The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (6 page)

Most Americans had never heard of Barack Obama until 2004, when, as an Illinois state senator, he delivered an electrifying keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. His meteoric rise left the Obamas with very little time to prepare for life in the White House. Knowing this, the residence staff wanted to help ease their transition. It must have felt surreal to Obama when the chief usher turned to him and said, “Hello, Mr. President, welcome to your new home,” as he walked through the imposing North Portico doors for the first time as president. During brief moments of quiet time that afternoon and evening, between parade watching on Pennsylvania Avenue and their first inaugural ball, the Obamas grazed on a buffet in the Old Family Dining Room where no detail was overlooked.

That day was the result of months of careful advance planning. For residence workers, the transition to the next administration begins about eighteen months before the inauguration, when the chief usher prepares books for the incoming president and first lady (with the added challenge of not knowing who they will be) that include a detailed White House layout, a list of staff, and an overview of allowable changes to the Oval Office.

Gary Walters, who served as chief usher from 1986 until 2007, started gathering information on the candidates during the primaries, well before a general election candidate is selected. It was particularly difficult when President Ford, President Carter, and President George H. W. Bush lost their bids for a second term. “The ownership is of the family that’s there but you have to be watching out for what’s going to occur,” Walters said.

In December, after the election and before the inauguration, Walters would arrange for the incoming family to get a guided tour of the White House from the current first lady. It’s then that the incoming first lady would be presented with a book containing the names and photographs of the people who work in the residence. The book helps the first family learn the names of everyone who works in the house and is partly a security measure, so that if they see anyone unfamiliar they can alert the Secret Service.

The departing first family pays for their personal things to be moved out of the White House. The incoming president also pays for bringing belongings into the mansion either out of the new first family’s own coffers or from funds raised for the campaign or transition. It is the job of the incoming family to coordinate with the Secret Service to get their personal effects to the White House the morning of the inauguration.

One logistical challenge that comes with every inauguration is the transfer of the incoming first family’s furniture and larger belongings to the White House. After the election of 1960, the
Kennedys’ social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, told Jackie in a memo that she had asked the Eisenhowers’ social secretary, Mary Jane McCaffree, “if we couldn’t smuggle a lot of stuff over without the [Eisenhowers] knowing and she said yes, the head Usher could store cartons, suitcases, etc., out of sight and then whisk them into sight on the stroke of 12 noon. Isn’t that marvelous??? Right out of Alfred Hitchcock.” Baldrige recalled pulling up to the White House with Jackie’s maid, Providencia Paredes, and Jack Kennedy’s valet, George Thomas, in a car with the inaugural gown and all of the Kennedys’ luggage. They arrived as everyone else was gathered at the Capitol for the inauguration ceremony. The snow-covered South Grounds were bathed in bright sunshine. “We had timed the pilgrimage from Georgetown to the White House so that we would not arrive before twelve noon, because at noon, officially, the new president takes possession of the White House.”

Nearly a half-century later, the same conditions applied. The Obama family’s advisers started meeting with residence staff soon after the election, and by the week before the inauguration, much of the Obamas’ furniture had already been shipped to the White House, where it was stored in the China Room on the Ground Floor so that it could be moved quickly upstairs. The Bushes had told Chief Usher Stephen Rochon that they wanted to make the move as easy as possible for everyone, but Rochon was eager to make sure the Bushes never felt as if they were being pushed out. “We want to keep it out of the sight of the existing family. Not that they didn’t know it was there, but we didn’t want them to feel that we were trying to move them out.”

Other Obama advisers made similar connections with the residence staff. More than two months before the inauguration, Chief Florist Nancy Clarke met with the Obamas’ decorator, Michael Smith, to discuss floral arrangements for the private rooms where friends and family would be staying on the night of the inauguration.

“There’s very limited time to prepare the house, so there’s
a whole team working on making certain that everything was as perfect as it could be in the time that we had allotted,” said Social Secretary Desirée Rogers, a close confidante of the Obamas since their Chicago days and their first social secretary. On Inauguration Day “we were in the house as soon as we could be,” she recalls, “laying out things, getting things ready, putting the clothing in each room.”

Weeks before the inauguration, Rogers met with the florists and discussed what kind of flowers would sit on the cabaret tables and which kind of candelabras and candlelight they would use for those precious moments the first family has to enjoy their new, heady surroundings before they change for the balls.

“All those little things can make everybody feel comfortable and welcome,” Florist Bob Scanlan said.

The new president filled most of the West Wing with loyal aides from his presidential campaign and from his early political career, including longtime spokesman Robert Gibbs, whom he named as his first White House press secretary, and close friend Valerie Jarrett, whom he brought on board as a senior adviser. Michelle Obama brought her own team of aides, many of whom she had known for years. A couple of days after moving in, Michelle asked her East Wing staff and the entire residence staff to gather in the East Room. Katie McCormick Lelyveld, the first lady’s then press secretary, remembers her boss making it clear who was in charge.

“This is the team I walked in the door with,” the first lady told the longtime residence staffers as she gestured toward her small cadre of political aides. “You guys are part of our new team,” she told them before turning to address her own staffers, including Lelyveld: “It’s on
you
to make sure that you know everybody here. They were here before you and they’re the ones that make this place tick. We are on
their
ground now.” The first lady’s staff then circulated around the room, introducing themselves.

“At the time it was a matter of us investing in them to make sure
that we knew what their role was, and how they fit into the bigger picture,” Lelyveld said. “
We
were the new kids.”

From those first days onward, Lelyveld looked to residence workers for advice. When she wanted to think of a clever way to preview the Obamas’ first state dinner menu, she went down to the kitchen and asked Executive Chef Cristeta “Cris” Comerford how she thought they should lay out the room so that members of the media could see what she was preparing without distracting her from her work. When she asked workers from the Engineering and Operations departments about rearranging furniture for a TV interview on the State Floor, she was reminded that the White House is not the average household. “You’re working in a museum,” she says. “It’s not just two chairs for an interview,” but “two chairs in the Blue Room that are older than you are—by centuries—that need to be moved out of the way. So you defer to the staff whose job it is to take care of that space.” (The furnishings are so precious that one housekeeper was told by his boss that if he broke a certain French gilded bronze clock that had been on display at the White House since 1817 he should not bother ever coming back. He wouldn’t make enough money in his lifetime to replace it.)

On the Friday after President Obama’s inauguration, the president casually made the rounds to introduce himself. When he came to the second-floor kitchen, he found several butlers gathered around the TV. He playfully punched James Jeffries on the shoulder.

“What are you looking at?” he asked them.

“We were looking at what was going on at the Lincoln Memorial before the inauguration,” Jeffries replied. “Congratulations on becoming president.”

“Thank you,” Obama said with his trademark ear-to-ear grin and walked out of the room.

A few minutes later, when he came back into the kitchen, Jeffries got up the nerve to add: “I just congratulated you. Tomorrow,
if I happen to be called to come to work, you can congratulate me for having been working here for fifty years.”

“I ain’t got to wait until tomorrow,” Obama replied, without missing a beat. “I can do that right now. Congratulations.”

Though Desirée Rogers describes their relationship with the staff as simply “very, very cordial,” the new president was considerably more reserved and less chatty than his immediate predecessors. Some staffers said they missed the easy camaraderie they had established with presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush. “With the Bushes, they wanted you to feel close to them,” Chief Usher Rochon said. With the Obamas, “you had to keep it completely professional.” Yet the Obamas have formed friendships with some of the men and women who work behind the scenes, and Butler James Jeffries said there’s an unspoken understanding and respect between the Obamas and the largely African American butler staff about the realities of being black in America. President Obama acknowledged this when he said that part of the butlers’ warmth to his family is because “they look at Malia and Sasha and they say, ‘Well, this looks like my grandbaby, or this looks like my daughter.’”

Doorman Vincent Contee, eighty-four, worked every Monday and Tuesday from 1988 to 2009, escorting the president to and from the Oval Office on the elevator. “We got along swell,” he recalls. “I would see him in the mornings and he would talk and ask me how my day was going.” During his twenty-one years at the White House, Contee couldn’t afford to get too starstruck, in addition to talking to presidents on a regular basis, he also escorted icons like Nelson Mandela and Elizabeth Taylor on the elevator to meet the president in the family’s private quarters. He says even presidents can’t hide their exhaustion sometimes. There would come a point when every president he served would turn to him during that short elevator ride and sigh, “I just wish I could go back to bed and sleep all day.”

On the way to the Oval Office, Obama would talk sports with
Contee. “He knew I was a football fan. I’m a Redskins fan. He would tell me when they got beat, you know, what they didn’t do or what they should do.” Sometimes Obama would ask him to take their Portuguese water dog, Bo, out for a walk on the grounds. When they were done, Contee would bring Bo back up to his room on the third floor.

Still, the Obamas proved an especially private family, and Chief Usher Rochon sensed a certain distance between the staff and the new president. The Obamas seemed “uncomfortable,” he said, having “so many butlers and housekeepers waiting on them hand and foot.” For a couple who’d only recently finished paying off their own student loans, the level of personal service afforded by the White House staff must have been unnerving. “You have to give them their privacy,” Contee told me. “You’d talk to them momentarily and then they would be on their way and you would be on your way.”

The Obamas were especially anxious to raise their daughters in as normal an environment as possible, even while living in a household staffed with dozens of cooks, butlers, and maids. In 2011, Michelle Obama told an interviewer that her older daughter, Malia, who was thirteen at the time, was going to start doing her own laundry—and that her own mother, Marian Robinson, who lives in a suite on the third floor, would teach her. “My mother still does her own laundry. She doesn’t want strangers touching her intimate wears.” The first lady’s former stylist, Michael “Rahni” Flowers, confirms that “Michelle is a no-nonsense kind of mother—and so is her mother. All they have to do is give you that eye, it will turn you into stone, it will stop you in your tracks.”

Katie McCormick Lelyveld remembers how the first lady made the ground rules clear to her daughters. “While she appreciated that there are staff there to pay attention to those details, those staff are not there for the girls.” Michelle reminded her daughters: “Don’t get used to someone else making your bed, that’s on your chores list.”

Still, after two grueling years on the campaign trail and a frenetic schedule, the Obamas appreciated the help. “There are certain conveniences that just make what are otherwise very long days a lot easier, like someone who’s in charge of figuring out your dinner plans,” Lelyveld explained.

Traditions die hard at the executive mansion. When the Obamas told the butlers they could trade in their starched tuxes for button-down shirts and slacks on the weekends, not everyone took them up on the offer. “For some of the older gentlemen, who are in their seventies and eighties, they might have several tuxes that they’re just used to and anything else would mean getting new clothes. They might just be more comfortable in those tuxes,” Lelyveld said. When many butlers insisted on sticking with their formal wear, she said she felt awkward wearing khakis or jeans around them, even though she was used to the more comfortable dress code on the campaign trail. “I respected how much respect they had for what they did.”

The Obamas clearly miss their lives in Chicago. Obama has said that “every president is acutely aware that we are just temporary residents” of the White House, adding, “we’re renters here.” After two grueling campaigns, the president refuses to miss family dinners more than twice a week. Those nightly meals were prepared by Sam Kass, the personal chef they had brought from Chicago, up until December 2014 when Kass left his post to move to New York.

As the president’s former personal assistant Reggie Love recalls, on his walk from the living quarters to the West Wing every morning, Obama would ask Chief Usher Stephen Rochon for updates on the kinds of simple household matters that everyone deals with, whether they live in the executive mansion or a suburban cul-de-sac. “You live in a building and someone’s responsible for the maintenance of the building. So if the water pressure wasn’t right, or the Wi-Fi’s not working, you’ve got to talk to somebody about it, right?”