II

Sisterhood of 1600

There’s a reason people like her. It’s because she doesn’t, sort of, you know, add fuel to the fire.

—MICHELLE OBAMA ON LAURA BUSH

There’s a sense of profound empathy among the first ladies that is very apparent in the letters they send to one another in times of hardship, in the aftermath of resignations, and during battles with illnesses. Many of these notes have “DO NOT ANSWER!” written in the margin so that there’s no obligation on the part of the recipient to write back. After the devastating losses of parents, husbands, and even, most tragically, children, they are there for each other. There are hundreds of these letters—many of which have never been seen by outsiders before—that show how their relationships evolve after they leave the White House and how they cut across political party lines. In an age when email is nearly ubiquitous, it’s fascinating to see the thoughtful letters these women wrote to each other and how they reveal universal truths about being first lady, whether serving as a Democrat or as a Republican. They also show the responsibilities they share as modern women who are wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends. Some of these letters are intensely personal and shockingly candid, and they offer a window into the private thoughts of these very public women.

The relationships between them last long after the White House years, with many letters inquiring about each other’s “grands” and “great-grands,” joking about aging (Lady Bird Johnson wrote to Laura Bush, “I don’t even buy green bananas anymore!”), and celebrating the openings of their husbands’ presidential libraries. They sympathize with each other about their exhausting schedules even after their husbands leave office, cheer each other on after television interviews, and donate to each other’s favorite causes (over the years Lady Bird donated thousands of dollars to the Betty Ford Center, a world-renowned addiction treatment center started by her friend Betty). In a 1983 letter, Lady Bird told Betty, “Not long ago I came across a mutual friend of ours who told me quite straight-forwardly that she decided to face up to a drinking problem and to overcome it. She is so much more fun to be around these days!” Betty was active raising money for the center and would invite very wealthy donors to the Fords’ house, sometimes taking her husband aside and declaring, “This is mine, not yours.”

Each came into office during a different time in the country’s history, and each was limited by the evolving perspectives on women’s rights and the role of the first lady. Protesters at Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, the all-women’s Wellesley College in Massachusetts, objected to having Barbara Bush as their commencement speaker in 1990 because, they said, her accomplishments were tied solely to her marriage. During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, stay-at-home mothers were furious when Hillary Clinton made the famous quip, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” It seems they draw fire from either side no matter what they do. But small acts of kindness, like the Carters’ invitation to Luci Baines Johnson to see the papal inauguration in the Vatican—a trip that meant so much to the Johnsons’ younger daughter because she had converted to Catholicism—and invitations to the White House, demonstrate a special and enduring bond among these families. Rosalynn Carter and Betty Ford grew so close that Betty’s daughter, Susan, sits on an advisory committee at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Upon the opening of the Kennedy Library in 1979, Lady Bird Johnson, who was seated in the front row with Jackie at the ceremony dedicating the library, wrote to her recognizing the complicated emotions of the day: “This has to be both a proud day and an emotionally exhausting day for you. . . . Do remember that there are so many people wishing you happiness and contentment. Count me among them.” Barbara Bush begged Pat Nixon to bring her children and grandchildren back to the White House in a 1990 note: “It would be so nice if you would bring Julie and Tricia and all their children back to the White House for lunch one day and then they could, with your help, give the grandchildren a tour. It would be such a treat for all.” In another private note, Barbara tells Pat that she thinks of her often, especially when she passes her White House portrait. “You are a shining example to us all of grace and graciousness both.” They even sent each other silly Hallmark cards, including a politically themed birthday card from Barbara Bush to Betty Ford in 1998 with a bunch of animals in party hats on the front. “We started out to get a signature for each of your birthdays and before we knew it—It turned into a petition drive—you’re now eligible to run for office in 23 states!!!” Barbara signed the card, telling Betty, “You’ll always be First Lady to us! Happy Birthday, with Respect and Love, Barbara B.”

Some of them use their former titles and friendships with each other to help personal friends. Lady Bird Johnson wrote an impassioned plea to President Clinton asking him to pardon her friend, Texas banker Ruben Johnson (no relation), who was convicted in 1989 of bank fraud. “To use an old-fashioned word, Ruben is very much a gentleman,” she wrote. Clinton obliged and Ruben Johnson’s was part of a slew of pardons he granted during the final days of his presidency (the pardon erased $4.56 million Johnson owed in court-ordered penalties).

These remarkable women are more than ceremonial figures—they play key roles in diplomacy, smoothing out rough edges and soothing hurt feelings. At countless formal dinners they are seated next to key political figures and have to communicate the administration’s agenda and, with any luck, sway their dinner partners. Often they report back to their husbands that night, or the next morning. During the Cold War, Pat Nixon was seated next to the cantankerous Soviet political leader Alexei Kosygin, whom she deftly handled throughout the dinner. She was a hard-liner when it came to the Soviets, according to her press secretary, Connie Stuart, “but she also felt that talking is better than not talking.” A Voice of America broadcaster who served as their translator during the dinner kept a record of their conversation. Kosygin asked the First Lady how many women served in the Senate and then said, “Women careerists in the U.S. are arrogant, ambitious, merciless, whereas in the Soviet Union, women deputies, who make up one-third of the total number, are serious, studious, and reasonable officials.” He went on to deride the American press, especially women reporters, whom the First Lady defended. But by the end of their conversation Pat had turned him around by expressing sympathy for the Russian people, who she noted had suffered terribly during World War II, and added that she was especially sorry for the Russians who had died because of the German blockade of Leningrad. Kosygin’s demeanor changed almost completely. “I was there,” he said softly. “It was dreadful.”

They understand the weight of the presidency better than anyone else. Betty Ford’s personal assistant, Nancy Chirdon Forster, remembers how Betty would call Lady Bird Johnson on quiet evenings. “And Lady Bird would call her sometimes, especially if there was something in the press and Mrs. Johnson thought she could be of help.” When asked if any former first ladies offered her support during the Iran hostage crisis, Rosalynn Carter said, “Lady Bird Johnson often reached out with concern.” Lady Bird was the grande dame of the first ladies and wrote beautiful letters. She wrote to Barbara Bush on June 5, 1991, while the Bushes were in the White House, saying, “I’ve been thinking of you with so much empathy and warmth. I hope you’ve been able to prevail upon the President not to let the all-pervasive duty of that Office devour completely his time and energies.” When Barbara Bush was First Lady she thanked Betty Ford for installing the outdoor pool on the south side of the West Wing. The pool, she wrote, “has saved my life.” When Laura Bush gave Michelle Obama her first tour of the White House, she was eager to assure Michelle that a life could be made there for her daughters. She wanted the tour to be special and private, even though Michelle had brought along a staffer. “This is really for Michelle and I,” Laura told Michelle’s aide. “You can meet with my staff, but this is a private visit for us.” Unlike the president, who leaves a note behind with advice for his successor, the first lady does not leave a letter behind but instead uses the tour of the second and third floors to impart words of wisdom. When asked if she left a note behind for Nancy Reagan, Rosalynn Carter said, “I did not leave her a note. I didn’t think about it. Betty Ford didn’t leave me one.” Laura Bush did not leave a note behind for Michelle Obama, either.

EACH OF THESE women, from Jackie Kennedy through Laura Bush, seemed to genuinely enjoy aspects of being first lady. Even Jackie Kennedy, though she hated seeing photographs in the press of her two small children, grew to love life as first lady. The only one who stands out is Michelle Obama. (Though Pat Nixon was unhappy in the White House, she enjoyed traveling, and reporters who covered her said she shone during trips away from Washington.) In dozens of interviews, friends and political aides say that Michelle is deeply unhappy in the White House. She’s not part of the Washington social scene that the Clintons embraced, and she mostly socializes with the same people she was friends with in Chicago, including the Whitaker and Nesbitt families, who have children close in age to the Obamas’ daughters, Sasha and Malia, and who live close to their house in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. (When they decided to run, the Obamas asked their longtime friends to promise that they would be there for them no matter what, win or lose.) Former Head Butler George Hannie was serving the new President and First Lady in the family’s private living quarters after the inauguration and told them, “You guys are going to be on the ride of a lifetime. Your whole life is changing today. You don’t have to wait for no more airplanes, you don’t have to do anything but just show up. Everything is right there ready for you.” Michelle’s eyes got big and she smiled, but Hannie got the sense that she had not fully understood how much their lives were about to change.

Now she cannot wait to leave. “They’re ready, they’re done!” says President Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn. During one of her first meetings with Chief Usher Admiral Stephen Rochon, Michelle told him, “Please, call me Michelle.” He replied, “I can’t do that, Mrs. Obama.” It wasn’t only his military training; it was his allegiance to the presidency that would not allow him to drop the formality. But Michelle longs to be treated like a private person again. In a September 2015 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Michelle said she was counting down the days until she could escape the intense and watchful eye of the Secret Service. “I also want to do little things like, you know, open a [car] window,” she said. “One day as a treat, my lead agent let us have the windows open on the way to Camp David. It was like five minutes out and he was like, ‘The window’s open. Enjoy it!’ I was like, ‘Thanks, Allen.’” It is the simple, everyday things that she misses. She still makes time at night to unplug, however, and especially likes watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta on Bravo after a long day.

Hillary can relate. In a 1995 column she wrote, “On a recent trip to Arkansas, I had a sudden impulse to drive. I jumped behind the wheel of a car and, much to the discomfort of my Secret Service detail, drove myself around town.” Such a simple act had become “extraordinary for me,” she said. Sometimes Hillary would throw on a baseball hat and walk through Georgetown, desperate to escape the White House. On the rare occasion when someone stopped her to say she looks like Hillary Clinton, she would smile and reply, “So I’ve been told.” Betty Ford’s press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, remembers getting a call from a White House reporter who said, “What is she doing in New York?” Weidenfeld said, “Mrs. Ford is not in New York. She’s upstairs in her bedroom.” The reporter replied, “No, she’s not. She was spotted on Seventh Avenue.” Betty had taken off shopping with her close friend Nancy Howe. “All right, let me check,” Weidenfeld said, annoyed. Like a small child who had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar, Betty promised she would not let it happen again. Betty’s personal assistant, Nancy Chirdon Forster, remembers how sad Betty was when, for fear of being spotted, she couldn’t go out in New York during scheduled trips and enjoy the evening. “So we’d just go back to the suite and we’d go to bed.”

Michelle Obama’s East Wing office is not forthcoming with information. “It’s harder than ever to get access to the First Lady!” said the exasperated veteran CBS News correspondent Bill Plante, who began covering the White House in 1981. “Requests to the First Lady’s office for an interview are normally politely declined.” The First Lady’s staff looks for any signs of self-promotion within the White House and makes sure to quash it. Friends and advisers say one reason for the hard line from her office is Michelle’s deep unhappiness as first lady.

Hairstylist Michael “Rahni” Flowers and his business partner Daryl Wells own Van Cleef hair salon, which is located in a refurbished church in downtown Chicago and caters to wealthy African American clients. Flowers first started doing Michelle’s hair when she was a teenager and she would come in with her mother, Marian Robinson. “Knowing her the way that we know her, this was nothing that she wanted,” Rahni said. Michelle is a “no-nonsense” woman who does not take herself too seriously, he adds. There was a casual atmosphere in the salon. Rahni remembers how he and the future first lady would talk about their shared love of bacon (“We’re bacon people,” she admitted in a 2008 interview on ABC’s The View), and Wells used to call her “Boo.” After her husband was elected president, Wells teased her, “Should I call you ‘First Lady Boo’? I’m going to call Marian ‘First Boo Mom.’” Now her whole world is different and her friends cannot get a message through to her directly. After her husband won the presidential election and Flowers and Wells wanted to make an announcement that she was at their salon, she asked them not to. “I’m just here to get my hair done,” she said. “I don’t want people standing up and clapping.”

When Michelle moved her young family into the White House, it was the first time that she’d been unemployed in her adult life. Before she started scaling back her schedule at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she was vice president of external affairs, to campaign for her husband, she was earning almost $275,000 a year. She was forty-five when she became first lady, the youngest woman to hold the position since Jackie Kennedy. “Remember, she was his mentor to begin with,” Bill Plante noted, referring to her work as an associate at the corporate law firm Sidley & Austin in Chicago and her assignment, at age twenty-five, to mentor Obama, who was a twenty-seven-year-old summer associate. (She rejected his requests to take her on a date because she thought it would be “tacky” if “the only two black people” at the law firm started dating, but she admits she fell in “deep like” with him when they first met.) She knew that the responsibility of transitioning their daughters, Malia and Sasha, who were ten and seven when they moved into the White House, would fall squarely on her shoulders. In an August 2008 interview with Ladies’ Home Journal she said, “They’ll be leaving the only home that they’ve known. Someone’s got to be the steward of that transition. And it can’t be the President of the United States. It will be me.” Her first chief of staff, Jackie Norris, said, “I think there were a lot of people saying no to her in the beginning, ‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t do this. No, I’m sorry, you can’t do that.’ Like going out for a walk, or ‘I just want to go to Target’ or ‘I just want to drive my kids to school.’ That’s pretty hard when you first come into an environment and have so many restrictions put on you and such high scrutiny. It was even higher than on the campaign trail.”

Michelle took a lavish trip to Spain in 2010 with daughter Sasha and family friends that came during the economic recession. The four-day vacation cost taxpayers almost half a million dollars due to the high cost of paying for the large Secret Service contingent and the cost of sending the First Lady’s traveling staff to accompany her on the trip. The Obamas paid for hotel expenses and the equivalent of first-class airfare. A New York Daily News headline blared, “A Modern Day Marie Antoinette.” A year later, in 2011, Michelle did get to take that trip to Target. She was photographed at a Target department store in suburban Alexandria, Virginia, where a photographer from the Associated Press shot photos of her casually dressed in a button-down floral shirt, a Nike baseball cap, and sunglasses. The trip was not as simple as it appeared, however, with Secret Service agents arriving at the store thirty minutes before the First Lady walked in. The First Lady’s office would not discuss how the lone AP photographer happened to be positioned to take shots of Michelle checking out, but the images were used to help diffuse the uproar about her expensive taste.

Michelle spoke much more bluntly than she ever had before about her frustrations with public life during Tuskegee University’s commencement in Tuskegee, Alabama, in May 2015. She told the graduating class of mostly African American students, “Back when my husband first started campaigning for president, folks had all sorts of questions of me: What kind of first lady would I be? What kinds of issues would I take on? Would I be more like Laura Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Reagan? . . . But, as potentially the first African American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?” She was angry about personal attacks against her husband, especially by those who persisted in questioning his citizenship. During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush attacked Bill Clinton’s ethics. But the Clintons and the Bushes, unlike the Obamas, are veterans of the bruising games of politics. “Things that were said about President Obama were taken very personally because it’s hard to hear someone talk about someone you love,” said Laura Bush’s chief of staff, Anita McBride. “The Bushes and the Clintons have been at this for so long, they know they have to brush it off.” In fact, twelve days after her husband was sworn in as governor of Texas, Laura was invited to the White House for a luncheon with governors’ spouses as part of the annual National Governors Association meeting. She was not surprised to find herself seated next to Rhea Chiles, the wife of Florida’s governor, Lawton Chiles, who had run and won a heated race against her brother-in-law Jeb the previous fall. “Whether the seating was intentional or accidental,” Laura Bush wrote in her memoir, “Rhea and I were forced to make polite conversation.”

Michelle is not always comfortable in the transactional world of politics, and friends say she finds it hard not to take some things personally. She has confessed to sleepless nights agonizing over how people were seeing her, people whom she would never meet in person but who had formed opinions about her through the media. The New Yorker spoof of her with an Afro in combat boots and a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder while fist-bumping her husband in the Oval Office was meant to show the outlandishness of her critics, but it wounded her. “You are amazed sometimes at how deep the lies can be,” she said in the New York Times. She told the students in Tuskegee that, eventually, she had to ignore the criticism. “I realized that if I wanted to keep my sanity and not let others define me, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to have faith in God’s plan for me.”

Reggie Love, Obama’s former personal assistant—who is known as his “body man” and is like a third child to the Obamas—says that he thinks the President is a hopeless optimist about the political system and his wife is a realist. She says she’s “Eeyore” and the President is “Mr. Happy.” Ever since Obama burst onto the national stage after he delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Michelle has been tamping down expectations that he can fix everything that’s wrong with Washington, though she made the case on the campaign trail in 2007 that “there is a specialness to him.” Unlike Hillary Clinton, Michelle rejects any comparisons of her young husband to President Kennedy, and of her style to Jackie Kennedy’s, even though she is the only other first lady to rival Jackie as a style icon. “Camelot to me doesn’t work,” Michelle said, referring to Jackie’s romanticized description of her family’s thousand days in the White House. “It was a fairy tale that turned out not to be completely true because no one can live up to that. And I don’t want to live like that.”

Michelle is frustrated in the White House, in part because she had to give up her career. “She can’t get up and leave and take a job in Europe or Chicago,” Love says, “so if there was something that was really appealing to her somewhere else she can’t do it.” She also doesn’t mask her feelings well. When she wrote emails to Alyssa Mastromonaco, who was in charge of the President’s schedule, to voice her concerns, she did it so bluntly that Mastromonaco asked for advice from colleagues about how to respond. (In the White House, staffers usually keep anything in an email innocuous, knowing that it could one day become public.)

President Obama knows that his wife is unhappy. In a 2013 Vogue interview the President spoke about Michelle, revealing a tinge of guilt. “She is a great mom. What is also true is Michelle’s had to accommodate”—here he pauses—“a life that”—another pause—“it’s fair to say was not necessarily what she envisioned for herself. She has to put up with me. And my schedule and my stresses. And she’s done a great job on that. But I think it would be a mistake to think that my wife, when I walk in the door, is, Hey, honey, how was your day? Let me give you a neck rub. It’s not as if Michelle is thinking in terms of, How do I cater to my husband?” The President told New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor that his staff “worries a lot more about what the first lady thinks than they worry about what I think,” a sentiment echoed by Love. “He’s the leader of the free world and she’s his wife. I think even the leader of the free world has to figure out how to keep everyone happy.” Michelle is a cut-to-the-chase working mother who “doesn’t hold stuff back,” Love says. And if anyone wants to challenge her, she says simply, “I’m not running for anything.” She does not get angry at criticisms of her husband’s policies, but she becomes infuriated by personal attacks, a current Obama administration official said on the condition of anonymity. She also abhors leaks, and at the beginning of her husband’s first term, when stories leaked out about infighting, she wanted explanations. “How could this happen?” she wanted to know. “We could say it’s just the way Washington works,” the Obama official said, “but she has a way of letting you know that that is no excuse.”

Michelle is keenly aware of what’s going on in her husband’s administration. One Obama staffer says that he worked for years in a less senior position, but when he got a much bigger job that brought him into daily contact with the President, he figured he had to introduce himself to the First Lady. “Oh, I know you,” she said, and rattled off five things about him. According to former White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton, Michelle watches MSNBC’s Morning Joe when she works out (ninety minutes, up to five times a week) and talks with the Obamas’ closest friend and adviser in the White House, Valerie Jarrett, often. “She’s plugged in,” Burton said. “She’s a consumer and knows what’s going on.” (Michelle introduced her husband to Jarrett, who has been instrumental in his political career.)

When her husband was a senator she dismissed the idea of leaving her girls, and her high-powered job, to fly to Washington for a luncheon with other Senate wives honoring then–First Lady Laura Bush. She still does not want to do anything without a specific purpose. When she became first lady she demanded that, in exchange for spending four hours at the annual Congressional Club luncheon—a tradition that began in 1912 in honor of the first lady—the well-to-do attendees commit to a day of volunteer work. “Whether it’s a food bank or a homeless shelter, there’s so much need out there,” she told the congressional wives clad in Lily Pulitzer dresses. During staff meetings, when advisers suggest she attend certain events, she will ask, “But why? I don’t want to just show up to show up.” She has always been absolutely clear to her staff that she is not Hillary Clinton. She laughs at the suggestion that she run for office herself one day, and she did not relish the battle to secure health-care reform and the fight to pass the President’s stimulus package. Unlike Hillary, whose feminism is so much a part of her identity, Michelle has said that while she agrees with much of the feminist agenda, she is “not that into labels” and would not identify herself as a feminist.

For Michelle, it’s always been about her husband’s personal exceptionalism and not about party loyalty. In a way, she is like Nancy Reagan, who had little interest in getting to know other Republican first ladies and even had a bad relationship with Barbara Bush during the eight years that the latter was the wife of President Reagan’s vice president. Sometimes Michelle’s advisers forget that she is part of a much larger tradition. The Obamas held a mental health summit at the White House in 2013, but Rosalynn Carter, who brought about the passage of mental health legislation in 1980 and made it her signature issue as First Lady, was left off the guest list. “I got really mad,” a former Carter aide said. He called a friend who had worked for the Obamas and told her about the oversight. She then called the First Lady’s chief of staff, Tina Tchen, who responded, “Oh God, I forgot.” According to President Carter’s aide, Rosalynn did not believe them and felt intentionally excluded. When asked in an interview if Hillary Clinton had sought her input when crafting health-care legislation, or if either Michelle Obama or President Obama asked for her advice when developing the health-care overhaul because of her extensive work on mental-health issues, Rosalynn said simply: “The answer to both of these questions is no.”

When they first moved into the White House the Obamas were overwhelmed, and it took them a long time to get used to a hundred-person staff. The day after his inauguration, President Obama came into the East Room and introduced himself to the residence employees. Both the President and the First Lady looked surprised when they met the staff separately, former White House Florist Bob Scanlan recalled. “They didn’t realize that there were that many people just in the house to take care of the house. At the time it doesn’t sink in that you have maybe two plumbers, three carpenters, you have gardeners, and you have eight housekeepers, because they’re not cleaning just the private quarters, they’re cleaning from the bottom up. Half those housekeepers are everywhere else in the house but the private quarters.” When the Obamas’ predecessors, George and Laura Bush, moved in, they knew exactly what to expect and they enjoyed reconnecting with butlers, maids, and others who affectionately referred to Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, as “Old Man Bush.”

Michelle Obama is surrounded by a team of women who insulate her from the press. It is easier for her handlers to go around traditional media and control the way she is perceived through posts on social media and selective interviews, often on late-night television. Her remove from her predecessors has been a source of frustration to the families of some of the women who came before her. Bob Bostock, who worked for the Nixons in the post-presidency and later worked for the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, was thrilled after the associate director of the library, Richard “Sandy” Quinn, met with a member of the First Lady’s staff about honoring the late Pat Nixon’s one-hundredth birthday in 2012 by dedicating the Spring 2012 Garden Tour in her honor. Pat had started the tradition of opening up the White House gardens to the public twice a year in 1972. He suggested a brief ceremony with Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Tricia Nixon Cox and their children, and a short dedication to Mrs. Nixon in the brochure. “Perhaps a photograph of Mrs. Nixon from that first spring tour could also be included,” Quinn offered. “I know that Mrs. Nixon’s daughters would be deeply gratified if you were to honor their mother in this way. They know, as few do, the enormous demands on the First Lady and on the President’s family.” A curt response from the First Lady’s deputy chief of staff, Melissa Winter, arrived two months later, thanking Quinn for the note and telling him that Mrs. Obama is “proud to continue the tradition of seasonal White House garden tours” but rejecting the idea of a ceremony. “It is not the practice of our office to dedicate White House tours,” she said. “We appreciate the thoughtful nature of your request.” The Nixon Library staff felt completely blown off and deeply disappointed. It’s not known whether Michelle ever saw Quinn’s original request or Winter’s response.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, read voraciously about her predecessors, in whom Michelle had expressed limited interest. When she was working on health care she sought advice from Betty Ford, who had worked tirelessly to get more funding for addiction. She invited Betty to a meeting with her and Vice President Al Gore’s wife, Tipper. In a letter dated March 24, 1993, she thanked Betty for her advice and wrote that she hoped her health-care proposal would reflect “a new commitment to the problems of substance abuse.”

Hillary’s closest relationship was with Jackie Kennedy, but the stresses of the job make for unlikely allies. According to her White House press secretary, Neel Lattimore, Hillary, who does not have much in common with Nancy Reagan, told her staff that she thought it was unfair that Nancy had been criticized for spending $200,000 (in private donations) on a new set of china for the White House. Nancy’s image as an imperial first lady—she was referred to contemptuously in the press as “Queen Nancy”—was amplified by the purchase (and not helped by revelations that she spent $25,000 on her inaugural wardrobe and $10,000 on a single gown). But when the Clintons first came to the White House and Hillary had to decide what china to use for state dinners, the Reagan china was the only complete set available. (Nancy was unapologetic about her decision to purchase new china. “We haven’t got enough china to serve a state dinner so we got china. The White House had to have china for heaven’s sake.”) As a young lawyer Hillary had worked on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment investigation of President Nixon, and she began to sympathize with the quiet suffering of Nixon’s wife, Pat, and the brave face she put on every day. Somebody on Hillary’s staff said something unkind about Pat when she passed away five months after the Clintons moved into the White House, and Hillary shot back, “That’s not true, you have to appreciate what Pat Nixon did in this White House.” (Neither Clinton, however, attended Pat’s funeral.) As first lady, Pat had created special tours for the blind and the disabled, so that blind visitors could touch some of the furniture, and she opened the White House to the public at night so that working people could visit more easily.

Hillary could identify with Pat’s humble childhood and her stoicism during her husband’s humiliating resignation. In a 1979 interview, Hillary made it clear that she empathized with political spouses and said, “I think that people who are married to politicians are under a tremendous strain, because unless you have a pretty strong sense of your own self-identity, it becomes very easy to be buffeted about by all the people who are around your husband. People who are advising him, people who want favors from him, people who want to do things with him, for him, or to him, and very often those people are not anxious to have the politician’s wife or family members around because that’s then competition for their time.”

Hillary’s friend and former speechwriter Lissa Muscatine says that Hillary believes strongly that women need to be given the freedom to make the right choices for their own lives, whether it’s working or staying home with their families. “She felt the same way about the first lady’s role, that the first ladies are different and they have different needs and interests and different experiences. They just need the freedom to be in that position in a way that works for them and their husbands and the presidency,” she said, adding, “This is not a defined job, so let people define it the way that they need to define it.” After the 2000 election, Hillary advised Laura Bush not to let the responsibilities of her new role cloud her decision making. Hillary had once turned down an invitation from Jackie Kennedy to go to the ballet in New York with Chelsea because she said she was too busy. She had always regretted it because Jackie passed away just a few months later.

When Hillary gave Laura the customary tour of the residence, they stood together in the first lady’s dressing room and Hillary said, “Your mother-in-law stood right here and told me that from this window you can see straight down into the Rose Garden and also over to the Oval Office.” Eight years later, when Michelle Obama came for her first tour of the White House, Laura showed her the exact same spot where so many first ladies have stood discreetly in the shadows, watching their husbands at work.

Surprisingly, Michelle is closer to Laura than she is to Hillary. Even though they are on different sides of the political spectrum, Laura and Michelle have personalities that mesh. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Michelle was heavily criticized for a remark she made during a speech in Milwaukee. “For the first time in my adult life,” she said, “I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Though she didn’t plan to say it, it became the most-talked-about quote from her time on the campaign trail. Laura Bush defended Michelle in an interview four months later. She had flown all night from Afghanistan, where she was visiting U.S. troops, to Slovenia, where she was joining President Bush for an annual summit. When she got to Slovenia she and her aides had a couple of hours to sleep and shower before an interview with ABC News’s Jon Karl. Laura had not anticipated being asked about Michelle’s remarks from several months earlier, but she immediately came to her defense. “I think she probably meant I’m ‘more proud,’ you know, is what she really meant,” she said sympathetically. “You have to be very careful in what you say. I mean, I know that, and that’s one of the things you learn and that’s one of the really difficult parts both of running for president and for being the spouse of the president, and that is, everything you say is looked at and in many cases misconstrued.”

A week later, in an interview on The View, Michelle said she was “touched” by what Laura said. “There’s a reason people like her,” she said. “It’s because she doesn’t, sort of, you know, add fuel to the fire.” Laura had grown accustomed to the rough-and-tumble world of presidential politics and remembered four years earlier when Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of then–presidential candidate John Kerry, told a newspaper that she didn’t know if Laura Bush had ever had “a real job,” forgetting that Laura had worked in Texas public schools as a librarian from 1968 to 1977. Michelle and Laura clearly had a rapport as they praised one another at a conference promoting women’s rights in September 2015. “I think it’s also a great example for the world to see that women of different political parties in the United States agree on so many issues,” Laura said. “We’re in the midst of a political campaign now, as everyone knows, a presidential race coming up and when you watch television you think that everyone in the United States disagrees with everybody else, but in fact we as Americans agree on so many more things than we disagree on.” Michelle added, “It has made my transition to this office so much easier having somebody like Laura and her team. . . . It’s not just Laura and I, it’s not just President Bush and President Obama, but it’s our staffs. My chief of staff continues to talk to Laura’s former chief of staff on a very regular basis and it’s that kind of sharing that prevents us from re-creating the wheel, allows us to build on the things that are already working so that the country gains as we transition from one party to the next.”

Michelle’s first chief of staff, Jackie Norris, says that she will “never forget the intense camaraderie and loyalty that the first ladies and members of the first ladies’ staffs have for each other.” After President Obama’s election, Norris sat down in Laura Bush’s office with Laura’s East Wing team, including Laura’s chief of staff, Anita McBride. Michelle’s staff was given what amounted to a blueprint, as Laura’s staff told them what missteps they had made along the way, which parties and luncheons were important, and which could be safely skipped. “What they wanted was to completely set aside politics and to help us succeed and to help Michelle Obama succeed as first lady. They were all in this unique position to understand just how hard her role would be.” When Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, was running a nonprofit specializing in global women’s rights, she brought a group of Afghan women to meet Laura Bush. After their meeting, Laura escorted the women out through the Diplomatic Reception Room. But Verveer lagged behind them, lost in conversation with Laura’s chief of staff. Laura approached them. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Verveer said, realizing that she had to leave, “but we belong to a small club.” “I completely understand,” Laura said with a smile. “I belong to a small club, too.”

PAT NIXON TOOK Connie Stuart, her chief of staff and press secretary, aside on a quiet day in February 1971 and whispered, “Jackie is coming. Nobody is to know and I’m only telling a few people; she is coming tomorrow.” Pat had invited Jackie and her children, Caroline and John-John, to visit the White House for the official unveiling of the President’s and the former First Lady’s portraits by Aaron Shikler. It was tradition for the former first family to attend such unveilings, but Jackie had not been back to the White House since her husband’s assassination. In response to an earlier invitation to return from Pat, she had told her that she wasn’t ready yet but that she knew that “time will make things easier, and that one day, when they and I are older, I must take Caroline and John back to the places where they lived with their father.” She had left the White House behind when she moved to New York shortly after the assassination, and she felt guilty about serving on the Committee for the Preservation of the White House and never showing up for meetings. “I’m still in mourning,” she told one reporter who asked for an interview a year after President Kennedy’s assassination. Jackie’s former social secretary and lifelong confidante Nancy Tuckerman sent her a memo on April 13, 1964, not yet five months after the assassination, asking her if she wanted to see a movie the navy had made of her husband’s funeral. “Could I wait a bit,” Jackie wrote at the bottom of the note. Jackie had been through so much pain in her life and Pat Nixon understood, telling her that she knew a public unveiling of the portraits would be too emotional. Pat promised that it would be absolutely private.

The Nixons and the Kennedys had known each other for years—the men’s offices were across the hall from each other when Richard Nixon was President Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president and John Kennedy was a senator. The Nixons were even invited to the Kennedys’ 1953 wedding (though they did not attend). After Pat wrote to Jackie that the portraits were ready to be hung in the White House, she must have been surprised by the letter she received, hand-delivered by Tuckerman. Jackie would come, but on her own terms. “I really do not have the courage to go through an official ceremony, and bring the children back to the only home they both knew with their father under such traumatic conditions.” She wanted to keep the press out of “their little lives” but said she was open to the idea of a private viewing. Immediately, Pat asked Tuckerman to call Jackie and schedule a time. A week later Jackie set foot in the house she had so lovingly restored and in which she had spent so many happy days with her husband.

If Jackie had had even the slightest sense that the press knew about her visit, she would never have come. (Veteran United Press International White House correspondent Helen Thomas somehow found out about the visit, and when she threatened to write a story she was promised an exclusive interview with Pat if she agreed to keep quiet.) During the top-secret meeting, the White House was on lockdown. There was no traffic between the normally bustling corridors connecting the East and West Wings. Most people on the staff did not know who was coming because it wasn’t noted on the President’s and First Lady’s calendars. Even their social secretary, Lucy Winchester, didn’t know what was happening. Only four staffers were told about the visit, and they had to pledge absolute secrecy.

On February 3, 1971, the Nixons sent a plane to pick up Jackie, ten-year-old John-John, and thirteen-year-old Caroline in New York for the trip to Washington. The Nixons quietly welcomed the Kennedys in the Diplomatic Reception Room, and Pat, knowing how much the White House restoration had meant to Jackie, showed her an English Regency chandelier she had added to the room. The Nixons’ two daughters—Tricia, twenty-four; and Julie, twenty-two—brought Caroline, who was wearing her school uniform, and John-John to the Solarium, which was once Caroline’s kindergarten, to see the panoramic view of the National Mall. Then the Nixon daughters stood in the hallway outside the Oval Office to let the Kennedys have a private moment inside. It was the place where their father had spent so many hours, and where two-year-old John-John had poked his head out from underneath his father’s desk in one of the most iconic photographs from the Kennedy White House. When they came to President Kennedy’s portrait in the Cross Hall, Jackie was quiet and simply thanked Pat for displaying it so prominently. The Nixon daughters dreaded showing the portrait to Caroline and John-John, but were relieved when the Kennedy children told their mother how much they liked it. Tricia and Julie continued the tour with three dogs in tow, including the Nixons’ beloved two-year-old Irish setter, King Timahoe.

The two families had dinner in the Family Dining Room on the second floor, and President Nixon joined them. Jackie, who wore an elegant long-sleeved black dress, told Pat that every first family should leave its own mark on the White House, and she complimented her on adding more antiques to the state rooms. (In a note later she told Pat, “I have never seen the White House look so perfect.”) There was an awkward moment when Jackie mused, “I always live in a dream world.” But John-John spilled his milk and lightened the mood considerably. The day after the visit, he wrote to the Nixons a heartbreakingly sweet, handwritten letter in childish scrawl on stationery with the imposing monogram JOHN KENNEDY in big block letters on the bottom right. “I can never thank you more for showing us the White House. I really liked everything about it,” he wrote. “You were so nice to show us everything. I don’t think I could remember much about the White House but it was really nice seeing it all again.” He said that when he sat on Lincoln’s Bed, where his father had slept, he made a wish and it was that he would do well in school. “I really really loved the dogs, they were so funny. As soon as I came home my dogs kept on sniffing me. Maybe they remember the White House.” He ended the note saying that he had “never tasted anything as good as the soufflé.”

Caroline wrote her thank-you note on hot-pink paper with a lowercase monogram on the bottom right: “Your Swiss chef is the best thing that ever came out of Switzerland, except maybe the chocolate.” She was five days shy of her sixth birthday when her father was killed, and remembered slightly more about the residence than her little brother. “It was so nice to see it all again,” she wrote, and thanked Julie and Tricia for being so nice to her. She also remembered to thank Butlers Eugene Allen and Charles Ficklin in her note. Caroline would recall that dinner years later as an adult, saying the visit helped her mother open up and share more of her White House memories with them. “I think she really appreciated Mrs. Nixon’s thoughtfulness in the sense that there are family values and a dedication to politics and patriotism that go beyond any disagreement on issues or party. One of the things you learn, having lived in the White House, is that there really are these common experiences and what we share is so much larger than what divides us.”

Jackie’s mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, sent Pat a touching note after Jackie called her to give the details of the evening. “Your warm-hearted welcome to her [Jackie] and my grandchildren on a day which might have been most difficult for all of them, moved me deeply. . . . And so, dear Mrs. Nixon, you brought joy to many who are near and dear to me and I thank you from my heart.”

The most poignant letter came from Jackie herself, written in her signature spidery handwriting on her sky blue stationery. “Can you imagine the gift you gave us to return to the White House privately with my little ones while they are still young enough to rediscover their childhood,” she wrote. “The day I always dreaded turned out to be one of the most precious ones I have spent with my children. May God bless you all. Most gratefully, Jackie.”

AFTER PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S assassination, the transition to the Johnson administration was difficult and emotional. Jackie politely declined all of Lady Bird Johnson’s invitations to come back to the White House. Phone calls between President Johnson and Jackie in the days following the assassination show just how much he wanted her to stay close after she moved out. After her incredible poise at her husband’s funeral, her popularity had risen to mythic heights and it was important that the Johnsons appear to have her support. In the calls LBJ tells her how much he loves her and how she gave him “strength,” and he all but begs her to come visit them. President Johnson even shamelessly had four reporters listen in on a call he made to her over Christmas 1963, in an attempt to show how close they were. But Jackie was not swayed. In 1965, Lady Bird renamed the elegant East Garden, with its boxwood and topiary trees and lavender and rosemary, after Jackie, but she never could get her to visit the White House. Jackie sent her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, to attend the dedication of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. “I explained to her [Lady Bird] in writing and on the telephone that it was really difficult for me and I didn’t really ever want to go back,” Jackie recalled.

Jackie and Lady Bird were bound forever by the assassination. Lady Bird was haunted by that day too, and would often refer to Jackie as “that poor young woman.” Rumors had been flying in late 1963 that Lyndon Johnson might be dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1964, so Lady Bird had gone to Texas a week earlier to prepare for the Kennedys’ scheduled stay at the Johnson ranch near Austin after they visited Dallas. She made sure the President’s favorite Ballantine’s Scotch was available and that champagne (champagne on the rocks was Jackie’s drink of choice) and Salem and L&M cigarettes (for Jackie) were on hand. Lady Bird even laid out terry-cloth hand towels because she had heard that the First Lady had an aversion to linen ones. Because of the President’s bad back, Lady Bird had procured a horsehair mattress like the one he used in the White House, and a Tennessee walking horse was available should Jackie want to ride. The smell of pecan pies cooling in the kitchen wafted through the air as technicians from the Signal Corps furiously installed secure phone lines for the President. Lady Bird reminded everyone to have the Kennedys come through the front door, instead of the kitchen door.

Leaving the rest of the preparations to the Johnsons’ social secretary, Bess Abell, Lady Bird went to Dallas to help her husband campaign. Abell remembers talking with a Secret Service agent outdoors about the entertainment they had set up for the Kennedys, including a man who would have a gun and a whip and a lasso for an act he was to perform. Suddenly someone ran down to the riverbank saying that the President had been shot. “Everybody was just in shock,” she said. “We all wanted to know, What can I do?” The Secret Service agents who had been waiting for the President’s arrival crammed around the television set in the kitchen, and in a panic Abell called her husband, Tyler, who would later become Johnson’s chief of protocol. He told her, “Bess, you’ve just got to buck yourself up and get yourself together. You’re in charge, now make something happen.”

Lady Bird was with her husband two cars behind the President’s limousine when the fatal shots were fired. She later stood dutifully beside him as he took the oath of office in the executive suite of Air Force One. Bess Abell did not see her until the next day when she went to the Johnsons’ Washington home, the Elms. Lady Bird was sitting in a small room off the foyer, a room she loved because of its privacy. Lady Bird put her arms around her friend. “Oh Bess, what you’ve been through,” she said. Abell laughs at the memory now—here was a woman who saw firsthand the devastation in Dallas, but she was worried about someone else. “She always thought about somebody else. She was just in control, she was moving forward.”

After her husband’s death, Jackie wrote a letter to LBJ and recounted good times they had all shared together. “We were friends, all four of us. All you did for me as a friend and the happy times we had. I always thought, way before the nomination, that Lady Bird should be the First Lady—but I don’t need to tell you here what I think of her qualities—her extraordinary grace of character—her willingness to assume every burden. She assumed so many for me and I love her very much.” Jackie ended the note with a sad and needless apology: “It cannot be very much help to you your first day in office to hear children on the lawn at recess,” she wrote, referring to Caroline’s kindergarten in the White House Solarium. “It is just one more example of your kindness that you let them stay—I promise they will soon be gone.”

When President Johnson died, Jackie called Lady Bird to express her condolences. Lady Bird, after all, had been there for her during the most difficult time in her life. “These have been emotion packed days, but there is still a certain feeling of insulation from the deep sadness I am sure must come,” Lady Bird wrote to Jackie, thanking her for her phone call. “You know all too well how the responsibilities come crowding in.” In the 1990s Jackie and Lady Bird met occasionally in Martha’s Vineyard, where they both vacationed. Lady Bird loved Jackie’s house on the island, and as a nature enthusiast she told Jackie, “It sits on the Island so ‘at home’ with its surroundings, almost as if it grew out of the land!” She agonized over news that Jackie had cancer and tried to boost the spirits of the woman she shared such an incredible history with. “Do know that you have an army of friends—known and unknown—who care very much about you.”

Letters between Jackie and Lady Bird show this lifelong feeling of sympathy Lady Bird had for her predecessor and what she called “the shadow of grief” that hung over the Kennedy family. Two remarkable letters from Lady Bird to Caroline Kennedy—one a week after Jackie’s death in 1994, the other after John Jr.’s death in 1999—show the depth of her feeling for the Kennedys and the enduring bond that they shared. Lady Bird had wept for Caroline three decades before, after President Kennedy’s death, and she cried for her again when she attended Jackie’s funeral at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue in New York. “As I looked at the faces of the crowds—and they were deep everywhere along the streets—I felt the keen edge of their sorrow,” she wrote to Caroline. She recalled a lunch with Jackie at her Martha’s Vineyard home the August before her death. “She seemed happy and contented and that is how I shall keep her in my thoughts—full of life, serene, and so justly proud of her beautiful family.” Five years later, Lady Bird wrote to Caroline again, after the plane John was piloting plunged into the Atlantic Ocean with his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, on board. The tragedy, Lady Bird wrote, “has cast a shadow over these long days. It is particularly painful for me thinking of all the suffering your family has had to bear.” It must have been surreal for Lady Bird to write about the man she knew best as a playful two-year-old little boy. “Mere words cannot erase, or even lessen—although I dearly wish they could—the enormous burden that lays so heavily upon you,” she told Caroline. “Surely you will be strengthened by the love and pride you feel for John, as so many of us did. He was the ‘nation’s child,’ too, universally admired and respected—a promising life too early ended.”

Presidents and first ladies, in and out of office, felt protective of the Kennedy children, who had endured so much. In 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr., by then the head of a major political magazine, George, and already named People’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” was at the Republican convention in San Diego to interview Gerald Ford for his magazine. After the interview, Ford, who was widely regarded as the nicest and most gracious of the former modern presidents, told him, “You know, John, I knew your dad fairly well. Is there anything you’d like to know about him?” Susan Ford was there and recalls that her father spoke privately with John. Her father never told her what Kennedy asked him. “He felt that was very much between him and John.”

Laura and Barbara Bush say that Lady Bird, a fellow Texan, is their favorite first lady. Aside from each other, of course. The Bushes and the Johnsons have a surprisingly strong relationship built over years of shared political ambition. In the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson was in the Senate with Prescott Bush, George H. W. Bush’s father, before divisive partisanship engulfed Washington. When Johnson, a Democrat, told George H. W. Bush, a Republican, how much he respected his father, Bush said he was happy to hear that from such a loyal Democrat. “Your father and I don’t like to be thought of as Republican or Democrat, rather as good Americans!” Johnson replied. George H. W. Bush was the first Republican congressman to represent the Houston area, and he voted for President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1968, even though it cost him political support. Bush left the inaugural celebration for Johnson’s Republican successor, Richard Nixon, to say goodbye to the Johnsons at Andrews Air Force Base, an act of kindness that Lady Bird always remembered. Barbara and George Bush also visited the Johnsons at their Texas ranch after they left Washington. Johnson took the Bushes for one of his famous high-octane, furiously fast drives around his 330-acre spread (Lady Bird called it their “own Serengeti”) and gave the young Republican congressman advice. The trip was a time for Barbara, a future first lady, and Lady Bird, a former first lady, to bond. Barbara summed up the families’ bipartisan friendship in a 1998 letter to Lady Bird: “All Bushes love the Johnsons.”

Lady Bird came back to the White House when Barbara’s daughter-in-law, Laura, was first lady. The two had met in 1973, but Lady Bird would not have known it. Laura had joined thousands of others to pay tribute to LBJ at his presidential library, where his flag-draped casket was brought to lie in state. Lady Bird and her daughters, Lynda and Luci, stood at the door of the library and shook people’s hands as they walked in, and Laura, then a young student, was among the mourners. Lady Bird was in her nineties by the time she visited Laura at the White House and had suffered a stroke. She could not speak and had to use a wheelchair, but when her car pulled up to the South Portico of the White House and Doorman Wilson Jerman, who had been maître d’ when the Johnsons lived there, greeted her the two shared an unforgettable moment together. “He and I are at the door,” Laura Bush later told Lady Bird’s two daughters, “and he literally falls into your mother’s arms.” When Laura Bush showed Lady Bird the official portrait of her husband, whom she had survived by decades, the former first lady raised her arms lovingly toward his face. So many years had passed since his death, but it was clear how much she loved him still.

JACKIE KENNEDY’S APPRECIATION for Hillary Clinton surprised her close friend the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Before he had met Hillary himself, he told Jackie that he was sure she would be “humorless.” Jackie quickly corrected him: “You couldn’t be more wrong,” she told him.

No other president had been able to develop a real rapport with Jackie. After the Clintons arrived on Martha’s Vineyard in August 1993, Jackie attended two private dinners for them with guest lists that included the celebrated writers William Styron and David McCullough and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. She also organized a luncheon for Hillary, and before the 1992 New Hampshire primary she and her son, John Jr., donated the maximum amount to Clinton’s campaign. Much has been made about President Bill Clinton’s worship of President Kennedy, but not much is known about the powerful friendship forged between Hillary Clinton and Jackie Kennedy.

Hillary asked Jackie how she had managed to raise her children to be such wonderful adults, all in the public eye. “That time together was extremely valued,” said Melanne Verveer during an interview in her small office in the back of a Georgetown townhouse. Verveer was Hillary’s chief of staff when she was first lady and remembers how important these conversations were to both women. “Nobody else can relate to this, there are so few women who’ve lived this existence. . . . No matter what differences they had among them, they shared that abiding understanding of the role that they played.”

Jackie had always tried to make sure that her children—John-John was the youngest child to live in the White House in the twentieth century—were respectful. She insisted that they call Doorman Preston Bruce, an African American who became like family to the Kennedys, “Mr. Bruce” instead of his nickname. “She was not about to have them say ‘Bruce,’” said Curator Jim Ketchum, who worked closely with Jackie on the redecoration of the White House. It was all about respect for the White House and its staff. “If you allow them,” Jackie told Hillary, “the White House staff will do anything for these kids. They will go out of their way for them and spoil them rotten.” She added, “You’re going to have to put your foot down, you’re going to have to make sure they have as normal a life as possible.”

Once, Chelsea had some of her classmates from her expensive private school, Sidwell Friends, over for a movie in the White House’s small private theater. “The kids made a real royal mess of the theater, there was popcorn everywhere,” Verveer recalled. Hillary saw it and was furious. “Nobody leaves the theater until every kernel is cleaned up,” she told them. There was also a real effort by the Clintons and the press to give Chelsea privacy. “As a mom you get to know another mom,” Verveer says. “And here’s a woman whose husband was assassinated, who went through horrors, all of that you accumulate.” Jackie thought that the identities of many of the other first ladies were too wrapped up in their husbands’, and she respected Hillary for cultivating her own image. Jackie herself had carefully done the same, even practicing her handwriting to make sure that it was distinct.

Jackie passed away on May 19, 1994, less than a year after that cruise off Martha’s Vineyard. The Clintons were heartbroken by the news of her death, Hillary most of all. She and Jackie had spoken on the phone in Jackie’s final days, and both Clintons received constant updates on her condition. When Jackie succumbed to cancer, the first couple spoke to the press from the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden on the east side of the White House.

“She’s been quite wonderful to my wife, to my daughter, and to all of us,” the President said. As he stepped away from the microphone, reporters started shouting questions. He cut them off. “I’d like for Hillary to say a word first, please.”

Unlike her husband, who was the picture of composure, the normally self-controlled Hillary Clinton was close to tears. “She was a great support to me personally when I started talking with her in the summer of 1992 about the challenges and opportunities of being in this position and how she had managed so well to carve out the space and privacy that children need to grow into what they have a right to become. She will always be more than a great first lady; she was a great woman and a great friend”—here her voice breaks—“and all of us will miss her very much.”

Hillary went to Jackie’s funeral Mass in New York City and flew back to Washington with members of the Kennedy family and Jackie’s close friends for her burial at Arlington National Cemetery. She was buried beside President Kennedy, their premature son, Patrick—who died shortly after his birth—and their stillborn daughter, Arabella. Two weeks later, John F. Kennedy Jr. wrote the Clintons a handwritten note about what their friendship had meant to his mother: “Since she left Washington I believe she resisted ever connecting with it emotionally—or the institutional demands of being a former First Lady. It had much to do with the memories stirred and her desires to resist being cast in a lifelong role that didn’t quite fit. However, she seemed profoundly happy and relieved to allow herself to reconnect with it through you.”

Hillary may have idolized Jackie, but she did not embrace the role of being first hostess and was not as sophisticated as Jackie, who left detailed instructions about minute details with the waitstaff, including what kind of champagne should be served. Hillary never forgot her middle-class roots. One evening, Vernon Jordan, a friend and powerful Clinton ally, went out to the West Sitting Hall, a living room on the second floor of the White House, and said, “Hillary, I got the wine.” She looked at the bottle—it was eight hundred dollars. “Oh no, you don’t have that one.” She took it and put it back. But Hillary’s old friend Mary Ann Campbell remembers how much had changed once she was in the White House. Campbell naïvely thought she could drop by casually and see Hillary. “One of her assistants said to come to this certain gate and she [Hillary] received me in the Diplomatic Reception Room. We sat in two antique chairs; a photographer came and took a picture of us.” Campbell could not fully comprehend the change in Hillary until she walked into the room. “For the first time in my life I was starstruck. I couldn’t say anything.” But the minute the photographer and Hillary’s aides walked out of the room, the First Lady leaned in conspiratorially and asked about their old Arkansas friends, local gossip, and who was getting a divorce.

JACKIE KENNEDY AND Nancy Reagan developed an unlikely friendship that began with a 1981 visit that Rose Kennedy made to the White House, the first time she had been back since her son John’s death. The Reagans had a delightful time with Rose and later attended a 1985 fund-raiser at Senator Ted Kennedy’s house in McLean, Virginia, to help raise money for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. “He was a patriot who summoned patriotism from the heart of a sated country,” Reagan told the crowd of wealthy donors on that summer night. “Which is not to say I supported John Kennedy when he ran for president, because I didn’t. I was for the other fellow. But you know, it’s true: when the battle’s over and the ground is cooled, well, it’s then that you see the opposing general’s valor.” The Reagans tried to greet every member of the Kennedy family they could, and after his remarks, Jackie approached President Reagan and said, “That was Jack.” The next morning a letter arrived from Ted Kennedy thanking the President: “Your presence was such a magnificent tribute to my brother. . . . The country is well served by your eloquent graceful leadership Mr. President.”

The day after Ted Kennedy died in 2009, Nancy Reagan did a telephone interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball. “We were close,” she said of the Kennedys, “and it didn’t make any difference to Ronnie or to Ted that one was a Republican and one a Democrat.” Jackie didn’t care much if Nancy was a Republican or a Democrat, either; she had a genuine respect for her. Nancy could also relate to Jackie’s trauma because she had almost lost her husband to an assassination attempt. Most of all, Jackie appreciated Nancy for her interest in fashion and for inviting icons like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra to perform at the White House. “She [Jackie] didn’t agree with them politically, but with Nancy she had a great appreciation for what she was trying to do to bring glamour back, because it’s the people’s house,” said a Kennedy family friend, Gustavo Paredes, the son of Jackie’s personal assistant Providencia Paredes.

Nancy had the same horrified reaction to the White House when she first saw it that Jackie had two decades earlier. “It really looked awful, the wooden floors, the painting, everything needed to be done to make it look the way it should have looked,” she said. Nancy raised $800,000 in private donations for its redecoration, with most of the money going to a face-lift for the second-floor residence. Nancy knew how her spending was perceived, and she wrote candidly in her memoir that she “won the unpopularity contest” among the other first ladies “hands down.” The Reagans’ son Ron was happy to hear that Jackie appreciated his mother’s sense of style. “I know that my mother admired Jackie Kennedy because she rewrote the book on first ladies; she was the first glamorous first lady and I think my mother was fascinated by that.”

Even though Jackie’s politics were more in line with the Carters’, she deplored their folksiness. Rosalynn Carter was well aware of Jackie’s opinion: “There is a bias against southerners, there was. . . . You had to keep proving yourself over and over. It didn’t matter what you did. . . . I wasn’t supposed to be sophisticated enough or something. But, you know, who wants to be sophisticated?!” In an interview, she mentioned a Washington Post cartoon that depicted her and her family with straw in their teeth and wearing straw hats. She sounded annoyed when asked if she sewed her and daughter Amy’s clothes in the White House, likely because of the criticism she had gotten for being a country bumpkin. She said she hadn’t made clothes for herself “since Jimmy was in the navy.” Unlike Jackie, who had the help of world-renowned decorator and socialite Mrs. Henry Parish II, known as Sister Parish, and Henry Francis du Pont, an heir to his family’s fortune, the Carters were decidedly less worldly. One of the only changes they made to the White House was paneling a wall on the third floor with wood from a barn from Rosalynn’s grandfather’s farm.

THE PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE between the first ladies provides a fascinating window into the true nature of their relationships. There are the pro forma thank-you notes (like the one from Lady Bird to Rosalynn Carter thanking her for an invitation to a White House dinner and mentioning the tablecloths with their “green lattice work and pink roses and the charming centerpieces of roses in antique baskets”) and the Christmas cards and small gifts (Texas pecan praline candy from Lady Bird Johnson, tchotchkes from Pat Nixon, and almond toffee from the Fords). One year, after Barbara Bush received her annual package of Texas pralines, she thanked Lady Bird with her usual self-deprecating sense of humor: “Only someone who lived in the White House would know that, although the food is the best in the world, the cupboard is bare in the upstairs kitchen. For someone who always fights a losing weight battle, this is not all bad.” There are also touching notes offering support after President Nixon’s resignation and after September 11, 2001, and letters to Nancy Reagan as she cared for her husband and dealt with the devastating effects of his Alzheimer’s disease.

They all share a deep and abiding loyalty to their husbands, perhaps none as great as what Nancy Reagan felt for Ronald Reagan. She told Mike Wallace in a 1975 interview: “My job is being Mrs. Ronald Reagan.” Does she ever see herself as her own person? “No, I never do. Always as Nancy Reagan. My life began with Ronnie.” Every year the President left a love note on her breakfast tray on March 4, the date of their wedding anniversary. In 1981 he told her that he would “scooch” down at his desk in the Oval Office just so that he could see the window in the West Sitting Hall where she would sometimes be sitting. He wrote that he “feels warm all over just knowing she is there.” In 1983 the two were apart on their anniversary and he wrote to her from their California ranch: “You know I love the ranch—but these last two days made it plain I only love it when you are there. Come to think of it that’s true of every place every time. When you aren’t there I’m no place, just lost in time and space.” Nancy Reynolds, a Reagan press aide and family friend, said, “He really didn’t function very well for a couple of days if she wasn’t around. Once she was there everything was all right. . . . He wanted her there every minute.” Nancy’s press secretary, Sheila Tate, remembered how the President would call her in her office early in the mornings as the Reagans were having coffee in bed. “Sheila, it’s President Reagan,” he’d say. “Mommy [the President’s nickname for Nancy] wants to speak to you,” and he’d pass the receiver over to Nancy because the phone was on his side of the bed.

Five years after President Reagan’s death, Nancy told Vanity Fair correspondent Bob Colacello that she hadn’t been to church in a while but that she asked preacher Billy Graham if she would be with her “Ronnie” again one day. “Just tell me that and I’ll be okay.”

“You are,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said, feeling as though she could go on, knowing that. She said if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she sometimes sees her late husband and talks to him. “It’s not important what I say. But the fact is, I do think he’s there. And I see him.”

Lady Bird Johnson praised Nancy for making the Reagans’ long goodbye public. “It will be a comfort to others,” she wrote to her, “whose families have been afflicted, to know that it [Alzheimer’s] is no respecter of fame or importance.” Lady Bird wrote to Nancy again on January 16, 2001, after the President broke his hip. “I hear news on the television since my limited vision and the newspapers have parted company. Some of the Secret Service agents on my detail also keep me informed.” She heard the news when she was listening to a set of tapes called Great Presidents and she was deep into the Reagan presidency. After President Reagan revealed he was suffering from Alzheimer’s in a moving letter to the nation, Betty Ford called Nancy several times. The two had not been close, but they both shared the experience of having been first lady and a deep love for their husbands. And their husbands had both been targets of assassination attempts. “She felt very bad for her because she realized what a lonely life Nancy had ahead of her,” Betty Ford’s daughter, Susan, says. On June 5, 2004, President Reagan died. Right before his death, Nancy said, he turned to look directly at her, something that he had not done in more than a month. “Then he closed his eyes and went. And that was a wonderful gift.” Even though Nancy was not particularly close with any first lady, the deep and lasting grief they all suffer after the deaths of their husbands binds them together. Ron Reagan said that although his mother is “not in a state of grief all the time” over his father’s death, “it’s not something you get over.”

FIRST LADIES BELONG to the world and get pleading letters and requests for help from people they know and from complete strangers. “Life as a first lady is to be in touch with the hard reality of other people’s lives,” says Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff, Melanne Verveer. “Going across the country there are constant pleas to a first lady for help. She doesn’t escape those stories, she doesn’t live in a bubble.” Verveer watched Hillary meet with a group of working-class women, one of whom said to her, “You know, Mrs. Clinton, I look up at the wall and when it’s three o’clock I freeze every day because I know my child’s getting out of school at three o’clock. I have no idea what’s happening to him from the moment he walks out of school until he gets home.” Hillary turned to Verveer after the meeting and said, “Can you imagine not being able to know until after you left your job hours later if your child is okay?” Decades earlier, when a residence staffer’s child was born with a disability, Mamie Eisenhower asked the mother and child to move into the White House. During Christmas she handed out Mamie dolls to the staffers, saving them some money on Christmas shopping. A couple of years later, when the Kennedys were in the executive mansion, White House Electrician Larry Bush asked Jackie if she would sell him her 1961 Mercury Colony Park, the car she often drove for long weekends in the Virginia countryside, because he knew that Jackie got a new car every year. She called him one day and said, “I heard my new car will be ready in two weeks. Do you still want my old one?” He bought it and drove it for ten years. Jackie donated many of the toys that were sent to her children to nearby orphanages. In a June 18, 1990, letter from First Lady Barbara Bush to former First Lady Betty Ford, the two are working together to help a young girl: “I do not know whether there is hope for little Diana Mowsesjan, but I will forward it to the appropriate office with the hope that maybe there can be.” According to the Ford Library, Mowsesjan was a Soviet child who needed help. Neither Betty Ford nor Barbara Bush wanted to publicize what they were doing to help this little girl, and there’s something dignified about their quiet efforts. In a similar way, Betty sent information about Pressley Ridge, a child advocacy organization, to Laura Bush in 2005, hoping that her office could do something to support its work. When Lady Bird Johnson found out that a butler’s wife was battling cancer she called two of the top oncologists in New York and that same day they landed at Washington’s National Airport to examine her. Before a trip to Korea, Nancy Reagan was told about two Korean children who badly needed heart surgery. Nancy started working the phones, and by the time the Reagans were flying back home on Air Force One, they had asked some staff to fly commercial so that the children could fly back with them. Both of the surgeries went well, and the children visited the White House when they were teenagers to thank the First Lady at the end of the administration. The son of one White House butler said it best: “The first lady can pick up the telephone and change your life.”

DURING THE 1976 presidential campaign, Rosalynn Carter was on her way to pay her respects to Lady Bird Johnson, whose husband had been the most recent Democratic president. The day before their meeting, Jimmy Carter’s embarrassing Playboy interview was published. In it, he said that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust” and had “committed adultery in my heart many times.” Carter’s campaign aides scrambled to repurpose a television ad featuring Rosalynn chatting with a bunch of women around a punch bowl and saying, “Jim has never had any hint of scandal in his personal life or his public life.” But the worst part, at least at that moment for Rosalynn, was what her husband had said in the interview about President Johnson: “I don’t think I would ever take on the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did—lying, cheating and distorting the truth.” Merely mentioning Johnson and Nixon in the same breath, so close to Nixon’s resignation, was anathema to Democrats. Rosalynn turned to an aide who was close with the Johnsons. “What does Mrs. Johnson think about the interview? What should I say about it?”

“You don’t say anything, Mrs. Carter,” the aide said. “You’re a southern lady just like Mrs. Johnson; it won’t be brought up. You’re two lovely southern ladies; just be yourself.” And that’s exactly what happened. No one understood the embarrassing position Rosalynn was in better than Lady Bird Johnson.