The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (23 page)

“Oh, I’ve got to go,” she told her friend. “The pigs are here.”

The agent turned “crimson,” Payne recalls. “Ms. Clinton, I want to tell you something. My job is to stand between you, your family, and a bullet. Do you understand?”

“Well, that’s what my mother and father call you,” she replied.

D
OORMAN
P
RESTON
B
RUCE
said he had an ominous, prescient feeling that two of Richard Nixon’s closest aides would one day betray the president. It was November 1968, and Bruce had already been the White House doorman for fifteen years. He knew something was unusual when, three or four days after Richard Nixon’s election, a political aide kept showing up at the White
House. “I heard this man asking minute questions about the way things were run,” Bruce said. “No detail seemed too small to escape his curiosity.”

The man was Nixon’s counsel and assistant for domestic affairs, John Ehrlichman. Chief Usher J. B. West led him on tours of the residence as Ehrlichman peppered him with questions.

Bruce had never seen anything like it. “We on the household staff already knew how to make the first families safe and comfortable—that was
our
job. What did this man plan to do?”

While Bruce was charmed that the Nixon family took the time to learn everyone’s names—all eighty of them—he resented the way Ehrlichman and Nixon’s incoming chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, treated him. “Hundreds of times they’d need the elevator. Each time they’d say, curtly, ‘Take me to the second floor,’ without so much as a please or thank you. They looked right through me as if I were invisible.”

Nixon had an easy banter with Bruce, but Haldeman did things to make it clear that the residence staff were the help and nothing more. His office sent out a memo saying that anyone on staff who asked the president or any family member for an autographed picture or a favor would be fired immediately. “We all felt this was a cheap little shot,” Bruce said. “We knew better than to approach the president with such requests.”

Haldeman wanted no one standing in the hall outside the State Dining Room during state dinners—not even the Secret Service. It had been a tradition and a special treat for the butlers to listen in on the toasts from the hallway.

“There was something about Haldeman and Ehrlichman, that you could look at them and you knew that they would never have respect for a person like you,” said Butler Herman Thompson.

Most of the presidential advisers were very protective of the president and wouldn’t get involved in details of how the residence
was run. “Even when we would be setting up tables, you would see Haldeman and Ehrlichman walking through,” Thompson said, shaking his head. “The way they carried themselves, it was like they were fully in charge of everything.”

Before Watergate, Nixon himself was well liked among the staff, although most staffers agree that he and his family were much more formal and stiff than their predecessors. Chef Frank Ruta tells a story about Pot Washer Frankie Blair, a congenial African American who was a fixture in the kitchen. One night Blair was cleaning up after the first family had finished dinner. President Nixon wandered into the upstairs kitchen and somehow they started talking about bowling—Nixon was such an avid bowler that he had a single-lane bowling alley installed in the basement under the North Portico. Nixon asked Blair if he would play with him, and the two of them bowled until two o’clock in the morning. “There may have been a bottle of scotch involved,” Ruta added.

When they wrapped up, Blair turned to the president and said, “There is no way my wife is going to believe I was out this late bowling with you.”

“Come with me,” Nixon told him.

The two walked to the Oval Office, where the president wrote a note apologizing to Blair’s wife for keeping him out so late.

Usher Nelson Pierce also remembered happy times with the Nixons before Watergate destroyed Nixon’s presidency. When he found out that the president and first lady were traveling to the Seattle area, where he was born, he told the first lady how much he missed the snowcapped mountains of the Northwest. Not long after that, she asked him to join them.

“The president’s secretary gave me the flight map,” Pierce recalled, and he studied it carefully, “trying to figure out what I would see, what I would recognize. But the closer we got to Washington,
the less I was seeing.” Then, just as he was trying to get his bearings, “all of a sudden we make a sharp bank to the right and of course I saw Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount Baker, and Mount Rainier. . . . I knew that somebody had asked the pilots to go that way so I could see the mountains.”

Pierce hadn’t been back home since 1941, when he was sixteen years old. “I was so emotional when we made that sharp right and I knew what had happened. I just started sobbing.”

Back at the White House, Pierce asked the first lady if she told the pilot to take that route just for him. “I wanted to see the mountains too,” she replied with a wink.

The Nixons were formal with the staff, but they were kind—and their kindness made watching the president’s slow unraveling so painful. The Watergate investigation dragged on for more than two years, and as each day passed, the president grew more and more exhausted. His shoulders slouched in defeat as he walked to and from the Oval Office each morning. Electrician Bill Cliber, who later became chief electrician, remembered Nixon having a very regimented schedule during his first term, waking up early to head to the Oval Office. But Watergate sent him into a deep depression; his whole routine “just broke apart.”

At the height of the scandal, Pat Nixon and her two daughters also seemed to sink into despair. “Oh, Mr. Bruce,” Nixon’s daughter Julie pleaded tearfully to the doorman. “How can they say such awful things about my father?” Nixon’s other daughter, Tricia, told me that she took comfort in the support of the residence staff. “You felt around you that positive spirit—that sense that we know who you are, we know who your father is, and we love you. We’ll always admire your father.” When you work in the residence you see “beyond politics, you see beyond the story,” she says. “You see the true person.”

BILL CLIBER

Backstairs, however, the tension that invaded the Nixon White House also infected the residence staff. Nixon may have discarded Johnson’s industrial-strength shower, but he had his own bathroom eccentricities, asking for a calming whirlpool bathtub to be put in its place. “Finding ways to relax in general seemed to occupy much of the president’s time at the White House,” said Traphes Bryant. Nixon was so completely consumed by his own paranoia—right down to his famous “enemies list” of political opponents—that even residence workers never knew where they stood. For many staffers, including Usher Nelson Pierce, Watergate was more traumatic than even the Kennedy assassination, because it dragged on for so long. “You saw a man deteriorate day by day by day and there was nothing you could do to help him.”

At nine o’clock on the evening of August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation. He made the announcement from his desk in the Oval Office, and asked that the room be cleared as completely as possible, even asking his Secret Service agent to leave. “It was just one cameraman, one engineer from the TV company, two military people, and me. All of us had to be in there for sound and pictures,” recalled Cliber, sitting at the kitchen table in his home in Rockville, Maryland. He remembers it like it was yesterday: “It was dead silence in that room. I mean, it was creepy silent.”

After Nixon finished his subdued broadcast, Cliber left the Oval Office and walked down the colonnade. Nixon followed in silence. Cliber paused to let the disgraced president get ahead of him.

“Where you heading, Bill?” Nixon asked, on what must have been the hardest day of his life.

“Back to the residence,” Cliber told him, sheepishly.

“Walk with me,” the president said.

The two of them walked side by side down the columned outdoor hallway, which runs alongside the Rose Garden. Cliber stopped and turned to Nixon.

“You should feel proud of yourself. You did a fine job. The best you could.”

“Yeah, I wish a lot of people felt that way,” Nixon replied. His eyes were glassy; to Cliber, it looked like he was willing himself not to cry.

“It will catch up to them one day,” Cliber told him.

They parted on the Ground Floor of the residence, neither saying another word. Nixon went to the president’s elevator and Cliber went down the basement staircase to the Electrician’s Shop.

That night Nixon stayed up until two o’clock in the morning, making phone calls from his favorite room in the house, the Lincoln Sitting Room. Outside, crowds could be heard chanting, “Jail to the Chief! Jail to the Chief!” He finally went to bed but slept restlessly,
and when he woke up and looked at his watch, it read four o’clock. When he couldn’t get back to sleep, he walked to the kitchen to get something to eat. He was startled to see Butler Johnny Johnson standing there.

“Johnny, what are you doing here so early?”

“It isn’t early, Mr. President,” Johnson said. “It’s almost six o’clock.”

In a 1983 interview, Nixon explained what happened: “The battery [in my watch] had run out, worn out, at four o’clock the last day I was in office,” he said. “By that time I was worn out too.”

Preston Bruce recalls seeing Nixon in the elevator in that last day in the White House. “Mr. President, this is a time in my life that I wish had never happened,” Bruce told him. In the privacy of the elevator, Bruce recalls, they hugged each other and wept—just as President Kennedy’s wife and brother had done with him after JFK’s assassination, more than a decade before.

“I have in you a true friend,” Nixon told Bruce.

P
RESIDENT
R
EAGAN WAS
so friendly that, after a while, the maids, butlers, and ushers learned to slip through a doorway as they were walking down the Center Hall of the residence if they wanted to avoid getting trapped in a long conversation with him. He particularly loved talking about California, the state he governed for eight years. Cletus Clark remembers almost nightly visits when he was painting the president’s exercise room. “One day he came down there and one of the painters was up on his treadmill. I was scared to death! I thought he was going to blow up. But he didn’t, he said, ‘Let me show you how that thing works.’ He got up on it and started walking!”

Nancy Reagan didn’t always approve of her husband’s habit of chatting up the staff. “She’d keep him the way she thought he
should be,” Clark says. “She didn’t want him to associate with the help.”

At 2:25
P.M.
on March 30, 1981, sixty-nine days into his presidency, John Hinckley Jr. shot a revolver six times at Reagan after he delivered a speech at the Washington Hilton. The attempted assassination shook the residence staff, who were still getting to know the easygoing president.

On the day Reagan was shot, Clark was in the Solarium. Nancy Reagan, her interior decorator, Ted Graber, and Chief Usher Rex Scouten were nearby. “I’ll never forget that,” Clark recalled. “Somebody came up there and whispered something to them, and the next thing you know they left. I was still up there trying to mix some paint to match some fabric.”