Upstairs at the White House Read online

  Upstairs at the White House

  My Life with the First Ladies

  J. B. West with Mary Lynn Kotz

  For KATHY and SALLY

  Contents

  Foreword

  The Roosevelts

  1

  2

  3

  The Trumans

  1

  2

  3

  4

  The Eisenhowers

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  The Kennedys

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  The Johnsons

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  The Nixons

  1

  2

  Image Gallery

  Bibliography

  About the Authors

  Upstairs at the White House from 1961 on

  Index

  Foreword

  ON MARCH 1, 1941, after my first day at work in the White House, I started to keep a diary. It was short-lived, however, because as the days became more frantic and filled with more responsibilities, and the working hours longer, I decided that I didn’t want to “relive” each day.

  And from that day until I retired on March 1, 1969, it was never my intention to write a book. Howell G. Crim, Chief Usher of the White House from 1933 to 1957 (when I was promoted to the position), had always said, when asked if he would write his memoirs, “I’m not the type to ‘kiss and tell,’” although he was an avid reader of 42 Years in the White House by Irwin H. (“Ike”) Hoover, the first Chief Usher.

  That book, covering the years from 1891 to 1933, has been cited as a mine of information by historians and authors. Since retirement, I have been encouraged by numerous people—including some First Ladies—to add my more recent recollections to bring the story up to date. That I have attempted to do. If this book is of some help to future historians, then my efforts will have accomplished my purpose.

  I am most grateful to all those who gave me encouragement and assistance, most of whom are mentioned in the text.

  I also wish to cite all of the dedicated, selfless people who staff the “President’s House”—ushers, housekeepers, butlers, maids, chefs, cooks, doormen, housemen, florists, gardeners, electricians, plumbers, storekeepers, engineers—each one of whom has a passion for anonymity. And I apologize profusely to those few whose names I have had to use in telling a story.

  Many times I was asked, “What does the Chief Usher do?” I usually replied, “I do what I’m told to do.” Also I received many letters from students asking what educational background would be helpful for a job as Usher at the White House. I could only reply that experience on the job was the main requirement—since its duties are unique; no other government or civilian establishment offers a comparable position. And how to get this experience? To be at the right place at the right time, and have a lot of luck.

  The title “Chief Usher” is a holdover from early times, when the principal duty was “ushering” expected visitors in to see the President and the First Lady. In recent years many have tried to change the title, but to date nobody has come up with an appropriate appellation.

  To give you a better idea of what the job encompasses, I quote from the official U.S. Civil Service Commission Position Description form:

  • Subject only to the general direction of the President of the United States, serves as “Chief Usher” of the White House. As such is the general manager of the Executive Mansion, and is delegated full responsibility for directing the administrative, fiscal, and personnel functions involved in the management and operation of the Executive Mansion and grounds, including construction, maintenance, and remodeling of the Executive Mansion.

  • Is responsible for the preparation and justification of budget estimates covering administrative and operating expenses, and for the construction and maintenance projects of the Executive Mansion …, as well as for the allotment, control, and proper expenditure of funds appropriated for these purposes.

  • Is responsible for the direction and supervision of the activities of approximately one hundred employees of the President’s household including their selection, appointment, placement, promotion, separation, disciplinary action, etc. In addition, exercises responsibility over the mechanical and maintenance forces in connection with the maintenance and repair of buildings and grounds.

  • Serves as the receptionist at the White House, and as such is responsible for receiving and caring for all personal and official guests calling on the President or the First Lady. These guests include, among others, members of the Congress and their families, members of the Judicial Branch, governors, foreign dignitaries, and heads of state. Is responsible for arranging for accommodations for houseguests, their comfort, their acquaintance with the customs of the household, etc. Is responsible and arranges for all personal and official entertainments, receptions, dinners, etc., in the Executive Mansion, which frequently include the heads of sovereign states, and several hundred persons. Is responsible for the procurement of all food consumed by the President’s family and their guests. Makes personal appointments for the President and other members of his official family.

  • Is responsible for answering a large volume of correspondence regarding the Executive Mansion, its history and furnishings, historical subjects, sightseeing, Congressional requests with regard to the Mansion and Grounds, State functions, etc.

  • Is completely responsible for the efficient operation, cleanliness, and maintenance of the 132 rooms of the Executive Mansion containing 1,600,000 cubic feet; $2,000,000 of mechanical and air-conditioning equipment.

  During all my years of managing the White House, I gave no interviews, sought no publicity. I felt articles about my activities would hamper my effectiveness. My loyalty was not to any one President, but rather, to the Presidency, and to the institution that is the White House. The Executive Mansion of the United States is more than a temporary home for the family who lives there for four or eight years. It is now a museum containing priceless works of art and furnishings, a national monument open to two million tourists a year, a guest hotel for entertaining visitors of state, and, in recent years, an impregnable fortress for protecting the life of the Commander-in-Chief.

  In more than a quarter-century in the Usher’s office just inside the front door, and in the private office of the Chief Usher upstairs at the White House, I came to know and admire Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and, briefly, Pat Nixon. Each brought with her a different viewpoint, a different life style, and each, in her own way, using her own background and training, made a special imprint upon the President’s House, and her own contribution to the heritage of the United States.

  As First Ladies of the land, these women filled the most demanding volunteer job in America. They were not elected, they were legally responsible to no one except the man with whom they had exchanged marriage vows. They had no official title. First Lady was a term popularized by a newswoman many years ago, but it has remained the only designation given to the woman who is married to the man we call “Mr. President.”

  To me, each is indeed the First Lady, and will ever hold my greatest respect.

  J. B. W.

  The Roosevelts

  1

  CONTRARY TO PUBLISHED REPORTS, Eleanor Roosevelt never walked anywhere. She ran.


  She always raced down the halls of the White House from one appointment to another, skirts flapping around her legs. And then she would sail out the front door at full speed, jump into her waiting car, and call out to the driver: “Where am I going?”

  Or she hurried down the driveway and out the front gates to the bus stop or, on a sunny day, marched resolutely a full ten blocks up Connecticut Avenue to her volunteer office on Dupont Circle—and on her way back, she gathered up people to bring home for lunch. There were no Secret Service men hovering around Eleanor Roosevelt.

  I was introduced to this awesome study in human motion on my first day in the White House, March 1, 1941. I had just begun work as assistant to Chief Usher Howell G. Crim, a small, proper man in a black suit, and was sitting beside his desk near the front door. Suddenly, the First Lady of the Land appeared in the doorway of the Usher’s office. I jumped to my feet.

  “Mrs. Roosevelt, may I present J. B. West, my new assistant,” announced Mr. Crim.

  The tall, imposing woman smiled, showing more teeth than I’d ever seen, and extended a slim, graceful hand. It was surprisingly soft in my grasp.

  “How do you do, Ma’am,” I managed to say.

  She was wearing a dark skirt and a white ruffled blouse, and wisps of gray were beginning to stray from her hair, which was loosely pulled back into a knot. When she spoke, her voice was high-pitched and shrill, and she talked so fast I had trouble understanding her.

  Dismissing me with a pleasant nod, she turned to Mr. Crim, who handled all appointments in the mansion: “I’m having the Japanese Ambassador to tea,” she said. “I’ll see him in the Red Room, but please don’t leave me in there too long with him—I don’t know what to talk about!”

  And she was off.

  Mrs. Roosevelt well knew that American and Japanese leaders were engaged in a delicate verbal sparring match, while her husband sought to prepare the country for any eventuality, including war. And as a single male of twenty-nine, reading newspaper warnings of impending war, and reports about Japan’s invasions, I, too, was concerned.

  A few minutes after Mrs. Roosevelt hurried down the red-carpeted hallway, Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, and Presidential Advisor Harry Hopkins entered the White House through the North Portico facing Pennsylvania Avenue. The liveried doorman brought the three gentlemen to the Usher’s office, the first door to the right off the marble-floored main lobby.

  Mr. Crim checked their names off the list of Presidential appointments and accompanied the three men upstairs to meet with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  “That’s the only ushering I do,” the Chief Usher explained. “We always accompany guests to a formal appointment with the President and First Lady. We simply announce their names. The rest of the time, we run the place. I have a budget of $152,000 a year, a staff of 62, and a free hand to furnish and direct the mansion as I see fit.” He added that he had working under him two ushers, Wilson Searles and Charles Claunch, on duty in shifts from the time the President awakened in the morning until his valet put him to bed at night.

  And I, because I could type and take shorthand and, I was told, mind my own business, was sent over from my job in the Veterans Administration to be assistant to the Chief Usher.

  “I’d like you to handle Mrs. Roosevelt’s travel arrangements, the mail, and assist in the operation of the White House,” Mr. Crim told me.

  “The President’s mail as well?” I asked, thinking I’d surely be snowed under.

  “No, just the mail that comes to our office, concerning anything related to the mansion itself. The President’s and Mrs. Roosevelt’s mail is handled by their personal staffs.”

  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.

  Mr. Crim tried to explain the signal system, which registered on the electric callboard above his desk. Listed on the board were the names of every room in the house, the corridors, the elevator. When the buzzer sounded, an arrow popped up, indicating one of those locations.

  “This is to alert everybody—police, secret service, doormen, ushers—when the President is on the move,” he said. “Three buzzes are for the President, two buzzes mean the First Lady, and one is for a guest—and that includes the President’s children.”

  One buzzer rang, the arrow pointed toward the word “elevator,” and minutes later Mrs. John Roosevelt, the President’s daughter-in-law, stopped in on her way to see her ailing husband at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. “I’ll be bringing him back here this afternoon for a few days,” the young woman said.

  Mr. Crim made a note for the housekeeping staff to prepare a bedroom for John Roosevelt.

  “Is he very ill?” I asked the Chief Usher.

  “Indeed not,” he said. “You sneeze around here and they call it pneumonia. This goldfish bowl is made out of magnifying glass.”

  Houseguests, including Alexander Woollcott—“The Man Who Came to Dinner,” opera star Grace Castagnetta, Henrik Van Loon, wandered in and out trying to make themselves at home.

  “We assign them to their rooms and hope they stay there,” Mr. Crim explained. Then, in a whisper, he confided: “Mr. Woollcott is impossible. He was supposed to stay for two days and stayed two weeks. He rings for coffee at all hours of the night, and he invites guests right up to his room.”

  The short, balding Mr. Crim was easily horrified at anything he considered a breach of the highest standards in manners and morals. He was so correct, his eyebrows seemed perpetually raised. When his employers appeared, he almost bowed and clicked his heels.

  “You ‘Mr. President’ the President,” he instructed me, “and ‘Ma’am’ the First Lady.”

  My strongest impression that first day was of Eleanor Roosevelt, who kept popping in and out of the office, her gray hair more disheveled with every appearance. She thrust a new list of appointments at Mr. Crim and was off again. I could have sworn the wind whistled as she zipped into the office still another time.

  “Frances Parkinson Keyes is coming for lunch,” she announced and zipped out.

  Mr. Crim pulled out a place card from his top desk drawer, carefully lettered the lady novelist’s name, and took me down the hall where we made a right turn into the Private Dining Room. “Set up one more place for lunch,” he ordered, introducing me to head butler Alonzo Fields.

  The Private Dining Room, adjoining the larger State Dining Room, was set for sixteen. “It’s hardly private,” Mr. Crim said. “She has a luncheon here nearly every day.”

  During the noontime lull, while the luncheon guests chattered away, and between every visitor, Mr. Crim quietly instructed the staff—head butler and his men, housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt, doormen, gardeners, engineers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, painters, drivers—in their duties for the day.

  By afternoon, I had met most of the people who kept the President’s House a going concern. And at four o’clock I watched Mr. Crim escort the Japanese Ambassador in to the Red Room, to have tea with Mrs. Roosevelt.

  “She hasn’t changed her dress or combed her hair,” Mr. Crim reported when he returned to our office, only a few yards away. At the end of fifteen minutes, he looked at his watch, then, as Mrs. Roosevelt had instructed, marched into the Red Room to help her end the tense appointment.

  When I got home, I wrote in my diary: “Spent the day wondering if I’ll like the job. The first day wasn’t too impressive, but I’ll know more tomorrow.”

  On my second day in the White House, Charles Claunch, the usher on duty, took me on the elevator to the second floor. The door opened, and the Secret Service guard wheeled in the President of the United States. Startled, I looked down at him. It was only then that I realized that Franklin D. Roosevelt was really paralyzed. Immediately I understood why this fact had been kept so secret. Everybody knew that the President had been stricken with infantile paralysis, and his recovery wa
s legend, but few people were aware how completely the disease had handicapped him.

  I’d seen the President once before, three years earlier, when he brought his campaign train through Creston, Iowa.

  “Why on earth do you want to see that man?” asked the owner of the store where I was bookkeeper. “I wouldn’t step across the street to look at him!”

  But after all, it was the first time a President of the United States had ever stopped in Creston, and I went to the train station to see him, even though he was a Democrat. (I spotted my boss in the crowd, too.)

  We all knew he was supposed to be “crippled,” that he walked with a limp or something, but then, standing with Mrs. Roosevelt on the back platform of the campaign train, he looked strong, healthy, and powerful. He had a huge head, broad shoulders and a barrel chest, and he stood well over six feet tall. I don’t remember a word of his speech, but there was something in his manner. He was truly dynamic, I thought.

  Now, as I watched him in his wheelchair, the vitality was gone. His little black Scottie, Fala, ran into the elevator, the door closed, and Claunch introduced me to Mr. Roosevelt. It was a tight squeeze in the car, and I felt uncomfortable towering over the President of the United States. It was a long two minutes back down to the first floor. As he wheeled out, Mr. Roosevelt flashed that famous smile at me:

  “You’re going to have to go some to be able to type and take dictation as well as Claunch can,” he said. Mr. Claunch beamed.

  I soon learned that the White House staff took extraordinary precautions to conceal Mr. Roosevelt’s inability to walk. Special ramps had been built all over the White House for the President’s wheelchair. During State dinners, butlers seated the President first, then rolled the wheelchair out of sight. Only then were guests received in the dining room. For ceremonies in the East Room, the doormen would quietly close the double doors, which were covered with red velvet curtains, after all the guests had assembled. Mr. Roosevelt then rode to the doors in his wheelchair, someone lifted him from the chair, and we flung open the doors and curtains. The President, on the arm of an aide, swung his legs the two steps to the podium, on which he could lean while speaking. No photographs were permitted. His entrances were passed off as Presidential dramatics.