The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (24 page)

The next day, while her husband was recovering in the hospital, Nancy Reagan suffered an injury of her own. When she got back to the residence, she went to the Game Room on the third floor, a cozy space with a pool table, to retrieve her husband’s favorite picture to bring to him in the hospital as a surprise. With a car waiting for her downstairs, she climbed up on a chair to reach the picture and fell off, breaking several ribs. Only a few people on the residence staff knew about her accident; she never revealed it publicly, and the staff has never talked about it until now.

The Reagans’ son, Ron, does not even remember the incident, though he was not surprised to learn about it decades later: “She would have been entirely focused on him at that point, and wouldn’t have let broken ribs get in the way.”

In that moment, Nancy Reagan conducted herself with the same resilience under pressure that the residence workers demonstrate every day.

CHAPTER VI

Sacrifice

That first day, I thought the Usher’s office was a twelve-by-twelve-foot madhouse. People ran in and out of the room all day, the phone rang incessantly, and the buzzer buzzed.

—J. B. WEST, USHER AND CHIEF USHER, 1941–1969,
UPSTAIRS AT THE WHITE HOUSE: MY LIFE WITH THE FIRST LADIES

U
sher Nelson Pierce lived with his wife, Caroline, in a pretty white Colonial house in Arlington, Virginia, about four miles from the White House. Before he passed away, on November 27, 2014, he and Caroline liked to sit on the porch swing on summer days. During an interview, when I asked him how long they’d been married, he glanced over and asked her to remind him. She did not seem to mind his momentary memory lapse; in fact, she seemed to be used to taking a lead role in the relationship. Because of her husband’s grueling schedule, Caroline spent much of their sixty-six years of marriage taking care of their four kids—two boys and two girls—almost singlehandedly.

One date Pierce did remember is the exact day he started at the residence: October 16, 1961. During his more than two decades at
the White House, Pierce’s hours were so long and unpredictable that it felt “strange” to his wife when he was actually home. The ushers’ shifts changed so often that the Pierces kept a calendar on the table by their telephone so Caroline would know when he was working. She said her children have “lived the White House.” Over and over, Caroline had to tell them: “‘We can’t do this because Dad has to work. We can’t go today because he has to work.’ Your life revolved around the White House.” (She teased him that their children’s friends never understood what Nelson did; given his title, they all assumed he was an usher in a movie theater. “That took him down a peg,” she joked.)

But the privilege of working in the White House was never lost on Pierce. One day, Steve Bull, an aide to Richard Nixon, was leaving the West Wing just as Pierce was coming up the steps to start his shift. Bull made fun of him for wearing his White House ID around his neck on the driveway before he needed it out. Pierce told him earnestly, “Out of the two hundred and ten million people in this country, how many of us have the privilege of putting it on?”

Bull paused and replied, “I never thought of that.”

In all his years at the White House, it was trying to keep up with Lyndon B. Johnson that put the greatest strain on his marriage. A nocturnal animal, Johnson often ate dinner after 10:00
P.M.
, slept a few hours, and woke up again at 4:00
A.M.
(Carpenter Isaac Avery, who started at the White House in 1930, had never seen anything like it. “The Kennedys lived in a hurry,” he said. “President Johnson lives in a race.”)

The president’s daughter Lynda recalls that her father “worked a two-day shift.” She said he “would get up in the morning and work,” and then about two or three o’clock, or whatever time he could take a break, he would come over to the mansion and eat lunch or a midday meal—sometimes it was pretty late in the afternoon,
three or four o’clock. And then he would go to his bedroom, put his pajamas on, and sleep for thirty minutes or an hour. Then his second day started.”

The residence staff adjusted their schedules to suit Johnson’s demands. They worked in shifts, with ushers, maids, butlers, and cooks coming in at seven or eight o’clock in the morning and working until four or five o’clock in the afternoon, and another group coming in after lunch and working late into the night or early morning.

Every night, the navy chief would give President Johnson a massage in the president’s living quarters. When Pierce was on night duty, he would wait downstairs until the navy chief came down to tell him the president had gone to bed, at which point he was free to leave. Every once in a while, Pierce recalled, the president would fall asleep on the table and the chief would have to sit down and wait until Johnson woke up so he could finish the massage.

“It was three, four, sometimes even five o’clock in the morning before we’d leave work,” Pierce said, without a hint of resentment in his voice.

Johnson wasn’t the only president who kept late hours. Pierce remembered a few parties thrown by the Kennedys that ran so deep into the night that he’d call his wife and ask her to tell their oldest son not to start his six-mile
Washington Post
paper route without him. He would rush home in time to drive him; sometimes it was the only time he got to see his son that day.

The ushers’ workload amazes even top West Wing staffers. Obama’s former personal secretary, Katie Johnson, was astonished at how efficiently they coordinated a last-minute celebration for the staff who worked on President Obama’s historic health care legislation the night it passed on March 21, 2010.

“We didn’t know if health care was going to pass until four in the afternoon, and of course the list of people who’d worked on
health care was much larger than anyone had originally anticipated. So at four-thirty in the afternoon I’m calling over to the residence and telling them that we need to have food and drinks for a hundred people at eight o’clock,” she recalled. She expected to hear some pushback. “They said, ‘Oh, no big deal, we’ve got it.’” In a matter of hours they were able to pull off a memorable night for the West Wing workers, who drank celebratory champagne on the Truman Balcony.

For former White House spokesman Reid Cherlin, it was the only time he ever set foot in the living quarters. (The Obamas are especially private and only a few close friends, including Valerie Jarrett, are frequently seen upstairs.) Cherlin called the memory “vivid, because I knew I would never be able to go again.”

While they were enjoying the champagne, speechwriter Adam Frankel asked Reggie Love if he could take a look at the Lincoln Bedroom. Soon everyone wanted to join in on the impromptu self-guided tour.

“Walk around,” the president told the festive crowd.

That was all it took. “Everyone from the top people on down to the most junior people were just wandering around the bedrooms on the second floor. Everyone had the biggest smiles on their faces,” Cherlin remembers. “The president was in a good mood.”

“I can only get away with having you guys up here because Michelle is out of town,” Obama told them. Pointing out the copy of the Gettysburg Address displayed in the Lincoln Bedroom, the president—who takes pride in his own handwriting—told the young staffers how much he admired Lincoln’s beautiful penmanship.

For a politician sometimes viewed as standoffish, Obama often talks about the White House with a kind of boyish charm. Shortly after the inauguration, Frankel brought a new speechwriter to the Oval Office.

“Is this your first time here?” Obama asked.

“Yes, sir,” Frankel’s colleague replied.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

E
XECUTIVE
C
HEF
W
ALTER
Scheib is quick to say how honored and grateful he is for the opportunity to work at the White House—even as he compares it to being in prison.

“You work for the same people every day, you don’t have any personal life, family, social life, you work what we used to call ‘White House flex time’—that is, you chose any eighty-five hours you want to work each week. You lose your family, lose your social life, lose your personal life, and in many cases even lose your professional life because you work with the same group of folks every day, day in and day out. So you have to find a new way to stay fresh.”

Many of the butlers I interviewed were divorced, in part because of their work. Butler James Ramsey insisted he was never happier than since his 1995 divorce, even though he lost his house and his car in the process. “My life now, I come and go. I do what I want to do. I ain’t got nobody to tell me what to do. I love my life.” Having no one to answer to is helpful when working such unpredictable hours. Ramsey sometimes left the house at five or six o’clock in the morning and didn’t return home until two o’clock the following morning if there was a state dinner.

Butler James Hall (nicknamed “Big Man” by Nancy Reagan) started at the White House in 1963 and was divorced nine years later. Hall was called to work state dinners and help the full-time butlers if they were short-staffed. He often got the call last-minute in addition to the full days he worked as a library technician in the National Archives.

Hall passed away around the time that his friend James Ramsey died. Before his death, I interviewed Hall at his tidy apartment in a
retirement home in Suitland, Maryland, where his second bedroom was a shrine dedicated to his career. His souvenirs included letters from Chief Usher Rex Scouten, thanking him for his work at a dinner honoring prisoners of war from Vietnam, and for his help at Tricia Nixon’s wedding reception. The letters hung next to a condolence note from President Clinton on the death of his father in 1995.

Hall harbored no resentment about his divorce or the late nights he spent working at the White House. He reminisced about the days during Nixon’s presidency when the butlers used to wear tails and white vests: “They had us take the white vests off and wear black vests because they said we were ‘sharper than the guests.’”

Of course, working on the residence staff didn’t jeopardize every worker’s marriage. In fact, some couples even found each other while working at the White House. After much cajoling, Head Housekeeper Christine Crans found time to fall in love with Engineer Robert Limerick in 1980. The two met when Crans was measuring Limerick for his uniform. Limerick’s boss, the chief engineer, kept teasing them—until finally, Christine recalls, the two decided, “Okay, we’re going to go out to make him happy.” Less than a year later they were married.

When she told Nancy Reagan she was engaged, the first lady was thrilled. And relieved. “I think she was worried I might become a spinster,” Limerick said, laughing. The housekeeper before her had married the pastry chef, and ever since then, “the joke is that housekeepers come in trying to find a husband.” At their small wedding ceremony in Deale, Maryland, about forty of the sixty-five guests were members of the White House staff and their spouses, including Gary Walters and Rex Scouten.

Still, their busy schedules could be challenging. When the Clintons were in the White House, Limerick had to work every Christmas, and she and Robert eventually decided it would be better if he left his job as a White House engineer because the schedule was too
grueling. Adding to the frustration of coordinating schedules, the Limericks couldn’t talk much with each other about the incredible things they heard and saw on the job—even though they both worked in the White House. Limerick insists, “We didn’t always come home and spill the beans.”

U
SHER
S
KIP
A
LLEN
, who worked in the residence from 1979 until 2004, knew one member of the staff who even gave his life for the job. Frederick “Freddie” Mayfield started as a houseman in 1962, vacuuming and moving heavy furniture. When he was promoted to doorman, he became something of an institution with his silver hair, white tie, and black tailcoat (he shared the same quiet dignity as his colleague Preston Bruce). As the doorman, he waited by the elevator at night to bring the president to the residence. “He had the greatest smile,” said Luci Baines Johnson. “Every day was Christmas for Freddie Mayfield.”