Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  For every hotel dinner, we went into the vaults beneath the North Portico, packed up the china, crystal, and gold flatware and hauled it all down to the hotel.

  We sent the White House butlers down to serve the President and his top-ranking guests. In fact, all the ushers, social aides, Marines, and others carried on as if it were a White House away from home. Fields worked out a tentative menu, Mrs. Truman approved it with the suggestion that room be left for the hotel chef’s specialty, and I took the menu, with a suggested wine list, to work out the details with the hotel’s maître d’.

  But not even away from the staid traditions of the mansion did we ever serve cocktails before a State dinner. Mr. Crim was adamant about holding to that rule, as was the social secretary. The main reason, however, was not propriety, but protocol.

  “They all march into the dinner according to order of precedence, and they are assigned specific dinner partners for the procession,” Mr. Crim told the surprised hotel manager, who was not accustomed to “dry” banquets.

  “If they drink too many cocktails, they’ll forget where they are in the line of protocol and who they’re supposed to be escorting!”

  With the preparations for State entertaining taken from under their supervision, the Trumans were able to live in Blair House as they preferred to live—quietly. There were no sightseers trooping through, no elaborate functions. I think they rather appreciated the quiet time, too, because a new course of world events began to occupy the President’s every waking moment. The Cold War, as it was now called, spread to new fronts.

  Among the issues which Harry Truman struggled with and thought crucial to the survival of the Western world were the ill-fated attempt to support the Nationalist Government of China and the establishment of West Germany.

  Mr. Truman was not making these decisions in a vacuum. At home, he had to cope with Senator Joe McCarthy’s charges that the government was infiltrated with Communists. The Soviet Union had produced its own atomic bomb, creating a new balance of terror.

  He countered the Russians’ Berlin blockade with an airlift; he made the tough decision to produce the hydrogen bomb.

  And in July, 1950, North Korea invaded the Republic of South Korea. President Truman decided that the United States would fight. After receiving United Nations support, he named General Douglas MacArthur as his commander, and sent two divisions of American soldiers into Korea.

  The seriousness of our new war brought a near moratorium to the already limited entertaining in Blair House, except for one innovation by Mrs. Truman. She began afternoon parties for wounded soldiers, a hundred at a time, at Blair House. They were brought in from hospitals by the Red Cross to be entertained by the Marine band and young friends of Margaret’s. Whenever she could interrupt her new concert career, Margaret came down from New York for the teas. And her father never failed to attend.

  It was the day after one of those teas, November 1, 1950, that something occurred to change unalterably the life of Harry S. Truman and the lives of future Presidents of the United States.

  * Senators Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, Edward Martin of Pennsylvania; Representatives Louis C. Rabaut, Michigan, and Frank B. Keefe, Wisconsin; Presidential appointees Richard E. Dougherty and Douglas William Orr. The Commission hired a staff, headed by Maj. Gen. Glen E. Edgerton (Ret.), and three consulting engineering firms.

  4

  AT ONE IN THE afternoon, punctual to the second, President Truman walked into Blair House, nodding to Mr. Crim and me, as we sat in our little office just inside the front door.

  The President went upstairs for a few moments, then came down to lunch with Mrs. Truman and Mrs. Wallace. Things were quiet, sleepy, back to normal after the previous day’s entertainment.

  I checked the Usher’s log as Mr. Truman went back upstairs to take his nap. The President had one appointment for the afternoon, a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery.

  “You can sleep until two thirty,” I joked to Mr. Crim. “His car won’t be here until then.”

  Mr. Crim laughed. “I’m afraid I might not wake up,” he said.

  I looked out the window—Blair House, like most period town-houses, is right on the street—at Officer Birdzell, dressed in his winter uniform, standing on the sidewalk.

  “I bet he’d like to be in his shirtsleeves today,” I said.

  Mr. Crim and I were sitting in the office just inside the front door with the window open, because it was so unseasonably warm outside. The house was so quiet, the day so close, it was a struggle to stay awake.

  Suddenly a shattering noise brought us both to our feet.

  “That’s gunfire!” Mr. Crim exclaimed as we ran to the window.

  I saw the White House policeman Davison and Secret Service agent Boring, their pistols drawn and shooting, running down the sidewalk from the police box, at the east end of the house. They were shooting at somebody near the front door of Blair House!

  I ran out to the entrance hall and found the front door wide open.

  Wade, the doorman, was just standing there, staring at a man in a dark striped suit, who was firing at the policemen.

  “Close the door,” I yelled and wheeled around to get at the open windows, when I saw Mrs. Truman coming down the stairs.

  “What’s happening?” she asked worriedly.

  “There’s a shooting outside,” I said. “Somebody is shooting at the police.”

  Eyes wide, she turned quickly and walked back upstairs.

  When I saw Officer Birdzell, who’d been standing out front only a few moments before, fall to the ground bleeding, I realized we were under attack. I had no idea how many gunmen there were or whether there’d be an invasion of Blair House. Then city police and Secret Service agents appeared in droves, and the shooting suddenly stopped.

  The man in the striped suit lay on the bottom doorstep, another man was crumpled in a heap inside the hedge in front of Lee House. Officer Coffelt was dead, and Officer Downs was seriously wounded.

  “Get me a priest,” Downs gasped, as they dragged him into Miss Walker’s office at Lee House. I called St. Stephen’s Church and asked a priest to meet him at Emergency Hospital. Fields and I stayed with the wounded, bleeding man until the ambulance arrived. There had obviously been an attempt to kill the President. But who—and why?

  One of the would-be assassins was killed. The other lived to explain that they were Puerto Rican nationalists, who had tried to kill the President because they hoped to set off a revolution in the United States so that their country could declare independence.

  It was a frightening experience for all of us to see people murdered just a few feet away, as they tried to invade the residence to kill the President of the United States.

  But we were astounded minutes later to see the President come downstairs and leave by the back alley door to make a speech, unveiling a statue of a British war hero, at Arlington Cemetery.

  If the killers had arrived at 2:50, instead of 2:20, the President would have been walking out the front door of Blair House—a frighteningly easy target.

  From that moment on, the Secret Service, the police, and the President were never allowed to forget the possibility of a madman’s bullet. No longer could President Truman walk across the street to his office nor take his constitutional. From then on, his car always picked him up at the back alley of Blair House, drove him around the back to the southwest gate of the White House to his west wing office. West Executive Avenue, between the White House and the old State-War-Navy Department building, was closed to traffic forever. Pedestrians no longer could stroll on the sidewalks in front of Blair House. We began to know the feeling of life behind a barricade, a feeling that never again left us.

  Publicly Mr. Truman shrugged off the attack. “A President has to expect those things,” he said, but he expressed great sorrow to the family of the dead policeman.

  Mrs. Truman, however, was visibly upset for days. Her great concern was to keep the news from her mother, who was quite
ill.

  The confrontation with mortality must have had a deep effect on this President, who had so geared his personal regimen to staying alive. During the next month his responsibilities and burdens multiplied even more with what he termed “the worst situation we have had yet”—the invasion of Korea by 260,000 Chinese Communist troops. General MacArthur was pressing for retaliation, but the President felt that would draw the Russians into a Third World War.

  On December 5, 1950, the President reacted to the great strain he was under, but in a very personal way that stirred limitless controversy.

  It happened not long after a tense conference aboard the yacht Williamsburg with Prime Minister Clement Attlee of Great Britain, which was followed by the sudden death of Mr. Truman’s close friend and press secretary Charlie Ross, who collapsed at his desk in the White House.

  The President requested that nobody tell Margaret about her friend’s death, because she was scheduled to sing at Constitution Hall that evening. She had been ill and he did not wish to upset her further.

  The Trumans, with Attlee as guest, dressed for the concert, despite the grave international situation, despite Charlie Ross’s death. If anything could lift the President’s spirits, it was the sound of his daughter’s voice.

  But when the doorman took Mr. Truman his newspaper the next morning, the President exploded.

  The reviewer panned Margaret’s recital and the irate father scribbled a furious note to the critic.

  I have just read your lousy review buried in the back pages. You sound like a frustrated man that never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job, and all four ulcers working.

  I never met you, but if I do you’ll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below. Westbrook Pegler, a guttersnipe, is a gentleman compared to you. You can take that as more of an insult than a reflection on your ancestry.

  The letter brought more unfavorable publicity to Mr. Truman than just about anything he ever wrote. But it was so in character. He could take anything himself, but just let somebody say a word against his womenfolk: “There’s just one thing I draw the line at,” he said, “and that’s any kind of attack on my family. Any man can make mistakes, even if he’s trying with all his heart and mind to do the best thing for his country. But a man’s family ought to be sacred. There was one columnist who wrote some lie about my family when I was in the Senate and instead of writing him a letter I called him on the phone and I said you so-and-so, if you say another word about my family, I’ll come down to your office and shoot you.”

  The publicity didn’t seem to hurt the budding singer’s career, though, because Margaret was soon on magazine covers, television shows, all over the place.

  The criticism of President Truman reached a crescendo on April 11, 1951, when he fired the insubordinate but popular General MacArthur. Congress was in the biggest uproar—there were even shouts to impeach the President.

  It was on that same day, of all days, that Mr. Crim had to go before the House Appropriations Committee to ask for a $49,000 increase in our annual budget. It would take $315,600 to operate the renovated White House, he explained, and, as he feared, he received quite a grilling from Representative Albert Thomas of Texas.

  All the new gadgets and space would have to be serviced, the electricity bill alone would be $25,000, with the new air conditioning, laundry, and two elevators. We also needed more staff to maintain the house and its physical plant. The interior was to be more than twice as big as it had been before.

  The mood of Congress showed in the way Mr. Crim was treated. The Senate trimmed the figure to $300,000.

  In addition, the Commission on Renovation had to go back in August, in the midst of the MacArthur hearings, to ask for a further $321,000 (above the $5,400,000 already voted) to complete the renovation of the mansion itself. The Korean War had driven prices up so that construction costs exceeded the estimates. And to further complicate the situation, a plasterers’ strike stopped the entire construction for a while. Once again, a President had to assure Congress that the White House would not be a royal palace. The Senate chopped off $60,000 from that request, which had to be made up out of the budget for furnishings.

  “I’ve been using a curry comb on the contractors to try to speed up reconstruction,” Mr. Truman joked, but by the promised completion date of September 26, 1951, they were nowhere near finished.

  The Trumans were more than a little set back by the delay.

  Margaret, who had become a good-will ambassador for her father on an “enchanting” trip to Europe (which she’d financed entirely from her music earnings), had been entertained at Buckingham Palace. She returned the invitation to Princess Elizabeth, hoping that there’d be a sparkling new mansion to welcome her. When the Princess accepted with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, for November, we had to scurry around to entertain them at Blair House.

  The Blair-Lee House bedrooms had been rather “hotel” in character, serving the official houseguests comfortably but with little charm. Margaret and her mother wanted to do something special for the future Queen of England.

  “Let’s put my bed in there,” Mrs. Truman told me, “and make the room a little more attractive.”

  So we moved the four-poster canopy bed and curtains to match from Mrs. Truman’s room into the guest bedroom. We brought in a small Oriental rug, with a table and a few books, to make it more cozy. But the Princess still had to use the concrete bathtub.

  President Truman was quite carried away by his young guest, toasting her as a “fairy Princess” at a small formal dinner in the Blair-Lee House.

  Another guest, General Eisenhower, drew no attention at all. He came into Blair House for an off-the-record afternoon appointment with the President in his study. The President had decided not to run for reelection, although he hadn’t announced it yet, and both political parties were courting General Eisenhower as a candidate.

  We felt sure that President Truman had called the General in to sell him on the Democratic party.

  Later, after President Truman’s State of the Union speech in January, when we again had Mr. Churchill in tow, Mr. Truman called Mr. Eisenhower a “grand man.” But when it turned out that the General was a Republican, Mr. Truman said, “If Eisenhower wants to go out and have mud and eggs thrown at him, that’s up to him.” (As it turned out, both threw some mud, and General Eisenhower, a newcomer to the tough world of political rhetoric and attack, never forgave Mr. Truman for it.)

  By now, the White House was almost ready for the Trumans. Mrs. Truman chose the colors and fabrics for her family’s bedrooms—plum for herself, pink for Margaret and green for the President’s oval study—but she left the decorating entirely up to the Commission on Renovation and to B. Altman Company.

  “I’m only going to be around for a year,” she said. “It would be unfair to the next First Lady to impose too many of my ideas upon the house.”

  As a result, the house had an impersonal, store-decorated look.

  The original allotment of $208,000 for furnishings had been cut back to $150,000, not anywhere near enough to buy grand furnishings for sixty-six rooms. The State rooms were restored, as closely as possible, to their former grandeur. In the white-and-gold East Room, our equivalent of the Grand Ballroom, the heavy gold chandeliers that had dragged the ceiling down were reduced in size, outfitted with tiny “candle” bulbs and equipped with a dimming control. New draperies of lemon-gold silk hung at the seven windows.

  In the adjoining Green Room, the green silk wallcovering was carefully rehung. A new rug, a copy of a green Aubusson with the Presidential seal, covered the floor. The Red Room wall had new silk damask, and the oval Blue Room, our formal reception room, had new, bright blue satin walls, with a gold design woven in. The dark oak paneling in the State Dining Room for the first time was painted a light green to complement a new dark-green marble fireplace.

  President Truman’s balcony remained, and he added one more final, p
ersonal touch to the house. He ordered that the Grand Staircase be relocated so that it swept up the center bay east of the Entrance Hall on the State floor. Previously it opened on to the long corridor opposite the Green Room door. Now the State procession—(President, State visitor and color guard descending the staircase)—could be seen by the guests.

  A few days before the Trumans finally moved back in on March 27, 1952, Mrs. Truman broke her own rule of silence to the press and took the women’s press corps on a tour of the house, upstairs and down. Someone asked her if she’d like to spend four more years at the White House.

  “That is a question to which you are not going to get a yes or no out of me,” the taciturn First Lady replied.

  “But could you stand it if you had to?”

  “Well, I stood it for seven years,” she replied.

  Our first guest, also returning hospitality extended to Margaret in Europe, arrived five days later—Queen Juliana of Holland and her husband, Prince Bernhard. The Queen’s Room was ready but the kitchen was not. Once again, we held a State dinner in the Carlton Hotel, the last time in the Truman administration we were to carry all our paraphernalia out of the White House for dinner.

  But we unveiled the State Dining Room the next day (and used the new Truman Presidential china) with a smaller official luncheon for the Queen. Once again the President bowed to royalty and toasted the “fairy queen.”

  Mrs. Roosevelt was next. President Truman had appointed her to the United Nations as a representative on the Human Rights Commission. She visited the White House on April 10, to report on her trip to India and the Middle East.

  President Truman proudly gave her a tour of her old home.

  “I think it is lovely,” she said. “The third floor is so much better arranged and nicer for guests!”

  The third-floor solarium, where the Trumans spent so much time, was greatly improved. The Roosevelts’ old sun porch was now almost a penthouse, with a blue-green window wall that afforded a spectacular view, yet was barely visible from the street. The most informal room in the House, it had tile flooring and was outfitted with rattan furniture.