He said when he got up in the middle of the night he ran into the bathroom door. But we’re pretty sure she clocked him with a book.
—RESIDENCE WORKER ON LIFE IN THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE DURING THE MONICA LEWINSKY SCANDAL
There was blood all over the president and first lady’s bed.
A member of the residence staff got a frantic call from the maid who found the mess. Someone needed to come quickly and inspect the damage.
The blood was Bill Clinton’s. The president had to get several stitches to his head. He insisted that he’d hurt himself running into the bathroom door in the middle of the night. But not everyone was convinced.
“We’re pretty sure she clocked him with a book,” one worker said. And who would know better than the residence staff? The incident came shortly after the president’s affair with a White House intern became public knowledge—clearly a time of crisis in the Clintons’ marriage. And there were at least twenty books on the bedside table for his betrayed wife to choose from, including the Bible.
In November 1995 Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-two-year-old White House intern. He had almost a dozen sexual encounters with her over the next year and a half, most of them in the Oval Office. When the affair became public more than two years after it started, the media firestorm consumed the rest of his presidency. The revelation stemmed from more than four years of investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr that looked into other charges, including the Whitewater land deal and the firing of several longtime White House employees in the Travel Office, a scandal known as Travelgate. Although they were not part of the residence staff, Usher Skip Allen says he remembers how upset some of his colleagues became after the dismissals in the Travel Office. After all, most of the residence staff had devoted their entire careers to their jobs at the White House and some were starting to feel vulnerable. “The mood in the house was a little on the tense side, because everybody was career and you never can tell, if it ever got going, how many people or who they would fire.” Career government employees are like professors with tenure who are very hard to fire, he says, and it was shocking to see them dismissed so summarily. The Clintons were also battling criticism that they had used the Lincoln Bedroom to woo wealthy donors.
On August 17, 1998, Clinton became the first president to testify as the subject of a grand jury investigation. Chief Electrician Bill Cliber, who helped set up the power for Clinton’s marathon four-and-a-half-hour testimony—conducted via closed-circuit television—recalls that the president was “in a really bad mood” that day. Later that evening, Clinton confessed to the “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky in a nationwide television broadcast. Four months later, in December, the Republican-led House voted to impeach him, though he was acquitted after a five-week trial in the Senate.
The public did not learn about Monica Lewinsky until January 1998. But some residence workers knew about the affair when it was still occurring, between November 1995 and March 1997. The butlers saw the president and Lewinsky in the family movie theater, and the two of them were seen together so frequently that the workers started letting one another know when they’d had a Lewinsky sighting. The butlers, who are closest to the family, zealously guard such secrets, but from time to time they share fragments of stories with their colleagues—because the information could be useful, or sometimes just to prove their access.
One household staffer, who asked not to be named, remembers standing in the main hallway behind the kitchen that was used by East Wing and West Wing aides. “That’s her—that’s the girlfriend,” a butler whispered, nudging her as Lewinsky walked by. “Yep, she’s the one. She was in the theater the other night.”
Nearly two decades later, many residence workers are still wary of discussing the fights they witnessed between the Clintons. But they all felt the general gloom that hung over the second and third floors as the saga dragged on throughout 1998.
The residence staff witnessed the fallout from the affair and the toll it took on Hillary Clinton, but West Wing aides had long suspected the kind of drama that was playing out on the second floor of the executive mansion. “She would have hit him with a frying pan if one had been handed to her,” said the first lady’s close friend and political adviser Susan Thomases in an interview with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia for their collection of oral histories documenting Bill Clinton’s presidency. “I don’t think she ever in her mind imagined leaving him or divorcing him.”
Betty Finney, now seventy-eight, started as a White House maid in 1993. She spent most of her time in the family’s private quarters and remembers well how things changed in those final years. “Things were definitely more tense. You just felt bad for the entire family and what they were going through,” she says. “You could feel the sadness. There wasn’t as much laughter.”
Florist Bob Scanlan was less guarded about the atmosphere: “It was like a morgue when you’d go up to the second floor. Mrs. Clinton was nowhere to be found.”
And when it wasn’t eerily quiet, the mansion was the scene of intrigue and heated arguments. One incident occurred around Christmas 1996, while the president’s affair with Lewinsky was still ongoing.
The Housekeeping Shop was going about their usual assignment of wrapping presents for the first family. Sometimes they were asked to wrap more than four hundred gifts for friends, relatives, and staffers. Gift wrapping was an elaborate process, beginning in the Reagan administration (when standards were particularly exacting), with careful logs recording details of each present that was wrapped. (These logs were shredded each time a new first family moved in.) The staffers who wrapped the presents always included a gift tag and a description of what was in the package, discreetly tucked underneath a ribbon. They then placed the wrapped gifts on a designated table in the West Sitting Hall or in the Yellow Oval Room.
That holiday season, one staffer remembers noticing an unusual gift, a copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, which she was asked to wrap. She put the wrapped book on the table and thought nothing more of it. A couple of months later, in February 1997, the president gave Lewinsky a gift: a copy of Leaves of Grass. Only later did the staffer learn that the present she had wrapped was most likely the same one that was given to the president’s mistress.
After the holidays, the staffer said, the president desperately wanted to retrieve a book from the Clintons’ bedroom, but the first lady was not yet dressed, and no one wanted to disturb her. “Betty Currie [the president’s secretary] called the valet, and he came to me and asked me if I’d go in and I said, ‘No way,’” the worker recalls. (When the door to the first couple’s bedroom is shut, it is the equivalent of a DO NOT DISTURB sign on a hotel door.) “Finally, I think Betty Currie called Mrs. Clinton directly.”
Moments later, a book came flying out of their bedroom. Hillary had hurled it into the hallway. The president’s valet picked it up and brought it to Currie. It’s not certain whether the book the first lady threw out of their bedroom was the same book that the president gave Lewinsky, but the staffer’s memories paint a picture of the tension.
Florist Ronn Payne remembers one day when he was coming up the service elevator with a cart to pick up old floral arrangements and saw two butlers gathered outside the West Sitting Hall listening in as the Clintons argued viciously with each other. The butlers motioned him over and put their fingers to their lips, telling him to be quiet. All of a sudden he heard the first lady bellow “goddamn bastard!” at the president—and then he heard someone throw a heavy object across the room. The rumor among the staff was that she threw a lamp. The butlers, Payne said, were told to clean up the mess. In an interview with Barbara Walters, Mrs. Clinton made light of the story, which had made its way into the gossip columns. “I have a pretty good arm,” she said. “If I’d thrown a lamp at somebody, I think you would have known about it.”
Payne wasn’t surprised at the outburst. “You heard so much foul language” in the Clinton White House, he said. “When you’re somebody’s domestic, you know what’s going on.”
Payne tested positive for HIV while working at the White House and became very ill, losing forty-three pounds at one point. He wanted to take a leave of absence, but he was told he had one of two options: quit or retire. He chose to retire early. He hoped to be able to return when he got his health back, since he said that several other retired workers had come back to work. “You can imagine what I looked like. I know they wouldn’t want me upstairs,” he says. “I wanted to get my strength and my weight back.” Once he did feel up to working again, however, he was told he couldn’t return because he had retired with disability. He was never told explicitly that he was fired because he was HIV-positive, and he doesn’t know who was ultimately behind the decision—it almost certainly did not rise to the attention of the Clintons—and he did not formally challenge it. But it had been a standing rule for several years, including during previous administrations, that staff with HIV were not allowed to have any exposure to the first family. “I saw them make it very difficult for other people who became HIV-positive,” Payne says. “Some were put down in the basement to work in the laundry room. Others were put out on the lawn.” And florists are in every room of the executive mansion, including the family’s bedrooms, so returning to his old job was impossible. He was heartbroken about the painful way his White House career came to an end, and is remembered fondly by many of the colleagues he left behind.
DURING THE HEIGHT of the drama, Hillary routinely missed afternoon appointments. The details of running the executive mansion, understandably, took a backseat to saving her husband’s presidency and their marriage. For three or four months in 1998, the president slept on a sofa in a private study attached to their bedroom on the second floor. Most of the women on the residence staff thought he got what he deserved.
Even Butler James Ramsey, a self-proclaimed ladies’ man, blushed when the subject came up. He said Clinton was his “buddy, but . . . come on now.” As usual, during the Lewinsky scandal Ramsey said he kept his “mouth shut.”
Some on the staff have said that Hillary knew about Lewinsky long before it came out, and that what really upset her was not the affair itself but its discovery and the media feeding frenzy that followed.
The first lady’s temper was notoriously short during those difficult months. Butler James Hall remembers serving coffee and tea in the Blue Room during a reception for a foreign leader. Suddenly, the first lady approached him while he was still standing behind the bar.
“You must have been staring into space!” she upbraided him. “I had to take the prime minister’s wife’s cup. . . . She was finished and looking for some place to put it.” Hall was dumbfounded—other butlers were working the reception with trays collecting drinks, and his job was to serve the drinks—but he knew that defending himself would be pointless. Clinton complained to the Usher’s Office, and Hall wasn’t asked back for a month.
“Working there during the impeachment wasn’t bad,” said former storeroom manager Bill Hamilton, but he agreed that working with Mrs. Clinton in those difficult months was a challenge. “It was just so overwhelming for her and if you said something to her she’d snap,” Hamilton recalled, shaking his head. Still, he says that he loved working for the Clintons, and although he retired in 2013, he sometimes wishes he had stayed at the White House, knowing that Hillary Clinton might one day return as America’s first female president. He says he would love to work for her again, even after the tumult of her eight years in the residence.
He is entirely sympathetic toward the first lady in those darkest days. “It happened and she knew it happened and everybody was looking at her,” Hamilton said.
Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier said he wanted to help Hillary feel better in any way he could. Her favorite dessert was mocha cake, and at the height of the scandal, he recalls, “I made many, many mocha cakes. You better believe it,” he said, chuckling. In the late afternoons, Hillary would call the Pastry Shop. In a small, unassuming voice—a far cry from her usual strong, self-confident tone—she’d ask, “Roland, can I have a mocha cake tonight?”
One sunny weekend in August 1998, just before the president made his confession to the country, the first lady called Usher Worthington White with an unusual request.
“Worthington, I want to go to the pool but I don’t want to see anybody except you,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, I understand,” he replied sympathetically.
White knew exactly what she meant. She did not want to see her Secret Service detail, she did not want to see anyone tending to the White House’s extensive grounds, and she certainly did not want to see anyone on a tour of the West Wing. “She wasn’t up for any of that,” he recalled. She just wanted a few hours of peace.
White told her he would need five minutes to clear the premises. He ran to find her lead Secret Service agent and told him they would have to work together to make it happen. And fast.
“It was a twenty-second conversation but I know what she meant. ‘If anybody sees her, or she sees anybody, I’m going to get fired, I know it,’” he told the agent. “‘And you probably will too.’”
So the Secret Service agents assigned to protect the first lady agreed to trail her, even though protocol calls for one agent to walk ahead of her and one to walk behind.
“She’s not going to turn around and look for you,” White told them. “She just doesn’t want to see your face. And she doesn’t want you looking at her face.”
He met Clinton at the elevator and escorted her to the pool with the agents walking behind them and no one else in sight. She was wearing red reading glasses and she was carrying a couple of books. She didn’t have on any makeup and her hair wasn’t done. To White, she seemed heartbroken.
They didn’t exchange a single word on the walk to the pool.
“Ma’am, do you need any butler service?” White asked her after she got settled in.
“No.”
“You need anything at all?”
“No, it’s just a beautiful day and I want to just sit here and enjoy some sunshine. I’ll call you when I’m ready to go back.”
“Okay, ma’am,” White replied. “It’s twelve o’clock now, and I get off at one and someone else will be in.”
Clinton looked intently at him. “I’ll call you when I’m done.”
“Yes, ma’am,” White replied, knowing that that meant he would have to stay until whenever she chose to leave. He didn’t get the call until nearly three-thirty that afternoon.
When he returned, White accompanied the first lady on another wordless walk from the pool to the second floor. Before she stepped off the elevator, the besieged first lady let him know how much his efforts meant to her.
“She grabbed me by my hands and gave them a little squeeze and looked me directly in my eyes and just said, ‘Thank you.’”
“It touched my heart,” White said of her gratitude. “It meant the world to me.”
A few of the household workers even found themselves dragged into the unfolding drama. At one point, Houseman Linsey Little was called to the second floor to answer questions about the affair. When he got upstairs, he was met by an intimidating federal agent, who asked him if he’d ever seen Lewinsky before. No, he answered nervously.
“They want to make you feel like they think you know something,” he said. He insists that he’d never seen anything untoward, but even if he had, he admits he would have been reluctant to risk his job and end up on the news himself. “They’d have your name up in bright lights,” he said.
Mesnier described 1998 as a “very sad time” watching two brilliant people consumed by scandal. And like so many others, he felt terrible for the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea.
In an iconic photograph taken August 18, 1998, the day after her father’s embarrassing admission, Chelsea held both of her parents’ hands as they walked to the helicopter on the South Lawn. Mesnier shook his head at the thought of what the young woman went through. “Chelsea was absolutely the sweetest person you’ll ever meet, and then to see them going through a stupid thing like this? Stupid. There was a lot of hardship.”
USHER SKIP ALLEN admits that it was easier to serve the families he liked than it was to pretend.
“But we pretend very well,” he said.
Allen cannot hide his reservations about the Clintons. Over lunch by the pool at his large home in rural Pennsylvania, he fondly recalled how Mrs. Clinton always asked him to help her by tying bows on her outfits, something she couldn’t do herself. But he said the Clintons never fully trusted the residence staff and were particularly suspicious of the Usher’s Office. “They were about the most paranoid people I’d ever seen in my life.”
Allen isn’t the only one with bitter memories of the Clinton White House. Usher Chris Emery, who had been close with the Bushes, remembers feeling unduly scrutinized by the Clintons. In the fourteen months he served them, he says, he was subjected to three drug tests and a background check that he was not due to have for several years. He says that some of the questions he was asked—including what church he belonged to—were unusually personal, so he refused to answer them. “I think they were just trying to find something to make it easier [to fire me].” He sighed. And, indeed, when Emery was fired from the White House in 1994, it was in part because of a favor he had done for former first lady Barbara Bush.
During the first Bush administration, Emery had been very helpful to Mrs. Bush. “We were very close. Chris taught me how to use a computer,” she told me. After leaving the White House, she was working on her memoir when she lost a chapter, so she called on Emery for help. Emery was happy to oblige—but the favor fueled the Clintons’ suspicion that the staff was too attached to the Bush family. When the Clintons saw the usher’s call logs, Emery said, they “came to the conclusion that I was sharing deep, dark secrets with the Bushes in Houston. Which I wasn’t.”
A short time later, Chief Usher Gary Walters called Emery into his office.
“Mrs. Clinton is not comfortable with you,” Walters told him.
“What does that mean?” Emery asked, stunned.
“It means tomorrow is your last day.”
Barbara Bush admits that her phone calls to Chris “caused trouble.” Emery was scolded in public for “an amazing lack of discretion,” in the words of Hillary’s spokesman Neel Lattimore. “We believe the position that he had, as a member of the residence staff, requires the utmost respect for the first family’s privacy.”
Emery says he was devastated at the loss of his job, and his $50,000 salary. “I was out of work for a year,” he says. “They ripped the rug right out from under me. You wonder what they’d do to someone who’s really powerful.” When he made it home that night, the first call he got was from Barbara Bush’s assistant, saying that the Bushes had heard the news and wanted to help however they could. “The next call I got was from Maggie Williams’s office [she was Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff], saying that if I get any calls from the press I should direct them back to the White House. I immediately thought, ‘Well, of course, that’s what we always do.’ I hung up the phone and I said, ‘Wait a minute. They just fired me!’”
All these years later, Emery told me sadly, he understands why he was fired. “She was facing so many pressures,” he says of Mrs. Clinton, “and unfortunately I was a victim.”
But at least one former colleague of Emery’s disputes his claims. This person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the Clintons were right to be paranoid about the residence workers, many of whom had served Republican presidents for twelve years. According to this source, “Everybody in the Usher’s Office was upset when President Bush 41 was not reelected . . . and they showed it in front of the Clintons.” Emery, in particular, was a “Republican from the top of his head to the tips of his toes,” according to this source, and Emery himself says that he would have gone to California with the Reagans after they left office if they’d asked him.
Emery may not always have hidden his feelings around the Clintons. According to his colleague, as President Clinton came down from the second floor to attend an event one day, Emery said, “I can’t understand why everybody has an orgasm when he’s around.” He made these kinds of comments loudly enough for Clinton aides to hear, his colleague said.
The Clintons may also have had good reason to be concerned about their security detail. They were still reeling from claims made by Arkansas state troopers assigned to protect Governor Clinton, who later told the press that they had helped facilitate Clinton’s extramarital affairs in what came to be known as “Troopergate.”
One incident particularly worried the Clintons. Late one night in 1994, while they were at Camp David celebrating Easter, Chelsea’s former nanny and White House staff assistant, Helen Dickey, was in her third-floor room at the White House when she heard noises coming from the family’s living quarters one floor below. When she went to see what was going on, she found a group of men dressed in black carrying weapons and rummaging through the Clintons’ things.
“What are you doing? You have no right to be here,” she yelled.
“We’re Secret Service doing our job. Get out,” they told her.
When Hillary returned, she asked Chief Usher Gary Walters for an explanation. He apologized for forgetting to tell her that the agents were sweeping the second floor to see if there were any listening devices. She was livid.
The Clintons cherished their time alone. In a 1993 interview, Hillary Clinton said she loved the second floor of the White House because it was the only place where the Secret Service didn’t trail her family. “We can tell the full-time help that they can get off. We don’t have to have them up there,” she said. “That’s a wonderful feeling, because everywhere else we are we’ve got people around us all the time.”
By most accounts, Chelsea Clinton treated the residence staff with respect. Yet Ronn Payne believes that she had internalized some of her parents’ animosity toward the Secret Service. In the very beginning of the Clinton administration, agents were stationed on the second-floor staircase landing, right by the president’s elevator. Another Secret Service post was at the top of the Grand Staircase across from the Treaty Room on the second floor. (These posts were later moved to the State Floor at the Clintons’ request.)
One day, according to Payne, he was walking through the second-floor private kitchen when an agent walked in behind him waiting to escort Chelsea to Sidwell Friends, the private school she attended in northwest Washington. Chelsea was on the phone.
“Oh, I’ve got to go,” she told her friend. “The pigs are here.”
The agent turned “crimson,” Payne recalls. “Ms. Clinton, I want to tell you something. My job is to stand between you, your family, and a bullet. Do you understand?”
“Well, that’s what my mother and father call you,” she replied.
DOORMAN PRESTON BRUCE said he had an ominous, prescient feeling that two of Richard Nixon’s closest aides would one day betray the president. It was November 1968, and Bruce had already been the White House doorman for fifteen years. He knew something was unusual when, three or four days after Richard Nixon’s election, a political aide kept showing up at the White House. “I heard this man asking minute questions about the way things were run,” Bruce said. “No detail seemed too small to escape his curiosity.”
The man was Nixon’s counsel and assistant for domestic affairs, John Ehrlichman. Chief Usher J. B. West led him on tours of the residence as Ehrlichman peppered him with questions.
Bruce had never seen anything like it. “We on the household staff already knew how to make the first families safe and comfortable—that was our job. What did this man plan to do?”
While Bruce was charmed that the Nixon family took the time to learn everyone’s names—all eighty of them—he resented the way Ehrlichman and Nixon’s incoming chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, treated him. “Hundreds of times they’d need the elevator. Each time they’d say, curtly, ‘Take me to the second floor,’ without so much as a please or thank you. They looked right through me as if I were invisible.”
Nixon had an easy banter with Bruce, but Haldeman did things to make it clear that the residence staff were the help and nothing more. His office sent out a memo saying that anyone on staff who asked the president or any family member for an autographed picture or a favor would be fired immediately. “We all felt this was a cheap little shot,” Bruce said. “We knew better than to approach the president with such requests.”
Haldeman wanted no one standing in the hall outside the State Dining Room during state dinners—not even the Secret Service. It had been a tradition and a special treat for the butlers to listen in on the toasts from the hallway.
“There was something about Haldeman and Ehrlichman, that you could look at them and you knew that they would never have respect for a person like you,” said Butler Herman Thompson.
Most of the presidential advisers were very protective of the president and wouldn’t get involved in details of how the residence was run. “Even when we would be setting up tables, you would see Haldeman and Ehrlichman walking through,” Thompson said, shaking his head. “The way they carried themselves, it was like they were fully in charge of everything.”
Before Watergate, Nixon himself was well liked among the staff, although most staffers agree that he and his family were much more formal and stiff than their predecessors. Chef Frank Ruta tells a story about Pot Washer Frankie Blair, a congenial African American who was a fixture in the kitchen. One night Blair was cleaning up after the first family had finished dinner. President Nixon wandered into the upstairs kitchen and somehow they started talking about bowling—Nixon was such an avid bowler that he had a single-lane bowling alley installed in the basement under the North Portico. Nixon asked Blair if he would play with him, and the two of them bowled until two o’clock in the morning. “There may have been a bottle of scotch involved,” Ruta added.
When they wrapped up, Blair turned to the president and said, “There is no way my wife is going to believe I was out this late bowling with you.”
“Come with me,” Nixon told him.
The two walked to the Oval Office, where the president wrote a note apologizing to Blair’s wife for keeping him out so late.
Usher Nelson Pierce also remembered happy times with the Nixons before Watergate destroyed Nixon’s presidency. When he found out that the president and first lady were traveling to the Seattle area, where he was born, he told the first lady how much he missed the snowcapped mountains of the Northwest. Not long after that, she asked him to join them.
“The president’s secretary gave me the flight map,” Pierce recalled, and he studied it carefully, “trying to figure out what I would see, what I would recognize. But the closer we got to Washington, the less I was seeing.” Then, just as he was trying to get his bearings, “all of a sudden we make a sharp bank to the right and of course I saw Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount Baker, and Mount Rainier. . . . I knew that somebody had asked the pilots to go that way so I could see the mountains.”
Pierce hadn’t been back home since 1941, when he was sixteen years old. “I was so emotional when we made that sharp right and I knew what had happened. I just started sobbing.”
Back at the White House, Pierce asked the first lady if she told the pilot to take that route just for him. “I wanted to see the mountains too,” she replied with a wink.
The Nixons were formal with the staff, but they were kind—and their kindness made watching the president’s slow unraveling so painful. The Watergate investigation dragged on for more than two years, and as each day passed, the president grew more and more exhausted. His shoulders slouched in defeat as he walked to and from the Oval Office each morning. Electrician Bill Cliber, who later became chief electrician, remembered Nixon having a very regimented schedule during his first term, waking up early to head to the Oval Office. But Watergate sent him into a deep depression; his whole routine “just broke apart.”
At the height of the scandal, Pat Nixon and her two daughters also seemed to sink into despair. “Oh, Mr. Bruce,” Nixon’s daughter Julie pleaded tearfully to the doorman. “How can they say such awful things about my father?” Nixon’s other daughter, Tricia, told me that she took comfort in the support of the residence staff. “You felt around you that positive spirit—that sense that we know who you are, we know who your father is, and we love you. We’ll always admire your father.” When you work in the residence you see “beyond politics, you see beyond the story,” she says. “You see the true person.”
BILL CLIBER
Backstairs, however, the tension that invaded the Nixon White House also infected the residence staff. Nixon may have discarded Johnson’s industrial-strength shower, but he had his own bathroom eccentricities, asking for a calming whirlpool bathtub to be put in its place. “Finding ways to relax in general seemed to occupy much of the president’s time at the White House,” said Traphes Bryant. Nixon was so completely consumed by his own paranoia—right down to his famous “enemies list” of political opponents—that even residence workers never knew where they stood. For many staffers, including Usher Nelson Pierce, Watergate was more traumatic than even the Kennedy assassination, because it dragged on for so long. “You saw a man deteriorate day by day by day and there was nothing you could do to help him.”
At nine o’clock on the evening of August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation. He made the announcement from his desk in the Oval Office, and asked that the room be cleared as completely as possible, even asking his Secret Service agent to leave. “It was just one cameraman, one engineer from the TV company, two military people, and me. All of us had to be in there for sound and pictures,” recalled Cliber, sitting at the kitchen table in his home in Rockville, Maryland. He remembers it like it was yesterday: “It was dead silence in that room. I mean, it was creepy silent.”
After Nixon finished his subdued broadcast, Cliber left the Oval Office and walked down the colonnade. Nixon followed in silence. Cliber paused to let the disgraced president get ahead of him.
“Where you heading, Bill?” Nixon asked, on what must have been the hardest day of his life.
“Back to the residence,” Cliber told him, sheepishly.
“Walk with me,” the president said.
The two of them walked side by side down the columned outdoor hallway, which runs alongside the Rose Garden. Cliber stopped and turned to Nixon.
“You should feel proud of yourself. You did a fine job. The best you could.”
“Yeah, I wish a lot of people felt that way,” Nixon replied. His eyes were glassy; to Cliber, it looked like he was willing himself not to cry.
“It will catch up to them one day,” Cliber told him.
They parted on the Ground Floor of the residence, neither saying another word. Nixon went to the president’s elevator and Cliber went down the basement staircase to the Electrician’s Shop.
That night Nixon stayed up until two o’clock in the morning, making phone calls from his favorite room in the house, the Lincoln Sitting Room. Outside, crowds could be heard chanting, “Jail to the Chief! Jail to the Chief!” He finally went to bed but slept restlessly, and when he woke up and looked at his watch, it read four o’clock. When he couldn’t get back to sleep, he walked to the kitchen to get something to eat. He was startled to see Butler Johnny Johnson standing there.
“Johnny, what are you doing here so early?”
“It isn’t early, Mr. President,” Johnson said. “It’s almost six o’clock.”
In a 1983 interview, Nixon explained what happened: “The battery [in my watch] had run out, worn out, at four o’clock the last day I was in office,” he said. “By that time I was worn out too.”
Preston Bruce recalls seeing Nixon in the elevator in that last day in the White House. “Mr. President, this is a time in my life that I wish had never happened,” Bruce told him. In the privacy of the elevator, Bruce recalls, they hugged each other and wept—just as President Kennedy’s wife and brother had done with him after JFK’s assassination, more than a decade before.
“I have in you a true friend,” Nixon told Bruce.
PRESIDENT REAGAN WAS so friendly that, after a while, the maids, butlers, and ushers learned to slip through a doorway as they were walking down the Center Hall of the residence if they wanted to avoid getting trapped in a long conversation with him. He particularly loved talking about California, the state he governed for eight years. Cletus Clark remembers almost nightly visits when he was painting the president’s exercise room. “One day he came down there and one of the painters was up on his treadmill. I was scared to death! I thought he was going to blow up. But he didn’t, he said, ‘Let me show you how that thing works.’ He got up on it and started walking!”
Nancy Reagan didn’t always approve of her husband’s habit of chatting up the staff. “She’d keep him the way she thought he should be,” Clark says. “She didn’t want him to associate with the help.”
At 2:25 P.M. on March 30, 1981, sixty-nine days into his presidency, John Hinckley Jr. shot a revolver six times at Reagan after he delivered a speech at the Washington Hilton. The attempted assassination shook the residence staff, who were still getting to know the easygoing president.
On the day Reagan was shot, Clark was in the Solarium. Nancy Reagan, her interior decorator, Ted Graber, and Chief Usher Rex Scouten were nearby. “I’ll never forget that,” Clark recalled. “Somebody came up there and whispered something to them, and the next thing you know they left. I was still up there trying to mix some paint to match some fabric.”
The next day, while her husband was recovering in the hospital, Nancy Reagan suffered an injury of her own. When she got back to the residence, she went to the Game Room on the third floor, a cozy space with a pool table, to retrieve her husband’s favorite picture to bring to him in the hospital as a surprise. With a car waiting for her downstairs, she climbed up on a chair to reach the picture and fell off, breaking several ribs. Only a few people on the residence staff knew about her accident; she never revealed it publicly, and the staff has never talked about it until now.
The Reagans’ son, Ron, does not even remember the incident, though he was not surprised to learn about it decades later: “She would have been entirely focused on him at that point, and wouldn’t have let broken ribs get in the way.”
In that moment, Nancy Reagan conducted herself with the same resilience under pressure that the residence workers demonstrate every day.