by Ben Shapiro
John Tyler never ran for reelection; if he had, he certainly would have faced questions about his marriage to Julia Gardiner, a statuesque woman thirty years his junior, just months after the death of his first wife.13 Rumors circulated about Zachary Taylor’s wife, Margaret—opponents falsely said that she smoked a corncob pipe. In fact, Margaret was simply reclusive and off-putting.14 Lifelong bachelor James Buchanan’s niece served as first lady.15 Mary Todd Lincoln was mentally unstable.16
Occasionally, prospective first ladies served to flesh out the characters of their candidate husbands. That was certainly the case with Frances Cleveland.With the advent of television, candidates’ wives have been forced into the spotlight more and more. Young and gorgeous Jacqueline Kennedy greatly aided her husband’s political quest, contributing to his glamorous Camelot image. Rosalynn Carter’s polish balanced Jimmy Carter’s earnestness; Betty Ford’s outspokenness only heightened perceptions that her husband was a bumbler. Hillary Clinton became a major campaign issue in 1992; she was simply too much of a harridan for many Americans. It was only after her famous hand-holding session with wayward husband Bill that Americans began to accept Hillary. Tipper Gore’s job in the 2000 campaign was to demonstrate that her husband could be passionate—but that was too much of a stretch for the staid couple. Teresa Heinz Kerry may have had the broadest impact of any first lady candidate in American history.
First lady candidates, then, are just as important to today’s presidential candidates as height or hair. It is no wonder that candidates’ wives routinely take the stage to stump for their husbands.
THE ELECTION OF 1828 WAS EXCEPTIONAL in many ways, not least for its focus on the candidates’ wives. Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, had a checkered history. At age seventeen, Rachel married Captain Lewis Robards, who turned out to be a philandering and jealous nut. Four years into the marriage, Rachel moved away from Robards to live with her family in Nashville. There she met Jackson. When Robards found out about Jackson, he quickly suspected that Rachel and Jackson were having an affair. He showed up in Nashville and dragged Rachel back to Kentucky with him.Two years later, in 1790, Jackson followed Rachel to Kentucky and sneaked her away to Mississippi.
But the saga wasn’t over. Jackson heard in 1791 that Robards had given Rachel a divorce, and he immediately married her. There was one problem, however—Robards hadn’t divorced Rachel. By law, the two were committing adultery. In 1793, Robards divorced Rachel on the grounds that Rachel “doth still live in adultery with another man.” Rachel and Jackson legally married in 1794.17
By 1828, the sordid story should have been long forgotten. Unfortunately for both Andrew and Rachel Jackson, it wasn’t. Supporters of incumbent president John Quincy Adams broke the story, asking, “Ought a convicted adultress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?”18 Thomas Arnold, a congressional candidate from Tennessee and vocal Adams backer, distributed a handbill denouncing Jackson as a barbarian who had “spent the prime of his life in gambling, in cock-fighting, in horse-racing . . . and to cap all tore from a husband the wife of his bosom.” Jackson, he stated, had been caught in flagrante delicto, “exchanging most delicious kisses.” During Rachel’s marriage to Robards, Jackson and Rachel had “slept under the same blanket,” wrote Arnold.19
Jackson fought back hard, sending out newspapers and speakers to counter the charges. “The wife of his bosom has been wantonly attacked . . . to think that the affectionate partner . . . should be represented as faithless and worthless . . . is not such conduct abominable?”20 Certain Jackson supporters attacked Adams’s wife, spuriously claiming that the president and first lady had engaged in premarital sex. Jackson, however, refused to allow such charges to be leveled against Adams. “Female character should never be introduced or touched unless a continuation of attack should be made against Mrs. Jackson and then only by way of Just retaliation on the known guilty . . . I never war against females and it is only the base and cowardly that do.”21
A month after Jackson’s election, Rachel stumbled across a pamphlet defending her against the charges of bigamy and adultery. She was shocked by the charges the pamphlet responded to—so shocked that she “slumped to the floor and wept hysterically. From that moment on Rachel Jackson began a slow mental and physical decline.”22 On December 18, Rachel collapsed. Four days later, she died.23
Jackson never forgave Adams; for the rest of his life, he believed that Adams’s supporters had driven Rachel to her grave.24 Jackson placed a marker over Rachel’s grave: “A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound but not dishonor.”25
FOR CLOSE TO TWO HUNDRED YEARS, the press gave enormous deference to presidents’White House sex lives. The elections of 1828 and 1884 concerned presidents’ pre-White House indiscretions; their infidelities in the White House remained off-limits. During his 1920 presidential campaign, Warren G. Harding paid one of his former mistresses $20,000 to keep quiet; during his presidency, Harding engaged in a long-running affair with Nan Britton, a woman three decades his junior. Most notoriously, the two had sex in an anteroom next to the Oval Office, which is where their daughter was conceived.26
Harding’s indiscretions were obscene; FDR’s were no better. In 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt discovered that FDR was sleeping with Lucy Mercer, his secretary. Sara Roosevelt, FDR’s mother, informed him that if he divorced Eleanor he would be disinherited; Roosevelt’s closest political advisor, Louis Howe, told FDR that he could kiss his presidential aspirations good-bye if he dumped Eleanor.27 By most accounts, Eleanor was shattered.
“The bottom dropped out of my own particular world,” Eleanor wrote, “and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”28 It is difficult to buy Eleanor’s shock and surprise; she was a uniquely unattractive woman, and she knew it. Eleanor had long worried that FDR was not in love with her—and FDR made no secret of his affair with Lucy, leaving letters from her all over his apartment. Eleanor, simply, was a political animal. Though she offered FDR a divorce, she knew he would not take it. “If you want to be President, Franklin,” she told her husband, “you’ll have to take me with you.”29 The Roosevelts’ was now a power marriage, pure and simple.
Though FDR broke off his relationship with Mercer in 1918, he renewed it in 1941.30 Bizarrely enough, FDR renewed the relationship with the help of his and Eleanor’s daughter, Anna.31 Lucy, not Eleanor, was with FDR when he died. John Kenneth Galbraith noted that Eleanor was hardly shattered by FDR’s death.32 Eleanor’s bitter description of her marriage demonstrates the extent of the coolness that pervaded her relationship with Roosevelt: “He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical. That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in some other people. Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur, even though spurring was not always wanted or welcome. I was one of those who served his purposes.”33 And, she might have added, he served hers.
With the help of the media, FDR’s wandering eye never met the public eye. In his diary, Raymond Clapper of the Washington Post stated that in 1933, the story of FDR’s affair during World War I “buzzed around Washington.” But, as Betty Winfield observed, “Clapper and others never mentioned it publicly.” Just as they had with FDR’s physical handicap, the press quietly tucked away information about FDR’s infidelity.34
As a candidate for first lady in 1932, Eleanor contributed unending energy and organizational skill to FDR’s campaign. She was so active that one Roosevelt critic complained that the country was receiving two presidents for the price of one.35 With the help of suspected lesbian lover and journalist Lorena Hickok, Eleanor assumed a larger-than-life status: “The adroit reporter made sure Eleanor came across as modest and frugal, describing her as a woman who was ‘embarrassed when she was recognized’ and who lived ‘a truly Spartan life’—wearing ten-dollar dresses, eschewing taxis for city buses, eating lunch at drug store soda fountains.”36 Eleanor flew to Chicago with FDR to help
him accept the Democratic nomination; she became the leading figure in the Democratic Party’s women’s campaign. “Gracious, charming, patient, serene . . . and plainly the devoted helpmate,” gushed one reporter.37
Most of all, Eleanor was ambitious. She later revised history, disingenuously claiming that entering the White House “deeply troubled” her.38 The record disagrees. Eleanor took to the White House like a duck to water. “The spectacle of Eleanor Roosevelt always on the go became a national jest,” explained historian Sol Barzman. “She was everywhere, watching, speaking, inspecting, writing, reporting back to the President . . . she was again the eyes and ears for her husband, and his legs as well.” She lectured, spoke to the nation via radio, and wrote a newspaper column.39
For the rest of her life, Eleanor remained a towering figure—an icon of public service, involved in everything from visiting the troops during World War II to acting as chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights.40 She is considered by many the most influential woman in American history. Without FDR, Eleanor would not have been Eleanor. Then again, without Eleanor, FDR would not have been FDR.
THE ELECTION OF 1952 pitted the first divorced presidential candidate in American history, Democratic Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, against a purported model of marital happiness, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Stevenson had married Chicago socialite Ellen Borden in 1928, but the couple had divorced in 1949 at her behest.41 This crippled Stevenson’s 1952 candidacy; divorce was still stigmatized in 1952. “If a man can’t run his family, he has no business trying to run the country,” explained one Midwestern man. The sentiment was common.42
Whispers about Stevenson’s personal life surrounded the 1952 campaign. With Adlai’s sister, Buffie, appearing at women’s functions rather than the traditional wife, rumors swirled that Adlai was a homosexual. The rumors became known around Washington as the “Stevenson innuendo.” Stevenson biographer Jean H. Baker wrote, “In the rest of the United States, the gossip wove its way into telephone conversations and informal political discussions, barroom jokes and beauty shop frowns . . . Delegates in Chicago heard the smear even before the convention ended.”43
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI purposefully disseminated the rumors. FBI agents were planted in major hotels and told to loudly discuss Stevenson’s alleged homosexuality. Stevenson, they said, had been arrested in New York and Illinois for lewd acts; he frequented gay bars under the name “Adelaide”; he had a gay affair with the president of Bradley University; Hoover kept Stevenson’s file in the “Sex Deviates” index in his office.44
The trumped-up scandal attached itself to Adlai, the bald intellectual who certainly seemed less masculine than his military-hero opponent. It was not hard to caricature a man who laughed that his slogan was “Eggheads of the World, Unite!” Republican congressman and vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon challenged Adlai’s testosterone: “The idea of putting Adlai Stevenson in the ring with a man like Stalin petrifies me.” Senator Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois) called Adlai one of the “lavender lads of the State Department.” Columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell announced over the national airwaves that “a vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgenson and a woman in the White House.” (Christine Jorgenson was the era’s most famous transsexual.)45
The scandal gained more credence when Adlai’s ex-wife announced that she would be writing a tell-all poetry book entitled The Egghead and I. In it, she said, she would “expose” Adlai. Though the book never appeared, Borden deeply damaged Stevenson’s campaign.46 For the rest of his life, Stevenson would be dogged by the “Stevenson innuendo.” In 1965, while serving as ambassador to the United Nations, boorish LBJ referred to Stevenson as “the kind of man who squats like a woman when he pees.”47
Eisenhower, by contrast, impressed the public as the archetypal family man. The rumors about Eisenhower and his wartime driver, Kay Summersby, were in all likelihood false;48 Ike’s relationship with his wife, Mamie, remained solid. “After thirty-six years of marriage,” cooed Newsweek, “her face still lights up like a bobbysoxer’s when she talks about Ike.” Newsweek wasn’t overstating the case. “The bigger the crowds, the more people I met, the happier I became,” Mamie said. “Seeing thousands and thousands of people adoring Ike, believing in his leadership, kept me cloud-high all the time.” This wasn’t exaggeration, and it wasn’t political posturing—by all accounts, Mamie was no political figure.49
Eisenhower wiped the floor with Stevenson in 1952.
In 1956, Stevenson’s divorce continued to pursue him. “The divorce issue was brought up a lot in ’56,” explained William Wilson, Stevenson’s live local television agent. “None of us knew what to do with it.”50 In response, the Stevenson campaign created a series of ads entitled “The Man from Libertyville.” While carefully explaining his ideas to America, Stevenson was constantly surrounded by members of his family.51
It didn’t help. Eisenhower trounced Stevenson again in 1956.
JACQUELINE BOUVIER was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Dark-haired, tall, elegant, with classic good looks, Jacqueline was a real catch. She met Jack in 1951, when he was thirty-four and she was twenty-two; they dated at a distance for two years, then married in 1953.52 In true Kennedy style, the wedding was enormous—Observers said that “the wedding festivities cost enough to start a fair-sized country bank.”53
For the next several years, the attractive couple was a mainstay in all the glossy magazines. Both McCall’s and Redbook wrote features on Jackie.54 But the relationship between Jack and Jackie was strained. During the first year of the marriage, Jackie said, “I was alone almost every weekend.” “Sometimes, when he is at home,” Jackie told a reporter, “he is so wrapped up in his work that I might as well be in Alaska . . . He rushes to finish dinner so we can turn on TV or get to a movie on time.”55
Jackie was the neglected housewife for a reason—Jack’s busy sex life left little room for her. In 1956, he began an affair with Joan Lundberg, who graphically explained later that Jack “loved threesomes—himself and two girls. He was also a voyeur.” Lundberg became pregnant by JFK; he paid for her abortion.56 Lundberg wasn’t Jack’s only conquest. He caroused in Washington, D.C. He often engaged in orgies at the Carroll Arms Hotel, conveniently located across the street from the Senate Office Building.57 JFK also pursued actresses Judy Garland, Jean Simmons, Lee Remick—and Sophia Loren, unsuccessfully.58 During his presidency, the affairs only increased. He smoked pot and did cocaine in the White House; he might even have tried LSD.59
But the media never reported JFK’s dalliances. Instead, they portrayed the Kennedy marriage as Camelot—innocent, clean-cut, all-American. Jackie contributed heavily to the image, claiming on the TV show Home that she pressed Jack’s pants. “This must have been a campaign chore, for at home a maid, houseboy, cook, and nursemaid would seem to provide ample manpower to smooth out pants wrinkles,” journalist Fletcher Knebel wryly observed.
But even Knebel was susceptible to the kind of media panting the Kennedys created:
When the balance of Kennedy’s presidential assets and liabilities is struck, it is uncertain in which column Jacqueline belongs. She is an obvious asset to the eyes and well-being of her husband, but an old political maxim says that the candidate’s wife should not be too young or too attractive.Women tend to be jealous of both. A kind of middle-aged neutrality is preferred.Whether or not this is true, if Kennedy is elected President the First Lady will be 31 when she enters the White House and possessed of a supple grace and beauty. Admirers wager she will be able to go a full two terms without dieting.60
During the election of 1960, Jackie did not campaign particularly actively—except with regard to the Hispanic vote. She filmed what is surely the first foreign language commercial by a first lady candidate, speaking in Spanish to stump on her husband’s behalf. She spoke in Spanish Harlem, addressing her “amigos,” then stating, in Spanish, “My Spanish is poor but my knowledge of your history, culture, and
problems is better. I can assure you if my husband is elected president you will have a real friend in the White House.” Republicans charged that Jackie was “pandering to foreign influences,” but Jackie responded, “These people have contributed so much to our country’s culture . . . It seems a proper courtesy to address them in their own tongue.”61
After JFK’s election, Jackie became a trendsetter, a fashion icon to millions. After JFK’s assassination, she signified dignity in tragedy. To this day, Jackie is often seen as the prototypical first lady.
JFK WAS A SECRET BOOR; LBJ was an open one. Before male and female aides, the president stalked about naked, burped, broke wind, urinated, and defecated—all while talking politics.62 When one of his friends visited the White House from Texas, LBJ promptly unzipped his pants, whipped out his genitals, and asked “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?”63 Johnson was promiscuous and stocked the White House with good-looking women, hoping that others would think he was sleeping with all of them.64 He engaged in sex in the Oval Office with at least six different women.65 “Sex to Johnson was part of the spoils of victory,” explained reporter George Reedy. “He once told me that women, booze, and sitting outside in the sun were the only three things in life worth living for.”66
So Johnson was not exactly Mr. Suave. Fortunately for him, he had Lady Bird. Lady Bird loved LBJ, but she recognized that he was not capable of an all-encompassing marital relationship. “He never paid any attention to Lady Bird when she was around,” said journalist John Chancellor. “The fact that she was fully aware and accepting of the terms of the relationship did not excuse him, but they both must be given credit for the truth that she was strong enough to have left him at any time. And he knew it.”67 Lady Bird knew of Johnson’s affairs; by some accounts, she approved of them.
