Such breezy, nonintellectual femininity satisfied so well the predominant mood of the 1950s that when Better Homes and Gardens published a series on how to raise children, it suggested Mamie’s background as perfect for producing a First Lady.161 Born in Boone, Iowa, to a couple who quickly accumulated enough money to live comfortably the rest of their lives, Mamie resembled in many ways her Swedish mother, Elivera Carlson Doud, who at age sixteen married a man considerably her senior. Before she was twenty-two, Elivera had borne him four daughters and in many ways acted as a fifth. When the family moved to Denver for the benefit of the health of one of the girls, Elivera made their house on Lafayette Street a gathering place for the neighborhood. The red carpet that lined the front porch steps served as seating for whoever came by and distinguished the rather ordinary structure from others on the street. A staff of four performed all domestic chores while the woman of the house ran around Denver in her Rausch and Lang electric auto, an extravagance that reportedly cost her husband $4,800 in 1910.162
On one of the Doud family’s winter trips to San Antonio, Mamie met young second lieutenant Eisenhower, who came from a family of seven boys and had received none of the pampering that Mamie and her sisters had. Ike had supported one brother through college, then gotten himself an appointment to West Point so that he could attend free. His pacifist mother had overlooked the implications of his going to a military academy, he said, because of her determination to see all her sons through college. Mamie’s parents, who paid no attention to cost, put far less importance on schooling for their daughters, and Mamie stopped after one year of finishing school. That was quite enough, Better Homes and Gardens reminded its readers: “Neither [Mamie’s mother] nor Mamie had attempted to become an intellectual yet both have been outstandingly successful as wives of their well-educated husbands.”163
Partly to preserve her youthful appearance and partly because of poor health, Mamie Eisenhower spent much of her White House day in bed. After being served a tray at 8:00 or 8:30, she sat in her pink bed jacket, a pink ribbon holding back her hair, and went over the day’s schedule with head usher Howell Crim and his assistant, J. B. West.164 Then came sessions with Mary Jane McCaffree, her social secretary, and with the housekeeper, Mabel Walker, a holdover from the Trumans. Mamie spent so much time in bed, one maid reported, that the staff nicknamed her “Sleeping Beauty.”165
For additional rests, Mamie sometimes went off to her mother’s house in Denver or to the Gettysburg farm that the Eisenhowers had bought, the only home they used for any length of time during their entire marriage. To speculation that these trips were really drying-out spells for her alcoholism, Mamie never gave a reply during the White House years, but in 1973, she admitted in an interview that she was aware the stories had circulated. They had begun, she said, because of the effect of a condition, carotid sinus, which put excessive pressure on her inner ear and upset her sense of balance. So severe was the disequilibrium that she was frequently covered with bruises because she collided with objects, but since her condition had no cure, she had learned to live with it.166
Mamie’s equilibrium had become a matter of discussion almost from the time her husband entered politics. In 1952 a Republican delegate from Nebraska confronted Ike directly: “We hear [Mamie’s] a drunk.” Ike waited a bit, one witness reported, and then replied, “Well, I know that story has gone around, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t think Mamie’s had a drink for something like 18 months.”167 Later, White House staff would back up Ike’s claim. If Mamie had a drinking problem earlier when she was an army wife, she showed no signs of it as First Lady.168
All her adult life Mamie had suffered poor health, and one illness had figured in the central tragedy of her life. In the winter of 1920 to 1921, her first-born son, then three years old, had become sick and been hospitalized. Mamie, suffering herself from a respiratory infection, was not permitted to go near him. Weeks later, when he died, her grief was multiplied because of her sense of helplessness. Ike called his first son’s death “the greatest disappointment and disaster in my life.”169 For Mamie, the loss was at least as traumatic. Even after the birth of a second son in 1923, she did not appear completely recovered from the tragic loss suffered earlier.
By the time Ike was assigned to the Philippines for a four-year stint (1935–1939), Mamie was already spending much of her time in bed.170 A weak heart and respiratory problems caused doctors to forbid her to fly and then when they permitted her to go up in planes, they suggested she not exceed five thousand feet.171 Her first term in the White House showed no decline in her health and in some ways she seemed better, but her physical condition again became an issue in the 1956 campaign. The Republican national chairman Butler referred indirectly to Mamie when he ventured that the incumbent would probably not run for reelection because of a “personal situation in the Eisenhower household.”172 The reference was not quite indirect enough, and the president and his supporters denounced Butler for bringing up Mamie’s health. James Reston, the widely read columnist, objected: “To drag a President’s wife into the political bear pit is a dubious maneuver. It has been tried before but never with notable success.”173 Mamie’s mother had fueled the speculation by declaring that her daughter could not stand another four years in the White House.174
By the time of renomination in the summer of 1956, the country’s attention focused more on the president’s health than on that of his wife. In September 1955, while visiting Mamie’s family in Denver, the president had suffered a coronary thrombosis, and the first reports from Denver indicated that the entire family had united to urge him not to try for another term.175 John Eisenhower later reported it had been Mamie, aware of the consequences for Ike if he was forced into inactivity, who encouraged him to run again. The final decision was the president’s, of course, and he announced at a news conference, in response to a reporter’s question about family influence, that he had made up his own mind and the family had gone along in good military fashion.176
Although reporters went into considerable detail explaining the president’s medical condition, they evidently considered details of the First Lady’s health inappropriate copy. When Mamie entered Walter Reed Army Medical Center in August 1957, James Hagerty, the president’s press secretary, told newsmen she had undergone a “two hour operation by a gynecologist … similar to those that many women undergo in middle age.” When a reporter asked if that had been a hysterectomy, Hagerty replied that he could “not go beyond [my] original statement.”177
This reticence in discussions of health, reticence so often associated with femininity and propriety, still extended to political campaigning in the 1950s. Even Eleanor Roosevelt had once questioned the wisdom of campaigning for her husband, and in 1932 she had spoken up—not for Franklin but for Herbert Lehman who was running for New York State governor. “I don’t think it would be proper,” she explained, “for the wife of a candidate to appeal to voters on his behalf … and I’m not going to mention [Franklin] in any speech I make.”178 Joseph Lash attributed Eleanor’s reluctance to “her clear concept of what was fitting in a democracy for a public official’s wife,” and he concluded that she struggled with that concept all through Franklin’s career. In Mamie Eisenhower’s case, the decision came more easily. She apparently had little interest in the political process, and Republican strategists in both 1952 and 1956 limited her campaigning to posing alongside Ike and to permitting an occasional article to be published under her name. “Vote for my husband or for Governor Stevenson, but please vote,” Mamie’s article in Good Housekeeping began.179
In showing little interest in politics, Mamie reinforced the very low profile of women in public affairs in the 1950s. Several women held elective and appointive office during that decade, but when the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs decided to honor women in government at its 1957 spring luncheon, it selected vice president Richard Nixon as the speaker. On the day he appeared, fifteen wo
men served in the House of Representatives, one in the Senate, and one sat on the cabinet, but he ignored them and talked instead about Hungarian refugees and Communists in government.180 If the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs had no objection to having the accomplishments of their sisters ignored, the president’s wife could hardly be faulted for keeping in step.
After eight years, Mamie Eisenhower left the job of First Lady as she had found it, except for one small, tentative change. The Congressional Directory of March 1953 acknowledged for the first time the distaff side of the Executive Office when it listed Mary McCaffree, “Acting Secretary to the President’s wife.” Mamie’s name did not appear, but the foundation was laid for a much expanded staff under her successors.
In nearly three decades (1933–1961) only three women presided over the White House, and their unprecedented longevity meant that more than one generation of Americans grew to maturity with these three models. The last First Ladies to have been born in the nineteenth century, they illustrate more variety than similarity and prove once again that while some presidents’ wives build on precedents, almost nothing is binding. Eleanor Roosevelt had little patience for discussing clothes and flower arrangements, while Mamie Eisenhower talked of little else. Bess Truman dedicated her energies to serving as private sounding board for her husband’s ideas, while Eleanor Roosevelt went out on her own to develop projects. Bess and Mamie stuck closely to the definitions of “lady” taught them by their genteel mothers, while Eleanor added a whole new dimension to the word, especially when preceded by “first.”
After 1960, expectations for presidents’ wives would change rapidly, and few candidates’ spouses would dismiss campaigning for their husbands as not “proper.” In fact, campaigning on her own would become the accepted—even expected route to First Lady. The old conflict between private “person” and public “personage” would continue to trouble all who took the job, and a new feminist movement would raise other expectations for each of them. Curiously enough, it was Mamie Eisenhower, generally perceived as the least shrewd of the three, who pointed out in 1977 how completely the job of First Lady had changed since she left Washington. Reticence and a place on the list of “Most Admired Women” no longer sufficed, she acknowledged when she met Rosalynn Carter and explained, “I stayed busy all the time and loved being in the White House but I was never expected to do all the things you have to do.”181
8
The Turbulent Sixties
IN FEBRUARY 1960, WHEN the field of likely nominees for that year’s presidential election had narrowed to five, Newsweek compared the men’s wives and predicted that one of them would preside over the White House in the next four years. As it turned out, two of them did; and before the decade ended, three of the five had served as First Lady. With very different personalities and priorities, each carved out an individual response to a turbulent period in American history—one of exhilaration, then questioning and delusion as attention turned from space exploration and the Peace Corps to John Kennedy’s assassination and then to Vietnam. In less than a decade, the style of First Ladies changed too, so that campaigning became a requirement instead of an option. Acting as White House hostess dropped as a priority; spearheading substantive reforms rose. In short, the president’s wife moved out of the society columns and on to the front page.
Of the five singled out by Newsweek before the major parties convened to choose their candidates, only Evelyn Symington fell from national prominence. Muriel Humphrey, the most traditional of the five and the one who described herself as a “mother of an ordinary family,” never lived in the White House, but she saw her husband take the vice presidency in 1965, and after his death she served briefly as a United States senator from Minnesota. The remaining three in Newsweek’s list, Pat Nixon, the disciplined “super-duper” wife of the vice president, Lady Bird Johnson, the “human-dynamo business-woman,” and Jacqueline Kennedy, the youthful, “stunning egghead,” all got a chance to preside over the White House.1
As soon as the two major parties made their nominations in 1960, attention focused on Thelma (“Pat”) Ryan Nixon and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, whom the New York Times described as “fantastically chic.” Beginning what became almost unqualified adulation of everything the Kennedys said or did, the Times announced in mid-July that Jackie had already captured “fashion’s high vote” by showing an interest in clothes that paralleled her husband’s approach to politics: both the Kennedys combined “confidence, individuality, a mind of [their] own and a knowledge of issues.”2 Photogenic Pat Nixon, already a familiar face since her husband had just completed eight years as vice president, fared less well in the Times, but crowds came out to see her campaign for the Republicans.
This prominent role for candidates’ wives marked a new development, fostered by the proliferation of television sets. By 1960, nearly 90 percent of American homes boasted at least one set. (The figure had been less than 50 percent when the Trumans left Washington in 1953.) Mamie Eisenhower had not ignored the medium—she had chatted amiably with Edward R. Murrow on “See It Now,” but the aging military wife lacked the charisma of a star. Both candidates’ spouses tried to do better in 1960, and one major newspaper emphasized how they had broken precedents: “Never before have the wives of both candidates been so active. … Mrs. Nixon sits in on strategic councils with her husband, travels extensively, and follows a busy schedule of press conferences.”3 Not many years had passed since Eleanor Roosevelt had deemed campaigning for one’s husband to be in poor taste—a view that Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower apparently shared.
Neither Jackie Kennedy nor Pat Nixon took real pleasure in the political game but each had learned, with varying degrees of success, to disguise her feelings. Pat Nixon insisted she found handshaking invigorating and the difference in crowds “interesting,” while the less experienced wife of the Massachusetts senator fought to curb her tongue on the subject. She had already angered reporters with her flip answers about wearing sable underclothing. Her lack of enthusiasm for the long hours of handshaking and small talk that went with winning primaries showed up in several ways. In the Midwest, she had reportedly baffled one audience by suggesting that everybody join in singing “Southie is my Hometown,” a song virtually unknown west of Massachusetts.4
Jackie Kennedy’s pregnancy (announced soon after her husband’s nomination) allowed her to retire to Hyannisport for the rest of the campaign, an absence generally interpreted as her best contribution to victory. Some wags suggested that the impending birth had been contrived to keep her home, and one story labeled the pregnancy a hoax: John Kennedy would wait for the election returns to come in and then turn to his wife and say, “Okay you can take out the pillow now.”5
Although Jackie’s political interest remained very low, she evidently had known the goal of John Kennedy’s ambitions before she married him in 1953. According to her cousin, John Davis, she had initially dismissed John as “quixotic because … he intended to be President.”6 John Davis concluded that Jackie found the “unity and spirit” of the Kennedy clan appealing after the “dissipation and squabbling” in her own family, but that she never completely disguised her boredom with politics—or her preference for discussing art and artists.7
If the woman whose husband would be president did not enjoy going to the people, she could perfect another campaign style which made them come to her. By remaining aloof—but glamorous and confident in her aloofness—she stirred up more interest than if she had mingled with the crowds and hugged every child in sight. Jackie Kennedy had the uncanny knack of intriguing a nation, partly because her personal history read like a fairy-tale with more than its share of sophistication, money, and villains.
Born on Long Island in 1929 to a stockbroker and his society-conscious wife, Jackie Bouvier attended the fashionable Chapin School in New York and then the prestigious Miss Porter’s in Connecticut. After her parents divorced and her mother was remarried, this time to Hugh Auchincloss, who w
as considerably wealthier and more successful than Jack Bouvier, Jackie and her younger sister Lee divided their time between Merrywood, the Auchincloss estate outside Washington, and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island. When time came for college, she took two years at Vassar and a year in Paris before finishing at George Washington University. Her stepfather arranged through a family friend for her to go to work for a Washington newspaper and soon she had her own byline for a column, “Inquiring Photographer.”
Although many other young women in the 1950s compiled similar records of international travel, multilingual competence, and careers of their own, none of the others topped off their accomplishments with marriage to a senator who seven years later won the presidency. Jackie’s youth (she was only thirty-one when she became First Lady), her wit (she had joked with reporters about the meaning of “egghead”), and her flair for fashion all put her in sharp contrast to her immediate predecessors. She would have aroused curiosity even if she had done nothing more than play the White House hostess, but she resolved to do more.
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