The Park Plaza Hotel, two blocks off the Commons, had become a fortress. Authorities had sealed off the entire block. Inside, city cops, state police SWAT men and plainclothes security agents from the Secret Service, the FBI and the Department of Defense were stationed every few feet throughout the lobby and main-floor corridors, the elevator
alcove, the mezzanine and the hallways of the 15th and 16th floors.
On the rooftops of the hotel and adjoining buildings, police and security agents stood sentry duty, scanning windows and other rooftops. Occasionally, a helicopter chattered overhead.
It was the kind of security normally reserved for a summit visit by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. It also called to mind public forays by the embattled Lyndon Johnson at the height of the Vietnam War.
But this time the security was for First Lady Barbara Bush.
Her mission on this day nearly three weeks ago, of course, was utterly peaceful. She had come to the hotel to address the annual banquet of Boston`s I Have A Dream Foundation, organized by her nephew, James Bush, a former social worker turned politician. Earlier, she had met with adult participants in a model literacy program at a factory in Watertown, Mass., a blue-collar community that, for a few hours, was turned into an occupation zone.
”We just accept it,” she said of the mammoth security apparatus surrounding her. ”But we`re not going to let this change our lives.”
The Persian Gulf war has changed her life, though, just as it has changed the lives of millions of other Americans. Before the dinner, she stopped at a reception for children enrolled in the I Have A Dream program, which prepares inner-city schoolchildren for college and then pays their tuitions and expenses.
These were bright, interested children, who seemed to have followed the media coverage of the war with as much interest as any adult. But they were just kids-confused, and not a little worried.
”Mrs. Bush,” one boy asked as she sat down at his table, ”why are people buying gas masks?”
”How is the war affecting your family, Mrs. Bush?,” asked another.
”Do you write to the soldiers?”
She has written to the soldiers, she said. She talked of her Thanksgiving dinner in Saudi Arabia with a group of servicemen and women and added that since her return she has exchanged letters with several of them. She has also contacted some of their families at home and plans, she said, to do more of that.
She explained to the boy who was nervous about gas masks that the fighting was far away. She has repeatedly urged parents to talk to their children about the war, to reassure them that missiles are not going to land in their backyards, to monitor their TV viewing of the combat carefully.
The first lady has been emphatic about ”not involving myself in my husband`s business,” but she freely offers children her rationale for the war: ”One fellow can`t be allowed to come in and just brutalize a country. It`s nice just to stay here, but you have to do what`s right.”
”The war is affecting every family,” she told the children in Boston,
”because we`re all concerned-not just about Americans, but about Iraqi families, Iraqi children.”
Her famous wit and breezy ease with strangers came forth, but with some effort. Part of this is due to pain she still experiences from a leg fracture suffered in a Camp David sledding accident over the holidays. But, as her press secretary, Anna Perez, observed, ”It`s the war too.”
The first first lady
As commentators have found frequent occasion to point out, no one elects first ladies. They have no constitutional or statutory role.
But there they are, nonetheless, at their husbands` sides, not only at gala state dinners and ribbon cuttings but in the grim times when battle and casualty reports come in, during fretful dinners and nights interrupted by telephone calls or visits by anxious aides.
Although nearly every military conflict in America`s history has produced deep political divisions, high morale at the front and at home have been widely shared goals, and there has always been a major role for first ladies in this area too.
Some have managed their jobs better than others.
During the American Revolution, George Washington and his often ragged little army were virtually all there was to the incipient United States. He was not yet president, but, as wife of the military commander in chief, Martha Custis Washington set an example for all wartime first ladies with her exemplary conduct: running the family`s vast plantation in her husband`s absence, sending clothing and food, often joining him at his headquarters in the field. Later, as a president`s wife, she tended to be a little aloof and autocratic, but as the general`s lady she was an inspiring figure of good cheer and encouragement to the troops.
The behavior of the redoubtable Dolley Madison was even more exemplary. Her husband, James, was a brilliant statesman and the individual most responsible for the success of the Constitution. But as commander in chief during the War of 1812, which was largely his own making, he was ineffective. When British redcoats marched on Washington from the east in the hot August of 1814, a frantic Madison went out to take personal command of the American forces. The result was a rout.
”I am accordingly ready,” Dolley Madison noted as the battle raged, though the British had vowed that, if given the chance, they would haul her through the streets of London as a prisoner of war. When a galloping rider brought news of the defeat, she was alone in the White House but for a few servants and two helpful strangers. With their assistance, she packed up the most precious treasures of the executive branch-including the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington-and took a coach into Virginia. Four hours later, the British began torching the city.
A burden to Lincoln
During the Civil War, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln was not a pillar of support but a wearying burden to her Great Emancipator husband. Abrasive, unstable, a desperate social climber and hopeless spendthrift, she insisted on playing great lady while Lincoln grappled with four years of the most massive slaughter known to America. In that time of national struggle and privation, she spent $7,500-a fantastic sum at the time-on a single shopping trip to Philadelphia. She outfitted her footmen in mulberry-colored livery and placed orders for hats ”of your richest velvet.”
The Lincolns` young son, Willie, died in the second year of the war. After that, Mrs. Lincoln was given to long periods of melancholy or hysteria. After her husband`s assassination in the final days of the war, she completely lost control and eventually was placed in a mental institution.
William McKinley`s wife, Ida, was little seen in public during the Spanish-American War, given as she was to what were described at the time as
”fainting spells”-in reality, severe epileptic seizures.
Woodrow Wilson`s first wife, Ellen, died just as World War I erupted in Europe in 1914. The following year, Wilson married a rich Washington society women named Edith Galt. Throughout the United States` involvement in the war, she set an example of austerity for the nation by instituting ”wheatless Mondays” and ”meatless Tuesdays” in the White House. She was as much her husband`s private confidante as his mysterious and all-powerful operative, Edward Mandell House, known as Colonel House.
When Wilson suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1919, his second wife became his regent, issuing commands in his name while much of America remained ignorant of his condition.
Carving out a role
Eleanor Roosevelt`s private estrangement from her husband, Franklin, was almost as well-kept a secret as his infidelities. They slept in separate bedrooms and seldom ate meals together. She was furious when he had his chain- smoking, most ungenteel close advisor Harry Hopkins move into the White House after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and she struggled mightily to have him ousted from the family quarters, not succeeding until 1943.
But she also labored mightily to be useful, and to carve out a wartime role for herself. She was a tireless speaker at war-bond rallies. Ignoring the threat to her safety, she toured bomb-blasted London, and in 1943 she journeyed to the Southwest Pacific, visiting every military hospital bed on Guadalcanal. She helped organize the White House meeting that laid the groundwork for what eventually became the United Nations, a cause she championed for years after her husband died.
Harry Truman was a devoted family man, but his wife, Bess, kept her distance from matters of state. It was to whiskey-drinking reporters, not his wife, that Truman revealed during a White House poker game his decision not to share atomic secrets with the Soviets. During the Korean War, she had enough preoccupations, what with an attempt on her husband`s life by Puerto Rican terrorists and the complete rebuilding of the White House interior, a project occasioned by a leg of daughter Margaret`s piano falling through the floor of the family quarters.
Vietnam was a small concern during the Kennedys` few years in office. It became a grim obsession of Lyndon Johnson`s presidency, but his wife, Lady Bird, was seldom a member of his war councils.
A close adviser
Like fellow Southerner Sarah Childress Polk, Rosalynn Carter was one of her husband`s closest advisers. She was a key counselor during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and reportedly was with husband Jimmy in the Oval Office as he helped direct the ill-fated Desert One rescue mission.
Nancy Reagan`s intrusions on the conduct of her husband`s White House business are now as well-known as her reliance on a Hollywood astrologer for advice in scheduling his trips and appointments. There is no evidence to indicate that astrology played any role in Ronald Reagan`s decisions to dispatch a Marine and naval force to Lebanon or to invade Grenada in 1983. Though she succeeded in overcoming an initially bad public image, she continued to pursue her active social life with wealthy New York and Los Angeles friends during her husband`s military crises.
Many viewed Barbara Bush as antithesis and antidote to Reagan-era glitz and excess. At this time of national crisis, she has emerged as a steady, reliable and indefatigably honest woman representing the anguish and concern of countless American mothers, wives and daughters.
Like Mrs. Roosevelt, she is concentrating her public efforts on setting a good example. George Bush vowed not to hole up within the security net erected around the White House because of terrorism threats from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and Mrs. Bush has helped him keep that vow. Despite the painful leg injury that still requires her to support herself with a cane (a souvenir from a vice presidential trip to Africa), she has strained to keep up a pre-war schedule on behalf of her favorite causes, mostly having to do with literacy, children and family life.
Thinking of the troops
A few days after her Boston trip, she journeyed to a Maryland treatment center to work on computers with educably handicapped 3-year-olds and also to help stroke victims go through the enormously tiring therapy of stair exercises.
”This is how we can help out,” she said. ”Make America a better place for the troops to come home to.”
Before the war, she says, she used to sit at a window on the north side of the White House and watch tourists across the way in LaFayette Park. Now the tourists have been replaced by anti-war protestors, who, until recently, were banging continuously-day and night-on a drum.
Mrs. Bush also liked to sit at another window where she could look across the Rose Garden into her husband`s Oval Office. Now, working late into the night, the president spends much of his time in an office she created for him in the second-floor family quarters. It`s equipped with a computer console, secure telephones and a huge bank of TV monitors and videotape machines, all contained in antique cabinets that nowadays are mostly left open.
Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Brent Scowcroft, Bush`s national security adviser, are in the office constantly, often taking their meals there with the president. Mrs. Bush is often there, too, seeing to their comforts as they discuss the daily destruction wrought by the weapons of war.
In the heady, and rapidly receding, times of convention nominations and inaugural parades, it cannot have been anything she bargained for.
