Ms. Mirrer good evening and welcome to the New York Historical society. Im louise mirrer, president and ceo, and i am thrilled to see you in our beautiful auditorium this evening. Tonights program, women in the white house, is part of our bernard and Irene Schwartz distinguished speaker series. I would like to thank mr. Schwartz for his support that has allowed us to bring many fine historians and writers to this stage. [applause] ms. Mirrer i would also like to thank and recognize members of the Chairmans Council in the audience and thank them for their generosity and all they do on our institutions behalf, and of course, my great and talented colleague, Vice President for Public Programs, dale gregory. [applause] ms. Mirrer tonights program is presented in collaboration with our brandnew center for womens history, and we are grateful to our partners at hogan lovells, who are the corporate sponsor for our womens history programming at New York Historical. Tonights program last about an hour, and it will include a question and answer session. You should have a note card when you entered, but colleagues are still going up and down the aisles if you have not received one. You will have an opportunity to write a question on the note card. They will be collected later on and used for the q a session. Following the program, there will be a formal book signing, and copies of our speakers books are available in our ny history store. We are pleased indeed to welcome back to the New York Historical society carol berkin. She is president ial professor of history america at the Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of new york. She has appeared in numerous television documentaries, including the pbs special alexander hamilton. She is the author of several books, including the fourth coming, which she will discuss in an upcoming Public Program here on may 23. We are also thrilled to count on our panel our own New York Historical trustee, annette gordonreed. She is the Charles Warren professor of american legal history at harvard law school. In addition to her role at harvard law, professor gordonreed is a member of the faculty of arts and sciences at harvard, and she was the carol k. Pforzheimer professor at Radcliffe Institute for advanced study. She is the author of many books, including the pulitzer prizewinning the hemingses of monticello, and her latest most blessed of the patriarchs. We are also glad to welcome gil troy back to the historical society, a professor of history at mcgill university, a weekly columnist for the daily beast, and the editor of the revised edition of the multivolume classic history of president ial elections. He is also the author of several books on political history, including his latest, the age of Clinton America in the 1990s. Our moderator is lesley stahl. She has been a correspondent for cbs 60 minutes for 25 seasons. Prior to joining 60 minutes, she was the cbs News White House correspondent during the carter, reagan, and george h. W. Bush presidencies. During much of that time, she served as moderator on face the nation, the cbs news sunday Public Affairs broadcast, where she interviewed margaret thatcher, boris yeltsin, yasser arafat, and virtually every top u. S. Official. She has a collection of emmy awards, including a Lifetime Achievement emmy. Her latest book is becoming grandma. As always, i would like to ask you, before our speakers begin, to please make sure that anything that makes noise, like a cell phone, is switched off. Now please join me in welcoming our speakers. [applause] lesley im going to start by putting on the coolest pair of glasses you have ever seen. [laughter] lesley when this topic was chosen quite a while ago, everybody i mean everybody was 100 sure we would have the first woman president. First grandma president. So in a way, tonight is kind of a consolation prize, because we are going to be talking about powerful women who are close to the pinnacle almost there. But for those of us who like to read about the presidency and i think the whole panel loves it, and you all probably do as well we know that first ladies can wield an awful lot of power. Some are quite open about it, some hide the fact. We will get to that. Lets start with carol, if we can, who is an expert in the 18th and 19th century era and presidencies, and ask, how did the concept of first lady come about . After you tell us that, give us your very best anecdote about a first lady. Carol actually, they werent called first ladies until sometime in the middle of the 19th century. What i think is most interesting is they werent particularly wellknown publicly. They were well known in circles of power, among diplomats and congressmen, but until the invention of the photograph, they were not widely known. Abigail fillmore is the first to be photographed, and from then on lesley [indiscernible] [laughter] carol it is her single claim to fame. She was more interesting than her husband. [laughter] carol from then on, the public got to know these women. It happened really rather quickly. Frances cleveland found her visage, her face, her photograph, appearing on advertisements that said, the first lady of the United States uses our cleaning powder. Of course, she didnt, these were all bogus, but she was on calendars, memorial plates, she was on ashtrays. So really, it is a Technological Development that makes the first lady a sort of household word. Lesley ok, best anecdote. Dont leave us hanging. Carol Grover Cleveland wasnt married when he began his first term, and so he, like any president who was a widower or a perennial bachelor as buchanan was called or whose wife was a recluse or sick, he had someone else come in. So cleveland has his sister rose come in to act as first lady. She is a bluestocking. That is, she is a writer, believes in womens rights, she is an editor. She really does not like this job. She is bored out of her mind. She records, she reports, that reception lines were so boring that she used to conjugate greek and latin verbs in her head. [laughter] carol just to keep herself occupied. As soon as she got herself out of the white house, she moved to utica and continued to be a writer. She buys a little house in naples, florida to get away from the winter. There, she falls madly in love with another woman. Evangeline simpson and Rose Cleveland live together in naples until evangeline decides she wants to be respectable, and she up and marries a 74yearold episcopal bishop from minnesota. You cannot get more respectable than that. When he dies, the two women flee together to italy and live together openly, and they are buried sidebyside there. I would give 1 million to know what Grover Cleveland thought about this. [laughter] lesley thats great. [applause] lesley boy, the competition for good anecdotes is on. [laughter] lesley im going to ask gil to tell us, what makes a successful first lady . What is the measure of that . And then your best anecdote. Gil there is a notion that every first lady is allowed to be whoever she wants to be, and this is kind of passed on first lady after first lady. I argue it is not true. There are whole series of dos and donts, invisible tripwires. When you are Hillary Clinton or nancy reagan, two very different and powerful personalities, and you cross that tripwire, you get pushback. You get demonized, often in the exact same way. Hillary clinton was called lady macbeth. Nancy reagan was called lady macbeth. It is deeply sexist. Every first lady comes in saying, im going to redefine this, take it over, feel empowered. They often find they have to be quite traditional. We have seen Michelle Obama, laura bush, barbara bush understand, if i dont want to generate static or make trouble, i keep quiet, keep traditional, perpetuate the sense of the first lady as part of this patriarchal role, and it works. Lesley even today . Gil i dont know what it does to the soul, but i know what it does to the polls. Lesley when i first met you at the reagan library, writing about the reagans, you and i talked about how the public sort of pushes against unelected power. When a first lady tries to wield power, in terms of policy, the public pushes back. You had told me that. Gil we are a nation forged in revolution, revolution against executive power. You see it to a certain extent with men, too, when there is a chief of staff considered to be too powerful. John sununu around george h. W. Bush. But particularly when it is around the wife, when she is unelected and unfirable. Although i would argue bill clinton fired hillary from being health czar. But she is perceived as being unfirable. Lesley best anecdote . Gil Jackie Kennedy hated the term first lady, she thought it made her sound like a saddle horse. She wanted to smoke, jack didnt want her to be photographed smoking. She wanted to cuss, jack didnt want people hearing her cuss. It gets difficult when Jackie Kennedy, who loved to ride horses, gets a fleet a whole bunch of stallions from saudi arabia. [laughter] gil im not a horseman. It is a whole bunch of horses. Jack goes not to jackie, because he is afraid of her to one of his aides, he goes, the israeli Prime Minister is going to come and give me some 10 bible, and i have to go, how wonderful. Meantime, jackie is going to be off with these white stallions in saudi arabia. Tell her to return them. He sends the aide to jackie. Jackie listens and says, tell him i am not doing it. [laughter] lesley that is really good. I should be taking notes. So annette, tell us about first ladies today. In this era, when we have women who are ceos of fortune 500 companies, what are the special restraints on a woman who had a career, like Michelle Obama or hillary, to kind of rein it in . Give us your concept of the role today. Annette it is a strange role, because it is actually a job, and it seems archaic, the notion that you are somebodys spouse, so therefore you have to become a hostess. It seems you ought to get paid for it, because it is a lot of work. It is odd to think of people who are very accomplished and ambitious being put to the task of something that sounds like it is from the 18th century. It is going to be interesting to see, now, with a first lady who is not playing the traditional role, and some people are upset about that. Other people, and i, would say, if you do not want to do that, you should not have to. What happens next . What happens if you have a man in that role . Would there be an expectation that this person gives up every single thing . It is very strange in modern times to have this very traditional notion of what a woman should be doing. Lesley best anecdote . Annette this is tough, because the person i wrote the most about was a widower. He was in the white house, and sometimes Dolley Madison served as hostess for him. I suppose the best anecdote is that while he was president , it is revealed that the person he is living with and having children with, a slave woman, was the halfsister of his deceased wife. People knew that and wrote about it. There was great consternation at monticello about this, and his daughters at some point come to washington to play the role of the dutiful daughters and hostesses. John quincy adams, who had sort of a weird relationship with jefferson over the years, wrote a series of poems anonymously about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. When jefferson is retiring one to the tune of yankee doodle, and other ones that aspired to be more classical. When jefferson is leaving office, he runs into quincy adams at the festivities for madison. He goes up to him and says, i just want to thank you for coming. I want to know, are you writing anymore poetry these days . John quincy adams puts this in his diary and writes he underlines poetry, because jefferson knows, even though it was anonymous, who did it, and this was his dig at him. John quincy got the message. Carol if it is any consolation, john quincys wife had a lot of difficulty with him and with their children. One son was an opium addict who fathered an illegitimate child with the chambermaid, and the other confessed to his mother that he had prurient interests, so he went to prostitutes. Annette there is another story about louisa and Sally Hemings. Jefferson invited native american chiefs to the white house. That had happened before, but he invited the wives. Many of the women in washington, the white women, were insulted, because it put them on par with them. Louisa is riding in her diary and says, what next, maybe the magnificent sally will make her appearance. There was a lot of bad blood between the two of them. Lesley let me ask this question, and anybody jump in. Can you tell us stories of first ladies who strongly influenced the flow of history, who had a huge impact on her husbands presidency and the direction the country moved in her time . Annette i could start with an influence that is very interesting, Eliza Johnson, who was the wife of andrew johnson, who is periodically listed as the worst or next to the worst president. In the years since i wrote a biography about him, he made it to being the worst. She taught him how to write. Andrew johnson did not learn to read until he was about 17 or 18 years old. He got married lesley i have a crack to make, but i better keep it to myself. [laughter] annette his wife taught him how to write, actually. So in a sense, that is an influence that you cant see in the white house, but just think about the kind of power that you had. You married somebody who teaches you, who educates you. That it is an amazing thing, to think of that kind of influence. Gil we can talk about the woman who was called madam president , edith wilson, Woodrow Wilsons second wife. Wilson is married, his first wife dies while he is in office. Lesley i have a crack to make, but i better keep it to myself. [laughter] annette his wife taught him how to write, actually. So in a sense, that is an influence that you cant see in the white house, but just think about the kind of power that you had. You married somebody who teaches you, who educates you. That it is an amazing thing, to think of that kind of influence. Gil we can talk about the woman who was called madam president , edith wilson, Woodrow Wilsons second wife. Wilson is married, his first wife dies while he is in office. On her deathbed, she says to the people around him, make sure he remarries. He marries this widow who runs a Jewelry Store in washington, d. C. They become very close very quickly, so much so that they say when Woodrow Wilson proposed to edith, she was so surprised that she fell out of bed. [laughter] gil that is early 20th century humor. Wilson has potentially the most influential soninlaw, because his treasury secretary marries one of the wilson daughters. A soninlaw with a role in the white house. We can talk about that later. [laughter] gil wilson has a series of strokes. In those days, you dont talk about those kinds of things. After world war i, the treaty of versailles, the league of nations, edith wilson does not want anyone to know. She ends up running the white house and covering this up for a very long time. You could almost say it is an act of treason, or an act of loyalty. That we can leave to our philosopher friends to figure out. Carol varina davis, the first and only first lady of the confederacy, and one of the most extraordinarily brilliant and interesting people i ever got to write about. When her husband was imprisoned by the union and put underground, literally, in a cell. There was no light. They kept the light on in the cell 24 7. There were guards outside. He had terrible eye problems. He was in terrible circumstances. He had always told his wife, in essence, that she was too uppity, did not behave like a good, obedient wife. But she is the person who got him out of prison. She broke every rule of gentile behavior you could possibly have. She went to men she did not know, which was a nono in the 19th century, and demanded that they send money to support his lawyer. She got him a lawyer from new york. She persuaded former abolitionists to sign a petition to get her husband free, and Jefferson Davis not one of my favorite husbands Jefferson Davis, who had berated her endlessly for her autonomy, now said, this is wonderful, you go, girl. She really had she not behaved in an unseemly fashion, with incredible determination and political sense she knew who to go to he would have rotted to death in this prison. Gil can i point out Something Interesting about this conversation . 25 minutes in, we have not mentioned the word eleanor. To me, that is remarkable progress. 25 years ago when i wrote the book on president ial couples, all we talked about was Eleanor Roosevelt. You would talk about the first lady of the moment, then Eleanor Roosevelt, little bit of jackie and lady bird johnson. Interesting to see how the conversation has developed. Annette i was about to jump in with that, because there was nobody like that. Lesley i was going to bring up nancy reagan, who i think and no one is ever going to know because she never told but i do believe she was far more powerful than we ever knew, and that she had great influence, particularly in the second term. We do know about her influence in terms of president reagans softening on the soviet union and gorbachev, but i think she was influential even in domestic po