First families of this nation
“I think Americans are very interested in (presidential candidates’) families, the spouses and the children,” Laura Bush, now preparing for her second speaking stint at a Republican National Convention, recently told Larry King. It’s a lesson the Bush daughters learned the hard way — but they’re hardly the first president’s kids to discover that their antics can make headlines, and they won’t be the last. Every four years the country debates the role of the candidates’ wives and children, as if it’s a wholly new phenomenon for them to be involved in politics. In fact, they have always been part of the political package, starting with George Washington. His family lived in a fishbowl, setting the tone for all first ladies and presidential progeny to follow.
When Martha Washington made her grand entrance into New York in 1789 to take on the undefined duties of the chief executive’s wife, she was well aware that her every move would be watched. The wealthy Virginia gentlewoman, with her keen sense of public relations, packed away the fine clothes she loved and made her triumphal trip from Mount Vernon to the then capital wearing homespun clothes — the 18th-century equivalent of Pat Nixon’s good Republican cloth coat. Newspaper reporters trailed her carriage on its way north, chronicling her maiden speech in Philadelphia, where Martha thanked the troops and townsfolk who had escorted her into the city.
President Washington met his wife on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, escorting her on a regal barge across to New York, where the governor greeted her and a huge throng chanted “God bless lady Washington.” She was truly a public figure, and the first family’s every decision was debated. Should the president and his wife accept private invitations, or would that smack of favoritism? How should they entertain? How could they be both democratic enough to satisfy revolutionary principles and decorous enough to earn the respect of the European courts? There was no “transition” time to figure it all out — the day after Martha Washington arrived in New York, official visitors came calling for her to “receive” them.
Soon, the first lady chafed at her circumstances, complaining to her niece, “I am more like a state prisoner than anything else.” A state prisoner with two children to raise in the public eye. After Martha’s son Jack died, his two youngest children went to live with their grandparents, and by the time they moved to New York Nelly Custis was 10 years old and her brother “Wash” only 8. Nelly, called by her grandmother “a little wild creature,” was already attending tea parties and balls by age 11. Her widowed mother, at home in Virginia with her two older children, worried that her youngest daughter would become an “affected, trifling Miss of the Town.” Martha had no such fears — she wanted Nelly’s assistance at her own tedious receptions, and a little social polish would help.
George Bush and John Kerry’s wives and children will not hold office; they won’t be making decisions that affect the nation. But political families have often influenced those decisions, and they also tell us something about the man who is running for president. (Unfortunately, it is still always a man.) What kind of woman did he marry, what’s his relationship with his kids? That’s why “Americans are very interested” in them, as Laura Bush said.
So Bush and Cheney and all their families will pile onto the podium next week to give everyone a look, just as the Kerry and Edwards families did at the Democratic National Convention. It’s an American tradition. Just ask Martha Washington.
Cokie Roberts is the author of the new book “Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation.”