First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (33 page)

Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney, the wife of George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, were friendly but they were not close. Lynne never thought that her husband would become vice president—she told a friend how relieved she was that he was on the committee to select Bush’s running mate: she thought this would ensure that he himself was out of the running. Bush campaign advisers agreed that Lynne was a better speaker than Laura, but it was decided during the 2000 campaign that she should be used sparingly so that she did not outshine Laura.

Sullivan says that the President and his wife and the Vice President and his wife are like knights in medieval times. “The knights have their own entourage and they come together and then separate and do their own thing.” There is no going rogue for second ladies—they have to be part of the apparatus, the behemoth that is a presidential campaign, and they must play the role they have been assigned to play. Barbara Bush made sure that Marilyn Quayle never forgot that.

A
S
F
IRST
L
ADY,
Barbara Bush had only one real brush with controversy. (“Short of ax murder,” says former Bush spokeswoman Sheila Tate, “I think she could get away with anything. She’s so benign.”) In 1990 she was invited to deliver the keynote address
at the graduation ceremony at the all-women’s Wellesley College in Massachusetts. One hundred and fifty students signed a petition saying they were “outraged” by the decision to have Barbara speak because, they said, she was famous only because of the man she married. (Barbara had dropped out of Smith after her freshman year, intent on focusing all of her attention on Bush.) Soon the storm blew over, but Barbara would not be made a fool of—before she made the speech, she called two of the Wellesley students who were leading the protest so she could “twist the knife in a little” and embarrass them, an aide said. In her speech Barbara said that women should always put family before their careers.

Behind the scenes, Barbara was a protective wife and mother. (In 1984 she famously called her husband’s rival, Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, “that four-million-dollar—I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.”) Barbara stood by her husband through two terms in Congress and through stints as UN ambassador, GOP chairman, U.S. envoy to China, and CIA director. She devoted her life to her family and like Betty Ford she raised their six children largely alone. She struggled with depression, she said, partly because “women’s lib had made me feel that my life had been wasted.” She represented a different generation than her successor Hillary Clinton, who was a proud feminist and a baby boomer. During the 1992 campaign Hillary was asked for her response to Barbara’s speech at Wellesley, Hillary’s alma mater, and gave a restrained answer: “
Personally
, I believe that a woman should put her family and her relationships—which are really at the root of who you are and how you relate to the world—at the top of your priority list. I don’t believe that I, or Barbara Bush, should tell all women that’s what they have to put first. . . . What we have to get away from is the idea that there’s only one right choice.”

Barbara worships her husband and puts his needs above her own every time. George Herbert Walker Bush’s brother Jonathan said of the Bushes’ courtship: “She was wild about him. And for George, if anyone wants to be wild about him, it’s fine with him.” The Bushes moved twenty-nine times during their marriage, eleven times in the first six years. When they were finally settled and putting down roots with their growing family, the nomadic George Bush came home one day, clapped his hands, and told his wife, “We’re moving to Odessa [Texas].” Barbara was heartsick. Silent for a moment, she composed herself and looked up adoringly at her husband: “I’ve always wanted to live in Odessa.” She knew that this was George H. W. Bush’s essence; he could never stay in one place too long.

Barbara worried about the negative campaign ads put together by Bush advisers Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes in the 1988 presidential campaign. She was concerned about whether they would reflect poorly on her husband. When Ailes walked into the room she announced, with a weary smile, “Here’s my bad boy.” But when her husband’s reelection prospects against Bill Clinton were looking dim in 1992, Barbara told him flatly, “I’m going negative.” Barbara was keeping score as she watched Hillary directly attack her husband time and time again. She would not forget how Hillary referred to Bush’s four years in office as a “failure of leadership.” Suggestions that Hillary, as retribution for all the coverage of Bill’s philandering, wanted to expose President George H. W. Bush’s alleged affair with a personal aide so infuriated Barbara that it led to a cold war between Barbara and Hillary that still has not thawed.

In a 1992
Vanity Fair
article, Hillary is quoted saying she had a conversation with a wealthy Atlanta socialite who told her about Bush’s alleged affair with a close aide. It’s all “apparently well
known in Washington,” she said slyly. Hillary was referring to Jennifer Fitzgerald, whom Bush was rumored to have had a romantic relationship with for years. “I’m convinced part of it is that the Establishment—regardless of party—sticks together. They’re gonna circle the wagons on Jennifer,” Hillary said. The Clinton campaign was trying its best to make sure the story of Bush’s alleged affair was exposed, and the Bush campaign accused the Clinton campaign of planting the story. “That’s definitely playing hardball,” Barbara said. Bush wrote in his diary that he and his family were humiliated by the allegations. “I talked to Bar this morning and she was telling me that her friends all had heard these ugly rumors.” Barbara invited Cragg Hines, who was then the Washington bureau chief of the
Houston Chronicle
, for an intimate interview in the West Sitting Hall. The First Lady sat demurely in an armchair wearing a pretty lilac suit, but her very serious intentions were clear from the moment Hines walked in. “It was the focus of her day,” he recalls with a laugh. She said that any suggestions that her husband had had an affair were “sick” and “ugly.” Barbara never mentioned Hillary, but when Hines asked her if this was the lowest point the campaign could sink to, she replied, “It can’t get any uglier.”

Barbara has the longest memory of anyone in her family, and she can never forgive Hillary. In a 2000 interview, four months before her eldest son was elected president and almost a decade after Hillary first criticized her husband, she said that her daughter-in-law, Laura, would be very different from Hillary because she would “not get into foreign affairs or controversial subjects. . . . I think she would rather make a positive impact on the country.” Barbara added passive-aggressively, “I’m not criticizing Mrs. Clinton. But it’s like oil and water. We’re talking about two different subjects. They’re two different people. I think Laura thinks of others.” The undercurrent is hard to miss: Laura would
not overstep in the same way that Hillary had as first lady, there would be no West Wing office, and there would be no meddling in presidential matters. Barbara has always considered Hillary a politician and therefore fair game. “Governor and Mrs. Clinton had both said that they were going to be a co-presidency,” Barbara said during the 1992 campaign.

The friendship between George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton has not softened the relationship between their wives. The two men became friends when they traveled to South Asia to help the victims of the 2004 tsunami and Bush became a sort of father figure to Clinton. According to former White House officials, it’s no coincidence that whenever Bill Clinton is invited to the Bush family’s summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Hillary has other commitments. “The relationship between Franklin and Eleanor [Roosevelt] sounds rather like the relationship between Bill and Hillary,” Barbara wrote in her diary. “Respect for each other, but separate lives. Who knows.”

Even when it comes to her daughter-in-law Laura, Barbara’s sometimes caustic wit can cause the always-in-control Laura to roll her eyes, or force herself to bite her tongue. The two women give each other a wide berth when the Bushes are all together at the family compound, but occasionally, when Barbara weighs in with parenting advice, Laura makes it clear who is in charge of her daughters. Jenna Bush calls her grandmother “the enforcer.” The night of George H. W. Bush’s inauguration every available space in the White House was taken up with a member of the Bush family. If a grandchild showed up to visit without reading material, Barbara marched him or her down to the White House library to pick out a book. She told her children, “If you’re going to spend the night, bring your own sheets!” Once, Butler George Hannie said, a bunch of her grandchildren were having a pool
party at the White House. Barbara asked him, “George, what’s going on at the pool?”

“Ma’am, they ordered sandwiches to eat by the pool.”

“Stop right there,” she said. “Take everything to the Solarium. Let them come and get it.” Then she walked downstairs to the outdoor pool and got them all out and told them if they wanted to eat they needed to do it inside.

In 2012 Barbara and Laura attended a conference at the LBJ Presidential Library. Library Director Mark Updegrove introduced them. “Laura Bush has graciously allowed me to call her Laura for the evening, so I will be referring to her as Laura and you as Mrs. Bush.” Barbara shot him a withering glance and said, “I would certainly hope so.” The audience burst into laughter. Ultimately, Barbara and Laura are bound by their shared love of George W. Bush. When Laura was asked at the conference what the biggest misconception of her husband was, she said, “That he was sort of a heedless, cowboy caricature.” Barbara cut in, “Don’t mention it to me, it makes me so mad.” But when Barbara was asked what the biggest misconception of her husband was, she said, “There was none, he is a saint.” For the most part, Laura is “very deferential” to her mother-in-law, said Anita McBride, who was Laura’s chief of staff. “She knows that that’s Bar.”

“Sometimes I’m reminded of things that I’ve said and I’m mortified,” Barbara said when a staffer reminded her of how she had told her husband that he needed to lose weight. But it was that kind of candor that earned Barbara the love of the White House residence staff, whom she teased constantly. She was the same way with the press. On a foreign trip a reporter asked her, “Are you going to be buying pearls in Bahrain?” She looked at the reporter and said, “Not as long as [costume jewelry designer] Kenneth Jay Lane is alive.”

E
VEN SOME OF
Hillary Clinton’s closest friends are wary of her seeking the presidency for a second time. They say they do not know why she wants to put herself through all of that again. When she was last in the White House, Hillary went through a four-year investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr into a myriad of charges, including the Whitewater land deal and “Travelgate,” the firing of several longtime White House employees in the Travel Office. Of course the biggest scandal of all was the revelation in January 1998 that her husband had been carrying on an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. When the affair was occurring between November 1995 and March 1997, butlers saw the President and Lewinsky in the family movie theater. They were seen together so often that workers let each other know when they had a so-called Lewinsky sighting. West Wing staffers called Monica “Elvira” because of her dark hair and ample cleavage, reminiscent of TV character Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Hillary’s friends wonder,
Why would she want to be reminded of all of that?

Hillary has been living in a bubble for decades; she has not driven a car in nearly twenty years, and if she wins the 2016 election, she will have the remarkable distinction of being the first president to have had Secret Service protection for a solid twenty-four years before she ever even got to the White House on her own. The Clintons were the only first family in the twentieth century without a home outside Washington. (In 1999, shortly before leaving the White House, they bought an eleven-room Dutch colonial in Chappaqua, New York, for $1.7 million in preparation for Hillary’s run for Senate in the state. Shortly after that, they bought a $2.85 million home near Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. Before those purchases the Clintons had not owned a home
for sixteen years.) When they moved into the White House they brought everything they owned with them and stored much of it in a climate-controlled storage facility about eleven miles outside Washington in Riverdale, Maryland; there every piece of furniture that has ever been in the White House is carefully cataloged. But one explanation for her decision to run again is clear, says a member of Hillary’s inner circle: it is partly out of vengeance for her 2008 loss to President Obama. “When we all first started talking about the Hillary campaign, we said we can’t wait to get him [President Obama] out of there and get back somebody who’s going to do something.” Obama, this former staffer said, does not have the same dogged work ethic as Hillary does.