First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  The fusillades about the First Lady as a political partner have tended to obscure Hillary’s role as President Clinton’s wife. In December 1993, the nation got a stark reminder of this reality, when Mrs. Clinton demonstrated anew her readiness to defend the President’s conduct and affirm her devotion to him. In a unique Christmas season press conference, Hillary denounced charges by Arkansas state troopers that they had regularly procured women for Bill Clinton while he was governor. Intermingled with her anger was an almost plaintive plea for the press to drop this unpleasant subject once and for all. “It hurts,” she said. “Even though you’re a public figure, which means apparently in America anybody can say anything about you. Even public figures have feelings and families and reputations.”

  One of the best comments on the First Lady’s request for a moratorium on the President’s sex life came from a Washington, DC, psychologist. In biting terms, he noted that adultery occurs in at least fifty percent of American marriages, according to recent studies. The Clintons have been struggling to present themselves to the American people as a couple who have survived an adulterous episode in their marriage. But the press and public refuse to let them testify to this achievement because it upsets the primitive, idealized ideas that people have about First Families. Sadly, the adversaries who promote these sexual smears profit from this widespread mind-set—forcing both Clintons to fall back to defensive, angry denials.

  Here, and elsewhere, I do not think this First Lady has received adequate credit for the way she has worked at traditional White House roles. At considerable cost in emotional stress, she was trying to protect her husband and her family from gutter tactics in the same way that Frances Cleveland responded to the fake journalism of her day. She was acting out of her deepest instincts as a woman, exactly as Edith Wilson did when she told Woodrow Wilson she would stand by him, not for duty, not for honor, but for love.

  I saw further evidence of a traditional First Lady when I asked Hillary how their daughter, Chelsea, was coping with the White House. Her face came aglow, the bitterness that tinged many of her comments about her political struggles vanished. “She’s a happy teenager, I think,”’ she said, playfully rapping the table, as any wise mother of a teenager would do after making such a claim. “She comes and goes pretty much as she pleases, she has wonderful friends. We’ve kept the press out of her life.”

  With just a touch of ruefulness, the First Lady added: “That may be our only achievement so far.”

  Mrs. Clinton has also struggled to take charge of the White House and put her personal stamp on it. Here, too, she talked of difficulties, but they were less harrowing than her political travails. “Just finding your way around this house and knowing what is done, what’s always been done, takes months,” she said. “It was July of the first year when someone told me: ‘You have to pick out a Christmas card by next week or we won’t get it out.’ I wish I’d known a little more about how things worked. We could have gotten up to speed a lot faster.”

  One sign of getting up to speed was a decision many other First Ladies might have hesitated to make—Mrs. Clinton fired the White House chef. She replaced the French-born incumbent, Pierre Chambertin, with a modernist American, Walter Scheib III, who specializes in “light” cuisine—a minimum of butter and rich sauces. When asked about the change, the President said he knew nothing about it. “I read it in the paper,” he said, suggesting that, in some matters, the Clintons have an Eisenhower-like division of responsibility. Some people have speculated that getting rid of Chambertin and his rich sauces was a stealth attack on Bill’s waistline. But I think it was largely an attempt to bring the White House in line with the ideas of Mrs. Clinton and her generation about healthy eating.

  Chef Scheib and the First Lady teamed up for a resoundingly successful first state dinner for the Emperor and Empress of Japan in June 1994. Hillary decided to have it on the White House lawn, partly because the Emperor’s father, Hirohito, had been entertained there in 1976. It was a brilliant idea, though a risky one—Washington can be very hot in June. But the First Lady equipped the huge white tent with air conditioners and hoped for the best. By 9:00 P.M., when the guests sat down to dine, there was a cool breeze and not a drop of perspiration in sight.

  Since that big show, Mrs. Clinton has given state dinners for Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. “I like working on these dinners,” Hillary told me. “I worry about the flowers, the menus, about everything you have to do to make them beautiful.”

  Hillary has also played the role of presidential protector in the style of previous First Ladies such as Lady Bird Johnson and Bess Truman. Bill Clinton has a tendency to work into the dawn. Hillary frequently urges her President to take time off to golf. Also, “Every so often, we put a moratorium on [political] talk,” she told me. “We say: no more. Let’s play cards, go for a walk, go bowling—do something different.”

  Mrs. Clinton says she and Bill try to go out one night a weekend with friends, or invite friends to the White House to watch a movie in the mansion’s theater. Bill has undertaken to teach Hillary how to bowl on the White House alley. She has an atrocious hook he is trying to correct.

  Mrs. Clinton told me the White House experience has been “pretty positive” for the Clinton marriage. “As one of my friends says, it’s like living over the store,” she said. “We see each other during the day—and we have dinner nearly every night with Chelsea.”

  She paused for a moment and said one of the most profound—and touching—things I have heard from any First Lady: “It’s more than being a political partner. I don’t think there’s any job like it in the world. You have to be a partner in the fullest sense of the word—someone who’s trying to support the President in a personal way that’s not available to him elsewhere.”

  On another traditional track, the First Lady has won high marks for her redecoration of the White House’s private quarters. Typically, Mrs. Clinton read every book on the history of the mansion she could find before embarking on the project, which she knew could be politically explosive. The results show a side of this “now” couple that does not often come across in the heat of their political battles: their love of the American past. If it is true, as some psychologists maintain, that a woman reveals a lot of her personality when she decorates a room, Mrs. Clinton’s changes suggest that behind her cool facade lurk a lot of strong feelings.

  In the second-floor Lincoln Sitting Room, for instance, the First Lady replaced the subdued beige and rust color scheme the Reagans and Bushes had preferred with an array of more robust colors. Burgundy draperies with gilt decorations frame the two windows. The walls have been “ragged” in cream, and the window frames, chair rails, and cornices painted gold. The ceiling has been covered with a bold coffer-patterned paper. The red, green, and gold “Scotch” rug is a Smithsonian reproduction of a nineteenth-century American favorite.

  For the Treaty Room, which President Clinton and several predecessors have used as an upstairs office, Mrs. Clinton decided to echo the days in the nineteenth century when it was used as the Cabinet Room. She added inlaid walnut bookcases and chairs upholstered in dark red fabric, ornamented with gold Napoleonic laurel wreaths. New draperies in vibrant red and blue complement vinyl wallpaper simulating red leather.

  It cheered me to see Hillary Clinton enjoying the traditional side of the First Lady’s role. I suspect she is discovering there are a lot of satisfactions in it that often elude the practitioner of hardball politics. But she is not about to abandon her political partnership with Bill Clinton. She made very clear to me her intention to continue the fight for health care. She pointed out that Harry S Truman introduced health-care legislation in every session of Congress while he was President. “If we had done what President Truman wanted us to do back then, we would be a lot better off, both financially and in our ability to provide every American with health care,” she said. “We’ve been struggling with this issue for fifty years. We’re goi
ng to keep on trying to get it done.”

  I asked Hillary if she had ever considered running for public office after Bill Clinton left the White House. She shook her head and said: “I’m just trying to get through this experience, one day at a time.”

  Then she added some words that could become a guideline, of sorts, for American women. “I think women’s role in politics will continue to grow,” she told me. “I don’t hold with the idea that women are better than men in public life, but most women bring different experiences into the public arena. I hope in the years to come not only will more women participate but women will try to change the content of politics so we will be more focused on what we can do for children, for instance, and win more support for families.”

  I left the White House with the feeling that I had talked to a First Lady who was growing as a woman and as a politician. I am confident Hillary Rodham Clinton will continue to do her very best to make a contribution to our American journey, in the White House or out of it.

  Chapter 24

  —

  IS THERE LIFE

  AFTER THE

  WHITE HOUSE?

  THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IS AN EMPHATIC YES. A REMARKABLE number of First Ladies have had interesting and sometimes dramatic lives after they and their husbands retired from the presidency. Martha Washington, whose tenure preceded the move to the District of Columbia, expressed a sentiment many of her successors would share when she and George returned to Mount Vernon in 1797. “The General and I feel like children just released from school,” she told one close friend.

  But—another leitmotiv in the lives of many First Ladies—politics proved difficult to escape. The country almost went to war with France in 1798, and Washington found himself drafted as general in chief of a largely paper army, which nonetheless required backbreaking correspondence and ticklish diplomacy as old friends quarreled over appointments for themselves and their relatives. After the briefest of illnesses, George died at the end of the following year, leaving Martha inconsolable.

  She remained the most famous woman in America and continued to entertain a stream of VIP visitors at Mount Vernon. She also remained a devoted friend to her successor, Abigail Adams. When Abigail moved into the unfinished White House in 1800, Martha sent her some venison, an invitation to Mount Vernon, and her love. After the Adamses lost the presidential election of 1800, Martha dropped her nonpolitical pose and startled some of her visitors by condemning President Thomas Jefferson and his embryo Democrats as national menaces.

  Before she died in 1802, Martha demonstrated a very First Ladyish determination to preserve her privacy. She burned all of George’s letters to her—an example my mother would imitate, without any need for a prior model. I can still hear my father saying: “Bess, think of history,” and Mother replying “I am”—and throwing another letter on the fire. George was not around to say this to Martha, but I have a feeling he might have objected in the same pro forma way, and gotten the same answer.

  Julia Tyler was one First Lady who played major-league politics after she left the White House. The advent of the Civil War catapulted Julia and her husband back into the national limelight. John Tyler was part of a 132-member “Peace Convention” that the politicians assembled in Washington, D.C., in February 1861 to see if some sort of compromise between North and South could be worked out before the guns began to boom. As an ex-President, Tyler had considerable prestige, and he conferred repeatedly with the lame-duck President, James Buchanan, while Julia wrote confident letters in all directions, assuring everyone that peace could be preserved.

  From her suite at Brown’s Hotel, Julia sallied forth to a round of parties, receptions, dinners, and balls. As one historian put it, “Washingtonians made one last effort to drown the throb of martial drums in a sea of alcohol and the swish-swish of dancing slippers.” Julia was in her element and cut a stylish swath through the capital. Meanwhile, John Tyler was elected president of the Peace Convention and made a long speech urging compromise. The floundering Buchanan was so grateful, he called on Julia and her husband to thank them personally—a coup which left social Washington gasping.

  It soon became apparent to many people that both Tylers were playing a very subtle game. While talking compromise, Tyler was secretly supporting resolutions within the Peace Convention that would have made the South a nation within the nation, with the power to veto all federal appointments within its borders and the right to secede from the Union whenever it pleased. Julia wrote candidly to her mother that she and the ex-President were basically playing for time, to give Virginia a chance to organize its defenses before seceding—and to persuade the border states of Tennessee, Maryland, and Kentucky to join her. “Very likely she [Virginia] will be able to draw off, which would be glorious, a couple of Northern states,” she added. This ex-First Lady had become a secret agent for the Confederacy!

  All these high-flying schemes came crashing to the ground when the President-elect, Abraham Lincoln, arrived in Washington and made it clear that he intended to enforce the U.S. Constitution in every part of the tottering union, and he was prepared to accept the South’s challenge to open warfare to make good on his vow. John and Julia Tyler retreated to Richmond, where he made a speech calling for Virginia’s immediate secession.

  The next years proved to be anything but romantic for this quintessential glamour girl. John Tyler died in 1862 while war raged around their plantation, Sherwood Forest. Julia finally fled the carnage for the shelter of her mother’s house on New York’s Staten Island. But after the war she proved that the flair she had displayed as First Lady was no fluke.

  With determination and guile, Julia regained ravaged Sherwood Forest and kept it going through Reconstruction and the depression of the 1870s, which wiped out much of the Gardiners’ Northern fortune. She somehow managed to raise and educate seven children in the bargain—and demonstrated a positive genius for getting them government jobs, though they remained unreconstructed Democrats while the Republicans ruled the White House and Washington. In the late 1870s, she capped her career with a five-year campaign to win a federal pension for herself and other widows of Presidents.

  Julia Dent Grant also remained immersed in politics for a while. Her post-White House years began with an absolutely fabulous world tour. Taking advantage of the fact that Ulysses S. Grant remained the most famous American of his time, Julia and a covey of Republican political bosses designed the trip as a covert bid for a third term. A small army of aides, servants, and reporters followed Ulysses and his First Lady for twenty-eight months, as they promenaded from London to Egypt to St. Petersburg to Tokyo, with innumerable stops in between. They dined with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle and conferred with Pope Leo XIII in the Vatican. Their other hosts included Prince Otto von Bismarck, the famed “Iron Chancellor” of Germany, the Emperors of Austria and Japan, and the Czar of Russia. American newspapers were filled with drawings and stories of the Grants’ royal progress.

  The General maintained he was indifferent to whether he spent another four years in the White House. Not so Julia, who exuded the sort of determination that suggests she might have conquered the South more swiftly than her husband, if Lincoln had made her a general. On the eve of the 1880 Republican convention, Grant wrote a letter of withdrawal and gave it to his backers in case they needed it to provide him with a dignified exit. Julia exploded and ordered them “not to use that letter.” She thereby set the stage for one of the forgotten dramas in the history of American politics, the die-hard stand of the Old Guard Republicans around their favorite candidate.

  Julia urged Grant to do the unorthodox—go to the convention floor, where his fame would sweep the delegates into a stampede in his favor. Grant refused. In those days, it was considered undignified for candidates to admit they wanted to be President before they were nominated. The General was adamant in his refusal to go “hat in hand” to the convention and beg for the nomination. Julia regarded this as “mistaken chivalry” and
urged him “for heavens sake to go—and go tonight.”

  The flabbergasted Grant, who knew his wife was headstrong at times, could only murmur: “Julia, I am amazed at you.” He was probably more amazed to discover she was right. Grant led on the first thirty-five ballots, but he remained sixty-six votes short of the needed two-thirds majority for the nomination. The liberal Republicans finally coalesced around a personable vacuum named James Garfield, who Grant thought “had the backbone of an angleworm.” Forbidden by Julia to withdraw, the Old Guard grimly cast their 306 votes for the General to the bitter end, leaving the Republican Party seriously fractured. The fissure widened after Garfield’s assassination in 1881, enabling Grover Cleveland to win the White House in 1884 and restore the Democratic Party to respectability.

  The widowed Edith Roosevelt remained aloof from politics until another Roosevelt reached the White House in 1933. Edith did not think much of Cousin Franklin. Any time a Republican newspaper wanted a blast against FDR, she was ready to supply it. She made headlines with her appearance at a Republican rally in Madison Square Garden in 1932. FDR, no slouch at this sort of game, wooed Edith’s easygoing son Archie and was soon entertaining him aboard the presidential yacht. When someone asked Edith for an explanation, she said Archie had been seduced “because his mother wasn’t there.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt’s involvement in politics scarcely missed a beat after she left the White House. My father recognized her immense value as a symbol of America’s global commitment to democracy and appointed her a delegate to the United Nations eight months after FDR’s death. There she became a primary spokesperson for one of her favorite causes, human rights. Many people regard her as the guiding force behind the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which to this day enables the UN. to act on behalf of oppressed and deprived peoples.