Living History (23 page)

So far, our instincts and Jackie’s prescriptions had served Chelsea well. She was adjusting to her new school as comfortably as could be expected, although she missed her friends from Arkansas. She was settling into her two rooms on the second floor. They had been Caroline’s and John’s and then Lynda and Luci Johnson’s, so Jackie knew exactly where they were. One was now Chelsea’s bedroom with twin beds so she could have sleepovers, and the other was a den where she could do homework, watch television, listen to music and entertain friends.

I told Jackie how grateful I was that she had created a dining room upstairs and that we were converting the butler’s pantry into a small kitchen where we could eat our family meals in a more relaxed and in formal atmosphere. One night, I sparked a culinary crisis.

Chelsea was not feeling well, and I wanted to make her soft scrambled eggs and applesauce, the comfort foods I had always provided in our pre-White House years. I looked in the small kitchen for utensils and then called downstairs and asked the chef if he could provide me with what I needed. He and the kitchen staff were completely undone at the thought of a First Lady wielding a frying pan with no supervision! They even called my staff to ask if I was cooking myself because I was unhappy with their food.

This incident reminded me of Eleanor Roosevelt’s similar experiences of adjusting to living in the White House. “Unconsciously, I did many things that shocked the ushers,” she wrote in her autobiography. “My first act was to insist on running the elevator myself without waiting for one of the doormen to run it for me. That just wasn’t done by the President’s wife.”

Jackie and I also discussed the Secret Service and the unusual security challenges that the children of Presidents presented. She confirmed my instincts that even though security was necessary, it was important to stress to Chelsea, as she had to her own children, that she owed respect to the agents sworn to protect her. I had seen children of Governors boss around and even defy the middle-aged state troopers assigned to guard them. Jackie told me about the time an older kid had taken John’s bicycle and he had asked his security detail to get it back for him. When Jackie found out, she told John he would have to stand up for himself. The successive teams of agents assigned to protect Chelsea understood that, as much as possible, she needed to live the life of a normal teenage girl.

The Service uses code names for its protectees, and each member of a family has a name beginning with the same letter. Bill became “Eagle,” I was “Evergreen” and Chelsea, appropriately, was called “Energy.” The code names sound whimsical, but they mask a harsh reality: Ongoing threats require the vigilance and intrusiveness of protective security.

Jackie spoke frankly about the peculiar and dangerous attractions evoked by charismatic politicians. She cautioned me that Bill, like President Kennedy, had a personal magnetism that inspired strong feelings in people. She never came out and said it, but she meant that he might also be a target. “He has to be very careful,” she told me. “Very careful.”

I was still having a hard time understanding how we could salvage any semblance of normality in our lives if we had to keep looking over our shoulders everywhere we went.

Jackie knew that, unlike previous presidential couples, we didn’t have our own house or vacation getaway to escape to. She urged me to use Camp David and to stay with friends who had homes in secluded places where we could avoid the curiosity seekers and paparazzi.

Not all our conversation was so serious. We gossiped about mutual friends and even fashion. Jackie was one of the twentieth century’s iconic trendsetters. My friends and some in the press had kibbitzed about my clothes, my hair and my makeup since the day Bill announced he would run. When I asked her if I should just turn myself over to a team of famous consultants as some in the media had recommended, she looked horrified.

“You have to be you,” she said. “You’ll end up wearing someone else’s idea of who you are and how you should look. Concentrate instead on what’s important to you.” Her words were a relief. With Jackie’s tacit permission, I determined to continue having fun while not taking any of it too seriously.

After lingering for two hours, it was finally time for me to leave. Jackie urged me to call or be in touch if I ever had questions or needed to chat. Until her untimely death from cancer sixteen months later, she remained a source of inspiration and advice for me.

I was reassured after my visit with Jackie, but the respite didn’t last long. I had agreed to grant my first newspaper interview as First Lady to Marian Burros of The New York Times, who typically covered the first big black-tie dinner of each new administration.

Her stories usually focused on the choice of food, flowers and entertainment for the evening.

I thought the interview offered me a chance to share my ideas about how I intended to make the White House a showcase for American food and culture.

Burros and I met in the Red Room, one of three sitting rooms on the State Floor of the Executive Mansion. We sat on a nineteenth-century American Empire sofa next to the fireplace. Gilbert Stuart’s famous 1804 portrait of Dolley Madison, President Madison’s wife and one of my feisty predecessors, hung on one wall. As Burros and I talked, I occasionally caught a glimpse of Dolley out of the corner of my eye. She was an extraordinary woman, well ahead of her time, famous for her sociability, trendsetting personal style (she favored turbans), political skills and great courage. During the War of 1812, as invading British troops advanced on Washington, she spent the day preparing what would be her last White House dinner party for President Madison and his military advisers, who were expected to return from the front. Although she finally realized that she had to evacuate, she refused to leave until the British were practically at the door. She fled with the clothes on her back, important state documents and a few treasured items from the Mansion. Her last act was to request that the full-length portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart be cut out from its frame, rolled up and removed to a safe house.

Shortly after her escape, Admiral Cockburn and his men sacked the White House, ate the meal she had prepared and burned the Mansion.

I wanted my first White House dinner party to be memorable, but not that memorable.

I told Burros that (wanted to put our personal stamp on the White House, as previous First Couples had done. I began by introducing American cuisine to the menu. Ever since the Kennedy Administration, the White House kitchen had been ruled by the French. I understood why Jackie had wanted to improve much about the White House, from decor to cuisine, but that was then. In the three decades since she had occupied the White House, American chefs had revolutionized cooking, starting with the incomparable duo Julia Child and Alice Waters. Child had written Bill and me at the end of 1992, urging us to showcase American culinary arts, and Waters wrote to encourage us to appoint an American chef. I agreed with them. The White House, after all, was one of our nation’s most visible symbols of American culture. I hired Walter Scheib, an experienced chef who specialized in American cuisine featuring lighter, fresher ingredients and introduced more food and wine supplied by American purveyors.

The dinner turned out to be a grand success, with the few flaws visible hopefully only to us. The mostly American-grown feast included smoked marinated shrimp, roast tenderloin of beef, baby vegetables in a zucchini basket and Yukon Gold potatoes with Vidalia onions. We ate goat cheese from Massachusetts and drank American wines. Our guests seemed genuinely pleased, particularly with the after-dinner Broadway-style revue put together at the last minute by our Tony Award-winning friend James Naughton and featuring Lauren Bacall and Carol Channing. I heaved a big sigh of relief.

The Burros story ran on the front page of The New York Times on February 2, and it broke some minor news. I announced that we were banning smoking in the Executive Mansion as well as the East and West Wings, that broccoli would return to the White House kitchen (having been exiled by the Bushes) and that we hoped to make the White House more accessible to the public. Accompanying the text was a photo of me wearing a bare-shoulder, black Donna Karan evening dress.

To me, the story and the photo seemed harmless enough, but they inspired a lot of commentary. The White House press corps was not happy that I had granted an exclusive interview to a reporter whose beat was not White House politics. In their view, my choice signaled my determination to avoid challenging questions about my role in the policy arena. Some critics suggested that the story was contrived to “soften” my image and portray me as a traditional woman in a traditional role. Some of my most ardent defenders also took exception to the interview and the picture because neither reflected their conception of me as First Lady. If I was serious about substantive policy issues, they reasoned, why was I talking to a reporter about food and entertainment? Conversely, if I was really worrying about floral centerpieces and the color of table linens, how could I be substantive enough to head a major policy effort? What kind of message was I sending, anyway?

It seemed that people could perceive me only as one thing or the other―either a hardworking professional woman or a conscientious and caring hostess. Iwas beginning to catch on to what Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a distinguished professor of communications and Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, would later term “the double bind.” Gender stereotypes, says Jamieson, trap women by categorizing them in ways that don’t reflect the true complexities of their lives. It was becoming clear to me that people who wanted me to fit into a certain box, traditionalist or feminist, would never be entirely satisfied with me as me-which is to say, with my many different, and sometimes paradoxical, roles.

My friends lived the same way. On any given day, Diane Blair might be teaching a political science class hours before preparing dinner for a huge crowd at the Blairs’ lakefront home. Melanne Verveer might be running a White House meeting one minute and talking on the phone with her granddaughter the next. Lissa Muscatine, a Rhodes Scholar from Harvard who gave birth to three children while working for me at the White House, might be on an airplane revising speeches or changing diapers at home. So who was the “real” woman? In fact, most of us took on all those roles and more every day of our lives.

I know how hard it is to integrate the many disparate demands, choices and activities women pursue and face every day. Most of us live with nagging voices questioning the choices we make and with loads of guilt, whatever our choice. In my own life I have been a wife, mother, daughter, sister, in-law, student, lawyer, children’s rights activist, law professor, Methodist, political adviser, citizen and so much else. Now I was a symbol―

and that was a new experience.

Bill and Ihad worried about the problems we would face when we moved into the White House, but I never expected that the way I defined my role as First Lady would generate so much controversy and confusion. In my own mind, I was traditional in some ways and not in others. I cared about the food I served our guests, and I also wanted to improve the delivery of health care for all Americans. To me, there was nothing incongruous about my interests and activities.

I was navigating uncharted terrain―and through my own inexperience, I contributed to some of the conflicting perceptions about me. It took me awhile to figure out that what might not be important to me might seem very important to many men and women across America. We were living in an era in which some people still felt deep ambivalence about women in positions of public leadership and power. In this era of changing gender roles, I was America’s Exhibit A.

The scrutiny was overwhelming. Ever since I had become a Secret Service protectee at the Democratic Convention in New York in July 1992, I had been trying to adjust to my loss of anonymity. Occasionally, I snuck out of the White House wearing sweats, sunglasses and a baseball cap. I loved walking through the Mall, looking at the monuments, or riding my bike along the C&O Canal in Georgetown. I bargained the Secret Service down to only one agent, dressed in casual clothes, walking or biking behind me. I soon learned, though, that they had one of those big black fully loaded vans trailing somewhere nearby just in case. If I moved fast, even people who thought they recognized me weren’t sure. One morning, a touring family asked me to take their picture as they posed in front of the Washington Monument. I quickly agreed, and as they stood together smiling, I snapped a photo. As I was leaving, I heard one of the children saying, “Mom, that lady looks familiar.” I was out of earshot before I heard whether they guessed who their photographer was.

These moments of quiet anonymity were fleeting, and so was time with close friends.

Several from Arkansas had come to work in Bill’s administration, but ironically, they were among the people I missed the most those early weeks. We simply hadn’t had time to see them.

In early February, Bill and I invited Vince Foster, now Deputy White House Counsel; Bruce Lindsey, also in the Counsel’s office and still one of Bill’s closest advisers and traveling companions; and Webb Hubbell, Associate Attorney General, to a small, informal dinner in the second-floor dining room of the residence to celebrate our friend Mary Steenburgen’s fortieth birthday. Mary, a fellow Arkansan, had done well in Hollywood, winning an Academy Award for acting, but she had never lost touch with her roots. She, Bruce, Vince and Webb were among our closest friends, and I remember that meal as one of the last carefree times we had together. For a few hours, we screened out the worries of the day and talked about adjusting to Washington and timeless issues―kids, schools, movies, politics. I can still close my eyes and see Vince at that table, looking tired but happy, leaning back and listening with a smile on his face. At that moment, it was impossible to guess the strain he was under as a newcomer to Washington’s political world.