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Double Jeopardy. Given the conflicting demands, a political wife begins to wonder who she is. She may lose her sense of worth and identity. "Politics has nullified my personality," claims Joy Dirksen Baker, who has suffered double political jeopardy, as it were. Her father was the sonorous Senate orator Everett Dirksen; her husband is Tennessee Senator Howard Baker. "The problem started with my father, who was famous," she says. "Then the Watergate hearings came along, and Howard catapulted to prominence. I've always felt I was sort of an appendage."
To avoid that danger, political wives are carving out lives or careers of their own. Says Marion Javits, who has managed to do so with considerable éclat: "The wife who accompanies the man who shakes the hands knows what 'impersonal' means best of all. She is completely left out ... You become part of your husband's audience. Although the ego of people in public life doesn't quite equal that of Orson Welles, who is supposed to have wanted applause when he climbed out of the bathtub, it is there."
It was after being elbowed aside once too often that Angelina Alioto decided to punish her husband Joseph, the ambitious mayor of San Francisco, by disappearing for 17 days last year without telling him where she was going. "At five feet," she says, "I'm the right size to be elbowed in the head." Her husband often failed to introduce her at functions they attended together; he even appropriated her quotes, she claims, without giving her credit. "Son of a biscuit-eater, I'm nobody's robot."
Henry Adams wrote that "a friend in power is a friend lost"; that may apply to a husband as well. He becomes a different man, and not necessarily a better one. However humble his office or aptitude, he develops an exaggerated notion of his power. "His ego is constantly fed," observes Jane Muskie, who periodically denies such nourishment to her own husband. "A little kick in the behind sometimes helps," she adds. "Politicians are not a lovable lot," says an internist who has treated countless numbers of them and their wives during nearly 30 years of practice. "They are self-serving egomaniacs, and I take off my hat to their wives. I don't know how the husbands get away with it." He believes that no more than 3% or 4% of political wives genuinely enjoy what they are doing. "There's a lot of resentment under the surface. They always start out with 'my dear, darling husband' and how much he's doing for Cayuga County or wherever the hell he comes from. But if you listen long enough, you find out she doesn't give a hoot about Cayuga County. If you really establish rapport with one of these wives, she will come right out and tell you how horrible her life is."