First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  Pat’s supporters noted evidence of her democratic appeal. Americans flocked to the White House and during her second year, the number of visitors broke all records.133 She chatted endlessly and tirelessly with hundreds of people, one observer noted, and “had more ways to say someone had a pretty hat than anyone I ever knew.”134 Her concern with those she called “the little guys” as opposed to the “big shots” led her to pay careful attention to the mail she received, and she insisted on an individual reply to each letter. She refused to use a facsimile of her signature, even in the face of staff arguments that no one could tell the difference. For four or five hours a day, she looked over responses that had been prepared, sending back for revisions those she deemed in need of improvement. She followed up on some of the requests herself, helping an immigrant woman, for example, with her citizenship problem. Right up to her husband’s resignation, when the White House seemed in disarray and confusion, Pat Nixon persevered with her mountain of mail, causing one writer to conclude that she had “abdicated” her First Lady role to her daughter Julie.135 Pat’s critics ridiculed her dedication as misplaced martyrdom, while her supporters thought it substantiated her promise to help the “little guys.”

  Popular magazines failed to spread the word of the Nixon acquisitions, just as they played down Pat Nixon’s travel. Her daughter Julie later pointed out that her mother was the most widely traveled First Lady (eighty-three nations).136 She crisscrossed the United States many times. These could be gruelling trips, as one reporter noted when she chronicled one western visit. Pat Nixon was “pelted by rain, sleet, snow and hail [then] sat serenely through sheets of rain in an outdoor amphitheater” before proceeding on to another city where she dedicated a new industrial arts building and addressed a crowd of 5,000 young people, most of whom were not old enough to vote.137 “I do or I die,” Pat Nixon was frequently quoted as saying, “I never cancel out.”

  Her White House residence ended in 1974, after a series of events connected with Watergate. President Nixon had arranged to record what went on in his Oval Office so that he would have a full account of his administration, and when he was accused of being involved in a break in at the National Democratic Party headquarters, the contents of the tapes gained importance. The burglary at the apartment building complex, known as Watergate, occurred in the summer of 1972; but not until two years later, after several of the president’s aides had been implicated, did attention turn directly and unremittingly to the Oval Office. A House Committee, appointed to decide whether sufficient evidence existed for a bill of impeachment, heard testimony in nationally televised sessions. Then opinion turned increasingly against the president. Experts testified that the tapes had been altered, and a lengthy blank spot could not be adequately justified, although the president’s loyal secretary tried to assign the blame to her own clumsy foot on the erase pedal of her office machine. By August 1974, the president’s options had narrowed to one, and he became the first president in American history to resign from office.

  In his final speech as president and ever since, Richard Nixon refused to accept blame for acting improperly. For him, the culprits were news reporters who had treated him unfairly. He hinted that he might have fared better had he destroyed the tapes before they became the subject of so much attention and well before their contents were revealed. His lawyers had convinced him, he said, not to destroy evidence.

  Pat Nixon, whose counsel the president apparently rejected or never sought, had reasoned otherwise, and reportedly told her friend, Helene Drown, “I would have burned or destroyed [the tapes] because they were like a private diary, not public property.”138 The First Lady’s press secretary gave corroborating evidence: “Very early, before they had become the subject of litigation, [Pat] urged him to destroy them but he did not listen. … [She] believed the whole idea of the tapes was ridiculous. They simply never should have been done.”139 Pat evidently concluded that public service did not extend to providing the material for one’s own indictment.

  That she felt she had failed in this, as well as in other parts of her husband’s administration, is hinted at in statements Pat made. She frequently said that she wanted to be remembered only as the “wife of the President” but when Jessamyn West asked her how she differed from Dolley Madison or Grace Coolidge, she replied, “Does it matter?”140 On that hot August morning in 1974, when the television crews gathered at the White House to record Richard Nixon’s last words as president, she stood behind him, apparently struggling to hold back tears. In a speech so rambling that it frightened some listeners, he spoke warmly and at length about his mother whom he called “a real saint,” but about his wife, he had not one word. As the Nixons walked with the Fords, who would replace them, to the helicopter that would take them on the first leg of their trip to retirement at San Clemente, Betty Ford, seeking to make conversation, remarked on the red carpet that had been rolled out. No longer impressed by red carpets, Pat Nixon replied: “You’ll see so many of those … , you’ll get so you hate them.”141

  The woman who had humbly stated how she hoped to be remembered showed in her announcements about volunteerism, literacy, and the environment, that she would have preferred to do more than play the hostess. That she failed is no doubt due to her own uneasiness in a public role and to the limited value which the president’s wing placed on her contributions. It may not be true (as reported in the Atlantic Monthly) that a White House aide overheard Pat tell her husband, “You have ruined my life,”142 but it is certainly accurate to say that reporters “observed with alarm [his] coldness.”143

  The Nixon years serve as a reminder that every First Lady relies on the president to set parameters of her power and effectiveness. If he refuses to involve her in any important decisions or show that he regards her seriously, she is forced into an insignificant role no matter what her own inclinations may have been. Even the greatest ambition cannot override a veto from the Oval Office. According to Letitia Baldrige, John Kennedy “never interfered” with his wife’s White House restoration project,144 and Lyndon Johnson’s active support of the beautification project is well documented. Richard Nixon relied on his wife and daughters to help in campaigning, but their roles apparently ended—except for ceremonial appearances—as soon as the votes were counted.145 Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who insists her parents were closer than people thought, could offer only one instance of her mother’s attempting to influence policy. According to Julie, Pat encouraged her husband to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.146

  Pat Nixon finished off the turbulent 1960s—a decade in which three very different First Ladies presided over the White House. Even in fiction, it would be difficult to create a more diverse trio. In the 1960 election, a patrician horsewoman from the East was pitted against a miner’s daughter from California; and the two women whose husbands shared the Democratic ticket that same year stood, if possible, even farther apart: the frugal, but rich, Texan, whose loyalty to her husband went beyond the usual bounds, and the young mother who spent considerable energy examining (on approval) expensive jewelry and paintings.

  But the three women shared a great deal, too, possibly of more significance that divided them. Each had come through a troubled youth, having lost at least one parent through death or, in Jackie’s case, divorce. They had all shown exceptional self-discipline in shaping their early lives, a control that persisted into adulthood and through their marriages. While philandering and insensitivity became part of the public records of their husbands, the wives stoically carved out their own niches, and refused to disappear into obscurity or relinquish their own dignity. All very much women of their century (Mamie Eisenhower had been the last First Lady to be born in the nineteenth), they had graduated from major universities and each had worked (or prepared to do so) before her marriage, unlike their three immediate predecessors whose formal education had stopped with boarding or finishing school and who never held jobs before their marriages.

  First Ladies of the 1960s w
ere hardly isolated from what went on around them. They had come of age when more married women than ever before were working outside their homes. The White House years of Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and Patricia Nixon coincided with the beginning of a new feminist movement that redefined objectives for many women and made them less tolerant of their sisters who continued to see themselves solely in terms of their husbands’ accomplishments. A widening political consciousness, as shown in increased attention to international issues and to the method of selecting presidential candidates, helped restructure campaign strategies and draw entire families into the process of winning an election and then helping win history’s favorable account of an administration.

  Perhaps most important in the redefinition of the job of the president’s wife were the new federal programs. The “New Frontier” and the “War on Poverty” extended the federal government’s role in such areas as housing and transportation (both of which gained cabinet status in the 1960s). Subjects that had once been the concern of local politicians were now discussed on the national level. When something did not suit, voters found it easy to make the capital the center of their discontent. Chartered buses headed toward the Potomac with thousands of Americans ready to demonstrate in behalf of one point of view or another. Men and women who could not volunteer their congressman’s name knew very well the address of the White House and the face of each occupant.

  Television increased recognition of presidential wives and pulled them into the public arena. Jackie Kenndy’s clamorous reception in Paris caused her husband to introduce himself as the “man who had accompanied her.” Lady Bird Johnson learned to factor in demonstrators on any trip she took, and she went to sleep in the White House to the chants from anti-war protesters outside:

  Hey/Hey/Hey

  L./B./J./

  How many boys/

  Did you kill today?

  Later Pat Nixon learned to walk coolly through showers of confetti, accompanied by jeers of, “If this was napalm, you’d be dead.” The job of First Lady was no longer private and ceremonial—it had moved into the public arena of matters affecting the nation’s prestige abroad and of issues seriously dividing the country at home.

  9

  New Dimensions to the Job of First Lady (1974–1993)

  AS THOUGH TO ACCELERATE the trend begun in the 1960s towards strong, more activist First Ladies, a quartette of particularly determined, energetic women passed through the White House in the 1970s and 1980s. What had once been a daring exception, much commented on in the press, became commonplace. Elizabeth (“Betty”) Bloomer Warren Ford, in the job less than a full term (August 1974 to January 1977), spoke with such candor about subjects that had formerly been taboo that she introduced an entirely new style; and her support of women’s rights made headlines. Rosalynn Smith Carter (1977–1981) continued Betty Ford’s example of using First Ladyhood as a platform for women’s issues; but she added a new component by going off on international missions, which the White House billed as “substantive,” and then testifying in front of a congressional committee on a mental health program. Nancy Davis Reagan began her Washington tenure in 1981 by insisting that she had little say in presidential decisions. But by July 1985, when Ronald Reagan underwent surgery for cancer, she displaced the vice president from the front pages of the country’s newspapers and announced herself at a White House reception as “the President’s standin.”1 Barbara Pierce Bush (1989–1993) chose to stay in the background on matters of public policy, but she was widely believed to hold strong views of her own on abortion and gun control. Unlike Edith Wilson, who had faced charges of “petticoat government” and “rule by regency,” these four encountered only the mildest criticism.

  Betty Ford appeared particularly eager to make her own mark, and she apparently had her husband’s support. While Pat Nixon had described Richard as unwilling to confer with her about anything, Betty Ford often spoke of the “pillow talk” that she used to bring Gerald around to her point of view. President Ford publicly acknowledged that he valued her opinions and admitted that in one of his most criticized moves, the pardon of Richard Nixon, she had exerted considerable influence. “Betty and I talked [the Nixon pardon] over,” Gerald Ford told an aide. “We felt we were ready. This [uncertainty over Nixon’s treatment] just has to stop; it’s tearing the country to pieces.”2 On another occasion, Gerald Ford volunteered to an interviewer: “[Betty] obviously has a great deal of influence.”3

  That special partnership had begun twenty-six years before it reached the White House when, within three weeks in 1948, Gerald Ford of Michigan made two significant changes in his life. He married Betty Bloomer Warren, a young divorcée, and won his first election to Congress. The thirty-five-year-old lawyer had not included a Washington career in his proposal, and his wife admitted many years later that she had lacked preparation to “be a political wife.”4 From the moment he arrived late for their marriage ceremony because of a campaign appearance, she began learning the long and sometimes painful lesson that Gerald Ford’s family frequently came second to his work.

  During his time in Congress, she dutifully joined the appropriate wives’ clubs, taught Sunday school, and saw to most of the details of raising the three boys and one girl born to them in the first seven years of their marriage. As her husband’s ambitions grew to include Speaker of the House, so too did his absences from home, but these were not the campaign trips that aspiring presidential candidates make with spouse in tow. Gerald Ford appeared in his Republican colleagues’ home districts to bolster their election chances—and in such contests, his wife played no part.

  While Gerald Ford accepted as many as two hundred speaking invitations in one year, Betty became so accustomed to chauffeuring their sons to the emergency room of the local hospital after minor injuries that she laughingly suggested that the family car could make the trip on its own. Single parenting produced its strains, causing her to reply rather petulantly to questions about her role. When asked who in her life had influenced her most, she answered, “my mother,” and added that her children should reply the same way because “their father’s always away.”5

  Friction resulting from conflicting demands of career and family is by no means unique to political marriages—it marks many marriages in which work takes so much time and energy that little is left for home. Yet autobiographies of Washington wives underline the multiple demands and stresses that politicians’ families feel. Marvella Bayh described in Marvella how she relied on prescribed drugs to get through the exhilarating and hectic schedule of a conspicuous senator’s wife.6 Ellen Proxmire subtitled her book on Washington living: Perilous Life of a Senator’s Wife.7 Abigail McCarthy, more reticent than most of her colleagues but also more eloquent, explained the circumstances that led her husband, Minnesota’s Senator Eugene McCarthy, to “leave our home in August, 1969,” after she had coped for many years with the pressures of being a political spouse. Not only did Abigail McCarthy perform seemingly endless unpaid tasks in support of her husband’s career, she also acted, she wrote, “as den mother to the inevitable strays who attach themselves to campaigns.”8

  In addition to the strains documented by other wives, Betty Ford suffered from a pinched nerve and arthritis. Finally, in 1970, she sought professional help, and as a result of several months of counseling, she resolved to keep more time for herself and to persuade her husband to leave Washington after his congressional term ended in 1976.9 Those plans abruptly changed in late 1973 when vice president Spiro Agnew resigned and Gerald Ford was named to that job. Instead of preparing to end her Washington residence as the unknown spouse of a Michigan congressman, Betty Ford moved into the center of national attention. The stock-taking begun in the therapy sessions served her well, however, and she resolved to guard part of her time and to continue to be “just me.”

  Maintaining her equilibrium was not easy when, within a year, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, and Gerald Ford moved up to that office. The entire F
ord family, none of whom had ever campaigned in a constituency larger than half a million people, became the focus of more scrutiny than they had ever imagined possible. Magazines profiled the four Ford children, and Betty Ford, the woman Good Housekeeping said “nobody knows,”10 quickly became someone whom everybody sought to meet.

  Having arrived in Washington when Bess Truman was First Lady, Betty Ford had come to admire (as many other Washington wives had) the way Bess combined being in the spotlight with staying “so humble.” Bess’s example guided her, she wrote.11 Perhaps Betty Ford felt particular sympathy for another Midwesterner, who like herself had moved without much warning or preparation into the White House. Certainly the two women shared little in their attitudes toward privacy or in their views about whether presidential wives should take sides on controversial issues. While Bess Truman refused to speak up on any matter more divisive than that of restoring the White House, Betty Ford appeared willing to talk about almost anything.

  Jacqueline Kennedy made a pleasure trip to India with her sister, and in traveling without the president, she helped make the American First Lady an international figure. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Jacqueline Kennedy made a poignant appearance at the inauguration of Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One less than two hours after her husband’s death. Courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.

  Newlyweds Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson appear to be tourists in the capital, but already in 1934, they had come to Washington to stay. Courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.

  Patricia Nixon visited the Great Wall of China during the Nixons’ historic tour of China in 1972. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.