First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies by Kate Andersen Brower Read Free Book Online Page B

traditional duties. The last time the White House had a hostess who was not the president’s spouse was a hundred years ago, after President Woodrow Wilson’s first wife, Ellen, died and their daughter, Margaret, took on the role until her father remarried.
    At the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival, Bill Clinton joked about breaking new ground. “Scottish friends of mine have suggested I should be called the ‘First Laddie.’ That would be the easiest to relate to the previous.” (Because “Laddie” sounds like “Lady.”) A member of Hillaryland, Lissa Muscatine, who was a speechwriter for Hillary in the White House and her chief speechwriter and asenior adviser when she was secretary of state, says that she thinks Bill Clinton will love being first man. “He’ll make it work. . . . He just connects with people so instinctively and so instantly,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll have an East Wing staff that takes care of a lot of the social side. He’s not going to sit there and pick the flowers for a dinner, obviously.”
    Bill Clinton’s hearing has gotten so bad that he has taken to reading lips, but that has not slowed him down and he is expected to play a formidable role in a Hillary Clinton administration. Still, a First Gentleman would be unprecedented (it’s not even clear that that would be his official title) and Clinton is a unique character. Former Vice President Walter Mondale, who is a friend of the Clintons, mused in an interview, “How’s this going to work? . . . Bill is somewhat unorganizable. . . . ”

    E VEN AFTER FIRST ladies leave Washington, politics is never far behind them, and it’s true not only for Hillary Clinton. Republican or Democrat, they all share a unique understanding of what the others have been through: excruciating campaigns; long days watching their husbands struggle with crises; the terrible and strange loneliness that comes from living in the world’s most public private home; and the intense desire to protect and preserve their families’ place in history. Nothing is done publicly without some political calculation and internal debate about whether it will help or hurt their husbands’ legacies.
    There’s no job description for first ladies, and the very title is anachronistic in the twenty-first century, when most women work and would balk at the notion of giving up their jobs simply because of their husbands’. But to say that the job is outdated and that these women are throwbacks to the nineteenth century would be to not understand them at all. Even though not all of them getalong, they all share an undeniably unique experience that binds them together. They all know what it’s like to live every day with the fear that their husbands may not come home. (White House Doorman Preston Bruce said that even before President Kennedy’s assassination the residence staff knew when they saw the President’s helicopter depart from the South Lawn that they might never see him again.) After President Obama’s election there was a spike in threats, but the number has since leveled off and has been consistent with threats to his predecessors, according to the Secret Service. Michelle Obama, like the first ladies before her, also knows what it’s like to live with deep concern for her own life and the lives of her children. On at least one occasion, body bags were loaded onto a first lady’s plane during a foreign trip. Several residence staffers say they worry about the safety and security of the first family, even when they are in the White House.
    Most will not admit it publicly, but all of these women realize their power, especially once they see their poll numbers eclipsing their husbands’. Putting their heads down every night on the pillow next to the president’s, they can sometimes influence policy. Once, at a small dinner party, President Ford reminisced about an old girlfriend who was a member of the family that owned Steelcase, a furniture company based in