by Rowena Mills
Susan Ford and Amy Carter have a good deal in common. Each is the youngest child and only daughter of a president of the United States who took office in the 1970s. Each has three older brothers. Each has been married twice and has two children. And each owned a Siamese cat who lived in the White House with the first family.
Susan Elizabeth Ford, daughter of Gerald R. Ford and Elizabeth (Betty) Bloomer Ford, was born in Washington, D.C., in 1957. She was attending a private preparatory school in Maryland when a series of unprecedented political shifts catapulted Ford, a longtime U.S. congressman from Michigan, into the vice presidency in 1973 and then the presidency after Richard M. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.
Suddenly the Fords and their female Siamese, Shan Shein, were living in the White House. Susan Ford hosted her senior prom in the East Room of the White House in 1975 and served as official White House hostess when her mother was hospitalized for breast cancer.
Shan Shein, a miniature seal point Siamese, was named for a town the Fords had visited in China. The Fords gave her to Susan as an Easter present in 1973. She slept in Susan’s bed at night and sometimes hid under the Lincoln bed during the day. Shan was very attached to the Fords and “wailed miserably” when they were gone on trips.
Richard H. Growald of United Press International, apparently unaware of Shan’s gender, reported, “Shan has a thing about men. It hates all but one man, the president. It rubs up against the president’s feet and, Susan said, hops onto Ford’s lap and allows him to pet it. But no other male, not even Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, has established any more of a detente with Shan than has Liberty [President Ford’s dog].” Shan carefully avoided Liberty and other “alien beings.”
Then the political scene changed again. Ford narrowly lost the 1976 presidential election to former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. On January 20, 1977, the Fords and Shan moved out of the White House, and the Carters moved in — with their nine-year-old daughter, Amy, and her male Siamese, Misty Malarkey Ying Yang. (One has to wonder whether the two felines met.}
Amy Lynn Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, in 1967, the daughter of James Earl Carter Jr. and Rosalynn Smith Carter. Ten years younger than Susan Ford, Amy didn’t dance in the East Room but roller-skated through it. The Secret Service monitored her tree house on the south lawn. She attended public elementary and middle school in Washington, D.C., during the four years of her father’s presidency.
Misty Malarkey had joined the family during the 1976 presidential campaign. He played and slept in Amy’s dollhouse and meowed along with the music when she practiced violin.
Time passed, and the first daughters attended college and had careers and families of their own. Susan Ford worked as a photojournalist at several newspapers and magazines and is the coauthor of two mystery novels. She succeeded her mother as chairman of the Betty Ford Center. She lived in Tulsa from 1989 to 1997 and from 2009 to 2018.
Starting when she was in college, Amy Carter was known for her political activism. In 1995, she illustrated a children’s book written by her father. She has been a board member of the Carter Center.
The Ford and Carter cats were not the first kitty occupants to prowl the White House or the most recent. But the combined residency of Shan Shein and Misty Malarkey Ying Yang put a Siamese in the spotlight as first feline for almost six-and-a-half years.
Note: See the “Focus on Felines” article in the January-February 2023 issue of this magazine to learn about Abraham Lincoln’s cats, the first known feline
occupants of the White House.
