First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (23 page)

Not long after the
60 Minutes
interview Betty doubled down with an interview for
McCall’s
magazine in which she said that she wanted to have sex with her husband “as often as possible,” and that she was “working on getting a woman on the Supreme Court.” But soon the hate mail was outweighed by the number of fan letters from people happy to finally see a first lady express her own opinions, and the
60 Minutes
interview is now featured at President Ford’s presidential library, along with exhibits devoted to Betty’s outspokenness.
Time
reporter Bonnie Angelo summed up Betty’s candor when she said, “She had not really been a captive of the political spotlight. Part of it was because she was always
home with the children. So she didn’t have the edges all worn smooth.”

Ford had never faced a fierce primary before he got to the White House, and his family was not used to being on display. Betty was more outspoken and less willing to bite her tongue, even during the 1976 presidential campaign. Ford’s advisers were not pleased. Once, when President Ford was meeting with his staff right before the kickoff of the campaign, one of his political strategists carefully brought up the “problem” of his wife. “Mr. President, we’re so close to getting into the campaign, we love your wife, but do you think there’s any chance you might be able to speak to her and just sort of politely ask her if she could tone it down until the campaign is over?” Ford looked around the table at each of his advisers and said, “My wife’s office is right down that hall and I know she’s in it right now. If anybody at this meeting would like to get up and talk to her you’re more than welcome.” No one took him up on his offer.

The Fords brought a casual warmth to the residence, even allowing their teenage daughter to roller-skate in the East Room and wear jeans on the State Floor, where the most formal and public rooms are located. Betty wanted to get to know the residence staff. Carpenter Milton Frame was impressed by her approachable manner. “I do recall that Mrs. Ford, she would invite you to sit down and have a cup of tea,” he said fondly. She also enjoyed teasing the staff. During a tour of the private quarters, her press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, noticed a flower vase with the figures of two angels, with their hands almost touching. A cigarette was perched perfectly between them. “Oh, that,” the First Lady said, laughing. “I put it there. That’s just my way of testing whether the maids have cleaned the room!”

She was fun-loving and never really changed from the
outspoken Alexandria, Virginia, housewife she had been before becoming first lady and before then being the wife of the vice president. More than any other first family, the Fords brought a middle-class sensibility to the White House. One Saturday night, Butler James Jeffries was told to stop washing dishes and go upstairs to the second floor to help Betty with something. When he got upstairs, Betty asked, “Where are the butlers?” She was looking for the full-time butlers.

“They just went downstairs. I can go get them for you,” he told her, pushing the elevator button to go back down.

“All I need is a man,” she called to him, impatiently, from the Family Dining Room.

He laughs with a wink. “I said to myself,
Wait a minute, what is this lady getting me into?
So I went to see what she wanted and all she wanted me to do was take the nineteen-inch television into the bedroom!”

Strength and dignity are her clothing,

and she laughs at the time to come.

She opens her mouth with wisdom,

and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.

She looks well to the ways of her household

and does not eat the bread of idleness.

Her children rise up and call her blessed;

her husband also, and he praises her:

“Many women have done excellently,

but you surpass them all.”

—
P
ROVERBS 31:25–29

Your mother is very sick, and she had to go to a psychiatrist.

—
T
HE
F
ORD CHILDREN’S NANNY,
C
LARA
P
OWELL, AFTER THEIR MOTHER,
B
ETTY
F
ORD, SUFFERED A BREAKDOWN

J
ackie Kennedy had always felt like “the worst liability” to her husband: she was too rich, she was too beautiful, she had an almost comically breathy voice, and she was often pregnant during the height of his campaigning, so she could not join him.
The President would get upset at her when the press wrote about her extravagant spending and her wealthy pedigree (she was educated at Miss Porter’s, Vassar, and the Sorbonne, and she was the product of a broken high-class marriage), and her sister Lee’s 1959 marriage to Polish Prince Stanislas Radziwill did not help. “I’m sorry for you that I’m such a dud,” she told him. (Her husband’s tastes were less highfalutin—she’d joke that the only music he really enjoyed was “Hail to the Chief.”) But soon she started seeing the crowds turn up during the 1960 presidential campaign just to see her, and letters poured in asking her about her clothes and how to replicate her hairstyle. On their way to the inaugural balls, President Kennedy told their driver to turn on the lights inside their car “so that people can see Jackie.” Kennedy family friend William Walton remembers, “We made her sit forward so that they could see her.”

In the spring of 1961, less than six months after the President took office, the Kennedys went to Europe, where he famously said, “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself. . . . I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.” Jackie thrilled the crowds, with half a million people lining the streets chanting “Vive Zhack-ee” and “Kenne-dee.” She spoke what French President Charles de Gaulle called her “low, slow” and flawless French. De Gaulle told the President that his Francophile wife “knew more French history than most French women.” (Jackie hired French chef René Verdon from New York’s famed Carlyle Hotel to take over the White House kitchen from navy stewards and caterers. She was the first first lady to insist that state dinner menus be written in French.)

Jackie could not help being aware of her own popularity and was sometimes generous with it. In Vienna, she stood on a balcony
as a crowd of five thousand people below cheered “Jack-ee!” and she deftly pulled the dowdy and overlooked Nina Khrushchev, wife of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, outside with her and the chants morphed into “Jack-ee! Ni-na!” Nina reached for Jackie’s white-gloved hand and held it high in hers, in a salute to the crowd. By the time they left the palace, Nina got an almost equal share of the applause. French cultural minister and author André Malraux was initially skeptical about the young American president and his wife, but Jackie won him over after an elaborate dinner she threw at the White House in his honor. At the end of the evening she got what she had been dreaming of when Malraux whispered to her softly, “Je vais vous envoyer
La Joconde
” (“I will send you the
Mona Lisa
”). Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was lent to the United States for the first and only time ever, all because of Jackie.

Jackie developed the first official White House guidebook as a way to raise money for redecorating (it sold an astounding half a million copies within ten months of publication). Nash Castro, who helped with the redecoration, recalls sitting with her during one of many meetings in the Yellow Oval Room of the residence as she went through every page of the book for two hours, making suggestions to editors along the way. She was far from her glamorous self in a loose housedress and loafers with no socks. Castro remembers one meeting ending at 6 p.m. Jackie’s hair was undone and she had no makeup on. The next morning he woke up to a front-page photo in the
Washington Post
of her looking gorgeous at a state dinner the night before.

It seems that Jackie adopted an obsession with appearances and with perfecting the furnishings of the White House as a way of stifling a deep sadness that must have come from knowing about her husband’s constant cheating. White House usher
Nelson Pierce remembered how involved Jackie was in the aesthetics of the mansion. “Mr. Pierce, I need some help!” she would often yell down. “I’d like to move this sofa over here,” she said one day. Pierce asked whether she wanted him to see if one of the doormen was free to help, but she said no. “You pick up one end and I’ll pick up the other.” That night they moved the sofa to three different locations in the West Sitting Hall before she finally decided where she wanted it.

The President often seemed amused by his wife’s obsession. White House Electrician Larry Bush remembers standing on a six-foot-tall ladder installing two gold sconces by the fireplace in the Red Room when the President walked in at the moment he began cutting into the gorgeous red twill satin walls. “Larry,” he said, “what in the world are you doing?” “Your wife wants these gold sconces. . . .” Bush said. The President smiled, shook his head, and watched for a moment or two before he went back to his office.

Hundreds of pages of exhaustive handwritten memos reveal how much Jackie truly cared about the history of the White House and the preservation of its priceless antiques, and she succeeded in turning it into a living museum. “All these people come to see the White House and they see practically nothing that dates back before 1948 [when the White House was last restored during President Truman’s administration],” she said in an interview with
Life
magazine in 1961. “Every boy who comes here should see things that develop his sense of history. For the girls, the house should look beautiful and lived-in. They should see what a fire in the fireplace and pretty flowers can do for a house.” She hated the word “redecorate” and insisted that she was on a scholarly mission of “restoring” the mansion. While some of her personal memos—asking the household staff to bring down “our pathetic group of
lamps” so that she could examine them, or to “take down the two hideous mirrors over the sofa” in the East Sitting Hall—seem elitist, they show her intensity and passion for making the White House more beautiful for every American. “The sun is going to fade the walls and curtains in the green, blue and red rooms—so the minute the tours are over, could you have the blinds drawn,” she told Chief Usher J. B. West in one memo. “Also in the Blue Room make sure the braid on the curtains is turned in . . . if the braid faces out it will get sunburned.”

Looking at her personal memos, however, it seems her quest for perfection would never be fulfilled: there was always more furniture to be ordered, more artwork to be swapped out or rearranged. She stood next to Electrician Larry Bush as he worked to arrange lighting for paintings depicting Native American life by George Catlin that she had acquired. Bush was lying underneath a piano in the room, trying to take measurements and decide where the spotlights should go. He went to fish a pen and paper from his pocket to write down some notes and was embarrassed to discover that he didn’t have either. “I’ll run and get my steno pad,” she told him. He dictated notes to her of what he would need for the lighting and she suggested exactly where she wanted the spotlights to go. “A little to the left,” she told him, motioning with her hand.

Her restoration of the White House was described in detail in the wildly popular hour-long CBS Television tour broadcast on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1962.
A Tour of the White House
was the first time television cameras were allowed inside the White House, and it was shot with eight television cameras over the course of almost seven hours in one day. “She was a brilliant woman. I wrote a script of what the questions might be, but she was so far ahead of me that she didn’t need it,” says CBS producer
Perry Wolff. Wolff went into the shoot with three color-coded scripts: one if Jackie was just interviewed, another if she was going to show photos, and the third if she was going to do a tour. “But she threw my script away; she was ready.”

Jackie never buckled under the pressure but between takes “she smoked all the time,” Wolff recalled. “She kept missing the ashtray and flicking the ashes onto the expensive silk covering of the bench she was sitting on. I knew there was tension there.” That night she had dinner with columnist Joseph Alsop and his wife, Susan Mary Alsop. Later, when she and President Kennedy watched clips from the taping, the President was so impressed with her performance that he asked CBS if the crew could reshoot his segment the next morning so that he could match hers.

In a letter to the Kennedys’ friend William Walton, Jackie wrote, “My life here which I dreaded & which at first overwhelmed me—is now under control and the happiest time I have ever known—not for the position—but for the closeness of one’s family. . . . The last thing I expected to find in the W. House.” Behind the scenes she was a skilled caretaker of her fragile husband, who suffered from severe back pain and other medical problems. In a memo to the President’s White House doctor she reminds him to use Johnson’s Back Plasters, sent from Kennedy’s mother. “He used one yesterday and liked it very much. It, obviously, isn’t a cure—but, it makes the sore spot feel warm which is better than just having it ache.” She gets into every detail and when she asks the doctor to order more plasters she even gives him the price: forty-three cents each. She ends the note by asking him to send some mineral oil and talcum powder to the President’s valet, George Thomas, because he needs those to make sure his skin isn’t irritated when he takes the plaster off.

Above all else, Jackie wanted her husband to be happy. On
particularly hard days, when she knew he was grappling with a major issue, she would leave him hand-drawn cartoons and do one of her hilarious impersonations of world leaders or his advisers. She always wanted the children to be on their best behavior when they saw their father after work, and she committed herself to making life in the residence a “climate of affection and comfort and détente.” She organized small dinners with their closest friends and would wait as late as 6 p.m. to have the President’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, phone in the invitations, because she often would not know if her husband would be in the mood for company until then. Every two weeks or so she would organize more elaborate dinners where guests danced to an orchestra in the elegant and intimate Blue Room until 3 a.m. She took care of her husband’s every need; in a memo dated April 2, 1963, sent to Chief Usher West, she asks him to inquire with the Smithsonian Institution to find a woodcarver who could make a copy of the President’s ornate Oval Office desk to be displayed in his library. In another she tells him that the President doesn’t like the “muddy colors” of the rug in the Cabinet Room and asks that the curtains in the Oval be less “draped” and less “feminine.” She even brought in his favorite foods, such as Joe’s Stone Crabs from Miami.

Once she told her friend, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that she made what she considered the terrible mistake of asking her husband about what was happening in Vietnam. “Oh, my God, kid,” Kennedy said, using a term of endearment that understandably rankled Jackie, “I’ve had that, you know, on me all day. Don’t remind me of that all over again.” The President had just taken his daily swim and was in his “happy evening mood,” and she was consumed with guilt for even bringing the topic up. If she wanted to know what was going on, he told her, she should
ask his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, to let her see all the cables. She read the weekly CIA summary as well as the India-Pakistan cables, mostly because she enjoyed the witty writing of Kennedy’s ambassador to India, old friend and scholar John Kenneth Galbraith.

One thing she was never curious about was the details of her husband’s cheating, though she certainly knew what was happening. But she had a sense of humor about him being a flirt. Early in their marriage, she was visiting Jack in the hospital where he was staying because of his bad back. Before the visit she went out to dinner with friends and the beautiful actress Grace Kelly was there. When Jackie got up to leave, Kelly said, “You know, I always wanted to meet Senator Kennedy.” Jackie replied, “Will you come back with me to the hospital and meet him now?” Jack had complained that the nurses were older and not very attractive, so Jackie asked Kelly to put on a nurse’s cap and uniform and tell Kennedy that she was his new night nurse. For a few minutes he didn’t know who it was but then he exploded in laughter.

But the President committed constant betrayals, including having trysts with women as young as nineteen who were working in the White House. Jackie had a decision to make: look the other way or risk losing everything. Not long before Kennedy’s inauguration, Jackie wrote a note to journalist and author Fletcher Knebel. “I would describe Jack as rather like me in that his life is an iceberg,” she wrote. “The public life is above the water—& the private life is submerged.” Her own father had cheated routinely on her mother, and she had come to accept it as the norm. A week after their tenth wedding anniversary Jackie wrote a letter to their friend Charles Bartlett, who had introduced them years earlier. She told him that without Jack her life would have “all been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way.”

But it was hard looking the other way all the time. One woman, named Mimi Alford, was a college freshman when she began a sexual relationship with the President. She and other young women were interns in the press office and soon became involved in relationships with Kennedy and some of his aides. “The thing that amazed me so was that these two or three girls were great friends and bosom buddies and gathered in corners and whispered and giggled, and there seemed to be no jealousy between them, and this was all one great big happy party and they didn’t seem to resent any interest that the President or any other men might have in any of the girls,” recalled Kennedy press aide Barbara Gamarekian. “It was a marvelous example of sharing, which I found very difficult to understand as a woman!” Kennedy’s cheating was an open secret with reporters, who made offhand remarks about it, but it was considered off-limits to serious journalists.