For Better or Worse

From a home cluttered with family photographs, Richard Holbrooke plucks a framed copy of a newspaper article written in Turkish.

His wife, author Kati Marton, is featured in a large photograph. In an inset photo, minuscule compared to hers, is Holbrooke. He is amused by how the Turkish paper presented their images during their trip through the region in 1995. The paper had spurned him, the man President Clinton was counting on to strong-arm a peace agreement in Bosnia, in favor of her. Marton was there as leader of the Committee to Protect Journalists; the paper had dubbed her “the belle of the Bosporus.”

“I thought this was hilariously funny,” Holbrooke says. He playfully tries to point out to Marton, as though he’s noticed them for the first time, two additional words in the caption: Peter Jennings. For before Marton, 52, was married to the high-profile Holbrooke, she was the wife of the famous anchorman. She refuses to acknowledge Holbrooke’s mention of the caption. “I don’t read Turkish,” she says politely.

From the constellation of frames in the den of their Bridgehampton, N.Y., weekend home, the framed article is perhaps the proverbial North Star: It says much about the territory Marton has been navigating in her personal and professional lives over the past five years. Since 1995, she’s been in her own power marriage to Holbrooke, who went on to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the highest-ranking foreign policy post in the Clinton administration after secretary of state. (He is now an investment banker.) And she’s been writing a book about the pinnacle of marriages: “Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History” (Pantheon Books, $25) hit bookstore shelves this month. “Hidden Power” analyzes 12 marriages of modern presidents from Woodrow and Edith Wilson to George and Laura Bush and promotes the theory that the way husband and wife relate to each other in the crucible that is the White House affects domestic policy, foreign policy and world events.

It is such a tricky business, the high-profile marriage. There is so much pressure to perform well, to behave correctly. Not to embarrass, but to reflect well on each other. There are egos and ambitions and expectations and competitions multiplied so much more intensely than in a normal marriage. Husband and wife have to balance the limelight, and complex emotions such as how one spouse feels about being upstaged by the other--whether he finds it “hilariously funny” or something unforgivable. A first lady--and Marton is of the opinion there will be a first gentleman in the next decade--must endlessly support her spouse’s plans, yet be the one to tell him the truth, guide him, comfort him, even advise him. “I’m out to present stories that haven’t been presented in this light,” Marton says. “We generally either do the first lady or we do the president. We don’t do the intersection of the two and how it affects the nation.”

There is perhaps no journalist with more ability to add a fresh voice on presidential unions than Marton. She has socialized, for instance, with the Clintons. And she surely knows what it takes to be married to a powerful man. She’s done it not once, but twice, and has had her share of experiences.

There was, for instance, the time during the 1995 Bosnia peace negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, that Holbrooke seated Marton between archenemies Slobodan Milosovic, the president of Serbia, and Alija Izetbegovic, the president of Bosnia, at a dinner designed to break the ice. “He said, ‘Make them talk to each other,’ and these were people who just weeks before were gouging each other’s eyes out,” Marton says.

But Marton summoned her journalistic questioning skills, asked them how they met, and how the war started. “By the end of the evening, they were calling each other Slobodan and Alija. It was a tremendous feeling, being a participant and a player in historic circumstances,” she says.

Does a writer ever get much closer to understanding what a first lady feels than that?

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Marton can go on and on about the first ladies, talking about one and then comparing her to another as if they are swatches of fabric. Her favorite: Lady Bird Johnson. Saddest marriage: the Nixons’. The best husband: Harry Truman. Most powerful first lady: no, not Hillary, but Edith Wilson, who, after her husband suffered a debilitating stroke and later a heart attack, kept it hidden from the country and essentially ran things herself. She has written four previous books, all of them about Europe. Marton was born in Hungary; both her Hungarian parents were reporters for American wire services and were wrongly imprisoned as spies prior to the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1958, when Kati was 8. Marton--her first name is pronounced Kah-tee--has the remains of a Hungarian accent, mainly when pronouncing her vowels.

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She followed in her parents’ footsteps, becoming a reporter for ABC News, where she met Jennings while she was bureau chief in Bonn and he also was a European correspondent. They were married in 1979 and had two children, Elizabeth, now 21, and Christopher, now 19. (Marton has been married three times, the first time to a fellow graduate student at George Washington University).

The idea for the book evolved from her publishers. “When Hillary [Clinton] was getting all the attention, the idea was to do a book about how the role of the first lady evolved,” Marton says. Instead, she began to study how the relationship between the first lady and the president affects national policy, going beyond how first ladies often are viewed, as the nation’s hostess.

“First ladies have had a much deeper political influence than they’re normally given credit for. In part, this is a kind of conspiracy between the presidential couples and the public. We, the public, are afraid of unelected power, with good reason, and therefore we don’t want to know the full extent of the first lady’s influence,” Marton says.

The first couples don’t want us to know either, afraid that if the public knew to what extent the president depends on his wife, it would diminish his stature. But there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t need advice from his wife, Marton says, especially in a job as crushingly stressful and isolating as the presidency, where aides prefer to flatter him and are reluctant to break bad news. Those presidents with strong wives who are used as counselors and confidantes have an advantage.

“I’ll give you a negative example. The saddest chapter of all was the chapter on Pat and Dick Nixon because Pat did not play that role. By the time they got to the White House, she had kind of given up on her husband. If Pat had been a more forceful, more fearless, more engaged first lady, maybe, a big maybe, she could have cut through Nixon’s paranoia and we might have been spared Watergate.”

Marton says that when she was in her 20s, she couldn’t have written this book, about how to meld marriage and power, love and ambition. She’d have viewed their contributions as derivative. “How could a woman take real pride in her achievements when she was in the White House because of him?”

“I probably would have thought that Jackie was not a woman worthy of serious respect or regard,” Marton says. “I see now ... Jackie understood that her husband was in office during the Cold War, an imperial period when the U.S. was ascending as a superpower. She understood that her role could be to make the White House very much an international center of culture and taste and that she herself could be a role model for women all over the world. She is the one who gave the Kennedy presidency its label: Camelot. And that has endured.”

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Beth Whitehouse is a reporter at Newsday, a Tribune Co. newspaper.