IX

Keep Calm and Carry On

Oh my God, I think I’m going to throw up.

—BETTY FORD, BEFORE MAKING A CAMPAIGN SPEECH

High office leads to high anxiety, and first families face enormous amounts of pressure. Former White House Maître d’ George Hannie remembers how mercurial President Obama could be. “One day he can talk you to death. The next day he can walk past you and he won’t say anything. That’s why his hair is turning gray, he’s having problems.” The same is true about the first ladies, he said; they can say hello as they pass staff in the hallway, or they can be so consumed with their own thoughts and private concerns that they keep their eyes fixed straight ahead and don’t say a thing. “You know their minds are on something else. It’s not them, they’re just thinking.” Hannie said Hillary Clinton was especially quiet when she was consumed with worry about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Gwen King, who worked in the Kennedy, Nixon, and Ford administrations, remembered Jackie Kennedy calling one day in a panic from the residence because she had lost an eighteenth-century historical document that she had been given by a wealthy donor. King volunteered to go hunting for it and finally found it lodged in a cubbyhole in a conference room. “She [Jackie] was so grateful, you would have thought that I was her best friend the way she was graciously thanking me. The next day I passed her in the hall and she looked right through me. That was Jacqueline Kennedy.”

Lady Bird Johnson was soother-in-chief, spending much of her time smoothing feathers ruffled by her hot-tempered husband. She was an impeccably well-mannered southern lady whose husband regularly spoke to aides with the bathroom door open as he was sitting on the toilet. As a northeasterner, White House Curator Jim Ketchum, like most of the people working in the Kennedy White House, was not accustomed to the Johnsons’ Texas accent, and he was uncomfortable with the President’s brash personality and imposing physicality. “Nobody likes change,” he says.

Lady Bird worked hard to preserve her husband’s legacy, and she always regretted letting one taped conversation out into the public. In it, the President instructed his tailor to cut his pants so that he would have more room in the crotch, “down where your nuts hang,” as he put it. “Give me an inch that I can let out there because they cut me. They’re just like riding a wire fence.” During the 1960 campaign Bill Moyers was helping Johnson on the campaign trail—he would later become his press secretary when Johnson became president. During the exhausting months leading up to the election, he slept on the bed in the Johnsons’ basement when they returned from the road for sessions of the Senate. Moyers missed his wife and their six-month-old son, who were still in Texas, and Lady Bird could tell. “She would often come down two flights of stairs to ask if I was doing all right,” he said. “One night, the Senator and I got home even later and he brought with him some unresolved dispute from the Senate cloakroom. At midnight I could still hear him carrying on as if he was about to purge the Democratic caucus. Pretty soon I heard her footsteps on the stair and I called out, ‘Mrs. Johnson, you don’t need to come down here, I’m all right.’ And she called back, ‘Well, I was just coming down to tell you, “I’m all right too.”’”

Lady Bird had to face criticism about her husband’s policies because the first lady is an easier, more accessible target than the president. On January 18, 1968, she invited a group of women for a luncheon at the White House to discuss how to reduce crime. On the guest list was the famous singer and actress Eartha Kitt, who was in a combative mood. Lady Bird noticed that Kitt did not touch her seafood bisque or her peppermint ice cream at the elegant lunch in the Old Family Dining Room. She did not applaud any of the speakers, either. When Lady Bird asked for questions from the audience, Kitt’s hand shot up. She walked toward Lady Bird, stared directly at her, and said, “We send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the streets. They take pot and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school, because they are going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.” Lady Bird looked back at Kitt, “stare for stare,” she later said. Then came the punch to the gut. With her finger pointed at Lady Bird, Kitt said, “You are a mother, too. . . . I have a baby and then you send him off to war.” The First Lady’s face had lost its color and her voice trembled as she replied, “I cannot identify as much as I should. I have not lived the background that you have, nor can I speak as passionately or as well, but we must keep our eyes and our hearts and our energies fixed on constructive areas and try to do something that will make this a happier, better-educated land.” She was not about to raise her voice. Lady Bird, Chief Usher J. B. West noted, “seemed to grow calmer as the world around her became more furious.”

Lady Bird had come a long way from the shy Texas girl she once was. In 1959 she began taking speech classes with Hester Provensen at the Capital Speakers’ Club to get over her fear of public speaking. Provensen was an institution in Washington and taught two packed classes of wives of senators and congressmen. Class met once a week for nine months, and Lady Bird joined because, she said, “I got real annoyed with myself for being so shy and quiet, and never having anything to say when asked to speak.” At the beginning of her husband’s political career, Lady Bird hated even standing up and saying something as simple as “Thank you for inviting me to this barbecue.” Provensen told her that the people in the audience were just like her, and that helped ease her fears.

Before Provensen’s students graduated they had to make a three- to five-minute speech on a subject assigned to them. Topics ranged from “The Plight of the American Indian” to “What I Liked in the Congressional Cookbook.” Lady Bird was appropriately assigned “Why Texas Is the Lone Star State.” Whenever any of these well-heeled women stammered during their presentation, a penny was dropped into a tin cup. Later, when Lady Bird became first lady, Provensen would be called to the second floor of the White House to help if she was about to give a particularly difficult speech. “I don’t remember seeing her nervous, I just remember seeing her practicing and going over her speech cards,” Social Secretary Bess Abell said. Lady Bird would become known for her slow, sweet southern drawl, and the way she spoke, her friends and family say, was pure poetry.

Not all the pressures faced by the first ladies involve high policy or giving speeches; some of them are much more private and personal. Nash Castro worked with Lady Bird on her signature beautification program and remembers getting calls from her at 5 p.m. most days asking him to join her on the Truman Balcony. “She would have half a glass of wine mixed with half a glass of water because she was forever watching her weight. I’d have a glass of Scotch and water and there would be a bowl of popcorn between us and we talked about everything.” Lady Bird was always on a diet and rarely allowed herself more than a few kernels of popcorn during these informal happy hours. She could not help being wounded by a 1964 Time cover story that praised her skills on the campaign trail but said cuttingly, “Her nose is a bit too long, her mouth a bit too wide, her ankles a bit less than trim, and she is not outstanding at clothesmanship.” Even Jackie Kennedy, who seemed always to be aware of her beauty, worried that her own hips were too wide. Jackie was so disciplined about her weight—a mere 120 pounds—that if she gained two pounds she fasted for a day, then upped her exercise regimen and limited herself to fruit for days afterward. (Jackie also had an intense beauty regimen that included brushing her hair fifty to one hundred strokes every night and applying skin cream to her eyelashes.) Lady Bird told an aide that she wished she had gotten her nose fixed before she became first lady, but by the time she became a household name, and her appearance was being scrutinized, it would have been too obvious. She felt forever destined to be compared with her predecessor.

The Time story was right about one thing: it was true that Lady Bird did not care about high fashion. Bess Abell said she had to convince her to buy dresses that were not off the rack. Lady Bird demurred: “I don’t think clothes are that important.” She had a limit, however. Before one state dinner, the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham arrived wearing the same dress that Lady Bird had on. Abell ran upstairs to tell the First Lady, who swiftly changed and came down wearing a different gown.

GENERAL DON HUGHES, who worked for the Nixons during the vice presidency, was having dinner with them when, almost nine months after Nixon’s resignation, the President first learned about the fall of Saigon that marked the end of the Vietnam War. “He showed a great remorse that night,” Hughes said. “He said, ‘If I had been there those SOBs would never have crossed the DMZ.’ He wasn’t crying, he was mad; he was mad at himself.” Hughes was used to the President’s intense flashes of anger, as was Pat. Hughes had been assigned to protect Pat during her husband’s 1960 presidential campaign, and though he had served in three wars, “nothing was as draining” as that campaign, he says.

Pat, who had already spent almost eight years as second lady, did not flinch when her husband pledged to campaign in fifty states in 1960. She was willing to do whatever it took, as she watched Democrat John Kennedy move into a two-point lead ahead of her husband. She was almost fifty but she refused to be intimidated by the young, regal Jackie. Richard Nixon was less calm. Once, when they were driving through Iowa, Nixon kicked the seat in front of him, where Hughes was sitting, so hard that Hughes smacked his head on the dashboard. Hughes had to leave the car to cool off. Both Nixons were exhausted after they visited twenty-five states in the two weeks leading up to the first televised presidential debate. Nixon had a 103-degree fever but Pat, who never admitted when she was not feeling well, soldiered on. She clenched her teeth when her husband flew into rages, exhausted because he could not sleep.

She had been through worse. In late November 1957, when President Eisenhower had a mild stroke, Mamie asked Pat to fill in for her with increasing frequency. Pat was exhausted by the heavy workload, even though she would never allow herself to admit it. Even while Mamie relied on Pat to do her grunt work, just as Jackie would depend on Lady Bird, the Eisenhowers never invited the Nixons to the residence for a party. But they were happy to use them when they needed them.

President Eisenhower asked the Nixons to take an eighteen-day diplomatic trip to South America in the spring of 1958. The point of the trip was to celebrate the inauguration of Arturo Frondizi, the first democratically elected president in Argentina in two decades. The trip was going well until the Nixons arrived at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, where rocks were thrown at them by leftist demonstrators. But the most dramatic episode happened during their stop in Caracas, Venezuela, when the Nixons arrived at the airport and were greeted by protesters who spat on them and threw fruit and garbage at them. On the drive into Caracas, Pat was in the car with Hughes and the foreign minister’s wife. In front of them, in a separate car, were Vice President Nixon and the foreign minister. Protesters blocked their route with a vehicle and hundreds of them flooded the streets and attacked both cars, throwing rocks and pipes at them. Pat looked ahead at her husband’s car, not knowing if either of them would survive. The foreign minister’s wife was sitting next to Pat and began to panic. Pat tried to soothe her, cradling her in her arms like a baby. “I did what I could to help but Mrs. Nixon didn’t need it; she calmed her down and comforted her until we got to safety,” Hughes recalled, describing that day as the closest he had come to death. A rock struck the Vice President’s window and a piece of glass hit the foreign minister’s eye and he started to bleed. The demonstrators began rocking the Vice President’s car, trying to overturn it. Secret Service agents did not want to draw their guns for fear that would cause more violence. After more than ten minutes, agents were able to use a press car to block traffic and give the Nixons’ motorcade a path to speed away and escape to the American Embassy.

The next day the press gathered around the cars, which Nixon insisted be left in full view so that their harrowing journey could be documented. Reporters burst into spontaneous applause when the Nixons left the embassy to attend a government luncheon. Tears welled up in the normally stoic Pat’s eyes. Before the Nixons left for home, the governing junta gave Hughes hand grenades for protection. When Pat climbed into the car, she had to delicately maneuver around a grenade that Hughes had accidentally left on the backseat. “I believe this belongs to you,” she said as she carefully handed it to him.

The Nixons were welcomed home as heroes. The Eisenhowers met them at Andrews Air Force Base, as did thousands of supporters, half of Congress, and the full Cabinet. Years later, when she was First Lady, Pat found herself surrounded by Soviet security agents at a large Moscow department store as members of the American press clamored to get closer to her and her hostess, the wife of the Soviet foreign minister. Traffic was closed off around the building and the Soviet police began shoving frustrated journalists aside. Pat was at the store’s ice cream counter when she noticed Associated Press reporter Saul Pett being pushed against a wall by a burly security guard. “He’s with me,” she told the guard. “Leave him alone.” A skilled politician with decades of training, she pulled Pett close to her and offered him a bite of her vanilla ice cream cone. Pett wrote her a note thanking her for the gesture. “You’ve been a heckuva good sport,” he wrote, “and the ice cream was especially good.”

The day before the President announced his resignation, the Nixons’ daughter Julie, with tears in her eyes, told her mother that it was all over. Pat never gave up hope, not at any moment during those agonizing months leading up to her husband’s August 8, 1974, televised Oval Office address announcing his resignation effective noon the next day. When Julie approached her mother’s bedroom, still decorated as it had been when Lady Bird lived there, she found her mother standing in the doorway. “Daddy feels he has to resign,” Julie said. “But why?” Pat asked, disbelievingly. Three months before his resignation, the First Lady gave an interview and said that her husband “has never considered resigning and isn’t now.” As late as July 31 she was deciding what china she would order. (She called Curator Clem Conger and told him, “I won’t explain, Clem, but don’t go ahead with the porcelain. Call it off.”) Julie put her arms gently around her mother, afraid that a full embrace would cause them both to break down. The Nixons had weathered other storms together—they had been through eleven major campaigns—and Pat still believed that as a family they would survive this one. Before her husband announced his decision in 1972 to escalate bombing in North Vietnam, she hugged him and said, “Don’t worry about anything.” She almost always ended meetings with her East Wing staff with a cheerful “Onward and upward!” President Nixon said of his wife years later, “She was a fighter to the last, she was the last to give up.” She had publicly defended her husband throughout the Watergate investigation, telling reporters, “The truth sustains me because I have great faith in my husband.” Once, when asked by a reporter about her husband’s state of mind as Watergate raged on, she waved her arm with her fists clenched and said, “He is in great health, and I love him dearly and I have great faith.” Her social secretary, Lucy Winchester, calls Pat a “rock-ribbed woman.”

Most members of Pat’s East Wing staff were in their mid-twenties or early thirties, and they included Winchester, Director of Correspondence Gwen King, and Susan Porter Rose, who worked on correspondence and scheduling. The trauma of Watergate has bound these women together forever, and many of them still keep in touch. At the time, they were afraid to go out for lunch and encounter protesters in Lafayette Square, so they huddled together and ate in the White House. They were so worried about perception that eight months before the President’s resignation, as Watergate dragged on, the First Lady’s staffers agonized over a snowman. Before a White House party for the children of diplomats, several of these young women were asked to build a snowman on the South Lawn. Wearing heavy coats over their dresses and skirts, they made the snowman, with the help of groundskeepers who brought over shovels and water to help pack the fluffy snow. After much discussion, they decided that the snowman should be facing away from the White House so that people would not say that the President’s snowman had his back to the public. These women knew the pain and tremendous pressure that the First Lady was under, so anytime they received a heartfelt message or an encouraging telephone call, they would pass it along to her. One day the First Lady invited some staffers to go on the presidential yacht, the Sequoia. They went down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon, a welcome break from the bunker the White House had become.

The First Lady’s staff had found out about Watergate the same way that everyone else did—they read about it in the newspapers. On August 9, 1974, the day he resigned, the President gathered all of the White House staffers in the East Room to say goodbye. The women of the East Wing vowed they would not cry because the First Lady would not want them to. Walking together from the East Wing to the East Room, they all kept their emotions in check, until they hit the Cross Hall, where the Marine Band was playing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the musical Carousel. That undid them, and they walked into the East Room with tears welling up in their eyes. Gwen King remembers the First Lady, standing onstage, ever composed. “I think that I saw a tiny tear,” she said. “So I moved over behind somebody; the empathy was just too much for me.”

Up until her death, Pat maintained that no one knew the full story of Watergate. Pat’s chief of staff and press secretary, Connie Stuart, loves her former boss, and she compares her willful ignorance to that of a woman whose husband has been having a long affair. Pat knew intellectually that her husband had done something wrong, but she did not want to acknowledge it to herself. The President didn’t tell his family the whole truth because he didn’t want them to carry the burden that he was already carrying, Stuart said. “They’re not blind, they can read and they can hear. They’re not going to say, ‘Daddy, why did you do that?’” Pat became such a loyal defender that she cut out news articles about other presidents who were said to have bugged the White House, including President Franklin Roosevelt, and set them aside. Her close friend Helene Drown said that Pat saw Watergate as an effort by her husband’s critics to get their “last pound of flesh.”

The residence staff did not know the family was leaving until Pat called downstairs asking for packing boxes. Shortly before the President announced his resignation, Pat’s hairdresser, Rita de Santis, finished doing her hair and said happily, “See you tomorrow.” Pat hugged de Santis as her eyes filled with tears. She hated the famous photo taken of her family by White House photographer Ollie Atkins in the Solarium on August 7, two days before Nixon left office, because, she said, “Our hearts were breaking and there we are smiling.” Nixon said he could tell his wife was upset that evening because when he walked into the Solarium he could see that she was suffering from a terrible pain in her neck—something that happened to her during times of stress. “This time I could see the throbbing. But when she saw me she put on a great act,” he recalled in an interview. “She threw her arms around me and she said, ‘We’re all very proud of you, Daddy.’” The night before Nixon announced his resignation, the First Lady could not sleep. The task of sorting through their furniture, photo albums, books, and clothing all fell on her shoulders.

On the morning of the President’s resignation, August 9, 1974, the Nixons were crowded into an elevator on their way to the East Room, where the President would make his emotional goodbye speech to his staff. Pat wore a pink-and-white dress and carried sunglasses with her in case she could not contain her sadness. Nixon’s aide Steve Bull began telling them where to stand and where the cameras were when Pat broke in plaintively, “Dick, you can’t have it televised.” No one had asked her opinion, and it was too late to change anything. The President never thanked Pat in his East Room speech, but her press secretary, Helen Smith, says that might be because “he knew that there is a limit to what Pat can endure—and still keep her head high.”

When the incoming President and First Lady, Gerald and Betty Ford, escorted the Nixons from the White House to the waiting helicopter, Pat and Betty clung to each other’s arms as they walked four abreast, flanked by two rows of military guards standing at attention. The most famous image from that day is President Nixon doing his trademark double V-for-victory sign as he stood on the steps of Marine One, but the way that Pat and Betty held on to each other on a day that would change the lives of both forever is just as fascinating. Betty Ford’s press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, said, “She [Betty] was very fond of her [Pat] and she felt very sorry for her, because she thought she was a very good person who had a very difficult marriage. She liked her as a person, in fact she liked her very much.” On the plane ride to California the Nixons, separated by a partition wall, each sitting alone in his or her own compartment, didn’t say a word to each other. And just like that, it was over. Barbara Bush remembers being there with her husband for Ford’s swearing in, and how jarring the transition was to witness. “After we waved goodbye to the Nixons the pictures on the wall were all of Jerry Ford’s family. We’re standing at the helicopter waving goodbye while they changed the pictures.”

Not long after the Nixons left Washington, Pat called her old friend Lucy Winchester and said, “I have a problem, I want to cook supper tonight. Dick wants me to fix my meat loaf recipe. The FBI still has my meat loaf recipe, do you remember it?” They couldn’t help laughing at the absurdity of it all. Winchester says the FBI took everything for a time, even one of the Nixon daughters’ wedding dresses.

On September 8, 1974, a month after Richard Nixon announced his resignation, President Ford granted the disgraced former president a “full, free and absolute” pardon. The Fords’ son Steve said that his mother worried about the reaction to the pardon, but his father was thinking of the long-term ramifications for the nation if Watergate dragged on. He said that his parents knew the pardon would cost them support, and possibly the next election. But Betty thought the risk was too high and warned her husband against it. Betty came to resent President Nixon for essentially ruining her husband’s chance of winning the White House in his own right. The pardon was the saddest day of Pat’s life because it marked her husband’s acceptance of defeat. To her, he still had nothing to apologize for. Susan Porter Rose, who worked for Pat and for Betty, said there was no phone call between the two about the pardon. “No, absolutely not. It just wouldn’t happen, it wouldn’t happen with anybody. . . . Now, had somebody died, they would have called.”

Pat Nixon’s director of correspondence, Gwen King, went to stay with the Nixons in San Clemente and over dinner and a martini, King started telling the Nixons stories about the presidents she had worked for (she began working at the White House during the Eisenhower administration). Richard Nixon was especially curious about President Johnson, and in the middle of her story King stopped and asked him, “You’re not taping this, are you?” The room went quiet and she couldn’t believe what she had blurted out. A few seconds went by and Pat burst into laughter. The President laughed, too, and assured her that he was not recording their conversation.

In 1984 Pat declined Secret Service protection (she had had it up until then) because she considered it an unnecessary expense. President Nixon gave up his security detail a year later. Pat retreated into herself and read as many as five books a week. She took to gardening (“I couldn’t dig into the White House garden very much. It always had to be on display”) and wore through four pairs of heavy gardening gloves as she compulsively tended to their estate in San Clemente, which was situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She knew how much her husband loved roses, so she made sure to plant some outside the window of his study. Their lives may have been a shambles, but she could make the garden lush and beautiful simply by spending time taking care of it. No amount of time would restore her husband’s dignity. Pat reluctantly agreed to pose for her official White House portrait by Henriette Wyeth Hurd, sister of the renowned artist Andrew Wyeth. Though she liked the painting, she said, “It makes me look too sad.”

SOMETIMES, BEFORE GIVING a speech, Betty Ford was so terrified that she would confess to her aides, “Oh my God, I think I’m going to throw up.” But when her husband, who was suffering from laryngitis, could not speak the morning after he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election, it was Betty who read his concession speech and she did it with grace.

Her courage grew with each passing day that she was in the White House. One evening, she was about to be given a Bible by Rabbi Maurice Sage, president of the Jewish National Fund of America, at a black-tie gala at the New York Hilton, when Sage collapsed onstage. Betty said it was chaos as people rushed to help him and when she saw everyone crowding around Sage she went back to her seat to get out of the way. But as she sat there she felt uneasy. “I felt someone had to do something,” she wrote in her memoir. “I truly believed that if I could get up there and pray, and get all these people to pray with me, we might somehow save Dr. Sage’s life.” The First Lady took over the microphone as doctors in the audience of 3,200 and her Secret Service agents rushed to try to revive the fifty-nine-year-old leader. “We must all pray in our way,” she said, her voice trembling as Sage was being given oxygen. “It is up to God what will happen. We should all have faith.” She asked those present to bow their heads in prayer. “Dear Father in Heaven,” she recited to the stunned audience. “We ask thy blessing on this magnificent man. We know you can take care of him.”

When the crowd stood to applaud her, she motioned that they should sit back down and she said the program should be ended as Sage’s life hung in the balance. Sage was pronounced dead at 11 p.m., shortly after arriving at the hospital. This woman, who used to hate public speaking, was able to command the attention of those in that ballroom and keep them calm. The experience of watching Sage die would stay with Betty forever; when she returned to the White House, she was haunted by it.

Betty was also plagued by fear after two assassination attempts were made on President Ford within the span of three weeks. Both attacks occurred in California and they were by the only two women who have ever tried to kill a president. In Sacramento, on September 5, 1975, a Charles Manson groupie named Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot at Ford, but her gun never went off. Seventeen days later, outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel, a forty-five-year-old middle-class housewife named Sara Jane Moore fired her gun and narrowly missed hitting the President.

Before these attempts, Betty Ford used to stand on the Truman Balcony to wave goodbye to her husband, watching happily as he walked out on the South Lawn to board Marine One for a trip. After the first attempt on his life, she said, “I couldn’t watch him leave without thinking, What’s going to happen this time? The worry was always there.” She told their four children, “Your dad has a really important job and we can’t concern him with our fears about his security and his life.” Steve Ford says, “We all tried to put on smiley faces.” But it weighed heavily on Betty every day. As one White House aide said, “All first ladies live in fear.”

The Secret Service insisted that President Ford wear a bulletproof vest, and several were made to match some of his suits. Betty and her children never wanted to know which suits had accompanying vests—they did not want to think about the daily threats that he was facing. President Ford had a wonderful sense of humor, and right after the attempted assassinations he walked into the room where his family was gathered and told his wife, “Betty, those women are lousy shots.” It was the perfect thing to say and everyone laughed and was smiling again, at least for that moment.

Gerald Behn was the head of the Secret Service White House detail from 1961 to 1965 and served during Kennedy’s assassination. He said that the only way to truly protect the president and his family would be in a dictatorship, where everyone could be kept off the streets when the first family leaves the White House. “But here in this country, well, the president wants to go out; he wants to see the people; the people want to see him.”

Even after the first families leave the White House they have threats hanging over them like an endless cloud. Before they left office the Johnsons went to visit the Eisenhowers and Mamie told Lady Bird how upset she was by all the tourists who came to the Eisenhowers’ Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, farm. Someone stole a sign, and even though their fence was wired someone—“apparently a psycho case,” Mamie said—had walked into their yard. “You’ll have all this, too,” Mamie told her—hardly a reassuring thought for someone who was leaving the relative comfort and safety of the White House in less than six months.

NANCY REAGAN HAD a hard exterior. Residence staffers said that when they were serving the Reagans it felt like serving the king and queen, not the President and the First Lady. When Nancy wanted something she spoke almost exclusively to Chief Usher Rex Scouten, who was the general manager of the residence and after whom she named her Cavalier King Charles spaniel. George Hannie was one of a half-dozen butlers who worked in the family’s private living quarters, and he remembers how nerve-racking it could be serving Nancy Reagan. When she was eating alone, Nancy still wanted a cloth napkin instead of a paper napkin, which would have been fine for some of the other first ladies. “If you had a silver tray, I don’t care if you shined it yesterday or an hour before, when you go out there make sure you do it again for Nancy Reagan. She don’t miss nothing. Nothing,” Hannie said with a laugh. When he first started working on the second floor the other butlers told him, “George, that lady is hard. You won’t be able to break her.” He replied, “It won’t be no problem, give me a couple of months, we’ll take care of it.” He said he was able to earn her respect just by doing what she asked. “Next thing I know she comes through the White House second floor calling my name. ‘I told you, I got her,’” he joked with his colleagues.

Each first lady has had to deal with a tremendous amount of pressure in the White House, and in 1987 Nancy had a succession of events play out in public that would have brought most people to their knees. During a routine mammogram on October 5 a suspicious lesion was discovered, and on October 17 she had her left breast removed. Just ten days later, her beloved mother, Edith Luckett Davis, died. But she could not wallow in her own physical pain from the surgery and emotional pain from her mother’s death, because she had to organize a state dinner for the historic visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev less than two months later. The visit resulted in the signing of one of the most significant arms control agreements of the Cold War. Through it all Nancy remained composed.

President Reagan’s assistant Kathleen Osborne was the first to learn of Nancy’s mother’s death, and she had all calls to Nancy blocked until she could tell the President, who was in the middle of a television interview in the Oval Office. “I was afraid somebody else would tell her, and knowing him the way I thought I did, I thought he’d want to tell her.” Osborne had the President’s doctor accompany him upstairs when he went to tell his wife the news. The next day Nancy flew to Arizona, where her mother had lived, with her assistant Jane Erkenbeck and a few aides to sort through her mother’s things. She had not yet recovered from her mastectomy. Osborne remembers being on the plane with her and asking what urn she wanted to buy and thinking, My God, she just had a mastectomy ten days ago and here she is on an airplane, going to Arizona to bury her mother.

Nancy had been through even worse times. At 2:25 p.m. on March 30, 1981, sixty-nine days into her husband’s presidency, John Hinckley Jr. fired a revolver six times at President Reagan after he delivered a speech at the Washington Hilton hotel (which has become so closely identified with the shooting that Washingtonians call it the “Hinckley Hilton”). Nancy learned about the shooting as she was looking at paint colors in the Solarium with Chief Usher Scouten and her interior decorator, Ted Graber. Painter Cletus Clark remembered the moment when the head of the First Lady’s Secret Service detail, George Opfer, walked in and motioned Nancy toward him. “The next thing you know, they left. I was still up there trying to mix some paint to match some fabric.” The First Lady was told that several people were wounded but that her husband had not been shot, and that there was no need for her to go to the hospital. “George,” she said, “I’m going to that hospital. If you don’t get me a car, I’m going to walk.” A White House limo picked her up at the South Portico and brought her to the hospital, where there was absolute mayhem with reporters and curious onlookers flooding the street. The First Lady threatened to jump out of the car and run to the emergency entrance of the gray cinder-block building, but Opfer pleaded with her to wait. Finally, the traffic eased and she ran in. Mike Deaver, the President’s deputy chief of staff, met her at the door and said, “He’s been hit.”

“They told me he wasn’t hit,” she said, stunned.

“Well, he was. But they say it’s not serious.”

“Where? Where was he hit?” She demanded answers but Deaver didn’t have any. She wanted to see her husband but Deaver said that she couldn’t.

“They don’t know how it is with us. He has to know I’m here!” she begged. He told her that Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, had been shot in the head and that a Secret Service agent and a Washington, D.C., police officer had also been hit. Deaver led her into an office where she repeated over and over to herself, They’re doing what they can. Stay out of their way. Let the doctors do their work. Her surgeon stepfather had drilled this into her head. She tried to suppress flashes of herself driving down a Los Angeles highway when she heard that Kennedy had been shot less than twenty years earlier. She would think of Dallas again and again as her husband was in the hospital.

Nurses gave her updates, each more disturbing than the last. She was told twice that they could not find a pulse, and then that the President’s left lung had collapsed. Finally, she was allowed to see him and what she saw broke her heart: her husband’s new blue pinstripe suit lay in the corner of the room and bandages and blood surrounded his pale body. In an interview for a 2011 PBS documentary thirty years later, Nancy teared up recalling that day. “I’ve never seen anybody so white. . . . I almost lost him.” The President was breathing through an oxygen mask, but when he saw her he took off the mask, his lips caked in dried blood, and whispered, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”

When the Reagans’ son Ron got to George Washington University Hospital and saw his mother, this political powerhouse, he immediately thought that she seemed so small, and so alone. There were so many advisers, doctors, and police officers wandering around, but she was by herself in those frightening hours following the shooting. “In a moment like that, as the wife of a husband whose life is hanging in the balance, you are very alone,” he said. He remembers looking at his father after his mother’s mastectomy and thinking the same thing. “You’re not a public figure at that point, you’re not the President or the First Lady, you’re a spouse.” Nancy told Ron how frightened she was. “I know, Mom, but hold on.” She sat in the waiting room after she escorted her husband in for surgery, and watched as incorrect reports flashed across the TV screen, including a bulletin that Press Secretary Brady had died. But watching television, and even seeing headlines she knew were untrue, provided her some sense of comfort and normalcy. She went to the hospital’s chapel, where she met Brady’s wife, Sarah, for the first time. “They’re strong men,” Sarah said. “They’ll get through this.” The two women, whose husbands were so close to death, held hands and prayed together.

When the Reagans’ daughter Patti found her mother in bed the next morning, she was picking at her breakfast and clearly hadn’t slept much. Nancy had wanted to stay overnight at the hospital, but her son convinced her not to—it would send the wrong message and would alert the public to just how dire the situation had actually been. Patti kissed her mother on the cheek and sat on the edge of the bed. “He almost died—several times,” Nancy said, her voice raspy. “They gave him so much blood. An inch from his heart—that’s how close the bullet was. And then when they put the tube down his throat—so scared—he was so scared.” But it was Nancy who was the most afraid; she was so deeply in love with this man, she couldn’t imagine life without him. When she got back to the White House she went into his closet and got one of his shirts to sleep with. “I just needed to have something of his next to me,” she told her daughter, with whom she had fought so fiercely but who now shared her fear and pain. “The bed seemed so empty.”

Nancy visited the President at the hospital every day. She brought pictures made by schoolchildren and hung them up on the walls to try to cheer him up. The room was bleak, and even the curtains were nailed shut because of an increasing number of threats on the President’s life.

At sixty-nine, Reagan was the oldest man ever to be sworn in as president, and Nancy had always worried about his health, but after the assassination attempt her concerns became all-consuming and she became increasingly involved in the level of protection surrounding her husband. In a CBS interview she told Mike Wallace how worried she was every time he went out in public. “I don’t think my heart started again until he came back.” She was paralyzed by her fear and referred to the year after the assassination attempt as “the lost year.” She became so overprotective that she insisted that her husband come home in the afternoons to the residence and take a nap. If she found him at his desk working, she would tell him, “Horizontal. I want you horizontal.” (It became an inside joke around the West Wing, with presidential aides mimicking the First Lady: “I want you horizontal.”) She even brought up Lyndon Johnson to make her point because she knew that he took afternoon naps when he was president.

Nancy began consulting astrologist Joan Quigley as a way of coping, and it helped. She used Quigley’s advice to plan her husband’s schedule, including the safest times for Air Force One to take off and land. She directed Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver to adjust the President’s schedule according to advice from Quigley. She never referred to Quigley by name and called her “my friend.” Quigley’s recommendations became so important that there was a color-coded calendar (green for good days, red for bad days, yellow for “iffy” days) that the staff could refer to for the best times for the President to travel. (During Barack Obama’s first press conference after his election, he was asked if he sought advice from former presidents and said, “I’ve spoken to all of them that are living. . . . I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances.” Obama called Nancy later that day to apologize for his off-the-cuff remark, and she teased him and referred to Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt: “You’ve gotten me mixed up with Hillary.”)

President Reagan’s brush with death seems to have affected his wife far more than it affected him. Richard Allen was Reagan’s national security adviser at the time and he had to give Reagan his first national security briefing after the shooting. Allen told his five-year-old daughter, Kimberly, that he would be briefing the President on his first day back in the White House. “Is that right?” she asked. She went off to kindergarten and when she came back she had handmade “get well” cards from everyone in her class. Allen stuck them in his briefing folder, thinking that the President might want to see a couple of them.

“Mr. President, we’re having a national security briefing today,” Allen said.

“Okay,” the President replied, his voice still soft and weak.

“There it is, and you’ve had your national security briefing. Congratulations, Mr. President.”

They both laughed. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, what’s that in there?” Reagan asked, pointing to the bulging briefing folder.

“These are cards from the kindergarten class of Oakridge Elementary School in Arlington, Mr. President.”

“Let me see them.” Allen handed the folder to him and the President looked at each and every card. Allen said there must have been twenty-five of them.

“Which one’s your daughter’s?” the President asked.

“It’s this one.” Allen handed him her card that read, “President Reagan, Please get better, Love, Kim Allen.” The President asked for a pen and wrote beneath it, “Dear Kim, forgive me for using your card for my answer, but I wanted to let you know how very much I appreciate your good wishes and your lovely card, Love, Ronald Reagan, April 15, 1981.”

After the shooting, Nancy no longer resented the constant presence of the Secret Service in their lives. “If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have a husband,” she said.

Nancy walled herself off in the White House, especially after the assassination attempt. When her assistant Jane Erkenbeck saw Nancy speak about her husband and his Alzheimer’s at the 1996 Republican National Convention, she called her up. It was the first convention that Nancy attended alone, and she was deeply depressed. “It was just wonderful to see you cry like that because that’s the real Nancy Reagan and that’s the Nancy Reagan no one ever got to see,” Erkenbeck told her. Nancy replied, “Well, Jane, when I was in the White House I built a wall around myself. That’s the only way I could exist.”

Very few people ever get to see that vulnerable side of any first lady, especially Nancy. Decades after the death of White House Doorman Freddie Mayfield, Nancy remembered getting the call that he had passed away and being “shocked and saddened” by the news. She was deeply hurt when the actress Katharine Hepburn, a good friend of her mother’s from her acting days, ended their friendship. “I’m terribly busy,” Hepburn told Nancy. “And besides, I don’t know what we’d have to talk about. After all, you’re a staunch Republican and I’m a staunch Democrat.” When President Reagan was having his portrait painted by artist Everett Raymond Kinstler, Nancy noticed several paintings of Hepburn on the wall of his studio. “She’s my oldest and dearest friend,” she told him wistfully. Kinstler offered to call Hepburn, but when he went to hand the phone over to Nancy she pushed it away—intimidated by the star—and said, “No, you talk to her first.”

FIRST LADIES TRAVEL around the country and the world and seem to live glamorous lives. But at a moment’s notice their Secret Service agents may tell them to duck and run as fast as they can. On a trip to Venice, Italy, after the assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, Rosalynn Carter and her daughter, Amy, had to wear bulletproof vests. Rosalynn was frustrated because the vest was so bulky and heavy, and it must have been terrifying to watch her young daughter put one on under her small blue windbreaker.

Because so much of the first family’s security is cloaked in secrecy, even the first lady does not always know why she is being asked to do certain things. Agents will make strange requests, like having all of the heavy glass ashtrays removed from tables in a banquet hall in Hawaii before the first lady enters, or pushing the furniture on one side of a living room to another in an Iowa farmhouse before the first lady walks in. “I never understood that and wouldn’t have known about it if one of my press advance persons hadn’t mentioned it on the plane on the way home,” Rosalynn mused about the last-minute furniture repositioning in Iowa. Just weeks after the U.S. bombed Libya in 1986, Nancy Reagan took a trip to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, a country with close ties to Libya at the time. A Secret Service officer told Erkenbeck that they were bringing body bags on the plane in case something happened. “I wished for a broken leg or something to keep me off of that trip,” Erkenbeck said. After the bombing, hordes of angry Libyans had taken to the streets and shouted, “Down, down USA! Death to all Americans!” Nancy, a constant worrier, went ahead bravely with the trip to globally promote her “Just Say No” antidrug campaign.

Security is an endless concern and it starts well before the White House. After they get their party’s nomination—and sometimes earlier—major candidates and their spouses are assigned Secret Service protection. This practice was established after the assassination of Robert Kennedy while he was campaigning in California in 1968.

Agents tell the candidates and their families on the campaign trail that they should lightly touch people’s hands and not clasp them, so that no one could lock hands with them and pull them off a platform and into a crowd. If someone hands them a gift or a note, they must hand it to an aide immediately. Once they’re in the White House, the only time they are without agents is when they’re on the second and third floors. As soon as they step off the elevator from those floors, an agent “picks them up” and escorts them to their office. If they’re at Camp David, agents watch them unobtrusively. Once, Rosalynn Carter was enjoying a quiet stroll on the beautiful, leafy grounds of Camp David with her mother.

“Who else is here this weekend?” her mother asked.

“No one,” she said.

There was a long pause and her mother looked at her with wide eyes and said, “I know there’s somebody else here because someone is following us.” She’d heard the rustling leaves behind them. It was Rosalynn’s Secret Service agent.

“Just don’t look back, Mother, and you’ll forget they’re here!” Rosalynn told her husband the same thing when he complained about the presidential motorcade, which can include as many as forty cars.

Daryl Wells co-owns Van Cleef hair salon in downtown Chicago, where Michelle Obama had been getting her hair done since she was a high school senior. He remembers the first time she came into the salon after her husband won the Iowa caucuses. Secret Service agents came to the salon an hour before she arrived, to sweep the building and look for exits. “Where’s the closest fire department?” they asked Wells. “Why?” “In case a bomb goes off,” they told him. While Michelle does not love being trailed by Secret Service agents all the time, she was furious when uninvited guests crashed the Obamas’ first state dinner and she understands why they need the protection. “How does this happen? I live here with my girls,” former Obama adviser Anita Dunn remembers hearing her say after the gate-crashing incident. Michelle used to sneak out of the White House more, but ever since security lapses occurred in 2011 and 2014 she has ventured out less. “I wouldn’t say she sneaks out a lot but you don’t need to sneak out a lot to keep your head screwed on straight,” said an Obama administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. When asked where she goes, the staffer said he couldn’t say because it would curtail her freedom even more. He would hate for her to feel even more like a prisoner than she already does.

In 2011 a White House maid was the first person to discover a broken window and a chunk of white concrete on the floor of the Truman Balcony. Because of her discovery the Secret Service investigated and realized that someone had actually fired at least seven bullets at the residence several days before. (The Secret Service knew a shooting had occurred but initially concluded that the shots were fired by rival gangs in a gunfight and were not intended to hit the White House.) Michelle’s mother, Marian, and the Obamas’ younger daughter, Sasha, were in the residence at the time the shots were fired. The President’s top aides decided they would tell the President first and let him tell his wife. But the President was on a trip and the First Lady was home, and she was not happy about being kept in the dark about the incident. She was understandably furious when she heard the news from Assistant Usher Reginald Dickson, who assumed she already knew. When she summoned now-former Secret Service director Mark Sullivan to the White House to discuss the enormous security lapse, she was shouting so loudly she could be heard from the hallway. On September 19, 2014, an even more unbelievable incident happened when a man armed with a knife scaled the White House fence, sprinted across the North Lawn, ran past several Secret Service officers, and made his way into the White House. He ran past the stairway leading to the second floor of the residence and went into the East Room. The intruder was finally tackled by an off-duty agent near the doorway of the Green Room. It was terrifying for the First Lady to think that, had he known the floor plan of the White House better, he could have run up the stairs to the family’s inner sanctum on the second floor instead of running into the East Room.

Her family’s safety was one of Michelle’s biggest concerns when her husband first started talking about running for president. In a 2007 60 Minutes interview, Michelle was asked by journalist Steve Kroft if she worried about her husband being shot by “some crazy person with a gun.” “I don’t lose sleep over it,” she said, “because the realities are that, as a black man, Barack can get shot going to the gas station . . . you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. We just weren’t raised that way.”

Her family has gotten so used to the constant presence of the agents that daughters Sasha and Malia call them the “secret people.” Former Deputy White House Press Secretary Bill Burton says the President’s safety weighs heavily on the First Lady’s mind. “The first time I went on the helicopter with the President I looked out the window and I saw the two decoy helicopters that were with us.” At first Burton marveled at how amazing it was to be part of a helicopter motorcade. “But then comes the realization that there are other helicopters in the air because someone would actually like to kill the person you’re sitting next to. So just imagine that that’s your husband.” He said that thought crossed his mind on every single trip he took with the President around the country. “You can see that he’s a guy who knows that he’s in mortal danger but he’s kind of come to grips with it. He’s not going to let that affect him. . . . His fate, in some ways, is not in his hands, and that to him that’s not a scary thing, it’s just the reality of his life.”

Even a simple dinner outdoors is not so simple for the President and the First Lady. “When the President is on the Truman Balcony we serve him behind the columns so nobody can see him,” says former Maître d’ George Hannie, who served the President and First Lady hundreds of times. “Same for the First Lady. If they’re together they’re on opposite ends.” If there are too many people down around the gate at the far end of the South Lawn, the butlers encourage the President and the First Lady to eat inside. The White House has always been exposed. After Robert Kennedy was killed, Lady Bird and her daughter Lynda sat outside on the Truman Balcony in the early evening, seeking some fresh air on a day that was a painful reminder of JFK’s assassination five years earlier. Suddenly Lady Bird was aware of how visible they were from the roof and dining terrace of the nearby Washington Hotel. “Not that I myself ever feel any fear at all,” she wrote in her diary. “It is absolutely foreign yet for me, or even really for Lyndon. But maybe neither of the Kennedys felt it either.”

Three former residence staffers—Chief Electrician Bill Cliber, Maître d’ George Hannie, and Usher Worthington White—say they are deeply concerned about the safety of the Obamas. In an effort to save money, they say, the White House is relying on more and more part-time workers, known as SBAs, an acronym for “service by agreement.” These staffers do not have the lengthy full-field security clearance that the full-time staffers have, they say. Investigations into the backgrounds of full-time workers can take up to six months and include in-person visits from agents to their homes to interview their friends and family members, and even to talk with their pastors, to make sure that they would never try to harm the first family. Agents also want to make sure that the prospective employees are not involved with drugs or anything else that could make them a target for blackmail. For a contract worker the vetting can take a few weeks, according to former staffers.

These former residence staffers say they’ve lost sleep worrying about the growing number of contract workers who are in the same room with the President and the First Lady, and in the kitchen as the full-time staffers prepare meals. White says that everyone blends in when the workers are wearing tuxedos, and so the Secret Service would not know who was full-time and who was there just to help out that night. Full-time staffers like the engineers, electricians, and others who volunteer to help at big events like state dinners keep an eye on the contract workers, but now there are simply not enough full-time staffers who work at these events, White says. Cliber says that full-time staffers have been alarmed by contract workers who ask personal questions about the President and the First Lady. One man who worked in the kitchen washing pans was caught selling drugs and did not return, Cliber said. “If you have a bad element in your life then somebody could use you to accomplish something.” At the end of the Bush administration more contractors were hired, and during the Obama administration, according to White and Hannie, it has gotten so that contract workers almost outnumber full-time staffers at state dinners.

Members of the first family always prefer to have people around whom they know personally, partly out of convenience and partly because it makes them feel safe. They have casual conversations with the butlers who work in the family quarters. The first family wants as few people up on the second and third floors of the White House as possible, and the President and the First Lady are comforted by the familiar faces of the butlers and the maids who work there every day. “They’re [SBAs] all over the place now,” Hannie said. “It’s dangerous.”

AS FIRST LADIES, these women are expected to be brave, physically and emotionally. They regularly meet with wounded veterans, the parents of murdered children, and children whose parents have been killed in the line of duty—all without letting their emotions show. Rosalynn Carter remembers one of her first visits to a hospital with mentally handicapped children, and how she could not control her tears. The director took her aside, shut the door, and told her gently, “Mrs. Carter, I’ve watched you this morning and I have to say one thing. Most mentally retarded people are happy. They do not know that they should be sad. If you are going to help at all, you’ve got to accept that and get over your tears.” First ladies walk a fine line: they need to show their humanity without appearing weak. This is especially the case for Hillary Clinton, who is vying to become the nation’s next commander in chief. Lissa Muscatine, who served for many years as a top speechwriter for Hillary when she was first lady and then secretary of state, said that one of the realities of being on the national stage, whether you’re a man or a woman, is simple: “You have to be able to chain your emotions.”

Muscatine recalls accompanying Hillary on a trip to Romania when she was First Lady; they visited children suffering from terrible diseases. “We went out to this little playground outside and I remember all of us on the staff, probably three or four of us, went to the corner in tears. It was just one of the most horrifying things you’ve ever seen.” When they got back to the motorcade Muscatine asked Hillary, who was wearing sunglasses to hide her tears, “How on earth did you keep it together?” Hillary replied, “I just kept thinking to myself over and over, This life is so bad for these kids, I have to not cry because crying about their condition would make it worse for them. I just have to not make it worse for them. So I just kept saying to myself, Don’t make it worse for them. Don’t make it worse for them. Keep your stuff together.” Neel Lattimore, Hillary’s press secretary when she was First Lady, remembers a trip to Bangladesh, where Hillary, her chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, and a group of reporters accompanying them got a tour of a hospital for malaria patients. Many of the patients were so sick that they were placed on rubber cots to make it easier to clean them and wastebaskets were at their bedsides in case they had to vomit. “At a certain point, I looked around and it was just me, Melanne, and Mrs. Clinton.” The reporters had left because they were overwhelmed by the smell and by so many desperately ill people. “She did not flinch.”

President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush regularly went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to visit soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. They did not bring press with them, but a member of their staff would usually accompany them. Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto said, “I never wanted to miss one; as hard as they were and as difficult as they were, you felt you wanted to be there with them.” He said the troops gave the President and First Lady strength and that, even when a service member or a family member criticized the President to his face, it was always a trip the President looked forward to. “They have the right to express themselves to the President. But it was amazing how some of the troops could lift him with their encouragement of him as commander in chief.” Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, described how moving it was to see these interactions. During one trip, the President met the parents of a dying soldier and the soldier’s mother yelled at him, desperate to know why her son was dying and the Bushes’ children were safe. “Her husband tried to calm her and I noticed the President wasn’t in a hurry to leave,” Perino wrote in her memoir. “He tried offering comfort but then just stood and took it. Like he expected and needed to hear the anguish.” On the helicopter ride back to the White House a single tear rolled down the President’s cheek. Laura, however, was more solemn and stoic during these gut-wrenching visits. Of the role reversal, an aide noted, “He is more publicly emotional, she was reserved. She never felt comfortable being on public display.” But residence staffers and people close to her can tell when she is upset: she quietly fiddles with the pleats in the back of her dress.

PRESIDENT OBAMA STARTED every day with a cigarette and ended every night with one until he quit smoking near the end of his first term. A residence staffer used to lead him up to the roof of the White House, where snipers are stationed and a small greenhouse is located. There the President would have his smoking kit waiting for him. The bundle was prepared by his valet and contained two packs of cigarettes, two packs of matches, and a couple of lighters. Obama always felt an obligation to make a self-deprecating joke about his need to smoke. While his smoking is relatively well known, Laura Bush’s urge for a cigarette is not. She dealt with the pressures of being first lady by retiring almost every night to the Treaty Room, a cozy office with a large Victorian chandelier on the second floor across from the Grand Staircase, where she smoked with her husband. Laura smoked cigarettes and President Bush smoked cigars after dinner (a residence staffer even arranged for a humidor specially made in Texas to be installed in a closet off President Bush’s bathroom on the second floor). When the door to the Treaty Room was shut everyone on the staff knew that meant they were probably smoking. The Bushes would sit on the couch with the bulletproof glass window open and a fan turned on. Sometimes, when a staffer needed to bring the President an “eyes only” paper to look at and the door was closed, it could be awkward. “My eyes were always on the floor,” one staffer said. “I couldn’t tell you what they were doing, but the room was always full of smoke.”

The residence staff was so concerned about the window being open and about the fact that the President and the First Lady sometimes forgot to shut it when they left the room that the staffers brought it up with the Secret Service. Secret Service agents put a procedure in place to check the window every night. They waited until the Bushes were in bed, and then either an usher or a Secret Service agent would discreetly close the window. By the end of the administration the Bushes had cut down on their smoking and had tried to stop altogether. The first couple did not want to bring the bad habit back with them to Texas.