First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (20 page)

“Look, my law practice was already established with the name as it was,” she said, fixing her gaze at him sincerely, and adding sweetly, “But really, I just love my daddy so much.” In the 1980 election, Clinton’s Republican opponent, Frank White, told voters as often as possible that his wife was “Mrs. Frank White.” White won the election. When Cragg Hines, then the Washington bureau chief of the
Houston Chronicle
, asked Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, what she thought of Hillary when she first met her, she paused and said, “Damn Yankee, I guess!” Virginia blamed Hillary for her son’s 1980 loss, saying that half of the voters in Arkansas, most of whom were socially conservative, thought that the Clintons were unmarried and were living in sin in the Governor’s Mansion. “The only time she got weepy was when she talked about Bill Clinton losing in 1980,” Hines recalled. “This was something that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

When Clinton announced in February 1982 that he was seeking the governorship again, Hillary began to be referred to as “Mrs. Bill Clinton.” She dyed her hair and got contact lenses, determined that she would not be the reason for another defeat. “I’ll be Mrs. Bill Clinton,” she told reporters in 1982, the day her husband announced his bid to get back into the Governor’s Mansion. “I suspect people will be getting tired of hearing from Mrs. Bill Clinton.” From 1983 to 1992, when Bill was elected president, Hillary was mostly referred to as Hillary Clinton. But when the Clintons got to the White House and Hillary was put in charge of
the health-care overhaul, she used Hillary Rodham Clinton. She never legally changed her name from Hillary Rodham.

Hillary sparred with the southerners, particularly the men, who made fun of her feminism and even of her appearance, yet she knew there was no point arguing with them. As the first lady of Arkansas, Hillary was sometimes asked to host fund-raisers, some even involving the incongruous sight of her modeling clothes. At one fund-raiser Hillary had her makeup done professionally and modeled a cashmere sweater. Guy Campbell went backstage and said, “Hillary, I can’t believe it, tonight you resemble a woman.” Hillary smiled through her annoyance and said, “Only you, Guy Campbell, would say something like that to me.”

Bill often told staffers to run their new ideas past his wife, and he put her in charge of his efforts to reform Arkansas public schools, which were almost at the bottom in national rankings. Hillary cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and helped get funding for early education, and she worked on reforming the juvenile justice system. As an associate and then a partner at the Rose Law Firm, she earned more than three times what her husband did.

She never stopped being Bill’s fiercest defender, and in May 1990, when her husband was running for his fifth term as Arkansas governor, she stood in the crowd in the state capitol’s rotunda as Tom McRae, his challenger in the Democratic primary, held a press conference. When McRae attacked Bill for refusing to debate him, a determined voice called out: “Tom, who was the one person who didn’t show up in Springdale? Give me a break! I mean, I think that we oughta get the record straight. . . .” Hillary emerged from the crowd and walked toward McRae as the television cameras shifted their focus from him to her. “Many of the reports you issued,” she charged, waving a sheaf of papers in her
hand, “not only praised the governor on his environmental record, but his education record and his economic record!” At the end of the press conference a local reporter wrapped up his live shot by saying, “Hillary Clinton showed again that she may be the best debater in the family.” She had saved Bill from what could have been a devastating defeat, and by doing so she had brought him one step closer to the presidency.

In the White House, the Clintons had a complicated relationship that played out every day in front of the residence staff. They stayed up late and entertained celebrities with invitations to stay the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. (The Clintons had so many guests in the White House that residence staffers kept a list of them in their shirt pockets in case Hillary stopped them to ask who they were hosting on any given evening.) They never seemed to stop working. They quizzed staffers to find out what people outside the Beltway thought and they talked politics constantly, even on vacation. In Martha’s Vineyard, Hillary told a reporter, “I was cutting Bill’s grapefruit this morning and we had the best idea we ever had about day care, and all of a sudden there’s this flapping at the window and it’s a seagull—a seagull at our window!”

The Clintons also had heated arguments and long, stony silences. During a movie screening in 1994 in the White House theater, the Clintons’ interior decorator, Kaki Hockersmith, who lived off and on at the White House for years, warned a guest, “Things are really dark around here; they may even leave early tonight.” White House Florist Ronn Payne remembers coming up the service elevator one day with a cart to pick up old floral arrangements and seeing two butlers standing outside the West Sitting Hall listening as the Clintons fought. The butlers motioned him over to them and put their fingers to their lips, “Shhh.” Suddenly,
Payne heard the First Lady shout, “Goddamn bastard!” And a heavy object slammed against the floor.

But there were sweet moments, too, and Hillary tried to help lighten the mood for her husband in the White House. She asked Head Housekeeper Christine Limerick to convert the room at the end of the hall—Room 330 on the third floor—into a music room for President Clinton as a surprise Christmas present. The room was painted and refurbished and outfitted with music stands, stereo equipment, speakers, and his saxophone collection. Limerick wrapped the entry door on Christmas Eve and Hillary led Bill to the room early Christmas morning. It was one of the rare moments when the Clintons were not working.

S
OMETIMES BEING A
supportive partner in the White House means being a firm taskmaster and a consistent, strong presence during times of tragedy. There is a depth and complexity to Laura Bush that few ever get to see. Laura says that her mother-in-law, Barbara, is much more “acerbic” than she is, but when Laura was in the White House she had a harder edge than Barbara ever did. When President George W. Bush asked for something, his staff moved as fast as they could. When Laura Bush had a request, everyone ran.

Laura was a prim and proper first lady and she was often not amused by the casual atmosphere in the West Wing. After the West Wing was redecorated, Laura walked through the new press room and lower press office. One of the twentysomething press assistants had a bunch of pictures pinned to the wall above her desk. Laura walked by, glanced at her space, and shook her head disapprovingly. “This is the White House,
not
a sorority,” she said. A few minutes later, the photos were down. Usher Worthington
White remembers how angry Laura was when residence staffers lost the keys to her daughter Jenna’s car twice. Jenna parked her car on the South Grounds, but sometimes the car had to be moved, either because the President would be making a statement outdoors, where the car would be visible in the camera shot, or because a last-minute guest was arriving and room needed to be made for the motorcade. Laura was always very calm and controlled but when she came into the Usher’s Office to find out what had happened the second time her daughter’s keys were lost, she was livid when she discovered that a staffer had accidentally dropped them into a storm drain. Her hands were shaking and her tone was curt: they were not inconveniencing her, they were inconveniencing her daughter, which was far worse in her mind. Staffers finally decided to place spare copies of Jenna’s keys in a safe in the Usher’s Office.

Laura did not miss a thing, White says. One day, shortly after he was made the usher in charge of housekeeping, the phone in the Usher’s Office blinked “Family Table,” indicating it was a call coming from the family breakfast table upstairs. It was the First Lady asking him to meet her at the President’s elevator right away. Laura quickly congratulated him on his new position and summoned him toward her. They walked into the East Sitting Hall, in between the Queens’ Bedroom and the Lincoln Bedroom, where she pointed to a small leak. “It has been like this for nine months,” she said. “I want it fixed.”

It’s remarkable that Laura, a shy librarian who married her husband on the condition that she would
never
have to make a political speech on his behalf, would become so comfortable giving orders in the White House. Laura was thirty-one and had already spent a decade working as an elementary school teacher and a librarian before she started dating George W. Bush, who really
is her opposite in so many ways. She smoothed the edges of her husband’s brash personality. On the campaign plane she would tell him, “Rein it in, Bubba,” when he was holding court in front of reporters. Around the residence she would admonish him with a delicate “Bushieee” (her voice lowering at the end) when he was out of line. And he helped her heal from the shame of a car accident, in which she accidentally ran a stop sign and killed one of her best friends when she was seventeen. She felt so guilty that she never told their daughters—they found out only when their father was governor of Texas and someone on their protective detail mentioned it, assuming they already knew.

Laura could never have known back in Midland, Texas, where she was born and raised, that she would one day have to help shepherd the country during the worst terrorist attack since Pearl Harbor. It was the residence staffers, who serve from one administration to the next, regardless of political party, who helped Laura feel she could go on after September 11, 2001. “We knew we were going to be there [in the White House], and we were confident that we would be safe, but on the other hand they [White House staffers] could have chosen another job or just said, ‘You know, this is just too much stress now. I’d rather go on,’” Laura said in an interview. “And they didn’t, none of them did.”

Veteran White House reporter Ann Compton says she remembers being at a private lunch with the First Lady when Laura told her that, in the terrifying hours after the terrorist attacks, she almost burst into tears when her Secret Service agent told her that all of the former first families were secure. “She hadn’t even thought about the ripple effect,” Compton said. Susan Ford’s two daughters attended Southern Methodist University and called their mother in a panic on September 11. Susan contacted one of the Secret Service agents who had been on her detail when she
was living in the White House and who lived near SMU, and he and his wife took her daughters in for several days. One daughter told her professor before leaving, “I know this may sound strange to you but my grandfather was President Gerald Ford and I have to leave.” When Laura Bush heard the story her eyes filled with tears; the bond these families share with the Secret Service and with each other runs deep.

Six days after 9/11, Laura Bush was sent to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as one of several administration officials dispatched to deal with the crisis. Hundreds of family members of the forty passengers and crew of the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 gathered in the desolate field, where a crater was still smoldering from the impact of the crash. It was the only one of the four hijacked planes that did not reach its intended target, because of the heroism of the passengers and crew who tried to regain control of the plane from the hijackers. A White House aide, who had been at the event site for hours before Laura arrived, said the audience seemed reassured when they saw her. “When she showed up, it felt different, it felt better,” he recalled. “People can believe what she says, they feel like they can cry on her shoulder and she can be strong for them.” Aides say that she is at her best in intimate settings, when the cameras are not on. Her visit to Shanksville was emotional. She had private meetings with family members who wanted to know what she and her husband could do to help them recover from their immense loss. “America is learning the names, but you know the people,” she told the audience, many of whom were crying in disbelief. “And you are the ones they thought of in the last moments of life. You’re the ones they called, and prayed to see again. You are the ones they loved.”

Laura told her staff that she wanted to visit all fifty states as First Lady, and by the end only one state was left: North Dakota.
Laura’s chief of staff, Anita McBride, recalled accompanying Laura to her last event, a potluck dinner in a church basement in North Dakota. “It was as middle America as you can imagine—the casseroles, the paper napkins—maybe a hundred people, all women dressed up.” Suddenly, a woman got up and started singing “God Bless America,” and Laura Bush, who had seen the pain of 9/11 family members and wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, began to cry. It was one of the only times she allowed herself to become visibly emotional, at a small potluck dinner in North Dakota that marked the end of her eight-year journey as First Lady.

We don’t have to do anything.

—
M
ICHELLE
O
BAMA TO HER ADVISERS AFTER THE 2008 ELECTION

T
he old-fashioned East Wing versus West Wing battle of the sexes has been a prominent feature of every modern White House. In the Kennedy White House it was Jackie’s formidable social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, in one corner and White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger in the other. When Baldrige would walk between the West Wing and the East Wing by the White House swimming pool, President Kennedy would occasionally call out to her as he was doing laps. “Now what’s with the East Wing? What are your problems today?” While JFK was amused by the drama, he usually took the side of the East Wing. Baldrige knew how to use Jackie’s proximity to power to get what she wanted. “If Pierre went against the specific instructions of JBK (Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy) I would get hell from Jackie, [so] I’d tattle on Pierre to the President, and the President went to bat for me against Pierre.” Jackie was ultimately in control.

During the Ford administration, Betty’s press secretary, Sheila
Rabb Weidenfeld, saw the East Wing as the heart and the West Wing as the head. “They were responsible for policy; we interpreted it by daily living, by example.” When she interviewed Maria Downs to be her new social secretary Betty asked her, “Could you go to bat against them [the President’s aides in the West Wing]?” Betty had watched helplessly as West Wing aides tried to take control over the guest lists for state dinners during the brief time that she did not have a social secretary.

Michelle Obama wants to maintain complete control of her image. One former adviser to the First Lady said that she wants every event to have a “clear electoral purpose,” and that “every time that she was used in any capacity, . . . it had to be connected to strategy.” Michelle had been a reluctant campaigner and has been a reluctant First Lady at times, the staffer says.

In the Obama White House, tension between the West Wing and the quiet second-floor office of the First Lady in the East Wing is still brewing. During the transition, after her husband was elected but before his inauguration, Michelle gathered her small staff in the transition headquarters and told them, “We don’t
have
to do anything.” Anything that they decided to do, she said, must be done “really, really well.” She had to be “value-added” or else she would not do anything. Every event must have a goal and casual suggestions were not welcome; instead every idea should be carefully considered, every downside explored, before it was even presented to her. All of that meant that she expected her schedule to be planned weeks in advance, even though the President’s schedule is more ad hoc and sometimes planned hours in advance, depending on global events. Her plan when she entered the White House was to work only two or three days a week and devote the rest of her time to her daughters. A former West Wing staffer made it clear that Michelle has the final word and that
any attempts to overschedule her, or to do something spontaneous, were not wise: “You knew what the limitations were.”

Once she commits to doing something, however, aides say Michelle spends hours and sometimes days personally preparing and editing her speeches. Her staff will have a lectern moved into her office so that she can practice them. What she most enjoys is speaking to young inner-city girls to whom she can be an inspiration. “Nothing in my life’s path ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African American First Lady,” she tells them, her voice swelling with emotion. “I wasn’t raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of.”

Michelle Obama is on her fourth social secretary after the departure of the first man and first openly gay social secretary, Jeremy Bernard. Four months after becoming First Lady, Michelle replaced Chief of Staff Jackie Norris, who ran the President’s successful Iowa operation, with her old friend Susan Sher. At the end of 2010 she replaced Sher with Tina Tchen, a lawyer who worked in the White House Office of Public Engagement. The turnover in her office is higher than in most of her predecessors’—Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton each had two chiefs of staff over their eight years as first lady.

Michelle speaks bluntly. She is willing to be a good sport, but she made it clear from the beginning that she does not appreciate other people speaking on her behalf and making promises that she would show up at events, without first consulting her. She was particularly angry when the President’s then–Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made commitments on her behalf. “Rahm has frayed relationships with everyone. I don’t think anybody has an uncomplicated, warm relationship with him,” a former Obama administration staffer said. When Michelle was being overscheduled she told the President’s aides: “Stop this right now.” Michelle’s backers
in the White House say they felt as though Emanuel was using her and that it was not fair to punish her and ask her to campaign more than other first ladies simply because she was popular.

Michelle’s relationship with her husband’s first press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was no better than it was with Emanuel. According to a former White House official with personal knowledge of the dynamic, Michelle thought Gibbs was brash and a know-it-all from the beginning, and she worried that he was more concerned with Obama the candidate than Obama the man. Gibbs was one of Obama’s few advisers who were vocal in their criticism of the East Wing. He was allegedly worried about Michelle’s decision in 2009 to hire decorator Michael Smith, who, unbeknownst to the First Lady, had been in charge of the $1.2 million redecoration of ousted Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain’s office. Thain’s outlandishly expensive trash can ($1,200) and even more absurdly priced rug ($87,000) became synonymous with Wall Street greed during the financial crisis, and Gibbs worried about the public backlash. But the First Lady argued that she was only trying to make the private quarters more comfortable for their daughters and that they would not be using taxpayer dollars. The President agreed with Gibbs, and while Smith was not fired he was asked to order less expensive items from stores like Anthropologie. Michelle resented her every decision being scrutinized by her husband’s advisers.

T
HE
O
BAMA
E
AST
Wing is far more traditional than the Clinton East Wing. In the Clinton administration, Maggie Williams became the first person to serve both as chief of staff to the First Lady and as an assistant to the President. Many members of Hillary’s staff worked in the West Wing and the Eisenhower
Executive Office Building (formerly the Old Executive Office Building) instead of in the East Wing. Hillary’s decision to take up an office in the West Wing rankled some administration officials. “It got out pretty quickly that Susan Thomases [a close friend of Hillary’s who worked on Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign] had a yardstick and was over at the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building measuring offices and deciding who is going to sit where,” said Roy Neel, who served as Al Gore’s vice presidential campaign manager and later as President Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. “That pissed off everybody.” Hillary even told her successor, Laura Bush, that, if she could turn back time, she would not have had an office in the West Wing. After health-care reform failed she rarely used it anyway, she said. Hillary’s aides told Laura’s staff that once it had been done, undoing the controversial office arrangement would have raised too many questions. There was never any debate about whether Michelle Obama wanted to play a role in the West Wing—she made it crystal clear from the start that she did not want to follow in Hillary Clinton’s footsteps. All communication with the West Wing is done through Michelle’s chief of staff, Tina Tchen. “It is quite unusual for the First Lady to have any interaction with the West Wing staff, unless she’s getting briefed on something. For the most part she doesn’t come over there,” said former Obama communications director Anita Dunn. “Maybe she was there once because we were doing a photo shoot. Besides that she never came over there. She just didn’t.”

Whereas Hillary fought for her team to have access to information, Michelle is not as involved. “The notion of sitting around the table with a set of policy advisers—no offense—makes me yawn,” Michelle said. “I like creating stuff.” Michelle does not want to be told about the day-to-day issues consuming the West
Wing because she says she is not making policy. Her “Let’s Move!” campaign to end childhood obesity has been her signature effort and has been relatively uncontroversial (though it has riled some critics who argue that she is acting like the food police and rigidly dictating what children should be eating).

Because Michelle does not stand up for her staff as much as Hillary did, they sometimes get steamrollered by the West Wing. Emanuel excluded the First Lady’s chief of staff, Jackie Norris, from the all-important 7:30 a.m. West Wing planning meeting. Norris says that the West Wing made a strategic miscalculation by not sharing more information. The President’s advisers were consumed with fixing the economy during the recession, and they considered things that the East Wing was dealing with, like handling the logistics of getting the Obama girls to school, to be trivial. “There’s equal parts blame to go around,” Norris says. “There’s blame on me, there’s blame on him [Rahm], there’s blame on the team, because I think together we would have been better.”

The White House is full of type A staffers who want to be part of the inner ring, as close to power as possible. Knowledge is the currency in Washington, and something as small as knowing two hours ahead of time that an event is going to happen is powerful because information is doled out to such a select group of people. Staffers in the Obama East Wing are often the last to know about the President’s schedule and are often treated like second-class citizens. There is a meeting of the press staff in the morning and a wrap-up meeting at the end of the day, separate from the morning staff meeting led by the President’s chief of staff. Michelle Obama’s aides would almost always be in those morning press meetings but sometimes they were left out of the end-of-the-day meetings. The East Wing began to be referred to as “Guam” by
staffers because it was often on the outside ring of the circle, the furthest from the center.

The one figure who is central to decision making in both wings is Valerie Jarrett. Jarrett is the Obamas’ best friend, and because of that she’s defensive and protective of both of them. Each of the first families becomes a commodity, and Jarrett is the CEO of Obama Inc. Both Obamas have gone to Jarrett to discuss their plans after they leave the White House. In Jarrett the Obamas have something that the Clintons did not have, and that’s someone who can act as a conduit between the West Wing and the East Wing. No staffer ever wants to get between the president and his wife, but Jarrett can. Jarrett occupies the second-floor office in the West Wing that once belonged to Hillary Clinton and, later, George W. Bush’s adviser Karl Rove. Even the closest staffers, like David Axelrod, who was a top Obama campaign strategist and then adviser in the White House, are still considered “staff,” but Valerie is almost like a “third principal,” aides say. She is “their everything,” according to one former Michelle Obama adviser who agreed to speak candidly on the condition of anonymity. Jarrett is part of the Obama family and is one of the only staffers routinely invited to the private residence. She occupies a unique position, being equally close to the President and to the First Lady. She tells friends she will stay until the end, and “turn the lights off in the White House.”

If one thing binds the often dueling West Wing and East Wing staffs, it’s their resentment of Jarrett, who many believe gets in the way of the relationship they have with their bosses. Jarrett can get messages to the President and the First Lady and undermine decisions already agreed upon on a staff level. “It’s harder to see how decisions are getting made; sometimes Valerie inherently makes decisions or makes recommendations based on what she thinks the President or First Lady will want and that can be a struggle
for people,” says one former aide to the First Lady. “They’d rather understand the logic and the framework.”