The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (37 page)

When President Kennedy died, Ketchum says, he finally understood what West meant. There was a degree of composure that was always expected from the domestic staff. And with the widowed first lady setting a stoic tone, everyone else fell in line. If the president’s wife was able to keep herself together, a curator at the White House who barely knew the president should certainly do the same.

West was surprised that the campaign-averse Mrs. Kennedy had wanted to accompany her husband to Dallas, but he remembered how close the couple had grown since Patrick’s death that August. Later, Jackie told West she was glad she had been there in her husband’s final moments: “To think that I very nearly didn’t go! Oh, Mr. West, what if I’d been here—out riding at Wexford [their house in Virginia’s horse country] or somewhere. . . . Thank God I went with him!”

Mrs. Kennedy was so fond of West, and grateful for his kindness in that dark time, that when he passed away in 1983 she asked Nancy Reagan if he could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, even though it is reserved for career military personnel and their families. The Reagans obliged.

I
T WAS
N
ANNY
Maud Shaw who broke the news of the president’s death to the children. Caroline was five days short of her sixth birthday when her father was assassinated. John-John was just three days from his third birthday. As helicopters noisily landed on the South Lawn, Caroline pointed at each one and asked if that was the helicopter carrying her father back from his trip. Shaw chose her words carefully. “There was an accident and your father was shot,” Shaw said haltingly, almost unable to control her own grief. “God has taken him to heaven because they just couldn’t make him better in a hospital.”

Shaw told Caroline that she would be reunited in heaven with her father and their baby brother Patrick, but in the meantime he would be watching over her and her mother and her brother. Caroline was just old enough to start crying.

John-John was so young that Shaw tucked him into bed without telling him anything. He soon learned enough, though, to say: “My poor mommy’s crying. She’s crying because my daddy’s gone away.”

A
T FIRST,
L
ADY
Bird Johnson thought someone was setting off firecrackers. That would have been entirely in keeping with the festive air of the day, as children waved signs and people threw confetti and leaned out of office building windows to wave at the gorgeous first couple.

The Johnsons were riding two cars behind the Kennedys on
November 22, 1963. Their lives, like those of the Kennedy family, would be forever changed by the events of that day.

Mrs. Johnson couldn’t believe that the president had been shot until they pulled up to the hospital. She glanced over at the Kennedys’ car and saw “a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the backseat. It was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the president’s body.”

When she went to see the first lady outside the operating room, she was amazed at how alone she looked. “You always think of someone like her as being insulated, protected,” she wrote in her diary. Lady Bird hugged Jackie and whispered, “God, help us all.”

On the flight back to Washington, with President Kennedy’s casket in the plane’s corridor, Lady Bird went to see Jackie again. Jackie told her the same thing she later told West: that she was glad she’d been with her husband in his final moments. “What if I had not been there?” she wondered aloud.

When Lady Bird asked if she could find someone to help her change out of her bloodstained suit, she refused “with almost an element of fierceness—if a person that gentle, that dignified, can be said to have such a quality.” The gory sight was deeply moving. It was a shock to see that “immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.”

“I want them to see what they have done to Jack,” Jackie told her defiantly. (The strawberry pink suit was an exact replica of a Chanel design, made by a small U.S. dressmaker; the first lady had chosen it to avoid criticism for wearing too many expensive foreign labels.)

The country was consumed by grief and panic. For Luci Baines Johnson, sixteen years old at the time, there was a deep fear that the news reports she was hearing secondhand were incomplete and that her parents had also been hurt. She was sitting in Spanish class at Washington’s National Cathedral School when her teacher announced the news. “No one ever said a word about my father
or mother,” she recalled. Class was swiftly dismissed and she wandered into the school’s courtyard alone and in a daze. “I looked over and saw that the Secret Service had very thoughtfully sent a man I knew, one of my father’s detail—and I turned and ran in the other direction as if I could run away from the inevitable. And of course, I wasn’t capable of outrunning a Secret Service agent.” The agent grabbed her and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Luci.” She beat on his chest and screamed, “No!” He never said that the president was dead, she says, “Because the words were just unsayable.” It wasn’t until she asked him, “And Daddy and Mother?” that she found out that her parents were unharmed.

Ninety-nine minutes after President Kennedy was pronounced dead, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One. When Johnson stepped off the plane at Andrews Air Force Base, this time as president, he told the waiting press: “We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”

The specter of tragedy would haunt the Johnsons those first few months in the White House. Their transition was made worse because some members of the Kennedys’ loyal staff would never trust the new president, whom they considered a loud, uncouth bully. (Even Jackie Kennedy had referred to Johnson during the campaign as “Senator Cornpone.”)

Caroline Kennedy’s life may have been changed forever, but her mother wanted her routine to stay in place for as long as possible. At Mrs. Kennedy’s request, Lady Bird Johnson allowed the little girl to continue to attend kindergarten with a group of her friends in their third-floor Solarium classroom until the end of the first semester in mid-January. Little Caroline was dropped off at the South Portico every morning and picked up every afternoon. The elevator
took Caroline and her classmates to the linoleum-floored classroom, complete with chalkboards and cubbies. The other students were the children of longtime friends of the first couple. Caroline’s ballet class sometimes still practiced on the South Lawn, “fluttering like little pink birds in their pink leotards, tulle tutus, and ballet slippers,” recalls Social Secretary Letitia Baldrige.

After her father’s death, Caroline never stopped to see her old room on the second floor or bounce on the trampoline, J. B. West said. “Except for a few sentimental servants, she was generally ignored. Lynda and Luci [the Johnsons’ teenage daughters] were the new Princesses.”

For Nelson Pierce, seeing Caroline every day brought a sense of solace, not sorrow. “We were so glad that she was continuing with school and her friends,” he told me. “Of course, she was young enough so that the loss of her father, when it was school time, it was forgotten. She blended in with the kids and had a good time.” (Once Caroline finished the semester, Luci and Lynda made the Solarium into a teenage hideaway, complete with a soda bar, a big TV set, and two record players.)

In the wake of the assassination, security at the White House was enhanced. Butler Lynwood Westray recalls that the residence staff were all subjected to a new clearance check by law enforcement—their backgrounds scrutinized and their friends and families interviewed. “One or two of the guys couldn’t make the grade after having been found okay” before, he said. “They were just cut off from working there after that.” Westray said his phone was tapped after the assassination. “They wanted to make sure people there were doing what they were supposed to be doing.”

Kennedy’s death changed the course of history and it had a deep, personal effect on the residence staff who loved him so much. A certain innocence would be forever absent from the halls of the executive mansion.

N
EARLY FORTY YEARS
later, a very different kind of traumatic event shook the White House. On a late summer morning, under a cloudless azure sky, the mansion was buzzing with activity. The Bushes were hosting the annual picnic for members of Congress and their families. One hundred and ninety picnic tables adorned the South Lawn. Executive Chef Walter Scheib was working with Tom Perini, a favorite caterer of the first family’s from Buffalo Gap, Texas, to create a festive, Texas-style cookout for the fifteen hundred expected guests, complete with chuck wagons and a green chili and hominy casserole.

Warm weather and clear skies were forecast for the afternoon barbecue. Maids were cleaning the Queens’ Bedroom on the second floor, where George H. W. Bush and Barbara had spent the night before. The former president and his wife left at 7:00
A.M.
for an early flight. President George W. Bush was in Florida, visiting a Sarasota elementary school.

Even with all the activity swirling around her, Laura Bush seemed alone in the White House on the morning of September 11, 2001. She was getting dressed in silence in the Bush’s second-floor bedroom, rehearsing the statement she was set to make before the Senate Education Committee that morning. She was nervous about her visit to Capitol Hill, where she would be briefing the committee about an early childhood development conference she’d organized earlier that summer.

The first lady and the residence staff—from the maids, butlers, and florists, to the cooks prepping for the annual picnic—were all lost in the events of a typically busy day. But that day was anything but typical. “Had the TV been turned on, I might have heard the first fleeting report of a plane hitting the North Tower,” Laura Bush said.

A few minutes after 9:00
A.M.
Laura got into her waiting car at the South Portico to head to the Russell Senate Office Building,
less than two miles away. The head of her Secret Service detail told her that a plane had slammed into one of the World Trade Center towers. Chief Usher Gary Walters, standing beside him, was also hearing the news for the first time.
How could a plane fly into the World Trade Center on such a clear day?
He wondered aloud.

“Gary, you need to go inside and watch the television,” the agent told him.

The first lady’s motorcade sped up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to make the hearing. Walters headed back inside to the Secret Service room on the Ground Floor, located behind the president’s elevator, where he knew there was a television. But the room was crowded with people in front of the TV, so he went to the Usher’s Office, where he ran into some household workers. He gave them quick instructions on the setup for the picnic, still unaware of the extent of the devastation.

When he got to his personal office, which is separate from the Usher’s Office, it too was packed with people huddled around the TV. He walked in just as the second plane flew into the South Tower.

“How in the world did they get that on television?” he asked, stunned.