By the standards of latter-day preservation work, this was a needless and tragic loss. The justification would be cost and the President’s own desire to see the job finished in reasonable time.
Before the renovation, there had been sixty-two rooms in the mansion, twenty-six halls and corridors, fourteen bathrooms. With the project complete, there were to be more than one hundred rooms, forty corridors and halls, and nineteen bathrooms. There would be 147 windows, 412 doors, 29 fireplaces, 12 chimneys, 3 elevators. There would also be a television broadcast room and a bomb shelter, two definite and costly signs of the times.
Most of the additional rooms and baths were on the third floor (thirty-one rooms and nine baths) and in the new basement levels, which, when finished, would resemble the off-stage service and utility complex of an up-to-date 1950s hotel. There were storage rooms, a laundry, a dental clinic, medical clinic, staff kitchen, barbershop, pantries, everything very institutional-looking. Few buildings anywhere in the country had such advanced mechanical and electrical equipment as went into the new White House that was emerging. The main electrical control board looked big enough for a theater. Plumbing, heating, air conditioning, kitchen appliances, elevators, incinerator, fire alarm systems, wall safes—all were the most advanced of the day, and cost well over $1,250,000. To accommodate the refrigeration compressors for the air conditioning, a tremendous additional excavation had to be made outside, next to the North Portico.
To make the lowest basement bombproof, an additional $868,000 was spent, and with no questions asked. The Secret Service and Truman’s military advisers had convinced him of the necessity. The decision was made in the grim first months of the Korean War, when it seemed a third world war could come any time. “The President has authorized certain protective measures at basement level in and adjacent to the wings of the White House,” the commission was informed on August 16, 1950. “Plans for this work are now being developed by the Architect of the White House….”
The change meant many tons of additional steel and concrete in corridor walls and the floor above, work that was rushed ahead full speed. The bomb shelter was completed in less than a year, long before the upstairs levels were even close to finished.
The entrance, at the end of a subterranean passage at the northeast end of the house, was a four-inch steel door with a narrow window at eye level, like the entrance to a speakeasy. In the event that the President and those with him reached the shelter after an atomic attack had already occurred, they were to shed their clothes once inside a small entrance hall, then, naked, proceed into another somewhat larger hall, where they would shower—to remove any radioactive material—and put on emergency clothing, which by the summer of 1951, like everything else in the shelter, was all ready and waiting.
Beyond was a large room with some seventy army cots neatly stacked against one wall, gas masks, chemical toilets, and acetylene torches (in case the occupants had to cut their way out of the steel door). In adjacent rooms were an emergency generator, a larder of Army rations, and a communications center, with radios, cryptographic machines, and telephone switchboard with direct lines to the Pentagon, state police headquarters, and a secret military relocation center near Leesburg, known as Mt. Weather. Accommodations for the President and his family consisted of an 8 by 10-foot room, four bunk beds, a toilet, and a supply of books.
Those inside, Truman was informed during a first visit to the shelter, would probably survive an atomic attack. The facility, however, would not sustain a direct hit. As the Secret Service and most of his staff already knew, Truman intended, in the event of an attack, to remain at the White House or in the shelter, both during and afterward, largely for “morale reasons.”
(Once when a radar operator incorrectly reported the approach of twenty-five unscheduled, unidentified planes—which turned out to be one plane—and several of the White House staff went below to the shelter, Truman did not.)
In the early months of the White House project, the work had proceeded ahead of schedule; but with the onset of the Korean War, and increasing shortages of building materials, progress slowed, costs began to rise. About 250 men were on the job. The work went on six days a Week. Truman came and went repeatedly, so often as time passed that the men scarcely bothered to glance up or take notice.
“He considered it his project. He was saving the White House,” remembered Rex Scouten, one of the Secret Service agents who regularly accompanied the President on such rounds and who, years later, would become head usher, then curator of the White House. “He was also showing his desire to get it done with.”
Truman wanted everything handled correctly, on the job and on paper. When he learned of a movement within the commission to dispense with making complete plans of the installations in the new building—as a way of cutting costs—he responded at once with a terse memorandum to the head of the General Services Administration:
It is absolutely essential that the conduits, both wire and water, and all the complicated arrangements underneath the floors and the air conditioning service, be put on paper so that future mechanics of the White House can find things when it is necessary to make repairs. One of the difficulties with the old White House was that nobody knew where anything went and why it was there.
Now there just isn’t any sense in not having in the Archives, in the General Service Headquarters and in the White House complete plans of all installations. I want this done and if it requires an extra appropriation to get it done we will get that done too.
His own principal contribution to the design of the building concerned the grand stairway, which he insisted be relocated to the east side of the main entrance hall and made more open, more fitting for the ceremonial processions of the President and his guests of honor. Before, the stairway had been largely out of sight.
Often over the years, Truman had told friends and members of his staff that had he been forced as a young man to choose a profession other than politics, he would have been either a farmer, an historian, or an architect. Now, working with Winslow, he could pore over plans and drawings to his heart’s content, as he had once with Edward Neild, when building the Kansas City Courthouse; and at first, he and Winslow got along extremely well. A tall, personable, highly gifted man, Winslow had been an important figure at the White House since the 1930s. He cared intensely about the building, knew and loved its history. Privately, he even communed with the spirits of a few departed presidents. (“Franklin Roosevelt appeared and presented a rose to me as did Andrew [Jackson],” Winslow had recorded in his diary after an evening over a Ouija board in the summer of 1950.) A married man, he was also romantically involved with several women, and while Truman seems to have been aware of this, he appears only to have grown annoyed by it when the project started to fall behind schedule. Losing his patience, Truman could often become quite abrupt with Winslow.
Most of the time, however, they worked smoothly together, each admiring the other’s strengths and pleased to find how often they agreed. Winslow would write long memoranda reporting on progress, or listing current problems, and Truman would give his answers in the margins or between paragraphs in longhand. When, for example, Winslow reported that the commission intended to dismantle the temporary sheds on the South Lawn and set up various storage rooms and facilities for the workers in the new basement areas, Truman scrawled, “No! HST.”
It is probable [Winslow continued] that ground floor areas will be…used for contractor’s offices [and] without a doubt there will be considerable damage done to the various interior finishes that cannot be repaired satisfactorily at the last minute.
Don’t use them. HST
The basement areas should be kept as clean as possible after being finished. For any of these areas to be put into use as storage and dressing rooms for laborers and mechanics is inconceivable in a residence of this kind.
Just do not do it. HST
I am inclined to believe that the sheds on the south lawn should remain until nea
rly all the work is finished throughout the interior of the building. If this is done all tools, paints and other materials may remain stored outside the building where they properly should be stored.
Right.
As each room is completely finished it should be locked and kept locked until the furnishings are moved in for occupancy. After that time no workmen or government personnel should be permitted free access throughout the building without specific permission from the Executive Director of the Commission.
Right as can be. HST
In August 1951 the plasterers went out on strike for two weeks, slowing progress still more. The laying of the fine parquet floors, a slow process at best, seemed to go on endlessly, since few craftsmen could be found who knew how the work should be done and those available were often advanced in years and worked very slowly.
The contract for furnishing and decorating the house went to B. Altman & Company of New York, which did the entire project at cost. When a number of socially prominent New Yorkers who had served on a White House advisory committee in years past began pressing for the chance to contribute their views, Truman wrote that
I want it distinctly understood that this matter will be closely watched by me and that no special privileged people [will be] allowed to decide what will be done….
I am very much interested in the proper replacement of the furniture in the White House in the manner in which it should be placed, and since I am the only President in fifty years who has had any interest whatever in the rehabilitation of the White House, I am going to see that it is done properly and correctly.
This settled, the work went on, directed principally by B. Altman’s young chief of design, Charles T. Haight, who was tireless, forceful, and got along well with both the President and the First Lady, even as Truman made his presence felt more and more.
He kept pressing for greater speed. He wanted everything ready by Christmas 1951. He hoped to have at least a year in the house, before his term of office expired. As the new year began, work on the floors was still behind schedule. Installation of marble and paneling was incomplete. Bath fixtures had yet to arrive, and though some twenty painters were at work, only the third floor, the guest and servant quarters, had been finished.
There was no letup in the racket and confusion. In February 1952, the main floor was a thicket of scaffolding, paint buckets, and stacks of lumber, as Truman led a half-dozen reporters on a preview tour. The builders were speeding things up, he said, obviously pleased. He had “taken a curry comb to them.” He intended to move in by April. The reporters confessed difficulty in imagining how the finished interior would look.
On March 15, The New York Times reported that things were “moving at the double quick” at the White House.
Two large moving vans stood under the White House front portico. From them movers carried furniture through the White House double doors. Graders were smoothing off a new front lawn just ahead of landscapers who were rolling down turf that arrived in great truck-loads….
Twelve days later, late in the afternoon on Thursday, March 27, Truman arrived back in Washington after a week’s stay at Key West and, joined by Bess, was driven to the White House, entering by the north gate on Pennsylvania Avenue.
It was spring again and the mansion looked warm and cheerful in the dusk, with lights glowing from every window on the ground floor. As a further note of cheer, a large cherry tree in full blossom had been planted just that day in the front lawn.
Beneath the North Portico several of the White House staff, members of the commission, and others stood waiting, with a cluster of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen. Along the sidewalk, by the iron fence, a crowd applauded and called welcome.
Head usher Howell Crim greeted the President at the door. John Mays, the veteran doorkeeper who had been at the White House since the time of William Howard Taft, took the President’s coat.
Truman, “tanned and appearing in excellent health,” “obviously highly pleased,” as reporters jotted in their notebooks, stepped inside. After an absence of three years, four months, the President of the United States was again in residence at the White House.
Every light was burning, everything shimmered with light—crystal chandeliers and red carpets, window glass, marble columns, gilt-framed mirrors. Wood floors shone like polished glass. Walls and ceilings glistened with new paint. The effect was stunning. It all looked much the same as before, yet brighter, more spacious, and finished to perfection.
With Bess, Truman toured the whole of the first floor. To the white and lemon-gold splendor of the East Room had been added new mantelpieces of Tennessee marble, in honor of the chairman of the commission, Senator McKellar. Except for two magnificent grand pianos standing in opposite corners and two newly acquired Adam benches against the far wall—eighteenth-century benches designed by John Adam of Edinburgh—the room was bare of furniture, its parquet floor shining like glass beneath the same two crystal chandeliers that had hung there before but that had been reduced slightly in scale. The Green Room—once Jefferson’s bedroom, later a dining room, later still a diplomatic reception room—looked no different from before, with the same silk on the walls, the same white Carrara marble mantels ordered by James Hoban in 1816. Above the entrance to the Blue Room, however, was a new presidential seal. Previously the seal had been embedded in the floor of the main hallway, but Truman had insisted it be moved—he didn’t like the idea of people walking on it.
The oval-shaped Blue Room itself had been changed from dark to royal blue, with a large motif in gold on its silk damask walls, while the Red Room had new damask walls, new draperies and valances—all very red—setting off another Hoban mantel of lustrous white Carrara marble. Truman was particularly fond of a small French clock on the mantel in the Red Room and of four portraits on the walls: of William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. The painting of Roosevelt, by John Singer Sargent, was, Truman liked to say, “the most expensive picture” in the house.
Where the State Dining Room had been formerly rather subdued, even somber, with dark oak paneling, it was now painted a soft green, a “lovely color,” Truman thought, and a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George P. A. Healy hung now over the mantel in a heavy gilt frame.
Because Bess had made a previous commitment to appear at a Salvation Army dinner at the Statler that evening, Truman dined alone, in the family dining room, off the State Dining Room, under a recently donated antique cut-glass chandelier and a spotless replacement of the ceiling where Margaret’s piano had once poked a hole.
“Bess and I looked over the East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room, and State Dining Room,” he recorded that night. “They are lovely. So is the hall and state stairway…. I spent the evening going over the house. With all the trouble and worry, it is worth it….” The cost had been $5,832,000. It could have been done for less, he thought, and taken less time, if he had been fully in charge. But he was extremely pleased all the same. He had been told by the architect and engineers that it had been built to last another five hundred years. He hoped it would be a thousand years.
On Tuesday, April 22, when the White House was reopened for public tours, 5,444 people went through. On Saturday afternoon, May 3, with the pride of a new householder, Truman led his own television tour of the mansion. The broadcast was carried by all three networks and three network announcers—Walter Cronkite of CBS, Bryson Rash of ABC, and NBC’s Frank Bourgholtzer—took turns accompanying him and asking questions. Thirty million people were watching, the largest audience ever for a house tour. There was no script and Truman was at his best, relaxed, gracious, amusing, and knowledgeable. “His poise, his naturally hearty laugh, and his intuitive dignity made for an unusual and absorbing video experience,” wrote Jack Gould, television critic for The New York Times. In the East Room, to demonstrate the tone of the magnificent Steinway—“the most wonderful tones of any piano I have ever heard,” Truman told Frank B
ourgholtzer—he sat down and gave an impromptu performance of part of Mozart’s Ninth Sonata, then crossed the room to the Baldwin, an American-made piano, as he said, and from a standing position, played a few more bars on it as well.
He spoke of Alice Roosevelt’s wedding in the East Room and recalled that Franklin Roosevelt had lain in state there.
The President was an inexhaustible source of information [wrote Jack Gould]. He explained the decor and furnishings and offered a host of anecdotes on former occupants of the White House. Yet through his narratives there always ran an underlying note of deeply sincere and moving awe for the historic continuity of the Presidency.
Time called his performance “outstanding.” The country loved the new White House and, for the moment, very much liked the man who occupied it.
III
For quite some time, Truman had been thinking about the question of a successor, someone to head the Democratic ticket in November 1952 and take his place in the White House after inauguration day in January 1953. The Republicans, he expected, would choose Taft, and the prospect of Taft as President was intolerable to Truman. There must be no isolationist takeover that would destroy everything he had worked for.
By late summer 1951, he appears to have concluded that the ideal Democratic candidate, “the most logical and qualified,” was Chief Justice Fred Vinson. But Vinson declined, saying he had been out of politics too long. In November Truman tried again, inviting Vinson to Key West where they could talk freely in the privacy of the Little White House, but not until after Truman had had a meeting with Eisenhower over which there was to be a good deal of controversy.
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