First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  The fashion triumph of those triumphant days, however, was Mother’s ball gown. It was made of black panne velvet cut on slender lines, the skirt draped to one side. The circular collar was covered with layers of white Alençon lace and fell gracefully over her shoulder, forming a lovely oval neckline.

  Both these dresses signaled Mother’s new enthusiasm for her job—a mood which continued to build throughout 1949, the happiest of our White House years. That summer she undertook a diet that shed more than twenty middle-age pounds and returned to the White House more ready than ever to wear stylish clothes. One of my favorite pictures is of the two of us at the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera a year or so later. Mother is wearing a high-necked dark blue satin coat, embroidered with flowers, over a long, full gown. Her hair is stylishly curled. On her face is a happy smile. She looks several years younger than the frowning woman who stood beside Dad when he took the oath of office in 1945.

  Then the Korean War erupted in June of 1950, and Mother’s euphoria began to evaporate. Dad’s second term became an even more severe test of the Truman partnership. Dad had to rally the free world against this naked Communist aggression and simultaneously cope with the constant insubordination of his Far East commander, General Douglas MacArthur. In this confrontation, his First Lady unwaveringly supported his decision to fire the general, even though some people—including numerous members of Congress—acted as if the world were coming to an end.

  On the home front, anarchic Senator Joseph McCarthy tempted Republicans into smearing Democrats—including the President—as Communists. Living in the White House became a little like inhabiting a fortress under siege. Several aides crumpled under the pressure. The most heartbreaking loss was Charlie Ross, who died of a heart attack at his desk during one particularly horrendous crisis in late 1950. By the time the presidential election year of 1952 appeared on the horizon, President Harry S Truman was very tired—and so was his First Lady.

  Yet Dad seriously considered running for another term. Although Congress had passed a constitutional amendment limiting the presidency to two terms, they had exempted Harry Truman. This time the President’s partner gave him something stronger than advice. She told him she could not survive another four years in the White House pressure cooker and neither could he.

  Dad took it under advisement, but he still retained the freedom to decide otherwise, if the Democratic Party could not find a decent candidate to oppose the man who was beginning to emerge as the Republican nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dad’s first two choices, Chief Justice Fred Vinson and Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, had proved elusive. President Truman called a meeting of his White House staff to discuss the problem. They agreed, almost unanimously, that he should not run again. They were almost as tired as the Chief Executive.

  Still Dad put off the decision. Finally, one night in the spring of 1952, his appointments secretary, Matt Connelly, a genial Irishman who had become Dad’s closest confidant since Charlie Ross’s death, brought up the subject while they were working late, as usual. Matt had been designated by a group of prominent Democrats to tell the President he had to accept another nomination.

  Dad listened, visibly upset, and asked Matt if he thought this pressure was serious enough to make “the old man run again.” Matt dropped his role as messenger and gestured toward the portrait of Mother on Dad’s desk, next to that famous sign, THE BUCK STOPS HERE. “Would you do that to her?” he asked.

  “All right,” Dad said. “That settles it.”

  The Truman partnership had made its final White House decision. In later years, Dad was fond of saying that most people in Washington leave in only two ways: by getting kicked out or carried out. Thanks to his First Lady and his own common sense, he and Bess walked out, smiling.

  Chapter 7

  —

  THE PERILS OF

  PARTNERSHIP

  BESS TRUMAN WAS BY NO MEANS THE ONLY FIRST LADY TO OPERATE as her husband’s political partner. The tradition began with the second First Lady, Abigail Smith Adams. She and her husband, President John Adams, spent most of their single term in Philadelphia, the interim capital of the United States. Not until 1800 did Abigail and John move into the unfinished White House, where she had the dolorous privilege of watching her husband become the first incumbent President to lose his bid for reelection.

  Abigail has another, happier distinction. She is the only First Lady who became the mother of a President. Her oldest and favorite son, John Quincy Adams, succeeded James Monroe in 1825. Unfortunately, for reasons which seem inherent in the Adamses’ genes, John Quincy too was a one-term President.

  Like almost every other First Lady, Abigail wondered if she could do the job—though there was scarcely a woman in America who was more qualified. Abigail Adams had been a political wife for twenty years before John won the highest office in the new republic in 1796. She had unwaveringly supported her husband as he and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington led the American people into independence and revolutionary war.

  In 1776 Abigail, in a now famous letter, had urged John to include woman’s rights in the new American order. “Remember the ladies and be more generous to them than your ancestors! Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of the husbands. Remember that all men would be tyrants if they could,” she wrote. John declined to repeal “our masculine systems,” which he maintained were “little more than theory.” That last remark is, I suspect, a tribute to the power of Abigail’s personality.

  During John’s diplomatic assignments in Paris, London, and Amsterdam, Abigail had dealt deftly with royalty and the sometimes shocking mores of the Old World. She had been a superb vice president’s wife for two terms. But as First Lady, she feared she lacked the “patience, prudence, and discretion” of her predecessor, Martha Washington.

  Politics did not particularly interest Martha. She kept her few opinions to herself or shared them with one or two close relatives. Abigail lived and breathed the hugger-mugger of issues and arguments day and night. Her letters are full of astute comments on the crises of the day and even more incisive pen portraits of the major players.

  Listen to her description of Timothy Pickering, the Massachusetts-born secretary of state in John Adams’s cabinet. “There is a man in the cabinet whose manners are forbidding, whose temper is sour and whose resentments are implacable, who nevertheless would like to dictate every measure.” Take a look at a portrait of Pickering sometime; I guarantee his pickled puss will persuade you that Abigail was on target. Five months after she wrote this, the President fired Pickering—something Abigail thought John should have done the minute he became President.

  Just as Abigail felt intimidated by Martha Washington, John Adams felt overshadowed by George. He hesitated to remove any of Washington’s appointees until it was too late to stop them from getting the Philadelphia equivalent of Potomac fever. Pickering in particular regarded Adams as an idiot and regularly leaked vicious stories about his incompetence and instability.

  Abigail’s propensity for politics kept her in hot water in the overheated ideological atmosphere of the late 1790s, when the French Revolution and the emergence of Napoleon had the whole world boiling with extremism. The Antifeds, now formally organized as the Democratic-Republicans, used her as a handy weapon to bludgeon the President. Swiss-born Congressman Albert Gallatin, a supporter of John Adams’s rival, Thomas Jefferson, claimed to be outraged when he heard “Her Majesty” going down the list of congressmen and naming those who were “our people.” Gallatin thought this was “not right.” He wanted women to stay on the sidelines of life, demure and submissive.

  Abigail returned the favor by calling Gallatin “sly, artfull… insidious,” and little more than a double agent for French attempts to manipulate the United States into backing France in its war with England. However, she reserved her most ferocious adjectives for a member of her own Federalist Party, Alexander Hamilton, not only because he was a notorious ladies’ man
but because he attempted to dump John Adams as the party’s presidential candidate in 1800. Abigail insisted she could see “the very devil” in Hamilton’s eyes.

  Abigail Adams was the first First Lady to leak stories to the press. It was part of an attempt to defend her husband’s foreign policy, which aimed at neutrality in the war between the era’s superpowers, England and France. Abigail had a “channel” in Europe, her son John Quincy, who was the American minister to Berlin. He sent her inside information on Europe’s seething politics, which she forwarded to friendly newspaper editors, carefully underlining the paragraphs she wanted to see in print.

  As a sometime actress, I was fascinated to discover how Abigail and her friends once used the theater to score a propaganda triumph for her husband. Traveling “perfectly in cogg” (incognito), she told her sister, the First Lady slipped into Philadelphia’s New Theater in the spring of 1798 and joined some congressional friends and their wives to hear a political song that had been inserted between the acts of a double bill. Titled “Hail Columbia,” the song had new lyrics to the tune of “The President’s March,” the music that had regularly greeted George Washington. The added lines reaffirmed America’s political independence.

  Firm, united let us be

  Rallying round our liberty

  As a band of brothers joined

  Peace and safety we shall find.

  The audience loved it. Recent news of French arrogance and aggression had dampened enthusiasm for Paris’s revolutionary notions. The idea of taking neither side in this ugly war suddenly seemed brilliantly original. Abigail rejoiced as the audience almost clapped their hands off in the final chorus and leaped to their feet to shout cheers for President John Adams.

  Criticism of Abigail as First Lady was mostly whispered in drawing rooms by politicians like Albert Gallatin. Far more unnerving was the public beating her husband took in the frenetic newspapers of the day. In one letter to her sister, the First Lady complained that reporters had recently called the President “Old querulous bald, blind crippled toothless Adams.” Goaded by such abuse, Abigail became a fierce advocate of censorship. She furiously supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which the Federalist Congress passed in 1798, giving the courts the right to jail anyone who “shall write, print, utter or publish… scandalous or malicious writings against the government of the United States, either house of Congress… or the President.”

  Abigail applauded when Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont got four months behind bars for denouncing President Adams’s “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.” She took even more pleasure in seeing James Thomson Callender, a newspaperman who had written a slanderous book about President Adams, sentenced to six months in another jail.

  Abigail’s enthusiasm for the Alien and Sedition Acts was the first—but not, alas, the last—example of bad advice from a First Lady political partner. The backlash against these tyrannical laws helped sweep John Adams out of the presidency in 1800. Even Abigail’s son John Quincy, the future President, mournfully admitted in later years that the acts “operated like oil upon the flames.” The attempt to muzzle the press was savagely attacked by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other opposition leaders. The newspapers added tyrant to the list of insulting adjectives they regularly applied to old John Yankee, as Adams liked to call himself.

  The Adams experience underscores a seldom recognized danger when First Ladies become political partners. In many ways John and Abigail Adams were too much alike; they rarely if ever disagreed on the issues of the day. This can be a wonderful reinforcement—but if the partners make a blunder as serious as the Alien and Sedition Acts and then sit around telling each other they are right and the rest of the world is wrong, the mistake can swiftly become a political disaster that engulfs the presidency.

  Abigail Adams was our first intensely political First Lady. Doesn’t she look it? Note those shrewd eyes. This portrait by Gilbert Stuart was begun while she was in the White House. (AP/Wide World Photos)

  Still another danger of intense political partnerships was glimpsed in Abigail Adams’s experience in 1798. After nearly two years as First Lady, the savage name-calling and reckless accusations against her husband had taken a fearful toll on Abigail’s nerves. That summer, as she journeyed to the Adamses’ farm in Massachusetts, she began hearing voices, warning her that “this Life’s a dream, an empty show.” She felt “ligaments” in her body giving way one by one. At home Abigail took to her bed and plunged into a four-month-long mental and physical collapse. She was racked by diarrhea and disabled by insomnia, which left her sleepless five nights out of six.

  In the fall, the President returned to Philadelphia without her, and Abigail tormented herself for deserting her “post.” John filled the mails with letters urging her to banish such gloomy thoughts and forget politics for a while. But Abigail stubbornly upheld her side of the partnership, making sure the President’s secretary sent her all the Philadelphia papers plus a stream of confidential reports on the administration’s ongoing crises.

  There were some nonpolitical factors in Abigail Adams’s collapse, which brings up another side of the First Lady’s job. Most presidential partners have been mothers as well as wives. Abigail worked at her maternal role as intensely as she tried to be a super First Lady. A stream of letters poured out to her four adult children, full of advice, concern, and more advice.

  A heritage of mental instability haunted the Adams family. Abigail’s brother had died of alcoholism, and her husband was as subject to bouts of depression as she was. Their second son, Charles, after a brilliant start as a lawyer in New York, developed a fondness for alcohol which rapidly destroyed his marriage and his career.

  Abigail’s youngest son, Thomas, was another headache, though a less serious one. Twenty-four when his father became President, he set up as a lawyer in Philadelphia and in his first case defended the owners of a local brothel. Thomas scorned the hairstyles of the establishment, which called for wigs or powdered hair. Any parent who has lived through the hair wars of the nineteen sixties and seventies can only groan, “The more things change the more they remain the same.”

  As seriously troubling as Charles was Abigail’s son-in-law, William Smith, who had married her beloved only daughter and namesake. A courageous soldier in the Revolution, Smith was a disaster as a peacetime husband, spending himself into bankruptcy with high living and feckless speculations. When the President, with partner Abigail’s full support, proposed to make Smith adjutant general of the American army, they had the humiliation of seeing him rejected by the Senate, in spite of being endorsed by none other than George Washington. This occurred in the summer of 1798 and undoubtedly contributed to Abigail’s prostration.

  In the spring of 1799, a recovered Abigail returned to First Ladying. She heartily backed her husband’s decision to defy Secretary of State Pickering and the rest of the inherited cabinet and send to France an envoy who defused the undeclared war Americans were already fighting at sea against French raiders. She also supported one of the President’s most controversial decisions, pardoning John Fries, an eccentric Pennsylvanian who had been sentenced to death for leading a ragtag revolt against federal taxes that the government crushed in about ten minutes.

  This humane act outraged conservative Federalists such as Pickering and Alexander Hamilton, and they resolved to jettison Mr. and Mrs. President Adams. Their machinations only succeeded in splitting the Federalist Party and handing the presidential election of 1800 to the father of all Democrats, Thomas Jefferson.

  Thanks to Abigail’s busy pen—she left behind over two thousand letters—we have interesting descriptions of her first days in the White House, which everyone called the President’s Palace. Abigail arrived in the middle of November 1800, with the presidential election roaring to a climax. The White House was still unfinished; wet plaster oozed from the walls; the entire place was pervaded by a chill which twelve fireplaces could not banish. Gazing at the sea of mud surroundin
g the mansion, she described Washington as “a city only in name.” But Abigail, ever the politician, was careful to confide her opinions only to family members. “When asked how I like it,” she advised her daughter, “say that I wrote you the situation is beautiful.”

  On December 4, the first election returns arrived, putting Jefferson narrowly ahead of Adams. Abigail was not surprised; unlike her husband, who had persisted in hoping against hope, she had been pessimistic about his chances. On the same day, a letter from New York told Abigail news she had dreaded far more than a lost election: her son Charles had died of alcoholism. She had visited him en route to Washington and realized there was little or no hope for his recovery. Eight days later, in the middle of a blizzard, a post rider from South Carolina arrived with the news that the Palmetto State had gone for Jefferson, making him the certified winner.

  Abigail accepted political defeat far more graciously than her husband. John Adams met his former friend Thomas Jefferson at the door of the White House with a roar: “You have put me out! You have put me out!” Four years as a presidential partner had left Abigail feeling old at fifty-six. No doubt the death of her son Charles contributed to this feeling. She claimed to have only one regret about relinquishing political power: the loss of “one of the principle pleasures of my life”—to “do good according to my ability.”

  That was a touching tribute to the reality and nobility of a political partnership that had helped to create the United States of America. It was also, I suspect, an attempt to solace the pain of defeat. But this first presidential partner deserves credit for helping her husband set an example of a peaceful transfer of power between political parties who thoroughly detested each other. She also set another example which succeeding generations have followed. For the rest of her long life, Abigail referred to John Adams in letters and conversation as “the President.”