VI

East Wing vs. West Wing

We don’t have to do anything.

—MICHELLE OBAMA TO HER ADVISERS AFTER THE 2008 ELECTION

The old-fashioned East Wing versus West Wing battle of the sexes has been a prominent feature of every modern White House. In the Kennedy White House it was Jackie’s formidable social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, in one corner and White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger in the other. When Baldrige would walk between the West Wing and the East Wing by the White House swimming pool, President Kennedy would occasionally call out to her as he was doing laps. “Now what’s with the East Wing? What are your problems today?” While JFK was amused by the drama, he usually took the side of the East Wing. Baldrige knew how to use Jackie’s proximity to power to get what she wanted. “If Pierre went against the specific instructions of JBK (Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy) I would get hell from Jackie, [so] I’d tattle on Pierre to the President, and the President went to bat for me against Pierre.” Jackie was ultimately in control.

During the Ford administration, Betty’s press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, saw the East Wing as the heart and the West Wing as the head. “They were responsible for policy; we interpreted it by daily living, by example.” When she interviewed Maria Downs to be her new social secretary Betty asked her, “Could you go to bat against them [the President’s aides in the West Wing]?” Betty had watched helplessly as West Wing aides tried to take control over the guest lists for state dinners during the brief time that she did not have a social secretary.

Michelle Obama wants to maintain complete control of her image. One former adviser to the First Lady said that she wants every event to have a “clear electoral purpose,” and that “every time that she was used in any capacity, . . . it had to be connected to strategy.” Michelle had been a reluctant campaigner and has been a reluctant First Lady at times, the staffer says.

In the Obama White House, tension between the West Wing and the quiet second-floor office of the First Lady in the East Wing is still brewing. During the transition, after her husband was elected but before his inauguration, Michelle gathered her small staff in the transition headquarters and told them, “We don’t have to do anything.” Anything that they decided to do, she said, must be done “really, really well.” She had to be “value-added” or else she would not do anything. Every event must have a goal and casual suggestions were not welcome; instead every idea should be carefully considered, every downside explored, before it was even presented to her. All of that meant that she expected her schedule to be planned weeks in advance, even though the President’s schedule is more ad hoc and sometimes planned hours in advance, depending on global events. Her plan when she entered the White House was to work only two or three days a week and devote the rest of her time to her daughters. A former West Wing staffer made it clear that Michelle has the final word and that any attempts to overschedule her, or to do something spontaneous, were not wise: “You knew what the limitations were.”

Once she commits to doing something, however, aides say Michelle spends hours and sometimes days personally preparing and editing her speeches. Her staff will have a lectern moved into her office so that she can practice them. What she most enjoys is speaking to young inner-city girls to whom she can be an inspiration. “Nothing in my life’s path ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African American First Lady,” she tells them, her voice swelling with emotion. “I wasn’t raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of.”

Michelle Obama is on her fourth social secretary after the departure of the first man and first openly gay social secretary, Jeremy Bernard. Four months after becoming First Lady, Michelle replaced Chief of Staff Jackie Norris, who ran the President’s successful Iowa operation, with her old friend Susan Sher. At the end of 2010 she replaced Sher with Tina Tchen, a lawyer who worked in the White House Office of Public Engagement. The turnover in her office is higher than in most of her predecessors’—Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton each had two chiefs of staff over their eight years as first lady.

Michelle speaks bluntly. She is willing to be a good sport, but she made it clear from the beginning that she does not appreciate other people speaking on her behalf and making promises that she would show up at events, without first consulting her. She was particularly angry when the President’s then–Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made commitments on her behalf. “Rahm has frayed relationships with everyone. I don’t think anybody has an uncomplicated, warm relationship with him,” a former Obama administration staffer said. When Michelle was being overscheduled she told the President’s aides: “Stop this right now.” Michelle’s backers in the White House say they felt as though Emanuel was using her and that it was not fair to punish her and ask her to campaign more than other first ladies simply because she was popular.

Michelle’s relationship with her husband’s first press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was no better than it was with Emanuel. According to a former White House official with personal knowledge of the dynamic, Michelle thought Gibbs was brash and a know-it-all from the beginning, and she worried that he was more concerned with Obama the candidate than Obama the man. Gibbs was one of Obama’s few advisers who were vocal in their criticism of the East Wing. He was allegedly worried about Michelle’s decision in 2009 to hire decorator Michael Smith, who, unbeknownst to the First Lady, had been in charge of the $1.2 million redecoration of ousted Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain’s office. Thain’s outlandishly expensive trash can ($1,200) and even more absurdly priced rug ($87,000) became synonymous with Wall Street greed during the financial crisis, and Gibbs worried about the public backlash. But the First Lady argued that she was only trying to make the private quarters more comfortable for their daughters and that they would not be using taxpayer dollars. The President agreed with Gibbs, and while Smith was not fired he was asked to order less expensive items from stores like Anthropologie. Michelle resented her every decision being scrutinized by her husband’s advisers.

THE OBAMA EAST Wing is far more traditional than the Clinton East Wing. In the Clinton administration, Maggie Williams became the first person to serve both as chief of staff to the First Lady and as an assistant to the President. Many members of Hillary’s staff worked in the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (formerly the Old Executive Office Building) instead of in the East Wing. Hillary’s decision to take up an office in the West Wing rankled some administration officials. “It got out pretty quickly that Susan Thomases [a close friend of Hillary’s who worked on Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign] had a yardstick and was over at the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building measuring offices and deciding who is going to sit where,” said Roy Neel, who served as Al Gore’s vice presidential campaign manager and later as President Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. “That pissed off everybody.” Hillary even told her successor, Laura Bush, that, if she could turn back time, she would not have had an office in the West Wing. After health-care reform failed she rarely used it anyway, she said. Hillary’s aides told Laura’s staff that once it had been done, undoing the controversial office arrangement would have raised too many questions. There was never any debate about whether Michelle Obama wanted to play a role in the West Wing—she made it crystal clear from the start that she did not want to follow in Hillary Clinton’s footsteps. All communication with the West Wing is done through Michelle’s chief of staff, Tina Tchen. “It is quite unusual for the First Lady to have any interaction with the West Wing staff, unless she’s getting briefed on something. For the most part she doesn’t come over there,” said former Obama communications director Anita Dunn. “Maybe she was there once because we were doing a photo shoot. Besides that she never came over there. She just didn’t.”

Whereas Hillary fought for her team to have access to information, Michelle is not as involved. “The notion of sitting around the table with a set of policy advisers—no offense—makes me yawn,” Michelle said. “I like creating stuff.” Michelle does not want to be told about the day-to-day issues consuming the West Wing because she says she is not making policy. Her “Let’s Move!” campaign to end childhood obesity has been her signature effort and has been relatively uncontroversial (though it has riled some critics who argue that she is acting like the food police and rigidly dictating what children should be eating).

Because Michelle does not stand up for her staff as much as Hillary did, they sometimes get steamrollered by the West Wing. Emanuel excluded the First Lady’s chief of staff, Jackie Norris, from the all-important 7:30 a.m. West Wing planning meeting. Norris says that the West Wing made a strategic miscalculation by not sharing more information. The President’s advisers were consumed with fixing the economy during the recession, and they considered things that the East Wing was dealing with, like handling the logistics of getting the Obama girls to school, to be trivial. “There’s equal parts blame to go around,” Norris says. “There’s blame on me, there’s blame on him [Rahm], there’s blame on the team, because I think together we would have been better.”

The White House is full of type A staffers who want to be part of the inner ring, as close to power as possible. Knowledge is the currency in Washington, and something as small as knowing two hours ahead of time that an event is going to happen is powerful because information is doled out to such a select group of people. Staffers in the Obama East Wing are often the last to know about the President’s schedule and are often treated like second-class citizens. There is a meeting of the press staff in the morning and a wrap-up meeting at the end of the day, separate from the morning staff meeting led by the President’s chief of staff. Michelle Obama’s aides would almost always be in those morning press meetings but sometimes they were left out of the end-of-the-day meetings. The East Wing began to be referred to as “Guam” by staffers because it was often on the outside ring of the circle, the furthest from the center.

The one figure who is central to decision making in both wings is Valerie Jarrett. Jarrett is the Obamas’ best friend, and because of that she’s defensive and protective of both of them. Each of the first families becomes a commodity, and Jarrett is the CEO of Obama Inc. Both Obamas have gone to Jarrett to discuss their plans after they leave the White House. In Jarrett the Obamas have something that the Clintons did not have, and that’s someone who can act as a conduit between the West Wing and the East Wing. No staffer ever wants to get between the president and his wife, but Jarrett can. Jarrett occupies the second-floor office in the West Wing that once belonged to Hillary Clinton and, later, George W. Bush’s adviser Karl Rove. Even the closest staffers, like David Axelrod, who was a top Obama campaign strategist and then adviser in the White House, are still considered “staff,” but Valerie is almost like a “third principal,” aides say. She is “their everything,” according to one former Michelle Obama adviser who agreed to speak candidly on the condition of anonymity. Jarrett is part of the Obama family and is one of the only staffers routinely invited to the private residence. She occupies a unique position, being equally close to the President and to the First Lady. She tells friends she will stay until the end, and “turn the lights off in the White House.”

If one thing binds the often dueling West Wing and East Wing staffs, it’s their resentment of Jarrett, who many believe gets in the way of the relationship they have with their bosses. Jarrett can get messages to the President and the First Lady and undermine decisions already agreed upon on a staff level. “It’s harder to see how decisions are getting made; sometimes Valerie inherently makes decisions or makes recommendations based on what she thinks the President or First Lady will want and that can be a struggle for people,” says one former aide to the First Lady. “They’d rather understand the logic and the framework.”

NO MODERN FIRST LADY had a more fraught relationship with her husband’s advisers than Pat Nixon. It was so bad that when Betty Ford became first lady she said, “They’re not going to lead me around like they did Pat.” H. R. “Bob” Haldeman was Nixon’s chief of staff and tried to have complete control over every part of the White House, including the First Lady’s office and the residence staff. Haldeman and the President’s counsel and assistant for domestic affairs, John Ehrlichman, took it upon themselves to reorganize the office of the First Lady and combined the posts of staff director and press secretary. The President himself even insisted on overseeing the delicate seating arrangements at state dinners, usually in the purview of the First Lady’s office, and he wanted to weigh in on the musical entertainment and what was being served.

When Pat’s director of correspondence, Gwen King, found Haldeman and Ehrlichman looking in cubbyholes and peering over people’s desks in her East Wing office, she was worried. Not long after that she got a memo telling her that she would be reporting to someone in the West Wing, instead of the East Wing. When she told the First Lady, Pat was furious. The very next morning King got a call from the First Lady, who said, “Business as usual.” She had won this battle—King would be reporting to Pat’s chief of staff—but she would lose many more.

To the First Lady’s face Haldeman was unfailingly courteous, but behind closed doors he referred to her derisively. Joni Stevens, who worked for special counsel and political strategist Harry Dent in the Nixon White House, remembered another staffer gesturing to Haldeman and asking, “Do you know who that is?” “No, I don’t,” Stevens replied. “That’s God. Or at least he thinks he is.” Haldeman’s control was so complete that Stevens was once asked to report to the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House at 4:30 a.m. to type a top-secret report, based on results of a particular primary election, that was going to be sent to the President. A uniformed division Secret Service agent stood guard at the door while she typed, and absolutely no one other than Stevens and a handful of advisers was allowed in the room. She never found out why that seemingly innocent primary election was so important.

On January 8, 1970, Haldeman wrote in his diary, “P [President Nixon] called me back up with Bebe [Bebe Rebozo, Nixon’s best friend] about problem of personal household staff, lousy food of wrong kind, etc. Wants me to solve it.” Even though it was the First Lady’s job to approve the menus each week, the President was having his chief of staff, and not his wife, tell the White House chef what to do. When given the chance Pat knew exactly what to tell the chef: “No lamb. Dick doesn’t like lamb, he had too much lamb in the Pacific [during the war] and he does not want lamb.” But the President’s requests were even more specific: no French or California white, “only Moselle or Rhine, Johannesburg, only Bordeaux red or very good light French Burgundy,” Haldeman told the chef. White House Doorman Preston Bruce remembered when Haldeman announced that no one would be allowed to stand in the hall outside the State Dining Room during state dinners—not even the Secret Service. It had been a perk of the job for the butlers to listen to the toasts from the hallway. Haldeman’s office also sent out a memo reminding the residence staff not to ask for a photo or autograph of the President or his family. If they did, they would be fired immediately. “We all felt this was a cheap little shot,” said Bruce. “We knew better than to approach the President with such requests.”

The Nixons’ social secretary, Lucy Winchester, said that she could always count on Haldeman to critique social events put on by the East Wing, and that once, when she fought back and told him that he did not know what he was talking about, he looked at her in “utter fury.” “You and Mrs. Nixon say ‘West Wing’ in the same voice you would say ‘left wing,’” he said, red in the face. “You don’t even think I know which knife to lick first.” Occasionally, he’d ask Winchester to fire residence staffers, but she always refused. At just five feet, one and a half inches she would straighten up and get very tall and tell him, “Listen here, you don’t know anything so let me tell you about this man and what you need to know and what you haven’t bothered to find out.” Haldeman threatened to fire her when she mentioned inviting the Johnsons’ social secretary, Bess Abell, and Lady Bird’s press secretary, Liz Carpenter, to the Navy Mess, which is usually reserved for the White House staff. “We spent too much time and effort trying to get those people out of the White House!” Haldeman bellowed. (Winchester wanted to show them what redecorating they had done, even though she was growing concerned that the White House was becoming ridiculously threadbare. She carried a pair of small scissors in a little beaded evening bag that she had for state dinners and would run around and cut the “whiskers” off furniture where the fabric had worn through.) Pat Nixon felt the West Wing pressure. “My mother was frequently exasperated by the indifference she encountered in Haldeman and some of his aides,” Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote in her biography of her mother. “But she had spent so many years around power that she took with a grain of salt how it changed people.”

Pat was aware of Haldeman’s growing influence, and she hated his constant videotaping of formal White House events. She wanted to maintain some sense of privacy and was frustrated at every turn. Pat was upset when she discovered that Haldeman had unilaterally approved Johnny Cash’s request to record a concert at the White House and call it Johnny Cash at the White House. She vetoed the idea, viewing it as disrespectful because it echoed his famous recording at Folsom Prison. Yet, by that point in 1970, the White House did feel like a prison to her. Haldeman helped redesign Air Force One so that the large staff section was directly behind the President’s office and before the First Lady’s sitting room. The family had liked to gather in the presidential lounge that had been next to the presidential suite. With the redesign, every time a family member wanted to go to the lounge, she or he would have to walk through the staff compartment, where Haldeman would inevitably be sitting keeping tabs on who was visiting the President and for how long. Pat let her displeasure be known after the first flight from Andrews Air Force Base to “La Casa Pacifica,” the Nixons’ beachfront mansion in San Clemente, California, where they went to escape the pressures of Washington. Eventually the plane was returned to its original design, with a suite of rooms for the President and his family at the front of the plane, at a cost of approximately $750,000.

The President’s advisers never understood Pat Nixon’s public power. She became the first wife of a president to lead a United Nations delegation overseas when she went to Liberian President William R. Tolbert Jr.’s inauguration in 1972; her trip was a huge media success, but no one in the President’s office congratulated her. Nixon’s aide Charles Colson wrote a memo to the President that said, “As you know we have tried for three years to project ‘color’ about you, to portray the human side of the President. . . . Mrs. Nixon has now broken through where we have failed.” But somehow that message was never conveyed to her and she felt undervalued. She was able to put people at ease in a way her husband never could. Once, a group of women from the Appalachian Mountains came to visit the White House and presented the First Lady with a cherry-tree quilt they had made for her. Some of them were weeping openly because they were so nervous and intimidated by the imposing surroundings. Pat entered the Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor of the White House, where they were gathered, and walked around the room, giving each guest a hug.

Chinese leaders wanted Pat to join her husband on his groundbreaking 1972 trip to China, the first visit ever by a sitting president to mainland China. But the men in the West Wing did not see the point. “He [Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai] wants Mrs. Nixon, he wants her on the trip,” National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger told the President. “If she goes, she goes solely as a prop,” Haldeman said, oblivious to the powerful image of an American First Lady visiting Chinese schools, factories, and hospitals and interacting with the Chinese people in a way the President could not. A hug between the First Lady and a Chinese child splashed across front pages could do as much to help diplomatic relations as high-level back-channel talks between diplomats. After it was settled that she would accompany her husband, Pat was told that she could take one person with her. “Mrs. Nixon said she wouldn’t go if she couldn’t take her hairdresser,” an aide recalled, laughing. Indeed, her hairstylist, Rita de Santis from the Elizabeth Arden Salon in Washington, was her traveling companion on the historic trip. They had fun together and even developed their own hand signals to communicate in their hotel suites, knowing the Chinese had them bugged. When later asked how the President could not see the political pluses of taking his wife, Pat’s chief of staff and press secretary, Connie Stuart, replied, “You can’t be president of the United States unless you think you’re the most important person in the world. You are more important than your wife. Period. I’m not so sure that the President was even happy that she came along, it was one more encumbrance, it meant more Secret Service, it meant another car.” Pat, though, was happy Zhou Enlai pushed for her to go. She enjoyed being a part of history.

Zhou took a liking to the First Lady and at one banquet they discussed her visit to the Beijing Zoo, where she saw the giant pandas. When she reached for a container of Panda cigarettes, which had a drawing of two pandas on it, she turned to him and said, “Aren’t they cute?”

Zhou replied, “I’ll give you some.”

“Cigarettes?” she asked him, confused.

“No, pandas.” Two giant pandas were soon sent to the Washington National Zoo and became a sensation.

On the plane ride back from China, the First Lady told reporters, “People are the same the world over. I think they’re [the Chinese] good people. It all depends on the leadership.” Her image as “Plastic Pat” was partly a by-product of being cast aside by the President’s West Wing, led by a small cadre of men, including the President, who never understood her power.

Pat Nixon was the ultimate political wife, with decades of training, and that may have been her problem. Rosalynn Carter’s press secretary, Mary Hoyt, said she had heard that Pat Nixon’s press secretary called her “the principal.” “I always thought that was a little bit chilly.” New York Times reporter Tom Wicker noted her ability to sit through speeches she had heard dozens of times as her husband was running for Congress, the Senate, and the presidency “with an only slightly glazed expression of awe and admiration.” Polly Dranov, who covered Pat Nixon for the Newhouse News Service, remembers how relaxed and chatty she could be with the female reporters who were covering her, and how that changed on a dime. “She had mic fright and camera fright. As soon as those lights went on, she froze.” Once, traveling with a chatty group of female reporters, Pat stopped talking as soon as one of them turned on a tape recorder. “She was very, very observant,” East Wing staffer Joni Stevens says, “and she always made you feel like you were the only person in the room.” That was the friendly Irish Pat Ryan sneaking through, with no West Wing staffers around to stop her. During a trip to Africa, Time reporter Bonnie Angelo says that she saw “Pat Nixon” return to the fun-loving woman she was and emerge as “Pat Ryan.” “Pat Nixon was left somewhere flying over the middle of the Atlantic,” she said. “I thought she was a special person and was being misused.”

Pat was pretty, slim, and graceful, and she often came across like a delicate china doll. Her social secretary, Lucy Winchester, remembered that, like all first ladies, she had a side to her that very few people ever saw. Winchester always tried to make her boss laugh and would bring tabloid newspapers into the White House and send them up in a folder to Mrs. Nixon. Pat would devour them and send them back with a note, “Burn before reading!” She instructed Winchester to get rid of any trace of them so that the press would not find out about her guilty pleasure. Once Pat told Winchester, “I shared them with Dick and he thought they were hilarious!” Another time Winchester, who loved to play practical jokes, used a blow-up doll to surprise members of the Daughters of the American Revolution who were touring the White House. She knocked on the First Lady’s door before the group arrived, knowing that she would be ready on time with every hair in place. When Pat answered, she saw the twinkle in Winchester’s eye and the strange doll and said, “What have you done this time?!”

“Let’s put her in the Queens’ bathtub!” Winchester suggested. “We were sobbing with laughter, she was holding one end and I was holding the other, marching her down the hall and there was a startled policeman there at the end of the hall and we put her in the bathtub,” Winchester said, laughing at the memory of this carefully controlled woman who claimed that she liked to iron her husband’s clothes to relieve stress, and who always wore sensible shoes and kept her skirt length at least two inches below the knee, lugging this doll down the hallway of the White House. They were howling with laughter until suddenly Pat froze and said, “They’re going to think it’s me!” And that made them laugh even harder.

Pat and her social secretary could tease each other in a way that only close friends can. After several state dinners, Pat asked Winchester, a Kentucky native, “Lucy, is this too much for you, a farm girl? Meeting all the kings of the world?”

“Oh, Mrs. Nixon, you were a farm girl so you understand this: feeding kings and feeding cattle are pretty much the same thing. Feed them what they like, don’t make loud noises or sudden gestures, and clean up afterwards.”

Winchester’s young daughter, also named Lucy, was given some toads and frogs as pets. “You know what frogs eat, don’t you?” the First Lady asked Winchester, not seeming a bit horrified. She always kept a flyswatter nearby on the shelf of her sitting room closet. (“She had a deadly sure swing,” her daughter Julie said.) For several weeks, until Winchester took the frogs and toads back to live with her mother in Kentucky, the First Lady sent down a red-tagged envelope in interoffice mail that was full of dead flies that she had swatted for Winchester’s daughter. “The White House is full of cluster flies, as old houses are,” Winchester said. The First Lady included a note: “Lucy, dear, I hope these help solve your feeding problem.”

These lighter moments are overshadowed by the darker ones. The Nixons had a complicated marriage, and when asked, Connie Stuart says she never saw them argue: “Mrs. Nixon would never be seen arguing in public, are you kidding?” Pat was treated so shabbily at times by her husband that Nixon’s media adviser Roger Ailes wrote Haldeman a memo on May 4, 1970, advising the President to “talk to her and smile at her.” One event went particularly badly. “At one point,” Ailes wrote, “he walked off in a different direction. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t looking and had to run to catch up.” In the margins of the long memo Haldeman wrote, “Good,” “Absolutely,” and “Right!” but for this particular suggestion he told Ailes flatly: “You tell him.” Pat’s press secretary, Helen Smith, says that Haldeman thought the President “would do well to dump her,” and rumors of an impending divorce after they left the White House were circulated by West Wing aides. Nixon’s private secretary, Rose Mary Woods, was close to Pat and would stick up for her during debates with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. But Pat was still often ignored. During a press conference with women reporters in honor of his wife’s birthday, the President was asked what woman he most admired. “Well, Mrs. Charles de Gaulle,” he said after a long, awkward silence. Yet Pat was getting more than five hundred letters a week, most of them supportive, at the height of Watergate. Pat had stood by him during the 1952 presidential election, when, as Eisenhower’s running mate, he was accused of accepting an unethical expense fund, charges he responded to with his famous Checkers speech. And she stood by him after his 1960 defeat when he ran against John Kennedy for president, and she did not waver after his defeat in the 1962 California governor’s race.

Being pushed aside, coupled with increasingly busy schedules, damaged the Nixons’ relationship and created tension among their staffs. “Unfortunately,” Ehrlichman said, “the Nixon family usually left it up to the staff to fight out these jurisdictional battles, and that allowed unnecessary animosities to develop.” A triangle was formed. Pat would sit down with her husband in the residence over dinner and tell him, “Dick, there’s something wrong down there and we’ve got to fix it!” Then the President would turn to Haldeman and tell him, “Bob, there’s something wrong over there. Pat says there are some problems. Now we’ve got to fix them.” They went around and around in the triangle, the First Lady and Haldeman growing increasingly frustrated with each other. Connie Stuart was installed by Haldeman to be the First Lady’s press secretary and chief of staff so that the triangle could be a square: the First Lady to the President, the President to Haldeman, Haldeman to Stuart, Stuart to the First Lady. Haldeman wanted Stuart to give him warning before the First Lady went to the President with something.

Shortly after she started working for the First Lady in 1969, Stuart got a call from Haldeman telling her that the President wanted to see her. She found President Nixon eating his usual cottage cheese and pineapple for lunch in the small sitting room off the Oval Office. He asked her to sit down and for a half hour told her how important Pat was, and how she deserved good press. “Get your hands on everything you can to read about her, so that you get to know her as quickly as possible.” He told Stuart that she was an amazing woman who had accomplished a great deal in her life. Before Stuart left him, he added, “Make sure you don’t become a lightning rod,” acknowledging the tension he knew was constantly consuming the East and West Wings of his White House.

Stuart was married to a West Wing staffer, and Haldeman considered her an ally in his ongoing war with the East Wing. “To him the East Wing was a problem and if I could keep the lid on it, I was his friend,” she said. “The real adversarial relationship in the White House is the men against the women.” Haldeman’s plan did not work. Stuart got a call one morning from Haldeman saying, “The President doesn’t like his lettuce.” “So?” she said. “Well, you’ve got to do something about the lettuce, it’s not fresh enough.” “Bob, what am I going to do about the lettuce?” “I don’t know how, but get it fresher.” That’s how it worked, she said: the President yelled at Haldeman and Haldeman yelled at her.

Feminist author and activist Gloria Steinem accompanied the Nixons on a ten-day campaign swing in hopes of getting an interview with the President for New York magazine. She was disappointed when she was given access to the First Lady only, but was surprised to discover that she “liked her [Pat] much better after this interview than before.” At first she was disappointed by Pat’s guarded answers, including her answer to what woman in history she most admired and would most want to resemble herself. Pat’s answer, “Mrs. Eisenhower,” was unconvincing to Steinem, and she pushed her to explain why she admired Mamie. Steinem says that after the two very different women sat through a long, awkward pause, “the dam broke.” In a slow and deliberate voice, Pat revealed her resentment of Steinem, the tone of her questions, and her entire generation. “I never had time to think about things like that, who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work. My parents died when I was a teenager, and I had to work my way through college.” She talked about an older couple whom she drove in their Packard cross-country so that she could make extra money to put herself through school, and how she had to fix their car when it was overheating in the desert and when the brakes gave out in the mountains. “I worked in a bank while Dick was in the service. Oh, I could have sat for those months doing nothing like everybody else, but I worked in the bank and talked with people and learned about all their funny little customs. Now, I have friends in all the countries of the world. I haven’t just sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I wanted to do. Oh no, I’ve stayed interested in people. I’ve kept working.” Then she gestured toward her folder bursting with letters and said the minute she has a free moment she makes sure to answer every last one of them. “Nobody gets by without a personal note,” she continued. “I don’t have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I’ve never had it easy. I’m not like all you. . . .” Her voice trailed off and almost instantaneously she returned to her guarded self and acted as if nothing had happened. She patted Steinem’s arm and said, “I’ve really enjoyed our talk. Take care!” Steinem was stunned, but Pat’s brief flash of anger helped make her seem human.

When Pat ticked off the list of jobs she had held over the years, she left out her work as a technician in a hospital in upstate New York that treated patients with tuberculosis. Those were the most “haunting” six months of her life, she said. “They weren’t supposed to do it, but some of the young patients would sneak away to go bobsledding and I went with them.” When asked if she was afraid of catching the disease from them she said, “I never had the least fear of that. And it almost seemed that they believed they might contract good health from me.”

While in the White House, Pat received hundreds of letters every week (sometimes more than a thousand a week) and prided herself on reading almost every one. She did not want anyone who took the time to write to her to receive a form letter with a signature from an auto pen. She sat at her desk in the residence for four to five hours every day answering letters, often after dinner. Her office would send a pile of letters in brown expandable accordion folders, sometimes as many as five or six a day, to the second-floor residence. Each of Pat’s signed letters was set aside to let the blue ink dry. When her head of correspondence arrived back at her office at eight thirty the next morning, the folders would be placed neatly on her desk. The only way that the women of the East Wing knew for sure that the President was resigning was when the folders stopped being returned. Pat did not open any letters during those painful final days.

First ladies get heart-wrenching requests, including letters from parents begging for help for their sick children. Several children were admitted to the National Institutes of Health because of Pat. One family wrote to the First Lady saying that their young daughter, who was very sick, needed heart surgery. An aide to the First Lady telephoned the American Heart Association and gave them the name and address of the little girl and told them that it was an emergency. Less than three months later Pat got a note from the little girl’s parents thanking her for saving their daughter’s life: “It may have been only a coincidence that shortly after your letter was received the problem was resolved in such an easy and a smooth succession of events. But we want to think that there was more to it than that.” Pat set aside especially touching or funny notes, including one titled “I am the wife of President Nixon,” written by a fifth grader from Elmont, New York. “Every time I make a speech I get a sore throat. When I go traveling with my husband we have to stand up for hours and my feet are killing me. My back aches from sleeping in so many different hotels. When I’m in bed trying to rest I hear the body guards standing outside my door. I wish I could be an ordinary housewife and wear sneakers and blue jeans.” Pat wrote back saying how happy she was to be First Lady, but in a note to an aide she said: “I have kept her letter. She hits the spot!”

Pat considered answering mail part of her job as first lady, and she did not want anyone to challenge it. Once, Ehrlichman asked for a meeting with Pat and quickly discovered how much quiet power she wielded. They met in the late afternoon in the elegant Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the mansion, overlooking the South Lawn. “Perhaps you feel the need of someone to talk to—even to share problems with. There’s the mail, for example. I would be glad to try to ease that burden,” Ehrlichman said. At the mention of the mail Pat tensed up and knew exactly why he had come: to keep tabs on her and eventually control her correspondence. “I have an obligation to all the people who cared enough to write me,” she told him. “I might be slow and old-fashioned, but I believe everyone deserves a personal answer and a personal signature.” When he told her she would never have the time to answer every letter, she simply nodded once. The subject was closed.

Before he left, Ehrlichman told her that he was worried that she had grown too thin: “In the same way that you owe your correspondents your personal attention, you owe your family and friends the best care you can give yourself.” He said she should call his wife, whom she was friendly with, if she wanted to talk to someone. But the First Lady did not offer any reaction at all. Ehrlichman said he was readying himself for tears or for anger, but her cold stare shook him to the core. He had been sent to talk to her by the President and by Haldeman, and as he sneaked out of the room, barely remembering to say goodbye, he realized he had absolutely nothing to report. This was a woman who was in complete control. It was a fierce battle between the East and West Wings because Mrs. Nixon was putting up a fight.

In interviews she often said she was never tired, and on the campaign trail she would sometimes make do with only a banana until dinner. But she never complained about being hungry. She had taken charge of her family’s household after her mother died when she was a young girl and could not afford to be tired or hungry. “I don’t get ill,” she told one reporter. “The girls [her daughters, Tricia and Julie] say that there’s no point in telling me if they don’t feel well. They’ll get no encouragement from me.” She once went so far as to say, “Even if I were dying, I wouldn’t let anyone know.”

Like most first ladies, she was more liberal than her husband and was pro-choice and supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In a rare moment of candor, she told a group of women reporters that she was pushing her husband to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court for the first time. “Don’t you worry,” she said, “I’m talking it up.” The President asked Attorney General John Mitchell to offer a list of qualified women and he seriously considered nominating a California Supreme Court associate, but decided against it. After weeks of consideration he announced his decision to appoint William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell to fill the two vacancies. When Nixon made the announcement Haldeman told him gushingly that he had “scored another ten-strike.”

“Well, probably so, except for my wife, but boy is she mad.” The silence at the dinner table that evening was broken by an angry Pat. She had gone out on a limb and spoken publicly, urging him to nominate a woman. Now letters flew in sympathizing with her about how her husband had “let her down.” “Women in 1971,” she told him, “need the recognition that a female member of the Supreme Court would bring them.” The president sighed heavily and said, “We tried to do the best we could, Pat.”

BETTY FORD, WHO replaced Pat so suddenly after President Nixon’s resignation, was unusual because she publicly challenged her husband’s decisions and made statements that sent his male political advisers into a frenzy. Her 1975 interview on 60 Minutes with Morley Safer shocked the nation. She said that all of her children had experimented with marijuana, and she said that if she were a teenager she would probably try marijuana herself. She also admitted to seeing a psychiatrist, and she revealed that she was pro-choice. When Safer asked how she would feel if the Fords’ eighteen-year-old daughter, Susan, confessed to having an affair, she said, “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. I would think she’s a perfectly normal human being, like all young girls.” There was an uproar as hate mail piled up in the First Lady’s correspondence office and angry callers jammed the White House telephone lines.

Not long after the 60 Minutes interview Betty doubled down with an interview for McCall’s magazine in which she said that she wanted to have sex with her husband “as often as possible,” and that she was “working on getting a woman on the Supreme Court.” But soon the hate mail was outweighed by the number of fan letters from people happy to finally see a first lady express her own opinions, and the 60 Minutes interview is now featured at President Ford’s presidential library, along with exhibits devoted to Betty’s outspokenness. Time reporter Bonnie Angelo summed up Betty’s candor when she said, “She had not really been a captive of the political spotlight. Part of it was because she was always home with the children. So she didn’t have the edges all worn smooth.”

Ford had never faced a fierce primary before he got to the White House, and his family was not used to being on display. Betty was more outspoken and less willing to bite her tongue, even during the 1976 presidential campaign. Ford’s advisers were not pleased. Once, when President Ford was meeting with his staff right before the kickoff of the campaign, one of his political strategists carefully brought up the “problem” of his wife. “Mr. President, we’re so close to getting into the campaign, we love your wife, but do you think there’s any chance you might be able to speak to her and just sort of politely ask her if she could tone it down until the campaign is over?” Ford looked around the table at each of his advisers and said, “My wife’s office is right down that hall and I know she’s in it right now. If anybody at this meeting would like to get up and talk to her you’re more than welcome.” No one took him up on his offer.

The Fords brought a casual warmth to the residence, even allowing their teenage daughter to roller-skate in the East Room and wear jeans on the State Floor, where the most formal and public rooms are located. Betty wanted to get to know the residence staff. Carpenter Milton Frame was impressed by her approachable manner. “I do recall that Mrs. Ford, she would invite you to sit down and have a cup of tea,” he said fondly. She also enjoyed teasing the staff. During a tour of the private quarters, her press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, noticed a flower vase with the figures of two angels, with their hands almost touching. A cigarette was perched perfectly between them. “Oh, that,” the First Lady said, laughing. “I put it there. That’s just my way of testing whether the maids have cleaned the room!”

She was fun-loving and never really changed from the outspoken Alexandria, Virginia, housewife she had been before becoming first lady and before then being the wife of the vice president. More than any other first family, the Fords brought a middle-class sensibility to the White House. One Saturday night, Butler James Jeffries was told to stop washing dishes and go upstairs to the second floor to help Betty with something. When he got upstairs, Betty asked, “Where are the butlers?” She was looking for the full-time butlers.

“They just went downstairs. I can go get them for you,” he told her, pushing the elevator button to go back down.

“All I need is a man,” she called to him, impatiently, from the Family Dining Room.

He laughs with a wink. “I said to myself, Wait a minute, what is this lady getting me into? So I went to see what she wanted and all she wanted me to do was take the nineteen-inch television into the bedroom!”