Episode 14: After the White House
Barbara Perry discusses the legacies that first ladies have left behind years after leaving the White House. This includes how their influence lives on through their post-White House work, their impact on the office of the first lady, and the historical sites and pop culture references that keep them in front of modern audiences.
TRANSCRIPT
Teri Finneman: Eleanor. Dolley. Mamie. Jackie. They were the nation’s original influencers. Some were fearless, some were fragile. All left their mark on the nation’s history. In this podcast, we'll reflect on the fascinating legacies of the women forever tied to the White House. I'm your host, Teri Finneman, a journalism historian who studies media portrayals of first ladies with production editing by Bella Koscal. This is The First Ladies podcast.
From the 30 days that Anna Harrison served as first lady to the 12 years of Eleanor Roosevelt, first ladies have had a finite period of time to make a difference while officially in office. That's why understanding their legacies after they leave the White House is so important, not only what they personally do and how they work to create a legacy for their husband's administration, but also how presidential tourism sites and pop culture continue connecting them to the public. Our guest today is Barbara Perry, a presidential studies professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, where she co-directs the presidential oral history program.
Barbara, welcome to the show. Why did you become interested in studying first ladies?
Barbara Perry (1:28): This is an easy one, Teri. In 1960, my mother took me and my brothers to see John F. Kennedy, then a senator who was campaigning for the presidency, in our hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. This was October. He would be elected the next month, and while I was only four and I can't remember exactly what he said, my mother would tell me until she passed that she had gotten us there early. We stood right in front of the podium, and what I could remember to this day is the excitement and the balloons and the confetti and what any four-year-old would remember about a big crowd. But it literally got me interested in presidents from that young preschool age onward, and particularly in President Kennedy, his presidency and his family, and so because of that, I became interested in his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, and in the early 2000s, I saw that the University Press of Kansas was going to be doing slim volumes on the first ladyships of the modern first ladies starting with the early 20th century.
(2:29): And I reached out to Lewis Gould, who is considered the dean of first ladies scholars from decades before, and I said, has anyone signed up to do the Jacqueline Kennedy volume, and he said no, send a proposal, and so that then got me more interested in first ladies topics broadly speaking, and the rest is history for me.
Teri Finneman: All right. So, today we're going to talk about first ladies after they left the White House, which I'm really excited about because so many book chapters about first ladies barely talk about this even though many of these women lived for decades after. Why do you think it's important to examine this?
Barbara Perry (3:10): I think it's important because you have two kinds of first ladies, at least that I have covered, and their legacies. Some are first ladies who have fairly short tenures in the White House. I would cite Betty Ford as an example of that, only in the White House a couple of years, and Jacqueline Kennedy, only a little over 1,000 days and then her husband, sadly, was assassinated. So, what we know about those first ladies, if they continued to be active in some kind of public life, if not politics, then in the case of Jacqueline Kennedy, historical preservation, for example, and certainly preserving her husband's legacy by the week after his assassination, coining the term Camelot to describe his presidency, or Betty Ford setting up the Betty Ford Center after her first ladyship, which is based in California for those suffering from various addictions.
(4:02): Or, you have long-term first ladies – Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House for 12 years, and then she continued her work that she had started in the first ladyship, for example, particularly related to civil rights and human rights. And just after her husband died in 1945, his replacement, Franklin's vice president was Harry Truman, and he named Mrs. Roosevelt to be a delegate to the new United Nations, and there she helped to develop and write and get passed, which was not an easy task, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And so her legacy continues, her legacy from the first ladyship, and other first ladies start new projects because they often will live many decades after their husbands and that was true of Mrs. Kennedy.
Teri Finneman: Let's go back to some of the early first ladies, Abigail Adams in particular. People nowadays are more familiar with Barbara Bush being the matriarch of a political family, but Adams really led the way on that first. What did Adams do after leaving the White House?
Barbara Perry (5:07): Yes, Abigail Adam is the precursor of Barbara Bush in that she, up until Barbara Bush in the 1990s, is the first woman to be both the first lady that is a [wife] of a president and then the mother of a second president, in the case of Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams, the son that she had with John Adams, our second president. And so, she and John, when he lost, when he was defeated in his reelection attempt by Thomas Jefferson in 1800, then in 1801, they left Washington. They had been the first of those to reside in the new White House, but they barely had moved in when they were defeated, and so off they went back to their home state of Massachusetts. They both came from the Quincy area just outside of Boston, and that's where they lived for a number of decades to come. And so, I think Abigail is most known at that time for her support for John Quincy Adams, his political career.
(6:06): He was a statesman. He became our minister to European nations, and one role that she had that was so important in that is that he had a couple of sons at that time, of his elder children, and they were school age, and so she offered to take care of them in the United States at the home in Massachusetts while he and his wife went abroad. And so she gave him that gift, if you will, and she followed his political fortunes very carefully, and she also, as a former first lady, attempted to make peace with Thomas Jefferson. Neither she nor her husband were very happy to have lost the reelection campaign in 1800, but when Thomas Jefferson's beloved daughter Mary died, Mrs. Adams had actually taken care of her when the Jeffersons and the Adams had been based in Paris, and Mrs. Adams had also lost a child herself, so she knew what that was like. So, she reached out to Thomas Jefferson, and they had some very cordial and sympathetic and empathetic letters that went back and forth.
Teri Finneman (7:09): More recently, people have been reintroduced to Abigail through the John Adams HBO miniseries. Why do you think that series was picked up? In other words, why do you think Abigail and John appeal to audiences today?
Barbara Perry: I think that our founding is always going to be fascinating for Americans and maybe those abroad as well, so that people are always interested in George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but Adams, perhaps, people knew a bit less about him because he was a one-term president. He was very scholarly and erudite, but I think that the reason that that show came to be and the reason it was so popular and award-winning on HBO, first of all, it had the high production values of HBO, but second, it was based, in part, on David McCullough’s brilliant biography of John Adams and, as we all know, the late David McCullough was a popular historian, and I mean that in two ways.
One that he wasn't necessarily a scholar of history, but he wrote history for popular audiences who loved not only his writing and his appearances himself on television and in person, but the fact that they chose Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney to play the Adams couple and David McCullough had said about his book – not only about John Adams, but writing about his marriage to Abigail – said it was the greatest love story in American history. So, the fact that you have David McCullough, a great love story, a great political story that helps to understand our founding and then you have two great actors to play the lead roles, by the way, they both won Emmy Awards, Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. I think that all came together to make for a really popular HBO series.
Teri Finneman (8:53): Let's move on to Edith Wilson, who has a controversial legacy to this day for serving as the stand-in president for an ailing Woodrow Wilson. As you note in your chapter, she was one of the most powerful first ladies in history and has been referred to as the first woman president. What do you think about the controversy surrounding her legacy?
Barbara Perry: I think it begins, Teri, with her marriage to Woodrow Wilson and through no fault of her own, she couldn't help it if she was a beautiful young woman, a widow in Washington and very successful in taking over her first husband's business, and she really caught the eye of a very sad, incumbent President Woodrow Wilson, who had lost his first wife Ellen while in the White House. And he was just a very sad, a lonely man, and so he was looking to remarry quickly. And again, I don't think there was anything improper about it, but I do think particularly in days of old, when there were mourning rituals and things like that, I do believe that maybe the second Mrs. Wilson started off on the wrong foot with the public, again through no fault of her own. In fact, she had tried to put Woodrow off for some time after his asking her to marry him.
(10:09): So, that may be the first step, but the more important one is the one that you mentioned, that after he suffered a very serious debilitating stroke as he was campaigning around, trying to get the Senate to pass the League of Nations Treaty of Versailles, he arrives back in Washington completely devastated, not only by fatigue, but then goes right into the stroke situation which paralyzes his left side. He's unable to speak. It seems that maybe his mind is compromised, his thought process is compromised, and Edith wanted to protect him as the good wife that she was, but in doing so, she kept him in a bubble, and she kept him isolated from the cabinet and the vice president and Congress. And I don't want to indicate that she was making policy as such, but she was literally helping him to sign documents, and again, simply keeping him out of the public eye and not allowing him to meet with other members of his own administration and other members of the government.
(11:11): This certainly was not very cricket, as they would say in England. Now, the other element I think that causes controversy to this day for her and her husband, they were both born in Virginia, and they were, we have to say, certainly by our modern terms, racist, and she lived a good long while into the 1960s, and maybe, I hope, reformed her ways a bit, but I think people are reconsidering, certainly Woodrow Wilson, and maybe her because of that.
Teri Finneman: Yeah, I want to talk further about her life after the White House, because she was still quite politically active. Talk about the various presidencies that engaged with her.
Barbara Perry (11:51): Yes, I think first of all, we should note as we connect these two sets of questions that because of how she handled her husband and his difficult illness and disability that that as well as Eisenhower having had some severe illnesses in the 1950s while he was president and then the Kennedy assassination, people asked, what if the president in 1963 hadn't died but had been incapacitated by an assassin's bullet? So, as early as the 1950s, Eisenhower instructed his attorney general to start thinking about a new amendment to the Constitution to care for the possibility of presidents being disabled, and in the 1960s, that becomes the 25th Amendment. So, unwittingly, we should say that part of the legacy of the second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson is the 25th Amendment, which we've heard quite a bit about in recent times.
(12:45): But for Mrs. Wilson to live into the early 1960s, because Woodrow Wilson still had a very positive, I think, view among the public, that she was therefore sought out by Democratic presidents. So, President Truman had his portrait taken with her outside the White House, sitting in one of the gardens, so that would have been in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s. She also, even going back into the Roosevelt administration under FDR, she went to Congress with Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady, when both of them attended on December 8, 1941, the Declaration of War by FDR on the Japanese Empire after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
And then finally, I would add that the second Mrs. Wilson, Edith, was invited to President Kennedy's inaugural in 1961. She attended, and she lived for another year. She overlapped with his presidency for another year or so, and he welcomed her to the White House.
(13:43): He signed a proclamation for her husband to set up the Woodrow Wilson Institute in Washington. And so, sitting at the famous resolute desk with Mrs. Wilson, he signs that document, and she's surrounded by Woodrow's family, his grandchildren there. And then finally, he also assigned her to a commission led by George McGovern, the senator and at one point a presidential candidate, and then the famous contralto, the African American Marian Anderson, and that was called the World Food Program, to try to spread food throughout the world for those suffering from food poverty.
Teri Finneman: In your section about Mamie Eisenhower, you touch upon how her legacy has been dismissed, that she was just an old-fashioned homemaker. What do you see as her contributions as first lady?
Barbara Perry (14:34): Well, first of all, it's unfortunate, I think, that she should be dismissed for that. I certainly admire homemakers in this day and age, men or women, and I think she should be given credit for that. And even her granddaughter, who's written a lovely memoir about her grandmother called Mrs. Ike, says that in the 1950s particularly, and I would chalk this up to being a return to normalcy after the upsetting of the ‘30s with the Great Depression and the ‘40s with the World War and then the Cold War beginning, that maybe by being what now people may look at and say, oh, that's an old-fashioned homemaker, but Americans were very much looking to get back to some normalcy, and the baby boom was happening. And so, while the Eisenhowers were older, they became kind of the all-American grandparents for this country, and I would say another of her contributions, in addition to that normalcy, was that both she and her immediate predecessor Bess Truman, they served as an antithesis, I believe, to Eleanor Roosevelt.
(15:40): Not all Americans were in favor of such an activist political first lady as Eleanor Roosevelt, and so again, kind of a return to normalcy in the post-war, post-Depression era, you had both Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower doing more traditional things, supporting their husbands, and in the case of Mamie Eisenhower, because Ike was very ill from a severe and sudden heart attack when they were on the road in Denver in 1955, he could not get back to Washington for seven weeks.
And so, she took care of him in those times. He also suffered from what we would now call Crohn's disease. In 1956, he had severe abdominal surgery, so her role, as again, kind of grandmother of the nation and taking care of her husband and giving us this return to a feeling of security and normalcy. Obviously, not all Americans had that feeling, but many found the Eisenhowers to be very comforting in the 1950s and that's why Ike was reelected in 1956, and Mamie was a very staunch supporter of his out on the campaign trail.
Teri Finneman (16:47): You talked about the Kennedys earlier. So much has been said about the legacy of Jackie Kennedy already, one of the most well-known first ladies in history. Is there an aspect of her legacy that you think doesn't get as much attention as others but should?
Barbara Perry: I do, and it does relate to part of her work in the White House and that was restoring it to its historical originality and authenticity, and so many people know about that because that was her biggest project while she was first lady. And I was talking to Betty Monkman, the former curator of the White House when I was doing my book in the early 2000s on Jacqueline Kennedy, and I was asking her about the restoration of the White House under Mrs. Kennedy, and she said, that is so embedded in the American memory and in the legacy of Mrs. Kennedy that many Americans, and I'm sure foreigners who visit the White House, think that nothing has changed in the White House since the 1960s and Jacqueline Kennedy. But related to her interest in historic preservation, I could make the argument that, in a way, she kicks off what we now know as historic preservation in two ways.
(17:55): One, while she was first lady, but this is also a legacy that I think is less known, for anyone who visits the White House and then walks across Pennsylvania Avenue to see Lafayette Square or stands in Lafayette Square and gazes across Pennsylvania Avenue at the beautiful White House, we need to thank Mrs. Kennedy, and this is her legacy, for saving that square. It's called the President's Park because Eisenhower and her husband, John Kennedy, had signed off on the razing of all of the beautiful 19th-century townhomes that have developed two sides of that park, and Mrs. Kennedy found out about this and went to her husband and said, please don't do this. This would just be a terrible loss to history, and he gave in to her, and to this day, you can see those beautiful 19th-century townhomes, and they include Dolley Madison's last home right there on Lafayette Square.
(18:52): So, I think she should be given credit for that, and in addition to that, saving ancient history while she was in the White House. Her husband was supportive of this, but it's called the Temple of Dendur, and this was an ancient Egyptian temple that was going to be inundated when the Aswan Dam was built in Egypt, and the Kennedys insisted that that be dismantled and saved and the Egyptians agreed, and it was saved, and because of Mrs. Kennedy, it was gifted to the United States, and it now is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Teri Finneman: Betty Ford's legacy continues to live on daily through the Betty Ford Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. Unlike many first ladies, she was outspoken and addressed topics considered taboo, like breast cancer, abortion, and equal rights. What do you think her legacy is for the office of the first lady?
Barbara Perry (19:48): I think it makes us think about first ladies who, one, are politically active in the Eleanor Roosevelt vein or the Hillary Clinton vein, and those who are outspoken and maybe even controversial, someone like Betty Ford or someone like Barbara Bush. They really speak their mind, and it, I think, helps us to think about what we expect from first ladies. We have to admit that they are unelected. The office is not even official. The office itself with the staff is now official, but the position of first lady, or someday first spouse if it's a man, or first gentleman, whatever we decide to call that person, I think it's the case that Americans have a way of pushing back against first ladies if they seem to be too activist or maybe even a little bit controversial.
(20:40): So, they are unofficial, they're unelected, and they're therefore unaccountable, but I believe that, as all women or all spouses should feel, particularly in public service if they are supporting a spouse in public service, they should feel free to speak candidly, particularly on something like breast cancer, where very shortly after the Fords came into office when Richard Nixon resigned because of Watergate in August of ‘74, suddenly Mrs. Ford faced a breast cancer diagnosis and a mastectomy. And she and her husband decided to go public with that, because even in the 1970s, cancer was not talked about, certainly breast cancer was very frequently hidden from friends, from family, certainly from the public. So, by doing that, and Nancy Reagan should also get credit for the fact that she spoke about the same disease that she had while first lady, it also encouraged women to be screened and not to be afraid.
(21:46): And so that kind of speaking out, I don't see why anyone should have a problem with that. Where first ladies can raise some issues is if they're speaking on political issues like abortion, and if they happen to have a different view from their husband and/or his party. So, they do have to be careful in a pragmatic way not to step on political toes or to do something that would be embarrassing to their husband, the president, or to his reelection campaign that might be upcoming. So, that's the caveat I think we have to add to, hoping that first ladies speak their minds.
Teri Finneman: Going back to Barbara Bush, you note that she didn't have the same kind of policy impact as Eleanor Roosevelt, but her political life was also lengthy. What stands out to you about her political legacy?
Barbara Perry (22:37): Yes, what I mean by contrasting her with someone like Eleanor Roosevelt, obviously, she did not have nearly the time that Eleanor Roosevelt had in the White House, so four years as opposed to 12, and that Eleanor Roosevelt took on these roles that she had been taking on as a young woman, as a young wife, and particularly, helping her husband through polio. So, she was very used to being an activist politico.
Barbara Bush was more of a traditional wife and a traditional mother, but one who was freely speaking her mind, but she took on the more traditional role as a first lady. I would say Eleanor Roosevelt executed what political scientists tend to call “hard power,” as opposed to powers that are a bit softer in their approach or the people they reach. So, I think Barbara Bush is most known as first lady and after for her literacy projects, but also, while first lady, reaching out to AIDS victims and really bringing that out into the public and getting her husband to speak about AIDS victims.
(23:45): And one thing that she did while first lady was go to facilities where AIDS patients were cared for, particularly babies who had been born with the disease, and she held them in her arms. She embraced them, and when people knew far less about AIDS than they know now, they didn't want to be around people who had it. Some people even said it was some sort of godly, you know, retribution on sinners, but the Bushes had lost their beloved first daughter, Robin, at age three in the 1950s to childhood leukemia. And so, they really knew what it was like to lose a child. They knew what it was like to try to help a child and a family through this horrible, horrible experience, and so I think that Mrs. Bush will be known for that, but she'll also be known as the second Abigail Adams in terms of yet just one other woman who was both married to a president and gave birth to another, in her case George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. So, I think the DNA of the Bushes is also their legacy.
Teri Finneman (24:51): You discussed the sites that remain today to memorialize first ladies and presidents. People can visit the Eisenhower graves in Kansas and their home in Gettysburg. The Wilson home is available to tour in Washington D.C., and really there's quite a list of presidential tourism sites. Why do you think sites like this matter?
Barbara Perry: Well, first of all, because I love to visit them, but I know that's a bit personal, and maybe just for me, but I've been going for several years now – every two years the White House Historical Association, and I'm very fortunate to serve on their board now, sponsors the Presidential Sites Summit, and we gather typically now in Washington, and we invite people from the presidential libraries and from these presidential sites. So, I've really learned more about them, but always, even as a child, I’d love to visit presidential birthplaces, when my parents took me to Lincoln's birthplace in Kentucky and visiting the historic homes.
So why? Why is it important that others like doing this or that we should encourage others to do it? I think people love to be close to history. I think they like to be close to historical figures, whether they're living or deceased, and I think that people, if they are seeing first ladies or presidents as heroic figures, George Washington, the father of our country, the general who led us in the victorious revolution against the British, to visit their homes and someone like a Thomas Jefferson we know who designed his own home of Monticello here where I am in Charlottesville, Virginia.
(26:30): It not only allows us to pay homage to people if we go to their grave sites, presidents and first ladies, but it also allows us to walk in their footsteps, and I always say this, “to breathe their air,” if you will. Also, to see what formed them. So, I often point out Hyde Park in upstate New York, right on the Hudson River, that FDR said that's where he wanted to be buried and that is where Eleanor is buried, and when I made my first trip there and the park rangers, it's the National Park site, and the park rangers taking us around the big mansion where FDR was born and raised. We turned a corner and the ranger said in this room, ladies and gentlemen, Franklin Roosevelt was born, and just completely involuntarily, I burst into tears, and I think it was because I remembered my parents and my aunts and my grandparents talking about how FDR saved them in the Depression.
(27:31): So that's one example, but then the same trip, we went a mile or so away to Val-Kill, to the cottage that FDR built for Eleanor, and that that's where she lived out her days all the way up to early 1960s, and that's where she met with Senator John F. Kennedy in 1960. Right before I saw him in Louisville, she invited him for lunch. She was not supportive of him. She wanted Adlai Stevenson to be the nominee a third time, but Jack Kennedy got the nomination, and so they had a rapprochement, and I'm actually writing a book about this luncheon that they had there.
So, for me, I not only thought, “Here I am where Eleanor Roosevelt met with Khrushchev, where she met with Kennedy, where they developed their rapprochement that she said ultimately, she would campaign for Kennedy.” That helped him win in 1960, so that space, that former first lady living there before she was first lady, after she was first lady, it is where history was made, and I know that others feel the same as I do. So, it's a way to learn history and politics, and I think that there's nothing like it to take young people and students to these sites if at all possible through field trips and that sort of thing.
Teri Finneman (28:46): And then, our final question of the show is why do you think studying first ladies matters?
Barbara Perry: First of all, for women's history, and we know for far too long, women's history was viewed as secondary to what is often called “great white man” theory of the presidency and of history written at large. So, let us join that wave of studying women's history and how these first ladies, how these women contributed to it. And I would cite there, just in the more recent times, Hillary Clinton, not only to become the first candidate of a major party for the presidency, but to be secretary of state, to be senator, all after having been first lady, but in terms of women's history, her speech in the mid-‘90s in Beijing at the Global Women's Conference where she uttered those famous words that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights.
(29:46): If she would be remembered for nothing else, that would be her historical contribution, and that she also thought that a whole doctrine that's been developed around what she called “women’s peace and security,” that when women are given their rights in this country and around the world, the studies show that it's not only good for women, it's good for everyone in the country, and those countries tend to be more at peace and peaceable members of the world community.
And then in terms of our politics, someone like Dolley Madison, who really launches our politics in Washington because the capital moves there in the early 1800s, and it's not a very nice city. It's swampy; it's got dirt streets. So, the people who came there who represented the first political parties of the Federalists and what were called the Democratic-Republicans led by Jefferson, they were at each other's throats. (30:44) We think that we have fraught politics today. Those first two political parties were really at each other's throats, and Dolley through, again, her soft power, bringing people together, having parties in her homes and gatherings in her homes because her husband James was quite an introvert, but boy, she was an extrovert, and she should be given credit for that.
So, that's part of our American politics. And then I guess lastly, I would say more narrowly, literally, some of these husbands of women who became first ladies, I think, would not have become president if not for the people they married. So, in the case of Eleanor and FDR, when he had this terrible siege of polio in the early 1920s, he, as most people know, was paralyzed from the waist down and had to spend two to three years trying to come back from that. (31:38) While he was recovering as best he could, Eleanor was sent out to represent him in his early political career in New York, which then allowed him to become the governor of New York, which allowed him to become the president of the United States.
For Mrs. Kennedy and Jack Kennedy, another very seriously ill president who had very serious back issues. He almost died from surgeries for those back issues. He had Addison's disease, and Mrs. Kennedy was not only supportive and caretaking for him, but she helped him in the writing of Profiles in Courage, the book that he penned with, let us say, Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter, but Mrs. Kennedy was helping him while he was recovering to write this book that in 1957 won a Pulitzer Prize, and I think that helped to launch him onward to the presidency.
(32:32): And on another more recent president, President George W. Bush, I think I could make an argument that if it hadn't been for Laura Bush, his wife, who read the riot act to him ultimately about his drinking, and I think it was about the time he turned 40. He was in the business realm, in baseball. He wasn't necessarily going to run for president at that point, but she said, “Look, you know, it's Jack Daniels way or the highway for you, you know, you’ve got to give up Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. You're just not healthy. We've got two young daughters that, you know, we're raising, and you need to move on and get over this addiction.” And he did, and he became a born-again Christian, which I'm sure helped him with that part of the electorate. So again, at least in those three examples, and I'm sure there are many others, in both a narrow way so beyond broad politics or broad American history and world history, I think you can actually make the argument that, you know, they always say behind every great man is a great woman, but that's the truth in the case of these women who not only made their contributions in the White House, but many of them beyond.
Teri Finneman (33:44): All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.
Barbara Perry: Thank you, Teri.
Teri Finneman: Thanks to all of our listeners for joining us for Season 1 of The First Ladies podcast. Stay tuned in early 2025 for news about a potential Season 2.
Show music credit: "Winning Elevation" by Hot_Dope.