The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (9 page)

“We’ve been doing this for two hundred years,” said Usher Chris
Emery. “They made all these promises to various people to come in and help. Of course we were upset, it was such a mess.” Emery, who had a difficult relationship with the Clintons and would eventually be fired during their administration, said that many FOBs actually had criminal records. According to Emery, the Secret Service called the Usher’s Office several times to report that some of the Arkansas guests had not passed their background checks and were deemed “do not admits.” Emery told agents, “The president’s expecting them. Make it happen.” They ended up having to assign Secret Service officers on every floor: “Typically if you bring a worker that has a ‘hit’ [on his background check] they have to be escorted.” Before long, much to Emery’s chagrin, there were several people with “hits” at the house.

Hockersmith took a hands-on approach to some elements of the redecoration, including the placement of the Clintons’ personal photographs and the knickknacks they brought with them from Little Rock, including a memorable collection of frogs. When Hillary and Bill were dating, it seemed, he had charmed her with a story from his childhood. The punch line was: “You can’t tell how far a frog will jump until you punch him.” Translation: You never know how far you can go until you try—an apt anecdote for the ambitious young couple. When her husband first ran for office, Hillary gave Bill a drawing of a frog being punched and jumping with the saying underneath. In 1993, for her birthday, Bill gave her a glass frog wearing a crown and a note that read: “This could have been me if you hadn’t come along.”

To Hockersmith, initially unaware of their sentimental significance, the frogs looked like a mishmash of misguided gifts. “Somebody goes to your house and they think, ‘Oh they must like frogs.’ Then you’re given a frog for your birthday.” She did her best to make them work.

When the first family returns to the White House from the
parade viewing stands, Hockersmith recalls, “That’s when everyone else disappears.” The residence workers, who have been working to make the house perfect all day long, rush back to their respective shops to give the family some much-needed privacy.

Hockersmith would become a White House fixture, staying in the Queens’ Bedroom off and on throughout Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House as redecoration efforts continued. Her guest room on the second floor was separated from their living quarters by pocket doors that close off the west end from the east end of the residence. She tried to make the house brighter, especially focusing on turning a drab second-floor Butler’s Pantry into an eat-in kitchen where Chelsea could do her homework. But the redecoration was met with mixed reviews, with Hockersmith’s elaborate Victorian furnishings in the Lincoln Sitting Room coming in for particular criticism.

T
HERE HAS BEEN
no transition in modern memory as shocking as the sudden and violent upheaval that brought the arrival of Lyndon B. Johnson and his family to the White House. The residence staff had to help a devastated first lady and her two children move out, even as they were grieving themselves, and at the same time they had to help the Johnsons move in. And it all had to be done without making Mrs. Kennedy feel rushed, or the Johnsons feel as though they were being ignored. “I’ve been on panels with other social secretaries and they make it all sound so exciting when they got there,” says Lady Bird’s social secretary, Bess Abell, a Katharine Hepburn–esque presence who speaks with great affection about the Johnsons. “I moved into the White House on an entirely different occasion. Instead of coming in with the excitement and the thrill of an inauguration, we moved into a house that was covered with black crepe on all the chandeliers and the columns.”

The new first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, often lamented the difficult position her family were suddenly thrust into. “People see the living and wish for the dead,” she’d say.

Out of respect for the president’s widow, Lyndon B. Johnson—who was largely disliked by Kennedy’s staff—did not move into the White House until December 7, 1963. He started working out of the Oval Office on November 26; before then he worked out of Room 274 in the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House. Some of Johnson’s advisers argued that moving in to the residence on December 7, the twenty-second anniversary of the horrific attack on Pearl Harbor, would be disrespectful. Others simply wanted to give Mrs. Kennedy more time before leaving the White House. Every move the Johnsons made must have been excruciating since nothing they did could help endear them to President Kennedy’s heartbroken aides.

Luci Baines Johnson, just sixteen years old at the time, remembers eavesdropping as her parents had what she called the “only argument” she can remember them ever having. “We have to move December seventh, Bird,” Johnson told his wife. “Lyndon, any day but that. Any day but that,” her mother pleaded, but in vain.

When the Johnson family finally arrived, their daughter Luci brought their beagles, “Him” and “Her,” in her convertible. Lady Bird and Bess and her press secretary, Liz Carpenter, brought breakable items, along with a portrait of House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a fellow Texan who was Johnson’s mentor.

At first the Johnsons seemed to treat the White House gingerly, as though they were impinging on sacred ground. But the residence staff, unlike Kennedy’s political aides, never made them feel like interlopers. “I never felt a sense of, ‘How could you be here?’” Luci told me. “It was, ‘Oh, how tough to have you come here this way. How can we help? How can we teach?’”

Not everyone was welcoming. After Kennedy’s assassination,
Traphes Bryant, an electrician who started caring for the first family’s dogs with the Kennedys (they had nine dogs at one point) and didn’t stop until the Nixons, was wary of President Johnson. “I was losing a dog and gaining a president I didn’t know. Not only didn’t I know him, I didn’t think I wanted to know him. He wasn’t boyish or good-natured or quick-witted like Kennedy, and I heard him cussing out the help when things weren’t done fast enough.” Bryant describes the abrupt shift at the White House to accommodate the new president: “Terriers were out and beagles were in. Jackie pink was out, Lady Bird yellow was in. Chowder was out and chili was in.” He hoped that one thing would remain the same, that Johnson would appreciate the way that he trained presidential dogs to greet their owners on the South Lawn when they returned from a trip on the marine helicopter. President Kennedy thoroughly enjoyed the tradition. He always gave a broad smile and greeted the waiting dogs “as if they were his distinguished hosts.”

After the Kennedys’ abrupt departure he writes touchingly, “Toddlers were out and teenagers were in,” referring to Caroline and John-John’s successors at the White House, the Johnsons’ teenage daughters, Luci and Lynda. Ultimately, though, Bryant would grow to love the Johnsons.

In her memoir, Lady Bird Johnson described the impossible task of trying to replace Jackie, marveling at the “element of steel and stamina” that must have flowed through her predecessor’s veins. She said she felt as though she were “suddenly onstage for a part I never rehearsed.”

While the new president was working in his temporary quarters, the White House staff had quietly made arrangements for the transition. Just four days after the assassination, Chief Usher J. B. West visited Lady Bird at the Johnsons’ Washington mansion, known as the Elms, where they discussed what furniture the Johnsons would bring with them to the White House.

Later that afternoon, Mrs. Johnson had tea with JFK’s widow at the White House. The outgoing first lady graciously showed her successor the second floor, allowing her to consider how her furniture would fit into the bedroom and sitting room Mrs. Kennedy had occupied for almost three years. “Don’t be frightened of this house—some of the happiest years of my marriage have been spent here—you will be happy here,” Jackie said. Lady Bird said she told her this so often during her tour that it felt “as though she were trying to reassure me.”

Jackie told her that J. B. West and Curator Jim Ketchum were the most dependable members of the residence staff. Ketchum, who served as the White House chief curator from 1963 to 1970, fondly recalls his first meeting with Lady Bird shortly after the family moved in. As one of four people on the curatorial staff, Ketchum was in charge of cataloguing and protecting every piece of furniture and artwork in the White House’s private collection, ranging from masterpieces by John Singer Sargent to porcelain dating back to George Washington.

Lady Bird asked Ketchum to set up time after she moved in for “walk and learns,” so she could go through each room with him and learn more about its history and its furnishings. She said she needed to have a working knowledge of the residence so that she could take friends and guests on tours, one of her duties as first lady. She took her new role very seriously—not surprising, as she had earned a reputation as a pinch hitter for Jackie Kennedy during the previous administration. When Jackie didn’t feel like doing something, Lady Bird dutifully stepped in.

Ketchum’s first meeting with the new first lady was not at all glamorous. When Lady Bird called down to the Curator’s Office and asked him to come upstairs, he recalls, “I found her in a closet, between her bedroom and sitting room, on her hands and knees with a cardboard box open in front of her,” he said. She was surrounded by about twenty porcelain birds all carefully wrapped and
brought from the Elms. He got down on the floor and began to help her unwrap each bird.

“What neither one of us realized is that the light for the closet was in the door jamb. And as we started, and we had the birds kind of lined up on the floor, Bonner Arrington [the carpenter foreman] and one of his colleagues from the Carpenter’s Shop were moving a sofa and went right down this narrow corridor and of course closed the door. So there we were, playing touchy-feely, trying to protect the birds and figure out how one could get up without stepping on something,” he laughed. They managed to find the light switch and remarkably they left the birds unharmed.

Soon after they moved in, the president and the first lady were invited to adviser Walter Jenkins’s house for dinner. Their absence gave “a breathing spell to the staff here at the White House who must have been carrying on with heavy hearts,” Lady Bird said.

The Jenkins’s daughter, Beth, was a close friend of Luci’s, and she came to the White House that night for a sleepover. “All I had felt was the challenge and the burden of this transition,” Luci told me.

Her room in the White House had a fireplace—“I’d never had something so delicious as a fireplace in my bedroom”—so she lit a fire. Neither girl knew anything about fireplaces, though, and the room soon filled up with smoke. Luci frantically tried using a juice glass filled with water, and then a trash can, to douse the flames. Finally she climbed up on her desk and opened a window to let the smoke out—and was horrified when she saw a White House policeman looking in at her in her nightgown. Once they realized what was happening, staff ran in to help.

“My mother felt it was very appropriate that I help clean the smoke stains off the walls of my bedroom that first week,” she said, still embarrassed decades later. “It was literally a baptism by fire.” She scrubbed alongside the maids, none of whom made her feel guilty.

A
LITTLE MORE
than a decade later, the residence staff found themselves once again confronted with a sudden and unceremonious transition, when President Richard Nixon announced his resignation on August 8, 1974.

“The transfer of power was shockingly abrupt, yet orderly as it had been after the assassination of President Kennedy,” wrote Doorman Preston Bruce. Yet despite the fact that the Watergate scandal had been raging for two years, and calls for Nixon’s resignation had mounted through the summer, no one inside the White House was expecting it. After all, no president had ever resigned before. The staff had no clue until Pat Nixon called down, asking for some packing boxes.

At seven-thirty on the morning after he announced his resignation, Nixon was in bare feet and pajamas when Executive Chef Henry Haller found him sitting alone in the Family Kitchen. He usually ate a light breakfast of cereal, juice, and fresh fruit, but that morning he ordered corned beef hash with a poached egg.