Presidential Wives and the Press

Abstract By the second half of the twentieth century, most Americans accepted the fact that they were on a first-name basis with the wives of their presidents. The faces of Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan peered out from the nation’s newsstands, and stories about Jackie Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson continued to dot women’s magazines long after they had moved away from the capital. Men and women too young to have comprehended much political news during the Great Society and the Vietnam War retained a very clear picture of the First Lady from Texas, although their image of Hubert Humphrey-longtime senator, Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president, and later a contender for president himself-was fuzzy. Walter Mondale, for all the publicity he received as a presidential candidate in 1984, slipped quickly into obscurity in comparison with the woman from Georgia whom everyone called Rosa lynn. What schoolchild has not seen at least one film on Eleanor Roosevelt, but who recognizes the name of John Nance Garner as the vice president for eight of the years that Eleanor was First Lady?