The Fine Art of Juggling the Kids and the President

Before Margaret LaMontagne agreed to become President Bush’s assistant for domestic policy, she worried about how a single mother could work “80 hours a week,” the standard at the White House.

The plain-spoken Texan discussed her concerns with another mother, senior Bush advisor Karen Hughes, and with Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, who recalled that the last time he worked for a president, he did not take a vacation for seven years.

But Bush was eager for LaMontagne to join his team, and when he heard she was hesitating, he asked Card: “Are you running off these mothers?” He wasn’t. LaMontagne took the job.

And now she muses about the payoff: an administration in which national policy is shaped in part by working mothers. “When [Bush] talks about people with credit card debt and single moms, the hardest job in America . . . he’s talking about me,” she said.

Bush has brought half a dozen working mothers into the power center of his administration, and they are embarking on a balancing act that, while still uncommon in corporate board rooms, is almost unheard of in the West Wing of the White House.

Though President Clinton appointed more women to top jobs in government than any chief executive before him, they were scarce in the White House. And over eight years he had fewer influential working mothers around him than Bush does now.

These are not just any group of women trying to have it all. They have jobs in the No. 1 workplace in America, where, until now, not just women, but mothers specifically, have not advanced. With their visibility high, they have the opportunity not only to influence policy but also to set a precedent so that, in the future, mothers in charge will be the norm around the Oval Office.

The culture of the White House traditionally has not been inviting to people who have priorities other than those of the nation. (And that has not kept fathers with young children and forgiving wives from rising through the ranks of many a White House.)

Whether on the laid-back Ronald Reagan team or the intense Clinton crew, people who work for presidents tend to come to work at dawn and leave long after dark, spending most of their days closeted in meetings--sometimes about whether to have more meetings. There is always a crisis threatening, and the relentless scramble for power does not bode well for anyone--man or woman--who wants to make it home for the bedtime ritual.

However, the mothers working for the 43rd president of the United States insist that they have been given assurances--by “senior, senior, senior people,” as one said--that they can have a personal life and a job with Bush. Even though Chief of Staff Card is a self-proclaimed workaholic who starts at 6:30 a.m. and quits at 10:30 p.m., he has lectured men and women he has hired to exert the self-discipline to say: “No, I’m going home.”

Certainly the president himself is attempting to keep his life in balance, if regular midday exercise breaks and one early Friday departure for the Camp David retreat in Maryland are any indications.

But the question looms: Can women in positions as senior as these retain their power if they duck out for even a fraction of that 80-hour week?

Consider the competing demands facing these high-ranking White House officials:

* Hughes, 44, probably the most powerful woman ever to work for a U.S. president, is the mother of an eighth-grader who traveled with her during the presidential campaign. He started classes last month at a Washington private school known for its heavy homework load, and his father, Jerry, a retired lawyer, is the parent in charge of his routine. Hughes made it to a dinner for parents at Robert’s school and plans to leave early every Wednesday evening. She left at 5:30 p.m. on a recent Wednesday but could not get home early the next two Wednesdays.

* Juleanna Glover Weiss, 32, is press secretary to Dick Cheney, who could well be the most powerful vice president in modern history. She is also mother to children ages 11 months and 2 1/2 years. While most parents struggle with sleepless nights, she looks forward to midnight awakenings as a gift of playtime that she misses during the day. Her children have a baby-sitter, as well as an attentive working father to help when mom is at the White House.

* Mary Matalin, 47, is an assistant to Bush and to Cheney, not to mention the mother of two girls, ages 2 and 5, whom she kisses goodbye early every morning to make those 7:30 meetings. She has talked about starting a day-care center for the children of administration staff. Her girls also have a baby-sitter, and their dad, Democratic consultant James Carville, is around to help them dress in the morning while Matalin is busy at work.

* LaMontagne, 43, who runs Bush’s large domestic policy shop, left her 8- and 11-year-old daughters with her former husband in Austin, Texas, but keeps in touch by cellular phone and weekend commutes. She spends her spare minutes looking for good public schools in Virginia and a place for her family to live when her children join her.

After a few heady weeks of working nearly around the clock in the White House, she is planning to modify her schedule when her two daughters come to Washington. Among other things, she will alternate with her deputy on attending the daily 7:30 a.m. senior staff meetings.

* Lezlee Westine, 40, deputy assistant to the president and director of public liaison, is a single mother from California who is living temporarily with her sister in Virginia. For the last two weeks, at the same time she has ushered more than 1,000 citizens to meetings with senior White House staff, she has been helping her 8-year-old daughter adjust to a new life. That meant setting up five play dates in one week alone, finding a suitable Brownie troop and signing up for a soccer team. Westine relies on her sister to be there when her daughter gets home from school.

Westine’s worst days were when she got home late to find her third-grader proclaiming through tears: “I miss my friends. I want to go back to California. I like my old school better.” But Westine, who worked for former California Gov. Pete Wilson and a Silicon Valley lobbying firm, is reluctant to complain about her schedule when she considers other single working mothers.

“There was a scheduled meeting at 6:30 p.m., and when I said I had to be on the road to get to dinner with my daughter, they agreed to hook me in by cell telephone,” she said. “Other women don’t have that type of flexibility. They’re chained to their desks.”

Indeed, most of America’s 26 million working mothers are not highly paid executives with cell phones and quality day care. Lisa Benenson, editorial director of Working Mother and Working Woman magazines, applauded these White House women--and Bush for hiring them for such senior positions. She also noted that most highly paid women are childless, “which tells us about what it takes to make it in the upper echelon.” Benenson said she is hopeful that the White House working mothers will use their leverage to change conditions for others like them.

“George Bush was credited with some fairly substantial improvements in the Texas education system, but the state ranks at the bottom of the barrel for safe, quality child care,” Benenson said. “One hopes these women will broaden their concerns for those who have fewer resources than they do but are facing some of the same stresses.”

Weiss, whose youngest was 5 months old when Cheney hired her, is confident that she can keep up a harried schedule. But she has the support of two important men: Cheney and her husband, a lobbyist who decided not to take an all-consuming job while she worked in the White House.

One recent morning, Weiss did not have time after a pediatrician’s appointment to take her feverish toddler home. So she brought him to the vice president’s office and he sat on her lap watching while Cheney conducted three interviews. Cheney shook the sick little boy’s hand as if it was the most normal thing in the world that he was there. “The gentleman didn’t lift an eyebrow,” Weiss said.

Weiss also is candid about the trade-offs for an absent mother as opposed to an absent father. After she returned home from four months on the campaign trail, she was heartbroken that her children reached first for their dad when they were hurt. “Mothers still want to feel that they’re the primary caregivers,” she said.

Matalin said she has sensed that, because Bush has made it clear he does not want “zombies working for him,” women and men in the White House are attempting to live balanced lives and find ways to help their colleagues do the same. She pointed to several working mothers on the staff of Lynne Cheney and said that the vice president’s wife brought them out of “mommy retirement.”

“A lot of us worked together for Bush Sr. when we were single and had no other lives except work,” Matalin recalled. “So eight years later, we’re working together again and we have kids and families, and it just doesn’t fit in the culture that we’d be sitting here at 8 o’clock at night unless there was really something to do.”

Still, Carol Rasco, one of the few working mothers in the Clinton White House, said that attitudes like those are good--but hard to sustain. Even if the president is supportive, it’s sometimes the ambitious co-workers who create the “face-time” pressures--to be in the meetings, jockeying for an agenda.

“I think people create long hours to suit their own purposes,” Rasco said. “But if you’re organized, have a good staff and know what your priorities are in terms of your task, you can do it.”

Rasco, who spent four years in the Clinton White House, recalled snickering among staff members the first time she left early to be with her then-teenage daughter. Clinton called out to her when he spotted her leaving: “Hey, Rasco, you got the good sense to get out of here at a decent hour.”

Rasco responded: “Yeah, I’m going to take Mary Margaret to dance.”

Clinton gave her a thumbs up, but the people watching were horrified: “I was getting caught leaving school early.

“The person at the top sets the tone. But you have to have confidence for that to be enough.”