First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (5 page)

E
VERY FIRST LADY
is her husband’s ultimate protector. She will sniff out anyone who she thinks could jeopardize his career. Nancy Reagan most famously helped get her husband’s chief of staff, Don Regan, fired. Jackie Kennedy was well aware of her husband’s plans to get rid of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Betty Ford did not care for her husband’s hard-charging speechwriter Robert Hartmann. Laura Bush was not a fan of Bush’s senior adviser and campaign guru Karl Rove. And Michelle Obama did not mesh well with her husband’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel, who is notoriously irascible and, as one former Obama staffer put it, “cultivates an asshole vibe,” wanted Michelle, whose approval ratings surpassed her husband’s (on the road during the 2008 campaign, people ran up to Obama campaign staffers excitedly and asked them, “Have you ever met Michelle?”), to make more political appearances than she was willing to do. But she does not like campaigning. According to a former White House
official, Michelle said that during the 2008 campaign she was assigned a small and uncomfortable plane compared with her husband’s. “Typical, isn’t it, how women get treated?” she said.

Michelle’s Chicago-based hairstylist, Michael “Rahni” Flowers, remembers how annoyed she was that every detail of her appearance was obsessed over. She used to have highlights before the campaign, Flowers said, but campaign aides decided they were “too racy.” Michelle’s frustration grew with each superficial critique. At a 2013 summit in Africa with Laura Bush, Michelle talked about the power that comes with being first lady and the absurdity of all the attention placed on trivial things, like her decision to get bangs in 2013. (There was even a backlash when her long bangs got in her eyes during a speech at the G8 Summit and the hashtag #bangsfail quickly popped up on Twitter.) “While people are sorting through our shoes and our hair and whether we cut it or not . . . whether we have bangs . . . We take our bangs and we stand in front of important things that the world needs to see, and eventually people stop looking at the bangs and they start looking at what we are standing in front of.”

In the end, the First Lady would not allow Emanuel to bully her. She resented some Senate Democrats for not supporting her campaign to end childhood obesity and she was not about to go out of her way to help them. “She doesn’t particularly like politics, which is why you rarely see her on the trail campaigning for Democratic candidates. She doesn’t love doing the fund-raisers or events, even for the President,” said one former Obama aide. Hillary Clinton, however, campaigned hard for Democrats in the midterm elections in 1998, visiting about twenty states, while Michelle Obama visited only a handful in 2014.

Getting the first lady on the campaign trail to support her husband and other important elected officials from his party has
long been par for the course. Though Hillary was more willing to campaign for fellow Democrats, she had a similarly strained relationship with Emanuel. When he was working for her husband as a senior adviser she was furious when Emanuel booked her to appear at a last-minute dinner with members of Congress without consulting with her office first. She had plans for that evening and simply refused to go. She called Emanuel to make her displeasure known, and when he promised her that it would not happen again, and added that she was needed just this once, she relented. (Hillary came to dislike Emanuel’s abrasive style so much that she tried to have him fired from her husband’s administration.)

Barbara Bush was so popular that in 1992 she was sent to New Hampshire to file the papers for her husband’s second candidacy, and she spent more time campaigning in the state than her husband did. Her loyalty to her husband had always been reciprocated: when George H. W. Bush first ran for president in 1980 a group of supporters strongly suggested that Barbara start dyeing her hair. Her hair had started turning white when she was twenty-eight years old and their toddler daughter, Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia. The stress of staying by Robin’s hospital bedside and watching their three-year-old daughter endure rounds of transfusions and painful surgeries was written all over Barbara’s face, and eventually it began to turn her dark hair silver. She had given up the chore of dyeing her hair in 1970, when she was in her mid-forties. Bush refused to bring it up with her, and he threw out the relative who had been given the unenviable task of going to his office to deliver the suggestion.

P
ART OF THE
bargain some of these women strike with their husbands is to keep quiet about infidelity. Jackie Kennedy and Hillary
Clinton are the most famous examples of this kind of compartmentalization, and in many ways they were the perfect matches for their husbands: intelligent, witty, and above all, discreet. The complicated Kennedy and Clinton marriages are not entirely unique. President Johnson made no secret of his affairs and would often try to corner the prettiest girl in the room at a party. By the end of the evening he’d have lipstick marks on his face. Lady Bird would sometimes be in the same room and would plead with him to stop embarrassing her. “You’re wanted over there, Lyndon,” she would tell him. “You’re neglecting some of your friends.” Traphes Bryant, who was a White House electrician and also cared for the first family’s dogs, said Johnson had “inherited” two female reporters from President Kennedy. “He would mention one or the other to me as ‘all woman’ or ‘a lot of woman’ and even accord them the ultimate compliment he ordinarily reserved for his favorite dog, Yuki, telling me they were ‘pretty as a polecat.’”

Lady Bird knew that her husband desperately wanted a son, and she went through four miscarriages in an attempt to give him one (the Johnsons had two daughters: Lynda, born in 1944; and Luci, born in 1947). She was particularly hurt to see him with younger women, who she worried would be able to give him what she could not. Long after the Johnsons left the White House and after her husband had died, Lady Bird appeared on the
Today
show, where anchorwoman Barbara Walters asked her directly about LBJ’s womanizing. She laughed and gave an off-the-cuff but shrewd response: “Oh, Lyndon was a people lover. And that certainly did not exclude half the people of the world, women.”

Some first ladies were willing to put up with incredible and recurring betrayals so that they could be part of their husbands’ lives. Jackie told her friend Adlai Stevenson II, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, “I don’t care how many girls [Jack
sleeps with] as long as I know he knows it’s wrong, and I think he does now. Anyway, that’s all over, for the present.” Sir Alastair Granville Forbes was a close friend of Jack and Jackie and in 1956 staged a sort of intervention with Kennedy, warning him to be less flagrant in his philandering if he wanted to pursue the presidency. “Jack was very, very attracted to women who were very attracted to him,” Forbes said of Kennedy. Because both Jack and Jackie were Catholic, and did not believe in divorce, they did not think they needed to work as hard on their marriage, Forbes argued.

JFK approached his private life as if he were in wartime, acting with reckless abandon as though any moment could be his last. Kennedy’s friend Charles Spalding said that the President’s chronic back problems and poor health gave him a great perspective on life: “Most of us don’t realize how fast time is passing, and he did.” (It’s no surprise that the always loyal Spalding abruptly stopped an oral history interview for the Kennedy Library when he was asked, “Is there anything about his [President Kennedy’s] attitude towards sex in American life that stands out in your mind?”)

Forbes was more candid. “I think he was very conscious that he was marrying in a way which was suitable in the sense that he was marrying a very pretty girl who was also Catholic. His family was pleased,” Forbes said. “I think that he was infatuated with Jackie, but I think that he also was aware that he was taking on somebody basically incompatible.” Jackie knew about his cheating and was deeply disturbed. Referring to the intervention he staged with Kennedy before he pursued the presidency, Forbes said, “He did express surprise that his slip was showing to that extent.”

Betty Ford was less accommodating than Jackie. The Fords had a loving marriage, and there is no evidence that President Ford cheated on Betty, but he was a flirt. Once, when Mexican American singer Vikki Carr came to perform at a state dinner,
Betty seethed when she saw the two giggling together. At the end of the evening, she watched as the President escorted Carr out of the White House and overheard the singer ask Ford what his favorite Mexican dish was. When she heard her husband’s reply—“You are”—it was too much for her. “That woman will
never
get into the White House again,” she declared.

Each of these first ladies, from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama, has had complete and utter devotion to her husband, and at a cost to her own career, each has been unswervingly loyal to the man she married. When Bill Clinton met Hillary he was in awe of her intellect, and mutual friends warned him to be careful about his womanizing. Susan Thomases, an old friend of both Clintons, told him to give up any hope of marrying Hillary. “She’s too good for you,” she said. “She’s so nice, and she’s so brilliant, and she’s so straight.” But their political partnership worked because Hillary fell in love with Bill and was completely devoted to him. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Thomases issued a warning similar to the one Forbes gave to JFK thirty-six years earlier: “You’re stupid enough to blow this whole presidential thing over your dick. And if that turns out to be true, buddy, I’m going home, and I’m taking people with me.” Thomases says President Clinton didn’t cheat on Hillary during the campaign because he “knew that I would land on his neck with both feet.”

But Clinton’s past came back to haunt him in the White House. One overnight White House guest of the Clintons remembers hearing the phone ring in the hallway of the second-floor residence around midnight. The President picked it up, and after a moment slumped over and yelled, “Oh
shit
!” and slammed the phone down. Clinton straightened himself up and continued entertaining his guests well into the early morning hours, as though nothing had happened. The next morning the houseguests—there were always
houseguests during the Clinton years—got up and went to the sunny Solarium, with its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Washington Monument and the Mall, to have a quiet breakfast. The
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, and the
Wall Street Journal
were laid out on a table and right away the guests could see what had upset the President the night before: Paula Jones had just filed a formal lawsuit accusing him of making an unwanted sexual advance toward her when he was governor of Arkansas.

It was just the beginning. Unlike Jackie, Hillary had no choice but to address her husband’s philandering in a very public way. His affair with Monica Lewinsky, which occurred between November 1995 and March 1997 and was finally revealed to the public in January 1998, shook their marriage to its core. It was “a near crisis in their relationship,” according to Thomases. He had humiliated Hillary, but in the end she would not leave him. Like Pat Nixon during Watergate, she stopped reading the newspapers at the height of the barrage and blamed others, in this case Republicans, for trying to bring her husband down. “She worked out a resolution that worked for her,” Thomases said. “It was important for her to keep their marriage together.” Shirley Sagawa, who was Hillary’s deputy chief of staff when she was first lady, said that Monica Lewinsky was a “terrible distraction” and that members of Hillary’s inner circle were all “very angry at the time. . . . It was a very complicated time and she handled it all with such grace.” It took a heavy toll on Hillary, especially knowing that their daughter, Chelsea, had read the Starr Report detailing her husband’s transgressions. Chelsea was the glue that bound them together, and the day after the President admitted the affair to the country, it was Chelsea who held hands with both of them as they crossed the lawn to Marine One for their annual Martha’s Vineyard summer vacation. For the first time,
Bill sought help for his reckless behavior when counselors were smuggled into the White House.

Hillary’s aversion to divorce stemmed in part from years of witnessing its effects among her friends. Rumors flew that she had hyperventilated when she discovered Bill’s cheating back in Arkansas. When an old friend told her that she was considering getting a divorce, Hillary said, “You need to be prepared. . . . If you are not prepared to stand on your own, the man gets the deal and you’ll get the shaft.” She then recited a list of their mutual girlfriends who had gotten a divorce and had struggled financially ever since.

With divorce off the table, Hillary transferred much of her anger and frustration to what she called “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” In a 1999 interview published in
Talk
magazine, Hillary does not object when the reporter calls her husband’s cheating “an addiction.” But when asked if she agrees that it is indeed an addiction, she replies, “That’s your word. I would say ‘weakness.’ Whatever it is, it is only part of a complex whole.” She makes excuses for him, saying that the Lewinsky affair occurred at a difficult time after the deaths of his mother, her father, and their friend Vincent Foster. She considered her husband’s cheating a “sin of weakness” not a “sin of malice.” She even compared their situation to when Peter betrayed Jesus three times. “Jesus knew it but loved him anyway.”