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rounds of transfusions and painful surgeries was written all over Barbara’s face, and eventually it began to turn her dark hair silver. She had given up the chore of dyeing her hair in 1970, when she was in her mid-forties. Bush refused to bring it up with her, and he threw out the relative who had been given the unenviable task of going to his office to deliver the suggestion.

    P ART OF THE bargain some of these women strike with their husbands is to keep quiet about infidelity. Jackie Kennedy and HillaryClinton are the most famous examples of this kind of compartmentalization, and in many ways they were the perfect matches for their husbands: intelligent, witty, and above all, discreet. The complicated Kennedy and Clinton marriages are not entirely unique. President Johnson made no secret of his affairs and would often try to corner the prettiest girl in the room at a party. By the end of the evening he’d have lipstick marks on his face. Lady Bird would sometimes be in the same room and would plead with him to stop embarrassing her. “You’re wanted over there, Lyndon,” she would tell him. “You’re neglecting some of your friends.” Traphes Bryant, who was a White House electrician and also cared for the first family’s dogs, said Johnson had “inherited” two female reporters from President Kennedy. “He would mention one or the other to me as ‘all woman’ or ‘a lot of woman’ and even accord them the ultimate compliment he ordinarily reserved for his favorite dog, Yuki, telling me they were ‘pretty as a polecat.’”
    Lady Bird knew that her husband desperately wanted a son, and she went through four miscarriages in an attempt to give him one (the Johnsons had two daughters: Lynda, born in 1944; and Luci, born in 1947). She was particularly hurt to see him with younger women, who she worried would be able to give him what she could not. Long after the Johnsons left the White House and after her husband had died, Lady Bird appeared on the Today show, where anchorwoman Barbara Walters asked her directly about LBJ’s womanizing. She laughed and gave an off-the-cuff but shrewd response: “Oh, Lyndon was a people lover. And that certainly did not exclude half the people of the world, women.”
    Some first ladies were willing to put up with incredible and recurring betrayals so that they could be part of their husbands’ lives. Jackie told her friend Adlai Stevenson II, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, “I don’t care how many girls [Jacksleeps with] as long as I know he knows it’s wrong, and I think he does now. Anyway, that’s all over, for the present.” Sir Alastair Granville Forbes was a close friend of Jack and Jackie and in 1956 staged a sort of intervention with Kennedy, warning him to be less flagrant in his philandering if he wanted to pursue the presidency. “Jack was very, very attracted to women who were very attracted to him,” Forbes said of Kennedy. Because both Jack and Jackie were Catholic, and did not believe in divorce, they did not think they needed to work as hard on their marriage, Forbes argued.
    JFK approached his private life as if he were in wartime, acting with reckless abandon as though any moment could be his last. Kennedy’s friend Charles Spalding said that the President’s chronic back problems and poor health gave him a great perspective on life: “Most of us don’t realize how fast time is passing, and he did.” (It’s no surprise that the always loyal Spalding abruptly stopped an oral history interview for the Kennedy Library when he was asked, “Is there anything about his [President Kennedy’s] attitude towards sex in American life that stands out in your mind?”)
    Forbes was more candid. “I think he was very conscious that he was marrying in a way which was suitable in the sense that he was marrying a very pretty girl who was also Catholic. His family was pleased,” Forbes said. “I think that he was infatuated with Jackie, but I