The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (22 page)

D
URING THE HEIGHT
of the drama, Hillary routinely missed afternoon appointments. The details of running the executive mansion, understandably, took a backseat to saving her husband’s presidency and their marriage. For three or four months in 1998, the president slept on a sofa in a private study attached to their bedroom on the second floor. Most of the women on the residence staff thought he got what he deserved.

Even Butler James Ramsey, a self-proclaimed ladies’ man, blushed when the subject came up. He said Clinton was his “buddy, but . . . come on now.” As usual, during the Lewinsky scandal Ramsey said he kept his “mouth shut.”

Some on the staff have said that Hillary knew about Lewinsky long before it came out, and that what really upset her was not the affair itself but its discovery and the media feeding frenzy that followed.

The first lady’s temper was notoriously short during those difficult months. Butler James Hall remembers serving coffee and tea in the Blue Room during a reception for a foreign leader. Suddenly,
the first lady approached him while he was still standing behind the bar.

“You must have been staring into space!” she upbraided him. “
I
had to take the prime minister’s wife’s cup. . . . She was finished and looking for some place to put it.” Hall was dumbfounded—other butlers were working the reception with trays collecting drinks, and his job was to serve the drinks—but he knew that defending himself would be pointless. Clinton complained to the Usher’s Office, and Hall wasn’t asked back for a month.

“Working there during the impeachment wasn’t bad,” said former storeroom manager Bill Hamilton, but he agreed that working with Mrs. Clinton in those difficult months was a challenge. “It was just so overwhelming for her and if you said something to her she’d snap,” Hamilton recalled, shaking his head. Still, he says that he loved working for the Clintons, and although he retired in 2013, he sometimes wishes he had stayed at the White House, knowing that Hillary Clinton might one day return as America’s first female president. He says he would love to work for her again, even after the tumult of her eight years in the residence.

He is entirely sympathetic toward the first lady in those darkest days. “It happened and she knew it happened and everybody was looking at her,” Hamilton said.

Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier said he wanted to help Hillary feel better in any way he could. Her favorite dessert was mocha cake, and at the height of the scandal, he recalls, “I made many, many mocha cakes. You better believe it,” he said, chuckling. In the late afternoons, Hillary would call the Pastry Shop. In a small, unassuming voice—a far cry from her usual strong, self-confident tone—she’d ask, “Roland, can I have a mocha cake tonight?”

One sunny weekend in August 1998, just before the president made his confession to the country, the first lady called Usher Worthington White with an unusual request.

“Worthington, I want to go to the pool but I don’t want to see
anybody
except
you
,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, I understand,” he replied sympathetically.

White knew exactly what she meant. She did not want to see her Secret Service detail, she did not want to see anyone tending to the White House’s extensive grounds, and she certainly did not want to see anyone on a tour of the West Wing. “She wasn’t up for any of that,” he recalled. She just wanted a few hours of peace.

White told her he would need five minutes to clear the premises. He ran to find her lead Secret Service agent and told him they would have to work together to make it happen. And fast.

“It was a twenty-second conversation but I know what she meant. ‘If anybody sees her, or she sees
anybody
, I’m going to get fired, I know it,’” he told the agent. “‘And you probably will too.’”

So the Secret Service agents assigned to protect the first lady agreed to trail her, even though protocol calls for one agent to walk ahead of her and one to walk behind.

“She’s not going to turn around and look for you,” White told them. “She just doesn’t want to see your face. And she doesn’t want you looking at her face.”

He met Clinton at the elevator and escorted her to the pool with the agents walking behind them and no one else in sight. She was wearing red reading glasses and she was carrying a couple of books. She didn’t have on any makeup and her hair wasn’t done. To White, she seemed heartbroken.

They didn’t exchange a single word on the walk to the pool.

“Ma’am, do you need any butler service?” White asked her after she got settled in.

“No.”

“You need anything at all?”

“No, it’s just a beautiful day and I want to just sit here and enjoy some sunshine. I’ll call you when I’m ready to go back.”

“Okay, ma’am,” White replied. “It’s twelve o’clock now, and I get off at one and someone else will be in.”

Clinton looked intently at him. “I’ll call
you
when I’m done.”

“Yes, ma’am,” White replied, knowing that that meant he would have to stay until whenever she chose to leave. He didn’t get the call until nearly three-thirty that afternoon.

When he returned, White accompanied the first lady on another wordless walk from the pool to the second floor. Before she stepped off the elevator, the besieged first lady let him know how much his efforts meant to her.

“She grabbed me by my hands and gave them a little squeeze and looked me directly in my eyes and just said, ‘Thank you.’”

“It touched my heart,” White said of her gratitude. “It meant the world to me.”

A few of the household workers even found themselves dragged into the unfolding drama. At one point, Houseman Linsey Little was called to the second floor to answer questions about the affair. When he got upstairs, he was met by an intimidating federal agent, who asked him if he’d ever seen Lewinsky before. No, he answered nervously.

“They want to make you feel like they think you know something,” he said. He insists that he’d never seen anything untoward, but even if he had, he admits he would have been reluctant to risk his job and end up on the news himself. “They’d have your name up in bright lights,” he said.

Mesnier described 1998 as a “very sad time” watching two brilliant people consumed by scandal. And like so many others, he felt terrible for the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea.

In an iconic photograph taken August 18, 1998, the day after her father’s embarrassing admission, Chelsea held both of her parents’ hands as they walked to the helicopter on the South Lawn. Mesnier shook his head at the thought of what the young woman went through. “Chelsea was absolutely the sweetest person you’ll
ever meet, and then to see them going through a stupid thing like this?
Stupid
. There was a lot of hardship.”

U
SHER
S
KIP
A
LLEN
admits that it was easier to serve the families he liked than it was to pretend.

“But we pretend very well,” he said.

Allen cannot hide his reservations about the Clintons. Over lunch by the pool at his large home in rural Pennsylvania, he fondly recalled how Mrs. Clinton always asked him to help her by tying bows on her outfits, something she couldn’t do herself. But he said the Clintons never fully trusted the residence staff and were particularly suspicious of the Usher’s Office. “They were about the most paranoid people I’d ever seen in my life.”

Allen isn’t the only one with bitter memories of the Clinton White House. Usher Chris Emery, who had been close with the Bushes, remembers feeling unduly scrutinized by the Clintons. In the fourteen months he served them, he says, he was subjected to three drug tests and a background check that he was not due to have for several years. He says that some of the questions he was asked—including what church he belonged to—were unusually personal, so he refused to answer them. “I think they were just trying to find something to make it easier [to fire me].” He sighed. And, indeed, when Emery was fired from the White House in 1994, it was in part because of a favor he had done for former first lady Barbara Bush.

During the first Bush administration, Emery had been very helpful to Mrs. Bush. “We were very close. Chris taught me how to use a computer,” she told me. After leaving the White House, she was working on her memoir when she lost a chapter, so she called on Emery for help. Emery was happy to oblige—but the favor fueled the Clintons’ suspicion that the staff was too attached to the Bush family. When the Clintons saw the usher’s call logs, Emery said,
they “came to the conclusion that I was sharing deep, dark secrets with the Bushes in Houston. Which I wasn’t.”

A short time later, Chief Usher Gary Walters called Emery into his office.

“Mrs. Clinton is not comfortable with you,” Walters told him.

“What does that mean?” Emery asked, stunned.

“It means tomorrow is your last day.”

Barbara Bush admits that her phone calls to Chris “caused trouble.” Emery was scolded in public for “an amazing lack of discretion,” in the words of Hillary’s spokesman Neel Lattimore. “We believe the position that he had, as a member of the residence staff, requires the utmost respect for the first family’s privacy.”

Emery says he was devastated at the loss of his job, and his $50,000 salary. “I was out of work for a year,” he says. “They ripped the rug right out from under me. You wonder what they’d do to someone who’s really powerful.” When he made it home that night, the first call he got was from Barbara Bush’s assistant, saying that the Bushes had heard the news and wanted to help however they could. “The next call I got was from Maggie Williams’s office [she was Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff], saying that if I get any calls from the press I should direct them back to the White House. I immediately thought, ‘Well, of course, that’s what we always do.’ I hung up the phone and I said, ‘Wait a minute. They just fired me!’”

All these years later, Emery told me sadly, he understands why he was fired. “She was facing so many pressures,” he says of Mrs. Clinton, “and unfortunately I was a victim.”

But at least one former colleague of Emery’s disputes his claims. This person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the Clintons were right to be paranoid about the residence workers, many of whom had served Republican presidents for twelve years. According to this source, “Everybody in the Usher’s Office was upset when President Bush 41 was not reelected . . . and they showed it in
front of the Clintons.” Emery, in particular, was a “Republican from the top of his head to the tips of his toes,” according to this source, and Emery himself says that he would have gone to California with the Reagans after they left office if they’d asked him.

Emery may not always have hidden his feelings around the Clintons. According to his colleague, as President Clinton came down from the second floor to attend an event one day, Emery said, “I can’t understand why everybody has an orgasm when he’s around.” He made these kinds of comments loudly enough for Clinton aides to hear, his colleague said.

The Clintons may also have had good reason to be concerned about their security detail. They were still reeling from claims made by Arkansas state troopers assigned to protect Governor Clinton, who later told the press that they had helped facilitate Clinton’s extramarital affairs in what came to be known as “Troopergate.”

One incident particularly worried the Clintons. Late one night in 1994, while they were at Camp David celebrating Easter, Chelsea’s former nanny and White House staff assistant, Helen Dickey, was in her third-floor room at the White House when she heard noises coming from the family’s living quarters one floor below. When she went to see what was going on, she found a group of men dressed in black carrying weapons and rummaging through the Clintons’ things.

“What are you doing? You have no right to be here,” she yelled.

“We’re Secret Service doing our job. Get out,” they told her.

When Hillary returned, she asked Chief Usher Gary Walters for an explanation. He apologized for forgetting to tell her that the agents were sweeping the second floor to see if there were any listening devices. She was livid.

The Clintons cherished their time alone. In a 1993 interview, Hillary Clinton said she loved the second floor of the White House
because it was the only place where the Secret Service didn’t trail her family. “We can tell the full-time help that they can get off. We don’t have to have them up there,” she said. “That’s a wonderful feeling, because everywhere else we are we’ve got people around us all the time.”

By most accounts, Chelsea Clinton treated the residence staff with respect. Yet Ronn Payne believes that she had internalized some of her parents’ animosity toward the Secret Service. In the very beginning of the Clinton administration, agents were stationed on the second-floor staircase landing, right by the president’s elevator. Another Secret Service post was at the top of the Grand Staircase across from the Treaty Room on the second floor. (These posts were later moved to the State Floor at the Clintons’ request.)

One day, according to Payne, he was walking through the second-floor private kitchen when an agent walked in behind him waiting to escort Chelsea to Sidwell Friends, the private school she attended in northwest Washington. Chelsea was on the phone.