Coming of age in the White House

Have other first families endured embarrassing public scrutiny?

A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice kept newspaper reporters busy with behavior that was considered scandalous at the time. Her smoking, for example, was regarded as a racy habit for a young lady. Reporters were delighted to learn that Alice, after her father banned her from smoking inside the White House, took to climbing onto the roof to light up. On an official trip to Asia, she made headlines by jumping into a swimming pool fully dressed. More recently, Ronald Reagan endured great embarrassment at the hands of daughter Patti Davis. Davis, who was openly liberal and lived with a member of the rock band the Eagles, wrote a thinly disguised novel about an emotionally distant father and a controlling mother obsessed with appearances. Reagan’s son, Ron, raised eyebrows when he took up ballet and, later, danced around in his underwear in a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch.

Have any presidential children avoided the spotlight?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Clintons succeeded in keeping coverage of daughter Chelsea to a minimum, although during eight years in the White House she was photographed thousands of times. Chelsea moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as a 12-year-old. Straitlaced and studious, she never provided much fodder for scandal sheets. Her awkwardness was lampooned on Saturday Night Live, a fate many latter-day presidential children have suffered and hated. Her arrival at Stanford University four years ago marked the end of her press immunity, although a flurry of speculative accounts about her boyfriends never aroused much interest. She studied history and graduated with highest honors last month, at age 21. The press coverage on graduation day included pictures of Chelsea smiling and playing kick ball. Her silence over the years and her stellar academic performance have earned her considerable respect with the public. But as one worried family friend confided to The New York Times, “She’s great, but if you’re on a pedestal, there’s only one direction to go.”

How have youngsters

of dating age coped?

As uncomfortably as might be expected. Jack Ford, who was a teenager while his father, Gerald, was in office in the 1970s, disliked going on dates with two Secret Service agents in tow. He joked that at least his dates never had to fear being bored, since they could always chat with his security detail if they found him to be uninspiring company. Luci Baines Johnson spent her first night in the White House in 1963, at the age of 16. She and boyfriend Patrick Nugent once gave their Secret Service detail the slip, ducking out the back door at a party and going for an unchaperoned night on the town. Young Barbara Bush reportedly has used the same trick, once darting through a highway toll booth while her official escort stopped to pay, allowing her to escape for a night out with friends.

Have the romances of presidential offspring ever complicated politics?

They have certainly added spice. Sarah Knox, one of the daughters of Zachary Taylor, president from 1849 until his death a year later, married Jefferson Davis, who later became president of the Confederate States of America. Had Sarah not died of malaria three months after the wedding, she would have been the South’s first lady during the Civil War.

Is post–White House life

any easier for these children?

Some former White House residents have remained in the public eye for life, while others have slipped into obscurity. One notable splash came in 1992, when Patti Davis embarrassed Reagan again with a tell-all memoir accusing her mother of popping pills and slapping her, and her father of ignoring the abuse. Davis, two years later, posed nude for Playboy magazine.

Does all the attention

have a lasting effect?

Some children of former presidents have gone on to be high achievers, with President George W. Bush himself an obvious example. However, Douglas Wead, a White House aide under the first President Bush, studied former first kids and found them more likely than the average person to get divorced, become an alcoholic, and/or die young. His study, which George W. Bush commissioned when his father was president, found that the hardest hit were children who actually grew up while Dad was in office, as the seemingly well-adjusted Chelsea Clinton did. Friends say that Amy Carter, an awkward White House daughter who grew up to be a social activist arrested three times for protesting, hated the constant attention she got when her father, Jimmy Carter, was in office. She has since

chosen to live a quiet life away from the spotlight with her husband and 2-year-old son, Hugo.

‘The other Washington Monument’

Alice Roosevelt, the wild daughter of rough-riding President Theodore Roosevelt, grew up to marry prominent Ohio congressman Nick Longworth. Until her death, in 1980, she was a fixture in the nation’s capital, earning the unofficial title “the other Washington Monument.” Her endless quips made her the irascible darling of the beltway set. President Warren Harding, she said, “was not a bad man. He was just a slob.” As for Calvin Coolidge, he “looked like he was weaned on a pickle.” Unsuccessful Republican presidential