First Ladies Read Free Page B

overwhelm him.
    No matter how political she becomes, the First Lady will always be a woman, married to a specific man (until, of course, we elect a woman President). That means there are spiritual depths in her marriage that only she understands, needs that only she can fulfill. Always, against the necessities of politics, she will balance these other needs.
    Not all First Ladies have been able to achieve this wifely responsiveness. Some came to the White House with such deeply troubled marriages, they were almost forced to chart courses that were semi-independent of their husbands’—and occasionally in opposition to them. These women deserve our deepest sympathy for their strugglesto cope with emotional as well as political problems in the glare of maximum publicity.
    There have also been times when a First Lady has said to the most powerful man in the world: enough. He has listened, and turned away from the ecstasy and agony of power. I saw that happen in my own family when my father decided not to run in 1952. It happened again in 1968 when Lady Bird Johnson said it to her husband, the most intensely political President who ever bestrode the Oval Office.
    Earlier I noted that modern First Ladies are doing a lot. I begin to think I should amend that remark. First Ladies, from Martha Washington to Louisa Adams to Julia Grant to Edith Roosevelt to Bess Truman to Hillary Clinton, have always done a lot. As symbols, wives, mothers, hostesses, and political partners, they have coped with anguish and tragedy and the temptations and illusions of power. Above all, they have borne witness, with their courage and their caring, to women’s share—and place—in the shaping of America.

Chapter 2
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DEMOCRACY
IN SKIRTS
    O NE HISTORICAL OBSERVER OF F IRST L ADIES HAS SUGGESTED THAT they appeal to the public’s heart while Presidents appeal to the head. I resisted that idea as too simplistic when I began writing this book. But there is no doubt that a First Lady has always had a lot to do with how people feel about a President’s performance. I came across other scholars who described this phenomenon as “setting the tone” of an administration.
    I rather like that idea.
Tone
, my dictionary tells me, is a word with layers of meaning. It is used to describe the characteristic quality of an instrument or voice. Painters use it to discuss subtleties of shade and color. It is also used to denote a general quality, effect, or atmosphere. It includes what a First Lady says and how she says it—and what she does not say and how she manages that. It deals with the often explosive questions of class and style, attitude and manner.
    Martha Washington discovered a lot of this when she arrived in New York to preside over the first Executive Mansion, a cramped, rented house on Cherry Street. (It was ripped down in the 1870s,when they built the approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge.) Her husband, our first President, was puzzled about his own role. He sought advice far and wide about how he should conduct himself vis-à-vis Congress, the title he should use, how he should receive callers. He knew he should not act like a king, but he also did not want to become a nobody. Washington was determined not to let the presidency—for which he had fought harder than anyone else at the Constitutional Convention—be diminished by petty critics and worrywarts who saw hobgoblins of potential tyranny everywhere.
    It might be apropos to recall here that the Constitution and the federal government it created were by no means universally admired at birth. In New York and other states, the national charter had been approved by minuscule margins. Prominent Americans such as Patrick Henry had attacked the Constitution ferociously, claiming it would destroy freedom. Already, two political parties were in embryo: the mostly conservative supporters of the federal government, who called themselves Federalists, and the Antis, who bitterly resented being called