11 Wives Who Shared the Power of the Presidency

Kati Marton’s “Hidden Power” gets and keeps the reader’s attention not because her subject is new but because her focus on it is interesting. Presidential marriages in the 20th century have had plenty of attention from historians in the context of the history of the presidencies. And some marriages have been the focus of books, of which Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “No Ordinary Time--Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II” is the standout example, fully acknowledged by Marton.

Marton’s device is to look at 11 marriages in the light of their effect on presidential policies. As a subtheme she examines the marriages she has chosen in relation to the status of women at the time.

She begins with Woodrow Wilson and his second wife, Edith Galt, and ends with the drama of Bill and Hillary Clinton, with an appendix on George W. and Laura Bush. Wilson’s first wife, Ellen, died in 1914, the year that World War I broke out, and both events shattered the stern-faced but passionate Presbyterian president, then in the second year of his first term. The next year he met Galt, a rich widow, and fell for her.

“The presidency was a powerful courtship tool for Wilson,” Marton writes. “He made Edith feel that she shared the burden of the office.”

Edith became enmeshed in Wilson’s conducting of the government after their marriage in 1915; but in 1919, when he was felled by a stroke while touring the country in a vain attempt to win Senate approval of the League of Nations treaty, she actually took over the government in cahoots with his doctor, issuing orders in his name and telling him what to sign. No first lady ever had such power, or ever could now. Reporters would force the story open, and in any case the 25th Amendment provides for an orderly succession in case of presidential disability.

Marton, author of the nonfiction “Raoul Wallenberg” and “A Death in Jerusalem,” runs through the familiar Roosevelt story briskly with affection for both spouses. She treats the Trumans sympathetically as well, though she wonders why Bess spent so much time in Independence, Mo., when Harry missed her so badly.

“Kind” describes her portrait of the Kennedys and the Johnsons too. She especially admires Lady Bird for both putting up with her husband and doing good works on her own, like “beautification” of cities and the countryside. But when she reaches the Nixons, she for the first time lets her sharp judgment show: Nixon was a heel to throw Pat over for his only love, politics, and Pat was too little a modern independent woman to fight back.

Discussing Betty and Gerald Ford, Marton delivers her analysis of what kind of people great leaders have to be: “History is driven by needy, dominating, narcissistic personalities who let nothing and no one stand in their way.” Winston Churchill was like that; Gerald Ford wasn’t and was no great leader, she concludes.

Married to the diplomat and trouble-shooter Richard Holbrooke and a former correspondent for ABC and NPR, Marton is something of an insider herself. She has an insider’s view of Jimmy Carter: contempt. Contempt for his piety, for his unwillingness to cozy up to the Washington insiders, for his post-presidential career. “Jimmy continued his biblical quest to end wars and eradicate disease with barely a nod to political or practical considerations,” she writes, adding that Rosalynn lacked the credentials or political base for a career of her own.

Marton is more generous to the Reagans, though she acknowledges Ronald declined noticeably as his tenure went on. She argues Nancy had a good eye for character in the officials surrounding her president and protected her husband as best she could. In a chapter wryly titled “Mother Knows Best,” Marton portrays a good-natured but weak George H.W. Bush and a tart-tongued Barbara.

And in writing about Bill and Hillary Clinton, she doesn’t say anything the whole world doesn’t know. She concludes that the public doesn’t like first ladies who were as active in policy as Hillary was in Bill’s first term. Marton’s look at 11 first couples is entertaining and sometimes instructive.