La Jolla Woman the Funding Force in First Ladies Exhibit

Rachel Jackson could have sympathized with Bill and Hilary Clinton. The wife of one of America’s earliest presidents knew what the stings of public criticism felt like during an election campaign.

It was revealed during the 1828 presidential campaign that Andrew Jackson’s wife had been a bigamist for a time. Rachel Jackson was still married to her first husband when she married Jackson in 1791. She finally received her divorce in 1794 and remarried Jackson.

“The enemys ( sic ) of my husband have dipt ( sic ) their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me,” Rachel Jackson wrote.

Andrew Jackson was elected anyway, but his wife never joined him in the White House. She died of a heart attack shortly after the election and was buried in the white gown she had chosen for the inaugural ball.

Millions of Americans who never knew this tale will learn it and a great deal more about first ladies from a new, permanent Smithsonian exhibit--thanks, in large part, to a La Jolla woman.

Dorene Whitney, a well-known fund-raiser for the San Diego Symphony and San Diego Opera, spent the past two years raising $1 million to create the major new exhibit, “First Ladies: Political Role and Public Image.”

First Lady Barbara Bush will officially open the exhibit today at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Dorene Whitney will be at her side.

“Dorene Whitney is a more vigorous source of energy than Hoover Dam,” said Roger Kennedy, the museum’s director. “We could never have been able to come up with this exhibit with our budget as it is. She volunteered to raise the $1 million necessary to do this major permanent exhibition and she did it.”

As national chairman of the “Friends of the First Ladies” Whitney came up with a successful plan to find 100 women throughout the United States willing to donate $10,000 each to sponsor the exhibit. The 58-year-old La Jolla woman has been married 32 years to San Diego lawyer John Hewitt Whitney. The couple have three daughters.

“When I was asked to be the fund-raiser for the exhibition, I was thrilled, because I felt the first ladies’ story was not well known to Americans. These women are as important as their husbands,” Whitney said. “Edith Bolling Wilson, for example, actually ran the country when her husband President Wilson was sick and incapacitated.”

The La Jolla civic leader said she is extremely pleased with the 8,000-square-foot exhibit, which features several hundred personal objects and memorabilia thatbelonged to first ladies and more than 500 photographs, illustrations and graphics.

Whitney worked full time the past two years--”a pro bono job.” She bought an apartment in Washington in order to see the project through and divided her time between the nation’s capital and her home in La Jolla.

Gov. Pete Wilson and his wife helped her find many of the donors, she said.

“These (first ladies) were politically savvy and saw the position as a way to enhance their husbands’ power and effectiveness,” said Edith Mayo, the exhibition curator. “They had more power than vice presidents, more than most of the cabinet members,”

Mayo finds Eleanor Roosevelt the most effective first lady in history because of her personal involvement in the women’s movement, the labor movement, civil rights and many other leading issues. FDR’s wife wrote two newspaper columns, “My Day” and “If You Ask Me,” and held press conferences exclusively for women reporters.

Mayo also had praise for Betty Ford.

“Betty Ford made the equal rights amendment very respectable,” she said. “I think prior to her advocacy of it, this movement was perceived by many as a bunch of discontented, loud-mouthed radical women unhappy with men and screaming about their unhappiness. She put ERA in context of legitimate political agenda at the national level.”

One part of the exhibit entitled “Widowhood and National Mourning” shows photographs and tells the story of the wives of the four assassinated presidents and first ladies whose husbands died in office and how they became the focal point of the nation’s sorrow.

The exhibit shows the interest some first ladies--Pat Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy among them--took in preserving the White House. And it explores the wives’ roles in their husbands’ campaigns, including the “Lady Bird Johnson Special” when Lyndon Johnson’s wife set out alone on a train campaigning for her husband.

Not all the first ladies were married to presidents. Harriet Lane, niece of James Buchanan, the only bachelor president, served in that role. So did the daughters of Zachary Taylor and Thomas Jefferson, among others.

“We are delighted to be able to provide a fresh look at what life has been for women who accompanied and, in some cases, energized presidents into the White House,” said museum director Kennedy.

As Daisy Ridgway of the museum staff observed: “Every four years a job opens in Washington, offering benefits, large, fully staffed home, free transportation, trips all over the world, close association with the United States. No salary. No description. Tough skin and stiff upper lip required. Title: First lady.”