First Ladies (13 page)

Not only did Bess Truman work hard at these events but she was extremely good at being a hostess. Lady Bird Johnson told me a charming story when I interviewed her for this book. She went to one of the congressional receptions in 1946 or 1947. “I was only a congressman’s wife,” Lady Bird said. “I was awed to find myself visiting the White House. When I finally got to Mrs. Truman, she was so warm and outgoing, as I passed off the line I turned to Lyndon and said: ‘I think she knew me!’”

As the social season wound down, Mother wrote me a letter in which you could almost hear her sigh: “These two weeks are really going to be a handshaking two weeks—conservative estimate forty one hundred.” After a reception for the Governor-General of Canada and his wife, she wrote to tell me how much she liked them, and added almost matter-of-factly: “The reception of course was horrible—1341 & my arm is a wreck this
A.M
.”

Though her arm ached, Mother’s hand survived this ordeal, thanks to some tutoring from a master of the political handshake, Harry S Truman. He taught Mother—and me—that the essence of the art was to seize the other person’s hand before he or she grabbed yours—and to slide your thumb between the other person’s thumb and index finger, so that you, not he or she, did the squeezing.

Even with this expert advice, by the time Mother left the White House, the glove size of her right hand had gone from 6 to 6 1/2. My hand too had gone up a half size. I cannot claim to have shaken nearly as many hands as she did, but I shook enough to produce the damage.

Dad’s miracle victory in 1948 worked a transformation in Mother’s attitude toward First Ladying. She no longer saw it as something inflicted on her by one of fate’s crueler blows. Instead it became a job she had chosen to do, in concert with her presidential partner. One of the first signs of this more positive attitude was the intense interest she took in choosing her inauguration dresses and evening gowns.

She had been buying most of her clothes from Agasta, a well-known Washington couturier. They were tasteful but not very exciting. Moreover, Agasta did not make evening gowns. So Mother chose Madame Pola of New York to supply these. Meanwhile, she put pressure on Agasta to come up with some more creative day wear. Twelve days before the inauguration, they still had not agreed on a fabric for her inauguration outfit.

Agasta was getting palpitations when she found a piece of silk that was an intriguing mixture of iridescent black and gray. Mother gave her an emphatic go-ahead, and Agasta created the outfit Bess wore to the ceremony. It had a straight skirt and a peplum jacket, which went beautifully with her blackish gray hat, trimmed with a single, massive mauve-pink rose.

The fashion triumph of those triumphant days, however, was Mother’s ball gown. It was made of black panne velvet cut on slender lines, the skirt draped to one side. The circular collar was covered with layers of white Alençon lace and fell gracefully over her shoulder, forming a lovely oval neckline.

Both these dresses signaled Mother’s new enthusiasm for her job—a mood which continued to build throughout 1949, the happiest of our White House years. That summer she undertook a diet that shed more than twenty middle-age pounds and returned to the White House more ready than ever to wear stylish clothes. One of my favorite pictures is of the two of us at the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera a year or so later. Mother is wearing a high-necked dark blue satin coat, embroidered with flowers, over a long, full gown. Her hair is stylishly curled. On her face is a happy smile. She looks several years younger than the frowning woman who stood beside Dad when he took the oath of office in 1945.

Then the Korean War erupted in June of 1950, and Mother’s euphoria began to evaporate. Dad’s second term became an even more severe test of the Truman partnership. Dad had to rally the free world against this naked Communist aggression and simultaneously cope with the constant insubordination of his Far East commander, General Douglas MacArthur. In this confrontation, his First Lady unwaveringly supported his decision to fire the general, even though some people—including numerous members of Congress—acted as if the world were coming to an end.

On the home front, anarchic Senator Joseph McCarthy tempted Republicans into smearing Democrats—including the President—as Communists. Living in the White House became a little like inhabiting a fortress under siege. Several aides crumpled under the pressure. The most heartbreaking loss was Charlie Ross, who died of a heart attack at his desk during one particularly horrendous crisis in late 1950. By the time the presidential election year of 1952 appeared on the horizon, President Harry S Truman was very tired—and so was his First Lady.

Yet Dad seriously considered running for another term. Although Congress had passed a constitutional amendment limiting the presidency to two terms, they had exempted Harry Truman. This time the President’s partner gave him something stronger than advice. She told him she could not survive another four years in the White House pressure cooker and neither could he.

Dad took it under advisement, but he still retained the freedom to decide otherwise, if the Democratic Party could not find a decent candidate to oppose the man who was beginning to emerge as the Republican nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dad’s first two choices, Chief Justice Fred Vinson and Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, had proved elusive. President Truman called a meeting of his White House staff to discuss the problem. They agreed, almost unanimously, that he should not run again. They were almost as tired as the Chief Executive.

Still Dad put off the decision. Finally, one night in the spring of 1952, his appointments secretary, Matt Connelly, a genial Irishman who had become Dad’s closest confidant since Charlie Ross’s death, brought up the subject while they were working late, as usual. Matt had been designated by a group of prominent Democrats to tell the President he had to accept another nomination.

Dad listened, visibly upset, and asked Matt if he thought this pressure was serious enough to make “the old man run again.” Matt dropped his role as messenger and gestured toward the portrait of Mother on Dad’s desk, next to that famous sign, THE BUCK STOPS HERE. “Would you do that to her?” he asked.

“All right,” Dad said. “That settles it.”

The Truman partnership had made its final White House decision. In later years, Dad was fond of saying that most people in Washington leave in only two ways: by getting kicked out or carried out. Thanks to his First Lady and his own common sense, he and Bess walked out, smiling.

—

B
ESS
T
RUMAN WAS BY NO MEANS THE ONLY
F
IRST
L
ADY TO OPERATE
as her husband’s political partner. The tradition began with the second First Lady, Abigail Smith Adams. She and her husband, President John Adams, spent most of their single term in Philadelphia, the interim capital of the United States. Not until 1800 did Abigail and John move into the unfinished White House, where she had the dolorous privilege of watching her husband become the first incumbent President to lose his bid for reelection.

Abigail has another, happier distinction. She is the only First Lady who became the mother of a President. Her oldest and favorite son, John Quincy Adams, succeeded James Monroe in 1825. Unfortunately, for reasons which seem inherent in the Adamses’ genes, John Quincy too was a one-term President.

Like almost every other First Lady, Abigail wondered if she could do the job—though there was scarcely a woman in America who was more qualified. Abigail Adams had been a political wife for twenty
years before John won the highest office in the new republic in 1796. She had unwaveringly supported her husband as he and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington led the American people into independence and revolutionary war.

In 1776 Abigail, in a now famous letter, had urged John to include woman’s rights in the new American order. “Remember the ladies and be more generous to them than your ancestors! Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of the husbands. Remember that all men would be tyrants if they could,” she wrote. John declined to repeal “our masculine systems,” which he maintained were “little more than theory.” That last remark is, I suspect, a tribute to the power of Abigail’s personality.

During John’s diplomatic assignments in Paris, London, and Amsterdam, Abigail had dealt deftly with royalty and the sometimes shocking mores of the Old World. She had been a superb vice president’s wife for two terms. But as First Lady, she feared she lacked the “patience, prudence, and discretion” of her predecessor, Martha Washington.

Politics did not particularly interest Martha. She kept her few opinions to herself or shared them with one or two close relatives. Abigail lived and breathed the hugger-mugger of issues and arguments day and night. Her letters are full of astute comments on the crises of the day and even more incisive pen portraits of the major players.

Listen to her description of Timothy Pickering, the Massachusetts-born secretary of state in John Adams’s cabinet. “There is a man in the cabinet whose manners are forbidding, whose temper is sour and whose resentments are implacable, who nevertheless would like to dictate every measure.” Take a look at a portrait of Pickering sometime; I guarantee his pickled puss will persuade you that Abigail was on target. Five months after she wrote this, the President fired Pickering—something Abigail thought John should have done the minute he became President.

Just as Abigail felt intimidated by Martha Washington, John Adams felt overshadowed by George. He hesitated to remove any of Washington’s
appointees until it was too late to stop them from getting the Philadelphia equivalent of Potomac fever. Pickering in particular regarded Adams as an idiot and regularly leaked vicious stories about his incompetence and instability.

Abigail’s propensity for politics kept her in hot water in the overheated ideological atmosphere of the late 1790s, when the French Revolution and the emergence of Napoleon had the whole world boiling with extremism. The Antifeds, now formally organized as the Democratic-Republicans, used her as a handy weapon to bludgeon the President. Swiss-born Congressman Albert Gallatin, a supporter of John Adams’s rival, Thomas Jefferson, claimed to be outraged when he heard “Her Majesty” going down the list of congressmen and naming those who were “our people.” Gallatin thought this was “not right.” He wanted women to stay on the sidelines of life, demure and submissive.

Abigail returned the favor by calling Gallatin “sly, artfull… insidious,” and little more than a double agent for French attempts to manipulate the United States into backing France in its war with England. However, she reserved her most ferocious adjectives for a member of her own Federalist Party, Alexander Hamilton, not only because he was a notorious ladies’ man but because he attempted to dump John Adams as the party’s presidential candidate in 1800. Abigail insisted she could see “the very devil” in Hamilton’s eyes.

Abigail Adams was the first First Lady to leak stories to the press. It was part of an attempt to defend her husband’s foreign policy, which aimed at neutrality in the war between the era’s superpowers, England and France. Abigail had a “channel” in Europe, her son John Quincy, who was the American minister to Berlin. He sent her inside information on Europe’s seething politics, which she forwarded to friendly newspaper editors, carefully underlining the paragraphs she wanted to see in print.

As a sometime actress, I was fascinated to discover how Abigail and her friends once used the theater to score a propaganda triumph for her husband. Traveling “perfectly in cogg” (incognito), she told her sister, the First Lady slipped into Philadelphia’s New Theater in the
spring of 1798 and joined some congressional friends and their wives to hear a political song that had been inserted between the acts of a double bill. Titled “Hail Columbia,” the song had new lyrics to the tune of “The President’s March,” the music that had regularly greeted George Washington. The added lines reaffirmed America’s political independence.

The audience loved it. Recent news of French arrogance and aggression had dampened enthusiasm for Paris’s revolutionary notions. The idea of taking neither side in this ugly war suddenly seemed brilliantly original. Abigail rejoiced as the audience almost clapped their hands off in the final chorus and leaped to their feet to shout cheers for President John Adams.

Criticism of Abigail as First Lady was mostly whispered in drawing rooms by politicians like Albert Gallatin. Far more unnerving was the public beating her husband took in the frenetic newspapers of the day. In one letter to her sister, the First Lady complained that reporters had recently called the President “Old querulous bald, blind crippled toothless Adams.” Goaded by such abuse, Abigail became a fierce advocate of censorship. She furiously supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which the Federalist Congress passed in 1798, giving the courts the right to jail anyone who “shall write, print, utter or publish… scandalous or malicious writings against the government of the United States, either house of Congress… or the President.”

Abigail applauded when Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont got four months behind bars for denouncing President Adams’s “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.” She took even more pleasure in seeing James Thomson Callender, a newspaperman who had written a slanderous book about President Adams, sentenced to six months in another jail.

Abigail’s enthusiasm for the Alien and Sedition Acts was the first—but not, alas, the last—example of bad advice from a First Lady political partner. The backlash against these tyrannical laws helped sweep John Adams out of the presidency in 1800. Even Abigail’s son John Quincy, the future President, mournfully admitted in later years that the acts “operated like oil upon the flames.” The attempt to muzzle the press was savagely attacked by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other opposition leaders. The newspapers added
tyrant to
the list of insulting adjectives they regularly applied to old John Yankee, as Adams liked to call himself.