That first day, I thought the Usher’s office was a twelve-by-twelve-foot madhouse. People ran in and out of the room all day, the phone rang incessantly, and the buzzer buzzed.
—J. B. WEST, USHER AND CHIEF USHER, 1941–1969,
UPSTAIRS AT THE WHITE HOUSE: MY LIFE WITH THE FIRST LADIES
Usher Nelson Pierce lived with his wife, Caroline, in a pretty white Colonial house in Arlington, Virginia, about four miles from the White House. Before he passed away, on November 27, 2014, he and Caroline liked to sit on the porch swing on summer days. During an interview, when I asked him how long they’d been married, he glanced over and asked her to remind him. She did not seem to mind his momentary memory lapse; in fact, she seemed to be used to taking a lead role in the relationship. Because of her husband’s grueling schedule, Caroline spent much of their sixty-six years of marriage taking care of their four kids—two boys and two girls—almost singlehandedly.
One date Pierce did remember is the exact day he started at the residence: October 16, 1961. During his more than two decades at the White House, Pierce’s hours were so long and unpredictable that it felt “strange” to his wife when he was actually home. The ushers’ shifts changed so often that the Pierces kept a calendar on the table by their telephone so Caroline would know when he was working. She said her children have “lived the White House.” Over and over, Caroline had to tell them: “‘We can’t do this because Dad has to work. We can’t go today because he has to work.’ Your life revolved around the White House.” (She teased him that their children’s friends never understood what Nelson did; given his title, they all assumed he was an usher in a movie theater. “That took him down a peg,” she joked.)
But the privilege of working in the White House was never lost on Pierce. One day, Steve Bull, an aide to Richard Nixon, was leaving the West Wing just as Pierce was coming up the steps to start his shift. Bull made fun of him for wearing his White House ID around his neck on the driveway before he needed it out. Pierce told him earnestly, “Out of the two hundred and ten million people in this country, how many of us have the privilege of putting it on?”
Bull paused and replied, “I never thought of that.”
In all his years at the White House, it was trying to keep up with Lyndon B. Johnson that put the greatest strain on his marriage. A nocturnal animal, Johnson often ate dinner after 10:00 P.M., slept a few hours, and woke up again at 4:00 A.M. (Carpenter Isaac Avery, who started at the White House in 1930, had never seen anything like it. “The Kennedys lived in a hurry,” he said. “President Johnson lives in a race.”)
The president’s daughter Lynda recalls that her father “worked a two-day shift.” She said he “would get up in the morning and work,” and then about two or three o’clock, or whatever time he could take a break, he would come over to the mansion and eat lunch or a midday meal—sometimes it was pretty late in the afternoon, three or four o’clock. And then he would go to his bedroom, put his pajamas on, and sleep for thirty minutes or an hour. Then his second day started.”
The residence staff adjusted their schedules to suit Johnson’s demands. They worked in shifts, with ushers, maids, butlers, and cooks coming in at seven or eight o’clock in the morning and working until four or five o’clock in the afternoon, and another group coming in after lunch and working late into the night or early morning.
Every night, the navy chief would give President Johnson a massage in the president’s living quarters. When Pierce was on night duty, he would wait downstairs until the navy chief came down to tell him the president had gone to bed, at which point he was free to leave. Every once in a while, Pierce recalled, the president would fall asleep on the table and the chief would have to sit down and wait until Johnson woke up so he could finish the massage.
“It was three, four, sometimes even five o’clock in the morning before we’d leave work,” Pierce said, without a hint of resentment in his voice.
Johnson wasn’t the only president who kept late hours. Pierce remembered a few parties thrown by the Kennedys that ran so deep into the night that he’d call his wife and ask her to tell their oldest son not to start his six-mile Washington Post paper route without him. He would rush home in time to drive him; sometimes it was the only time he got to see his son that day.
The ushers’ workload amazes even top West Wing staffers. Obama’s former personal secretary, Katie Johnson, was astonished at how efficiently they coordinated a last-minute celebration for the staff who worked on President Obama’s historic health care legislation the night it passed on March 21, 2010.
“We didn’t know if health care was going to pass until four in the afternoon, and of course the list of people who’d worked on health care was much larger than anyone had originally anticipated. So at four-thirty in the afternoon I’m calling over to the residence and telling them that we need to have food and drinks for a hundred people at eight o’clock,” she recalled. She expected to hear some pushback. “They said, ‘Oh, no big deal, we’ve got it.’” In a matter of hours they were able to pull off a memorable night for the West Wing workers, who drank celebratory champagne on the Truman Balcony.
For former White House spokesman Reid Cherlin, it was the only time he ever set foot in the living quarters. (The Obamas are especially private and only a few close friends, including Valerie Jarrett, are frequently seen upstairs.) Cherlin called the memory “vivid, because I knew I would never be able to go again.”
While they were enjoying the champagne, speechwriter Adam Frankel asked Reggie Love if he could take a look at the Lincoln Bedroom. Soon everyone wanted to join in on the impromptu self-guided tour.
“Walk around,” the president told the festive crowd.
That was all it took. “Everyone from the top people on down to the most junior people were just wandering around the bedrooms on the second floor. Everyone had the biggest smiles on their faces,” Cherlin remembers. “The president was in a good mood.”
“I can only get away with having you guys up here because Michelle is out of town,” Obama told them. Pointing out the copy of the Gettysburg Address displayed in the Lincoln Bedroom, the president—who takes pride in his own handwriting—told the young staffers how much he admired Lincoln’s beautiful penmanship.
For a politician sometimes viewed as standoffish, Obama often talks about the White House with a kind of boyish charm. Shortly after the inauguration, Frankel brought a new speechwriter to the Oval Office.
“Is this your first time here?” Obama asked.
“Yes, sir,” Frankel’s colleague replied.
“Pretty cool, huh?”
EXECUTIVE CHEF WALTER Scheib is quick to say how honored and grateful he is for the opportunity to work at the White House—even as he compares it to being in prison.
“You work for the same people every day, you don’t have any personal life, family, social life, you work what we used to call ‘White House flex time’—that is, you chose any eighty-five hours you want to work each week. You lose your family, lose your social life, lose your personal life, and in many cases even lose your professional life because you work with the same group of folks every day, day in and day out. So you have to find a new way to stay fresh.”
Many of the butlers I interviewed were divorced, in part because of their work. Butler James Ramsey insisted he was never happier than since his 1995 divorce, even though he lost his house and his car in the process. “My life now, I come and go. I do what I want to do. I ain’t got nobody to tell me what to do. I love my life.” Having no one to answer to is helpful when working such unpredictable hours. Ramsey sometimes left the house at five or six o’clock in the morning and didn’t return home until two o’clock the following morning if there was a state dinner.
Butler James Hall (nicknamed “Big Man” by Nancy Reagan) started at the White House in 1963 and was divorced nine years later. Hall was called to work state dinners and help the full-time butlers if they were short-staffed. He often got the call last-minute in addition to the full days he worked as a library technician in the National Archives.
Hall passed away around the time that his friend James Ramsey died. Before his death, I interviewed Hall at his tidy apartment in a retirement home in Suitland, Maryland, where his second bedroom was a shrine dedicated to his career. His souvenirs included letters from Chief Usher Rex Scouten, thanking him for his work at a dinner honoring prisoners of war from Vietnam, and for his help at Tricia Nixon’s wedding reception. The letters hung next to a condolence note from President Clinton on the death of his father in 1995.
Hall harbored no resentment about his divorce or the late nights he spent working at the White House. He reminisced about the days during Nixon’s presidency when the butlers used to wear tails and white vests: “They had us take the white vests off and wear black vests because they said we were ‘sharper than the guests.’”
Of course, working on the residence staff didn’t jeopardize every worker’s marriage. In fact, some couples even found each other while working at the White House. After much cajoling, Head Housekeeper Christine Crans found time to fall in love with Engineer Robert Limerick in 1980. The two met when Crans was measuring Limerick for his uniform. Limerick’s boss, the chief engineer, kept teasing them—until finally, Christine recalls, the two decided, “Okay, we’re going to go out to make him happy.” Less than a year later they were married.
When she told Nancy Reagan she was engaged, the first lady was thrilled. And relieved. “I think she was worried I might become a spinster,” Limerick said, laughing. The housekeeper before her had married the pastry chef, and ever since then, “the joke is that housekeepers come in trying to find a husband.” At their small wedding ceremony in Deale, Maryland, about forty of the sixty-five guests were members of the White House staff and their spouses, including Gary Walters and Rex Scouten.
Still, their busy schedules could be challenging. When the Clintons were in the White House, Limerick had to work every Christmas, and she and Robert eventually decided it would be better if he left his job as a White House engineer because the schedule was too grueling. Adding to the frustration of coordinating schedules, the Limericks couldn’t talk much with each other about the incredible things they heard and saw on the job—even though they both worked in the White House. Limerick insists, “We didn’t always come home and spill the beans.”
USHER SKIP ALLEN, who worked in the residence from 1979 until 2004, knew one member of the staff who even gave his life for the job. Frederick “Freddie” Mayfield started as a houseman in 1962, vacuuming and moving heavy furniture. When he was promoted to doorman, he became something of an institution with his silver hair, white tie, and black tailcoat (he shared the same quiet dignity as his colleague Preston Bruce). As the doorman, he waited by the elevator at night to bring the president to the residence. “He had the greatest smile,” said Luci Baines Johnson. “Every day was Christmas for Freddie Mayfield.”
One day, Mayfield confided to Allen that his doctor told him he needed bypass surgery—immediately. Mayfield said, “I know I have to have it done, and the doctor said I had to do it right away, but I’ll just wait until after the next presidential trip.” By the time the next trip came around, it was too late. Mayfield had a heart attack on his way to work and died at just fifty-eight years old. “He never got his heart fixed because he kept saying, ‘The president needs me now, I’ll wait until he goes on this next trip and then I’ll go to the hospital.’ He never made it.” It wasn’t that Mayfield thought he was the only person who could do his job, Allen said. “It’s just pride in station. It’s ‘I want to do my best for the president,’ and they go out of their way to do that.”
Nancy Reagan attended Mayfield’s funeral on May 17, 1984, and was so affected by his loss that she said at the time, “It doesn’t seem right here without him.” Butler Herman Thompson remembers being moved when he saw her in the audience. “I thought it was very respectful.” Decades later, she said she still remembers getting the call that he had died, and how “shocked and saddened” she was by the news. She knew right away that “it just wouldn’t be the same without his smiling face at the elevator.”
The staff are all like family to each other. Many of them played golf together back during Freddie Mayfield’s day, and every Friday night a group of workers would gather in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s small bowling alley to play against Secret Service agents and police officers. When Nelson Pierce’s wife, Caroline, heard her old friend Freddie’s name, her face lit up. “He liked turkey necks. I’d have to save the turkey neck every Thanksgiving to send to Freddie.”
That camaraderie persists today. When one of the workers has a death in the family, or is having trouble paying medical bills, his or her colleagues pool together their money in a jar in the Butler’s Pantry on the first floor to help with the costs.
“You could be having a bad day and a butler would come in that morning and say hello to you and get you laughing,” Usher Nancy Mitchell recalled. “Somebody always comes in and picks you up.”
Butler James Jeffries comes from a long line of White House workers. In fact, nine members of his family have worked at the White House. His mother’s brother Charles Ficklin was the maître d’ at the house, and another uncle, John Ficklin, was a butler and later became maître d’ as well.
When Jeffries’s mother died in 2012, he recalled tearfully, “practically everybody was at my mother’s funeral except the president.” His mother had never worked at the White House, but Butlers Buddy Carter and James Ramsey and Storeroom Manager Bill Hamilton all came to show their support for the Ficklin family. And his colleagues contributed almost four hundred dollars in memorial donations, though none of them were wealthy themselves. But Jeffries was even more amazed when the same thing happened after one of his uncles died. “My uncle, he didn’t work at the White House. But he was a Ficklin, and he had passed away down in Amissville, Virginia, and we’re going on and having the funeral, and all of a sudden I heard the door open in the church and Mr. West and the ushers and quite a few other people from the White House came to the funeral. I think they had a letter somebody read in the church from the president.” He paused. “I started crying because I felt so good that people thought enough of us to come.”
Jeffries still works a couple of days a week as a butler at the White House; he says he’ll retire “when my legs don’t want to let me stand up.” When he arrives at the White House, the first thing he does is check a list on the cabinet in the pantry that gives him his assignment. He could be on first-floor pantry duty, bartending, or pickup (carrying a tray to pick up dirty glassware). He said he prefers working as a bartender or cleaning dishes in the back, because holding trays loaded with glasses is hard work for a man in his seventies with arthritis. He said his manager recently asked him if he was all right after he became breathless rushing between the Butler’s Pantry and the East Room carrying two plates at a time. But he brushes off any such concerns—“I don’t want to complain,” he says—and these days his colleagues save him from doing much heavy labor, just as he did for the older butlers when he started, back in 1959.
“One time I remember the butlers had gotten so old that, when they were holding a tray with glasses or drinks on it, all of a sudden you could hear those glasses clanging because they didn’t have the strength in their arms,” he said. “I would go out there and take the tray from the guy and take his place so he could go on in the back.”
Butlers often make a lasting impression on the first family and their aides. Desirée Rogers remembers the loss of longtime butler Smile “Smiley” Saint-Aubin, who passed away suddenly in 2009. Rogers called his death “one of the most poignant things of my tenure, and our team’s tenure.” Talking as though it were a loss in her own family, she said the Obamas held a service in his honor at the White House with his family.
“He was just an incredibly gracious man who was very, very good at what he did. That’s why they call him ‘Smiley’—always cheerful, always ready to serve, and always so helpful, whether it be something that our office needed or one of his peers needed,” she said, adding, “I think for all of us it was an incredible loss so early on, at a time when all of us were just learning our way. It was a tough time.”
The staff’s sacrifices do not go unrecognized. Charles Allen, the son of Butler and Maître d’ Eugene Allen, remembers a story his father once told him that shows the mutual devotion between the first family and their staff. Lady Bird Johnson was so worried about a butler’s cancer-stricken wife that she kept pressing him about her treatment. When she did not like his answer, she called up two of the country’s most well-regarded oncologists. That afternoon they flew in from New York and landed at Washington National Airport to meet the butler’s wife.
In a similar display of love and respect, Electrician Bill Cliber remembers Secret Service agents approaching him after the birth of his son.
“Where’s your wife at?” they asked.
“She’s at Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park,” he told them. “Why?”
They said Lady Bird was thinking of sending her flowers. He pauses, tears beginning to fill his eyes so many years later. “No,” he said, disbelievingly. “The first lady went and got flowers and she took them to her and gave them to my wife in the hospital.” His wife, Bea, sat next to him as he spoke, but she just shook her head when I asked her to elaborate. It’s a memory she wants to keep only for herself.
When Cliber thanked Lady Bird the next day, she told him it was the easiest thing she ever had to do as first lady.