The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (30 page)

Many of those who worked closely with the Johnsons had no idea that he would be announcing his decision not to seek reelection on the night of March 31, 1968. Social Secretary Bess Abell found out when she turned on the TV. Wright was at home too, and she cried when she heard her longtime boss say he would be leaving the White House. She knew this would mark the end of her time with the Johnsons: Washington was home to her now, and she wanted to stay.

Wright admired Johnson, both for his civil rights reforms and for the sheer effort it took to push them through Congress. “He had always been such a fighter,” she said. Politics was his “whole life,” she recognized, and she was convinced that he gave it up because he felt his presidency’s greatest accomplishments were being overshadowed by the albatross of Vietnam.

Johnson’s frustrations were no secret among the residence workers. Once, around the time of his announcement, Dog Keeper and Electrician Traphes Bryant walked into a room just as Johnson was railing about the war. “They shot me down. The only difference
between the Kennedy assassination and mine is that I am still alive and feeling it,” he lamented.

To Wright, Johnson seemed at peace with his decision to leave Washington. “At last we are going home,” he said to Wright the day after his announcement. “Are you going with us?”

“No, I’m staying here,” she told him.

He was stunned. “It won’t be the same without you,” he said, sadly.

Wright was sad too, and in a way she felt abandoned by the president’s decision. “To me it was just like losing a family. But it was what he wanted to do.”

After he went back to his ranch in Stonewall, Texas, Johnson suffered from major heart problems and he fell into depression. His daughter Luci would call to check on him and see if she could help. “There’s nothing you can do,” he told her. “I just miss some of my creature comforts.” He especially missed the custard that his mother and Zephyr made for him.

“Maybe I could help,” she offered.

“No, you can’t. Your mother doesn’t cook. My mother’s dead, and Zephyr got uppity and left me,” Johnson complained.

“Zephyr got
uppity
and left you?” Luci repeated back to him, aghast. It seemed absurd for her father, who was a champion of the civil rights movement, to be angry at Wright for pursuing her dreams and staying where she felt most at home. “You spilled your life’s blood trying to give her more opportunities in life, and then when you left Washington she chose to stay in that community because she found them and discovered them and was able to enjoy a great deal more opportunity in Washington, D.C., than she would have in Texas.”

Her father recognized that he was being selfish, but he said he still missed her custard and comfort food. Luci offered to help.
“Daddy, Zephyr told me that I could either get out of her kitchen or learn how to cook. So what is it that you want that she used to make for you? Because I can make it and I’ll drive down from Austin every day.”

The former president went through a litany of foods, asking if she could make each one. When she said yes, “all of a sudden I went up in the world. It meant a lot to me. Though I’m sure it didn’t mean much to his cardiologist.”

I
N 1959
, J
AMES
Jeffries was just seventeen years old when he joined a family tradition and started working in the White House kitchen. His uncles Charles, John, and Sam Ficklin were never far away if he needed them. “When I went to work down there, they used to give me a five-gallon bucket of ice cream every day and I ate ice cream all day long. They were trying to fatten me up!”

His job was to put out the desserts: “They didn’t have all of these fancy desserts back then, they only had vanilla ice cream and we’d sprinkle some chocolate on top. I had fun working.” He worked in the kitchen for about a year before he moved upstairs to become a pantry helper.

Jeffries, now seventy-four, was born in Virginia. His mother had to drive from their home near Warrenton to give birth to him at the Freedmen’s Hospital, which provided medical care to the African American community in the area. He was aware that the lingering racism of the time also existed inside the White House. “Back in the day white folks always thought they were superior to black folks,” Jeffries said during an interview in his Washington row house. “I would not let nobody talk to me any kind of way.”

At the end of each week, Jeffries had to give Executive Chef Henry Haller a voucher with his hours to sign so that he could get paid. “Some part-time chef came in and he looked at my sheet and
saw that I was making more money than he made,” Jeffries said. The newly hired white worker went to Chief Usher Gary Walters and asked how an African American pot washer could be making more money than he was.

Jeffries was furious when he learned about the complaint. The answer was simple: “I was putting in more hours. There were a lot of times when I’d be working two or three hours after they’d all gone home.” He approached Haller and said, “Henry, how would you feel if you had a young guy come in starting at the same salary as you? I’ve been working here years before this guy was even thought of. I don’t want to watch my pay go backward.”

Haller replied: “You’re right about that.”

Jeffries remembers the scene from decades ago vividly. “It was funny, that day we had some mats on the floor that were about an inch thick or so and he stood on the edge of the mat rocking back and forth and said ‘Jimmy, let me think about this.’ He walked over to where the oven was and he said, ‘Jimmy, how do you figure you have the right to talk to me like you’re talking to me?’”

“I put my pants on the same way you put yours on. Why shouldn’t I talk to you? I’m telling you the way I feel,” Jeffries replied.

Haller looked at him and said, “Jimmy, you aren’t going to ever have to worry about your money. Not as long as I’m here.” And he was as good as his word.

T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE
has long been used to showcase American talent. The Kennedys invited the American Ballet Theatre to perform in the East Room, and when the Clintons were in office, Eric Clapton, B. B. King, and Yo-Yo Ma all performed there.

In 1969, twenty-three-year-old Tricia Nixon invited the Temptations, the chart-topping Motown group, to perform. Jeffries remembers how the members of the band lingered in the Old Family
Dining Room with the serving staff when they weren’t onstage, because “they could relate to us and have a personal conversation.”

“I got to see them, I got to shake hands and party with them,” Jeffries says. “They didn’t stay out in the parlors, they came in the back because at the time most all of us in the back were black,” he said. “James Brown and the [Famous] Flames—they all came back there.” The residence workers made the stars more than welcome: “Whatever food we’d have back there, they’d have that food and drinks and stuff.” That night in 1969, while they were chatting, the band invited Jeffries to bring his children to come play at the pool at their hotel in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland. “I didn’t, that’s the only thing I regret. I just got busy.”

Otis Williams, the last surviving original member of the legendary Motown group, told me that they made it a rule not to talk politics when they performed at the White House. “Our mind-set is just to entertain. We don’t go there with politics in our mind. We strictly go there to perform.”

Williams does not remember the specifics of that night in 1969—he has performed at the White House at least half a dozen times—but he does remember watching the African American staff at work. “They didn’t show any disgust about the way they were treated. They were consummate professionals.” While he and his bandmates had certainly experienced racism outside the White House, the singer recalled, he never felt it when he performed there.

Williams says that performing in front of President Obama was a special honor: “We never would have imagined—in our lifetime anyways—[that we would] see a black man be president.”

For Jeffries, having the Obamas in the White House makes him want to keep working: “That just makes me feel like, ‘Okay, I’ll go to work as often as I can.’”

CHAPTER VIII

Backstairs Gossip and Mischief

I’m loyal to doing my job for the family, but I’m going to go back and say, “Do you know what they did today? I can’t believe they said that!”

—BILL HAMILTON, HOUSEMAN AND STOREROOM MANAGER, 1958–2013

T
he staff is discreet, but they’re also human. They naturally swap stories over lunch, not only sharing important information but also bonding over the incredible events they witness and, sometimes, the inherently funny situations they get into.

One of Social Secretary Bess Abell’s favorite stories involved the White House china. In 1966, the Johnsons decided to order a new china service. Lady Bird worked closely with designers from Tiffany & Company and the manufacturers Castleton China to create designs that reflected her commitment to the beautification of America’s roadways and parklands. The dinner plates feature an eagle, and the borders of each plate were decorated with different American wildflowers. The dessert plates showcased the state flower of each of the fifty states.

When the china finally arrived it was breathtaking, Abell recalled—except for the dessert plates. The state flowers were ugly
and unformed. “They looked like puppies had squatted in them.” She laughed, as though she’d seen them just yesterday. At the time, though, it was not so funny. She was horrified. Abell ran to show them to J. B. West. (West was a favorite of both Abell and Jacqueline Kennedy. “He was divine,” Abell recalls. “He made the best frozen daiquiris—one of the reasons he and Mrs. Kennedy got along so well!”)

West’s daiquiris, she said, “fueled one of the great little extravaganzas” at the White House. Because standards required that anything that was not perfect would have to be destroyed, a set of replacements were ordered—and then the staff found a clever way to destroy the faulty plates. Instead of throwing them in the Potomac River (a longtime graveyard for broken White House china), they decided to have some fun. Abell, West, and a few others went down to the bomb shelter with the plates—and a pitcher of daiquiris. They hung bull’s-eyes on the wall with the names—and in some cases caricatures—of their least favorite West Wing staffers and threw the plates at them.

“It was better than a Greek wedding.”

I
N 1975
, F
ORMER
residence worker Traphes Bryant became one of the first insiders to expose Kennedy’s now-famous philandering in a book. Most of the workers had known about it at the time, but they had resolved to keep the secret to protect the institution of the American presidency. According to the Kennedys’ press secretary, Pierre Salinger, the workers were explicitly asked “not to engage in publicity which might adversely reflect on the White House as a national monument.” And, though he said he never signed a nondisclosure agreement, Carpenter Milton Frame remembered: “We were told not to talk to the press or the news media when I was hired.” Another staffer was asked to sign a piece of paper the day
he retired that said he wouldn’t write a memoir until a grace period had passed—the White House suggested a whopping twenty years.