First Ladies (45 page)

The shyness that marked Bess Truman in public led people meeting her for the first time to characterize her as formal and cold, but the household staff held quite a different view. One maid who served almost thirty years in the White House, following her mother who served an equivalent time, concluded that “Bess was best.”
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When John Kennedy invited the Trumans back to the White House in the early 1960s, he commented on how exuberantly the older staff members greeted them.

Much of Bess's value lay in her tempering influence on her husband. When his salty language and fiery temper got him into trouble, she reprimanded. Her frequent “You didn't have to say that” became a joke with the White House staff.
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Liz Carpenter, later press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson, remembered seeing Bess take her husband by the collar and back him into a hotel room when she thought it unwise for him to go out.
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Harry's most noted outburst of indignation—the fiery letter he sent to Paul Hume, music critic of the
Washington Post
who had disparaged Margaret Truman's singing ability—appeared in print because the president wrote it and mailed it himself rather than checking it out with Bess or the usual White House channels that were equipped to save him from his own excesses.

Harry repaid his wife with frequent vows of devotion and swift attacks on her critics. When Washington reporters hinted that she lacked style, being “dull, dumpy and distant,”
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Harry retorted that she looked just the way a woman of her age ought to look. Leonard Lyons, the columnist, remembered that he had driven past a billboard with Harry and had noted the advertisement, “Gentlemen Prefer Blonds.” Harry had sniffed and said that “real gentlemen prefer gray.”
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In defining just what a First Lady should do, Harry and Bess Truman apparently agreed that Bess's activities, except for ceremonial appearances, were her own business. He liked to remind reporters that he had been the candidate and if something in the Truman household did not please, he would take the blame.

For her part, Bess acted as though she could go where she pleased regardless of her husband's job. When she attended a reception of the Daughters of the American Revolution after that organization had refused to permit a black pianist to perform in its Constitution Hall, her critics were many and loud. The pianist, Hazel Scott, was married to a New York congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, who quickly dubbed Bess “Last Lady of the Land.” The president retaliated by barring Powell from the White House along with Clare Booth Luce, who had nicknamed the president's wife “Payroll Bess” because of her Senate office job. So willing to confront criticism of himself, Harry Truman would not tolerate derogatory remarks about his wife or daughter.

In Bess's definition of a lady, especially a First Lady, taking sides in public controversy did not appear. She went ahead with her plan to attend a play starring Ingrid Bergman, even though she had to cross a picket line protesting George Washington University's exclusion of Negroes from the audience.
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Except for an occasional appeal that people buy savings bonds or contribute to the March of Dimes and the Girl Scouts, she rarely issued public statements; her announcement in 1949 that she hoped Congress would repair the old White House rather than taking the cheaper option of constructing an entirely new mansion was an exception. She publicized a drive to prevent waste of food by inviting one thousand War Hospitality volunteers to a garden party and then did not serve refreshments,
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but when mothers appealed to her in early 1951 to oppose the draft for eighteen-year-olds, she answered that she could not help. On the matter of extending women's rights, she showed little interest, and the number of women holding high presidential appointments did not register big gains during her husband's two administrations.

In one of her more revealing statements, reported in
McCall's
in 1949, Bess chose the Monroe administration as the period in American history that she found “interesting.”
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She did not explain whether it was the lack of party rivalry that drew her to the early nineteenth century or the reputed skill with which Elizabeth Monroe shunned the public's curiosity about her. Perhaps Bess felt a special sympathy for Elizabeth Monroe, who followed the popular Dolley Madison into the White House and had to redefine the limits of being a president's wife. Like Elizabeth Monroe, Bess Truman realized how different her own training and inclinations were from those of her predecessor, and she insisted on working with what she had and letting those who followed do the same.

That tolerance for difference served Bess Truman well when the time came to introduce her successor to the White House. After giving Mamie Doud Eisenhower (1953–1961) the traditional tour, Bess turned to one of the domestic staff and predicted a “lot of pink” in the years ahead. That maid had reason to recall those words later as she watched Mamie Eisenhower add “fluffy, fussy” touches everywhere, from the pink furniture in her bedroom
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down to pastel cloth covers on her lipstick holders.
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The First Lady's favorite color fit well America's mood in the 1950s when femininity meant opinionless dependence. Pink was, after all, the insignia of baby girls.

Mamie Eisenhower did not invent that model of femininity, but she represented it well, making clear by her every public utterance that she thought a wife's role entirely secondary and supportive. Her thirty-six years of marriage had been a series of moves, averaging almost one per year, as she trailed her army husband from one assignment to another. When he went to Panama or the Philippines or Paris, she followed, and when she could not, as in the war years, she settled down in Washington to wait. When he took her along on tours of historic battlefields, she tried not to yawn, and when he relaxed on long golf trips where there was nothing to interest her, she improved her mahjongg and canasta, becoming a “demon” player.
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To the reporters who inquired in 1952 how she felt about her life, she replied she was “thankful for the privilege of tagging along by [Ike's] side.”
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Even a magazine named
Independent Woman
accepted this concept of the perfect wife and put Mamie on its January 1953 cover. The new First Lady had adapted to each change in her husband's career, Lenore Hailparn wrote, quickly rearranging successive new homes for his comfort. Mamie even carried swatches of her favorite colors to save time in the redecorating. A large part of an army wife's job
involved fitting in, the
Independent Woman
writer explained, and never distinguishing oneself or staying apart from the other spouses.
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Mamie had met that test well, and Hailparn predicted that similar behavior would assure her success in the White House.

Eleanor Roosevelt had made her first name familiar because of her ubiquitous presence and constant writing on behalf of one cause or another, but “Mamie” became a trademark for a certain style or taste. In addition to “Mamie's Fudge,” there was “Mamie pink” and the famed “Mamie bangs.” Americans' penchant for associating First Ladies with such matters went back to the nineteenth century, when women wore their hair à la Cleveland, but television and mass circulation magazines in the 1950s made Mamie familiar in a way that her predecessors had not achieved.

Public recognition of General Eisenhower's wife (“Mrs. Ike”) had developed during World War II, when he was catapulted to fame as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and she was singled out by reporters for both her breezy manner and her example of the patient wife. “Eisenhower's Wife Finds Wait Tough” the armed forces' newspaper,
Stars and Stripes,
reported in an article later carried in the
New York Times.
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Part of the public's interest in her personal life caused her great discomfort—especially the reports that her husband was romantically involved with his Irish driver, Kay Summersby. While Mamie waited in Washington, she could not fail to hear speculation about the two, who were frequently photographed together. Summersby, a willowy ex-model, young enough to be Mamie's daughter, had first been assigned to drive Ike around England. Later she followed him to Africa, and after the death of her financé in 1943, speculation increased about the relationship between her and her boss.

Evidence of just what happened between Summersby and Dwight Eisenhower is not easily assembled. Years later, Summersby wrote her own account, raising doubts about the general's ability to perform sexually at the time she knew him. “For years I never thought of making love,” he reportedly told Kay, “and then when I did … I failed.”
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The Eisenhowers' surviving son published his father's wartime letters to Mamie to bolster claims of Ike's devotion to his wife.
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Harry Truman, in an interview with author Merle Miller for
Plain Speaking,
added as much fuel to the gossip as anyone when he recounted how Dwight Eisenhower had written to his superior, General George C. Marshall, after the war ended to announce that he intended to divorce Mamie and marry Kay.
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According to Truman, Marshall threatened to end Ike's career if he went ahead with his plan, and the matter ended there. This exchange of letters was never made
public for reasons not entirely clear. Summersby admitted that she had no hint that Ike had written to Marshall until she read Truman's account,
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and Marshall's biographer doubts that the exchange of letters ever took place.
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Whether or not the relationship threatened the Eisenhowers' marriage, reports of it circulated freely and continued to be part of Washington gossip even after Ike became president.
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Mamie kept up a cheerful front, maintaining in
Look
magazine that there could have been nothing improper between her husband and Summersby because “I know Ike.”
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Between 1945 and 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower served first as Chief of Staff, then as president of Columbia University, and finally in Paris as Commander of NATO forces, Mamie perfected her skill at entertaining large groups of important people. She paid close attention to centerpieces, menu selections, and seating arrangements, giving reporters every reason to believe that being a good hostess would continue to be her focus in the White House. In contrast to Eleanor Roosevelt and Bess Truman, who both disliked that part of the job, Mamie insisted she enjoyed it, and at her first press conference she read a projected schedule for herself, listing what one reporter described as “tea by inexorable tea.”
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One group after another descended on the executive mansion for a personal greeting from the president's wife, and she tried to satisfy as many requests as possible. When she could not manage to receive 1600 members of the Federation of Women's Clubs who wanted to come by for tea on short notice, she went down to their convention center to soothe hurt feelings.
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She shook hands with thousands of people, averaging more than 700 a day in 1953, and managed, her admirers said, to make each greeting individual and different.
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Rather than complaining, she gave the impression,
Time
reported, of being a “happy household manager.”
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What her husband called her “unaffected manner” made Mamie's choices for the White House a reflection of popular taste rather than a showcase of high culture. She liked to call on Fred Waring or on male quartets to entertain her guests,
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one of whom reported that Mamie's favorite number was “Bless This House.”
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Her publicized preference for gladioli (flowers her successor, Jackie Kennedy, reportedly detested)
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and for taking her dinners off TV trays (just as many Americans learned to do in the 1950s) rendered her a familiar, friendly figure. She made the White House “livable and comfortable,” her husband said, and therefore “meaningful for the people who came in.”
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Behind the scenes, the staff gave a different picture—one that reflected Mamie's “spit and polish” army background. She checked for cleanliness by running a white glove over window sills as she passed through rooms, one of the staff reported, and she insisted that vacuum cleaners be run frequently to erase evidence that anyone had walked on the plush carpets.
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To one maid who had seen many presidents' wives come and go, Mamie's possessiveness about her temporary domain grated, particularly her references to “my sofa” and “my rugs” as though they belonged to her personally.
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J. B. West, assistant chief usher, argued that Mamie was simply establishing her command, having developed in her years as an army officer's wife a “spine of steel” and a complete understanding of how a large household worked. “She could give orders,” West wrote, “staccato crisp, detailed and final, as if it were she who had been a five-star General.”
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Americans less acquainted with the running of the White House saw only Mamie's “softer” side and they found her as charming as a pretty little girl accepting compliments at a family reunion. For a woman who spent much of her energy on how she looked, there could be no headier reward than a bevy of ubiquitous photographers. She obliged them cheerfully. In 1952 she had accompanied Ike on the campaign train and she posed with him even if that meant getting up in the middle of the night to satisfy well-wishers who had waited for hours to catch a glimpse of the famous general. On one occasion she had gone out on the platform in her bathrobe; when some photographers, who had missed the shot, asked for a replay she gamely acquiesced even though it meant putting her hair back in curlers.
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