First Ladies (46 page)

The Eisenhower White House presented its occupants as a typical family with Mamie as familiar and folksy as the woman next door. She insisted that reporters call her Mamie “because it's so much friendlier,”
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and her close associates revealed that she greeted them with “girls” or “kiddo,” regardless of their ages and that she signed her letters “Bless you, Mamie E.”
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She announced that she often bought clothes off the rack, and that once, after having spotted a $17.95 dress in a store window during a campaign, she had mailed off an order for it. Instead of expensive jewelry, she wore costume pieces and had a costume jeweler design a set of pearls and rhinestones for the inaugural ball.
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In spite of her protests that she spent no more than most women on clothes, Mamie Eisenhower made the Dress Institute's roster of Best Dressed Women, a list enlarged in 1952 beyond the usual ten to accommodate two from the world of politics: Mamie and Oveta Culp Hobby, later named Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Both women had started out slowly in the polling, the Institute announced,
but had ended up tying for eleventh place.
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The wardrobes of presidents' wives had been a recurring topic of conversation since the earliest days of the republic, and Mamie's popularity promised that she could affect cash registers. One major newspaper put it this way: her “taste in garb [will] give a lift to the fashion industry … [because she always wears her clothes] with an air.”
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Mamie's claim to fashion fame relied less on line than on coordination of color. She favored full skirts and small hats that clung to her head and showed off the bangs she had worn for years to conceal a high forehead. Young ladies (and their mothers) all across America imitated her and matched their accessories in the pastel pinks and greens that she preferred. Mollie Parnis, who designed many of Mamie's clothes, explained that the First Lady had very little fashion sense but relied on others to “bring all the accessories she would need … to make sure Mamie would be put together correctly.”
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In a decade that put more stress on women's youthfulness than on their intelligence, Mamie became a national heroine. Reporters frequently noted that she looked younger than her years, and she herself admitted that she hated “old lady clothes.”
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Pink strapless evening dresses that she chose for White House parties differed little from those selected by high-school seniors for their proms.
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Because she felt “too young to be a grandmother,” she urged her grandchildren to call her “Mimi,”
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and to maintain a figure in line with that image of herself, she made frequent trips to an Arizona spa.

Mamie contributed to the 1950s maxim, so well illustrated in the movies of Marilyn Monroe and Judy Holliday, that intellect and femininity did not mix. A national women's magazine described her as “no bluestocking feminist,”
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and she announced that, like Bess Truman, she preferred mysteries for reading matter.
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She cheerfully admitted that she had no ear for languages, and although she had lived all over the world, in Panama, the Philippines, and France, she spoke little Spanish or French. Language classes with Bess Truman and other Washington women had been mostly for laughs, Mamie admitted: “None of us ever really studied.”
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When St. Joseph College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, conferred an honorary degree on her in March 1959; she had such a case of “mike fright” that she called on Ike to relay her thanks.
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Anyone suggesting that she might enjoy writing her memoirs was reminded that she did not like to work.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Mamie's mother had fueled the speculation by declaring that her daughter could not stand another four years in the White House.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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 women 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.
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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.”