Episode 5: International Influencers

Elizabeth Natalle explains how modern first ladies influence diplomacy, often championing democracy on the world stage and advancing progress in foreign policy, human rights, education, and health.

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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.

(0:41): First ladies have traveled millions of miles around the globe as ambassadors for the United States in what is often referred to as soft diplomacy. Each appearance they make, whether it be at the Olympics, cultural events, disaster relief, summits, or other humanitarian or education efforts has a notable impact. In today's episode, we visit with Elizabeth Natalle, author of Jacqueline Kennedy and the Architecture of First Lady Diplomacy, who has recently done more work examining first ladies and international diplomacy.

Elizabeth, welcome to the show. Why did you become interested in studying first ladies?

Elizabeth Natalle (1:21): Well, my maternal grandmother worked on the Kennedy campaign in 1960, and so, in our household, the Kennedy administration was what really kicked it off. And then, in the late ‘90s, I answered the call from Molly Wertheimer to contribute a chapter on Jackie Kennedy to her “Inventing a Voice” anthology. And that's kind of what kicked off my application of my theoretical interests in women on the public platform to first ladies as a focus for that.

Teri Finneman: So, as we mentioned in the introduction, we're going to be talking about first ladies in international diplomacy today. You hear the word soft power used a lot when discussing the first lady. What is meant by that phrase?

Elizabeth Natalle (2:04): Well, soft power comes out of political science, and now it's used rather in an interdisciplinary way and, in a general way, what it means is that a government uses strategies other than military or economic power as a way to add to nation-to-nation negotiations. So, for example, that could be personality of people in play, so if a president or a first lady has high credibility and charisma, that personality functions as a form of soft power to get other countries, nations, collaborators to want to really see democracy in the American way as something that they would like. So, you can use culture, you can use political values, and that's everything from the Peace Corps to athletes to rock stars to American movies. Those are all forms of soft diplomacy. So, it's other than economic aid and military as kind of a counterbalance persuasive strategy.

Teri Finneman (3:12): Yeah, I want to delve into that a little bit more and how soft power comes into play with first ladies on the international stage. I know that you talked about their six main strategies. What are those?

Elizabeth Natalle: Well, the strategies that I've discovered in my work, including a first lady's ability to build relationships with other people in international settings, so that could be her personal relationship with the prime minister or her prompting of a relationship with her husband and someone in a foreign government. The use of foreign language, for example, Jacqueline Kennedy did use Italian and Spanish and primarily French in her interactions with other people.

Fashion diplomacy, of course, is something that everyone knows, and that's a very serious business, by the way, so that fashion becomes a coded and symbolic way of delivering democratic values across the globe, of state activities, we're all aware of, such as international travel, state dinners, those kinds of activities, receptions for diplomats, all of that sort of thing, and then culture would be everything from the arts and education and humanitarian aspects of culture.

(4:25): So that's where things like the Peace Corps come into play. Sharing art exhibits, taking dignitaries to the national museum, hosting activities at the Kennedy Center, that kind of thing would be cultural, and then the one that has come out of this work that I just did for this chapter is the idea of issue-based diplomacy where first ladies really since Hillary Clinton have been able to use their own agendas and their own contacts overseas to go from influencing to actually participating in issues that are relevant to American foreign policy.

Teri Finneman: So, what are some specific examples of early first ladies engaging in international diplomacy?

Elizabeth Natalle (5:10): Well, I like to say the Dolley Madison's one of my favorite early examples of first lady diplomacy, because we have some evidence that Dolley did a number of things in terms of social networking, as she encouraged the diplomatic community to come together where she served as hostess for not only Thomas Jefferson, but for her own husband James Madison, in the White House. And she – one of her more famous interventions in relationship building was when her husband's inaugural dinner took place and it was a very elaborate affair. She wound up putting herself between the French ambassador and the English ambassador at the inaugural dinner as a way to create a diplomatic climate for communication and conversation.

(5:59): And then another first lady that I like to talk about is Edith Wilson, who was the first first lady to go overseas with her husband and during the peace negotiations for the Versailles Treaty in 1917, they actually spent seven months abroad while that treaty was being negotiated, and not only did she raise the visibility of first ladies, what was interesting was people around the world, because there were a number of diplomats involved in that process, suddenly realized, oh I've got a back channel to the president through the first lady and that was a new kind of political process that is part of international diplomacy, even to this day.

Teri Finneman (6:48): You note that the Cold War was a pivotal turning point for first ladies to engage more in international diplomacy. So, we've talked a little bit about Jackie Kennedy already, but let's talk about her more because her legacy is very much, you know, involved with her reputation abroad and what she all did to build international diplomacy.

Elizabeth Natalle: Well, it's very interesting because Jacqueline Kennedy did not go abroad nearly as much as what first ladies do today, but she was such a sensation in the context of the Cold War because we had Khrushchev and Kennedy battling each other ideologically around the world and the nuclear development that was simultaneously going on post-World War with the communist model for government versus our American capitalistic system were intertwined in this military situation that was really all about, you know, is somebody going to push the red button and we’ll be annihilated by nuclear warhead, and this goes back even to my own childhood when I am old enough to have been one of those people who, under the Kennedy administration, was doing the duck and cover exercises under our desks when I was in about second or third grade.

(8:11): And so the idea of nuclear war was literally on the tip of the tongue of people all across the globe. So, when Jackie Kennedy went to Europe for the first time and JFK was negotiating at that point in Paris with de Gaulle who was really the pivotal person for NATO, and when they traveled on to Vienna to meet up with Khrushchev, and Kennedy and Khrushchev had a terrible time interacting with each other, those are the types of things that suddenly the world saw Jackie Kennedy and she was “Viva Jackie,” you know, everywhere. As they went on to Latin America in Colombia and Venezuela, they were doing economic work out in communities that were heavily influenced by communist ideology. She was such a glamorous celebrity without even trying, because she was absolutely beautiful.

(9:10): She had a great wardrobe and she spoke in Spanish and French. The ordinary person just fell in love with JFK and Jackie, and so this happened all over the world, and she was so elegant and had such an international upbringing herself and interacted at the highest levels of the intelligentsia and the Congress that she was well-known all over the world and had contacts all over the world. She was able to use her ability to communicate, her use of language, her ability to engage these state activities in these wonderful dinners, and even bringing the Mona Lisa over to the United States through her relationship with the Minister of Culture André Malraux.

(10:02): All of these things set the stage for her final coup, which was to travel solo, actually, with her sister to India and Pakistan as she navigated what was happening between JFK and Nehru, and India and Pakistan were not only in conflict with each other regarding the development of nuclear power but also favor with the United States so that they could benefit from foreign aid, and Jackie went to both of these countries and balanced the power struggles that were going on and then came back and reported to her husband and let JFK know so that he could make some further decisions about how to navigate with these great leaders and keep America and democracy out there as the ideology that the world should want.

Teri Finneman (11:00): I want to talk a lot next about Pat Nixon, whose legacy I think has been unfairly forgotten. Talk about the difference that she made on the international scene.

Elizabeth Natalle: Well, you know, Pat Nixon is just in such an unfortunate position because of what happened with her husband and going out in such disgrace and the fact that Pat Nixon also never wrote her own autobiography or memoir, [it] was her daughter who wrote the so-called untold story of Pat Nixon.

Pat Nixon was a wonder as a first lady. She had so much experience as a second lady, and she was educated. She was trained as a teacher, so she had a college education. She was a tried and true experienced government wife, so to speak, and so, by the time she got into the first lady role, Pat was very astute. She made excellent decisions, she strategized well, but she was constantly up against the group that surrounded Nixon, who didn't want to have anything to do with Pat until they realized what a political tool Pat was when she headed to Peru after the earthquake in 1970.

(12:19): And here she was on this trip, in low heels and a dress along with the first lady of Peru climbing over rubble, meeting and greeting earthquake victims, and this is when the government realized oh, wait a second, maybe Pat Nixon has more to offer than what we're willing to acknowledge, and so Pat then suddenly rose in the esteem of her own husband because he realized what Pat could do for him in his actual excellence in foreign policy and intergovernmental negotiation.

(12:58): And so suddenly, Pat becomes a tool. So, when they headed to China for detente, here's Pat stepping off the airplane in a red coat, red being a color that symbolizes good luck for the Chinese culture and endearing herself to the Chinese people as she traveled around to various communes and clinics and schools and children's hospitals in China. And then the really great coup is when she's at the state dinner and she's suddenly in conversation with the Chinese premier and there is a package of Panda cigarettes sitting on the dinner table. And she says to the premier, you know, I really love the pandas [at the zoo] and he said, oh, great, I'll give you some, and she thought he meant the cigarettes on the table. And the next thing she knows, it's not the cigarettes. The National Zoo, several months after the trip, is receiving these wonderful pandas that we've had now for all these years.

(14:05): This kind of diplomacy not only endeared her to the people of China, it enhanced the relationship of Richard Nixon to the Chinese government and got into the hearts of the American people by the way in which she was able to travel and do the kinds of things that she did. Two other things about Pat Nixon worth thinking about: she is the first first lady to travel solo in a kind of surrogate role, taking the place of both Richard Nixon and herself as a couple when she went to Africa to the Liberian inauguration of William Tolbert, who happened to be a personal friend of the Nixons from their days as vice president and second lady, and then finally Pat was the first first lady to travel in an open helicopter in a combat zone during the Vietnam War.

(15:04): So even though Eleanor Roosevelt had traveled both to Europe and to the Pacific Theater, Pat Nixon did what was really a daring kind of activity when she was in that helicopter over a combat zone in Vietnam. So, Pat set the precedent for so much of what other first ladies, you know, have followed through with.

Teri Finneman: It's only more recently that it's become more common for first ladies to engage in foreign policy, although it's certainly been done in the past. Sarah Polk, in particular, comes to mind, but of the more recent first ladies, Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bush were particularly engaged in this area. Let's discuss each of their contributions to foreign policy.

Elizabeth Natalle (15:51): Well, if we start with Rosalynn Carter, she becomes the legacy of Pat Nixon in terms of surrogacy. So, when she was asked to go to Latin America in 1977, at Jimmy Carter's request to be her surrogate and travel the circuit of countries in Latin America to let the governments in on Jimmy Carter's foreign policy as humanitarian based, that is human rights-based. Rosalynn Carter was doing something that was rather controversial at the time because much of the public opinion of the day was that she was usurping her husband's power, when in fact, her husband had actually asked her to go in his place, and she did so willingly.

(16:47): Rosalynn Carter is also a person who, if you look at the historical record and the people who were surrounding Jimmy Carter and his own staff, she was the one who suggested Camp David as the site for Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin’s negotiations over the peace accords that eventually came out of the Camp David visit in 1978. And so, through her ability to play a role in the issues of the Carter administration, she began to be seen as a person who was participating in diplomacy as much as she may have just been influencing diplomacy.

(17:35): So, then it becomes Hillary Clinton who's the person who actually, in her own right as a first lady, takes her own agenda for women and children and makes it a foreign policy issue when she goes to Beijing in the mid-‘90s, and she gives in front of the UN-based conference the famous line that women's rights are human rights and suddenly the Clinton administration has got human rights intertwined with women's rights as part of its legitimate foreign policy agenda.

And so, of course, we know that Hillary Clinton went on to not only be a senator but to become the secretary of state where women's rights and human rights as a combined issue have been on our foreign policy agenda ever since.

(18:34): And then, if we move that even more forward in time to Laura Bush and what happened in the wake of 9/11, was that she turned back around and began to focus on the devastation of Afghanistan's women and girls in the wake of the Taliban and what had happened with the terrorism that was going on in Afghanistan. And to this day, Laura Bush has continued the issue of women's and girls' rights, including education, health care, pulling children away from childhood marriages and arranged marriages that were for the detriment of girls, and now, through her own initiatives, i.e. her issues, we've got a worldwide look at women and children as a global issue that is backed by and reinforced by what first ladies are doing both in office and then out of the White House, post-White House.

(19:37): So, this has been an incredible development in the modern time period of first ladies, as they have literally gone from influencing diplomacy to participating in diplomacy, and I think that's a very important thing to acknowledge.

Teri Finneman: Let's move on to Michelle Obama, who more recently had a “Let Girls Learn” initiative, which you refer to as issue-based soft diplomacy, so talk more about what her initiative was and what is meant by issue-based soft diplomacy.

Elizabeth Natalle (20:13): Well, what's really interesting about issue-based soft diplomacy is that it is the idea that a first lady can take a topic of a policy-oriented idea – so issue-based in this case would be education, and that's education that begins in the United States but becomes a global issue as well because we're aware of empirical evidence that education as a strong component of civil society is what brings societies forward. An educated mass is a healthier society, is a more literate society, is a society that has a higher quality of living.

So, Michelle Obama began with Reach Higher, which was her program that dovetailed with the Obama's domestic policy to educate more people in public settings, public university, and access to education, to then launching, Let Girls Learn as a more global approach, using both the American government in collaboration with agencies and international governments.

(21:24): So, Michelle Obama winds up doing global advocacy for girl’s rights in the context of terrorism because that's where we were in the world at that moment in time, and she has collaboration with the State Department, with the Agency for International Development, with the Peace Corps, with the U.S. Department of Labor, and with the AIDS Relief Group, PEPFAR, and she's got all of these agencies involved, and she's traveling around the world, and she reports back in 2016 as they're about to leave the White House about the outcomes. And so, that's the other part of issue-based diplomacy. It's not in the way soft diplomacy advocates and influences for ideology. Issue-based takes us a step further and produces outcomes.

(22:21): So, by the time Michelle Obama is reporting to the UN in 2016 about what Let Girls Learn has accomplished, she is quoting statistics about how millions of dollars are being spent by countries who are our allies and how the World Bank Group is getting ready to invest over two and a half billion in five years time to educate girls. So, this is where we begin to see a first lady’s influence where we can see tangible results that is moving the dial forward on issues that are a matter of not just life and death, but of the civilization process, the socialization process of civil society on a global level. This is very important.

Teri Finneman (23:15): One of the things that I like about your chapter is that, to me, it feels like researchers have spent too little time on what first ladies do after they leave the White House. Now, you talked a little bit about Laura Bush, of course, just a little bit ago, but talk more about how some of the former first ladies are maintaining international diplomacy even after their terms are technically over.

Elizabeth Natalle (23:40): Well, I do have to go back to Eleanor Roosevelt on this one because she's the one who set the historical precedent. President Truman asked her to be the American delegate to the United Nations organizing meetings for the General Assembly back in 1946. So, she winds up being the delegate to the United Nations from the U.S., but then she also becomes the chair of the UN Human Rights High Commission, and she winds up overseeing and helping to compose the International Bill of Rights that we still use to this day. So, when we look at modern times and we see Hillary Clinton ascending to the role of the secretary of state in the Obama administration, she is a direct legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Hillary Clinton, through her own political appointment as a legitimate part of the government, becomes a person post-White House who is contributing to international diplomacy nonstop.

(24:45): And of course, then her running for president assisted as well. But even today, Hillary Clinton now teaches a course at Columbia University on foreign policy decision-making that is part of her post-White House participation in international diplomacy and so yes, we did talk about Laura Bush, but before Laura Bush's time, Rosalynn Carter at her death just several months ago was characterized in the press as a global humanitarian because she and President Carter set up through the Carter Center all of their NGO work in both medicine and the Habitat for Humanity work that they did, monitoring free elections.

And so Carter wound up visiting well over 120 countries, many of them post-White House in her work in health and housing as part of her post-White House work. and in the same way that presidents and first ladies are now setting up (25:48) centers and foundations because the money happens to be there in the modern times that it wasn't in earlier times in the history of the United States, money can now be funded through first ladies and their husbands’ centers and foundations to support the work that was started in the White House that can now be continued post-White House. So, the women's initiative at the Bush Institute produced research and programming that linked Laura Bush to other first ladies around the world, and that's a first in and of itself.

(26:31): So, their publication called A Role Without a Rulebook, which is available through the Bush Institute, is really precedent-setting when you take a look at the way in which other first ladies are being documented in their work for their own countries and in tandem with other first ladies, and how the American first ladies can continue interfacing with other first ladies both during their time in office and then post. And Michelle Obama is doing the same thing. So, while Let Girls Learn was not continued in the next administration, she found a way through the Obama Foundation to create what's now called the Girls Opportunity Alliance, and here's something really exciting.

(27:20): Obama has now joined forces with the foundations that are funded by Melinda French Gates and Amal Clooney as they have created a campaign called Get Her There, and Get Her There is all about getting girls all over the world educated and productive so that they can make educated contributions to the civil society from which they come, and so these are ways in which the notion of mothers and motherhood and what we call in the literature “Republican motherhood,” where the first lady is seen as the symbol of the mother of the land and the socializing of the values and education of children has now become this very sophisticated and complex effort through post-White House work in large measures to get some of this work done that you don't have time for in the four to eight years that you might be in the White House.

(28:28): So, I think it's particularly obvious in the international work that first ladies do that concerns in the United States are concerns all over the world when we think about civil society and first ladies are to the point where they're not willing to give up their work once they walk across the lawn of the White House, that's for sure.

Teri Finneman (28:52): And then our final question of the show is why do you think studying first ladies matters?

Elizabeth Natalle: I think it matters because first ladies are a part of the presidential administration in spite of what the Constitution does not say about them. And so, first ladies contribute in a very powerful way, and they need to be documented. It's that simple because for the record, we need to know what first ladies are doing as leaders because they are indeed de facto leaders, and we need to know what their effects are or have been as they serve the American government. And so, that's why I think first ladies matter. They are a part of American government.

Teri Finneman: All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.

Elizabeth Natalle: You're quite welcome. My pleasure.

Teri Finneman: We hope you enjoyed the show. Tune in next time to uncover more untold histories of the nation's first ladies. I'm Teri Finneman, and this is The First Ladies podcast.

Show music credit: "Winning Elevation" by Hot_Dope.