First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (10 page)

Lady Bird came back to the White House when Barbara’s daughter-in-law, Laura, was first lady. The two had met in 1973, but Lady Bird would not have known it. Laura had joined thousands of others to pay tribute to LBJ at his presidential library, where his flag-draped casket was brought to lie in state. Lady Bird and her daughters, Lynda and Luci, stood at the door of the library and shook people’s hands as they walked in, and Laura, then a young student, was among the mourners. Lady Bird was in her nineties by the time she visited Laura at the White House and had suffered a stroke. She could not speak and had to use a wheelchair, but when her car pulled up to the South Portico of the White House and Doorman Wilson Jerman, who had been maître d’ when the Johnsons lived there, greeted her the two shared an unforgettable moment together. “He and I are at the door,” Laura Bush later told Lady Bird’s two daughters, “and he literally falls into your mother’s arms.” When Laura Bush showed Lady Bird the official portrait of her husband, whom she had survived by decades, the former first lady raised her arms lovingly toward his face. So many years had passed since his death, but it was clear how much she loved him still.

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ENNEDY’S APPRECIATION
for Hillary Clinton surprised her close friend the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Before he had met Hillary himself, he told Jackie that he was sure she would be “humorless.” Jackie quickly corrected him: “You couldn’t be more wrong,” she told him.

No other president had been able to develop a real rapport with Jackie. After the Clintons arrived on Martha’s Vineyard in August 1993, Jackie attended two private dinners for them with guest lists that included the celebrated writers William Styron and David McCullough and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. She also organized a luncheon for Hillary, and before the 1992 New Hampshire primary she and her son, John Jr., donated the maximum amount to Clinton’s campaign. Much has been made about President Bill Clinton’s worship of President Kennedy, but not much is known about the powerful friendship forged between Hillary Clinton and Jackie Kennedy.

Hillary asked Jackie how she had managed to raise her children to be such wonderful adults, all in the public eye. “That time together was extremely valued,” said Melanne Verveer during an interview in her small office in the back of a Georgetown townhouse. Verveer was Hillary’s chief of staff when she was first lady and remembers how important these conversations were to both women. “Nobody else can relate to this, there are so few women who’ve lived this existence. . . . No matter what differences they had among them, they shared that abiding understanding of the role that they played.”

Jackie had always tried to make sure that her children—John-John was the youngest child to live in the White House in the twentieth century—were respectful. She insisted that they call Doorman Preston Bruce, an African American who became like
family to the Kennedys, “Mr. Bruce” instead of his nickname. “She was not about to have them say ‘Bruce,’” said Curator Jim Ketchum, who worked closely with Jackie on the redecoration of the White House. It was all about respect for the White House and its staff. “If you allow them,” Jackie told Hillary, “the White House staff will do anything for these kids. They will go out of their way for them and spoil them rotten.” She added, “You’re going to have to put your foot down, you’re going to have to make sure they have as normal a life as possible.”

Once, Chelsea had some of her classmates from her expensive private school, Sidwell Friends, over for a movie in the White House’s small private theater. “The kids made a real royal mess of the theater, there was popcorn everywhere,” Verveer recalled. Hillary saw it and was furious. “Nobody leaves the theater until every kernel is cleaned up,” she told them. There was also a real effort by the Clintons and the press to give Chelsea privacy. “As a mom you get to know another mom,” Verveer says. “And here’s a woman whose husband was assassinated, who went through horrors, all of that you accumulate.” Jackie thought that the identities of many of the other first ladies were too wrapped up in their husbands’, and she respected Hillary for cultivating her own image. Jackie herself had carefully done the same, even practicing her handwriting to make sure that it was distinct.

Jackie passed away on May 19, 1994, less than a year after that cruise off Martha’s Vineyard. The Clintons were heartbroken by the news of her death, Hillary most of all. She and Jackie had spoken on the phone in Jackie’s final days, and both Clintons received constant updates on her condition. When Jackie succumbed to cancer, the first couple spoke to the press from the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden on the east side of the White House.

“She’s been quite wonderful to my wife, to my daughter, and
to all of us,” the President said. As he stepped away from the microphone, reporters started shouting questions. He cut them off. “I’d like for Hillary to say a word first, please.”

Unlike her husband, who was the picture of composure, the normally self-controlled Hillary Clinton was close to tears. “She was a great support to me personally when I started talking with her in the summer of 1992 about the challenges and opportunities of being in this position and how she had managed so well to carve out the space and privacy that children need to grow into what they have a right to become. She will always be more than a great first lady; she was a great woman and a great friend”—here her voice breaks—“and all of us will miss her very much.”

Hillary went to Jackie’s funeral Mass in New York City and flew back to Washington with members of the Kennedy family and Jackie’s close friends for her burial at Arlington National Cemetery. She was buried beside President Kennedy, their premature son, Patrick—who died shortly after his birth—and their stillborn daughter, Arabella. Two weeks later, John F. Kennedy Jr. wrote the Clintons a handwritten note about what their friendship had meant to his mother: “Since she left Washington I believe she resisted ever connecting with it emotionally—or the institutional demands of being a former First Lady. It had much to do with the memories stirred and her desires to resist being cast in a lifelong role that didn’t quite fit. However, she seemed profoundly happy and relieved to allow herself to reconnect with it through you.”

Hillary may have idolized Jackie, but she did not embrace the role of being first hostess and was not as sophisticated as Jackie, who left detailed instructions about minute details with the waitstaff, including what kind of champagne should be served. Hillary never forgot her middle-class roots. One evening, Vernon Jordan, a friend and powerful Clinton ally, went out to the West Sitting Hall, a living room
on the second floor of the White House, and said, “Hillary, I got the wine.” She looked at the bottle—it was eight hundred dollars. “Oh no, you don’t have that one.” She took it and put it back. But Hillary’s old friend Mary Ann Campbell remembers how much had changed once she was in the White House. Campbell naïvely thought she could drop by casually and see Hillary. “One of her assistants said to come to this certain gate and she [Hillary] received me in the Diplomatic Reception Room. We sat in two antique chairs; a photographer came and took a picture of us.” Campbell could not fully comprehend the change in Hillary until she walked into the room. “For the first time in my life I was starstruck. I couldn’t say anything.” But the minute the photographer and Hillary’s aides walked out of the room, the First Lady leaned in conspiratorially and asked about their old Arkansas friends, local gossip, and who was getting a divorce.

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ACKIE
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ENNEDY AND
Nancy Reagan developed an unlikely friendship that began with a 1981 visit that Rose Kennedy made to the White House, the first time she had been back since her son John’s death. The Reagans had a delightful time with Rose and later attended a 1985 fund-raiser at Senator Ted Kennedy’s house in McLean, Virginia, to help raise money for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. “He was a patriot who summoned patriotism from the heart of a sated country,” Reagan told the crowd of wealthy donors on that summer night. “Which is not to say I supported John Kennedy when he ran for president, because I didn’t. I was for the other fellow. But you know, it’s true: when the battle’s over and the ground is cooled, well, it’s then that you see the opposing general’s valor.” The Reagans tried to greet every member of the Kennedy family they could, and after his remarks, Jackie approached President Reagan and said, “That was Jack.” The next morning a letter arrived
from Ted Kennedy thanking the President: “Your presence was such a magnificent tribute to my brother. . . . The country is well served by your eloquent graceful leadership Mr. President.”

The day after Ted Kennedy died in 2009, Nancy Reagan did a telephone interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s
Hardball
. “We were close,” she said of the Kennedys, “and it didn’t make any difference to Ronnie or to Ted that one was a Republican and one a Democrat.” Jackie didn’t care much if Nancy was a Republican or a Democrat, either; she had a genuine respect for her. Nancy could also relate to Jackie’s trauma because she had almost lost her husband to an assassination attempt. Most of all, Jackie appreciated Nancy for her interest in fashion and for inviting icons like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra to perform at the White House. “She [Jackie] didn’t agree with them politically, but with Nancy she had a great appreciation for what she was trying to do to bring glamour back, because it’s the people’s house,” said a Kennedy family friend, Gustavo Paredes, the son of Jackie’s personal assistant Providencia Paredes.

Nancy had the same horrified reaction to the White House when she first saw it that Jackie had two decades earlier. “It really looked awful, the wooden floors, the painting, everything needed to be done to make it look the way it should have looked,” she said. Nancy raised $800,000 in private donations for its redecoration, with most of the money going to a face-lift for the second-floor residence. Nancy knew how her spending was perceived, and she wrote candidly in her memoir that she “won the unpopularity contest” among the other first ladies “hands down.” The Reagans’ son Ron was happy to hear that Jackie appreciated his mother’s sense of style. “I know that my mother admired Jackie Kennedy because she rewrote the book on first ladies; she was the first glamorous first lady and I think my mother was fascinated by that.”

Even though Jackie’s politics were more in line with the Carters’, she deplored their folksiness. Rosalynn Carter was well aware of Jackie’s opinion: “There is a bias against southerners, there was. . . . You had to keep proving yourself over and over. It didn’t matter what you did. . . . I wasn’t supposed to be sophisticated enough or something. But, you know, who wants to be sophisticated?!” In an interview, she mentioned a
Washington Post
cartoon that depicted her and her family with straw in their teeth and wearing straw hats. She sounded annoyed when asked if she sewed her and daughter Amy’s clothes in the White House, likely because of the criticism she had gotten for being a country bumpkin. She said she hadn’t made clothes for herself “since Jimmy was in the navy.” Unlike Jackie, who had the help of world-renowned decorator and socialite Mrs. Henry Parish II, known as Sister Parish, and Henry Francis du Pont, an heir to his family’s fortune, the Carters were decidedly less worldly. One of the only changes they made to the White House was paneling a wall on the third floor with wood from a barn from Rosalynn’s grandfather’s farm.