Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  As Mrs. Roosevelt walked through the bright new rooms, she made one more observation: “The closets are a great help!”

  I recalled Mabel Webster’s endless processions to the third floor to store Mrs. Roosevelt’s dresses, because the old White House didn’t have built-in closets.

  We all agreed with Mrs. Roosevelt that closets would be a great help in the White House. So would the laundry room—we’d sent out the White House wash twice a week. So would the electric dishwashers—the butlers had washed millions of dishes by hand. So was the kitchen elevator—the butlers and maids had run up and down stairs for years. And so, above all, was the air conditioning!

  As summer approached, we realized how miserable we had been all those years. The First Families always were able to escape for the entire summer, as did most of Washington. Before the War, the Congress, of course, disappeared from sweltering Washington. The diplomatic corps left, fancy shops closed down. Some government offices sent workers home in the afternoon. But we stayed on.

  With air conditioning, Washington became a year-round city, the White House a year-round house.

  Despite all the new conveniences, though, Mrs. Truman was worried about her pet concern—keeping the house clean.

  She had opened the house to tours. Before the war, tourists could come through only by Congressional appointment. But the Trumans wanted the house open, accessible to the public. Thousands of people flocked through that first year of the “new” White House, leaving fingerprints on the woodwork, tracks on the floor.

  “The Appropriations Committee would love it if we asked for more staff right now,” she told Mr. Crim and me one afternoon. “Do you know of any way we can get some more in here?”

  “Not unless it’s through the military,” I answered. “We have already had to go to G.S.A. for extra maintenance engineers, and to the Park Service to get some proper care for the lawns.”

  “It’s sort of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, isn’t it?” Mrs. Truman said.

  The next morning, as I met her for the daily schedule, she said, “Mr. West, I have an idea. We aren’t planning to use the Williamsburg as much as we have been now that it’s so pleasant up here. Could we bring some of the Filipino stewards in to be housemen and kitchen helpers? Do you think the Navy would approve?”

  “I don’t see why it couldn’t be arranged,” I replied, “if the Commander-in-Chief should request a transfer.”

  The Navy quietly acquiesced, assigning three seamen to the White House pantry and as housemen to help with heavy cleaning, vacuuming, waxing, washing walls upstairs.

  Beginning with Mrs. Truman, they became a White House fixture. Some, after they retired from the Navy, stayed on as White House employees. Until that time, though, the Navy paid their salaries.

  The Truman White House sported a new fleet of automobiles. Because General Motors executives contributed to Governor Dewey and Henry Ford supported the President, Mr. Truman got rid of the Cadillacs and ordered Ford products. Actually the cars were leased from the manufacturers for $500 a year, so a rapid turnover never surprised anyone.

  Mr. Truman’s new limousine was a specially built Lincoln Cosmopolitan, with gold-plated fittings in the rear compartment, special running boards for the Secret Service, a padded leather top, and at the President’s own request, “sufficient head room for high silk hats.” The garage also supplied the family with eleven other Lincolns, two Packards, two Mercuries, ten Fords, and three Ford trucks.

  Mr. Truman did his best traveling in trains, however, and he took to the rails once again to go on the stump for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate opposing General Eisenhower, even though Stevenson chose not to run on the record of the Truman Administration.

  None of us was surprised when the General won. After all, the World War II hero was so popular that both parties had wanted him.

  Despite the Democratic defeat, President and Mrs. Truman hoped to enjoy their last two months in the White House. Right after the election, they began bringing in close friends to share their remaining days.

  On December 4, we held a farewell dinner for the Truman Cabinet. Adlai Stevenson slept in the Lincoln bedroom, his only chance to spend the night in the White House.

  The next day, at noon, Mrs. Truman stood in the Red Room receiving a group of ladies. As soon as they left, she hurried back upstairs. Her mother had suffered a mild stroke on December 1, and Mrs. Truman had scarcely left her bedside since.

  At about 12:45, the President called me to his oval study. He and Mrs. Truman were seated side by side on the green damask couch.

  “Mrs. Wallace has just passed away,” he said.

  Mrs. Truman was composed, sitting quietly beside the President while he talked.

  “We’d like to make arrangements to go to Independence, but without any notice. Mrs. Truman would like it to be as private as possible. Would it be possible that we could travel in a regularly scheduled train, just go in a regular drawing room?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I answered.

  But the Secret Service would not allow it. The President of the United States cannot travel around like a private citizen, no matter how deeply he may wish it.

  So they had to use the Presidential car, on the end of a regular train, to go to Independence for the funeral. The press, for once, respected Bess Truman’s wish for privacy.

  They came back to the White House for Christmas, for dinner with the family in the State Dining Room. But Mrs. Truman was sad, both at losing her mother and, I suspected, at leaving the White House.

  We had three weeks to pack, but the Trumans left with little more than they’d brought with them. Margaret’s piano went to Independence, her collection of Dresden china to her apartment in New York. The pink bedroom, with its antiqued ivory furniture, looked almost bare without her girl’s clutter.

  Mrs. Truman had one final request for me.

  “Mr. West, Margaret would like to have her bedroom furniture from the White House, for sentimental reasons. Do you think we could replace it?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I answered.

  The three of us took the limousine to Mayers, the Washington furniture store, where we’d bought the pieces in the first place.

  We selected an identical set on the spot, Mrs. Truman paid for it with a personal check, and exchanged it for Margaret’s White House bedroom. No one was ever the wiser.

  Mrs. Truman, by herself, gave Mrs. Eisenhower a tour of the White House on December 1, 1952. The two ladies, who shared the same Spanish teacher, had known each other for years and were much more cordial than their husbands.

  It is a tradition that the President-elect ride up to the front door of the White House to greet the outgoing President, and then that they ride together to the Inauguration. In my thirteen years there, this was the first time I’d witnessed the ceremony, because there’d been no “outgoing” President since 1932. And I almost missed this one because the President-elect was so angry with the President he didn’t want to go through with it. But he did, of course.

  I watched the two grim-faced men step into the special, high-roofed limousine (General Eisenhower refused to wear a tall silk hat, for which the limousine was designed), and I was glad I wasn’t in that car. But I had a strong feeling that Mrs. Truman should have been at her husband’s side. She always had been, in every endeavor.

  As Mr. Crim and I turned to go inside, hurrying to remove the big, black Steinway from the East Room before our new residents came back from the parade, I said to him:

  “The White House didn’t seem to change the Trumans too much.”

  “No,” he replied. “I watched the Hoovers and the Roosevelts grow into something completely different from what they were when they moved in. They left as different people. But the Trumans—Margaret grew up, that was all.”

  The Trumans had used the White House more or less as a temporary government residence. They didn’t leave much of an imprint on the patterns and appearance o
f the mansion. Their strongest effect, I think, was on the lives of the help, who came to like and admire them as people. The times, rather, had imposed changes on White House life. More Secret Service, more police, less freedom of movement for the First Family, more people around to manage—we were becoming more of an institution than an official residence.

  And yet, within this institution, Bess Truman had been successful in guarding the privacy she so dearly cherished. She simply set firm rules for her private life and never deviated from them.

  The full impact of Bess Truman’s contribution to the history of America, and, indeed, of the world, will probably never be measured. Only she can supply the details, and I’m sure that she won’t. Her keen intelligence, calm reasoning, and unswerving devotion to her husband were rarely revealed to the public (perhaps they sensed it) because of her vision of her role as First Lady: To stand always in the background, showing herself only as a support for Harry Truman the man. Few people knew that she was his full partner, in every sense of the word.

  There was a sign on President Truman’s desk: “The Buck Stops Here.” However, we knew the buck didn’t stop there. He packed it in his briefcase every night, took it upstairs, and discussed it with “The Boss.”

  The Eisenhowers

  1

  THERE’D BE NO SEPARATE bedrooms for the Eisenhowers. Mary Geneva Doud Eisenhower made that perfectly clear her first morning in the White House, after she’d spent the night in Bess Truman’s narrow, single bed in the little room known as the First Lady’s dressing room.

  That morning, January 21, 1953, she called for Mr. Crim and me.

  We adjusted our neckties, picked up our notebooks, and hotfooted it upstairs for our first conference. As we stepped off the elevator, we looked down the hall to where Rose Woods, Mrs. Eisenhower’s personal maid, stood beckoning to us from the First Lady’s bedroom door.

  Mr. Crim and I walked into the room and stopped in our tracks, both assuming our deadest deadpans to hide our surprise. For Mrs. Eisenhower was still in bed!

  Standing awkwardly at the foot of the narrow bed, we managed to say “Good morning,” as Mamie Eisenhower pushed away her breakfast tray. She was wearing a dainty, pink-ruffled bed-jacket and had a pink satin bow in her hair.

  “I’d like to make some changes right away,” she said, lighting a cigarette and surveying her new quarters.

  “First of all, I’m not going to sleep in this little room. This is a dressing room, and I want it made into my dressing room. The big room”—she indicated with a sweep of her arm the mauve-and-gray chamber next door, where Mrs. Truman had sat listening to baseball games—“will be our bedroom!”

  “Prior to the Roosevelts, it had been used that way,” Mr. Crim ventured.

  “Good!” Mrs. Eisenhower went on. “We need a ‘king-sized’ bed—with a mattress twice as wide as a single bed—and we’d like it as soon as possible, please.” Taking a pencil from her bedside table, she quickly designed a double headboard for the bed, to be upholstered and tufted in the same pink fabric as the easy chair in Margaret Truman’s sitting room, and a dust-ruffle to match.

  The bed must have been an immediate success. The morning after it arrived in a White House truck from New York, Mr. Crim and I accompanied the butler bringing Mrs. Eisenhower’s breakfast tray.

  “Come in, come in,” the First Lady sang out, as Rose Woods opened the door to the new bedroom.

  She was nestled in the big bed, propped up against half a dozen pillows, deep in conversation on the white bedside telephone. Waving gaily at Mr. Crim and me to take a seat, she said, still talking to her friend, “… And I’ve just had the first good night’s sleep I’ve had since we’ve been in the White House. Our new bed finally got here, and now I can reach over and pat Ike on his old bald head anytime I want to!”

  That was Mamie Eisenhower. Gay, breezy, open—we all got to know her better than we did any other First Lady because she let us in on almost everything that went on in her life, and she took an interest in everything in ours.

  She was feminine to the point of frivolity—for her, ruffles and flourishes were something to wear. She was affectionate and sentimental—nobody could celebrate a birthday like Mamie Eisenhower. She adored the pomp and circumstance and grandeur that went along with the nation’s top job, and she even embellished that, somewhat.

  Yet underneath that buoyant spirit, there was a spine of steel, forged by years of military discipline. As the wife of a career army officer, she understood the hierarchy of a large establishment, the division of responsibilities, and how to direct a staff. She knew exactly what she wanted, every moment, and exactly how it should be done. And she could give orders, staccato crisp, detailed, and final, as if it were she who had been a five-star general. She established her White House command immediately.

  President Eisenhower had scheduled a stag luncheon for business associates his second week in office. Alonzo Fields pulled out a menu from his “appropriate for stag” file, and we set about our usual preparations to serve fifty in the State Dining Room.

  Two days before the luncheon, Ann Whitman, General Eisenhower’s personal secretary, called the Usher’s office. “The President wants to see the menu for the luncheon,” she informed us. Fields sent it over immediately, and back it came by return messenger, “Approved DDE.”

  The morning of the luncheon, when I went upstairs for Mrs. Eisenhower’s bedside conference, she looked over the day’s menus.

  “What’s this?” she asked. “I didn’t approve this menu!”

  “The President did, two or three days ago,” I quickly explained.

  Mrs. Eisenhower frowned, shaking her head in annoyance.

  “I run everything in my house,” she said. “In the future all menus are to be approved by me and not by anybody else!”

  Later that morning, she went down to inspect the table. It was set with the green-bordered Lenox china selected during the Truman renovation, and the “President’s House” silver. We had brought up the new banquet chairs purchased by Mrs. Truman.

  Mrs. Eisenhower was aghast at the size of the small bentwood chairs.

  “Heavens! It looks like we’re having a children’s party in here!” she exclaimed.

  The next day, she was ready for action. “We must do something about those little chairs,” she said. “They won’t do for men at all.”

  I explained that the twenty large, high-backed upholstered chairs in the State Dining Room were mainly for show.

  “Have some more of the big ones made,” she ordered, “enough to fit at the banquet table. We just won’t invite any more people than we can seat.”

  The skilled craftsmen in the White House carpenter’s shop set about copying the heavy, handsome, gold cut-velvet chairs, because it was soon obvious that President Eisenhower planned to use the State Dining Room often for men’s business.

  Whether for Presidential luncheons, stag dinners, or gala occasions of state, the new President’s wife swiftly exercised her firm control as mistress of the Mansion. She needed no period of adjustment to learn White House routines, no slow introduction to her role as First Lady. The small, smiling lady in the curly bangs simply took over.

  In Mamie Doud Eisenhower, the public saw a friendly, outgoing lady, rather like Mrs. Average America, the member of the garden club, the congenial suburban housewife. A closer look showed a vivacious, fun-loving grandmother, an uninhibited belle who adored her Ike.

  Though many identified with her, she’d never, ever been a suburban housewife. From her earliest childhood, when maids and butlers waited on her in John Sheldon Doud’s home in Denver, she’d been accustomed to large houses with servants in attendance. More recently, in a New York mansion, as wife of the president of Columbia University; in the spacious Quarters Number One in Fort Myer, Virginia, as wife of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff; and in an elegant estate at Marnes-La-Coquette outside Paris, as wife of the Supreme Commander, Headquarters of Allied Powers in Europe, she had manag
ed large household staffs, entertaining with ease, surrounded by elegance. (A general has always at his disposal a trained corps of aides who are bound by military code to “pass muster” in operating his household.) For Mamie Eisenhower, the White House was a snap.

  In Europe, the Eisenhowers had already been feted by royalty, and she seemed determined to bring to her Executive Mansion all the grandeur, all the autocracy of those palaces, as well as all the prestige, status, and deference she felt was due the First Lady of the land. Once behind the White House gates, though she appeared fragile and feminine, she ruled as if she were Queen.

  She could be imperious.

  “When I go out,” she insisted, “I am to be escorted to the diplomatic entrance by an usher. And when I return, I am to be met at the door and escorted upstairs.”

  One day, dressed, hatted and gloved to go outside, she started to get on the elevator, and to her amazement it shot up to the third floor. So she sailed right up, curious to see who was using her elevator. It was George Thompson, a wizened little houseman.

  “Never use my elevator again!” she admonished George, and she called Mr. Crim immediately to make an order that none of the household staff must ever use the “family” elevator.

  The service elevator didn’t open onto the second floor, however, so servants would have had to walk up and down stairs—or sneak into the family elevator. But fifteen minutes after she left the White House, George was riding on her elevator again. The servants had a long history of skirting around a First Lady’s wishes.

  Ever since the two “executive wings” were added to the White House, the west wing, installed by Theodore Roosevelt, had been used for the President’s executive offices; the east wing, built by FDR, for the social office. And naturally there had always been traffic on the ground floor of the White House between the two wings. Mrs. Eisenhower stopped the traffic.