Barbara Bush

Barbara Bush spent her White House years deliberately underselling herself, wearing fake pearls and letting her hair go white while cultivating an image as the nation's unglamorous, plainspoken grandmother — a persona that made her one of the most consistently popular First Ladies in modern polling even as she pursued a genuinely substantial policy agenda underneath it. She met George H.W. Bush at a dance in 1941 when she was 16, married him in 1945 while he was on leave from the Navy, and moved with him through 17 addresses and several business ventures before he entered Texas politics in the 1960s.

Literacy was her central cause, built on a long-held belief that illiteracy sat underneath nearly every other social problem she encountered, from poverty to crime to unemployment. She founded the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy in 1989 to fund programs teaching parents and children together, and that same year she visited Grandma's House, a Washington home for children with HIV, where she was photographed holding and kissing an infant patient at a moment when public fear of the disease still ran high enough that the gesture made national news.

She and George H.W. Bush were married 73 years, the longest marriage of any presidential couple in American history, and she lived to see their son George W. Bush become the 43rd president in 2001, making her only the second woman, after Abigail Adams, to be both a president's wife and a president's mother. She died in April 2018 at 92, months before her husband, at their home in Houston.