I still can’t talk about it.
—WENDY ELSASSER, FLORIST, 1985–2007, ON WORKING IN THE WHITE HOUSE ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
Pierce, hurry up and get to the office. The boss has been shot,” a panicked Secret Service officer barked at Nelson Pierce as he walked through the White House gates to start his shift on the afternoon of November 22, 1963.
More than five decades later, Pierce remembered every minute of that day in 1963. Once he got through the gate he raced to the residence and rushed to the Usher’s Office, where a group of horrified staffers were gathered around the TV.
Unlike the rest of the country, Pierce had no time to mourn. He had a job to do. Like most of the residence staff, he showed very little outward emotion that day. Everyone on the household staff went on “automatic pilot,” said Curator Jim Ketchum. “I think most of us were intent on carrying on.”
As the usher on duty that terrible day, it was Pierce who got the official word from a Secret Service agent calling from Parkland Hospital in Dallas confirming the president’s death.
Pierce was steering the ship in unchartered waters. No modern president had ever been assassinated, and never before had there been footage of the event with the violent images playing over and over.
It was the beginning of a long and emotionally draining week. Pierce walked through the White House gates on a Friday and didn’t leave until the following Wednesday night. There was so much work to be done. The first thing he did, in a state of shock, was to call the engineers and order them to lower the flag on the roof of the White House to half-staff. He let himself break down only once—when he saw that flag being lowered. After composing himself, he called the General Services Administration Control Center to notify all U.S. embassies and ships at sea to lower their flags in kind.
Within ten minutes of leaving Dallas, Mrs. Kennedy’s personal secretary, Mary Gallagher, called Pierce from Air Force One and told him that Jackie wanted her husband’s funeral to be as much like President Lincoln’s as possible. Pierce wasn’t sure what that would entail, but he immediately set to work. “We had no training for anything like that. It was just something you fell into automatically—we were doing what the first lady wanted,” he said. He quickly got in touch with the Curator’s Office, and they in turn worked with the Library of Congress to figure out how best to replicate Lincoln’s lying in state and funeral.
Curator Jim Ketchum found an old engraving of the East Room draped in black for Lincoln’s funeral. To re-create the effect, West called Lawrence Arata, the White House upholsterer, who proposed using black cambric, a thin black material stretched across the bottom of chairs to disguise their springs. As it happened, Arata had ordered a new hundred-yard roll just a few days before.
Arata and his wife quickly got to work, hanging the fabric exactly as instructed by the president’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, who supervised funeral preparations at Robert Kennedy’s request. The Aratas hung the black cloth over chandeliers, windows, and doorways. They worked with the help of their grief-stricken colleagues from late in the evening until the president’s body returned in the early-morning hours.
“A lot of people thought it was silk material, but it was plain black cambric. Mrs. Kennedy wanted it very, very humble, the same as Lincoln’s funeral. Nothing fancy,” Arata said. “I pinned the cambric on the draperies and tried to drape the material to give it a custom appearance.”
A grief-stricken Preston Bruce directed friends and family who were arriving in shared disbelief to begin preparations for the president’s funeral. He helped drape the black fabric on the main floor of the White House as the first lady instructed. In the East Room, Bruce and Maître d’ Charles Ficklin placed giant tapers—long, slim candles—next to the platform that would support the president’s casket. From the moment Bruce arrived at the White House at 2:22 P.M. on November 22 until the hearse pulled under the North Portico after four the next morning, Bruce said he had “only one idea in my mind. I would wait for Mrs. Kennedy. I wanted to be there when she came back to the White House.”
Chief Usher J. B. West was at home when he heard the news on the radio, and he rushed to the office. He writes in his memoir about the following hours: he directed the butlers to prepare coffee and the maids to start readying all the guest rooms, “little meaningless gestures, but a signal that our work must go on.”
“We were told originally that the president’s body would arrive at the White House about 10:00 P.M. Well, we got the call at 10:00 P.M. that they didn’t know what time it would be so it was about 4:25 A.M. when the president’s body arrived at the White House,”Pierce said with sadness sweeping over his face. “We were up all night and all the next day.”
Pierce helped the butlers settle Kennedy family members into their rooms at the residence. Over the next four nights, he and the other ushers slept on folding cots in the basement. There was an area there that they used to change into tuxedos for state dinners, and there was at least a bathroom and a shower for them to share.
When Pierce saw Jackie for the first time in the early morning on November 23, he nearly froze. “When Mrs. Kennedy and Ted and Robert came around the corner from the hall to the elevator I was wondering what I would say to Mrs. Kennedy. Our eyes met as she came around the corner and we had a rapport that I had never had with anybody that I knew—I didn’t have to say anything,” he recalled, tearing up when he talked about seeing her suit caked in her husband’s blood. The traumatized first lady was only thirty-four years old. “We lost a friend, a very close friend,” Pierce said as he thought back to the mood among the residence workers that fateful day. Social Secretary Letitia Baldrige remembered being asked by Robert Kennedy to select a coffin; she decided on a midpriced casket, since it would forever be hidden underneath the American flag.
“Hundreds of people were walking around those corridors silently, numbly,” she recalled. “They used to be such happy, bustling, noisy corridors. Now people moved slowly, bowed, and when they spoke, they whispered, as if afraid their emotions would burst forth.”
Within fifteen hours, by the time the president’s body was back at the White House, the staff was able to arrange for the casket to rest on the same catafalque used for Lincoln nearly one hundred years earlier. President Kennedy’s body was returned after hours at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the president’s autopsy was performed while Jackie paced the halls smoking cigarettes. Representatives of each of the armed services carried the coffin up the North Portico stairs. Father John Kuhn of St. Matthew’s Church offered a short prayer. Only after the flag-draped coffin was in the East Room did the first lady leave her husband’s side. In the coffin she placed a letter she wrote to her husband, a pair of gold cuff links she had given him, the presidential seal carved on a whale’s tooth, and a note from Caroline and John-John to their slain father.
For Mrs. Kennedy, the president’s loss was compounded by the couple’s renewed intimacy after the devastating death of their baby, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, on August 9, 1963, less than four months before the president’s assassination. About ten days before Patrick’s premature birth, Jackie wrote Head Housekeeper Anne Lincoln and asked her to go out and buy some baby hangers. Lincoln was putting off the errand, since the baby was not due for several more weeks.
The boy died just two days after he was born five and a half weeks early. “The whole room was fixed up, and I know the second when Patrick died [that] we got up there just as fast as we could and took everything out and put it all away,” she recalled. They didn’t want the president and first lady to be reminded of their gut-wrenching loss when they returned. J. B. West called the Carpenter’s Shop immediately upon learning of Patrick’s death, and ordered them to get rid of the rug, crib, and curtains in the blue-and-white nursery. Now Jackie was being forced to endure another life-changing death.
Bill Cliber had just started as an electrician at the White House that year. He helped drape the black cloth over the chandeliers, and when Jackie Kennedy came to review her husband’s body, he quietly walked to the opposite side of the room to give her privacy.
“We knew how to disappear,” he said. And this was a moment when the residence staff were especially aware of the first lady’s need for privacy.
For twenty-four hours, the president’s family and friends paid their respects in the East Room. After a small mass that Saturday, Jackie walked up to Chief Usher J. B. West and threw her arms around him. “Poor Mr. West,” she whispered.
“I couldn’t speak. It was all I could do to stand,” West said. “I just held her for a moment.”
Knowing that she and her children would have to leave the White House soon, Jackie asked him to take her to see the Oval Office one last time. Shockingly, it was already being taken apart. Model ships, books, and the president’s rocking chair were being carted away by the residence staff. “I think we’re probably in the way,” she murmured, trying to take in every last detail of the room.
She walked the short distance to the Cabinet Room and sat at the imposing mahogany table. “My children. They’re good children, aren’t they, Mr. West?” she asked the chief usher, who had become a friend.
“They certainly are.”
“They’re not spoiled?”
“No, indeed.”
“Mr. West, will you be my friend for life?” the first lady, who had seemed to have it all just a day earlier, pleaded.
He was too upset to speak. He could only nod. The Sunday after the assassination, the flag-draped coffin was carried on a horse-drawn caisson, the same one that had carried the bodies of Lincoln, FDR, and the Unknown Soldier, to the Capitol Rotunda where it laid in state for twenty-one hours. The procession mirrored Lincoln’s so closely that there was even a riderless black horse just as there had been almost a hundred years earlier. Two hundred and fifty thousand people went to pay tribute to the president. The state funeral was held on Monday, November 25.
“We were standing out on the North Portico, and it was just a quiet day, couldn’t hear nothing but those horses—click, click,” longtime residence worker Wilson Jerman vividly recalls. “It was a very sad day.”
Shortly before the funeral, Usher Rex Scouten called Preston Bruce into his office, where Robert Kennedy was waiting for him. Kennedy told Bruce that Jackie wanted him to walk in the funeral procession to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. A car would drive him to the cemetery for the burial.
The funeral service “went by like a dream,” Bruce recalled. He remembered seeing John-John salute his father’s casket, and remembered that that night Jackie had arranged for cake, ice cream, and candles to go with the little boy’s dinner to celebrate his third birthday.
The great-grandson of slaves, Bruce had never gone to college, so he was astounded to find himself standing feet away from General Charles de Gaulle and Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, dressed in their full regalia, at the president’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. They were just some of the dignitaries from more than one hundred countries who came to Washington to share in the nation’s grief. For Bruce, Jackie Kennedy had done him the honor of a lifetime: positioning him alongside heads of state and including him among the president’s family and closest friends.
JIM KETCHUM HAD just left the Oval Office, where he had been working all morning with a crew from the Smithsonian. It was less than a year before the 1964 presidential election, and Kennedy was already making plans for his presidential library in case he was defeated. The president insisted that his library have an accurate copy of the ornate Resolute desk that was carved from the timbers of a British Arctic Exploration ship named the H.M.S. Resolute. Kennedy was the first president to have it installed in the Oval Office, and it became world-famous because of a playful photo of John-John peeking his head out from a built-in panel underneath it as his father worked. That morning Ketchum and the team from the Smithsonian were examining every square inch of the iconic piece of furniture.
As soon as he sat back down in his office, he heard a police officer talking in the hallway. “We just had word from Dallas that the presidential motorcade has been hit and we think the president was involved.”
Ketchum and two other people in the Curator’s Office took the elevator to the third floor and rushed to find a guest room with a TV to watch the news. Not long after, Ketchum got a call from Mrs. Kennedy herself, on board Air Force One. She repeated the order her secretary gave to the ushers: she wanted him to find books describing how the East Room was decorated during Lincoln’s funeral.
Around dusk that evening, helicopters started landing on the White House lawn in quick succession. Looking back on that terrible day, Ketchum told me that he could only liken the sight to a scene from the epic Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, released years later. The copters were coming from Andrews Air Force Base, carrying some of the people who had been on the flight back from Dallas and others whom Johnson had asked to come meet him to discuss the transition. Ketchum spent the next several hours preparing the East Room. He didn’t leave to go back to his northern Virginia apartment until Sunday morning. After getting a few hours of rest at home, he got a phone call at around six-thirty on Monday morning, the day of the president’s state funeral. It was Mrs. Kennedy. “She was obviously getting next to no sleep,” he said. She was calling about a small detail, showing her almost obsessive focus on appearances even as she faced the enormity of losing her husband.
“She was going to receive most of the visiting dignitaries in the Red Room, but she wanted to have people like [French president] de Gaulle and a handful of other individuals who would really be considered the top of the ranking, in the Yellow Oval Room just above the Oval Blue Room,” he said.
Jackie was worried that they would see the painting by French post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne in the Yellow Oval Room. “I’d really like to have something more American to share with these people,” she told Ketchum resolutely. “Would you, and could you, as soon as possible, get into the White House and take down the Cézanne?” By 8:15 that morning, the Cézanne had been replaced by a newly acquired series of large prints of American cities. “They were the perfect substitute,” Ketchum said proudly.
Ketchum was surprised that Chief Usher J. B. West, who was so close to Mrs. Kennedy, didn’t show more emotion after the assassination. West explained to the grief-stricken Ketchum: “I came to the White House in 1941 and my president [Roosevelt] died in April of 1945. If the first president under whom you’ve served in the White House dies, it is a much more trying experience than those that come after.”
When President Kennedy died, Ketchum says, he finally understood what West meant. There was a degree of composure that was always expected from the domestic staff. And with the widowed first lady setting a stoic tone, everyone else fell in line. If the president’s wife was able to keep herself together, a curator at the White House who barely knew the president should certainly do the same.
West was surprised that the campaign-averse Mrs. Kennedy had wanted to accompany her husband to Dallas, but he remembered how close the couple had grown since Patrick’s death that August. Later, Jackie told West she was glad she had been there in her husband’s final moments: “To think that I very nearly didn’t go! Oh, Mr. West, what if I’d been here—out riding at Wexford [their house in Virginia’s horse country] or somewhere. . . . Thank God I went with him!”
Mrs. Kennedy was so fond of West, and grateful for his kindness in that dark time, that when he passed away in 1983 she asked Nancy Reagan if he could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, even though it is reserved for career military personnel and their families. The Reagans obliged.
IT WAS NANNY Maud Shaw who broke the news of the president’s death to the children. Caroline was five days short of her sixth birthday when her father was assassinated. John-John was just three days from his third birthday. As helicopters noisily landed on the South Lawn, Caroline pointed at each one and asked if that was the helicopter carrying her father back from his trip. Shaw chose her words carefully. “There was an accident and your father was shot,” Shaw said haltingly, almost unable to control her own grief. “God has taken him to heaven because they just couldn’t make him better in a hospital.”
Shaw told Caroline that she would be reunited in heaven with her father and their baby brother Patrick, but in the meantime he would be watching over her and her mother and her brother. Caroline was just old enough to start crying.
John-John was so young that Shaw tucked him into bed without telling him anything. He soon learned enough, though, to say: “My poor mommy’s crying. She’s crying because my daddy’s gone away.”
AT FIRST, LADY Bird Johnson thought someone was setting off firecrackers. That would have been entirely in keeping with the festive air of the day, as children waved signs and people threw confetti and leaned out of office building windows to wave at the gorgeous first couple.
The Johnsons were riding two cars behind the Kennedys on November 22, 1963. Their lives, like those of the Kennedy family, would be forever changed by the events of that day.
Mrs. Johnson couldn’t believe that the president had been shot until they pulled up to the hospital. She glanced over at the Kennedys’ car and saw “a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the backseat. It was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the president’s body.”
When she went to see the first lady outside the operating room, she was amazed at how alone she looked. “You always think of someone like her as being insulated, protected,” she wrote in her diary. Lady Bird hugged Jackie and whispered, “God, help us all.”
On the flight back to Washington, with President Kennedy’s casket in the plane’s corridor, Lady Bird went to see Jackie again. Jackie told her the same thing she later told West: that she was glad she’d been with her husband in his final moments. “What if I had not been there?” she wondered aloud.
When Lady Bird asked if she could find someone to help her change out of her bloodstained suit, she refused “with almost an element of fierceness—if a person that gentle, that dignified, can be said to have such a quality.” The gory sight was deeply moving. It was a shock to see that “immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.”
“I want them to see what they have done to Jack,” Jackie told her defiantly. (The strawberry pink suit was an exact replica of a Chanel design, made by a small U.S. dressmaker; the first lady had chosen it to avoid criticism for wearing too many expensive foreign labels.)
The country was consumed by grief and panic. For Luci Baines Johnson, sixteen years old at the time, there was a deep fear that the news reports she was hearing secondhand were incomplete and that her parents had also been hurt. She was sitting in Spanish class at Washington’s National Cathedral School when her teacher announced the news. “No one ever said a word about my father or mother,” she recalled. Class was swiftly dismissed and she wandered into the school’s courtyard alone and in a daze. “I looked over and saw that the Secret Service had very thoughtfully sent a man I knew, one of my father’s detail—and I turned and ran in the other direction as if I could run away from the inevitable. And of course, I wasn’t capable of outrunning a Secret Service agent.” The agent grabbed her and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Luci.” She beat on his chest and screamed, “No!” He never said that the president was dead, she says, “Because the words were just unsayable.” It wasn’t until she asked him, “And Daddy and Mother?” that she found out that her parents were unharmed.
Ninety-nine minutes after President Kennedy was pronounced dead, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One. When Johnson stepped off the plane at Andrews Air Force Base, this time as president, he told the waiting press: “We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”
The specter of tragedy would haunt the Johnsons those first few months in the White House. Their transition was made worse because some members of the Kennedys’ loyal staff would never trust the new president, whom they considered a loud, uncouth bully. (Even Jackie Kennedy had referred to Johnson during the campaign as “Senator Cornpone.”)
Caroline Kennedy’s life may have been changed forever, but her mother wanted her routine to stay in place for as long as possible. At Mrs. Kennedy’s request, Lady Bird Johnson allowed the little girl to continue to attend kindergarten with a group of her friends in their third-floor Solarium classroom until the end of the first semester in mid-January. Little Caroline was dropped off at the South Portico every morning and picked up every afternoon. The elevator took Caroline and her classmates to the linoleum-floored classroom, complete with chalkboards and cubbies. The other students were the children of longtime friends of the first couple. Caroline’s ballet class sometimes still practiced on the South Lawn, “fluttering like little pink birds in their pink leotards, tulle tutus, and ballet slippers,” recalls Social Secretary Letitia Baldrige.
After her father’s death, Caroline never stopped to see her old room on the second floor or bounce on the trampoline, J. B. West said. “Except for a few sentimental servants, she was generally ignored. Lynda and Luci [the Johnsons’ teenage daughters] were the new Princesses.”
For Nelson Pierce, seeing Caroline every day brought a sense of solace, not sorrow. “We were so glad that she was continuing with school and her friends,” he told me. “Of course, she was young enough so that the loss of her father, when it was school time, it was forgotten. She blended in with the kids and had a good time.” (Once Caroline finished the semester, Luci and Lynda made the Solarium into a teenage hideaway, complete with a soda bar, a big TV set, and two record players.)
In the wake of the assassination, security at the White House was enhanced. Butler Lynwood Westray recalls that the residence staff were all subjected to a new clearance check by law enforcement—their backgrounds scrutinized and their friends and families interviewed. “One or two of the guys couldn’t make the grade after having been found okay” before, he said. “They were just cut off from working there after that.” Westray said his phone was tapped after the assassination. “They wanted to make sure people there were doing what they were supposed to be doing.”
Kennedy’s death changed the course of history and it had a deep, personal effect on the residence staff who loved him so much. A certain innocence would be forever absent from the halls of the executive mansion.
NEARLY FORTY YEARS later, a very different kind of traumatic event shook the White House. On a late summer morning, under a cloudless azure sky, the mansion was buzzing with activity. The Bushes were hosting the annual picnic for members of Congress and their families. One hundred and ninety picnic tables adorned the South Lawn. Executive Chef Walter Scheib was working with Tom Perini, a favorite caterer of the first family’s from Buffalo Gap, Texas, to create a festive, Texas-style cookout for the fifteen hundred expected guests, complete with chuck wagons and a green chili and hominy casserole.
Warm weather and clear skies were forecast for the afternoon barbecue. Maids were cleaning the Queens’ Bedroom on the second floor, where George H. W. Bush and Barbara had spent the night before. The former president and his wife left at 7:00 A.M. for an early flight. President George W. Bush was in Florida, visiting a Sarasota elementary school.
Even with all the activity swirling around her, Laura Bush seemed alone in the White House on the morning of September 11, 2001. She was getting dressed in silence in the Bush’s second-floor bedroom, rehearsing the statement she was set to make before the Senate Education Committee that morning. She was nervous about her visit to Capitol Hill, where she would be briefing the committee about an early childhood development conference she’d organized earlier that summer.
The first lady and the residence staff—from the maids, butlers, and florists, to the cooks prepping for the annual picnic—were all lost in the events of a typically busy day. But that day was anything but typical. “Had the TV been turned on, I might have heard the first fleeting report of a plane hitting the North Tower,” Laura Bush said.
A few minutes after 9:00 A.M. Laura got into her waiting car at the South Portico to head to the Russell Senate Office Building, less than two miles away. The head of her Secret Service detail told her that a plane had slammed into one of the World Trade Center towers. Chief Usher Gary Walters, standing beside him, was also hearing the news for the first time. How could a plane fly into the World Trade Center on such a clear day? He wondered aloud.
“Gary, you need to go inside and watch the television,” the agent told him.
The first lady’s motorcade sped up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to make the hearing. Walters headed back inside to the Secret Service room on the Ground Floor, located behind the president’s elevator, where he knew there was a television. But the room was crowded with people in front of the TV, so he went to the Usher’s Office, where he ran into some household workers. He gave them quick instructions on the setup for the picnic, still unaware of the extent of the devastation.
When he got to his personal office, which is separate from the Usher’s Office, it too was packed with people huddled around the TV. He walked in just as the second plane flew into the South Tower.
“How in the world did they get that on television?” he asked, stunned.
“Because that’s the second plane,” someone responded.
Once Walters realized that the event wasn’t an isolated accident, he called the Bushes’ social secretary, Catherine Fenton. They decided to cancel the event, and Walters went back to the South Portico, where he had just seen Laura Bush off moments before. There was so much confusion and uncertainty but he couldn’t waste a moment.
Just as they had after President Kennedy’s assassination, the residence staff delved into their work with a single-minded focus. Walters coordinated with the National Park Service, in charge of the White House grounds, to determine who would be moving the picnic tables and cleaning up the chuck wagons.
“As I walked out of the South Portico, I saw the terrible smoke and flames at the Pentagon,” Walters recalled. It suddenly struck him: the White House could be next.
Even as people started to evacuate the White House, Walters knew he would be staying: “As far as I was concerned, my responsibility was there at the White House.”
His job was to make the house run at all costs, even if it now felt like he was working in the center of a giant bull’s-eye. He couldn’t do it alone. He asked the uniformed division of the Secret Service to allow Executive Chef Walter Scheib, who had already been evacuated, to return. He grabbed a few others, including Chief Electrician Bill Cliber, and told them they needed to stay and help clear the picnic tables, even as the Secret Service was screaming for everyone to drop everything and run for their lives. “I got the word that everybody was evacuating, but we had something that we needed to do,” Walters said.
Meanwhile Walters’s daughter, a student at Boston College, was anxiously watching the news, terrified for her father after someone mistakenly told her that a plane had crashed into the White House, not the Pentagon. Walters and his small crew were too focused on clearing space for the president’s helicopter to call their families.
Cliber’s wife, Bea, was home watching TV with relatives. She didn’t know whether her husband was going to be all right. “It was panicsville,” she recalled. “We just sat and waited.” She didn’t hear from him until eight o’clock that night.
On his way up the driveway—and, potentially, back into harm’s way—Scheib yelled at the colleagues streaming toward him out of the mansion to leave the grounds as fast as they could. He shouted at the president and first lady’s staffs, already racing out of the West and East wings, warning them that the police were saying another plane was heading for the White House.
“Everyone who worked for me in the East Wing—they were mainly young women who expected a very glamorous job at the White House—were told to kick off their high heels and run,” Laura Bush recalls. “Can you imagine what it would be like to all of a sudden have a job where you were told to run?”
Walters and the others cleared 190 picnic tables, weighing hundreds of pounds each, from the South Lawn. “My knees banged together,” Walters said. “It sounded like a bass drum.” Rumors of further attacks kept coming in, but they blocked them out. “We’ve got a job, we’ve got to do it,” Cliber said.
Even then, when the world felt like it was turned upside down, the residence staff focused on keeping their beloved house running and not spilling any secrets. As some reporters noticed them feverishly working to clear the South Grounds, they asked whether the president was coming back to Washington right away. “Haven’t heard a word,” Cliber told them, even though he knew they were working to help speed up the president’s return.
The first lady’s car was driving up Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill when she learned that a second plane had hit the other World Trade Center tower. “The car fell silent; we sat in mute disbelief,” she wrote in her memoir. “One plane might be a strange accident; two planes were clearly an attack.”
WHEN MAID BETTY Finney started working at the White House in 1993, she had no housekeeping experience except for taking care of the home she shared with her husband and their two daughters. She was working at a steakhouse in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when her husband died suddenly. She needed a job—fast. As with most White House positions, hers came through a connection: her daughter knew Executive Housekeeper Christine Limerick, who brought her on board.
BETTY FINNEY
Eight years after she was hired, she found herself fearing for her life.
Finney was cleaning the second floor Queens’ Bedroom, where the president’s parents had spent the night on September 10. When they left for the airport, the Bushes had forgotten to turn off the TV. Finney and a couple of other terrified maids gathered around it, watching as the second tower was hit. Like so many other tragedies that affected the presidency, even as they were standing at the heart of the story, the residence workers were left to learn the news from the TV.
“I ran down the hall to the Yellow Oval Room and looked out the window, and you cannot see the Pentagon from there, but I saw smoke,” she says. “I went back to the Queens’ Bedroom and then I had to run upstairs for something.”
Before she made it to the third floor, she heard one of the Secret Service agents yelling “Get out of the house! Get out of the house!” She never made it upstairs; instead she ran downstairs. “I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know they had started the evacuation. We got out and everybody was on the streets. It was really scary. Everybody just went in a different direction, wherever they could get out.”
On Capitol Hill, Laura Bush got out of the car to meet with Senator Edward Kennedy, chair of the Education Committee, both knowing that there would be no briefing that day. He escorted her to his office.
Oddly, even as an old TV in the corner of the room was blaring the devastating news out of New York, Kennedy wouldn’t look at the screen. Instead he gave the first lady a tour of the family memorabilia in his office, including a framed note that his brother Jack had sent their mother when he was a child. It said, “Teddy is getting fat.”
“All the while,” the first lady said, “I kept glancing over at the glowing television screen. My skin was starting to crawl, I wanted to leave, to find out what was going on, to process what I was seeing, but I felt trapped in an endless cycle of pleasantries.” Later she wondered if Kennedy had simply seen too much death in his lifetime and couldn’t face another tragedy, especially one on such a massive scale.
After they made a statement to the press telling them there would be no briefing and expressing concern about the attacks, Bush walked toward the stairs to go back to her car and the White House. The lead Secret Service agent stopped her and her staff abruptly and told them to run to the basement. Deeply worried about her husband’s safety, she waited with her friend Senator Judd Gregg, the ranking Republican on the Education Committee, in his private interior office in the lower level of the Capitol. There, they huddled together and called their children to make sure they were safe. Reports were coming in from everywhere, some less reliable than others—including one rumor that Camp David had been hit and another that a plane had flown into the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Moments after the second plane hit the South Tower, Christine Limerick ran to the linen room on the third floor and told her staff to drop everything and leave. Immediately.
She heard American Airlines Flight 77 crash into the Pentagon. “It sounded like an explosion,” she recalled.
When she returned to her office, she realized she couldn’t account for maid Mary Arnold. She tried to go back upstairs into the residence to search for her, but the Secret Service wouldn’t let her. She was told she had two minutes to get out of the White House and that a plane was on its way.
“Nobody questions them when it’s on lockdown,” she said. Arnold somehow got out of the White House and had enough money on her to get home.
Limerick remembers being haunted when she realized that not everyone would be allowed to evacuate the potential target. “The look on the faces of the Secret Service agents who were told that they had to stay,” she said. “I will never forget that.”
Workers say the Secret Service told everyone to head north because they thought the plane would come from the south—a less obstructed flight path to the White House. Cooks, butlers, carpenters, and maids fanned out, running for their lives. Some members of the Pastry Shop walked across Arlington Memorial Bridge, crossing the Potomac together and gathering at the nearest person’s home.
Finney and half a dozen of her colleagues went to one of the florists’ houses on Capitol Hill, where they huddled around the television in disbelief. They had all run out so fast that hardly anyone had time to collect their purses, leaving them all without wallets. That night they walked miles to their cars back at the White House and drove home, many still in shock.
Some staffers didn’t make it out in time to evacuate at all. There were butlers on the second and third floors who were working on setting up the bars for the picnic—peeling lemons and making lemon wedges—who didn’t get the word that something was going on until nearly an hour after the house was evacuated. A few engineers were stuck in the basement for hours, oblivious to the panic upstairs and the danger they were in.
Amid the chaos, one butler ran down to his locker in the basement to change his clothes before riding home on his motorcycle. The gate slammed behind him, trapping him, and he couldn’t get out until a Secret Service officer recognized him and finally opened the gate.
A LITTLE AFTER ten that morning, a few minutes after the World Trade Center’s South Tower collapsed and about twenty minutes before the North Tower followed, the first lady was collected from Senator Gregg’s office by Secret Service agents and an Emergency Response Team dressed in black wielding guns. “GET BACK!” they shouted to Capitol Hill staffers as they raced the startled first lady to a waiting car. At about the same time, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, when a group of brave passengers tried to wrestle control of the plane from the terrorists. If they hadn’t acted, that plane would likely have headed straight for the Capitol or the White House. Many White House workers credit the passengers on that plane for saving their lives.
There was a lot of discussion about where to take the first lady during those confusing hours. The Secret Service eventually decided to move her to their own headquarters, a few blocks away from the White House. She sat there for hours, in a windowless basement conference room, watching the video of the twin towers falling over and over.
Phone lines were jammed that day as petrified family members tried to make sure their loved ones were safe. Even the president had trouble reaching his wife from Air Force One after he took off from Florida. A little before noon, after three unsuccessful attempts, the Bushes finally managed to connect. She told him she’d reached their daughters and that they were safe.
Meanwhile dozens of residence workers dressed in their uniforms gathered in Lafayette Square across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Chef John Moeller described the aftermath of the Pentagon attack: “I could see huge plumes of smoke swirling in the sky—it was a beautiful day—it was as black as black can be. They were just swirling, swirling, swirling into the sky. I’ve never seen an explosion that big in my life.” Finally, a group of workers decided to walk to the nearby Capital Hilton in search of bathrooms, landlines, and a television.
Nearby, the busy Connecticut Avenue commercial district was in chaos. Drivers had gotten out of their cars and gone running down the street, worried that they would be caught in an attack. “Mass hysteria had taken over,” Walter Scheib recalls. “I remember walking by a BMW 700 series sitting in the middle of Connecticut Avenue with the doors open and the engine running and nobody in it.”
Laura Bush saw none of this. After hours of sitting in the windowless conference room, she was finally brought to the President’s Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House. Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials had been gathered there since that morning. Built for President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II, the command center is accessible only through a series of unfinished underground hallways with pipes hanging down from the ceiling. There she would wait to be reunited with her husband.
Florist Bob Scanlan was putting the finishing touches on the picnic table arrangements in the small Flower Shop underneath the North Portico when a friend called and told him the news. Stunned, he wound up at nearby Freedom Plaza, several blocks from the White House.
As he walked there with several colleagues, he heard the piercing noise of American Airlines Flight 77 slamming into the Pentagon. “We decided that we couldn’t stay there,” he said. “We were like lost souls.” He and a coworker walked more than two miles together to reach their homes on Capitol Hill.
AFTER HELPING CLEAR the picnic tables, Scheib and a group of residence staff worked in the kitchen from two o’clock in the afternoon until nine o’clock that evening, serving food (much of it prepared earlier for the barbecue) to the Secret Service, National Guard, D.C. police, and White House staff who had to stay behind. Leftovers were sent to the relief effort at the Pentagon. “Four of them [residence workers] served over five hundred meals to the staff that were in and around the White House,” Walters said.
When people thanked him for the food, Scheib replied, “Just keep whatever the hell’s on the outside on the outside, will you?”
Once the lawn was cleared, Cliber and a handful of others finally tried to leave the White House, only to find themselves locked in by security doors. A plane had been spotted overhead, and the Secret Service ordered them down to the bomb shelter, a corridor running west to east under the White House. They stayed down in the old shelter until around eight o’clock that night. (The plane overhead turned out to be a U.S. military aircraft.)
When they learned of the death toll—all told, nearly three thousand people lost their lives that day—all anyone who works at America’s most famous house could think was, That could have been us.
That evening the first lady finally got to see the president when they were reunited in the President’s Emergency Operations Center.
The Secret Service recommended that the Bushes sleep on an old bed in the basement, but they refused. “I’ve got to get some sleep, in our own bed,” the president said. To the Bushes, the White House was home. They were even more fiercely attached to it now that it had narrowly missed total destruction.
AFTER THE ATTACKS, the Secret Service wanted to close the White House to tours. Early on the morning of September 12, Chief Usher Gary Walters approached the president as he walked to the Oval Office and lobbied for the public tours to remain open. “Mr. President, last night you said everybody should go about their normal activities. One normal activity that will be watched very closely is that the White House is open for tours.”
The president paused and replied, “You’re right.”
In the wake of the attacks, however, the decision was made to close them. The September 11 attacks weren’t the only cause for concern; just a week later, letters containing anthrax spores arrived at the offices of several news media figures as well as two Democratic senators. Walters said that some members of the residence staff were put on preventative drugs in case they were exposed to anthrax.
Bill Cliber would never be the same after 9/11. He knew how it felt to be scared as he walked into work every day; after all, his White House career had started shortly before Kennedy’s assassination. But this was different.
“It shook me. I had my time in,” he said, referring to the years of service that government workers need in order to qualify to get a significant portion of their pay in retirement. Still, he wouldn’t leave because he had promised himself that he would work at the White House for forty years, so he kept on going.
After September 11, though, the mood changed at the White House for everyone. The Curator’s Office deposed members of the staff, asking them to talk about what they went through that day for their records. The glamour of working at the White House was overtaken by fear. Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier said that he and his staff were completely unaware why they were being evacuated so urgently, because they didn’t have a TV in their kitchen. Afterward he demanded that one be installed. After 9/11, most of the workers decided to keep a bit of cash and their White House pass on them at all times in case they needed to leave quickly.
Betty Monkman, who was in charge of preserving and cataloguing all of the important artwork and furniture in the White House, had to worry not only about saving her own life but also which historic pieces must be salvaged in case of an emergency. The Lansdowne portrait of George Washington in the East Room and the Gettysburg Address in the Lincoln Bedroom are among the top priorities.
Reflecting on that horrible day, she says she is still furious that there was no clear evacuation plan for the building. “This young woman who worked in the Usher’s Office came running through our office saying, ‘Get out, get out, get out!’ and then the White House police said ‘Go south!’ and then some people said ‘Go north!’ It was so chaotic.”
Monkman had decided to go to the bomb shelter that morning, but when she got halfway down she thought, Oh my God, if they bombed us we’d be buried under the rubble. So she headed back upstairs and went to Lafayette Square, where ambulances and fire trucks blazed past her on their way to the Pentagon.
Scheib said the household workers are not the priority in a crisis and shouldn’t expect the Secret Service to worry about them. “We are domestic staff, we are not the thrust of anything,” he said. “If you’re going to be there, you have to understand there’s a target on the back of every person who works at the White House.”
Scheib was sad to see the enormity of the attacks weigh on the president. Bush seemed as if he “literally had the weight of the world on his shoulders.” Always aware of how food affects moods, Scheib went from creating more contemporary cuisine to preparing pure comfort food for the president and the countless world leaders who came to show their sympathy and to strategize in the weeks following the terrorist attacks. “I went back to my mother’s table,” Scheib said.
Counselors from Bethesda Naval Hospital came in to talk to the workers about the trauma they had experienced. Cliber spoke with a counselor, but no one had any time-tested advice for the staff: “Nobody had ever been through that.”
Florist Wendy Elsasser says she still can’t talk about that day without crying. For months, Mesnier had panic attacks taking his morning shower. His wife and son begged him not to go back to work, and he listened when Gary Walters gathered the staff about a week after 9/11 and said they should leave if they couldn’t stand the pressure.
But just like Bill Cliber, Mesnier couldn’t bring himself to go. “You have to understand, I believe this job was made for me,” he said. “It’s where I belong.”
First Lady Laura Bush was comforted that no one quit out of fear. She told me that watching the residence staff go back to work made her feel better about living in the White House. “We knew we were going to be there and we were confident that we would be safe, but on the other hand they could have chosen another job or just said, ‘You know, this is just too much stress now. I’d rather go on,’” she said. “They didn’t. None of them did.”