First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (27 page)

After her husband was elected, Rosalynn sometimes felt intimidated. She remembers how mortified she was when Henry Kissinger, who was President Ford’s secretary of state, came to brief Carter in Plains before the inauguration, and she went to get Kissinger a glass of water. It was a Tweety Bird glass from
Looney Tunes
. She thought,
When I get to the White House, I’ll serve him with crystal
.

Jimmy and Rosalynn ignored security concerns and broke with tradition when they decided to walk hand in hand with their daughter Amy down Pennsylvania Avenue after the inauguration ceremony. It was part of their mutual desire to connect with people and move away from what they saw as President Nixon’s imperial presidency. Rosalynn even wore the same ensemble to the inaugural balls in 1977—a gold-embroidered sleeveless coat over a blue chiffon dress—that she wore to her husband’s inauguration as governor in 1971. Two of the Carters’ sons and their families, Jimmy Carter’s mother, and his brother Billy all lived in the residence part-time. Rosalynn had to contend with an eccentric and hard-drinking mother-in-law who paid butlers to walk
to Connecticut Avenue to buy her a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a liquor store because her son kept such a watchful eye on her. (An aide remembers her saying, “Okay, now that Jimmy’s gone, you want a drink?”) The President’s younger brother Billy was involved in several scandals while his big brother was President, and he loved his beer. “I didn’t know he drank until I saw him sober one time,” said a Carter family friend.

Jimmy Carter was the first American president to be born in a hospital, and in many ways his wife helped modernize the office of the First Lady. As a young girl, Rosalynn had watched Eleanor Roosevelt wield an enormous amount of power and influence as First Lady. Rosalynn was the first first lady to use her own office in the East Wing, and she became the first first lady to hire a chief of staff whose government salary and rank were equal to the President’s chief of staff. Full-time positions in the East Wing grew by almost 20 percent under her stewardship. In order to get to work efficiently every day and not be distracted by the tourists who visited the White House from 8 a.m. to noon, Rosalynn took a secret passageway through the basement underneath the mansion, passing large laundry rooms, the Plumber’s Shop, and the bomb shelter, and coming up through a stairway that led straight to her offices in the East Wing. The steam pipes running in the basement ceiling made the route especially welcome on cold days. “With Jimmy’s energy conservation program, it was the only really warm place in the White House,” she joked.

Rosalynn had an official lunch with her husband in the Oval Office every Wednesday, a highly unusual arrangement that followed the tradition of the President and Vice President’s weekly lunches. The ritual came about because Rosalynn had pressing issues to discuss, including their personal finances and their children, as well as the policy issues she cared deeply about. When
the President stepped off the elevator on the second floor at night he dreaded seeing her because he knew she would come at him with an onslaught of questions and suggestions. Once he proposed a weekly lunch, she began to organize her thoughts and put important notes in a brown leather folder that she brought with her each week. By the time it was Wednesday the folder was completely stuffed. Sometimes she would bring up personnel issues—she lobbied intensely to have her husband fire Joe Califano, the secretary of health, education, and welfare. “My reasons were purely political,” she said. “I felt Jimmy could find someone who would do the job just as well and keep a lower profile.” She was much more political than her husband and would often argue passionately with him about postponing certain decisions and announcements until after his reelection, including parts of the Mideast peace agreement and federal budget cuts that would affect the Democratic constituency in New York City a week before the New York State primary. “Can’t you wait a week?” she pushed him. He had a stock reply to her pleas, which only angered her more because it sounded so pompous: “I’ll never do anything to hurt my country.”

Jerry Rafshoon, who was one of the President’s top three advisers, turned to Rosalynn if they couldn’t convince the President of something. He said pollster Pat Caddell did the same. If Caddell was worried about something that Rafshoon and other aides were pushing, he would tell Rosalynn, “These guys screwed up, they’re my friends, but they’re wrong,” Rafshoon said. “Then she would get on Jimmy and he would get on us.” Sometimes Caddell would have dinner with the Carters alone. Rafshoon says that he could always tell the next day because the President would walk into the Oval Office with bloodshot eyes because the First Lady had been trying to convince him of
something that Caddell had told her. “She’s had him all night,” he and Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan would joke.

During the 1976 campaign the press called Rosalynn the “steel magnolia” because she masked her own sharp intellect under a veneer of southern femininity. (She did not mind the nickname and said, “Steel is tough and magnolia is southern.”) She was an active first lady who, during her first fourteen months, visited eighteen countries and twenty-seven U.S. cities, made fifteen major speeches, and held twenty-two press conferences, according to a study by the
Washington Star
. She clearly loved every minute of it and was thrilled when the President asked her to take a twelve-thousand-mile journey to visit seven countries in Latin America, where she pushed leaders on human rights and nuclear nonproliferation. She joined Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at Camp David. She was there for much of the thirteen-day summit at the secluded, 134-acre retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, where they reached a historic agreement in September 1978. “I was there for most of it and I saw her being deeply involved in the process,” said Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale. In her autobiography, Rosalynn wrote about “our experiences” with Sadat and Begin and says, “We had found the two men to be very different.” Rosalynn was her husband’s confidante, she was perceptive, and she was able to see things that the President could not. “He’s not observing when people are lying to him, or kissing his ass, and she is,” Rafshoon said.

Rosalynn took almost two hundred typed pages of notes during the summit. When she could not sit in on meetings, the moment the President walked in the door she asked him, “What happened?” She went through the ups and downs and the false starts and stops during the momentous series of meetings. She
knows her husband better than anyone else and wrote in her notes: “When Jimmy’s pondering, he gets quiet, and there’s a vein in his temple that I can see pounding. Tonight it was pounding, and neither of us could eat much as the sun set on our third day.” (Rosalynn had helped smooth the path of negotiations by hosting Sadat and his wife, Jehan, during a visit to Camp David in February 1978, seven months before the Camp David negotiations began. The Carters and the Sadats had taken snowmobile rides on the grounds of the beautiful presidential retreat and Rosalynn had made sure that Sadat’s favorite hot mint tea was always available.) Among the best days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency was Monday, September 18, 1978. While Sadat and Begin watched from the balcony, Carter briefed a joint session of Congress on the success of the summit and had to stop twenty-five times for applause. Rosalynn sat between the two leaders wearing a pretty blue blazer and matching skirt. Few people ever knew just how important she was to the negotiations and that she was there through every turn.

The most controversial thing that Rosalynn did as first lady was to attend Cabinet meetings, something no other first lady had done, at least not to public knowledge. She said she needed to know what was happening so that she could tell the American people. “I never, of course, liked the criticism, but I didn’t pay any attention to it,” Rosalynn said in an interview. “I had learned that you were going to be criticized for whatever you did, so why not do what you wanted to do.” Other women do not blame her. Ann Romney, married to Mitt Romney, who ran for president in 2008 and was the Republican nominee in 2012, says, “Frankly, I’d love to [go to Cabinet meetings]. Who wouldn’t?”

President Carter said he had no problem with his wife attending the high-level gatherings. Jerry Rafshoon said it was to be
expected because the Carters talked to each other about absolutely everything. “Whatever secrets there were,” Vice President Mondale said, “she knew about all of them.” That kind of intimacy can be unnerving, even for longtime aides. Rafshoon says, “They used to read the Bible in Spanish. Hamilton and I would really get worried when we’d be in a meeting with the Carters and if the subject was a little bit touchy, if we were advocating something, all of a sudden they’d start speaking to each other in Spanish.” Neither Rafshoon nor Hamilton spoke Spanish. (Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou, both spoke Chinese after living in China for several years, and shared the same intimacy—they would whisper in Chinese to each other when they wanted to have a private conversation during receiving lines at the White House.)

The first Cabinet meeting Rosalynn went to was on February 28, 1978. She sat next to Veterans Administration head Max Cleland near the door and occasionally took notes. President Carter says that no one else paid much attention to her. But he knew. “I was constantly aware that my wife was watching me,” he said. By attending such high-level meetings Rosalynn left herself open to criticism in a way that Nancy Reagan, who wielded as much power as Rosalynn, would never allow. (Nancy said she would have been “embarrassed” to attend a Cabinet meeting, yet in fact she helped select members of her husband’s Cabinet and was a critical part of her husband’s political career, including his two terms as governor of California.)

It was a few months after President Carter’s inauguration when he asked Rosalynn to go on a special mission for him. He said he was too consumed with the energy crisis and the Middle East peace process to go himself. The trip to Central and South America during the first two weeks of June 1977 was not devoted to typical visits for a first lady to schools and hospitals. This time
Rosalynn was being sent to deliver a very serious message on human rights to the leaders of Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. Critics in Congress and the press were furious—one
Newsweek
reporter said a first lady should be given such a weighty foreign policy assignment only if some way could be found to hold her accountable if something went wrong. Rosalynn was determined to be taken seriously and spent two months preparing for the precedent-breaking trip, with countless briefings from the State Department. She brushed up on her Spanish with lessons with Gay Vance, the wife of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, three mornings a week in the White House Solarium. During meetings with leaders she took notes and then wrote long memos to the President and the State Department. It was not an easy visit. When she met with the president of Costa Rica, he invited his wife to join them and she worried that he had assumed the visit was purely social. “No matter what I asked him, he would answer to the men in our party,” she said. “I was determined to get his attention and to have my say, and finally, when I opened my notebook and continued to address questions directly to him, he began to respond to me.” Eventually, one by one, she began to win over different South American leaders, most of whom were not used to talking to a woman about policy. They began to realize that she had a direct line to the President and that it would be far more effective to communicate with her than with any member of his Cabinet.

Like any shrewd politician, she knew that on her trip she would be peppered at press conferences with questions about the latest controversy, including one involving a U.S. financier accused of fraud who was seeking refuge in Costa Rica. But she was a step ahead of the press corps: “I had anticipated this before leaving Washington and had refrained from being briefed about him so
I could legitimately claim ignorance of the situation.” When she came back to Washington she briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Her signature issue was mental health, an issue that dominates the news decades later. She had a distant cousin who suffered from mental illness when Rosalynn was a young girl, and she remembered running and hiding when she heard him coming down the streets of their small town singing at the top of his lungs. Years later she felt ashamed at how she had treated him, and she devoted much of her time in the White House to advocating for better care for the mentally ill. She wanted mental illness to be treated like any physical illness. One month after taking office, President Carter created the Mental Health Commission. On the day the committee was announced, Rosalynn told the press that she had just gotten a note that very morning informing her that the Department of Justice prohibits the president from appointing a close relative, such as a wife, to a civilian position. Up until then she was planning to chair the commission. “There is, however, no problem with you being designated as honorary chairperson,” she said, amid laughter from reporters. “So I’m going to be a
very
active honorary chairperson.” She was upset that the press overlooked the commission’s work to cover sexier stories, like the Carters’ edict banning hard liquor from state dinners. She delved into the committee’s work, and she helped draft a bill that provided more funding for the treatment and prevention of mental illness and was submitted to Congress in 1979. She was the second first lady (Eleanor Roosevelt was the first, when she testified on behalf of coal miners) to testify before Congress. She was constantly talking with Congressman Henry Waxman and Senator Ted Kennedy, the chairmen of the House and Senate committees handling the legislation, even as Kennedy was mounting a challenge to her
husband during the 1980 primary. The bill passed and the Mental Health Systems Act was signed into law by President Carter in October 1980. But when President Reagan came into office he cut most of the funding for the legislation. “I felt betrayed,” Rosalynn said. “It was one of the greatest disappointments in my life.” Now, when she sees mental health discussed as such an important issue, she’s frustrated. Rosalynn’s director of projects in the White House, Katherine Cade, says that on a number of occasions in private meetings Rosalynn has said that if the recommendations of her commission had been implemented thirty years ago, it might not be such a crisis now.