The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (39 page)

Nearby, the busy Connecticut Avenue commercial district was in chaos. Drivers had gotten out of their cars and gone running down the street, worried that they would be caught in an attack. “Mass hysteria had taken over,” Walter Scheib recalls. “I remember walking by a BMW 700 series sitting in the middle of Connecticut Avenue with the doors open and the engine running and nobody in it.”

Laura Bush saw none of this. After hours of sitting in the windowless conference room, she was finally brought to the President’s Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House. Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials had been gathered there since that morning. Built for President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II, the command center is accessible only through a series of unfinished underground hallways with pipes hanging down from the ceiling. There she would wait to be reunited with her husband.

Florist Bob Scanlan was putting the finishing touches on the
picnic table arrangements in the small Flower Shop underneath the North Portico when a friend called and told him the news. Stunned, he wound up at nearby Freedom Plaza, several blocks from the White House.

As he walked there with several colleagues, he heard the piercing noise of American Airlines Flight 77 slamming into the Pentagon. “We decided that we couldn’t stay there,” he said. “We were like lost souls.” He and a coworker walked more than two miles together to reach their homes on Capitol Hill.

A
FTER HELPING CLEAR
the picnic tables, Scheib and a group of residence staff worked in the kitchen from two o’clock in the afternoon until nine o’clock that evening, serving food (much of it prepared earlier for the barbecue) to the Secret Service, National Guard, D.C. police, and White House staff who had to stay behind. Leftovers were sent to the relief effort at the Pentagon. “Four of them [residence workers] served over five hundred meals to the staff that were in and around the White House,” Walters said.

When people thanked him for the food, Scheib replied, “Just keep whatever the hell’s on the outside on the outside, will you?”

Once the lawn was cleared, Cliber and a handful of others finally tried to leave the White House, only to find themselves locked in by security doors. A plane had been spotted overhead, and the Secret Service ordered them down to the bomb shelter, a corridor running west to east under the White House. They stayed down in the old shelter until around eight o’clock that night. (The plane overhead turned out to be a U.S. military aircraft.)

When they learned of the death toll—all told, nearly three thousand people lost their lives that day—all anyone who works at America’s most famous house could think was,
That could have been us.

That evening the first lady finally got to see the president when
they were reunited in the President’s Emergency Operations Center.

The Secret Service recommended that the Bushes sleep on an old bed in the basement, but they refused. “I’ve got to get some sleep, in our own bed,” the president said. To the Bushes, the White House was home. They were even more fiercely attached to it now that it had narrowly missed total destruction.

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FTER THE ATTACKS,
the Secret Service wanted to close the White House to tours. Early on the morning of September 12, Chief Usher Gary Walters approached the president as he walked to the Oval Office and lobbied for the public tours to remain open. “Mr. President, last night you said everybody should go about their normal activities. One normal activity that will be watched very closely is that the White House is open for tours.”

The president paused and replied, “You’re right.”

In the wake of the attacks, however, the decision was made to close them. The September 11 attacks weren’t the only cause for concern; just a week later, letters containing anthrax spores arrived at the offices of several news media figures as well as two Democratic senators. Walters said that some members of the residence staff were put on preventative drugs in case they were exposed to anthrax.

Bill Cliber would never be the same after 9/11. He knew how it felt to be scared as he walked into work every day; after all, his White House career had started shortly before Kennedy’s assassination. But this was different.

“It shook me. I had my time in,” he said, referring to the years of service that government workers need in order to qualify to get a significant portion of their pay in retirement. Still, he wouldn’t leave because he had promised himself that he would work at the White House for forty years, so he kept on going.

After September 11, though, the mood changed at the White House for everyone. The Curator’s Office deposed members of the staff, asking them to talk about what they went through that day for their records. The glamour of working at the White House was overtaken by fear. Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier said that he and his staff were completely unaware why they were being evacuated so urgently, because they didn’t have a TV in their kitchen. Afterward he demanded that one be installed. After 9/11, most of the workers decided to keep a bit of cash and their White House pass on them at all times in case they needed to leave quickly.

Betty Monkman, who was in charge of preserving and cataloguing all of the important artwork and furniture in the White House, had to worry not only about saving her own life but also which historic pieces must be salvaged in case of an emergency. The Lansdowne portrait of George Washington in the East Room and the Gettysburg Address in the Lincoln Bedroom are among the top priorities.

Reflecting on that horrible day, she says she is still furious that there was no clear evacuation plan for the building. “This young woman who worked in the Usher’s Office came running through our office saying, ‘Get out, get out, get out!’ and then the White House police said ‘Go south!’ and then some people said ‘Go north!’ It was so chaotic.”

Monkman had decided to go to the bomb shelter that morning, but when she got halfway down she thought,
Oh my God, if they bombed us we’d be buried under the rubble
. So she headed back upstairs and went to Lafayette Square, where ambulances and fire trucks blazed past her on their way to the Pentagon.

Scheib said the household workers are not the priority in a crisis and shouldn’t expect the Secret Service to worry about them. “We are domestic staff, we are not the thrust of anything,” he said. “If you’re going to be there, you have to understand there’s a target on the back of every person who works at the White House.”

Scheib was sad to see the enormity of the attacks weigh on the president. Bush seemed as if he “literally had the weight of the world on his shoulders.” Always aware of how food affects moods, Scheib went from creating more contemporary cuisine to preparing pure comfort food for the president and the countless world leaders who came to show their sympathy and to strategize in the weeks following the terrorist attacks. “I went back to my mother’s table,” Scheib said.

Counselors from Bethesda Naval Hospital came in to talk to the workers about the trauma they had experienced. Cliber spoke with a counselor, but no one had any time-tested advice for the staff: “Nobody had ever been through that.”

Florist Wendy Elsasser says she still can’t talk about that day without crying. For months, Mesnier had panic attacks taking his morning shower. His wife and son begged him not to go back to work, and he listened when Gary Walters gathered the staff about a week after 9/11 and said they should leave if they couldn’t stand the pressure.

But just like Bill Cliber, Mesnier couldn’t bring himself to go. “You have to understand, I believe this job was made for me,” he said. “It’s where I belong.”

First Lady Laura Bush was comforted that no one quit out of fear. She told me that watching the residence staff go back to work made her feel better about living in the White House. “We knew we were going to be there and we were confident that we would be safe, but on the other hand they could have chosen another job or just said, ‘You know, this is just too much stress now. I’d rather go on,’” she said. “They didn’t. None of them did.”

Epilogue

Oh my God, she would be so proud of me.

—BUTLER JAMES RAMSEY ON HOW HIS MOTHER WOULD HAVE REACTED TO HIS WHITE HOUSE CAREER IF SHE HAD LIVED TO SEE IT

I
t was ninety-eight degrees, another sticky Washington summer day. A window unit is working overtime in the three-bedroom redbrick row house in northeast Washington that Butler James Jeffries bought in 1979. He quickly and unnecessarily apologizes for his half-painted living room walls. “This would have all been painted before Easter, but I’m seventy-two and I get tired quick.”

With the History Channel blaring in the background, and his lanky teenage grandson wandering in and out (“I used to look just like him”), we sit at a table covered with photographs of his children and grandchildren, and Jeffries tells the story of how the White House came to define his family’s legacy. In a slow and deliberate voice, he explains how he was either related to or knew most of the people who ran the residence over the last fifty years. His name might be Jeffries, but he’s a Ficklin; nine members of his family have worked there.

Even the members of the staff who he wasn’t actually related to became like family. Eugene Allen, who took over as maître d’ after Jeffries’s uncle John Ficklin retired, “was just like an uncle too.” Doorman Preston Bruce lived in the same housing complex as his aunt, and Jeffries says Bruce was a father figure to him.

“Mr. West, Mr. Scouten, they stayed in the background. My uncle [John] ran the White House,” Jeffries says, proud of the close-knit circle of African Americans who made the residence tick. Family folklore has it that his uncle Charles got the family a foothold in the White House by impressing President Franklin Roosevelt while working on a military ship in the navy. Roosevelt asked him to draw a table setting, and he sat down and drew it expertly. Years later, Charles was asked to come to the White House for an interview.

Jeffries is continuing his family’s tradition. He started working at the White House when he was just seventeen years old, in 1959. He remembers the exact date: January 25. His son is a butler there now, and even though Jeffries himself is long past retirement age, he still works at “the house” part-time. The job pays twenty-five dollars an hour. “They help me out down there, they don’t have me doing any hard lifting or nothing.”

Jeffries is a witness to American history. He is one of a handful of people still alive who remembers what it was like working in the Kennedy White House, when a new generation and new technology brought the residence into America’s living rooms. He remembers a side of the first lady that few people ever saw.

“I remember Mrs. Kennedy would come downstairs, she might ask us to put a chair over there or even have us take the chair out of the room, and maybe fifteen or twenty minutes later she wanted us to bring the chair right back.” He laughs. “Another guy and myself, we were the youngsters, and all the older guys would disappear! I never felt like I had to run, I wanted to be right there with her. I
just stood by and did whatever she asked me to. If I could move it by myself, I moved it.”

One Saturday night, years later, he was told to stop washing dishes and go upstairs to the second floor to help Betty Ford with something. When he got upstairs, Ford asked, “Where are the butlers?” She was looking for the full-time butlers.

“They just went downstairs. I can go get them for you,” he told her, pushing the elevator button to go back down.

“All I need is a man,” she called to him, impatiently, from the Family Dining Room.

He laughs with a wink. “I said to myself,
Wait a minute,
what
is this lady getting me into?
So I went to see what she wanted and all she wanted me to do was take the nineteen-inch television into the bedroom!”

Like so many of his colleagues, Jeffries fondly remembers President George H. W. Bush’s kindness. “Old man Bush made me feel like I was just a person, just the same as he is. I was so glad I had watched a football game, because the next day, or one day during the week after the football game, I happened to walk in to take the orders for drinks up on the second floor and he was talking to the other guests and he asked me, What did I think about the game? I managed to talk with him about it. I took the orders and went on back and when I came back he said something else to me about the game.”