First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  A painful example was one of Pat Nixon’s first remarks when she prepared to take over the White House in 1968. Understandably elated by her husband’s triumph, after his heartbreaking hairbreadth loss to Jack Kennedy in 1960, Pat declared that now the Executive Mansion would be a place where ordinary people would be welcomed. “The guests won’t be limited to big shots!” she said.

  Her just-elected husband jokingly—and perhaps nervously—reminded her that all their friends were big shots. Dick Nixon was not about to bar the White House door to the millionaire contributors to his war chest. Pat Nixon was being herself in those poignant words—reflecting her hardworking middle-class background. For a moment she had forgotten that she was also a politician’s wife.

  Again and again, First Ladies, while being themselves or trying to be public symbols, have collided with harsh political realities—and with the public’s often unrealistic expectations of their roles. Betty Ford found this out when she voiced some frank personal opinions about abortion and premarital sex on the TV show 60 Minutes. The firestorm of criticism looked for a while like it might trigger a political meltdown in the Ford White House. Barbara Bush confessed in her memoirs that her opinion on abortion differed from her husband’s conservative stance—but remembering Betty’s experience, she artfully concealed it during her White House years.

  In both their private and public lives, which have become virtually indistinguishable, First Ladies have had to feel their way along an invisible boundary between aristocratic luxury and democratic simplicity. Criticism of a First Lady’s style did not begin with Nancy Reagan. It goes back to Martha Washington and has recurred with varying degrees of rancor throughout the following two hundred plus years.

  Not long ago, journalist Barbara Matusow moderated a panel on First Ladies and the media at the Smithsonian Institution. She opened the discussion by stressing the importance of historical perspective in understanding First Ladies. Without naming her, Ms. Matusow described a First Lady who was incredibly superstitious and fearful for her husband’s safety and who loved elaborate gowns and spent so much money on them and on decorating the White House that the bills deeply embarrassed her husband. She also had a reputation for pushing her husband around politically so often some people called her the Associate President. A ripple of recognition ran through the audience—until Ms. Matusow said: “It’s not Nancy Reagan. It’s Mary Lincoln.”

  The disapproval both these First Ladies incurred for their supposed extravagance and political weight throwing underscores a fundamental point. The American people have always wanted a First Lady to be a traditional wife and mother first Any interests or activities beyond these spheres have frequently been greeted with criticism or distrust.

  Not just from the public, I might add. Jack Kennedy was violently opposed, at first, to Jackie’s plans to redecorate the White House in 1961. It took a great deal of firmness on Jackie’s part to resist this presidential negativism and push ahead to the famous—and fabulously successful—redecoration. Other First Ladies, from Mary Lincoln to Pat Nixon to Nancy Reagan, have had to contend with powerful presidential aides, who saw them as competitors and were not averse to blackening their reputations.

  There is another trip wire in the First Lady’s path if she enters the explosive world of real politics. Bess Truman’s instinct to remain behind the scenes as her husband’s political partner was in part the result of her personal reluctance to face reporters and congressional committees. It was also rooted in conclusions she drew from Eleanor Roosevelt’s overtly political activities. She felt that sometimes Mrs. Roosevelt’s good intentions, her desire to achieve instant justice and equality between the sexes and races in America, led her into situations which embarrassed her husband—and even forced him to disavow her opinions.

  FDR, one of the most popular Presidents in American history, landslide winner of a second term in 1936, could tolerate these political differences, often with a smile. As a vice president catapulted into the White House by fate, Harry Truman had very little political capital to expend, so this too justified my mother’s covert style.

  No one can top me (or my mother) in admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt. She was one of the great Americans of our century—and she expanded the First Lady’s role as no one before her. But she should not be a model against whom all other First Ladies must be measured. Each First Lady has to deal with the particular political climate swirling around and through the White House when she arrives. Above all, she has to consider her individual, intensely personal relationship with her husband.

  Living and working together in the same house, a President and his wife often see more of each other than they have in any previous era of their marriage. The First Lady is frequently more intimately involved in her husband’s political reactions and decisions than ever before. Betty Ford was one of several First Ladies who told me this in unvarnished terms. Lady Bird Johnson made it even clearer. “You and your husband suddenly look at each other and say: ‘It’s just you and me. Other people—our children, friends—will try to help. But in the end it’s the two of us who are going to succeed—or fail.’”

  Another little-understood task which many First Ladies have assigned themselves is protector of their husbands from the killing pace of the job. One out of every five presidents has died in office, at an average age of fifty-seven. Almost as many died within five years of leaving office—and these too were comparatively young men—their average age sixty. While the life span of the average American rose throughout the nineteenth century, presidential longevity declined from an average of seventy-three for the Presidents before the Civil War to sixty-three for the Presidents who followed it. My mother considered safeguarding Harry Truman from his penchant for overwork one of the most important sides of her job. Again, Lady Bird Johnson said it best: “It’s up to you [the First Lady] to create a zone of peace, of comfort, within the White House where your husband can regain his equilibrium, restore his spirit.”

  Hillary Rodham Clinton may be able to change the public’s attitude toward overt political activity by First Ladies. For her sake and the sake of future First Ladies, I wish her well. I think a First Lady should be free to make political statements and commitments—if she has the ability and is so inclined. When it comes to First Ladies, I am for more freedom, in all directions.

  But Rosalynn Carter’s experience suggests that politics is still surrounded by an invisible boundary that First Ladies cross at their peril. She came to the White House determined to be Jimmy Carter’s public partner. Four years later she exited defensively, explaining again and again that she never told Jimmy what to do, he was a strong person and he made up his own mind.

  By now, I hope you are convinced that the title of this chapter is more or less justified. First Lady is the world’s, or at least Washington, D.C.’s, second toughest job. But it can also be a fascinating job. No one else has a better view of the maddening, exhausting, frequently baffling problems of the President of the United States, the most powerful politician in the world. No one else is as likely to meet as many electrifying, controversial personalities in any given calendar year. No one else is in a position to exert more influence on the future of the world—and on the way Americans think about fundamental values.

  If there is one quality that comes through vividly from studying the history of the women of the White House, it is their strength. Who else but a strong woman can live with the most unnerving aspect of her job—the knowledge that at any given moment somewhere in America there are probably a half-dozen individuals plotting to kill her husband?

  More than once a First Lady has made a significant political contribution to her husband’s administration. Even more often, and more difficult to discover, the spiritual strength of a First Lady has sustained a President in hours when the awful loneliness of the job threatened to overwhelm him.

  No matter how political she becomes, the First Lady will always be a woman, married to a specific man (until, of cou
rse, we elect a woman President). That means there are spiritual depths in her marriage that only she understands, needs that only she can fulfill. Always, against the necessities of politics, she will balance these other needs.

  Not all First Ladies have been able to achieve this wifely responsiveness. Some came to the White House with such deeply troubled marriages, they were almost forced to chart courses that were semi-independent of their husbands’—and occasionally in opposition to them. These women deserve our deepest sympathy for their struggles to cope with emotional as well as political problems in the glare of maximum publicity.

  There have also been times when a First Lady has said to the most powerful man in the world: enough. He has listened, and turned away from the ecstasy and agony of power. I saw that happen in my own family when my father decided not to run in 1952. It happened again in 1968 when Lady Bird Johnson said it to her husband, the most intensely political President who ever bestrode the Oval Office.

  Earlier I noted that modern First Ladies are doing a lot. I begin to think I should amend that remark. First Ladies, from Martha Washington to Louisa Adams to Julia Grant to Edith Roosevelt to Bess Truman to Hillary Clinton, have always done a lot. As symbols, wives, mothers, hostesses, and political partners, they have coped with anguish and tragedy and the temptations and illusions of power. Above all, they have borne witness, with their courage and their caring, to women’s share—and place—in the shaping of America.

  Chapter 2

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  DEMOCRACY

  IN SKIRTS

  ONE HISTORICAL OBSERVER OF FIRST LADIES HAS SUGGESTED THAT they appeal to the public’s heart while Presidents appeal to the head. I resisted that idea as too simplistic when I began writing this book. But there is no doubt that a First Lady has always had a lot to do with how people feel about a President’s performance. I came across other scholars who described this phenomenon as “setting the tone” of an administration.

  I rather like that idea. Tone, my dictionary tells me, is a word with layers of meaning. It is used to describe the characteristic quality of an instrument or voice. Painters use it to discuss subtleties of shade and color. It is also used to denote a general quality, effect, or atmosphere. It includes what a First Lady says and how she says it—and what she does not say and how she manages that. It deals with the often explosive questions of class and style, attitude and manner.

  Martha Washington discovered a lot of this when she arrived in New York to preside over the first Executive Mansion, a cramped, rented house on Cherry Street. (It was ripped down in the 1870s, when they built the approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge.) Her husband, our first President, was puzzled about his own role. He sought advice far and wide about how he should conduct himself vis-à-vis Congress, the title he should use, how he should receive callers. He knew he should not act like a king, but he also did not want to become a nobody. Washington was determined not to let the presidency—for which he had fought harder than anyone else at the Constitutional Convention—be diminished by petty critics and worrywarts who saw hobgoblins of potential tyranny everywhere.

  It might be apropos to recall here that the Constitution and the federal government it created were by no means universally admired at birth. In New York and other states, the national charter had been approved by minuscule margins. Prominent Americans such as Patrick Henry had attacked the Constitution ferociously, claiming it would destroy freedom. Already, two political parties were in embryo: the mostly conservative supporters of the federal government, who called themselves Federalists, and the Antis, who bitterly resented being called Democrats—the worst political insult you could throw at a person in the 1790s. (The word connoted anarchy and mob rule—more than a theoretical worry in the shadow of the French Revolution.) The Antifeds tried to evade the slur by calling themselves Republicans, but they were Democrats under the skin. The word did not become respectable until Andrew Jackson’s era.

  From the start, Martha Washington was an essential part of George’s presidential plans. When she reached the west bank of the Hudson on her journey from Mount Vernon, he brought her across the river in his official barge—forerunner of other presidential water-craft. This was a sign all by itself that the Father of the Country expected her to be something more than his after-hours companion. But Martha may have been a bit startled by the accolade she received as she debarked from the presidential rowboat: “Long Live Lady Washington!” shouted the crowd—while thirteen cannon left over from the Revolutionary War gave an earsplitting salute.

  The term First Lady, which sounds old-fashioned to postfeminist ears, was born during that cannonade. It would take another 145 years for it to appear in Merriam-Webster’s 1934 edition of their dictionary. But it would be floating through the political airwaves long before that.

  So-called high Federalists wanted Martha—and half the other wives in George’s administration—to be called Lady. The high Federalists (forerunners of Old Guard Republicans) thought only the “best” people should rule, and they wanted the unwashed masses to get the message as often as possible. Martha never used the title—though she never repudiated it either. Nor did Washington. Antifed newspapers ridiculed the notion of titles for anybody, including the President. The House of Representatives, who even then kept their ears tuned to the voice of the people, agreed with them.

  Martha was not particularly surprised to discover she had a role to play. As the daughter of one of the richest men in Virginia and the mistress of Mount Vernon’s 8,000 acres, she had long since mastered the arts of hospitality. She had presided over George’s dinner table at Morristown and other Revolutionary War camps, where hungry Continental Congressmen and foreign diplomats had to be feasted and soothed in a style befitting their stations. But she was not used to thirteen-gun salutes or the discovery that she was public property. On her first morning in New York, she awoke to find Cherry Street jammed by dozens of carriages full of curious women eager to get a glimpse of her. She became the first of a long line when she complained privately to a niece that she felt like a “state prisoner.”

  Most pictures of Martha Washington make her look like an old fuddy-duddy. I like this one because it shows her strength and intelligence. (AP/ Wide World Photos)

  But she rose to the public challenge—and then some. Without her sure hand, Washington’s dinner parties had drawn criticism for their lack of style. Food was served in such profusion that the diners were reduced to debating where to start. One senator went off huffing it was “the least showy [fashionable] dinner” he ever saw. Before the end of Martha’s first summer in New York, another senator, one of the President’s sourest Antifed critics, burped home to confide to his diary: “It was a great dinner, and the best of the kind I ever was at.”

  Martha did not do the cooking, of course. She had a steward and sixteen servants handling the stove and peeling the vegetables. But anyone who has ever run the White House or any other large establishment knows that the real responsibility for the success of a dinner for several dozen guests is upstairs, where the basic decisions on what to serve and how to serve it are made. “I have not had one half hour to myself since the day of my arrival,” the weary First Lady told her niece, in another letter.

  Callers were a much bigger problem—there were so many of them. The President and his Lady shared this dilemma. At first George thought the democratic thing to do was let anybody pop in to see him, anytime. The executive department almost ground to a halt, and he finally put a notice in the papers announcing that those who merely wanted to shake his hand should call between two and three, twice a week. Those with government business could make an appointment anytime.

  To deal with the social side of his job, George decided to have a “levee” for men only, each Tuesday afternoon. This was a superdignified show, in which the President stood before a fireplace in black velvet with silver buckles on his shoes and knees, his hair powdered and gathered behind in a silk bag, yellow gloves on his huge hands. Unde
r his arm was a cocked hat with a black feather, on his hip a long sword in a white leather scabbard. People were introduced to him, got a brief bow, and retreated to the other side of the room.

  After the doors closed, the President circled the room, exchanging a few words with each visitor, and returned to his starting point in front of the fireplace. This was the signal for a general departure. The Antifeds asked each other if there was any difference between this and George III in St. James’s Palace. In their anxiety to make the President important, Washington and his advisers, notably high Federalist Alexander Hamilton, were in danger of making him pretentious.

  Martha rescued the situation with her Friday evening “drawing room” receptions. Dressed in white muslin, she remained seated with the vice president’s wife, Abigail Adams, beside her. She chatted agreeably with anyone who approached her, and the President, sans sword and hat, soon appeared and further charmed the ladies with light conversation and the men with reminiscences of wartime heroics. A few Antifed hard-liners—the professional liberals of their day—grumbled that Martha’s decision to remain seated was too “queenly” for their taste, but they swiftly became a disregarded minority.

  Compliments descended on Lady Washington from all directions. Everyone loved her fondness for white. They said it made her look like a Roman matron. The color went perfectly with her fine complexion, her lovely teeth, her snowy hair. They especially liked her “unassuming manner” and “unaffected” personality. They found the President much more cheerful and easygoing in her presence. The human George Washington, who liked a joke and a glass of wine as much as any man of his era, emerged to everyone’s delight.