by Mike Wallace
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ington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Pretty strong company, to be sure, but in my view, Franklin D. Roosevelt deserves his place in that pantheon.
For a variety of reasons—the usual combination of red tape, iner-tia, and disagreements that had to be resolved—the memorial was not completed until 1997. The dedication was scheduled for May 2
of that year and, to my utter astonishment, David asked me to serve as master of ceremonies at the event. It was a glorious occasion, a historic milestone if ever there was one, and being invited to take part in it was an honor and a privilege I will always cherish. My only regret is that my parents were no longer around to see their boy Myron up there on the podium with President Clinton and the other big shots as we all paid tribute to the president and First Lady they so revered.
They would have beamed with pride and happiness.
J i m m y a n d Ro s a l y n n C a rt e r M O S T O F T H E F I R S T L A D I E S who followed Eleanor Roosevelt into the White House didn’t exactly follow in her footsteps. Her immediate successors, in particular, chose to revert to the traditional role of modest hostess. Bess Truman had such a retiring personality that her public appearances were confined largely to ceremonial functions that she felt obliged to attend, and she steadfastly refused to be drawn into discussions about policy issues or political disputes.
She left all that to Harry. Mamie Eisenhower was cut from similar cloth; after all, she had spent most of her adult life in a military culture, where the wives of officers were expected to know their subservient place. Jackie Kennedy, it’s true, had a far more visible
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presence and was widely admired for her beauty and elegance and aesthetic sensibility. But the impact she had was almost entirely in style and tone (all that preening over Camelot); she, too, shied away from political conflicts and other quarrelsome matters. Lady Bird Johnson’s grand passion was her beautification program, and although her husband offered lip-service support to her efforts in that area, sprucing up the nation’s parks and highways was hardly a top priority on LBJ’s ambitious agenda for a Great Society, as he demonstrated on those rambunctious rides around his ranch.
In contrast to those examples (and others like them), we have the two-term reign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, by any conceivable measure, must be regarded as the most independent and politically active First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. Among other distinctions, Mrs. Clinton was the first presidential wife who came of age during the women’s movement, and she brought a keen feminist edge into the arena of a national election. Along with other controversial remarks she made in the course of her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton described herself as the kind of wife who would not be content to stay home and “bake cookies.” Such assertive candor was applauded by many Americans—especially women of her own generation—but many others were turned off by what they considered her pushy and arrogant attitude. As a result, she became as polarizing a figure in our politics as Eleanor Roosevelt had been, and she would continue to attract a steady barrage of both kudos and brickbats throughout her years in the White House.
But there was no denying her independence and professional status. Hillary Clinton came to Washington from a flourishing career as a lawyer, and no other First Lady ever brought to the post such impressive credentials. Like her husband, she was an indefatigable policy wonk, and from the moment she moved into the White House,
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she devoted her time and considerable energy to a variety of pet issues, from health care reform to equality for women and children’s rights.
Mrs. Clinton had another distinction that set her apart from her predecessors, though she would no doubt prefer that it not be cited.
She became the first First Lady to go through a long siege of exposure about her husband’s sexual peccadilloes, most notably the hanky-panky with Monica Lewinsky that led to his being impeached—
though not convicted—by Congress. Yet for Hillary Clinton, that scandal may have been a subtle blessing. As millions of Americans came to appreciate that even a tough lady can be wronged, she began to attract more sympathy and support than she had ever enjoyed before, and that helped to give her the boost she needed to pursue her own political ambitions. While still serving in the White House, she launched a campaign for major public office, a bold and radical step that no other First Lady—not even Eleanor Roosevelt—had dared to take. And following her 2000 election to the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton became the first former First Lady to be seriously touted as a future candidate for president.
Among the other First Ladies who have served during my lifetime, Rosalynn Carter is the one I would single out who came the closest to Eleanor Roosevelt’s and Hillary Clinton’s political activism.
I didn’t meet the Carters until March 1985, when I visited them in Plains, their small hometown in rural Georgia, and by then, four years had passed since they’d left the White House. During their time in Washington, most of my journalistic focus had been on the Middle East and on investigative pieces that exposed con men and other rogues. Hence, I never got around to doing a story on any aspect of the Carter administration. Nevertheless, I had been intrigued by Jimmy Carter’s unexpected rise to power. Unlike Lyndon Johnson,
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he was from the Deep South—the heart of the Old Confederacy—
and until he made his triumphant 1976 run, I had shared the conventional wisdom that no politician from that region could ever be elected president. Carter managed to turn that time-honored maxim on its head, and that struck me as some kind of political miracle.
Yet the time was ripe for such a miracle. In 1976 millions of Americans were yearning for a change in political leadership, and one that went beyond the periodic shift in power from one party to another. The four presidents who had preceded Carter—Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford—had cut their political teeth on Capitol Hill and had used their seats in Congress as springboards to national office. To varying degrees, they were all creatures of the Washington establishment, the power elite, and it was generally assumed that without such inside-the-Beltway status, one could not hope to make a successful run for the White House.
But by 1976, Washington politicians had lost their luster, to put it mildly. Thanks to the double whammy of our ignominious failure in Vietnam, a disaster that drove a president out of office, and the Watergate scandal, which forced another to resign in disgrace, many Americans had become convinced that what was desperately needed in the White House was fresh leadership from someone who had not been tainted by the corruption and cynicism of the Washington power game. From the moment he announced his candidacy, Jimmy Carter brilliantly exploited that discontent. He presented himself as a rank outsider—a simple, no-frills peanut farmer with a “just folks”
personality—and he built his campaign around the modest promise that he would never “lie to the American people.” Because his down-home approach struck such a responsive chord, he became the first governor since FDR to capture the White House.
I was also intrigued by Rosalynn Carter and her determination to
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take on a prominent role in her husband’s presidency. She, too, asserted herself in ways that broke with tradition. Until she came along, no First Lady ever had the temerity to attend cabinet meetings, but with her husband’s blessing, Mrs. Carter occasionally sat in on them. She also represented the president at ceremonial events and even served as his official emissary on a diplomatic visit to seven countries in Latin America. In her tone and manner, Rosalynn Carter came across as a typically gracious southern belle; her voice was as soft and sweet as warm molasses. But beneath that mellow surface, she could be as hard as nails, and the Washington press corps routinely referred to h
er as “the Steel Magnolia.” In viewing Mrs. Carter from a distance, I didn’t see her that way. In fact, I found her to be most attractive and appealing.
The skill and success that Jimmy Carter brought to the campaign trail in 1976 did not carry over into the White House, in large part because he had the misfortune to be president during a deeply troubled time in our history. Thanks mainly to the dislocations set in mo-tionby the Arab oil boycott of the mid-1970s, he had to contend with soaring inflation and other economic woes. And during the last year of his presidency, he struggled invainto bring anend to the hostage crisis in Iran. Carter’s problems on the economic front and his failure to resolve the hostage crisis made him a vulnerable target whenhe ranfor reelectionin1980, and he was soundly trounced by his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan. Four years later, Reagan succeeded where Carter had failed and easily won his bid for a second term.
President Reagan’s landslide victory in the fall of 1984 was still fresh in everyone’s minds when I flew down to Georgia the following March to interview the Carters for a 60 Minutes story that we called
“Plain Talk from Plains.” When I sat down with the former president,
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I promptly referred to the man who had ousted him from the White House.
W A L L A C E : You must be very jealous, ina sense, of Ronald Reagan.
C A R T E R : Not really.
W A L L A C E : Jealous of the fact that he is— I mean, if his is the
“Teflon presidency,” nothing sticks—
C A R T E R : Mine was the opposite.
W A L L A C E : Yours was the “flypaper presidency.”
C A R T E R : I think that’s true. When I was there, there was no doubt who was responsible. I was responsible. And now there is a great deal of doubt about who’s responsible, and Reagan has been extremely successful, more than any of his thirty-nine predecessors, in not being responsible for anything that’s unpleasant or not completely successful.
W A L L A C E : How does he manage that, Mr. President?
C A R T E R : Well, he’s blamed me for his two-hundred-billion-dollar deficits. He’s blamed me and Ford and Nixon for his lack of understanding of the Lebanon crisis, saying that this intelligence network was not adequate for him. He’s blamed the Congress for his withdrawal of the marines from Lebanon under, you know, very damaging circumstances, and—and he has never accepted responsibility for lack of progress in Middle East peace or a lack of progress on alleviating the problems of the poor and so forth. . . .
Throughout our interview, the former president kept coming back to what he regarded as Reagan’s lack of moral leadership in foreign policy, and that led to the following exchange.
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W A L L A C E : You think we’re closer to war today than we should be?
C A R T E R : I think we have let the world know that our country is no longer the foremost proponent or user of negotiations and diplomacy, and that our country’s first reaction to a troubled area on earth is to try to inject American military forces or threats as our nation’s policy.
W A L L A C E : Human rights under Ronald Reagan.
C A R T E R : Well, Reagan has basically abandoned our nation’s commitment to the human rights policy that we espoused.
W A L L A C E : Why? Because he’s a callous man?
C A R T E R : I don’t know what his motivations are, but the result has been that the world now sees our country as not being a champion of human rights, but as being dormant, at best, in the face of persecution.
The plain talk in Plains became even more pungent when I interviewed Rosalynn Carter. On the subject of Reagan, she was even more critical than her husband had been.
M R S . C A R T E R : I think this president makes us comfortable with our prejudices.
W A L L A C E : That’s not very nice, what you’re saying.
M R S . C A R T E R : But it’s the way I feel, and I think it’s true. . . .
I think he’s been devastating to the country and—
W A L L A C E : How? How has he devastated the country?
M R S . C A R T E R : Well, I wouldn’t trade places with him in history, with Jimmy and Ronald Reagan, for anything in the world.
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As she spoke, her face was clenched in anger. She obviously despised Ronald Reagan, and to judge from her frosty response to my presence, she didn’t care much for me, either. (Perhaps she’d heard that Nancy Reagan was a friend of mine.) Whatever the case, on that day Rosalynn Carter was pure steel; the magnolia facade had disappeared. But that was not my last encounter with the former First Lady, and the next few times I saw her, the context had nothing to do with partisan politics.
At the time of my 1985 visit to Plains, I was recovering from a severe bout of clinical depression. Thanks to a wise and caring psychiatrist and the medication he prescribed, I was able to break out of that terrible darkness. I’ll be writing more on that episode in a later chapter, but for the moment let me just say that for years afterward I didn’t tell many people about my affliction. Except for my doctor and family and two very close friends, nobody knew what a painful ordeal I had gone through. And there was a reason for such reticence; given my fishbowl line of work and my reputation for being a tough and abrasive reporter, I was ashamed to be identified as the sort of “pathetic wimp” who had suffered from depression. For that, I knew, was the popular (though completely erroneous) perception of the disease.
But as time passed, I gradually came around to the view that if I talked about my experience in public, it just might help others come to a better and more accurate understanding of depression. Thus, for the past ten years or so, I’ve done just that, on Larry King’s television show and similar interview programs, as well as at other public forums. Though I’ve resisted the various efforts to depict me as a poster boy for depression, I have agreed to speak at occasional fund-raising events, and it was at these fund-raisers that I began running into Rosalynn Carter. As I soon learned, she has been vigorously engaged in programs to eradicate the stigma attached to depression and simi-
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lar afflictions ever since her years in the White House, when she served as the honorary chairperson of the president’s Commission on Mental Health.
I should point out that her dedication to helping the less fortunate is a moral imperative she shares with her husband, who is living testament to the belief that presidents can go on to serve their country with impressive distinction even after they’re voted out of office.
In fact, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have been such paragon role models that they may have set the gold standard for conduct and achievements by former first families. Since leaving Washington, the ex-president has been in the forefront of the vigilant effort to assure honest elections in emerging democracies around the globe, and that is only part of his larger commitment to the cause of human rights. In addition, he has brought his own hammer-and-nails labor to the task of building habitats for humanity.
As for the commitment I shared with Mrs. Carter to combat the ordeal of depression and other threats to mental health, I must say that the more we saw of each other, the warmer and more cordial our relationship became. The last time our paths crossed was at a fund-raiser in Atlanta. In what can only be regarded as an eerie, even morbid coincidence, two of the best friends I’ve ever had—Art Buchwald and William Styron—were stricken with depression around the same time that I was. Their ordeals were just as harrowing as mine, and because Art and Bill and I enjoy a certain celebrity status, we’re sometimes asked to appear together at fund-raising events as a kind of depression team or trio, and that was what the three of us were doing in Atlanta in the spring of 2004. By then we had begun to bill ourselves as “the Blues Brothers.” That, I grant you, is not the most clever pun ever coined, but it d
id help to attract attention. About eight hundred donors showed up that night to hear us relate our tales
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of woe, and as we walked out on the stage, I spotted Rosalynn Carter sitting in the front row. I still find her attractive, so I waved to her and said, “Hi, good-looking.” She rewarded me with a radiant smile: On that occasion, she was all magnolia.
Ro n a l d a n d N a n c y R e a g a n W H I L E R O S A L Y N N C A R T E R W A S A relatively new friend, the woman who succeeded her as First Lady was a dear old friend. In fact, I’m certain I was the only working journalist who could boast that I had known Nancy Reagan longer than her husband had.
Throughout most of the 1940s, when I was in the early phase of my career in broadcasting, I had lived and worked in Chicago, where I jumped around quite a bit from one radio job to another.
One of my regular assignments was to announce and narrate programs at the CBS station WBBM, and there I was befriended by an actress named Edie Davis, who performed on various network soap operas that originated from WBBM. She was not only talented but versatile; on one show called Betty and Bob, Edie played both the society grande dame and the black maid Gardenia. And though she was old enough to be my mother—I was then twenty-four and she was forty-six—we became close pals. Edie was gregarious and high-spirited and, at the time, the bawdiest woman I had ever met. I frequently ran into her in the station’s green room, where we all gravitated for coffee and gossip, and invariably, she would greet me with some choice obscenity and then proceed to relate, with lip-smacking glee, the latest dirty joke she had heard. She was a pip, and since I was a new kid on the block of big-time broadcasting and