First Ladies
Page 37
For a companion, Jackie chose an affable, worldly diamond merchant, Maurice Tempelsman. She presided serenely over her children’s progression into adulthood. She loaned her name to various good causes, such as the preservation of Grand Central Terminal from the wrecker’s ball, and to numerous fund-raisers and festivals for the arts. When she died of cancer in the spring of 1994, the outpouring of grief demonstrated how totally she had recaptured the world’s admiration.
That other nonpolitical First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower, proclaimed herself a lost soul when Ike died in March 1969. Over the next ten years, however, Mamie showed more than a few signs of becoming a woman in her own right, outspoken and not in the least afraid of the limelight. She had no hesitation about comparing her home and mother lifestyle to the home and workplace of the feminists, and finding hers a better choice. She addressed the graduating class of Gettysburg College and paid several visits to the White House. On one of the last of these returns to Pennsylvania Avenue, she got on beautifully with Rosalynn Carter, the first of the public partner First Ladies. “I stayed busy all the time and loved being in the White House,” she told Rosalynn. “But I was never expected to do all the things you have to do.”
Some people see a sort of rueful confession in these words. I think they miss the basic satisfaction Mamie Eisenhower felt with her life. It seems to me she was telling Rosalynn, in a nice way, that if the First Partner wanted to work her head off and share the heart-palpitating heat generated by the Oval Office, that was perfectly fine—but you wouldn’t catch Mamie Eisenhower doing it! She was too polite, of course, to point out which of them stayed way up on the list of most admired women during their White House years.
In spite of all the brickbats thrown at her and her husband by the press and biographers, Nancy Reagan emanated a quiet, even a triumphant, satisfaction when we met at the Hotel Carlyle in New York to discuss her White House years. In presidential terms, she and Ronnie “did it all.” They won reelection, and Nancy left the White House far more admired than she had been when she entered it. We talked several months before doctors diagnosed Ronald Reagan as suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. But I have no doubt that Nancy will face this challenge with courage and devotion. It will be one more task in the major mission of her life: the protection of Ronald Reagan.
When we met, the only negative in Nancy’s world was her continuing fear of an attempt on her husband’s life. If anyone has any doubts about ex-First Families needing Secret Service protection, they will be banished by a story Nancy told me. A year or so after the Reagans returned to California, Nancy happened to glance out a window of their Bel Air home and saw a stranger wearing a T-shirt and overalls walking down a glass-walled corridor that connects the two wings of the house.
Who in the world is that? Nancy wondered. As far as she knew, there was no work being done on any part of the house. Before she could pick up the phone and ask her husband, who was in the exercise room, two Secret Service agents charged into the corridor. One of them jammed his gun under the intruder’s chin. The man was a former mental patient who had scaled a wall and gotten into the house. He had no weapon. He planned to strangle Ronald Reagan.
For Barbara Bush, the most recent departee from the White House, life is still full of multiple satisfactions. When I talked with her at her summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, she was entertaining seven grandchildren. She was writing her memoirs and was still deeply involved in supporting literacy programs and other causes in which volunteers play a major role.
Mrs. Bush also spoke with glowing pride about her sons Jeb and George, who were running for governorships in Florida and Texas. “Whether they win or lose,” she said, “the mere fact that they have chosen to go into politics astounded me. It made me think maybe they didn’t resent all those hours George and I spent away from home pursuing his career.”
As for George losing the election to Bill Clinton, Mrs. Bush put it this way: “I didn’t like it. But having said that, I think I’ve put it behind me. It’s not my style to brood over the past—especially when the future is full of good things.” Among the best of those things was the discovery when they returned to live in Houston that she could pick up with old friends after twenty years “without missing a beat.” She says she and George have “yet to say no” to any board or committee in Houston that has asked them for help. It is part of their continuing commitment to the “thousand points of light,” George’s call for a massive outpouring of volunteers to help improve American life. “I still feel that is one of the most important things he said while we were in the White House,” Mrs. Bush told me.
Her biggest surprise about her post-White House years was the discovery that “it doesn’t stop.” By “it” she meant being a public person. Her mail still runs to forty letters a day. Only a week before we talked, she had gone out for a sail with a grandson and stopped at a nearby town to pick up some groceries. People swarmed from all directions the moment she set foot on the dock. “We had to run a gauntlet from the boat to the store and back,” she said.
With a few exceptions, such as Mary Lincoln and Pat Nixon, First Ladies have seldom evinced any major regrets when they look back on their sometimes agonizing tours in the White House. “I loved every minute of it,” Barbara Bush told me. Rosalynn Carter said almost exactly the same thing. Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan, ditto.
Even Bess Truman, who sometimes claimed to hate every minute of it, confessed to a secret attachment to those tumultuous years. I once asked her if she missed anything about the White House. She sighed and said: “All that help.”
Chapter 25
—
THOUGHTS AT
MY MOTHER’S
FUNERAL
ON A SUNNY OCTOBER DAY IN 1982, BESS TRUMAN WAS BURIED FROM Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence. It was the same small, brick house of worship in which she had married Captain Harry Truman, just back from the Western Front, in 1919. Determined to keep the service as quiet and private as possible—the way I knew Mother wanted it—I limited the guest list to 150. Only a few personal friends went back to her Washington days. There were far more people from Independence.
But I also knew that history could not be excluded from the ceremony. In spite of her fierce clutch on privacy, Mother was still a former First Lady, and Nancy Reagan, wife of the incumbent President, was on the invitation list, along with Betty Ford, the former First Lady she liked best. In a gesture that surprised me, Rosalynn Carter also flew to Independence to express her own and her husband’s sympathy. Mother had declined to endorse Jimmy Carter in his run for reelection in 1980, although he and Rosalynn had kicked off their campaign in Independence in yet another presidential attempt to borrow some Truman magic.
The three First Ladies sat in the front pew, and one of the news photographers hovering around us begged me for permission to take a picture. I had banned all photography inside the church. After some urging from my newsman husband, who could not tolerate my inclination to ignore a historic moment, I relented and the picture was taken.
Now I am glad Clifton talked me into that picture. It has become a sort of touchstone to which I have returned more than once while writing this book. The seed for this book was planted at that brief, quiet funeral service, attended by those three very different First Ladies. They personified the amazing variety of talents and personalities who had held this unique unelected office. Then and there I decided I wanted to tell their story.
Here is the picture that partly inspired this book. Nancy Reagan, Betty Ford, and Rosalynn Carter sit in a front pew at my mother’s funeral service. (Bettmann Archive)
Mother’s life of course evoked other thoughts. At ninety-seven, she had become the oldest First Lady in American history. I remembered teasing her when Mrs. Wilson died at eighty-nine. I wondered if there was something in the air of the Big White Jail that contributed to longevity, little knowing I was talking to the coming champion. I thought of the staggering sweep of history
that Mother’s life encompassed. Born when Chester Arthur was in the White House, she had seen the nation through five wars and eighteen presidents.
Sitting there, listening to the hymns, I began to perceive in Mother’s life what has since become apparent as I studied the lives of other First Ladies—their story transcends the politics of the moment and deals with fundamental things, above all faith and love. For Bess Truman—and for so many other of these presidential wives—faith encompassed not only belief in a caring God, even when life stirred bitter doubts, but the faith to endure, to go on caring about the people in their lives.
It was the strength, the duration of Bess Truman’s caring that inspired affection in so many people. She shared that strength with her troubled mother, who never recovered from her husband’s suicide, her often troubled brothers, her occasionally troublesome daughter—and above all her husband, especially during those eight years in the White House when he carried the future of the free world on his shoulders.
For Mother, faith also included a basic confidence in the huge, complex, ever-evolving United States of America. Disappointments and difficulties, public or private, never daunted her bedrock mid-western sense of America’s immense potential, its endless capacity for change and renewal. Spiritually, psychologically, she remained close to those pioneer ancestors who had crossed the wide Missouri and gazed at the vast prairie’s seemingly infinite distance, its promise of abundance.
Each of the three First Ladies in the front pew had attempted in her own way to forge a similar faith and offer a similar caring strength to her presidential husband. At the same time they sought within the context of their individual lives a way to find the White House role that best suited them as women. They recognized the symbolic power of the office of First Lady, and they struggled to cope with its multiple challenges—each choosing from a host of alternatives the ones that, in those wonderful words of Lady Bird Johnson, made her heart sing.
That last word may strike some people as a bit too extravagant for Bess Truman. For her, I would substitute “laugh.” Mother had a wonderful eye for the absurdities, the follies of politics and politicians in Washington. In public, she usually looked solemn. But in private, she could unleash one-liners and sarcastic asides that reduced us to helpless laughter, with hers the heartiest of all. It was a priceless asset for any President to have in his White House.
All her gifts—of laughter, of native shrewdness, of caring, of faith in America—Bess Truman offered freely to her presidential husband. The other First Ladies did the same thing. Betty Ford’s courageous candor, Nancy Reagan’s protective devotion, Rosalynn Carter’s fiercely energetic public partnership came with the same no-strings arrangement. That is where the faith that created these gifts crosses into love.
Love is the word which makes First Ladies ultimately important in the national scheme of things. Love has never been much of an ingredient in the politics of men. The closest they come to it is loyalty, which is an admirable virtue. But love goes beyond the boundaries of friendship and party; it evokes realities that every American can share in the framework of his or her individual life.
Unquestionably, there is something to the idea that the First Lady speaks to the nation’s heart. A President has to do that too, but he represents other things—power, pride, policy—that can easily interfere with the unqualified caring the heart evokes. Simply by being there, creating, as Martha Washington did, the tone, the emotional aura of a President’s administration, the First Lady reminds us that American politics has been different from the start. It has always recognized the need to win hearts as well as minds.
Whether First Ladies attempt to define this caring dimension or simply choose to personify it with a minimum of words, as Bess Truman and Jacqueline Kennedy and Pat Nixon did, in their very different ways, a loving woman is the ultimate role the First Lady plays before the American people. Thanks to the power of mass communication, she can now express many meanings of her love, she can reach out to a broad spectrum of causes and people. But she must remember—first, last, and always—she is the wife of a President who needs her strength and devotion as he struggles to lead America into an always unknown future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARGARET TRUMAN is the author of bestselling biographies of her father, Harry S Truman, and her mother, Bess W. Truman. She also wrote the highly praised Women of Courage. Simultaneously, she has become one of America’s favorite mystery writers, with a series of bestsellers set in Washington, D.C.
A Fawcett Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Truman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Fawcett and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96502
eISBN: 978-0-307-42054-1
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