First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies

T
O THE FIRST LADY IN
OUR
FAMILY, MY MAGNIFICENT

MOTHER,
V
ALERIE
A
NDERSEN.

A
ND TO MY EXTRAORDINARY FATHER,

C
HRISTOPHER
A
NDERSEN.

There is no way in the world to figure out what it’s like to live here.

—
H
ILLARY
C
LINTON ON LIFE IN THE
W
HITE
H
OUSE

B
oth women were wearing sunglasses. One looked glamorous even in a baseball cap with her hair tied back in a ponytail; the other looked a little less regal in a straw hat with a black bow, her hair blown by the salty wind. Both were beaming as the President of the United States snapped their photograph.

It was August 24, 1993, and Hillary Clinton was posing for a photo with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on board the
Relemar
, a seventy-foot, sleek white yacht owned by the former first lady’s longtime companion, diamond dealer Maurice Tempelsman. Jackie had invited the Clintons, who had moved into the White House just seven months before, for a five-hour cruise on the brilliantly sunny day along Vineyard Sound, heading toward the red clay bluffs of Gay Head at the western end of Martha’s Vineyard island. Jackie owned a four-hundred-acre estate nearby but the Clintons were far less familiar with the patrician elite who
dominate the Vineyard in the summer. It was more than just a joyride; Jackie Kennedy was one of six former first ladies alive at the time, and she wanted to give Hillary advice on how to survive life in the White House. Jackie knew that Hillary was concerned about her daughter Chelsea’s well-being, and, as a member of the elite sorority of former first ladies, she wanted to explain how she had raised the well-adjusted Caroline and JFK Jr. in the spotlight. Months before, Hillary had had a private lunch with Jackie at her elegant New York apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue. At the meeting they discussed how to keep Chelsea shielded from the press.

Lisa Caputo, Hillary’s press secretary in the White House, remembers how Jackie and her children talked to both Hillary and the President about “how you can grow up and have a sense of normalcy. That was really important to both the President and Mrs. Clinton at the time.” In a letter to Betty Ford, another member of the exclusive sorority, Hillary said the trip “gave us the change of pace our family really needed for a few days.” It was one of several meetings between Jackie and Hillary that solidified their profound bond. Jackie was happy that she could help Hillary, not only with parenting advice, but also by guiding her through the complicated social world of old-money Martha’s Vineyard. Jackie made sure to introduce Hillary to her wealthy friends and encouraged her to make entertaining a priority in the White House. (She felt that some of her successors—especially Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, and Rosalynn Carter—could have done more to bring entertainers to the White House and expose the country to the arts.)

Jackie, who was sixty-four years old at the time, took a particular liking to the Clintons, in part because of Bill Clinton’s adulation of President Kennedy, whom he referred to as his hero. She especially liked seeing the famous photo of a teenage Bill Clinton
shaking President Kennedy’s hand in the Rose Garden during a visit he made with a civic organization to Washington, D.C. (The Clintons were not shy about their admiration of the Kennedys. On the eve of the 1993 inauguration, they laid white roses at President Kennedy’s grave and the grave of his brother, Robert, at Arlington National Cemetery.) No other Democratic president—not President Johnson or President Carter—had been quite so devoted to JFK’s legacy. And no other first couple had been able to develop a real rapport with Jackie. The meeting that day between Hillary, a new first lady struggling to find her own voice, and Jackie, a former first lady who seemed so self-possessed, would have a deep impact on how Hillary raised her teenage daughter during the eight years of her husband’s presidency.

At first, the always camera-shy Jackie stayed belowdecks while her brother-in-law Senator Ted Kennedy greeted the Clintons. “Hello, welcome to Massachusetts!” Senator Kennedy called out as the Clintons arrived, the President in preppy salmon-colored pants and Hillary in shorts. “Glad to be here!” the President shouted back as he climbed aboard. A forty-eight-foot boat trailed the presidential party, carrying White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers and dozens of reporters and photographers all hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous passengers. Jackie sat next to Hillary at one point and Hillary beamed, but Jackie, who had lived most of her life in the spotlight, seemed to resent the intrusion of the press.

The yacht sailed out into Buzzards Bay, beyond Vineyard Sound, and stopped in a quiet, sun-drenched cove for three hours in the middle of the day while the guests, including Chelsea Clinton and Caroline Kennedy, ate lunch and dived into the cold water from a thirty-foot diving board, the highest diving board on the yacht. When it was Hillary’s turn, she climbed to the top and stood there, terrified.

“Jump!” President Clinton yelled. “Don’t be a chicken, Hillary! JUMP!” Other male members of the intrepid Kennedy clan joined in until suddenly Hillary could hear a woman’s voice rise above the rest from down below, in the water—it was Jackie’s.

“Don’t do it, Hillary! Don’t do it! Just because they’re daring you, you don’t have to!”

Hillary paused a moment, considering Jackie’s advice, and turned around to climb down to a less frightening height. No other woman in the world could understand Hillary’s feeling of vulnerability better than Jackie. From there, Hillary leapt into the cold blue water.

I
N A LETTER
to First Lady Betty Ford, a Texas woman wrote, in all seriousness: “You are constitutionally required to be perfect.” So much is expected of these women while so little is defined about the role they play. Lady Bird Johnson said a first lady needs to be a “showman and a salesman, a clotheshorse and a publicity sounding board, with a good heart, and a real interest in the folks” from all over the country, rich and poor. No easy feat.

When I covered President Obama’s administration for Bloomberg News, I was invited to a luncheon for fewer than a dozen reporters who were assigned to follow First Lady Michelle Obama. At the lunch, which was supposed to be about her campaign to end childhood obesity, the First Lady mentioned that her husband had kicked his smoking habit. Any kernel of information about the first families travels fast and the news quickly became a big story, eclipsing anything about her healthy-eating campaign. I wondered how she felt sharing such personal information with the world, and whether she had come to accept her life as a global celebrity.

No one has written about the relationships between the first ladies and how these fascinating women turn to each other in times of joy and in times of sorrow. For this book, I interviewed more than two hundred people, including chiefs of staff to the first ladies, press secretaries, and other top political advisers, along with the first ladies’ close friends and family members, to discover what life is really like in the White House. Their children shared revealing stories about their mothers’ personal struggles and their ultimate resilience.

From Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama, each of these women has carved out her own path, all while raising her children, serving as her husband’s greatest protector and confidante, and negotiating the fraught relationship between her staff in the East Wing and her husband’s advisers in the West Wing. Those responsibilities are punctuated by the constant fear these women share for their families’ safety.

Never-before-published letters between the first ladies reveal just how deeply they empathize with each other, and offer a window into the complexities of their relationships and into their own private worlds. Just as presidents are part of a lifelong club, so too are first ladies: presidents are members of the world’s most selective fraternity, and first ladies are members of the world’s most elite sorority. Staffers who have never spoken with a reporter before, including White House butlers, maids, ushers, chefs, and florists whom I interviewed for my first book,
The Residence
, have spoken with me about their unique relationships with these remarkable women. For this book I was able to interview more staffers who would not agree to talk with me before. It is the residence staffers who work in the White House who see the first families during their most private moments. I also had candid conversations with Rosalynn Carter (whom I interviewed twice)
and Barbara and Laura Bush that helped build the foundation for this book.

These women’s lives are shaped by history. Betty Ford’s son, Steve, remembers coming home from elementary school in 1963 and finding his mother alone and crying in their family room. “Why are you crying, Mom?” he asked her. “President Kennedy has been killed,” she told him softly. Nancy Reagan was driving down San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles when she first heard the news over her car radio that Kennedy had been shot. Neither Betty nor Nancy knew then that they would become part of this small sorority of first ladies and that both of their husbands would one day be the targets of assassination attempts.

Ten first ladies have lived in the White House since 1961, from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama. They were married to five Republicans and five Democrats, and they are all incredibly different women. What makes them so compelling is their shared humanity, their imperfection. “My mom,” Steve Ford says proudly, “always thought she was an ordinary woman in an extraordinary time.” These women aren’t “perfect,” and that is what makes them so captivating.