“I think the Bidens know that their affection for each other serves as a healer,” said Dr. Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Rice University and a presidential historian.
“New presidents and first ladies need to empathize,” he explained, and the Bidens’ PDA is only part of the first couple’s effort to fulfill this institutional imperative.
“When we watch [first couples] together, we don’t want to feel tension in your marriage, ”said Brinkley. “We don’t want to feel that they like to be separated from each other. We want to believe that there is harmony and deep respect in this. “
Casual displays of affection were not always so common for early couples. According to Dr. Barbara Perry, director of Presidential Studies at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, it was the 1960s sexual revolution that redefined the standards for how all Americans – including commanders in chief – could interact with their spouses. in public.
After Richard Nixon resigned as president in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Gerald and Betty Ford became the first of the first couples to fully embrace the PDA concept after these social changes, Perry said.
The Fords have expressed their affection for each other since the first day, on August 9, 1974, when they escorted the Nixons out in an elaborate farewell ceremony at the White House that put the two relationships in full relief.
As a red carpet rolled down the south lawn, Gerald and Betty Ford were arm in arm with First Lady Pat Nixon. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon – slightly removed from the group – walked unimpeded towards the presidential helicopter that would take him back to California.
The Ford “were natural together” and “looked so happy” during their brief two and a half years at the White House, Perry said. Not only did they become less overwhelmed as a result of the cultural progress of the 1960s era; they also benefited from following the Nixons, whom Perry dubbed “the winner of the cold couple award” among modern presidential peers.
Perhaps more importantly, however, Gerald Ford never aspired to such ambitious political heights. Ford, a former minority leader in the House, was not elected to the presidency – first elevated to vice-presidency after Spiro Agnew resigned and then to the Oval Office when Nixon stepped down.
“They were never in the national and white spotlight,” Perry said of the Fords. “So, they felt comfortable doing what they always did.”
Subsequent presidents and first ladies showed their affection for each other in their own way – including Ronald’s love letters to Nancy Reagan, who Perry considers to be the most affectionate of the first modern couples.
The baby boomers, a generation far less disturbed by the PDA than their ancestors, managed to enter the White House in the form of Bill and Hillary Clinton. But their marriage, shaken in the mid-1990s by the Lewinsky affair, represented a major turning point in the history of the presidential PDA, when millions of Americans began examining the first couple’s movements for signs of insincerity.
Considering that the public only learned of the marital struggles of previous presidents well after they left office, Perry noted that the Clintons “are the first couple, and he is the first president, which we know in real time, while he is president, that he strayed from his marriage. And then, for them, that is why it is so difficult to know what is genuine and what is artifice. “
Since Bill and Hillary Clinton, the presidency has seen a series of first couples – George W. and Laura Bush, Barack and Michelle Obama and Joe and Jill Biden – who have demonstrated that American culture “has overcome all taboos” that were previously associated with PDA Perry said.
The stark exception is the first previous couple, Donald and Melania Trump, whose frigid public meetings interrupted what would otherwise be a natural integration of the PDA into daily presidential behavior.
In that sense, the Bidens’ displays of affection seem somewhat foreign after the past four years, although they represent yet another return to the norms of previous governments that the new president has repeatedly promised to rehabilitate during the campaign.
“It is comforting. It’s warm. It’s genuine, ”said Perry. “And so, if you ask the question of Covid, our country divided [and] the violence in our country in the face of the contrast with the Trumps, simply symbolizes everything. “