NO MORE WHITE HOUSE PUFFERY

correction

The smoking habits of President Lyndon B. Johnson were described incorrectly in Tuesday's Style section. Johnson stopped smoking cigarettes after suffering a heart attack in 1955. After retiring from the presidency in 1969, he began smoking again. (Published 2/6/93)

"Lemonade Lucy" Hayes, "Sahara Sarah" Polk and -- as Washington humorist Byron Kennard dubbed her -- "Rose Rosalynn" Carter earned their nicknames for banning hard liquor in the White House. But "Smoke-Free Hillary" Clinton is indeed the first to ban tobacco there.

The mansion will become "a smoke-free environment immediately," a spokesman for the First Lady said yesterday.

"The president and Mrs. Clinton have a no-smoking policy in the residence and non-office spaces of the White House, with the possibility to expand into other areas," said Neel Lattimore, deputy press secretary. "As for outside events, we have not really addressed that yet. The Clintons are very health-conscious, and it was a policy they had in Little Rock that worked well for them and their guests. It's something they wanted to have here."

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The ban will end a long history of the use of nicotine by presidents and their wives, a story both amusing and tragic, reflecting social mores of the changing times as well as the reality that great leaders suffer from the same human consequences of addiction that the common man does.

Ironically, it was the First Lady whom the media and public pundits compare most to Hillary Rodham Clinton -- Eleanor Roosevelt -- who started the public puffing.

In 1934, tradition still held that following White House dinners, the men would retreat to the Green Room for cigars and brandy while the women went to the Red Room. At the time, smoking was still considered a gentleman's prerogative, and ladies in polite society refrained. Eleanor Roosevelt considered this sexist and began to smoke cigarettes in the Red Room to make a point. (Grace Coolidge was actually the first First Lady to smoke cigarettes, although she did so rather secretly, recalled the chief usher, in the private rooms.)

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Eleanor's husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt, actually incorporated the cigarette and cigarette holder into his public image, with one of his most famous photographs showing him with aristocratic elan in profile, the cigarette jauntily affixed to his grin, as he made his way in an open car through a parade. This was not unlike Ulysses S. Grant, always shown smoking cigars. Campaign paraphernalia, political cartoons, even the song "A-Smoking His Cigar" spread the legend. Tragically, Grant spent his last days unable to speak, his throat ravaged by cancer.

Although both suffered from heart disease, President and Mrs. Eisenhower smoked cigarettes. Ike had a heart attack in his first term, but he continued smoking during the pre-warning-label era, when tobacco was advertised as the best way to relax or fight food cravings. His 1969 death, eight years after leaving the White House, came after a series of heart attacks that left him permanently hospitalized. Mamie even smoked in bed and had cigarettes in pink paper made for her.

During the tense days of the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson found his only narcotic relief in nicotine, and his smoking habit became so intense that it alarmed Lady Bird. He died of a heart attack just four years after leaving office.

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While it seemed permissible for modern presidents to be seen and photographed smoking in public -- John F. Kennedy smoked small cigars, Gerald Ford smoked pipes -- that was not the case for their wives. Jacqueline Kennedy, Pat Nixon and Betty Ford all smoked cigarettes but were never photographed doing so. In fact, when Mrs. Nixon was spotted smoking at a restaurant, her press secretary offered that the First Lady "does not inhale." Mrs. Ford had a further amusing use for cigarettes. She put them in the fingers of statues to ascertain if servants were cleaning.

Earlier presidents and First Ladies used tobacco as props. Although Dolley Madison had what one friend called an "unfortunate propensity to snuff-taking," an offer to pinch from one of her enameled snuffboxes was her convenient method of broaching a political figure for a favor, as she did with Henry Clay. The western Andrew Jackson was famous for chewing tobacco, and his polished spittoons cluttered the White House hallways, reinforcing his image as a common man of the people. Calvin Coolidge fiddled with his cigar wrappers more than he smoked, with a habit of putting two-cent wrappers on 25-cent Cuban stogies. Warren Harding's cigarette habit was so well known that he was lobbied by the Women's Christian Temperance Union to stop. He publicly stopped smoking but kept cigarettes in his pockets, which he would crush for tobacco, and then chew.

Asked about her husband's nicotine habit, Florence Harding said she permitted him to smoke a pipe and cigars but astutely remarked that "a cigarette is something that seems to infuriate swarms of voters who have a prejudice against cigarettes."

Perhaps workers and guests in the Clinton White House will not follow another little-known tradition, begun by Alice Roosevelt Longworth, enfant terrible of her father Theodore Roosevelt's administration. When he yelled, "I shall not have you smoking under my roof!" Alice took her lighter and smokes out onto the roof, where, amid the chimney stacks, she puffed away.

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