The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (13 page)

“The residence staff knows when the comfortableness gets to the point where we can all collectively say, ‘Ahhhhhh.’ It happens usually with the butlers or with the ushers when a conversation is going on and you walk into the room and the conversation doesn’t stop. It continues. That’s a collective sigh, we know we have proven that we can be trusted.”

There are times, however, when the president needs total privacy. As Butler Herman Thompson recalls, even the approachable George H. W. Bush would sometimes say “Thank you very much,” to one of the residence workers. “That meant for you to turn around and go back out.”

JAMES RAMSEY

Each president has a favorite butler, and for President George W. Bush it was James Ramsey, or just plain “Ramsey,” as he was affectionately called around the residence. He was a consummate professional, but he liked trading zingers with President George W. Bush, and their rapport led to a real bond between the men; Ramsey was one of the few residence staffers invited by the Bushes to fly with them on Air Force One to work at their ranch in Crawford, Texas. He zealously guarded the family’s privacy, never talking to the press or causing the president to doubt his loyalty. He also turned down invitations to go out drinking with his colleagues because, he said, other people “get you in trouble.”

Ramsey had a joyful and ready smile, and he seemed genuinely in awe of the families he served during three decades as a White House butler. Reggie Love, President Obama’s young, handsome, and gregarious personal assistant, remembers Ramsey’s contagious
sense of humor. “He’d joke, ‘I’m seventy years old. When you’re my age, hopefully you’ll look half as good as I do.’”

Ramsey sported a bright silver mustache, shaving it off only after he retired in 2010. He dry-cleaned all his clothes, even his undershirts, and always made sure his nails were manicured because people would see his hands when he was serving them. He was not at all ashamed of his love of self-pampering: “I want to look nice all the way: nails done, hair groomed,” he said. “I was a butler at the White House!”

A self-described ladies’ man, Ramsey dated quite a bit after getting divorced and even introduced some of his girlfriends to President George W. Bush at staff holiday parties. He sometimes told the Bush daughters about his dates. “Jenna, Barbara—I loved them to death. They were my friends. . . . If they ask, I tell them, ‘I got a lady friend. I ain’t that old, am I?’”

George W. Bush, whom Ramsey affectionately called the “young Bush,” would tease him mercilessly—and Ramsey gave as good as he got. He fondly recalled one day when he was serving refreshments at a T-ball game on the South Lawn and the president came out from the Diplomatic Reception Room. “Do some work, Ramsey!” the president joked. That’s just the way their relationship was, he said: they were casual with each other, even though it was clear who was in charge.

President George W. Bush loved having a little fun with the residence workers. He would turn framed photos on their sides when the butlers and maids weren’t looking and chase imaginary flies with flyswatters as they walked by. “There were great practical jokes that the president would play on the butlers,” recalled Andy Card, Bush’s chief of staff.

“Bush,” Ramsey said, pausing. “I’ll never forget his family. If I live to be one hundred, I’ll never forget his family.”

Ramsey’s small apartment, which he called his “bachelor pad,” was plastered with astounding photos of himself with presidents and other historic figures, including Nelson Mandela (“Oh, I got a
lot of them baby”), and personal notes from President Reagan and Hillary Clinton thanking him for his help with state dinners. One photo is autographed by President Obama: “You are a great friend and will be missed,” the president wrote.

He was so proud of his job at the White House that his friend, fellow butler Buddy Carter, teased him: “Ramsey—he sleeps in his damn White House pass.”

While the first family is in their private quarters on the second and third floors of the White House, a butler is almost always available—in the second-floor pantry or nearby—waiting to serve. The rooms are equipped with buzzers that go off in the pantry when their service is requested, but Ramsey rarely needed them: “I could sense it if they wanted something.”

It’s easy to see why Ramsey was so beloved. He kept his sweet Southern accent from his years growing up in Yanceyville, North Carolina. His stepfather was a tobacco farmer (he never met his father), and he spent much of his childhood using the family’s mule to plow the tobacco field.

“It was rough. I told my dad, I said, ‘When I graduate from high school, I got to go. I can’t stay here.’ He said, ‘How are you going to live?’ And I said, ‘That’s a chance I got to take.’ So when I came to Washington I didn’t know nobody.”

He finally got to Washington when he was twenty years old. He had nowhere to stay until he found a sympathetic owner of a gas station who let him sleep at the station and wash up in the bathroom. Eventually he found a room on Rhode Island Avenue Northwest for ten dollars a week, and while he was there he befriended someone who worked at the glamorous art deco Kennedy Warren apartment building in northwest Washington. He told his friend that he was a good worker and his friend got him an interview. He was hired on the spot.

Not long after that, at a party, he met someone who worked at the White House. Ramsey asked him if he could get him a job
there. The first thing this White House staffer asked Ramsey was, “Do you have a record?”

“No, man, I ain’t got no record,” Ramsey replied.

“If you do, don’t bother filling the papers out,” he said skeptically. “They’re not going to hire you with
any
kind of record.” (Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy remembers being shocked to learn how many job applicants had serious criminal records. “Everybody comes there and they have a clean record. Until you do the background check. With the background check all these little skeletons start coming out of the closet. One boy came in during the Clinton administration and he told us, at the very last minute, that he was arrested and convicted of rape. We have thirteen-year-old Chelsea upstairs! That application went in the trash can.”)

Ramsey’s record was unblemished, so he filled out the application and waited. “I passed the White House going to the Kennedy Warren, oh my god for two or three years, and I said, ‘I wonder how in the world it would be working in that place?’” he said, smiling. But it took a few years until the White House finally called him. When they met him, Maître d’ Eugene Allen and then–Chief Usher Rex Scouten hired him the same day.

Starting as a butler during Carter’s presidency, Ramsey worked at the White House for thirty years, serving six presidents: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. He credits Eugene Allen—“He talked to me like I was his son”—with advising him to keep his nose clean and keep anything he heard in the residence to himself. (The 2013 film
Lee Daniels’ The Butler
was loosely based on Allen’s life.)

Even decades later, Ramsey would not betray Allen’s instruction—he would never reveal anything private about those he served to the outside world. “You’re not working at no McDonald’s or Gino’s, you’re working down here at the house,” Allen told Ramsey. “If you get in trouble or say the wrong thing, you might be history.”

That code of silence didn’t extend to his colleagues. Chief Usher Stephen Rochon remembered that Ramsey was the first residence worker to welcome him and that he went out of his way to tell Rochon what was happening on the second and third floors.

T
HE RESPONSIBILITY OF
being privy to the family’s inner sanctum was never lost on loyal staff like Wilson Jerman, a soft-spoken eighty-five-year-old when I interviewed him recently. Starting as a houseman in 1957, he retired as a butler in 1993, then came out of retirement in 2003 (he missed “the house”) and worked as a part-time doorman until 2010. Like a doorman in any building, he saw everyone coming and going and held their secrets.

Jerman views his loyalty to the first family and his guarding of their privacy as a natural response to the trust they place in him. “It makes you feel good that you could just go up there and walk in the first lady’s bedroom and pick up whatever she asked you to go get.”

Katie Johnson, President Obama’s former personal secretary, said she used to love quizzing the butlers. When she asked one butler what had changed the most in the White House over his several decades of service, he mentioned two things: more women and no more drinking at lunch.

“People used to drink really heavily in the middle of the day,” he told her. “One reason they had so many staff was, they were making martinis for these meetings in the middle of the day, which would never happen now,” she said. “Can you imagine if someone went to a Cabinet meeting and asked for a dry martini?”

Nelson Pierce, a White House usher for twenty-six years who passed away in 2014 at eighty-nine years old, was often required to bring the president documents classified as “eyes only,” papers so sensitive that only the president is authorized to see them. I was lucky enough to have interviewed Pierce before his passing. He told
me that one day he had to bring something to President Lyndon Johnson to sign during a luncheon with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and at least a half dozen other advisers. They were almost certainly talking about Vietnam at the time.

Pierce stood anxiously next to the president, waiting for him to sign the document when he heard something unusual: “Secretary McNamara was raising his voice and yelling at the president. He was mad about something. I could not repeat a single word he said or the president said to him. I have no idea and I would swear on a stack of Bibles I don’t remember a single word that was said because you blank it out. Even under hypnosis I don’t think they’d be able to get anything.”

Decades later, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said that during Oval Office meetings with George W. Bush he noticed that some of his fellow advisers got nervous when butlers and residence staff came in.

“They were trying to be as nonintrusive as possible at the same time they were trying to serve. I think other people were more uncomfortable with the presence of a butler than the president or the first lady ever were. They didn’t know if they should stop talking!”

Yet the very thing that the staff most pride themselves on—their ability to fade into the background—can also be dehumanizing. Having the president count on their ability to tune out conversations has sometimes made residence workers feel as though they don’t exist at all.

“People would say anything around you. It was surprising to me,” said Butler Herman Thompson, who worked part-time from the Kennedy era until the end of the first Bush administration. “Sometimes the conversation in the State Dining Room, when you were working in there, you would think that they’d be whispering certain things. It was almost like you weren’t there.”

In some cases, the president or the first lady have proved uncomfortably oblivious to the workers nearby. Nelson Pierce remembered his embarrassment one night, when he was bringing some bags up to the Reagans’ room, and Nancy Reagan yelled at her husband, the most powerful man in the world, right in front of him. “She cussed him out for having the TV on. He said, ‘Honey, I’m just watching the news.’ As soon as she opened the door, she was into him like you wouldn’t believe. Right in front of me. I thought she would fuss at him in private. He was watching the eleven o’clock news. She thought he should be asleep. I was a little surprised, so I dropped the luggage and got out as soon as I could.”

President Johnson often undressed in front of staffers and was famous for rattling off orders while he was sitting on the toilet. Once, reporter Frank Cormier was shocked to see Air Force One Steward Sergeant and Valet Paul Glynn kneel before the president while they were in midair and wash his feet—all the more so because Johnson never once acknowledged Glynn.

“Talking all the while, Johnson paid no heed except to cross his legs in the opposite direction when it was time for Glynn to attend to the other foot,” Cormier observed. After witnessing this, Cormier said, he was unfazed when he learned that Glynn also cut Johnson’s toenails.