Hilary Clinton, Eleanor Roosevelt and Abigail Smith - 19 January 1996

After Washington dug itself out of the blizzard of '96 – it's still hacking away in the side streets at little mountains of snow and finding under them, surprise, surprise parked cars – the government opened up again and we were very soon back to normal. Normal now means a renewal on television, of the vicious little 15 second political ads summing up in a tart phrase, the miserable shortcomings of your political opponent. Since there are seven Republicans running at the moment sloshing through the snows of New Hampshire, each of them is going to have to raise a lot of money to take six pot shots at his opponents. Normal also means that the president has started holding White House meetings again with the Republican leaders in the Senate and the House, Senator Dole and Mr Gingrich, and as usual they seem to be getting nowhere with this never-ending dog fight over how to balance the budget.

However, there's something a good deal juicier for the gossips, and perhaps for the historians, in the return to what has become a sort of second or subsidiary presidential campaign: the campaign to discredit Mrs Clinton and so by association weaken the president's chances in November of re-election.

Let's see just how badly, tactlessly a president's wife can behave. How far she can get out of line from her expected role as loyal wife, gracious hostess and you might say presidential ornament. It's come to something, don't you think, when the first lady, the president's wife insists on saving the country from its threatened bankruptcy by negotiating a loan from a foreign power, against the president's wishes and without his knowledge. If he won't do it, she said, then I will.

Since this took an age to come out, I won't mention the name of the foreign country, suffice it to say that it had saved the credit of the United States once before, but since the Congress hadn't yet agreed on a tax bill, the first lady insisted on getting a second loan from the obliging foreign power. Absolutely not said the President, so his wife secretly wrote to his big political opponent saying in effect, he's a stubborn old mule, you try to persuade him to seek a second loan. The enemy prevailed and America, as the first lady said, is saved from bankruptcy for another two years. The president by the way, didn't know about his wife's role in the business, but when it came out he wrote, it's all your own intrigue, which has forced me to this loan, I suppose you'll boast of it as a great public service.

Did you ever hear about this incident? Nobody mentioned it this week and I remembered it only when more and more Republicans and newspaper columnists began to rail at the first lady as a busybody surrogate president, and a woman strenuously denying her part as a lawyer in a real estate scandal and a building society savings and loans scandal in Arkansas 20 years ago.

Oh about the foreign loan business, Holland was the helpful foreign power. And I hope you gathered from the tense of the verbs that I was not talking about Mrs Clinton, but about Mrs John Adams, the wife of the second president of the United States. It was only one remembered example of a president's wife asserting herself in the running of the presidency or otherwise assuming a role that does not correspond with what people think ought to be the role of the president's wife.

It's what whole gangs of politicians, mostly Republicans, naturally have been saying almost since Mrs Clinton moved with her husband into the White House, one of them, overcome with writer's indignation, declared that never in the history of the United States had a president's wife so intruded into the actual business of the presidency. All this means is that the politicians and the parroting commentators don't know any American history.

Of course it has to be said that American history in schools, and colleges for that matter, rarely includes a history of the presidential wives, but since the very beginning, since Martha Washington, it seems that every succeeding generation of Americans has assumed a stereotype of what the first lady ought to be and every other generation is shocked when she doesn't conform to it. I suppose the role model that everyone expects every first lady to fill was set by Martha Washington, George Washington's wife who had, as one author put it: "Little interest in politics and less in fame." Her husband, his private life and his welfare was her whole life, mother, hostess, nurse – during the revolutionary war, the War of Independence – nurse to too many wounded and sick soldiers whom she housed.

Well as you might have guessed, the mould was very rudely broken by the wife of the second president, the Abigail Adams we've just talked about. She must have been, as a politician's wife, something of a freak in the 18th century. She was deeply interested in politics and philosophy, particularly in something that ought to be an attribute of every politician but rarely is, namely the difference between an ideal policy – what ought to be done – and what in a world of divided opinions can sensibly be expected. She had ideas about everything that was being discussed and much that wasn't during the first Congress and the drawing up of the first American codes of law.

Imagine in the 1780s, the president's wife seeing him off to yet another session of law making and nation inventing, and giving him a note to read and memorise: "Now remember the ladies...and do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands, remember all men would be tyrants if they could." Oddly, the women's lib people don't seem to have heard of her because she could, with more justice than many another choice, be hailed as a true pioneer of women's rights. A hundred and forty years before it became a fact of political life in the United States and Britain she urged votes for women. Eighty years before it was done, she advocated the abolition of slavery. Talk about a dangerous radical! Alas, her brilliant and lively engagement in politics caused her husband's political downfall.

In 1800, he ran for re-election. One of the elements that beat him was the widespread belief that she had too much influence over the public conduct of her husband. Well since 1800 there have been 17 first ladies. I've been looking them over, and their public character, and I realise now that this stew over Mrs Clinton is due to a stretch of history during which we've had more first ladies who approximate to Martha Washington than to Abigail Adams or, I hasten to say, Eleanor Roosevelt. The people who are complaining about Mrs Clinton today, and were the first to protest her nosing into politics with a huge ill-fated healthcare program, they mostly were little children when Mrs Franklin Roosevelt was rampaging up and down the land, railing about the diet of Southern farm families, urging her husband, beyond his power I might say, to start a massive federal housing program for the poor of any colour.

The Republican outcry against Mrs Roosevelt as a political busybody was far more strident and unceasing than anything Mrs Clinton has had to put up with. Mrs Roosevelt appeared everywhere making public speeches on the radio for a long stretch every breakfast time, which is why she gurgled over a delicious coffee. Yes, she was sponsored by among others the manufacturers of soap and mattresses. She wrote a well paid column, she earned by herself a steady $100,000 a year, which in the 1930s was about a million and a half today. Every penny of it she gave to experiments she sponsored, for unemployed miners families, for all sorts of New Deal reforms. In the depression, oddly, she like her husband, was as often loved as hated, most of all, because Mrs Roosevelt was plain and had a high falsetto headmistress's voice, she was easily and mercilessly mocked, she felt the sting of it as much as Mrs Clinton must be doing.

The Democrats and others who now believe that Mrs Clinton has done nothing improper in her real estate and building society dealings in the long ago, are quick to point to Mrs Roosevelt as an assertive politically active first lady. She too did not act as a first lady should, which is be housewifely, non-political, if possible decorative like Mrs Kennedy who was so non political she had to be begged to do her duty and appear as hostess at state dinners, be like Mrs Truman, good old Bess, who never said a mumbling word in public. But how about Rosalynn Carter? She sat in on every cabinet meeting and President Carter himself said that she had an opinion on every crucial political decision of his presidency. How about Mrs Reagan? She had a tough time for two years or so, for too much influence on the public conduct of the president. Did she not get the president's chief of staff fired? The evidence is persuasive.

While Mrs Clinton's involvement in the healthcare plan brought the charge of being a political busybody, the new charge of deceit is based entirely on what Mrs Clinton did or didn't do 20 years ago, about that failed savings and loan association, which cost the taxpayers of Arkansas about 20 million dollars and about the associated real estate deal.

She was a lawyer at the time, her husband was governor. A senate committee led by Senator Dole's presidential campaign manager is sweating over 1,000's of documents, documents they've rescued from oblivion, documents the Clinton's have been tardy or strangely reluctant to find. So far though, they are out fishing night and day and changing the bait every hour on the hour, they have not landed a criminal or even an illegal Mrs Clinton, and she seems pretty cheerful as she goes off on a tour flogging her book about children. Maybe she's been told about a word or two Mrs Roosevelt spoke to a meeting of women Democrats in the mid 30s at the height of the ridicule Eleanor Roosevelt Campaign: "You cannot bear grudges...you have to take defeat over and over again and pickup and go on".

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