First families

'First Families provides a look at how presidential families learned to cope with the demands and grandeur imposed on them and worked to create a home in a beloved but often stifling national monument.' 'Angelo probes two hundred years of American history to tell the story of real life within the White House walls. As a longtime correspondent for Time magazine, she witnessed and reported about much that has happened in the White House over the last four decades. In this book Angelo chronicles exhilarating moments and dark days in the lives of the First Families and the nation, with behind-the-headline accounts of the stirrings of love, the joyful weddings, the tragic deaths of children and spouses, the squabbles of marriage, the glittering evenings and glaring mistakes all occurring within the same historic rooms. Through it all, the families constantly struggle to keep their lives private from the public domain.' Here are the unique pleasures and pains of a vast array of characters, from activist wives Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt to reluctant occupants Bess Truman and Jacqueline Kennedy to those who embraced their new address and status such as Mary Todd Lincoln, Dolley Madison, and the rollicking sons of Theodore Roosevelt.