One of these things was the creation of a First Ladies’ gallery in the corridor just beyond the South Entrance on the ground floor of the White House. Some people complained that the portraits should have been placed somewhere on the first floor (they are now in the East Wing lobby and are among the first things a tourist sees), but the wife of a Texas congressman congratulated Edith for rescuing “these admirable females from oblivion.” I am happy to add my somewhat belated plaudits.
In her husband’s second term, Edith Roosevelt’s domestic management met a severe test. A crew of desperadoes took over the White House. They terrorized the staff, unnerved visitors, and even sabotaged the federal government. No one knew where they would strike next. The White House Gang, as they were called by insiders, were a rough bunch. They went by names like Slats and Sailor and Taffy. The leader was inclined to sign his name with a single, ominous letter: Q. He led them in swearing terrible oaths which always began: “By Buzzard!”
The leader, you may not be entirely surprised to learn, was Edith’s youngest son, her “fine little bad boy,” as she fondly called him—Quentin. He was, his father admitted, “a handful.” He explored the White House with complete disregard for his own safety, crawling out on the roof and squeezing under the eaves in the attic, where he came face to face with several rats almost as big as he was. He also scaled the magnolia tree by his mother’s window and wound streams of “official red tape” in and out among its boughs. He was equally unintimidated by reporters. One asked him for some details of how the President relaxed. “I see him sometimes,” Quentin replied. “But I know nothing of his family life.”
With (X in command, and Taffy (Charles Taft, son of William Howard Taft) as his right-hand man, nothing in the White House was safe. One of the gang’s early triumphs was a shower of spitballs on Andrew Jackson’s portrait, including a beautiful “gob” on the end of his nose. Another time, they used hand mirrors to flash sunlight into the windows of the State War Navy Building, completely disrupting two-thirds of the federal government until a sailor appeared on the roof and semaphored them to report to the President’s office without delay for “Y-O-U K-N-O-W W-H-A-T”
Edith encountered the gang when she entertained an Italian diplomat, complete with a monocle, in a second-floor sitting room. The junior fiends climbed onto a skylight to examine their quarry, and Quentin began speaking in what he thought was Italian. “Quentin!” Edith called, glaring up at the skylight. The diplomat followed her gaze and saw six small boys, each with a monocle (improvised from watch crystals) in his eye, staring down at him. The astonished envoy’s monocle popped out of his eye into his teacup.
Quentin collaborated with his older brother Archie for another coup against White House conformity. Eleven-year-old Archie was flat on his back, simultaneously stricken by measles and whooping cough, and mourning the death of his favorite animal, Jack Dog, a black and tan fox terrier. Quentin decided nothing would speed Archie’s recovery faster than the sight of his calico pony, Algonquin. With the cooperation of a White House footman, he coaxed the 350-pound creature into the elevator and down the second-floor corridor to Archie’s bedroom. The invalid, it is claimed, made a miraculous recovery and was soon galloping around the grounds on Algonquin’s back.
Other resident pets made the Roosevelt White House an unnerving place to work or visit. The Speaker of the House, an imperious Illinoisan named “Uncle Joe” Cannon, had his ankle clawed by Tom Quartz, the family kitten, as he descended the grand staircase. Kermit’s kangaroo rat regularly came to the breakfast table and demanded lumps of sugar. Quentin wandered around with Emily Spinach, an emerald green snake, under his coat.
Edith’s toleration of these antics is the best possible proof that her management of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was infused with genuine maternity. Earle Looker, who later became the chronicler of the White House Gang’s exploits, opined she probably knew what they were up to almost every minute but let them get away with most of their dark deeds because she secretly enjoyed them. As the mother of four boys, I know exactly what Looker meant.
The offspring who put Edith’s management skills to their ultimate test was not the White House Gang but her stepdaughter, Alice. An unabashed rebel, Alice made a specialty of doing what she hoped would upset her father. She spent most of her time with the 1905 equivalent of the jet set—the sons and daughters of the ultraconservative multimillionaires whom TR denounced as “malefactors of great wealth.” With their encouragement, Alice smoked in public, bet on the horses, played poker, danced until dawn and slept until noon, and once raced an automobile from Newport to Boston unchaperoned. One member of her late mother’s family characterized her as “a young wild animal that has been put into good clothes.”
When someone complained to the President about his older daughter’s behavior, TR exploded. “I can run the country or control Alice,” he said. “I can’t do both.” Edith, keenly aware that she was only a stepmother, and that Alice was convinced her father did not care for her “one eighth as much as the other children,” made no attempt to play the disciplinarian. She let Theodore handle that role—which he occasionally did in halfhearted fashion—while Edith persisted, in spite of frequent rebuffs, in being Alice’s friend.
Proof of her success is a touching scene that I could never have envisioned for Alice Roosevelt. When I knew her in the late 1940s, she was all acid wit and sarcasm, an utterly delightful grande dame. It is hard, even now, for me to realize she was once as young as I was in my White House years. One evening in the fall of 1905, Alice followed Edith into the bathroom, waited until the First Lady was brushing her teeth (so she would have a moment to think before saying anything), and told her she had become engaged to Nicholas Longworth, the. Republican congressman from Ohio.
Fifteen years older than Alice and already a bit bald, Nick Long-worth had a reputation as a womanizer. Alice had spent four weeks getting up the nerve to tell her parents. It is not insignificant that she told Edith first. To her immense relief, Edith warmly approved the match. She knew Alice would never be happy married to some businessman. Politics was in her blood, and Longworth was considered presidential timber. Edith confided her doubts to a discreet relative. Love, she said, had “softened” Alice wonderfully, but “I still tremble when I think of her face to face with the practical details of life.”
Alice’s White House wedding became another of Edith’s triumphs. Everyone who mattered sent presents and hoped for an invitation, but Edith limited the guest list to one thousand—coolly excluding some people who had hoped to buy their way into the ceremony with expensive gifts. One well-chosen guest was Nellie Grant Sartoris, who had been a White House bride herself thirty-two years earlier. Alice, resplendent in a princess-style gown, testified to her bond with Edith at the end of the ceremony. She walked over to her, arms outstretched, and kissed her twice.
—
EDITH ROOSEVELT LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE IN 1909 ARGUABLY THE most esteemed, beloved First Lady since Martha Washington. Eighty years later another First Lady, far more familiar to modern readers, duplicated many of her maternal triumphs, with a lot more irreverence and fun. In some ways, Barbara Bush faced a far tougher challenge. She succeeded a bone-thin First Lady who had been the essence of chic—and a favorite press target—Nancy Reagan. Before her had come Rosalynn Carter, the public partner who had her own problems with the First Lady watchers. Would the scribes do a similar number on Mrs. Bush?
Not to worry. Like Edith Roosevelt before her, Barbara Bush had thought out the role of First Lady from studying her predecessors’ mistakes. No one would catch her playing uncrowned queen in the White House. Nor would she so much as hint at pretensions to being a coequal President. No, Barbara Bush decided she would just be herself, and that self flowed not only from her unique personality but from her age, her gray hair, her wrinkles, and her size 14 figure.
If Edith Roosevelt conquered the White House as everybody’s mother, Barbara Bush, with five children in their th
irties and forties and twice that many grandchildren, became everybody’s grandmother. The role not only came naturally, it was shrewd, it was apt, it demonstrated once more the amazing range of choices available to First Ladies if they have the courage of their convictions—or, better, their predilections.
These days grandmother has more appeal than mother; grandmothers are those wonderful people who baby-sit for harried mothers and let the kids get away with murder. They are more lovable than mothers, who in my family at least are often regarded as the equivalent of Parris Island drill sergeants. Barbara Bush boldly made a virtue of her grandmotherly image. She not only declined to apologize for her gray hair and ample figure, she joked about these somewhat dubious assets.
The new First Lady said her mother told her she weighed a hundred pounds at birth. She grew up hearing her mother tell her sister Martha to eat up and then add “But not you, Barbara.” She dyed her prematurely gray hair until she decided the hell with it in 1970—and “George never noticed it,” she added acerbically, reporting on a phenomenon that sounded familiar to any number of wives.
Only in little flashes like these has the public gotten glimpses of Barbara Bush’s truly wicked wit. One friend tells of sitting next to her at a rally in New Hampshire during the 1988 primary campaign while George Bush was on the podium taking questions. A woman asked him to explain his stand on abortion and added a virtual oration on her opinion of this thorny issue. Mrs. Bush leaned over to the friend and whispered in his ear: “Now there’s a b.s. question.”
Up on the podium, George Bush labored mightily to get on both sides of the dilemma with a series of convoluted on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand sentences. Mrs. Bush leaned over to the friend again and whispered: “And there’s a b.s. answer.”
When they were younger, Barbara Bush sometimes made her husband a target of her ego-deflating tongue—until one day he asked her in his offhand way to quit ridiculing him in public. She stopped, instantly and forever. She also did penance for another slip of her forked tongue in the 1984 campaign, when she remarked during the flap over Geraldine Ferraro’s tax returns that the Democratic vice presidential candidate not only was rich but could also be described by another word that rhymes with rich. That crack got into print, and Mrs. Bush admitted to a relative that she cried for twenty-four hours and called Ms. Ferraro to apologize.
Both stories make it clear that Barbara Bush is a sensitive, deeply caring woman. As First Lady, she was also a political partner in ways that Edith Roosevelt never tried to be. When George Bush considered running for President in 1980, his wife sat in on the briefing sessions and shared the final decision with him. Together, she and her husband became one of the smoothest functioning teams in the history of the White House.
This is not entirely surprising, if we pause for a backward look. Barbara Bush has been at George Bush’s side throughout his amazing Cook’s tour of the American government, which took him from congressman to UN. ambassador to CIA director to ambassador to China to vice president to president. If we combine these travels with his business career, which took him from the security of his upper-class Greenwich, Connecticut, world (and his bride from the nearby comfortable New York suburb of Rye) to the wilds of West Texas to learn the oil business, you get a woman who moved twenty-nine times in her forty-four years of marriage—and coped all the way.
Like Edith Roosevelt, Mrs. Bush has always been an impeccable hostess, who enjoys meeting new people and is unfazed by cultural and generational gaps. She especially liked George’s tour as UN. ambassador in New York City, where entertaining and diplomacy were closely intertwined. “I’d pay to have this job,” she told one reporter. In Beijing during George’s ambassadorship, she made a mighty effort to learn Chinese at the age of fifty so she could communicate with her hosts.
Pertinent as all this diplomacy undoubtedly was as a warm-up for the White House, it pales beside Mrs. Bush’s toils during her eight years as the vice president’s wife. She hosted a staggering 1,192 events at the handsome vice president’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue and attended another 1,132 as a guest, frequently the guest of honor. She and George traveled to sixty-eight countries and four territories, racking up 1,330,000 miles on Air Force Two—the equivalent of fifty-four times around the world. By the time the Bushes reached the White House in 1989, they had met almost every political leader on the globe.
Barbara Bush proves she is a First Lady for all seasons, tossing out the first ball for the Texas Rangers. (AP / Wide World Photos)
This virtual on-the-job training may explain why Barbara Bush was probably our most unflappable First Lady. When reporters spotted her in slippers and bathrobe walking her dog, Millie, outside the family’s Kennebunkport, Maine, compound, she struck them dumb with a terse “Haven’t you ever seen an old lady walk a dog before?” Once Millie ran into the vice presidential residence with a saliva-drenched tennis ball in her mouth and tried to present it to Australian Prime Minister Robert Hawke. Mrs. Bush “gave her a clean one in honor of the PM,” and the meeting continued as if nothing had happened. During her first months in the White House, she coped without blanching when her supersociable husband invited twenty people for dinner on two hours’ notice and upped the count to forty the following night with the same amount of warning.
Some people have dismissed Barbara Bush’s smiling serenity as a dividend of a privileged, affluent life. They could not be more wrong. She has come through one of the most awful ordeals a mother can face in this world—the loss of a child. Her first daughter, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953 at the age of four. That was when Barbara’s hair turned prematurely gray. She sank into a depression in which, she “felt as if I could cry forever.” She credits George Bush’s optimism and energy and love for pulling her out of it.
Well before she got to the White House, Barbara Bush had decided to make children the focus of any cause she would adopt as First Lady. She soon refined this decision to focus on literacy and reading, partly because one of her sons had been dyslexic and she had seen firsthand the problems that a reading difficulty can cause. As the vice president’s wife, she attended or hosted 538 events related to literacy. As First Lady, with money from her bestselling book about (or, as it said on the cover, “by”) Millie, she created the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, which disbursed her royalties to institutions and experts involved in the fight to improve America’s reading skills.
Beyond literacy, Barbara Bush found time as First Lady to promote volunteerism in general. In Robin’s memory she had long made a point of visiting hospitals to bring chronically ill children gifts and hugs at Christmastime. As First Lady she put on an apron in a mobile soup kitchen and took valentines to patients at a Washington old-age home. At an assembly in a de facto segregated Washington, D.C., school during Black History Month, she delighted the students by singing from memory all eight verses of “We Shall Overcome.”
The Bushes liked living in the White House, in part for the historical setting. Mrs. Bush told me she particularly loved dining off the forty varieties of china now in the mansion’s collection. She and George would kid about eating off Grover Cleveland for lunch and Abe Lincoln for dinner. She found she could wave to George in his Oval Office from her own office in the southwest corner of the East Wing—and she made sure he glanced up from his desk now and then to respond to her high sign.
Another reason why they enjoyed the old place was the First Lady’s no-nonsense management style. When Nancy Reagan advised her not to let her children live in the White House, Barbara Bush crisply replied: “Don’t worry. I haven’t invited them.” When grandchildren came to visit, there were no Amy Carter-like appearances at state dinners. The kids dined separately and undoubtedly had a much better time. They saw enough of the White House to say “I was there,” but they never upstaged the adults. I am heartily in favor of this style of grandparenting.
On Mrs. Bush’s side of the White House, things went so smoothly, it is hard to find anyth
ing that can be called a crisis. Perhaps the closest to one was the Wellesley flap, when a cadre of students at that eminent college protested the First Lady as their commencement speaker, because she had supposedly never accomplished anything as an independent woman. At the commencement, Barbara Bush replied for the millions of American women who have devoted their lives to husbands and children and volunteer work. She praised careers for women but ably defended those who chose to stay home and raise their children. It was, as one reporter said, “a job Wellesley done.”
Most of the time, Mrs. Bush’s profile as a political partner remained so low, it was practically invisible. But many people gave her credit for nudging George Bush’s agenda toward a more caring administration. As someone else put it, she carried “the banner of compassion” in a presidency that was largely preoccupied with foreign affairs, from the invasion of Panama to the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Gulf War. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that Barbara Bush was sending the public the signals they wanted to hear from George. Honesty compels me to add that when I interviewed Mrs. Bush for this book, she vehemently rejected this description of her role, saying George Bush did not need anyone, including his spouse, to make him more compassionate.
Nevertheless, the presidential election of 1992 was fought almost entirely on domestic issues. It was a tribute to—but also a liability of—Barbara Bush’s determinedly nonpolitical style that in the final year of her husband’s presidency, when his poll numbers began to sink, she remained at a stratospheric eighty percent approval rating with the American public. Another poll found her to be the world’s most admired woman. But she was unable to transfer an iota of her amazing popularity to her husband.
Maybe that is a tribute to the good sense of the American people. For all the power and importance of First Ladies, nowhere in this book will you find me suggesting they should be on the ballot. The President is the man who is elected to the world’s greatest political office. The buck will always stop in the West Wing of the White House, not in the East Wing.
First Ladies Page 33