First Ladies Library Blog

Dominant by nature, Eliza Monroe Hay’s social edicts shaped the very nature of her father’s Administration.

This wife and mother, thirty-year old at the time her father James Monroe began his eight-year, two-term presidency in 1817, managed to help worsen an acrimonious situation between the Administration and the representatives of foreign countries into a serious diplomatic crisis.

Like other Presidents before the Civil War such as the two Adamses, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, James Monroe invited extended family members to live with him in the White House and named one, his wife’s nephew, to collect the federal salary for the post of land officer while performing the duty of private presidential secretary.

The nephew, Samuel Gouverneur would go on to marry his first cousin Maria and then become the presidential son-in-law.

The First Family also included the President’s eldest daughter Eliza Hay, married to the prominent Virginia attorney George Hay who had also served as prosecutor in the trial of former Vice President Aaron Burr, and their only child, a daughter Hortensia.

During the first six years of her father’s presidency, Eliza Hay’s husband served in the Virginia House of Delegates in Richmond, until moving to Washington in 1822 and going into private law practice.

While Hortensia Hay would come to help her grandfather in organizing his papers before the family vacated the White House before the end of his presidency, her mother was playing a far more public role on behalf of the First Lady, specifically, and the First Family, generally.

The precise nature of the debilitating ailment afflicting Elizabeth Monroe during her husband’s presidency is indeterminable but there are references to her suffering from both severe arthritis and a condition which led to her “falling.” The latter matched certain symptoms of epilepsy. At public events she was described as youthful but always with an entourage of other women relatives, like her daughters, sisters and nieces.

Among these Eliza Hay was the most prominent, an outspoken woman with none of the grace of her mother nor submissiveness with which women of her class and era were often expected to behave. There are scant claims that she substituted for her mother on occasion but most accounts pinpoint her as receiving guests along with her mother yet assuming a role more dominant than the First Lady at social figure.

Although it was an era when the details of a President’s family life were largely considered to be private, his daughter assumed the most overt role among them, acting as a sort of modern equivalence of a spokesperson. She never held press conferences or made formal announcements, but she did make distinct verbal declarations during her interactions with members of Congress, the diplomatic corps and other officials in Washington.

Whereas the President and First Lady had only first gone to Europe as adults to fulfill two assignments of his diplomatic career, most importantly as Minister to France, their eldest child, Eliza, was only eight years old in 1794, when they first lived on the Continent. In 1803, they returned, bringing with them their infant daughter Maria who was sixteen years younger than her sister.

Eliza Hay’s entire outlook was heavily influenced by her French education and friends. She was enrolled at the elite Parisian private school of Madame Campan, the former lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Antoinette. She also befriended many women of European royal families and would later count Queen of Holland Hortense de Beauharnois and Queen of Naples Caroline Bonaparte.

To what degree Eliza Hay coordinated the protocol established during the Monroe Administration with her father is unclear. Certainly the presidential social life which Mrs. Hay dominated suggested the same sense of American autonomy in its own hemisphere and an effort to protect the contiguous United States from being colonized by foreign countries.

Mrs. Hay and Mrs. Monroe refused to make the first social call on foreign diplomats, a snub which symbolized the prerogative of the United States government to determine its own rules in its own land.

Eliza Hay was also the Monroe presidential family member who decided that the guests at her sister Maria’s March 9, 1820 White House wedding would be limited to some four dozen relatives and close friends and that invitations would not be made to the diplomatic corps, nor would their gifts be acknowledged. Further, she agreed to attend a charity ball as a guest on the peculiar condition that her presence as the First Daughter not be acknowledged.

She could often be dismissive towards those who made polite inquiries about her husband and his well-being.

The foreign representatives were so taken aback by Mrs. Hay’s rudeness that they formally protested the President’s protocol shift from the less exclusive Jefferson and Madison Administrations. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams made it the subject of discussion at two Cabinet meetings but the Monroes insisted on adherence to their new regulations.

Margaret Bayard Smith, wife of the of the newspaper National Intelligencer editor, who often provided brief items about Presidents and their families for the paper, nevertheless also chronicled how Eliza Hay ignored threats to her own health by serving as a volunteer nurse to local residents who were suffering during a malaria outbreak.

After the presidency, Eliza Hay remained a central figure in the Monroe family, sometimes at odds with her brother-in-law on how to best seek government restitution for the large sums of personal spending which her parents had outlaid during their years of foreign public service.

Eliza Hay’s mother and husband both died in 1830, her father a year later.

Although she still had a married daughter living in the United States, this widowed White House hostess returned to France, where she seemed to have most naturally felt at home, converting to Catholicism and living in a convent.

She is buried not with her family members in Virginia, but in Paris.

This is an introductory essay to a forthcoming series on the National First Ladies Library Blog about some of the most obscure yet often most important “other women” of the White House, with individual articles coming in the weeks and months ahead.

With a series of presidential spouses in the White House who have, for over a half a century now, been healthy and vital as well as interested in assuming public responsibilities, it is hard to conceive of the role of First Lady being assumed by anyone other than the person who happens to be married to the President.

Yet there have been some two dozen First Ladies who had a variety of family relationships with Presidents other than that of spouse, being daughters, daughters-in-law, niece, sisters, cousin, and aunts.

Even when these “other women” are acknowledged as “surrogate First Ladies” or “White House hostesses,” the titles by which they are often designated, little to no consideration is given to the value their presence provided a President in private or what the nature of their uncertain status revealed about the nation’s evolving perceptions of the presidency.

It’s been a century since there was an incumbent President who was either widowed or had a wife unable or unwilling to assume any public duties or fulfill the traditional expectations placed on them as the spouse of the nation’s chief executive.

Yet even in the intervening years, the nation has seen some brief moments when schedule or health prevented a presidential wife from being able to make public appearances with her husband and a daughter has substituted on her behalf to both fulfill traditional expectations for the public and press and to serve as a companion of familial support for the President.

Helene Taft aided her mother as hostess during the First Lady’s last social season, when her poor health required assistance.

Chelsea Clinton was her father’s companion during a state visit to Australia, while her mother was campaigning for the U.S. Senate.

Anna Roosevelt was her father’s companion during his World War II conference at Yalta.

Susan Ford served presided as hostess over a state dinner when her mother was recovering from breast cancer surgery.

Like that modern trio, most of the other “surrogate” First Ladies were presidential daughters.

Three daughters assumed the First Lady role upon their mothers dying in the White House: Letty Tyler Semple, Mary Harrison McKee and Margaret Wilson. Margaret Wilson shared the duties with the President’s cousin Helen Bones, who had worked for the first Mrs. Wilson as personal secretary.

Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren and Chester Arthur were the four Presidents who assumed office as widowers. Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph, Jackson’s niece and daughter-in-law Emily Donelson and Sarah Jackson, Van Buren’s daughter Angelica Van Buren, and Arthur’s sister Molly McElroy served for varying lengths for them.

James Buchanan and Grover Cleveland were both bachelors when they assumed the presidency.

Cleveland’s sister Rose Elizabeth served as his First Lady until he married fifteen months into his administration.

Buchanan’s niece Harriet Lane acted as his hostess and was a highly visible public figure, assuming all of the roles a presidential wife of that era would have. By her prominence yet lacking the marital status of presidential wife, the press bestowed on her the term “First Lady,” making her the first woman who was publicly referenced by that unofficial title. Among all the “other women” of the White House, Harriet Lane served for the longest period of time, the full four years of the Buchanan presidency.

Five daughters and one daughter-in-law assumed the leading public role of hostess at Administration social events while their mothers or mother-in-law, with either chronic health problems or disinterest, assumed control of presidential private life and entertaining: Eliza Hay (James Monroe’s daughter), Priscilla Tyler (John Tyler’s daughter-in-law), Betty Bliss (Zachary Taylor’s daughter), Mary Fillmore (Millard Fillmore’s daughter) and Martha Patterson and Mary Stover (Andrew Johnson’s daughters).

Presidential wife Anna Harrison had every intention of coming in the warmer spring weather from her Ohio farm to join her husband in the White House after his 1841 inauguration but in her absence daughter-in-law Jane Harrison and Jane’s aunt, the former congressional wife Jane Findlay, acted as hostesses for the brief one-month administration.

Struggling with depression and keeping herself from public view during a mourning period for her son, Jane Pierce relied on her aunt-by-marriage Abby Kent Means to assume household management and the fulfillment of the public duties of hostess.

Who these figures were as real human beings, how they came to assume the public role of First Lady, what their presence meant to a President and how the rest of their post-White House lives played out will be explored in this forthcoming NFLL Blog series.

One of the time honored traditions each Spring in Washington DC is the spectacle known as the First Ladies’ Luncheon.

A  ticket to lunch with the current First Lady and 1300-1400 associates of members of Congress and/or Cabinet members in the intimate ballroom at the Washington Hilton; these invites are coveted and not easily obtained.

It is a fashion show of luncheon attire that could rival gowns at the Academies and it’s as much fun to just hang out in the Hilton lobby and observe the latest trends of the season as to be a participant. One  year hats were in style and the “plummery” was so abundant  one could hardly see across the room to view the First Lady at the podium.

Started by the Congressional Club in 1912, the event was originally a breakfast and later morphed into a luncheon, now held at the Washington Hilton in the Grand Ballroom. It was originally at the Shoreham Hotel, but in the late 80’s outgrew that space.

Each member of the Club is permitted to bring three guests. Currently there are 693 members (More information on the Congressional Club and its history will appear in my next blog post). Guests come from around the country and the world to attend the event, some staying on to enjoy the sights in Washington, others just blasting in for a quick overnight. Sometimes local restaurants have specials in honor of the event and even cardboard cutouts of the President and First Lady for patrons to pose beside.

One year Madame Tussauds’ Wax Museum provided wax statues of the current and former First Ladies. Guests at the luncheon could wait in the queue and have a picture taken with the lifelike replica of the First Lady. It was a memento to take home and impress friends with your proximity to the First Lady!

Pomp and circumstance opens the show with the Marine Band and the introduction of the Junior hostesses, daughters and granddaughters of Congressional Club members. This is followed by the introduction of distinguished guests. The First Lady is then introduced and follows the preceding guests walking down the cat walk in the center of the ballroom. She is escorted, as are the distinguished guests, by a Marine.

This procedure has varied over the years and at one time all the past presidents of the Congressional Club came down the runway also, but in the last couple years this has not been the case.

Every year the luncheon has a different theme and everything from the tablecloths to the favors (always some type of bag filled to the brim with goodies) to the centerpieces revolves around this theme. Generally the theme is inspired by the state from whence the chairman of the luncheon committee hails. Goodies in the bag usually come from the state and the food on the menu is representative as well.

This year the chair was from Illinois and the theme was America the Beautiful. The unusual appetizer was St Patty’s Day Chicago River Soup with Corned Beef & Cabbage Dumpling.

This year’s goodie bag included a “dove of peace” pin of hand-made pewter plated with 18k gold and designed by Lois Breaux, wife of former Senator John Breaux. Also included was a nifty purse hanger (not so useful for the males in attendance) and the usual variety of small snacks; popcorn from a specialty factory in IL and a cookie with the Congressional Club seal on it.

Every year it’s a treat to see what’s in the bag and normally restrained women gleefully open them before the ceremony starts or surreptitiously look them through during lunch. A personal favorite was the year the chairwoman was from Florida and it was a beach bag filled with a huge beach towel with the CC seal and a pair of leather thong sandals as well.

Usually there is a one of a kind piece of jewelry made especially for the event and perfume is a favorite as well. Again always keeping with the theme or representative of the State affiliation of the Chair.

After being satiated with the gourmet lunch the fun begins with the entertainment. Always spectacular this is a highlight of the event. This year it was Ken Ford, an electric violinist. Not only was his violin electric, his performance was as well. He danced, played and gyrated down the runway giving a breath taking, hand clapping, foot stomping show.

In a previous year Gloria Estafan literally had the entire audience up dancing to her high energy tunes. Other entertainment has included a former American Idol winner, Ruben Studdard.

A good time and a special memory; the First Ladies Luncheon is a unique experience. Each year more and more male faces appear in the crowd of what used to be exclusively women, a  sign of changing times. Spouses of members of Congress, Justices of the Supreme court and Diplomats are no longer all women!!

One last note: One of my guests learned the hard way not to leave the goodie bag anywhere a four legged friend might want to search to see what was missed at the First Ladies Luncheon.

oops!

yum, was that the Congressional Club cookie I just ate? loved it!

One of Few Female American Impressionists:
First Lady Ellen Axson Wilson

by Nassem Al-Mehairi

Ellen Axson Wilson was the wife of the 28^th President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. In a period marked by flashy attire and the beginnings of globalization, First Lady Wilson was a woman who found solace in painting the world around her.

Ellen Axson Wilson was born on May 15^th, 1860 in Savannah, Georgia. Her love of art was cemented when, at the age of 18, she won a bronze medal at the Paris International Exposition for her art piece School Scene. She married Woodrow Wilson in 1885, and in 1890 the family went to Princeton University, where Woodrow became a professor. As she began to have to take on further social responsibilities, she took refuge in art. She found herself putting self-second, but saw no reason why she should have give up her love of art.

In 1905, Ellen entered a deep depression after the death of her sister-in-law, youngest brother, and a child. She joined an art colony in Connecticut and developed her art even further. It was here Ellen chose to paint motifs such as mountain laurels and the river. She returned here nearly every year after this.

In November 1911, Ellen sent one of her pieces to the MacBeth Gallery in New York under a fake alias. When she revealed her real identity, the gallery owner encouraged her to enter more works and eventually began to act as her agent and advocate.

Ellen was influential in getting her husband the Democratic Nomination for President in 1912. She made sure that he met William Jennings Bryan and made an impression on party leaders.

Shortly before the inauguration of President Wilson, a one-woman show of 50 of Ellen’s art pieces opened in Philadelphia. The funds that came from that exhibition went to the Berry School in Georgia to help underprivileged children. Other than her family, Ellen’s other greatest passion was to help reform social issues.

In the summer of 1913, Ellen Wilson went to an art colony in Cornish, New Hampshire. The letters sent between Woodrow and Ellen show how much he relied and leaned on her.

When First Lady Wilson returned to the White House in the fall of 1913, she planned to use the studio that had been installed for her there. Soon, however, she began to realize that her social duties had to take precedence. She influenced the cause of the slums of Washington D.C., and she visited areas of them. She lent her prestige to bring this to the attention of Congress and other officials.

As First Lady, she also utilized her love of art and created the Rose Garden, with the assistance of the gardener she had during her time at Princeton. This was a way Ellen could display her artistic ability while fulfilling her social roles.

Ellen Wilson had suffered from a kidney issue since she was young, but never was able to be diagnosed with any disease. As her health began to deteriorate, her daughter Jessie moved her wedding up for Ellen to be able to see it. This went through, and was one of the happiest moments of her life, but depleted her bit of remaining strength. On August 6^th, 1914, Ellen Wilson passed away, leaving behind a legacy through her work as a social activist and as an artist.

            Ellen Wilson was one of the few women who painted in the Impressionist style. Her work incorporates the themes, brushstrokes, and color palette that defined this artistic period. A woman who remarkably balanced her art with her duties as mother, wife, First Lady, reformer, and activist, Ellen Wilson leaves behind a legacy we feel still today in society and nation.

 Currently, there is an amazing exhibit on display at the National First Ladies Library entitled, “The Art of First Lady Ellen Axson Wilson, American Impressionist,” which includes her art, her letters to President Wilson, and a movie about her life. The display will run until May 16, 2014.

Author Note: I personally was able to see the exhibit displaying Ellen Wilson’s art and it was fascinating. It had fascinating information on a First Lady who had such an amazing life. I would recommend it for anyone.

Nassem Al-Mehairi was born in 1999. Possessing unique viewpoints due to his heritage and the times, he is well-suited to understand the solutions to modern issues, such as domestic poverty, international relations, and women’s rights. He aspires to higher education, law, and politics, as well as to continue writing.

Mr. Al-Mehairi is an author and currently runs the personal online column Seize The Moment. He is in progress of writing a novel about his maternal line ancestor Baron Resolved Waldron, who resided in New Amsterdam (now New York) in 1610-1690. 

He resides in Ashland, Ohio.

Note: Seize the Moment above links to www.nassemalmehairi.wordpress.com

 

 

This week, First Lady Michelle Obama began her first trip to China, which will last until March 26, making her the fifteenth U.S. presidential spouse to visit that nation. Accompanying Mrs. Obama will be her mother Marian Robinson and, as did her predecessors Betty Ford, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush on their trips to China, the First Lady’s daughters.

In making official appearances at a university and two high schools in China, Michelle Obama is continuing her agenda of focusing young people on the crucial role that the pursuit of higher education has on their lives. Through social media and, in conjunction with PBS LearningMedia and Discovery Education, she is encouraging American students to follow her itinerary through China as she visits its historical and cultural sites, and to find commonalities with its students.

The social media technology which will keep American students updated on the First Lady’s trip in real time is a primary factor in the increased globalization which has marked the world in the last quarter of a century and has led to inevitable societal change within both the U.S. and China.

While the First Lady’s press office included mention of “current events and people of China” among the topics she hopes to focus on while there, her trip comes during a period when First Ladies, both present and former, were inevitably drawn into more overtly political issues during their time in China, especially on human rights, democratic change, and economic empowerment.

In this final of a three-part series on American First Ladies in China, the experiences of Barbara Bush, Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush are of an entirely different nature than those of  First Ladies Julia Grant, Nellie Taft, Lou Hoover, Edith Roosevelt and Edith Wilson, who first visited.

Barbara Bush, 1974-1975, 1989

When President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford made their official visit to China in 1975, among the small delegation of American officials in the party which welcomed them in Beijing was Barbara Bush. Her husband George Bush had been appointed Chief of the Liaison Office to the People’s Republic of China in the fall of 1974 and served until the end of 1975.

In living there with him during that time, Barbara Bush became only the second woman who was an American First Lady to do so, the first being Lou Hoover three-quarters of a century earlier.

When the Bushes first arrived with their spaniel dog named C. Fred, they were assigned a four-bedroom, two-bath apartment above his office, with a staff of six domestic workers and a driver. Barbara Bush took daily lessons to learn the Chinese language and intensively read up on the centuries of Chinese history.

On the couple’s first full day in their new land they bought bicycles to get around Beijing as the city’s entire native population did. Barbara Bush began to fully explore the ancient city on her bike.

Her official duties were essentially limited to socializing at receptions hosted by her husband for delegations of visiting Americans or Chinese groups that would be soon making visits to the U.S.

Barbara Bush’s perspective of this period in her life captured a closed Chinese society still reflective of the revolutionary era of the 1950s and 1960s.

She and her husband went on Sunday to the only church in Beijing which had only three congregants among the scant total of twenty who were Chinese; their daughter was the first person to be baptized in the entire of China since before the Maoist revolution.

Chinese citizens did not smile at or engage her, but did stare at her dog, a rare sight in that land where the species had been largely annihilated on the premise that food they consumed could be better used to feed humans.

On excursions to Canton, Nanking, Wuxi, Shanghai, Beidaihe, Loyang, Sian, Datong, Dalien, Daqing, she was struck by the abject poverty, government sterilization programs to reduce the population, and the hard manual labor shared equally by men and women.

The most startling aspect of her new life in China was the inescapable propaganda campaigns aimed at the Chinese people, both the massive signs (one of which read “Beware of the Imperialist Dogs Who Invaded Vietnam”) and loudspeakers blaring out Communist Party rhetoric. Without prior government approval, she was not permitted to explore China beyond a twenty miles radius of Beijing, as was true even for citizens.

During trips to cities like Harbin and Tientsin, at factories and commune farms, it was plainly obvious to her that output had been manipulated to suggest the increase was all a result of “the glorious leadership of Chairman Mao.” She also had all types of evidence that she and her husband were being spied upon through their calls, mail and activities.

One month and five days after moving into the White House as First Lady, Barbara Bush returned to China for the first time in fourteen years, joining her husband there on a state visit from February 25 to February 27, 1989.

In Tiananmen Square, Mrs. Bush was stunned by the changes that had occurred in Chinese society since she had last been there: more automobiles, citizens wearing various-colored clothes and not just the requisite drab jumpsuits of the Maoist era, a tremendous number of new buildings.

Citizens were more overtly friendly towards Mrs. Bush and her American staff and the tiny congregation of the obscure church she had once attended was now massive and had moved to a far larger gathering place.

During First Lady Barbara Bush’s 1989 trip to China, however, were also the first signs of conflict rising from the communist nation’s move towards a more op

en market economy and concurrent, growing expectations of freedom. At the reciprocal dinner traditionally given by a visiting head of state for the leadership of the host country, among the guests invited to this event hosted by George and Barbara Bush was the Chinese human rights dissident Fang Lizhi.

Insulted, the Chinese government leaders to be honored at the dinner threatened to not attend. When they appeared, President Bush tried to diplomatically justify the invitation of the dissident, but the Chinese leadership were elusive in their response. Only the following day did George and Barbara Bush learned that the Chinese police had stopped Fang Lizhi on his way to the dinner, and prevented his attendance.

Mrs. Bush had her own first-hand experience with the hard-line tactics of the Communist Chinese. While following as part of her official media entourage to cover her visit to the Forbidden City, several American journalists found themselves being physically shoved by Chinese security agents in an attempt to distance and separate them from the First Lady.

Admitting that the Chinese had become “way too rough” with the reporters, Barbara Bush later reflected, “I should have stopped the tour and told our hosts that unless they lightened up, the tour was over.”

When finally the official White House photographer was “socked so hard that her jaw was dislocated,” the First Lady put a halt to the tour to “lay down a few ground rules” to Chinese officials in the entourage.

It was a menacing incident which seemed to foreshadow those which would take place just four months after Barbara Bush was in China.

In June of that year, in the very same Tiananmen Square where the First Lady had been startled by the radical changes she saw in China, pro-democracy demonstrations symbolized by a large white statue of a woman carrying a torch were crushed by the government.

Through the then-recent technologies of instant replay video, however, the entire world was able to witness much of it as the crisis unfolded.

Hillary Clinton, 1995, 1998

While coming to China with an entirely different agenda than Pat Nixon, First Lady Hillary Clinton’s 1995 trip to Beijing left just as indelible a global impression.

She journeyed in what would be the first of her two visits as First Lady to China to address the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women meeting, a gathering of women from around the globe’s different cultures and nations united in their belief that, as Mrs. Clinton famously put it, “women’s rights are human rights.”

There had been considerable pressure before the conference for the First Lady to boycott the conference, due to the fact that China had imprisoned American citizen human rights activist Harry Wu in June when he had returned to his native country with a valid visa. It was officially announced that Hillary Clinton would not enter China unless he was first released. This possibility would prove humiliating to the Chinese government.

The Chinese ended up holding a sham trial which found him guilty of spying, and expelled Wu. Charges were made that China had agreed to freeing him in exchange for a promise that Hillary Clinton would attend the conference and not criticize its policies, to which the U.S. had agreed, but not such deal was made.

In fact, no such deal took place and when Hillary Clinton did go to China for the conference, she ended up becoming the first American dignitary to overtly speak out against both China’s human rights violations and media censorship on Chinese soil.

On September 5, 1995, after attending a morning session on “women and health security,” the American First Lady entered the Plenary Hall and made a forceful speech:

Her first trip to China also became an important turning point not only as an American First Lady but also the long arc of public life that Hillary Clinton would later embark upon.

As she put it, “To me, it was important to express how I felt and to do so as clearly as I could.”Three years later, from June 25 to July 3, 1998, Hillary Clinton returned to China, joining President Clinton on an official state visit there, accompanied by her daughter Chelsea Clinton and mother Dorothy Rodham.

While this trip entailed some of the more traditional aspects of trips by American First Ladies to China, such as a walk along the Great Wall, a grand state banquet in the Great Hall of the People, a cruise down the Li River to see its unusual mountain formations, and a quiet summer evening in an old tea house, Hillary Clinton also made public appearances which underlined many of the public issues important to her.

At the Shanghai Library, she gave a speech about the status of women and how all of society thrives when the entire population is permitted to contribute to it with their talents. To further emphasize her intrinsic belief in a woman’s right to legal equal treatment, she met with women lawyers working at the Center for the Women’s Law Studies at Beijing University, similar to a legal clinic she had once helped establish while a law professor at the University of Arkansas.

To signal her support of more religious freedom in China, the First Lady toured the recently restored Ohel Rachel Synagogue, where a once-thriving Jewish community had worshiped in Shanghai, and attended Sunday services at the state-sanctioned Protestant Chongwenmen Church.

She also joined the President in politely but unequivocally arguing against the cagey rationale of President Jiang Zemin that China’s oppression of Buddhist Tibet had “liberated” its people.

Despite the aspects of harsh control exercised over its people which China could often demonstrate, Hillary Clinton believed it was important to still visit such a nation for, “deep differences are created by history, geography and culture and those can be bridged only – if at all – through direction experience and relationships.”

Rosalynn Carter, 1981, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2007, 2009, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

To date, no future, incumbent or former First Lady has visited China more frequently than has Rosalynn Carter. Thus far, she has made ten trips there.

As she did during her tenure as First Lady, Rosalynn Carter worked alongside her husband Jimmy Carter in nearly all of his activities as a former President, including traveling with him around the world as they made trips on behalf of the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, advocating on a number of issues including human rights, fair elections, economic development and accessible health care.

In a series of trips to China which she has made for over thirty years now, Rosalynn Carter has accompanied her husband as they both initiated private sector efforts on behalf of a multitude of these issues and then continued to investigate the progress of the endeavors, expand and improve upon them.

After Chinese Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping and President Carter normalized diplomatic relations in 1979, rapid economic change began in China, starting with families being permitted to farm a percentage of state-owned property and to begin a profitable small business, like animal husbandry or bike repair. He then urged Rosalynn Carter and the President to come to China and see for themselves the resulting changes.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter proved to be the only incumbent President and First Lady since the Nixon presidency who did not visit China – yet they would soon enough earn a record by visiting that country more than any other President or First Lady.

In 1981, several months after leaving the White House, however, they did accept the offer of Deng to first visit and see how the nation was beginning to change.

More than any factor, the Carters were startled by the Chinese government’s genuine commitment to free enterprise.

In 1997, Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter returned at the invitation of The Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, to explore possibilities for an expanded relationship for the Carter Center in Chinese town elections, ascertain Chinese attitudes toward Korea, discover as much as possible the true state of affairs about life in China from top political leaders to peasants in villages.

They also raised issues the Chinese would rather ignore, such as its control of Tibet, Taiwan independence, religious and press freedom, persecution of dissidents, and other human rights issues.

Besides Beijing, they also conducted work at Jinan in Shandong province and the rural Zouping County which had not permitted any foreigners to enter until 1984.  Among the promising discoveries, the Carters found that citizens were largely benefiting from a relatively free economic system and able to more freely travel within China.

In 2001, just ten days before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter were making their third joint visit to China, joined by Carter Center trustees, to help monitor and improve village elections at the invitation of the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Although there were tense and sharp arguments on the matter of freedom of religion during discussions in Beijing’s Great Hall, which continued over dinner, it resulted in an invitation for the Carter Center to send a delegation for unrestricted assessment of the religious and Tibetan issues.

On this trip, they also went to Shanghai, and Zhouzhuang, in Jiangsu province.

The Carters returned again to China in September of 2003 to further their efforts of political democratization there and begin meeting also with students who represented the next generation of political and business leaders there.

By the time of their next visit, in December of 2007, the Carter Center had established a working office in China. Among the efforts of particular interest to Rosalynn Carter was one to help train grammar school teachers of blind and deaf children.

At an elaborate sixteen-course banquet in honor of the former President and First Lady, they met with, as the former President put it, “extremely successful entrepreneurs who have emerged from China’s shift to free enterprise and its remarkable economic growth.”

In January of 2009, the Carters returned to China to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of normalized US-Chinese diplomatic relations and to further expand the Carter Center’s working relations with government ministries.

During discussions on sensitive matters between the former President and Premier Wen Jiabao in the Hall of Purple Lights, Rosalynn Carter took notes of the discreet conversation.

After visiting a museum in Hong’an, the Carters were feted by Hubei’s governor at a banquet in Wuhan, overlooking the Yangtze River.

Despite frigid temperatures, the couple had a change to enjoy a quiet walk together along the river’s edge.

Before leaving, they visited the Hubei Provincial Museum, where they enjoyed a concert on enormous 2,400-year-old bells.

Perhaps the most unique trip to China made by Rosalynn Carter was the one she undertook in November of 2009 with her husband, son Chip and his wife, to join some three thousand volunteers from around the world in a project of the annual Habitat for Humanity Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project.

They flew into Chengdu, and drove to the project site in Qionglai City, Sichuan, where an earthquake had destroyed or damaged many of the residential buildings.

The Chinese building project was one of a five-Asian nation effort in the Mekong River basin.

Once again in September, the Carters were back in China in 2010, for meetings on issues of mutual concern to the Chinese government and the Carter Center, as well as making good on their promise to visit the World Expo in Shanghai.

After meetings in Beijing intended to encourage greater public access to government information, they flew to Zhijiang, in Hunan Province.

Here they participated in a statue dedication ceremony honoring American and both nationalist and communist “Flying Tiger” Chinese pilots who fought together to defeat the occupying Japanese.

Rosalynn Carter went on her own to Shanghai to tour the city’s Mental Health Center, and then delivered a speech which reflected her lifelong commitment to overcoming the societal stigma of mental health problems.

Before returning to the US, they went to Changsha, where the former President delivered a speech at Hunan University, then observing its 1034th year of teaching.

The following year, in December, the Carters again journeyed to China, seeking underwriting for ongoing Carter Center projects and establishing an office for it in Beijing. They also went to Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen, once a rural region that had become a booming center of free trade.

The most recent trip to China made by Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter was in December of 2012, intended to pursue new projects of the Carter Center there and also to meet with a new generation of rising political leaders.

In Beijing during this trip, Mrs. Carter spoke to the large staff of American Embassy workers, where she and the former President also learned of the surprising increase of Chinese citizens seeking to formalize their faith in church membership.

In Nanking, they visited a memorial to those Chinese massacred by Japanese troops in 1937, unveiled a statue honoring American and Canadian missionaries who helped found the original hospital there and helped dedicate a new one.

The 2012 Carter trip to China ended on Hainan Island, where the former President delivered a keynote address on “China’s Place in the World.”

It was during their first 2009 trip, as the Carters made the brief excursion to the Shanghai Airport that may have left the most indelible impression of the new China. As the former President described it:

“The first time I visited Shanghai, in 1949, there were only pedestrians, bicycles and rickshaws. After lunch with Consul General Beatrice Camp, we rode the magnetic-levitated train to the airport, a trip that takes an hour by automobile. Computer controlled, it left at exactly 3 p.m. and arrived at 3:07 p.m. It is the fastest train in the world, designed to run 310 miles per hour, and reached a speed of 269 mph on this short run of about 16 miles. As we flew past the Old City one centimeter above the tracks, I thought the amazing experience symbolized what is happening in China.”

Laura Bush, 2002, 2005, 2008

First Lady Laura Bush made three trips to China during her tenure as First Lady, not having accompanied her husband on a more official state visit there soon after the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York in September of 2001. Mrs. Bush’s China trips were relatively brief and did not take her extensively through the vast nation.

On February 21, 2002, she joined her husband President George W. Bush on a thirty-hour visit to China, her first. The date marked the anniversary of the President and Mrs. Nixon’s historic 1972 trip there.

Shortly after her morning arrival in China with the President, Laura Bush toured the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum and three of the most architecturally significant of the historic structures on the grounds, the Hall of Supreme Harmony (Taihe Dian) and Hall of Preserving Harmony (Baohe Dian), and Juanqinzhai, a palace built for Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799).

She was joined by the wives of both the U.S. and Chinese ambassadors to each country, led by assistant curator Zhu Chengru, an expert on Ming and Qing dynasty histories. Apart from official appearances with President Bush, she had time only alone to visit a Chinese Cuisine Show in a hotel.

In November of 2005, Laura Bush joined her husband on another trip to China. It was a largely ceremonial trip, with the First Lady visiting the famous Ming Dynasty Tombs as well as the Great Wall of China.

With their trip including a Sunday, the Bushes also attended a missionary Christian Church, highlighting the slight but growing trend towards a more lax attitude by the Chinese government towards freedom of religion.

The occasion of her third trip as First Lady to China was markedly celebratory and uniquely international.

From August 8 until August 11, 2008, Laura Bush joined her husband and their daughter Barbara, as well as her father-in-law former President George Bush, to attend the Opening Ceremonies and watch several competitions of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China.

“China was consumed with its global spectacle…We waved flags and cheered, moving from the Olympic swimming pool to the basketball stadium to the imported sand court for beach volleyball. It was a stunning sight to see the Chinese cheering for the American basketball players, chanting “Kobe, Kobe, Kobe!” she wrote, referencing Los Angeles Lakers player Kobe Bryant who was part of the U.S. Men’s Basketball team.

With her family members, she also participated in the dedication ceremony of the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Among the few official events scheduled with the Chinese government leadership, Laura Bush particularly recalled a luncheon hosted by President Hu Jintao in the Forbidden City.

“There were small meandering streams and gardens,” she wrote in her poetic memoir, “but the ancient rooms are now largely bare, leaving their past to our imagination.”

Although she refrained from chastising the Chinese government when she was in that nation, before her 2008 arrival in Beijing, she visited the Mae La refugee camp on the Tahi-Burma border, the largest of nine which sheltered 35,000 refugees.

Her visit was part of an ongoing campaign she had been focused on for several years, to bring global attention to the harsh regime of Burma and the need for inciting peaceful change within it. She publicly called upon Chinese officials to speak out more definitively on Burma’s human rights violations.

Hillary Clinton, 2009, 2010, 2011, 20012, 2012 (2)

Apart from her two trips to China as First Lady, Hillary Clinton would make five further visits there during her tenure as Secretary of State during the first term of the Obama Administration. This tallies to a total of seven trips to China by Mrs. Clinton.

In February of 2009, a month after assuming her new role as the U.S. Secretary of State, former First Lady Hillary Clinton made her first trip to Asia, visiting Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, and China on what she described as a “listening tour” that was “intended to really find a path forward.”

During her three days in China, beginning on February 20, had Secretary Clinton meeting with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and  State Counselor Dai Bingguo. The topics of their discussion were general in nature, covering economic, security and environmental protection issues.

She returned again in May of 2010, to co-lead the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue.

At that event, she pointed with particular pride to being able to sign a student exchange agreement, affirming an intent of President Obama to send some 100,000 American students to China by 2014 to learn the language, culture and business models of the Chinese.

At the same event, the Chinese government announced it would provide scholarships to 10,000 American students.

The following year, at the end of July, 2011, she returned to China, this time to meet with Dai Bingguo in Shenzhen just as the U.S. government was on the verge of potential debt default, a matter of anxiety as well for China, its largest foreign creditor. At the time, China owned almost $1.2 trillion of U.S. Treasury debt.

Before she had arrived on the mainland, Mrs. Clinton was in Hong Kong where she expressed a calm confidence about the looming crisis: “I’m confident that Congress will do the right thing and secure a deal on the debt ceiling, and work with President Obama to take the steps necessary to improve our long-term fiscal outlook.”

Less than a year later, in early May of 2012, Secretary Clinton was joined by her fellow Cabinet member Treasury Secretary Timothy  Geithner for the fourth joint meeting of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue with Bingguo and the Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan. The meetings took place in Beijing’s Great Hall, again with the objective was to strengthen the U.S.-China bond in arenas like culture, education, sports, science and technology, and women’s issues.

That trip, however, put Clinton in the middle of a drama involving blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng. He had escaped house arrest and, after finding his way to the Embassy of the United States, requested the Americans to negotiate his safety in continuing to live in China.

Doing this right before Mrs. Clinton arrived for her meetings, however, the situation “exploded into an absolute circus” as one aide put it. Finally, Secretary Clinton personally negotiated to arrange for Chen’s asylum in the U.S.

Although Chen begged for a seat on the former First Lady’s plane returning to the U.S. she arranged for him to make the trip on a separate flight, and thereby saved the Chinese government from a sense of humiliation on the matter and move it as an example of human rights violations off the agenda of the imminent meetings.

When Hillary Clinton called Chen to inform him of all this, he burst with gratitude at her over the phone, “‘I want to kiss you!”

Four months before she left her position as U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton made her fifth and final trip to China in that official role.

When she arrived in early September of 2012 for this final trip, however, she discovered that her scheduled meeting with Vice President Xi Jinping had been abruptly cancelled. The reason given was that he was suffering from an injured back. She did, however, meet with President Hu and other leading officials over the next two days.

Most of the geopolitical intelligentsia, however, was convinced that it was a result of the U.S. attempting to involve itself in a conflict among China and its Asian nation neighbors over disputed territorial maritime rights in the South and East China seas, which are believed to hold rich lodes of minerals and other natural resources.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a strained statement that  nations not part of the region should “respect the choice of the relevant parties, hold an impartial position on the issue and make more efforts in favor of regional peace and stability.”

The decidedly Communist Chinese newspaper Global Times more harshly and personally declared that “many Chinese” resented Secretary Clinton.

On September fifth, during this final trip as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton gave a larger context to the smaller conflicts which continued to arise between the United States and China: “Our two nations are trying to do something that has never been done in history, which is to write a new answer to the question of what happens when an established power and a rising power meet.”

Not unlike her 1995 speech in China gently chastising it for ignoring women’s rights and human rights when she made her initial trip there as First Lady, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State had overtly challenged that nation on a variety of issues. She called it “despicable” that both Russia and China were unwilling to take a firm stand against the harsh violence being imposed by Syria’s President Bashar Assad upon his people. She warned African continent nations that the radical changes being wrought in their countries by Chinese development could create a “new colonialism” there if they did not firmly guide their own destiny. She also boldly criticized China for blocking parts of the Internet from being accessed by its citizens.

On March 18, 2012, to mark the 40th anniversary of the historic first trip to China by an incumbent President and First Lady, Richard and Pat Nixon, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke before the United States Institute of Peace on the significance of that first adventure.

In her remarks, Clinton also acknowledged that United States and China had become inextricably linked in so many vital ways, and pondered with a sense of hope about their future together by looking back on how far the relationship had developed in that time:

“In 1972, [the U.S. and China] were connected only through a narrow official channel. Today, the web of connections linking our nations is vast and complex, and reaches into just about every aspect of our societies….

The opportunities before us are also shared, and they define our relationship much more than the threats….We have the chance, if we seize it, to work together to advance prosperity, pursue innovation, and improve the lives of our people and others worldwide…..

We are trying to do this without entering into unhealthy competition, rivalry, or conflict . . . and without falling short on our responsibilities to the international community.

We are, together, building a model in which we strike a stable and mutually acceptable balance between cooperation and competition. This is uncharted territory. And we have to get it right, because so much depends on it….

Interdependence means that one of us cannot succeed unless the other does as well . . . This is, by definition, incredibly difficult.

So let us remember and take inspiration from how far apart our countries were when President Nixon landed in Beijing and how much we have accomplished together since then . . . It is now up to us to make sure that the future is even more promising than the past.”

 

In this second of a three-part series, the National First Ladies Library will offer the first narrative about the experiences of the fourteen First Ladies who have preceded Michelle Obama in visiting China, unfolding chronologically to also provide a sense of developing US-Chinese relations over a century and a half and how what was once an entirely mysterious culture of what was so long referred to by westerners as the “Orient” has evolved into a 21^st century society.

As First Lady Michelle Obama prepares to make her first trip to China, she is first visiting the Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School, a Chinese-immersion, International Baccalaureate, elementary school in Washington, DC. After hearing a report from sixth-grade students about their own trip to China last year, she will make informal remarks encouraging students all across the United States to follow the progress of her visit there, and then listen to the school’s pre-kindergarten students as they make conversation with her in the Chinese language they have thus far learned.

The Washington Yu Ying School was named to remember one by the same name which was created for girls in Beijing 103 years ago by Tzen-Kuei Wang, an aide to the Dowager Empress, the first in that country to reform teaching from a tutorial system to the classroom method. Such a shift towards a more western model, however, was not always welcomed by China’s changing leadership.

In the nearly eighty-year period covered by the first article in this series, as First Ladies from Julia Grant to Edith Wilson went to China, and then Eleanor Roosevelt was prevented from visiting, that nation underwent enormous political and cultural change, shifting from an ancient dynastic rule to one of hard-rule communism, wrought by the 1949 revolution. In 1966, the leader of that revolution, Mao Zedong was then serving as the Communist Party Chairman and imposed harsh edicts intended to purge Chinese society of not merely western capitalist influence but also traditional customs of his own nation. It was known as the Cultural Revolution.

Throughout the two decades which followed, events during the trips to China by three incumbent America First Ladies and two former First Ladies reflected the growing change in Chinese society and its increasingly open relationship with the U.S. And while there was never any change in the way the name of its capital was pronounced in Chinese, in English “Peking” was increasingly spelled as “Beijing,” perhaps as a distinction between the old and new China.

In 1972, just six years after the Cultural Revolution, not just the people of China and the United States but the entire world were stunned as a new era suddenly seemed to be dawning when it was learned that Chairman Mao was welcoming the first visit to his nation by an American President and his wife, Richard and Pat Nixon.

Pat Nixon, 1972, 1976

Perhaps no American First Lady is better remembered for her visit to China than is Pat Nixon.

She is the first among the seven most recent First Ladies who have done so, and the first to make the journey as an incumbent President’s spouse and the first to visit it at any point in their lives when it was a communist nation, following its 1949 revolution.

Beyond these facts, however, this First Lady’s visible activities in the People’s Republic of China during the February 21 to February 28, 1972 presidential trip there, were vital to the media and the public realization of the unprecedented visit’s monumental significance.

Too, for a presidential spouse who never encouraged publicity for herself during an Administration embattled by a war and political scandals, Pat Nixon’s seven days in China proved to be a turning point for her personally, a moment when the world focused its attention and then acclaimed her.

Long before the historic trip to this communist land by a famously anti-communist was publicly divulged, Mrs. Nixon kept fully apprised of the secret negotiating which occurred before it was finalized. In the last planning stages, Chinese leader Chou En-lai suggested to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “Bring Mrs. Nixon.”

In preparation, Pat Nixon read State Department dossiers on the communist party leadership and studied its hierarchal power structure, so she could remain always aware of who asked her what and tailor what she said in response to them. She learned several key phrases in spoken Chinese.

She also familiarized herself with the ubiquitous “little red book” of China, a collection of remarks entitled Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong, requisite reading for every Chinese citizen intended to rigorously inculcate them on communist principals.

With her preparation, Pat Nixon was better able to understand the thinking of those she encountered and who were her constant guides and companions around China. Whenever Maoist rhetoric was spewed at her, the American First Lady smilingly quipped to simultaneously acknowledge but end the lecturing: “Oh yes, I am acquainted with his philosophy.” She cautiously avoided efforts to debate her on the greater virtues of socialism versus democracy without praising her own nation or denigrating theirs.

All she would concede was that Chinese communism seemed to offer “a well-rounded education.” The only hint of her view on communism was a subtle remark that she preferred the historical buildings instead of the monolithic ones constructed since the Cultural Revolution.

From the moment the doors to Air Force One swung open upon landing in Beijing, and Pat Nixon stepped out wearing a winter coat in an eye-popping red color that was the same shade as the Chinese flag, there was no missing her presence anywhere on the trip; in that color, she stood out not only from President Nixon and other US state department officials, but also the thousands of everyday Chinese citizens and officials who uniformly wore drab navy unisex clothes.

In making her numerous appearances for all but one day of her week in China, Pat Nixon also made a point of wearing the same red cloth coat. Not only could she not be ignored, but it seemed to emphasize an important subliminal message: here was the wife of the wealthy, capitalist world leader in appearing in the same clothes on numerous consecutive days and, furthermore, in the emblem color of China, a tacit nod of respect.

For eight years, from 1953 to 1961, Pat Nixon had traveled the world in her role as vice president’s spouse, pioneering what is now the fairly routine pattern of American Presidents’ spouses on foreign trips: she maintained a separate public schedule from her husband, not resting in palaces and cruising on royal yachts but visiting hospitals, schools, markets and other venues where average citizens lived and worked, focusing spontaneously on a few individuals in each place. She called it her “personal diplomacy.”

Since President Nixon spent the majority of his time in China behind closed door in meetings, the large international media contingent that was covering the visit ended up following Pat Nixon: she talked with workers at a glass factory, watched physicians perform acupuncture at a free clinic, listened to grade-school children recite their lessons in a schoolroom, and even sampled the delicacy of goldfish in a restaurant kitchen.

Through the media, however, the general public which watched the television coverage of Mrs. Nixon learned as much about her as a person as it did on the communist Chinese as people. Countering the misperceptions of her as a woman who rose from privilege, she delighted peasants at the Evergreen People’s Commune when, as she pet a pig behind the ear, told of how she had labored as a working-class child and teenager on her father’s farm in southern California and managed to find time to raise a prize-winning pig.

Among her scheduled activities in China, First Lady Michelle Obama will visit the Chinese panda bears in Chengdu, but American interest in the rare species was prompted by Mrs. Nixon’s intense curiosity when she first set eyes on some during her tour of Peking Zoo.

Later at dinner, she animatedly went on about the pandas to Chou En-lai.

Some sources claim it was either her enthusiasm for the unique Chinese pandas or her pointing to a pack of his cigarettes which had a picture of a panda on it which led him to make an outright gift to Mrs. Nixon of two panda bears, which she promptly accepted and donated to the people of the United States.

A special habitat pen was created for them at the National Zoo in Washington, and Mrs. Nixon presided over the ceremony in which the panda bear habitat was officially opened to the public.

Surprisingly flirtatious, Chou En-Lai made no secret of his affection for Mrs. Nixon. Less receptive was the notorious “First Lady of China,” the formidable Jiang Jing, Mao’s wife who possessed a growing degree of power during the Cultural Revolution.

Controlling all aspects of national culture so that it aligned with Maoist doctrine, from art to music to theater, she and Mrs. Nixon met only once, when the American President and his wife attended a ballet called The Red Detachment of Women, which she had written, cast, produced and directed.

What Pat Nixon could not know at the time was that this humorless doctrinal communist leader was secretly an avid fan of Gone with the Wind.

As the newspaper Chicago Today put it:

“…the President talked business and politics with Chinese leaders while his wife did the important work. Mrs. Nixon’s presence in Peking and her unfailingly warm, gracious conduct are accomplishing something that official discussions, important as they are, cannot do.  She is establishing direct and friendly contact with the Chinese people on a normal human level; the level where children and families and food and service and health are the most important things.”

Another newspaper said that despite President Nixon’s resulting pact with China to not dominate any Asian Pacific nation, the American people had remained “much misunderstood and denounced by enemy countries as being war-minded imperialists,” but that Pat Nixon had singularly helped dispel that notion in China.

Although Richard Nixon would make numerous return trips to China, as a former President, Pat Nixon only accompanied him back there once, in February 1976.

During that visit, Mao was ailing badly and appointed “the First Lady of China” to this time take the central political role over other leaders to serve as escort.

Pat Nixon would again employ her “personal diplomacy” in a visit to the Soviet Union shortly after the China trip, joining President Nixon. On her own, she would also visit three African nations and two South American countries.

Apart from her having the first Chinese panda bears brought to the United States, the role which Pat Nixon played during her husband’s historic visit to China lives on in perpetuity through the repeated performances of the modern opera, Nixon in China written by John Adams, with music by Philip Glass.

Betty Ford, 1972, 1975

In a manner entirely different from Pat Nixon, her immediate successor Betty Ford also helped to also instantly forge empathy between the Chinese and Americans when she visited China as an incumbent First Lady in December of 1975.

In June of 1972, six months after Pat Nixon first went to China, congressional spouse Betty Ford followed in her wake, joining her husband, who was then serving as House Minority Leader, on a junket there.

The only real challenge she encountered was having to politely consume the sea slugs that were served to her on more than occasion at dinners.

She found the Chinese people to be “much more cheerful” than Russians, who she encountered on an earlier trip to the Soviet Union. “I’m sure there was just as much surveillance,” she wrote, “but it wasn’t so obvious; you felt more at ease.” She was also startled by the control displayed among young Chinese children, and their disciplined marching to martial music.

Exploring Manchuria in the far north, Betty Ford found herself the object of curiosity, there having been no non-Chinese people to visit the region in a quarter of a century.

She also visited an all-women’s rice commune, bought Thermos bottles imprinted with the ubiquitous panda bear and, like Pat Nixon, watched a full medical operation performed with acupuncture rather than anesthesia.

While she found the red wine to be of good quality, she was perplexed by the national population’s propensity for orange soda.

During her trip to China as First Lady, where she and President Ford were also joined by their daughter Susan, Betty Ford tried to see sites she had missed on her first trip, mostly museums.

She also had the chance to meet an ailing Chairman Mao, who would die within the year. It was her visit to a ballet class at the Central May 7th College of Art in Beijing that ended up becoming the biggest news of the presidential trip.

Discovering that she had enjoyed a career in modern dance before her marriage, some of the students invited Mrs. Ford to join them in a rehearsal.

Although she found it “quite different from anything I had ever tried, particularly in the hand movements,” this American First Lady who was always game to pose or perform publicly in sometimes delicate or humorous situations her peers usually avoided, “took off my shoes and worked in my stocking feet.”

News photographs showing her in perfect professional form dancing alongside the young communist students became an international sensation.

As she recalled: “My act was hailed as having done more to cement relations between the United States and China than all the talks of diplomats. I told Jerry he could stop talking to diplomats. I’d already made the world safe for détente, but he didn’t listen.”

There was one other legacy resulting from Betty Ford’s two trips to China, albeit more personal to her. During her times there she found herself especially drawn to the embroidered silks she found in the marketplaces.

She had several gowns made for herself in a Chinese style, using the mandarin collar so often that it became something of a signature style for her.

Not only did she often wear these to formal White House functions, but one example of these in a mint green is now the gown which represents her in the Smithsonian Institution’s famous First Lady collection of clothing displayed to the public.

Lady Bird Johnson, 1981

Although she visited Hong Kong at the time her husband was serving as Vice President of the United States, it was not until June of 1981 Lady Bird Johnson was able to explore China.

Making the visit there in her capacity as a trustee of the National Geographic Society, the former First Lady specifically went to the nation in search of active archeological sites.

Little information is readily available about which specific sites she visited beyond Beijing.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, 1982

In the immediate years following President Kennedy’s assassination, his widow worked assiduously in planning his presidential library and museum, her strong opinion in support of then-relatively unknown Chinese-born I.M. Pei as the designated architect.

Two years after Pei’s inspiring JFK Presidential Library and Museum was dedicated, he returned a favor to his friend Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by inviting her to visit China with him.

The primary event of the October 1982 trip was the opening of the new Fragrant Hill Hotel, north of Beijing, which Pei had been commissioned to design by the communist Chinese government.

Jackie Onassis experienced a China in the midst of change, archaic aspects of life there showing growing pains as element of luxury associated with capitalism were being haltingly introduced.

From Hong Kong, she and the Pei party of guests visited Canton, Kwelin, Soochow, Hangchow, Xian, Shanghai and Beijing.

They would get about on modern trains with massive picture windows dreamily overlooking ancient landscapes to a droning motor bus with a broken toilet, to limousines retooled out of old Soviet Union Zis cars.

The former First Lady found herself in some questionable accommodations that ranged from crumbling cottages to unkempt hotel suites.

The legendary politeness of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was, however, most tested when one day she was simply met at the hotel by officials who, as she later joked, “kidnapped” her.

The promise had been that she would be shown “special places” that non-Chinese visitors were never permitted to visit.

No matter how she resisted their offers, they insisted until finally one day a tank-like limousine awaited her at her hotel lobby and Chinese officials essentially ambushed and, as she put it “kidnapped” her for an entire day.

Even though she no longer had the protection of U.S. Secret Service agents as a presidential widow (due to her 1968 remarriage), Jackie Onassis was famous for spontaneously going on adventures.

Hustled into a retooled Zis limousine, she was led on an exhausting all-day tour of sites by a Communist party official bent on didactically inculcating her with visual proof of socialist superiority of citizen services. She soon noticed that the jitney bus of her friends were often arriving at these sites as she was leaving and waved forlornly from behind the window of her car at them, longing to be with them rather than alone.

Ultimately, Jackie Onassis saw no more than her friends had. Once the limo pulled into the entry drive of her hotel and its engine was off, the former First Lady bolted from the “clutches of my kidnappers” as she wrote a friend to join her friends for a cocktail at day’s end.

The trip also held great high points.

Mrs. Onassis was permitted to walk down in the lower exhibition space where Xian’s six-thousand historic life-size terra cotta warrior figures were on display.

It was the calm voyage and astounding views of her trip down the Li River which left the greatest impression on the former First Lady and the other guests of I.M. Pei.

As they proceeded deeper into the valley, there before their very eyes were the hairpin-shaped mountains familiar to them in ancient Chinese paintings and drawings. To ensure a peaceful experience, the noisy motor of their vessel was turned off and was instead pulled by a tugboat.

Until seeing these themselves, they had assumed the old pictures had exaggerated the bulbous mountains. A fellow guest recalled that, with her fantastical imagination, Jackie Onassis felt that she had indeed been transported back in time to the period the paintings had been done, the 8th century.

Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving recalled, “There were other tourists on the boat, and one woman would say to another, ‘That’s Jackie!’ Even in A.D. 800 China on the Li River, they knew Jackie!”

In fact, among the very few known images of Jackie Kennedy Onassis in China was snapped inadvertently: as American Hawk Moore posed in front of the Forbidden City entrance, there was the famous former First Lady in the background, the sole figure in a white coat among a sea of curious Chinese citizens in green, black and blue.

The very elegance of Pei’s modern hotel with its one-hundred foot atrium, although commissioned by the communist leadership was resented by party workers employed in constructing the building to completion.

The hotel rooms occupied by the former First Lady and Pei’s other guests had non-functioning restrooms and in the lobby modern abstract canvases commissioned by the architect were deliberately damaged.

Despite all she had been through, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis refused to believe Hoving who insisted these were acts of sabotage. “She could never understand that people could have that kind of dedicated, blind evil.”

The world’s most famous woman at the time, recognizable by simply her face, Jackie Kennedy Onassis may still have had the last laugh.

While in China, she learned that her friend, French photographer Mark Riboud would be photographing the University of Beijing and asked to join him. He agreed.

“I introduced her as my assistant. She took notes, I took pictures. For an entire day, among students at the cafeteria and in dormitories, with professors and even the rector, she went completely unrecognized. This greatly delighted her,” he recalled.

Nancy Reagan, 1984

During her six days in China, from April 26 to May 1, 1984, Mrs. Reagan’s public appearances were made with the President.

These included a climb up the Great Wall, watching a Rainbow Bridge Township Kindergarten class performance in Shanghai, a tour of historic sites like the historic terra cotta figures in Xi’an, and meeting with Chairman Deng Xiaoping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Mrs. Reagan made an especially strong impression on Deng, so much so that before she left, he flirtatiously encouraged her to return to China, “without your husband.”

Among the state gifts which the Chinese presented to the President and First Lady of the United States was an unusually personal one.

Created in the color that was both emblematic of the People’s Republic of China and her own well-known favorite shade of “Reagan Red,” was a formal gown designed in a traditional Chinese style, made of embroidered silk.

When Chinese President Xiannian Li and his wife were honored at the White House  a year later, the First Lady wore the gown their government had given her, in a nod of respect.

And President Li told her that Chairman Deng had instructed him to remind Mrs. Reagan that she must return alone to see him in Beijing, “without your husband.”

It was a flattering, if unconventional, sign of just how much closer relations between the two nations had become.

With the White House announcement that First Lady Michelle Obama will be in China on a solo international trip from March 20 to March 26, her first to that nation, numerous media outlets have contacted the National First Ladies Library to place her historic journey within an historical context.

This popular incumbent First Lady’s forthcoming visit to Asia’s largest country will find her in Beijing for four days, Xi’an for one day, and Chengdu for two days.

In the last century and a half, fourteen American First Ladies have visited China. Some went before their husbands became Presidents of the United States, others went there while they were incumbent First Ladies and still others made their first journey to the vast nation only after leaving the White House. Several made numerous trips to China before, during or after their tenure as presidential spouses. It covers a period of tremendous change within China, as it went from a nation ruled by dynastic families, still feudal in nature, to a republic during which conflict immediately arose between those seeking to transform into into a socialist state and those favoring a more democratic one.

In this multi-part series, the National First Ladies Library will offer the first narrative about the experiences of these fourteen women in China. Unfolding chronologically, it  provides a sense of developing US-Chinese relations over a century and a half and how what was once an entirely mysterious culture, so long referred to by westerners as the “Orient”, has evolved into a 21^st century society.

Julia Grant, 1879

It was while making her unprecedented world tour with her husband, former President Ulysses S. Grant that Julia Grant became the first (former) First Lady to visit China.

The Grants  landed in England on May 28, 1877 and from there traveled the globe, treated as touring American monarchs in the British Isles, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Russia, Austria, and Germany, Burma, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Nearly a year into their travels, they arrived in China on the night of May 5, 1879 when they first landed in Canton. The entire population was said to have been ordered out to greet the “American King and Queen.”

In both closed carriages on land or aboard the U.S. ship Ashuelot by water, the Grants made stops in Hong Kong, Macao, Woosung, Shangkai, Pei-ho and Chefoo.

Julia Grant became the first of numerous other First Ladies to marvel at what she called the “great Chinese wall,” at the base of which she picked up pebbles and shells as souvenirs, as well as having the record of her visit discreetly painted on the wall.

Along the way, they were feted with endless ceremonies, cannon salutes, welcoming banners, flying flags, thousands of swaying, lit paper lanterns, torchlight parades, and overwhelming firework displays.

This fancy American matriarch was a bit of a novelty for the Chinese. While aboard a rustic flatboat, she glanced into her mirror and noticed three members peering into an open porthole window as she was methodically dressing in her many layers of clothing and decorating her extravagant hairstyle.

Never a teetotaler, Julia Grant admitted that her flatboat junket was made all the merrier by bottles of claret wine.

In Canton, there was so much formal ceremony and so many officials she was expected to meet, the former First Lady was “greatly disappointed….as I…did not have an opportunity to see anything of the city.” Still, she proudly recorded, she did “get one afternoon for shopping.” The highly acquisitive Mrs. Grant managed to select, “at first sight,” jade pieces, enamel boxes, embroidered silks and “best of all,” two massive blue cloisonné vases.

Julia Grant’s most interesting exposure to the Chinese culture was in Tientsin. Although permitted to take tea with the legendary Viceroy Li Hung-Chang aboard ship, she was otherwise sequestered with women.

In light of her status, however, the former First Lady was honored at a special luncheon hosted by the Viceroy’s wife, an unprecedented gesture, and it proved to be the first time that she was even seen by the six other women guests.

Perceived as still holding some form of inherent power, Julia Grant was conveyed through the streets of Tientsin as a potentate, seated on a chair which was raised on a platform and carried by four men, veiled from public sight by a yellow silk curtain.

With the grand flourish of trumpets, her chair was placed on the stone vestibule and the curtains drawn, where Lady Li helped her rise and proceed into the court dining room.

There was a mutual fascination between Julia Grant and Lady Li when it came to clothing.

For the first time in her life, Mrs. Grant saw a woman in a pair of pants, the pair worn by Lady Li being made of brown velvet brocade over which she wore a pearl and jade-encrusted tunic. Julia Grant removed her sizable collection of jewelry, a stickpin, earrings, necklace, rings and brooch and handed them over to the Viceroy’s wife who was curious to examine the items closely.

The meal was a mix of eastern and western custom, the food served on French china accompanied by Chinese chopsticks.

When Mrs. Grant and the other American women proved unable to eat much with them, a sterling silver service from England was brought out. Each course alternated between European and Chinese foods but, Mrs. Grant recalled, “out of complement to my hostess, I partook only of the Chinese courses.”

Noticing how the Chinese women ate nuts in between courses, Julia Grant took to the habit and introduced it in the United States at dinners she would thereafter host.

After the meal, Lady Li staged a Chinese pantomime performance for her guests. So curious about how it was all proceeding, the Viceroy himself was spotted peering into the room – until noticed, when he vanished from the sight of the women.

The high and wide walls of the Forbidden City left Julia Grant feeling “safe indeed if on the inside,” unlike the dusty, unpaved streets outside of it. In Peking, she was not invited with her husband to meet the young Prince Kung or the Prince Regent.

When she learned that the Prince Regent had quipped to her son “what a pity” that he had only a daughter and not a son, Mrs. Grant retorted with a bit of American indignation over gender inequality: “[W]e do not agree with Prince Kung; we are very proud of our little girlie.”

Lou Hoover, 1899

On February 11, 1899, the day after Lou Henry Hoover was married, the newlyweds set sail from California for China, where her mining engineer groom Herbert Hoover would be working.

Upon settling into a home in Tientsin, she began an intensive study of her imminent life in the new country – the culture, the regional differences, and the history, as well as the language. Even learning several different Chinese dialects, Lou Hoover spoke Chinese more easily than her husband and often translated materials for him.

She also began making trips around the country, not only to Peking but some of the interior provinces.

Her interest in Chinese porcelains prompted a lifelong passion for collecting samples of various period porcelains, especially of the Ming and K’ang periods.

One year into their residency in Tientsin, in June of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion broke out.

This was a famous series of violent attacks on and murder of foreigners in a portion of the port city where they predominantly resided by bands of native Chinese who resented the growing foreign influences on Chinese society.

Throughout the crisis, Lou Hoover displayed a brave calm, helping build protective barricades, caring for those wounded by gunshots, and assuming management of a small local cow herd to ensure fresh dairy products for those living within the protected area.

Eventually troops from the U.S., England, France and Russia arrived and patrolled the foreign-resident region along with civilians, like Lou Hoover who worked guard duty.

Before, during and after the Boxer Rebellion, Lou Hoover made her way around China by bicycle, but during the conflict she also learned to fearlessly use a pistol as a means of self-protection.

Despite their home being riddled with bullets and shells, the Hoovers remained unharmed.

Although Lou Hoover never completed the book she’d begun about living in China, in 1909 she did author a definitive article on Tzu Hsi, the Dowager Empress of China.

Nellie Taft, 1901

With more of a  taste for fearless adventure than most First Ladies, and a wanderlust which never abandoned her, Nellie Taft made it her business to get into China and explore alone, leaving her children with her husband, then in Manila serving as the American governor-general of the recently-colonized Philippine Islands.

The atrocities of guerrilla fighters against U.S. military forces had upset the delicate peace that had begun to settle on the islands and this, along with the intense heat had set her on edge.

“I would have to get out of the Philippine Islands or suffer a nervous breakdown,” she later wrote, “I agreed that it would be well for me to ‘run up to China.’”

The fact that she was simply going to “run up to China” in October of 1901, not long after the Boxer Rebellion had been quelled, was not even to stop her, believing that the “alarums of war” meant she was “likely to see more of China ‘from the inside’” than had she gone “during a period of complete calm.”

A year earlier, upon her initial arrival in Asian waters, Nellie Taft was talked out of her determination to explore Shangkai because the Boxer Rebellion was then raging, and she was able only to stop briefly in Hong Kong, before heading on to Manila.

Mrs. Taft sailed into Shanghai and proceeded on to Peking. Aboard the S.S. Hamburg, she delighted in drinking the “best beer on draught that I have tasted since leaving Germany.”

When she arrived at the Temple of Heaven, Nellie Taft witnessed this famous place of meditation for generations of Chinese emperors still being used as barracks for U.S. troops who had landed in China to help protect American citizens during the Boxer Rebellion.

Since Tzu Hsi and her retinue, having retreated from the Forbidden City during the fighting, was about to return to her palace, Mrs. Taft was able to look briefly through some of the royal residences.

Although she found the streets of Peking to be narrow and pungent, and a hotel employee attempted to steal her watch, she wrote of Peking with allure, “This place is very much out of the world.”

For this future First Lady, however, failing to closely inspect ancient historic sites during her “very busy days sightseeing” was more than compensated for by the chance to buy “oriental artifacts” at great prices.

“Then there were wonderful tales of valuable ‘loot,’” she admitted. “Not necessarily illegitimate loot, but curious and art treasures in the hands of Chinese themselves who were selling things at ridiculously low figures and, sometimes, with a fascinating air of great mystery. There is some allurement in the idea of bargaining for priceless porcelains, ivories, silks and Russian sables behind closed and double-locked doors, in the dark depths of some wretched Chinese hovel.”

Besides her purchases of numerous bolts of embroidered silks, Nellie Taft was pleased to be gifted with a three-foot brass Buddha and a blue porcelain dog from American officials.

She returned to Shangkai, continuing to tour and shop. And rarely failing to note the appearance of the opposite sex of nations she visited, Mrs. Taft declared northern Chinese men to be, “by the way, stunning looking men.”

Instead of remaining in Shangkai for the steamer that would return her to the Philippines, Nellie Taft decided to use the time for a houseboat excursion down the Yangtze River. Not only did she find the local residents on the shore hostile in their stares at her, but she learned that the clay mounds which her vessel often shored upon were graves.

Edith Roosevelt, 1924, 1932

Edith Roosevelt visited China as part of a multi-nation tour she made in February 1924, proceeding there from California to Hawaii, and afterwards visiting Japan.

Accompanied by her adult son Kermit, she entered a nation which was functioning under a new anti-royalist republic.

Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt was considerably uncomfortable in a land where a societal fracture was occuring between nationalist forces and those seeking to enforce a communist form of control without any freedom of religious choice over the vast and varied population of China.

In Peking, she made the rounds of the typical western tourists, from the Forbidden City, to the Summer Palace of the legendary Empress H’sui, the latter site prompting her memory of the rich and ornate tapestries, fabrics, scrolls and other gifts the monarch had sent her in the White House.

She was unable to shake a sense of vanishing hope as she looked over ancient but now rarely utilized temples of different Eastern religious sects once so central to Chinese life. “The great spaces of the Temple of Heaven still mark the searching for spiritual light which no longer exists in China.”

Some nine years later, Edith Roosevelt made a second but far briefer visit to China in the last days of December, 1932. President Herbert Hoover had appointed her son, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. as Governor of the Philippine Islands.

Nearly two months earlier, however, Hoover had been defeated for re-election by the husband of the former First Lady’s niece-by-marriage, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Determined to visit the Philippines as her late husband had always hoped to do, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt first stopped in Shanghai, China before proceeding on to Manila.

While in Shanghai, the former First Lady turned down many invitations to private dinners and receptions from both Chinese and foreign political figures but at the last minute changed her mind and accepted one from Mr. and Mrs. Sun Fo, the son and daughter-in-law of the late “Father of the Chinese Republic” Sun Yat-sen.

Of course, Edith Roosevelt’s famous stepdaughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth had been the first in the family to tour through China.

In her heyday as “Princess Alice” this Presidential daughter had not only met the old Dowager Empress during her tour of several Asian nations, but had not at all been  intimidated by her.

When this First Daughter married in the White House in 1906, the Empress sent her crates full of lavish, exquisite gifts, from bolts of embroidered silk cloth to porcelain urns to lacquered black wood chests to enameled boxes to multiple pieces of carved jade and ivory jewelery.

The greatest gift from the Chinese Empress which Miss Roosevelt long after remembered, however, was not an object but a living being. It was a little Pekingese dog which the First Daughter named Manchu.

Edith Wilson, 1929

“Pekin[g] is the most fascinating city I have ever seen,” wrote former First Lady Edith Wilson to her brother Randolph during her stay there in June of 1929. Her visit to China was part of a multi-nation voyage she made with a cousin who was working on the rebuilding of a Japanese hospital he helped establish. Landing at Shanghai, she and her party proceeded to Peking by train.

Ensconced in a large corner hotel suite, she had a breathtaking view of the blue-tiled roofs of the Forbidden City’s buildings which entranced her.

Much of her time was spent being feted as the widow of the man who had proposed the League of Nations, and she was the center of attention at nearly two dozen feasts of twenty-course meals hosted by diplomats and wealthy Chinese business and social leaders.

While game to try all types of exotic foods, some of it made her ill. Rallying to full strength, she made acute observations in her letters about the radical difference between the squalor of the impoverished majority and the luxuries afforded the elite class.

From Peking, Edith Wilson proceeded to Mukden, Manchuria where her world voyage would continue, her next port-of-call being Toyko.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If there is any First Lady that might have been expected to visit China, it would be Eleanor Roosevelt. During World War II, she became the first incumbent First Lady to make overseas trips, and do so without the President, travelling by air and sea to the British Isles, the Caribbean and the Pacific, as a representative of the Red Cross. As a former First Lady, both in her official capacity as a representative of the United Nations and as a private citizen, she was at home around the globe, visiting nations in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, South America, Eastern and Western Europe.

With the Chinese Communist Revolution leader Mao Zedong establishing the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, however, and the retreat of nearly 3 million nationalist Chinese with their leader Chiang Kai-shek to the island of Taiwan, however, the United States Department of State placed a firm ban on any travel to China by American citizens.

 

In 1957, her friend, New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff whose newspaper carried Mrs. Roosevelt’s daily column, suggested an enticing assignment to the former First Lady: “How would you like to go to Red China for us?”

Eleanor Roosevelt was eager to make the trip, but the State Department, then under the Republican Eisenhower Administration, refused to change its policy, adding that there was no way for the American government to ensure her safety there.

Mao and his party leaders were also especially hostile to Eleanor Roosevelt. Since her days as First Lady, she had been a consistent supporter of the anti-communist nationalists and in that role, she had not only befriended but welcomed its leader’s wife, the overtly political Madame Chiang Kai-shek as an overnight White House guest with much publicity and fanfare.

Thus, China remained one of the few important nations never visited by Eleanor Roosevelt.

The broadcast of the annual Academy Awards for Motion Pictures this coming Sunday, March 2, 2014, offers an opportunity to consider an often neglected period in the career of one of history’s most important First Ladies, Nancy Reagan.

Born far from the glamorous hills of Hollywood with which she would come to be so closely associated in the working-class neighborhood of Flushing, Queens in New York City, this First Lady’s legals born as Anne Frances Robbins on July 5, 1921.

Nancy Reagan might well have been born in a theatrical trunk, however, given the nature of her mother’s active professional life as a theatrical actress.

Following her separation from Nancy’s birth father Kenneth Robbins, Edith Luckett returned to the theatrical profession which had gainfully employed many of her own family in the late 19^th century in the Washington, D.C. area.

Edie counted many friends who went on to become legendary movie actors like Katherine Hepburn and Claudette Colbert, who then took her daughter under their wings. Even Nancy Reagan’s godmother was the famously exotic actress Alla Nazimova.

Since Edie’s work meant she was not just in New York for a show’s run but often traveling the nation as part of touring companies, Nancy Reagan matured into adolescence in the care of her maternal aunt in Bethesda, Maryland.

While living apart from her mother created anxiety, being so close to Washington permitted the future First Lady to at least attend the annual Easter Egg Roll contest on the White House lawn during the years that Grace Coolidge hosted the event.

Following Edith’s 1928 divorce from Ken Robbins, marriage a year later to Chicago neurosurgeon Loyal Davis and his 1935 adoption of her daughter, Nancy Davis enrolled at the Girls Latin School in the Windy City. There she performed in many of the school plays, including one called First Lady.

Upon graduation, Nancy Davis went on to attend Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts. While at Smith, Nancy Davis continued her interest in acting, involving herself in the school’s theatrical productions, including a World War II show called The Factory Follies, which referenced the famous Rosie the Riveters of the era.

She graduated with her bachelor’s degree in dramatic arts.

The future First Lady was still in college, however, when she made her very first appearance on film, performing in a National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis fundraising short film short shown across the nation’s movie theaters.

In the short, Nancy Davis played a volunteer in the fight against polio, a public service effort with incumbent First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt then serving as an honorary chair of the organization which her husband had helped foster.

In 11945, two years after graduating from Smith College, Nancy Davis followed her mother’s footsteps in the limelight, cast in a small role in the touring company of Ramshackle Inn, starring Edith Davis’s friend, the legendary actress Zasu Pitts.

A year later, she won a role in the Broadway musical Lute Song, which starred Mary Martin and Yul Brynner.

With many theatrical works being filmed for the earliest television show series in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Nancy Davis appeared in another production of Ramshackle Inn for television broadcast, as well as one called Broken Dishes.

It was that latter TV appearance which led to her being flown out to the state she would always love as her home, California, bidden there to make a screen test for Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios.

Mrs. Davis told her friend Spencer Tracey about the exciting prospect and he then phoned legendary director George Cukor who, along with Howard Keel, worked with Nancy Davis in producing a screen test which resulted in a contract.

“Joining Metro,” said Nancy Reagan, “was like walking into a dream world.” On her first day at the MGM studios, she admitted to being “nervous and gullible.”

The new starlet was struck, recalling how she would report to work some mornings only to find she was seated in the makeup room beside stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner.

In the MGM lunchroom, she ate alongside the likes of big-name stars such as Fred Astaire, Lana Turner, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, Gene Kelly, and Esther Williams.

Usually typecast as a youthful mother, she auditioned for many other roles in competition with leading stars of the era. With unnerving frequency, however, Debbie Reynolds got the part.

“I was beside myself with excitement. Not only was Metro the greatest studio in Hollywood,” she wrote, “but I was finally earning a regular paycheck…”

Over the years, Nancy Reagan would make a total of eleven feature films, appearing with bold-faced names such as Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Ray Milland, Ann Sothern, James Whitmore, Cyd Charisse, and Glenn Ford.

During her first year on contract, her first two film roles The Doctor and the Girl and East Side, West Side were as a supporting cast member.

A year later, in 1950, she was cast in two films which won her good reviews.

The New York Times called her Shadow on the Wall depiction of a child psychiatrist “beautiful and convincing” and the newspaper declared her co-starring role as an expectant mother to whom God speaks through the radio in The Next Voice You Hear to be “delightful.”

Of all her movie roles, Mrs. Reagan’s own favorite was that of a fiancée whose intended husband dies, in the 1951 film Night into Morning.

Both the New York Times and Washington Post film critics detected authenticity in the emotions she conveyed on screen. The Times declared that she “knows the loneliness of grief,” while the Post critiqued that she “is splendid as the understanding widow.”

It was not then publicly known that, in real life, Nancy Davis had been engaged to a young man during her college years who had, in fact, been killed in an accident which thus altered the course of her personal life.

“I loved the work, although it was a lot less glamorous than people think,” Mrs. Reagan later candidly reflected. She also addressed why she made the choices she did during her life at the time: “I was never really a career woman but only because I hadn’t found the man I wanted to marry. I couldn’t sit around and do nothing, so I became an actress.”

Even her initial 1949 press release upon signing with MGM had explicitly stated that a “successful happy marriage” had always been her personal priority.

Once working steadily as a professional actress, however, she had every hope she would eventually receive offers for a wider range of roles. “I think I could have gone on and made a good career for myself,” she later reflected. She was likely less compulsive about “making it big in pictures” than most of her peers at the time because within a year of arriving in Hollywood, she met the president of the Screen Actors Guild, fellow actor Ronald Reagan.

After they married in March 1952, the new Mrs. Reagan went on to serve on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors for a decade. Released from her MGM contract that year, she went on to make three more feature films at other studios, the first being a science fiction movie called Donovan’s Brain.

Her role as a nurse in the 1957 film Hellcats of the Navy is perhaps her most famous because her co-star was her husband.

While the script was panned, her performance was not, one critic noting that Mrs. Reagan “does well with what she has to work with.”

Before making her last motion picture, 1958’s Crash Landing, Nancy Reagan had already begun a second phase of her Hollywood career, guest-starring in a number of television theatrical dramas including four episodes of General Electric Theater, which her husband hosted.

In one of those GE Theater episodes Nancy Reagan’s co-star was Ronald Reagan. The name of it?  A Turkey for the President.

The year 1962 marked the last time Mrs. Reagan acted professionally on camera, doing episodes of four series that year, Wagon Train, 87^th Precinct, and The Dick Powell Theater.

Five years later she would be serving as the Golden State’s First Lady during Reagan’s two terms as governor and within twenty years, Nancy Reagan was First Lady of the United States from 1981 to 1989.

It was not the end of offers to star in a feature film, however.

Just seven years after she left the White House, director and actor Albert Brooks approached the former First Lady to consider starring as the lead in his 1996 movie Mother.

Nancy Reagan turned down the offer. And Debbie Reynolds got the part.

The Feature Film Roles of Nancy Davis Reagan

1949 The Doctor and the Girl as Mariette Esmond 

1949 East Side, West Side as Helen Lee

1950 Shadow on the Wall as Dr. Caroline Canford

1950 The Next Voice You Hear as Mary Smith

1951 Night Into Morning as Katherine Mead

1951 It’s a Big Country as Miss Coleman

1952 Talk About a Stranger as Marge Fontaine

1952 Shadow in the Sky as Betty Hopke

1953 Donovan’s Brain as Janice Cory

1957 Hellcats of the Navy as Helen Blair

1958 Crash Landing as Helen Williams

 

Television Series Roles of Nancy Davis Reagan

1948 Portrait of Jennie, (uncredited role as girl in art gallery)

1949 The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse

– Ramshackle Inn (1949)

–Broken Dishes (1949)

1953 The Ford Television Theatre
–The First Born (1953) as Laura Glenn

1953-1954 Schlitz Playhouse
– The Pearl Street Incident (1954) …[character name unknown]

– Twenty-two Sycamore Road (1953) as Nan Gage

1955 Climax!
– Bailout at 43,000 Feet as Carol Peterson

1961 Zane Grey Theater
– The Long Shadow as Amy Lawson

1961 The Tall Man
– Shadow of the Past as Sarah Wiley

1956-1961 General Electric Theater
– That’s the Man! (1956) as Evelyn Kent

– A Turkey for the President (1958) as Native-American Indian woman

– The Playoff (1960) as Betty Anderson

– Money and the Minister (1961) as Vicky Carlisle

1962 Wagon Train 
– The Sam Darland Story as Mrs. Baxter

1962 87th Precinct
– King’s Ransom as Diane King

1962 The Dick Powell Theatre
– Obituary for Mr. X as Flora Roberts

 

By Will Swift 

 

The following is an excerpt from Pat and Dick: The Nixons, An Intimate Portrait of a Marriage written by Will Swift, a leading presidential biographer. Will Swift’s website is www.willswift.com You can see more about the book on:  https://www.facebook.com/PatAndDickTheNixonsAnIntimatePortraitOfAMarriage

 “All lives have triumphs and tragedies, laughter and tears, and mine has been no different. What really matters is whether, after all of that, you remain strong and a comfort to your loved ones.”

-Pat Nixon in her final interview, June 1992

 

“Pat was always stronger. Without her, I could not have done what I did.” Richard Nixon, In The Arena, 1990.

In a culture that celebrates extroverts, encourages public displays of emotion, and fosters the idea that relationships can be discarded when troubles arise, much of the American public and press still does not understand the private, spacious, and committed nature of the Nixon marriage. The Nixons’ friends saw a tender side to Dick, and a man who depended heavily on his wife. In Pat they witnessed resolve and authentic engagement. Her surprising, deft, and enduring partnership with her husband over nine political campaigns was central to his rise to power and to his enduring impact on the nation. Their union, complex and mysterious, intrigued Americans for half a century. The Nixons’ swift ascent into prominence and power was followed by repeated plunges into public humiliation, and then, each time, a tenacious recovery. Their marriage represented both the fulfillment and the failure of the American dream of self-invention and worldly success.

Twenty years after her death, Pat Nixon has not been fully appreciated for her role in helping her husband make the second half of the twentieth century into what Senator Bob Dole called “the age of Nixon.” She was the loyal and at times resentful wife of a brilliant, sentimental, and sometimes distant man she admired. She proved herself a humane and shrewd team player to a politician who considered her an essential helpmate. A modern, wise and playful woman with a wicked sense of humor, she was also fiercely partisan. Publicly silent but powerful in private, she influenced and tempered her husband, his actions, and his policies.

Pat was also astute in her assessments of people and situations in ways that facilitated her husband’s political career and diplomacy. She had “a good sixth sense about people,” according to her son-in-law Ed Cox. To powerful effect, she studied the subtleties of international politics combining her fascination about foreign cultures with an ability to open her heart to people she met on her travels. Dwight Eisenhower rated her an excellent political spouse, able to converse intelligently with any world leader. Her husband agreed. She believed, with her husband, in the American myth of mission, divinely ordained — that America should serve as an example of justice and freedom, and encourage the people of other nations to believe in their right to liberty and democracy. As a good will ambassador—representing the best of the American spirit—from the 1950s to the 1970s, she significantly advanced her husband’s career at home and elevated the status of the United States abroad, often in countries tottering between democratic and authoritarian forms of government. It is a shame that she did not have a greater opportunity to use her diplomatic gifts; like Jean Kennedy Smith, she might have made an excellent ambassador to Ireland.

When he is viewed through the lens of his marriage and the humanizing portrait of his wife, Richard Nixon, always a conundrum, takes on new dimensions At those times in his life when he was obtaining and wielding power, he could be surprisingly relaxed and engaging, as he revealed in his early married years, his middle age in New York City, and his retirement in New Jersey. His mind worked so quickly that he could often be impatient and awkward in public, but he was far more sensitive and thoughtful in private with his wife, his daughters and his friends. His wife understood the vulnerability that underlay the polarizing and vindictive aspects of his public character.

Dick knew that her positive persona was important to his bid to make his presidency successful, but he genuinely wanted her to feel valued by the American public and the press for her stellar qualities. Even when he was preoccupied with his own career and public agenda, he cared deeply about how his wife was perceived. He valued her as an asset to his administration and sought to safeguard her place in history. While his controlling behavior caused contention between his West Wing and her East Wing, he fought diligently to assist his wife in her first years in the White House and, later, to counter her negative image as a passive first lady, a “Plastic Pat.” The president and First Lady worked together to rectify harsh portrayals of their marriage: when the Nixon union was attacked as lifeless; the couple cooperated on television documentaries and in print interviews to correct portrayals of them that they felt were hurtful and inaccurate.

No one marital style predicts whether a couple will be successful over the long term. Both couples who fight frequently and those who bury their differences can survive the rigors of married life and live contentedly into old age. Pat and Dick often handled problems by avoiding them. They fought by moving apart for brief periods or by communicating through others when tensions peaked. Nonetheless, they always found a way to reconnect before their injuries led to a permanent estrangement. The last year of Watergate, for example, understandably strained the bond between the Nixons, but during their subsequent exile in California they painstakingly renewed their connection to each other, amid life-threatening illnesses, disgrace, and defeat. Many onlookers wondered whether Pat should have stayed with Dick, but her apparent contentment during their last years together suggests it was the right decision for her.

Presidential speechwriter William Safire recognized that Pat shared her husband’s “prejudices and scar tissue.” “Pat and I come from similar backgrounds,” Dick said in a 1982 interview with Good Housekeeping magazine. “We have compatibility and the same general beliefs. I married her because I loved her and admired her intelligence and her great sense of humor.” Their common underlying values allowed them to surmount a vast difference in their enthusiasm for politics, but prevented them from fully acknowledging how their view of themselves as outsiders impeded their public performance.

The Nixons’ well-documented traumas and conflicts led them to discover their strength, courage, and resilience as a couple. Over fifty-three years of marriage each remained a solid comfort to the other. Within the marriage, Pat treaded close to the troublesome line between self-abnegation and healthy love, but in the end she felt that she had received and given enough love to make her life meaningful. Dick had trouble balancing ambition, intimacy, and relaxation in his home life, but he learned from his close brush from death in 1974 to live more fully in the moment, savoring quiet and relaxed times with his wife, and, thus, recalibrating his marriage.

The Nixons haunt and inspire our national psyche. They strove to portray the best of America’s moral character and they succeeded, but they also represented for some Americans the pursuit of achievement and a preoccupation with public image at the expense of self-awareness, personal contentment and integrity. Their marriage—rich with flaws and virtues, constantly reinvented in crisis after crisis, enduring for half a century in the public arena—makes them figures crucial to — and emblematic of — the American story.

Excerpted from Pat and Dick: The Nixons, An Intimate Portrait of a Marriage.

 

Published by Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster. Copyright (c) Will Swift, 2013.

 

 

 

+Wi

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+

 

+