First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  Among the many former critics Eleanor beguiled in her post-White House years was the formidable Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed, the senator said: “I want to take back everything I ever said about her, and believe me it’s been plenty. She’s a grand person and a great American citizen.” Few people know that part of the credit for this unexpected display of political harmony belonged to Harry S Truman, who had spent hours and hours converting Senator Vandenberg from the isolationism that typified the Republican Party of that era.

  Eleanor Roosevelt examines the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. She was largely responsible for this historic document. My father appointed her U.S. delegate to the world body in 1946. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

  A few First Ladies have remained in Washington, or returned to it, and enjoyed the reflected glow of their previous fame, while serenely ignoring politics. The one who managed this difficult trick best was Dolley Madison. For nearly twenty years, she lived on her husband’s Virginia plantation, Montpelier, hovering tenderly over her “great little Madison” as he slipped into a long, slow decline. When he died in 1836, Dolley headed back to the capital, where she reigned as a sort of queen mother for the next thirteen years. Presidents, congressmen, and ambassadors flocked to parties at her house on Lafayette Square. She was a virtual fixture at receptions in the White House as well. First Ladies sought her advice on matters of protocol and social diplomacy. Senator Daniel Webster declared she was “the only permanent power in Washington.”

  When anything important happened in the capital, Dolley was there, ready to lend the event her inimitable personal touch. In 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, gave a demonstration of his marvel. Dolley was on hand to receive the portentous message that crackled from Baltimore: “What hath God wrought” Morse asked Dolley what message she wanted to transmit in reply. She told him to send “my love to Mrs. Wethered,” an old friend who was at the Baltimore end of the line.

  Congress accorded Dolley a unique testimony of their near adoration of her. A North Carolina legislator moved that whenever she visited the Capitol, she should be seated on the House floor, instead of being forced to resort to the visitors’ gallery. The resolution passed unanimously, and two congressmen were appointed Dolley’s official escorts, to guide her to her seat whenever she chose to appear.

  Edith Wilson spent her first three post-White House years caring for her crippled husband in a handsome red-brick Georgian revival house on Northwest S Street. (It is open to the public now and worth a visit.) After Wilson died in 1924, Edith devoted the rest of her long life to perpetuating his memory.

  From the start, she nursed grudges and would brook no criticism of Wilson. Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican senator who had led the fight against the League of Nations, was told he would be persona non grata at the funeral. Thirty-two years later, the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock spoke at ceremonies celebrating the centennial of Wilson’s birth. He was generally praiseful—but he opined that Wilson should have done more to make his diplomacy a bipartisan effort by inviting a few prominent Republicans such as William Howard Taft to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. A few days later, Krock met Edith at another Washington affair and remarked on what a nice occasion the centennial ceremony had been. “Yes,” Edith said. “It’s too bad you could not have been with us.”

  Of Wilson’s successors, the President who stirred Edith’s greatest enthusiasm was John E Kennedy, not because she agreed with his policies but she liked his book Profiles in Courage. Perhaps she felt the title implicitly praised Woodrow Wilson, although he is mentioned only in passing in the text. I remain fond of this feisty Democratic First Lady for an anecdote connected to her support for JFK. When a friend with a Nixon-Lodge bumper sticker on his car called on her in 1960, Edith told him never to park in her driveway again.

  Readers may be surprised to learn Bess Truman almost settled in Washington, D.C. Most people assume it was Bess, the supposed non-politician, who could not get out of the capital fast enough. Actually, Mother was a non-politician the way the retired Joe DiMaggio is a non-baseball player. Politics fascinated her, and at first she could not bear the thought of leaving Washington for small-town life in Independence, Mo. For a while, Dad was disposed to humor her, and they actually made a few discreet inquiries about buying a house somewhere in the District.

  But Dad, the supposed political habitué of the partnership, was the one who decided that an ex-President simply could not hang out in Washington, D.C. It would make the incumbent uneasy and might lead to unpleasant clashes. This was especially probable in the atmosphere of livid dislike and sneering superiority with which the outgoing Truman Democrats and the incoming Eisenhower Republicans regarded each other in 1952. For the sake of his blood pressure, as well as the dignity of the presidency, Dad decided Independence was the best—even the only—option.

  Mother took the decision with good grace. But she had no intention of spending the rest of her days in Missouri. She had always had a yen to travel, and what better time to do it than in the afterglow of the White House? For the next ten years, the Trumans came pretty close to being globe-trotters, with trips to Hawaii and Europe (twice) and numerous hegiras to New York and, yes, Washington, D.C. They made no attempt to imitate General Grant and Julia, but they enjoyed spectacular receptions at several special habitats, such as Winston Churchill’s spacious home, Chartwell.

  The Trumans enjoyed all these expeditions immensely, even though the trips to Washington invariably ignited Dad’s political fires and Mother occasionally had to do some emphatic stamping to put them out again. She finally convinced him that ex-Presidents only think they have power. If they actually try to throw their weight around, the results can be humiliating.

  After Dad’s death in 1972, Mother overruled my cogent arguments in favor of a move to New York and the proximity of me and her four grandchildren and elected to stay in Independence. She demonstrated everything I have claimed about her passion for politics by staying in close touch with the electoral scene on both the national and state levels. When Missouri’s Senator Thomas Eagleton was massacred by the press for admitting he had a history of depression and had to step aside as George McGovern’s vice presidential running mate in 1972, Mother wrote him one of her no-nonsense letters, telling him Bess Truman still admired him. When he ran for reelection in 1974, she endorsed him wholeheartedly, and the senator won, as they used to say in the Kansas City clubhouses, in a walk.

  In 1976, operating from a hospital bed while being treated for arthritis, Mother demonstrated her local clout. She endorsed State Senator Ike Skelton in his race for Congress from Jackson County (which includes Independence). In the primary, Skelton had run poorly in Jackson County. With the support of the old pro from Independence, he breezed to an easy victory against a discomfited, unendorsed Republican.

  Mother was amazed and not a little pleased by the upsurge in Dad’s popularity during the post-Watergate years. Gerald Ford became the first of a long line of Republican Presidents who tried to claim similarities to Harry Truman. When the Truman Library dedicated a statue to Dad in 1976, President Ford was delighted to be the principal speaker. He and Betty Ford had a most enjoyable visit with Mother. She thought Betty was doing a wonderful job as First Lady—even though she said some things that left Mother gasping. “I like Mrs. Ford’s honesty?” she told me, reaffirming her faith in that basic Truman trait.

  It was Betty’s honesty that rescued her troubled post-White House years. They began with a terrific struggle against the depression that had descended on her when Gerald Ford lost his reelection battle against Jimmy Carter in 1976. Try as she might to see the future in a positive light, Betty could not shake off her gloom. Her problem was complicated—perhaps even caused—by the medication she took to dull the pain of osteoarthritis. A further complication was a tendency to use tranquilizers and alcohol to control her anxiety an
d enliven her moods.

  By the end of her first year in Palm Springs, which the Fords had chosen for their retirement home, Betty was in a daze most of the time. Her daughter, Susan, grew deeply alarmed and persuaded her father to convene a family conference at which everyone tried to awaken Betty to her plight and persuade her to get help. She resisted mightily at first, furiously condemning them for invading her privacy. Perhaps that was an inevitable reaction of someone whose privacy had been invaded so often in the White House. Eventually, Betty calmed down and realized her husband and children were motivated by love. She soon sought help at the Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Service of the Long Beach Naval Hospital.

  Betty found it easy to admit that she had become addicted to medication but balked at confessing a dependence on alcohol. On this point, of course, she was imitating millions of other Americans who have the same problem. Denial is the alcoholic’s first line of defense. Once more, Betty’s innate honesty triumphed over her attempt at self-deception. She not only admitted she was an alcoholic, she accepted her doctor’s advice and went public with the statement, to help others face the problem. Average folks do this at AA meetings. Ex-First Ladies do it on national television—one more testimony to the awesome power of their unelected office, even after they leave the White House.

  With her life under control once more, Betty found herself almost as busy as she had been in the White House, coping with thousands of letters from people seeking advice or just eager to share their private tales of alcoholic woe. She hurled herself into campaigns to raise money for the National Arthritis Foundation and founded the Betty Ford Center for Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation at Rancho Mirage, California. The center rapidly became a national resource for people with substance abuse problems.

  When I visited Betty Ford at her beautiful summer home in Colorado, she was still having a wonderful time being herself. She bubbled with opinions about the world around her, almost all of them positive. She was still deeply involved in fund-raising and other matters at the Betty Ford Center and repeatedly expressed her continuing concern for Americans struggling with addiction problems. She looks back on her twenty-eight months as First Lady without regret now, satisfied that she—and Jerry—have no reason to apologize for anything. They both take justifiable pride in having helped the nation recover from Watergate, our worse political crisis since the Civil War.

  Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign to beautify America did not end with her departure from the White House. After LBJ’s death in 1973, she launched a program to plant wildflowers along hundreds of miles of Texas highways. She was also the prime mover in creating a beautiful park along the banks of Austin’s share of the Colorado River.

  On her seventieth birthday in 1982, Lady Bird founded the National Wildflower Research Center outside Austin. Here a staff of horticulturists study how to preserve and restore our native wildflowers, almost a quarter of which are in danger of extinction. Thousands of tourists and schoolchildren come to the center each year to tour the sixty blooming acres, which feature a reconstructed prairie with nineteen species of native grasses and more than seventy-five species of wildflowers that greeted the Texas pioneers.

  When I visited her in Austin, Lady Bird, at eighty-two, was continuing to maintain a schedule that would intimidate most forty-year-olds. She still goes anywhere and everywhere to preach the gospel of beautification. She sits on boards and committees that promote this unimpeachable cause. On a visit to New York, she raced through a packed day with her staff panting in her wake. At 5:00 P.M. she confessed she was feeling a little tired. “Oh, to be seventy again!” she sighed.

  Some First Ladies have preferred to emphasize the word private when they retired from public life. They not only avoided politics, they courted near invisibility. Frances Cleveland was one of these. She moved to Princeton, New Jersey, with Grover Cleveland and devoted herself to raising their family, which eventually numbered five children. When Cleveland died in 1908, Frances was only forty-four. In 1913 she married Thomas Preston, a Wells College archaeologist who soon joined the Princeton faculty.

  When I met her in 1946, she was a gracious, self-assured woman of eighty-two. We were all attending a fete commemorating the founding of Princeton University. My mother, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Edith Wilson completed the plethora of First Ladies present. Among the other luminaries was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike joined me and Mrs. Preston as we were discussing the renovation that the White House was undergoing at the time. Before I could introduce him, Ike turned to Mrs. Preston and asked: “Where did you live in Washington?”

  “The same place Margaret is living now,” she replied sweetly.

  Only then did I manage to inform Ike that he was talking to Mrs. Grover Cleveland. His response was “It’s time for lunch, Margaret.” When a general is embarrassed, no one is more expert at executing a rapid retreat. I suspect that later in the day, some hapless aide got chewed out for not briefing his boss on Mrs. Preston’s identity.

  That sunniest of First Ladies, Grace Coolidge, also remained persistently nonpolitical—and virtually invisible—after her husband’s death in 1933. Returning from a trip to Europe in 1936, when every Republican in America was girding for a titanic effort to defeat FDR’s supposedly un-American New Deal, she was asked for a political comment. Grace coolly replied: “We are all interested in politics—we should be—but I am not actively interested.”

  Grace stayed far away from Washington, DC, and generally eschewed the slightest attempt to get any mileage out of her previous fame. On the contrary, she did her utmost to disguise her identity whenever she traveled. One of her favorite stories concerned an incognito trip she took to Europe with a friend. Somehow the staff at one Swiss hotel learned she was the widow of an American President. While Grace was seeing to their luggage, the desk clerk asked her friend: “Would you sign the register for yourself and Mrs. Lincoln?”

  Jacqueline Kennedy also largely eschewed politics—but she never courted invisibility. It would have been a waste of time. Thanks to TV and modern America’s craze for celebrities, she remained one of the most famous, instantly recognizable women in the world. Jackie’s post-White House years were divided into three oddly contradictory parts. For the first five years, she was a kind of secular saint, a status in which she willingly participated, building up the John F. Kennedy legend.

  Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 brought this phase of Jackie’s life to a horrendous stop. Lady Bird Johnson told me that when she attended Bobby’s funeral service in New York, she offered Jackie her hand and Mrs. Kennedy looked right through her, as if Lady Bird were not there. Mrs. Johnson, in her usual generous, understanding way, attributed this lapse to shock and grief. But something much more profound was happening in Jackie’s soul. “I hate this country,” she told a friend not long after the funeral. “I want to get out.”

  The result was a right-angle turn, from secular saint to fallen idol. Readers may remember that in the summer of 1963, Jackie had spent a controversial vacation aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht in the Mediterranean, while JFK fretted and fumed in the White House. She had continued to see this unsavory but utterly charming Greek shipping magnate, and even before Bobby’s death had toyed with marrying him. Now, the only Kennedy who might have stopped her was gone. Jackie accepted Onassis’s offer, after he reinforced it with a ruby “the size of an egg”—and a prenuptial contract that deposited five million dollars in her bank account.

  The dismay was global. Swedish newspapers cried: HOW COULD YOU? Bewildered Americans said they felt almost as bad as they had on November 22, 1963. The Roman Catholic Church tut-tutted that Jackie would be living in sin, because Onassis was a divorced man. But Jackie knew exactly what she wanted: money. Her presidential widow’s pension of $50,000 and the $200,000 she received from a Kennedy trust fund were simply not enough to maintain her in the style she preferred—and perhaps felt she deserved. Occasionally she was defiant. She said she liked making people—especially po
liticians—squirm when they heard the name Onassis.

  As Mrs. Onassis, Jackie spent Greek drachmas, French francs, and American dollars on a scale that staggered even a tycoon who maintained a staff of seventy on his private island of Skorpios. This led to violent quarrels and a growing coolness, which was exacerbated by the death of Onassis’s son in a plane crash. Onassis began talking about a divorce so he could marry a younger woman and sire another male heir.

  As one friend put it in a masterpiece of understatement, Onassis was “not kind” to Jackie in these later years. Another friend tells of watching him excoriate her for her sloppy clothes and unkempt hair when they went to lunch at the villa of one of his billionaire friends. Before he could subject her to the humiliation of a divorce, the golden Greek fell ill and died in a Paris hospital. His only heir, his daughter Christina, settled with Jackie for twenty-six million dollars.

  Coming back to the United States, Jackie made another right-angle turn, into the sedate, respectable world of the very rich. Essentially, this was the milieu into which she had been born—but the Bouviers, their fortune shredded by the 1929 Wall Street crash, had found it anything but idyllic. Now Jackie triumphantly returned to it, her own woman, and concentrated on what mattered most to her—raising her children to be stable, intelligent adults.

  This was the link that gradually enabled Jackie to regain her most admired status with American women. She lived on a scale beyond their dreams, with a fourteen-room Fifth Avenue apartment, a horse farm in New Jersey, and a 464-acre estate on Martha’s Vineyard. But on this crucial family value of putting one’s children first their lives and hers intersected.

  In this most private phase of her public life, Jackie worked three to four days a week at a prominent New York publishing house, editing about a dozen books a year. The writers with whom she dealt testify unanimously to her intelligence, her wit, her remarkable breadth of knowledge about art and fashion and a host of other subjects that interested her. One fellow editor who knew her well has described these last fifteen years as the “most satisfying” part of Jackie’s life: “It seems her happiness in that time quadrupled.”