First Ladies (39 page)

The net result was one of the most humiliating rejections in presidential history. Forty-two out of forty-eight states repudiated President Herbert Hoover. Only two out of five Americans voted for him. Lou Henry Hoover could not believe it. She told friends it was the most vicious, the most unfair campaign she had ever seen. On her last day in the White House, as she said good-bye to her personal maid, tears filled her eyes. “Maggie,” she said, “my husband will live to do great things for his country.”

This became the faith to which both Hoovers clung. They refused to go quietly into the night. For the next ten years, Herbert Hoover flailed at Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. Not only were his efforts futile but he did not seem to realize he gave the Democratic Party’s flacks more opportunities to attack their favorite target. In each of FDR’s three bids for reelection, he ran against the synthetic Herbert Hoover—the rubber face above the size 17 collar.

Lou Hoover supported her husband loyally. But no one seemed to realize the depths of her private sorrow, as she watched him humiliated
again and again. Only a few close relatives, such as her niece Hulda Hoover McLean, saw how deeply she had been hurt in 1932, how “broken hearted she was by the injustice of it all.”

One other person knew: Grace Coolidge, watching from retirement in Massachusetts. Grace had become close to Lou Hoover during the Coolidge White House years. The two women had exchanged gifts, particularly flowers, and Grace had playfully adopted nicknames from their favorite blooms. Hers was Lily. Lou Hoover became Bleeding Heart. Was this latter choice evidence of Grace’s loving perceptiveness? I think so.

For eleven years Lou Hoover waited in vain for her husband’s vindication. Instead, Franklin Roosevelt went on from triumph to triumph. When World War II began, Herbert Hoover offered his services to his government. FDR rejected him with contempt, remarking to Bernard Baruch that he was not “going to raise him from the dead.” Compounding his cruelty, the President leaked old slanders against Hoover—that he had led investors astray as a mining expert and that he had collaborated with the Germans in some of their World War I atrocities, such as the murder of the English nurse Edith Cavell.

On the surface, Lou Hoover seemed reasonably contented. She spent most of her time in their beautiful hilltop home in Palo Alto, overlooking the Stanford University campus, where she and Bert had met. A glimpse of how much she loved that place is visible in an impromptu poem she sent to Grace Coolidge, inviting her out for a visit:

Herbert Hoover scorned this tranquillity. Still embroiled in his feud with FDR, he spent so much time in the East he acquired an apartment in the Waldorf Towers. Lou seldom accompanied him there. She was elected president of the Girl Scouts and became active in the Salvation Army. But her central role, helpmate of the Great Engineer, the man the whole world admired, had been destroyed. In the last year of her life, she confessed to a would-be biographer a yearning for a lost career of her own: “All kinds of projects I should like to have put through. A number of callings or professions I should like to have followed, and was prepared to begin. But always duties, interests or activities of the moment pushed farther back the moment for taking up any long-to-be continued cause or profession.”

In 1943 Herbert Hoover finally persuaded Lou to join him in the Waldorf Towers. He was girding for another assault on FDR in 1944, and he felt Palo Alto was too remote from the center of the action. Lou came east with great reluctance. For her Palo Alto had been a refuge from the bitter memories of 1932. Fragments of the trauma still lingered. In her desk she kept a stack of checks from people she had helped in the depths of the Depression. They had tried to pay her back, but she never cashed their checks.

As Christmas 1943 approached, she sent a generous check to her White House maid, Maggie, with a note suggesting she buy presents for her children. Two weeks later, on January 7, 1944, Lou went to Carnegie Hall to hear Mildred Dilling, a gifted harpist who had performed several times at the Hoover White House. On the way back to
the Waldorf, Lou felt ill and hailed a taxi. When Herbert Hoover went to her bedroom to kiss her good night—he was on his way out to a dinner honoring an old friend—he found Lou unconscious on the floor, her heart fluttering spasmodically. By the time he lifted her to the bed, Bleeding Heart was gone.

Recent studies at Johns Hopkins University have convinced doctors that the old wives’ tale is true: people can die of broken hearts. Researchers have discovered links between the limbic nervous system, which deals with the emotions, and a small spot in the section of the brain called the insular cortex, which controls the heartbeat. Repeated stimulation of the cortex by an intense emotion can cause the heart to fibrillate—beat wildly out of control—leading to cardiac arrest. The fact that Lou Hoover went to a concert that carried her back to the anguish of her White House years may well have been a factor in her sudden death.

Admittedly, it is not an open-and-shut case. But I think that ultimately Lou was killed by the same weapon that sent Rachel Jackson to her death. There is nothing inherently wrong with newsprint, of course. But in the wrong hands, it can have tragic consequences for some inhabitants of the White House.

—

W
HAT A PITY
L
OU
H
ENRY
H
OOVER DID NOT LIVE ANOTHER SIXTEEN
months. By then a new President was in the White House, and he was resolved to right the wrong that history—and the publicity mavens of the Democratic Party—had done to Herbert Hoover. He also believed the country needed Hoover’s talents as a thinker and manager of great humanitarian enterprises. “If you should be in Washington,” Harry Truman wrote to Mr. Hoover on May 24, 1945, “I would be most happy to talk over the European food situation with you. Also it would be a pleasure for me to become acquainted with you.”

I was a college student when that letter was written. One morning, as I hurried out of the White House, a tall, bulky man of a certain age came striding past me in the hall leading from the North Portico. He looked vaguely familiar, but I did not recognize him and he obviously did not know me. I watched with curiosity as he took the family elevator to the second floor. That evening I asked my father who he was.

“Go downstairs and look at the portraits hanging on the wall,” my father said. He never missed a chance to make me do my own historical research. I quickly discovered the man was Herbert Hoover, and the reason I had not recognized him also became clear. His portrait is not full length and gives you little sense of his height and surprising bulk.

That visit marked the beginning of a friendship with my father that brought Herbert Hoover back to Washington to help feed more millions of destitute people at the end of World War II and, later, to reorganize the executive branch of the federal government. In 1946 my mother invited Mr. Hoover to the White House to help her unveil a lovely portrait of Lou, which should have been hung there years before.

By the time Herbert Hoover died in 1964, he had become a beloved elder statesman, restored to the list of great Americans. In 1962 he wrote to ex-President Truman: “Yours has been a friendship that has reached deeper into my life than you know…. When you came to the White House, within a month you opened the door to me to the only profession I know, public service, and you undid some disgraceful action [s] that had taken place in prior years.”

I like to think that Lou Henry Hoover’s spirit guided her husband’s pen across the page as he wrote that letter—and her loving hand caressed his bowed head. It would by no means be the only example of the mysterious workings of the spirit in the history of the White House.

—

T
HE HOOVERS’ STORY REMINDS ME OF ANOTHER WHITE HOUSE
marriage between a gifted woman and a brilliant but rigid, driven public man. In one of the most extraordinary behind-the-scenes dramas in the mansion’s long history, the relationship between Louisa Johnson Adams and her husband, John Quincy Adams, ran the gamut from love to loathing to redemption.

Louisa Johnson’s father, Joshua, was a Marylander who flourished as a merchant in London before, during, and after the American Revolution.
Louisa was born in England and was exceptionally well educated in French schools. A striking beauty, with glossy, reddish blond hair and large brown eyes, she played the piano and the harp, sang well, and wrote more than passable poetry. When she met John Quincy Adams, his father was President of the United States and he was the American ambassador to the Netherlands.

Each recognized the other was a catch. But something warned Louisa—and John Quincy—not to take the bait. Louisa seemed too forward to the proper young diplomat, and she was put off by his sloppy appearance, his stiff manner, and his fierce temper. When she urged him to wear more fashionable clothes, he complied, appearing at a Johnson family picnic looking like a veritable Beau Brummell. Later, he furiously informed her that no wife of his would ever tell him what to wear. Louisa advised him to find a more submissive spouse. When he proposed, however, she swallowed her misgivings and said yes.

Louisa was supposed to bring a handsome dowry to the union. But within months of their marriage, they discovered Joshua Johnson was bankrupt and the money would not be forthcoming. This alone was enough to give John Quincy negative thoughts about his new bride. Louisa did not help matters by talking back to him about everything from where they should live to how they should raise their children.

At times Louisa could be outright defiant. She and her husband began their married lives in Berlin, where John Quincy was sent as the first American ambassador to Prussia. The Queen of Prussia suggested Louisa wear rouge, which was very much in fashion in the capital. Her Majesty even presented her with a jar of the stuff, but John Quincy forbade Louisa to use it. To him rouge was synonymous with immorality. When Louisa applied it anyway, John Quincy scrubbed it off with a wet towel. A few months later, getting ready for an evening at the royal court, Louisa rouged her face again and absolutely refused to take it off. An infuriated John Quincy went to the palace without her. Far from being upset, Louisa felt she had won a moral victory.

Back in the United States, still more battles awaited them. Louisa found Boston’s frigid winters excruciating and was even more pained
by the chilly reception she received from her mother-in-law. Abigail Adams did not think any woman on earth was worthy of her eldest—and favorite—son. Louisa was soon telling friends that “hanging and marriage were strongly assimilated.”

In spite of their quarrels, they were a well-matched marital team. Louisa was an expert hostess who invariably dazzled male guests. John Quincy’s diplomatic experience, which included serving as his father’s secretary when John Adams helped negotiate the treaty of peace that ended the American Revolution, made him an important personage. He had little difficulty winning a stint as U.S. senator from Massachusetts. But his heart was in foreign affairs, and he accepted an appointment as ambassador to St. Petersburg.

Pinched for money, John Quincy decided, without so much as consulting Louisa, to leave their two older sons, George and John, behind in Massachusetts with his parents. They would take with them only their third son, Charles. He did not even inform Louisa of this heart-wrenching decision until they were preparing to board their ship in Boston harbor. As America slipped beneath the horizon, Louisa asked her diary: “Can ambition repay such sacrifices?” She penned her own reply: “Never!”

Louisa Adams did not see her two older sons for eight years. Her bitterness toward her husband deepened after she gave birth to a daughter in Russia and the child died within little over a year. In spite of this searing loss, Louisa soon demonstrated a self-reliance which amply proved her contention that women are men’s equals. While the Adamses were in St. Petersburg, the whole world went to war. Napoleon invaded Russia and simultaneously dueled England for global supremacy on land and sea. Meanwhile the British began slugging it out with the United States in what we call the War of 1812.

When Napoleon’s Grand Army failed ingloriously and the Americans regained their fighting spirit after the burning of Washington, D.C., peace negotiations broke out. John Quincy Adams was appointed to head the American team of diplomats confronting some surly Britons at Ghent in Belgium. Leaving Louisa in St. Petersburg for the better part of a year, he successfully wrested a very advantageous
peace treaty from the English, then casually ordered her to join him in Paris.

John Quincy apparently gave not even a passing thought to the dangers he was asking his wife to face. With her eight-year-old son Charles and three servants, Louisa set out in February across frozen Russia and Poland in a sled, braving desolate wastes and lawless guerrillas. In eight weeks she traveled a thousand miles and arrived in France just in time to encounter drunken French soldiers marching to join Napoleon, who had escaped from exile and was preparing for another try at
la Gloire
. The infantrymen took one look at Louisa’s Russian-built carriage, remembered their humiliating retreat from Moscow, and decided to murder her.