First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (4 page)

While there are enormous perks that come with the job, the family doesn’t get to keep any gifts over a certain amount. When
the Carters were in the White House they could not accept anything that cost more than one hundred dollars. Their daughter, Amy, tearfully had to give up a carved coral head of Christ that Pope John Paul II had given her when she visited him at the Vatican, and a small gold bracelet inscribed with her name (and valued at $150) given to her by President Sandro Pertini of Italy. Rosalynn said they weren’t allowed to purchase the items, even at retail price. Occasionally, the First Lady got around the rules—while giving a tour of the Carters’ home in Plains, Georgia, she told the interviewer about a little bowl that was given to them by Emperor Hirohito on a state visit to Japan. “They valued that at ninety-nine dollars and I was able to keep it,” she said happily. President Carter quickly interjected, “One of the few things we ever kept, by the way.”

The complete lack of privacy is a common complaint. Rosalynn Carter recalls first moving into the White House and being surprised to discover a Secret Service agent posted in the stairwell outside the door to the family’s private quarters, another at the foot of the stairs, and “plenty” on the ground floor. “We thought, ‘This isn’t home!’ so Jimmy had the one outside our door removed.” White House Usher Chris Emery remembers his first week on the job during the Reagan years when the panic alarm went off in the residence. He thought,
Oh, God, the President’s having a heart attack!
Emery was sitting at his desk in the Usher’s Office and he saw Secret Service officers gathering at the door. An agent said, “Chris, you’re really supposed to respond first before we go up there. Mrs. Reagan’s not going to like us walking in her room.” So Emery went running up the stairs and knocked on the First Lady’s door. “Mrs. Reagan, it’s Chris from the Usher’s Office.” When he did not get a response he opened the door to find the First Lady in bed with cold cream on her face and Vaseline under
her eyes. “Mrs. Reagan, I’m really sorry but the panic alarm went off and I just want to be certain that everything’s all right.” She said, “Everything’s fine,” and could offer no explanation. When he left, all he could think of were reports of the First Lady’s tirades. But no one ever said a thing about the incident—not even Nancy Reagan could demand complete privacy in the White House.

While Nancy is happy that her husband has emerged as an important historical figure, she does not appreciate candidates, on the right or the left, using his legacy for their own political ends. “She doesn’t really see any of these people as being the reincarnation of her husband,” the Reagans’ son Ron says. And she does not hesitate to call friends and offer her opinion on the state of the Republican Party. Ron says that his mother has a definite opinion of Donald Trump. “She thinks Trump is as silly as everybody else does.”

Nancy has been more protective of her husband than any other first lady. She rejected two official portraits of President Reagan by famed artist Aaron Shikler, who was commissioned by the White House Historical Association to paint the couple. (One portratit was scrapped altogether and the other one hung only briefly in the White House.) The Reagans enlisted Everett Raymond Kinstler, who had painted several portraits of President Ford, to try again. When Kinstler showed them four sketches, “[t]here was no question,” he says, “
she
was the one I had to please.” And at first Nancy was not happy. She did not like one preliminary sketch of her husband in a brown suit and asked Kinstler worriedly, “What are you going to do about his shoulders?” When the President finally sat for his official portrait, Nancy sat behind Kinstler for three hours as he painted, something Betty Ford had never done. “It was terribly distracting,” he recalled. When Kinstler asked Nancy if she would rather go sit in the living room, she replied, “No, I really would like to stay here while you work.”

The
Associated Press Stylebook
advises that “first lady” is always lowercase because it is not an official title. When her husband leaves office, he will always be called “president” for the rest of his life but she will always be referred to as “former first lady.” Expectations for first ladies change as women’s roles in society evolve; the only constant is their lifelong central role as their husbands’ chief protectors. “If they made a mistake it was in loving their husbands,” says Tony Fratto, who served as deputy press secretary in President George W. Bush’s White House. “None of them are perfectly cast for the job, or at least what our expectations of the job are.”

The East Wing is where the first lady’s office is located, along a quiet corridor on the second floor next to the calligraphers, who write elegant invitations to formal White House events. Pat Nixon and Nancy Reagan preferred working out of their offices in the private family quarters on the second floor of the residence rather than their formal offices in the East Wing, which Michelle Obama uses. For Michelle, working from her East Wing office helps keep her work life separate from her family life in the residence.

There is a battle between the East Wing staff, made up mostly of women who are loyal to the first lady, and the West Wing staff, which is still predominantly male. No administration is without this old-fashioned conflict. In the Obama White House, when Michelle officially launched her “Let’s Move” healthy-eating campaign, it conflicted with a televised statement that the President was scheduled to make about health care. When East Wing aides called the West Wing to request that the President’s schedule be tweaked, the President’s advisers acted like they were being inconvenienced. Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tried to avert a potential public relations nightmare when a book published in France claimed that Michelle told then–French First
Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy that living in the White House was “hell.” After effectively quashing the story, Gibbs allegedly cursed the First Lady at a meeting when he was told that she was not happy with his handling of the situation. The First Lady was not present at the meeting but aides were stunned by his reaction. The tension between the First Lady and Gibbs, who had worked for the president for more than six years, was said to have contributed to his resignation in 2011. Things got so bad that a consultant was even brought in to lead a retreat at Blair House, the official guesthouse across the street from the White House, to discuss the East Wing staffers’ resentment of the West Wing.

Michelle can do very little without the consent of her husband or his staffers. Social Secretary Desirée Rogers left fourteen months after the Obamas took office, in part because of controversy after two people managed to sneak into the Obamas’ first state dinner. But before then she was close with Michelle and she had made it clear that she did not care for Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford. Comerford was the first woman appointed to the prestigious post of executive chef, by Laura Bush in 2005. Because Michelle was surrounded by only a handful of people, she listened to Rogers’s opinion of Comerford and let it color her own, according to a former residence staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. This staffer was called into a meeting with the First Lady and Rogers in the family’s private living quarters on the second floor. “Cris is not capable,” Michelle told the staffer flatly. “Tell her she is on a six-month probation.” Michelle wanted to replace Comerford with the Obamas’ longtime Chicago friend and personal chef, Sam Kass.

Historically, new first families have brought in new executive chefs, as Hillary Clinton did when she replaced French chef Pierre Chambrin with the younger American chef Walter Scheib. But Comerford is a beloved member of the residence staff and she
is not only the first woman, she is the first person of color—she is Filipino—to serve in the highly esteemed post. “The look on her face ripped me apart,” the staffer said, recalling how Comerford took the news of her probation. “Desirée just had it out for her.” Five months later the staffer was called back to the second floor to meet with the First Lady and Rogers again. Rogers told him, “Cris is not cutting it.”

“I was practically on my knees,” the staffer said. Comerford had been working harder than ever, often staying until midnight to clean the kitchen and prepare for the next day’s meals. A moment later, the First Lady chimed in. “I talked to Barack, and he told me that this isn’t a good thing to do.” The President was rightly concerned that firing Comerford would look bad in the press. Michelle paused, turned to the staffer, and said, “I guess you won on this one.” Even though first ladies have the most direct authority over the residence staff, Michelle was powerless to make any changes.

The conflict between the East Wing and the West Wing was never more pronounced than during Pat Nixon’s five-and-a-half-year tenure. Richard Nixon’s trusted chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, sneeringly called First Lady Pat Nixon “Thelma” behind her back. (“Thelma Catherine Ryan” was Pat’s given name, but she adopted “Pat,” the nickname her Irish father gave her because she was born on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day.) In a diary entry for November 4, 1970, Haldeman wrote, “On flight back to DC, Pat Nixon blasted me and P [Haldeman refers to President Nixon as “P” throughout his diary] about West Wing interference in social operations. Feels we override Lucy [Pat Nixon’s social secretary, Lucy Winchester] and slow down decisions, etc. Wants all control in East Wing.” The fight between the men of the West Wing and the women of the East Wing was particularly pronounced during the Nixon administration in part because Pat
was adored by the women who worked for her. When the men of the West Wing communicated with Pat Nixon’s staff they would say, “Tell Mrs. Nixon.” The standard East Wing retort was “We don’t
tell
Mrs. Nixon anything, we
ask
Mrs. Nixon.” The President’s advisers wanted to have a book written about Pat ahead of the 1972 reelection campaign to soften her image. A reporter came to the White House and met with her several times, but Pat abruptly called the project off when it was halfway finished. She did not like the attention and hated talking about herself.

Pat’s staff called her the “Minute Man” because she never kept anybody waiting and operated with military precision. (This was very different from her successor, Betty Ford, who was jokingly referred to as “the late Mrs. Ford” by her staff because she was never on time.) “I love team sports and that’s what I thought it was going to be,” Pat Nixon’s social secretary, Lucy Winchester, said. “I was stunned when it turned out
not
to be a team sport.” But Pat put up a strong defense. Winchester said, “She was an absolute rock-ribbed woman.”

Since no woman has been president, vice president, or even White House chief of staff (a position that was created in 1946), the first lady is the most visible office in the White House held by a woman. Residence staffers are just as protective of the first ladies as their East Wing staffers are. Within the private quarters, when staffers say that a decision comes from “the second floor,” they mean it’s coming directly from the first lady. Residence staffers deal directly with the first lady and her social secretary. They watch elections closely; in 2004 their greatest fear was that John Kerry would win and that they would have to deal with Teresa Heinz Kerry, who was called “a loose cannon” during the campaign. Christine Limerick, who was head housekeeper on and off from 1979 to 2008, said, “If the first ladies were happy, I was
happy.” When she was working upstairs in the residence and noticed Nancy Reagan lying on her bed with her legs crossed chatting with one of her close girlfriends (she was often on the phone with her friend and confidante Betsy Bloomingdale), Limerick was relieved. “She’d be on the phone like a teenager. And when we saw that, we knew she was at peace, everything was good with her.” When Hillary was laughing with Chelsea, or Laura Bush’s daughters were home from college, the residence staff knew things were all right. So much of life in the White House is claustrophobic and anxiety-filled that these lighter moments take on new meaning. “That’s when we knew they were as close to having a normal life as possible and that’s what we tried to help them accomplish,” says Limerick.