First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (13 page)

Years later, after Betty left the White House, her unflinching honesty about her own addiction to pain pills and alcohol would help remove the stigma from another disease. She opened the now world-famous Betty Ford Center in 1982, on fourteen acres in Rancho Mirage, California. The center has treated more than one hundred thousand people. Her recognition of her own struggle with alcoholism and her addiction to painkillers has saved an untold number of lives. She visited the center regularly and would go to local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and stand up in the
middle of the room and introduce herself. “I’m Betty, and I’m an alcoholic,” she’d say. Long after she left rehab herself, she would meet regularly with a group of women who had graduated from the program. “I had had breast cancer and I had survived that and now I was confronted with addiction, and by golly I made up my mind I was going to survive that, too,” she said.

After her mastectomy, she urged other women who were facing breast cancer surgery to “go as quickly as possible and get it done.”

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

Though she approached the surgery with unflinching heroism, her recovery was not easy. Afterward she woke up to see her family surrounding her, some in tears. “If you can’t look happy, please go away,” she told them from her hospital bed. “I can’t bear to look at you.” Betty did exercises to try to strengthen her right arm after part of the muscle was removed, and it was a small victory when she could finally gain enough strength to pick up a cup of tea with her right hand. Susan remembers those tough times. “There were days she would walk in her closet and say, ‘Well, I can’t wear
that
dress anymore. Everybody will look at my scar.’” Betty never got reconstructive surgery and was often worried that during formal dinners she would bend over in an evening gown and her gel prosthetic would fall out. Sometimes she had pads sewn into her clothes.

Betty hit the campaign trail as her husband sought the presidency in 1976. His advisers considered her a potent weapon and were astounded to find that her candor led to approval ratings as high as 75 percent, even while her husband’s presidential approval rating dipped below 50 percent. At almost every campaign event there were women wearing buttons saying “Keep Betty in the
White House” and “Betty’s Husband for President.” Still, Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. When Ford could not read his concession speech because his voice was weak, it was Betty Ford who read it. “She supported him wholeheartedly from beginning to end,” says Susan. “And he supported her from beginning to end, through her breast cancer and her drug and alcohol issues. They were true soul mates.” Betty Ford’s bravery earned her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991, an astounding eight years before her husband was awarded his own medal. On the tenth anniversary of her founding of the Betty Ford Center, President Ford said, “When the final tally is taken, her contributions to our country will be bigger than mine.” And that was just fine with him.

If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.

—
J
ACKIE
K
ENNEDY

H
aving children in the White House brings a sense of fun to the executive mansion’s formal halls, especially for the butlers, maids, and chefs who tend to the needs of the first families, and for the reporters who cover them. When a reporter asked three-year-old Caroline Kennedy, “Where’s your daddy?” she replied, “He’s upstairs with his shoes and socks off, doing nothing.” Caroline always wanted her door open a crack when she lived at the White House because she was scared by the size of her room and the height of the ceilings.

Presidential children have a way of grounding the rich and famous, and no one did it quite like Caroline and John-John. World-renowned composer Leonard Bernstein was frequently invited by Jackie Kennedy to the small dinner parties she organized to entertain her husband. One evening Bernstein asked Jackie if he could watch the first few minutes of a TV program that he was on before dinner. She showed him into Caroline’s room, where the
little girl was getting ready for bed with her nanny, Maud Shaw. Bernstein sat holding hands with Caroline, who was mesmerized by the program featuring very adult classical music. “I thought she was all wrapped up in it, and suddenly she looked up at me with this marvelous clear face and said, ‘I have my own horse.’ I thought now that does it for me, you know, that really brought one so down to earth that I was grateful to her for it because I realized that I was being horrid for watching my own show on television and not being with the guests. So at that moment I turned off the set and rejoined the others.”

White House Electrician Larry Bush remembers Jackie asking him to put some blocks on the pedals of the tricycle that Caroline got for Christmas because her legs weren’t yet long enough to reach them. A few months later, the First Lady needed another favor. “She’s grown so much, can you please take the blocks off?” Jackie asked him. “She was just so in love with those children. And she showed it,” Bush recalled. It also made for some scary moments for the young Kennedys. Caroline and John-John used to love to accompany their father in the White House elevator and walk with him to the Oval Office in the morning. “Come on! We’ve got to get to work!” John-John would shout, still in his pajamas. One morning when Caroline and the President stepped off the elevator, dozens of flashbulbs exploded. The President had forgotten that he had arranged to have the press trail him that day. Caroline was so scared that JFK swept her back into the elevator and asked the doorman to take her back upstairs to the residence. President Kennedy’s doctor, Janet Travell, was riding with them in the elevator that morning and remembers a startled Caroline crying, wanting to see her father but frightened by the sheer number of photographers gathered around to catch a glimpse of her. “She ran out of the elevator and under the sofa,” Travell recalled. “It took all of Miss Shaw’s coaxing to get her out.”

The Kennedys had different views of how to raise their toddler son John-John and their kindergartner Caroline, and their staffs—both on the political side and on the residence side—had to try to meet both parents’ demands. Jackie liked John-John’s hair to be long but the President preferred it short. “You know, sir,” Maud Shaw told the President, “I have to look along the corridor and see who’s coming. If Mrs. Kennedy comes, I comb his hair frontways, if you come along, I give him a part.” Both wanted to make their children’s abnormal life in the White House as normal as possible. The day they moved into the White House, Jackie asked the gardener to make a giant snowman near the driveway at the South Portico with a carrot for its nose and an apple for its mouth. Caroline was thrilled.

At times Jackie and JFK disagreed about how much exposure their children should have to the media. President Kennedy’s friend Charles Spalding said that when photographers got a shot of Caroline riding her pony, Macaroni, on the South Lawn, the President knew the political value of that one photo. The President loved roughhousing with his kids and did not talk down to them. He had a special bond with Caroline. Gustavo Paredes, the son of Jackie’s personal assistant Providencia, was close to the Kennedy children and was a constant playmate of John-John. He remembers the assassination hitting Caroline the hardest, and not just because she was older. “Fathers always love their daughters and mothers always love their sons. They kind of divvied it up, so Caroline felt the most loss, a tremendous loss.” A week after the assassination, Jackie said simply, “I’m going to bring up my son. I want him to grow up to be a good boy. I have no better dream for him.” She mused that he might become an astronaut one day “or just plain John Kennedy fixing planes on the ground.” She did everything she could to give her children as normal a life as
possible. After the assassination she took them to Palm Beach for Christmas and hung up the familiar stockings. When they moved into an eighteenth-century Georgetown townhouse she asked her decorator to replicate the bedrooms the children had had in the White House.

Before she moved out of the White House, she asked Chief Usher J. B. West, whom she considered a friend, to accompany her to the Oval Office one last time. The model ships and books, and the President’s beloved rocking chair, were all being carted away before her eyes. “I think we’re probably in the way,” she murmured. She and West walked the short way to the Cabinet Room, where they sat at a long mahogany table. “My children. They’re good children, aren’t they, Mr. West?”

“They certainly are.”

“They’re not spoiled?”

“No, indeed.”

“Mr. West, will you be my friend for life?” West could only nod. He was afraid that if he spoke the floodgates would open and his own personal grief and sympathy for the young widow would overwhelm him.

Jackie saw a therapist in New York for years and would never completely heal from the trauma of sitting next to her husband during the violent end of his life. Recounting the horror of November 22, 1963, she told journalist Theodore H. White, “His [President Kennedy’s] last expression was so neat; he had his hand out, I could see a piece of his skull coming off; it was flesh colored not white—he was holding out his hand—and I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head; then he slumped in my lap.” She was tormented in the spring of 1964 and kept asking herself,
Why hadn’t I insisted on a bubbletop?
She had trouble sleeping and would take long naps in the afternoon. She
mused that it would have been better if her husband had not been killed by a lone gunman with communist beliefs; it would have offered her some solace if he had died for a bigger cause at the hands of someone who was angered by his support of civil rights or someone who was part of a larger conspiracy. In an interview, she said, “I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him and see our children grow up together . . . so now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.”

Maud Shaw had been with the family since Caroline was eleven days old, and she was the one who fed, bathed, and clothed the children, but Jackie was a surprisingly hands-on mother and a disciplinarian. (“John was in the know absolutely. When any lady walks into the room, you stand up,” John Kennedy Jr.’s longtime friend Gustavo says.) Jackie would not tolerate tantrums. “If you have a tantrum, you bring it to me,” she’d tell her son if she found him crying with Shaw or a member of the White House residence staff. “Don’t take it out on the staff.”

Jackie took charge of her children’s education, setting up a kindergarten for Caroline in the Solarium, a sort of family room on the third floor of the residence. She asked the parents of friends from a playgroup Caroline was part of in Georgetown if they’d like to join the White House school. Fourteen children came to the White House two mornings a week, filling the hallways with laughter. Jackie even designed a playground for them on the South Lawn. The first year it was actually a cooperative nursery school with all the mothers, including the First Lady, pitching in as teachers and aides. Gradually they hired professional teachers and made it more formal. Jackie and the President would stop by every week and check on the class, and the President would play with the children on the South Lawn. “The house was full
of children morning, noon, and night,” recalled Social Secretary Letitia Baldrige. “You never knew when an avalanche of young people would come bearing down on you—runny noses, dropped mittens in the hall, bicycles. . . .” At recess they lined up to head outside and once the doors to the South Lawn were opened the children exploded out, running after puppies and careening toward the playground.

Jackie asked Caroline’s French teacher, Jacqueline Hirsh, to take her daughter out on Mondays so that she could have a normal outing. Going with her famous mother was too fraught. “Just take her anywhere. Just anywhere.” Hirsh ended up taking her on bus rides so that she could get fresh air and see people outside her small circle. One time they were on an old bus on Pennsylvania Avenue and all the seats were occupied, so Caroline sat on her teacher’s lap clutching a stuffed rabbit. A bunch of teenagers got on and one of them said, “You know, I think I’m sitting next to Caroline Kennedy.” Their friend snapped back, “Oh, don’t be silly. What would she be doing on a bus like this?” Sometimes they went grocery shopping or to museums; once they even picked up Hirsh’s son and watched his school’s football game. “It was very difficult for Mrs. Kennedy to take her out and not be recognized and it spoiled the fun,” Hirsh recalled. The President joined Caroline in trying to learn French to surprise Jackie. When Jackie returned from Greece in 1963, he watched proudly as Caroline exclaimed, “I’m so happy you’re back” (“Je suis contente de te revoir”). Jackie didn’t know about his French lessons (he had taken four classes before he was killed) until Hirsh told her. “After the funeral I mentioned it,” Hirsh said. “I thought, as a gift, you know, I would tell her that her husband had thought of giving her a surprise, that obviously she was on his mind.”

The White House was a lively place when the Kennedys
were in residence and the President delighted in all kinds of pets. They had five dogs, two parakeets, two hamsters, one rabbit, one canary, and one cat. The White House residence staffers took care of the pets, with Electrician Traphes Bryant serving as the dog minder. Jackie enjoyed the happy chaos wrought by their children and their ever-expanding slew of pets, and she had a sense of fun rarely seen by the public. “Let’s go kiss the wind,” she would whisper to Caroline when they went outside to play on the South Lawn.

The President, like many fathers of his generation, was mostly there for the fun times and was not the primary disciplinarian. Doorman Preston Bruce fondly recalled seeing the President on all fours crawling around his office with Caroline on his back. He even witnessed the President bump his head as he was playing with them. “I made a quick retreat out of sight,” he said, not wanting to embarrass the President. The children would run into the President and First Lady’s bedroom while they were eating breakfast and they would turn on the television so they could watch cartoons, and story time was a real favorite. One of Caroline’s favorite stories, about a white shark, was one the President usually reserved for when they were on his beloved yacht, the
Honey Fitz
. This shark, JFK told her, ate only socks. When Caroline asked him where the white shark went he’d tickle her and say, “I think he is over there and he’s waiting for something to eat.” Once he teased one of Caroline’s friends, “Give him your socks. He’s hungry.” In a panic the young boy threw his socks overboard and Caroline looked on with great interest, waiting for the shark to appear. The President showed a softer side to his daughter when she rushed to the Oval Office with one of their pet birds who had died. “He was really upset,” Spalding said in an interview for the JFK Library. “He insisted that she get it out
of his sight.” Spalding wondered whether the President’s reaction was in some way an intimation of his own death.

Jackie was fiercely protective of her children. She resented the press’s insatiable appetite for photos of her family. After she had an emergency C-section for John-John’s birth, her husband, then president-elect, obligingly stopped at an X mark that photographers had taped on the floor of the lobby of Georgetown University Hospital. Jackie, in a wheelchair, bristled, “Oh, Jack, please keep going!” In one memo to her close friend and personal secretary Pamela Turnure, she went after a comedian on
The Ed Sullivan Show
named Vaughn Meader, who had done a sketch with a girl name Caroline. She told Turnure to call Meader and let him know that the First Lady considered him to be “a rat.” The actress Grace Kelly remembered Jackie’s dismay that her children were being harassed by a voracious press that treated them like American royalty. Kelly, who was an actual princess after marrying Prince Rainier III of Monaco, remembered her daughter, also named Caroline, watching a ceremony on television showing the Kennedy children standing outside the White House. “She saw Jackie Kennedy’s Caroline peering out from behind a curtain and asked, ‘Mummy, why is Princess Kennedy’s house white?’”

Assistant White House Press Secretary Christine Camp said that Jackie made it clear that she did not want any photographers using long-range lenses to capture images of the children playing on the South Lawn—she had tall rhododendron bushes planted along the fence to block their view. But the rules were constantly changing. “Mrs. Kennedy, of course, in her great glorious way, would forget her own rule and take the kids out in a sleigh on the South Lawn and be kind of mad that there weren’t any pictures,” Camp said. Press aide Barbara Gamarekian said there was a general understanding that when Jackie and her children were
playing together on the South Lawn, the photographers would respect their privacy. Gamarekian remembers one shot of Caroline playing with a friend on the White House swing set. The picture won a prize from the White House Correspondents’ Association, but Jackie was furious when she saw it in the papers. White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger was instructed to call up the wire photographer who took the photo and ream him out, but two days later Jackie asked Salinger to get a print of the photo for herself because she liked it so much.