First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (39 page)

Before President Carter announced in August 2015 that he had cancer—surgery to remove a mass from his liver found that cancer had spread to his brain—he was moving at his usual astoundingly energetic pace. Sometimes he was moving so fast that he did not notice that his wife was slowing down. When he announced his diagnosis in a press conference he said, “I was surprisingly at ease, much more than my wife was. But now I think it’s in the hands of God and I’ll be prepared for anything that comes.” In early December 2015, Carter said that the aggressive treatment of the disease had worked and that he was cancer-free.

B
ARBARA
B
USH WAS
sad to leave the White House for many reasons. One very personal one was knowing that the Clintons were planning to get rid of the horseshoe pit the Bushes had set up next to the swimming pool at the White House. The President and his son Marvin sometimes played there as often as two or three times a week in tournaments against residence staffers. They took the game very seriously and even had tryouts. “You could hear the cling, cling, cling of the horseshoes at lunchtime. . . . It was a wonderful place to live as a home,” Barbara recalled. And when President George H. W. Bush’s library in College Station, Texas, opened, staffers were invited to come and play horseshoes again at the pit set up outside.

Barbara is one of the happiest ex–first ladies. She enjoys being a mother and grandmother, and having those “great-grands” that Lady Bird so lovingly talked about. But right after they moved out of the White House, she admits, she had a difficult time without an army of maids, butlers, and cooks at her disposal. First families can become so out of touch with normal life that, for example, President Reagan quipped that he might not remember how to turn on a lamp after he left the White House. President George H. W. Bush was famously mocked during his 1992 reelection campaign after he marveled at a supermarket scanner. Not long after leaving office, the President took his first trip to a Sam’s Club, where he purchased what Barbara deemed “the world’s biggest jar of spaghetti sauce and some spaghetti.” While he sat down to watch the evening news the former First Lady began to cook—for probably the first time in ages—and accidentally knocked the jar to the floor. She was grateful to discover that night that pizza could be delivered straight to their door.

Barbara is aware of the tremendous power she has, even twenty
years after leaving the White House. When she was asked in 2013 whether her son Jeb should run for president, she said, “We’ve had enough Bushes” in the White House. Two years later, Jeb announced his candidacy. Jeb’s wife, Columba, is shy and consumed by worry about her family’s security. (In 2012, Ann Romney was also concerned about the protection of her large family. The Secret Service had already begun talking about adding more people to the staff if her husband, Republican nominee Mitt Romney, had won the election.) Barbara Bush admits that when Jeb, a seventeen-year-old prep school student, came back from a trip to Mexico and told his family that he had fallen in love with Columba, a Mexican woman who did not speak much English, the patrician Bushes were stunned. “I’m not going to lie to you and say we were thrilled,” Barbara recalled.

Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Laura Bush is offering some advice to her sister-in-law. She tells Columba that she has a great story to tell and encourages her to start developing a smart speech and to seek out good and loyal staffers. “Find a way to tell your story,” Laura urges her. As for what her mother-in-law tells her, Barbara is playing coy. “She is a tiny, shy woman with a huge heart. I try not to give my daughters-in-law advice, so they will come visit with my sons.” But that’s not entirely true. Laura says that Barbara did give her one piece of advice that their idol Lady Bird Johnson certainly did not follow. “Never criticize your husband’s speeches,” Barbara told Laura. “It will only cause arguments.”

M
ICHELLE
O
BAMA IS
looking forward to life as a former first lady. Aides say that she will likely focus on causes she cares about and making money through book deals and speaking fees. (Hillary
was paid an advance of $8 million for her memoir
Living History
.) Advisers say that once they are out of the White House the Obamas will work on issues that particularly affect minorities, like gun violence. The Obamas will have lifetime Secret Service protection if they want it, and the President will get an annual pension of about $200,000. It is likely that the family will move to New York City, but they may wait to relocate there full-time until Sasha finishes high school at Washington’s Sidwell Friends School. (When their father’s term ends, Sasha will be a sophomore in high school and her sister Malia will be in college.)

Michelle clearly does not share Hillary’s childlike feeling of staring at the White House from outside the gates; she cannot wait to break through those gates. The Clintons were so reluctant to move out of the White House and give up the privileges of the presidency that they hosted a series of overnight parties for the staff at Camp David during their last weekend; they stayed up so late the night before George W. Bush’s inauguration watching the movie
State and Main
in the White House movie theater that Laura swore she saw the President doze off during her husband’s inaugural address. President Clinton confessed to the Bushes on the morning of the inauguration that he had put off packing for so long that, right at the end, “he was packing simply by pulling out drawers and dumping their contents into boxes.” The Bushes, however, had packed light, bringing only one chest of drawers and some framed photos; Laura was looking forward to scavenging through the storage facility in Maryland. (Laura would tell Caroline Kennedy that she was using the writing desk that had once occupied her mother’s office in the residence.)

There was chaos on the day that the Clintons moved out, and they were later criticized for taking $190,000 worth of china, rugs, televisions, flatware, and other gifts with them when they
left. The Clintons agreed to pay $86,000 for the gifts and they sent $28,000 worth of furnishings back to Washington because they mistakenly thought they were personal gifts to them, but in fact they were gifts to the permanent collection of the White House. It was one of the many public scandals of those last few days, including reports that political staffers had vandalized the White House, even removing the “W” key from computer keyboards. The Clintons were not the only ones to bring White House furnishings home, however. Five years after he left office, while redecorating his Houston office, President George H. W. Bush was stunned to discover two bookcases with stickers on the back that read “Property of the White House.” The Bushes had a close aide drive the furniture back to Washington in an SUV.

F
ORMER FIRST LADIES
keep their husband’s legacies alive through their work with the presidential libraries. Lady Bird Johnson visited every presidential library in existence at the time when she began planning her husband’s library and promised that his would outshine them all. Tyler Abell remembers a week he and his wife, Bess, spent at the Johnsons’ ranch long after the President had died. Harry Middleton, who was then director of the Johnson Library, had decided it was time to show Lady Bird the courtship letters LBJ had sent her, which library staffers had found in papers donated to the library. Lady Bird could not read because her eyesight had deteriorated, so Middleton read the letters aloud to her. Over the course of the week, Lady Bird and Middleton would go off to the small secluded library at the ranch, and every once in a while the Abells could hear Lady Bird laughing through the closed door. She loved hearing her husband’s words again.

No other woman has been more devoted to her husband’s legacy than Nancy Reagan. A friend of Nancy told her, “You’re so lucky, Nancy, because Ronnie left you the library. You have that to work on, and to go to, and, in a sense, to be with him.” Her friend was right, Nancy says. “I had never thought of it like that, but it’s true. I go to the library or work for the library all the time, because it’s Ronnie. I’m working for Ronnie.” She has made the Reagan Library a cultural and political hub. In the last several presidential elections she has personally invited each candidate to the pristine library located in Simi Valley, forty-five minutes north of Los Angeles. Before she retired from public life (her last interview was in July 2009, when she was almost eighty-eight), she helped raise more than $100 million for the library, cultivating wealthy donors and booking famous speakers, including Ted Kennedy and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On the anniversary of President Reagan’s death she can be seen sitting alone quietly outside the library at her husband’s hilltop gravesite with no one but her Secret Service detail accompanying her.

T
HE PERSONAL LEGACIES
of these modern first ladies include championing important causes like healthy eating, literacy, drug awareness, and historic and natural preservation, as well as serving as the greatest protectors and confidantes to their husbands. Sometimes they’ve even decided who should be part of their husbands’ Cabinets and helped their husbands develop policy. Whether in the White House or long after they’ve left, they have tremendous power. Hopefully, they will continue to support each other and to forge deep and long-lasting friendships, empathizing with each other’s joys, frustrations, and sorrows. They are bound together by the extraordinary lives they have lived, and they are exceptional
in this polarized political climate because their friendships have nothing to do with political party.

Jackie Kennedy made it clear just how grateful she was to Pat Nixon for arranging her family’s peaceful and private return to the White House when she wrote, “The day I always dreaded turned out to be one of the most precious ones I have spent with my children.” Jackie and Pat were the standard-bearers for opposing political parties—Pat had even suggested a recount when her husband lost to JFK in the 1960 presidental election—and they had very different personalities and interests, but all of that was secondary to the human connection they shared as wives, mothers, and, most uniquely, first ladies.