First Ladies (37 page)

A year after she left the White House, Grace Coolidge awoke one night with a poem alive in her mind. She had been writing poems since she was a girl. But this one had a special message—one that I think she was desperately trying to share with her husband:

“The Open Door” was the ultimate expression of Grace Coolidge’s serenity. But Calvin Coolidge, if he read it, could not accept the message. Four years after he left the White House, he was dead at sixty. His wife knew why. “The death of our younger son was a severe shock and the zest for living never was the same for him afterward,” she said.

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S
OME READERS ARE AWARE THAT I AM AN AFICIONADO OF MURDER
mysteries and have even written a few set in Washington, D.C. But I never thought I would find myself exploring the sudden and unusual deaths of two First Ladies. Nor did I expect to find they were both done in by the same unique weapon.

The first death is what the old cliché experts in the murder mysteries of the nineteen thirties used to call an open-and-shut case. There is no doubt that Rachel Jackson, wife of President Andrew Jackson, was murdered by the nation’s newspapers before she even reached the White House.

Anyone who thinks the public’s interest in political sex scandals is a twentieth-century phenomenon may be surprised to learn that Rachel’s virtue—or lack of it—was the chief issue in the presidential campaign of 1828. The incumbent President, John Quincy Adams, was a stiff, superdignified son of the second president, John Adams. John Quincy’s presidency had been a political calamity—Congress
had ignored virtually every proposal he sent them—but the forces of respectability (read snobbery) in the original thirteen states regarded him as the last bastion in their losing struggle against the wild-eyed Democrats of the West. Adams’s opponent, Andrew Jackson, personified this rough, tough, swaggering breed—although he lived in a Nashville mansion, The Hermitage, as impressive as any house in the country.

President Adams’s backers correctly foresaw that Jackson was unstoppable on the high road. The country was disgusted with John Quincy’s inert presidency. So they opted for the lowest of low roads—the somewhat messy details of how Rachel and Andrew Jackson met and married. On March 27, 1828, the
Daily National Journal
, an influential Washington paper, announced that Jackson was not only a wastrel who had spent the prime of his life in gambling, cockfighting, and horse racing but also a libertine who had “torn from a husband the wife of his bosom.”

With quivering indignation, the newspaper demanded to know how the public would react if President Adams or his secretary of state, Henry Clay, “were to take a man’s wife from him pistol in hand.” It all came down to a question of character, the Adamsites maintained. If Andrew Jackson had indeed seduced another man’s wife, he was not fit to be President of the United States. It was “an affair in which the National character, the National interest, the National morals” were all deeply involved.

In Nashville, Andrew Jackson did his utmost to shield his sixty-year-old wife from the ugly details of this mudslinging. But it was impossible to prevent her from hearing something about it. Rachel knew that the circumstances of their marriage were more than a little unusual. When Jackson first met her in 1788, she was a married woman—a deeply unhappy one. At the age of seventeen, high-spirited Rachel Donelson had married Kentuckian Lewis Robards, who quickly became a walking, talking—and snarling—disaster. He was pathologically jealous and flew into a rage if she so much as said hello to another man. At the same time, he did not regard the marriage vow as binding on his side of the bed.

Rachel had a sharp tongue and gave Robards the what for he deserved. In a fit of exasperation, he sent her back to Tennessee, where she went to work for her widowed mother, also named Rachel, who ran a boardinghouse in Nashville. One of the boarders was an energetic young lawyer named Andrew Jackson, who soon could not keep his eyes off the younger Rachel. Unfortunately, neither could Robards, who showed up at the Widow Donelson’s to declare he could not live without his darling wife. Still jealous, he grew testy about the attention she was getting from Jackson and warned the junior attorney to keep his distance.

Men said such things to Andrew Jackson at their peril. Jackson reportedly hoisted Robards aloft by his gizzard and announced he would cut his ears off if he ever cast another slur on Rachel’s reputation. The panicky Robards sought the protection of the courts, and Jackson was escorted to the local magistrate under guard. Knowing he was among friends, Andy suddenly called for his hunting knife. That got everyone’s attention, especially Robards’s. Jackson ran his thumb down the knife’s gleaming edge while Robards began to quake. Ten seconds later he was out the door with Jackson on his heels. When Andy returned, the magistrate dismissed the charges against him because the complainant had “vanished.” Obviously, the courts in frontier Tennessee gave some prisoners a lot of leeway to defend themselves.

Robards went home to Kentucky but again found life without Rachel intolerable. He wrote her a letter, announcing his intention to take her back to the Bluegrass State. Horrified, Rachel decided to flee to Natchez in Mississippi Territory. Andrew Jackson volunteered to escort her through the wilderness. In Natchez they heard that Robards had gotten a divorce and decided they were free to marry. Only when they returned to Tennessee two years later did they learn that Robards had delayed getting the divorce until he found out Rachel and Andrew were living as husband and wife. He then obtained a permanent severance on the grounds of adultery.

The Jacksons were dismayed and reluctantly accepted the advice of several friends that they should remarry. By doing so, however, they more or less admitted their previous marriage was invalid and they
had been living in adultery. The accusation returned to haunt Jackson several times before he ran for President. In 1806 he killed a man in a duel for saying it to his face. But he could do little about newspaper stories. The tangled affair had left a rich lode of evidence from eyewitnesses and court papers.

As the 1828 campaign escalated, Rachel Jackson was called “an American Jezebel,” “a convicted adulteress,” and “a profligate woman.” The Adamsites studiously ignored the almost three decades of fidelity and domestic happiness in which Rachel had lived with Andrew Jackson. She was irredeemable, a forever fallen woman. Jackson’s infuriated supporters tried to counterattack along the same low road, dredging up flimsy rumors that President Adams and his wife had had sexual relations before they married. A bellow from Tennessee stopped this onslaught. “I never war against females and it is only the base and cowardly who do,” Old Hickory thundered.

The Jacksonites regrouped and counterattacked with their own version of the marriage story, which portrayed a gallant Andrew Jackson rescuing a forlorn and beautiful woman from a life of misery. They found a man who had been living in the Donelson boardinghouse at the time to bolster their account. They obtained affidavits from politicians who had voted on the divorce decree in the Kentucky legislature, affirming they only wanted to liberate Rachel from the beastly Robards. Finally they cited the way all the respectable women in and around Nashville accepted Rachel as their equal in virtue and reputation.

This Democratic defense was distributed throughout the country in pamphlet form. A hefty share of copies went to Tennessee, where, paradoxically, Jackson was both loved and hated with maximum intensity. The original smear campaign had, in fact, begun with a pamphlet by a home state rival. Inevitably, this meant Rachel heard still more about the campaign. “The Enemyes of the Genl have dipt their arrows in wormwood & gall and sped them at me,” she told a friend in the summer of 1828.

Possibly because of their tangled marital background, Rachel had repeatedly urged Jackson to forswear politics and retire to The Hermitage. In her middle years she had grown religious, and the pursuit
of fame seemed so much worldly nonsense to her. “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than live in that palace in Washington,” she declared.

The news that Jackson had won the presidency in a landslide only made Rachel anxious and depressed. Except for her journeys to Natchez and Kentucky, she had seen little of the world and severely doubted her ability to cope with Washington, D.C. She pleaded with her husband and his advisers to let her at least skip the inauguration, where she would be on maximum public display. She wanted to tiptoe into Washington and take refuge in the White House when the uproar had subsided.

Nonsense, declared the exultant Jacksonians. If she acted in such a furtive manner, her persecutors would “chuckle and say they have driven you from the field of your husband’s honors.” They were almost certainly right about that; political hatchet men were much the same in those pre-Beltway days as they are now.

Rachel reluctantly began acquiring a wardrobe for the inauguration. Early in December 1828, she went shopping in Nashville. She stopped to rest in the office of a cousin who happened to be a newspaper editor. There she found the pamphlet which Jackson’s friends had written to defend her against the Adamsites. It was full of the grisly specifics of the charges and countercharges. When friends arrived to pick her up, they found the once and future First Lady sobbing hysterically.

Rachel Jackson never recovered from the shock of reading that pamphlet. Back at The Hermitage, she took to her bed and died a few days before Christmas. Andrew Jackson uttered a typical homily at her grave. “In the presence of this dear saint, I can and do forgive all my enemies,” he said. “But those vile wretches who have slandered her must look to God for mercy.” One hopes the wretches did look heavenward because for the eight years Old Hickory was President they found no mercy in Washington, D.C.

—

R
ACHEL
J
ACKSON’S DEMISE MIGHT BE CALLED SIMPLE, PREMEDITATED
murder by newsprint. The attack was made on her directly, with malice
aforethought. The other First Lady who suffered a similar fate is a more complex story. The plot, you might say, is thicker, but the conclusion is, I think, equally inescapable.

No one would have dreamed anything but happiness and glory awaited Lou Henry Hoover in the White House. Few First Ladies seemed better prepared for the job. The same seemed true of her husband, President Herbert Hoover. Between them, in 1928, they appeared to be supreme examples of all that was wise and good in American civilization.

Lou Henry was the first woman to get a geology degree from Stanford University. She married Herbert Hoover, a fellow geology major, in 1899 and followed him around the world while he amassed a fortune as a mining engineer. When World War I broke out, the Hoovers were living in London. Together they hurled themselves into the chaos that erupted, helping over 120,000 Americans fleeing the war zone to get back to the United States. All told, they loaned these often frantic fugitives $1.5 million out of their own pockets—the equivalent of $100 million today All but $300 was repaid, forever convincing them, Herbert Hoover liked to say, of the basic honesty of ordinary Americans.

On the European continent, the entire country of Belgium, occupied by the Germans, blockaded by the British fleet, was close to starvation. Herbert Hoover, with Lou at his side, plunged into an emergency effort to feed 7.5 million people. Lou braved German submarines to return to America to raise money in a cross-country speaking tour. Herbert set up the world’s first international relief agency in London. While Lou was being called “the most capable woman alive” for her vivid appeals for American aid, Herbert assembled a fleet of forty ships and five-hundred canal boats, at a cost of $25 million a month, to carry food to the beleaguered country. The success of this stupendous operation made the Hoovers world famous.

When America entered the war in 1917, Woodrow Wilson brought Herbert Hoover back to America and put him in charge of the Food Administration. His job was to persuade Americans to produce more and eat less, so the United States could rescue England and France from
starvation. With Lou’s help, Hoover once more succeeded magnificently. He organized the farmers and shippers with his usual efficiency. She told the nation’s housewives how to “Hooverize” a family’s diet by cutting down on meat, wheat, and sugar, and encouraged the nation’s Girl Scouts to increase food production by cultivating war gardens.

After the war Herbert Hoover accepted still more international relief assignments, funneling millions of tons of food to the starving women and children of Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia. By 1920
The New York Times
ranked Hoover among the ten greatest living Americans. Woodrow Wilson reportedly said he hoped the Great Engineer, as the newspapers called him, would succeed him as President. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, said he would be proud to run as Herbert Hoover’s vice president. Too late, they found out the Great Engineer was a Republican.

At the 1920 Republican Convention, Hoover was brushed aside by the conservatives in the party, who wanted Warren Harding and the status quo. But Hoover had been bitten by the presidential bug. He accepted an appointment as secretary of commerce in the cabinets of Harding and Calvin Coolidge. While both administrations drifted into passivity, Hoover converted commerce into the most dynamic department in the government, topping his performance with another miraculous rescue operation when the Mississippi overflowed its banks in 1927, leaving thousands homeless and penniless. Meanwhile, Lou entertained like a First Lady in waiting at the Hoovers’ opulent home on S Street in Washington and made speeches urging American women to chart new paths by combining marriage and careers. When Calvin Coolidge chose not to run in 1928, there was no serious Republican competition to keep the Hoovers out of the White House.