First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (18 page)

By almost all accounts, Hillary and Bill raised a remarkably unspoiled daughter who was quick to write thank-you notes to White House residence staffers for things like pretty flower arrangements in her room. At a birthday dinner in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for one of Hillary’s aides, Chelsea was given a commemorative Smokey Bear doll from a National Park Service worker. Chelsea would not leave until she got the name and address of the person who gave it to her so she could send a thank-you note.

M
OTHERHOOD UNITES ALL
of these women, no matter how different they are. Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton do not have much in common. Friends say that Michelle never wanted to be a public person and that she signed up for eight years and cannot wait for them to end. That is clearly not the case for Hillary, who is trying for a second time to get back into the White House. One thing they do have in common is their deep relationship with their mothers and their own commitment to being good mothers.

“It hurt so much when I lost my mother, I know how it feels,” Hillary told a friend whose mother had recently passed away. “I will
never
get over it.” In a 2015 interview with ABC News, Hillary got emotional when she mentioned her mother, Dorothy Rodham, who died in 2011. Dorothy grew up in poverty and at eight years old she was sent from Chicago to California to live with her grandparents after her parents divorced. “She told me every day you’ve got to get up and fight for what you believe in, no matter how hard it is. I think about her a lot, I miss her a lot. I wish she were here with me.”

Michelle has a strong relationship with her mother, Marian Robinson, whom she credits with helping her family stay grounded
in the White House. She says she felt like a single parent when her husband was elected to the Illinois State Senate. He was typically home in Chicago only from Thursday night until Monday afternoon: the rest of the week he was in Springfield. “At times it can be wearing, because you’re on twenty-four/seven. Part of what we’ve had to figure out is what kind of support do I need to make my life less hectic? I’d like the support to come from Dad, but when it can’t, I just really need the support. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s him or not as long as our kids are happy and they feel like they are connected to him. So I have to get over the fact that it’s not him. It’s Mom, friends, babysitters.”

Unlike Hillary, whose infamous cookie comment offended stay-at-home mothers, Michelle frames her struggles with work-life balance and motherhood in a more subtle way by urging women to prioritize their own happiness. She admits that there were times when she felt lonely. “I am sitting there with a new baby, angry, tired, and out of shape. The baby is up for that four o’clock feeding. And my husband is lying there, sleeping. That’s when it struck [me] that if I wasn’t there, he would eventually have to wake up [and take care of the girls]. It worked. I would get home from the gym, and the girls would be up and fed. That was something I had to do for me.”

When she interviewed for her job at the University of Chicago Medical Center she was on maternity leave and still breast-feeding her newborn daughter. She didn’t have a babysitter so she took her daughter to the interview. “Sasha slept through it, thank goodness.” Michelle’s longtime Chicago hairstylist Michael “Rahni” Flowers said that she’s like her mother, who is a firm disciplinarian. “All they have to do is give you that eye—it will turn you into stone, it will stop you in your tracks.” There’s always a bowl of candy at the front of the hair salon, and instead of grabbing a
handful, like most kids, Sasha and Malia would always ask first, “Mom, is it okay if I have a piece of candy?” Like any mom, she would sometimes have to bring her two daughters with her when she was getting her hair done. When they were really little, she would let other ladies hold them while she was getting her hair washed, but once she got under the dryer she’d hold the baby on her lap. “It was such a beautiful thing,” Flowers says, “and that’s the life she gave up.”

Former White House Chief Usher Admiral Stephen Rochon remembers that on his birthday, Malia came into the Usher’s Office followed by her mother, who was carrying a birthday cake for him. The Obama girls were unfailingly polite, Rochon says. “Malia would be heading upstairs to the residence and I’d ask, ‘How was your day?’ and she’d reply, ‘How was
your
day?’” At their Chicago home, Michelle had rules that are for the upstairs bedrooms, where more silliness is allowed, and rules for the downstairs, where grown-ups congregate. Even in the White House she allows her daughters only one hour of television a day, and only after homework is done.

When it comes to parenting, Michelle admires Hillary’s ability to raise Chelsea and her demands for privacy for her only child. “You can tell from one conversation with Chelsea that she’s a mature, decent, well-balanced young lady. [The Clintons] did something right,” she said. Michelle made it clear to her husband’s advisers that she expected to have a family dinner most nights at 6:30 p.m., and she and her girls are rarely ever seen in the West Wing. They see their father much more now than before when he was in the Senate and commuting between Chicago and Washington, or while he was going back and forth from Chicago to Springfield. “Being in the White House has made our family life more ‘normal’ than it’s ever been,” the President wrote in a column
for
More
magazine. “To our surprise, moving to the White House was really the first time since the girls were born that we’ve been able to gather as a family almost every night.”

Michelle has kept a strict rule in the White House: the second and third floors are the family area. The Obamas are the first first family to turn off the lights in the living quarters themselves. “She treats it just as if it were her house,” says Usher Worthington White. “She doesn’t need anybody going up and turning the lights off for her, she wants privacy.” Before the Obamas, at night an usher would drop off a folder of work from the West Wing for the President on the reading table on the backside of a sofa, outside his bedroom. The folder was clearly in view when he and his wife walked out of their bedroom—the President’s papers were to the left and the First Lady’s were always to the right. Michelle did not like that system because it implies that there is always business going on, even in the most intimate parts of the residence. She issued a mandate that all of her husband’s work material goes in his office in the Treaty Room because that’s where business is conducted. Reading material for her from the East Wing is placed in an ante office. It’s a small change, but it represents a whole different way of thinking: she wants everyone on staff to know that this is the family’s home, not an extension of the Oval Office.

She misses being able to spend time with her girls outside the White House without being swarmed by photographers and reporters. A close Obama aide has a child around the age of one of the Obamas’ daughters. During soccer season, the First Lady teased him that he would probably be tied up all weekend doing carpools. “Yeah, probably,” he said with a shrug. “I’m sure you don’t miss it.” She replied, “Oh, you’d be surprised.”

Marian Robinson lives in a suite on the third floor, and not long after she moved in she called the Usher’s Office asking to be
served the food the staff eats; she was quickly growing tired of the elaborate meals the chef conjures up to impress the first family. She had not wanted to move and give up her life in her hometown of Chicago—she had just joined a running club for senior citizens and had won her first track meet—and she agreed only after Michelle made the case that it was the best way to keep Sasha and Malia grounded. “They’re dragging me with them,” she said in a 2009 interview, “and I’m not comfortable with that. But I’m doing exactly what you do. You do what needs to be done.” Because she has successfully avoided the spotlight, she remains relatively anonymous. She takes the girls to school in an unmarked SUV and occasionally leaves the White House to go shopping. When they first moved into the White House, President Obama, bemused, said that his mother-in-law “just walks out the gate and goes over to CVS and starts doing her shopping.” But as the years have dragged on, Marian feels increasingly isolated.

“Ma’am, I’m going to get my wife to get you out for a while, to get some fresh air,” Head Butler George Hannie told Marian one morning when he served her breakfast.

“I’d love to,” she told him. So his wife, Shirley, took Michelle’s mother to a suburban mall for lunch. Shirley wouldn’t say which mall because she worries that it could make it harder for Marian to leave the confines of the White House if people knew where she goes.

“I’m sure it’s lonely,” Shirley said. “They have their schedule being first family; there are downtimes for her.”

The First Lady is maternal toward trusted staffers, especially the young ones like Reggie Love, who was twenty-four when he began working for Obama in the Senate in 2006. “Strong and beautiful—reminds me of my mom,” Love says of her. Before Love left in 2011 to go to business school, Michelle teased him
about finding a girlfriend and settling down. During the 2008 campaign she would approach staffers and ask, “What’s going on with you?” “You eating okay?” When there’s a tragedy in a young staffer’s family, she often checks on them. Bill Burton was national press secretary during Obama’s first presidential campaign and then was deputy press secretary in the White House, and he remembers the thrill of traveling in 2008 with Michelle, before she grew tired of the road. He traveled to New Hampshire with her and her press secretary, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, and remembers the forty-minute drive in the rental van from the airport to the first event and how she wrote her entire speech on eight pages of legal pad paper in longhand. But she didn’t end up using it. “When we got to the event she gave the entire speech without notes and spoke in these perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs and wowed the crowd.” They bounced around New Hampshire the rest of the day and stopped at a McDonald’s, where the soon-to-be First Lady got a Filet-O-Fish sandwich. (“I’ll never forget it because who gets the fish at McDonald’s?” Burton said, laughing.) They ended up being snowed in at the airport that night for several hours. So they sat at the small airport cafeteria and shared a pizza, and Michelle drank wine while he had a beer. “It was one of those really lovely days on the campaign trail that you see in the movies. Since ninety percent of the days are not like that, you appreciate those days.”

Somebody else can have Madison Avenue. I’ll take Bird.

—
LBJ
ON HIS WIFE
’
S EXTRAORDINARY POLITICAL SAVVY

F
irst ladies support their husbands, and that includes acting as sources of reassurance and normalcy during times of tragedy, as Lady Bird Johnson did after President Kennedy’s assassination and as Laura Bush did after 9/11. They can speak to grieving mothers and wives in a more personal way than their husbands can. They often put their own ambitions and desires aside for the sake of their husbands’ presidencies. Even when they want to do something as small and seemingly inconsequential as replace a member of the White House residence staff, they seek the President’s approval. They are co-stars on a national stage where their every move is scrutinized and they cannot do a thing without considering how it will affect the presidency. In all cases it is doubtful that their husbands would have been elected had it not been for them.

Lady Bird Johnson loved to read, but she developed macular degeneration in her old age and could no longer read easily. Her
devoted staff, made up of a handful of women, some of whom had been with her in the White House, took turns reading to her. Shirley James was Lady Bird’s executive assistant and was with her when she passed away at ninety-four years old on July 11, 2007. Years earlier, James was preparing Lady Bird for a retrospective interview she had agreed to do about the year 1968. The two sat quietly together at the Johnsons’ Texas ranch and James read aloud the parts of Lady Bird’s diary that were about the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. James fought back tears as she read Lady Bird’s entry from the day Robert Kennedy was killed. “Nineteen sixty-eight was a hell of a year,” James said, shaking her head as tears rolled down her cheeks. When she looked up, she was surprised to see Lady Bird, who rarely cried, also in tears. “Yes,” Lady Bird said softly, “It was a hell of a year.” In an entry from her diary on the day Robert Kennedy was shot, Lady Bird wrote, “There was an air of unreality about the whole thing—a nightmare quality. It couldn’t be. You dreamed it. It had happened before.”

She knew all too well what had happened before, when President Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963, and her life changed forever. No modern first lady has ever had to handle such a violent transition as Lady Bird Johnson did. Unlike her predecessors, Lady Bird moved into a White House in mourning. Her social secretary, Bess Abell, remembered just how jarring the transition was: “Instead of coming in with the excitement and the thrill of an inauguration, we moved into a house that was covered with black crepe on all the chandeliers and the columns.”

The new First Lady often lamented the impossible position her family was suddenly thrust into. In her diary she wrote, “If Lyndon could pull all the stars out of the skies and make a necklace for Jackie Kennedy he would do it.” Lady Bird was in
the motorcade with the Kennedys, and on the flight back from Dallas, as President Kennedy’s casket sat in the plane’s corridor, she approached a dazed Jackie. “We never even wanted to be vice president,” she told her. “Now, dear God, it’s come to this.” When the media began pelting her press secretary, Liz Carpenter, with questions about when Jackie and her two children would be moving out of the White House, Lady Bird was furious. “I would to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort; I can at least serve her convenience,” she told Carpenter.

Lady Bird was adamantly opposed to the plan to move her family into the White House on December 7, 1963, because it fell on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. “The only argument I ever recall witnessing my parents having—I didn’t actually witness it, I was eavesdropping—I heard raised voices and some expression of anger between my parents,” Luci Johnson said. “It was my mother, who was always so respectful and deferential, and my father, who was always honoring my mother deeply. My father was saying, ‘We have to move December seventh, Bird.’ My mother said, ‘Lyndon, any day but that.
Any
day but that.’” Lady Bird was “begging for an alternative,” her daughter recalled. Ultimately, she lost the fight.

Lady Bird had a complicated relationship with Jackie, whose youth and jaw-dropping beauty she could not match. A newspaper editor from Texas told her, “You poor thing having to follow Jackie Kennedy.” “Don’t pity me,” she said. “Grieve for Mrs. Kennedy; she lost her husband. I still have my Lyndon.” What she couldn’t match in appearance she made up for in dedication and stamina. Because Jackie was pregnant with John-John, then-Senator John Kennedy had asked Lady Bird to take on a defining role in the 1960 campaign. She was proud of her southern roots (she regularly peppered sentences with phrases like “He was as
full of ideas as a pomegranate is of seed”) and she was a natural on the campaign trail. She never complained and always sought to shield her husband. When she was campaigning with LBJ and the Kennedys, she got a call telling her that her father, whom she adored, had developed blood poisoning in one of his legs and that the leg would have to be amputated the next day. Her entire body flinched when she answered the phone, but she quickly straightened up. “What time will they operate?” she asked her father’s doctor. “I will be there.” She didn’t tell LBJ right away because he was getting dressed for an event and was dealing with several political problems. She waited until he was in good spirits, put her hand calmly on his shoulder, and said, “Daddy’s going to have to be operated on in the morning, and I will have to leave and be there.” Johnson sighed deeply and nodded, and the two of them went through the campaign events they had lined up for the rest of that evening. Lady Bird summoned her extraordinary self-discipline to push her private pain from her mind and get back to work.

When she became First Lady, she eagerly took on an exhausting schedule. She told Chief Usher J. B. West, “My husband comes first, the girls second, and I will be satisfied with what’s left.” Doorman Preston Bruce, who started at the White House at the beginning of President Eisenhower’s first term, would stand in the doorway of the sweeping Entrance Hall and watch her with amusement. “I never saw her take a moment for herself all the time she was at the White House.” During the 1960 campaign, she traveled 35,000 miles, visited eleven states, and went to about 150 events during one two-month span. During just five days she gave forty-five speeches. “Lady Bird carried Texas for us,” Robert Kennedy said at the time. Once her husband became President Kennedy’s vice president, she spent much of her time being a pinch hitter and doing the photo ops and events that
Jackie Kennedy didn’t want to do. Lady Bird took Jackie’s place more than fifty times, filling in for her while Jackie did one of her signature PBOs, her own acronym for “the polite brush-off.” Jackie’s staff came to refer to Lady Bird as “Saint Bird” for saving them from embarrassment again and again.

Bess Abell, who had two young children when she was the Johnsons’ social secretary, remembers how much the Johnsons entertained and how hard they, and everyone on their staffs, worked. Before formal dinners, after all the guests were seated, Abell would sneak into the Usher’s Office and read bedtime stories to her sons over the phone. “Some people think that was unforgivable,” she laughed, but it was a job and a friendship that both she and Lady Bird would not have traded for anything. In 1968, when Lady Bird’s husband announced his decision not to seek the presidency again, Lady Bird said, “We need to make every minute, every day, every hour between now and next January twentieth count.”

Lady Bird had been a gifted student in high school, but she was so painfully shy that she purposefully answered some questions incorrectly on exams so that she wouldn’t have to speak as valedictorian or salutatorian at graduation. But through the years her confidence grew, and she attended the University of Texas, where she earned a double bachelor’s degree in history and journalism at a time when few women would have dreamed of going to college. Her father was the richest man in their small East Texas town, and her mother, who died when she was five years old, was from a wealthy Alabama family. When LBJ decided to run for Congress, his bride took ten thousand dollars of her inheritance to help get him there.

She had wanted to become a newspaper reporter, but soon after she met young congressional aide Lyndon Baines Johnson,
she traded in her plans for this larger-than-life character, whom she called “electric.” She said she felt “like a moth drawn to a flame.” He proposed the day after they met but she was unsure. The two exchanged more than ninety letters sent between Washington, D.C., where Johnson was working for Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg, and her home in Karnack, Texas. “We either do it now, or we never will,” he wrote to her. Days later, he showed up at Bird’s doorstep with a $2.50 ring from Sears, Roebuck and refused to leave without her acquiescence. They married on November 17, 1934, when she was twenty-one years old and he was twenty-six. It was less than three months from the day they first met.

Even though Lady Bird helped get him elected to every office he ran for, by supporting him financially or emotionally, LBJ sometimes treated her with outright contempt. He made other couples blush when he harangued her in public, comparing her with other women he found more beautiful. At parties he would yell at her to get him another slice of pie, or tell her to change her “funny-looking shoes.” He did not even bother informing her about his first run for Congress until he announced it publicly. “See you later, Bird,” he’d bark the minute any political conversation came up—her cue to leave the room immediately. He hated the color purple and would tell his wife not to wear it, and to stop wearing “saddlebag” fabrics. (“He likes the things that show the shape of your figure, if you have one to show,” says Abell.) LBJ’s drinking sometimes got out of hand and Lady Bird would occasionally ask the White House butlers to cut his Cutty Sark whiskey with water. Johnson’s adviser Joe Califano said Lady Bird was the best thing that ever happened to LBJ. “She helped him when he was down; he was essentially a manic depressive, up and down; she leveled it out for him.”

As LBJ’s political star rose, Lady Bird became more and more sure of herself, slowly transforming from a shy bookworm into a political force and a cunning businesswoman who (against her husband’s wishes) invested $17,000 of her inheritance in a small media company that by the time they got to the White House was worth $9 million (roughly $68 million in today’s dollars). Lady Bird vividly remembered when they first made a profit—eighteen dollars—on her investment in August 1944. She began taking an active role in politics in 1941, after he lost his first bid for the Senate and returned to the House. While he was on active duty in the navy during World War II, she managed his legislative office.

Lyndon Johnson smoked nearly sixty cigarettes a day and suffered an almost-fatal heart attack in 1955 while in the Senate. It was then that he began to see her as a lifeline, and he pleaded with her to stay by his bedside the entire time he was in the hospital. Like the dutiful wife that she was, she returned home only twice during those five weeks to see their eleven-year-old and eight-year-old daughters. “Her priority was always him,” said the Johnsons’ social secretary, Bess Abell. “Those two girls, they could take care of themselves.” The ordeal softened LBJ’s treatment of Lady Bird. After his brush with death he let her listen in on policy discussions and asked her how she thought certain decisions would play to the American public. She changed, too, in part because of her new position in her husband’s world. In the mid-1950s, she started to critique LBJ, sometimes even handing him notes during public speeches that said things like “That’s enough” when she thought he was going on too long. Occasionally, when he did not heed her advice, she physically pulled on his jacket lapel to get him to sit down.

In the White House, Lady Bird had each day planned out ahead of time and worked diligently in her “office,” the cream-colored
bedroom where she studied speeches and dictated letters. Sometimes she escaped to the blue-and-white Queens’ Sitting Room to work on projects like Head Start and organize monthly luncheons dubbed “Women Do-ers,” which gathered high-powered businesswomen together. She’s best remembered for the Highway Beautification Act, signed by her husband on October 22, 1965, and nicknamed “Lady Bird’s Bill,” which called for limiting billboards and landscaping and planting flowers along the nation’s highways. What is less known is that she influenced almost all of the nearly two hundred laws having to do with the environment during her husband’s administration. She fought to protect California’s redwood trees and to preserve the breathtaking beauty of the Grand Canyon. She was one of the country’s earliest and most famous environmentalists, and she believed that there was something sacred about nature’s beauty that must be cherished and preserved. “Where flowers bloom, so does hope,” she’d say.

She was kind to the staff. Electrician Bill Cliber remembers Secret Service agents approaching him after the birth of his son. They asked him which hospital his wife was at because the First Lady wanted to send flowers. “No,” he said, shaking his head as tears filled his eyes. “The First Lady went and got flowers and she took them to her and gave them to my wife in the hospital.” When Cliber thanked her later, Lady Bird told him that it was the easiest thing she ever had to do as First Lady.

In 1964, the stakes were even higher than they had been in 1960, and her husband told her he needed her help to win the presidency. She became the first first lady to go on the campaign trail without the President at her side when she traveled 1,628 miles across eight southern states on her “Lady Bird Special,” making forty-seven speeches to half a million people on the historic whistle-stop train tour. It was the fall of 1964 and her husband was in
trouble in the South because, months earlier, he had pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which overturned the so-called Jim Crow segregation laws. Some southerners felt that their way of life was being threatened. Lady Bird, who grew up in a small town in East Texas, was the administration’s emissary to the South. In a slow and deliberate voice, she urged southerners to accept desegregation or else watch their economy crumble. Referring to her Texas accent an aide said, “They may not believe what you’re saying, but they sure will understand the way you’re saying it!” She told her staff, “Don’t give me easy towns. Anyone can get into Atlanta—it’s the new, modern South. Let me take the tough ones.” She insisted on calling the senators and governors of each state that she visited, Democrat or Republican, to tell them of her arrival and to ask them to hop onto the train with her. It was a clever move that helped endear her to her husband’s fiercest critics. “I don’t think I’ll have many takers,” she admitted. “But it’s only polite to ask.”