I had never thought about lighting, either, until Merv told me mine was awful. “Every Hollywood star always worries about their lighting,” he said. So we went out and hired a superb lighting director named Chuck Lofthouse and from then on I have had lighting from the floor shining up at me—or directly at me—rather than shining down. Good for all of us, even in our living rooms, to remember.
Though I may have come late to what many in television enjoy today, like having their own lighting directors, I’ve had a fantastic run, and to think I get paid for having fun! Well, the Specials do take work but I’ve laughed a lot with every comedian from Bob Hope and George Burns to David Letterman and Robin Williams. I’ve danced a lot with such varied partners as Bing Crosby, Patrick Swayze, and Al Pacino. I’ve baked cookies with Martha Stewart, ridden on an elephant with Jimmy Stewart, flown on a helicopter piloted by King Hussein, and sped through streets on a motorcycle driven by Sylvester Stallone, while wearing his leather jacket. The cookies crumbled. I don’t get to ride too many elephants, and I’m not crazy about motorcycles. But I still have the leather jacket.
Presidents and First Ladies: Forty Years Inside the White House
NOW I WILL BRAG a little. I have interviewed, at least once, every U.S. president (and first lady) since Richard Nixon, up to and including the current president, George W. Bush. So here now, various impressions blended by time and modified by the events of history, with some special moments that have remained in my head all these years. And, by the way, in some cases, I found the first ladies more interesting than their husbands.
As I said, I never did a formal interview with Lyndon Johnson, although we had occasion to meet several times. What particularly struck me when we did meet was that he, who was outgoing and gregarious in private, had so much trouble communicating with the American people. In part this was because he never became comfortable with the teleprompter attached to the cameras. He seemed stilted and cautiously afraid of losing his place. We talked about this one time, and President Johnson asked if I had any advice to give him. I said that it was important to be very familiar with what you were going to say so that if you lost your place, you could ad-lib until the prompter caught up with you. Also I told him that unless you were really comfortable with the prompter, you should not stray from your script, as you would most likely lose your next lines. (This is good advice, by the way, for anyone using a teleprompter.) My suggestions were probably the same as he got from others, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. With his glasses perched on his nose, staring stony faced into the camera, he came across as awkward and ill at ease, not at all the way he was in person.
I knew Mrs. Johnson better. Like her husband she was warm and easy to talk with one-on-one, but these qualities also seemed to disappear when she had to give speeches or make public appearances. I did several interviews with Mrs. Johnson. The first time I angered some of her friends when I raised the question of her husband’s predilection for attractive women. I felt I had to ask because the rumors persistently swirled around him. I tried to couch the question by putting the blame on others, as in “Mrs. Johnson, many people wonder, etc. etc.” If Mrs. Johnson was upset by the question, she certainly didn’t show it. Answering serenely, she said: “Lyndon loves people and 50 percent of those people are women.” Great answer. But my question was considered so impertinent that some years later when I was at a dinner in New York, a great friend of Mrs. Johnson’s, when we were introduced, refused to shake my hand. I remember feeling as if I had been slapped in the face, but I understood her reaction. To her I was one more of those pushy, rude journalists. Maybe I was.
In another interview, this one in Austin, Texas, many years after her husband’s death, Mrs. Johnson talked about the fact that during their marriage, she practically waited on her husband hand and foot and never minded when he bellowed, “Bird, get in here!” She told me, “It was a different world then. That was your husband. You lived his life, pretty much. You had your own life, yes, but many things you put on the shelf and many things I have done since his departure were on that shelf.”
Mrs. Johnson was so wise that I have often thought that if this were now, rather than then, she might have run successfully for political office after her husband’s death.
At the end of our last interview, I asked Mrs. Johnson if she ever felt anger or bitterness toward her husband’s detractors. Her reply has stayed with me ever since, and I try myself to live by what she told me: “I am too close to the great departure from life to harbor anger.” Mrs. Johnson died at the age of ninety-four in July of 2007. A much-loved first lady.
I have already written a good deal about Richard Nixon, but Nixon’s two daughters’ paths also crossed mine. There was the elder, blond, reticent Tricia, and the younger, more outgoing brunette, Julie.
In 1971 I reported, along with NBC newsman Edwin Newman, on Tricia’s wedding to lawyer Ed Cox. Tricia, with her demure white wedding gown and long blond hair, looked like Alice in Wonderland, young and innocent. But this is what I really remember about the wedding: The reception was in the White House and at one point, while dancing with her husband, Pat Nixon tried to give him an affectionate hug. The president stiffened and almost seemed to recoil. The following night, we aired the wedding again in a special program, so I had a second chance to see this poignant and telling moment. I wondered what Mrs. Nixon thought when she viewed the wedding footage? I know what I thought. I felt sorry for her and angry at him. Where were his emotions? Was he incapable of publicly showing affection?
Evidently his aides also noticed Nixon’s lack of attention, let alone affection, toward Mrs. Nixon and found it a political liability. Years later, when Nixon’s private archives were turned over to federal control, a telling memorandum surfaced from Roger Ailes, then Nixon’s television adviser, voicing his concern. “From time to time he should talk to her and smile at her,” Ailes wrote. “Women voters are particularly sensitive to how a man treats his wife in public.”
Julie was the Nixon daughter I knew best. We are still occasionally in touch. Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, grandson of President Eisenhower, have a son, Alex, and two daughters, Jennie and Melanie. Jennie has visited me and is the image of her mother.
Not too long after her father’s resignation as president, I was at LaGuardia Airport waiting to board a shuttle for Washington. There I spotted Julie looking lost. She had never in her whole young life had to take a commercial flight by herself and had no idea how to get a ticket or where to board. I helped her, realizing once more how life changes when power and privilege disappear.
After ending his postpresidential retreat in San Clemente, California, President Nixon moved to the East Coast. I saw him now and then at the home of a grande dame named Mildred Hilson. He played the piano at her birthday celebrations. Once he showed me how to make sure that I wasn’t cut out of a photograph. “Put your arm through the arm of the person you are next to and then they can’t cut you out because your arm would still be there.” I have sometimes taken that advice.
In 1976, the year I came to ABC, Gerald Ford, who had never been elected president, or vice president for that matter, lost the election to Jimmy Carter. Shortly after the New Year I sat down with President and Mrs. Ford for what was to be their farewell interview before leaving the White House. What I remember most about that interview was not the president but First Lady Betty Ford. Before the interview began Mrs. Ford took me on a tour of the living quarters of the White House. It was meant to be a charming, personal portion of our visit, but it wasn’t. Mrs. Ford, it turned out, could hardly put a sentence together. She was slurring her words and was obviously inebriated or on drugs or both. Later, when she sat down with her husband to do the actual interview, she had a glass of some pale amber liquid at her side. “Can’t you put that away?” the president asked with both concern and annoyance. Mrs. Ford answered that she really needed a sip or two. We barely directed any questions her way.
When the interv
iew was about to air, I had a decision to make. Should I show the part of the interview in which Mrs. Ford was obviously inebriated, or should I be considerate and humane and delete that section? My executive producer said he would go with whatever decision I wanted to make. It was my interview, my decision.
Well, I was probably a lousy reporter, because I made the decision to omit Mrs. Ford’s slurred voice. We showed the visuals of Mrs. Ford taking us around the rooms, but I did the voice-over description of what we were seeing. If she had a drinking problem, I wasn’t going to be the one to expose her. In retrospect, exposing her problem might have helped her. But at the time I didn’t feel I could add to her obvious despair.
Some years after leaving the White House, a sober and reflective Betty Ford sat down with me again and for the first time publicly discussed her struggle with addiction. She had been on pills to ease back pain and drank to ease the stress of being first lady. Her husband and four children finally confronted her with her condition and explained how devastating it had become for all of them. Grateful but frightened, Mrs. Ford agreed to go into a rehabilitation program at the Long Beach Naval Hospital. We took Mrs. Ford back to that hospital for our interview in 1987. She had not been there since her release. She walked the halls with us and, with tears in her eyes, described her condition before her rehabilitation.
“I couldn’t remember anything,” she confessed. “Telephone calls from one day to the next, plans we had, I wouldn’t remember having heard of them.”
“So if you have physical pain, you take a pill?” I asked. “If you have emotional pain, you take a drink?”
“I used the pills and alcohol to help me cope,” Mrs. Ford said. “It was like an anesthetic.”
Right after New Year’s of 2007, I covered Gerald Ford’s funeral. He had died at the age of ninety-three. All eyes were on his grieving widow. They had been married for fifty-eight years. I remarked then that I thought the lasting legacy of the Fords was Mrs. Ford’s founding of the Betty Ford Center for Alcohol and Drug Abuse. Few people understood the problem of addiction better than she did, and she used that knowledge and influence to help thousands of others. Betty Ford made her own kind of history. But here is my postscript. If I were interviewing a first lady today and she was obviously inebriated, I would certainly air it. Times have changed. My interview with the Fords was thirty years ago. Today we let it all hang out, no matter who it is—and that’s how it should be. We do have the right to know. Too much is already covered up.
Jimmy Carter was elected as this country’s thirty-ninth president one month after I came to ABC. His was the election night I stumbled through with Harry Reasoner.
In addition to talking to Carter for my first Special, I had other opportunities to spend some time with him. Here are two memories. The first was during the Christmas holidays in 1978. The Carters invited my daughter to spend the day and evening with their daughter, Amy, at the White House. It was enormously thoughtful of them. At age eleven Amy was one year older than Jackie. I was not invited. This was to be Jackie’s day, but I could bring her and pick her up after dinner. Jackie had a happy time. She told me she really liked Amy and found her friendly and unspoiled.
There was a party that night for the children of White House employees, and Walter Cronkite had been asked to read A Visit from Saint Nicholas. “’Twas the Night before Christmas,” Walter intoned to the delighted children in that famous mellifluous voice. I was invited to that part of the festivities. When the performance was over and Walter and I were preparing to leave, President Carter asked us to stay for coffee. Walter and I have often laughed at what happened then. Each of us had hoped the president would say something newsworthy that we might use on a broadcast—some pithy kind of a Christmas message. Instead the president took the opportunity to tell us about his hemorrhoids. “Very uncomfortable and painful,” he said. He might have to have an operation. Merry Christmas: I have hemorrhoids.
My last anecdote about Jimmy Carter took place in the Oval Office in January 1981, just weeks before he was to vacate it. Roone Arledge and I, perhaps because we’d had so many encounters with Carter, asked if we could pay him an informal, off-the-record visit. I can’t imagine doing that with a sitting president today, but that’s what we did and Carter, dispirited and depressed, seemed happy to see us. All his negotiations for the release of the American hostages in Iran had proved fruitless, and a U.S. rescue mission, nine months before, had failed miserably. The newspapers, in recapping his presidency, were not only dwelling on the hostages but dredging up his encounter with an angry swamp rabbit some months before while fishing in a lake. The rabbit had attempted to board the president’s small boat (I didn’t know rabbits could swim), and Carter had had to shoo it away with his paddle. It was a silly incident but the report of the “killer rabbit” had been carried on the evening news of all the major television networks, making Carter look very foolish. And here it was being rehashed again.
Roone and I were more interested in the election than in rabbits. When we asked Carter if he blamed the Iranian hostage crisis for his defeat, he said yes, but then surprised us by saying, “That and the Cubans in Florida.” Why the Cubans? Because in 1980 Castro had allowed, and Carter had permitted, the influx of more than 100,000 Cubans, among them convicted felons and psychiatric patients. The Cubans had flooded into south Florida, particularly Miami, overwhelming immigration services and infuriating the resident “Anglos” and African Americans. The economy was in a recession, and the non-Cuban population deeply resented the havoc caused by the influx of refugees and the millions of U.S. tax dollars being spent on them. “It was costly in political popularity,” Carter later admitted in his presidential memoir Keeping Faith. As a result Carter, who had won the state of Florida in 1976, lost it in 1980. But as history has recorded, Carter has become a more admired ex-president than president.
As for Rosalynn Carter, I found her distant and chilly but I applaud her attention, while first lady, to those suffering with the misery of mental illness. She brought about greater understanding and helped millions to seek assistance. It was an important contribution. Congress even passed legislation she had introduced, the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, but it was never implemented by the incoming Reagan administration.
In spite of his great success in negotiating a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, and returning the Panama Canal to its rightful owner, Jimmy Carter never really recovered from the series of crises that plagued his later years in office, not the least of which was the 1979 energy crisis that resulted in gas rationing and long lines at the pumps. In what became known as his “malaise speech,” Carter called on the country to carpool, drive slower, and turn down their thermostats to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. It was a message Americans didn’t want to hear or heed. But, if Jimmy Carter’s presidency ended on a note of despair, his successor, Ronald Reagan, began his presidency on a high note of hope.
When Reagan came into office in 1981, the country entered into a state of near euphoria. No sacrifices were called for with the arrival of good-natured, optimistic Ronnie and his ever-so-stylish wife, Nancy. The American people much preferred this optimistic view of the world.
I had interviewed Reagan as a candidate. He was certainly affable, but I couldn’t help but be struck by his lack of knowledge in specific important areas. For example, there was a lot of talk in the press back then, as now, about Israel achieving peace with all its Arab neighbors by returning the land it had occupied since the 1967 war. Much of the arguing back and forth had to do with an important United Nations Resolution, number 242, which outlined the formula of “land for peace.” But when I questioned Reagan about it, he looked at me blankly. Not a clue.
In the summer of 1980 I reported on the Republican convention in Detroit that nominated Reagan. It was an unusual convention. There was some concern that he might not be a strong enough president and the convention was debating the possibility that Gerald Ford might be chosen as Reagan’
s vice president. As an ex-president, Ford would then have been a kind of copresident, an unprecedented position.
Here is my own sideline experience at the time. I was in a room off the convention floor, doing special reports with Sam Donaldson and columnist George Will. The three of us weren’t anchoring; Frank Reynolds was. Frank would call on us from time to time for special reports or when we had some news. My friend Alan Greenspan, a former adviser to Ford, was also attending the convention in an unofficial capacity. He wasn’t giving me any secret information, but knowing him did give me good access. It looked as if the Ford nomination wasn’t going to happen, and George H. W. Bush’s name was beginning to surface. This was a surprise because Bush had run against Reagan in the primaries and had been quite critical of him.
I knew George Bush fairly well, and I was on the phone with him in the midst of all the speculation about who would be the VP nominee. Suddenly he told me to hold on, that Ronald Reagan was calling him. I shouted to my producer that I was about to get big news and to tell the director to put me on the air instead of just on the phone. But the attempt to do this disrupted the call, and I lost Bush. As I was trying desperately to get him back, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported that she had just heard that George Bush was going to be Reagan’s running mate. Good for Andrea, but I nearly went crazy. I had lost the scoop of the whole convention. At this point George Will looked at me with disdain and said, “It’s only television, Barbara.” Well, although I enjoy listening to George and reading his insightful columns, he has also for many years earned a very good living from “only television.”
The Reagan years, especially during the first term, were a great contrast to the Carter era. Hollywood stars attended the state dinners along with the other guests all gussied up in diamond necklaces and fur coats. The wine flowed. The orchestras played. Except for Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan was the most fashionable first lady we ever had. She was applauded by her friends but criticized by most of the press for her extensive and costly wardrobe. She loved the color red, and her favorite designers were Bill Blass and Adolfo, whose outfits cost thousands of dollars. Mrs. Reagan claimed she paid for them herself, but there were investigations and she didn’t get off the hook until her performance at the Gridiron dinner, an annual roast given by the Washington press corps. I was there when she came onstage looking like a bag lady. Singing special lyrics to a Barbra Streisand song, “Second Hand Rose,” Mrs. Reagan crooned, “I’m wearing secondhand clothes.” She was a smash and had an easier time of things after that.
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