The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (18 page)

The residence staffers’ long hours and incredible loyalty do not go unnoticed by the first family. President Ford knew that Doorman Frederick “Freddie” Mayfield liked to swim, so one day he told him to bring his bathing suit, and the two of them swam laps together. They came back inside, laughing and wrapped up in towels.

First ladies often have an unspoken understanding with their favorite members of the household staff: they will help them out in a bind. In 1986, Nancy Reagan’s maid, Anita Castelo, was accused of helping two fellow Paraguayan natives smuggle 350,000 rounds of .22 caliber ammunition to Paraguay. The first lady provided an affidavit attesting to Castelo’s integrity. Charges against Castelo were dropped just as the Iran-Contra affair, which involved arms smuggling on a much larger scale, was starting to make national news. The president was being charged with sanctioning the sale of arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages and funding for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua; the White House doubtless hoped to keep the Castelo charges quiet as the Iran-Contra story was about to break. Yet Nancy Reagan wanted Castelo to stay so badly that she was willing to risk public embarrassment to keep her.

T
HE RESIDENCE WORKERS
’ exceptional devotion to President George H. W. Bush and his family seems to have stemmed from the family’s accessible demeanor. The Bushes put everyone at ease around them. Barbara Bush remembered one scene during the Persian Gulf War when she was anxiously watching the news. As she was waiting for her husband to walk in, White House Maître d’ George Hannie asked her, “What would you like to drink? And what do you think Pops would like?” (While some in the media have taken to calling him “Poppy” Bush since his son’s presidency, “Pops” was a
nickname from President Bush’s youth; while he was in the White House, no one outside his family used the nickname.)

She laughed at the memory. “I said to him—and he knew
I
was joking, and I knew
he
was joking; we were that close—‘George, you can’t say that about the president of the United States.’”

Without missing a beat, Hannie replied, “Trust me, Mrs. Bush, at the White House presidents come and go. But George Hannie stays.”

“We had that kind of a relationship, where you could tease and laugh. And yet, when sad things happened to either one of us, we were supportive,” Barbara Bush said.

Houseman Linsey Little said the first President Bush was more approachable than any other president (including his own son). “Old man Bush, they were more out there. The other one, all he’d do is speak to you and keep walking. No conversation, no nothing. But old man, he was lovely—him and his wife.”

Born in Robbinsville, North Carolina—a town of fewer than one thousand people—Little had to leave school in the seventh grade to help take care of his six brothers and sisters. His father was a sharecropper, but Little escaped the backbreaking work of peanut, cotton, and tobacco farming to head north to Washington in the early 1950s.

He started working at the White House in 1979, leaving his town house—which is so close to FedEx Field that he can hear the cheers from the crowd on game day—at 5:00
A.M.
in order to make it to work by six o’clock. He would have the house ready for public tours by seven-thirty, setting up ropes, mopping floors, and rolling out carpets. When the tours were over he’d take it all down, only to start again the next morning. After a quick breakfast he’d get a call from Executive Housekeeper Christine Limerick, who would tell him and his colleagues when the family was up so that they could go to the second floor and vacuum while the maids dusted and made up the beds.

LINSEY LITTLE

Little’s relationship with the first President Bush extended far beyond cleaning up around the house. Little was one of a handful of household staff who played horseshoes with the president several times a month, sometimes two or three times a week.

The president and his son Marvin would happily head out to the horseshoe pitch next to the swimming pool and play with Little and his supervisor when they got off work. They all got so into the game that Little even had T-shirts made that read
HOUSEMEN
’
S PRIDE
.

“We always beat him, until the end,” Little said, laughing. “The last year we were there, he and Marvin won the championship.” Barbara Bush said she and the president were upset when they left because they knew the Clintons weren’t likely to continue the tradition.

Once, the president even asked Little to join him in the Family Dining Room on the second floor. “He told me to have a seat at the table and we sat there and talked,” Little said, shaking his head.
“Sitting at the table with the president, having a conversation. None of the rest of them would have done a thing like that.”

Bush quickly forgave mistakes that would have enraged other presidents. One summer weekend, he was out playing horseshoes and asked a staffer for some bug spray. The worker had sprayed the president from head to toe before he realized he’d accidentally used a container of industrial strength pesticide. Minutes later, when the mistake was discovered, the staffer “literally ran” to the doctor always stationed nearby, said Usher Worthington White.

“By the time they got there the president’s face was already red,” White said. Bush needed to be “decontaminated” in the shower.

“President Bush, being who President Bush was, said, ‘Okay, okay, okay, we just want to get back to our horseshoe tournament!’” No one was fired.

The Bushes genuinely seemed to appreciate the workers’ sacrifices, and in turn the staff went out of its way to make them happy. The kitchen staff knew that Barbara Bush hated it when people sang “Happy Birthday to You.” “On the campaign trail I would have four birthday cakes in one day from people who really didn’t give a darn about me,” she told me with her usual candor.

“One day I came home for lunch and there was a dessert on my plate—incidentally, you do eat very well at the White House—and there was a little tiny square cake and it had the musical notes to ‘Happy Birthday to You.’ They didn’t say it, they didn’t sing it. It was just notes.” Mesnier had made the cake for her to enjoy quietly while she read a book by herself at lunch.

Barbara Bush stopped by the Flower Shop almost every morning just to say hello, sometimes wearing a bathrobe over her bathing suit before her morning swim. And she would joke with Mesnier when she ran into him in the hallway, hitting him playfully with a folder and teasing, “What are you doing here? Don’t you have any cookies to bake or anything?”

Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy said she treated all the staffers like she was their grandmother. “If you were in the elevator, she would get in the elevator with you. She’d say, ‘Oh, no, boys, don’t get off the elevator. I’m going upstairs too.’”

In 1992, when Hurricane Iniki devastated Hawaii, Florist Wendy Elsasser was desperate to reach her parents, who had retired there. She went days without hearing from them, but she refused to interrupt the Bushes with her personal concerns. Finally, one Sunday when she was changing the floral arrangements in the living quarters, Barbara Bush asked how she was doing.

“I’m okay, Mrs. Bush, thank you,” she replied, trying to mask her worry. She kept on working. A few minutes later Barbara Bush was standing next to her again. “What’s really going on?” she asked. “That did not sound like Wendy to me.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Mrs. Bush, my parents are in that hurricane, and I haven’t heard from them for days, and I’m just so upset. I’m just so preoccupied with that.”

Without hesitating, Bush told her, “Wendy, if you can think of anything I can do to help you I will.” There was nothing the first lady could do, of course, but Elsasser was moved by her concern. (A few days later, she finally heard from her parents.)

Usher Chris Emery remembers “going numb” after receiving an unexpected call from the Bushes the day his father died. It was Thanksgiving, and the Bushes were at Camp David celebrating the holiday. Less than thirty minutes after he called to tell his boss, Gary Walters, about losing his father, he got a call from the military operator at Camp David who told him, “Stand by for the president.”

President Bush “said he was so sorry to learn about my father,” Emery recalls, “and asked me if there was anything he could do.” Emery thanked him, but there was nothing to be done. The president paused.

“Stand by, Chris. Bar [Barbara Bush] is here and she wants to talk to you too.”

“Can you imagine?” Emery said, still stunned.

The Bushes took special care to make sure that members of the residence staff had time with their families. When Emery was on night duty, he was expected to wait until the president and first lady told him he could go home. “The Reagans would buzz twice at nine or ten o’clock, which meant I would go up and turn off the lights and call the admin operator and tell them I’m leaving. With the Bushes, Mrs. Bush would call sometimes and say, ‘What are you still doing here? Go home to your family!’ It would be eight o’clock.”

Barbara Bush and Emery still exchange e-mails a couple of times a year. The former first lady signs off: “Love, BPB.”

CHAPTER IV

Extraordinary Demands

A shower that had volume and force was one of life’s few comforts.

—LUCI BAINES JOHNSON

S
erving the first family goes well beyond dealing with the world’s most trying hotel guests: if they wanted napoleons from the bakery at the Watergate Hotel (as Tricia Nixon often did), then that’s what they got. If they needed someone to listen without judgment as they talked about the excruciating decisions they had to make every day, then a sympathetic ear was provided. But some presidents have made demands that proved impossible to meet.

President Lyndon Johnson, a crass, boisterous character, was rarely satisfied with anything. (“Move it, damn it, move your ass,” he was heard to cry throughout his administration. “When are you going to get the lead out of your ass?”) Butler Wilson Jerman remembers serving shrimp creole and rice to the president on the Truman Balcony. The tray of rice came with two serving forks. “He looked up at me and said—I’m not gonna use [the exact words] he said, but, ‘How you
think I’m gonna get this rice outta here with two forks?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. President. I’ll get a spoon right away.’”

Johnson’s intensity, and his outright bullying, caused many staffers to go out of their way to avoid him. “The clearest sign of how different he was from other presidents was that normally a half a dozen staffers and hangers-on would walk the president from the Oval Office to the residence,” said former chief usher Rex Scouten. “With President Johnson, only the Secret Service agents walked home with him.”

Doorman Preston Bruce first ran afoul of Johnson on the very day the Johnsons moved into the White House. That day, the president invited more than two hundred people to a reception in the family’s private quarters, bringing together former Kennedy advisers and his staff. Bruce was struggling to handle the elevator alone when suddenly he saw the light blinking off and on. That could only mean the president was calling for it. And he was not happy.

By the time Bruce made it to the second floor Johnson was fuming. “Where have you been? I’ve been
waiting
and
waiting
for this elevator!” the president screamed, puffing out his chest and looming over Bruce—giving him what came to be known as “The Treatment,” which he used to intimidate members of Congress.

“Mr. President,” Bruce said, not ceding his ground. “I’ve been trying to get your guests out of the house. I know how to do it, but I must have time.”

Johnson continued bellowing at Bruce in front of Kennedy staffers Ted Sorensen and Ken O’Donnell. Bruce was humiliated. “I will not work here any longer, being treated like this!” he told Usher Nelson Pierce later that night. “I’m never going to get over President Kennedy’s death.”

The next day, Johnson acted as though nothing had happened—and Bruce decided that the only way to manage this new difficult president would be to refuse to back down. “It was obvious to me
that if I started scraping and bowing when he lost his temper, that would be the end of me.” Bruce knew Johnson was a bully from the start, what he respected was strength. “If I was right and stood my ground I’d have a friend for life.” It turns out Bruce
was
right: before he left office, Johnson credited the doorman with being one of the people who helped him survive the job. The thirty-sixth president was complicated.