First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (17 page)

Patti visited the White House only a handful of times when her father was President. “I realized that my parents had brought with them the same hushed atmosphere that always waited beyond the front door of our home. . . . My mother’s footsteps were louder than my father’s, more determined.” When news of her overnight stay at a hotel with celebrity Kris Kristofferson somehow reached her mother, who must have found out from the Secret Service agents who were assigned to watch Patti’s every move, Nancy was vicious. “I realize you have a long history of promiscuity but your father is President now and I think you could manage to be considerate of that fact.”

B
ARBARA
B
USH WAS
the first woman since Abigail Adams to be both the wife and the mother of U.S. presidents. Barbara was also in the delicate position of being the mother of two sons with presidential ambitions. Worthington White, a six-foot-two former tackle at Virginia Tech who worked as a White House usher from 1980 to 2012, rarely becomes emotional. But when he talks about seeing Barbara Bush and her family, he gets misty-eyed. The fiercely devoted mother, grandmother, and now great-grandmother was celebrating her elder son’s second inauguration as president in 2005 with most of their large family at a brunch in the second-floor Family Dining Room. She was also in the odd
position of comforting her other son, Jeb, who was governor of Florida at the time. White saw Barbara standing in the hallway outside the Queens’ Bedroom and the Lincoln Bedroom with her husband, President George H. W. Bush; Jeb and Jeb’s wife, Columba. Barbara looked concerned, with tears welling up in her eyes as she talked to Jeb and his wife. Here she was, with one son celebrating a second presidential victory down the hall and another son going through a political crisis.

The Bushes had been shocked when Jeb lost his first run for governor in Florida in 1994, the same year that his brother, George W., won the governorship in Texas. A stunned President Bush told the press at the time, “The joy is in Texas, but our hearts are in Florida.” Jeb asked his mother after his defeat, “How long is it going to hurt?” She recalled that that conversation “killed me.” Barbara and George H. W. Bush were at Jeb’s side when he ran again in 1998 and won. George W. also ran again in Texas that year and won in a landslide, but it is clear whom the Bushes thought they needed to be with that election night.

Though it is not certain what they were discussing on that day in 2005, the Terri Schiavo case was raging in Florida. Jeb had become deeply involved in the emotional battle that was consuming the country over whether to remove Schiavo’s feeding tube. She had been in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years. He got the legislature to pass “Terri’s Law” ordering that the feeding tube remain, but the Florida Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional. Bush’s lawyer appealed for a hearing in the U.S. Supreme Court but four days later the Court announced it would not hear the case, clearing the way for Schiavo’s husband, Michael, to order the removal of the feeding tube. Barbara was telling Jeb that he had accomplished so much and had many more accomplishments ahead of him. “She was giving him emotional
support, almost as if he had lost a big fight,” White recalled. “It touches me all these years later.”

Five decades earlier, Barbara had faced every mother’s nightmare when their second child, three-year-old daughter Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia. The Bushes’ son Jeb was only a few weeks old when Robin woke up one morning in 1953 and told her mother, “I don’t know what to do this morning. I may go out and lie on the grass and watch the cars go by, or I might just stay in bed.” When the Bushes brought Robin to see their doctor to find out why she was so tired, they were told she had the highest white blood cell count the doctor had ever seen. When they asked what they could do, they were told to take her home and in three weeks she would be gone. They would not let that happen without a fight, and the very next day they took Robin to New York and left George W. and his baby brother Jeb with friends.

In the end it was Barbara who stayed in New York with her sick daughter while George H. W. Bush flew back and forth to Midland, Texas, where he had just started a new business. Robin was given aggressive treatment by doctors at Memorial–Sloan Kettering hospital, which gave her seven more months to live but only after painful bone marrow tests and blood transfusions. Barbara became friends with other parents who were keeping vigil for their children, exposing her to people from different walks of life, such as one woman who had to commute every day on the bus from the Bronx to be by her son Joey’s bedside, unlike Barbara, who stayed at her in-laws’ elegant apartment on Sutton Place. “I loved that courageous lady, and I loved Joey. God bless him,” Barbara wrote in her memoir. Barbara taped photos of Robin’s brothers on her headboard at the hospital. Robin called her big brother George “superman.”

People didn’t know very much about leukemia then, and
some of the Bushes’ friends were afraid it was contagious. It was Barbara who was by Robin’s side, holding her hands and combing her hair during her last days. She never cried in front of her daughter and told anyone who came to visit, including her husband and her mother-in-law, that they were not allowed to cry in front of her, either. She did not want her daughter to know how sick she was. “George and his mother are so softhearted, I had to order them out of the hospital room most of the time,” Barbara says. When he became emotional George H. W. Bush would excuse himself and tell his daughter that he had to go to the restroom. He and Barbara wondered if Robin thought “he had the weakest bladder in the world” because he left so often. Barbara recalled, “He just had the most tender heart.” She was only twenty-eight years old when she had to make a quick decision: perform a scary operation to stop her daughter’s internal bleeding or let her die. She could not reach her husband as he traveled to New York, so she decided to let the doctors operate. Robin never made it out of that operation and died just before her fourth birthday. “I saw that little body, I saw her spirit go,” Barbara says. Both parents held her one last time.

Barbara had been unbelievably stoic throughout her daughter’s battle with leukemia, but when she sat in an upstairs bedroom at her in-laws’ house and heard guests gathering to attend her daughter’s memorial service she allowed herself to give in to her grief. “For one who allowed no tears before her death, I fell apart,” she recalled. “And time after time during the next six months, George would put me together again.” Their friends tried to make them feel better, but really there was nothing they could say. Barbara was furious when she found one friend actually practicing her most grave expressions in the mirror before she went in to see her. “At least it wasn’t your firstborn and a boy at
that,” the visitor said callously. When Barbara exploded in anger about such insensitivity, her husband helped her. “George pointed out that it wasn’t easy for them and that I should be patient,” she remembered. “He was right. I just needed somebody to blame.” For a long time no one would speak of Robin, and that made Barbara even more upset. It was Robin’s older brother George W. who started to mention her casually. Once, at a football game, he told his father that he wished he were Robin. When his father asked him why, he answered, “I bet she can see the game better from up there than we can here.” Barbara relied on her elder son to cheer her up and help relieve her unbearable sadness. One day she heard him tell a friend that he couldn’t go play outside because he had to stay inside and keep his mother company. It was then that she knew she had to try to move on for the sake of her children. “I was thinking, ‘Well, I’m being there for him,’” Barbara said later. “But the truth was he was being there for me.”

The Bushes donated Robin’s body to scientific research, and they are happy to see that so much progress has been made on leukemia. “Robin to me is a joy. She’s like an angel to me, and she’s not a sadness or a sorrow,” Barbara says, remembering “those little fat arms around my neck.” George H. W. Bush has told family members that when he passes away Robin will be the first person he expects to see. His wife is sure of it. But to this day it is not easy to talk about Robin, and when the subject comes up Barbara says, “We’re all fine now,” clearly wanting to move on from the topic.

H
ILLARY SAW MORE
of her daughter in the White House than ever before. When she was working as a law partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Bill was governor, they had a series of live-in babysitters who were on call twenty-four hours
a day, seven days a week. When Chelsea asked for her mother as a toddler, she would learn to answer her own questions with “Mommy go make ’peech.” In the 1992 presidential campaign Hillary did homework with her daughter by fax and talked to her every night on the phone from her hotel room. Once they were in the White House, the Clintons turned a second-floor Butler’s Pantry into an eat-in kitchen so that they could occasionally eat together informally around a small square table. One night when Chelsea was sick, Hillary said she knew then that they had made the right decision to put in the small kitchen. “I went to make her some scrambled eggs and, you know, everybody went crazy. Oh, we’ll bring an omelet from downstairs. I said no, I just want to make some scrambled eggs and applesauce and feed her what I would feed her if we were living anywhere else in America.” The Fords’ son Steve said that he felt sorry for Chelsea being an only child growing up in the giant house alone under the glare of the media spotlight. He wrote her a note giving her advice: befriend your Secret Service agents. When Barbara Bush gave Hillary a tour of the residence she recommended that Hillary bring a cousin or friend of Chelsea to live with her for a year to keep her company.

Clinton aides say Hillary has a warm, maternal side. Hillary’s aide Shirley Sagawa started working at the White House weeks after she gave birth to her first child. She got the call from Hillary’s chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, asking if she could join Clinton’s team and it was a job she could not pass up. Before she lined up child care, she came into her office, which was adjacent to Hillary’s in the West Wing, with her son in a stroller. (She jokes now that he was probably one of the only babies who had to go through a metal detector.) “He had just woken up from a nap and was just howling, and all of a sudden she’s standing in my door and there’s the baby crying.” Sagawa, who was on an important
call, was sure that Hillary would tell her that it wasn’t working out, but instead she took Sagawa’s son and walked him around the halls of the West Wing to calm him down while his mother finished the call. Sagawa says Hillary gave her some advice: spend time with your child when he’s little. “When they’re little they’re always around and you can talk to them when you want to talk to them. When they’re older, if you’re not around them very much, you may miss the time when they’re ready to open up to you in the car about what’s bothering them . . . because it’s on their agenda, and not yours.” Hillary always wanted to be around Chelsea as much as her schedule would allow, taking family bike rides along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in Washington and attending school fund-raisers. Chelsea may not have really needed her help with homework, but Hillary often offered it, just to spend time with her at the end of the day.

Even though Hillary tried to protect Chelsea from becoming spoiled, it wasn’t always possible. When they were in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion the Clintons’ lives changed and they began to have more in common with celebrities than with friends from their former lives. Today, in Little Rock, a fifteen-minute drive east on President Clinton Avenue takes you from the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library straight to Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport. Mary Ann Campbell, a friend of Hillary’s from Little Rock, remembers having lunch with her and their friend actress Mary Steenburgen. Hillary told them a story about Chelsea, who was in grade school at the time when her father was governor. Chelsea was playing with another child but started fighting about a game and said, “If you don’t do that, then I’m going to have my daddy call the National Guard on you.” Hillary overheard her and was horrified. She told Chelsea, “You can’t say that!”