First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (16 page)

The Fords never had to endure a bruising campaign to get to the White House. Ford was selected by President Nixon to replace the disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign because of tax evasion charges. In fact, Ford had only ever stood for election in Michigan’s Ionia and Kent counties. When the family moved into the White House Betty could not understand why the maids and butlers were so quiet around her. She thought they might not like her. She found out that Pat Nixon had preferred that they stay in the background. When she redecorated the Oval Office she told her press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, that she wanted to replace the blue and gold colors because they “seemed to reflect a kind of Imperial Presidency.” She redecorated with darker earth tones and even added houseplants.

Susan Ford recalled that her family was truly like middle-class families around the country: “My parents, when we were kids, if you picked a fight, you fought your fight. They would not go in and break up a fight between us kids. If somebody got hurt that was different.” The Ford kids wore clothes from Sears
and JCPenney. “When you’ve got four kids and you’ve got to put four kids through college you have to save your pennies when you can.” The first time Susan got a Lord & Taylor dress was when her dad became Vice President. The Fords did not even have a separate dining room table at their Alexandria house, so the kids would cram next to each other at the kitchen table where there was a lazy Susan. The three boys always grabbed the food before it went around the second time to Susan, who was the only girl and the youngest. Susan says that when Jack was a teenager, he would pick fights with his mother. “There was no father there to say, ‘Jack Ford, stop that.’” Susan would end up going to her mother after one of their fights at dinner in an effort to calm her down, and her brother Mike would go up to Jack’s bedroom and tell him that he needed to apologize. Betty made no secret of her unhappiness at having to raise the children without a father much of the time. The future president felt guilty about his long absences and would try to make it up to her by buying her jewelry. But his time was what she wanted most.

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE
to completely shelter a child who grows up in the White House. Nine-year-old Amy Carter took one look at the reporters lined up to watch her leave the executive mansion to go to her first day of school at Thaddeus Stevens Elementary and asked, “Mom, do we still have to be nice to them?” The press swarmed around the Carters’ car as they arrived at the school with Amy looking miserable. President Carter had been on the school board in Georgia and the Carters remembered how, when schools were desegregated, people took their children out and sent them to private schools. It was important for them that Amy be exposed
to people from different economic and racial backgrounds. “We decided to try to promote the public schools,” Rosalynn said in an interview. “The kids that she went to school with were mostly the sons and daughters of the staff that worked for us. I think there were twenty-eight different languages in her class.”

Though Amy ate hot dogs and beans for lunch, just like her classmates, she was clearly different. Her bedroom at the White House had once been Caroline Kennedy’s, and she did her homework at Eleanor Roosevelt’s old desk. During her first week of school her teacher made her stay inside the classroom with her Secret Service agents during recess because the other students were all crowding around her on the playground. She was so unhappy with the arrangement that they soon let her play outside. The school set up a special office for her two Secret Service agents so they could stay out of sight. Amy was the Carters’ fourth child and their only daughter, and Rosalynn insists that life in the White House felt normal to her. “It was what she knew because she was three when we moved to the Governor’s Mansion.”

At the Governor’s Mansion in Georgia there was even less privacy, Rosalynn said. There, the only way to get to the kitchen was to go through the tourists. Once, Rosalynn said, she had a momentary lapse and “stepped out in my bathrobe” in front of a crowd of visitors. Public life was the only life Amy had ever known. “Everybody made a big fuss over the baby when they saw her, she got to where she’d just walk straight through and look straight ahead. . . . I remember when she went to school the first day in Washington everybody was so distressed because Amy looked so lonely. That was just her normal life.” Soon the other kids got used to Amy and she would bring home friends like Claudia Sanchez, whose father was a cook at the Chilean Embassy. They had sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom and listened
for President Lincoln’s ghost. They even slept outside in a tree house on the South Lawn on balmy summer nights.

Rosalynn said that it helped that they brought Amy’s nanny, Mary Prince, with them to the White House. Rosalynn first met Prince when she was a prisoner brought to work at the Governor’s Mansion through a trustee program. Prince was serving a life sentence for murder. (“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Prince says. “She was totally innocent,” Rosalynn said in an interview.) Prince was twenty-seven years old when she began working at the Governor’s Mansion taking care of three-year-old Amy. The two played endless games of hide-and-seek, tickled each other, and climbed trees. At bedtime, Prince rubbed Amy’s back and helped her fall asleep. Sometimes she would lie down with her and sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” When Carter’s term as governor ended in 1975 and the family moved back to Plains, it seemed Prince’s Cinderella story was over, too, and she returned to prison.

But Rosalynn did not forget her, even after becoming the wife of the Democratic nominee for president, and visited Prince at the Fulton County Jail and the Atlanta Work Release Center, where Prince worked as a cook. When the Carters moved into the White House, even though Prince was not eligible for parole for another three months, she traveled to Washington for the inauguration and spent two nights in the White House. She went to an inaugural ball wearing a gown she had sewn from velvet given to her by her fellow female prisoners. Right before she left to go back to Georgia, the new First Lady asked her, “How would you like to work in this big old place?” One letter from the Carters to the Georgia prison officials, and Mary was free to work as Amy’s nanny. An unusual agreement was made for President Carter to serve as her parole officer. Prince moved into a bedroom
on the third floor and was paid $6,004 a year. To this day, Mary still takes care of the Carters and lives three blocks away from them. She even helped Amy when she became a mother. “If anybody gets sick or needs her she’s always there,” Rosalynn said of her longtime friend. “We couldn’t travel and do the things we’re doing now without Mary taking care of things back home.”

In the White House, Mary helped make Amy’s life more predictable. President Carter woke up every day at 6:00 a.m. (two glasses of orange juice were always on his bedside table when he awoke) and was in the Oval Office by 6:30 a.m. Before he left their bedroom, Carter would put one of the glasses of juice on Rosalynn’s bedside table. Rosalynn, like so many mothers, would wake up their daughter and run her bath, then turn on the Suzuki violin tape of the song she was being taught. Rosalynn remembers a time when Amy was supposed to attend a White House reception for a conservation program for children set up by the Department of Energy. Hundreds of children were waiting to see her on the South Lawn, but she had just had her braces tightened that morning and her teeth hurt so much that she was crying. Rosalynn brought Amy to see the White House physician, Dr. William Lukash, who put drops in her eyes so that it would not look like she had been crying when she went outside to make her appearance. Amy often got sick of making such an effort, and in public she would reach a limit after giving several autographs, so it was decided that she would not give any. Sometimes, when people would recognize her in public, she would pretend the closest Secret Service agent was her father.

Prince started taking swimming lessons because Amy loved to swim and the nanny wanted to be prepared. One early evening she walked by the White House swimming pool, where Rosalynn was doing laps. “Come on in!” the First Lady said playfully. “I
don’t have a bathing suit,” Mary told her. “Just dive in in your uniform!” So she kicked off her shoes and jumped in in her white pantsuit and showed the First Lady what she had learned in her swimming classes. “I think that was the most fun time that I really had. Just me and the First Lady together out there swimming.”

Mary insisted that Amy was never spoiled. “She was always an independent little girl and she’s an independent woman. . . . She was not a spoiled brat, she really never tried to get her way. She was just a young kid having fun.” But reporters were appalled when Amy brought a book to a state dinner. As Rosalynn explains, “The reason was, we were married twenty-one years when Amy was born. And she was born in ’67 and Jimmy was elected governor in ’70. And she got to where she didn’t want to go with us because all she did was go listen to political speeches. And so we started letting her take a book or take a coloring book just to make her want to go. And she, being a child growing up with adults, she learned to be just alone in her own little world no matter where she was.” At President Carter’s inauguration a family friend who had been Amy’s teacher in Plains was able to fish a book out of Amy’s coat pocket before they descended the stairs of the Capitol to take their seats. Amy had planned to keep it handy in case she was bored during her father’s inaugural address.

N
OT ALL FIRST
families had uncomplicated relationships with their children. After undergoing a mastectomy in 1987, Nancy Reagan got a phone call from the last person she was expecting to hear from: her daughter, Patti Davis. Patti was an outspoken Democrat who had not voted for her father in the 1980 presidential election, and she had not spoken with her mother in two years. Patti called
her only after Nancy’s brother urged her to. It was an awkward conversation. “I’m sorry,” Patti told Nancy, whose voice, she said, sounded weak. “If you decide to have reconstruction I know several good plastic surgeons in Los Angeles.”

There was a long pause. “I don’t want to have more surgery,” Nancy told her.

“Oh, well, I just thought—if you decided down the line . . .” Patti’s voice trailed off. Nancy was offended and said later, “I longed to hear something more comforting about what I had just gone through.”

Ten days later, in another blow, Nancy’s mother died. Patti did not go to her own grandmother’s funeral—she said she had travel plans that she could not change. Nancy’s assistant, Jane Erkenbeck, is still upset at the way Patti treated her mother during such a difficult time. “No call, no card, no flowers—nothing.” Erkenbeck was the one who had to tell Nancy that Patti would not be attending the funeral. “She was sad. . . . Patti missed many wonderful opportunities with her parents being President and First Lady.” Nancy’s office issued a statement that said Patti’s decision not to attend her grandmother’s funeral was “another crack in an already broken heart.”

But the relationship between the Reagans and their children had been strained almost from the start. Nancy dedicated her memoir,
My Turn
, “To Ronnie, who always understood. And to my children, who I hope will understand.” Patti resented her parents’ closeness and how it got in the way of their relationship with their children. “Ronald and Nancy Reagan are two halves of a circle,” she said, “together, they are complete, and their children float outside.” She said that her mother was physically abusive and her father was emotionally distant. Her brother, Ron, had a better relationship with them but butted heads with them over politics.
Maureen Reagan, who was the first child of Ronald Reagan and his first wife, Jane Wyman, and Michael Reagan, who was their adopted son, were treated like outsiders by Nancy, Patti said. After their father was shot in a 1981 assassination attempt, they sat in stony silence on the flight to Washington, realizing how little they all knew each other. They had not called each other when they heard the news and Nancy had not called them.