First Lady's Lady: With the Fords at the White House

by Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld

Here is a book that truly brings the White House alive--an intimate and intensely human portrait of a Presidential family--and an enormously entertaining journal that could be written only by an insider like Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, White House Press Secretary to Betty Ford. What happens to an average family when it moves into the White House, when the public clamors for every detail of its members' private lives, when opportunists, political groupies, and journalists constantly intrude? Sheila Weidenfeld knows, firsthand, and now she recounts it in candid, compassionate detail. Here is an unposed picture of the family who added a human dimension to high-level politics at a time when the country wanted desperately to believe again in the decency and honor of its leaders. Here are the inner workings of the White House, the perquisites, put-downs, and power plays that go along with life at the summit of political power. Here is an insider's look at the upper-echelon caste system and its secret status indicators, at the roles women play in that system, at the competitive scramble for position that all too often crushes marriages and drives men and women to drink and beyond. And here, too, is the sometimes equivocal position of First Lady, both powerful and powerless, and often anything but "First." Fascinating, revealing, and filled with anecdotes, First Lady's Lady records the trials of life at the political pinnacle and the tribulations and triumphs of being there at a critical time in America's history. (from dust cover/jacket inside flaps).

419 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Sara Goldenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was sort of fun to walk down Memory Lane with a book written about 40 years ago, and see what Helen Thomas and Donald Rumsfeld were like back then.