The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (29 page)

The fact that the White House butlers were mostly African Americans sometimes raised questions. Usher Chris Emery remembers when Soviet political leader Mikhail Gorbachev made his historic visit to the White House in 1987 and they had to scramble at the last minute to protect the two world leaders from a sudden downpour on the South Lawn.

“[Chief Usher] Gary Walters saw all the butlers standing there with umbrellas and said, ‘I can’t have all these African Americans holding umbrellas for these world leaders. It will look terrible.’” So Walters asked Emery and another white usher to go outside and hold umbrellas over Reagan and Gorbachev so that the White House would not look like “the last plantation,” as Emery put it.

Butler Herman Thompson, a member of the first fully integrated high school class in Washington’s public schools, was on the front lines of desegregation. The discrimination and outright hatred he saw in his white classmates made him “very rebellious as a person,” he said recently over lunch at a downtown Washington restaurant not far from where he grew up. “It was not pleasant.”

Thompson saw the same kind of racism in the White House that he did in the rest of the city, and he tried to fight it, but more surreptitiously than Bill Hamilton. “Many times, when African American people were there as guests, we would make it a point to make sure that they were looked after, that they would have the same type of attention as everyone else had,” he said. As late as the
Nixon administration, butlers still wore tails for state dinners. As more black musicians like Duke Ellington and the Temptations started playing at the White House, however, and more African American guests appeared, the butlers were told to stop wearing tails to avoid exacerbating the appearance of a social divide between the workers and the guests.

“We used to joke that they changed the tails because the world was changing. A lot of times people who would come in, they wouldn’t know who the butlers were and who the guests were.” He chuckled. “You had some very distinguished-looking gentlemen working there and people would make predecisions about who was who.” Thompson said he was mistaken for a guest a few times.

Even though he had seen things slowly improve, he was shocked when he met Admiral Stephen Rochon, the new chief usher, at Eugene Allen’s funeral. “You figured it would be a cold day in hell before any black person would get the job!”

Rochon, who was born in 1950, grew up in New Orleans at a time when 10 percent of Americans still couldn’t eat at Woolworth’s counters. He still vividly remembers an incident that occurred when he was thirteen, when a red 1957 Chevrolet with a big Confederate flag in its back window pulled up to him while he was walking to a Boy Scout meeting. The car was full of white teenagers who shouted “nigger” and threw a Coke bottle at him. Because of that painful experience, he said, he told his White House staff he would always listen to their concerns about discrimination. “I didn’t want someone else to hurt the way I did.”

He did occasionally hear charges of racism. The only African American working in one of the shops came to Rochon one day and told him he thought he was being talked down to because of his skin color. Rochon immediately got the man’s supervisor in his office and told him he wouldn’t stand for it. “Word travels fast at the
White House,” he said. “If it was with one department, believe me, every department knew about it.”

There’s a divide between workers like Bill Hamilton and Herman Thompson, who saw clear racism at the White House and felt compelled to combat it, and Eugene Allen, Lynwood Westray, and James Ramsey, who made do with the way things were.

Butler Alvie Paschall, now ninety-three years old, is a lot like his friend Lynwood Westray. He was just four years old when he started picking cotton in Henderson, North Carolina. He and his six brothers and sisters worked straight through the Great Depression, and he says his parents taught them to be respectful of authority. Reluctant to share too much, he represents an older generation of African Americans who were taught not to be “mouthy,” he says, because that could cost them their jobs. “You’re there for a particular thing: you’re there to serve. Your job comes first.”

Dressed nattily in suspenders and a cream-colored silk tie, Paschall told me that he carried that lesson with him all the way to the White House, where he started his career during the Truman administration. When there was a fight, or a private conversation he knew he wasn’t supposed to hear, he had to decide quickly whether to leave the room discreetly or stay and pretend he hadn’t noticed. “I did all of those things!” He laughed.

Westray is incredibly forgiving. The segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, whose “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech was a black mark on the politics of the 1960s, sought to redeem himself in the eyes of the public after surviving a 1972 assassination attempt. Westray recalls that he also tried privately to win over the African American residence staff during visits to the White House. “After George Wallace got shot you would think he was one of our buddies,” Westray said, shaking his head. “Every time he’d come down to the White House, the first thing he’d do was come back and want to be back there with
us, back there in the Butler’s Pantry.” The assassination attempt “changed him completely,” Westray said. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. It took a bullet to straighten him out.”

Instead of snubbing Wallace, the African American butlers sat around and joked with him. It was not about holding grudges or about forgetting past offenses, it was about doing their jobs—which sometimes meant biting their tongues.

Butler and Maître d’ Eugene Allen’s son, Charles, said that his father experienced more racism at the high-end Kenwood Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., where he shined members’ golf shoes, than he ever did at the White House. Not because the racism didn’t exist, but because no one wanted to get on the bad side of the president.

“People are going to be careful about the way they treat you because of the way these first families feel about these people. You can see yourself sailing out of the gate if you’re disrespectful.”

Lynwood Westray agrees. The White House “was one place where you didn’t have all that foolishness,” he says. “Even though we were all black butlers, people thought more of us because there we all were meeting kings and queens.”

Outside the White House was a different matter. Westray loves to recount a story about his old friend Armstead Barnett, who worked and lived in the White House when Franklin Roosevelt was president. “One day he caught a cab to go home and he told the guy, ‘Take me to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.’ It was a white cabdriver and he didn’t want to take him. ‘There are no blacks living at the White House,’ the driver told him. But he finally took him, and when they got to the gate Armstead got out to go in, everybody knew him, he didn’t even have to show his identification.” Westray smiled. “When he went in the gate and didn’t come out, the cabdriver was still sitting there wondering, ‘Where in the hell is that guy going?’”

President Kennedy shared a crowning moment of the civil rights era with Doorman Preston Bruce. Less than three months before his assassination, Kennedy asked Bruce to join him in the third-floor Solarium and listen to the throngs of people gathering to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech at the Lincoln Memorial. They could hear the crowd singing the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” as they stood there together—Bruce the son of a sharecropper and Kennedy the scion of America’s royal family. The president gripped the windowsill so hard that his knuckles turned white. “Oh, Bruce”—he turned to his friend—“I wish I were out there with them!”

The respect Kennedy had for the African American residence workers was returned. Eugene Allen never missed a day of work in thirty-four years and never complained about his coworkers or his bosses, the president and first lady. His son, Charles, said the only time he ever saw his father cry was when he was putting his coat on to go back to work at the White House after Kennedy was assassinated. “It depressed him terribly at that moment,” Allen said thoughtfully of his father. “But, to use military terminology, he was a soldier. You buck up. The only tragedy that he didn’t recover from was when my mother passed. He couldn’t pull himself back up from that.”

Allen, who passed away in 2010, was the last person who would have ever wanted a movie made about his life. By all accounts he was a shy and gentle man who would never have agreed to talk to the media were it not for prodding from Helene, his wife of sixty-five years. She said she wanted people to recognize Eugene’s service to the country.

“When he walked in that door, he never complained about his coworkers, he never talked about the principals he worked for in a bad way. He kept that stuff close to his vest. That was our livelihood.”

James Ramsey was another residence worker who shared that attitude. He grew up working in tobacco fields in North Carolina,
sometimes helping to serve lunch in his high school cafeteria “just to give me a plate of food to eat.” He came far in life and was grateful for the opportunity to work in “the house.” Ramsey said he hated to hear stories of butlers going directly to the chief usher to complain about working conditions or their peers. “We didn’t have no problem. All of us stuck together.”

He also said that he never saw any racism, or he chose to rise above it. “People have been very nice to me since I’ve been coming up. Because I used to do the part-time catering and meet a lot of people. Segregation?” he asks. “It’s over with—done.”

One thing that may have helped Ramsey weather the indignities of segregation was his healthy sense of humor. Chef Frank Ruta remembers Ramsey joking openly about race, poking his head into the second-floor family kitchen to ask Ruta, who is white, how he wanted his coffee: “Do you want it like me, or do you want it like you?”

Yet James Ramsey conducted himself with pride and dignity, and he recognized the momentous change that the 2008 election brought to the White House. What was it like to be a black man working for the first African American first family?

“It was beautiful. It was beautiful.”

Z
EPHYR
W
RIGHT WAS
truly a part of the Johnson family. Hired by Lady Bird Johnson when she was still a home economics student at a Texas college, she cooked for the Johnsons for twenty-seven years in Texas and in Washington, D.C., where the Johnsons brought her to live with them at the White House.

As they drove through the segregated South on their way to Washington, Lady Bird stopped the car at a hotel to look for a place to stay the night. She refused to stay in a hotel if Zephyr could not also stay there.

“Do you have rooms for tonight?” Lady Bird asked at one hotel.

“Yes, we have a place for you,” the woman behind the desk told her.

“Well, I have these other two people,” Lady Bird replied, gesturing toward Zephyr and another African American who worked for the Johnsons.

“No. We work ’em but we don’t sleep ’em,” the woman replied.

Lady Bird was disgusted. “That’s a nasty way to be,” she said over her shoulder as she stormed out.

After that humiliation, Wright wouldn’t drive back to Texas until a decade later. The journey was one factor that informed the president and the first lady’s zeal for civil rights legislation. After President Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act that overturned so-called Jim Crow laws through Congress in 1964, Wright agreed to visit the state where she was born. “It’s very different now,” Johnson reassured her. “You can go any place you want to go; you can stop any place you want to stop.” LBJ was proud that the historic legislation that he spearheaded would have a direct impact on his friend’s life.

Johnson looked to Zephyr Wright as a kind of sounding board for his efforts on behalf of civil rights. During his vice presidency, he asked her for her feelings about Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. As president, when he appointed Thurgood Marshall as the first African American Supreme Court justice, he rushed to tell Wright the news. Johnson was persistently insecure about whether African Americans appreciated the reforms he enacted on their behalf, and sometimes complained to Wright about it: “I can’t see how they can’t see what I’m trying to do for them.” Since his death, it has been alleged that Johnson used the word
nigger
even as he fought to pass civil rights legislation. One Johnson aide told me that the president did use the racial slur when he was expressing his frustration with certain African American civil rights leaders who wanted bolder reforms. “They
were just being so wretched, making it harder for him,” the aide said. For some, incremental change was not enough.

One frequent White House guest of Johnson’s was Georgia senator Richard Russell, a mentor of Johnson’s in the Senate but also a leading opponent of the civil rights movement. At first, Zephyr Wright knew him only as a visitor. “He was a very nice person” behind closed doors, she said. As the civil rights battle played out in public, however, she saw Russell more clearly. “When I read about and heard about the things he was doing and saying in Congress, then I got a different feeling about him.” But she never let her feelings show. “I felt, ‘Here I am; I’m working for Lyndon B. Johnson. These are his friends. I must accept them the way they are because he accepts them. There is nothing else I can do about it.’”