The transformation in the household from one Administration to another is as sudden as death. By that I mean it leaves you with a mysterious emptiness. In the morning you serve breakfast to a family with whom you have spent years. At noon that family is gone out of your life and here are new faces, new dispositions, and new likes and dislikes.
—ALONZO FIELDS, BUTLER AND MAÎTRE D’, 1931–1953,
MY 21 YEARS IN THE WHITE HOUSE
It’s the only time I ever had a job quit me.
—WALTER SCHEIB, EXECUTIVE CHEF, 1994–2005
Once or twice a decade, on an often bone-chillingly cold day in January, Americans are riveted by the public transfer of power from one president to the next. Hundreds of thousands of people flood the National Mall to watch the president-elect take the oath of office, in a serene and carefully choreographed ceremony that Lady Bird Johnson called “the great quadrennial American pageant.”
Behind the scenes, however, this peaceful ceremony is accompanied by an astounding number of complex logistics. Laura Bush calls the “transfer of families” a “choreographic masterpiece, done with exceptional speed,” and its successful execution depends on the institutional knowledge and the flexibility of the residence staff. The hum of White House activity starts even earlier than usual on Inauguration Day, with workers coming in before the break of dawn. By the time their day has come to an end, a new era in American history has begun.
The White House belongs to the outgoing family until noon, when the new president’s term begins. On the morning of the inauguration, the president hosts a small coffee reception for the new first family. Just before the first family departs, the staff crams into the opulent State Dining Room, where they have served so many state dinners, to say good-bye to the family. They are often overcome by the range of emotions they feel—trading one boss, and in some cases a friend, for another in the span of just six hours. In many cases they have had eight years to grow close to the departing family; they have seldom had any time to get to know the mansion’s new residents. There is rarely a dry eye in the room—even though many may be excited about the future.
“When the Clintons came down and Chelsea came with them, they didn’t say a word,” Head Housekeeper Christine Limerick recalled about Inauguration Day 2001. “I’ll get emotional about this now—[President Clinton] looked at every person dead on in the face and said, ‘Thank you.’ The whole room just broke up.”
During the farewell, residence workers present the family with a gift—sometimes the flag that flew over the White House on the day that the president was inaugurated—placed in a beautiful hand-carved box designed by White House carpenters. In 2001, Limerick, Chief Florist Nancy Clarke, and Chief Curator Betty Monkman gave Hillary Clinton a large pillow made from swatches of fabrics that she had selected to decorate different rooms in the house.
There is very little time for reflection. At around eleven o’clock in the morning, the two first families leave the White House for the Capitol. Between then and approximately five o’clock in the afternoon—when the new president and his family return to rest and prepare for the inaugural balls—the staff must complete the job of moving one family out and another family in. In that rare moment, when the eyes of Washington and the world are trained away from the White House toward the Capitol, the staff is grateful that the public’s attention is temporarily diverted from the turbulent activity within the residence walls.
Since employing professional movers for one day would require an impractical array of security checks, the residence staff is solely responsible for moving the newly elected president in and the departing president and his family out. No outside help is allowed. Throughout the day, even as they continue to perform their traditional roles, the residence workers also serve as professional movers, with just six hours to complete the move. The job is so large, and so physically demanding, that everyone is called in to help: pot washers in the kitchen help arrange furniture, and carpenters can be found placing framed photographs on side tables. The move is so labor intensive that on the day of the Clintons’ arrival one staffer sustained a serious back injury from lifting a sofa and was unable to return to work for several months.
For Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy, Inauguration Day is the most important day of his career. The Operations Department usually handles receptions, dinners, rearranging furniture for the tapings of TV interviews, and outdoor events, but during the inauguration they are the team that “moves ’em in and moves ’em out,” Savoy says. The trucks carrying the new family’s belongings are allowed in through one set of gates, and dozens of residence workers from the Operations, Engineering, Carpenters, and Electricians shops race to remove furniture from the trucks and place them precisely where the first family’s interior decorator wants them. “The best transition is when they don’t lose” and get to stay another four years, Savoy joked, masking the very serious anxiety that comes with this astounding task.
In the six hours between the departure of the first family and the arrival of the newly elected president and his family, the staff has to put in fresh rugs and brand-new mattresses and headboards, remove paintings, and essentially redecorate in the incoming family’s preferred style. They unpack the family’s boxes, fold their clothes perfectly, and place them in their drawers. They even put toothpaste and toothbrushes on bathroom counters. No detail is overlooked.
Florist Bob Scanlan helped with the transition from Clinton to George W. Bush in 2001. As transitions go, the Bushes’ was relatively easy, since they knew the territory better than most. George W. Bush was a frequent visitor to the residence when his father was president. The Bushes were used to being surrounded by a large staff, and Laura Bush recognizes that they “had a huge advantage” over other first families because they had spent so much time at the White House when the first President Bush (“old man Bush” as the staffers affectionately call him) was in office. “The only other family that had that were John Quincy and Louisa Adams.”
Bill Clinton was well aware of the Bush’s familiarity with the house and its staff and joked that Bush even knew where to find the light switches. Clinton, on the other hand, had been to the White House only a handful of times before his inauguration: once, as a teenage member of the American Legion Boys Nation, when he was photographed shaking President Kennedy’s hand; once as a guest of the Carters in 1977 (which also marked Hillary Clinton’s first visit); and several times for the National Governors Association dinners during his terms as governor of Arkansas. Before they moved in, Hillary said she had only been to the second floor once, when Barbara Bush gave her a tour after her husband won the election. She had never even seen the third floor. When they moved in, Hillary delved into the history of the house, asking curators to compile a book showing how every room looked through history back to the earliest photographs and drawings.
In the modern era, however, Barack Obama is the president who found the transition the most challenging. He moved with his family from their home in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood directly into the White House. The Obamas were even less accustomed to a household staff than the Clintons: they had one housekeeper in Chicago, but not a nanny, leaving their daughters, Sasha and Malia, with Michelle’s mother, Marian, during the campaign. Without the benefit of growing up the son of a president—or living in the relative luxury of a governor’s mansion—it took time for Obama and his family to grow comfortable with their new lives.
ON JANUARY 20, 2009, 1.8 million people huddled together in twenty-eight-degree weather to watch Barack Obama become the first African American to take the oath of office. It was not only the largest crowd that had ever attended a presidential inauguration, it was also the largest attendance for any event in the history of Washington, D.C.
Most Americans had never heard of Barack Obama until 2004, when, as an Illinois state senator, he delivered an electrifying keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. His meteoric rise left the Obamas with very little time to prepare for life in the White House. Knowing this, the residence staff wanted to help ease their transition. It must have felt surreal to Obama when the chief usher turned to him and said, “Hello, Mr. President, welcome to your new home,” as he walked through the imposing North Portico doors for the first time as president. During brief moments of quiet time that afternoon and evening, between parade watching on Pennsylvania Avenue and their first inaugural ball, the Obamas grazed on a buffet in the Old Family Dining Room where no detail was overlooked.
That day was the result of months of careful advance planning. For residence workers, the transition to the next administration begins about eighteen months before the inauguration, when the chief usher prepares books for the incoming president and first lady (with the added challenge of not knowing who they will be) that include a detailed White House layout, a list of staff, and an overview of allowable changes to the Oval Office.
Gary Walters, who served as chief usher from 1986 until 2007, started gathering information on the candidates during the primaries, well before a general election candidate is selected. It was particularly difficult when President Ford, President Carter, and President George H. W. Bush lost their bids for a second term. “The ownership is of the family that’s there but you have to be watching out for what’s going to occur,” Walters said.
In December, after the election and before the inauguration, Walters would arrange for the incoming family to get a guided tour of the White House from the current first lady. It’s then that the incoming first lady would be presented with a book containing the names and photographs of the people who work in the residence. The book helps the first family learn the names of everyone who works in the house and is partly a security measure, so that if they see anyone unfamiliar they can alert the Secret Service.
The departing first family pays for their personal things to be moved out of the White House. The incoming president also pays for bringing belongings into the mansion either out of the new first family’s own coffers or from funds raised for the campaign or transition. It is the job of the incoming family to coordinate with the Secret Service to get their personal effects to the White House the morning of the inauguration.
One logistical challenge that comes with every inauguration is the transfer of the incoming first family’s furniture and larger belongings to the White House. After the election of 1960, the Kennedys’ social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, told Jackie in a memo that she had asked the Eisenhowers’ social secretary, Mary Jane McCaffree, “if we couldn’t smuggle a lot of stuff over without the [Eisenhowers] knowing and she said yes, the head Usher could store cartons, suitcases, etc., out of sight and then whisk them into sight on the stroke of 12 noon. Isn’t that marvelous??? Right out of Alfred Hitchcock.” Baldrige recalled pulling up to the White House with Jackie’s maid, Providencia Paredes, and Jack Kennedy’s valet, George Thomas, in a car with the inaugural gown and all of the Kennedys’ luggage. They arrived as everyone else was gathered at the Capitol for the inauguration ceremony. The snow-covered South Grounds were bathed in bright sunshine. “We had timed the pilgrimage from Georgetown to the White House so that we would not arrive before twelve noon, because at noon, officially, the new president takes possession of the White House.”
Nearly a half-century later, the same conditions applied. The Obama family’s advisers started meeting with residence staff soon after the election, and by the week before the inauguration, much of the Obamas’ furniture had already been shipped to the White House, where it was stored in the China Room on the Ground Floor so that it could be moved quickly upstairs. The Bushes had told Chief Usher Stephen Rochon that they wanted to make the move as easy as possible for everyone, but Rochon was eager to make sure the Bushes never felt as if they were being pushed out. “We want to keep it out of the sight of the existing family. Not that they didn’t know it was there, but we didn’t want them to feel that we were trying to move them out.”
Other Obama advisers made similar connections with the residence staff. More than two months before the inauguration, Chief Florist Nancy Clarke met with the Obamas’ decorator, Michael Smith, to discuss floral arrangements for the private rooms where friends and family would be staying on the night of the inauguration.
“There’s very limited time to prepare the house, so there’s a whole team working on making certain that everything was as perfect as it could be in the time that we had allotted,” said Social Secretary Desirée Rogers, a close confidante of the Obamas since their Chicago days and their first social secretary. On Inauguration Day “we were in the house as soon as we could be,” she recalls, “laying out things, getting things ready, putting the clothing in each room.”
Weeks before the inauguration, Rogers met with the florists and discussed what kind of flowers would sit on the cabaret tables and which kind of candelabras and candlelight they would use for those precious moments the first family has to enjoy their new, heady surroundings before they change for the balls.
“All those little things can make everybody feel comfortable and welcome,” Florist Bob Scanlan said.
The new president filled most of the West Wing with loyal aides from his presidential campaign and from his early political career, including longtime spokesman Robert Gibbs, whom he named as his first White House press secretary, and close friend Valerie Jarrett, whom he brought on board as a senior adviser. Michelle Obama brought her own team of aides, many of whom she had known for years. A couple of days after moving in, Michelle asked her East Wing staff and the entire residence staff to gather in the East Room. Katie McCormick Lelyveld, the first lady’s then press secretary, remembers her boss making it clear who was in charge.
“This is the team I walked in the door with,” the first lady told the longtime residence staffers as she gestured toward her small cadre of political aides. “You guys are part of our new team,” she told them before turning to address her own staffers, including Lelyveld: “It’s on you to make sure that you know everybody here. They were here before you and they’re the ones that make this place tick. We are on their ground now.” The first lady’s staff then circulated around the room, introducing themselves.
“At the time it was a matter of us investing in them to make sure that we knew what their role was, and how they fit into the bigger picture,” Lelyveld said. “We were the new kids.”
From those first days onward, Lelyveld looked to residence workers for advice. When she wanted to think of a clever way to preview the Obamas’ first state dinner menu, she went down to the kitchen and asked Executive Chef Cristeta “Cris” Comerford how she thought they should lay out the room so that members of the media could see what she was preparing without distracting her from her work. When she asked workers from the Engineering and Operations departments about rearranging furniture for a TV interview on the State Floor, she was reminded that the White House is not the average household. “You’re working in a museum,” she says. “It’s not just two chairs for an interview,” but “two chairs in the Blue Room that are older than you are—by centuries—that need to be moved out of the way. So you defer to the staff whose job it is to take care of that space.” (The furnishings are so precious that one housekeeper was told by his boss that if he broke a certain French gilded bronze clock that had been on display at the White House since 1817 he should not bother ever coming back. He wouldn’t make enough money in his lifetime to replace it.)
On the Friday after President Obama’s inauguration, the president casually made the rounds to introduce himself. When he came to the second-floor kitchen, he found several butlers gathered around the TV. He playfully punched James Jeffries on the shoulder.
“What are you looking at?” he asked them.
“We were looking at what was going on at the Lincoln Memorial before the inauguration,” Jeffries replied. “Congratulations on becoming president.”
“Thank you,” Obama said with his trademark ear-to-ear grin and walked out of the room.
A few minutes later, when he came back into the kitchen, Jeffries got up the nerve to add: “I just congratulated you. Tomorrow, if I happen to be called to come to work, you can congratulate me for having been working here for fifty years.”
“I ain’t got to wait until tomorrow,” Obama replied, without missing a beat. “I can do that right now. Congratulations.”
Though Desirée Rogers describes their relationship with the staff as simply “very, very cordial,” the new president was considerably more reserved and less chatty than his immediate predecessors. Some staffers said they missed the easy camaraderie they had established with presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush. “With the Bushes, they wanted you to feel close to them,” Chief Usher Rochon said. With the Obamas, “you had to keep it completely professional.” Yet the Obamas have formed friendships with some of the men and women who work behind the scenes, and Butler James Jeffries said there’s an unspoken understanding and respect between the Obamas and the largely African American butler staff about the realities of being black in America. President Obama acknowledged this when he said that part of the butlers’ warmth to his family is because “they look at Malia and Sasha and they say, ‘Well, this looks like my grandbaby, or this looks like my daughter.’”
Doorman Vincent Contee, eighty-four, worked every Monday and Tuesday from 1988 to 2009, escorting the president to and from the Oval Office on the elevator. “We got along swell,” he recalls. “I would see him in the mornings and he would talk and ask me how my day was going.” During his twenty-one years at the White House, Contee couldn’t afford to get too starstruck, in addition to talking to presidents on a regular basis, he also escorted icons like Nelson Mandela and Elizabeth Taylor on the elevator to meet the president in the family’s private quarters. He says even presidents can’t hide their exhaustion sometimes. There would come a point when every president he served would turn to him during that short elevator ride and sigh, “I just wish I could go back to bed and sleep all day.”
On the way to the Oval Office, Obama would talk sports with Contee. “He knew I was a football fan. I’m a Redskins fan. He would tell me when they got beat, you know, what they didn’t do or what they should do.” Sometimes Obama would ask him to take their Portuguese water dog, Bo, out for a walk on the grounds. When they were done, Contee would bring Bo back up to his room on the third floor.
Still, the Obamas proved an especially private family, and Chief Usher Rochon sensed a certain distance between the staff and the new president. The Obamas seemed “uncomfortable,” he said, having “so many butlers and housekeepers waiting on them hand and foot.” For a couple who’d only recently finished paying off their own student loans, the level of personal service afforded by the White House staff must have been unnerving. “You have to give them their privacy,” Contee told me. “You’d talk to them momentarily and then they would be on their way and you would be on your way.”
The Obamas were especially anxious to raise their daughters in as normal an environment as possible, even while living in a household staffed with dozens of cooks, butlers, and maids. In 2011, Michelle Obama told an interviewer that her older daughter, Malia, who was thirteen at the time, was going to start doing her own laundry—and that her own mother, Marian Robinson, who lives in a suite on the third floor, would teach her. “My mother still does her own laundry. She doesn’t want strangers touching her intimate wears.” The first lady’s former stylist, Michael “Rahni” Flowers, confirms that “Michelle is a no-nonsense kind of mother—and so is her mother. All they have to do is give you that eye, it will turn you into stone, it will stop you in your tracks.”
Katie McCormick Lelyveld remembers how the first lady made the ground rules clear to her daughters. “While she appreciated that there are staff there to pay attention to those details, those staff are not there for the girls.” Michelle reminded her daughters: “Don’t get used to someone else making your bed, that’s on your chores list.”
Still, after two grueling years on the campaign trail and a frenetic schedule, the Obamas appreciated the help. “There are certain conveniences that just make what are otherwise very long days a lot easier, like someone who’s in charge of figuring out your dinner plans,” Lelyveld explained.
Traditions die hard at the executive mansion. When the Obamas told the butlers they could trade in their starched tuxes for button-down shirts and slacks on the weekends, not everyone took them up on the offer. “For some of the older gentlemen, who are in their seventies and eighties, they might have several tuxes that they’re just used to and anything else would mean getting new clothes. They might just be more comfortable in those tuxes,” Lelyveld said. When many butlers insisted on sticking with their formal wear, she said she felt awkward wearing khakis or jeans around them, even though she was used to the more comfortable dress code on the campaign trail. “I respected how much respect they had for what they did.”
The Obamas clearly miss their lives in Chicago. Obama has said that “every president is acutely aware that we are just temporary residents” of the White House, adding, “we’re renters here.” After two grueling campaigns, the president refuses to miss family dinners more than twice a week. Those nightly meals were prepared by Sam Kass, the personal chef they had brought from Chicago, up until December 2014 when Kass left his post to move to New York.
As the president’s former personal assistant Reggie Love recalls, on his walk from the living quarters to the West Wing every morning, Obama would ask Chief Usher Stephen Rochon for updates on the kinds of simple household matters that everyone deals with, whether they live in the executive mansion or a suburban cul-de-sac. “You live in a building and someone’s responsible for the maintenance of the building. So if the water pressure wasn’t right, or the Wi-Fi’s not working, you’ve got to talk to somebody about it, right?”
One of the president’s preoccupations, in the early days, was the White House basketball court. During the 2008 campaign, Obama had enjoyed the ritual of playing a pickup game on the days of nominating primaries and caucuses. The two times he didn’t play, in New Hampshire and Nevada, he lost the contests. Not long after taking office, he told Rochon that he wanted the South Lawn tennis court, shrouded in pine trees, to be converted into a full basketball court. Removable basketball hoops were installed, new lines were painted on the court, and basketballs with White House seals were ordered. The effort cost $4,995.
The project took several months to complete. Eventually Obama grew impatient, telling Rochon on their morning walks: “You know, Admiral, this is not rocket science.”
One morning, Rochon didn’t mention the court’s progress. When the president asked him how his “hoops were coming,” he replied: “Well, Mr. President, I’m pleased to report that it will be done by eleven-thirty today.”
Obama’s eyes lit up. By ten-thirty, an hour before it was scheduled to be ready, he was out on the court playing with Love, a onetime forward for the Duke Blue Devils.
MICHELLE OBAMA’S STYLIST, Michael “Rahni” Flowers, had done her hair since she was a teenager, and he was the incoming first lady’s choice for the inauguration. Though hairstylists are not officially on the residence staff, they offer a unique behind-the-scenes perspective on the events of that memorable day.
Flowers’s day started at 4:00 A.M. at Blair House, the elegant town house across the street from the White House, where the president-elect and his family traditionally stay before they officially move into the executive mansion. That morning he styled Michelle, her daughters, and her mother, and he traveled with the Obamas throughout the day, to Capitol Hill and all ten official inaugural balls that night.
Flowers noticed immediately how excited the mostly African American butlers were about the incoming president. “There was a pride that goes beyond pride—this is something that happened that they never would have dreamed in their lifetime,” said Flowers, who is black himself. “I saw it in the way they talked, the way they walked. You could tell by their smiling faces—it was beyond their wildest dreams.”
Everyone seemed calm that morning, he said, except for Marian Robinson, the first lady’s mother. Robinson was on the verge of a dramatic change: she had just started a track club for seniors in Chicago, and had recently won a track meet, but Michelle had asked her to live with them at the White House, to help with the girls, and now she was leaving her hometown for a new—and very tightly regimented—life.
“She’s a very independent woman,” Flowers says. She might not have chosen the change for herself, he believes, but “she let me know that Michelle wants her to do this, and she’s got the kids to think about.” When she left her beloved Chicago, Robinson said, “They’re dragging me with them, and I’m not that comfortable, but I’m doing exactly what you do. You do what has to be done.”
Yet the incoming president seemed unfazed by the dramatic change. After delivering an ambitious inaugural address—citing policy objectives like health care reform while renewing his broader promise to change the divisive rhetoric in Washington—he asked casually, “How did I do?”
“Barack’s always very calm, his mood is always controlled,” Flowers said. “Michelle’s a more in-the-moment type of person.”
Because of a glitch in the schedule (someone forgot to account for the traditional Capitol luncheon after the oath of office) the Obamas had only forty-five minutes to prepare for the balls that evening. As they rushed to get ready, the president stopped by the small beauty parlor on the second floor of the White House and asked his wife which bow tie she thought he should wear.
“I want to look my best for you,” he told her.
As he was walking out, Flowers noticed that one of the president’s French cuffs didn’t go through all the way.
“Barack, check your cuffs,” Flowers pointed.
“Oh that’s nice, people care,” Obama said affably.
When the first lady’s wardrobe stylist, Ikram Goldman, whose high-end Chicago boutique Michelle Obama frequented before moving into the White House, heard Flowers call the president “Barack,” she snapped at him. “She suggested that I should call him ‘Mr. President,’” Flowers recalled. “When I called him ‘Barack’ he smiled. I went to their wedding, I’ve met [Michelle’s] dad, he hasn’t changed with me,” Flowers said, still obviously smarting from the rebuke. “That would have been unnatural for me.” That transition—from personal names to formal titles—is a rite of passage for many friends of future presidents. The Kennedys’ social secretary, Letitia Baldrige—who later became an arbiter of etiquette—had known the couple as “Jack and Jackie,” but they became “Mr. President and Mrs. Kennedy” immediately after the presidential election in November 1960. “President and Mrs. Kennedy may have been young, and personal friends from earlier times, but a new aura of great dignity surrounded them now.” Few people call President Obama by his first name anymore.
INAUGURATION DAY—AN OVERWHELMING event for any new president—begins hours before the oath of office is administered at noon at the Capitol. In the early morning he gets a national security briefing from the outgoing president’s national security adviser and his own incoming national security adviser. At the end of the briefing, a senior officer from the White House military office explains the top secret codes used to launch a nuclear strike. Once he is sworn in, an aide with the “football”—a briefcase carrying the codes—will always be close by. (After he is sworn in, the president will be given the card allowing him to actually launch the strikes.) This all happens before a morning church service.
While adjusting to the weight of his new job, the new president must also get used to life in the residence. The day after his inauguration, President Obama came into the East Room to introduce himself to the staff. The president had “a look of surprise,” Florist Bob Scanlan recalled. “It’s like, ‘Wow.’ He didn’t realize that there were that many people just to take care of the house.” The staff Obama greeted that day was responsible not only for servicing the private quarters, but also for maintaining the State Floor, including the constant traffic from public tours.
West Wing staffers, many of whom grew used to a more ad hoc way of life during the campaign, are suddenly thrust into their new roles with little understanding of how things work. For Obama’s personal secretary, Katie Johnson, Inauguration Day itself was “complete chaos.” When she arrived at the White House that morning, she was told she wasn’t cleared for entry. “I was on my own personal crash course,” she says. (Top Obama aide Denis McDonough eventually cleared her through security.) And her problems didn’t stop there. “Looking back on it, the West Wing is tiny,” she says, “but at the time it felt like a maze.” Once she was settled in the “Outer Oval,” her small office located just outside the Oval Office, she spent much of the day getting a hurried tutorial about how to use the “shockingly complicated” phone system. During the first few weeks of the administration, she remembers being unable to transfer a call from a high-level official to the president, who was on board Air Force One. The call never went through and eventually Obama himself had to call the person directly from the plane. “I was so panicked,” Johnson recalls.
For the residence staff, of course, this was not their first rodeo, and they were able to calm Johnson’s frazzled nerves. The West Wing staff relies on the Usher’s Office to help them settle in, and Johnson kept the ushers busy with one question or another, including where to find the Flower Shop so that she could ask them to refill the gala apples the president keeps in the Oval Office. “I called the Usher’s Office if I had questions about anything,” she recalls. “If someone wanted some particular wine in the Oval, I’d call the Usher’s Office and they would find it.”
Sometimes she needed help from the valets and ushers locating important presidential memos, especially when there was a piece of paper the West Wing staff was looking for that nobody could find. “Whenever I was panicked, desperately looking for something—and the president’s traveling so I can’t ask him where it is—and people are telling me there’s a piece of paper that has some important decision on it, and the president says he brought it down to me and I swear I don’t have it, I’d ask them to check,” she says breathlessly. “They’d go look for it, and ninety percent of the time they could find it.”
Reggie Love remembers how patient the ushers were in helping him “navigate the back of the house of the White House.” He says, “There’s a nickname for every hall, there’s a nickname for every room.”
After a few days the Obamas started “moving about the house little by little,” Scanlan recalled, usually after the tourists and most of the residence staff had left for the day. “It’s a process for them too. It’s a process to know almost a hundred people, because they don’t see them all at once. Maybe one housekeeper, one florist at a time. You may only have one chef up there doing the cooking. They don’t know all the other people who are down in those workshops and eventually they do meet them but it’s over a period of time.”
And eventually they get used to the help, or at least learn to live with it. “I think the White House staff has really figured out how to accommodate families and make them feel as normal as possible, even though there are dozens of people around, dropping off flowers, vacuuming, fixing things up all the time,” Michelle Obama said. “You begin to see them as family in so many ways and that’s the beauty of this place.”
EACH FIRST FAMILY behaves differently around the staff. In the late 1920s and early 1930s the family of Herbert Hoover often preferred to have the workers out of sight; the sounding of three bells would send maids, butlers, and housemen scurrying into closets. FDR and Truman were much more relaxed, telling the staff that it was all right to keep working when they walked into a room.
In modern times, relations between the first family and the staff have grown much more comfortable. Maid Ivaniz Silva said the first lady usually knows everyone’s names within a week—at least those of the dozen or so maids and butlers who regularly work on the second and third floors.
One day, Silva said, she was cleaning when Barbara Bush walked in and stopped her.
“Oh, I haven’t seen you yet,” Mrs. Bush told her.
“But I’m in the book,” she insisted.
“Are you sure?” The First Lady went to go get the book listing the residence staffers prepared by the chief usher. She returned a few minutes later.
“Oh, this is not a good enough picture. That’s why I don’t recognize you!” Bush teased her.
Along with new furniture and paint, each first family brings a different spirit to the White House. The sea change from the Eisenhowers to the Kennedys was both superficial—from grandparents who personified the 1950s to a beautiful young couple with two small children—and tangible. The staff had to get used to the Kennedys’ more relaxed style of entertaining: black tie instead of white tie, cocktails served before dinner, and smoking allowed everywhere. At formal dinners, the Eisenhowers served six courses and sat their guests at a giant E-shaped banquet table. The Kennedys quickly decided to change the seating to fifteen round tables seating eight or ten apiece, and pared down dinners to four courses.
Jackie Kennedy, who was used to being surrounded by servants and wealth, was eager to delve right into running the 132-room mansion. The morning after her husband’s inauguration, she approached Chief Usher J. B. West. “I’d like to meet all the staff today,” she told him. “Could you please take me around the White House to meet them at their work?”
Reluctant to present the first lady to the staff workshops without advance warning, West suggested bringing the staff to her in groups of three instead. Each group, from the ushers and butlers to the maids and cooks, were incredibly nervous about the formal inspection. When they got off the elevator, they were startled to see the first lady wearing pants (a particularly shocking sight at the time) and brown boots, standing there with disheveled hair. As the staffers introduced themselves one by one, West recalled, Jackie tried to think of ways to memorize their names. She repeated each of them slowly and though she didn’t take notes she remembered all of them. One of the maids who met her that day, Lucinda Morman, was a skilled seamstress; the first lady would later ask her to tailor her one-of-a-kind Oleg Cassini gowns.
Jackie Kennedy was a perfectionist and was deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of the residence. At night she scribbled notes to herself, checking off each item as it was completed throughout the day. She also wrote West daily notes on a yellow pad she carried everywhere.
“She always had a list for me,” recalled West. “Each person that had any authority over anything, she had their name, and under it there would be all the things that she wanted to discuss with each person.”
Mrs. Kennedy also noticed that some of the residence workers were nervous around the first family. She wrote a note about the maids: “They are so terrified of being in W.H.—of First Family, etc., that they are rigid with fear and get panicky—even Lucinda who knows me well still apologizes 10 minutes if she drops a pin.” To help them overcome their fears, she suggested that they come to the second and third floors more often so that they get used to being around her family. “I can’t teach them anything—nor have time—when they are that scared.”
DOORMAN PRESTON BRUCE was used to the predictability of the Eisenhowers, who typically went to bed at ten o’clock. When the Kennedys returned from the inaugural balls at two o’clock in the morning, Bruce was sure they would be exhausted. Instead, they brought friends back to the White House to continue the party on the second floor—unaware that the residence workers had to stay until the first couple were safely in bed. At 3:15 A.M. Bruce escorted the last guest out and turned off the lights in the West Sitting Hall. When he got to the president’s bedroom, no one was there.
“Is that you, Bruce? I’m here in the Lincoln Bedroom,” the president called out. Bruce couldn’t believe it. Workers thought the Lincoln Bedroom was cursed. Kennedy ordered a Coke and asked Bruce to open a window to let the cold night air in. Jackie called out from the Queens’ Bedroom across the hall and asked the ever-obliging Bruce for an aperitif. He did not get home until after four o’clock in the morning.
Despite that long first night, Bruce learned to love the Kennedys, and because he worked nights he got a glimpse of the more intimate side of the family. He’d laugh when he witnessed the beautiful young couple scamper between each other’s bedrooms late at night when he brought up their after-dinner drinks. (“Don’t worry, Bruce. We know you’re married too,” Jackie Kennedy would say, her eyes twinkling.)
From 1953 to 1977 Bruce arrived at the White House at three o’clock in the afternoon, greeting dignitaries at the door, calming nervous visitors before they met the president, escorting the president from the Oval Office to his residence at night, and waiting until he was in bed to go home. He was a star at the White House. Other staffers praised his elegance and his ability to remain calm under the enormous pressure of his job. Butler Lynwood Westray calls him a “diplomat.”
“That’s why he was so well liked, some people have it and some don’t. He had it.”
The day after the Kennedy inauguration, Bruce escorted the president and the first lady upstairs after dinner. He breathed a sigh of relief at the thought of getting home at a decent hour. “Bang! The elevator door opened in the hallway across from the Usher’s Office. Out popped the president. He charged down the hall, the Secret Service in hot pursuit,” Bruce wrote. Kennedy wanted to take a late-night walk and marched out the Northwest Gate into the freezing cold air without a coat. “Only twenty-four hours in the White House, and he had to escape.”
The Secret Service had to rein Kennedy in and told him he would have to limit walks to the eighteen acres surrounding the White House. From then on, Bruce was always prepared with two overcoats: one if the president decided to leave for his walk through the first-floor doors, and another if he chose the Ground Floor. Whenever he offered the president a coat and rain boots, the commander in chief protested. “He was like a little schoolboy, bound to run off unprotected into the cold.”
NOT EVERY FIRST family has enjoyed such a joyous arrival as the Kennedys. On the Monday after the 1992 election, the Clintons called interior decorator Kaki Hockersmith and asked her to perform the monumental task of redecorating the White House. Even though she had decorated the Arkansas governor’s mansion for them, she wasn’t expecting the call—she recalls being “very, very surprised”—but she accepted the invitation. Between the election and the inauguration, she visited the governor’s mansion several times to show the Clintons the different fabrics and furnishings she had selected for the residence.
“On the first of those occasions President Clinton was in a meeting with his transition staff and Hillary called him out of the meeting,” she said. She splayed out drapery swatches and rug designs on the kitchen counter to show him. (Clinton is the rare modern president who has shown such an interest in décor.) In the ensuing weeks, Hockersmith made several trips to the White House to work with the curators. They brought her to the huge climate-controlled storage facility about eleven miles outside of Washington in Riverdale, Maryland, where every piece of furniture that was once in the White House is stored in a warehouse. Incoming families can pick pieces they want to take out of storage and bring back to the residence.
The furniture in Riverdale is methodically organized into categories with rows of desks and writing tables situated alongside chests and rugs that sat in the Oval Office during different administrations. Pieces from different eras, each with an extensive provenance, are described and catalogued. The curators know where every candlestick and side table can be found in the massive space. There’s even a conservation studio with X-ray equipment where photography can be done for guidebooks. It is a far cry from theramshackle storage facility a stunned Jackie Kennedy visited at Fort Washington along the Potomac River in Maryland, where she was appalled to find precious antiques lying on the dirt floor.
Hockersmith carried with her a detailed floor plan, keeping track of the desired locations for pieces already in the house and new pieces from the warehouse. “We had this very ambitious plan,” Hockersmith said, sounding exhausted by the memory.
The Clintons began Inauguration Day with an interfaith church service. Afterward they stopped at Blair House before arriving at the White House at 10:27 A.M.—twenty-seven minutes late. The Bushes stood at the North Portico waiting to greet them.
“Welcome to your new house,” President George H. W. Bush told twelve-year-old Chelsea, who petted the Bush’s springer spaniel, Millie. The outgoing president wished his successor good luck—and, following tradition, left a note in the desk in the Oval Office offering advice to his successor. (When Clinton left office eight years later, he wrote a note to President George W. Bush and left behind the note that Bush’s father had left for him.) Details of the notes have not been made public.
On the big day, Hillary Clinton told Hockersmith that she didn’t want her to miss the inaugural ceremony, held at the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. But she needed her to get back to the White House as soon as it was over.
“We have to figure out a way to get you out of that mess and quickly back to the White House,” Hillary told her.
After the hour-long inaugural ceremony, Hillary told Hockersmith to look for a colonel on a corner in a van who would whisk her back to the White House to help oversee the move.
“I thought, how in the world are they going to work this out?” Hockersmith says.
Amid the cheering throng of people gathered at the Capitol on January 20, 1993, Hockersmith was astonished to see the van waiting for her. Every time they hit a security barrier, the police moved it. The crowd lining Pennsylvania Avenue awaiting the new president waved excitedly at her van. “They thought we might be someone really famous.”
“We just drove up to the South Lawn with a view of two large moving vans that said ‘Little Rock, Arkansas’ on them,” she says. “Quite an exciting drive.”
The Clintons spent roughly $400,000 redecorating the White House, all financed by private donations. But the effort raised some eyebrows, both within and outside the mansion. Even the normally discreet residence workers have called Hockersmith’s efforts disorganized, her expectations too high.
Chief Electrician Bill Cliber, who worked on nine transitions, said that the Clintons’ arrival was by far the most difficult. Shortly before the inauguration, Hockersmith told him that he and the other electricians needed to rehang seven chandeliers—now.
“Why does it have to be done now? Let them move in and we’ll do it one a day,” said Cliber.
“No, they want them all changed before they come in the door,” she replied.
Cliber had no choice. He went to the second-floor Treaty Room, which Clinton would use as a private study, to start work on one of the chandeliers.
Almost as soon as the Clintons returned from the inaugural parade, Hillary appeared in the Treaty Room. “How long are you going to be in this room?” she asked Cliber.
“Truthfully, I’m looking at maybe four hours,” he told her as he handled the elaborate crystal chandelier that was dismantled on the floor.
“Hmm, we’ll see about that,” she said, and stormed out.
Hockersmith poked her head in and told him to leave the room within twenty minutes. Cliber said he’d need more time just to collect the hundreds and hundreds of priceless crystals strewn about the floor. She replied: “Don’t worry about it. They can be replaced.”
“No, ma’am. This is crystal that can’t be replaced,” he told her indignantly.
Cliber did as he was told, leaving the Treaty Room a mess with crystals everywhere. But he wasn’t about to let the first lady, or her decorator, have the final word. Chief Curator Rex Scouten (who was well respected on the staff and had been an usher and then chief usher from 1969 to 1986 before he took the job as curator) locked the door to protect the chandelier until Cliber could get back to work. The electrician wasn’t allowed back in the room for three weeks.
Gary Walters is always careful not to single out any one administration for criticism. But when I asked him how the Clinton move-in went there was a long pause: “That’s when you get the most difficulty, when you’re going from one administration to another of different parties.” The Clintons, he said, “had no concept of what the White House was like.” He had to go up to the residence multiple times a day to answer questions.
Usher Nancy Mitchell was on duty early in the morning when the first couple came home from the inaugural balls. “President Clinton wanted to make a phone call, so I had gone upstairs with him and I hear this roar from him, ‘Nancy!’ and I say, ‘Yes, sir.’ He says, ‘How do I make a phone call?’” When the president picked up the phone, he was greeted not by a dial tone but by a White House operator; he was shocked that he couldn’t just dial a number himself. The entire phone system was changed shortly thereafter.
It did not help that the Clintons invited friends from Little Rock (“friends of Bill’s,” or “FOBs”) to help them unpack, which only served to complicate matters.
“We’ve been doing this for two hundred years,” said Usher Chris Emery. “They made all these promises to various people to come in and help. Of course we were upset, it was such a mess.” Emery, who had a difficult relationship with the Clintons and would eventually be fired during their administration, said that many FOBs actually had criminal records. According to Emery, the Secret Service called the Usher’s Office several times to report that some of the Arkansas guests had not passed their background checks and were deemed “do not admits.” Emery told agents, “The president’s expecting them. Make it happen.” They ended up having to assign Secret Service officers on every floor: “Typically if you bring a worker that has a ‘hit’ [on his background check] they have to be escorted.” Before long, much to Emery’s chagrin, there were several people with “hits” at the house.
Hockersmith took a hands-on approach to some elements of the redecoration, including the placement of the Clintons’ personal photographs and the knickknacks they brought with them from Little Rock, including a memorable collection of frogs. When Hillary and Bill were dating, it seemed, he had charmed her with a story from his childhood. The punch line was: “You can’t tell how far a frog will jump until you punch him.” Translation: You never know how far you can go until you try—an apt anecdote for the ambitious young couple. When her husband first ran for office, Hillary gave Bill a drawing of a frog being punched and jumping with the saying underneath. In 1993, for her birthday, Bill gave her a glass frog wearing a crown and a note that read: “This could have been me if you hadn’t come along.”
To Hockersmith, initially unaware of their sentimental significance, the frogs looked like a mishmash of misguided gifts. “Somebody goes to your house and they think, ‘Oh they must like frogs.’ Then you’re given a frog for your birthday.” She did her best to make them work.
When the first family returns to the White House from the parade viewing stands, Hockersmith recalls, “That’s when everyone else disappears.” The residence workers, who have been working to make the house perfect all day long, rush back to their respective shops to give the family some much-needed privacy.
Hockersmith would become a White House fixture, staying in the Queens’ Bedroom off and on throughout Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House as redecoration efforts continued. Her guest room on the second floor was separated from their living quarters by pocket doors that close off the west end from the east end of the residence. She tried to make the house brighter, especially focusing on turning a drab second-floor Butler’s Pantry into an eat-in kitchen where Chelsea could do her homework. But the redecoration was met with mixed reviews, with Hockersmith’s elaborate Victorian furnishings in the Lincoln Sitting Room coming in for particular criticism.
THERE HAS BEEN no transition in modern memory as shocking as the sudden and violent upheaval that brought the arrival of Lyndon B. Johnson and his family to the White House. The residence staff had to help a devastated first lady and her two children move out, even as they were grieving themselves, and at the same time they had to help the Johnsons move in. And it all had to be done without making Mrs. Kennedy feel rushed, or the Johnsons feel as though they were being ignored. “I’ve been on panels with other social secretaries and they make it all sound so exciting when they got there,” says Lady Bird’s social secretary, Bess Abell, a Katharine Hepburn–esque presence who speaks with great affection about the Johnsons. “I moved into the White House on an entirely different occasion. Instead of coming in with the excitement and the thrill of an inauguration, we moved into a house that was covered with black crepe on all the chandeliers and the columns.”
The new first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, often lamented the difficult position her family were suddenly thrust into. “People see the living and wish for the dead,” she’d say.
Out of respect for the president’s widow, Lyndon B. Johnson—who was largely disliked by Kennedy’s staff—did not move into the White House until December 7, 1963. He started working out of the Oval Office on November 26; before then he worked out of Room 274 in the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House. Some of Johnson’s advisers argued that moving in to the residence on December 7, the twenty-second anniversary of the horrific attack on Pearl Harbor, would be disrespectful. Others simply wanted to give Mrs. Kennedy more time before leaving the White House. Every move the Johnsons made must have been excruciating since nothing they did could help endear them to President Kennedy’s heartbroken aides.
Luci Baines Johnson, just sixteen years old at the time, remembers eavesdropping as her parents had what she called the “only argument” she can remember them ever having. “We have to move December seventh, Bird,” Johnson told his wife. “Lyndon, any day but that. Any day but that,” her mother pleaded, but in vain.
When the Johnson family finally arrived, their daughter Luci brought their beagles, “Him” and “Her,” in her convertible. Lady Bird and Bess and her press secretary, Liz Carpenter, brought breakable items, along with a portrait of House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a fellow Texan who was Johnson’s mentor.
At first the Johnsons seemed to treat the White House gingerly, as though they were impinging on sacred ground. But the residence staff, unlike Kennedy’s political aides, never made them feel like interlopers. “I never felt a sense of, ‘How could you be here?’” Luci told me. “It was, ‘Oh, how tough to have you come here this way. How can we help? How can we teach?’”
Not everyone was welcoming. After Kennedy’s assassination, Traphes Bryant, an electrician who started caring for the first family’s dogs with the Kennedys (they had nine dogs at one point) and didn’t stop until the Nixons, was wary of President Johnson. “I was losing a dog and gaining a president I didn’t know. Not only didn’t I know him, I didn’t think I wanted to know him. He wasn’t boyish or good-natured or quick-witted like Kennedy, and I heard him cussing out the help when things weren’t done fast enough.” Bryant describes the abrupt shift at the White House to accommodate the new president: “Terriers were out and beagles were in. Jackie pink was out, Lady Bird yellow was in. Chowder was out and chili was in.” He hoped that one thing would remain the same, that Johnson would appreciate the way that he trained presidential dogs to greet their owners on the South Lawn when they returned from a trip on the marine helicopter. President Kennedy thoroughly enjoyed the tradition. He always gave a broad smile and greeted the waiting dogs “as if they were his distinguished hosts.”
After the Kennedys’ abrupt departure he writes touchingly, “Toddlers were out and teenagers were in,” referring to Caroline and John-John’s successors at the White House, the Johnsons’ teenage daughters, Luci and Lynda. Ultimately, though, Bryant would grow to love the Johnsons.
In her memoir, Lady Bird Johnson described the impossible task of trying to replace Jackie, marveling at the “element of steel and stamina” that must have flowed through her predecessor’s veins. She said she felt as though she were “suddenly onstage for a part I never rehearsed.”
While the new president was working in his temporary quarters, the White House staff had quietly made arrangements for the transition. Just four days after the assassination, Chief Usher J. B. West visited Lady Bird at the Johnsons’ Washington mansion, known as the Elms, where they discussed what furniture the Johnsons would bring with them to the White House.
Later that afternoon, Mrs. Johnson had tea with JFK’s widow at the White House. The outgoing first lady graciously showed her successor the second floor, allowing her to consider how her furniture would fit into the bedroom and sitting room Mrs. Kennedy had occupied for almost three years. “Don’t be frightened of this house—some of the happiest years of my marriage have been spent here—you will be happy here,” Jackie said. Lady Bird said she told her this so often during her tour that it felt “as though she were trying to reassure me.”
Jackie told her that J. B. West and Curator Jim Ketchum were the most dependable members of the residence staff. Ketchum, who served as the White House chief curator from 1963 to 1970, fondly recalls his first meeting with Lady Bird shortly after the family moved in. As one of four people on the curatorial staff, Ketchum was in charge of cataloguing and protecting every piece of furniture and artwork in the White House’s private collection, ranging from masterpieces by John Singer Sargent to porcelain dating back to George Washington.
Lady Bird asked Ketchum to set up time after she moved in for “walk and learns,” so she could go through each room with him and learn more about its history and its furnishings. She said she needed to have a working knowledge of the residence so that she could take friends and guests on tours, one of her duties as first lady. She took her new role very seriously—not surprising, as she had earned a reputation as a pinch hitter for Jackie Kennedy during the previous administration. When Jackie didn’t feel like doing something, Lady Bird dutifully stepped in.
Ketchum’s first meeting with the new first lady was not at all glamorous. When Lady Bird called down to the Curator’s Office and asked him to come upstairs, he recalls, “I found her in a closet, between her bedroom and sitting room, on her hands and knees with a cardboard box open in front of her,” he said. She was surrounded by about twenty porcelain birds all carefully wrapped and brought from the Elms. He got down on the floor and began to help her unwrap each bird.
“What neither one of us realized is that the light for the closet was in the door jamb. And as we started, and we had the birds kind of lined up on the floor, Bonner Arrington [the carpenter foreman] and one of his colleagues from the Carpenter’s Shop were moving a sofa and went right down this narrow corridor and of course closed the door. So there we were, playing touchy-feely, trying to protect the birds and figure out how one could get up without stepping on something,” he laughed. They managed to find the light switch and remarkably they left the birds unharmed.
Soon after they moved in, the president and the first lady were invited to adviser Walter Jenkins’s house for dinner. Their absence gave “a breathing spell to the staff here at the White House who must have been carrying on with heavy hearts,” Lady Bird said.
The Jenkins’s daughter, Beth, was a close friend of Luci’s, and she came to the White House that night for a sleepover. “All I had felt was the challenge and the burden of this transition,” Luci told me.
Her room in the White House had a fireplace—“I’d never had something so delicious as a fireplace in my bedroom”—so she lit a fire. Neither girl knew anything about fireplaces, though, and the room soon filled up with smoke. Luci frantically tried using a juice glass filled with water, and then a trash can, to douse the flames. Finally she climbed up on her desk and opened a window to let the smoke out—and was horrified when she saw a White House policeman looking in at her in her nightgown. Once they realized what was happening, staff ran in to help.
“My mother felt it was very appropriate that I help clean the smoke stains off the walls of my bedroom that first week,” she said, still embarrassed decades later. “It was literally a baptism by fire.” She scrubbed alongside the maids, none of whom made her feel guilty.
A LITTLE MORE than a decade later, the residence staff found themselves once again confronted with a sudden and unceremonious transition, when President Richard Nixon announced his resignation on August 8, 1974.
“The transfer of power was shockingly abrupt, yet orderly as it had been after the assassination of President Kennedy,” wrote Doorman Preston Bruce. Yet despite the fact that the Watergate scandal had been raging for two years, and calls for Nixon’s resignation had mounted through the summer, no one inside the White House was expecting it. After all, no president had ever resigned before. The staff had no clue until Pat Nixon called down, asking for some packing boxes.
At seven-thirty on the morning after he announced his resignation, Nixon was in bare feet and pajamas when Executive Chef Henry Haller found him sitting alone in the Family Kitchen. He usually ate a light breakfast of cereal, juice, and fresh fruit, but that morning he ordered corned beef hash with a poached egg.
Nixon walked up to Haller and grabbed his hand: “Chef, I have been eating all over the world, your food is the best.”
Later that morning, just before walking to the helicopter on the South Lawn and giving his famous V-for-victory salute, Nixon made an emotional farewell speech to his staff in the East Room. As the staff gathered for the event, Painter Cletus Clark unexpectedly found himself in the middle of the drama. “I was in the East Room painting the stage. I was the only one in there on the residence staff,” he said. “The next thing you know I looked up and all these people started coming into the East Room—I couldn’t get out! And the paint wasn’t even dry!”
He told the Secret Service agents who were in place before the president’s arrival to make sure the president was careful not to touch the wet paint.
“The room was filling up. I grabbed my little bucket and went over there on the south side and mixed in with the crowd. I put my bucket down between my feet and stayed in there.”
Standing in his all-white uniform, Clark listened as the thirty-seventh president began good-byes by praising the residence staff, who, as usual, stayed in the shadows. “This house has a great heart and that heart comes from those who serve. I was rather sorry they didn’t come down; we said good-bye to them upstairs,” Nixon said, already wistful. “But they’re really great. I recall after so many times I’ve made speeches, some of them pretty tough, you’d always come back, or after a hard day, and my days usually run rather long, I’d always get a lift from them. Because I might be a little down, but they always smiled.”
The residence staff took on the familiar role of movers that day, packing up the first family’s things and managing as seamless a transition as they could under the circumstances.
Barbara Bush, whose husband was then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, described in amazement witnessing just how quickly the White House was handed over to the Fords. “The day President Nixon resigned we went down to the White House, we met there for his resignation and Jerry Ford’s swearing in hours later. After we waved good-bye to the Nixons, the pictures on the wall were all of Jerry Ford’s family. We were standing at the helicopter waving good-bye while they changed the pictures.”
THE NIXONS’ FORMAL style was replaced by the more relaxed attitude of Gerald and Betty Ford, who allowed their four children to wear jeans anywhere in the White House. Susan Ford even roller-skated on the State Floor’s pristine floors while her parents were traveling, which she says she’s embarrassed to admit now.
Betty Ford was fiercely independent, and when she got the tour of the second-floor family quarters she immediately rejected the idea of sleeping in a separate bedroom from her husband. “Well, there’ll be no need for that,” she told the head usher.
She could not understand why the maids and butlers were so quiet around her. She worried that they didn’t like her. She soon found out that Pat Nixon had preferred it that way.
Carpenter Milton Frame was impressed by Betty Ford’s approachable manner. “I do recall that Mrs. Ford, she would invite you to sit down and have a cup of tea,” he said fondly. She asked him where he was from and made small talk, an act of kindness that her predecessor would never have initiated.
She also enjoyed teasing the staff. During a tour of the private quarters, her press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, noticed a flower vase featuring the figures of two angels, with their hands almost touching. A cigarette was perched in one of the angel’s hands. “Oh, that,” the first lady said, laughing. “I put it there. That’s just my way of testing whether the maids have cleaned the room!”
NEW FAMILIES MUST get used to a big staff—and to paying shockingly high monthly bills. Contrary to popular belief, the first family pays for all of their own personal expenses. And almost every first lady ends up pleading with the chief usher to keep costs down.
The family pays for their own dry cleaning, which is farmed out to a local dry cleaner chosen by the head housekeeper or the family themselves. During the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, Executive Housekeeper Christine Limerick said, they often used the nearby Willard Hotel. Even that basic service has to be conducted in secrecy: the family’s clothing is dropped off and picked up discreetly by members of the Operations Department.
The first family is also required to cover their personal food and drink expenses—including not just their own meals but also those of their personal guests, which can include dozens of friends and family over the inauguration or the holidays. Walters told me that “each and every” first lady, except for Barbara Bush, has seemed surprised and not very pleased to discover this. Many have asked for menus featuring cheaper cuts of meat to cut down on the enormous monthly costs; the Carters even asked to be served leftovers for their own personal meals.
Even Jackie Kennedy instructed the chief usher to “run this place just like you’d run it for the chinchiest president who ever got elected!” She dropped her voice comically, adding: “We don’t have nearly as much money as you read in the papers!”
Her husband was obsessed with the food bill, talking in great detail with the ushers about how to keep the milk bill down at their Hyannis home. The Kennedys’ social secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, said she never saw him sit still for that long or be that interested in anything for more than five minutes. The liquor bill multiplied during the Kennedy years and that’s because, before Kennedy took office, the White House amazingly and very discreetly accepted bootleg whiskey from the General Services Administration. A new regulation would have made it impossible for the White House to continue doing so without making it public, so the president quickly ordered an end to the practice and sent Housekeeper Anne Lincoln to shop for inexpensive booze. Kennedy had his own private liquor cabinet tucked away in a closet on the third floor and the only people with the key were Lincoln and his valet. He was always mindful of the cost of living in the White House, even though he wouldn’t be asked to pay for the bulk of the alcohol himself because it was mostly used for official entertaining.
Obama aide Reggie Love was twenty-seven years old when he arrived at the White House and remembers the first time Admiral Rochon walked him through the Obamas’ monthly bill. “I saw the number and I was like, ‘I see the numbers, I see all the things itemized, but for me, a person who’s only lived in a household of one with no children, I have no real way to look at that and say, ‘You know what, this seems about right.’”
The executive chef sends the first lady a weekly menu every Sunday. If she finds something there that she doesn’t like, or feels is too extravagant for a family meal, she may ask the chef to look for an alternative.
Luci Baines Johnson said her mother talked “constantly” about the exorbitant costs of living at the White House. After she got married, Luci went with her family to Camp David for the weekend—and received a bill for the food she ate while she was there. She was astonished.
“Oh yes, we’ve always been billed, but when you were a minor living in our home we paid it for you,” Lady Bird Johnson told her irate daughter.
“My mother was quite stunned that I was stunned!” she said, laughing.
Somehow, seeing a line-item breakdown at the end of the month makes the prices seem higher than if the family were going to the grocery store, or out to eat. President Ford’s daughter, Susan, said that her father would wave the bill at her and warn her, “You need to be aware that when you have a bunch of friends over I do see this.”
Rosalynn Carter vividly remembers her family’s first monthly bill: $600. “It doesn’t sound like very much, but that was enormous to me back in ’76!” She thought the prices were higher than they would be outside the White House because the food has to be examined to make sure it hasn’t been poisoned.
The food bills weren’t the only costs that worried the Carters, according to Florist Ronn Payne. Jimmy Carter wanted his flowers on the cheap too. Even though the first family doesn’t usually pay for flowers, Carter didn’t believe the government needed to foot the bill for elaborate arrangements either. “We had to go out and pick flowers to do dinners,” Payne remembers. “We would go to the city parks to cut flowers.” He and other staffers took field trips to Rock Creek Park to pick daffodils and the National Zoo to collect wildflowers. “Police would actually stop us. One guy was arrested and they had to go and get him out of jail for picking daffodils on that big hillside in Rock Creek Park to do a dinner.” The White House intervened to get him released, Payne said.
“We’d buy dried flowers from the market, or we’d have our garden club ladies dry their own garden flowers, and that’s what we had to use.” In other administrations it was not uncommon to spend $50,000 on flowers for a state dinner, with single arrangements costing several thousand dollars.
Barbara Bush, every bit the patrician matriarch, has no sympathy for any first lady who is surprised when she receives her family’s monthly food bill. Or any bill, for that matter. “If they were shocked, there’s something wrong with them,” she says sternly. “We had lots of guests, as did George W., and we paid for those private guests. But the bill would come and it would say, ‘One egg: eighteen cents.’ Mrs. So and So had an egg and a piece of toast. It’s cheaper to eat at the White House.” She points out that, while the first family has to pay for food and dry cleaning, they don’t have to pay for electricity, air-conditioning, flowers, butlers, plumbers, or “yard people,” making their cost of living a relative bargain—especially for a family like the Bushes, who were accustomed to having hired help. “I thought it was very cheap to live at the White House!” she said. “I’d like to go back and live there and not have the responsibility.”
Laura Bush’s mother-in-law may have prepared her for the cost of living in the White House, but she was still surprised when she got her first bill. She noted how expensive it was to throw her husband a birthday party because they had to pay time and a half for staff who worked after five o’clock in the evening.
Executive Chef Walter Scheib also reported that he sometimes got calls from the chief usher, saying that the first lady’s office had asked him to keep the cost of ingredients down, or requesting that fewer cooks be used in the kitchen.
“Chef, did you really need that many people to produce that event?” Chief Usher Gary Walters would ask him.
“Well, Gary, maybe not. Maybe we could have done it with a couple less people,” the uncompromising Scheib would reply. “Let’s play this scenario out: we made a mistake at the White House, and we’re sitting across the table from Mrs. Bush or Mrs. Clinton, and we’re trying to explain why her name is being bandied around by all the late-night comedians. ‘But the good news, Mrs. Bush, the good news, Mrs. Clinton, is, we saved five hundred dollars.’ How do you think that discussion’s going to go?”
Above all else, he said, “Our goal was to make sure that the first family was never embarrassed.” No matter the cost.
WHEN A NEW family moves in, routines change abruptly. The Obamas have pushed their wake-up time back slightly later than their recent predecessors; they prefer to turn off their own lights at night; and they want gala apples in addition to the usual flowers in the Oval Office. The apples added a fresh task for the florists: they have to be checked every day, because the president encourages people to eat them and the supply dwindles fast. Florists are out of the Oval Office no later than 7:30 A.M., when President Obama is usually making his way to work.
While the Obama family’s requests don’t veer too far from those of previous first families, when their first social secretary, Desirée Rogers, arrived with them in 2009, she was committed to shaking up tradition by bringing a new energy and new ideas to the staid executive mansion. A Harvard MBA and descendant of a Creole voodoo priestess, Rogers was the first African American social secretary, so her very presence defied tradition. In her first sixty days in the post, she coordinated more than fifty events. That’s twice as many as President George W. Bush held during the same period of his first term, and surpassed even the pace of the party-loving Clintons. She sought to change the way the White House worked, mixing and matching china from different eras at formal dinners and including Republicans in every congressional event. She also involved herself in details traditionally handled by the residence staff, deeply irritating some of them.
“She really was in her own little world when she came in the door,” Florist Bob Scanlan said. “She made it quite clear that they didn’t want what we had been doing and they were looking for a new look. I can’t tell you how many times we heard [Rogers ask for] ‘the Four Seasons look.’” He interpreted Rogers’s edict as a request for more contemporary floral arrangements, with flowers placed at an angle, as opposed to the more traditional oasis arrangement, an array of lush fresh-cut flowers stuck in foam. Scanlan said that he and his colleagues bristled when a woman was brought in for several weeks to “revamp the Flower Shop” because, he said, they were told they were stuck in the past.
Scanlan said that from the beginning many of the florists viewed Rogers as disrespectful of the mansion’s long-standing traditions and were happy to see her go fifteen months later (after a scandal involving gate-crashers who managed to infiltrate the Obamas’ first state dinner without an invitation). “When you become part of that house and you are a florist, there’s a certain element and a certain look that belongs strictly for that house. It’s not just the first family’s, it’s the public’s too. We’re doing flowers for the country.” Rogers remembers the controversy over the flowers a little differently. She says she didn’t ask for changes immediately and stuck to tradition, at least on Inauguration Day. “There was a certain way that flowers were done in the house,” she said, adding that there was nothing new done on Inauguration Day to incorporate the first family’s style. “Remember, this is before they ever got into the house. They’re not able to say ‘we like this’ or ‘we like that,’ ‘more of this’ or ‘less of that.’ So it was pretty much set up the way it had historically been set up over the years by that florist.”
When I asked Chief Usher Admiral Rochon what it was like working with Rogers, he joked that he might need to take an Excedrin. Rogers had been a successful businesswoman, but when it came to the White House transition, she had unrealistic expectations.
“It wasn’t exacting, it was just impossible,” he said, exasperated by the memory. She wanted the walls to be painted and dry by the time the Obamas came back from the inaugural parade, Rochon recalls. “We would have to convince them that, no, you can’t have a mural on this wall, because it has to be done after President Bush leaves.”
The new family is not allowed to change the historic State and Ground floors, but they are free to make a variety of changes on the second and third floors once they actually move in. The staff even closed a wall up in Malia’s room because it led to an open walkway and the teenager wanted more privacy. Such changes, however, must wait until the limousine carries away the outgoing first family.
Executive Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier had extensive experience in the hotel industry, having worked at London’s Savoy Hotel and at the Homestead in Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains, and he earned a reputation for quickly figuring out what the president wanted. Instead of listening to Obama’s political advisers, who all claimed they knew what kind of food the president and first lady preferred, he discreetly approached family members when they visited the White House.
One aide to George W. Bush told Mesnier not to worry about making elaborate birthday cakes. Instead, he suggested, just make an angel food cake with strawberries. “I never made an angel food cake with strawberry in the hole!” said Mesnier, a boisterous, plump Frenchman with rosy cheeks. “After they see what you can do, forget about what they used to have.”
AFTER AMERICAN VOTERS elect a new president, all eyes turn to the future. For the residence workers, though, life goes on. David Hume Kennerly, President Ford’s White House photographer and a close Ford family friend, said that working at the White House is like being on a movie set: “When the movie’s over you go on to the next gig.”
For the residence staff, it’s not always easy to deal with the revolving door of families. Inauguration Day feels like starting a new job, working for the most powerful family in the world with no certainty about what they expect. Will the first lady, who has much more direct contact with the staff than the president, find fault with the food, or the flower arrangements, or the way the beds are made? “There are thousands of things like that running through your mind,” Scanlan confessed. “Is she going to call up and say, ‘I hate this’? They can do whatever they want.”
Executive Chef Walter Scheib was hired by Hillary Clinton and fired by Laura Bush. For him, the transition to Bush was painful. After serving the Clintons haute American cuisine for almost the entirety of their two terms, he didn’t know what the Bushes expected. Almost overnight, he had to go from preparing layered late-summer vegetables with lemongrass and red curry to serving up Tex-Mex Chex and BLTs. (President Clinton satisfied most of his unhealthy food cravings when he was on the road and away from the watchful eye of the first lady who even requested that calorie counts be included on family dinner menus.)
“It’s the only time I ever had a job quit me: the physical plan was the same, all the pots and pans were the same, the refrigerator was the same, all the ovens were the same, but you didn’t know your job anymore. You had to relearn your job literally in an afternoon.”
Mesnier describes saying good-bye to the departing family as “little short of funereal.”
Leaving the happy environment of the White House often isn’t any easier for the first family. President George H. W. Bush broke down crying when he saw the staff gathered before him. He was rendered speechless. “We were too choked up with emotion to say what we felt, but I think they knew the affection we had for them all,” recalled Barbara Bush. Before leaving for the Capitol, she raced through the Red and Blue Rooms to hug all the butlers privately. “From then on it was all downhill. The hard part for me was over.”
The transition back to civilian life is difficult, no matter how much presidents and first ladies say they crave a return to privacy. When the Reagans said their good-byes to the residence staff in the State Dining Room, the president joked: “You know the only problem about leaving the White House: When I will wake up tomorrow morning, how am I going to turn the electricity on? I haven’t done it in eight years. You have done it for me all these years. How will I turn the switch on? I don’t know.” (Nancy Reagan said her husband loved the luxury of the residence, referring to it as an eight-star hotel. She agreed. “Every evening, while I took a bath, one of the maids would come by and remove my clothes for laundering or dry cleaning. The bed would always be turned down. Five minutes after Ronnie came home and hung up his suit, it would disappear from the closet to be pressed, cleaned, or brushed.”)
In her memoir, Barbara Bush offers a rare glimpse of how sheltered the first family becomes after years of having cooks, maids, and butlers. The Bushes had spent decades in public service and were famously not accustomed to buying groceries. (During his 1992 reelection campaign, Bush was ridiculed after he marveled at a supermarket scanner.) Not long after leaving office, Barbara Bush says, her husband took his first trip to Sam’s Club and “bought the world’s biggest jar of spaghetti sauce and some spaghetti” for dinner.
While he sat down to watch the evening news, the former first lady started to cook. She accidentally knocked the enormous jar of sauce off the counter, sending it crashing onto the kitchen floor. Their dinner plans ruined, they scrambled for an alternative. “That was the night George and I made an amazing discovery: You can call out for pizza!”
Sometimes the good-byes are funny. Lyndon Johnson’s youngest daughter, Luci, now sixty-seven, entered nursing school while she was living at the White House, and for months she kept the cat fetus she used for dissection in class in the third-floor Solarium’s refrigerator. She fondly referred to the fetus as “Crunchy” because it was housed in a crunchy peanut butter jar. On the day she left, one staffer, a maid named Clara to whom she had grown particularly close, thrust the jar into her hands and said, “This is the only good thing I can think about you leaving.” The two hugged and “cried our eyes out.”
“I knew it would never be the same,” Luci said. “I knew that she would be turning those energies and that deference and that grace just as quickly as I walked out the door to trying to help the Nixon girls feel just as much at home as she had made me. The allegiance that the White House domestic staff feels toward the White House and toward the president and his family who occupy it is something that makes you feel very proud to be an American.”
White House Electrician and Dog Keeper Traphes Bryant, who was skeptical of LBJ when he first moved into the residence so full of bluster, was devastated when the Johnsons moved back to Texas in 1969. “It was over. It was really over. It was a relief. It was not a relief. It was as if someone told me I would never see a member of my family again,” he wrote in his memoir. “I had known LBJ and felt closer than a brother. And now if we met again, we would be almost like strangers. I felt lost. Then free, as I realized I wouldn’t have to take his guff anymore.”
SOME TRANSITIONS ARE easier than others. President George W. Bush and his family brought only one chest of drawers and some family photos, because, Laura Bush said, “part of the fun” of living at the White House is going to the warehouse in Maryland and picking out pieces from the White House collection to furnish the house. It helped that the Bushes already knew the layout of the house. “You could hardly take a breath and it was done,” Bob Scanlan said of their move-in.
Before the Bushes could start choosing furniture, however, they had to deal with a most unexpected complication: the 2000 recount, which kept the outcome of the election a mystery until December 12, more than a month after the votes were cast. Perhaps no one, aside from the candidates themselves, was watching the unfolding drama of the election quite as closely as the residence workers. Between Election Day and the day the Supreme Court upheld Bush’s victory, Walters scoured the news constantly, anxious to learn whom they would be catering to: George W. Bush or Al Gore. After the decision was handed down, Laura Bush had less than half the normal amount of time to prepare for their move.
The recount was highly contentious, with the entire national election hinging on the results in Florida, and when the verdict came down against Gore, Bill Clinton’s staff was furious. The younger Clinton aides, in particular, were vocal about their disdain for the incoming president. One staffer shouted at Chef Mesnier, in no uncertain terms, that Bush would be a one-term president: “We’ll kick his ass out of here!” he yelled at the chef. In keeping with the residence staff’s credo to be apolitical Mesnier says, “I let him have his say and said nothing myself.” (He says that the Clintons themselves weren’t happy about their staff’s behavior, loyalty notwithstanding.)
Regardless of who won the election, the Clintons hated to leave. Hillary Clinton said that even after eight years of living in the residence, and enduring incredibly painful times there, she still views the White House “with the same awe I felt as a little girl pressing my face up to the gate to get a better look.” The whole family, including Chelsea, took advantage of their private theater one last time to watch the movie State and Main well after midnight the night before President George W. Bush’s inauguration. They didn’t want to miss a minute that the house was still under their temporary ownership. “The fun of that night left them so tired that when Barbara, Jenna, and I glanced over at Bill during George’s inaugural address, he was dozing,” Laura Bush recalled.
President Clinton confessed to the Bushes on the morning of the inauguration that he had put off packing for so long that, right at the end, “he was packing simply by pulling out drawers and dumping their contents into boxes.”
While Hillary Clinton always appreciated the majesty of the White House, she had her regrets. She told Laura Bush that she wished that she hadn’t insisted on having an office in the West Wing and that she had not decided to turn down invitations just because her schedule was too packed. She always felt particularly guilty about declining an invitation from Jackie Kennedy to attend the ballet. Jackie died a few months later. Her advice to Bush: Don’t lose sight of what’s important.
WORKERS OFTEN FOUND themselves at the center of world events. Betty Monkman, who served in the curator’s office from 1967 to 2002, eventually becoming chief curator, was responsible for supervising the workers who hung and removed artwork for each new incoming first family. During the transition from Carter to Reagan, she remembers, the staff turned on televisions throughout the residence as they worked so that they could watch the final throes of the tense Iran hostage crisis. “President Carter had been up in the Oval Office all night long with his staff and barely got over to the house to dress for his ten A.M. event with President Reagan,” Monkman said. “Nobody knew what was going to happen. The whole country was waiting.” The Iranians released the remaining fifty-two hostages minutes after Reagan was sworn in as the nation’s fortieth president—one last dig at Carter, who had worked day and night to bring about their release before the end of his administration.
No matter what occurs outside the White House, the staff is always singularly focused on the move. “We were constantly on our feet,” Monkman said. “Once, in the Ford administration, we were doing something in Susan Ford’s bedroom and President Ford just happened to come around when people were starting to disassemble things to say good-bye to the household staff. Right before he went downstairs he made it a mission to come by and thank everybody for their work and that was something the staff appreciated.” As soon as he left, the rush was on.
Though they try not to get too attached to the mansion’s current residents, the staff often seems to be pulling for the incumbent to be reelected, whether Democrat or Republican. When Bill Clinton defeated the first President Bush, Chef Mesnier felt the outcome was a “veritable disaster.” He had grown so close to the Bushes that he was truly unsure whether he would be able to serve another president. He wasn’t alone: when other residence staffers called out sick after President Clinton’s election, the joke was that they had caught the “Republican flu.”
In part, this is because the arrival of a new family means casting aside everything they’ve learned about each member of the outgoing first family and starting fresh. But most accounts agree that the residence workers’ devotion to President George H. W. Bush was more than customary—it was genuine, almost profound. The Bushes were generally easy to please, and the residence workers found themselves quickly at ease with them. Even before she moved into the White House, Chief Usher Gary Walters reported, Barbara Bush assured him that she wouldn’t be making any changes in the kitchen. “I’ve never had a bad meal [at the White House], so you just have the chefs put whatever they want to on the menu every evening and we’ll be surprised at what we eat each night.”
“What if you don’t like something?” he asked her, unaccustomed to such an easygoing first lady after working for Nancy Reagan.
“Then we’ll tell the chef not to have it again,” she told him.
ON NOVEMBER 11, 1968, days after Richard M. Nixon won the presidential election, he and his wife, Pat, were guests of the Johnsons at the White House. Johnson and Nixon were bitter political enemies, but they made nice during a four-hour lunch. Johnson surprised even his wife with his civility. “Lyndon, I thought, was generous and rather fatherly,” Lady Bird said. “I thought, it was not so much Nixon the man he was talking to, but the next President of this country.”
Lady Bird showed the incoming first lady the second and third floors, reassuring her of “the efficiency, devotion, and impersonal professionalism” of the residence staff.
During the stress and strain of the move, first ladies have been seen on the morning of the inauguration stealing a quiet moment to themselves. “You wonder what must be going through their minds,” mused Head Housekeeper Christine Limerick. The Johnsons had a particular affinity for life in the residence. Lady Bird recalled wandering through the second and third floors in her robe with a cup of coffee early on the morning of Inauguration Day, her final day in the White House. A little more than five years earlier, she and her family moved into a White House consumed by grief. On the evening of December 7, 1963, just as Jackie Kennedy was moving out, Lady Bird must have been moved to tears by a note the first lady left behind. “I wish you a happy arrival in your new house, Lady Bird,” Jackie wrote. “Remember—you will be happy here.” All those years later, the grief of those first few months must have come rushing back.
She stood in the Yellow Oval Room and the Lincoln Sitting Room, wanting to soak in their rich history one last time. She said a final, private good-bye to the place she and her family had called home for so many years. “This was partly the housewifely need to see whether any personal object had been left anywhere,” she said, “but mostly just to stand still and absorb.”
Lady Bird peeked into her daughter Luci’s room, which was strewn with half-filled bags and boxes, and leafed through a guest book showing all the guests who had stayed with them over the years. When she walked up to the Solarium she was struck by how different it looked without their furniture. “Its personality all stripped away and looking cold and clinical now, and what a gay, happy room it had been—the citadel of the young.” On the State Floor she could smell the ammonia as maids, butlers, and almost everyone else on the residence staff pitched in to ready the house for the Nixons.
As the inaugural parade was going on, the staff fulfilled an unusual request. The outgoing president had been a devoted consumer of television news, and had filled the White House with sets. “Lyndon Johnson would sit like a king with four sets on in a row, watching himself,” according to Bryant. “There he’d be, throwing out comments and switching the sound from one to another, or keeping several sets on together, with the sound turned up loud.” Richard Nixon, in contrast, was famously uncomfortable with the medium, and after his election the residence staff were instructed to remove most of the sets from the house. Some were still being yanked out even as staffers tried to catch a glimpse of the inaugural parade on TV.
Late that morning, as President Johnson and President-elect Nixon headed off to the Capitol together, Lady Bird shared a car with Pat Nixon. As she drove away, the last thing Lady Bird saw through her rearview window was Maître d’ John Ficklin and Butler Wilson Jerman watching the Johnsons depart. She blew them a kiss good-bye. It must have been bittersweet to know that the next time she returned to her beloved White House, she would be just another guest.