Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  “The President of the United States and Mrs. Truman!”

  I couldn’t help wondering how Mrs. Roosevelt felt at hearing those words, so formal, so matter-of-fact, so impersonal. For twelve years, Mr. Crim had announced, “The President of the United States and Mrs. Roosevelt” every time they entered the room. It was a custom as old as the White House, one we had inherited from the royalty our forefathers rebelled against.

  But all I could think of was: “The King is dead. Long live the King!”

  And at that moment I discovered the secret of White House existence—the secret that had kept everyone calm, performing smoothly, showing no reaction. It was a secret that sustained me through the years ahead, that kept me from developing emotional attachments, from becoming personally involved with any administration.

  The secret was loyalty to the White House and to the Presidency, rather than to whoever happens to be occupying the office for four years, or eight. I discovered that there is a continuity to our government institutions and to the house where our Presidents live. I think it’s a good thing that there are people who serve to maintain that continuity, and that all the Presidents have appreciated that. Of course, each has had his own ideas and has used them, but at the same time each has been very much interested in how things have been done in the past.

  We had no time to mourn.

  We stayed up all night. Mr. Crim and I met with the President’s staff to plan the funeral. Because no one had yet replaced “Pa” Watson, Mr. Roosevelt’s military aide who had died on the return trip from Yalta, a representative from the Military District of Washington read us the Army procedures for a State funeral. Then the State Department protocol officer read the official “List of Precedence” for diplomatic functions. The invitations had to be narrowed to a few because the East Room could hold only two hundred people. It was really no different from arranging any other appointment for Mrs. Roosevelt.

  Our agenda set, we automatically ordered the housekeeper to ready the guest rooms and equip the kitchen—no extra work, because with Mrs. Roosevelt we’d learned always to be ready for guests.

  But Robert Redmond, the head gardener, was not ready for the avalanche that fell on him. “What shall I do with all these flowers?” he asked in amazement. The wreaths had begun to arrive almost as soon as the announcement was heard.

  “Arrange them in the East Room, around the walls,” I said, setting up a flower brigade for Redmond and his eleven helpers.

  At midnight, I looked out the window. There were throngs of people crowding the sidewalks, thousands massed in Lafayette Park across the street, all standing, crying, staring up at the darkened White House.

  Tall and stately in black, Mrs. Roosevelt returned Saturday morning, entering the White House with the flag-draped casket, which had been drawn on a caisson from Union Station by six white horses. Her children, Anna and Elliott, walked behind her. In the car following them Mr. Roosevelt’s cousin, Margaret Suckley, held Fala in her arms.

  The undertaker placed the President’s body on a catafalque in the East Room, where the honor guard was waiting.

  Mrs. Roosevelt stopped at our office. “Can you dispense with the Honor Guard for a few moments,” she asked, “and have the casket opened? I would like to have a few moments alone with my husband.”

  She waited in our office while we called the undertaker in to open the casket. When it was ready, she said to us, “Please don’t let anybody come in.” Mr. Crim asked the military honor guard to leave the room, and he stationed himself at one door, Claunch at another, and I stood guard inside the third door.

  Mrs. Roosevelt stood at the casket, against the east wall, gazing down into her husband’s face. Then she took a gold ring from her finger and tenderly placed it on the President’s hand. She straightened, eyes dry, and she left the room. The coffin was never opened again.

  We returned to the East Room for the funeral that afternoon. The air was heavy with the sweet odor of flowers that came by the thousands, from all over the world, to line the walls of the East Room, floor to ceiling. Just the wreaths. Mrs. Roosevelt told us to send fresh flowers in vases to the hospitals.

  The chill of two days before had disappeared; the sun beat down on the White House roof, and the packed room was steaming. The service, fortunately, was short.

  Ceremonies and officials then moved to Hyde Park for the burial. Mr. Crim, Claunch, and Searles all joined the family on the funeral train, leaving me in charge of the White House, with a twenty-four-hour respite before beginning the transfer from one family to another.

  It took twenty big army trucks, jam-packed to the corners, to move the Roosevelts’ monumental twelve-year collection of possessions out of the White House. We packed night and day, for one entire week. Every morning after breakfast, Mrs. Roosevelt took me through room after room, pointing out things that belonged to her—photographs by the hundreds, ships’ models, books and books and books, tiny souvenirs from all over the world. But she saved the President’s study for last. On the final day, when her last box was crammed into a truck, she called me in to the gray, oval room. The walls looked pockmarked without the pictures.

  But on the President’s desk was the familiar clutter. Letter openers, bronze donkeys, a clock, some models of ships, a nautical ashtray. We had already received a note from Mrs. Roosevelt that the President had bequeathed $100 to each member of the staff in his will. Now, pointing out the desk, she said, “If you would like a remembrance, please take anything here.”

  I was young then, and had no idea I’d ever wind up with a collection of Presidential presents. Besides, the three Wests had already outgrown our small apartment. I knew what was needed.

  “There’s a playpen up on the third floor that some of your grandchildren used,” I ventured, and she smiled. “Of course, Mr. West.”

  When she left that day, she shook hands with Mr. Crim, the ushers and me, at the front door. Then she hurried to her car, coat flapping, legs moving faster than they were designed to. Looking back only once, she drove away.

  It took just one truck to move the Trumans from their three-bedroom apartment to the White House. All they brought was their clothes and Margaret’s piano.

  During the time it took to pack up Mrs. Roosevelt’s belongings, the three Trumans stayed at Blair House, the President’s guest house across the street from the White House. The Secret Service insisted upon installing them in quarters where they’d be better protected, as crowds of news people and curious onlookers had begun to impede traffic at the Connecticut Avenue apartment house, where the Trumans had lived since a year after Mr. Truman’s election to the Senate from Missouri in 1934.

  We hadn’t even had time to think what life with the Trumans might be like. From the swearing-in ceremony, we could see that they were quiet, modest people. They looked pitifully lost, surrounded by members of the impressive Roosevelt Cabinet. Perhaps the strangeness of their presence was increased because they had been around the White House so seldom.

  During the week of packing for Mrs. Roosevelt, we asked for an appointment with Mrs. Truman. Notebook in hand, I reported to the new First Lady at Blair House. She was seated at a desk in the fourth-floor room she’d set up as her office. I was struck by the difference between her and Mrs. Roosevelt.

  As I entered, she indicated a comfortable chair, and smiled. It was the smile of an equal, not of someone who considered herself of superior rank or status. When she spoke, I was aware from her words, from her tone of voice, that there was no distance of class or background between Bess Truman and myself. She seemed like an ordinary person, like someone from Creston, Iowa. Or Independence, Missouri. I felt at ease and I liked her immediately.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about the operation of the White House,” she began. “You can appreciate how sudden this is for us.”

  “We’re here to do everything in the world to help you,” I answered. “I’ll try my best to explain how the house operates and how the staff is s
et up. And then we’ll be at your disposal to try to make it work to fit your family’s needs.”

  Those first few days, we sat at Mrs. Truman’s Blair House desk talking about how it would be to live in the White House. She was just feeling her way. From the beginning, I felt she’d be easy to work for—that there’d be no problem getting along with this very down-to-earth, personable lady. She was correct but not formal, hesitant but not indecisive. And she let us know how glad she was to find us there.

  Our relationship—First Lady to administrative officer—was immediately different. The Trumans were new, and I had been at the White House four years. When I came to work for the Roosevelts, I had to fit into an established White House routine. Now, I had to help guide the Trumans into a new one.

  She walked across the street to the White House the day after Mrs. Roosevelt’s departure. It was like a ghost house. The walls of the second floor rooms were streaked with dust and faded around the outlines of all Mrs. Roosevelt’s pictures. Much of the furniture was shabby, badly in need of an upholsterer. Draperies hung limply, many not blending with colors in the room. What little was left in the White House gave it the appearance of an abandoned hotel.

  “How much redecorating can we do?” she asked.

  “Actually, you’ll be able to do quite a bit,” I answered, “because Mrs. Roosevelt hadn’t gotten around to doing it yet.”

  Then I explained that every four years, with each new (or reelected) administration, Congress allots $50,000 above our annual appropriation to paint the house white and refurbish the interior.

  Mrs. Truman seemed immensely relieved. “We won’t be bringing any furniture,” she explained, “we’d planned to use what’s already here.” We walked through the guest rooms, borrowing a bed here, a table there, a mirror somewhere else, to set up the Trumans’ private apartments.

  During the next two weeks, she worked with me and with a Kansas City decorator, who brought paint samples, photographs, and fabric swatches, from which Mrs. Truman selected lavender and gray for her bedroom, raspberry pink for Margaret’s bedroom, pastel green and blue for the President, and beige for the President’s study. She did all the furniture arranging herself.

  “I don’t have nearly enough pictures to put on the walls,” she told us. The National Gallery of Art can lend paintings to the White House from their storage vaults, I explained. The three Trumans had one grand, art-filled evening when the National Gallery sent over painting after painting, from which they could select. They chose mostly landscapes.

  For two more weeks our staff painted, hung draperies, cleaned, upholstered, and rearranged the White House for the Trumans.

  During this time, Mrs. Truman was obviously concerned, as we all were, about what was going on in the world and in the President’s office, as Foreign Ministers of Russia, China, France, and England trekked in and out of the west wing. But we were impressed by her calm, deliberate manner. One thing at a time, quietly, was her approach. Very different from Mrs. Roosevelt’s juggling eighteen decisions at once, dictating while running down the halls. In the vernacular of today, the new First Lady kept her cool.

  There was little glamour to Bess Truman. Like most Midwestern women I’d known, her values went deeper than cosmetics and color schemes. She was matronly and comfortable, often wearing gray to complement her soft gray hair. I don’t think it ever occurred to her to tint her hair—it might end up purple, like that of so many of the berouged Washington ladies who came through our reception lines.

  “She looks exactly as a woman her age should look,” Harry Truman said proudly.

  As a young girl, she had been considered a beauty; at sixty, she wore her age gracefully, and naturally. Her clothes were tailored—two-piece suits with hat and gloves for outside, simple dresses at home. In the evening, she wore long gowns cut with straight lines, usually with one strand of pearls. And I never saw her wrinkled or rumpled. She was always impeccably groomed.

  Her eyes were her single most engaging feature. Her warm, expressive smile began with a twinkle there. But her eyes could freeze you with their steel-blue glint.

  We saw very little of the President. He began early in the morning, walking across the street from Blair House to the President’s oval office in the west wing, and every morning a huge crowd gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue to watch him make the trip and to walk back home for lunch. The traffic tie-ups were terrible.

  He was too busy grappling with the huge burden of government that had so suddenly dropped in his lap to worry much about the White House. With the war still raging in Europe and in the Pacific, with the birth of the United Nations in San Francisco and the incredible secret of the atomic bomb, his days were filled with ambassadors, communications with Mr. Churchill, Stalin, General Eisenhower, General Marshall, Admiral King, and especially stormy sessions with Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov.

  But on May 1, nineteen days after he took office, President Truman asked to be taken for a thorough tour of the White House. We had set up a table for his poker game on the third floor, and before the players arrived I took him upstairs. He was in a jaunty mood, perhaps because of the announcement of Hitler’s death, and I was delighted to see the grim expression disappear from his face for a few moments as he expressed a lively interest in the history of the mansion.

  “When you think of all the great men who’ve lived in this house, you can’t help but feel a sense of awe,” he said.

  Up on the second floor, he wanted to see “where Mrs. Truman is going to put us all….”

  I explained that she’d decided to use Mrs. Roosevelt’s living arrangements: She, too, would sleep on a little single bed in the First Lady’s dressing room and use Mrs. Roosevelt’s big room as her own sitting room. The President’s bedroom was to be the same, with an antique four-poster from a guest room replacing Mr. Roosevelt’s hospital bed.

  The President decided to use Mr. Roosevelt’s private oval study as his own. “It looks like I’m destined to work in oval rooms,” he said. (On his first day in office, he had cleared the chaotic jumble off the desk in the President’s oval office in the west wing. That desk was soon shipped to Hyde Park, and thereafter Mr. Truman worked behind Herbert Hoover’s desk.)

  Mrs. David W. Wallace, Mrs. Truman’s aging mother, would move into the guest room in front, over the north portico. Miss Reathel Odum, Mrs. Truman’s secretary, could sleep across the hall and double as a companion to Mrs. Wallace. Mrs. Truman planned to use Mrs. Roosevelt’s little office overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, I explained.

  We covered the second-floor territory at a brisk trot. The President walked as if he were marching, I observed.

  As we talked, I was struck by the fact that President Truman evidently had very poor eyesight, even worse than mine. His glasses were so thick they magnified his eyes enormously, giving him a peering, owlish gaze. I had the feeling he was looking at me, all around me, straight through me.

  The President moved quickly from room to room, murmuring approval at the progress, at his wife’s choice of colors, at the furniture.

  Then when we came to the Lincoln Room, one of the most historic rooms in the house, with its massive Victorian furniture and oversized bed, the President stopped, looked around, studying. And then the President said:

  “Would we dare move Mr. Lincoln out of here? Would that be tampering with history too much?”

  “Well, I’m sure Mr. Lincoln probably slept in every room in the house,” I ventured.

  “We’d like to put Margaret up in our end of the house,” he continued, “and this suite seems the ideal spot, but the furniture isn’t suitable for a young girl.”

  “The President may use the house any way he wishes,” I assured him. “It’s always been so. Actually, the room that Mrs. Truman has chosen for her sitting room was probably where Lincoln slept. The Coolidges kept the Lincoln furniture there, and President and Mrs. Coolidge slept in the room together. The Hoovers slept in the same room but they moved the Lincoln fur
niture across the hall to where it is now. You could just as easily move it down the hall over the East Room, because that was the Lincoln Cabinet Room, where he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.”

  “Now I know why they say Lincoln’s ghost walks around up here at night,” President Truman chuckled. “He’s just looking for his bed.”

  Much relieved at being able to “tamper” with history, Mr. Truman continued the tour, bringing up Jefferson, Madison, and Theodore Roosevelt, and how they had used the house.

  President Truman was intrigued by the third-floor “diet kitchen,” which had been installed for the convenience of President Roosevelt. “Well, well, look at this,” Mr. Truman said. “Bess thought she was going to get out of cooking when she moved to the White House, but I’ve got news for her!”

  On that exploratory walk around the White House together, I got some first impressions of the newest occupant, that would be reinforced in the years ahead. Harry Truman was his own man. There was no pomp or pretense about him, and he seemed to be at ease with every one of us. I had the impression that the new President knew who he was and was satisfied that his own personality would do just fine in the White House.

  We were going to enjoy working for this family, I decided.

  May 8, 1945, was a big day at the Executive Mansion of the United States. It was the President’s sixty-first birthday. As if to celebrate, he made his first Cabinet shift (appointing Robert Hannegan of Missouri as Postmaster General), thus beginning the delicate process of turning the Roosevelt Administration into the Truman Administration. That day, also, was the Trumans’ first full day in the White House. And most important from a standpoint in history, it was V-E Day. The war had ended in Europe!

  As we brought Margaret’s baby grand piano in the front door, crowds were gathering outside the fence. It brought to mind the thousands who had gathered three weeks before, a silent mournful crowd. But this was different. People were shouting, honking horns, celebrating long into the night. The President came out twice—raising his arms in victory, joining the crowds in their jubilation.