History Buff's Guide to the Presidents (49 page)

For Martha Custis Washington, nothing in the Constitution or social protocol outlined what she was supposed to do as the wife of the nation’s head of state. Under this entirely new form of government, customs had to be invented. Even her title was a matter of debate. The aristocratic Federalists chose to call her “Lady Washington,” while the more democratically inclined Republicans preferred “Mrs. Washington” (“first lady” would not be used until 1877 and only became popular in the twentieth century). In the search for balance, both Martha and her husband relied on restraint. They showed respect for the office through formal dinners and upper-class attire, but they avoided behaving like royalty.

The challenge for every first lady thereafter lay in finding equilibrium, to serve in an unelected, undefined position in such a manner that satisfied both right and left, prince and pauper, fellow American and foreign visitor. Most presidential spouses soon realized that they were publicly criticized no matter what they did. But to do nothing was not an option, as they lived at the very center of the executive branch. By tradition, none of them were ever technically employed by the government, yet all were expected to accept what Pat Nixon called “the hardest unpaid job in the world.”

Ascertaining their respective “greatness” depends on the criteria one chooses. Ambition ran high in Florence Harding, whereas none were more independent from the federal circus than Bess Truman. In speaking one’s mind, Betty Ford stands above, while Laura Bush is the model of compliance. None guarded a spouse with more militant resolve than Nancy Reagan, or herself more than Pat Nixon. Few were as scholarly as the bibliophile Abigail Fillmore, or as worldly and cerebral as geologist Lou Hoover, or as warm and kind as Lucy Hayes or Grace Coolidge.
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Arguably the primary role of the first ladies has always been public relations, promoting the image, policies, and public appeal of their significant other. Whether through correspondence and social gatherings in the nineteenth century, or through mass media and fundraising in the twenty-first, wives were the first and most personal link between the politician and the population. The success of any given career depended heavily on how well the spouse connected to the body politic. Ranked here are the most effective partners ever to hold the rank of first lady and the means by which they supported their president.

1
. ANNA ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

(NEW YORK, 1884–1962)

Since the Great Depression, it has never been a question as to which first lady had the greatest impact on the presidency and the nation. In any poll of the president’s wives, she is eternally first by a wide margin.
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It is often contended that Franklin Roosevelt, who grew up in wealth and comfort, developed his sympathy for the downtrodden when he was stricken with polio at age thirty-nine. In reality, his change in character came decades before, when his girlfriend Eleanor introduced him to a world he had never seen. Also a member of society’s elite, she was a debutante and a graduate of a prestigious girls’ academy outside London. But she chose to be a social worker in the decrepit slums of New York’s East Side. In 1902, she brought him to where she worked. As he walked among the destitute, seeing and smelling the repressive filth in which they lived, he became profoundly aware of what suffering did to people. The experience never left him.
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When polio struck FDR in 1921, the person most altered by it may have been Eleanor. Shy and worrisome by nature, she developed a sense of inner strength by helping him conquer a deep depression. Through her diligence and encouragement, he was back among his Democratic colleagues and practicing law by 1924. He would never walk on his own power again, but she could campaign where he could not, acting as his legs, his eyes, and his ears. In 1928, they completed the miracle comeback when he won the race for New York governor. Four years later, he would be president, and she would redefine what it meant to be first lady.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the first wife of a president to hold press conferences, write a syndicated column, and give national radio addresses on a regular basis. In the first year alone, she traveled more than forty thousand miles to monitor the progress of the New Deal. If FDR was the mastermind of the new government, she was the conscience, spending time with coal miners, sharecroppers, the displaced, and the unemployed. She also publicly ended her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution because of the organization’s segregationist practices.

During the war, she unsuccessfully pressed the State Department to issue visas to European Jews seeking asylum and failed in her protests against internment of Japanese Americans. She succeeded in her case to get more women in the workplace and African Americans in the military. Though she loathed travel, the first lady flew into the war zones of Britain and the South Pacific. She visited wounded GIs, conferred with royalty, and reassured the British high brass of America’s continued support. At one point in her ambassadorial duties, she was covering twenty-five thousand miles per month.
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Millions adored her, especially enlisted men, minorities, and the British. Others found her relentless drive and liberal idealism worthy of ridicule, particularly white conservative southerners and anti–New Deal Republicans. Regardless of her means, she ultimately and conspicuously placed the interests of the country far above her own. Over the course of twelve years, in a government that promised to restore dignity to common Americans, no one in the administration pursued that end with greater honesty and commitment than Eleanor.

As a paid public speaker and columnist, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sometimes made more money than her presidential husband. Much of what she earned was donated to charity.

2
. CLAUDIA TAYLOR “LADY BIRD” JOHNSON

(TEXAS, 1912–2007)

Lyndon Johnson knew he had met his perfect match in 1934. He proposed to her within hours of their first meeting. Extremely intelligent, Claudia Taylor had finished high school at age fifteen and graduated with honors from Texas University, attaining degrees in history and journalism. She possessed a remarkable memory for faces and details, and she balanced him. He was profane; she was lyrical. He intimidated; she listened. He was another Bull Moose; she was the original Lady Bird.
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They began their political ascendance battling illiteracy through the New Deal’s National Youth Administration. He moved up through the ranks to become a U.S. representative, heavily dependent on her moral, financial, and political support. She ran his Washington office while he served in the Pacific War.

She wept when her senator husband lost the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination to a lower-ranked senator from Massachusetts. But when Jack Kennedy named LBJ as his running mate, Lady Bird Johnson canvassed the country on their behalf, conducting more than 150 public appearances. Her hectic efforts helped to reduce the burdens of campaigning for the reticent and very pregnant Jacqueline Kennedy (who gave birth to John Jr. two weeks after the election).

While some wives withdrew from politics when their spouses became president, Claudia became more involved, if that were possible. A prime example was her support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The late Kennedy felt reluctant to impose the controversial measure upon the segregated South, where his political capital was marginal. LBJ was able to get it passed, but the backlash threatened to destroy everything the law was trying to achieve. To quell the dissent, Claudia set out on a seventeen-hundred-mile rail tour into her native Deep South. Stop after stop aboard the “Lady Bird Special,” she defended the new law and extolled its virtues. Only in South Carolina did she experience any meaningful resistance, and that soon dissipated under the public support for the first lady.
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She was best known for her community and highway “beautification project,” which was effectively an environmental movement, planting millions of flowers and thousands of trees, reducing litter, junkyards, and highway billboards. As the program’s official spokesperson, she logged more than two hundred thousand miles in forty separate trips. Critics dismissed it as a vast aesthetic makeover, trivializing the true substance of the woman and her work. But criticism was something to which she had grown accustomed. Traditionalists attacked Claudia’s stance on civil rights, progressives denounced her slavish loyalty to her husband, and the shallow chided her age and middle-class wardrobe.

Yet as the national chair of Head Start, a voice for historic preservation, a devout conservationist, and a highly effective political campaigner, she maintained both her own agenda as well as her husband’s and still managed to appeal to the majority. For a woman straddling the breakpoint of feminism, and operating in the tumultuous 1960s, to be a convincing and respected voice of compromise was no small achievement.
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When Claudia Taylor Johnson was a little girl, her nanny called her “Bird.” Claudia hated the nickname immensely, but it stuck.

3
. SARAH CHILDRESS POLK

(TENNESSEE, 1803–91)

The first truly political first lady, Sarah Polk had no children, no pet causes, no pressing obligations beyond her own interests in politics and the desire to work with her equally driven spouse. Highly educated for her era, she had studied history and geography as a teenager at the prestigious Moravian Academy in North Carolina, and she read voraciously throughout her life. Playing hostess was not for her. When her husband became the Democratic nominee for president in 1844, Sarah reportedly declared, “If I get to the White House, I expect to live on $25,000 a year and I will neither keep house nor make butter.”
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