The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (17 page)

Mesnier and his wife picked a date for his retirement four years before he actually retired.

Even when he did finally retire he couldn’t completely sever ties with the White House, returning twice when asked personally by Laura Bush. “I made [George W. Bush’s] birthday cake and then I retired again. And then two weeks later she called me to come back again and I went back until December 2006. I don’t think that ever happened before with any staff.”

The pressure to please the first family may never have been greater than when the Reagans were in office. Nancy Reagan went so far as to arrange the serving platters herself, insisting that the staff should prepare no “gray food,” only vibrantly colored meals. Before each state dinner, the executive chef would plan every course in consultation with the first lady; then, several weeks beforehand, the Reagans would serve the meal to a small group of friends and ask them how
they liked each dish. The first lady would examine the platter and instruct the chef, “‘No, I think the roast beef should go here’—she’d point—‘and I think it would look better if the peas were on this side,’” recalls Usher Skip Allen. And if a dinner wasn’t exactly the way she wanted it, then “watch out,” Allen said. He said she sometimes called the Usher’s Office asking to see the chef on the second floor. “If it was really bad, if she was expecting asparagus and got green beans, you had to have a good excuse.” Mesnier recalls creating one dessert after another for a state dinner until Nancy Reagan was satisfied.

One incident haunts him still. With days to go before a Tuesday state dinner in honor of Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus of the Netherlands, in April 1982, Nancy Reagan was seated at a long table in her beloved Solarium, having lunch with the president, who was seated at the opposite end. After Mrs. Reagan rejected two dessert options, Roland returned to present her with a third. When she was unhappy everyone on staff knew the cue: she would cock her head to the right and give a little smile. She cocked her head.

“Roland, I’m sorry but that’s not going to do again.”

“Okay, madam.”

President Reagan interjected from the other end of the table: “Honey, leave the chef alone. That’s a beautiful dessert. Let’s do that, that’s beautiful.”

“Ronnie, just eat your soup, this is not your concern,” she said.

He looked down at his bowl and finished his soup without another word.

Mesnier was beside himself. “I went back to the kitchen—that was a Sunday, I remember—I was turning around in the kitchen and I was really contemplating suicide,” Mesnier said. “What am I going to do? How many years [will] I have to do that? For eight years? I was really in despair, total despair. I said I don’t know what to make, I don’t know what to do. Then the phone rang and she asked me to come back upstairs to see her.”

She told Mesnier that she had finally decided what she wanted him to make: elaborate sugar baskets with three sugar tulips in each basket. He would have to make fifteen baskets for the dinner, each of which would take several hours—along with the tulips, the desserts inside each basket, and cookies to accompany it all.

“This is what I would like you to do,” she told him calmly, pleased by her own wonderful idea.

“Mrs. Reagan, this is very nice and very beautiful and I really think that would be great, but I only have two days left until the dinner.”

She smiled and tilted her head to the right: “Roland, you have two
days
and two
nights
before the dinner.”

Roland had no choice. “You say, ‘Thank you, madam, for the wonderful idea.’ [Then] you click your heels, turn around, and go to work.”

He dug in and worked day and night. After the state dinner, when he knew the first lady was happy with the result, he drove home late that night elated. He had met the challenge.

Looking back, Mesnier appreciates the way Nancy Reagan pushed him, however harrowing it must have felt at the time. On that long drive home, he recalls, “I thought,
I can make it happen.
This is how you measure a person, when you’re trapped like this: How is that person going to make it happen? You do whatever it takes.”

On December 8, 1987, the Reagans hosted a widely anticipated state dinner for Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa. It was the first time a Soviet leader had come to Washington since Nikita Khrushchev in 1959. The onus of pulling off this hugely important visit was carried, in part, by the residence staff.

“Nancy Reagan and her social secretary came into the Flower Shop and she told us she wanted to ‘blow [Raisa’s] socks off,’” said Florist Ronn Payne. “So we did. We changed every single flower in
the house three times in one day: for the morning arrival, for the afternoon lunch, and for the state dinner. Every single flower, three times, every one.”

S
OME RESIDENCE WORKERS
try too hard to play the role of the devoted staffer, and they usually don’t last. Worthington White, a six-foot-two, four-hundred-pound former tackle at Virginia Tech who worked as a White House usher from 1980 to 2012, says the reason he stayed for so long was because he knew when to keep quiet. When staffers tried “to laugh at jokes that weren’t funny,” or vied for “face time—anything to get their face in front of the president’s face and the first lady’s face,” he says, it never worked.

“They hated that,” White insisted. “That’s what I used to tell new employees when they came in: the worst thing you can do is try to be phony. These are the most confident politicians on the face of the earth. You need to be yourself. They’ll like you, or they won’t, but you can’t fool them.”

T
HOUGH THEIR JOBS
as butlers, maids, florists, and chefs may seem familiar, residence workers are keenly aware that they must also safeguard the president and his family from an increasing number of threats in a post–9/11 world. According to reporting by the
Washington Post
, it was a maid, and not a Secret Service officer, who first discovered evidence that someone had fired shots into the first family’s living quarters. At 8:50 on a sleepy Friday night on November 11, 2011, a twenty-one-year-old man named Oscar Ortega-Hernandez parked his black 1998 Honda Accord on Constitution Avenue, rolled down the passenger-side window, and shot his semiautomatic rifle nearly seven hundred yards across the South Lawn toward the White House. At least seven bullets hit the second and third floors
of the first family’s private residence, smashing a window outside the Yellow Oval Room, the family’s formal living room. The president and the first lady were out of town, and their daughter Malia was out with friends, but their younger daughter, Sasha, and the first lady’s mother, Marian Robinson, were inside the residence at the time of the shooting. Several Secret Service officers heard the shots but were told to stand down. It was wrongly concluded that the shots were fired by rival gangs and that none were aimed at the White House.

Four days later, around noon on Tuesday, November 15, a maid asked Assistant Usher Reginald Dickson to meet her at the Truman Balcony where she had noticed a broken window and a chunk of white concrete lying on the floor. When Dickson arrived he spotted a bullet hole and a dent in a windowsill and quickly reported the maid’s discovery to the Secret Service. The FBI soon started an investigation. They found a bullet in a window frame and metal fragments from a window ledge. (The windows had antique glass on the outside and bulletproof glass on the inside.) The president was still traveling, but the first lady had arrived home earlier that morning and was taking a nap. Dickson went to check on her, assuming she had already been briefed about the shots fired into her home, but she had not. Top Obama aides decided they would tell the president first and let him tell his wife about the frightening incident. Keeping her in the dark turned out to be a very bad decision.

The first lady was understandably furious when she heard the news from Dickson. When former Secret Service director Mark Sullivan was summoned to the White House to discuss the shooting, Michelle Obama was so angry that her voice could reportedly be heard through a closed door. If it weren’t for an observant maid and a diligent usher, the bullets may have been discovered much later, or possibly not at all.

Chief Usher Stephen Rochon, who had retired several months before the shooting, had hired Dickson for the position and says
that he is particularly close with the first family. Rochon is not surprised that Dickson and an unnamed maid played such a central role in bringing the shooting to light. “The staff are trained to keep their eyes open and bring anything unusual, whether it be a broken window or a package left after a tour, to the attention of the ushers. The ushers will go to the Secret Service.” He added: “We are not just there to clean the house and serve meals.”

In another scary security breach, on September 19, 2014, a man armed with a knife launched over the North Lawn fence, ran past several Secret Service officers, and sprinted into the White House. Once inside, he overpowered one officer and barreled past the stairway leading to the second floor of the residence and into the East Room. (The Usher’s Office had reportedly asked that an alarm near the main entrance of the mansion be muted because it was too loud. If it had been operating normally, it would have alerted every officer on the ground about the break-in.) The intruder, named Omar Gonzalez, was finally stopped by an off-duty Secret Service agent near the doorway of the Green Room.

Skip Allen, who was a member of the Secret Service uniformed division for eight years before becoming an usher in 1979, is aghast by these security breaches. “I saw one fence jumper when I was in the Usher’s Office,” he recalled. “He made it as far as the middle of the North Grounds and by that time he was surrounded by Secret Service officers. I just don’t understand how somebody could get from the front gate into the East Room without somebody doing something.”

Other threats to the president and his family have been less obvious, but no less treacherous. Executive Chef Walter Scheib says that his goal was not only to keep the first family healthy, but to keep them alive. “This is no small consideration given all the people that dislike the president for whatever reason, whether it’s international or national.”

Scheib, who worked for the Clintons and for George W. Bush’s family, said that “there is no one more important to the physical safety of the president than the pastry chef and the chef.” Mesnier agrees. Even after 9/11, he says, no food tasters stood by in the kitchen. “We were it. We were truly, truly trusted that nothing will happen.”

Lyndon Johnson had ways of getting around the rules governing food deliveries to the White House (which were less stringent in the 1960s). The president happened to love the blintzes made by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s wife, Margaret, and from time to time she asked her husband to get a batch to Johnson by handing them off to someone at the White House. Once McNamara gave the blintzes to a police officer, who handed them to the Secret Service. The blintzes were destroyed, and when McNamara asked Johnson if he enjoyed his wife’s latest batch of blintzes, the president grew furious.

“You leave my food alone!” the mercurial Johnson shouted at a Secret Service agent who was unlucky enough to be in his path that day. “Use that thing on top of your head that’s supposed to have a brain. Did you think the Secretary of Defense is going to kill me?”

Mesnier took advantage of the system only once. In preparing for the Reagans’ state dinner for Mikhail Gorbachev, Mesnier used raspberries in the elaborate dessert—because in Russia raspberries “are so expensive they’re like gold, like caviar.” A few days after the Soviet premier arrived back home, Mesnier was in the kitchen with another chef when a large brown box from Gorbachev somehow made its way there. He knew that whatever was in the box would have to be destroyed immediately—but first he decided to open it.

When he looked inside, he was thrilled to find two large tins each filled with seven pounds of the finest Russian caviar. “I don’t care what you do with yours,” he told his colleague, “but I’m taking mine home. I’m willing to die for that!”