VIII

Bad Blood

When Michelle Obama views the Clintons, I don’t want to say she’s looking down her nose at them—but she kind of is.

—FORMER OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AIDE

During the 1960 presidential election, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower supported Richard Nixon, his vice president, and made his aversion to the young John Kennedy clear when he derided him as “the boy.” When Kennedy won the election, Eisenhower took it as a personal blow. The enmity was mutual. Kennedy’s friend Charles Spalding said that Kennedy thought of Eisenhower as “being a nonpresident” who was not “totally aware of his powers.”

More than any other first lady—with the exception of Hillary Clinton—Mamie Eisenhower hated to leave the White House. She had never spent so much time with her husband as she had when he was President. He’d been the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II and was often overseas. And at age sixty-four Mamie resented her replacement, whom she sneeringly referred to as “the college girl.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s beauty and cutting-edge style would soon eclipse the middle-class and ultrafeminine shirtwaist dresses, pearl chokers, and short bangs of Mrs. Eisenhower.

The outgoing first lady traditionally gives her successor a walk-through of the White House’s private living quarters on the second and third floors. The press was clamoring to find out the date when Jackie would get her private tour, just like the tour Lou Hoover had given Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bess Truman had given Mamie. Jackie had never seen the second floor, and as late as mid-November no one had any idea when she would get a look. Time was of the essence as Jackie was pregnant and her due date was fast approaching. During a November 22, 1960, press conference the Kennedys’ vivacious social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, told reporters, “The invitation has not been extended yet, but we hope it will be.”

Jackie had been told by the White House that she would be getting an invitation in mid-November, but Mamie clearly had no interest in making a big announcement or a show of public affection to her young and beautiful successor. Mamie was in control and she intended to relish her position. Finally, the invitation was formally extended through Mamie’s secretary to Jackie’s secretary for a visit on December 9. The call came a few days before November 25, when Jackie delivered her son John-John by C-section, and it was a much more formal invitation than the personal call Bess Truman had made inviting Mamie to the residence after the 1952 presidential election. The much-anticipated meeting was not revealed to reporters until five minutes after Jackie had arrived.

Before the visit, Jackie’s Secret Service agent called Chief Usher J. B. West, who ran the residence, advising him to have a wheelchair and a staffer to push it readily available, since Jackie was still weak from the C-section. When West told Mamie, she replied, “Oh, dear. I wanted to take her around alone.” Mamie suggested that a wheelchair be ready but not made available unless Jackie asked for it.

Exhausted and pale, Jackie arrived alone at noon on the ninth, a little more than a month before her husband’s inauguration. She was dressed in a dark coat, black fur hat, and black gloves. West led her through the imposing Diplomatic Reception Room and into an elevator to the second-floor residence, where Mamie was standing regally in the hallway.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” West said, introducing the new First Lady. Mamie extended a cool hand toward Jackie but never stepped forward, forcing Jackie to walk slowly toward her. The First Lady was not going to make it easy for the woman who was dethroning her. “I turned and left them, and waited in my office for a call for the wheelchair,” West recalled. “A call that never came.” After some time, two buzzers rang in the Usher’s Office, the signal that Mamie and Jackie were coming down the elevator. The tour had lasted an hour and ten minutes, and Mamie showed Jackie some thirty rooms. As the First Lady walked over to a Chrysler limousine that would take her to her usual card game, Jackie slowly and quietly made her way to her three-year-old station wagon. “I saw pain darken her face,” West said. There had been no wheelchair, that much was clear. The next morning West and Maître d’ Charles Ficklin went to Mamie’s bedroom for their daily meeting. The First Lady sat, propped up by pillows against her pink headboard, picking at her breakfast. There was even a pink bow in her hair. She lowered her voice and said, “There certainly are going to be some changes made around here!”

After her White House tour, Jackie went to meet her family at the airport for a flight to the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach. Ever the politician, she lied to reporters and told them how kind Mamie had been to have a wheelchair available for her, but that she had chosen to walk. When a reporter asked Jackie what color she planned to paint John-John’s nursery, she laughed: “Don’t ask such silly questions.” She had much more than the nursery on her mind. She was carrying copies of the entire White House floor plan and spent much of the planned vacation before the inauguration outlining how she wanted to change each and every room.

Two months later, when Jackie was comfortably installed as the new First Lady, she turned to West and asked, “Did you know that my doctor ordered a wheelchair the day I first went around the White House?”

“Yes, I did,” he replied.

She was puzzled. “Then why didn’t you have it for me? I was so exhausted after marching around the house for two hours that I had to go back to bed for two whole weeks!” West told her that Mamie had asked him to have it placed behind a closet door next to the elevator in case she needed it. But Mamie never mentioned it to her guest. Jackie laughed and said, “I was too scared of Mrs. Eisenhower to ask.”

PAT NIXON WAS so humiliated by her husband’s 1960 defeat to John Kennedy that she did not want him to concede the election too soon, and she even demanded a recount. There were hurt feelings on Jackie’s side as well. During the campaign, when Jackie was accused of spending thirty thousand dollars a year on her clothes and going on shopping sprees in Paris, she shot back, “I couldn’t spend that much unless I wore sable underwear.” She added cattily, “I’m sure I spend less than Mrs. Nixon on clothes.” Jackie later said that she was grateful that her husband didn’t make her “get a little frizzy permanent and be like Pat Nixon.”

Oddly enough, Pat and Jackie first met when Jackie was the “Inquiring Camera Girl” for the Washington Times-Herald before her marriage to JFK. She was paid $42.50 per week and she lugged a ten-pound Graflex camera around Washington; her short columns featured chatty interviews. In one column, Jackie asked six housewives, “Do you think that Mamie Eisenhower’s bangs will become a nation-wide fad?” She asked Pat Nixon, when she was the wife of the vice president, “Who will be Washington’s No. 1 hostess now that the Republicans are back in power?” Pat shrewdly replied, “Why, Mrs. Eisenhower, of course.” Jackie even interviewed six-year-old Tricia Nixon for her column. Three days after Eisenhower was first elected, Jackie went to the new Vice President’s house on Tilden Street in Washington and asked Tricia, “What do you think of Senator Nixon now?” The little girl replied, heartbreakingly, “He’s always away. If he’s famous, why can’t he stay home?” Jackie’s boss at the newspaper teased her when she told him that she was quitting her job and getting married to then-Senator John Kennedy. “Don’t you think he’s a little too elderly for you?” Jackie was then twenty-four years old and Jack was thirty-six.

Because Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice president, the Kennedys had to come face-to-face with their defeated challengers the morning of the inauguration for the ceremonial coffee at the White House. “I remember,” Jackie recalled, “sitting on the sofa next to Mrs. Nixon, who looked really pretty that day. You could see she could really be rather New York chic when she wanted.” Mamie Eisenhower got one final dig in as she, Jackie, and New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges, who was responsible for part of the inaugural ceremony, waited in the car. President Eisenhower and President-elect Kennedy walked by in their black top hats and Mamie exclaimed, “Look at Ike in his top hat. He looks just like Paddy the Irishman!” Mamie no doubt referred to the caricature of an Irishman on purpose as the nation’s first Irish Catholic president was on his way to being inaugurated.

JACKIE AND HER successor, Lady Bird Johnson, had a complicated relationship. When LBJ was her husband’s vice president she got to know Lady Bird well. Jackie said that she had never seen someone so eager to do her husband’s bidding. Lady Bird, she moaned, “would crawl down Pennsylvania Avenue over splintered glass for Lyndon.” In a conversation with her friend, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jackie compared Lady Bird to a “trained hunting dog” when she saw her taking notes for her husband. In her oral history for Johnson’s presidential library, Jackie recounts the same episode but with a different spin, saying how “impressed” she was with Lady Bird jotting down names of important people in the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port living room after Johnson was picked as Kennedy’s running mate. In this retelling, Lady Bird had a small spiral notepad balanced on her lap as she sat and chatted with Jackie and her sister, Lee, in one part of the living room as the men sat on the opposite side talking shop. LBJ would occasionally call out, “Bird, do you know so-and-so’s number?” She would always have it on hand. “Yet she would be sitting with us, looking so calm,” Jackie mused. “I was very impressed by that.”

Part of what complicated their relationship was the 1960 campaign, when Johnson and Kennedy were fighting for the Democratic nomination. In the heat of the campaign Jackie called Lyndon Johnson “Senator Cornpone” and Lady Bird “Mrs. Pork Chop.” Lady Bird, however, admired Jackie and was a bit threatened by her, and LBJ had a terrible relationship with Jackie’s brother-in-law Robert Kennedy. Johnson’s adviser Joe Califano says the Kennedys and the Johnsons were “street fighters on opposite sides of the street.” Johnson certainly felt that most of President Kennedy’s aides disliked him; he told Social Secretary Bess Abell, “I’ve got one friend in the White House and fortunately his name is Jack Kennedy.” In a series of oral history interviews Jackie did after JFK’s assassination, she said that while her husband was not planning on dropping Johnson from the ticket in 1964, he told her, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” Shortly before his death, Kennedy had begun talking with his brother Robert about how to thwart Johnson from running for president in 1968.

In the White House, Jackie was mortified when Lady Bird told her that she didn’t know who Pablo Casals was. Jackie had invited Casals, who was widely regarded as the world’s greatest cellist, to perform at a state dinner. But Lady Bird never pretended to be anything other than what she was, the daughter of the most prominent man in their small East Texas town. “Goodness knows,” she laughed, “I didn’t know a fauteuil from a bergère.” The Johnsons were deeply hurt by the Kennedys’ treatment, and, after LBJ became president, the East Wing staff was self-conscious about organizing any event that would fit the stereotype. “I would have loved to have had a square dance in the East Room for a visitor from abroad—American folk dancing—but I just didn’t feel that we could get away with it,” Abell said, still remembering the strained atmosphere.

The nearly twenty-year age gap between Jackie and Lady Bird did not help. Lady Bird invited Jackie to meet about a dozen other senators’ wives after Kennedy was elected to Congress. At the small tea, Lady Bird recalled, Jackie struck her as a “bird of beautiful plumage among all of us little grey wrens.” Jackie was a source of fascination for Lady Bird, who would always remember how Jackie pronounced her name: “Lay-dee Bird.” But Lady Bird was often awkward around Jackie. She tried to comfort her on Air Force Once as they flew back from Dallas on November 22, 1963, but her immediate comment after the President’s assassination was thoughtless. “I don’t know what to say,” Lady Bird told a shell-shocked Jackie. “What wounds me most of all is that this should happen in my beloved state of Texas.” Jackie did not respond but just sat there, motionless, caked in her husband’s blood. When Lady Bird offered to send someone into the private bedroom on Air Force One to help Jackie change out of her bloodstained suit, Jackie vehemently refused. “I want them to see what they have done to Jack.”

Lady Bird made it clear that she did not want to rush Jackie out of the White House. But much of their interaction was stilted and formal. “I was not an intimate of Mrs. Kennedy, by any means,” Lady Bird said. “Lyndon actually saw more of her because she was a very appealing woman. I remember when she wanted to get something done, she was absolutely the most graceful person. At the same time, I felt she could also be a difficult opponent.” Jackie did not vote in the 1964 presidential election, when Johnson ran against Republican Barry Goldwater, because, she said, “Jack would have been alive for that vote.” At the time of the election, she had just moved to New York and was still registered in Massachusetts, and she could have easily voted by absentee ballot. But she refused. She never even sent Johnson a telegram congratulating him on his victory because she felt that her husband should have been the one sitting in the Oval Office. Jackie said that she had heard that President Johnson was hurt that she did not vote. “I’d never voted until I was married to Jack,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m not going to vote for any [other person], because this vote would have been his.’” Even Robert Kennedy, who hated President Johnson, pressured Jackie to vote, knowing what a media firestorm it would be if word got out that she had not voted. Jackie held her ground and told him, “I don’t care what you say, I’m not going to.”

Luci Johnson said that after the assassination her mother was worried that the “economically endowed” people whom Jackie convinced to join the White House Fine Arts Committee, which she established within a month of becoming first lady, would leave without Jackie at the helm. She also worried that Kennedy aides, many of whom had tangled with her unpredictable and wildly emotional husband when he was Vice President, would leave when LBJ needed them most. Lady Bird had the Johnsons’ family cook, Zephyr Wright, bake dozens of loaves of bread, and Lady Bird marched up and down the halls of the White House pushing a grocery cart full of warm homemade bread wrapped in aluminum foil, each loaf tied with a tidy ribbon. She went into every single office and thanked aides for supporting the President and Mrs. Kennedy and asked that they continue their support for her husband.

When it came time for her to transition out of the White House, Lady Bird was handing the baton to someone she knew well. Lady Bird and Pat Nixon had known each other for years because their husbands served in Congress at the same time and they both loyally attended the Senate Ladies Luncheons. After the 1968 election, Lady Bird gave Pat and her daughter Tricia a tour of the private quarters of the White House. She apologized for the stains left by their dogs and told Pat that she had not bothered to change the once-white carpet because she assumed they would want to choose a new carpet themselves. (Pat told her daughters that she wished Lady Bird had done at least a little upkeep.) Lady Bird was generous and even opened closet doors in each of the bedrooms. She had been reluctant to change any of Jackie Kennedy’s décor, knowing that changes could spark a public relations nightmare, so the house had grown threadbare from the five years of the Johnsons’ expansive entertaining and the seven million tourists who had walked through.

Even though Lady Bird and Pat were friendly, the ride to the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony was still full of long pauses and stilted small talk. “I’m so happy it didn’t sleet today,” Lady Bird said. Pat replied, “We might get lucky and have no rain.” A car packed with Secret Service agents separated them from the car their husbands shared. Lady Bird and Pat had made the same trip eight years earlier, when Pat was leaving Washington as the wife of the Vice President and Lady Bird was taking her place. Their small talk was cordial but Lady Bird’s feelings about President Nixon and her loyalty to the Democratic Party were clear in her critique of the forty-five-minute inauguration ceremony. “It was low-keyed, restrained, grave, it seemed to me,” she wrote in her diary. “Perhaps the times set the mood. None of the youthful ebullience, the poetic brilliance of the Kennedy Inauguration, nor the robust, roaring Jacksonian quality of ours.” Lady Bird was touched when she boarded the plane with her husband to go home to Texas and found a large bunch of yellow roses from the Nixons at her seat. She dutifully sent Pat a thank-you note five days later from the Johnsons’ Texas ranch: “What a dear and thoughtful gesture!” She knew better than anyone else the challenges that lay ahead of the Nixons.

Once she was First Lady, Pat learned the hard way why Lady Bird had not changed anything in the residence. During the last month of the Johnson administration, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, with Lady Bird presiding, had decided to replace a wooden mantel from the Lincoln Bedroom with a historic late-eighteenth-century marble mantel. There was a public outcry when news broke that the mantel being replaced was the one on which Jackie had placed a tender inscription: “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy with his wife, Jacqueline, during the 2 years, 10 months and 2 days he was President of the United States.” Headlines blared, “Pat Nixon Removes Jackie’s Handiwork.” The decision had been made during the Johnson administration, but it was not carried out until the Nixons moved into the White House, so Pat bore the brunt of the criticism. First ladies must tread carefully when it comes to replacing any part of Camelot. Years later, Betty Ford made the bold decision to remove antique wallpaper Jackie had picked out that depicted a Revolutionary War battle scene. It had hung in the Family Dining Room on the second floor, and Betty remarked with her customary honesty, “It’s really very difficult to sit there eating and watching all these people shooting each other and bleeding.”

WHEN RONALD REAGAN challenged President Gerald Ford in an audacious bid for the Republican nomination in 1976, the party was torn. There had been subtle signs before Reagan announced his attempt at a palace coup, as when Ronald and Nancy walked in front of the Fords at an event, leaving Ford’s political aides aghast. In a dramatic scene at the Republican National Convention, which was split down the middle, Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan sat across the hall from each other, and dueling rounds of applause erupted from the crowd. Nancy was upset that she was assigned a skybox while Betty, who was First Lady, was given a seat on the floor. On the second night of the convention Nancy felt upstaged by Betty, especially when she started dancing with Tony Orlando to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” at the same time the crowd was applauding Nancy; everyone’s attention immediately turned to Betty. The two never really got along. “Mrs. Ford did not admire Nancy Reagan,” a close aide to Betty Ford said. Betty was particularly upset when she found out that Nancy was not supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. “I couldn’t understand how a woman who had had a professional life could show so little interest in working women,” Betty said in an interview at the end of the convention. “I just think when Nancy met Ronnie, that was it as far as her own life was concerned. She just fell apart at the seams.” Betty refused to call Nancy and apologize, even when Betty’s press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, pressed her to. “You’ve got to call and say that’s just not the case, that you never said that.” But Betty held her ground; that was what she thought and she wasn’t about to apologize for it.

SUSAN PORTER ROSE, who handled correspondence and scheduling for Pat Nixon, coordinated scheduling for Betty Ford, and worked as Barbara Bush’s chief of staff when Barbara was second and then first lady, says there is a natural inclination for politicians to guard their hard-won turf once they are in the White House. Political party does not matter, she said; you can dislike someone in your own party. “They’re fiercely themselves. . . . I think when you’re president, if there are other people who’ve been president or first lady or are aspiring to be, they don’t want other people thinking about being president while they’re there.”

When Sarah Weddington traveled to the Johnson ranch in Texas to interview Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, and Rosalynn Carter for a 1988 Good Housekeeping story, she found three former first ladies who were like old friends. The three women had banded together to fight for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (which was defeated), and they had all attended the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, the first and only national women’s conference sponsored by the federal government. Each one of them knew the sting of defeat: Rosalynn and Betty had cried bitter tears when their husbands lost, and Lady Bird had struggled with her husband’s decision not to seek reelection. Lady Bird had showed up herself to pick up Betty and Rosalynn at the airport to spend the weekend at her Texas ranch, where Lady Bird pointed out different animals and the flowers she loved best. Weddington remembers being on the plane with Betty and Rosalynn flying home. She and Betty started talking about how hard it was for the Fords to leave the White House. “No matter who follows you, you know they didn’t deserve to be there,” Betty said. Rosalynn overheard their conversation, but instead of being offended—since she was the woman who followed Betty as first lady—she chimed in, “Betty, you are so right!”

Though the Fords and the Carters became close after the White House, initially Betty Ford was furious when her husband lost to Jimmy Carter. Like so many other first ladies, she bore the grudge for the entire family. After watching Rosalynn do an interview on a morning news show during the bitter 1976 campaign, Betty told an aide, “Rosalynn Carter looks tired. . . . She has a way of smiling while sticking a knife in your back. There’s a saccharine quality to her.” In early December 1976, after Carter had won the election, the Fords invited the Carters to the White House for the traditional tour. The Carters were staying at Blair House, the formal guesthouse across the street on Pennsylvania Avenue, when Rosalynn got a call from Betty’s assistant saying that the First Lady was not feeling well and that the meeting would have to be canceled. Rosalynn did not realize at the time that Betty was dealing with addiction. On that day in December, after two and a half years as First Lady, Betty Ford was fragile.

Not long afterward another call came through. “Everyone thinks it would be better if you came this afternoon,” a Ford aide told Rosalynn. Then another call came to say the First Lady still was not well enough for a meeting. The next in the flurry of calls was from Jimmy Carter himself, telling his wife that she should come and that if she did not come it would become a news story. So Rosalynn put on a brown-and-blue wool dress, which she had bought for the occasion, and had a quick but friendly enough tour with Betty Ford.

David Hume Kennerly was President Ford’s White House photographer and a close Ford family friend. He remembers waiting for the Carters to arrive for that first visit after they won the election. He recalls Betty not wanting to go greet them. She whispered to her husband as they waited at the door of the White House, “I really don’t want to do this.” He said, “You’ve got to do it, we have to be good sports here.” (Privately, though, President Ford griped, “I can’t believe I lost to a peanut farmer.”) Kennerly said he could understand Betty’s reaction. “Most people don’t like getting their ass kicked; you don’t get real warm and fuzzy about the people who did it to you.”

President Ford was able to put his hurt feelings aside more easily than his wife—he even offered Jimmy Carter the use of the private office next to the Oval Office if he needed it for briefings before his inauguration. Carter declined. “To this day Cheney [Dick Cheney, who was Ford’s chief of staff] doesn’t like Carter. A lot of people took it [the loss] personally, it was very emotional,” Kennerly said. “I think what Carter did was really hurting her [Betty’s] husband and she didn’t take it lightly.” Eventually, though, Betty grieved the loss (Susan Ford actually referred to it as “grieving”) and recovered, and by the time the Fords left she decided to have some fun. On her last full day in the White House Betty said goodbye to her husband’s West Wing staff. As she was walking back to the residence she passed the empty Cabinet Room and thought, You know, I’ve always wanted to dance on the Cabinet Room table. She had a willing accomplice in the twenty-nine-year-old Kennerly.

“I think I want to do this,” she told him.

“Well, nobody’s around,” he said, as he readied his camera.

“I took off my shoes, hopped up there, and struck a pose,” she recalled, bringing her experience as a Martha Graham dancer to one of the most powerful rooms in the world. She was a little embarrassed by the photo, so she had it restricted in the archives at her husband’s presidential library for nearly two decades before Kennerly published it in a book in 1995. He remembers that when President Ford saw it for the first time, “He about fell off his chair.” Ford looked at his wife and said, “Well, Betty, you never told me you did that.”

“There are a lot of things I haven’t told you, Jerry!’”

ROSALYNN CARTER ADMITS that she still feels the sting of her husband’s loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980. She ends her autobiography, First Lady from Plains, with: “I’d like people to know that we were right, that what Jimmy Carter was doing was best for our country, and that people made a mistake by not voting for him.” She lets her own personal ambition show. “Our loss at the polls is the biggest single reason I’d like to be back in the White House. I don’t like to lose.” The worst moment for President Carter was not when he found out that he had lost the election; it was breaking the news to his wife. “Don’t say anything to Rosalynn yet,” Carter instructed his staff. “Let me tell her.” Rosalynn simply refused to believe the lopsided verdict. “I was in such denial,” she admitted years later. “It was impossible for me to believe that anybody could have looked at the facts and voted for Reagan.”

There was bad blood between the Carters and the Reagans long before Election Day. During the campaign the Reagans’ son, Ron, accused President Carter of “having the morals of a snake” who “would have sold his mother to get reelected.” Ron said that he made the comments because he resented Carter for implying that his father was “a racist and a warmonger.” Reflecting on it now, he says, “You’re competing, it’s a very personal kind of competition. It’s not sports, you’re not on a tennis court, you’re competing with, in the best-case scenario, with your ideas and your character so it can get very personal during a campaign.” Rosalynn grew even angrier when rumors circulated that Nancy Reagan wanted the Carters to move out a few weeks before the inauguration and live in Blair House, across the street from the White House, so that she could begin redecorating the family’s private quarters. Rosalynn said that Nancy called her to deny reports that she wanted them out. “I don’t know whether she said she was sorry or not,” Rosalynn said. “She just said she did not make those statements.”

White House Florist Ronn Payne says that between the election and President Reagan’s inauguration, every time he went to the family’s private living quarters he could hear at least one member of Carter’s extended family crying. Rosalynn remembered how agonizing were those weeks between the election and the inauguration. “You lose the election on November 4, and then you’re just ready to go home.” It may have been the enormity of the loss—Carter won just 41 percent of the vote—that made it that much harder to take. The morning after the election, Carter’s communications director, Jerry Rafshoon, went to visit the President, who was sitting with tears in his eyes in the Oval Office. “Forty-one million, six hundred thousand people don’t like me,” Carter said. His best friend and chief adviser, Rosalynn, admits she was “bitter enough for both of us.” Even years later, in a 1999 interview with the New York Times, Rosalynn said, “My biggest regret in life was that Jimmy was defeated.”

When it came time for Rosalynn to give Nancy her first tour of the residence, she dutifully walked her through the second and third floors, describing as they strolled through the Yellow Oval Room her efforts to showcase American paintings. But she was not at all enthusiastic, and she abruptly cut the tour short without showing Nancy the presidential bedroom and study. “The chill in her manner matched the chill in the room,” Nancy recalled. (Jimmy Carter insisted on keeping the White House a cool 65 degrees during the day and a downright chilly 55 degrees at night because of the energy crisis. White House staffers often typed with gloves on, and a maid even picked up a pair of long underwear for Rosalynn when she went to buy some for herself.)

The tension at President Reagan’s inauguration was amplified by the Iran hostage crisis. The Iranians had finally decided to release the hostages but they kept the planes with the returning Americans waiting on the runway so that they would not clear Iranian airspace until after Ronald Reagan became President at noon. Rosalynn was furious and saw it as one final dig at her husband. After the traditional coffee with the incoming president and his wife in the Blue Room, both the Carters and the Reagans left for the Capitol and the swearing-in ceremony. Barbara Bush, who was the wife of the incoming vice president, remembers being kept waiting by Rosalynn as she said goodbye to the residence staff. Barbara and Nancy Reagan felt they were standing around for forty-five minutes with nothing to do. “We won’t drag it out like this,” Barbara whispered to Nancy at the time. But Barbara says that when she had to leave the White House twelve years later, she could understand why Rosalynn acted the way she did.

Rosalynn says she felt “very smug” knowing, as she made chitchat with Nancy Reagan, that fifty-two American hostages were coming home after being held in Iran for well over a year. But she knew that most people would assume that Reagan had gotten them released. Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, said, “The Reagans were not very good at handing out compliments to others. That was not their strong suit.” Nancy remembered how awkward the ride to the Capitol was with Rosalynn and how thankful she was that House Minority Leader John Rhodes was there to make conversation. “Rosalynn just looked out the window and didn’t say a word. I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet, too. Fortunately, it’s a short ride.”

Nearly a year after the 1980 presidential election, the wounds between Nancy and Rosalynn were still fresh. When Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamic extremists during a military parade in Cairo in 1981, the Secret Service decided that neither President Reagan (who had barely survived an assassination attempt just six months before) nor Vice President George H. W. Bush should attend Sadat’s funeral. In an unprecedented show of support for the U.S. ally, President Nixon, President Ford, and President Carter agreed to attend in Reagan’s place. Rosalynn Carter accompanied her husband because she had developed a close friendship with Sadat and his wife, Jehan, while they were working on the Camp David peace treaty. President Reagan’s assistant Kathleen Osborne remembers how surprised everyone was to see Rosalynn, the only first lady among the three presidents. “I don’t know if it was just understood or it was made clear that it was just the former presidents, but she showed up, and they didn’t know what to do. I guess she decided to go, which is fine, but it would have been nice if somebody had told us.” Hundreds of staffers gathered on the South Lawn and watched as the former presidents and the former first lady stepped off the helicopter and walked across the sweeping White House grounds to meet with the Reagans. What no one could see was the look on Barbara Bush’s face as she peered through heavy silk drapes from a window in the White House, taking in the scene on the lawn with a wry smile. “It all rather amused me,” she said. “I don’t really think they liked each other very much.”

THE CARTERS AND the Clintons would seem like natural allies: both former presidents are southern-born Baptists, and they are the only two Democrats to have won the presidency between 1964 and 2004. Rosalynn Carter and Hillary Clinton challenged tradition and sought a place at the table in high-level meetings. Rosalynn, like Hillary, was even asked to run for the Senate by her party after her husband’s defeat. The Clintons were early Carter supporters when Carter ran for president in 1976, and when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas he stood by Carter and did not support Senator Ted Kennedy in his efforts to win the 1980 Democratic nomination. But the relationship between the Carters and the Clintons eventually disintegrated. It is so bad now that the Carters privately hoped that Elizabeth Warren, a liberal senator from Massachusetts who is a leading critic of Wall Street, would challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016. If Clinton wins the election they would like to see Warren challenge her in 2020.

When President Carter was campaign chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1974, he went to Little Rock to help “this kid Billy Clinton who was running for Congress.” Clinton, as usual, was forty-five minutes late. Carter aide Jerry Rafshoon was waiting at the hotel with Carter’s trusted staffers, Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell. “What the hell are you doing? You’re late!” Rafshoon said. Carter is never late, an attribute Rafshoon credits to his years at the U.S. Naval Academy. Even though that first meeting did not go according to plan, the Carters and the Clintons were firmly in each other’s corners. But Hillary soon began to annoy the Carters’ inner circle. She went to Carter’s Atlanta campaign headquarters wearing no makeup and her trademark thick glasses, and told Jordan that she wanted to handle Illinois because she was from Chicago. He laughed at her. “You think you can handle Mayor Daley?” Jordan asked her mockingly, convinced that the hard-edged mayor with working-class Irish roots would have no interest in meeting with this self-proclaimed feminist with an Ivy League pedigree. “I can handle him,” she said. But Jordan refused and instead gave her a much less weighty assignment and sent her to Indiana.

The biggest blow to their relationship came in May 1980 when Carter sent eighteen thousand Cuban refugees to be interned at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. Several hundred broke out and yelled “Libertad! Libertad!” through the streets, sparking a political disaster for Clinton, who was then Arkansas’s governor. When Clinton called to talk to President Carter, he was punted to a midlevel aide. Eventually Carter promised not to send any more refugees to Fort Chaffee, but he broke his promise when, during his run for reelection and three months before Clinton was up for reelection, Carter moved all the refugees that he had sent to more important political states (like Pennsylvania) back to Arkansas. Clinton was convinced that Carter’s decision cost him the election. “There was a big political price to pay for supporting his President,” Hillary Clinton wrote in her memoir.

When Clinton ran for president he did not see any use in cozying up to the one-term Democrat, whom many perceived as a failure, and Carter’s requests to discuss foreign policy with the newly elected President were never answered. Carter vented his frustration in a New York Times interview shortly after Clinton’s inauguration. In the interview he said he was “very disappointed” that the Clintons had decided to send Chelsea to the Sidwell Friends private school, instead of to a Washington, D.C., public school, as the Carters had done with their young daughter, Amy. He also got in a dig about the Clintons’ visit to Georgia the summer before to help Carter build houses for Habitat for Humanity. “He was obviously not an experienced carpenter,” Carter said dismissively. The Carter camp’s real vitriol is reserved for Hillary though. In a 2001 Wall Street journal op-ed, Carter’s former chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, wrote: “Instead of leaving him for his public betrayal, Hillary Clinton exploited her public image of a wronged but loyal spouse to create a new persona for herself and win election to the Senate. The Clintons are not a couple but a business partnership, not based on love or even greed but on shared ambitions.”

While the Clintons were in the White House, Rosalynn saw Hillary only a handful of times, once at President Nixon’s funeral. “This is embarrassing,” Rosalynn said, squirming, when asked how often she’d seen Hillary since she became first lady. Rosalynn understood the politics behind their distance: “When they first went to Washington, he [Bill Clinton] was a southern governor,” she said. “And Jimmy had not been reelected. And I think they wanted to detach themselves a little from that. And I can understand that.” Rosalynn recognizes the distance between herself and her Democratic successors—Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama—who don’t often seek her advice. First ladies, she says, are “bound together by having had the experience of living in the White House and all that involves,” but, she adds, “I’m not sure we would call the relationship among first ladies a sisterhood. About the only time we are ever together is when a new presidential library is established or for a funeral.”

NANCY REAGAN CERTAINLY did not offer to leave the White House early when it was her turn to move out. She and Barbara Bush had such a caustic relationship when George H. W. Bush was Reagan’s vice president that Barbara had very little idea what the residence looked like when she moved in. During the eight years that Barbara Bush was second lady she was rarely invited to the family quarters. Barbara said the chief usher came to the Vice President’s residence to show her pictures of the rooms on the second and third floors of the White House. “I really didn’t know anything about the upstairs at the White House to speak of and he told me different things. I then marked things that were to go to the White House because most of our things went to Maine [their summer home in Kennebunkport].”

In his private diary, President George H. W. Bush put it bluntly when he wrote in a 1988 entry, “Nancy does not like Barbara.” Nancy, he said, was jealous of his wife. “She feels that Barbara has the very things that she, Nancy, doesn’t have, and that she’ll never be in Barbara’s class.” There was no official tour of the residence until January 11, only nine days before the Bushes were to move in. And it was brief and unsatisfying. The animosity was mutual. When a negative biography of Nancy Reagan was published, Barbara snapped it up but slapped on another book jacket so that no one would know what she was reading. When Barbara visited a San Antonio clinic as first lady in 1992, a recovering drug addict handed her a photo of himself and asked her to autograph it with Nancy’s antidrug motto, “Just say no.” Barbara simply signed her name.

Nancy Reagan had her own friends, and Barbara had hers. Barbara was from an old patrician family—she grew up in Rye, New York, and is related to President Franklin Pierce—and she could not have approved of Nancy’s obvious grasp for power and of her movie star friends. Nancy Reagan’s assistant Jane Erkenbeck was reticent when asked to describe their relationship. They had, after all, eight years to get to know each other. “I’m not going to go into that,” she said, pausing a moment. “She was there because her husband was vice president. Mrs. Reagan was there because her husband was president. The men had a very good relationship, saw each other a lot. . . . If your husband and my husband were law partners and they were friends and they see each other all the time, of course that doesn’t mean that you and I have to be good friends.” Nancy once paused when a reporter asked for her opinion of Barbara. “Well, I never got to know her very well,” she said.

Barbara had a way of connecting with people as First Lady and was nicknamed “the National Treasure” by her husband’s aides. She became everyone’s favorite grandmother: loving, self-deprecating, and, above all, compassionate. She cultivated an image as the anti-Nancy, oblivious to her hair or what she was wearing. On the eve of her husband’s inauguration Barbara said, “My mail tells me that a lot of fat, white-haired, wrinkled ladies are tickled pink. I mean, look at me—if I can be a success, so can they.” The 1987 visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, marked the first time a Soviet leader had come to Washington since Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, and the Gorbachevs’ arrival ceremony at the White House was watched by the world. Barbara recorded in her diary that she wore “a very Republican cloth coat and Nancy wore her mink.” Barbara was not putting on an act, says Joni Stevens, who worked in the Military Office across the hall from the First Lady’s office. At the head of the stairs are the men’s room and the ladies’ room, and in between them were two giant photographs of Barbara Bush and George H. W. Bush (the photos, known as “jumbos,” are scattered along the walls of the West Wing and the East Wing and change periodically). A couple of days after the Bushes moved into the White House, Stevens ran into Barbara at the top of the stairs as she was going into the ladies’ room. “Who is that wrinkled white-haired lady?” Barbara asked, pointing to her photo. Barbara looked at her Secret Service agent and he just started laughing.

Barbara and Nancy are from the same political party, but they have such different personalities that they have closer friendships with Democrats. Barbara became close to Democrat Lady Bird Johnson, and Nancy had enormous respect for Democrat Jackie Kennedy. Even when Barbara tried to be nice to Nancy it backfired. During the only debate between Reagan and Carter before the 1980 election, Barbara and her husband sat with Nancy in the auditorium. “I think [Reagan] looks so much better than Carter,” Barbara whispered. “His makeup is better.” Nancy replied dismissively, “Ronnie never wears makeup.” Nancy readily admits that she did not care for George H. W. Bush when her husband picked him as his running mate; Bush had run against Reagan in the Republican primaries and had criticized his policies. “George’s use of the phrase ‘voodoo economics’ to describe Ronnie’s proposed tax cuts still rankled,” Nancy wrote in her memoir.

Nancy was a perfectionist and had very particular ideas of how she wanted the White House to look. She was also constantly sizing people up. For the Gorbachevs’ visit, White House Florist Ronn Payne recalls when the First Lady and her social secretary came into the Flower Shop on the ground floor and told the florists, “We want to blow [Raisa’s] socks off.” Payne said, “We changed every single flower in the house three times in one day: for the morning arrival, for the afternoon lunch, and for the state dinner. Every single flower, three times, every one.” Nancy and Raisa also did not get along. During their first meeting over coffee the two sat with their interpreters. Jane Erkenbeck recalled a couple of times when Raisa spoke in English. “She was just trying to humiliate the First Lady: ‘I can speak English as well as Russian. You cannot speak Russian.’ That set the tone.” Barbara described the animosity between the two first ladies as a “chemical thing.” Barbara had a better relationship with Raisa than Nancy did, and Raisa even asked her why she thought Nancy did not like her. Barbara was hard-pressed to answer.

Nancy was a First Lady who was often hard to please and sometimes seemed to be looking for slights. Head Housekeeper Christine Limerick avoids saying anything negative about her former bosses, but one incident involving the Reagans’ personal belongings caused her to leave the White House for five years before Barbara Bush asked her to return. Christine had gotten along with Nancy and even talked with her about her love life (the First Lady considered herself a born matchmaker and was thrilled when Christine told her she was getting married to White House Electrician Robert Limerick). The Reagans had “an incredible amount of stuff and that’s because they don’t have to clean,” Limerick said, with a wry smile. If any of Nancy’s collectibles—including about twenty-five small hand-painted porcelain Limoges boxes, silver frames, and expensive perfume bottles—was put back in the wrong place after a cleaning, Limerick would hear about it. “At the beginning of their administration,” Limerick recalled, “there were several items that were broken: one by Housekeeping, one by the Secret Service, and one by the Operations Department.” Nancy blamed Limerick and yelled at her with such venom that Chief Usher Rex Scouten had to come to Limerick’s defense. Nancy was so angry, she had Limerick pack up most of the keepsakes that she kept in the private living quarters and put them away for several months, until things calmed down. Limerick decided then that she needed a break from the White House. The hushed voices in the corridors of the executive mansion during the Reagan years were no surprise to the Reagans’ children, who knew how much their mother valued order and respect for material objects. “Things rarely got broken in our house; Kool-Aid wasn’t spilled on couches, chocolate wasn’t smeared on draperies. Fabergé eggs and antique china vases were safe from us,” said the Reagans’ daughter, Patti Davis, referring to herself and her younger brother, Ron.

Time could not heal old wounds between Nancy and Barbara. Barbara was fuming when, as first lady, she reviewed the guest list for the 1989 unveiling of the Reagans’ official portraits at the White House. Nancy had commandeered the list and once again had taken control. “She was angry. She felt that they were imposing on her,” said former White House Usher Chris Emery, who was close with Barbara. “She was the first lady, it was her White House and they were telling her what to do. It was like they were still in charge.” Just before President George H. W. Bush left office, he awarded President Reagan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Nancy called Dick Cheney, who was Bush’s secretary of defense and a friend of the Reagans, to make sure he would be at the East Room ceremony; she told Cheney that they needed allies there. Nancy obviously did not consider the Bushes to be on their side. “Nancy apparently never even said thank you to Barbara,” President Bush recalled in his diary.

Ron Reagan wrote a scathing op-ed in Esquire about President George W. Bush weeks after Bush and his father spoke at President Reagan’s 2004 funeral. Nancy called Barbara Bush to apologize but it was not enough; there was too much bad blood between them. Nancy stayed at the White House at the invitation of George and Laura Bush, and during Bush’s presidency she urged him, mostly through emissaries, to support embryonic stem-cell research as a potential tool for treating Alzheimer’s disease, which had afflicted her husband. But Bush restricted federal financing for the experimental procedures that required the use of cells from a human embryo. Nancy said she thought she brought it up directly with him once, “and then I didn’t anymore.”

BARBARA BUSH HAS more in common with Nancy Reagan than she might like to think: they both worried much more than their husbands did, and neither cared half as much as her husband did about what people thought of her. Barbara, like Nancy, was the chief disciplinarian and grudge holder for her family. President Bush told reporters, “Look out, the silver fox is really mad at you,” referring to his wife. George W. Bush told a reporter that his mother “can smell a phony a mile away.”

Weeks before the President left office the Bushes were in Moscow, where he was signing a nuclear treaty. Reporter Cragg Hines had just filed an unflattering story about Bush’s loss to Clinton. The “silver fox” was not happy. Hines was with a group of traveling reporters who were giddily taking photographs in the Kremlin when he saw Barbara approaching them from the top of the stairwell. Hines had begun covering Bush in 1964, when Bush made an unsuccessful bid for the Senate, and felt comfortable enough with Barbara to approach her. “Mrs. Bush, can I take a picture with you?” She glared at him. “Not with you, bub,” she replied.

Barbara, like Nancy, expressed opinions about her husband’s team of advisers. She was not happy with his decision to name Dan Quayle, a forty-one-year-old senator from Indiana, as his running mate. Bush had kept many of his top aides in the dark until the last minute. Barbara sided with longtime Bush allies who were unhappy with the choice and who resented not being part of the decision-making process. Once they were in the White House, the Bushes and the Quayles had a strained relationship. Quayle was ridiculed in the press for gaffes, like when he went to a Trenton, New Jersey, school and a student was asked to write “potato” on a blackboard and he urged him to add an “e” at the end.

Barbara never warmed up to Quayle’s wife, Marilyn, who is more than twenty years younger than her. A friend of Marilyn said that getting invited to a state dinner was like “pulling teeth” for the Vice President and his wife. But the relationship between the Vice President’s wife and the President’s wife is almost always fraught, and it can resemble the relationship between a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law. Barbara made it clear when she did not want Marilyn talking about a particular issue or going to a certain event. “Barbara Bush had been the student of Nancy Reagan for eight years. She thought Marilyn should suck it up,” Marilyn’s friend said.

The two vice presidential candidates in the 1992 campaign, Al Gore and Dan Quayle, enrolled their daughters at Washington’s elite all-girls’ National Cathedral School. Kristin Gore, Sarah Gore, and Corinne Quayle were at the school at the same time and were the school’s three star lacrosse players. “Marilyn Quayle told me those girls clung together, they protected each other, they shut out the political world, the campaign,” said former ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton. Marilyn Quayle’s former chief of staff, Marguerite Sullivan, said that the life of a second lady is very different from the life of a first lady. They have many of the trappings of the office, including Secret Service protection, and almost none of the luxuries. “If you want to go somewhere you have the same security apparatus as the first lady, but you either go on commercial airlines or you get somebody to donate a plane.” It is considered a cardinal sin for the second lady to outshine the first lady; there is an understanding in Washington that vice presidents cannot help their running mates get elected, but they can certainly hurt their chances, and the same is true of vice presidential wives. During a campaign, the wives of the vice presidential nominees are sent to parts of the country that are considered second or third tier and are not crucial for an electoral victory.

Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney, the wife of George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, were friendly but they were not close. Lynne never thought that her husband would become vice president—she told a friend how relieved she was that he was on the committee to select Bush’s running mate: she thought this would ensure that he himself was out of the running. Bush campaign advisers agreed that Lynne was a better speaker than Laura, but it was decided during the 2000 campaign that she should be used sparingly so that she did not outshine Laura.

Sullivan says that the President and his wife and the Vice President and his wife are like knights in medieval times. “The knights have their own entourage and they come together and then separate and do their own thing.” There is no going rogue for second ladies—they have to be part of the apparatus, the behemoth that is a presidential campaign, and they must play the role they have been assigned to play. Barbara Bush made sure that Marilyn Quayle never forgot that.

AS FIRST LADY, Barbara Bush had only one real brush with controversy. (“Short of ax murder,” says former Bush spokeswoman Sheila Tate, “I think she could get away with anything. She’s so benign.”) In 1990 she was invited to deliver the keynote address at the graduation ceremony at the all-women’s Wellesley College in Massachusetts. One hundred and fifty students signed a petition saying they were “outraged” by the decision to have Barbara speak because, they said, she was famous only because of the man she married. (Barbara had dropped out of Smith after her freshman year, intent on focusing all of her attention on Bush.) Soon the storm blew over, but Barbara would not be made a fool of—before she made the speech, she called two of the Wellesley students who were leading the protest so she could “twist the knife in a little” and embarrass them, an aide said. In her speech Barbara said that women should always put family before their careers.

Behind the scenes, Barbara was a protective wife and mother. (In 1984 she famously called her husband’s rival, Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, “that four-million-dollar—I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.”) Barbara stood by her husband through two terms in Congress and through stints as UN ambassador, GOP chairman, U.S. envoy to China, and CIA director. She devoted her life to her family and like Betty Ford she raised their six children largely alone. She struggled with depression, she said, partly because “women’s lib had made me feel that my life had been wasted.” She represented a different generation than her successor Hillary Clinton, who was a proud feminist and a baby boomer. During the 1992 campaign Hillary was asked for her response to Barbara’s speech at Wellesley, Hillary’s alma mater, and gave a restrained answer: “Personally, I believe that a woman should put her family and her relationships—which are really at the root of who you are and how you relate to the world—at the top of your priority list. I don’t believe that I, or Barbara Bush, should tell all women that’s what they have to put first. . . . What we have to get away from is the idea that there’s only one right choice.”

Barbara worships her husband and puts his needs above her own every time. George Herbert Walker Bush’s brother Jonathan said of the Bushes’ courtship: “She was wild about him. And for George, if anyone wants to be wild about him, it’s fine with him.” The Bushes moved twenty-nine times during their marriage, eleven times in the first six years. When they were finally settled and putting down roots with their growing family, the nomadic George Bush came home one day, clapped his hands, and told his wife, “We’re moving to Odessa [Texas].” Barbara was heartsick. Silent for a moment, she composed herself and looked up adoringly at her husband: “I’ve always wanted to live in Odessa.” She knew that this was George H. W. Bush’s essence; he could never stay in one place too long.

Barbara worried about the negative campaign ads put together by Bush advisers Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes in the 1988 presidential campaign. She was concerned about whether they would reflect poorly on her husband. When Ailes walked into the room she announced, with a weary smile, “Here’s my bad boy.” But when her husband’s reelection prospects against Bill Clinton were looking dim in 1992, Barbara told him flatly, “I’m going negative.” Barbara was keeping score as she watched Hillary directly attack her husband time and time again. She would not forget how Hillary referred to Bush’s four years in office as a “failure of leadership.” Suggestions that Hillary, as retribution for all the coverage of Bill’s philandering, wanted to expose President George H. W. Bush’s alleged affair with a personal aide so infuriated Barbara that it led to a cold war between Barbara and Hillary that still has not thawed.

In a 1992 Vanity Fair article, Hillary is quoted saying she had a conversation with a wealthy Atlanta socialite who told her about Bush’s alleged affair with a close aide. It’s all “apparently well known in Washington,” she said slyly. Hillary was referring to Jennifer Fitzgerald, whom Bush was rumored to have had a romantic relationship with for years. “I’m convinced part of it is that the Establishment—regardless of party—sticks together. They’re gonna circle the wagons on Jennifer,” Hillary said. The Clinton campaign was trying its best to make sure the story of Bush’s alleged affair was exposed, and the Bush campaign accused the Clinton campaign of planting the story. “That’s definitely playing hardball,” Barbara said. Bush wrote in his diary that he and his family were humiliated by the allegations. “I talked to Bar this morning and she was telling me that her friends all had heard these ugly rumors.” Barbara invited Cragg Hines, who was then the Washington bureau chief of the Houston Chronicle, for an intimate interview in the West Sitting Hall. The First Lady sat demurely in an armchair wearing a pretty lilac suit, but her very serious intentions were clear from the moment Hines walked in. “It was the focus of her day,” he recalls with a laugh. She said that any suggestions that her husband had had an affair were “sick” and “ugly.” Barbara never mentioned Hillary, but when Hines asked her if this was the lowest point the campaign could sink to, she replied, “It can’t get any uglier.”

Barbara has the longest memory of anyone in her family, and she can never forgive Hillary. In a 2000 interview, four months before her eldest son was elected president and almost a decade after Hillary first criticized her husband, she said that her daughter-in-law, Laura, would be very different from Hillary because she would “not get into foreign affairs or controversial subjects. . . . I think she would rather make a positive impact on the country.” Barbara added passive-aggressively, “I’m not criticizing Mrs. Clinton. But it’s like oil and water. We’re talking about two different subjects. They’re two different people. I think Laura thinks of others.” The undercurrent is hard to miss: Laura would not overstep in the same way that Hillary had as first lady, there would be no West Wing office, and there would be no meddling in presidential matters. Barbara has always considered Hillary a politician and therefore fair game. “Governor and Mrs. Clinton had both said that they were going to be a co-presidency,” Barbara said during the 1992 campaign.

The friendship between George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton has not softened the relationship between their wives. The two men became friends when they traveled to South Asia to help the victims of the 2004 tsunami and Bush became a sort of father figure to Clinton. According to former White House officials, it’s no coincidence that whenever Bill Clinton is invited to the Bush family’s summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Hillary has other commitments. “The relationship between Franklin and Eleanor [Roosevelt] sounds rather like the relationship between Bill and Hillary,” Barbara wrote in her diary. “Respect for each other, but separate lives. Who knows.”

Even when it comes to her daughter-in-law Laura, Barbara’s sometimes caustic wit can cause the always-in-control Laura to roll her eyes, or force herself to bite her tongue. The two women give each other a wide berth when the Bushes are all together at the family compound, but occasionally, when Barbara weighs in with parenting advice, Laura makes it clear who is in charge of her daughters. Jenna Bush calls her grandmother “the enforcer.” The night of George H. W. Bush’s inauguration every available space in the White House was taken up with a member of the Bush family. If a grandchild showed up to visit without reading material, Barbara marched him or her down to the White House library to pick out a book. She told her children, “If you’re going to spend the night, bring your own sheets!” Once, Butler George Hannie said, a bunch of her grandchildren were having a pool party at the White House. Barbara asked him, “George, what’s going on at the pool?”

“Ma’am, they ordered sandwiches to eat by the pool.”

“Stop right there,” she said. “Take everything to the Solarium. Let them come and get it.” Then she walked downstairs to the outdoor pool and got them all out and told them if they wanted to eat they needed to do it inside.

In 2012 Barbara and Laura attended a conference at the LBJ Presidential Library. Library Director Mark Updegrove introduced them. “Laura Bush has graciously allowed me to call her Laura for the evening, so I will be referring to her as Laura and you as Mrs. Bush.” Barbara shot him a withering glance and said, “I would certainly hope so.” The audience burst into laughter. Ultimately, Barbara and Laura are bound by their shared love of George W. Bush. When Laura was asked at the conference what the biggest misconception of her husband was, she said, “That he was sort of a heedless, cowboy caricature.” Barbara cut in, “Don’t mention it to me, it makes me so mad.” But when Barbara was asked what the biggest misconception of her husband was, she said, “There was none, he is a saint.” For the most part, Laura is “very deferential” to her mother-in-law, said Anita McBride, who was Laura’s chief of staff. “She knows that that’s Bar.”

“Sometimes I’m reminded of things that I’ve said and I’m mortified,” Barbara said when a staffer reminded her of how she had told her husband that he needed to lose weight. But it was that kind of candor that earned Barbara the love of the White House residence staff, whom she teased constantly. She was the same way with the press. On a foreign trip a reporter asked her, “Are you going to be buying pearls in Bahrain?” She looked at the reporter and said, “Not as long as [costume jewelry designer] Kenneth Jay Lane is alive.”

EVEN SOME OF Hillary Clinton’s closest friends are wary of her seeking the presidency for a second time. They say they do not know why she wants to put herself through all of that again. When she was last in the White House, Hillary went through a four-year investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr into a myriad of charges, including the Whitewater land deal and “Travelgate,” the firing of several longtime White House employees in the Travel Office. Of course the biggest scandal of all was the revelation in January 1998 that her husband had been carrying on an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. When the affair was occurring between November 1995 and March 1997, butlers saw the President and Lewinsky in the family movie theater. They were seen together so often that workers let each other know when they had a so-called Lewinsky sighting. West Wing staffers called Monica “Elvira” because of her dark hair and ample cleavage, reminiscent of TV character Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Hillary’s friends wonder, Why would she want to be reminded of all of that?

Hillary has been living in a bubble for decades; she has not driven a car in nearly twenty years, and if she wins the 2016 election, she will have the remarkable distinction of being the first president to have had Secret Service protection for a solid twenty-four years before she ever even got to the White House on her own. The Clintons were the only first family in the twentieth century without a home outside Washington. (In 1999, shortly before leaving the White House, they bought an eleven-room Dutch colonial in Chappaqua, New York, for $1.7 million in preparation for Hillary’s run for Senate in the state. Shortly after that, they bought a $2.85 million home near Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. Before those purchases the Clintons had not owned a home for sixteen years.) When they moved into the White House they brought everything they owned with them and stored much of it in a climate-controlled storage facility about eleven miles outside Washington in Riverdale, Maryland; there every piece of furniture that has ever been in the White House is carefully cataloged. But one explanation for her decision to run again is clear, says a member of Hillary’s inner circle: it is partly out of vengeance for her 2008 loss to President Obama. “When we all first started talking about the Hillary campaign, we said we can’t wait to get him [President Obama] out of there and get back somebody who’s going to do something.” Obama, this former staffer said, does not have the same dogged work ethic as Hillary does.

Michelle Obama and Laura Bush are held to different standards than Hillary is, according to Hillary’s loyal staff. Laura Bush’s chief of staff, Andi Ball, worked closely with Hillary’s then–deputy chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, through the transition, and they’ve maintained a very good relationship over time. Shortly after 9/11, Laura Bush became the first first lady to deliver the weekly presidential radio address—she used it to draw attention to human rights abuses against Afghan women. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” she said, using the bully pulpit of the presidency to make the case. Verveer was one of the first people to call Ball after Laura’s radio address. “Hillary never could have done that,” she said. “If she had taken the microphone of the presidential podium to deliver an address all hell would have broken loose for Hillary. But people didn’t expect it out of Laura Bush.” That is probably because it was not something that she was naturally inclined to do. It was her husband’s idea and she looked at the statement and put it in her own words. She did not know the impact it would have.

The 2008 presidential campaign left deep and lasting scars on both the Clinton and the Obama camps, and they are still shockingly fresh. One Obama aide said that Michelle would have liked to see Vice President Joe Biden run against Hillary for the 2016 Democratic nomination. She is very close to the Bidens, especially Vice President Biden’s wife, Jill, whom she’s worked with to advocate for military families. Several high-level advisers in both camps expressed disdain for their former opponents and even shared stories that made the other side look bad. One of Hillary’s best friends, Susie Tompkins Buell, who describes herself as “an eddy in a wild river” for Hillary, was defensive when asked whether Hillary regretted having an office in the West Wing. Buell said, “Where is Michelle Obama’s office?” (Michelle’s office is in the East Wing.)

Working for a Clinton, or a Bush, or an Obama, is like working for a major corporation. Staffers come to identify themselves closely with the politician they serve. Some of these aides would lie down on a train track for the president and the first lady. They often hold grudges far longer than the president and first lady do. On the eve of the 2008 New Hampshire primary, after she finished third in the Iowa caucuses, Hillary was asked a question that almost brought her to tears: “How do you do it?” It was a “chick question,” said Marianne Pernold, the woman who asked her. She wanted to know how Hillary got up every morning and seemed so put together. Hillary paused for ten seconds and revealed a side of herself that few people ever see. “You know, I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don’t want to see us fall backwards, you know?” she said, her voice cracking. She added, “This is very personal for me. It’s not just political. It’s not just public. I see what’s happening, and we have to reverse it.” She became the first woman to win a presidential primary with her victory in New Hampshire. Not everyone thought she was being sincere, however. Laura Bush’s chief of staff, Anita McBride, remembers watching Hillary answering Pernold’s question on the news from her office in the East Wing, and calling Laura in the residence to tell her to turn on the television. “You’ve got to see this,” she told her. Even while McBride and other staffers sat with their mouths agape, viewing Hillary’s sudden display of emotion as nothing more than a ploy, the sitting First Lady was convinced it was genuine. “You don’t understand,” Laura told them.

Ahead of the New Hampshire primary, Hillary had said that Martin Luther King Jr. needed President Johnson to pass the Civil Rights Act in order to begin to realize his dream of racial equality. “It took a president to get it done,” she said. Critics said she was downplaying King’s role in the passage of the legislation. She grew increasingly bitter as more and more of her friends, including Senator Ted Kennedy, who had been a mentor to her in the Senate and part of the family dynasty that she and her husband so revered, publicly expressed their support for Obama. The morning after the primary in South Carolina, where Obama won by twenty-eight points, President Clinton drew fire when, campaigning for his wife, he said, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.” Comparing Obama to Jackson was quickly condemned by African Americans in the state, including the influential former majority whip and key member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Jim Clyburn, who called the former president’s behavior “bizarre” and went on television to implore him to “chill.”

Bill Clinton’s overzealous campaigning for his wife is perhaps a symptom of his own guilt over having put her through so much, since the very start of their life together. Mary Ann Campbell, an old friend of Hillary from Arkansas, remembers a charity roast of Hillary in Little Rock when the Clintons were in the Governor’s Mansion. Campbell was assigned the delicate task of roasting Hillary and she made some jokes about Hillary’s appearance. “Everybody laughed, except Bill. Hillary just barrel laughed. She knows I like her.” When Bill came onstage he said pointedly, glancing sideways at Campbell, “I like Hillary’s frizzy hair. I like her glasses. I like Hillary with no makeup.” Bill could not stand someone making fun of his wife, just as he could not stand to watch Obama criticize her during the campaign.

Michelle first met Hillary when Hillary was her husband’s rival for the 2008 Democratic nomination and, unlike Laura Bush, she would never be able to forget the things that Hillary said about her husband, especially how she mocked his message of hope and change. “I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified,” Hillary said sarcastically at a campaign stop in Ohio in February 2008. “The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect.”

The Obamas view the Clintons as a political dynasty that came before them. “There’s a work functionality to that relationship, not exactly a close personal bond,” said one former Obama aide. The Obamas consider themselves far less calculating. Even while Clinton staffers argue strongly that Hillary herself thinks that every first lady has to carve out the job in a way that works best for her and for her family, most of her confidantes say that Michelle Obama has not done enough as first lady. “She gave up a lot of gains,” said a former Clinton staffer in a hushed voice.

There is a reason why there were no couples dinners when Hillary was a frequent guest at the Obama White House as secretary of state. By then Hillary was a former senator and fourth in line for the presidency. “I don’t think that she [Michelle] ever thought much of the Clintons,” says one former Obama adviser. “Even before the presidential race, even before we were really into it, I think that the Obamas’ view of the Clintons is that those years were an opportunity squandered. Big things could have been done but there was a lot of nibbling around the edges and a lot of it was consumed by President Clinton’s behavior.” In a 2007 Washington Post story, Michelle refused to say whether she would vote for Hillary if her husband were not in the race. “I would be more concerned at this time with finding the best president for this time, and if it is a woman, that would be a great thing,” she said. “Would I naturally be a Hillary supporter if my husband weren’t running? I don’t know, I’d be looking at the race totally differently. And it’s hard for me to see beyond the wonders of my husband.”

Shortly before the Obamas moved into the White House, Laura Bush’s East Wing aides handed Michelle’s staff binders detailing which events were added by which first lady and the different programs Laura had worked on. Laura had been a strong supporter of Save America’s Treasures, a program started by Hillary Clinton to help preserve historic sites. Laura’s staff was sure that Michelle would feel obligated to support it because Hillary was going to be part of her husband’s Cabinet. But Michelle did not feel any such obligation and she did not prioritize the program, which has since lost its funding. In a 2015 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Colbert asked Michelle, if the next president is a woman, would she leave behind a letter of advice for her husband? Michelle said she would and gave what at first seemed like a safe, non-controversial answer: “I would say, ‘Follow your passion, just be you.’” Colbert said quickly, “I think he does,” and the audience burst into laughter, the implication being that Bill Clinton has always followed his passions. “I think he would,” she replied, smiling broadly at Colbert. “I mean that in the best possible way,” Colbert said quickly. “I didn’t say . . . I’m just sitting here minding my business,” Michelle said, trying to distance herself, raising her hands in the air.

Recent charges of corruption and messy contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative, the family’s $2 billion foundation, fuel the animosity between the warring factions. “It fits into this narrative about the Clintons that they come off as just trying to claw their way towards success and money,” said a former Obama adviser with close personal knowledge of the dynamic between the two couples. “When Michelle Obama views the Clintons, I don’t want to say she’s looking down her nose at them—but she kind of is.”

Even so, President Obama uses the Clintons’ popularity when necessary. It was hard to ignore the difference between the two presidents when they both appeared unexpectedly in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room in the late afternoon of December 10, 2010. A voice on the loudspeaker was piped into the reporters’ booths in the White House and gave a ten-minute warning—no one was prepared for former President Clinton to come out and stand onstage with President Obama. During a half-hour Q&A with reporters, the former president gleefully answered questions and defended President Obama’s compromise agreement reached with congressional Republicans to extend tax cuts and unemployment benefits. But Clinton was not about to relinquish the spotlight. “I’ve been keeping the First Lady waiting for about half an hour, so I’m going to take off,” Obama told reporters several minutes into the briefing. “I don’t want to make her mad,” Clinton said. “Please go,” and he stayed for another twenty-three minutes of questions. He seems to want to get back into the White House almost as badly as his wife does.