VII

The Good Wife

Strength and dignity are her clothing,

and she laughs at the time to come.

She opens her mouth with wisdom,

and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.

She looks well to the ways of her household

and does not eat the bread of idleness.

Her children rise up and call her blessed;

her husband also, and he praises her:

“Many women have done excellently,

but you surpass them all.”

—PROVERBS 31:25–29

Your mother is very sick, and she had to go to a psychiatrist.

—THE FORD CHILDREN’S NANNY, CLARA POWELL, AFTER THEIR MOTHER, BETTY FORD, SUFFERED A BREAKDOWN

Jackie Kennedy had always felt like “the worst liability” to her husband: she was too rich, she was too beautiful, she had an almost comically breathy voice, and she was often pregnant during the height of his campaigning, so she could not join him. The President would get upset at her when the press wrote about her extravagant spending and her wealthy pedigree (she was educated at Miss Porter’s, Vassar, and the Sorbonne, and she was the product of a broken high-class marriage), and her sister Lee’s 1959 marriage to Polish Prince Stanislas Radziwill did not help. “I’m sorry for you that I’m such a dud,” she told him. (Her husband’s tastes were less highfalutin—she’d joke that the only music he really enjoyed was “Hail to the Chief.”) But soon she started seeing the crowds turn up during the 1960 presidential campaign just to see her, and letters poured in asking her about her clothes and how to replicate her hairstyle. On their way to the inaugural balls, President Kennedy told their driver to turn on the lights inside their car “so that people can see Jackie.” Kennedy family friend William Walton remembers, “We made her sit forward so that they could see her.”

In the spring of 1961, less than six months after the President took office, the Kennedys went to Europe, where he famously said, “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself. . . . I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.” Jackie thrilled the crowds, with half a million people lining the streets chanting “Vive Zhack-ee” and “Kenne-dee.” She spoke what French President Charles de Gaulle called her “low, slow” and flawless French. De Gaulle told the President that his Francophile wife “knew more French history than most French women.” (Jackie hired French chef René Verdon from New York’s famed Carlyle Hotel to take over the White House kitchen from navy stewards and caterers. She was the first first lady to insist that state dinner menus be written in French.)

Jackie could not help being aware of her own popularity and was sometimes generous with it. In Vienna, she stood on a balcony as a crowd of five thousand people below cheered “Jack-ee!” and she deftly pulled the dowdy and overlooked Nina Khrushchev, wife of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, outside with her and the chants morphed into “Jack-ee! Ni-na!” Nina reached for Jackie’s white-gloved hand and held it high in hers, in a salute to the crowd. By the time they left the palace, Nina got an almost equal share of the applause. French cultural minister and author André Malraux was initially skeptical about the young American president and his wife, but Jackie won him over after an elaborate dinner she threw at the White House in his honor. At the end of the evening she got what she had been dreaming of when Malraux whispered to her softly, “Je vais vous envoyer La Joconde” (“I will send you the Mona Lisa”). Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was lent to the United States for the first and only time ever, all because of Jackie.

Jackie developed the first official White House guidebook as a way to raise money for redecorating (it sold an astounding half a million copies within ten months of publication). Nash Castro, who helped with the redecoration, recalls sitting with her during one of many meetings in the Yellow Oval Room of the residence as she went through every page of the book for two hours, making suggestions to editors along the way. She was far from her glamorous self in a loose housedress and loafers with no socks. Castro remembers one meeting ending at 6 p.m. Jackie’s hair was undone and she had no makeup on. The next morning he woke up to a front-page photo in the Washington Post of her looking gorgeous at a state dinner the night before.

It seems that Jackie adopted an obsession with appearances and with perfecting the furnishings of the White House as a way of stifling a deep sadness that must have come from knowing about her husband’s constant cheating. White House usher Nelson Pierce remembered how involved Jackie was in the aesthetics of the mansion. “Mr. Pierce, I need some help!” she would often yell down. “I’d like to move this sofa over here,” she said one day. Pierce asked whether she wanted him to see if one of the doormen was free to help, but she said no. “You pick up one end and I’ll pick up the other.” That night they moved the sofa to three different locations in the West Sitting Hall before she finally decided where she wanted it.

The President often seemed amused by his wife’s obsession. White House Electrician Larry Bush remembers standing on a six-foot-tall ladder installing two gold sconces by the fireplace in the Red Room when the President walked in at the moment he began cutting into the gorgeous red twill satin walls. “Larry,” he said, “what in the world are you doing?” “Your wife wants these gold sconces. . . .” Bush said. The President smiled, shook his head, and watched for a moment or two before he went back to his office.

Hundreds of pages of exhaustive handwritten memos reveal how much Jackie truly cared about the history of the White House and the preservation of its priceless antiques, and she succeeded in turning it into a living museum. “All these people come to see the White House and they see practically nothing that dates back before 1948 [when the White House was last restored during President Truman’s administration],” she said in an interview with Life magazine in 1961. “Every boy who comes here should see things that develop his sense of history. For the girls, the house should look beautiful and lived-in. They should see what a fire in the fireplace and pretty flowers can do for a house.” She hated the word “redecorate” and insisted that she was on a scholarly mission of “restoring” the mansion. While some of her personal memos—asking the household staff to bring down “our pathetic group of lamps” so that she could examine them, or to “take down the two hideous mirrors over the sofa” in the East Sitting Hall—seem elitist, they show her intensity and passion for making the White House more beautiful for every American. “The sun is going to fade the walls and curtains in the green, blue and red rooms—so the minute the tours are over, could you have the blinds drawn,” she told Chief Usher J. B. West in one memo. “Also in the Blue Room make sure the braid on the curtains is turned in . . . if the braid faces out it will get sunburned.”

Looking at her personal memos, however, it seems her quest for perfection would never be fulfilled: there was always more furniture to be ordered, more artwork to be swapped out or rearranged. She stood next to Electrician Larry Bush as he worked to arrange lighting for paintings depicting Native American life by George Catlin that she had acquired. Bush was lying underneath a piano in the room, trying to take measurements and decide where the spotlights should go. He went to fish a pen and paper from his pocket to write down some notes and was embarrassed to discover that he didn’t have either. “I’ll run and get my steno pad,” she told him. He dictated notes to her of what he would need for the lighting and she suggested exactly where she wanted the spotlights to go. “A little to the left,” she told him, motioning with her hand.

Her restoration of the White House was described in detail in the wildly popular hour-long CBS Television tour broadcast on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1962. A Tour of the White House was the first time television cameras were allowed inside the White House, and it was shot with eight television cameras over the course of almost seven hours in one day. “She was a brilliant woman. I wrote a script of what the questions might be, but she was so far ahead of me that she didn’t need it,” says CBS producer Perry Wolff. Wolff went into the shoot with three color-coded scripts: one if Jackie was just interviewed, another if she was going to show photos, and the third if she was going to do a tour. “But she threw my script away; she was ready.”

Jackie never buckled under the pressure but between takes “she smoked all the time,” Wolff recalled. “She kept missing the ashtray and flicking the ashes onto the expensive silk covering of the bench she was sitting on. I knew there was tension there.” That night she had dinner with columnist Joseph Alsop and his wife, Susan Mary Alsop. Later, when she and President Kennedy watched clips from the taping, the President was so impressed with her performance that he asked CBS if the crew could reshoot his segment the next morning so that he could match hers.

In a letter to the Kennedys’ friend William Walton, Jackie wrote, “My life here which I dreaded & which at first overwhelmed me—is now under control and the happiest time I have ever known—not for the position—but for the closeness of one’s family. . . . The last thing I expected to find in the W. House.” Behind the scenes she was a skilled caretaker of her fragile husband, who suffered from severe back pain and other medical problems. In a memo to the President’s White House doctor she reminds him to use Johnson’s Back Plasters, sent from Kennedy’s mother. “He used one yesterday and liked it very much. It, obviously, isn’t a cure—but, it makes the sore spot feel warm which is better than just having it ache.” She gets into every detail and when she asks the doctor to order more plasters she even gives him the price: forty-three cents each. She ends the note by asking him to send some mineral oil and talcum powder to the President’s valet, George Thomas, because he needs those to make sure his skin isn’t irritated when he takes the plaster off.

Above all else, Jackie wanted her husband to be happy. On particularly hard days, when she knew he was grappling with a major issue, she would leave him hand-drawn cartoons and do one of her hilarious impersonations of world leaders or his advisers. She always wanted the children to be on their best behavior when they saw their father after work, and she committed herself to making life in the residence a “climate of affection and comfort and détente.” She organized small dinners with their closest friends and would wait as late as 6 p.m. to have the President’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, phone in the invitations, because she often would not know if her husband would be in the mood for company until then. Every two weeks or so she would organize more elaborate dinners where guests danced to an orchestra in the elegant and intimate Blue Room until 3 a.m. She took care of her husband’s every need; in a memo dated April 2, 1963, sent to Chief Usher West, she asks him to inquire with the Smithsonian Institution to find a woodcarver who could make a copy of the President’s ornate Oval Office desk to be displayed in his library. In another she tells him that the President doesn’t like the “muddy colors” of the rug in the Cabinet Room and asks that the curtains in the Oval be less “draped” and less “feminine.” She even brought in his favorite foods, such as Joe’s Stone Crabs from Miami.

Once she told her friend, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that she made what she considered the terrible mistake of asking her husband about what was happening in Vietnam. “Oh, my God, kid,” Kennedy said, using a term of endearment that understandably rankled Jackie, “I’ve had that, you know, on me all day. Don’t remind me of that all over again.” The President had just taken his daily swim and was in his “happy evening mood,” and she was consumed with guilt for even bringing the topic up. If she wanted to know what was going on, he told her, she should ask his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, to let her see all the cables. She read the weekly CIA summary as well as the India-Pakistan cables, mostly because she enjoyed the witty writing of Kennedy’s ambassador to India, old friend and scholar John Kenneth Galbraith.

One thing she was never curious about was the details of her husband’s cheating, though she certainly knew what was happening. But she had a sense of humor about him being a flirt. Early in their marriage, she was visiting Jack in the hospital where he was staying because of his bad back. Before the visit she went out to dinner with friends and the beautiful actress Grace Kelly was there. When Jackie got up to leave, Kelly said, “You know, I always wanted to meet Senator Kennedy.” Jackie replied, “Will you come back with me to the hospital and meet him now?” Jack had complained that the nurses were older and not very attractive, so Jackie asked Kelly to put on a nurse’s cap and uniform and tell Kennedy that she was his new night nurse. For a few minutes he didn’t know who it was but then he exploded in laughter.

But the President committed constant betrayals, including having trysts with women as young as nineteen who were working in the White House. Jackie had a decision to make: look the other way or risk losing everything. Not long before Kennedy’s inauguration, Jackie wrote a note to journalist and author Fletcher Knebel. “I would describe Jack as rather like me in that his life is an iceberg,” she wrote. “The public life is above the water—& the private life is submerged.” Her own father had cheated routinely on her mother, and she had come to accept it as the norm. A week after their tenth wedding anniversary Jackie wrote a letter to their friend Charles Bartlett, who had introduced them years earlier. She told him that without Jack her life would have “all been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way.”

But it was hard looking the other way all the time. One woman, named Mimi Alford, was a college freshman when she began a sexual relationship with the President. She and other young women were interns in the press office and soon became involved in relationships with Kennedy and some of his aides. “The thing that amazed me so was that these two or three girls were great friends and bosom buddies and gathered in corners and whispered and giggled, and there seemed to be no jealousy between them, and this was all one great big happy party and they didn’t seem to resent any interest that the President or any other men might have in any of the girls,” recalled Kennedy press aide Barbara Gamarekian. “It was a marvelous example of sharing, which I found very difficult to understand as a woman!” Kennedy’s cheating was an open secret with reporters, who made offhand remarks about it, but it was considered off-limits to serious journalists.

Jackie was no fool. She sought out a doctor, who was a friend and neighbor of Robert Kennedy, to talk about the bouts of depression her husband’s cheating had brought on. Once, when she was giving a reporter friend of hers from Paris Match a tour of the White House, she went to the vestibule of the Oval Office to say hello to the President’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. She noticed one woman who was said to be having an affair with her husband sitting quietly nearby, probably petrified. Jackie turned to her friend and said, in French, “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.” (Decades later, when Diane Sawyer asked Caroline Kennedy if her mother ever spoke about JFK’s betrayals, Caroline said uncomfortably, “I wouldn’t be her daughter if I would share all that.”)

Jackie was always an individual. When the President came to her with letters criticizing her for wearing shorts that were too short, she simply said, “But they’re not too short,” and he would let it go. He did suggest that she wear hats instead of the scarves that made her look like a movie star. In an interview with the JFK Library, Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, revealed advice she surely gave her daughter when she was first lady. “I do really think that you have to keep your own identity or you just become exactly like Mrs. Coolidge or exactly like Mrs. Eisenhower or exactly like Mrs. Truman. I think you must try somehow—within bounds there are certain things that obviously you can’t do when you are very much in the public eye. I think Jackie, on the whole, was right to do what she thought was right or natural to her.”

JACKIE SPOKE IN a childlike whisper of a voice (Kennedy’s sisters called her “the Deb” behind her back), but she was tough as nails and would cut people off if she felt they had betrayed her. She delicately crafted the image of Camelot after persuading her friend journalist Theodore H. White to refer to the Kennedy years as Camelot—a magical time that was too good to last—in Life magazine. “Only bitter men write history,” she told White. “Jack’s life had more to do with myth, magic, legend, saga and story than with political theory or political science.” She was terrified that her husband’s dreams and accomplishments would be forgotten. In the days following the assassination she asked President Johnson to rename the Florida space center, Cape Canaveral, after her husband. Within an hour, Johnson had it done. She did not want her contributions to be forgotten, either, and she wrote an eleven-page memo listing the treasures she had brought to the White House and had it sent to Lady Bird before she moved out.

Jackie summoned White to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in Massachusetts just a week after her husband’s murder and delivered an incredibly compelling four-hour narrative of their tenure in the White House. According to handwritten notes White took during the interview, Jackie told him, “I’m not going to be the widow Kennedy in public; when this is all over I’m going to crawl into the deepest retirement there is.” Jackie painted a vivid picture of those frightening moments after her husband was shot, when she cradled him in her arms as they raced to Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital. “Jack, Jack, can you hear me? I love you, Jack.” When they finally got to the hospital (the short ride felt interminable) Jackie’s beloved Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, pleaded with her to allow them to get the President out of the car. But she didn’t want anyone to see him like that, with his brains exposed and blood everywhere.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” Hill said. “Please let us help the President.” But she would not let go of her husband.

“Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” he begged her. “Please let us get him into the hospital.” When she didn’t answer he instinctively knew the problem and took off his jacket and placed it over the President’s head. It was only then that she let go.

She insisted on going in to see her husband before they closed the casket in the hospital, and a police officer helped her pull off her stained white gloves that were stiffened with his blood. She put her simple bloodstained gold wedding band on his finger and kissed his hand. Later, she regretted the decision and felt she had nothing left of him, so one of Kennedy’s most trusted aides called the morgue and got the ring back. “This is the closest thing I have to a memory of him,” she told White as she quietly twisted it around her finger. “He bought it in a hurry in Newport just before we were married. It wasn’t even engraved to me when he gave it to me. I had to put the date in later.”

She carefully edited White’s thousand-word essay, which ran in Life’s December 6 issue. She talked about the “magic” of her husband’s presidency and how they would listen to the Lerner and Loewe Broadway musical Camelot before going to sleep. “I’d get out of bed at night and play it for him when it was so cold getting out of bed,” she said, using the “old Victrola” in the dressing room between their two bedrooms to soothe him to sleep. His favorite lines came at the end: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

Jackie, like most of the other first ladies, was the fiercest protector of her husband’s legacy. She held epic grudges against any of his detractors, or anyone who questioned the mysterious perfection of those thousand days. She never spoke again to their close friend the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee after his book Conversations with Kennedy was published in 1975 because she felt that the book was too intimate. She selected historian William Manchester to write the definitive account of her husband’s assassination and gave him unprecedented access, spending hours with him recounting her most personal memories of her husband’s death. But she was furious when she saw the final product, Death of a President, and demanded that his publisher, Harper & Row, and Look magazine, which was set to run an excerpt of the book, make hundreds of changes. “The worst thing in my life was trying to get all those things of Mr. Manchester’s out of his book,” Jackie said. “I did my oral history with him in an evening and alone, and it’s rather hard to stop when the floodgates open.” She failed in her attempts to make sure that Manchester did not receive any of the profits, but he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown because of the stress of the legal battle.

Jackie was similarly furious when, in 1978, she signed the deed of gift on her oral history interview for the LBJ Library and almost immediately Hugh Sidey of Time magazine got hold of it and wrote a column on it. Soon other organizations were clamoring for it and for duplicate copies of the tape of the interview. The tape and the transcript were to be made available unless the donor objected, and since Jackie had signed over the deed to the library no one was at fault. Still, she was angry and had her lawyer insist that the transcript and tape be removed from the research room until she and the library could work on a new agreement. Lady Bird wrote to Jackie on August 3, 1978, acting like a concerned mother: “Library staff members have explained to me how the routine of the Archives regulations could result in the unfortunate exploitation of your interview. Nonetheless, I feel that steps could have been taken, and should have, to be more protective of you. You have had to endure so much in the public eye, I hate for us to be even the distant agent for unpleasant publicity for you.” Lady Bird would never stop feeling protective of Jackie.

PAT NIXON GREW up on a small truck farm in Artesia, California, about twenty miles southeast of Los Angeles. She lost her mother to cancer when she was twelve. After her mother’s death she took over the household chores, including the laborious task of doing the laundry, which involved building a fire in an outdoor brick fireplace and lifting the clothes with long sticks from cauldrons of boiling water into cold water and hanging the heavy wet clothes on a line to dry. (Even in the White House, with a staff of almost one hundred, she insisted on washing her own underwear and nightgowns and doing her own packing for trips.)

She told her daughter Julie, “When my mother died I just took responsibility for my life.” She also took care of her two older brothers and her father before his death from silicosis, or miner’s disease, five years after her mother’s passing. By the age of seventeen, Pat was an orphan. She was determined to get a college degree and worked her way through the University of Southern California as a telephone operator and a bit actor in movies. She graduated cum laude in 1937. When she worked at a bank she was robbed at gunpoint; even then she calmly studied the robber’s face and identified him to police. She met Richard Nixon when they both tried out for parts in a local production of The Dark Tower in 1938. She was earning $190 a month teaching shorthand and typing at a high school in Whittier, California, and he was a young lawyer in town who had just graduated from Duke University School of Law, where he was nicknamed “Gloomy Gus.”

Nixon fell in love with Pat at first sight and proposed to her the day they met, but he had to court her for two years until she agreed to marry him. He was so infatuated that he even occasionally drove her to Los Angeles to meet other men for dates just so that he could spend time with her in the car. Her letters to him were friendly and decidedly unromantic. She began one 1938 letter with “Hi-ho, Hi-ho! How does it go?” and invited Nixon over so she could “burn a hamburger” for him. His notes to her reveal a deep love that may have lessened over the years but was strong at first. “Every day and every night I want to see you and be with you. Yet I have no feeling of selfish ownership or jealousy. In fact I should always want you to live just as you wanted—because if you didn’t then you would change and wouldn’t be you,” he wrote in a voice that is hard to picture as Richard Nixon’s. “Let’s go for a long ride Sundays; let’s go to the mountains weekends; let’s read books in front of fires; most of all let’s really grow together and find the happiness we know is ours.” They married on June 21, 1940, in a Quaker ceremony in Riverside, California. Pat was twenty-eight and Dick was twenty-seven. After several years in the navy during World War II, Nixon decided to run for Congress. Pat became his office manager and spent the rest of her life supporting his political ambitions, even though it was not the life she had ever wanted for herself or for her family.

Richard Nixon’s youngest and last surviving brother, Ed, remembers those early days and how Pat, whom he had met in 1939 when he was nine and she was twenty-seven, took him under her wing. He told her that he wanted to see what the beach was like and she said, “Well, let’s go see!” The Nixons were a working-class family who all worked at the family-owned grocery store and gas station in Whittier, and Ed says they never had time for anything but work. At the beach, Ed says, “I remember her running, she could almost run as fast as me, and that was something for a girl. . . . She wanted me to see the other side of life.”

Pat’s White House chief of staff and press secretary, Connie Stuart, says Pat did not want to be first lady in 1968; she wanted to be first lady in 1960, when her husband lost to John Kennedy. Pat was so upset by that defeat that it would be the only time photos show her crying. In fact, she sobbed after her husband all but conceded the election to Kennedy in the ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. She tried to hide from the cameras as she walked with her husband to their fifth-floor suite. Unable to hold it in any longer, she left his side and darted out ahead of him and ran to her bedroom so she could close the door and mourn the loss alone. She had worked hard on the campaign trail and she tried desperately to fight back bitter tears: “Now I’ll never get to be first lady.”

Pat was all the more stung by the narrow loss because her husband had been so kind to Kennedy; they shared memories of their time as junior senators and of the times when Nixon visited him as Kennedy was recovering from a back operation that nearly killed him in 1954. Jackie even wrote Nixon a note thanking him for his help while her husband was sick: “I don’t think there is anyone in the world he thinks more highly of than he does you—and this is just another proof of how incredible you are.” But during the heat of the 1960 campaign, the gloves were off and Pat was deeply hurt. Years later, when they were finally in the White House and Watergate was consuming her husband’s presidency, she wondered aloud why no one in the media crucified Kennedy for stealing that election, citing the speculation that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley had stolen Illinois’s twenty-seven Electoral College votes for Kennedy. (Kennedy won the bitter 1960 election by just 300,000 votes, or less than one-half of 1 percent of the total vote.) Why had no one investigated the Kennedys for voter fraud when her own family was subjected to so much scrutiny?

Nixon had promised Pat that he would not run again after he lost his 1962 comeback campaign for governor of California, famously blasting the press with this parting message: “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Pat was relieved. Her happiest years were after that 1962 defeat, when the family moved to New York and retreated to private life and Nixon worked as a lawyer. Jackie’s reply to a condolence note that the Nixons had sent her after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 must have made Pat question whether her husband should ever return to politics. “We never value life enough when we have it,” Jackie wrote. “I know how you must feel—so long on the path—so closely missing the greatest prize—and now for you the question comes up again—and you must commit all your and your family’s hopes and efforts again. . . . If it does not work out as you have hoped for so long—please be consoled by what you already have—your life and your family.”

Pat was not eager to enter the fray again in 1968. By the time they actually got to the White House in January 1969, the Vietnam War was raging and the feminist movement was in full force. As the wife of President Eisenhower’s vice president, Pat had been trained at the knee of Mamie Eisenhower, the quintessential 1950s political wife, and she would have been an excellent first lady in the 1950s and early 1960s. “Life and history have not been fair to Pat Nixon. Period,” Connie Stuart says. On the eve of Richard Nixon’s first inauguration, Pat was asked if she had wanted her husband to get into politics. “No,” she said. “I did not. Politics was not what I would have chosen for him because, after all, you don’t see as much of your husband as you would like and it’s a hard life.”

Jackie wrote to Pat again after Nixon’s victory. The handwritten card was delivered by messenger from Jackie’s 5,300-square-foot New York apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue to the Nixons’ apartment at 810 Fifth Avenue (the most famous First Lady and the incoming First Lady lived just twenty-three blocks away from each other). In the letter Jackie congratulated Pat but added ominously, “You are such a close family that I know you will be able to be happy in spite of the pressures and the absence of privacy.” Firmly believing their time had passed and wishing that her husband had given up politics, the exhausted Pat ate dinner alone before the inaugural balls while her family had a decadent steak meal served on china in the Family Dining Room. “I don’t want any dinner,” she said. “You’ve got to eat something, Pat,” her husband told her. She relented and asked for a bowl of cottage cheese in her room (which sent the kitchen staff into a frenzy when they discovered that they did not have any cottage cheese on hand and someone had to race out to a local supermarket). Pat was in no mood to celebrate.

But she took her job seriously. She traveled more than one hundred thousand miles as First Lady, visiting more foreign countries (seventy-eight) than any before her. Her foreign travels included the Nixons’ historic visit to China in 1972 and a trip to Peru in 1970, when she led a major humanitarian effort, bringing tons of donated food, clothing, and medical supplies to tens of thousands of people devastated by an earthquake. She became the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to travel to a combat zone when she visited wounded American soldiers in South Vietnam in 1969. She flew from the Saigon airport to the Presidential Palace in a helicopter that made dramatic nearly vertical takeoffs and landings to avoid sniper fire. Her Secret Service agents were armed with machine guns and shoulder belts loaded with cartridges. During a visit to an orphanage with 774 children, fighter jets and circling helicopters nearly drowned out her conversations with the children.

The protests over the war in the fall of 1969 were so large that the President called in hundreds of army troops to Washington to defend the White House. There were days when the window shades had to be drawn and the bomb shelter under the East Wing was used as an official command center where communications were kept open with the military in case National Guard troops were needed. The Nixons’ social secretary, Lucy Winchester, had unknowingly scheduled the annual Senate Ladies Luncheon at the height of Vietnam War protests in May 1971. Streets around the White House were clogged as two hundred thousand demonstrators flooded the city. Winchester says that when she was leaving work protesters would leap on her car and spit on her windshield.

“Are you sure you want to do this? We can cancel this,” she told the First Lady.

“Absolutely not,” Pat replied—she had chaired the group when her husband was vice president. “The senators have no idea what we put up with all day long, every day. They are so sheltered. If their wives have to come to town, they will see what we are up against and they will tell their husbands.” She told Winchester to spend the night before in a guest room on the third floor and not to forget her party dress. “I will not have you be held up in the morning by all those bad actors. The luncheon goes on.”

Though she never publicly crumbled, Watergate took a terrible toll on Pat Nixon’s health as she lost more and more sleep and felt that she needed to put on a brave face. She also lost weight and rumors of her drinking began to circulate, though her loyal aides beat them back, saying that she enjoyed an occasional highball and a cigarette at the end of a long day. “Watergate is the only crisis that ever got me down,” Pat told her daughter Julie. “It is just constant. And I know I will never live to see the vindication.” In a letter from the Eisenhowers’ home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Mamie wrote, “Pat Dear—This is not an engraved invitation but I would love to have you come up here when the President goes away—you could rest, walk, read, and gossip with me—know please everything would be on the QT.” She signed the note “Love, Mamie E” and never once mentioned Watergate, but the implication that she knew Pat needed a place to escape is clear.

Pat strongly objected to her husband’s decision to release transcripts of secretly recorded tapes of conversations relating to Watergate. She said they should be destroyed (preferably burned), and she was hurt that her husband never asked for her opinion before they were released. The tapes, she told her close friend Helene Drown, should be treated like “private love letters” meant for “one person alone.” She was fiercely loyal to her husband, whom she had stood by for nearly thirty years of political life.

House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes, a Republican, told a group of reporters at a breakfast session that the President should consider resigning in order to avoid impeachment. “If Nixon comes to conclude that he can no longer be effective as president, he will do something about it,” Rhodes said. “If he should resign, I would accept it.” In fact, resignation, he said, “would probably be beneficial” to the party.

Rhodes came face-to-face with Pat Nixon in a receiving line at a party on Capitol Hill that evening.

“How are you, Mrs. Nixon?” he asked her.

As a photographer asked them to smile for a picture she said, through pursed lips, “Oh, yes. Let’s smile as if we liked each other.”

“Mrs. Nixon,” Rhodes replied, “it isn’t the way you heard it.”

“Yeah,” she said coolly, “that’s what they all say.”

In the spring and summer of 1974, before her husband’s resignation, she spent most of her time in her pale yellow bedroom on the second floor of the residence, a prisoner of the White House. She still answered as many letters as she could, looking out onto a magnificent view of the National Mall. She also read books about friendship and love, and around 11 a.m. she would order a coffee and chef’s salad or soup to be served at 1 p.m. Often the coffee would be the only thing she touched on the tray. Things got so tense that the butlers rushed to serve the Nixons dinner because once they sat down there was a deafening silence in the Family Dining Room that made five minutes seem like an hour. But there were times when the President tried in vain to lighten the mood. He suddenly looked at his wife one morning, focusing on her for the first time that day, and said, “My, that’s a pretty suit you have on, Pat, you really look nice. I like that.” She replied, a little sharply, “Oh, Dick, I’ve had this suit for years. You’ve seen this before. You know this isn’t new.”

On Valentine’s Day in 1974, six months before the President’s resignation, the Nixons had a rare dinner out at Trader Vic’s, not far from the White House. UPI reporter Helen Thomas and CBS reporter Lesley Stahl found out that they would be there and got a table nearby. The Nixons brought along the President’s best friend, Bebe Rebozo, and when they got up to leave Thomas and Stahl pushed to get ahead of them and ask them questions. The two reporters thought they would be getting a scoop, but as soon as the Nixons stepped outside, microphones and cameras were shoved in their faces by reporters who had been staking out the restaurant. Stahl and Thomas found themselves pushed aside as everyone clamored to ask the President about Watergate. When Thomas glanced to her left she saw that someone else had also been left behind: Pat Nixon. “How are you?” Thomas asked her. “Helen,” the First Lady said, her eyes filling with tears, “can you believe that with all the troubles Dick has had, all the pressures he’s been under, he would do this for me?” Thomas was speechless—she thought the President owed his loyal wife much more than just a dinner date.

In early August President Nixon told his family of his decision to resign and they pushed him to reconsider. But even they recognized the deep hole he was in when the so-called smoking gun transcript was released revealing a June 23, 1972, meeting between the President and Haldeman proving his culpability in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in. “This was the final blow, the final nail in the coffin,” Nixon told former aide Frank Gannon in a 1983 video. “Although you don’t need another nail if you’re already in the coffin—which we were.” On August 7, a congressional delegation led by Republican Senator Barry Goldwater told the President that he would not survive an impeachment vote. That night, Nixon decided he finally had to resign. Pat began packing and worked through most of the night; there was no use trying to sleep anyway. She would stand by him through it all. “With us sometimes,” the President reflected, “you don’t have to say it publicly, or even privately. Things unspoken say it more strongly.”

They left the White House on August 9, 1974, and spent months in self-imposed exile at their home in San Clemente, California. When the former President was in the hospital because of a blood clot in his lung, Pat brought him McDonald’s hamburgers and the two huddled together and watched reruns of Bonanza, a TV show they had never had time to watch before. So much had changed in their lives. The helicopter landing pad at their home was turned into a makeshift volleyball court and weeds started to take over the small golf course on their property. They were used to being completely surrounded by aides who acted as buffers between them, and it was the first time since their first political campaign in 1946 that they were truly alone with each other. Julie says that she and her sister, Tricia, saw “that they both survived because when my father felt defeated, Mother upheld him, and when she was spiritless, he rallied to comfort her. We never saw them give in to despair at the same time.” Nixon would encourage his wife to eat more at dinner—“try the delicious squash from the garden”—and she’d leave a gardenia on his pillow at night.

BETTY FORD HAD dealt with debilitating pain from a pinched nerve after tripping over a stool in the family’s den in their Alexandria, Virginia, home. She was also racked by arthritis. Her addiction to painkillers began in 1964 when she was prescribed medication for her neck, and those prescriptions multiplied when her doctor gave her pills for everything: for pain, for anxiety, to help her sleep. She was taking as many as twenty pills a day and often mixing them with alcohol, a potentially deadly combination that she began to depend on when she was raising her four children in their suburban home. It was a dependence that her husband did not want to admit to himself.

It was clear to some of the women in the East Wing that the First Lady had a serious problem. One of her East Wing staffers, along with a navy nurse who traveled with Betty, approached the White House physician, Dr. William Lukash, and told him they were concerned about the seven or eight bottles of pills, including pain medicine, that the First Lady traveled with. “We believe Mrs. Ford is taking too much medication,” they said. He stared back at them: “Which medical school did you go to?”

Like so many women of her generation, Betty struggled to be the perfect housewife. She felt the heavy responsibility of raising children alone in the suburbs and keeping up appearances for her husband, his work colleagues, and their friends. But behind the scenes, Susan Ford recalled witnessing her mother buckle under the weight of it all and break down in the Fords’ bedroom. Susan was eight years old and her congressman father was on the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, with President Johnson. She found her mother alone and sobbing. She ran to get their nanny, Clara, who called Ford and told him he needed to come home. Clara told the children, “Your mother is very sick, and she had to go to a psychiatrist.” Susan Ford remembered not being able to process that at her young age. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to go. I was scared that mother might fall apart in front of my friends.”

Betty kept her painful secret private during her time in the White House. Finally, on a Saturday morning in 1978, after the glare of the White House years was gone and the Fords had retired to Rancho Mirage near Palm Springs, California, her addiction was hard to ignore. For decades President Ford had looked the other way and refused to acknowledge it. The family staged an intervention at Susan Ford’s insistence. Betty was thinking of calling her son Mike and his wife, Gayle, who lived in Pittsburgh, when the doorbell rang and Mike walked in. Suddenly she found herself sitting on the living room couch with her children sitting in chairs in a semicircle around her. Betty was stunned. “They went from one to another saying how I had let them down, how I had disappointed them. And, of course, this just was cutting to me. I was so hurt. I felt I had spent my whole life devoted to them, and they were telling me I was failing them.”

They confronted her with the mornings when she had forgotten what they had told her the night before because she had had too much to drink. They went over the times when they had to turn to Clara when they were growing up because their mother wasn’t acting like herself. Her son Jack said he avoided bringing friends home because he was never sure whether she would be slurring her words or not. Mike and Gayle told her they wanted her to be healthy for her grandchildren. Steve talked about a weekend not long before when he and his girlfriend had made dinner but Betty refused to come to the table and eat with them when they asked her to. “You just sat in front of the TV and you had one drink, two drinks, three drinks. You hurt me.” She felt humiliated and strangely alone, and she burst into tears. “It’ll be a day we’ll never forget, but let me say this very affirmatively: it was the only thing that saved Betty’s life,” President Ford said.

Betty had trouble admitting that she was an alcoholic but she acknowledged her dependence on pills and partly blamed the doctors who had been overmedicating her for so many years. “It was easier to give a woman tranquilizers and get rid of her than to sit and listen to her.” In 1978, two days after she turned sixty, Betty entered Long Beach Naval Hospital’s alcohol and drug rehabilitation unit. When she went to drop off her things, she was astounded to discover four beds in her room. She said she would not sign in unless she was given her own room. “If you insist on a private room, I will have all these ladies move out,” said Captain Joe Pursch, a navy doctor. “No, no, I won’t have that,” she told him, and within an hour she was moved in and a statement was being read to reporters.

It took Betty several days in treatment to acknowledge that she was not only dependent on pills, but also an alcoholic. “You’re trying to hide behind your husband,” Pursch said. “Why don’t you ask him if it would embarrass him if you say you’re an alcoholic?” She began to cry and her husband took her hand in his and said, “There will be no embarrassment to me. You go ahead and say what should be said.” She sobbed uncontrollably and that night, lying in bed, she wrote a statement revealing the whole truth for the first time. “I have found that I am not only addicted to the medications I have been taking for my arthritis, but also to alcohol.” Every evening the Fords would have a drink before dinner, but when Betty left treatment President Ford gave up his Jack Daniel’s Silver and replaced it with club soda with lime. Betty had supported him through all those years; now it was his turn to support her.

After President Ford’s death in 2006, Betty was depressed and was having trouble coping with life alone. Ford was the first president to reference his wife in his inaugural address when he said, “I am indebted to no man, and only to one woman.” When Betty stayed at Blair House during her husband’s state funeral she cried herself to sleep each night. (President George W. Bush was in office, and he told a staffer who was planning the funeral, “Whatever they need, we’ll do.”) “Do you think this is going okay?” Betty asked her assistant Ann Cullen. “I’ve got to tell you,” Cullen replied, “I think you are doing absolutely a magnificent job.” Betty started to cry and said, “Well, I have to because I’m doing it for him.” President Bush, who was to escort Betty down the long aisle to her seat at Washington’s National Cathedral at the state funeral, asked her if she wanted to use her wheelchair. She was eighty-eight years old and frail, and would have to endure days of national mourning and ceremonies, but she refused. She told friends, “I just did what my husband would have wanted me to.”

When she was at President Ford’s burial site at his museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan (Ford’s presidential library is in Ann Arbor), her family kept asking her if she wanted to use her wheelchair, but again, she refused. She had walked along the river with President Ford near the exact spot where he was to be buried, and she wanted to make the walk with him one last time. With everyone worried about her health, all she could think about was her husband and the deep love they shared for more than fifty-eight years of marriage. She insisted on making the long walk from the car to the burial site, and told anyone who objected, “This is the last time I’ll make this walk.” After the funeral, she kept white Christmas lights plugged in year-round on an olive tree in front of their house. She did it, she told friends and family, so that her husband could see her from heaven and know that she was all right. When the Fords’ personal chef, Lorraine Ornelas, saw Betty after her husband’s death, they sat on the edge of the Fords’ bed and Betty pushed a photo of her late husband closer to the edge of the nightstand toward them. “There he is,” she said wistfully. “I just want to go be with my boyfriend,” she told her children. “I don’t know why I’m still here, I don’t want to be here. I’m ready to go.”

LIKE PAT NIXON, Rosalynn Carter acted as a mother figure early on in her life. She knew aching loss as a young girl when her father, Edgar, died in 1940 when she was only thirteen. Wilburn Edgar Smith was a cotton and peanut farmer and a mechanic and he was a strict disciplinarian. But at the end of the day, he loved getting down on the floor and roughhousing with his brood of four children. “We had as much as anybody else in town and so we didn’t realize we were poor,” she said. Rosalynn helped milk cows and her father would flavor the milk with vanilla or chocolate and sell it at five cents a bottle. She also pruned watermelons and put arsenic on cotton to combat the boll weevil beetles that destroyed crops. During harvesttime, she picked cotton and harvested peanuts by pulling them up from under the ground and shaking the dirt off them. When her father died of leukemia at age forty-four, her whole life changed and she had to help her mother, Allie Smith, who was only thirty-four years old. Rosalynn’s mother recalled the painful day when her husband gathered the children together to tell them he wasn’t going to get better. He told his small children—the youngest was just four years old when he died—that he wanted them to look after their mother. “They all started screaming,” Rosalynn’s mother said. “Of course, I started crying, too.” Rosalynn recalled, “My mother depended on me to help her with the smaller children. I worked in a beauty shop in Plains for a while but, looking back, I didn’t help her nearly as much as I should have.” She did the cooking, laundry, and cleaning so that her mother could go to work at the post office and support their family.

Rosalynn threw herself into her schoolwork. She was her school’s valedictorian, and in seventh grade she got five dollars from a man in town who said he would give the cash reward (which is the equivalent of approximately eighty-five dollars today) to the student with the highest grade point average because he didn’t pass the seventh grade.

It is not surprising that Rosalynn crossed paths with Jimmy Carter, who also grew up in Plains, Georgia, a small town with dirt roads and a population of fewer than seven hundred people. They grew up at a time when a bag of candy cost a nickel and everyone in town knew each other. The closest movie theater was in Americus, about ten miles away, which meant if they went, they would go for the whole day. There were nine girls and six boys in Rosalynn’s high school class. She was on the basketball team, and because her school was so small the girls on the team became cheerleaders after they played.

Rosalynn’s mother was a true southern lady (during the births of her four children she said, “I tried to be as quiet as I could”), and she raised Rosalynn to be a feminine, shy little girl who liked to play with dolls. “Some children get out and get so dirty, but she was right neat and all,” her mother recalled.

Rosalynn and Jimmy met through Jimmy’s sister, Ruth, who was Rosalynn’s closest friend. Jimmy’s mother, Lillian (a tart-tongued woman affectionately referred to as “Miss Lillian” by almost everybody), was a nurse in town and was helping to care for Rosalynn’s father during the year and a half that he was sick before he passed away. Lillian knew that Rosalynn’s mother had four children to care for, so she would occasionally bring Rosalynn home with her to stay at their house after she took care of her father. Rosalynn’s mother sometimes asked her to go get the doctor when her father could not take the pain any longer. Once, Rosalynn ran to the doctor to get the medicine herself instead of waiting for him to come. She ran so hard and so fast that she was out of breath by the time she got to his house and couldn’t tell him what was wrong, so he took her back home in his car. “It was a terrible time,” Rosalynn’s mother recalled.

Like Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn and Jimmy did not know each other well before they got married, but they wrote to each other every day while he was at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and she was at Georgia Southwestern College. They were married in 1946 in a small ceremony with no attendants, when Rosalynn was eighteen and Jimmy was twenty-one. By then they were both itching to leave Plains. “When we got married I think I was kin to everybody that Jimmy wasn’t,” Rosalynn said. “Once we got married, we were kin to everybody in town.” Rosalynn became a navy wife and gave birth to three sons while Jimmy was away at sea. They moved around the country, from bases in Virginia to Hawaii to Connecticut. Each of their three sons was born in a different state, and Rosalynn raised them and kept track of all the family’s bills, a job she maintains today. She made most of her children’s clothes and all of her own. (Years later, when she was in the White House, she brought a sewing machine with her, which she kept in her dressing room and used to do quick repairs on dresses for herself and for their daughter, Amy.) Jimmy was accepted into an elite nuclear submarine program but turned it down after his father died so they could return to Plains in 1953 to look after the family’s peanut farm. But he didn’t bother to consult his wife about the decision, and about relocating the family yet again after his seven years as a naval officer. Rosalynn was so furious that she refused to talk to him during their entire trip from where they were living at the time, in Schenectady, New York, to Plains. “I didn’t particularly want to come back. I thought I was seeing the world,” Rosalynn said. After that, Carter learned his lesson: to always consult his wife on major decisions.

Back home in Plains, Rosalynn helped run the peanut farm and raised her family there. She remembers arriving in Plains shortly before the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Court decided unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was a hard time for us,” Rosalynn said, since some of their neighbors treated them badly because of their support for integration. “I remember going to church when people wouldn’t speak to you, you’re kind of outcasts.” Sometimes, when they pulled up at a gas station, nobody would come out to fill up their car.

Soon Jimmy began his first political campaign. In 1962 he won election to the Georgia Senate, and in 1971 he was elected governor of Georgia. By the time he announced his presidential campaign in December 1974, Rosalynn was a seasoned politician herself. She would number her husband’s jokes so that he wouldn’t repeat any to the same group, she typed thank-you notes to people her husband met on the campaign trail, and she even started taking memory classes to remember faces and names. Rosalynn worked tirelessly and stayed up until the early hours of the morning rehearsing campaign speeches.

Carter ran for president against Gerald Ford in 1976 as a Washington outsider. Before he won the Democratic nomination, he had a group of Georgia volunteers, known as the Peanut Brigade, who campaigned door-to-door for him. Rosalynn hit the road with a vengeance, and when she arrived in a small town she would scope out the tallest antennae and head straight there to the local television and radio stations to offer herself up for an interview. Some of the stations were so small that they had only one employee, who usually had no idea who Jimmy Carter was. Rosalynn came prepared with a list of five or six questions she wanted asked. Nine times out of ten, she said, the station used the questions she suggested. “I was getting my message across.”

Carter won a narrow victory over President Ford in 1976, capturing just 51 percent of the popular vote and 297 electoral votes (Ford won 241 electoral votes). After his inauguration, Carter, who was a Baptist Sunday school teacher, banned hard liquor from being served at White House formal dinners. Because he thought it was too pompous, he insisted that “Hail to the Chief” no longer be played, a tradition that dated back to 1829. He took the oath of office wearing a $175 business suit from Georgia, pledged to cut back on chauffeured cars for staff members, and sold the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, in his effort to be a citizen-president.

After her husband was elected, Rosalynn sometimes felt intimidated. She remembers how mortified she was when Henry Kissinger, who was President Ford’s secretary of state, came to brief Carter in Plains before the inauguration, and she went to get Kissinger a glass of water. It was a Tweety Bird glass from Looney Tunes. She thought, When I get to the White House, I’ll serve him with crystal.

Jimmy and Rosalynn ignored security concerns and broke with tradition when they decided to walk hand in hand with their daughter Amy down Pennsylvania Avenue after the inauguration ceremony. It was part of their mutual desire to connect with people and move away from what they saw as President Nixon’s imperial presidency. Rosalynn even wore the same ensemble to the inaugural balls in 1977—a gold-embroidered sleeveless coat over a blue chiffon dress—that she wore to her husband’s inauguration as governor in 1971. Two of the Carters’ sons and their families, Jimmy Carter’s mother, and his brother Billy all lived in the residence part-time. Rosalynn had to contend with an eccentric and hard-drinking mother-in-law who paid butlers to walk to Connecticut Avenue to buy her a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a liquor store because her son kept such a watchful eye on her. (An aide remembers her saying, “Okay, now that Jimmy’s gone, you want a drink?”) The President’s younger brother Billy was involved in several scandals while his big brother was President, and he loved his beer. “I didn’t know he drank until I saw him sober one time,” said a Carter family friend.

Jimmy Carter was the first American president to be born in a hospital, and in many ways his wife helped modernize the office of the First Lady. As a young girl, Rosalynn had watched Eleanor Roosevelt wield an enormous amount of power and influence as First Lady. Rosalynn was the first first lady to use her own office in the East Wing, and she became the first first lady to hire a chief of staff whose government salary and rank were equal to the President’s chief of staff. Full-time positions in the East Wing grew by almost 20 percent under her stewardship. In order to get to work efficiently every day and not be distracted by the tourists who visited the White House from 8 a.m. to noon, Rosalynn took a secret passageway through the basement underneath the mansion, passing large laundry rooms, the Plumber’s Shop, and the bomb shelter, and coming up through a stairway that led straight to her offices in the East Wing. The steam pipes running in the basement ceiling made the route especially welcome on cold days. “With Jimmy’s energy conservation program, it was the only really warm place in the White House,” she joked.

Rosalynn had an official lunch with her husband in the Oval Office every Wednesday, a highly unusual arrangement that followed the tradition of the President and Vice President’s weekly lunches. The ritual came about because Rosalynn had pressing issues to discuss, including their personal finances and their children, as well as the policy issues she cared deeply about. When the President stepped off the elevator on the second floor at night he dreaded seeing her because he knew she would come at him with an onslaught of questions and suggestions. Once he proposed a weekly lunch, she began to organize her thoughts and put important notes in a brown leather folder that she brought with her each week. By the time it was Wednesday the folder was completely stuffed. Sometimes she would bring up personnel issues—she lobbied intensely to have her husband fire Joe Califano, the secretary of health, education, and welfare. “My reasons were purely political,” she said. “I felt Jimmy could find someone who would do the job just as well and keep a lower profile.” She was much more political than her husband and would often argue passionately with him about postponing certain decisions and announcements until after his reelection, including parts of the Mideast peace agreement and federal budget cuts that would affect the Democratic constituency in New York City a week before the New York State primary. “Can’t you wait a week?” she pushed him. He had a stock reply to her pleas, which only angered her more because it sounded so pompous: “I’ll never do anything to hurt my country.”

Jerry Rafshoon, who was one of the President’s top three advisers, turned to Rosalynn if they couldn’t convince the President of something. He said pollster Pat Caddell did the same. If Caddell was worried about something that Rafshoon and other aides were pushing, he would tell Rosalynn, “These guys screwed up, they’re my friends, but they’re wrong,” Rafshoon said. “Then she would get on Jimmy and he would get on us.” Sometimes Caddell would have dinner with the Carters alone. Rafshoon says that he could always tell the next day because the President would walk into the Oval Office with bloodshot eyes because the First Lady had been trying to convince him of something that Caddell had told her. “She’s had him all night,” he and Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan would joke.

During the 1976 campaign the press called Rosalynn the “steel magnolia” because she masked her own sharp intellect under a veneer of southern femininity. (She did not mind the nickname and said, “Steel is tough and magnolia is southern.”) She was an active first lady who, during her first fourteen months, visited eighteen countries and twenty-seven U.S. cities, made fifteen major speeches, and held twenty-two press conferences, according to a study by the Washington Star. She clearly loved every minute of it and was thrilled when the President asked her to take a twelve-thousand-mile journey to visit seven countries in Latin America, where she pushed leaders on human rights and nuclear nonproliferation. She joined Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at Camp David. She was there for much of the thirteen-day summit at the secluded, 134-acre retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, where they reached a historic agreement in September 1978. “I was there for most of it and I saw her being deeply involved in the process,” said Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale. In her autobiography, Rosalynn wrote about “our experiences” with Sadat and Begin and says, “We had found the two men to be very different.” Rosalynn was her husband’s confidante, she was perceptive, and she was able to see things that the President could not. “He’s not observing when people are lying to him, or kissing his ass, and she is,” Rafshoon said.

Rosalynn took almost two hundred typed pages of notes during the summit. When she could not sit in on meetings, the moment the President walked in the door she asked him, “What happened?” She went through the ups and downs and the false starts and stops during the momentous series of meetings. She knows her husband better than anyone else and wrote in her notes: “When Jimmy’s pondering, he gets quiet, and there’s a vein in his temple that I can see pounding. Tonight it was pounding, and neither of us could eat much as the sun set on our third day.” (Rosalynn had helped smooth the path of negotiations by hosting Sadat and his wife, Jehan, during a visit to Camp David in February 1978, seven months before the Camp David negotiations began. The Carters and the Sadats had taken snowmobile rides on the grounds of the beautiful presidential retreat and Rosalynn had made sure that Sadat’s favorite hot mint tea was always available.) Among the best days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency was Monday, September 18, 1978. While Sadat and Begin watched from the balcony, Carter briefed a joint session of Congress on the success of the summit and had to stop twenty-five times for applause. Rosalynn sat between the two leaders wearing a pretty blue blazer and matching skirt. Few people ever knew just how important she was to the negotiations and that she was there through every turn.

The most controversial thing that Rosalynn did as first lady was to attend Cabinet meetings, something no other first lady had done, at least not to public knowledge. She said she needed to know what was happening so that she could tell the American people. “I never, of course, liked the criticism, but I didn’t pay any attention to it,” Rosalynn said in an interview. “I had learned that you were going to be criticized for whatever you did, so why not do what you wanted to do.” Other women do not blame her. Ann Romney, married to Mitt Romney, who ran for president in 2008 and was the Republican nominee in 2012, says, “Frankly, I’d love to [go to Cabinet meetings]. Who wouldn’t?”

President Carter said he had no problem with his wife attending the high-level gatherings. Jerry Rafshoon said it was to be expected because the Carters talked to each other about absolutely everything. “Whatever secrets there were,” Vice President Mondale said, “she knew about all of them.” That kind of intimacy can be unnerving, even for longtime aides. Rafshoon says, “They used to read the Bible in Spanish. Hamilton and I would really get worried when we’d be in a meeting with the Carters and if the subject was a little bit touchy, if we were advocating something, all of a sudden they’d start speaking to each other in Spanish.” Neither Rafshoon nor Hamilton spoke Spanish. (Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou, both spoke Chinese after living in China for several years, and shared the same intimacy—they would whisper in Chinese to each other when they wanted to have a private conversation during receiving lines at the White House.)

The first Cabinet meeting Rosalynn went to was on February 28, 1978. She sat next to Veterans Administration head Max Cleland near the door and occasionally took notes. President Carter says that no one else paid much attention to her. But he knew. “I was constantly aware that my wife was watching me,” he said. By attending such high-level meetings Rosalynn left herself open to criticism in a way that Nancy Reagan, who wielded as much power as Rosalynn, would never allow. (Nancy said she would have been “embarrassed” to attend a Cabinet meeting, yet in fact she helped select members of her husband’s Cabinet and was a critical part of her husband’s political career, including his two terms as governor of California.)

It was a few months after President Carter’s inauguration when he asked Rosalynn to go on a special mission for him. He said he was too consumed with the energy crisis and the Middle East peace process to go himself. The trip to Central and South America during the first two weeks of June 1977 was not devoted to typical visits for a first lady to schools and hospitals. This time Rosalynn was being sent to deliver a very serious message on human rights to the leaders of Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. Critics in Congress and the press were furious—one Newsweek reporter said a first lady should be given such a weighty foreign policy assignment only if some way could be found to hold her accountable if something went wrong. Rosalynn was determined to be taken seriously and spent two months preparing for the precedent-breaking trip, with countless briefings from the State Department. She brushed up on her Spanish with lessons with Gay Vance, the wife of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, three mornings a week in the White House Solarium. During meetings with leaders she took notes and then wrote long memos to the President and the State Department. It was not an easy visit. When she met with the president of Costa Rica, he invited his wife to join them and she worried that he had assumed the visit was purely social. “No matter what I asked him, he would answer to the men in our party,” she said. “I was determined to get his attention and to have my say, and finally, when I opened my notebook and continued to address questions directly to him, he began to respond to me.” Eventually, one by one, she began to win over different South American leaders, most of whom were not used to talking to a woman about policy. They began to realize that she had a direct line to the President and that it would be far more effective to communicate with her than with any member of his Cabinet.

Like any shrewd politician, she knew that on her trip she would be peppered at press conferences with questions about the latest controversy, including one involving a U.S. financier accused of fraud who was seeking refuge in Costa Rica. But she was a step ahead of the press corps: “I had anticipated this before leaving Washington and had refrained from being briefed about him so I could legitimately claim ignorance of the situation.” When she came back to Washington she briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Her signature issue was mental health, an issue that dominates the news decades later. She had a distant cousin who suffered from mental illness when Rosalynn was a young girl, and she remembered running and hiding when she heard him coming down the streets of their small town singing at the top of his lungs. Years later she felt ashamed at how she had treated him, and she devoted much of her time in the White House to advocating for better care for the mentally ill. She wanted mental illness to be treated like any physical illness. One month after taking office, President Carter created the Mental Health Commission. On the day the committee was announced, Rosalynn told the press that she had just gotten a note that very morning informing her that the Department of Justice prohibits the president from appointing a close relative, such as a wife, to a civilian position. Up until then she was planning to chair the commission. “There is, however, no problem with you being designated as honorary chairperson,” she said, amid laughter from reporters. “So I’m going to be a very active honorary chairperson.” She was upset that the press overlooked the commission’s work to cover sexier stories, like the Carters’ edict banning hard liquor from state dinners. She delved into the committee’s work, and she helped draft a bill that provided more funding for the treatment and prevention of mental illness and was submitted to Congress in 1979. She was the second first lady (Eleanor Roosevelt was the first, when she testified on behalf of coal miners) to testify before Congress. She was constantly talking with Congressman Henry Waxman and Senator Ted Kennedy, the chairmen of the House and Senate committees handling the legislation, even as Kennedy was mounting a challenge to her husband during the 1980 primary. The bill passed and the Mental Health Systems Act was signed into law by President Carter in October 1980. But when President Reagan came into office he cut most of the funding for the legislation. “I felt betrayed,” Rosalynn said. “It was one of the greatest disappointments in my life.” Now, when she sees mental health discussed as such an important issue, she’s frustrated. Rosalynn’s director of projects in the White House, Katherine Cade, says that on a number of occasions in private meetings Rosalynn has said that if the recommendations of her commission had been implemented thirty years ago, it might not be such a crisis now.

THE HARDEST PERIOD of the Carter presidency was during the Iran hostage crisis, which consumed the last 444 days of her husband’s presidency. On November 4, 1979, Islamic revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took more than sixty Americans hostage. The hostage takers, who were mostly students, said that the American hostages would not be released until the shah, an exiled former Iranian leader who had sought treatment for cancer in the United States, was sent back to Iran so that he could stand trial. The revolutionaries said the shah was “anti-Islamic” and they accused him of stealing billions of dollars. Rosalynn admitted that she wanted to send the shah back to Iran so that the hostages would be released, but she knew he would most likely have been killed. “I never stopped wishing we hadn’t let him come into the country in the first place. I wished Jimmy had followed his first instincts. But when the shah became ill, it was the right thing to do, and I suppose we always have to do ‘the right thing.’” The bulk of the campaigning in 1980, when Carter ran against Ronald Reagan, fell to Rosalynn because the President decided to stay in the White House to handle the crisis. She checked in several times a day from the campaign trail, and when she could not speak with her husband she talked directly with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who even initiated meetings with her to discuss how to handle the crisis. “I kept her abreast because I knew she would be discussing those issues with the President.”

When the Carters left the White House in January 1981, they returned to Plains and embarked on the longest and most ambitious post-presidency in American history. Despite all of his accomplishments, Jimmy Carter says, in all of his ninety-one years he is proudest of marrying Rosalynn. “That’s the pinnacle of my life.”

LIKE BETTY FORD, whose father was an alcoholic who died in an apparent suicide when she was just sixteen years old, Nancy Reagan had a painful relationship with her father, who left her mother a few months after she was born. Her mother, Edith, was a Broadway actress who got a divorce from Nancy’s father and passed along her own incredible determination to her daughter. When she arrived at the hospital to give birth to Nancy and was told there were no rooms available, Edith said, “No rooms? Then I guess I’ll have to lie right down on the floor of this lobby and have my baby here!” Edith sent a two-year-old Nancy to live with her sister and brother-in-law in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., so that she could pursue her acting career. Nancy’s six-year abandonment haunted her forever. When she was five years old she got double pneumonia. If I had a little girl, Nancy said to herself, I’d certainly be there if she was ever sick.

When Nancy was seven years old, her mother married a prominent surgeon named Loyal Davis, and Nancy moved with Edith to live in Chicago. Edith gave up acting and devoted herself to promoting her husband’s career. The family lived on the city’s wealthy Gold Coast in a fourteenth-floor apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Nancy begged Loyal to adopt her but he resisted because her biological father was still alive. But she was determined, and by age sixteen she was officially Loyal’s daughter. As with her mother, once Nancy had her sights set on something it was going to happen. Once she decided Ronald Reagan would be her husband, Nancy won him over by going to his Los Angeles horse ranch on weekends and helping him with the decidedly unglamorous task of painting the pickets on his fence.

Nancy so appreciated the unconditional love she received from her husband that she fiercely protected him from anyone who she felt did not have his best interests at heart. The men in the West Wing were absolutely afraid of crossing her. The West Wing staff called Nancy “Evita” (after Argentina’s first lady Eva Perón) and “The Missus” behind her back. “At the end of the day, first ladies are going to bed with the president each night and may say, ‘I really want you to do this for me,’” said a staffer. “And then he will likely say yes.”

In a letter Lady Bird sent to Nancy on November 9, 1994, five years after Ronald Reagan left office, Lady Bird refers to an interview Nancy gave to Charlie Rose a few weeks before at the 92nd Street Y in New York. In that interview Nancy skewered Oliver North, who was the Republican Senate candidate in Virginia at the time. When Rose asked her about North she said, “Ollie North—oh, I’ll be happy to tell you about Ollie North,” pausing for laughter and applause. “He lied to my husband and lied about my husband—kept things from him he should not have kept from him. And that’s what I think of Ollie North.” She was referring to North’s central role in the Iran-Contra affair, when the Reagan administration admitted to selling arms to Iran in violation of an embargo in exchange for the release of hostages, and to using the proceeds of those sales to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. “The last time you and I talked, we were discussing giving or not giving interviews,” Lady Bird wrote. “I feel I know exactly why you did it—because he [Oliver North] tried to hurt your husband—my reaction would be to feel like striking back. But I can’t resist telling you, Nancy, that the ‘fall-out’ of your interview was a most wonderful surprise and help for me and mine!” In a strange twist, Nancy Reagan, the most well-known Republican woman at the time, helped Lady Bird’s son-in-law, Democratic Virginia Senator Charles Robb, in his reelection bid because Oliver North was his opponent. Nancy’s comments helped destroy North’s political career, and Robb won the election.

Nancy was especially furious about the way her husband’s chief of staff, Don Regan, was handling the Iran-Contra scandal. Nancy prodded her husband to get out and make a public statement and fire the people responsible, something he had always resisted. But once President Reagan took his wife’s advice and spoke publicly about the scandal and acknowledged his mistakes, his popularity surged. Nancy helped push out National Security Advisers Richard Allen and William Clark, Secretary of the Interior James Watt, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler. But Don Regan was the best-known casualty of her anger. Two years after becoming her husband’s chief of staff, he was fired. Reagan’s first chief of staff, James Baker, explains Regan’s departure simply: “He did not take care to make sure that he had one-half of the team [Nancy] on his side, which was a fundamental mistake.”

Nancy thought Regan was pushing her husband in all the wrong ways. She worried about Reagan’s 1987 State of the Union address, which came just three weeks after he had prostate surgery. (“He doesn’t need to work full-time,” she told Regan, “he can work out of the residence.”) She was not the only one who did not think Regan was up to the job. Vice President George H. W. Bush told the First Lady, “You’ve really got to do something about Donald Regan.”

“I’ve got to do something? What about you?” she said.

“Oh, no, no, no. It’s not in my job description.” Firing high-level presidential aides was not technically in her job description, either, but, she said, “It landed on my watch.” If no one else was going to take charge then she would. She deftly arranged for her husband to meet with former Democratic National Committee chairman Robert Strauss, whose opinion the President respected, and who also wanted Regan gone. Strauss’s advice helped bolster Nancy’s argument and Regan was soon out.

Later she said Regan had overstepped in other ways, even trying to monitor the President’s phone calls. There was no doubt in her mind that he had to go after he hung up on her twice. “You might have been able to get away with it once, but not twice!” the Reagans’ son, Ron, said. “That was really the end of Don Regan. That’s not something you’re going to do to my mother.”

In her memoir, Nancy, a self-described worrier, wrote, “In my next life, I’d like to come back as Ronald Reagan. If he worries, you’d never know it. . . . I seem to do the worrying for both of us.” Before President Reagan left for a trip, Nancy would give him a three-by-five card with reminders: 5 p.m.: Take medication; 6 p.m.: Dinner; 9 p.m.: Brush teeth; 9:30 p.m.: Bedtime. After his surgery for an enlarged prostate in 1987 she reminded him, “Honey, stop talking, go take your bath.” George Hannie, who was a White House butler, says Nancy would watch the President get ready for press conferences in the Rose Garden from the window in the West Sitting Hall, and she would let everyone know if she thought his jacket was not quite right. “Here, go bring him this one,” she’d say, handing a butler a different jacket. Once there was hardly any time before the news conference was set to begin, and the butler did not want to bother the President, but he dutifully raced to the Rose Garden. No one wanted to disappoint Mrs. Reagan.

Reagan’s adviser Michael Deaver remembered one hilarious visit to an Episcopal church near Middleburg, Virginia, during the 1980 presidential campaign. After making sure the sermon would be suitable and nothing would catch the Reagans off guard, he agreed that they would attend an eleven o’clock service. The Reagans were stunned, however, when they were invited, along with the rest of the congregation, to the front of the church to take Communion. Nancy had a look of panic on her face, and as they walked up the church aisle she whispered, “Mike! Are those people drinking out of the same cup?” At the Reagans’ church in Los Angeles, Bel Air Presbyterian, small glasses of grape juice and squares of bread were passed between the aisles, so the Reagans really had no idea what to do. Deaver told Nancy that she could simply dip the wafer into the cup, but when she did, it fell in. Reagan followed his wife’s lead and dropped his wafer in the wine. Nancy was mortified, but as her husband stepped out into the midday sun he had a smile on his face, confident that all had gone well. It was Nancy who was left to worry about whether the press would notice that the Reagans had no idea how to take Communion.

Nancy was most concerned about who was advising her husband, and she had final say. The First Lady wanted James Baker, a more moderate Republican, to be chief of staff in her husband’s first term, even though her husband wanted the more conservative Edwin Meese. Baker got the job. “I would never have been in the Reagan White House had it not been for Nancy Reagan, I’m quite confident of that,” Baker admits. Baker picked Deaver, a close confidant of Nancy, as his deputy, a smart decision that showed he knew just how important it was to have the First Lady in his corner. Nancy worked to make sure that her husband was surrounded by aides who were loyal, and she favored moderates because she knew that he would have to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress and that moderates would have a better chance of getting deals done. Reagan political consultant Stuart Spencer says, “She made decisions on who was going to be around him from the campaign to the [California] governor’s office to the White House. That was her role.” She was at almost every campaign meeting, and she cultivated wealthy California friends who she knew could help her husband’s gubernatorial campaign and, later, his presidential campaign. “I talk to people, they tell me things. And if something is about to become a problem I’m not above calling a staff person and asking about it,” Nancy said at a 1987 luncheon at the American Newspaper Publishers Association convention in New York City. “I’m a woman who loves her husband and I make no apologies for looking out for his personal and political welfare.”

She even had a hand in foreign policy. She felt that it was important for the United States to open up a dialogue with the Soviet Union. She thought that National Security Adviser William Clark was too much of a hard-liner when it came to the Soviet Union. She was constantly talking to Secretary of State George Shultz, a moderate, and she eventually pushed Clark out. “Ronnie thought,” she hastened to add, “as did I, that there had to be a breakthrough. . . . Well, I didn’t just sit back. I was talking to people.”

In September 1984 the President invited Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko to the White House. Nancy swept in, wearing one of her signature bright red dresses. The men were having sherry before lunch. “Does your husband believe in peace?” Gromyko asked her.

“Of course,” she said.

“Well then, whisper it in his ear every night.”

“I will, and I’ll also whisper it in your ear.” She wanted to make an impression that would get back to the Kremlin.

It was Nancy who was always looking for signs of disloyalty among her husband’s political aides, and it was Nancy who scanned the crowd as her husband spoke to see who was paying him the proper respect. At the Italian-American Federation dinner in Washington with Democratic rival Walter Mondale, Nancy said, “When it was Ronnie’s turn to speak, I noticed that Mondale didn’t applaud—not even once.” During his 1984 reelection campaign, Reagan had a disastrous debate with Mondale and Nancy demanded answers. When her husband told her that he’d felt “brutalized” by the grueling debate prep, which included a full-dress rehearsal in the Old Executive Office Building complete with lights and cameras and about thirty staffers pelting him with suggestions, she was furious. “I was upset because I thought they’d gone about it all wrong. And they had. They overloaded him.”

The Reagans’ son Ron said that his father was impossible not to like. “You can dislike his policies or something he said, but him personally, he was very, very difficult to dislike.” Nancy, on the other hand, was a “pricklier personality” and he watched as his mother became a magnet for criticism that should have been directed at his father. If people disagreed with the President they vented their frustration by labeling the First Lady as a ruthless, vapid, control freak. Ron said he’s not sure if his mother took on this burden consciously or not, but by doing so she shielded her husband from lots of pain and took it upon herself to be the lightning rod for his administration. Ronald Reagan desperately wanted everyone to like him and, of course, everyone likes to be liked, but Nancy was willing to sacrifice that admiration to be her husband’s ultimate protector. And she paid the price: in a December 1981 Gallup poll, she had the highest disapproval rating—26 percent—of any modern first lady.

HILLARY CLINTON’S DEFINITION of being a good wife was very different from her predecessors’, and was more transactional. She did not want to just sit in on Cabinet meetings—she wanted to speak up during Cabinet meetings. At first she wanted to be her husband’s domestic policy chief, but the President’s pollster, Stan Greenberg, convinced them that it would be disastrously unpopular. The President’s own secretary of health and human services, Donna Shalala, and Treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen, warned Clinton against appointing Hillary to head up the Task Force on National Health Care Reform to usher in the biggest social program since President Roosevelt’s creation of Social Security. Hillary led a massive, bureaucratic team to come up with a plan for a new health insurance system that would keep costs down and expand coverage. It would be her job to sell the plan to lawmakers and business leaders. Alarms sounded in the West Wing when the President announced his wife’s appointment just five days after the inauguration. But the President knew how badly she wanted to tackle the issue and he felt he had to give her the important assignment after she stood by him during the allegations that he had had an affair with Gennifer Flowers. (Flowers claimed she had a twelve-year affair with Clinton in Arkansas; years later he would admit to one occasion in 1977.)

Clearly his advisers were correct and Hillary’s interpretation of the role of first lady was not meshing with what most Americans wanted. A Gallup poll found that after the 1993 inauguration Hillary was viewed favorably by 67 percent of Americans. By July 1994, only 48 percent rated her favorably, with a large number saying she had overstepped by having an office in the West Wing. She invited a group of female reporters to lunch at the White House and asked them how she could soften her image. “I am surprised at the way people seem to perceive me,” she said to the group, which included Marian Burros of the New York Times and Cindy Adams of the New York Post. “Sometimes I read stories and hear things about me and I go ‘ugh.’ I wouldn’t like her either. It’s so unlike what I think I am or what my friends think I am.” When Burros wrote a story—“Hillary Clinton Asks Help in Finding a Softer Image”—that appeared on the front page of the New York Times, Hillary was furious and demanded an apology, arguing that the lunch was supposed to be off the record. “I was dumbfounded,” Burros said. “There was nothing unflattering in that piece. On the contrary. I had taped the whole thing, including where she gave us permission to quote her.” Hillary’s need for control eclipsed the story and became late-night news fodder.

She wanted to play a major role in policy decisions, but when her health-care plan failed to get approval from Congress and Democrats suffered a disastrous loss in the 1994 midterm elections, she decided to leave Washington as often as she could. She had a “two-hundred-mile limit,” according to veteran ABC reporter Ann Compton, who covered the Clintons. In Washington Hillary was very unapproachable, but the farther out of town she got the more accessible she became. Hillary loved going on foreign trips, especially when she traveled with Chelsea. The press had lots of personal time with her on those trips when they sat around and really talked, almost always off the record. “The minute we came home the political walls went back up,” Compton recalled. These glimpses of an unguarded Hillary were so sought after that reporters clamored to get on the foreign trips. On her first trip overseas, according to her then–press secretary, Neel Lattimore, there was so much interest that he had to bring reporters to the luggage compartment and ask them to take some of their things off the plane because the plane was too heavy. (The excess luggage was put on a separate support plane.)

While Hillary was still First Lady she decided to run for the Senate, and things were better around the White House as the fighting with Bill over the Monica Lewinsky affair subsided. “She would have hit him with a frying pan if one had been handed to her,” says Hillary’s friend Susan Thomases, “but I don’t think she ever in her mind imagined leaving him or divorcing him.” Members of Hillary’s inner circle say that the idea of running for the Senate came from New York congressman Charlie Rangel, but it’s clear that no matter who brought it up first she didn’t need much convincing. President Clinton was pushing her behind the scenes to run—he knew that he owed her that much at least. In a 1999 interview with Talk magazine Rangel said, “He [Clinton] was the one who asked the most questions about how she could win. You could see the guilt written all over his face. Any man would do anything to get out of the doghouse he was in.” When Hillary first told Thomases about her idea, her friend said that she did not want to see her battered in a campaign. “Then it became clear to me that this was something she really wanted to do, and she convinced me that it was very important for her that she herself have validation by the voters.” During those final months as First Lady, when she was looking at floral arrangements for formal dinners, Hillary’s mind was clearly elsewhere. “You could feel there was some disconnect. Sometimes she’d sigh, ‘I’ve got to hurry, I have to be somewhere,’” said White House Florist Bob Scanlan. She was thinking of bigger things.

Hillary had fought for her husband during the Senate impeachment trial. She helped win him the support of the Democratic caucus by arguing before its members as dispassionately as possible that what he had done was wrong but not impeachable. “You all may be mad at Bill Clinton. Certainly, I’m not happy about what my husband did. But impeachment is not the answer,” she told them. “Too much is at stake here for us to be distracted from what really matters.” Some members left with tears in their eyes.

On the same day that the Senate was voting against impeachment, Hillary was meeting with New York politico Harold Ickes, who had been her husband’s deputy chief of staff, to plot her run for the Senate. She bristled at the thought of being known as the “former first lady” for the rest of her life. She had used her star power to help salvage her husband’s presidency under humiliating circumstances, and now it was her turn. “After eight years with a title but no portfolio,” she said, “I was now ‘senator-elect.’” Ironically, years later, Hillary was asked what TV show she enjoyed watching when she took a break from the presidential campaign. Her reply: The Good Wife.