The East Wing

So it is probably just as well that First Ladies ends with Michelle Obama.

If the old saying is true, and a camel is what you get when a committee tries to design a horse, First Ladies—an uneven compilation of the lives of all of the women married to presidents, plus a few nieces, friends, and other relations who served as White House hostesses, based on a year-long series of C-SPAN interviews with a mixed bag of presidential historians—is what you get when a committee writes a book. While short on style, flow, and depth, it offers a rich trove of insights and anecdotes—some trivial, some profound—about the women who have occupied what is arguably the highest unelected political position in American society.

It’s a job that comes with a heavy price tag. As Grace Goodhue Coolidge, the underestimated wife of an underestimated president, once wrote, it means having to be two people at once: 

Some presidential wives have relished their role; others have done their best to evade it. None more so than Jane Pierce, who spent her husband’s presidential years “cloistered on the second floor of the White House, where she would compose letters to her dead son and connect with spiritualists.” Her letters to others, we are told, reveal that she was “very selfish. She seemed hooked on being ill, but they were never serious illnesses; they were usually colds. She could have a cold at the drop of a hat.” All of which may help to explain why Franklin Pierce had a reputation for hitting the bottle pretty hard. 

As to her legacy, “If she had any influences [on the administration], they were negative. Jane Pierce came into the White House as a 47-year-old lady who, it was well known, hated politics.” She did, however, successfully push for “a new luxurious bathroom on the second floor of the White House where the family lived,” making her an early advocate of clean government.

Ironies abound in this catch-all compendium. The only show-business couple to occupy the White House, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, were deeply, romantically, traditionally in love and entirely devoted to each other, while the Clintons—both Ivy League lawyers by profession—had a show-business-style marriage of convenience, chained together by personal ambitions that could only be forwarded by keeping the matrimonial act from breaking up. 

As Hillary biographer Gail Sheehy reveals, in 1989, “Bill Clinton .  .  . fell in love with another woman, really fell in love with her. This was not a bimbo. This was not a black-rooted lounge singer. This was actually a woman of quality, a professional whose family was in Arkansas and in politics. He asked Hillary for a divorce.” Hillary’s response, says Sheehy, was, “Nothing doing. That’s not going to happen. This affair is going to end.” The show, as they say, must go on, and love had little or nothing to do with it. One can’t help wondering how many lamps would have gone unthrown and unbroken in a Hillary-free White House.

But Mrs. Clinton is far from the only first lady to make a devil’s bargain on the way to the White House. Florence Kling Harding was a grimly high-minded do-gooder who once observed that “the happy woman is not one who has married the best on earth but the one who is philosophical enough to make the best of what she got.” In her case, what she got was Warren Gamaliel Harding, an amiable philanderer of modest intellect who would never have made it to the presidency without his wife’s steely determination to get him there. 

In the end, Mrs. Harding’s great achievement turned out to be more a triumph of the Peter Principle than of will. While both husband and wife were personally honest, the Harding administration was riddled with corruption, including a disgraceful scandal at the newly established Veterans Bureau, headed by a crook named Charles Forbes. Forbes, who “flattered Florence shamelessly,” got the appointment partially as a result of her recommendation, which she lived to regret bitterly.

Lady Bird Johnson, who also turned a blind eye to her husband’s repeated adulteries and ethical inadequacies, at least succeeded in making a more lasting, positive contribution as first lady. Washington, D.C., and the millions of visitors who have passed through it since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency are the beneficiaries of Lady Bird’s beautification program that transformed the local landscape for the better. While Cokie Roberts and Betty Boyd Caroli also lay on the praise for Mrs. Johnson as a business genius, the fact is that the modest radio station she bought for $17,500 in 1943 grew into “a communications empire” largely through her husband’s growing Washington influence as Senate majority leader during the Eisenhower years, with sweetheart licensing deals that guaranteed a virtual monopoly in one of the most lucrative media markets in the southwest. 

If ever a wife had earned a long and satisfying widowhood, it was Lady Bird Johnson, and she got it, from 1973 to 2007, when she died at the ripe old age of 94. A series of strokes slowed her down in her last few years, but not before she had played a key role in setting up her husband’s presidential library and continued her conservation and beautification efforts. She was also instrumental in the release of the Johnson White House tapes—warts and all—that portray her larger-than-life mate in all of his egotistical savvy, brilliance, and vulgarity. This was an act of courage and integrity on her part that was also a gift to historians. Mrs. Johnson was a positive influence on at least two future first ladies, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, both of whom would invoke her words: “I realized I had a pulpit and I could use it, and I could use it for good.”

And then there is Eleanor Roosevelt, another cheated-on wife who consoled herself by using her position as first lady to tirelessly forward her reform-minded, and sometimes radical, socio-political agenda. No first lady before or since has played a larger public role in her husband’s presidency, a role magnified by the sheer length of Franklin Roosevelt’s time in office (1933-1945). Eleanor Roosevelt edited party manifestos, used radio even more effectively and frequently than her husband, wrote a widely syndicated daily newspaper column from 1935 to 1962, and toured extensively, all with FDR’s encouragement—in part because it kept her on the road and out of his hair.

The quality of the individual chapters and contributors varies, with recognized White House historians and biographers such as Richard Norton Smith, Michael Beschloss, David Maraniss, and Douglas Brinkley, as well as well-known television commentators Judy Woodruff and Cokie Roberts, participating side-by-side with specialists on obscure first ladies such as Abigail Fillmore (née Powers). But First Ladies is useful as a wide-ranging, rough-draft introduction to “all the presidents’ women,” albeit with an overall liberal tilt and occasional instances of editorial sloppiness, such as when it describes the Hermitage as having become Andrew Jackson’s “home early in the eighteenth century,” when Old Hickory wasn’t even born until 1767.

As a former White House aide who witnessed the impact of three presidential wives—Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, and Nancy Reagan—at close quarters and had the pleasure of getting to know Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis while serving as a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, I found the chapters on all four of these strong, intelligent women to be balanced and often insightful portraits of very different characters, each of whom was devoted to, and appreciated by, her husband. And each of whom made the most of her time in the White House, whether or not she enjoyed being there. 

Aram Bakshian Jr., who served as an aide to presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, is a writer in Washington.