First Ladies (31 page)

There was nothing little girlish about the way Mamie took charge of the White House. The staff swiftly found out they were dealing with a general’s lady. The chief usher, J. B. West, discovered she gave orders that were “staccato, crisp, detailed and final.” Whenever she left the White House, Mamie told Mr. West, she wanted to be “escorted to the diplomatic entrance by an usher. And when I return, I am to be met at the door and escorted upstairs.”

J. B. West reported Mamie could also display a “spine of steel.” She meticulously reviewed menus and seating arrangements for luncheons and dinners. One day West showed her a luncheon menu she had never seen before. “What’s this?” Mamie demanded. West explained the President had approved it several days ago. “I run everything in my house,” Mamie said. “In the future all menus are to be approved by me and no one else.”

Early in their marriage, Mamie and Ike had worked out a division of labor. He handled the “office” part of their life together with no interference or comments from her. She ran the home on the same basis. She had always handled their household finances with a thrifty eye, and she applied it to their White House living expenses, which came out of the President’s pocket. Every morning she scanned the local newspapers for bargains and hustled the staff around the city to nail down the good buys.

Mamie Eisenhower liked life in the White House with Ike. “I’ve got my man right here where I want him,” she told one staffer, contrasting this with her years of separation as an army wife
.
(Bettmann Archive)

Mamie was equally firm about staff conduct. White House employees were banned from the family elevator. If they wanted to get from one wing of the house to the other, they were told to use the basement or go outside. J. B. West became “Mr. West,” but his subordinates were addressed by their first names. Within a few weeks, Mamie had mastered the Executive Mansion’s table of organization and knew not only every job but who held it.

As with Julia Grant, the staff soon discovered the General’s lady was also intensely interested in their welfare. If someone fell ill, a bouquet from the First Lady cheered him or her toward recovery. The White House chef had a standing order to supply every staffer with a scrumptious cake on his or her birthday. For Christmas Mamie spent days selecting and wrapping presents for all of them.

Simultaneously, she hostessed and hostessed, averaging seven hundred visitors a day in 1953. (My hand aches just thinking about it.)
When sixteen hundred members of the Federation of Women’s Clubs tried to wangle an invitation to tea on about twenty-four hours notice, Mamie compromised by driving to their convention center and shaking hands there. Some other First Ladies would have used the short notice as an excuse to stay home and take a nap. Mamie’s broad smile, her bright clothes (green was another favorite color), her bubbly good cheer wowed the visitors. Ike was so delighted, he burst into uncharacteristic praise, declaring that Mamie’s “intelligence and charm” had made the White House “meaningful” to guests.

Beyond that remark, there is considerable evidence that Mamie’s performance as First Lady earned her new respect from Ike and did a lot to restore their badly strained marriage. Mamie seemed to sense this—and it became another reason why she liked the White House. “I’ve got my man right here, where I want him!” she told J. B. West.

One day Mamie arrived late for dinner. Ike, punctual like most generals, felt a reprimand was in order. “Do you realize you’ve kept the President of the United States waiting?” he huffed, only half humorously.

“Why no,” Mamie said. “I’ve been busy making myself pretty for my husband.”

Stories like this may explain why Ike shunned the Washington party circuit. “For years my evenings have been somebody else’s,” he told a friend. “At last I’ve got a job where I can stay home nights and by golly, I’m going to stay home.” Mamie persuaded him to take up as a hobby what used to be his household chore: cooking. In their peripatetic Army years, Mamie never got familiar with a stove, mainly, she claimed, because Ike was a much better cook. She ordered a kitchen installed on the second floor, and President Ike regularly whipped up their favorite dishes.

As a hostess, Mamie gradually found she could not maintain her 1953 pace. Her weak heart and her dizzy spells required a number of long vacations from the White House and a lot of bed rest. I learned from Julie Nixon that Mamie was also influenced by a skin specialist who told her that if she spent one day a week in bed, she would never
get a wrinkle. She spent so much time in her White House bed one of the maids nicknamed her “Sleeping Beauty.”

Mamie’s daughter-in-law, Barbara Eisenhower, often played substitute First Lady for her. Barbara even accompanied Ike on his historic trip to India, when Mamie, dreading the long flight, decided to pass. I wish I had room to say more about being a surrogate First Lady. I did a bit of it myself when my mother lingered in Independence. It is hard work but sort of fun, if you don’t mind getting your hand mashed.

Ike too found the presidency a stressful job. In 1955 he suffered a heart attack, which left many people unsure whether he should run for reelection in 1956. His brother Milton and a number of other close advisers urged him to quit. But Mamie, unwittingly borrowing a leaf from Edith Wilson’s book, demurred. She felt Ike would deteriorate without a challenge to his will to live—and cast her vote for a second term.

Ike made the final decision, of course. But it was the start of Mamie performing another traditional First Lady’s role—protector. She became the guardian of Ike’s schedule, constantly urging him to take vacations, worrying every time he gave a speech, because the effort invariably raised his blood pressure to unnerving heights. In his second term, Ike was stricken by another heart attack and an intestinal disorder, ileitis, which required serious surgery, redoubling Mamie’s concern.

In her protector role, Mamie Eisenhower, unquestionably the least political of the modern First Ladies (in her eight White House years, she only entered the Oval Office four times), may have changed the course of American history. As John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon came down to the wire in 1960, they were in a dead heat. Both sides knew that the most contested state—the one that would make or break the election—was Illinois. Dwight Eisenhower, one of the greatest vote getters in the history of the Republican Party, had agreed to make two appearances in southern Illinois for Dick Nixon in the final week of the campaign.

After a previous appearance for Nixon, Ike’s blood pressure had shot up alarmingly. Without consulting anyone, Mamie telephoned
the Nixons and begged them to release Ike from the Illinois assignment. Of course they agreed. She then went to work on Ike and talked him out of it too. A week later, John E Kennedy carried Illinois by a hairbreadth nine thousand votes and won the presidency.

I remember reading in a book about West Point that generals were “in the history business”—which may explain why we have had so many of them as Presidents. As First Ladies, Julia Grant and Mamie Eisenhower, seemingly uninterested in politics, proved that now and then they could match their soldier husbands in the same momentous trade.

—

A
CCORDING TO A POLL OF THE NATION’S HISTORIANS TAKEN BY
Marist College, Nancy Reagan should be ranked near the bottom of the list of First Ladies—grim tribute to her bad press notices. But there is one First Lady beneath her—consigned, as it were—to history’s version of hell. In an incredible paradox, she is the wife of the man most people regard as our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln.

I majored in history at George Washington University, but I never went on to earn the M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s sported by the voters in that poll. Nevertheless, I beg to disagree with these learned ladies and gentlemen about Mary Lincoln. I think I have made it clear that I also disagree with their opinion of Nancy Reagan, who overcame some major obstacles to give a better than average performance in the White House.

One day in 1962, my good friend historian Arthur Schlesinger asked President John F. Kennedy to participate in a poll that compared presidents. Arthur was working in the Kennedy White House at the time, and the President readily, in fact eagerly, agreed to contribute
his opinion. As the author of
Profiles in Courage
, JFK was intensely interested in presidential performance. But when Arthur spoke to him about the poll a few days later, he found a frustrated Chief Executive. Kennedy said he had no difficulty rating the greats: Washington, Lincoln, FDR. But when it came to the lesser figures, it was impossible to judge a President unless you made a fairly intense study of his administration and had a grasp of the problems he confronted and his options for dealing with them.

I have been trying to apply that principle to First Ladies. We should judge each First Lady not on some abstract scorecard but on the basis of what she accomplished in spite of the obstacles, personal and political, with which she had to cope during her White House years. Viewed in that more generous light, I believe Mary Todd Lincoln emerges as a First Lady who did her job moderately well under incredibly trying circumstances.

Almost from the day Abraham Lincoln was elected president in a four-way race with only forty percent of the popular vote, he began collecting death threats. Nevertheless, Mary Lincoln courageously insisted she would accompany her husband to embattled Washington, D.C. To add to their worries, the South made it clear that they were not going to tolerate a “black Republican” in the White House and began making good on their vow to secede from the Union. Mary at first thought that she and her husband, as Kentuckians, with ties to neither North nor South, would be ideally suited to reconcile the hostile sections.

Her task as First Lady, as she saw it, was to add dignity and even grandeur to the Lincoln administration—something that large parts of the North and South thought no “westerner” was capable of achieving. It is hard for us to grasp the intense snobbery with which the older sections of the country regarded Americans on the wrong side of the Appalachian Mountains in those days. It was an antagonism that went back to Andrew Jackson’s presidency, when the men of the West first seized power in the name of expanding democracy.

In eastern newspapers and magazines, westerners were regularly portrayed as illiterate, tobacco-spitting boors. Whiffs of this prejudice have lingered into our own times. Not a little of Lyndon Johnson’s
White House travails could be traced to comparisons of supposedly uncouth Texans with the theoretically ultracivilized denizens of New York and New England. Harry Truman had similar problems when people compared his Missouri accent with FDR’s Harvard-honed inflections.

Mary Lincoln thought—with a great deal of justification—that her husband’s presidency needed all the help it could get. Lincoln himself was ridiculed in Northern Democratic newspapers as “the brainless bob-o-link of the prairies.” In the South the adjectives were barely printable. Mary was all too aware that her ungainly, awkward-looking spouse, with his thick Kentucky accent, did not make a good impression on many people—that he was, in fact, too western for eastern tastes. One of her first moves, after the election, was a trip to New York to buy materials for sixteen expensive gowns. She was determined to show Washington and the world that the President’s wife could dress as fashionably as any easterner, North or South.

This approach came naturally to Mary. She had always dressed well, first as the daughter of one of Kentucky’s wealthier planters and later as the wife of one of the most successful attorneys in the Midwest. The urge to democratize Lincoln after his death has more or less obscured the fact that he was a very prosperous lawyer, who represented railroads and other major corporations in many lucrative cases.

Moreover, Mary had no trouble visualizing herself as Abraham Lincoln’s presidential partner. Throughout their marriage, her ambition had been a major force in her moody husband’s career. Politics fascinated Mary. She discussed the subject constantly with Abraham and urged him to run for public office. When he was elected to Congress in 1846, she moved to Washington with him and enjoyed every minute of it. On November 6, 1860, when Lincoln learned he had won the presidency, he burst through the door of their Springfield house shouting: “Mary, Mary, we are elected.” That
we
came as naturally to him as Lady Bird Johnson’s pronoun when she talked about Lyndon Johnson becoming President.

Mary Lincoln went to Washington hoping to make the White House a rallying point for peace, civilization, and sanity. Even without
this motivation, the mansion badly needed an overhaul. Neglected by our only bachelor President, James Buchanan, and his feckless predecessor, Franklin Pierce, it was a sorry mess of peeling wallpaper, cheap, often broken furniture, and threadbare rugs that according to one visitor looked as if nothing had been changed or repaired “since Washington’s day.” Mary discovered that Congress allotted each President twenty thousand dollars for redecoration—the equivalent of at least two hundred thousand dollars today—and she embarked on a vigorous search for the finest rugs, china, wallpaper, and crystal in America. In no time she had spent the twenty thousand dollars, which was supposed to last four years—and a lot more.