Love & Politics

KATE ANDERSEN BROWER

PRESIDENTIAL PARTNERSHIPS ARE FORGED decades before couples step onto the national stage. By the time we meet them, they have already made countless sacrifices and weathered many storms together. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s affair with Eleanor’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer, began almost two decades before he became President. Ultimately, the betrayal gave Eleanor the space to become the most consequential First Lady of the twentieth century. Hillary Clinton tolerated her husband’s affair with the cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers while he was the governor of Arkansas because she was playing the long game. But this negotiation between what Hillary Clinton was willing to tolerate in her marriage in order to reach the White House may be less scandalous and, in some ways, more profound than it appears. For First Ladies, their sacrifices can even mean giving up some of their own sense of self for their husbands.

One of the most famous power couples in Western literature is King Arthur and Guenevere. Of course, their match began as a political act, but their particular brand of love brings Camelot, a symbol of peace and hope, to life. With great power comes great pressure, though, and they must decide how much of themselves they are willing to sacrifice in order to preserve Camelot. In the end, it is their very relationship that upends the utopia they created.

It is said that politics is all about compromise, and in political marriages those compromises come with high stakes and they play out on a public stage. Jackie Kennedy famously used Camelot to create the illusion of a brief period of harmony in the country made possible by her husband. But she, more than anyone, knew the sacrifices demanded of the First Lady in order to create that illusion. Decades later, Michelle Obama was schooled in the demands of a Presidential marriage. Michelle, who had graduated from Princeton, earned a law degree from Harvard, and became, first, a corporate lawyer, and was an executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center, when she was asked to examine a video of herself to find out why she had made people so mad. Her husband was the only person on earth she would even consider going through that humiliating exercise for.

It was during Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign that Obama’s adviser David Axelrod asked Michelle to watch herself giving a speech on the campaign trail so that she could see why she was being perceived as “angry.” Of course, she had never thought of herself in that way, and she was genuinely hurt that her offhand remark, when she said, “For the first time in my adult life, I’m proud of my country,” had caused such an uproar. Michelle knew all too well that the country she loves has a long history of labeling Black women that way. After she and her husband became the first Black President and First Lady, they celebrated what their election meant for the country, but as a couple they worried about being in uncharted territory.

“I had lived with an awareness that we ourselves were a provocation,” Michelle wrote in her memoir, Becoming. But the idea that her very mannerisms, her way of speaking and being, could hurt the man she loved cut her to her core. Add to that the inherent pressures of raising two young children in the spotlight—Sasha was seven, and the youngest person to live in the White House since John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Malia was ten—and you have a tinderbox of resentment to work through. An ongoing conflict between love and duty. For Michelle, that meant giving up a career that was a part of her identity in order to focus on their children as she and her husband carried the heavy burden of being “firsts.”

In some ways, Barack and Michelle Obama represent Arthur and Guenevere 2.0. They believed in the possibility of a more perfect nation, and in their own imperfect human way they made their marriage work while reaching for Camelot. F.D.R. and Eleanor also shared a strong belief in the values of democracy and progress; their great love and affection for each other became secondary to their passion for social reform. When F.D.R. was the assistant secretary of the Navy, Eleanor would take their five children away from Washington to their Campobello retreat, off the coast of Maine, during the summer. While she was out of town, his relationship with Mercer grew. Historians say the affair likely began sometime during 1916, but it was in 1919 that Eleanor discovered the love letters, when she was unpacking her pneumonia-stricken husband’s luggage. She was devastated. She burned them and offered her husband a divorce. He refused, knowing that it could ruin his political career.

Eleanor’s granddaughter, Nina Gibson Roosevelt, recalled how it changed their relationship. “I can remember her saying, ‘You forgive, you don’t necessarily forget, but you can forgive.’ From then on, their marriage became a partnership in a way that freed her to become the woman she became. So through adversity sometimes we rise and become things that we never thought we might become.” On April 12, 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt died at his cottage in Warm Springs, with Mercer by his side. Eleanor was at work back in Washington, where she had delivered a speech that afternoon. But it was through her work as First Lady that she found herself, and through an intimate relationship she shared with the journalist Lorena Hickok. Her husband’s infidelity gave her the freedom to pursue her own passions.

Every Presidential couple tries to reconcile the feelings that they should somehow make everyone else in the country happy while also fulfilling each other’s needs. An impossible task, to be sure. In a famous episode of 60 Minutes in 1975, during an interview, First Lady Betty Ford shocked the nation simply by being honest. She acknowledged that all of her children had experimented with marijuana, and she said that if she were a teenager she would probably try it herself. She also admitted to seeing a psychiatrist, and she revealed that she was prochoice. None of this was considered proper behavior for a First Lady. One man actually wrote, aghast and without a trace of irony, “You are, because of the position your husband has assumed, expected and officially required to be PERFECT.” What his definition of “perfect” was is anyone’s guess.

The weight of criticism and the toll it takes on a Presidential marriage is difficult to calculate—it’s never possible to really get inside a relationship— but since leaving office in 2017 the Obamas have pulled back the curtain just a few inches.

“During the time we were there, Michelle felt this underlying tension,” the former President wrote in his memoir A Promised Land. “The pressure, stress, of needing to get everything right, to be ‘on’ at every moment. . . . There were times where I think she was frustrated or sad or angry but knew that I had Afghanistan or the financial crisis to worry about, so she would tamp it down.” In short, he simply did not have the bandwidth to handle her needs.

Compared with the Clintons and the Trumps, the Obamas’ marriage and its trials and tribulations might seem tame, but that is what makes it so compelling. They represent the power dynamic playing out in many relationships, but on a grand stage and under outsized pressure. They had to decide whether their needs rose to the level of being addressed amid the immense strain of the positions they held in the White House. The President’s role is obvious, but the First Lady’s is not—a reality that, ironically, only adds to the stress of the position. As Presidential partner, she is everything and nothing all at once. She has to define the job for herself. Nancy Reagan considered it within her purview to sniff out and fire staff members whom she suspected of being disloyal to her husband. Ronald Reagan desperately wanted everyone to like him, and, of course, everyone likes to be liked, but Nancy was willing to sacrifice that admiration to be her husband’s ultimate protector. And she paid the price: in a December 1981 Gallup poll, she had the highest disapproval rating—twenty-five percent—of any modern First Lady.

Most First Ladies avoid total honesty while they’re in the White House, but they’re liberated after they leave. (Nancy Reagan’s My Turn is a must-read for anyone interested in First Ladies.) In her post-White House memoir, Michelle Obama was similarly startlingly honest. She wrote about her and her husband’s struggles getting pregnant, then suffering a miscarriage, and she revealed that both Malia and Sasha were conceived through in-vitro fertilization. She had to administer the shots required in the process herself while her husband was away serving in the state legislature in Springfield, Illinois. Well before the White House, they had sought couples counseling that saved their marriage during a time when she worried that his political career “would end up steam-rolling our every need.” So it was during those early years that the power dynamic between them began to shift, and her career began to take a backseat to his political ambitions. It was a bargain they made in order to preserve what they had.

Inside the White House, when a President talks about wanting his staff to achieve a work-life balance, the joke is always that he’s referring to his home life and no one else’s. Staff members are expected to miss their own children’s birthday parties and doctor’s visits when duty calls. And, while Michelle made the case that her husband was home more often as President than he had been when he commuted to Springfield, Illinois, or to Washington, D.C., there were still many things that he missed. But dinners in the second-floor residence, a sacred private space for First Families, were inviolable. So much so that even Michelle’s mother, Marian Robinson, who moved into a small suite on the third floor to help care for her granddaughters, wasn’t invited.

But you can have only so much privacy when you live above the store. That was obvious when the President’s Daily Brief (or, as Michelle called it, “The Death, Destruction and Horrible Things Book”) was presented at the breakfast table every morning: a heavy thump that rattled the coffee cups.

There is an obvious paradox that the Obamas negotiated every day of their eight years in the White House: that of maintaining a private life in the most high-profile positions imaginable while also recognizing how endearing their domestic life was to much of the country. Michelle grew up on Chicago’s South Side, and keeping it real was one of her superpowers; it was why she eventually became such a sought-after campaigner, earning the nickname “the closer” from Obama aides. Her mom-next-door persona included sometimes making fun of her husband’s morning breath and his body odor. Some people thought this unbecoming of a First Lady, but most of the country seemed to enjoy her candor and her ability to take her husband down a peg or two when she felt that it was necessary.

Lady Bird Johnson considered her role to be “balm, sustainer, and sometime critic for my husband.” She even gave L.B.J. “critiques”—if she thought he was doing “too much looking down” during a speech, or sounded breathless, she told him so. Sometimes she graded him on his performance. One speech earned “a good B+.” Joseph Califano, a close Johnson adviser, put it well when he said, “She was more important to what he did in the White House than any staffer.” L.B.J., who could be cruel to his wife, actually appreciated her input. He needed her opinion, because he must have known that, like every President, he was surrounded by yes men. And it made her feel like a true partner.

In 2022, when Barack Obama was asked about how to navigate political opposition at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit, he warned leaders, “Sometimes we get filled up in our own self-righteousness. We’re so convinced that we’re right that we forget what we are right about.” But what applies to politics also applies to marriage: Obama needed to be reminded, from time to time, that at home he was a father and a husband first, and not the leader of the Free World. His wife was his grounding influence.

The Obamas now have a renewed sense of relative privacy, and multimillion-dollar brandbuilding deals. Their combined influence goes well beyond politics; critics refer to their postPresidential life as “Obama, Inc.”

Growing together in a relationship is always a challenge, but after a couple has made it to the stratosphere of American political power—he could not have become President without her by his side—the obligation to fulfill a duty to the position and to oneself shifts dramatically. The Obamas can finally exhale. Sure, more attention is given to their courting of multimillion-dollar donors to fund the Obama Presidential Center, and the global media blitzes to promote their respective blockbuster memoirs, but what is even more interesting is this: they now have the chance to rebalance a relationship that has been out of whack for too long.

Since leaving the White House, they have become more themselves and less guarded. The former President directly campaigns for Democratic candidates, and the former First Lady, who has long expressed disdain for the nastiness of politics, devotes her time to her nonprofit When We All Vote, which seeks to encourage voter registration. During their portrait unveilings at the White House, Obama made this plea for understanding: “What you realize when you’re sitting behind that desk, and what I want people to remember about Michelle and me, is that Presidents and First Ladies are human beings like everyone else. We have our gifts. We have our flaws. You’ve all experienced mine. We have good days and bad days. We feel the same joy and sadness, frustration and hope.”

It is often First Ladies like Michelle Obama and Betty Ford, women who feel free to say what’s on their minds because they will never run for office themselves, who are most popular in any White House. The overtly political ones, à la Hillary Clinton, are the most polarizing. But while women like Michelle and Betty did not want to enter politics as candidates, they recognized that, like Guenevere, they could serve the greater good by being the partners their husbands needed.

In her memoir, Michelle Obama described the profound moment when her husband asked her to come to his side in the middle of the day. It resonated with her because it was a recognition that their marriage was the most important thing in his life, and the carnage of that particular day made him want to hold her close. The day was December 14, 2012, and twenty first graders and six adult staff members had been killed by a gunman in Newtown, Connecticut.

“My husband needed me,” Michelle later wrote. “This would be the only time in eight years that he’d request my presence in the middle of a workday, the two of us rearranging our schedules to be alone together for a moment of dim comfort.”

No matter how heavy the burden of the Presidency, there was an undeniable emotional, almost magnetic pull, they had to each other in their darkest moments. Human nature, and the need for love, acceptance, and empathy, triumphs, even inside the White House, where the stakes are at their highest.

KATE ANDERSEN BROWER’s latest book, Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, is the first authorized biography of the actress. Brower is the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller The Residence and of First Women, also a New York Times bestseller, as well as Team of Five, First in Line, and the children’s book Exploring the White House The Residence is being made into a television series produced by Shonda Rhimes for Netflix.

President Barack Obama unexpectedly runs into Michelle on her birthday in the basement of the White House, January 17, 2012. © Christopher Morris/VII/Redux.

Former First Lady Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, waving her hand during the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, California, July 1960 © Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection/ Shutterstock.

First Lady Betty Ford dances on the Cabinet Room table on the day before departing the White House. January 19, 1977 © David Hume Kennerly/Everett Collection.

President Reagan saying goodbye to Nancy Reagan at Andrews Air Force base, November 17, 1984. Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.