CARSON: Downton is a great house, Mr. Bates, and the Crawleys are a great family. We live by certain standards and those standards can at first seem daunting.
BATES: Of course—
CARSON: If you find yourself tongue-tied in the presence of his lordship, I can only assure you that his manners and grace will soon help you to perform your duties to the best of your ability.
—DOWNTON ABBEY, EPISODE 1, SEASON 1
Sundays and holidays are only words” to a White House usher, observed Irwin “Ike” Hoover, who served as chief usher from 1913 until his death in 1933.
Residence staffers have such devotion to their jobs that they sometimes refuse to go home, even when they’re told to. Lady Bird Johnson was so disturbed by her husband’s nocturnal habits that she called Chief Usher J. B. West to her dressing room one morning after the butlers had been sent home at midnight the night before.
“I am so distressed about the servants having to stay so late,” she said. “I’ve long since given up on my husband eating dinner at a decent hour. Can’t we just have Zephyr [the Johnsons’ family cook] fix something that can be kept warm—or I’ll go in and warm it up for him—or if I’m asleep he can easily serve himself? Then we can just send the butlers home at eight o’clock every night, the way they’re supposed to.”
When West passed her question to Maître d’ Charles Ficklin, he was incensed. It was their pleasure to stay as long as the president wanted them to stay. “The president of the United States having to serve himself dinner? Never!” Ficklin said.
Charles’s brother John, also a butler, concurred. “We’ve served the presidents and first ladies every meal in formal service as long as I can remember. Even if it’s a cheese sandwich or a bowl of chili or a boiled egg. That’s a tradition.”
When West told Lady Bird that there would be a full-fledged revolt if they were sent home early, she replied: “I’ve never seen such a house. First it takes two engineers to light the fireplaces—they won’t let me do it. And now the servants don’t want to go home at night.”
Gary Walters, who was chief usher from Reagan to George W. Bush, was in charge of hiring and firing staff. He always warned them during the job interview: “This is certainly not a nine-to-five job.” He felt the toll himself; one of the reasons he retired was so that he could set his own schedule and actually go on vacation with his family.
“I had given assigned times that people were scheduled to work, but they all knew that any particular day the world situation drives what the presidency does, and that at any given time they may be called upon to stay over and work or come in early, or come in at the last minute or stay there for multiple days. It all revolved around the schedule of the presidency.”
For Walters, interruptions from his family life were routine. In 1991, he was just pulling out of the White House driveway, heading out to a University of Maryland basketball game, when he got word that the United States, along with an international coalition, had begun bombing Iraqi forces in Kuwait. “So I drove out one gate, and before I got down Pennsylvania Avenue very far I came in the other gate.”
Painter Cletus Clark, who worked at the White House from 1969 to 2008, said that during those years he gave up his life for the job. He always had his walkie-talkie on and was regularly called in from home to work on the weekends because of the whims of the first family. “If the first lady wanted to move a picture and make a hole in the wall, they’d hunt me down to get me to come down there and fix it.”
Clark’s friend, Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy, worked closely with him. If the first lady decided she wanted to change a paint color, the two of them made the gargantuan assignment look effortless. “We had to strip all the rooms, move all the furniture. They’d paint the room on Friday and Saturday and we’d come in Sunday and put all the furniture back,” said Savoy. “When [the first family] came home on Sunday night or Monday, it would look like they never left.”
No one ever wanted to say no to the president or to the first lady. And every first lady is impatient. “Everybody’s scared of them. They won’t tell the first lady the truth,” Clark says. “She might say, ‘Can you paint the whole White House in one day?’ They’d say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ They’re not going to say no. Nobody wants to jeopardize their job by telling the truth.”
Clark said he could never take his time, even when he was working on difficult projects like finding the exact shade of yellow to freshen up the Yellow Oval Room. No record remained of what color had been used the last time it was painted, years before. Because his office was in the basement and had no natural light, he had to go back and forth outside with sample colors to see how they actually looked in the sunlight. His dedication did not go unnoticed. Laura Bush told him he was “born to be a painter,” he recalled, his chin raised proudly.
Often world events made the president’s job all-consuming, and the residence staff needed all hands on deck. Jimmy Carter lived in an almost constant state of agitation, brought on by a nation facing double-digit inflation, endless lines at gas stations, and an energy crisis. (Rosalynn said her husband kept the residence so cold—he asked that the White House be kept at sixty-five degrees—that one of the maids took pity on her and bought her long underwear!)
But most of all it was the Iran hostage crisis that left Carter, and those who served him, exhausted. For 444 excruciating days, the residence staff had to adapt to the president’s new schedule, turned on its head because of the more than eight-hour time difference with Iran. Every day, the kitchen staff set out sandwiches and cookies late at night in the Oval Office for the president and his exhausted foreign policy staff. In the mornings Carter marched into the Oval Office by five o’clock, so staff had to have it clean with fresh floral arrangements no later than 4:45.
Mrs. Carter remembers the staff being especially attentive during the crisis. “They were concerned about us,” Rosalynn recalled gratefully. The staff also gave them the private time they desperately needed. In quiet moments, the president would sit with his wife and relax on the Truman Balcony in the afternoons. “That was good, quiet time for us.”
Thirty-five years later, Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan still feels personal, Mrs. Carter recalled. Staying in the White House for more than two months after being voted out of office was excruciating. “You lose the election on November fourth and then you’re just ready to go home.” Florist Ronn Payne remembers the toll it took on the family. “They sobbed for two weeks. I mean uncontrollably. You couldn’t go to the second floor without hearing it.”
WORKING IN THE residence becomes a way of life. Storeroom Manager Bill Hamilton retired after fifty-five years on the residence staff. Not long after he left, he finally took his wife, Theresa, to London and Paris for their fifty-eighth wedding anniversary. They have seven children, thirteen grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Neither had ever been to Europe before; they could never find the time to get away.
“My wife is the only girl I ever dated in my life. We met in the fifth grade,” he said, just loudly enough so that his wife could hear him in the next room. “When I told my mother that this was the lady I was going to marry, my mother turned around and slapped me out of the chair. . . . She said I didn’t know nothing about it.”
Hamilton was hired as a houseman at the age of twenty. Like almost everyone on staff, he got the job because he knew someone who worked there. His good friend Wilson Jerman, whom he met while he was working at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, brought him in for an interview. The two still call each other every couple of weeks to catch up, arguing playfully about who actually served longer.
Another residence worker who was all too familiar with the unusual demands of the job is the appropriately named carpenter Milton Frame, now seventy-two. Frame started his White House career in 1961 helping Traphes Bryant take care of the Kennedy family’s dogs, and spent the next thirty-six years commuting an hour and a half each way from his home in rural Virginia to the Carpenter’s Shop. When he retired in 1997 as the carpenter foreman, he was happy to stop waking up at four o’clock in the morning to get to work by six-thirty.
Milton’s father, Wilford Frame, was also a White House carpenter. That connection helped to make the interview process more casual for Milton than for those without a family connection. He met with Chief Usher J. B. West on a Sunday morning.
“Would you like to work at the White House?” West asked him.
“Well, sir, I’m looking for a job,” Frame replied. He was working odd jobs at the time.
“If I should hire you, when would you be able to start?”
“Any time that you tell me, sir.”
Frame started the next day, and from the very beginning, he put in long days and nights. Anxious to make sure his staff could keep up with the Kennedys’ constant entertaining, West put them through unannounced training exercises. “One night we had a dry run,” Frame said, laughing improbably at the memory. “We spent all night putting up a stage in the East Room and as soon as we got it up Mr. West said, ‘Take her down.’” West stood by watching the time, clocking how long it would take to set up the stage. (About four hours to put up and an hour and a half to take down, says Frame.)
Many staffers’ days were made even longer by their commutes downtown. Most days, well before dawn, Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy could be found sitting in his car in the parking lot waiting for the Secret Service to let him in at five in the morning. His shift did not start until six-thirty, but he wanted to beat beltway traffic. He usually put in a thousand hours of overtime a year, sometimes working a solid month without a day off. He retired in 2013 and says he’s planning on doing “anything I feel like doing”—including, he added, doing “nothing in particular.”
WHEN ASKED TO name the sacrifices they made for the job, few people ever mention the money. The residence staff are federal employees whose pay is “administratively determined,” rather than dictated by a government service pay scale. Their pay is based onexperience level and the complexity of the job. Some workers make $30,000 a year; those at the top of the pay scale, like the chief usher, executive chef, pastry chef, executive housekeeper, and maître d’, can pull down more than $100,000.
Executive Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier turned down jobs with salaries of several hundred thousand dollars, at restaurants in Las Vegas and the Ritz in Paris, to work at the White House. “I could have made triple—quadruple—what I made at the White House!”
Mesnier is a bit of a legend on staff. He started at the White House in 1979 and left in 2006. He took his job incredibly seriously, comparing his desserts to works of art and giving them elaborate names. Who could resist “the Australian Black Pearl,” a white chocolate seashell complete with chocolate seaweed and small chocolate fish that he made for the Australian state dinner, or “Sweet Serenity-Bonsai Garden,” a sour cherry sorbet with almond mousse, tiny macaroons, and bits of nougat, accented with fresh peaches and cherries filled with kumquat puree, in honor of a state dinner for Japan? He spent long days thinking up the concoctions in the third-floor office he shared with the executive chef and the assistant chef. He occasionally stayed late enough to make use of the room next door, equipped with a bed and a sofa and set aside for overnight stays. Mesnier’s love for his job is contagious. Seven years after retiring, he told me that he still worries about the first family. Even today, when he hears about an upcoming state dinner, he starts planning elaborate desserts in his dreams.
Still, even the most passionate staff admit there is a price to be paid for life at the White House. Mesnier acknowledges that he missed more birthdays and family dinners than he cares to count. He often planned weekend dinners out with his wife and son, only to call and cancel on the ride home from work on Friday because the first family had decided to have a birthday party or a pool party on Sunday and he knew he’d need to be there. That’s how he kept his job, he said: by knowing that the White House always came first. Residence workers who did not put their jobs above their personal lives were eventually fired, he says, as the first family could decide to fire a residence staff member at any time, without explanation.
“The family knows what’s going on, trust me,” he says. “They’re not in the back of the house checking everything, but there are people who let them know.” In particular, the social secretaries often serve as conduits between the residence staff and the first family.
Working for the Clintons took the biggest physical toll on the perfectionist chef. They hosted twenty-nine state dinners during their time in the White House, compared to six during President George W. Bush’s presidency. For their millennial New Year’s celebration alone, they invited fifteen hundred people. Mesnier didn’t leave work until seven o’clock the next morning.
“The Clintons about killed me. My legs are shot, totally shot. I didn’t sit—I could not sit. You have to move. In a sixteen-hour day I may have sat twenty minutes, that’s it. I took my meals standing up.”
Mesnier and his wife picked a date for his retirement four years before he actually retired.
Even when he did finally retire he couldn’t completely sever ties with the White House, returning twice when asked personally by Laura Bush. “I made [George W. Bush’s] birthday cake and then I retired again. And then two weeks later she called me to come back again and I went back until December 2006. I don’t think that ever happened before with any staff.”
The pressure to please the first family may never have been greater than when the Reagans were in office. Nancy Reagan went so far as to arrange the serving platters herself, insisting that the staff should prepare no “gray food,” only vibrantly colored meals. Before each state dinner, the executive chef would plan every course in consultation with the first lady; then, several weeks beforehand, the Reagans would serve the meal to a small group of friends and ask them how they liked each dish. The first lady would examine the platter and instruct the chef, “‘No, I think the roast beef should go here’—she’d point—‘and I think it would look better if the peas were on this side,’” recalls Usher Skip Allen. And if a dinner wasn’t exactly the way she wanted it, then “watch out,” Allen said. He said she sometimes called the Usher’s Office asking to see the chef on the second floor. “If it was really bad, if she was expecting asparagus and got green beans, you had to have a good excuse.” Mesnier recalls creating one dessert after another for a state dinner until Nancy Reagan was satisfied.
One incident haunts him still. With days to go before a Tuesday state dinner in honor of Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus of the Netherlands, in April 1982, Nancy Reagan was seated at a long table in her beloved Solarium, having lunch with the president, who was seated at the opposite end. After Mrs. Reagan rejected two dessert options, Roland returned to present her with a third. When she was unhappy everyone on staff knew the cue: she would cock her head to the right and give a little smile. She cocked her head.
“Roland, I’m sorry but that’s not going to do again.”
“Okay, madam.”
President Reagan interjected from the other end of the table: “Honey, leave the chef alone. That’s a beautiful dessert. Let’s do that, that’s beautiful.”
“Ronnie, just eat your soup, this is not your concern,” she said.
He looked down at his bowl and finished his soup without another word.
Mesnier was beside himself. “I went back to the kitchen—that was a Sunday, I remember—I was turning around in the kitchen and I was really contemplating suicide,” Mesnier said. “What am I going to do? How many years [will] I have to do that? For eight years? I was really in despair, total despair. I said I don’t know what to make, I don’t know what to do. Then the phone rang and she asked me to come back upstairs to see her.”
She told Mesnier that she had finally decided what she wanted him to make: elaborate sugar baskets with three sugar tulips in each basket. He would have to make fifteen baskets for the dinner, each of which would take several hours—along with the tulips, the desserts inside each basket, and cookies to accompany it all.
“This is what I would like you to do,” she told him calmly, pleased by her own wonderful idea.
“Mrs. Reagan, this is very nice and very beautiful and I really think that would be great, but I only have two days left until the dinner.”
She smiled and tilted her head to the right: “Roland, you have two days and two nights before the dinner.”
Roland had no choice. “You say, ‘Thank you, madam, for the wonderful idea.’ [Then] you click your heels, turn around, and go to work.”
He dug in and worked day and night. After the state dinner, when he knew the first lady was happy with the result, he drove home late that night elated. He had met the challenge.
Looking back, Mesnier appreciates the way Nancy Reagan pushed him, however harrowing it must have felt at the time. On that long drive home, he recalls, “I thought, I can make it happen. This is how you measure a person, when you’re trapped like this: How is that person going to make it happen? You do whatever it takes.”
On December 8, 1987, the Reagans hosted a widely anticipated state dinner for Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa. It was the first time a Soviet leader had come to Washington since Nikita Khrushchev in 1959. The onus of pulling off this hugely important visit was carried, in part, by the residence staff.
“Nancy Reagan and her social secretary came into the Flower Shop and she told us she wanted to ‘blow [Raisa’s] socks off,’” said Florist Ronn Payne. “So we did. We changed every single flower in the house three times in one day: for the morning arrival, for the afternoon lunch, and for the state dinner. Every single flower, three times, every one.”
SOME RESIDENCE WORKERS try too hard to play the role of the devoted staffer, and they usually don’t last. Worthington White, a six-foot-two, four-hundred-pound former tackle at Virginia Tech who worked as a White House usher from 1980 to 2012, says the reason he stayed for so long was because he knew when to keep quiet. When staffers tried “to laugh at jokes that weren’t funny,” or vied for “face time—anything to get their face in front of the president’s face and the first lady’s face,” he says, it never worked.
“They hated that,” White insisted. “That’s what I used to tell new employees when they came in: the worst thing you can do is try to be phony. These are the most confident politicians on the face of the earth. You need to be yourself. They’ll like you, or they won’t, but you can’t fool them.”
THOUGH THEIR JOBS as butlers, maids, florists, and chefs may seem familiar, residence workers are keenly aware that they must also safeguard the president and his family from an increasing number of threats in a post–9/11 world. According to reporting by theWashington Post, it was a maid, and not a Secret Service officer, who first discovered evidence that someone had fired shots into the first family’s living quarters. At 8:50 on a sleepy Friday night on November 11, 2011, a twenty-one-year-old man named Oscar Ortega-Hernandez parked his black 1998 Honda Accord on Constitution Avenue, rolled down the passenger-side window, and shot his semiautomatic rifle nearly seven hundred yards across the South Lawn toward the White House. At least seven bullets hit the second and third floors of the first family’s private residence, smashing a window outside the Yellow Oval Room, the family’s formal living room. The president and the first lady were out of town, and their daughter Malia was out with friends, but their younger daughter, Sasha, and the first lady’s mother, Marian Robinson, were inside the residence at the time of the shooting. Several Secret Service officers heard the shots but were told to stand down. It was wrongly concluded that the shots were fired by rival gangs and that none were aimed at the White House.
Four days later, around noon on Tuesday, November 15, a maid asked Assistant Usher Reginald Dickson to meet her at the Truman Balcony where she had noticed a broken window and a chunk of white concrete lying on the floor. When Dickson arrived he spotted a bullet hole and a dent in a windowsill and quickly reported the maid’s discovery to the Secret Service. The FBI soon started an investigation. They found a bullet in a window frame and metal fragments from a window ledge. (The windows had antique glass on the outside and bulletproof glass on the inside.) The president was still traveling, but the first lady had arrived home earlier that morning and was taking a nap. Dickson went to check on her, assuming she had already been briefed about the shots fired into her home, but she had not. Top Obama aides decided they would tell the president first and let him tell his wife about the frightening incident. Keeping her in the dark turned out to be a very bad decision.
The first lady was understandably furious when she heard the news from Dickson. When former Secret Service director Mark Sullivan was summoned to the White House to discuss the shooting, Michelle Obama was so angry that her voice could reportedly be heard through a closed door. If it weren’t for an observant maid and a diligent usher, the bullets may have been discovered much later, or possibly not at all.
Chief Usher Stephen Rochon, who had retired several months before the shooting, had hired Dickson for the position and says that he is particularly close with the first family. Rochon is not surprised that Dickson and an unnamed maid played such a central role in bringing the shooting to light. “The staff are trained to keep their eyes open and bring anything unusual, whether it be a broken window or a package left after a tour, to the attention of the ushers. The ushers will go to the Secret Service.” He added: “We are not just there to clean the house and serve meals.”
In another scary security breach, on September 19, 2014, a man armed with a knife launched over the North Lawn fence, ran past several Secret Service officers, and sprinted into the White House. Once inside, he overpowered one officer and barreled past the stairway leading to the second floor of the residence and into the East Room. (The Usher’s Office had reportedly asked that an alarm near the main entrance of the mansion be muted because it was too loud. If it had been operating normally, it would have alerted every officer on the ground about the break-in.) The intruder, named Omar Gonzalez, was finally stopped by an off-duty Secret Service agent near the doorway of the Green Room.
Skip Allen, who was a member of the Secret Service uniformed division for eight years before becoming an usher in 1979, is aghast by these security breaches. “I saw one fence jumper when I was in the Usher’s Office,” he recalled. “He made it as far as the middle of the North Grounds and by that time he was surrounded by Secret Service officers. I just don’t understand how somebody could get from the front gate into the East Room without somebody doing something.”
Other threats to the president and his family have been less obvious, but no less treacherous. Executive Chef Walter Scheib says that his goal was not only to keep the first family healthy, but to keep them alive. “This is no small consideration given all the people that dislike the president for whatever reason, whether it’s international or national.”
Scheib, who worked for the Clintons and for George W. Bush’s family, said that “there is no one more important to the physical safety of the president than the pastry chef and the chef.” Mesnier agrees. Even after 9/11, he says, no food tasters stood by in the kitchen. “We were it. We were truly, truly trusted that nothing will happen.”
Lyndon Johnson had ways of getting around the rules governing food deliveries to the White House (which were less stringent in the 1960s). The president happened to love the blintzes made by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s wife, Margaret, and from time to time she asked her husband to get a batch to Johnson by handing them off to someone at the White House. Once McNamara gave the blintzes to a police officer, who handed them to the Secret Service. The blintzes were destroyed, and when McNamara asked Johnson if he enjoyed his wife’s latest batch of blintzes, the president grew furious.
“You leave my food alone!” the mercurial Johnson shouted at a Secret Service agent who was unlucky enough to be in his path that day. “Use that thing on top of your head that’s supposed to have a brain. Did you think the Secretary of Defense is going to kill me?”
Mesnier took advantage of the system only once. In preparing for the Reagans’ state dinner for Mikhail Gorbachev, Mesnier used raspberries in the elaborate dessert—because in Russia raspberries “are so expensive they’re like gold, like caviar.” A few days after the Soviet premier arrived back home, Mesnier was in the kitchen with another chef when a large brown box from Gorbachev somehow made its way there. He knew that whatever was in the box would have to be destroyed immediately—but first he decided to open it.
When he looked inside, he was thrilled to find two large tins each filled with seven pounds of the finest Russian caviar. “I don’t care what you do with yours,” he told his colleague, “but I’m taking mine home. I’m willing to die for that!”
The residence staffers’ long hours and incredible loyalty do not go unnoticed by the first family. President Ford knew that Doorman Frederick “Freddie” Mayfield liked to swim, so one day he told him to bring his bathing suit, and the two of them swam laps together. They came back inside, laughing and wrapped up in towels.
First ladies often have an unspoken understanding with their favorite members of the household staff: they will help them out in a bind. In 1986, Nancy Reagan’s maid, Anita Castelo, was accused of helping two fellow Paraguayan natives smuggle 350,000 rounds of .22 caliber ammunition to Paraguay. The first lady provided an affidavit attesting to Castelo’s integrity. Charges against Castelo were dropped just as the Iran-Contra affair, which involved arms smuggling on a much larger scale, was starting to make national news. The president was being charged with sanctioning the sale of arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages and funding for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua; the White House doubtless hoped to keep the Castelo charges quiet as the Iran-Contra story was about to break. Yet Nancy Reagan wanted Castelo to stay so badly that she was willing to risk public embarrassment to keep her.
THE RESIDENCE WORKERS’ exceptional devotion to President George H. W. Bush and his family seems to have stemmed from the family’s accessible demeanor. The Bushes put everyone at ease around them. Barbara Bush remembered one scene during the Persian Gulf War when she was anxiously watching the news. As she was waiting for her husband to walk in, White House Maître d’ George Hannie asked her, “What would you like to drink? And what do you think Pops would like?” (While some in the media have taken to calling him “Poppy” Bush since his son’s presidency, “Pops” was a nickname from President Bush’s youth; while he was in the White House, no one outside his family used the nickname.)
She laughed at the memory. “I said to him—and he knew I was joking, and I knew he was joking; we were that close—‘George, you can’t say that about the president of the United States.’”
Without missing a beat, Hannie replied, “Trust me, Mrs. Bush, at the White House presidents come and go. But George Hannie stays.”
“We had that kind of a relationship, where you could tease and laugh. And yet, when sad things happened to either one of us, we were supportive,” Barbara Bush said.
Houseman Linsey Little said the first President Bush was more approachable than any other president (including his own son). “Old man Bush, they were more out there. The other one, all he’d do is speak to you and keep walking. No conversation, no nothing. But old man, he was lovely—him and his wife.”
Born in Robbinsville, North Carolina—a town of fewer than one thousand people—Little had to leave school in the seventh grade to help take care of his six brothers and sisters. His father was a sharecropper, but Little escaped the backbreaking work of peanut, cotton, and tobacco farming to head north to Washington in the early 1950s.
He started working at the White House in 1979, leaving his town house—which is so close to FedEx Field that he can hear the cheers from the crowd on game day—at 5:00 A.M. in order to make it to work by six o’clock. He would have the house ready for public tours by seven-thirty, setting up ropes, mopping floors, and rolling out carpets. When the tours were over he’d take it all down, only to start again the next morning. After a quick breakfast he’d get a call from Executive Housekeeper Christine Limerick, who would tell him and his colleagues when the family was up so that they could go to the second floor and vacuum while the maids dusted and made up the beds.
LINSEY LITTLE
Little’s relationship with the first President Bush extended far beyond cleaning up around the house. Little was one of a handful of household staff who played horseshoes with the president several times a month, sometimes two or three times a week.
The president and his son Marvin would happily head out to the horseshoe pitch next to the swimming pool and play with Little and his supervisor when they got off work. They all got so into the game that Little even had T-shirts made that read HOUSEMEN’S PRIDE.
“We always beat him, until the end,” Little said, laughing. “The last year we were there, he and Marvin won the championship.” Barbara Bush said she and the president were upset when they left because they knew the Clintons weren’t likely to continue the tradition.
Once, the president even asked Little to join him in the Family Dining Room on the second floor. “He told me to have a seat at the table and we sat there and talked,” Little said, shaking his head. “Sitting at the table with the president, having a conversation. None of the rest of them would have done a thing like that.”
Bush quickly forgave mistakes that would have enraged other presidents. One summer weekend, he was out playing horseshoes and asked a staffer for some bug spray. The worker had sprayed the president from head to toe before he realized he’d accidentally used a container of industrial strength pesticide. Minutes later, when the mistake was discovered, the staffer “literally ran” to the doctor always stationed nearby, said Usher Worthington White.
“By the time they got there the president’s face was already red,” White said. Bush needed to be “decontaminated” in the shower.
“President Bush, being who President Bush was, said, ‘Okay, okay, okay, we just want to get back to our horseshoe tournament!’” No one was fired.
The Bushes genuinely seemed to appreciate the workers’ sacrifices, and in turn the staff went out of its way to make them happy. The kitchen staff knew that Barbara Bush hated it when people sang “Happy Birthday to You.” “On the campaign trail I would have four birthday cakes in one day from people who really didn’t give a darn about me,” she told me with her usual candor.
“One day I came home for lunch and there was a dessert on my plate—incidentally, you do eat very well at the White House—and there was a little tiny square cake and it had the musical notes to ‘Happy Birthday to You.’ They didn’t say it, they didn’t sing it. It was just notes.” Mesnier had made the cake for her to enjoy quietly while she read a book by herself at lunch.
Barbara Bush stopped by the Flower Shop almost every morning just to say hello, sometimes wearing a bathrobe over her bathing suit before her morning swim. And she would joke with Mesnier when she ran into him in the hallway, hitting him playfully with a folder and teasing, “What are you doing here? Don’t you have any cookies to bake or anything?”
Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy said she treated all the staffers like she was their grandmother. “If you were in the elevator, she would get in the elevator with you. She’d say, ‘Oh, no, boys, don’t get off the elevator. I’m going upstairs too.’”
In 1992, when Hurricane Iniki devastated Hawaii, Florist Wendy Elsasser was desperate to reach her parents, who had retired there. She went days without hearing from them, but she refused to interrupt the Bushes with her personal concerns. Finally, one Sunday when she was changing the floral arrangements in the living quarters, Barbara Bush asked how she was doing.
“I’m okay, Mrs. Bush, thank you,” she replied, trying to mask her worry. She kept on working. A few minutes later Barbara Bush was standing next to her again. “What’s really going on?” she asked. “That did not sound like Wendy to me.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Mrs. Bush, my parents are in that hurricane, and I haven’t heard from them for days, and I’m just so upset. I’m just so preoccupied with that.”
Without hesitating, Bush told her, “Wendy, if you can think of anything I can do to help you I will.” There was nothing the first lady could do, of course, but Elsasser was moved by her concern. (A few days later, she finally heard from her parents.)
Usher Chris Emery remembers “going numb” after receiving an unexpected call from the Bushes the day his father died. It was Thanksgiving, and the Bushes were at Camp David celebrating the holiday. Less than thirty minutes after he called to tell his boss, Gary Walters, about losing his father, he got a call from the military operator at Camp David who told him, “Stand by for the president.”
President Bush “said he was so sorry to learn about my father,” Emery recalls, “and asked me if there was anything he could do.” Emery thanked him, but there was nothing to be done. The president paused.
“Stand by, Chris. Bar [Barbara Bush] is here and she wants to talk to you too.”
“Can you imagine?” Emery said, still stunned.
The Bushes took special care to make sure that members of the residence staff had time with their families. When Emery was on night duty, he was expected to wait until the president and first lady told him he could go home. “The Reagans would buzz twice at nine or ten o’clock, which meant I would go up and turn off the lights and call the admin operator and tell them I’m leaving. With the Bushes, Mrs. Bush would call sometimes and say, ‘What are you still doing here? Go home to your family!’ It would be eight o’clock.”
Barbara Bush and Emery still exchange e-mails a couple of times a year. The former first lady signs off: “Love, BPB.”