Margaret Truman Read online

  Rutherford and Lucy Hayes often included their children in White House activities. One of Scott’s biggest kicks was meeting a delegation of Native Americans who came to plead for their homelands. He was thrilled when the Sioux chief, Red Cloud, patted him on the head and called him a “young brave.”

  On Memorial Day, Fanny joined her mother and some friends at Arlington National Cemetery to decorate the graves of Civil War soldiers. At Christmas, the children helped their mother distribute gifts to the White House staff, and on Easter Monday they donned their Sunday best and presided over the annual Easter egg roll on the White House lawn.

  For many years, this event had been held on Capitol Hill, but in 1878, Congress decided to prohibit public use of the grounds. Unaware of the ban, the children showed up on Easter Monday 1879 and were turned away by the Capitol police. Disappointed and angry, they proceeded down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, where President Hayes offered them the use of the South Lawn and created a White House custom that endures to this day.

  VII

  The largest and liveliest group of children to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was Theodore Roosevelt’s family of six, which included sixteen-year-old Alice, his daughter by his first marriage to Alice Lee, who died in childbirth, and her half brothers and sister, Theodore Jr., fourteen; Kermit, twelve; Ethel, nine; Archibald, seven; and Quentin, four.

  The older children, Alice and Ted, might have been expected to be more sedate, but they were not above joining their younger siblings in such antics as sliding down staircases on tin trays borrowed from the kitchen, roller-skating in the East Room, or stilt-walking and bicycle riding through the upstairs halls. Quentin, who liked to go speeding through the house in his wagon, once crashed into a full-length portrait of Lucy Webb Hayes, leaving a hole in the canvas. On another occasion, Quentin and Archie livened up an otherwise ordinary afternoon by following the White House lamplighter around the grounds and turning off the lights as he turned them on.

  For the most part, the Roosevelts enjoyed their children’s antics, but they were quick to enforce discipline when the occasion demanded. One night, when Quentin had a sleepover for some of his friends—they called themselves the White House gang—the boys sneaked downstairs and peppered a portrait of President Andrew Jackson with spitballs. They finished the job by climbing on chairs and arranging the soggy lumps in designs—three across his forehead, one on each of his coat buttons, blobs on both ears, and another blob on the tip of his nose.

  The boys scampered back upstairs and were just drifting off to sleep when the president flung open the door, dragged Quentin from beneath the covers, and whisked him out of the room. The next morning, the gang learned that Q, as they called him, had been forced to remove the spitballs under his father’s watchful eye. Nor did the rest of the gang escape. They were all summoned to the president’s office for a stern lecture on respecting public property.

  As his siblings went off to boarding school one by one, Quentin and his gang all but took over the White House. They spent hours exploring the mansion from attic to basement and once disrupted the Departments of War and Navy, in their adjacent building, by using mirrors to flash sunbeams into their office windows, almost blinding the staff.

  One spring the gang encountered two plumbers working on the fountain on the South Lawn and started pestering them with questions about what they were doing. The men quickly tired of the cross-examination and shooed the boys away, whereupon Quentin led them to a large iron door sunk into the ground behind a clump of evergreens. The boys managed to open the door and turn the key in the massive valve that controlled the flow of water to the fountain. A few minutes later, streams of water came gushing out of the pipes on which the men were sitting. One man was lifted straight off his perch; his coworker slid backward into the empty pool. They both lay sprawled on the bottom while the water from the fountain rose in a graceful arc and thoroughly doused them. The gang members beat a swift retreat and avoided the South Lawn for the next couple of weeks.

  Perhaps the gang’s worst crime was rolling a giant snowball off the roof of the North Portico. It hit one of the White House policemen squarely on the head and knocked him out. The president, who was just stepping into his carriage, saw the prank and although he tried to control himself, he couldn’t resist laughing. Fortunately, only the policeman’s dignity was injured, but the gang got yet another presidential lecture along with orders to apologize.

  Roosevelt’s lectures usually persuaded his children to behave themselves, at least temporarily. The one exception was Alice, who defied her father’s attempts at discipline and seemed to delight in finding ways to annoy him. He disapproved of women smoking and forbade her to do it under his roof. Alice made her way up the White House staircases and smoked on the roof. To liven up a particularly dull social event, she once pulled out a cap pistol and started shooting at the startled guests.

  As Roosevelt famously said to an old friend, “I can do one of two things. I can be president of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”

  VIII

  Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president of the United States after the sudden death of Warren G. Harding in the early morning hours of August 3, 1923. The new president’s sons, John, almost seventeen, and Calvin Jr., fifteen, were not at home that summer and the laconic Coolidge let them find out on their own that they would be moving into the White House.

  Calvin Jr. had a summer job harvesting tobacco for which he was paid three dollars and fifty cents a day. When one of his coworkers heard the news, he remarked that if his father were president, he wouldn’t be harvesting tobacco. Calvin responded, “If my father were your father, you would.”

  The following summer, John, who had just graduated from Mercersburg Academy in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, was in a military training program at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, while Calvin Jr., who was on vacation from Mercersburg, remained at home. The 1924 Republican convention met in June and nominated Coolidge to run for president in his own right and he was spending the summer in the White House preparing for the campaign.

  One day toward the end of June, young Calvin was playing tennis without any socks on. With his bare feet rubbing directly against his tennis shoes, he soon developed a blister on his right toe. He paid no attention to it until it started to hurt. When he mentioned the pain to his parents, they sent him to the White House doctor who saw that the blister had become infected and ordered the young man to bed.

  By the Fourth of July, the infection had turned into blood poisoning. Calvin’s temperature rose and he drifted in and out of consciousness. By July 6 the doctors were holding out little hope. On the slim chance that surgery might help, he was taken by ambulance to Walter Reed Hospital, where, in his feverish state, he tossed and turned and seemed to have the impression he was leading a charge of troops into battle. Suddenly he murmured “We surrender” and fell into a coma. He died the following evening.

  Some weeks later a newsman who had known Coolidge when he was active in Massachusetts politics called at the White House to express his sympathy. “I am sorry,” he said. “Calvin was a good boy.”

  Coolidge swiveled around in his chair and stared out the windows of the Oval Office for several minutes. “You know,” he finally responded, “I sit here thinking of it, and I just can’t believe it has happened.” The president was in tears as he repeated the last sentence. “I just can’t believe it has happened.”

  Later, writing in his autobiography about the loss of his son, Coolidge said, “When he went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.”

  IX

  Chelsea Clinton was the second young woman in history to be the only child of the president of the United States. I was the first. In some ways, our experiences are not really comparable. I was twenty-one when we moved to the White House; Chelsea was only twelve. But there are a few parallels.

  With no siblings to share the limelight, we both came in for an
inordinate amount of attention—good and bad. My parents made sure I didn’t let being a first daughter throw me, and from everything I’ve seen and heard, Bill and Hillary Clinton were just as careful not to let Chelsea get carried away by it, either.

  In spite of the myriad problems with which the Clintons had to cope—scandals, investigations, impeachment— Chelsea’s needs were not neglected. Not only did she get through eight years in the White House with a reasonable amount of privacy, she seems to have had a very good time.

  Chelsea had pizza parties in the State Dining Room and sleepovers on the third floor of the White House with her classmates. When she graduated, Bill Clinton was the speaker, joining two other presidents—Lyndon Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt—who delivered commencement addresses at their daughters’ schools. Knowing her father’s tendency to be long-winded, Chelsea warned him in advance to be brief.

  Jenna and Barbara Bush, the latest presidential daughters to occupy the White House, are also the first set of twins. That’s had the media panting for stories, but so far the Bushes have followed the policy the Clintons adopted with Chelsea: No comments, period.

  The Bush daughters were both in college, just as I was when my father became president. Back then, the reporters were all over Dad’s press secretary, Charlie Ross, begging him to let them interview me. Even if I had wanted to hold a press conference (which I didn’t) and even if my parents would have let me (which they wouldn’t), I didn’t have anything to say.

  Charlie, smart, wonderful man that he was, was as anxious as my parents were to protect my privacy, but having been a newspaperman himself, he knew he couldn’t hold the reporters at bay indefinitely, so he came up with a clever solution.

  “We’ll let them follow you around for one whole day,” he said, “and they’ll soon realize that there isn’t anything to write about.”

  Charlie, as usual, was right. After clearing the matter with the university administration, he told the reporters they could follow me around the campus of George Washington University for a day and see how I spent my time.

  If any of those journalists thought they were going to come away with a great story, they must have been pretty disappointed. They spent most of the day shuttling from one classroom to another and sitting through courses in history and government. It quickly dawned on them that I was leading a life that was much like that of any other college student and, as Charlie had foreseen, they decided to leave me alone—at least until I graduated and did something newsworthy on my own.

  X

  When I chatted with Chelsea Clinton during a visit my husband and I made to the White House in 1993, one of the key questions she asked me was “Did you enjoy living here?”

  My answer was an unqualified yes. Living in the White House is a unique privilege, and for anyone who is as interested in American history as I am, it provides unbeatable insights into the workings of the government and the day-to-day lives of the men and women who shaped this country.

  The biggest lesson I learned from the experience is that the White House is not the real world, and when you walk out the door and the next president and his family walk in, it’s all over. No more household staff ready to press a skirt or sew on a button in an emergency, no more unending supplies of chocolate ice cream—my favorite—in the freezer, no more special treatment everywhere you go.

  Unless you’ve learned to put the experience in perspective, it can be a terrible letdown. I have to confess that after a year or two in my role as first daughter, I got a little full of myself, which was against the rules in the Truman household. My father saw what was happening and after I had spent a weekend in Washington—by this time, I was living in New York—he sat down and wrote me a letter. The gist of his message was not to get carried away by the White House aura. “Keep your balance,” he said. “Do not let the glamour get you.”

  If I were the advice-giving type, I’d pass that along to every young person who faces the challenge of living in the White House.

  Questions for Discussion

  Why might a young person enjoy living in the White House?

  What would be some of the drawbacks?

  Can presidents’ children lead normal lives?

  Nellie Grant was not the first White House bride, but her wedding was the first to attract public attention. Every detail was reported in the press. Credit: Library of Congress

  11

  Here Come the Brides

  DURING THE SEVEN and two-thirds years Dad was in the White House, there was never any shortage of news. Just for openers, we had the dropping of the atomic bomb, the end of World War II, and the beginning of the Korean War. But in the midst of all this, the media was always on the lookout for the really big story: When was I going to get married?

  I’m afraid I disappointed them. I didn’t get married until 1956—four years after Dad left office. It was another ten years before the reporters finally got the story of their dreams: a White House wedding. But perhaps to make up for the long wait, they got a doubleheader: Luci Johnson’s in 1965 and her sister Lynda Bird’s two years later.

  The Johnsons weren’t the first pair of presidential daughters to get married during their father’s administration. Two of Woodrow Wilson’s three daughters did the same thing. There have been other White House brides as well, but the wedding that occupies a truly unique place in the annals of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue took place on June 2, 1886. The bride was a twenty-one-year-old beauty from upstate New York named Frances Folsom and the groom was none other than the president himself—crotchety, forty-nine-year-old Grover Cleveland, a lifelong bachelor who supposedly worked so hard he didn’t have time for a wife.

  II

  Grover Cleveland had known Frances Folsom—her family and friends called her Frank—all her life. Her father, Oscar Folsom, had been Cleveland’s partner in his Buffalo, New York, law office. When Oscar was killed in a carriage accident in 1875, Cleveland became Frank’s legal guardian. She was eleven years old at the time.

  It is not clear when he started thinking about a change in their relationship, but by the time Frances was a student at Wells College in Aurora, New York, Cleveland was regularly sending her flowers. After he became president in 1884, the flowers came from the White House conservatory.

  Frances graduated from Wells in 1885 and embarked with her mother and her cousin Benjamin Folsom on a tour of Europe. She had already agreed to marry Cleveland. He proposed one night when they were walking together in the East Room during a visit she paid to the White House as the guest of his sister, Rose.

  Sometime between that conversation and the time Frances sailed for Europe, the wedding date was set and they agreed to be married at the White House. Frances decided it was the only place they could be sure of having some privacy.

  Shortly before the Folsoms were scheduled to return to the United States, rumors of the president’s secret engagement began circulating, but because of the difference in the couple’s ages, it was assumed that he was engaged not to Frances, but to her widowed mother.

  Toward the end of May, the Folsoms’ ship docked in New York. A crowd of reporters was on hand to interview the bride-to-be but there was no sign of her. The president’s secretary, Daniel Lamont, had arranged to meet the ship in the harbor, take the Folsoms aboard a government revenue cutter, and whisk them off to their hotel.

  By this time the identity of the bride was no longer a mystery. Cleveland had sent handwritten notes to slightly more than two dozen friends inviting them to the ceremony. Meanwhile, the press was using every imaginable form of pressure to be allowed to cover the proceedings, and a small army of would-be gate-crashers were racking their brains for ways to get past the guards. One enterprising fellow offered band leader John Philip Sousa fifty dollars to let him don a uniform and pose as a triangle player in the Marine Band.

  Frances wore a gown of ivory satin with a fifteen-foot train, but aside from the elaborate gown, it was a very simple wedding. The ceremony was held in t
he Blue Room and the president entered the room with his bride on his arm. The twenty-eight guests stood in a semicircle during the brief ceremony while outside, cannon boomed in an official salute. Church bells rang out all over Washington and in many other cities as well. Afterward the guests adjourned to the State Dining Room for refreshments.

  Frances and Grover Cleveland not only enjoyed an extremely happy marriage, but Frances turned out to be the most popular first lady since Dolley Madison.

  III

  Alice Roosevelt Longworth was one of my favorite Washingtonians. She had a sharp eye and an even sharper wit, plus a gift for being delightfully outrageous. I always liked the inscription on the pillow she kept on her living room sofa: “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

  “The other Washington Monument,” as Alice was sometimes called, was a commanding figure on the D.C. social scene long before the Trumans got to Washington and long after we left. She died in 1980 at the age of ninety-six, almost seventy-eight years after she swooped into the public eye by becoming the first presidential daughter to make her debut in the White House.

  In those days, “coming out” was a signal, not unlike the sound of the starter’s pistol in a race. If you didn’t get married within the next two or three years, you were counted among the losers. So, of course, Alice’s debut immediately started a wave of speculation about when, where, and, above all, whom she would marry.

  Alice tantalized the gossipmongers for three years before she finally said yes to Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati, Ohio. Their wedding was to take place in the White House on February 17, 1906.