First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (38 page)

Members of the first family always prefer to have people around whom they know personally, partly out of convenience and partly because it makes them feel safe. They have casual conversations with the butlers who work in the family quarters. The first family wants as few people up on the second and third floors of the White House as possible, and the President and the First Lady are comforted by the familiar faces of the butlers and the maids who work there every day. “They’re [SBAs] all over the place now,” Hannie said. “It’s dangerous.”

A
S FIRST LADIES,
these women are expected to be brave, physically and emotionally. They regularly meet with wounded veterans, the parents of murdered children, and children whose parents have been killed in the line of duty—all without letting their emotions show. Rosalynn Carter remembers one of her first visits to a hospital with mentally handicapped children, and how she could not control her tears. The director took her aside, shut the door, and told her gently, “Mrs. Carter, I’ve watched you this morning and I have to say one thing. Most mentally retarded people are happy. They do not know that they should be sad. If you are going to help at all, you’ve got
to accept that and get over your tears.” First ladies walk a fine line: they need to show their humanity without appearing weak. This is especially the case for Hillary Clinton, who is vying to become the nation’s next commander in chief. Lissa Muscatine, who served for many years as a top speechwriter for Hillary when she was first lady and then secretary of state, said that one of the realities of being on the national stage, whether you’re a man or a woman, is simple: “You have to be able to chain your emotions.”

Muscatine recalls accompanying Hillary on a trip to Romania when she was First Lady; they visited children suffering from terrible diseases. “We went out to this little playground outside and I remember all of us on the staff, probably three or four of us, went to the corner in tears. It was just one of the most horrifying things you’ve ever seen.” When they got back to the motorcade Muscatine asked Hillary, who was wearing sunglasses to hide her tears, “How on earth did you keep it together?” Hillary replied, “I just kept thinking to myself over and over,
This life is so bad for these kids, I have to not cry because crying about their condition would make it worse for them. I just have to not make it worse for them.
So I just kept saying to myself,
Don’t make it worse for them. Don’t make it worse for them. Keep your stuff together.
” Neel Lattimore, Hillary’s press secretary when she was First Lady, remembers a trip to Bangladesh, where Hillary, her chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, and a group of reporters accompanying them got a tour of a hospital for malaria patients. Many of the patients were so sick that they were placed on rubber cots to make it easier to clean them and wastebaskets were at their bedsides in case they had to vomit. “At a certain point, I looked around and it was just me, Melanne, and Mrs. Clinton.” The reporters had left because they were overwhelmed by the smell and by so many desperately ill people. “She did not flinch.”

President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush regularly
went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to visit soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. They did not bring press with them, but a member of their staff would usually accompany them. Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto said, “I never wanted to miss one; as hard as they were and as difficult as they were, you felt you wanted to be there with them.” He said the troops gave the President and First Lady strength and that, even when a service member or a family member criticized the President to his face, it was always a trip the President looked forward to. “They have the right to express themselves to the President. But it was amazing how some of the troops could lift him with their encouragement of him as commander in chief.” Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, described how moving it was to see these interactions. During one trip, the President met the parents of a dying soldier and the soldier’s mother yelled at him, desperate to know why her son was dying and the Bushes’ children were safe. “Her husband tried to calm her and I noticed the President wasn’t in a hurry to leave,” Perino wrote in her memoir. “He tried offering comfort but then just stood and took it. Like he expected and needed to hear the anguish.” On the helicopter ride back to the White House a single tear rolled down the President’s cheek. Laura, however, was more solemn and stoic during these gut-wrenching visits. Of the role reversal, an aide noted, “He is more publicly emotional, she was reserved. She never felt comfortable being on public display.” But residence staffers and people close to her can tell when she is upset: she quietly fiddles with the pleats in the back of her dress.

P
RESIDENT
O
BAMA STARTED
every day with a cigarette and ended every night with one until he quit smoking near the end of his first term. A residence staffer used to lead him up to the roof of the White
House, where snipers are stationed and a small greenhouse is located. There the President would have his smoking kit waiting for him. The bundle was prepared by his valet and contained two packs of cigarettes, two packs of matches, and a couple of lighters. Obama always felt an obligation to make a self-deprecating joke about his need to smoke. While his smoking is relatively well known, Laura Bush’s urge for a cigarette is not. She dealt with the pressures of being first lady by retiring almost every night to the Treaty Room, a cozy office with a large Victorian chandelier on the second floor across from the Grand Staircase, where she smoked with her husband. Laura smoked cigarettes and President Bush smoked cigars after dinner (a residence staffer even arranged for a humidor specially made in Texas to be installed in a closet off President Bush’s bathroom on the second floor). When the door to the Treaty Room was shut everyone on the staff knew that meant they were probably smoking. The Bushes would sit on the couch with the bulletproof glass window open and a fan turned on. Sometimes, when a staffer needed to bring the President an “eyes only” paper to look at and the door was closed, it could be awkward. “My eyes were always on the floor,” one staffer said. “I couldn’t tell you what they were doing, but the room was always full of smoke.”

The residence staff was so concerned about the window being open and about the fact that the President and the First Lady sometimes forgot to shut it when they left the room that the staffers brought it up with the Secret Service. Secret Service agents put a procedure in place to check the window every night. They waited until the Bushes were in bed, and then either an usher or a Secret Service agent would discreetly close the window. By the end of the administration the Bushes had cut down on their smoking and had tried to stop altogether. The first couple did not want to bring the bad habit back with them to Texas.

It’s Heaven not to be bound by a schedule—at least for a few days—don’t you think?

—
L
ADY
B
IRD
J
OHNSON, IN A PRIVATE LETTER TO
B
ETTY
F
ORD,
J
ULY 31, 1987

F
irst ladies are part of a sisterhood—the world’s smallest and most elite sorority. They live their lives in the fishbowl of the White House and become symbols of American womanhood. Behind the scenes, they display incredible courage and determination under tremendous pressure. Most campaign hard for their husbands—Barbara Bush was on the campaign trail for twenty-seven days in one month alone, visiting thirty-seven cities in sixteen states (and that was just when her husband was President Reagan’s running mate). When Betty Ford left the White House in 1977, she was crestfallen. She had finally found her voice and was being forced to leave it all behind after just two and a half years. Mamie Eisenhower was among that small group of women who knew what Betty was going through. After President Ford lost the election, Mamie wrote to her, “Words are inadequate from your friends but you can always say: ‘God I have done
my best,’ Amen.” When Lady Bird Johnson returned to Texas and found mountains of luggage piled up with no one from the enormous White House staff in sight, she sighed, “The chariot had turned into a pumpkin and all the mice have run away.”

Leaving the White House was especially difficult for Jackie Kennedy, who spent the rest of her life struggling with the horror of her husband’s murder. In 1968, five years after JFK’s assassination, Jackie married the billionaire Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in a small ceremony on his private island of Skorpios. Their marriage was attacked in the press with headlines blaring “Jackie How Could You?” and “Jack Kennedy Dies Today for a Second Time.” Lady Bird Johnson, who was in the motorcade with Jackie in 1963 and who had seen her endure so much heartache, was more sympathetic. In her diary Lady Bird wrote: “Remembering her [Jackie’s] eyes when last I had seen her at the funeral of Bobby Kennedy, I thought this complete break with the past might be good for her.” Onassis provided Jackie with a retreat from public life and a sense of privacy and security (Onassis had his own speedboats and armed security guards at their private wedding ceremony). But they had a difficult marriage, and when he died in 1975, Jackie was not by his side. After Onassis’s death, Jackie worked as a New York book editor at Viking and then at Doubleday, and she began a long relationship with diamond dealer and financier Maurice Tempelsman, who moved into her fifteen-room Fifth Avenue apartment in 1982. (They never married, because Tempelsman, who was separated from his wife, could not get a divorce because she was an Orthodox Jew.) Jackie died of cancer in 1994 at sixty-four years old. Up until shortly before her death, she was working from her New York office—which was crammed with books—three days a week.

Post–White House years were not always easy for Pat Nixon,
either. She had always wanted to be alone with her family and away from public life, but she would forever be haunted by Watergate and her husband’s humiliating departure from Washington. In self-imposed exile, Pat spent most of her days obsessively tending to her garden at La Casa Pacifica, their twenty-nine-acre, Spanish-style estate in San Clemente, California, and taking on the hardest jobs, including climbing up on the roof to remove palm fronds—anything to avoid reporters and the gaze of the public. The Nixons moved to New York City in 1980 to be closer to their daughters, after five and a half years in California. Not long after that they bought a home in Saddle River in north New Jersey, where Nixon penned his memoirs and where they spent time with their grandchildren. In 1991, when Pat’s health was in decline, they moved to a smaller house with an elevator in a gated development in nearby Park Ridge. Pat was eighty-one when she died of lung cancer in 1993. Nixon cried at Pat’s funeral and held a handkerchief to his face. Nixon’s youngest brother, Ed, remembers how difficult it was. “I had never seen Dick so torn up, he was really out of it,” Ed says. “After the ceremony out on the lawn he came inside and spoke to those who were still there—he got front and center like a cheerleader saying, ‘We have to go on now. We’ll never forget this lady and what she meant to all of us.’” Nixon died ten months later.

Nancy Reagan had a surprisingly difficult life after the glamorous years she spent in the White House. She called on the deep and abiding love she had for her husband as she nursed him through a long and heartbreaking goodbye. The Fords wrote a letter to the Reagans in 2002 to mark their fiftieth wedding anniversary. “Nancy, I can think of no one who so completely embodies St. Paul’s admonition that ‘love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.’”

Sometimes, though, leaving the White House is like being unshackled after serving a long prison term. The endless teas, luncheons, dinners, and photo ops fade away and former first ladies can work on causes they care about. They live remarkably long lives and have often outlived their husbands: Betty Ford was ninety-three when she passed away, Rosalynn Carter is eighty-eight, Nancy Reagan is ninety-four, and Barbara Bush is ninety. (Bess Truman, who died at ninety-seven, was the longest-living former first lady.)

When President Johnson died of a heart attack on January 22, 1973, he and Lady Bird had been married for thirty-nine years. She lived another thirty-four years, until her death in 2007 at ninety-four. Moody and consumed with how his legacy was being marred by the Vietnam War, in retirement LBJ brooded and said that men in his family typically did not live past sixty-five. He died at sixty-four. After he left the White House, Johnson ignored doctor’s orders and began smoking and eating with abandon. On the cold January morning of his death, Lady Bird did not notice anything out of the ordinary and decided to drive into Austin to do some shopping. She received an urgent call on her car telephone from a Secret Service agent at the ranch telling her to return right away. Later, she told an aide, “This time we didn’t make it. Lyndon is dead.” Lady Bird was composed throughout his funeral; as the Nixons led her to the Rotunda of the Capitol, where her husband’s body lay in state, she talked wistfully about all the times she had waited for him at the door of the Senate.

“Mrs. Johnson lived two lives,” says her former aide Shirley James, who often refers to the former first lady lovingly as “Mrs. J.” “No question, she spread her wings.” After devoting almost four decades of her life to her husband’s happiness, Lady Bird began to concern herself with her own happiness, traveling and
spending time with her grandchildren. President Johnson’s wild mood swings and his desire to stay in Texas had made her life more complicated, and while she missed him dearly and spoke of him often in her private letters, she had always wanted to see the world, and after his death she finally could. The Johnsons’ social secretary, Bess Abell, says that she once jokingly accused Lady Bird of having a box of three-by-five cards full of things that she wanted to do. “And she did them all.”

T
HE FIRST LADY
who was in the White House for the shortest amount of time out of all of these ten women is the one who has had the most lasting legacy. After Betty Ford left the White House, she confronted a very modern issue that had once been a very private shame, and she liberated so many others by publicly admitting her addiction to alcohol and pills. Her daughter, Susan, says, “Sometimes I think she gets remembered more than dad does.” Ford photographer and family friend David Hume Kennerly says that the Fords’ literary agent decided to bundle their 1977 book deal so that no one could look at the amount of money they each got for their memoirs—because it was likely that she would have gotten more. Betty’s book,
The Times of My Life
, did outsell her husband’s. But President Ford had a sense of humor about it—Betty even gave him a T-shirt for his birthday that read “Bet My Book Outsells Yours.” Ford conceded, “She’s a lot more interesting than I am!”

The Betty Ford Center was dedicated on October 3, 1982, and is a perfectly manicured oasis on the grounds of the Eisenhower Medical Center, eleven miles southeast of Palm Springs. The center relies on the tenets of the twelve-step program Alcoholics Anonymous, and celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor and
Chevy Chase, have sought treatment there. But so have people without boldfaced names, and Betty Ford became particularly close to one woman whose life she helped save.

Lorraine Ornelas was in her twenties when she met the Fords in the late 1980s. Ornelas was a chef at the Marriott Desert Springs when her employer staged an intervention and she went to the Betty Ford Center. Ornelas remembers sitting in a circle with a group of patients at the center when Betty Ford walked in. Everyone stood up, except Lorraine. She said she did not recognize the former first lady and at that low point in her life, she did not care. “I was pretty much lost and broken, I had a broken spirit.” Betty immediately noticed Lorraine, walked right up to her, stuck out her hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Betty Ford.”

Betty had a broken spirit once, too. In 1977 Barbara Walters interviewed the Fords when they were in the White House. Betty’s speech was slow and slurred at times, and Walters decided to edit most of it out. Betty’s personal assistant, Nancy Chirdon Forster, said the First Lady’s staff had asked Walters to postpone the interview, but their pleas “did not seem to matter.” A decade later, Betty told Walters how hard it was to come to grips with her addiction. “The word ‘alcoholic’ to me had a meaning of being disheveled, drunk, all of those things. So how could I be an alcoholic?” The former first lady visited the clinic named in her honor nearly every day.

Shortly after they first met, Betty told Lorraine that she was looking for a personal chef and that Lorraine should drop by the Fords’ house for an interview. When Lorraine met with the Fords she felt that, for the first time in years, she had hope for a brighter future. When Lorraine got the job, Betty told her that she would be more than an employee: she would be part of the Fords’ large family. Lorraine thought,
Well, that’s a nice gesture,
but I will be your employee
. But she soon learned that Betty was not exaggerating. Lorraine, who was dyslexic and who had never finished high school, spent every holiday with the Fords for almost seven years and could tell Betty anything. Lorraine says that while Betty had an air of sophistication about her, there was a brokenness there, too. “When it was just her and I in this big house—I was lonely at the time, and I always have that in me. I felt the same from her, that deep down inside she was lonely too,” Ornelas recalled. In the beginning, Lorraine was still struggling with her addiction, and after two weeks on the job she took Betty aside and said, “I don’t think this is the job for me.” But Betty would not give up on her. “Let’s just wait two more weeks and see,” she said. The weeks turned into years. Lorraine relapsed once while she was with the Fords, and when she told Betty, the former first lady sat her down on the living room couch. “You can fire me if you want,” Lorraine said. “Absolutely not,” Betty told her, and put her hand on Lorraine’s knee. “You never have to be alone.”

Betty Ford died at the age of ninety-three, and her July 12, 2011, funeral in Palm Desert, California, was attended by Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama. Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith was one of Betty’s eulogists and remembers looking down from the stage to see Rosalynn crying. “Who would have guessed thirty years ago that this is how the story ends,” he said, recalling how much bitterness there was after Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election. In her own remarks, Rosalynn spoke lovingly of her onetime rival, a woman with whom she had developed a close friendship. “Her honesty gave to others every single day.”

T
HE
C
ARTERS ARE
the only post–World War II first couple to return to their original hometown. Since their homecoming to Plains, Georgia, Rosalynn has worked to revitalize the working-class town, revamping the local inn and adding a butterfly garden. But the Carters are most famous for their work with the Carter Center in Atlanta, where they work fifty-one weeks a year (the remaining week they devote to Habitat for Humanity). The Carter Center has a $600 million endowment and oversees elections around the world. The center has also funded treatment for millions of people suffering from diseases and improved the lives of people in more than eighty countries with its work advancing human rights and democracy. Rosalynn has been active in it from its inception. She goes to Africa with her husband a couple of times each year. She gets emotional when she talks about visiting a village where guinea worm, a debilitating disease that in 1986 afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people, has finally been eradicated because of the work of the Carter Center. “It’s just so wonderful, just to see the hope on their faces that something good is happening. I didn’t mean to get emotional.”