First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (31 page)

“I think I want to do this,” she told him.

“Well, nobody’s around,” he said, as he readied his camera.

“I took off my shoes, hopped up there, and struck a pose,” she recalled, bringing her experience as a Martha Graham dancer to one of the most powerful rooms in the world. She was a little embarrassed by the photo, so she had it restricted in the archives at her husband’s presidential library for nearly two decades before Kennerly published it in a book in 1995. He remembers that when President Ford saw it for the first time, “He about fell off his chair.” Ford looked at his wife and said, “Well, Betty, you never told me you did that.”

“There are a lot of things I haven’t told you, Jerry!’”

R
OSALYNN
C
ARTER ADMITS
that she still feels the sting of her husband’s loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980. She ends her autobiography,
First Lady from Plains
, with: “I’d like people to know that we were right, that what Jimmy Carter was doing was best for our country, and that people made a mistake by not voting for him.” She lets her own personal ambition show. “Our loss at the polls is the biggest single reason I’d like to be back in the White House. I don’t like to lose.” The worst moment for President Carter was not when he found out that he had lost the election; it was breaking the news to his wife. “Don’t say anything to Rosalynn yet,” Carter instructed his staff. “Let me tell her.” Rosalynn simply refused to believe the lopsided verdict. “I was in such denial,” she admitted years later. “It was impossible for me to believe that anybody could have looked at the facts and voted for Reagan.”

There was bad blood between the Carters and the Reagans long before Election Day. During the campaign the Reagans’ son, Ron, accused President Carter of “having the morals of a snake”
who “would have sold his mother to get reelected.” Ron said that he made the comments because he resented Carter for implying that his father was “a racist and a warmonger.” Reflecting on it now, he says, “You’re competing, it’s a very personal kind of competition. It’s not sports, you’re not on a tennis court, you’re competing with, in the best-case scenario, with your ideas and your character so it can get very personal during a campaign.” Rosalynn grew even angrier when rumors circulated that Nancy Reagan wanted the Carters to move out a few weeks before the inauguration and live in Blair House, across the street from the White House, so that she could begin redecorating the family’s private quarters. Rosalynn said that Nancy called her to deny reports that she wanted them out. “I don’t know whether she said she was sorry or not,” Rosalynn said. “She just said she did not make those statements.”

White House Florist Ronn Payne says that between the election and President Reagan’s inauguration, every time he went to the family’s private living quarters he could hear at least one member of Carter’s extended family crying. Rosalynn remembered how agonizing were those weeks between the election and the inauguration. “You lose the election on November 4, and then you’re just ready to go home.” It may have been the enormity of the loss—Carter won just 41 percent of the vote—that made it that much harder to take. The morning after the election, Carter’s communications director, Jerry Rafshoon, went to visit the President, who was sitting with tears in his eyes in the Oval Office. “Forty-one million, six hundred thousand people don’t like me,” Carter said. His best friend and chief adviser, Rosalynn, admits she was “bitter enough for both of us.” Even years later, in a 1999 interview with the
New York Times
, Rosalynn said, “My biggest regret in life was that Jimmy was defeated.”

When it came time for Rosalynn to give Nancy her first tour of the residence, she dutifully walked her through the second and third floors, describing as they strolled through the Yellow Oval Room her efforts to showcase American paintings. But she was not at all enthusiastic, and she abruptly cut the tour short without showing Nancy the presidential bedroom and study. “The chill in her manner matched the chill in the room,” Nancy recalled. (Jimmy Carter insisted on keeping the White House a cool 65 degrees during the day and a downright chilly 55 degrees at night because of the energy crisis. White House staffers often typed with gloves on, and a maid even picked up a pair of long underwear for Rosalynn when she went to buy some for herself.)

The tension at President Reagan’s inauguration was amplified by the Iran hostage crisis. The Iranians had finally decided to release the hostages but they kept the planes with the returning Americans waiting on the runway so that they would not clear Iranian airspace until after Ronald Reagan became President at noon. Rosalynn was furious and saw it as one final dig at her husband. After the traditional coffee with the incoming president and his wife in the Blue Room, both the Carters and the Reagans left for the Capitol and the swearing-in ceremony. Barbara Bush, who was the wife of the incoming vice president, remembers being kept waiting by Rosalynn as she said goodbye to the residence staff. Barbara and Nancy Reagan felt they were standing around for forty-five minutes with nothing to do. “We won’t drag it out like this,” Barbara whispered to Nancy at the time. But Barbara says that when she had to leave the White House twelve years later, she could understand why Rosalynn acted the way she did.

Rosalynn says she felt “very smug” knowing, as she made chitchat with Nancy Reagan, that fifty-two American hostages were coming home after being held in Iran for well over a year. But
she knew that most people would assume that Reagan had gotten them released. Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, said, “The Reagans were not very good at handing out compliments to others. That was not their strong suit.” Nancy remembered how awkward the ride to the Capitol was with Rosalynn and how thankful she was that House Minority Leader John Rhodes was there to make conversation. “Rosalynn just looked out the window and didn’t say a word. I didn’t know
what
to say, so I kept quiet, too. Fortunately, it’s a short ride.”

Nearly a year after the 1980 presidential election, the wounds between Nancy and Rosalynn were still fresh. When Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamic extremists during a military parade in Cairo in 1981, the Secret Service decided that neither President Reagan (who had barely survived an assassination attempt just six months before) nor Vice President George H. W. Bush should attend Sadat’s funeral. In an unprecedented show of support for the U.S. ally, President Nixon, President Ford, and President Carter agreed to attend in Reagan’s place. Rosalynn Carter accompanied her husband because she had developed a close friendship with Sadat and his wife, Jehan, while they were working on the Camp David peace treaty. President Reagan’s assistant Kathleen Osborne remembers how surprised everyone was to see Rosalynn, the only first lady among the three presidents. “I don’t know if it was just understood or it was made clear that it was just the former presidents, but she showed up, and they didn’t know what to do. I guess she decided to go, which is fine, but it would have been nice if somebody had told us
.”
Hundreds of staffers gathered on the South Lawn and watched as the former presidents and the former first lady stepped off the helicopter and walked across the sweeping White House grounds to meet with the Reagans. What no one could see was
the look on Barbara Bush’s face as she peered through heavy silk drapes from a window in the White House, taking in the scene on the lawn with a wry smile. “It all rather amused me,” she said. “I don’t really think they liked each other very much.”

T
HE
C
ARTERS AND
the Clintons would seem like natural allies: both former presidents are southern-born Baptists, and they are the only two Democrats to have won the presidency between 1964 and 2004. Rosalynn Carter and Hillary Clinton challenged tradition and sought a place at the table in high-level meetings. Rosalynn, like Hillary, was even asked to run for the Senate by her party after her husband’s defeat. The Clintons were early Carter supporters when Carter ran for president in 1976, and when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas he stood by Carter and did not support Senator Ted Kennedy in his efforts to win the 1980 Democratic nomination. But the relationship between the Carters and the Clintons eventually disintegrated. It is so bad now that the Carters privately hoped that Elizabeth Warren, a liberal senator from Massachusetts who is a leading critic of Wall Street, would challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016. If Clinton wins the election they would like to see Warren challenge her in 2020.

When President Carter was campaign chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1974, he went to Little Rock to help “this kid Billy Clinton who was running for Congress.” Clinton, as usual, was forty-five minutes late. Carter aide Jerry Rafshoon was waiting at the hotel with Carter’s trusted staffers, Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell. “What the hell are you doing? You’re late!” Rafshoon said. Carter is never late, an attribute Rafshoon credits to his years at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Even though that first meeting did not go according to plan, the Carters and the Clintons were firmly in each other’s corners. But Hillary soon began to annoy the Carters’ inner circle. She went to Carter’s Atlanta campaign headquarters wearing no makeup and her trademark thick glasses, and told Jordan that she wanted to handle Illinois because she was from Chicago. He laughed at her. “You think you can handle Mayor Daley?” Jordan asked her mockingly, convinced that the hard-edged mayor with working-class Irish roots would have no interest in meeting with this self-proclaimed feminist with an Ivy League pedigree. “I can handle him,” she said. But Jordan refused and instead gave her a much less weighty assignment and sent her to Indiana.

The biggest blow to their relationship came in May 1980 when Carter sent eighteen thousand Cuban refugees to be interned at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. Several hundred broke out and yelled “Libertad! Libertad!” through the streets, sparking a political disaster for Clinton, who was then Arkansas’s governor. When Clinton called to talk to President Carter, he was punted to a midlevel aide. Eventually Carter promised not to send any more refugees to Fort Chaffee, but he broke his promise when, during his run for reelection and three months before Clinton was up for reelection, Carter moved all the refugees that he had sent to more important political states (like Pennsylvania) back to Arkansas. Clinton was convinced that Carter’s decision cost him the election. “There was a big political price to pay for supporting his President,” Hillary Clinton wrote in her memoir.

When Clinton ran for president he did not see any use in cozying up to the one-term Democrat, whom many perceived as a failure, and Carter’s requests to discuss foreign policy with the newly elected President were never answered. Carter vented his frustration in a
New York Times
interview shortly after Clinton’s
inauguration. In the interview he said he was “very disappointed” that the Clintons had decided to send Chelsea to the Sidwell Friends private school, instead of to a Washington, D.C., public school, as the Carters had done with their young daughter, Amy. He also got in a dig about the Clintons’ visit to Georgia the summer before to help Carter build houses for Habitat for Humanity. “He was obviously not an experienced carpenter,” Carter said dismissively. The Carter camp’s real vitriol is reserved for Hillary though. In a 2001
Wall Street
journal op-ed, Carter’s former chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, wrote: “Instead of leaving him for his public betrayal, Hillary Clinton exploited her public image of a wronged but loyal spouse to create a new persona for herself and win election to the Senate. The Clintons are not a couple but a business partnership, not based on love or even greed but on shared ambitions.”

While the Clintons were in the White House, Rosalynn saw Hillary only a handful of times, once at President Nixon’s funeral. “This is embarrassing,” Rosalynn said, squirming, when asked how often she’d seen Hillary since she became first lady. Rosalynn understood the politics behind their distance: “When they first went to Washington, he [Bill Clinton] was a southern governor,” she said. “And Jimmy had not been reelected. And I think they wanted to detach themselves a little from that. And I can understand that.” Rosalynn recognizes the distance between herself and her Democratic successors—Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama—who don’t often seek her advice. First ladies, she says, are “bound together by having had the experience of living in the White House and all that involves,” but, she adds, “I’m not sure we would call the relationship among first ladies a sisterhood. About the only time we are ever together is when a new presidential library is established or for a funeral.”