First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (32 page)

N
ANCY
R
EAGAN CERTAINLY
did not offer to leave the White House early when it was her turn to move out. She and Barbara Bush had such a caustic relationship when George H. W. Bush was Reagan’s vice president that Barbara had very little idea what the residence looked like when she moved in. During the eight years that Barbara Bush was second lady she was rarely invited to the family quarters. Barbara said the chief usher came to the Vice President’s residence to show her pictures of the rooms on the second and third floors of the White House. “I really didn’t know anything about the upstairs at the White House to speak of and he told me different things. I then marked things that were to go to the White House because most of our things went to Maine [their summer home in Kennebunkport].”

In his private diary, President George H. W. Bush put it bluntly when he wrote in a 1988 entry, “Nancy does not like Barbara.” Nancy, he said, was jealous of his wife. “She feels that Barbara has the very things that she, Nancy, doesn’t have, and that she’ll never be in Barbara’s class.” There was no official tour of the residence until January 11, only nine days before the Bushes were to move in. And it was brief and unsatisfying. The animosity was mutual. When a negative biography of Nancy Reagan was published, Barbara snapped it up but slapped on another book jacket so that no one would know what she was reading. When Barbara visited a San Antonio clinic as first lady in 1992, a recovering drug addict handed her a photo of himself and asked her to autograph it with Nancy’s antidrug motto, “Just say no.” Barbara simply signed her name.

Nancy Reagan had her own friends, and Barbara had hers. Barbara was from an old patrician family—she grew up in Rye, New York, and is related to President Franklin Pierce—and she
could not have approved of Nancy’s obvious grasp for power and of her movie star friends. Nancy Reagan’s assistant Jane Erkenbeck was reticent when asked to describe their relationship. They had, after all, eight years to get to know each other. “I’m not going to go into that,” she said, pausing a moment. “She was there because her husband was vice president. Mrs. Reagan was there because her husband was president. The men had a very good relationship, saw each other a lot. . . . If your husband and my husband were law partners and they were friends and they see each other all the time, of course that doesn’t mean that you and I have to be good friends.” Nancy once paused when a reporter asked for her opinion of Barbara. “Well, I never got to know her very well,” she said.

Barbara had a way of connecting with people as First Lady and was nicknamed “the National Treasure” by her husband’s aides. She became everyone’s favorite grandmother: loving, self-deprecating, and, above all, compassionate. She cultivated an image as the anti-Nancy, oblivious to her hair or what she was wearing. On the eve of her husband’s inauguration Barbara said, “My mail tells me that a lot of fat, white-haired, wrinkled ladies are tickled pink. I mean, look at me—if I can be a success, so can they.” The 1987 visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, marked the first time a Soviet leader had come to Washington since Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, and the Gorbachevs’ arrival ceremony at the White House was watched by the world. Barbara recorded in her diary that she wore “a very Republican cloth coat and Nancy wore her mink.” Barbara was not putting on an act, says Joni Stevens, who worked in the Military Office across the hall from the First Lady’s office. At the head of the stairs are the men’s room and the ladies’ room, and in between them were two giant photographs of Barbara Bush and George
H. W. Bush (the photos, known as “jumbos,” are scattered along the walls of the West Wing and the East Wing and change periodically). A couple of days after the Bushes moved into the White House, Stevens ran into Barbara at the top of the stairs as she was going into the ladies’ room. “Who is that wrinkled white-haired lady?” Barbara asked, pointing to her photo. Barbara looked at her Secret Service agent and he just started laughing.

Barbara and Nancy are from the same political party, but they have such different personalities that they have closer friendships with Democrats. Barbara became close to Democrat Lady Bird Johnson, and Nancy had enormous respect for Democrat Jackie Kennedy. Even when Barbara tried to be nice to Nancy it backfired. During the only debate between Reagan and Carter before the 1980 election, Barbara and her husband sat with Nancy in the auditorium. “I think [Reagan] looks so much better than Carter,” Barbara whispered. “His makeup is better.” Nancy replied dismissively, “Ronnie
never
wears makeup.” Nancy readily admits that she did not care for George H. W. Bush when her husband picked him as his running mate; Bush had run against Reagan in the Republican primaries and had criticized his policies. “George’s use of the phrase ‘voodoo economics’ to describe Ronnie’s proposed tax cuts still rankled,” Nancy wrote in her memoir.

Nancy was a perfectionist and had very particular ideas of how she wanted the White House to look. She was also constantly sizing people up. For the Gorbachevs’ visit, White House Florist Ronn Payne recalls when the First Lady and her social secretary came into the Flower Shop on the ground floor and told the florists, “We want to blow [Raisa’s] socks off.” Payne said, “We changed every single flower in the house three times in one day: for the morning arrival, for the afternoon lunch, and for the state dinner. Every single flower, three times, every one.” Nancy and
Raisa also did not get along. During their first meeting over coffee the two sat with their interpreters. Jane Erkenbeck recalled a couple of times when Raisa spoke in English. “She was just trying to humiliate the First Lady: ‘I can speak English as well as Russian. You cannot speak Russian.’ That set the tone.” Barbara described the animosity between the two first ladies as a “chemical thing.” Barbara had a better relationship with Raisa than Nancy did, and Raisa even asked her why she thought Nancy did not like her. Barbara was hard-pressed to answer.

Nancy was a First Lady who was often hard to please and sometimes seemed to be looking for slights. Head Housekeeper Christine Limerick avoids saying anything negative about her former bosses, but one incident involving the Reagans’ personal belongings caused her to leave the White House for five years before Barbara Bush asked her to return. Christine had gotten along with Nancy and even talked with her about her love life (the First Lady considered herself a born matchmaker and was thrilled when Christine told her she was getting married to White House Electrician Robert Limerick). The Reagans had “an incredible amount of stuff and that’s because they don’t have to clean,” Limerick said, with a wry smile. If any of Nancy’s collectibles—including about twenty-five small hand-painted porcelain Limoges boxes, silver frames, and expensive perfume bottles—was put back in the wrong place after a cleaning, Limerick would hear about it. “At the beginning of their administration,” Limerick recalled, “there were several items that were broken: one by Housekeeping, one by the Secret Service, and one by the Operations Department.” Nancy blamed Limerick and yelled at her with such venom that Chief Usher Rex Scouten had to come to Limerick’s defense. Nancy was so angry, she had Limerick pack up most of the keepsakes that she kept in the private
living quarters and put them away for several months, until things calmed down. Limerick decided then that she needed a break from the White House. The hushed voices in the corridors of the executive mansion during the Reagan years were no surprise to the Reagans’ children, who knew how much their mother valued order and respect for material objects. “Things rarely got broken in our house; Kool-Aid wasn’t spilled on couches, chocolate wasn’t smeared on draperies. Fabergé eggs and antique china vases were safe from us,” said the Reagans’ daughter, Patti Davis, referring to herself and her younger brother, Ron.

Time could not heal old wounds between Nancy and Barbara. Barbara was fuming when, as first lady, she reviewed the guest list for the 1989 unveiling of the Reagans’ official portraits at the White House. Nancy had commandeered the list and once again had taken control. “She was angry. She felt that they were imposing on her,” said former White House Usher Chris Emery, who was close with Barbara. “
She
was the first lady, it was
her
White House and they were telling her what to do. It was like they were still in charge.” Just before President George H. W. Bush left office, he awarded President Reagan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Nancy called Dick Cheney, who was Bush’s secretary of defense and a friend of the Reagans, to make sure he would be at the East Room ceremony; she told Cheney that they needed allies there. Nancy obviously did not consider the Bushes to be on their side. “Nancy apparently never even said thank you to Barbara,” President Bush recalled in his diary.

Ron Reagan wrote a scathing op-ed in
Esquire
about President George W. Bush weeks after Bush and his father spoke at President Reagan’s 2004 funeral. Nancy called Barbara Bush to apologize but it was not enough; there was too much bad blood between them. Nancy stayed at the White House at the invitation of George and Laura Bush, and during Bush’s presidency she
urged him, mostly through emissaries, to support embryonic stem-cell research as a potential tool for treating Alzheimer’s disease, which had afflicted her husband. But Bush restricted federal financing for the experimental procedures that required the use of cells from a human embryo. Nancy said she thought she brought it up directly with him once, “and then I didn’t anymore.”

B
ARBARA
B
USH HAS
more in common with Nancy Reagan than she might like to think: they both worried much more than their husbands did, and neither cared half as much as her husband did about what people thought of her. Barbara, like Nancy, was the chief disciplinarian and grudge holder for her family. President Bush told reporters, “Look out, the silver fox is really mad at you,” referring to his wife. George W. Bush told a reporter that his mother “can smell a phony a mile away.”

Weeks before the President left office the Bushes were in Moscow, where he was signing a nuclear treaty. Reporter Cragg Hines had just filed an unflattering story about Bush’s loss to Clinton. The “silver fox” was not happy. Hines was with a group of traveling reporters who were giddily taking photographs in the Kremlin when he saw Barbara approaching them from the top of the stairwell. Hines had begun covering Bush in 1964, when Bush made an unsuccessful bid for the Senate, and felt comfortable enough with Barbara to approach her. “Mrs. Bush, can I take a picture with you?” She glared at him. “Not with
you
, bub,” she replied.

Barbara, like Nancy, expressed opinions about her husband’s team of advisers. She was not happy with his decision to name Dan Quayle, a forty-one-year-old senator from Indiana, as his running mate. Bush had kept many of his top aides in the dark until the last minute. Barbara sided with longtime Bush allies who were
unhappy with the choice and who resented not being part of the decision-making process. Once they were in the White House, the Bushes and the Quayles had a strained relationship. Quayle was ridiculed in the press for gaffes, like when he went to a Trenton, New Jersey, school and a student was asked to write “potato” on a blackboard and he urged him to add an “e” at the end.

Barbara never warmed up to Quayle’s wife, Marilyn, who is more than twenty years younger than her. A friend of Marilyn said that getting invited to a state dinner was like “pulling teeth” for the Vice President and his wife. But the relationship between the Vice President’s wife and the President’s wife is almost always fraught, and it can resemble the relationship between a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law. Barbara made it clear when she did not want Marilyn talking about a particular issue or going to a certain event. “Barbara Bush had been the student of Nancy Reagan for eight years. She thought Marilyn should suck it up,” Marilyn’s friend said.

The two vice presidential candidates in the 1992 campaign, Al Gore and Dan Quayle, enrolled their daughters at Washington’s elite all-girls’ National Cathedral School. Kristin Gore, Sarah Gore, and Corinne Quayle were at the school at the same time and were the school’s three star lacrosse players. “Marilyn Quayle told me those girls clung together, they protected each other, they shut out the political world, the campaign,” said former ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton. Marilyn Quayle’s former chief of staff, Marguerite Sullivan, said that the life of a second lady is very different from the life of a first lady. They have many of the trappings of the office, including Secret Service protection, and almost none of the luxuries. “If you want to go somewhere you have the same security apparatus as the first lady, but you either go on commercial airlines or you get somebody
to donate a plane.” It is considered a cardinal sin for the second lady to outshine the first lady; there is an understanding in Washington that vice presidents cannot help their running mates get elected, but they can certainly hurt their chances, and the same is true of vice presidential wives. During a campaign, the wives of the vice presidential nominees are sent to parts of the country that are considered second or third tier and are not crucial for an electoral victory.