First Lady Lit

First Lady memoirs are discussed in The New York Times, after Laura Bush recently published her memoirs that have been well-received by the critics.

From the essay...

In the days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Lady Bird decided that, as the president’s wife, she owed history an archive. So most nights around 7, she would retreat to her White House dressing room-office, hang a small pillow on the door (“I Want to Be Alone”) and talk to her tape recorder. She also saved lunch menus, guest lists, anything to aid her memory, and when the Johnsons were getting ready to leave the White House she began cutting and revising what had become about two million words of material. By December 1968, New York’s publishing elite were filing in to a secure “reading room” to examine the manuscript. Holt, Rinehart & Winston ended up publishing “A White House Diary” in 1970, to effusive reviews. Appearances by Lady Bird on radio and television (including “The David Frost Show”) and a book tour soon followed, and the memoir spent 13 weeks on The Times’s best-seller list. Every first lady since, with the exception of Pat Nixon, has written a memoir.

Lady Bird Johnson may have been the first first lady to get the full modern book rollout, but she was hardly the first whose White House experiences made it into a book. As early as 1840, readers were devouring Abigail Adams’s “Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams,” and Louisa Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams and daughter-in-law of Abigail, made several attempts at an autobiography. (She titled her final try “The Adventures of a Nobody.”)