A Test of Endurance for Spouses

Before her husband fired up his presidential campaign, Laura Bush confessed to being “reluctant” to go along, boiling down her concerns to a loss of privacy and “the ugliness of public life.”

Getting Cindy McCain on board was “like pulling teeth,” said husband John, who had to promise her she’d never have to set foot in Iowa or New Hampshire for the early Republican contests. Still, she predicts she “will shed a tear” if her onetime addiction to painkillers, which she admitted in 1994, is eventually dredged up.

Such candor among political spouses--not even pretending to look forward to the 2000 campaign--is rare. But the spouses of leading presidential candidates know that they are prime targets in an era of blowtorch politics. These wives and one husband have watched campaigns get longer and the process become more punishing; they have few illusions about this game in which virtually everything is fair game.

Marilyn Quayle is philosophical about what former Vice President Dan Quayle’s dreams do to her life. “That is my reality,” she says, sounding tough. “You don’t say, ‘Oh, I have such a lovely life. I can’t give it up.’ ”

Tipper Gore and Ernestine Schlant Bradley, the wives of Democratic contenders Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley, talk about the inevitability of their husbands’ ambitions the way Californians talk about the next earthquake.

Interviews with these spouses demonstrate that, while there is no one way they expect to survive the cross hairs of a campaign, each approaches the 2000 race with varying trepidation.

“For the last eight years with Bill Clinton, there is a stronger sense than ever that politics ain’t bean bag,” says John Buckley, a former GOP campaign advisor. “The media goes for the knees, the opponents go for the elbows, and when it’s all over, the one who feels the pain, internalizes it most, is the wife. The men, they just put on their armor and keep going.”

Each spouse is bracing. Gore is Mrs. Gung-Ho; McCain is Mrs. Stay-at-Home; Quayle is Mrs. Experience-With-Gritted-Teeth; Bush is Mrs. Traditional-Yet-Cautious; and Bradley is Ms. Modern-but-Naive-About-Politics.

And don’t forget Bob Dole. After decades in politics, he has debuted as Mr. Foot-in-Mouth to GOP candidate Elizabeth Hanford Dole, when he suggested he could support another candidate.

Candidates’ wives are supposed to conform to a conflicted feminine ideal, the 1950s wonder wife crossed with the 1990s superwoman. Who else is expected to be the impossible combination of wife, mother, lover, political advisor, and, yes, professional--Betty Crocker and board president all packaged for a 24-hour news cycle to enhance her husband’s image?

And Hillary Rodham Clinton’s experience as first lady has only made the job less appealing to her potential successors. She tried to break the mold, viewing herself as half of a two-for-one deal but had to retreat after the humiliating failure of her health care reform plan. And while she gained enormous public support as a victim-spouse, the Monica S. Lewinsky episode was a reminder of the secrecy and seductiveness of political life that invariably isolate a wife.

Certainly, these spouses of governors and senators know how politics threatens family life, but now the ante is much higher. A national contest means hip-hopping across the country, attending whopper fund-raisers and enduring media character cops digging into every tax return and personal indiscretion.

Sharing Their Spouses With the Public

The wives epitomize a late-20th century woman’s struggle to flourish with a strong separate identity while also being wholly invested in her husband’s success. She also must happily share her husband with many others--campaign staffs and the public--and realize that they own him as much as she does because they make or break him as a candidate.

To Phyllis Rose, a professor at Wesleyan College who has written about Victorian marriage, these political spouses are in some ways “the last married women in America, absolutely committed to these marriages with no way out. They’re almost required for the purposes of their husband’s campaign to pretend they don’t have other lives.”

When Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) announced his uphill-as-Everest presidential candidacy, he said his wife, Elaine, would support him but added: “What wife really wants her husband to do it?”

In the 2000 pack, Tipper Gore acts like the wife who wants it most. She has been the most visible of the spouses--Newsweek even put her and the vice president on a cover headlined “TeamGore.”

In May, Gore, a longtime mental health advocate, carefully revealed that she had taken medication for depression after her son nearly died in a car accident. While this was seen as a preemptive strike, Gore insists her intentions were altruistic.

“My whole goal has been to try to erase the stigma that has been attached to mental illness,” she said in a brief phone interview during a campaign stop in Los Angeles.

Certainly, no one knows better than she how frantic and senseless a national campaign can get, or how it can take a wife’s life away. “While I’m an enthusiastic campaigner,” Gore, a mother of four and a new grandmother, says, “I am also realistic about the demands that the campaign puts on a family.”

Yet a close associate says Gore is still “a somewhat hesitant” campaigner. “She doesn’t enjoy being poked and prodded . . . by the beast the media can become,” he says.

As in many political partnerships, Al Gore’s yearnings for higher office have long been part of their marriage. As the son of a U.S. senator, he was raised in the nation’s capital and has given most of his adult life to politics.

“This [campaign], of course, is very different,” says Tipper Gore, who turns 51 next week. “I have told him I will campaign 150%.”

Her friend offers his interpretation: “I think Tipper had to come to grips a while ago with whom she was married to: a politician who, practically after he got out of his mother’s womb, was destined to run for president.”

Perhaps any woman who marries a man with politics in his bloodline or public service in his destiny must gird herself for the eventuality. Didn’t basketball star Bradley tell his wife that his mother thought since he was a kid that he should run for president? Didn’t Laura Bush have a hint of her future when she went campaigning--on her honeymoon?

Bush, 52, appears to be the most traditional of political wives: She is often at her husband’s side offering an adoring gaze and, like her mother-in-law, former First Lady Barbara Bush, seems to have no need for the spotlight.

Still, last January, as George W. Bush was playing politically coy, she expressed ambivalence about his quest for the presidency. Seated beside her husband in the Texas Governor’s Mansion, she fielded questions from a mob of reporters.

Was she ready to trade in the Texas mansion for a white one in Washington?

“I’m reluctant,” she replied. “Absolutely.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” he interjected.

Mrs. Bush, a former librarian, explained: “I just think it’s a major life change. We really have a very nice life in Texas.” She was worried, she said, about giving up her privacy and what it would all do to her twin teenage daughters.

Laura Bush, who declined to be interviewed, has made it clear that, despite her misgivings, she will not stand in her husband’s way.

‘Blood Lust for the Candidate’s Wife’

There is a long history of political wives privately growing agitated because they had become little more than “public property,” as Abigail Adams, wife of the second president, once characterized herself. None has been clearer about her feelings than Lady Bird Johnson, who, as President Lyndon B. Johnson was considering a reelection campaign, wrote in her diary that she looked upon it as “an open-ended stay in a concentration camp.”

For as often as political wives have been lionized, they have also been hounded, scrutinized and misconstrued, says Edith Mayo, curator of the First Lady exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. “There was always a blood lust for the candidate’s wife and at the same time a hands-off attitude,” she says. “Today, there is mostly blood lust.”

Few modern spouses have a better understanding of this than Marilyn Quayle.

In an interview in a Phoenix restaurant not far from her husband’s campaign headquarters, where she is putting in a few hours a week, Quayle displayed the ferocious vigor and relentless optimism that served her during her stay in the vice president’s residence from 1989 to 1992. She also made it obvious that it is her husband--not she--who has unfinished business in Washington.

When asked why, having lived through the lampooning of her husband in two national campaigns, she agreed to go through it all again, she smiles.

Why would an empty-nester who just turned 50, a law-firm partner who writes mystery novels on the side and who lights up when she talks about her work for the Salvation Army, want to put all that on hold?

Perhaps she’s going along because, like some of the others, she knows her husband’s candidacy is a long shot and may be over sooner rather than later?

Her smile tightens.

She tries to explain: “Every couple who has an equal partnership knows it’s 60-40, 40-60, 80-20, 20-80; it’s never just 50-50. Each week, month, year, one partner is giving more than the other. Right now, it’s Dan’s time. This is an opportunity that may never come again.”

Marilyn Quayle is a complete campaigner, comfortable with everything from talking taxes and campaign finance to reading the polls. She points out, with a nostalgic sigh, that she was the first wife of a statewide candidate in Indiana to address policy, she ran scheduling during Dan’s congressional campaigns, she did constituent work. And those were happy years, when he was a rising star and she and the kids campaigned in a Winnebago.

“We didn’t have a whole bunch of people telling us what to do,” says Quayle, who has three children.

Quayle knows what it’s like to get caught up in the hubbub of a big campaign: six or seven stops a day with junior staffers telling the wife what to say and when to say it.

It is also Quayle and Tipper Gore, her successor as second lady, who know best how to assess a wife’s post-campaign possibilities.

Quayle notes that some people consider the first lady “just the potted plant on the side.”

“The power you have,” she counters, “not over your husband but over issues and moods within the country, is hard for outsiders to comprehend.”

Putting Family Before Campaigning

Cindy McCain isn’t there yet. Of all the wives, she has the most reasons to want to sit out the 2000 campaign: To begin with, she and Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain have four children, ages 14, 13, 11 and 7.

“My biggest concern is not being home with my kids,” says McCain, 45, who travels sporadically overseas to do rescue missions for refugees. She hopes her decision not to campaign much may signal that politics is catching up with the rest of society: “There are so many two-parent working families and busy families. The opportunity is out there to choose not to be as visible in a campaign because you have other things to do,” she says.

In a phone interview from her home in Phoenix, McCain says she will probably do some campaigning this fall. But she believes that going to school events and helping children with homework will give her husband peace of mind.

McCain echoes Marilyn Quayle’s comments about shifting power in a marriage, telling about the time four years ago when she returned from a rescue mission. She got off the plane and surprised her husband by handing him an ill baby from Pakistan. “It was a good test of our marriage,” she recalls. “He took one look at me, one look at the baby and winked.” They adopted the child and named her Bridget.

But her worst campaign fear is that her past personal problems will turn her into an issue.

Five summers ago, she admitted an addiction to painkillers and to stealing them from a charity medical team she was running. The McCains carefully orchestrated public disclosure of her problems, and she avoided prosecution after agreeing to get treatment. But the couple were not able to escape harsh public criticism that she got off easily because of her husband’s power.

In the tradition of Betty Ford and Kitty Dukakis, McCain says she used her husband’s prominence as a platform to inspire others struggling with addiction. Still, if her past becomes an issue in her husband’s campaign, she says, “It will devastate me.”

Ernestine Schlant Bradley, 64, a German literature professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey for the last 35 years, is taking a one-year leave to campaign for her husband. But she doesn’t intend to let his aspirations swamp hers: “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I find literature as consuming as politics is for Bill.”

In an interview in her small university office, the mother of two grown daughters admits to a naivete about what the campaign might do to her life.

A petite, energetic woman who talked openly about her mastectomy last year, she speaks metaphorically about her privacy concerns, mentioning her apartment building’s security camera. “When I close that door,” she says, “I don’t want that monitor to follow me inside the apartment. Maybe that’s all the privacy we can have . . . .”

After a career studying the power of language, she does not want to become an ornament of public life and stop speaking her mind. She is not worried that every word she has ever written--including a book examining how West German writers treated the Nazi era--or every student she ever flunked could come back to haunt her.

“I’m very much aware that the word I use can be interpreted 50,000 ways and twisted,” she says. “But if you try to avoid that, all you become is an icon, no longer human.”

Former Sen. Bob Dole, 76, the only male spouse in the campaign and a veteran of a half-century in public life, has already discovered how tough the partner’s role can be, how a twist of intent can inflict a political wound. He committed the consummate no-no: disloyalty.

He embarrassed his wife by telling the New York Times that while she’d make a bang-up president, he could also support his old Senate buddy McCain if it came to that.

Mrs. Dole, who endured her share of press grillings during her husband’s three runs for president, was so angry at his remark that, according to sources familiar with the couple, she locked him out of their apartment for a night. More recently, however, the former senator--whose aides said he did not have time to be interviewed for this story--has been seen on the hustings in Iowa, trolling for votes for his wife in Saturday’s straw poll in Ames.

Times staff writers Elizabeth Mehren and Edwin Chen contributed to this story.