-to-earth Bess Truman, whose favorite reading was detective stories?
“What she admired,” the friend said, “is the way your mother defended her privacy.”
I nodded, much as I was to do later with Hillary Rodham Clinton, and thought: of course. A gentle, enormously sensitive woman like Jackie would understandably want to escape much of the pitiless public gaze and the occasional public frenzies that are an inevitable part of the First Lady’s job.
There was another reason Jackie admired my mother, the friend said. “She brought a daughter to the White House at a very impressionable age and managed to get her through eight years without being spoiled.”
I am not sure my mother (or my husband) would completely agree with that compliment. But, again, I felt an instant sympathy as I recalled Jackie’s desire to raise Caroline and John in the White House without the distorting glare of publicity. She had learned that the American people tend to feel the First Family is public property, like the White House itself.
Hillary Clinton told me she did not discover this troublesome tendency until she and Bill enrolled their daughter, Chelsea, in the Sid-well Friends School. Suddenly they were under fire in a half dozen newspapers and on television for choosing a private rather than a public school.
The President and First Lady tried to explain that Sidwell was used to handling the children of VIPs and would not come to a dead stop when the Secret Service began issuing diktats about how things must be done to assure Chelsea’s safety. The Clintons did not want to disrupt the lives of several hundred public school kids merely to make a symbolic statement about their support for public education. It was a poor trade-off—not to mention the likelihood that it would turn Chelsea into an isolated, unhappy young woman.
The Clintons’ imbroglio reminded me of the virtual war that raged between the press and another First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, when she decided to let her daughter, Amy, come to state dinners—and bring a book to read to get through the boring adult conversation and speeches. As Mrs. Carter explained it to me, Amy had done this sort of thing when Jimmy was governor of Georgia without anyone making a fuss. The First Lady was hurt and not a little angry when the press constantly noted Amy’s presence and discussed it pro and con.
Like First Ladies before her, Rosalynn Carter was feeling her way. Like them she had to learn from harsh experience that reporters love to write about the lifestyles of First Families. Frances Cleveland, Grover Cleveland’s wife, conducted a running war with the journalists of her era over their coverage of her family life. White House children, from Jesse Grant to Quentin Roosevelt to Margaret Wilson to Margaret Truman, have provided grist for columnists and commentators.
Speaking of state dinners brings up the First Lady’s role as a hostess. Until they got to the White House, most Presidents’ wives considered themselves hard-pressed if more than a dozen family members turned up for Thanksgiving dinner. Suddenly they find themselves confronted with entertaining hundreds of VIP guests on a regular basis. All these sophisticated people expect not only to b
e fed well but to be charmed by discovering friends—or people with mutual interests—among their tablemates. The ninety-person White House staff is there, of course, to assist and advise the First Lady in selecting menus and seating plans. But the buck stops at her desk if something goes wrong.
A good example of how a culinary disaster can undo the best-laid plans was a dinner to which the Kennedys invited Clifton and me and my parents in 1962. It was a night of toasts and tributes to the Truman administration—a wonderfully thoughtful thing to do. The meal was planned as an elegant French feast—a demonstration of how Jackie had revamped the White House’s humdrum kitchen.
Feast it was until we got to the main course, which was grouse (perfectly named, as it turned out). What the kitchen did to these birds remains a mystery. My knife glanced off mine as if the creature were titanium. On my left, Bobby Kennedy was sawing away with the ferocity of a man who never let anyone or anything, from corrupt labor leaders like Jimmy Hoffa to arrogant bureaucrats like J. Edgar Hoover, intimidate him. I leaned over and whispered in his ear: “These White House knives never could cut butter.” Bobby, who seldom so much as smiled in public, burst out laughing.
The President, who had been sawing just as hard, started chuckling, too. Suddenly another guest’s grouse sailed off his plate onto the floor—and a mortified Jackie ordered the rest removed. Fortunately, we were all old White House hands, and my parents told a few horror stories from their early encounters with the awful Roosevelt kitchen that made the inedible fowl seem trivial.
Few First Ladies have approached Jackie’s sense of style when she wanted to be regal. Here she glitters at a dinner President Kennedy gave for my parents. My husband and I were among the guests. (Truman Library)
Jacqueline Kennedy’s love affair with France and European culture reminds me of another flash point in the First Lady’s nonexistent job description. Jackie looked like a movie star, and she occasionally acted like one, gamboling on Mediterranean yachts with the jet set, who happened to be her friends. Some people criticized Jackie for those exotic vacations. That raises the intriguing question of how much a First Lady can be herself—pursuing and enjoying what comes naturally to her—and remain this public person, who has suddenly become a symbol of American womanhood in all its myriad guises. It is a dilemma which every modern First Lady has to face.