We usually see Michelle Obama as an elegant first lady who can do a mean Dougie. But Jodi Kantor’s new book, The Obamas, paints a more nuanced portrait of the first lady. She was reportedly critical of her husband’s advisers—including former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel—after the Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010. Though Emanuel denies there was friction, according to Kantor, “advisers described a grim situation: a president whose agenda had hit the rocks, a first lady who disapproved of the turn the White House had taken, and a chief of staff who chafed against her influence.”
Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.
Barbara Bush (1989 to 1993)
Barbara may appear to be a sweet old lady in this photo with Raisa Gorbachev. Don’t let looks deceive you: Beneath that sweater set lurks a shiv. From Marjorie Williams’ classic Vanity Fair profile of Bar: “[S]taffers learn that Barbara is always ‘just within earshot, just out of sight,’ in the words of one campaign staffer. Courtiers tread very, very carefully in this domain, knowing, in the words of media adviser Roger Ailes, that ‘she wants what's best for her husband, and boy, she's strong.’ ”
Photograph by Don Emmerg/AFP/Getty Images. CREDIT:
Nancy Reagan (1981 to 1989)
Nancy (shown here with Reagan press secretary James Brady) clashed with Donald Regan, Ronald’s chief of staff in his second term. Regan claimed that Nancy plotted his ouster. "It's no secret that [she] wanted to get rid of me,” Donald Regan said in the late ’80s. “She thought I was bringing the President down and apparently didn't care for me personally. She fanned the flames of bad publicity."
Photograph by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images.
Pat Nixon (1969 to 1974)
Pat Nixon didn’t get along with either Bob Haldeman, her husband’s chief of staff, or his aide John Ehrlichman. According to the National Library’s biography of Pat, Haldeman and Ehrlichman tried to overrule decisions made by Pat and her staff . She didn’t shed any tears when both resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal in ’73.
Photograph of Pat Nixon courtesy the Library of Congress.
Jackie Kennedy (1961 to 1963)
Last year, DoubleX ran a slide show called “Jackie Kennedy’s Diss List,” because the fashion-forward first lady used her breathy voice to share some less-than-diplomatic opinions. Of her husband’s vice president, LBJ, Jackie once said, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?”
Photograph courtesy of National Archive/Newsmakers via Library of Congress.
Mamie Eisenhower (1953 to 1961)
Mamie (shown here with Dwight and French Gen. Raoul Vernoux) clashed with her husband’s press secretary James Hagerty, who tried to control her in ways she didn’t appreciate. For example, she wanted to support public television, but Hagerty put the kibosh on it, afraid the public would think Mamie was encouraging government support of propaganda.
Credit: Photograph by AFP/Getty Images.
Edith Bolling Galt Wilson (1915 to 1921)
After Woodrow Wilson had a stroke in 1919, his wife, Edith, led an astonishing campaign of misinformation, convincing Congress and the public that he was merely suffering from exhaustion. Despite the fact that her husband was incapacitated, Edith decided that he should not resign, that the VP should not become president, and that all president correspondence should be filtered through her.
Photograph courtesy Library of Congress.
Helen Harron Taft (Nellie) (1909 to 1913)
Nellie Taft (shown here, center, with the wife of chairman Norman E. Mack at the 1912 Democratic National Convention) basically browbeat her husband into the White House. He really dreamed of becoming a Supreme Court justice, but Nellie wore him down. According to American First Ladies: Their Lives and Legacy by Lewis L. Gould, when William Howard was running for president, Nellie sent him dozens of letters, in which “she advised him on how to position himself, sometimes down to what words to use, so that he would be seen as supporting some of Roosevelt's popular policies yet also standing on his own, apart from Roosevelt.”
Photograph from Flickr Commons project, 2009 via Library of Congress.
Elizabeth Monroe (1817 to 1825)
The second she arrived at the White House, Elizabeth Monroe simply decided that she did not want to play by the social rules of Washington. Nor would she listen to any advisers. “Upon assuming the duties of first lady, Elizabeth Monroe let it be known immediately that she would no longer engage in the tiresome social chore of returning social calls that her predecessors had all suffered,” John Roberts wrote in Rating the First Ladies. Elizabeth’s all-inclusive snubbing made Washington socialites deeply insecure—according to Roberts “[I]t must have been like a dentist hitting an exposed nerve.”
Painting by John Vanderlyn via Wikimedia Commons.
Martha Washington (1789 to 1797)
After her husband died, Martha stopped pretending that she didn’t have political views of her own. She would tell visitors to her Virginia estate in Mount Vernon that her husband’s secretary of state, then-President Thomas Jefferson, was a “vile demagogue.”
Photograph published by Currier & Ives/courtesy Library of Congress.
In New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor’s new book, The Obamas, one of the juiciest revelations is that Michelle did not get along with her husband’s most volatile former adviser, Rahm Emanuel. According to Kantor:
Jessica Grose is a frequent Slate contributor and the author of the novel Sad Desk Salad. Follow her on Twitter.
Michelle and Rahm Emanuel had almost no bond; their relationship was distant and awkward from the beginning. She had been skeptical of him when he was selected, and now he returned the favor.
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Kantor says that Emanuel entered the Obama White House already wary of first ladies. When he served as an adviser to Bill Clinton, his clashes with Hillary were so rancorous that Hillary reportedly tried to get him canned. Though Emanuel allegedly tried to avoid Michelle, he couldn’t avoid sparring with her. They fundamentally disagreed over how Barack should handle issues from immigration to health care reform, and according to Kantor, Barack sided with his wife. (For his part, Emanuel, who is no longer working at the White House, says that he is great friends with the Obamas—both of them).
We’ve heard much about the influence wielded by modern first ladies like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Reagan. But the spitfire first lady is not a new development: Martha Washington told people that her husband’s former secretary of state Thomas Jefferson was a "vile demagogue." Even more extreme was Elizabeth Monroe, who simply decided that, White House protocol be damned, she would not return any social calls because she didn’t feel like it. Though she was socially a washout on the party scene, according to Rating the First Ladies: The Women Who Influenced the Presidencyby John B. Roberts, she may have been quite politically astute—there is some evidence that she had a hand in shaping the Monroe Doctrine.
Herewith, from Michelle to Martha, a slide show of first ladies and the staffers they scrapped with. Though Michelle has those famous biceps, the wife I’d be most frightened to step to is grandmotherly Barbara Bush. As Marjorie Williams once wrote in a great 1992 Vanity Fair profile, "Even Barbara Bush’s stepmother is afraid of her."
Thanks to L.V. Anderson and Katy Waldman for their research assistance.