First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (11 page)

T
HE PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE
between the first ladies provides a fascinating window into the true nature of their relationships. There are the pro forma thank-you notes (like the one from Lady Bird to Rosalynn Carter thanking her for an invitation to a White House dinner and mentioning the tablecloths with their “green lattice work and pink roses and the charming centerpieces of roses in antique baskets”) and the Christmas cards and small gifts (Texas pecan praline candy from Lady Bird Johnson, tchotchkes from Pat Nixon, and almond toffee from the Fords). One year, after Barbara Bush received her annual package of Texas pralines, she thanked Lady Bird with her usual self-deprecating sense of
humor: “Only someone who lived in the White House would know that, although the food is the best in the world, the cupboard is bare in the upstairs kitchen. For someone who always fights a losing weight battle, this is not all bad.” There are also touching notes offering support after President Nixon’s resignation and after September 11, 2001, and letters to Nancy Reagan as she cared for her husband and dealt with the devastating effects of his Alzheimer’s disease.

They all share a deep and abiding loyalty to their husbands, perhaps none as great as what Nancy Reagan felt for Ronald Reagan. She told Mike Wallace in a 1975 interview: “My job is being Mrs. Ronald Reagan.” Does she ever see herself as her own person? “No, I never do. Always as Nancy Reagan. My life began with Ronnie.” Every year the President left a love note on her breakfast tray on March 4, the date of their wedding anniversary. In 1981 he told her that he would “scooch” down at his desk in the Oval Office just so that he could see the window in the West Sitting Hall where she would sometimes be sitting. He wrote that he “feels warm all over just knowing she is there.” In 1983 the two were apart on their anniversary and he wrote to her from their California ranch: “You know I love the ranch—but these last two days made it plain I only love it when you are there. Come to think of it that’s true of every place every time. When you aren’t there I’m no place, just lost in time and space.” Nancy Reynolds, a Reagan press aide and family friend, said, “He really didn’t function very well for a couple of days if she wasn’t around. Once she was there everything was all right. . . . He wanted her there every minute.” Nancy’s press secretary, Sheila Tate, remembered how the President would call her in her office early in the mornings as the Reagans were having coffee in bed. “Sheila, it’s President Reagan,” he’d say. “Mommy [the President’s nickname for Nancy]
wants to speak to you,” and he’d pass the receiver over to Nancy because the phone was on his side of the bed.

Five years after President Reagan’s death, Nancy told
Vanity Fair
correspondent Bob Colacello that she hadn’t been to church in a while but that she asked preacher Billy Graham if she would be with her “Ronnie” again one day. “Just tell me that and I’ll be okay.”

“You are,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said, feeling as though she could go on, knowing that. She said if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she sometimes sees her late husband and talks to him. “It’s not important what I say. But the fact is, I
do
think he’s there.
And I see him
.”

Lady Bird Johnson praised Nancy for making the Reagans’ long goodbye public. “It will be a comfort to others,” she wrote to her, “whose families have been afflicted, to know that it [Alzheimer’s] is no respecter of fame or importance.” Lady Bird wrote to Nancy again on January 16, 2001, after the President broke his hip. “I hear news on the television since my limited vision and the newspapers have parted company. Some of the Secret Service agents on my detail also keep me informed.” She heard the news when she was listening to a set of tapes called
Great Presidents
and she was deep into the Reagan presidency. After President Reagan revealed he was suffering from Alzheimer’s in a moving letter to the nation, Betty Ford called Nancy several times. The two had not been close, but they both shared the experience of having been first lady and a deep love for their husbands. And their husbands had both been targets of assassination attempts. “She felt very bad for her because she realized what a lonely life Nancy had ahead of her,” Betty Ford’s daughter, Susan, says. On June 5, 2004, President Reagan died. Right before his death, Nancy said, he turned to look directly at her, something that he had not done in more
than a month. “Then he closed his eyes and went. And that was a wonderful gift.” Even though Nancy was not particularly close with any first lady, the deep and lasting grief they all suffer after the deaths of their husbands binds them together. Ron Reagan said that although his mother is “not in a state of grief all the time” over his father’s death, “it’s not something you get over.”

F
IRST LADIES BELONG
to the world and get pleading letters and requests for help from people they know and from complete strangers. “Life as a first lady is to be in touch with the hard reality of other people’s lives,” says Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff, Melanne Verveer. “Going across the country there are constant pleas to a first lady for help. She doesn’t escape those stories, she doesn’t live in a bubble.” Verveer watched Hillary meet with a group of working-class women, one of whom said to her, “You know, Mrs. Clinton, I look up at the wall and when it’s three o’clock I freeze every day because I know my child’s getting out of school at three o’clock. I have no idea what’s happening to him from the moment he walks out of school until he gets home.” Hillary turned to Verveer after the meeting and said, “Can you imagine not being able to know until after you left your job hours later if your child is okay?” Decades earlier, when a residence staffer’s child was born with a disability, Mamie Eisenhower asked the mother and child to move into the White House. During Christmas she handed out Mamie dolls to the staffers, saving them some money on Christmas shopping. A couple of years later, when the Kennedys were in the executive mansion, White House Electrician Larry Bush asked Jackie if she would sell him her 1961 Mercury Colony Park, the car she often drove for long weekends in the Virginia countryside, because he knew that Jackie got a new car every year. She called him one day and said, “I heard
my new car will be ready in two weeks. Do you still want my old one?” He bought it and drove it for ten years. Jackie donated many of the toys that were sent to her children to nearby orphanages. In a June 18, 1990, letter from First Lady Barbara Bush to former First Lady Betty Ford, the two are working together to help a young girl: “I do not know whether there is hope for little Diana Mowsesjan, but I will forward it to the appropriate office with the hope that maybe there can be.” According to the Ford Library, Mowsesjan was a Soviet child who needed help. Neither Betty Ford nor Barbara Bush wanted to publicize what they were doing to help this little girl, and there’s something dignified about their quiet efforts. In a similar way, Betty sent information about Pressley Ridge, a child advocacy organization, to Laura Bush in 2005, hoping that her office could do something to support its work. When Lady Bird Johnson found out that a butler’s wife was battling cancer she called two of the top oncologists in New York and that same day they landed at Washington’s National Airport to examine her. Before a trip to Korea, Nancy Reagan was told about two Korean children who badly needed heart surgery. Nancy started working the phones, and by the time the Reagans were flying back home on Air Force One, they had asked some staff to fly commercial so that the children could fly back with them. Both of the surgeries went well, and the children visited the White House when they were teenagers to thank the First Lady at the end of the administration. The son of one White House butler said it best: “The first lady can pick up the telephone and change your life.”

D
URING THE 1976
presidential campaign, Rosalynn Carter was on her way to pay her respects to Lady Bird Johnson, whose husband had been the most recent Democratic president. The day
before their meeting, Jimmy Carter’s embarrassing
Playboy
interview was published. In it, he said that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust” and had “committed adultery in my heart many times.” Carter’s campaign aides scrambled to repurpose a television ad featuring Rosalynn chatting with a bunch of women around a punch bowl and saying, “Jim has never had any hint of scandal in his personal life or his public life.” But the worst part, at least at that moment for Rosalynn, was what her husband had said in the interview about President Johnson: “I don’t think I would ever take on the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did—lying, cheating and distorting the truth.” Merely mentioning Johnson and Nixon in the same breath, so close to Nixon’s resignation, was anathema to Democrats. Rosalynn turned to an aide who was close with the Johnsons. “What does Mrs. Johnson think about the interview? What should I say about it?”

“You don’t say anything, Mrs. Carter,” the aide said. “You’re a southern lady just like Mrs. Johnson; it won’t be brought up. You’re two lovely southern ladies; just be yourself.” And that’s exactly what happened. No one understood the embarrassing position Rosalynn was in better than Lady Bird Johnson.

Once it’s done, put it behind you and go on with your life.

—
B
ETTY
F
ORD TO A WOMAN ABOUT TO UNDERGO BREAST CANCER SURGERY

T
wo first ladies who were in the White House during different decades and married to men from different political parties demonstrated incredible grace under pressure. One was willing to sacrifice her life for her husband and the other fought for her life on the national stage.

Jacqueline Kennedy was lying in the sun, breathing in the crisp, fresh country air at Glen Ora, the four-hundred-acre estate that the Kennedys rented in Virginia’s horse country. She had just arrived there after an hour-and-a-half car ride from the White House with her two children, five-year-old Caroline and two-year-old John-John. They whined for most of the ride and had just been put down for naps. Jackie was relieved to have a moment to herself, and she was happy to finally relax and get away from the tension of the White House. Then the phone rang.

“I’m coming back to Washington this afternoon. Why don’t you come back there?” President Kennedy said, telling his wife,
rather than asking her. Jackie stopped herself before she suggested, “Well, why don’t you come down here?” President Kennedy knew how much his wife enjoyed being in the country and away from the claustrophobic White House. According to her Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, between the summer of 1961 and the summer of 1962, the First Lady spent nearly four months away from Washington. She often left on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning and would not return until Monday afternoon or even Tuesday morning. In the summers she went to the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and to her family’s Hammersmith Farm home in Newport, Rhode Island—where the Kennedys were married in 1953—and she escaped to Palm Beach, Florida, for Christmas and Easter, but these very long weekends were usually reserved for Virginia.

“I could tell from his voice something was wrong, so I didn’t even ask,” she recalled during an interview with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Still, she wanted to know what was happening that would be worth her sacrificing one of her coveted weekends out of town, where she would have picnics with her children and enjoy the rare opportunity of tucking them into bed herself.

“Why?” she asked him.

“Well, never mind,” the President said, his voice persistent and strained. “Why don’t you just come back to Washington?”

Though she was frustrated, Jackie woke Caroline and John-John up from their naps and dutifully drove back to the White House with her Secret Service detail, still not knowing what awaited her there. She said to herself,
That’s why you’re married, you do things for the other person when you sense that they need you, even if you don’t know why they need you.

It was Saturday, October 20, 1962, and the President wanted his wife to be by his side during the agonizing thirteen-day
standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Photos taken by a U.S. U-2 spy plane revealed that during the summer of 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had reached a secret deal with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba that could reach the United States in less than four minutes. The forty-two Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles were each capable of hitting the United States with a nuclear warhead twenty or thirty times more powerful than the bomb that hit Hiroshima.

The President convened ExComm, a nickname for his Executive Committee, composed of his closest advisers, including his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Adviser McGeorge “Mac” Bundy. Day and night the haggard advisers gathered around the long conference table in the Cabinet Room or in Undersecretary of State George Ball’s conference room, which became known as the “think tank.” JFK was facing a possible nuclear war and wanted his wife by his side.

“From then on, it seemed there was no waking or sleeping,” Jackie recalled of the days after she returned to the White House. The President clung to her for strength during the loneliest time of his presidency; he asked her to join him on long walks on the South Lawn, where the two talked through the complicated options laid before him. Kennedy told her everything: he told her about his tense meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, in which he did not let on just how much he knew about the Soviets’ deal with Cuba; he told her about Khrushchev’s angry telegram sent in the middle of the night during the agonizing final weekend of the crisis; and he confessed to her his anguish about the criticism he was getting from some of his more hawkish
advisers, who did not think he was being strong enough. (“Those trigger-happy so-and-sos want me to knock Cuba off the map. We can do that. But we’d be bullies. They could be right or they could be dead wrong.”)
Time
magazine’s White House correspondent, Hugh Sidey, said that over dinner the President “would tell her everything that was happening.” This woman, who is so often recognized only for her expensive taste in clothes, often knew exactly what was going on in her husband’s administration.

When he did not tell her himself, she took to eavesdropping during meetings with the President’s top advisers in the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor in the family’s private quarters. The President had a general aversion to women in positions of power; his friend Charles Spalding said he was “much more comfortable with Secretary [of Defense Robert] McNamara than he would have been with [former U.S. Labor Secretary Frances] Perkins. It just seemed incongruous to him that a woman would have to appear at a Cabinet meeting.” But Jackie knew about the political landscape he was operating in because of her proximity to power and her intelligent maneuvering.

The Cuban Missile Crisis engulfed the lives of both Kennedys. lives. Once, during those tense days, late at night, Jackie came into the President’s bedroom in her nightgown to find him lying on the bed. She did not see National Security Adviser “Mac” Bundy sitting out of sight, on the phone. As she walked over to Kennedy, he waved her away, saying, “Get out! Get out!” Bundy held his hands over his eyes. Other days, Bundy would be standing at the foot of their bed to wake the President up in the early-morning hours. Jackie would later cherish this tense time, when the country stood at the brink of war, because it was then that she felt valued in her husband’s life. “That’s the time I’ve been the closest to him, and I never left the house or saw the children, and when
he came home, if it was for sleep or for a nap, I would sleep with him.” She’d walk by the Oval Office to see if he needed a break; the two held what she described as a sort of “vigil.”

The White House was shrouded in secrecy during the crisis. The President’s advisers agonized over how to respond to the Soviet action and what the Soviets’ motivation truly was. One group argued for a naval quarantine of Cuba and another insisted that the United States launch an air strike targeting the missile sites. The discovery was being kept secret until the President could decide on a response. In an oral history, Undersecretary of State Ball described the top-secret meetings and how much ExComm members dreaded any leaks to the press before they could devise a plan. Ball recalled ushering Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara into the State Department through his private elevator so that the press would not see them. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the President’s most trusted adviser, showed up for one Oval Office meeting in his riding clothes so that it would look as though he was working during an otherwise carefree weekend, and once all of the President’s other advisers piled into one car so as not to arouse suspicion from the press.

Jackie heard that the wives of Cabinet officials were preparing to leave Washington, knowing that it would be a target in the event of war. She would have none of it. “Please don’t send me anywhere. If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you,” she told her husband. “Even if there’s no room in the bomb shelter in the White House . . . Please, then I just want to be on the lawn when it happens—you know—but I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do too—than live without you.” The President promised her that he would not send her anywhere. Their relationship had grown closer in the White House than it had ever been before. The President’s
personal doctor, Janet Travell, remembered seeing Kennedy walk from the West Wing to Marine One on the South Lawn shortly before the crisis began, trailed by his loyal aides. Then something strange happened. “The President reappeared in the doorway and descended the steps alone.
How unusual
, I thought. Then I saw why. Jackie, her hair wild in the gale of the rotors, was running from the South Portico across the grass. She almost met him at the helicopter steps and she reached up with her arms. They stood motionless in an embrace for many seconds.”

During a private meeting with her Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, Hill reached out to Jackie and gently touched her elbow. “You know about the bomb shelter here, under the White House. I know that [Chief Usher] J. B. West gave you a brief tour of the facility a few months ago. . . . In the event . . . a situation develops . . . where we don’t have time to leave the area, we would take you and the children into the shelter for protection.” But Jackie had already made up her mind and she would not be told what to do. She abruptly pulled her arm away. “Mr. Hill, if the situation develops that requires the children and me to go to the shelter, let me tell you what you can expect.” She lowered her already soft, sweet voice into an even deeper whisper and said, “If the situation develops, I will take Caroline and John, and we will walk hand in hand out onto the south grounds. We will stand there like brave soldiers, and face the fate of every other American.”

Hill was stunned. “Well, Mrs. Kennedy, let’s just pray to God that we will never be in that situation.”

For the first time ever, the U.S. Strategic Air Command was placed on DEFCON (Defense Condition) 2, meaning there was an immediate threat of war. It was the closest the country has ever come to launching nuclear missiles. If one wrong move was made,
one miscalculated comment or misguided message between advisers in the so-called ExComm and Soviet advisers hunkered down in the Kremlin, it could mean complete and utter devastation. Usher Nelson Pierce, who began working at the White House just a year before the crisis, said he was the most frightened he had ever been in his life. “You knew that those missiles were aimed right at us,” he recalled, shivering at the memory of walking through the White House’s Northwest Gates on Pennsylvania Avenue, knowing he was walking into a bull’s-eye. “You knew that if you heard that something [a missile] was on the way, you had to get the first family out, or to a safe place, and you were there regardless. You’d be the last one to leave,” he paused, “if you left at all.”

Part-time Butler Herman Thompson was called in to work during the crisis and served drinks to the President’s advisers who gathered day and night at the White House. “I was scared to death. I went to bed that night and didn’t sleep,” Thompson recalled, having heard the men talk. Unfurled maps, half-eaten sandwiches, and old coffee cups littered the usually pristine Oval Office.

Jackie took charge and, never missing a detail, realized she had to begin the delicate process of canceling a dinner planned for the Maharajah and Maharani of Jaipur, who had graciously hosted her during a whirlwind trip to India. Before the crisis took hold of the White House, Jackie’s memos to the man who ran the residence, Chief Usher J. B. West, were so thoughtful and detailed that she instructed him, ahead of the visit, to paint a chest of drawers black in the Queens’ Dressing Room and to put her fur rug on a daybed in the Lincoln Sitting Room along with “some green and yellow pillows” to make her guests more comfortable. There was no time for such things now; everything had changed
once the missiles were detected. That Sunday, October 21, 1962, Jackie woke West up at his Arlington, Virginia, home, just as he and his wife, Zella, were enjoying a rare morning of sleeping in.

“Could you please come to the White House right away, Mr. West, but come up through the kitchen elevator so nobody will know you’re here.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he told her. He noticed more cars than usual in the White House driveway, and when he stepped off the elevator he saw Jackie with no makeup on, wearing bright Pucci pants and loafers and sitting on a sofa in the West Sitting Hall beneath its dramatic half-moon window as sunlight flooded into the room. She seemed enveloped in a halo, a bright light during a very tense, dark time.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. West,” she said apologetically. “There’s something brewing that might turn out to be a big catastrophe—which means that we may have to cancel the dinner and dance for the Jaipurs Tuesday night.” West was surprised; it was rare to cancel an event so suddenly. “Tell me when the Jaipurs are set to arrive and make sure they are assigned the best maid, Wilma, and the best valet at Blair House,” she told him, cool and calm under unimaginable pressure.

“Could you please handle the cancellation for me? This is all very secret,” she told him, “and I’m afraid Tish [Social Secretary Letitia Baldrige] would get all upset and rant and rave—
you
know—and I think you could do it more calmly.” Jackie and her social secretary were often at odds. Baldrige had been three years ahead of her at Miss Porter’s and Vassar, and at the White House she always wanted Jackie to do more, to host more teas, to have more luncheons with deserving groups. But all Jackie wanted was to have more privacy and rest.

Mary Boylan, a secretary in the East Wing, remembers the
flurry of activity that weekend as she sat in her office across the hall from the Military Office. On October 22 the President explained the crisis to the nation in a prime-time televised address. That morning Baldrige walked into the East Wing and, as Jackie had predicted, she was anything but calm. She commanded everyone’s attention: “I have an announcement to make.” The room full of well-dressed young women grew silent. “All of you should start praying like you never prayed before. Tonight you’re going to hear some news that’s going to be very shocking, and none of us know what the outcome is going to be.”