The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (50 page)

Standing second from the right:
Butler Lynwood Westray, serving at an outdoor picnic at the White House, July 29, 1970. Westray, now ninety-three, gets emotional discussing one evening when a member of the British royal family insisted on serving him a drink. “It blows your mind,” he says about that night, a highlight of his thirty-two-year career.

Handsome young President-elect John F. Kennedy and President Dwight D. Eisenhower depart the White House for inaugural ceremonies, January 20, 1961. Preston Bruce, the impeccably dressed White House doorman who would become a close Kennedy family friend, holds the door open at the North Portico.

John Kennedy Jr. stands on the steps of his tree house on the South Lawn as his nanny, Maud Shaw, and Maître d’ Charles Ficklin look on. One of the Kennedys’ nine dogs, a Welsh terrier named Charlie, takes part in the fun.

On their last day in the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy and John-John say a tearful good-bye to residence workers, including Doorman Preston Bruce, standing to the left of Jackie.

Caroline Kennedy (
far left
) in the kindergarten classroom created for her in the residence’s third-floor Solarium. The photo was taken less than a month after her father’s assassination.

The Johnsons’ longtime cook, Zephyr Wright, at a reunion for residence workers held at Smokey Glen Farm outside Washington, D.C., June 1983. Wright was one of the few people who could stand up to Lyndon Johnson. She said she knew she had to “talk up to him” well before he became president.

Lynwood Westray (
standing on the far left
) with fellow butler and friend Samuel Washington (
third from left
) at a holiday reception with President Johnson, December 16, 1964.

President Nixon with kitchen worker Frankie Blair. One evening they bowled until 2 A.M. “There may have been a bottle of scotch involved,” recalls one staffer.

Steve Ford chatting with (
from right
) Butler Johnny Johnson, Executive Chef Henry Haller, Butler Eugene Allen, and Butler Alfredo Saenz (
standing on the left
) outside the family kitchen on the second floor of the residence.

Amy Carter and her nanny, Mary Prince, who had been in prison for murder when she met the Carters, playing on the South Lawn, February 1977. The two were inseparable from the moment they met.

Doorman Frederick “Freddie” Mayfield shaking hands with the legendary Muhammad Ali in the Blue Room after a state dinner for Jordan’s King Hussein I and Queen Alia, March 30, 1976. Mayfield was so devoted to his job that he put off having bypass surgery because he didn’t want to miss work. He waited too long—dying of a heart attack in 1984 at just fifty-eight years old.