For KATHY and SALLY
Foreword
The Roosevelts
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3
The Trumans
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2
3
4
The Eisenhowers
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2
3
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5
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8
The Kennedys
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7
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The Johnsons
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The Nixons
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Image Gallery
Bibliography
About the Authors
Upstairs at the White House from 1961 on
Index
ON MARCH 1, 1941, after my first day at work in the White House, I started to keep a diary. It was short-lived, however, because as the days became more frantic and filled with more responsibilities, and the working hours longer, I decided that I didn’t want to “relive” each day.
And from that day until I retired on March 1, 1969, it was never my intention to write a book. Howell G. Crim, Chief Usher of the White House from 1933 to 1957 (when I was promoted to the position), had always said, when asked if he would write his memoirs, “I’m not the type to ‘kiss and tell,’” although he was an avid reader of 42 Years in the White House by Irwin H. (“Ike”) Hoover, the first Chief Usher.
That book, covering the years from 1891 to 1933, has been cited as a mine of information by historians and authors. Since retirement, I have been encouraged by numerous people—including some First Ladies—to add my more recent recollections to bring the story up to date. That I have attempted to do. If this book is of some help to future historians, then my efforts will have accomplished my purpose.
I am most grateful to all those who gave me encouragement and assistance, most of whom are mentioned in the text.
I also wish to cite all of the dedicated, selfless people who staff the “President’s House”—ushers, housekeepers, butlers, maids, chefs, cooks, doormen, housemen, florists, gardeners, electricians, plumbers, storekeepers, engineers—each one of whom has a passion for anonymity. And I apologize profusely to those few whose names I have had to use in telling a story.
Many times I was asked, “What does the Chief Usher do?” I usually replied, “I do what I’m told to do.” Also I received many letters from students asking what educational background would be helpful for a job as Usher at the White House. I could only reply that experience on the job was the main requirement—since its duties are unique; no other government or civilian establishment offers a comparable position. And how to get this experience? To be at the right place at the right time, and have a lot of luck.
The title “Chief Usher” is a holdover from early times, when the principal duty was “ushering” expected visitors in to see the President and the First Lady. In recent years many have tried to change the title, but to date nobody has come up with an appropriate appellation.
To give you a better idea of what the job encompasses, I quote from the official U.S. Civil Service Commission Position Description form:
• Subject only to the general direction of the President of the United States, serves as “Chief Usher” of the White House. As such is the general manager of the Executive Mansion, and is delegated full responsibility for directing the administrative, fiscal, and personnel functions involved in the management and operation of the Executive Mansion and grounds, including construction, maintenance, and remodeling of the Executive Mansion.
• Is responsible for the preparation and justification of budget estimates covering administrative and operating expenses, and for the construction and maintenance projects of the Executive Mansion …, as well as for the allotment, control, and proper expenditure of funds appropriated for these purposes.
• Is responsible for the direction and supervision of the activities of approximately one hundred employees of the President’s household including their selection, appointment, placement, promotion, separation, disciplinary action, etc. In addition, exercises responsibility over the mechanical and maintenance forces in connection with the maintenance and repair of buildings and grounds.
• Serves as the receptionist at the White House, and as such is responsible for receiving and caring for all personal and official guests calling on the President or the First Lady. These guests include, among others, members of the Congress and their families, members of the Judicial Branch, governors, foreign dignitaries, and heads of state. Is responsible for arranging for accommodations for houseguests, their comfort, their acquaintance with the customs of the household, etc. Is responsible and arranges for all personal and official entertainments, receptions, dinners, etc., in the Executive Mansion, which frequently include the heads of sovereign states, and several hundred persons. Is responsible for the procurement of all food consumed by the President’s family and their guests. Makes personal appointments for the President and other members of his official family.
• Is responsible for answering a large volume of correspondence regarding the Executive Mansion, its history and furnishings, historical subjects, sightseeing, Congressional requests with regard to the Mansion and Grounds, State functions, etc.
• Is completely responsible for the efficient operation, cleanliness, and maintenance of the 132 rooms of the Executive Mansion containing 1,600,000 cubic feet; $2,000,000 of mechanical and air-conditioning equipment.
During all my years of managing the White House, I gave no interviews, sought no publicity. I felt articles about my activities would hamper my effectiveness. My loyalty was not to any one President, but rather, to the Presidency, and to the institution that is the White House. The Executive Mansion of the United States is more than a temporary home for the family who lives there for four or eight years. It is now a museum containing priceless works of art and furnishings, a national monument open to two million tourists a year, a guest hotel for entertaining visitors of state, and, in recent years, an impregnable fortress for protecting the life of the Commander-in-Chief.
In more than a quarter-century in the Usher’s office just inside the front door, and in the private office of the Chief Usher upstairs at the White House, I came to know and admire Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and, briefly, Pat Nixon. Each brought with her a different viewpoint, a different life style, and each, in her own way, using her own background and training, made a special imprint upon the President’s House, and her own contribution to the heritage of the United States.
As First Ladies of the land, these women filled the most demanding volunteer job in America. They were not elected, they were legally responsible to no one except the man with whom they had exchanged marriage vows. They had no official title. First Lady was a term popularized by a newswoman many years ago, but it has remained the only designation given to the woman who is married to the man we call “Mr. President.”
To me, each is indeed the First Lady, and will ever hold my greatest respect.
J. B. W.
CONTRARY TO PUBLISHED REPORTS, Eleanor Roosevelt never walked anywhere. She ran.
She always raced down the halls of the White House from one appointment to another, skirts flapping around her legs. And then she would sail out the front door at full speed, jump into her waiting car, and call out to the driver: “Where am I going?”
Or she hurried down the driveway and out the front gates to the bus stop or, on a sunny day, marched resolutely a full ten blocks up Connecticut Avenue to her volunteer office on Dupont Circle—and on her way back, she gathered up people to bring home for lunch. There were no Secret Service men hovering around Eleanor Roosevelt.
I was introduced to this awesome study in human motion on my first day in the White House, March 1, 1941. I had just begun work as assistant to Chief Usher Howell G. Crim, a small, proper man in a black suit, and was sitting beside his desk near the front door. Suddenly, the First Lady of the Land appeared in the doorway of the Usher’s office. I jumped to my feet.
“Mrs. Roosevelt, may I present J. B. West, my new assistant,” announced Mr. Crim.
The tall, imposing woman smiled, showing more teeth than I’d ever seen, and extended a slim, graceful hand. It was surprisingly soft in my grasp.
“How do you do, Ma’am,” I managed to say.
She was wearing a dark skirt and a white ruffled blouse, and wisps of gray were beginning to stray from her hair, which was loosely pulled back into a knot. When she spoke, her voice was high-pitched and shrill, and she talked so fast I had trouble understanding her.
Dismissing me with a pleasant nod, she turned to Mr. Crim, who handled all appointments in the mansion: “I’m having the Japanese Ambassador to tea,” she said. “I’ll see him in the Red Room, but please don’t leave me in there too long with him—I don’t know what to talk about!”
And she was off.
Mrs. Roosevelt well knew that American and Japanese leaders were engaged in a delicate verbal sparring match, while her husband sought to prepare the country for any eventuality, including war. And as a single male of twenty-nine, reading newspaper warnings of impending war, and reports about Japan’s invasions, I, too, was concerned.
A few minutes after Mrs. Roosevelt hurried down the red-carpeted hallway, Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, and Presidential Advisor Harry Hopkins entered the White House through the North Portico facing Pennsylvania Avenue. The liveried doorman brought the three gentlemen to the Usher’s office, the first door to the right off the marble-floored main lobby.
Mr. Crim checked their names off the list of Presidential appointments and accompanied the three men upstairs to meet with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“That’s the only ushering I do,” the Chief Usher explained. “We always accompany guests to a formal appointment with the President and First Lady. We simply announce their names. The rest of the time, we run the place. I have a budget of $152,000 a year, a staff of 62, and a free hand to furnish and direct the mansion as I see fit.” He added that he had working under him two ushers, Wilson Searles and Charles Claunch, on duty in shifts from the time the President awakened in the morning until his valet put him to bed at night.
And I, because I could type and take shorthand and, I was told, mind my own business, was sent over from my job in the Veterans Administration to be assistant to the Chief Usher.
“I’d like you to handle Mrs. Roosevelt’s travel arrangements, the mail, and assist in the operation of the White House,” Mr. Crim told me.
“The President’s mail as well?” I asked, thinking I’d surely be snowed under.
“No, just the mail that comes to our office, concerning anything related to the mansion itself. The President’s and Mrs. Roosevelt’s mail is handled by their personal staffs.”
That first day, I thought the Usher’s office was a twelve-by-twelve-foot madhouse. People ran in and out of the room all day, the phone rang incessantly, and the buzzer buzzed.
Mr. Crim tried to explain the signal system, which registered on the electric callboard above his desk. Listed on the board were the names of every room in the house, the corridors, the elevator. When the buzzer sounded, an arrow popped up, indicating one of those locations.
“This is to alert everybody—police, secret service, doormen, ushers—when the President is on the move,” he said. “Three buzzes are for the President, two buzzes mean the First Lady, and one is for a guest—and that includes the President’s children.”
One buzzer rang, the arrow pointed toward the word “elevator,” and minutes later Mrs. John Roosevelt, the President’s daughter-in-law, stopped in on her way to see her ailing husband at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. “I’ll be bringing him back here this afternoon for a few days,” the young woman said.
Mr. Crim made a note for the housekeeping staff to prepare a bedroom for John Roosevelt.
“Is he very ill?” I asked the Chief Usher.
“Indeed not,” he said. “You sneeze around here and they call it pneumonia. This goldfish bowl is made out of magnifying glass.”
Houseguests, including Alexander Woollcott—“The Man Who Came to Dinner,” opera star Grace Castagnetta, Henrik Van Loon, wandered in and out trying to make themselves at home.
“We assign them to their rooms and hope they stay there,” Mr. Crim explained. Then, in a whisper, he confided: “Mr. Woollcott is impossible. He was supposed to stay for two days and stayed two weeks. He rings for coffee at all hours of the night, and he invites guests right up to his room.”
The short, balding Mr. Crim was easily horrified at anything he considered a breach of the highest standards in manners and morals. He was so correct, his eyebrows seemed perpetually raised. When his employers appeared, he almost bowed and clicked his heels.
“You ‘Mr. President’ the President,” he instructed me, “and ‘Ma’am’ the First Lady.”
My strongest impression that first day was of Eleanor Roosevelt, who kept popping in and out of the office, her gray hair more disheveled with every appearance. She thrust a new list of appointments at Mr. Crim and was off again. I could have sworn the wind whistled as she zipped into the office still another time.
“Frances Parkinson Keyes is coming for lunch,” she announced and zipped out.
Mr. Crim pulled out a place card from his top desk drawer, carefully lettered the lady novelist’s name, and took me down the hall where we made a right turn into the Private Dining Room. “Set up one more place for lunch,” he ordered, introducing me to head butler Alonzo Fields.
The Private Dining Room, adjoining the larger State Dining Room, was set for sixteen. “It’s hardly private,” Mr. Crim said. “She has a luncheon here nearly every day.”
During the noontime lull, while the luncheon guests chattered away, and between every visitor, Mr. Crim quietly instructed the staff—head butler and his men, housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt, doormen, gardeners, engineers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, painters, drivers—in their duties for the day.
By afternoon, I had met most of the people who kept the President’s House a going concern. And at four o’clock I watched Mr. Crim escort the Japanese Ambassador in to the Red Room, to have tea with Mrs. Roosevelt.
“She hasn’t changed her dress or combed her hair,” Mr. Crim reported when he returned to our office, only a few yards away. At the end of fifteen minutes, he looked at his watch, then, as Mrs. Roosevelt had instructed, marched into the Red Room to help her end the tense appointment.
When I got home, I wrote in my diary: “Spent the day wondering if I’ll like the job. The first day wasn’t too impressive, but I’ll know more tomorrow.”
On my second day in the White House, Charles Claunch, the usher on duty, took me on the elevator to the second floor. The door opened, and the Secret Service guard wheeled in the President of the United States. Startled, I looked down at him. It was only then that I realized that Franklin D. Roosevelt was really paralyzed. Immediately I understood why this fact had been kept so secret. Everybody knew that the President had been stricken with infantile paralysis, and his recovery was legend, but few people were aware how completely the disease had handicapped him.
I’d seen the President once before, three years earlier, when he brought his campaign train through Creston, Iowa.
“Why on earth do you want to see that man?” asked the owner of the store where I was bookkeeper. “I wouldn’t step across the street to look at him!”
But after all, it was the first time a President of the United States had ever stopped in Creston, and I went to the train station to see him, even though he was a Democrat. (I spotted my boss in the crowd, too.)
We all knew he was supposed to be “crippled,” that he walked with a limp or something, but then, standing with Mrs. Roosevelt on the back platform of the campaign train, he looked strong, healthy, and powerful. He had a huge head, broad shoulders and a barrel chest, and he stood well over six feet tall. I don’t remember a word of his speech, but there was something in his manner. He was truly dynamic, I thought.
Now, as I watched him in his wheelchair, the vitality was gone. His little black Scottie, Fala, ran into the elevator, the door closed, and Claunch introduced me to Mr. Roosevelt. It was a tight squeeze in the car, and I felt uncomfortable towering over the President of the United States. It was a long two minutes back down to the first floor. As he wheeled out, Mr. Roosevelt flashed that famous smile at me:
“You’re going to have to go some to be able to type and take dictation as well as Claunch can,” he said. Mr. Claunch beamed.
I soon learned that the White House staff took extraordinary precautions to conceal Mr. Roosevelt’s inability to walk. Special ramps had been built all over the White House for the President’s wheelchair. During State dinners, butlers seated the President first, then rolled the wheelchair out of sight. Only then were guests received in the dining room. For ceremonies in the East Room, the doormen would quietly close the double doors, which were covered with red velvet curtains, after all the guests had assembled. Mr. Roosevelt then rode to the doors in his wheelchair, someone lifted him from the chair, and we flung open the doors and curtains. The President, on the arm of an aide, swung his legs the two steps to the podium, on which he could lean while speaking. No photographs were permitted. His entrances were passed off as Presidential dramatics.
At formal receptions, the gardeners set up a wall of ferns at the south end of the Blue Room. A special seat, like a bicycle seat, was placed between the ferns. It protruded just enough for the President to sit on and still look as if he were standing. His legs, shrunken and useless, could not balance him. With his heavy, steel braces, he could only remain in an upright position with the assistance of someone or something.
My entire first week I spent observing the comings and goings in the White House—Ambassadors, the Secretaries of War and Treasury, the omnipresent Mr. Hopkins. We were in the midst of growing international tension, first about the German armies which had swept through Europe and now threatened England, then also because of Japan’s drive deeper into China. The President’s visitors, I discovered, had to do with the Lend-Lease program of aid to the Allies, which he signed into law on March 11, and which was eventually to cost fifty billion dollars.
The mansion was always full of people. But sitting just inside the front door, I soon found that the White House had two kinds of visitors: there were the President’s people, and then there were Mrs. Roosevelt’s people.
FOR THE ROOSEVELTS, THE White House was like a Grand Hotel. Eleanor Roosevelt’s life was filled with visitors from early morning until late at night. Her house was full of guests, some of whom stayed for months, and some of whom she’d just picked up on the street. Sometimes she invited so many people, she forgot who they were.
Mrs. Roosevelt never took a meal alone, that I remember. Dressed in her wrapper, a flowing morning robe, she’d step out of her tiny, austere bedroom, to the chintzy, floral West Sitting Hall, where she presided over a table of assorted houseguests, business appointments, or just friends. The bacon and eggs, carried up two floors and served by two butlers, were usually quite cold by the time breakfast began.
She always had guests for lunch. Every day she was at the White House, the butlers served a formal seated luncheon for at least twelve, in the Private Dining Room on the first floor. She arranged the seating herself, stopping in at the Usher’s office to pick up the place cards, sometimes scribbling the names herself, sometimes handing the cards to Mr. Crim to letter. There were always at least two more people to fit in at the last minute.
Her dinner guests, again in the Private Dining Room, wore black tie, although they were usually “working” guests, people involved in the projects in which she was interested—subsistence homestead, National Youth Administration, Work Corps for single women, WPA art, and anything else to do with public welfare or social justice. Unless the dinner were a State occasion, the President rarely appeared.
On Sunday nights, Mrs. Roosevelt’s table was like a European salon. The President did attend, if he felt well, and listened to authors, artists, actresses, playwrights, sculptors, dancers, world travelers, old family friends—mixed in with Ambassadors, Supreme Court Justices, Cabinet officers, and Presidential Advisors.
Eleanor Roosevelt, using a large silver chafing dish she’d brought from Hyde Park, scrambled eggs at the table. But the main course was conversation.
We called the menu “scrambled eggs with brains.”
Mrs. Roosevelt often entertained her personal guests in her two-room suite on the second floor. Her sitting room, a drab parlor with sofa and desk, adjoined a small dressing room, where she slept in a narrow, single bed. As in her husband’s suite, the walls were covered with framed photographs of official life. There were so many pictures that we had to draw a detailed plan of their arrangement each time we cleaned or painted the walls.
The Roosevelts were great collectors. President Roosevelt’s books took every inch of space on the White House shelves, and they overflowed into stacks and stacks on the third floor. His intricate ship models and Naval mementoes were not appreciated by the staff, however. Each tiny sail and gangplank had to be carefully dusted, and he was in the room so much the servants hardly had time to finish their chores. His study was not air-conditioned, and in the summer, with the windows always open, his collections collected more dust.
Eleanor Roosevelt collected people. We could accommodate 21 overnight visitors at a time, but Mrs. Roosevelt often invited more. And it was always musical chairs with the guest rooms at the President’s House. “We’ve got them hanging from the hooks,” Mr. Crim told me one day as two new arrivals appeared, suitcases in hand, and we had to move one of the President’s sons to his third bedroom of the week, to make room.
By 1941, the Roosevelt children, Anna, James, Franklin, Elliott, and John, were grown, with families of their own. When they visited the mansion, they were accorded no special privileges because they were Roosevelts. Mrs. Roosevelt saw them briefly by appointment or at breakfast, treating them just like any other houseguest.
Movie stars, political friends, just plain people she had met on her travels—Mrs. Roosevelt invited them all to spend the night at the White House. The First Lady was so busy with her own work, however, she sometimes didn’t know who was sleeping down the hall. Once they came, she left the visitors to their own devices. They used the White House like a hotel, meandering in and out at will, sometimes stopping by the Usher’s office for help in scheduling their day in Washington.
Some never went home. There were two “permanent guests” at the White House. One of them, Lorena Hickok, a former reporter who currently worked at the Democratic National Committee, lived in the little room on the northwest corner of the second floor, across the hall from Mrs. Roosevelt’s bedroom. “Hick,” as she was called, had become an intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s while covering the first Presidential campaign, and moved into the White House after she left journalism to join the Roosevelt administration. A heavy-set, mannish woman, she kept to herself, never taking meals with the family or staff, never appearing at any social functions. Sometimes there were so many people in the house that Miss Hickok would have to relinquish her room to another guest and sleep on the couch in Mrs. Roosevelt’s sitting room.
The other “staying guest” was Joseph Lash,* a young man in his early thirties, who when he was in Washington slept in the small blue bedroom on the second floor, across from the President’s study. Lash was executive secretary of the American Student Union. Because of her work with the American Youth Congress, Mrs. Roosevelt took a special interest in the young man.
Joe Lash occupied a unique position in Mrs. Roosevelt’s life during my years in the Roosevelt White House. He was her closest confidante, her most personal friend. The two would sit in his room talking until late at night; she’d step across the hall to say good morning before her breakfast, and to say good night after everyone had gone to bed. They often walked together around the sixteen acres of White House lawn, or down Washington streets. When he was called to the Capitol to testify before a House Committee, Mrs. Roosevelt sat in the hearing-room audience like an anxious mother, her knitting needles clicking. Eleanor Roosevelt was closer to Joe Lash than she was to her own children, we thought. But then, her children didn’t live in the White House.
Once, we almost caused an international incident because we moved Joe out of his room.
Mrs. Roosevelt had gone to New York. While the First Lady was out of town, Crown Princess Martha of Norway and her gentleman-in-waiting moved in for a personal visit with the President. We placed the Princess in the Queen’s Room, at the east end of the floor, and her aide nearby in the small blue room, moving Joe Lash to a little room on the third floor.
But Mrs. Roosevelt came home during the night—actually it was early in the morning, she’d slept on the train—and nobody told her of the arrangements. Her first stop was the small blue room, Joe’s room. As she usually did, she gave a little rap on the door and walked right in. And was greeted by a totally shocked—and totally undressed—gentleman-in-waiting for Princess Martha.
The First Lady was mortified.
At eight o’clock that morning, Mrs. Roosevelt phoned the Usher’s office. In her iciest tones, she said, “Never, never move or change a guest from one room to another without first contacting me. The telephone operators can reach me wherever I might be.”
In my early days in the White House, the President’s closest confidante appeared to be his secretary. One morning shortly after I came to work there, I was alone in the Usher’s office when the telephone rang.
“Is this the Usher?” a young woman’s voice asked. “No …” I answered, and the lady hung up. Minutes later, the garage called. “Miss LeHand has ordered a car,” the dispatcher reported. The garage, as well as the front door, was under Mr. Crim’s supervision, and normally the Usher placed orders for all cars. When the Chief Usher returned, I mentioned the puzzling order.
“Who is Miss LeHand?” I asked.
Mr. Crim’s eyebrows elevated. “She is the President’s personal secretary, who lives in a two-room apartment on the third floor,” he explained, noting her order in his “Garage” book. “In fact, she probably sees more of the President than Mrs. Roosevelt does. She acts as his hostess when Mrs. Roosevelt isn’t here.”
Thereafter, Miss LeHand ordered cars at will.
But in early June, Marguerite LeHand, acting as hostess at a small party in the Diplomatic Reception Room for the President’s close personal staff, suffered a stroke, and after a stay in the hospital, went to Warm Springs to recover.* Her duties were taken over by her assistant, Grace Tully, who did not live in the mansion.
In contrast to Mrs. Roosevelt’s close relationship with friends, and her husband’s with his staff, we never saw Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt in the same room alone together. They had the most separate relationship I have ever seen between man and wife. And the most equal.
When she met with him, it was usually in the evenings. She always brought him a sheaf of papers, a bundle of ideas. His secretary Grace Tully was usually there, or hers, Malvina Thompson. Mrs. Roosevelt reported to her husband not only to plead for her own projects and for liberal programs that she favored, but also to discuss other matters. The President had lots of people serving as his “eyes and ears” around the country. But his wife was perhaps his most trusted observer.
Because of his infirmity, the President couldn’t travel at the pace his wife did. He sent her out to assess the feelings of the people on just about everything, including his own policy statements. After eight years in office, he knew full well the awe that strikes most men when they walk into the President’s office, that they are tempted to tell the Chief Executive only what he wants to hear. Because of that tendency to be less than frank, he felt he couldn’t trust his regular channels to filter correct information to him.
Mrs. Roosevelt, therefore, performed a high-level intelligence operation for him. A skilled interviewer, she could easily instill confidence in anyone from an illiterate farm worker to a high government official, and draw out the person’s true opinions or reactions. Her reports to the President were filled with facts and quite often went to the very heart of a subject.
The longer she lived in the White House, the more people found out about this “intelligence service,” and an ever-increasing number tried to get to her, hoping she would filter their messages to Mr. Roosevelt. Which may have partially accounted for some of our overburdened guest lists.
The White House conferences between husband and wife did not occur all that often. The President spent far more time with his personal advisor Harry L. Hopkins. Mr. Hopkins had been one of the original Brain Trust; he was the first administrator of the National Relief Administration, then head of the Civil Works Administration and Works Progress Administration, and from 1938 until September, 1940, Secretary of Commerce. Now he was living in the White House, with his daughter, Diana. He walked up the hall from his bedroom to spend hours on end with the President. Mr. Hopkins, a widower, took the “Lincoln’s office” guest room down the hall from the family quarters, and Diana lived on the third floor next to the sun porch.
A little girl of eight, Diana was the first child to live in the White House since “Sistie” and “Buzzie” Dall, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger’s two children, had lived there for a few years in the Thirties. But now the Roosevelt White House was not geared to life with children, and Diana was quite lonely. She had few visitors her own age, very few occasions to see the Roosevelts, and little time with her father. So the White House domestic staff “adopted” Diana.
Her father ate dinner with President Roosevelt, on trays in the President’s private study, and worked with him there, often joined by Grace Tully, until late at night. The President also entertained his private visitors in that study. He was proud of his abilities as a bartender. A butler would place a tray of fixings atop the ornately carved desk, and, announcing that his specialty was a dry martini, Franklin Roosevelt mixed the drinks himself.
Two of the most important men in President Roosevelt’s life, however, were his valets, Arthur Prettyman and George Fields. The two men worked a twenty-four-hour shift, taking turns sleeping on the third floor, so the President could call for assistance after retiring, for he could not get out of bed without their help. Every morning, the valet would call down to the kitchen to order Mr. Roosevelt’s breakfast, and a White House butler soon brought up a tray.
The President’s bedroom, on the south side of the second floor, was sparsely furnished, with a modified hospital bed—not much wider than a standard single bed. At about ten every morning, his aides, General Edwin “Pa” Watson and Press Secretary Steve Early, went up to his bedroom for their morning conference. The three would pore over the day’s newspapers (except the Chicago Tribune, which was barred from the house), and the list of daily appointments.
Then Mr. Roosevelt’s valet would dress the President and wheel him into his adjoining oval study. The room, painted a flat battleship gray, was like a naval museum. The study shelves were lined with hundreds of books, photographs, and a vast collection of ships’ models. Mr. Roosevelt’s massive oak desk, made from the timbers of HMS Resolute, was covered with personal mementoes. A cabinet radio, two breakfronts full of books, and a big green rug filled the room.
If the President was feeling well, he’d emerge from the second floor at about noon and his bodyguard or valet would wheel him to the elevator and down to his official office in the west wing. Mr. Roosevelt frequently suffered from sinus trouble, and he came down with a good case of flu every winter. When he did not feel well, he held all his appointments in that oval study upstairs.
Franklin Roosevelt loved to have a fire crackling in the marble fireplace of that room. But the valets were instructed to extinguish the fire if he were left in the room alone, even for a few minutes. He was afraid that the room might catch fire, and he knew that he could not get out by himself.
The valets, Mr. Hopkins, “Pa” Watson and Steve Early, Grace Tully—those were the Oval Room “regulars.” The President shuffled other appointments in and out about every fifteen minutes, with an usher appearing at the door to announce the next guest. But there was one frequent visitor whom we never hurried.
Quite often, but only when Mrs. Roosevelt was out of town, the President invited his friend Mrs. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd to the White House. An attractive, vivacious woman in her forties, she’d arrive at the front door, the north entrance. We’d watch her hurry up the steps, to be escorted by an usher to the second floor. The butler would serve tea, close the door, and leave the President and Mrs. Rutherfurd alone. After about an hour’s time, the President rang for the doorman to escort her back to her car.
In good weather, the President enjoyed taking a drive in the Virginia countryside with his little dog, Fala, and the Secret Service guard. One day Mr. Roosevelt directed the driver to go along a certain wooded, dirt road. Suddenly, he ordered the driver to stop. “There seems to be a lady walking along the road. Let us ask her if she needs a ride,” the President directed.
The fourth time this incident occurred, the Secret Service men following the President began to be aware that the same lady, on the same country road, always needed a ride. They’d take the long route to her destination, giving the President and his passenger a scenic spin in the big car. One of the agents mentioned those drives to the Usher’s office, wondering if any of us might know the mysterious lady. So one day Wilson Searles talked the agent into letting him accompany them on an excursion. When he saw Searles in the Secret Service car, Mr. Roosevelt laughed.
“I see it’s your turn to find out what’s going on!” the President said. The lady was Mrs. Rutherfurd.
President Roosevelt’s recreation—drives in the country, fishing from the yacht Potomac, weekends at Shangri-La—was limited by his desire for privacy and by the restrictions of his physical condition. At the White House, his sole form of exercise was swimming in the austere, fifty-foot pool under the west terrace. That swimming pool had been built for the President in 1933, from funds raised by a nationwide newspaper campaign. At first, Mr. Crim told me, Mr. Roosevelt had exercised there several times a day; now, at the age of fifty-nine, he seldom swam. He spent most of his time in his oval office in the west wing of the White House, or upstairs in his oval study.
If Franklin Roosevelt’s days were spent more or less in confinement, Mrs. Roosevelt more than made up for it in activity.
After her “company” breakfasts in the West Hall upstairs, which all first families use as a sitting room, Mrs. Roosevelt joined her competent secretary, Malvina (“Tommy”) Thompson, in the First Lady’s tiny office by the elevator, overlooking the north lawn. There, she’d begin dictating her syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” which gave the country a running account of the Roosevelts’ activities. She could never sit still for long, however, and she’d often jump up from her desk, “Tommy” at her elbow, and fly down the halls, dictating all the way. She’d even dictate—or write notes to herself—riding in limousines, on trains and planes.
Eleanor Roosevelt was very communicative. She wrote for magazines, talked over the radio, went on lecture tours, pouring out millions of words to the patient Miss Thompson. During the process, the two of them would cook up enough work to occupy the White House staff for the next 48 hours. It had to be done in eight, of course.
The President’s wife delegated responsibility, requiring the same efficiency from her staff as she did of herself. Once she had given an order, she immediately forgot about it. There was no checking back with her for clarification. She didn’t have time to give instructions twice.
She must have scribbled a million notes during her years in the White House—notes which had all the legibility of a doctor’s prescription. One day Mr. Crim came down with two gold wristwatches. “Send the watches to the engraver,” he told me. “Mrs. Roosevelt wants them to be sent out as gifts. Here are the inscriptions and the addresses.” I tried all morning to read the instructions but couldn’t make head or tail of them. Neither could Mr. Crim, which I suspect is why he turned them over to me.
Finally I went up and asked Mrs. Roosevelt’s personal secretary. “Tommy” knew what to expect from her boss. “I’m not going to take those watches back to her,” she said. “You’ll have to do it yourself.”
Embarrassed, I took the watches in to Mrs. Roosevelt’s sitting room and found her at her desk, scribbling away. The First Lady looked up, then frowned. By that time she had quite forgotten which watch was for whom. She was not amused. “You are supposed to get things right the first time,” she said.
One of the watches, it turned out, had been selected by Joe Lash as a gift to his future wife.
Although she dealt with thousands of details every day, Mrs. Roosevelt wanted trivial matters handled with dispatch. There were more important things on her mind.
She didn’t have much time for housekeeping problems either, and the mansion suffered because of it. Even to me, an Iowa boy with little experience in such matters, it seemed dingy, almost seedy. She left things up to the housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, who was more country gentlewoman than dirt chaser. Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t pay much attention to White House food, either, but the President did. He couldn’t stand it.
“I wish we could do something about Mrs. Nesbitt,” he said to Mr. Crim, in mock surrender, “but Mrs. Roosevelt won’t hear of it.”
Henrietta Nesbitt prided herself on her friendship with the First Lady, and blithely instructed cook Elizabeth Moore to carry out her menus, no matter what the President requested.
“The food around here would do justice to the Automat,” the President said.
On the third floor, they installed a diet kitchen, where meals for the President were prepared by his mother’s old Hyde Park cook, Mary Campbell. As the years went by, the President ordered almost all his meals cooked there, separate from the White House kitchen.
Her feelings ruffled, Mrs. Nesbitt complained to Mr. Crim, “Mary Campbell’s kitchen is so dirty, I’m concerned about the President’s health.” Mr. Crim, alarmed, reported the complaint to the President.
“You tell Mrs. Roosevelt I’ll get rid of Mary Campbell when she gets rid of old lady Nesbitt!” the Chief Executive shot back.
And Mrs. Nesbitt stayed on. Once, during a White House luncheon where she was a guest, she looked up at a chandelier and remarked to the woman next to her, “My goodness, isn’t that filthy?”
“As if she were a guest instead of the housekeeper,” Mr. Crim sniffed.
Mrs. Roosevelt’s personal maid, Mabel Webster, lived on the third floor and took care of the First Lady’s clothing and personal laundry. Mabel had come down from Hyde Park with the Roosevelts, but was now on the government payroll. All the Roosevelts’ servants were treated with great deference by the White House staff. They ate with the other domestics in the servants’ dining room on the ground floor, which was decorated with paintings by WPA artists, but when Mabel Webster entered the dining room, the White House servants rose to attention, as if the First Lady herself had walked in.
The First Lady’s table was more democratic. Neither the President nor Mrs. Roosevelt liked to sit at the head of the table, whether in the State Dining Room or in the small Private Dining Room. Instead, they were seated across from each other, on either side of the table, where they’d have a chance to be near, and talk with, more of their guests. Mrs. Roosevelt also sat in the same central position at her luncheons, having worked out her seating arrangements on a chart in the Usher’s office.
After the Private Dining Room had been cleared from Mrs. Roosevelt’s luncheons, the First Lady herself went back upstairs with “Tommy” to her office for an hour or two, then came down again to greet official visitors.
When she received those appointments in the formal State rooms on the first floor, we had them lined up in every room. She might come down to meet someone in the Red Room, while others were waiting in the Blue Room, the Green Room, the East Room, and even in the Lobby. Each visitor garnered about fifteen or twenty minutes of her time. At the end of that time, one of us would go in and announce her next appointment, so that her present visitor would know it was time to leave.
When Mrs. Roosevelt served tea in the Red Room, pouring herself, she could see many people in a short period of time. Tea was an important ritual in her life. Eleanor Roosevelt, educated in England, was of an era, of a social class, where a young lady learned the niceties of serving tea at an early age, and expected to preside at a tea table as part of her daily life. She was also a strict teetotaler, the only one among my First Ladies, and tea was the one beverage she could offer graciously—and briefly.
For the huge teas, Edith Helm, her social secretary, sat at one end of the long table in the State Dining Room, Miss Thompson at the other, serving the hundreds of guests. On one occasion the efficient “Tommy” was presiding behind the silver urns at the south end of the table. Among the honored guests was the British Ambassador.
“Coffee, tea, or cocoa?” Tommy asked routinely.
“Madam, I was invited for tea!” the gentleman replied.
In the West Sitting Hall upstairs, Mrs. Roosevelt served tea every afternoon at five for family, personal friends, and houseguests. Eleanor Roosevelt had tea even on the rare occasions when she was alone, sitting at a table covered with a lace cloth, pouring from a silver teapot.
The First Lady served tea to the women attending her regular press conferences in the Monroe Room. Next door to the old Lincoln office, where Harry Hopkins slept, the Monroe Room was filled with reproductions of the original Monroe furniture—which President Monroe had taken with him. When Mrs. Roosevelt had parties for the entire Washington press corps, however, they served beer in the foyer and danced the Virginia reel in the East Room.
Mrs. Roosevelt held conferences in the East Room, too, meetings mainly concerned with public welfare projects. Seated in the front row, knitting away, she spoke out whenever an idea caught her imagination. During those conferences, she turned out more baby blankets than she had grandchildren, and began passing her handiwork along to her friends. Knitting, scribbling notes, marking a passage in a book, Mrs. Roosevelt had the busiest hands I ever saw.
She believed in physical exercise, and encouraged all her staff to square-dance or do calisthenics. Besides her walking, which was always to somewhere, she often rode horseback in Rock Creek Park, either alone or with her good friend Elinor Morgenthau, wife of the Secretary of the Treasury.
I’ll never forget my first sight of Eleanor Roosevelt in her riding habit, jodhpurs, boots, striding into the Usher’s office, calling for her horse. I would call the White House stable, at Fort Myer, Virginia, and they’d put the horse in a van and take him to Rock Creek Park. There Mrs. Roosevelt, who had arrived in a White House car, would mount, and trot around in the woods along the shallow creek. She refused to take a Secret Service man along when she rode—or when she walked or took the train. Despite the great passions she aroused pro and con, the agents bowed to her wishes and let her roam around by herself.
When she returned from her ride, tired, disheveled, and smelling of horse, Mr. Crim always turned up his nose a bit. I had the feeling that, despite his protestations of neutrality, he slightly disapproved of Mrs. Roosevelt’s breezy informality. The Chief Usher, a stern and proper gentleman of the old school, was accustomed to the strict life of the Herbert Hoovers, who dined regally in formal attire in the State Dining Room even if they were alone. He never quite recovered from the shock of one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s early-morning visits to the Usher’s office.
“I was sitting in my office with the door open, and there she came padding down the back stairs—barefoot. She had on a yellow bathing suit! She came up to me with some letters and said she was on her way to swim, and wouldn’t I please mail these—.” Eight years later, Mr. Crim was still aghast.
Mr. Crim had an ally in Sara Delano Roosevelt, the President’s mother. During her visits the staff snapped to attention, and the service was as formal as if a queen were being entertained—even though the atmosphere was somewhat tense. A formidable matriarch, the elder Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t take to her daughter-in-law’s collection of friends, and she let everyone know it. Sara Roosevelt enjoyed Mr. Crim’s company, however, and she often stopped by to chat with him.
One morning during my early days, she was sitting in our office when Naval Officer Earl Miller walked through the hall. A frequent overnight visitor and great comrade of the First Lady, Miller’s friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt dated from earlier years, when her husband served as governor of New York. At that time, he had been a private in the New York State Police. Then later he guarded the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park. Now he was a lieutenant commander in the Navy.
Sara Delano Roosevelt recognized him.
“First it was Private Miller. Then it was Sergeant Miller. Then it was Commander Miller. Now it’s Earl, dear,” she sniped, imitating the First Lady’s high-pitched voice.
“Mrs. Roosevelt, Senior,” as the telephone operators called her, also let Mr. Crim know how she felt about Mrs. Roosevelt’s determination to integrate the White House domestic staff. She disapproved.
Eleanor Roosevelt was deeply involved in fighting for human rights for Negro Americans, and though her efforts seem, in today’s world, naïve and even conservative, she shocked the New York socialites with whom she had grown up, and infuriated Washington, D. C., a very segregated town.
She begged, cajoled, pleaded with her husband to integrate the Armed Services, to propose sweeping civil rights legislation, and to integrate the defense industry. Perhaps his zeal was not so great as hers, perhaps he had other priorities before the Southerners in Congress, but she was continuously far ahead of Franklin D. Roosevelt on that subject.
She aroused the wrath of Washington, and of her mother-in-law, but raised the hopes of millions of Americans by inviting blacks to the White House. Most notable of these was her friend Mary McLeod Bethune, the distinguished Negro educator.
When Mrs. Bethune arrived, Mrs. Roosevelt always went running down the driveway to meet her, and they would walk arm in arm into the mansion. Few heads of State received such a welcome.
In those days, my job had very little to do with entertaining, however, so I glimpsed the famous visitors only as they went in and out of the White House. One day Mr. Crim caught me gazing out the window of our cubicle.
“See those people out there,” he pointed to the crowd walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. “They’d give anything to be in here looking out.”
Actually, I had little time to look out the window. Handling Mrs. Roosevelt’s travel arrangements was a full-time job. Back and forth she crossed the country by train, bus, and car. Even though air travel was very limited in those days, she wanted to take commercial planes as often as possible to dispel the public’s fear of flying.