Eleanor Roosevelt Jacqueline Kennedy Hillary Clinton and I am expecting Michelle Obama to wind up replacing one of these names.

Elanor Roosevelt Jacqueline Kennedy Martha Washington

I’m with Candice on this one, and add Michelle Obama to the mix. CA

Jackie!! She was one of America’s top horsewomen, a championship Scrabble player, a wonderfully witty watercolorist, multi-lingual (French, Spanish, Italian), intellectual….knew history, an expert on ancient myth and art, and the 18th C. -At Vassar she won the Edna St. Vincent Milly prize for Literature and kept in a special place in her bedroom for the rest of her life. She won the Vogue’s Prix d Paris contest out of nearly 2,000 entries for designing an entire edition of the magazine but then turned down the prize. She was also Deb of the Year and the Inquiring Photographer in WDC, she covered the coronation of Queen Elizabeth delighting her newspaper’s editors and readers with her witty sketches of events. -As a young teenager during the war on Hammersmith Farm in Newport she did many of the chores when the help took off for war including feeding the chickens and taking a shift answering the one phone in the mansion. -In post-WWII deprived Paris for her year at the Sorbonne, she lived without heat and on rations, but made the best of everything and was unflappable even when the old fashioned water heater blew up in the bathroom with her in the tub. -Loved the extremely clever book she and Lee penned “One Special Summer” about their European tour. I’d seen the book at the Smithsonian in the First Ladies exhibit and then happend on a copy at an musty second hand bookstore, but then my Japanese exchange wanted it so I gave it to her. Many insights into the young Jackie, including her considering art historian Bernard Berenson ‘a god’ and quoting his advice to be with life enhancing people, not life diminishing. -I loved her scholarship about the restoration of the WH, and how she solved problems of money for the project including self-funding the first WH curator’s office when she penned the original White House Guidebook that subsequently raised tens of millions. -She and JFK both loved history, sports and books. Jackie snow and water skied, was a great swimmer, they sailed, and she even rode with the expert Pakistani calvary during her visit there. She famously inhaled books, and was a certifiable egghead. -She had such great enthusiasm and imagination. She was genuinely caring about all people, genuinely democratic. When upset by the poverty she saw in W Virgina, arranged the WH stemware would be ordinary but nicely styled glasses made there to help the local economy, knowing that if she bought them, millions of other Americans would too. -Loved that she brought the arts into the WH and that so many institutions founded or inspired by she and JFK still exist: The Kennedy Center Honors, the Peace Corps, the Profile in Courage Awards, the Kennedy Center for Government at Harvard. Historical preservation laws began with Jackie after she helped save Layfayette Sq in WDC. The Anwar Dam project antiquites in Egypt [the gift of the 5th century BC nubian Temple of Dendur at MOMA was the result of her actions, and it was also her selection from a group of offerings.] She was also instrumental in saving Grand Central Station. And her original watercolors paintings appeared on UNICEF Christmas cards in the early 60s helping to raise money for UNICEF. -As someone said she was the last of the very good taste. She was very sensitive to other cultures when traveling abroad, knew their histories and dressed with a nod to their cultures. Everywhere she traveled hundreds of thousands even millions poured out (and that’s when the world population was 1/2 it is today). In Canada, England, Mexico, Columbia, Venezula, Italy, France, Ireland, India, Pakistan she was greeted like a cross between a divinity and rock star. As a private citizen later she traveled quite simply. When she and architect I. M. Pei journeyed to China, he said she took one bag with mostly rolled up T-Shirts and khaki pants. -She returned to work at 50, and acquired/edited100 books in 20 years, mostly for Doubleday, Her boss was Stephen Rubin the marketing genuis behind DaVinci Code. She argued for Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth which has had a huge impact on our culture and gave Disney, Fox and other studio’s their hero archetype for films. She also acquired Bill Moyers “Healing and the Mind.” And the wonderful Peter Sis books. -She was an excellent mother, famously stating that “If you bungle raising your children whatever else you do well doesn’t matter very much.” -Carly Simon, a close friend said that most of all Jackie was a 16 year old girl. I loved her curiosity and appreciation, her refusal to allow others to define her. That she never wrote about her life and was always moving forward and focused on learning, enjoying, witnessing. -She did pilates, yoga, meditated with Deepak Chopra. She didn’t complain and she didn’t speak about the past. She was a very modern woman with terrific sensibilites, amazing self-discipline, dignified, and with an incredible sense of self. She was a terrific writer. -Jackie is among the 100 most admired women in history, as she deserves to be. Her heroic behavior at age 34 those four horrible days in Nov 1963 “Showed the world how to behave,” as President de Gaulle said. She wasn’t ostentacious but down to Earth, living simply at her Red Gate Farm on Martha’s Vineyard….and with her impish/girlish sense of humor that name made me wonder if she took it from the Nancy Drew book so entitled. -The last book Jackie edited at Doubleday just before she died was on the Goddess Isis. I thought her entire life was like a myth and that was an incredibly fitting end. The Temple of Dendur given to MOMA in thanks to Jackie’s efforts as First lady, was built for Isis. Jackie’s favorite city Paris was named for Isis. Isis was worshipped as the ideal mother and wife, patron of nature and artisans, the downtrodden as well as aristocrats and rulers. And like Jackie, Isis is the goddess of simplicity and beginnings. Isis is also the goddess of wisdom. Isis was the complete female, the Goddess of Magic, the sister-wife to Osiris who was murdered, she was inconsolable and didn’t stop until she put him back together. And Jackie did that for Jack. Rescuing what could have been an ignoble end and giving it mythological dimensions. From someone who knew them I learned how very distraught Jack was over the wartime death of his irrepressible/charming sister, Kick, who was wildly popular in England when Jack, Kick, and Joe Jr were there during the lead up to WWII and when their father as Ambassador to England. Many who knew Jack well believed he saw alot of Kick in Jackie. I went along on a private tour of the Kennedy Library given by Dave Powers and he said there was no question (he was with the Kennedys throughout their marriage) that they were two very strong, independant people, who had tremendous respect, caring and admiration for each other. Jack was broken hearted when Patrick died, and tremendously concerned for Jackie, it brought he and Jackie very close together. She said to him, “The thing I couldn’t take is if anything happened to you.” He died less than four months later.

PS, I met Nancy Reagan who was very sweet, like her son, Ron, Jr. Admired Lady Bird for her beautification project, and agree that Michelle Obama will be an outstanding First Lady.

Eleanor Roosevelt: an outstanding, vocal woman in her own right throughout her life, it was she who wrote a daily - daily - syndicated column called “My Day” each day for the newspapers, was out giving speeches, visiting servicemen, and was helpmate for a husband with polio. Her name remained in the news long after her husband died, as U.S. spokesperson for the United Nations. Watched by all, criticized for her “plainness”, she nevertheless was respected for her abilities and intelligence in reaching out in her own right in a way not seen before, making good headlines with her speaking ability and as a lady that we all could see could stand on her own - and did. Distinguished - yes, in the true sense of the word as probably no other. Abigail Adams: we only know her by letters, but if you have read them, you know that in those early days, she was first who wanted women to be treated as equals. What did a woman do in those times? She wrote, and in doing so to her husband - as again she was an intelligent woman - her knowledge of government and her information may have influenced her husband far more than we know. The woman behind the throne. As for the third: the question was “distinguished” not beautiful, sociable, or the like, so while I think Jackie Kennedy may well be the most remembered, I am not sure she was in the class of the women above. And how in the world could we judge Michelle Obama from the relatively few times we have seen her and BEFORE we know how she will perform as First Lady? Aren’t we - as women - smarter than to put the cart before the horse? So - for the third - who I feel really should be first - would be First Daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth, T.R.’s daughter - who, as I have written before, was the most active woman in politics ever. She spent her days in the balcony of the houses of Congress for a lifetime, picking off the prizes for her evening salons for 60 years - and thus encouraging a mix of politicians who could talk into the night, disagree or agree - amiably, she said - and know each other as in no other venue. Politicians did not need to be prodded to spill confidences into her ear at the constant functions as she was a one-of-a-kind personal and political “draw” into her death at 90. WHAT a woman — my kind of woman — never letting a blade of political grass grow under her feet, full of live, full of knowledge of politics throughout the administrations that followed T.R.’s — and a dynamo of a woman. Loved her — and if you don’t read the new biography of her called “ALICE”, you are missing a woman of the world big time!