The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (34 page)

“You can’t escape what’s happening around you there,” she said. “It feels like you’re in a little cocoon, but you’re very aware of everything that’s happening outside.” On a bitterly cold day, President Johnson—desperate to quell the protestors’ rage—even asked the butlers to bring them all hot coffee.

“I was quite young then, in my late twenties,” Monkman recalls, “and I would go to parties and I would not tell people where I worked, because if I did the reaction to me would be so negative. So I would say, ‘I work for the Park Service,’ because they’d want to vent to me about their politics. Maybe I felt the same way, but I didn’t want to hear it!”

On Tuesday through Saturday, parts of the Ground Floor and the State Floor of the White House were open to the public, and during those years of constant public protests, the lack of privacy grew unbearable for Lynda. “Even after the assassination we didn’t have the kind of security [we should have had], and so the tourists would be there right under our window early,” she said. “They would be right under my window and they would be saying, ‘Stand over here, Myrtle,’ and I would be trying to sleep!”

Texas first lady Nellie Connally once told Lynda that she’d often thought about dropping a water balloon on tourists from the window of the governor’s mansion.

“I laughingly said I wanted to do the same,” Lynda says. “I never did.”

It wasn’t the affable tourists who were the real problem, however; it was the protestors outraged by the continuation of the war who made life in the White House so difficult. Usher Nelson Pierce remembered once when “kids” on a public tour dumped vials of their own blood in the State Dining Room of the residence workers’ beloved house. “We had to dry-clean the drapes.” Sometimes visitors even unleashed cockroaches inside the White House. “We had to train the housekeeping staff on what to do if some of these situations occurred,” Monkman said.

A pivotal moment for LBJ came when Lynda went to him in the middle of the night, in tears after seeing her husband off to Vietnam, and asked why Robb had to go to war. The president faltered, realizing that he had no answer. It wasn’t long afterward that Johnson announced he would not be seeking reelection.

S
TEVE
F
ORD WAS
just a couple weeks away from starting his freshman year at Duke University in August 1974 when his father was suddenly thrust into the presidency.

“All of a sudden we all got ten Secret Service agents, and life changed. Trust me, at eighteen years old, that’s not really the group you’re hoping to hang out with.”

Ford decided to forgo college and moved to Montana to work on a ranch and avoid the spotlight. Still, he spent two months at a time staying with his parents in a room on the third floor, where his three siblings also had rooms.

“The White House really belonged to the staff, because they were the ones who were there for four, five, six different administrations,” he said. “The lease on the house was very temporary.
For some of us shorter than others!” (Ford’s father spent fewer than three years in the White House, leaving in 1977.) But Ford remembers those years vividly. “It was truly like living in a museum,” he says. “Everything dates back to Lincoln or Jefferson. I can remember moving in there—at home usually I put my feet up on the table where we lived in Alexandria, but Mom goes, ‘Don’t put your feet up there! That’s Jefferson’s table.’”

For the Ford family, moving into the White House was an earth-shattering change. For almost twenty years, while Gerald Ford was in Congress and even while he was vice president, they had lived in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom redbrick Colonial on a quarter-acre lot on Crown View Drive in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac from the White House.

When Ford became vice president in December 1973, after Spiro Agnew’s resignation, their two-car garage became home to his Secret Service detail, and bulletproof glass was installed in their master bedroom. (It wasn’t until 1977 that the U.S. Naval Observatory became the vice president’s official residence.)

Chief Usher Gary Walters later recalled how approachable the Fords were. Once he got a phone call from President Ford asking him to send someone to look at the shower in his bathroom in the White House because there was no hot water. It had been like that for a couple of days and he was just using the shower in his wife’s bathroom. But no rush, Ford told him.

The Fords had to wait to move into the White House for seven days after their father became president because the Nixons needed time to move their things out. When they finally moved in, the president and first lady brought their favorite chairs from home—his was a comfortable leather chair—for the private sitting room off their bedroom.

Susan Ford, the youngest of President Ford’s four children,
remembers begging her parents to let her redecorate her room and switch out the blue shag carpet. They wouldn’t let her because the cost would come out of their own pockets. “My father didn’t believe in mortgages; he was truly a Depression baby,” she told me.

Like most normal kids, the four Ford children, all in their teens or early twenties, could not wait to cause trouble. On the day they moved into the White House, Steve Ford called his best friend, Kevin Kennedy, who lived around the corner from him in Alexandria. “Kevin, we finally moved in. You gotta come over—you gotta see this place.”

He cleared his friend through security and gave him a tour, showing him his room on the third floor and taking him to the Solarium, with its rooftop access. They took out a stereo and blasted Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” on a turntable on the roof of the White House. “That was my first night in the White House,” Ford said. “Eugene, the butler, knew what we did, and I was so thankful that he never ratted me out to my parents. The staff knows everything you do.”

But they try not to judge, Ford said. In part because they greatly sympathize with all the children who do some growing up in the residence. “There were no moral billy clubs.”

F
OR GENERATIONS OF
presidential children, living in the White House was both a blessing and a curse. Margaret Truman called the executive residence “the great white jail,” and some other children even took pains to escape.

Susan Ford recalls sneaking out, making her famously softhearted father furious. In a practical joke gone wrong, Ford somehow managed to make a run for her car, which was sitting at the semicircle on the South Lawn (“You always left your keys in the car in case they have to move it,” she said) and drove straight out
of the White House gate. The Secret Service agents assigned to her couldn’t shut the gate or chase after her because her mother’s car was driving in at the same time.

Susan picked up a friend and went to a Safeway parking lot, where they shared a six-pack of beer. Eventually she went to a pay phone and told the Secret Service agents she would return to the White House by 7:00
P.M.
(She had to come home to pick up Hall & Oates concert tickets.) As soon as she returned, her father wanted to see her.

“The fun is over,” she remembered thinking. “Now reality sets in.”

The president said he was disappointed in her. He must have been furious, knowing that the radical Symbionese Liberation Army (the group that had kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst) had threatened to take her hostage. Susan was the only Ford child to have Secret Service protection before her father became president. What was a lighthearted adventure could have turned into a national crisis if she had been kidnapped. (Susan clearly didn’t mind the Secret Service that much; later she would marry a former member of her father’s protective detail.)

Like his sister, Steve Ford tried to live a normal life. It didn’t always work. “When we moved in, I had a yellow Jeep that I drove,” he said, laughing at his own naïveté. “I used to pull in and I’d park it in front of the diplomatic entrance on the driveway. I’d go upstairs and I’d look out my window and it would be gone.” The staff didn’t think a Jeep was an appropriate car to park in front of the White House. “Every time I’d come home they would move it around back and kind of hide it. I’d get frustrated and I’d go down and move it out front again and they’d move it back.”

A
MY
C
ARTER, WHO
was nine years old when she moved in, left her mark on the White House—literally. Her name is written in Magic
Marker on the wall between the elevator shaft and the second-floor service elevator. “Amy opened the door and stuck her hand between the elevator shaft and wrote her name,” said Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy.

Amy wasn’t content staying upstairs in the residence, Savoy recalled. She wanted to explore. “She was curious. You have this great big house, all these doors, let’s look in ’em.”

The Carters famously sent their daughter to public school in Washington, D.C. It was hard for a girl trailed by Secret Service agents to fit in, especially when her teacher kept her indoors during recess in a misguided effort to protect her. By the time they got to the White House, her mother Rosalynn recalls, Amy—their fourth child and only daughter—was used to being an outsider. “It was what she knew, because she was three when we moved to the governor’s mansion. It was not different for her. Mary came to be with us. It was just her life.”

Nanny Mary Prince helped Amy feel more comfortable with it all, Rosalynn said, but the freckle-faced girl knew that her life was different. Back in the Georgia governor’s mansion, she’d had even less privacy: there, just getting to the kitchen meant braving a wave of tourists. But Amy was a self-possessed child, so much so that she sometimes seemed oblivious to outsiders. “When she was three years old,” her mother says, “everybody made a big fuss over the baby when they saw her and she’d just walk straight through and look straight ahead. I remember when she went to school the first day in Washington everybody was so distressed because Amy looked so lonely. That was just her normal life.”

When they first moved into the White House, Rosalynn says, Amy sometimes went downstairs to the State Floor during the public tours, but “people made such a fuss over her” that she stopped. When the tours were done for the day, she returned—and went roller-skating through the East Room.

Members of the residence staff were fond of the feisty little girl. Mary Prince often called Nelson Pierce at his desk to see when he would come over to the mansion to tune Amy’s violin (“Music and baseball were the things I lived for,” Pierce said.). Butler James Jeffries said Amy would sometimes ask him for help with her homework when he was upstairs in the family kitchen. Life lived in government housing—albeit elegant government housing—was all Amy knew, and the staff were like family to her. One day she went to all the different shops in the residence with her Secret Service agent to ask the staff for money to help sponsor her in a walk, said Curator Betty Monkman. “We were her neighborhood. She was coming to solicit. Then we pledged a certain amount—and then she came back to collect!” said Monkman. “She couldn’t go out in the street and do that.”

The Carters tried to provide some sense of stability and normalcy for Amy. Monkman remembers passing the China Room near the Curator’s Office one day when she saw Amy and her friends carving pumpkins—and “there was President Carter, down on the floor with them.”