The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (12 page)

Regardless of who won the election, the Clintons hated to leave. Hillary Clinton said that even after eight years of living in the residence, and enduring incredibly painful times there, she still views the White House “with the same awe I felt as a little girl pressing my face up to the gate to get a better look.” The whole family, including Chelsea, took advantage of their private theater one last time to watch the movie
State and Main
well after midnight the night before President George W. Bush’s inauguration. They didn’t want to miss a minute that the house was still under their temporary ownership. “The fun of that night left them so tired that when Barbara, Jenna, and I glanced over at Bill during George’s inaugural address, he was dozing,” Laura Bush recalled.

President Clinton confessed to the Bushes on the morning of the inauguration that he had put off packing for so long that, right at the end, “he was packing simply by pulling out drawers and dumping their contents into boxes.”

While Hillary Clinton always appreciated the majesty of the White House, she had her regrets. She told Laura Bush that she wished that she hadn’t insisted on having an office in the West Wing and that she had not decided to turn down invitations just because her schedule was too packed. She always felt particularly guilty about declining an invitation from Jackie Kennedy to attend the ballet. Jackie died a few months later. Her advice to Bush: Don’t lose sight of what’s important.

W
ORKERS OFTEN FOUND
themselves at the center of world events. Betty Monkman, who served in the curator’s office from 1967 to 2002, eventually becoming chief curator, was responsible for supervising the workers who hung and removed artwork for each new incoming first family. During the transition from Carter to Reagan, she remembers, the staff turned on televisions throughout the residence as they worked so that they could watch the final throes of the tense Iran hostage crisis. “President Carter had been up in the Oval Office all night long with his staff and barely got over to the house to dress for his ten
A.M.
event with President Reagan,” Monkman said. “Nobody knew what was going to happen. The whole country was waiting.” The Iranians released the remaining fifty-two hostages minutes after Reagan was sworn in as the nation’s fortieth president—one last dig at Carter, who had worked day and night to bring about their release before the end of his administration.

No matter what occurs outside the White House, the staff is always singularly focused on the move. “We were constantly on our feet,” Monkman said. “Once, in the Ford administration, we were doing something in Susan Ford’s bedroom and President Ford just happened to come around when people were starting to disassemble things to say good-bye to the household staff. Right before he went downstairs he made it a mission to come by and thank everybody for their work and that was something the staff appreciated.” As soon as he left, the rush was on.

Though they try not to get too attached to the mansion’s current residents, the staff often seems to be pulling for the incumbent to be reelected, whether Democrat or Republican. When Bill Clinton defeated the first President Bush, Chef Mesnier felt the outcome was a “veritable disaster.” He had grown so close to the Bushes that he was truly unsure whether he would be able to serve another president.
He wasn’t alone: when other residence staffers called out sick after President Clinton’s election, the joke was that they had caught the “Republican flu.”

In part, this is because the arrival of a new family means casting aside everything they’ve learned about each member of the outgoing first family and starting fresh. But most accounts agree that the residence workers’ devotion to President George H. W. Bush was more than customary—it was genuine, almost profound. The Bushes were generally easy to please, and the residence workers found themselves quickly at ease with them. Even before she moved into the White House, Chief Usher Gary Walters reported, Barbara Bush assured him that she wouldn’t be making any changes in the kitchen. “I’ve never had a bad meal [at the White House], so you just have the chefs put whatever they want to on the menu every evening and we’ll be surprised at what we eat each night.”

“What if you don’t like something?” he asked her, unaccustomed to such an easygoing first lady after working for Nancy Reagan.

“Then we’ll tell the chef not to have it again,” she told him.

O
N
N
OVEMBER 11
,
1968,
days after Richard M. Nixon won the presidential election, he and his wife, Pat, were guests of the Johnsons at the White House. Johnson and Nixon were bitter political enemies, but they made nice during a four-hour lunch. Johnson surprised even his wife with his civility. “Lyndon, I thought, was generous and rather fatherly,” Lady Bird said. “I thought, it was not so much Nixon the man he was talking to, but the next President of this country.”

Lady Bird showed the incoming first lady the second and third floors, reassuring her of “the efficiency, devotion, and impersonal professionalism” of the residence staff.

During the stress and strain of the move, first ladies have been
seen on the morning of the inauguration stealing a quiet moment to themselves. “You wonder what must be going through their minds,” mused Head Housekeeper Christine Limerick. The Johnsons had a particular affinity for life in the residence. Lady Bird recalled wandering through the second and third floors in her robe with a cup of coffee early on the morning of Inauguration Day, her final day in the White House. A little more than five years earlier, she and her family moved into a White House consumed by grief. On the evening of December 7, 1963, just as Jackie Kennedy was moving out, Lady Bird must have been moved to tears by a note the first lady left behind. “I wish you a happy arrival in your new house, Lady Bird,” Jackie wrote. “Remember—you will be happy here.” All those years later, the grief of those first few months must have come rushing back.

She stood in the Yellow Oval Room and the Lincoln Sitting Room, wanting to soak in their rich history one last time. She said a final, private good-bye to the place she and her family had called home for so many years. “This was partly the housewifely need to see whether any personal object had been left anywhere,” she said, “but mostly just to stand still and absorb.”

Lady Bird peeked into her daughter Luci’s room, which was strewn with half-filled bags and boxes, and leafed through a guest book showing all the guests who had stayed with them over the years. When she walked up to the Solarium she was struck by how different it looked without their furniture. “Its personality all stripped away and looking cold and clinical now, and what a gay, happy room it had been—the citadel of the young.” On the State Floor she could smell the ammonia as maids, butlers, and almost everyone else on the residence staff pitched in to ready the house for the Nixons.

As the inaugural parade was going on, the staff fulfilled an unusual request. The outgoing president had been a devoted consumer of television news, and had filled the White House with sets. “Lyndon Johnson would sit like a king with four sets on in
a row, watching himself,” according to Bryant. “There he’d be, throwing out comments and switching the sound from one to another, or keeping several sets on together, with the sound turned up loud.” Richard Nixon, in contrast, was famously uncomfortable with the medium, and after his election the residence staff were instructed to remove most of the sets from the house. Some were still being yanked out even as staffers tried to catch a glimpse of the inaugural parade on TV.

Late that morning, as President Johnson and President-elect Nixon headed off to the Capitol together, Lady Bird shared a car with Pat Nixon. As she drove away, the last thing Lady Bird saw through her rearview window was Maître d’ John Ficklin and Butler Wilson Jerman watching the Johnsons depart. She blew them a kiss good-bye. It must have been bittersweet to know that the next time she returned to her beloved White House, she would be just another guest.

CHAPTER II

Discretion

Secrecy, loyalty, discretion applies to the humblest, not so much personal loyalty to the incumbent as loyalty to the office. The atmosphere of the house would be intolerable if the President had to look on all hands as eaves-droppers; he must take their loyalty for granted. State and personal secrets aren’t shouted, but in a house so uttered daily with confidences, some must reach the ears of the least employee.

—IRWIN “IKE” HOOVER, CHIEF USHER, 1913–1933, “WHO’S WHO, AND WHY, IN THE WHITE HOUSE,”
SATURDAY EVENING POST
, FEBRUARY 10, 1934

Q: “Why don’t you have a lot of photos?”
A: “Because I knew where the cameras were.”

—NELSON PIERCE, USHER, 1961–1987

S
ee no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” residence workers often respond when they are asked to share details about the private moments of the first families. If they share one unifying quality, it is the ability to keep secrets, especially when they are still on the job. James Jeffries was the only current residence worker who was willing to discuss his experiences; retired
staffers often rebuffed several approaches before they agreed to share their memories, and even then some of them tried to mask painful or negative stories by painting them in a good light, no matter how strained they seemed. The stories shared here represent only what they felt they could divulge, and in almost every case, reflect their efforts to present their experiences in a thoughtful and deliberate manner. Still, their recollections pull back the curtain and provide fascinating and sometimes shocking insights into the personalities of the occupants of the executive mansion.

Butlers, maids, and valets have the most intimate exposure to the first family. They are also the hardest workers to get to open up, because they guard so passionately the trust the first family places in them. They are the first people to see the first family in the morning and the last people to see them at night. These residence workers—along with a few others, such as the family chefs—watch the presidents and first ladies as they conduct themselves as husband and wife: fighting, laughing, crying, and being each other’s most trusted advisers. All of these residence workers will doubtless take plenty of secrets to their graves.

One telling example of the importance of the staff’s discretion comes not from a staffer but from a first family member. Ron Reagan remembers visiting his parents at the White House during the Iran-Contra affair, before his father’s administration admitted to helping sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages and funding for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. During the visit, the president’s son, then in his midtwenties, was amazed at how candid his family was in front of the help. They shared dinner that night in the Family Dining Room on the second floor, and then repaired to the West Sitting Hall on the second floor—a more informal room with a stunning
floor-to-ceiling half-moon window looking out over the West Colonnade and the West Wing—where the younger Reagan found himself pushing his father about the Iran-Contra situation.

“I was getting a little heated about this at a certain point,” he says, “and realized suddenly as I was berating my father that somebody was standing there with a plate of cookies. I felt immediately like, ‘Oh, God, this is not good’—doing this in public, as it were.” But he was amazed to realize that the presence of the servants “seemed to be of no concern” to his parents. “The staff there is so discreet that there really wasn’t any concern that somebody was going to run and tell stories to the papers.” Such discretion is mandatory, Reagan reflects now. If the president had to worry about the staff talking to the press, “life there would be almost unbearable. You need a retreat you can go to and not be constantly scrutinized.”

Building up to this level of trust can take time, and each administration is different. Everyone on staff knows when the first family finally trusts them, said Chief Usher Gary Walters. For Walters, his favorite moment of a new administration comes when the president calls him by his first name.