First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  In the process, Rosalynn Carter joined that list or remarkable women generally judged more successful than their husbands in the White House. The same historians who ranked Jimmy Carter next to last among all twentieth-century presidents put Rosalynn in third place, behind Eleanor Roosevelt and Lady Bird Johnson.80 The disparity raises questions about how much a First Lady depends on her husband’s success for her own place in history. Could Eleanor Roosevelt have fared so well had she been the spouse of Herbert Hoover? What if the highly ranked Lady Bird, Rosalynn, and Betty had been wives of more successful presidents? What kind of public careers might the women have compiled on their own, had they not married at all? What differences in opportunities and expectations resulted in such different records within one presidential family?

  For her part, Rosalynn was pleased with her demanding role. Once presidents’ wives had been confined to “official hostess” and “private helpmeet,” she wrote, [but] “Nowadays, the public expectation is just the opposite, and there is a general presumption that the projects of a First Lady will be substantive, highly publicized, and closely scrutinized. I am thankful for the change.”81

  The success of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, emphasizing traditional values and smaller government, might have encouraged his wife to view the example of her outspokenly feminist predecessors as outdated models. Nancy Davis Reagan was old enough to remember the popularity of Mamie Eisenhower who had stuck with the “home-maker” image. Perhaps more to the point, Jackie Kennedy’s emphasis on elegance and style, which had gained her so many permanent admirers, coincided with Nancy’s own inclinations. She saw nothing wrong with putting “the best of everything” in the White House, and she underscored her point by inviting Letitia Baldrige, social secretary in the Kennedy years, to return to Washington to make sure things were done correctly.

  This elitist approach to living in the executive mansion was not unique to the 1980s, but it contrasted markedly with the Carters’ reputation for carrying their own luggage and entertaining informally. Although it would be difficult to calculate the amount of time each First Lady devoted to her own wardrobe and guests, Nancy Reagan gave every indication that she meant to develop a public image very different from that of Rosalynn Carter. While the First Lady from Georgia had projected herself as a full-time serious worker who chaired conferences on mental health and testified in front of Senate committees, Nancy Reagan appeared to concentrate her time on china patterns and luncheons for her glamorous friends. Both Rosalynn and Betty Ford had used their prominence to help solve important problems and improve the status of women, but a Washington Monthly reporter declared that the coterie surrounding Nancy Reagen considered it a “divine mission” to make such serious women “look tacky.”82

  Old discussions about the proper role of a First Lady were revived. Traditionalists, who preferred the helpmate, voted solidly for Nancy Reagan. Washington caterers, whose business in caviar and other imported delicacies increased overnight, and dress designers, whose creations in the four-figure range became de rigueur at White House parties, applauded the change. But there were dissenters. Washington reporters who had cooperated in making a heroine of Jackie Kennedy treated Nancy Reagan as though she bought her wardrobe out of public funds. Feminists and other women, who refused that label but shared the goals, entered that very old debate about what kind of model the country needed “at the head of female society.”

  The alternatives had shifted considerably but were as hotly discussed as during the days of Rachel Jackson, and it was a contemporary of Nancy Reagan’s at Smith College who received most credit for outlining the current situation. In 1963, Betty Friedan (who graduated from Smith College one year ahead of Nancy), had published The Feminine Mystique, which indicted wives who defined themselves entirely in terms of husbands and children.83 Friedan had set out to write about her Smith classmates and what had happened to them in the fifteen years following graduation so she may well have had women like Nancy Reagan in mind. When Friedan found many unhappy women, some so dissatisfied with their lives that they were seeking help in therapy or turning to alcohol and drugs, she enlarged her focus to include all American women. For Friedan, the problem was an outmoded model of femininity, one that severely limited women’s options, and she termed this “feminine mystique” that kept women from developing as much as they might have, the “problem that has no name.”

  Friedan had her own recommendations for change and she argued for them forcefully in this and later books. Women needed to pattern their lives the way men did, working out a “life plan” or agenda of what they hoped to accomplish. No one argued that the turning of the calender would bring each goal easily into reach, but list-making itself would impose direction. Friedan offered other suggestions as well, some of them involving an infusion of federal funds to equalize educational opportunities, much as the federal government had footed the bill for training war veterans. Such suggestions were hardly radical. They offered no attack on traditional family structure or on the economic system. They simply suggested a different division of the American pie of good schools and good jobs so that women got a bigger share.

  But there were problems, and Friedan later confessed that she had not foreseen all the difficulties that arose when women entered the professions in much larger numbers. Her sharpest critics pointed out that she had not dealt at all with the problems of working-class women, who, like their fathers, brothers, and husbands, had never had much control over their lives. Forced to earn at a young age, they could hardly make a “life plan” in the manner urged by Friedan. Low family income, illness, monotonous and unrewarding jobs kept them on a treadmill that offered few opportunities to pause for reevaluation. While Friedan seemed to see a job as liberating, most working-class women saw it as something to escape, and they retained dependence and luxury as their ultimate goals.

  One popular statement of the anti-Friedan position came in Marabel Morgan’s book, The Total Woman, which described a route to happiness that centered on a husband.84 Morgan urged the suspension of all critical faculties in order to become a “total woman.” She advised her readers to make a list of their husbands’ faults and strengths, then throw away the first list and refer frequently to the second. The definition of “Wife” became for “Total Woman” advocates an attractive but unthinking supportive robot, whose value lay in pleasing others, particularly her husband.

  Nancy Davis Reagan would not have described herself as “unthinking” but at least one journalist thought she epitomized the Total Woman. Gloria Steinem entitled an article in Ms magazine, “Finally, a Total Woman in the White House.”85 Nancy Reagan had announced on more than one occasion that her “life began when I met my husband” and that seeing to his well-being was her one career.86 She had gladly let an MGM movie contract expire at the end of seven years in order to dedicate her total energy to her husband and children. Ronald had not pushed her—it was what she had always wanted, she said, and on the questionnaire she completed when she arrived in Hollywood, she had listed as her ambition in life: “to have a successful, happy marriage.”87

  Biographers frequently point to the lack of security and permanence in Nancy’s childhood as the reason for her putting great emphasis on her marriage. Born to an actress who soon left her daughter with relatives in order to pursue her career and to an auto salesman who left both of them, Nancy Davis Reagan spent her early years (as Anne Frances Robbins) living in Baltimore with an aunt. When her mother remarried, this time choosing a more settled mate, and took her daughter to live in Chicago, the new husband adopted the girl, providing the name she later used in movies—Nancy Davis. Her stepfather had a son from a previous marriage but Nancy was the only daughter of this successful neurosurgeon and he made the rest of her growing up protected and secure: a debut, four years at Smith where she majored in drama, and then a try, with help from family friends, at Hollywood.

  Feminists and liberal critics would later charge that Nancy went too
far in her devotion to her husband, and one reporter dubbed Nancy’s loving focus on Ronald during his speeches “the gaze.”88 Such ridicule should not obscure, however, the important part she played in Ronald’s political ascent. Several of her husband’s advisers, even those who had suffered expressions of her displeasure, agreed on her value. Michael Deaver, close adviser to the Reagans over many years, said she deserved “as much responsibility for [Ronald Reagan’s] success as he.”89 Historians, who initially gave her a very low rating as First Lady, admitted she had been a valuable asset to her husband.90

  Part of Nancy’s value resulted from the unorthodox path her husband took to the top. National politics had shown a tendency in the 1960s and 1970s to open up to the outside. While most high offices had typically been gained by working up a ladder of lesser jobs, some of the most visible posts began to go to people who had achieved a reputation in one field and then transferred that popularity to government. Astronauts, athletes, and actors turned up as candidates for high office.

  Such a horizontal entry into politics at the top (Ronald Reagan took his first political office as governor of California in 1967 when he was almost fifty-six years old) involved considerable money and a support staff that could play a variety of roles. A “Total Woman” spouse who could be endlessly amiable and pleasant to prospective contributors was no small asset. Nancy Reagan lunched with wives, and she gamely shared long private plane rides with people she had just met.

  Nancy Reagan gave every indication of wanting to transfer this supportive wife-style to Washington, and she began by refurbishing the White House. The routine appropriation of $50,000 that Congress allotted each new president was entirely inadequate for her plans, which included a decorator who usually put that much into a single room (art and antiques were additional).91 To raise the $900,000 she needed, she turned to private donors. Some of the contributions came from old Hollywood friends, well-heeled and cheerful givers, but critics were not so sure about the provenance of the rest. President Reagan had ended the remaining price controls on domestic oil and gasoline as soon as he took office, several months before the controls were slated to come off; when names of some who had apparently profited from the move showed up on the list of White House donors, suspicion grew that the largess was not motivated solely by patriotism.92 Whatever their reasons for giving, the contributors had received tax deductions, and since many of them paid federal levies at the rate of 50 percent, the government was footing half the bill.

  Considerably more unsettling to many critics was the nearly simultaneous announcement of cuts in federal programs for the poorest Americans: those who used subsidized day-care centers, food and nutrition programs, job training centers, and family planning services. Rumors of planned cuts in social security benefits frightened other Americans. Jackie Kennedy’s spending two decades earlier had hardly been modest, but most Americans had closed an eye—perhaps because reporters had encouraged them to do so. When upbeat talk about progress and “putting a man on the moon in this decade” dominated presidential addresses, few people stopped to worry about who would pay the bill. Two decades later, the rhetoric had turned to pruning the national budget and cutting back, and people caught outside the “safety net,” that Ronald Reagan insisted would always be there for the neediest, questioned why they had been cut when so many other people seemed to be doing so well. Nancy Regan’s penchant for expensive items may have had a long history, but she was not so visible then nor so close to decisions affecting others who lived on considerably less. Her timing was off—an announcement about $200,000 for new china came one day before the administration publicized a plan to decrease nutrition standards for school lunch programs. The new guidelines would have permitted, according to some interpretations, catsup to be classified as a “vegetable.” Although the president later blamed an Agriculture Department official for needlessly stirring up the catsup controversy, the harm had been done.93

  Nancy Reagan’s first year in Washington was not a good one. In addition to facing up to the fact that returning elegance to the White House was not going to win her the same permanent admiration that Jackie Kennedy received, she had to deal with one of the worst experiences of her life—the attempted assassination of her husband in March 1981. For months afterwards, she could not even refer to the incident more directly than “that thing that happened,” and, during a televised interview much later, she broke into tears when describing her reaction. She had announced early in the administration that she would continue with a Foster Grandparents program that she had worked with in California, but the effects of the assassination attempt left her little energy, and public perception of her association with the program was weak at best.

  Identification came, instead, as part of “millionaires on parade,” and she was singled out as the “administration’s number-one public relations problem.”94 Feminists ridiculed a woman whose “two-china policy” dealt with dishes, and historians rated her among the worst of all First Ladies, just below the ineffectual Jane Pierce and superior only to Ida McKinley, Florence Harding, and Mary Lincoln.95 References were made to “Queen Nancy,” and even her loyal friend Michael Deaver admitted she had a problem.96

  In 1982, the highly effective Reagan staff turned its attention to Nancy and set out to temper her elitist image. Her secretary announced that the designer clothes received as gifts would be donated to museums.97 Nancy Reagan learned to make jokes about herself. She quipped that she would never wear a crown, because it would mess her hair, and when time came for the Gridiron Dinner on March 29, 1982, the First Lady appeared in old, ill-assorted clothing and sang a ditty about wearing “second-hand clothes.”98

  By the middle the first Reagan administration, it had become clear that Nancy needed to do more. In what one major newspaper described as the “Washingtonization of Nancy Reagan,” she began to devote more time to serious problems, particularly drug abuse. She visited facilities, headed up a series of community-based endeavors billed on television as the “Chemical People,” made a cameo appearance with Gary Coleman on “Diff’rent Strokes,” and invited the wives of other countries’ leaders to meet with her in Washington to discuss drug problems. The First Ladies Conference in April 1985, received frontpage coverage across the country.99 The perception was not so much that a president’s wife could end drug abuse—no one, least of all, Nancy Reagan, would have expected she could do that—but that she was concerned about unglamorous, public problems.

  Whatever the reasons for Nancy Reagan’s changed approach to her job, it immediately paid off. She had occasionally explained that drug abuse had always been a top priority for her but that she had been warned away from it by advisers who judged it too “downbeat.” Whether she was listening to new advisers or they had changed their counsel remained unclear, but her popularity immediately improved. One pollster reported a twenty-point increase in her approval rating, a change he attributed to the perception that her involvement in rehabilitation programs was both genuine and significant.100

  As the country’s economy improved, the president’s popularity rose even higher. This show of confidence along with the security of having entered into a second—and presumably last—presidential term in January 1985 encouraged Nancy Reagan to take an even more prominent part in the administration. The Reagans had always played down or laughed off accounts that Nancy exerted clout in Ronald’s political decisions, and to some extent, this pose continued. An NBC special on the First Lady, broadcast in June 1985, showed her laughingly dismissing accounts of her political expertise and interest, but only the naïve believed. Too much evidence to the contrary came from high White House sources who publicly described her as “indispensable,” “a savvy adviser,” and important on political matters, such as “getting the Russians to a summit,” personnel decisions, such as removing Alexander Haig from the cabinet, and procedures, such as preparing her husband for debates against Walter Mondale during the 1984 campaign.101 When important people played musical
chairs in the executive branch, it was generally conceded that she had a part in calling the tune.

  What happened in the summer of 1985 added fuel to that speculation. Immediately following President Reagan’s surgery for cancer in July, Nancy returned to the White House to receive foreign dignitaries.102 As soon as it became clear that the president’s surgery would require him to work on a reduced schedule, broadcasters speculated on who was “in charge in the White House.” Consensus settled on a triumvirate: the president, his chief of staff (Donald Regan), and the First Lady.103

  Ronald Reagan lent weight to this interpretation when, in a radio address following his surgery, he spoke about the contributions of First Ladies who, he said, “aren’t elected and they don’t receive a salary…. They’ve mostly been private persons forced to live public lives, and in my book they’ve all been heroes…. Abigail Adams helped invent America. Dolley Madison helped protect it. Eleanor Roosevelt was F.D.R.’s eyes and ears.” Then, as though to stake out a place for his wife on the Mount Rushmore of First Ladies, he added: “Nancy is my everything. When I look back on these days, Nancy, I’ll remember your radiance and your strength, your support and for taking part in the business of the nation. I say to myself, but also on behalf of the nation, ‘Thank you, partner. Thanks for everything.’ “104

  No wonder the New York Times chose to describe Nancy Reagan as having “expanded the role of First Lady into a sort of Associate Presidency.”105 The change was not that the president’s wife played a part in important decisions but that her participation was taken as a matter of course. Spouses had often acted in unusual ways in times of illness or other crisis, but in the White House that role had often been camouflaged or, as in the case of Edith Wilson, denigrated. By 1985, Americans had become so accustomed to acknowledgments of power on the distaff side of the White House that Nancy Reagan’s prominence caused little comment. After Betty Ford, who openly disagreed with her husband on a whole list of important national issues, and Rosalynn Carter, who sat in on cabinet meetings and represented Jimmy in substantive talks with leaders in Latin America, Nancy Reagan’s stepping forth seemed unremarkable. That perception of the change had become international is suggested by a duo of telephone calls made from the Philippines to Washington in February 1986, as the ruling Marcos family decided whether or not to flee. Ferdinand Marcos sought advice by telephone from Senator Paul Laxalt, a close friend of President Reagan’s; Imelda Marcos called Nancy.106