The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (10 page)

Nixon walked up to Haller and grabbed his hand: “Chef, I have been eating all over the world, your food is the best.”

Later that morning, just before walking to the helicopter on the South Lawn and giving his famous V-for-victory salute, Nixon made an emotional farewell speech to his staff in the East Room. As the staff gathered for the event, Painter Cletus Clark unexpectedly found himself in the middle of the drama. “I was in the East Room painting the stage. I was the only one in there on the residence staff,” he said. “The next thing you know I looked up and all these people started coming into the East Room—I couldn’t get out! And the paint wasn’t even dry!”

He told the Secret Service agents who were in place before the president’s arrival to make sure the president was careful not to touch the wet paint.

“The room was filling up. I grabbed my little bucket and went over there on the south side and mixed in with the crowd. I put my bucket down between my feet and stayed in there.”

Standing in his all-white uniform, Clark listened as the thirty-seventh president began good-byes by praising the residence staff, who, as usual, stayed in the shadows. “This house has a great heart and that heart comes from those who serve. I was rather sorry they didn’t come down; we said good-bye to them upstairs,” Nixon said, already wistful. “But they’re really great. I recall after so many times I’ve made speeches, some of them pretty tough, you’d always come back, or after a hard day, and my days usually run rather long, I’d always get a lift from them. Because I might be a little down, but they always smiled.”

The residence staff took on the familiar role of movers that day, packing up the first family’s things and managing as seamless a transition as they could under the circumstances.

Barbara Bush, whose husband was then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, described in amazement witnessing just how quickly the White House was handed over to the Fords. “The day President Nixon resigned we went down to the White House, we met there for his resignation and Jerry Ford’s swearing in hours later. After we waved good-bye to the Nixons, the pictures on the wall were all of Jerry Ford’s family. We were standing at the helicopter waving good-bye while they changed the pictures.”

T
HE
N
IXONS’ FORMAL
style was replaced by the more relaxed attitude of Gerald and Betty Ford, who allowed their four children to wear jeans anywhere in the White House. Susan Ford even roller-skated on the State Floor’s pristine floors while her parents were traveling, which she says she’s embarrassed to admit now.

Betty Ford was fiercely independent, and when she got the tour
of the second-floor family quarters she immediately rejected the idea of sleeping in a separate bedroom from her husband. “Well, there’ll be no need for that,” she told the head usher.

She could not understand why the maids and butlers were so quiet around her. She worried that they didn’t like her. She soon found out that Pat Nixon had preferred it that way.

Carpenter Milton Frame was impressed by Betty Ford’s approachable manner. “I do recall that Mrs. Ford, she would invite you to sit down and have a cup of tea,” he said fondly. She asked him where he was from and made small talk, an act of kindness that her predecessor would never have initiated.

She also enjoyed teasing the staff. During a tour of the private quarters, her press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, noticed a flower vase featuring the figures of two angels, with their hands almost touching. A cigarette was perched in one of the angel’s hands. “Oh, that,” the first lady said, laughing. “I put it there. That’s just my way of testing whether the maids have cleaned the room!”

N
EW FAMILIES MUST
get used to a big staff—and to paying shockingly high monthly bills. Contrary to popular belief, the first family pays for all of their own personal expenses. And almost every first lady ends up pleading with the chief usher to keep costs down.

The family pays for their own dry cleaning, which is farmed out to a local dry cleaner chosen by the head housekeeper or the family themselves. During the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, Executive Housekeeper Christine Limerick said, they often used the nearby Willard Hotel. Even that basic service has to be conducted in secrecy: the family’s clothing is dropped off and picked up discreetly by members of the Operations Department.

The first family is also required to cover their personal food and
drink expenses—including not just their own meals but also those of their personal guests, which can include dozens of friends and family over the inauguration or the holidays. Walters told me that “each and every” first lady, except for Barbara Bush, has seemed surprised and not very pleased to discover this. Many have asked for menus featuring cheaper cuts of meat to cut down on the enormous monthly costs; the Carters even asked to be served leftovers for their own personal meals.

Even Jackie Kennedy instructed the chief usher to “run this place just like you’d run it for the
chinchiest
president who ever got elected!” She dropped her voice comically, adding: “We don’t have nearly as much money as you read in the papers!”

Her husband was obsessed with the food bill, talking in great detail with the ushers about how to keep the milk bill down at their Hyannis home. The Kennedys’ social secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, said she never saw him sit still for that long or be that interested in anything for more than five minutes. The liquor bill multiplied during the Kennedy years and that’s because, before Kennedy took office, the White House amazingly and very discreetly accepted bootleg whiskey from the General Services Administration. A new regulation would have made it impossible for the White House to continue doing so without making it public, so the president quickly ordered an end to the practice and sent Housekeeper Anne Lincoln to shop for inexpensive booze. Kennedy had his own private liquor cabinet tucked away in a closet on the third floor and the only people with the key were Lincoln and his valet. He was always mindful of the cost of living in the White House, even though he wouldn’t be asked to pay for the bulk of the alcohol himself because it was mostly used for official entertaining.

Obama aide Reggie Love was twenty-seven years old when he arrived at the White House and remembers the first time Admiral
Rochon walked him through the Obamas’ monthly bill. “I saw the number and I was like, ‘I see the numbers, I see all the things itemized, but for me, a person who’s only lived in a household of one with no children, I have no real way to look at that and say, ‘You know what, this seems about right.’”

The executive chef sends the first lady a weekly menu every Sunday. If she finds something there that she doesn’t like, or feels is too extravagant for a family meal, she may ask the chef to look for an alternative.

Luci Baines Johnson said her mother talked “constantly” about the exorbitant costs of living at the White House. After she got married, Luci went with her family to Camp David for the weekend—and received a bill for the food she ate while she was there. She was astonished.

“Oh yes, we’ve always been billed, but when you were a minor living in our home we paid it for you,” Lady Bird Johnson told her irate daughter.

“My mother was quite stunned that
I
was stunned!” she said, laughing.

Somehow, seeing a line-item breakdown at the end of the month makes the prices seem higher than if the family were going to the grocery store, or out to eat. President Ford’s daughter, Susan, said that her father would wave the bill at her and warn her, “You need to be aware that when you have a bunch of friends over I do see this.”

Rosalynn Carter vividly remembers her family’s first monthly bill: $600. “It doesn’t sound like very much, but that was enormous to me back in ’76!” She thought the prices were higher than they would be outside the White House because the food has to be examined to make sure it hasn’t been poisoned.

The food bills weren’t the only costs that worried the Carters, according to Florist Ronn Payne. Jimmy Carter wanted his flowers on the cheap too. Even though the first family doesn’t usually pay
for flowers, Carter didn’t believe the government needed to foot the bill for elaborate arrangements either. “We had to go out and pick flowers to do dinners,” Payne remembers. “We would go to the city parks to cut flowers.” He and other staffers took field trips to Rock Creek Park to pick daffodils and the National Zoo to collect wildflowers. “Police would actually stop us. One guy was arrested and they had to go and get him out of jail for picking daffodils on that big hillside in Rock Creek Park to do a dinner.” The White House intervened to get him released, Payne said.

“We’d buy dried flowers from the market, or we’d have our garden club ladies dry their own garden flowers, and that’s what we had to use.” In other administrations it was not uncommon to spend $50,000 on flowers for a state dinner, with single arrangements costing several thousand dollars.

Barbara Bush, every bit the patrician matriarch, has no sympathy for any first lady who is surprised when she receives her family’s monthly food bill. Or any bill, for that matter. “If they were shocked, there’s something wrong with them,” she says sternly. “We had lots of guests, as did George W., and we paid for those private guests. But the bill would come and it would say, ‘One egg: eighteen cents.’ Mrs. So and So had an egg and a piece of toast. It’s cheaper to eat at the White House.” She points out that, while the first family has to pay for food and dry cleaning, they don’t have to pay for electricity, air-conditioning, flowers, butlers, plumbers, or “yard people,” making their cost of living a relative bargain—especially for a family like the Bushes, who were accustomed to having hired help. “I thought it was very cheap to live at the White House!” she said. “I’d like to go back and live there and not have the responsibility.”

Laura Bush’s mother-in-law may have prepared her for the cost of living in the White House, but she was still surprised when she got her first bill. She noted how expensive it was to throw her
husband a birthday party because they had to pay time and a half for staff who worked after five o’clock in the evening.

Executive Chef Walter Scheib also reported that he sometimes got calls from the chief usher, saying that the first lady’s office had asked him to keep the cost of ingredients down, or requesting that fewer cooks be used in the kitchen.

“Chef, did you really need that many people to produce that event?” Chief Usher Gary Walters would ask him.

“Well, Gary, maybe not. Maybe we could have done it with a couple less people,” the uncompromising Scheib would reply. “Let’s play this scenario out: we made a mistake at the White House, and we’re sitting across the table from Mrs. Bush or Mrs. Clinton, and we’re trying to explain why her name is being bandied around by all the late-night comedians. ‘But the good news, Mrs. Bush, the good news, Mrs. Clinton, is, we saved five hundred dollars.’ How do you think that discussion’s going to go?”

Above all else, he said, “Our goal was to make sure that the first family was never embarrassed.” No matter the cost.