First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  White House insiders underscored Nancy Reagan’s clout when they wrote their memoirs: Former Chief of Staff Donald Regan’s For the Record got special attention for its disclosure that the First Lady had intervened in the president’s scheduling of important trips and news conferences, and that she had done so after consulting with a California astrologist. Nancy had kept the president convalescing too long after surgery, Regan complained, and the delay hurt. “Mrs. Reagan’s concern for her husband’s health was understandable, even admirable,” Regan wrote, “but it seemed to me excessive, particularly since the president himself did not seem to think that there was any need for him to slow down to the point where he was lying dead in the water.”107 Rather than apologize, Nancy explained that she had simply been doing what First Ladies had done since the beginning of the Republic—looking out for their husbands’ health and well-being.

  Soon after leaving Washington, Nancy Reagan got the chance to explain her position more carefully in her own autobiography. Rather petulantly, she titled it My Turn and then pointedly dedicated it to “Ronnie who always understood. And to my children, who I hope will understand.” She thus alluded to strained family relationships that had been the subject of numerous articles and daughter Patti’s thinly veiled fiction.

  Like Betty Ford, Nancy chose to work with an editor, and she selected William Novak who had already had his name on Lee Iacocca’s best-selling story. Nancy’s My Turn dealt with the low times of her White House tenure—the assassination attempt, the president’s various illnesses, her own mastectomy, and the death of her mother. But she also admitted to having had some influence in the Oval Office: “For eight years I was sleeping with the president, and if that doesn’t give you special access, I don’t know what does.” Even that power had bounds, she explained: “Believe me, if I really were the dragon lady that [Donald Regan] described in his book, he would have been out the door many months earlier.”108

  In January 1989, she showed no reluctance to return to California (except for leaving behind the perks of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue). For her successor, she had little advice, except to reiterate the point made many times before that the job of First Lady was one “you can never get used to.”109

  For eight years, Barbara Bush had been preparing for the job from the vantage point of the vice president’s house. Ascent of the second-in-command was by no means assured in American political history. Not since the 1830s, when Martin Van Buren moved up, had a sitting vice president won election to chief executive, and several Republicans worked to keep that tradition alive a bit longer. Conservative Representative from New York Jack Kemp, television evangelist Pat Robertson, and Senate Republican leader Robert Dole all made spirited runs for the nomination in 1988. But George Bush had not merely bided his time, since losing out to Ronald Reagan in 1980; he had worked hard to cement support among key Republicans and raise the funds to make a strong presidential run.110

  During the course of the 1988 campaign, both George and Barbara Bush became considerably better known to voters. Like so many of her predecessors in the White House, she boasted more than one ancestor who had served in public life. Her father Marvin Pierce was distantly related to the fourteenth president of the United States, Franklin Pierce, and her mother Pauline Robinson Pierce was the daughter of an Ohio Supreme Court Justice.111 Like many presidential spouses, she had grown up in circumstances very similar to her husband’s.

  Born on June 8, 1925 in the affluent New York suburb of Rye, Barbara was the third of four children of businessman Pierce whose job at the McCall Corporation in New York City, where he started as an assistant to the publisher and then worked up to become president in 1946, provided a comfortable life for his family. Full-time household help allowed Barbara’s mother to devote her days to gardening and volunteer work, two interests that her daughter would later take on as her own.

  The Pierce children could choose from among the best public and private schools, and after attending the local public school through the sixth grade, Barbara enrolled in the Rye Country Day School for four years before transferring to Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, for her final two years.112 Her attractive older sister Martha had preceded her to Ashley Hall so Barbara could not have been surprised that the boarding school placed as much emphasis on the social graces as it did on the classics. Nothing about her stay there—or any of her education—suggests that she was more than an average student. Like most females of her generation, she considered school a waiting game until she could make the same kind of marriage that her mother had made—to a man who would provide her with a good life.

  During Christmas vacation of her junior year, Barbara met a likely candidate—George Herbert Walker Bush. Introduced at a party, the two apparently were attracted to each other immediately, and Barbara later joked that she had married the first man she ever kissed.113 Since she was only sixteen at the meeting and he scarcely a year older, the marriage had to wait until both finished school, a wait lengthened by the events of World War II.

  On his eighteenth birthday, George enlisted in the navy and went to fight in the Pacific while she returned to Ashley Hall to complete her senior year. Still waiting his return, she enrolled at Smith College, just missing Nancy Davis (later Reagan) who had graduated a few months earlier. Barbara remained little more than one year. Within weeks of beginning her sophomore year, she dropped out to prepare for a Christmas wedding, scheduled to coincide with her fiancé’s return. He was delayed and the nuptials had to be rescheduled, but on January 6, 1945, Barbara Pierce married George Bush. She was nineteen years old, one of only four teenage brides in the history of First Ladies.114

  After the war ended in 1945, George and Barbara Bush prepared for his return to civilian life and college education. When he enrolled at Yale, to work toward a degree in economics, she settled into being a student’s wife. Such arrangements were common at the time when the government provided GI benefits to returning veterans, and the men, unwilling to postpone marriage any longer, squeezed their families into crowded housing. Everyone learned to juggle babies’ night feedings around typing term papers and studying for examinations. Money was often tight, and like many other wives, Barbara worked at a college cooperative until the birth of her first child in July 1946. Except for a summer job during her high school years, this was the only paid employment that she ever had, and she never returned to complete the college education that she had dropped after little more than one year at Smith.

  As soon as George collected his degree in 1948, his young family moved to Texas where he hoped to make his own way without either the help or hindrance of family connections in the East. The work in a burgeoning oil business was hard, involving frequent uprooting and moves from one assignment to another. The names of those towns often blurred in Barbara’s mind and only her husband’s later prominence would provide for sorting them out: Odessa, Texas, then several towns in California, and back to Midland, Texas.115 Since some of these stays ended before the unpacking, the number of Bush family residences resists computation, but by the time she moved into the White House, Barbara counted 28 homes in 17 different cities in 42 years of marriage.

  Barbara’s life centered on running a home efficiently and looking after her children, three of whom were born within the first eight years of her marriage. It was soon after the birth of the third, son Jeb in early 1953, that the Bushes encountered what they would later single out as an event that changed their lives forever. Their three-year-old daughter Robin was diagnosed as having leukemia and the local doctor advised them that nothing they could do would save her life. He counseled them to tell no one, make the child’s last days as comfortable and happy as possible, and in three weeks she would be dead.

  As Barbara told an interviewer in 1988, she and George rejected this advice entirely. Within twenty-four hours, everyone in town knew about Robin’s illness, and the entire Bush family drew on every resource they could muster to get her the best medical help.116 Trips b
ack and forth between Texas and New York’s Sloan-Kettering Hospital resulted in only temporary remission for the child and enormous stress on the rest of the family. Eight months later, she was dead.

  Barbara often singled out this period of her child’s illness and the inevitable grieving that followed her death as one of the most difficult in her life, and it was at this time that her hair began to turn prematurely white. She felt the need to return to her normal workload and the mothering of her two young sons, but had trouble finding the inner strength to pull herself out of her depression. Son George, then seven, was credited with inadvertently helping in his mother’s recovery. She had overheard him telling a young friend that his mother was “so unhappy.”117 Her husband got even more credit—he simply made her get on with her life, she said.

  In the next few years, Barbara settled into the routine of a traditional wife and mother while George devoted his time to an increasingly successful oil business. She gave birth to three more children (two boys and a girl), making a total of five, whose needs filled her days and took most of her energy. Little League games, parent conferences with teachers, and unscheduled trips to the hospital emergency room kept her busy, but they hardly engaged her full potential, “This was a period for me, of long days and short years, of diapers, runny noses, earaches,” she told an audience at the American University in 1985. While George was out “having an exciting time,” she was “sitting home with these absolutely brilliant children who say one thing a week of interest.”118

  But these apparently mundane household management chores gave her time to develop a confidence that she could do things well on her own, and she realized she could juggle tasks so that all the important ones got attention. Neighbors reported that she not only looked after her own lawn—she also mowed theirs when they were away—and they thought her inordinately well organized. Her son Jeb later suggested that if born in a later generation, she would have made an excellent CEO.

  After George’s election to the House of Representatives in 1966 (the first Republican to represent Houston in Congress), Barbara enrolled in the unofficial quick course that many candidates’ wives find useful. She conquered her fear of public speaking and memorized the names of political contributors and opponents—while keeping her own household running smoothly. That role changed little when George’s job took them to New York where he served as Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations, then to Washington, D.C. where he chaired the Republican National Committee, and to Beijing, China where he headed the U.S. Liaison Office.

  The Bushes’ return to Washington in late 1975 caused Barbara to reconsider, perhaps for the first time in her life, the choices she had made.119 The feminist movement, reaching a peak with its talk of consciousness raising and self-fulfillment, appeared to have its sharp arrows aimed at precisely the kind of life that Barbara Bush, then aged 50, had led. Her children, now grown to adulthood or nearly so, needed her less, and her husband’s job at the Central Intelligence Agency did not permit his sharing many work problems with her. Like other women of her generation, she began to reexamine her past and think about what to do with the rest of her life.

  Volunteer work, the female version of public service that had attracted generations of American women before her, became Barbara’s focus. She later said that she considered several different alternatives before selecting literacy as her chief interest. Having struggled with the problems of a dyslexic son, she had gained a new appreciation for the problems related to a lack of literacy, and she tended to connect many of society’s ills, including homelessness and drug abuse, to the lack of power that springs from inability to read. Although she failed to make the connection, others noted that literacy was a “safe” and acceptable project for the wife of an ambitious politician. In fact, her involvement in the literacy campaign coincides with George’s first full-fledged attempt to win the Republican nomination for president.

  When the 1980 run failed and George Bush settled for second place on a Reagan ticket, Barbara Bush faced the prospect of eight years in close proximity to the White House. Much of her energy went to promoting literacy. She volunteered at dozens of events that advanced the cause, organized a public broadcasting project focused on the need to raise reading levels, and after publishing a book about the family dog, C. Fred, donated the proceeds to literacy groups. By the time her husband took on the presidency in 1989, she had geared up for the job of First Lady as she saw it: engage an experienced staff who would guard her interests, employ a self-deprecating wit that would win her popularity, and keep a tight lip so as not to go on public record as disagreeing with her husband.

  As First Lady, Barbara Bush exuded self-confidence, perhaps because of her preparation and her age. At 63, she was the oldest woman ever to take on the job. (Anna Symmes Harrison, wife of the seventh president, had been 66 at the time he was elected but she never moved to the capital.) Barbara had managed homes from California to New York to Beijing. She also appeared blessed by a healthy constitution and a “centered” personality that thrived on doing whatever the day brought her to do.

  Unlike many of her younger, more timid predecessors, she expected no great changes in her life as a result of her husband’s high office. Lady Bird Johnson had used Lyndon’s presidency (and his prodding and cajoling) as an incentive to lose weight and dress more stylishly. Rosalynn Carter felt pushed by the focus put on her in the White House to study Spanish and tutor with experts in economics and world affairs. Pat Nixon turned to wardrobe consultants. Indeed, most First Ladies approached the job as though their husbands’ election imposed some kind of giant mandate to do bigger and better things with their lives now that they stood at the center of national attention.

  Barbara Bush took a different tack. She appeared enthusiastic at the prospect of her husband’s elevation to the presidency, and she promised to work hard at the job of First Lady. But in the seventh decade of her life, she knew who she was and apparently had no intention of changing. She would do anything asked of her, she sometimes was quoted as saying, except dye her halo of white hair into a “more youthful” color or go on a diet to diminish her size fourteen figure. Hers was no easy announcement since jokes punctuated the 1988 campaign about her looking more like George’s mother than his wife.120 But many Americans evidently applauded her approach. Her mail told her, she said, that “a lot of fat, white-haired, wrinkled ladies are tickled pink.”121

  Much about the Bush agenda played on differences with the Reagans, and the contrast was especially pronounced on the First Lady’s side. Barbara Bush joked with reporters that one of her thighs would just about equal Nancy’s size four silhouette, and she warned photographers that they would have a hard time catching her in one of the expensive dresses or elaborate hair styles that Nancy favored. When reporters queried Barbara on the reason for wearing a three-stranded faux pearl choker, she cheerfully replied that it covered some wrinkles. Such candor contrasted with actress Nancy Reagan’s acceptance of aging—she had shaved two years off her birth date when she went to Hollywood and then found difficulty putting them back on when she moved to Washington. Advertisers immediately seized on the different styles of the two women and boasted that they sold “Nancy Reagan merchandise at Barbara Bush prices.”

  In fact, the Bushes had not known the frugal life for some time. He had sold the family’s share in Zapata Oil for more than one million dollars, and she was thoroughly familiar with the price tags of Arnold Scaasi dresses and Hermès handbags. But her relaxed attitude toward style and appearance appealed to Americans who agreed that a wise woman spent her time on other matters. She cheerfully converted Nancy’s exercise-beauty-salon in the White House into a birthing room for the family dog.

  During her first year at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Barbara Bush, was diagnosed as having Graves’s disease, a disorder of the thyroid that causes severe weight loss, requires long-term medication, and produces considerable discomfort, including red itchy eyes.122 Rather than withdraw from
public appearances, she maintained a full schedule, promoting literacy and fighting against prejudice aimed at those infected with AIDS. A widely circulated photo showing her holding a baby born with AIDS was credited with helping reduce fear about how easily the disease could be transmitted.

  The First Lady’s large, professional staff was carefully balanced to include minority women. Anna Perez, the first African-American woman to serve in a prominent East Wing position, held the title of press secretary to the First Lady.123 Other staff members, under the direction of Susan Porter Rose, carefully culled from the many invitations proffered so that Barbara Bush would appear at those events designed to increase her popularity and that of her husband.124 Requests for photographs of events inside the residence portion of the White House went routinely to the East Wing.

  Barbara Bush made her own First Lady history when she put together Millie’s Book as Dictated to Barbara Bush, a collection of photographs and purported musings of the family dog who divided her time among three homes—the White House, Camp David, and Kennebunkport, Maine—meeting famous people, cavorting with the president’s grandchildren, and preening in the Blue Room. When the book became a best seller, earning nearly $800,000 in royalties in 1991, the First Lady donated the net proceeds to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, an organization she had helped establish as soon as she moved into the White House. Had she not given the money away, she would have earned far more than her husband that year and a great deal more than any previous president’s spouse had earned while in the White House.