Though her enthusiasm in the role of senatorial helpmeet has led some skeptics in her native Minnesota to dub her "Phony Joanie," those who know her best believe her cheerfulness is unfeigned. "A long time ago, when the children were small, Joan accepted the fact that Fritz is a politician," says her mother, Mrs. Eleanor Adams. "She puts up with a lot because Fritz is away, but the excitement of Washington compensates. And Joan is a good politician herself."
Few political wives, in fact, have come as thoroughly hardened to the demands of the role. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister (Dr. J. Maxwell Adams, now chaplain emeritus of Macalester College in Saint Paul) who spent six months on the road every year, she grew accustomed to absentee husbands. "I've known nothing else," she says. "My mother paid the bills and cut the grass and did the gardening. So do I." Industrious, and frugal to the point of exasperation within her own family ("I don't like to spend money," she admits), Mrs. Mondale has almost singlehandedly raised three children, campaigned vigorously throughout Minnesota and emerged as a civic-minded gadfly. "Joan is a drillmaster," says her sister Jane Canby of Tempe, Ariz., who recalls that Joan has been known to buy Christmas presents in July. "There's a planned pattern in her home, but she makes it warm and informal."
A lifelong liberal, like her husband, Mrs. Mondale was born in Oregon and raised in suburban Philadelphia in an atmosphere attuned to politics. Her mother, the family conservative, voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt, her father for Socialist Norman Thomas. Once the Reverend Adams took his three daughters cherry picking with migrant workers in Michigan to teach them how hard a life it was. Joan remembered the lesson, and later taught the family one of her own. "Fritz was working on a welfare bill, and Joan wanted to see how much a welfare check would buy," recalls her sister Joyce Newman of Homewood, Ill. "She gained six pounds in two weeks from eating so much starch."
A 1952 graduate of Macalester (where Fritz "was the big shot on campus"), Joan, now 45, met Mondale at a dinner party in 1955 while working at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. "I was dating all those, you know, nice Republican boys, and there wasn't anybody I wanted to bring along," she remembers. "My brother-in-law Bill Canby called up Fritz and told him that I was going to be his dinner partner, but that he didn't have to come if he didn't want to." Recalls Mondale: "We met and that was it." Fifty-three days later Fritz and Joan were engaged, and three months after that they were married.
Both Mondales were active in Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor party. When Fritz was appointed state attorney general in 1960, Joan began his campaign for a second term. "I'd given a lot of guided tours and art lectures," she says, "but standing up and talking about yourself to a group of strangers is an emotional thing. They are judging you, and it's scary." When Mondale was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1964, Joan was once again forced to adapt. "Each time our lives have changed, it's been for the better," she observes. "But it's never been easy. When we moved to Washington, everything I knew or cared about was in Minneapolis. I didn't have anything to say at a dinner party for a year."
Joan's current dilemma is deciding how to deal with the pressures of the 1976 campaign. "I have to think about how I want to be," she says. "I'm an outspoken person in private, and I don't know how I'll handle it." Her first reassurance came from her husband's presidential running mate, Jimmy Carter. "I mentioned to him that the newspapers had described me as well-dressed but not stylish. Jimmy said, 'Don't worry about it. You're just fine.' "
The Mondales plan to campaign separately. She will spend a week in Minnesota, buying clothes, reading the Democratic platform and priming herself on issues involving the family. "I'm going to figure out what to say to all those people," she says. "I want to be concise and to the point. I hate all those nothing answers."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
