First Ladies (60 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Unlike her Republican predecessor Betty Ford, who had publicly differed with her husband on important public issues, and Nancy Reagan, who was widely reported to take a hand in her husband's personnel decisions and scheduling, Barbara Bush kept her views to herself. She had briefly flirted with the dangers of sarcasm in the 1984 election when she had described the Democratic candidate for vice president Geraldine Ferraro as “a 4-million dollar … I can't say it but it rhymes with rich.”
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Barbara Bush's phoned apology to Ferraro failed to obliterate the remark from the public record, and her disclaimer that she had meant “witch,” rather than a stronger term commonly applied to forceful women, found few believers. Opponents took this outburst as evidence of a small nasty streak in an otherwise kindly genteel front.

The White House years showed no public repetitions of this lapse, and Barbara Bush stuck to noncontroversial topics related to her family and her hostessing duties whenever she gave an interview. Not since Bess Truman had the nation witnessed in a First Lady such a combination of self-confidence in herself and “hands off” national issues. Other presidents' wives, including Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy, had not forayed into the political thicket but they had not been seen as holding strong opinions of their own on such topics. Barbara Bush was widely believed to differ with her husband on gun control laws and on a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, but she skillfully skirted attempts to put those views on public record.

By the 1990s, such a traditional approach to the job of First Lady had many critics, and some of them surfaced during the debate over whether Barbara Bush was the appropriate commencement speaker at Wellesley College. The invitation had been offered by administration officials without consulting students, who, when they learned of it, got up a petition against her appearance that more than 150 students signed. They objected that she boasted no achievement of her own—her fame resulted entirely from her marriage to a man who later became president.

Rather than defend herself, the First Lady spoke up for the students, saying that she understood their point and respected other women's rights to make decisions different from hers. Then, in an impressive public relations coup, she offered to bring along with her to Wellesley Raisa Gorbachev, wife of Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was scheduled to be in the United States at the time to sign an important agreement on nuclear arms and chemical weapons.

The Wellesley audience heard two women from quite different backgrounds on June 1, 1990: Raisa Gorbachev, university professor, and Barbara Bush, college dropout. The latter injected some wit in her remarks by noting that “somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House as the president's spouse.” She paused, then added, “I wish him well.”
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When feminists expressed disappointment over Barbara Bush's traditional approach to the job, she tried to deflect them by keeping quiet. The suspicion that she would have joined them, left to her own reputation to defend, helped soften the criticism. In fact, she was enormously popular with many segments of the public and often garnered an “approval rating” higher than that of her husband.
Good Housekeeping
readers put her at the top of their “Most Admired” list for four years in a row, and at the 1992 nominating convention, the Republicans scheduled her speech during prime time on national television. The convention had already broken one precedent by listing the vice president's wife, attorney Marilyn Quayle, as a featured speaker, and she had angered many in the audience by referring to “women's essential nature” to be mothers and homemakers.

Much of the 1992 campaign centered on the country's economic status. Although a recession appeared ended, the Republican candidate failed to make that message clear or credible, and many voters who had supported him in 1988 cast their ballots for the Democrat or the insurgent Texas billionaire Ross Perot. Even before the returns came in, it was clear the president would lose. In fact, he garnered only 38 percent of the popular vote, less than any incumbent since William Howard Taft ran for a second term in 1912.

Barbara Bush did not seem entirely unhappy with the prospect of leaving the White House. She had often said she wanted to get out of politics while she was still vigorous enough to garden, and she appeared to relish the privacy and freedom that her husband's exit from public life promised. She had neither redefined the job of First Lady nor been altered significantly by living in the White House.
Gardening, reading, and being with her grandchildren were sufficient to occupy her time and hopes. “Life inside the White House was great,” she later wrote, “and believe it or not, it's great outside, too.”
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Still enormously popular with the public, she and George continued to top Gallup polls asking which couples Americans admired most.

When Barbara Bush relinquished the White House in early 1993, she closed a chapter in First Lady history. She and the trio of women who preceded her achieved a transition—their tenures looking as much backward to their predecessors as forward to the new century. All four had been born within a few years of each other (1918–1927), and they had matured at a time when daughters were less likely to go to college than their brothers. Of the four, only Nancy Reagan earned a college degree. All had worked at some time in their lives, but only one had a career of her own and that was clearly a stopgap measure until she married. Actress Nancy Reagan had never concealed from Hollywood the fact that her real goal in life was to have a family. Hers was small—two children—but the other three produced more: Bush gave birth to six, Ford and Carter each had four.

All the women had played important partnership roles in their husbands' political ascents, and in each case, the husband acknowledged his debt publicly. But much of the influence went undocumented and unquantified because it occurred off the record. Largely self-taught, the women learned quickly, and in the process they showed the potential in the job. But it remained for another generation of women to show what a well-educated, professionally qualified, forceful First Lady could do.

ON JANUARY
20, 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton moved into the White House amid predictions that she would completely rewrite the job of First Lady. Headlines described a president's “First Partner” who is “breaking new ground.”
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One magazine searched the record of three administrations to fashion a composite that did her justice, finally concluding that she was a “presidential super spouse” who combined “the policy presence of an Eleanor Roosevelt [with] the sounding board of a Milton Eisenhower and the … generalship on hard decisions that Robert F. Kennedy offered during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.”
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Within months, a popular magazine outlined not “The President's First One Hundred Days” but “A Hundred Days of Hillary.”
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The normally sedate
Atlantic
suggested that she was making “motherhood look good” on women's job resumés,
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and the career-minded
Working Woman
evaluated the “ripple effect of the ‘Billary' phenomenon” on “husband-wife business relationships” across the nation.
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Television viewers of CNN's popular “Sonya Live” cheerfully offered their own opinions of the First Lady's effect on the president and on the nation.
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Much about the Clinton presidency looked new. Three decades earlier Americans had listened to John Kennedy speak passionately of power passing to a generation of leaders “born in this century,” but as the year 2000 approached, the nation's top politicos talked more of the twenty-first century. Many had matured in a time when the United States had already claimed prominence among the nations of the world. Both President Clinton and Vice President Gore, together with their spouses and closest colleagues, had come of age when atomic bombs and nuclear warfare were household words; they had grown up with computers and jet planes. They expected to play major roles in policies affecting the 2000s.

The gap between George Bush's generation and that of Bill Clinton was bigger than is usual between one administration and the next, and for their wives the distance loomed even larger. Historians focusing on American women's lives may one day argue that the greatest watershed of all lay in those decades separating Barbara Bush's birth in 1925 and Hillary Rodham Clinton's in 1947. One year younger than Barbara's oldest child, Hillary had grown up in a very different world.

Hillary had not only graduated from college but had completed law school and then gone on to work her entire adult life. Barbara Bush dropped out of college after one year and never held a full-time job. The older woman's choices had been defined by her husband's jobs and by the needs of her children; the younger had begun a career first and then fit family around it. The contrast is underlined in their approach to their names. Most Americans find difficulty coming up with the maiden name of Barbara (Pierce) Bush, whereas few have trouble remembering that Hillary was born a Rodham.

It was not just that the two women had taken such remarkably different paths—in education, work, and domestic arrangements—but that so many of their contemporaries had made the same choices they had. Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton were quintessential examples of women of their time and class. As the older woman, Bush may have had some friends whose careers resembled Clinton's but such a path would have been as much an anomaly as a Barbara-Bush-type among Hillary's contemporaries.