V

Supporting Actors

Somebody else can have Madison Avenue. I’ll take Bird.

—LBJ ON HIS WIFE’S EXTRAORDINARY POLITICAL SAVVY

First ladies support their husbands, and that includes acting as sources of reassurance and normalcy during times of tragedy, as Lady Bird Johnson did after President Kennedy’s assassination and as Laura Bush did after 9/11. They can speak to grieving mothers and wives in a more personal way than their husbands can. They often put their own ambitions and desires aside for the sake of their husbands’ presidencies. Even when they want to do something as small and seemingly inconsequential as replace a member of the White House residence staff, they seek the President’s approval. They are co-stars on a national stage where their every move is scrutinized and they cannot do a thing without considering how it will affect the presidency. In all cases it is doubtful that their husbands would have been elected had it not been for them.

Lady Bird Johnson loved to read, but she developed macular degeneration in her old age and could no longer read easily. Her devoted staff, made up of a handful of women, some of whom had been with her in the White House, took turns reading to her. Shirley James was Lady Bird’s executive assistant and was with her when she passed away at ninety-four years old on July 11, 2007. Years earlier, James was preparing Lady Bird for a retrospective interview she had agreed to do about the year 1968. The two sat quietly together at the Johnsons’ Texas ranch and James read aloud the parts of Lady Bird’s diary that were about the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. James fought back tears as she read Lady Bird’s entry from the day Robert Kennedy was killed. “Nineteen sixty-eight was a hell of a year,” James said, shaking her head as tears rolled down her cheeks. When she looked up, she was surprised to see Lady Bird, who rarely cried, also in tears. “Yes,” Lady Bird said softly, “It was a hell of a year.” In an entry from her diary on the day Robert Kennedy was shot, Lady Bird wrote, “There was an air of unreality about the whole thing—a nightmare quality. It couldn’t be. You dreamed it. It had happened before.”

She knew all too well what had happened before, when President Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963, and her life changed forever. No modern first lady has ever had to handle such a violent transition as Lady Bird Johnson did. Unlike her predecessors, Lady Bird moved into a White House in mourning. Her social secretary, Bess Abell, remembered just how jarring the transition was: “Instead of coming in with the excitement and the thrill of an inauguration, we moved into a house that was covered with black crepe on all the chandeliers and the columns.”

The new First Lady often lamented the impossible position her family was suddenly thrust into. In her diary she wrote, “If Lyndon could pull all the stars out of the skies and make a necklace for Jackie Kennedy he would do it.” Lady Bird was in the motorcade with the Kennedys, and on the flight back from Dallas, as President Kennedy’s casket sat in the plane’s corridor, she approached a dazed Jackie. “We never even wanted to be vice president,” she told her. “Now, dear God, it’s come to this.” When the media began pelting her press secretary, Liz Carpenter, with questions about when Jackie and her two children would be moving out of the White House, Lady Bird was furious. “I would to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort; I can at least serve her convenience,” she told Carpenter.

Lady Bird was adamantly opposed to the plan to move her family into the White House on December 7, 1963, because it fell on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. “The only argument I ever recall witnessing my parents having—I didn’t actually witness it, I was eavesdropping—I heard raised voices and some expression of anger between my parents,” Luci Johnson said. “It was my mother, who was always so respectful and deferential, and my father, who was always honoring my mother deeply. My father was saying, ‘We have to move December seventh, Bird.’ My mother said, ‘Lyndon, any day but that. Any day but that.’” Lady Bird was “begging for an alternative,” her daughter recalled. Ultimately, she lost the fight.

Lady Bird had a complicated relationship with Jackie, whose youth and jaw-dropping beauty she could not match. A newspaper editor from Texas told her, “You poor thing having to follow Jackie Kennedy.” “Don’t pity me,” she said. “Grieve for Mrs. Kennedy; she lost her husband. I still have my Lyndon.” What she couldn’t match in appearance she made up for in dedication and stamina. Because Jackie was pregnant with John-John, then-Senator John Kennedy had asked Lady Bird to take on a defining role in the 1960 campaign. She was proud of her southern roots (she regularly peppered sentences with phrases like “He was as full of ideas as a pomegranate is of seed”) and she was a natural on the campaign trail. She never complained and always sought to shield her husband. When she was campaigning with LBJ and the Kennedys, she got a call telling her that her father, whom she adored, had developed blood poisoning in one of his legs and that the leg would have to be amputated the next day. Her entire body flinched when she answered the phone, but she quickly straightened up. “What time will they operate?” she asked her father’s doctor. “I will be there.” She didn’t tell LBJ right away because he was getting dressed for an event and was dealing with several political problems. She waited until he was in good spirits, put her hand calmly on his shoulder, and said, “Daddy’s going to have to be operated on in the morning, and I will have to leave and be there.” Johnson sighed deeply and nodded, and the two of them went through the campaign events they had lined up for the rest of that evening. Lady Bird summoned her extraordinary self-discipline to push her private pain from her mind and get back to work.

When she became First Lady, she eagerly took on an exhausting schedule. She told Chief Usher J. B. West, “My husband comes first, the girls second, and I will be satisfied with what’s left.” Doorman Preston Bruce, who started at the White House at the beginning of President Eisenhower’s first term, would stand in the doorway of the sweeping Entrance Hall and watch her with amusement. “I never saw her take a moment for herself all the time she was at the White House.” During the 1960 campaign, she traveled 35,000 miles, visited eleven states, and went to about 150 events during one two-month span. During just five days she gave forty-five speeches. “Lady Bird carried Texas for us,” Robert Kennedy said at the time. Once her husband became President Kennedy’s vice president, she spent much of her time being a pinch hitter and doing the photo ops and events that Jackie Kennedy didn’t want to do. Lady Bird took Jackie’s place more than fifty times, filling in for her while Jackie did one of her signature PBOs, her own acronym for “the polite brush-off.” Jackie’s staff came to refer to Lady Bird as “Saint Bird” for saving them from embarrassment again and again.

Bess Abell, who had two young children when she was the Johnsons’ social secretary, remembers how much the Johnsons entertained and how hard they, and everyone on their staffs, worked. Before formal dinners, after all the guests were seated, Abell would sneak into the Usher’s Office and read bedtime stories to her sons over the phone. “Some people think that was unforgivable,” she laughed, but it was a job and a friendship that both she and Lady Bird would not have traded for anything. In 1968, when Lady Bird’s husband announced his decision not to seek the presidency again, Lady Bird said, “We need to make every minute, every day, every hour between now and next January twentieth count.”

Lady Bird had been a gifted student in high school, but she was so painfully shy that she purposefully answered some questions incorrectly on exams so that she wouldn’t have to speak as valedictorian or salutatorian at graduation. But through the years her confidence grew, and she attended the University of Texas, where she earned a double bachelor’s degree in history and journalism at a time when few women would have dreamed of going to college. Her father was the richest man in their small East Texas town, and her mother, who died when she was five years old, was from a wealthy Alabama family. When LBJ decided to run for Congress, his bride took ten thousand dollars of her inheritance to help get him there.

She had wanted to become a newspaper reporter, but soon after she met young congressional aide Lyndon Baines Johnson, she traded in her plans for this larger-than-life character, whom she called “electric.” She said she felt “like a moth drawn to a flame.” He proposed the day after they met but she was unsure. The two exchanged more than ninety letters sent between Washington, D.C., where Johnson was working for Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg, and her home in Karnack, Texas. “We either do it now, or we never will,” he wrote to her. Days later, he showed up at Bird’s doorstep with a $2.50 ring from Sears, Roebuck and refused to leave without her acquiescence. They married on November 17, 1934, when she was twenty-one years old and he was twenty-six. It was less than three months from the day they first met.

Even though Lady Bird helped get him elected to every office he ran for, by supporting him financially or emotionally, LBJ sometimes treated her with outright contempt. He made other couples blush when he harangued her in public, comparing her with other women he found more beautiful. At parties he would yell at her to get him another slice of pie, or tell her to change her “funny-looking shoes.” He did not even bother informing her about his first run for Congress until he announced it publicly. “See you later, Bird,” he’d bark the minute any political conversation came up—her cue to leave the room immediately. He hated the color purple and would tell his wife not to wear it, and to stop wearing “saddlebag” fabrics. (“He likes the things that show the shape of your figure, if you have one to show,” says Abell.) LBJ’s drinking sometimes got out of hand and Lady Bird would occasionally ask the White House butlers to cut his Cutty Sark whiskey with water. Johnson’s adviser Joe Califano said Lady Bird was the best thing that ever happened to LBJ. “She helped him when he was down; he was essentially a manic depressive, up and down; she leveled it out for him.”

As LBJ’s political star rose, Lady Bird became more and more sure of herself, slowly transforming from a shy bookworm into a political force and a cunning businesswoman who (against her husband’s wishes) invested $17,000 of her inheritance in a small media company that by the time they got to the White House was worth $9 million (roughly $68 million in today’s dollars). Lady Bird vividly remembered when they first made a profit—eighteen dollars—on her investment in August 1944. She began taking an active role in politics in 1941, after he lost his first bid for the Senate and returned to the House. While he was on active duty in the navy during World War II, she managed his legislative office.

Lyndon Johnson smoked nearly sixty cigarettes a day and suffered an almost-fatal heart attack in 1955 while in the Senate. It was then that he began to see her as a lifeline, and he pleaded with her to stay by his bedside the entire time he was in the hospital. Like the dutiful wife that she was, she returned home only twice during those five weeks to see their eleven-year-old and eight-year-old daughters. “Her priority was always him,” said the Johnsons’ social secretary, Bess Abell. “Those two girls, they could take care of themselves.” The ordeal softened LBJ’s treatment of Lady Bird. After his brush with death he let her listen in on policy discussions and asked her how she thought certain decisions would play to the American public. She changed, too, in part because of her new position in her husband’s world. In the mid-1950s, she started to critique LBJ, sometimes even handing him notes during public speeches that said things like “That’s enough” when she thought he was going on too long. Occasionally, when he did not heed her advice, she physically pulled on his jacket lapel to get him to sit down.

In the White House, Lady Bird had each day planned out ahead of time and worked diligently in her “office,” the cream-colored bedroom where she studied speeches and dictated letters. Sometimes she escaped to the blue-and-white Queens’ Sitting Room to work on projects like Head Start and organize monthly luncheons dubbed “Women Do-ers,” which gathered high-powered businesswomen together. She’s best remembered for the Highway Beautification Act, signed by her husband on October 22, 1965, and nicknamed “Lady Bird’s Bill,” which called for limiting billboards and landscaping and planting flowers along the nation’s highways. What is less known is that she influenced almost all of the nearly two hundred laws having to do with the environment during her husband’s administration. She fought to protect California’s redwood trees and to preserve the breathtaking beauty of the Grand Canyon. She was one of the country’s earliest and most famous environmentalists, and she believed that there was something sacred about nature’s beauty that must be cherished and preserved. “Where flowers bloom, so does hope,” she’d say.

She was kind to the staff. Electrician Bill Cliber remembers Secret Service agents approaching him after the birth of his son. They asked him which hospital his wife was at because the First Lady wanted to send flowers. “No,” he said, shaking his head as tears filled his eyes. “The First Lady went and got flowers and she took them to her and gave them to my wife in the hospital.” When Cliber thanked her later, Lady Bird told him that it was the easiest thing she ever had to do as First Lady.

In 1964, the stakes were even higher than they had been in 1960, and her husband told her he needed her help to win the presidency. She became the first first lady to go on the campaign trail without the President at her side when she traveled 1,628 miles across eight southern states on her “Lady Bird Special,” making forty-seven speeches to half a million people on the historic whistle-stop train tour. It was the fall of 1964 and her husband was in trouble in the South because, months earlier, he had pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which overturned the so-called Jim Crow segregation laws. Some southerners felt that their way of life was being threatened. Lady Bird, who grew up in a small town in East Texas, was the administration’s emissary to the South. In a slow and deliberate voice, she urged southerners to accept desegregation or else watch their economy crumble. Referring to her Texas accent an aide said, “They may not believe what you’re saying, but they sure will understand the way you’re saying it!” She told her staff, “Don’t give me easy towns. Anyone can get into Atlanta—it’s the new, modern South. Let me take the tough ones.” She insisted on calling the senators and governors of each state that she visited, Democrat or Republican, to tell them of her arrival and to ask them to hop onto the train with her. It was a clever move that helped endear her to her husband’s fiercest critics. “I don’t think I’ll have many takers,” she admitted. “But it’s only polite to ask.”

Tens of thousands of people lined the tracks at railroad stations in small towns across the rural South. There were death threats and angry hecklers who held up signs that read “Black Bird. Go Home.” Aides noticed that her southern accent got more and more pronounced as they traveled farther and farther south. Her message to those who considered the Civil Rights Act a betrayal: “There is, in this Southland, more love than hate.” She spoke from the platform of the caboose and would sometimes calmly raise a white-gloved hand to try to calm the protesters. At one stop she told the angry crowd shouting racial epithets that their words were “not from the good people of South Carolina but from the state of confusion.” Johnson’s aide Bill Moyers remembers hearing from an advance man who called from the road almost in tears. “As long as I live,” he said, trying not to cry, “I will thank God I was here today, so that I can tell my children that courage makes a difference.” In Columbia, South Carolina, a group of young men shouted, “We want Barry [LBJ’s Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater]! We want Barry!” Without losing her composure, the First Lady turned to them and said: “My friends, in this country we are entitled to many viewpoints. You are entitled to yours. But right now, I’m entitled to mine.” The crowd roared with approval. When Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs grew so angry with the hecklers that he told the First Lady that he wanted to make a statement on her behalf, she called him into her private train car. “I can handle any ugly moment,” she told him. Lady Bird refused to call off the trip even when Secret Service agents told her that it would be necessary to sweep the railroad tracks for bombs. (An extra engine traveled fifteen minutes ahead of her train for this very reason.)

The Carters of Georgia shared the Johnsons’ southern roots, and Lillian Carter, President Carter’s mother, was a county chairman for Lyndon Johnson in Americus, Georgia, during the 1964 campaign. “Nobody else would take [the job],” said Rosalynn Carter, who was the only other first lady who could truly understand what Lady Bird went through during that southern swing. People wrote racial slurs with soap on Lillian’s car parked outside campaign headquarters and tied her radio antenna in a knot. “Our boys would go to school with Democratic buttons on, Lyndon Johnson buttons on, and literally get beat up,” President Carter recalled. “Their clothes would be torn.”

Even amid all the hate, Lady Bird had fun traveling through the South and the train was full of laughter. On board were pretty, young hostesses wearing blue uniforms and handing out “All the Way with LBJ” buttons. For the 225 members of the traveling press who rode in the nineteen-car caravan there was a daily happy hour from 4 to 5 p.m. complete with food from the region: ham and biscuits in Virginia, shrimp and avocado dip in Florida. The two dining cars were open at all hours and offered dishes like “LBJ steak platter—Please specify: raring to go, middle of the road, or all-the-way.” Johnson carried most of the South in November and won the election. “All those women that were on that train trip, if they weren’t feminists before the train trip I’m sure they were afterwards,” Bess Abell said with a smile. Lady Bird called the trip “the most dramatic four days in my life, the most exhausting, the most fulfilling.”

Lady Bird had evolved from a woman who was totally removed from politics to an indispensable adviser to her husband in the White House. Over the years LBJ described her as “the brains and money of this family.” When President Johnson was mired in self-doubt before the 1964 election, she did more than win votes for him: she boosted him up. “Beloved—You are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln. You can go on to find some peace, some achievement amidst all the pain,” she wrote to him in a letter, adding that she wasn’t afraid of “losing money or defeat.” This kind of unflinching strength is typical of all the modern first ladies, who view the support of their husbands as part of their job descriptions. “I know you are brave as any of the thirty-five [Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president],” she wrote.

She was used to LBJ’s eccentric demands, including his insistence on an impossibly forceful shower in every house they ever lived in, and a telephone always within reach. When President Nixon was elected, he had fifty telephone lines removed from the presidential bedroom. When Betty Ford was giving a tour of the second floor to her new press secretary, she pointed to about ten electrical outlets over the sink in the President’s bathroom. “I understand Johnson ordered these one day in a moment of frenzy when the one existing outlet did not work.” Well before he became president, LBJ was on the phone so often that he demanded that one be permanently placed underneath a shaded tree in the backyard of the family’s Austin home. When Lady Bird went into labor with their first daughter, Lynda, LBJ had to be yanked off the phone during one of his interminable calls.

One phone call between Lady Bird and the President on October 14, 1964, shows that she was truly her husband’s moral compass. Weeks before the presidential election, their longtime friend and political adviser since 1939, Walter Jenkins, was arrested on what was then called a homosexual morals charge in a YMCA men’s room a few blocks from the White House. Because of the scandal, Lady Bird knew that Jenkins could not continue to work for her husband’s administration, but she did not want to set him and his family adrift.

In a call to her husband she suggested that they offer Jenkins the number-two job at the Austin television station they owned. “I wouldn’t do anything along that line now,” the President said, urging her to let Jenkins and his wife, who was a dear friend of theirs, know, through an aide, that Jenkins would not have any trouble finding work. After a long pause Lady Bird said firmly, “I don’t think that’s right. . . . When questioned, and I will be questioned, I’m going to say that this is incredible for a man that I’ve known all these years, a devout Catholic, the father of six children, a happily married husband. It can only be a period of nervous breakdown.” Johnson cut her off and begged her not to say anything publicly. “If we don’t express some support to him I think that we will lose the entire love and devotion of all the people who have been with us,” she told him. It’s only then that the President told her to meet with his advisers about issuing a statement, but when she told him that she already had (she was often one step ahead of him) he still resisted. She kept pushing for a public statement of support, but Johnson said, “The average farmer just can’t understand your knowing it and approving it or condoning it.”

The call ends with Lady Bird stroking her husband’s ego in a sweet lyrical voice and then telling him that she is going to put out a statement, whether he likes it or not. “My poor darling, my heart breaks for you, too.”

“I know it, honey,” he says.

“You’re a brave good guy and if you read where I’ve said some things in Walter’s support they’ll be along the lines that I’ve just said to you.” Her statement came out before the President’s.

Larry Temple, who served as special counsel to President Johnson, says “there was nobody closer during my time to LBJ than Lady Bird Johnson. Absolutely no one whose advice, whose counsel, whose judgment he sought and took more than Lady Bird Johnson.” Temple was as close to their relationship as one could get; among his responsibilities was briefing the President in their bedroom at seven thirty every morning. LBJ and Lady Bird would both still be in their pajamas in bed, but the President would have been on the phone for a long time by then. Temple knew when Lady Bird was out of town to be extra careful with the President. “If she were gone, and occasionally she’d go to New York to see a play with a friend, he’d be like a caged animal.”

She was his trusted adviser. The two of them would have breakfast together in his bedroom and he would listen to her intently. She even graded his speeches. “She graded him and he expected to sit there and listen to it because he felt that she had no alternative agenda except his best interest and she would tell him what he needed to hear whether he wanted to hear it or not,” the Johnsons’ daughter Luci says. “Did he like it? No.” She laughs and says that her mother was “that one person who’s going to tell him if there’s spinach in his teeth so he has a chance to get to a mirror and get it out.” Lady Bird was her husband’s best friend. “I think he thought he was a better man because he had someone who loved him that much,” Luci says.

In a phone call on March 7, 1964, after he gave a news conference, Lady Bird asked her husband, “You want to listen for about one minute to my critique, or would you rather wait until tonight?” “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “I’m willing now.” Her takeaway: he spoke too fast and looked down too often. He needed to study the text before he got onstage and read with more passion, “I’d say it was a good B-plus.” Moments before the shocking 1968 nationally televised address in which President Johnson announced he would not seek another term, the First Lady rushed to his desk in the Oval Office and handed him a note: “Remember—pacing and drama.”

For many years, long after his death, Lady Bird was a constant presence at her husband’s presidential library. There are audio speakers in the re-creation of President Johnson’s Oval Office, and she could hear his voice echo up and down the halls. “I often wondered how hard that must be on her to hear his voice,” her friend and former assistant Betty Tilson said. “I think she was comforted by it. She used to talk about him quite a bit. . . . She used to say how she wished he could have seen the fine young women Luci and Lynda had become.” In a January 13, 1999, letter Lady Bird told her friend Betty Ford how much she had missed her husband over the holidays, when their grandchildren and “great-grands” came to visit. “Lyndon would have loved it, and no doubt, would have stirred it up some more!”

MODERN FIRST LADIES set their own dreams aside to support their husbands’ ambitions. But in the case of Hillary Clinton, she took a temporary detour to help her husband, but she never abandoned her own plans. She would not be content playing the role of supporting actor her entire life.

How Bill and Hillary met says so much about their relationship and Hillary’s undeniable self-confidence. They were both studying one night in the Yale Law School library, and Bill spent much of the time staring at Hillary. She was sitting at the opposite end of the library, wearing oversize glasses and no makeup. He was stunned as he watched her walk toward him. “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me, then I’m going to keep looking back,” Hillary said, “and I think we ought to know each other’s names. I’m Hillary Rodham.” Bill recalls being “dumbstruck” and unable to remember his own name.

Hillary knew from the moment they met that Bill wanted to be president. He was quick to tell friends of his aspiration, and she fell in love with him and his ambition. She stayed an extra year at Yale to be with him, rather than graduate with her own class (she was one of twenty-seven women in her class). After a whirlwind courtship, Bill proposed three times before Hillary said yes. In an interview, Hillary said she was “terrified” about marrying Bill because she worried that her identity would get “lost in the wake of Bill’s force-of-nature personality.”

Hillary grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois, a middle-class suburb of Chicago, and she seemed destined to move to a big city and join a law firm or run for office herself. But she knew that, to be with Bill, she would have to move with him to his home state of Arkansas, where he was planning to run for Congress. And unlike Bill, who grew up with an eccentric mother and an abusive stepfather, Hillary was from a stable home. Her friends told her that she would be squandering her own astounding potential—they wanted her to delve into politics herself instead of playing the traditional role of the supportive wife. “I was disappointed when they married,” says Betsey Wright, a longtime friend of the Clintons who was Bill’s chief of staff when he was governor and later worked on his 1992 presidential campaign. But in the struggle between her head and her heart, Hillary’s heart won out. Once Hillary decided to move to Arkansas there was no turning back. “I think I knew at some level that I would be very cowardly and foolish to walk away from that relationship,” she said. In 1974, after working on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment investigation of President Nixon, Hillary moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas. They married in 1975 in the living room of their first house.

Hillary became the second woman to join the University of Arkansas Law School faculty. Bill also taught classes at the university while he ran for Congress and, according to students who took classes with each of them, Hillary was the better teacher. She was rigorous and disciplined while Bill earned a reputation for being the easier grader.

Bill ran for Congress in 1974 and lost, but he was elected attorney general in 1976 and the Clintons moved to Little Rock. Hillary kept her maiden name and joined the prestigious Rose Law Firm, where she specialized in children’s rights cases, and Bill geared up to run for governor. Hillary’s refusal to change her last name became a growing liability after Clinton was elected governor in 1978. After the election, he was asked by an Associated Press reporter about Hillary’s decision to keep “Rodham.” “She decided to do that when she was nine, long before women’s lib came along,” Bill answered defensively. “People wouldn’t mind if they knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way.” Bill’s Little Rock friend Guy Campbell could not understand why Hillary would not take her husband’s last name. Finally, at dinner with the Clintons one night, Guy leaned into Hillary and said, “All right, Hillary, I just want to know, why didn’t you take your husband’s name?”

“Look, my law practice was already established with the name as it was,” she said, fixing her gaze at him sincerely, and adding sweetly, “But really, I just love my daddy so much.” In the 1980 election, Clinton’s Republican opponent, Frank White, told voters as often as possible that his wife was “Mrs. Frank White.” White won the election. When Cragg Hines, then the Washington bureau chief of the Houston Chronicle, asked Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, what she thought of Hillary when she first met her, she paused and said, “Damn Yankee, I guess!” Virginia blamed Hillary for her son’s 1980 loss, saying that half of the voters in Arkansas, most of whom were socially conservative, thought that the Clintons were unmarried and were living in sin in the Governor’s Mansion. “The only time she got weepy was when she talked about Bill Clinton losing in 1980,” Hines recalled. “This was something that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

When Clinton announced in February 1982 that he was seeking the governorship again, Hillary began to be referred to as “Mrs. Bill Clinton.” She dyed her hair and got contact lenses, determined that she would not be the reason for another defeat. “I’ll be Mrs. Bill Clinton,” she told reporters in 1982, the day her husband announced his bid to get back into the Governor’s Mansion. “I suspect people will be getting tired of hearing from Mrs. Bill Clinton.” From 1983 to 1992, when Bill was elected president, Hillary was mostly referred to as Hillary Clinton. But when the Clintons got to the White House and Hillary was put in charge of the health-care overhaul, she used Hillary Rodham Clinton. She never legally changed her name from Hillary Rodham.

Hillary sparred with the southerners, particularly the men, who made fun of her feminism and even of her appearance, yet she knew there was no point arguing with them. As the first lady of Arkansas, Hillary was sometimes asked to host fund-raisers, some even involving the incongruous sight of her modeling clothes. At one fund-raiser Hillary had her makeup done professionally and modeled a cashmere sweater. Guy Campbell went backstage and said, “Hillary, I can’t believe it, tonight you resemble a woman.” Hillary smiled through her annoyance and said, “Only you, Guy Campbell, would say something like that to me.”

Bill often told staffers to run their new ideas past his wife, and he put her in charge of his efforts to reform Arkansas public schools, which were almost at the bottom in national rankings. Hillary cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and helped get funding for early education, and she worked on reforming the juvenile justice system. As an associate and then a partner at the Rose Law Firm, she earned more than three times what her husband did.

She never stopped being Bill’s fiercest defender, and in May 1990, when her husband was running for his fifth term as Arkansas governor, she stood in the crowd in the state capitol’s rotunda as Tom McRae, his challenger in the Democratic primary, held a press conference. When McRae attacked Bill for refusing to debate him, a determined voice called out: “Tom, who was the one person who didn’t show up in Springdale? Give me a break! I mean, I think that we oughta get the record straight. . . .” Hillary emerged from the crowd and walked toward McRae as the television cameras shifted their focus from him to her. “Many of the reports you issued,” she charged, waving a sheaf of papers in her hand, “not only praised the governor on his environmental record, but his education record and his economic record!” At the end of the press conference a local reporter wrapped up his live shot by saying, “Hillary Clinton showed again that she may be the best debater in the family.” She had saved Bill from what could have been a devastating defeat, and by doing so she had brought him one step closer to the presidency.

In the White House, the Clintons had a complicated relationship that played out every day in front of the residence staff. They stayed up late and entertained celebrities with invitations to stay the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. (The Clintons had so many guests in the White House that residence staffers kept a list of them in their shirt pockets in case Hillary stopped them to ask who they were hosting on any given evening.) They never seemed to stop working. They quizzed staffers to find out what people outside the Beltway thought and they talked politics constantly, even on vacation. In Martha’s Vineyard, Hillary told a reporter, “I was cutting Bill’s grapefruit this morning and we had the best idea we ever had about day care, and all of a sudden there’s this flapping at the window and it’s a seagull—a seagull at our window!”

The Clintons also had heated arguments and long, stony silences. During a movie screening in 1994 in the White House theater, the Clintons’ interior decorator, Kaki Hockersmith, who lived off and on at the White House for years, warned a guest, “Things are really dark around here; they may even leave early tonight.” White House Florist Ronn Payne remembers coming up the service elevator one day with a cart to pick up old floral arrangements and seeing two butlers standing outside the West Sitting Hall listening as the Clintons fought. The butlers motioned him over to them and put their fingers to their lips, “Shhh.” Suddenly, Payne heard the First Lady shout, “Goddamn bastard!” And a heavy object slammed against the floor.

But there were sweet moments, too, and Hillary tried to help lighten the mood for her husband in the White House. She asked Head Housekeeper Christine Limerick to convert the room at the end of the hall—Room 330 on the third floor—into a music room for President Clinton as a surprise Christmas present. The room was painted and refurbished and outfitted with music stands, stereo equipment, speakers, and his saxophone collection. Limerick wrapped the entry door on Christmas Eve and Hillary led Bill to the room early Christmas morning. It was one of the rare moments when the Clintons were not working.

SOMETIMES BEING A supportive partner in the White House means being a firm taskmaster and a consistent, strong presence during times of tragedy. There is a depth and complexity to Laura Bush that few ever get to see. Laura says that her mother-in-law, Barbara, is much more “acerbic” than she is, but when Laura was in the White House she had a harder edge than Barbara ever did. When President George W. Bush asked for something, his staff moved as fast as they could. When Laura Bush had a request, everyone ran.

Laura was a prim and proper first lady and she was often not amused by the casual atmosphere in the West Wing. After the West Wing was redecorated, Laura walked through the new press room and lower press office. One of the twentysomething press assistants had a bunch of pictures pinned to the wall above her desk. Laura walked by, glanced at her space, and shook her head disapprovingly. “This is the White House, not a sorority,” she said. A few minutes later, the photos were down. Usher Worthington White remembers how angry Laura was when residence staffers lost the keys to her daughter Jenna’s car twice. Jenna parked her car on the South Grounds, but sometimes the car had to be moved, either because the President would be making a statement outdoors, where the car would be visible in the camera shot, or because a last-minute guest was arriving and room needed to be made for the motorcade. Laura was always very calm and controlled but when she came into the Usher’s Office to find out what had happened the second time her daughter’s keys were lost, she was livid when she discovered that a staffer had accidentally dropped them into a storm drain. Her hands were shaking and her tone was curt: they were not inconveniencing her, they were inconveniencing her daughter, which was far worse in her mind. Staffers finally decided to place spare copies of Jenna’s keys in a safe in the Usher’s Office.

Laura did not miss a thing, White says. One day, shortly after he was made the usher in charge of housekeeping, the phone in the Usher’s Office blinked “Family Table,” indicating it was a call coming from the family breakfast table upstairs. It was the First Lady asking him to meet her at the President’s elevator right away. Laura quickly congratulated him on his new position and summoned him toward her. They walked into the East Sitting Hall, in between the Queens’ Bedroom and the Lincoln Bedroom, where she pointed to a small leak. “It has been like this for nine months,” she said. “I want it fixed.”

It’s remarkable that Laura, a shy librarian who married her husband on the condition that she would never have to make a political speech on his behalf, would become so comfortable giving orders in the White House. Laura was thirty-one and had already spent a decade working as an elementary school teacher and a librarian before she started dating George W. Bush, who really is her opposite in so many ways. She smoothed the edges of her husband’s brash personality. On the campaign plane she would tell him, “Rein it in, Bubba,” when he was holding court in front of reporters. Around the residence she would admonish him with a delicate “Bushieee” (her voice lowering at the end) when he was out of line. And he helped her heal from the shame of a car accident, in which she accidentally ran a stop sign and killed one of her best friends when she was seventeen. She felt so guilty that she never told their daughters—they found out only when their father was governor of Texas and someone on their protective detail mentioned it, assuming they already knew.

Laura could never have known back in Midland, Texas, where she was born and raised, that she would one day have to help shepherd the country during the worst terrorist attack since Pearl Harbor. It was the residence staffers, who serve from one administration to the next, regardless of political party, who helped Laura feel she could go on after September 11, 2001. “We knew we were going to be there [in the White House], and we were confident that we would be safe, but on the other hand they [White House staffers] could have chosen another job or just said, ‘You know, this is just too much stress now. I’d rather go on,’” Laura said in an interview. “And they didn’t, none of them did.”

Veteran White House reporter Ann Compton says she remembers being at a private lunch with the First Lady when Laura told her that, in the terrifying hours after the terrorist attacks, she almost burst into tears when her Secret Service agent told her that all of the former first families were secure. “She hadn’t even thought about the ripple effect,” Compton said. Susan Ford’s two daughters attended Southern Methodist University and called their mother in a panic on September 11. Susan contacted one of the Secret Service agents who had been on her detail when she was living in the White House and who lived near SMU, and he and his wife took her daughters in for several days. One daughter told her professor before leaving, “I know this may sound strange to you but my grandfather was President Gerald Ford and I have to leave.” When Laura Bush heard the story her eyes filled with tears; the bond these families share with the Secret Service and with each other runs deep.

Six days after 9/11, Laura Bush was sent to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as one of several administration officials dispatched to deal with the crisis. Hundreds of family members of the forty passengers and crew of the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 gathered in the desolate field, where a crater was still smoldering from the impact of the crash. It was the only one of the four hijacked planes that did not reach its intended target, because of the heroism of the passengers and crew who tried to regain control of the plane from the hijackers. A White House aide, who had been at the event site for hours before Laura arrived, said the audience seemed reassured when they saw her. “When she showed up, it felt different, it felt better,” he recalled. “People can believe what she says, they feel like they can cry on her shoulder and she can be strong for them.” Aides say that she is at her best in intimate settings, when the cameras are not on. Her visit to Shanksville was emotional. She had private meetings with family members who wanted to know what she and her husband could do to help them recover from their immense loss. “America is learning the names, but you know the people,” she told the audience, many of whom were crying in disbelief. “And you are the ones they thought of in the last moments of life. You’re the ones they called, and prayed to see again. You are the ones they loved.”

Laura told her staff that she wanted to visit all fifty states as First Lady, and by the end only one state was left: North Dakota. Laura’s chief of staff, Anita McBride, recalled accompanying Laura to her last event, a potluck dinner in a church basement in North Dakota. “It was as middle America as you can imagine—the casseroles, the paper napkins—maybe a hundred people, all women dressed up.” Suddenly, a woman got up and started singing “God Bless America,” and Laura Bush, who had seen the pain of 9/11 family members and wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, began to cry. It was one of the only times she allowed herself to become visibly emotional, at a small potluck dinner in North Dakota that marked the end of her eight-year journey as First Lady.