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

About this book

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 insiders 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 Ladys Lady records the trials of life at the political pinnacle and the tribulations and triumphs of being there at a critical time in Americas history. (from dust cover/jacket inside flaps).