Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  Mrs. Johnson also went straight to her “office,” which happened to be her own off-white bedroom. She worked there all morning, in the comfortable chair in front of the fire, or propped up in bed with papers and datebooks spread around her, dictating letters to her personal secretary, Ashton Gonella, scanning files of background information for the day’s activities, memorizing details about the evening’s State visitor, approving speeches written for her by Liz Carpenter and staff, studying the scenario for some program or another. All that preparation was an integral and essential part of how Mrs. Johnson functioned as a corporate First Lady. She was programmed and prepared and then she performed.

  Bess Abell and Liz Carpenter, the two women who played such major roles as Mrs. Johnson’s advisors and administrators, brought a unique combination of talents with them to the White House. Liz, a veteran Washington correspondent for newspapers in Texas and elsewhere, was a shrewd observer of both politics and the Washington social scene. And from her own background as a newspaperwoman, Liz knew how to use the fine art of public relations in a way that would attract the desired news coverage, rather than repel the reporters.

  Bess, the wife of Tyler Abell, who served the Johnson administration as Assistant Postmaster General and later as Chief of Protocol, also knew the political and social life of Washington. She had grown up in it as the daughter of Earle Clements, who served as governor of Kentucky and later in the Senate, where he was one of Lyndon Johnson’s closest confidantes. Bess had served as a secretary for her friend Lady Bird Johnson when her husband was Vice President.

  Mrs. Johnson conferred with Bess and Liz every day and, by prearranged appointment, with curator Jim Ketchum and with me. But we rarely knocked on her door unless we’d been invited first. As before at The Elms, she guarded her privacy in a small room with one door.

  Often, if the work were particularly heavy or required a little more concentration, the President’s wife worked down at the other end of the hall, in the Queen’s sitting room. Actually the room was a dressingroom for the Queen’s suite, although guests (including Harry Truman’s mother in earlier days) sometimes slept there. The blue-and-white room was attractive, with a day bed in a black lacquer frame, a coffee table—and only one door.

  The Johnsons used the Executive Mansion more thoroughly than any other family has ever done. The President held impromptu luncheons and dinners with all the members of his administration; he presided over regularly scheduled “working dinners” for members of Congress and the Senate; he invited labor leaders to stag luncheons; and, in addition to every possible State visitor, every official or diplomatic occasion, he had frequent dinners for the Cabinet, business and manufacturing executives, which always included educators and representatives from the worlds of religion and the arts.

  And Lyndon Baines Johnson conducted official business all over the house. There were bill-signing ceremonies and televised press conferences in the East Room; awards presentations in the State Dining Room; White House Conferences and Festivals pouring people in and out. Meanwhile, Mrs. Johnson held small meetings and receptions in the Green Room and Red Room practically every day, sometimes two or three at the same time. For the Johnsons, the White House was like the apartment over the store.

  Every day was a logistics triumph, a race against the clock to dismantle the chairs, desks, electronics equipment, and people from a 9:00 a.m. bill-signing ceremony in the East Room so the 10 o’clock tourists (by this time we herded in as many as 26,000 in one four-hour period) could begin trekking through the State Rooms, sweep out their debris after the doors closed at noon and set up the State Dining Room for a 1 o’clock luncheon, and get the Red and Green Rooms ready for afternoon receptions.

  The White House was nearly always full of people. There were droves of houseguests—the President’s Aunt Olivee and Aunt Josefa, Uncle Huffman Baines, Becky Bobbitt, various Texas friends, friendly governors and their families, famous Americans, schoolgirl friends of Lynda and Luci. The second and third floors were more “open house” than they’d been since the Roosevelts’ days.

  But there was one relative the President always kept track of.

  At one point, the White House served as a long-term way station for Sam Houston Johnson, the President’s high-spirited brother whose exploits sometimes gained publicity that bothered President Johnson. At one point, Sam Houston lived on the third floor for months. His principal activity was clipping newspapers, which the President told him would be useful for a future political campaign. It seemed, in fact, as if Sam Houston was under some sort of house arrest. At any rate, a Secret Service agent kept a log of his movements and visitors, and his contact with the world was pretty much limited to long conversations with Assistant Usher Nelson Pierce.

  I’ll never forget the night that Sam Houston brought light into the White House.

  The President’s sometime tenant had been told, in no uncertain terms, to observe the “electricity-saving” blackouts at the White House. One evening, when President and Mrs. Johnson had been out, they returned late at night to a pitch-dark mansion. Not a light on in the place. They groped their way to the elevator, got off on the second floor and saw, at the end of the hall, only a dim flicker of light.

  It was Sam Houston, working at a desk, with only one small candle.

  The Johnsons’ steady stream of visitors were well attended to. Mrs. Johnson’s personal secretary, Ashton Gonella, typed up a daily schedule for the guests’ entertainment, suggested sightseeing, White House amenities, and arrangements for meals, all at Mrs. Johnson’s direction. Although the First Lady didn’t shepherd her visitors around personally, as Mrs. Truman and Mrs. Eisenhower had done, she set aside a definite hour to spend with each of them as part of her busy day’s schedule.

  Unless there was one of the frequent luncheons on the State floor, Mrs. Johnson had lunch alone in her room, dieting on salads and clear soup before dressing for her afternoon appointments. If she were surrounded by staff at that time, she’d order a tray for them, as well.

  The First Lady was always dieting. She kept herself petite and trim and much more attractive than any of her photographs. (She also tried to keep the President on a low-cholesterol diet because he had had a coronary some ten years before.) She concentrated on staying in trim with a will that almost matched that of physical fitness champion Harry Truman, swimming forty or fifty sidestroke laps in the White House pool almost every day. She often bowled in the Executive Office Building with her favorite bowling partner, Lynda Bird, then a nineteen-year-old college sophomore who’d transferred for one semester from the University of Texas to George Washington University per her parents’ wishes. (The non-bowling Eisenhowers had moved the bowling alley installed by the Trumans from the White House to the Executive Office Building across the street.)

  She occasionally took sunbaths on the White House roof, and although it didn’t fit the category of physical exercise, Mrs. Johnson relaxed by playing bridge, sometimes with her old friends from the Senate days, especially Mrs. Herman Talmadge of Georgia, sometimes with the wife of the Iranian Ambassador, but mostly with Lynda and her young friends.

  In the afternoons, she usually made public appearances, and received her advisors on the many projects she had embarked upon. But there was one project that she worked on alone. In the afternoon or morning, when she had an hour (or the evening if her husband were away), Mrs. Johnson went into her little blue-and-white sitting room, after scotch-taping a page from her spiral notebook on the one door: “Mrs. J. At Work!”

  She sat on her blue-velvet sofa, in that corner room over the Rose Garden, Jacqueline Kennedy’s and Mamie Eisenhower’s dressingroom, Bess Truman’s and Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom, and, looking out over the roses, she spoke into her “talking machine”—a small tape recorder always kept on the side table. If she fell behind in her diary, Ashton Gonella kept a daily list of her schedules, her visitors, so she could catch up on several days’ worth of recollections and impressions. She s
tored all the tapes in a closet in that dressing room, and no one, except for Chief Justice Earl Warren, who borrowed the segment for November 22, 1963, for use by the Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy, heard them until a month before she left the White House when two secretaries transcribed them for her.*

  In the rare evenings she was home alone, Mrs. Johnson usually read for pleasure or dropped in on one of her daughters’ movie parties. The Johnsons used the movies to entertain guests, although the President rarely took time out to join the audience. When he did, he usually fell asleep before the first reel was finished.

  Like Mrs. Eisenhower, Lady Bird Johnson also was an avid TV fan, but her selections were far more limited. Her one confessed television addiction was Gunsmoke, and we took measures to ensure that she never missed a single performance. If she happened to be away during the weekly installments, the Army Signal Corps came to the rescue by videotaping the program, which she could watch later on the television set in her bedroom. Gunsmoke’s hero, Marshal Matt Dillon, undoubtedly reminded her of the young Lyndon Johnson. She longed to meet the hero, played by James Arness, until she discovered that he was a Republican. “How could he?” she asked, crestfallen. But then she decided her hero was Marshal Matt Dillon, not the actor, and Marshal Dillon had to be a Democrat! And so she didn’t miss a segment.

  Like the President, she crowded many appointments into one day, but she had usually moved her meetings away from the second floor—or at least the family end of the second floor—when he came home for lunch at three, usually bringing eight or ten people along to enjoy Zephyr’s cooking.

  After lunch, almost as regularly as Harry Truman, President Johnson went across to his bedroom for a nap, on the strict orders of Dr. Burkley. Also, Mrs. Kennedy had told Mrs. Johnson how much an hour of rest in the afternoon can mean to the man who must shoulder the burdens of the Presidency, and the First Lady enforced Mr. Johnson’s nap.

  When he awakened, he went straight back to his office, where he worked until all hours of the night. But sometimes the President swam after his nap. Sometimes he swam with his assistants, with friends such as the minister Billy Graham, or with a visiting Congressman.

  The walls of the Johnson White House pool were lined with swimming trunks—huge ones, small ones—swimsuits for every size and shape of visitor who might want to take a dip with the President. Lyndon Johnson used the swimming pool to politick, just as he politicked no matter where else he happened to be, including in his bedroom while changing pants, or in his bathroom, talking on the phone or shouting above the force of running water in his shower.

  That shower, and the complicated system of telephones, with scores of direct lines and all the new electronic surveillance equipment, were Mr. Johnson’s few “extravagances” in the Executive Mansion. He couldn’t resist the new inventions of our technological age. In contrast, however, he thought up endless ways to save pennies, some of which infuriated his employees.

  Grappling with our household budget must have given him more satisfaction than trying to control the billions of dollars of national expenditures in the federal budget. These multibillions, to most human minds, become incomprehensible—even to Presidents. The budget of our house, on the other hand, was finite. He could see the results of his “economy in government.”

  The lights-out rule was no joke. And on a winter evening, with dark coming as early as 5 o’clock, someone trying to get from the west wing to the east wing or vice-versa had to stumble along in darkness. “The ground floor of the White House is just like the Black Hole!” fumed Bess Abell. The household staff simply had to accommodate their eyes to the dark.

  He told Bess, when she began shopping for gifts for State visitors, “Now I want you to spend all of your imagination, and very little of the taxpayers’ money! If you can get it for less, get it for less—if you can get it for free, get it for free—but no strings attached.”

  Savings in the form of “back-to-back” parties also occurred to President Johnson. There’d been a large gathering out on the south lawn, with colorful tents. As soon as the crowds had left, the carpenters began to dismantle the tents, and Mr. Johnson, walking through the ground-floor corridor, asked, “Why are they taking those tents down so soon? As long as they’re up, let’s invite all the press to come down and bring their children tomorrow.”

  The press played an almost larger-than-life role in the White House life of Lyndon Johnson.

  The President watched television in his bedroom and in his west wing office, three sets going at once. But he limited his viewing to news programs. With a remote-control switch in his hand, he’d turn the sound on one commentator, then another, then another, giving equal time to the networks as they give equal time to politicians. It was the same impulse—he never had enough time to see enough, to hear enough of what the country was thinking and how he and his programs were being portrayed.

  From the moment he took the reins of office, he had very important reasons to be concerned with his image. The country was badly shaken, and much of the liberal Democratic constituency considered him a Southern regional character of suspect political ideology. From November 22, 1963, through 1965, it seemed to me that President Johnson exerted an enormous effort to gain acceptance as a liberal, national leader, and to accomplish legislative deeds that far overshadowed any administration’s since Roosevelt’s first years in the 1930s. And to a remarkable degree, he succeeded. By sheer dint of hard work, helped by a Democratic Congressional victory in 1964, President Johnson succeeded in launching bold new attacks on problems of health, education, poverty, and the environment.

  The President’s almost superhuman efforts “to reason with” the country to achieve his goals extended into the kitchen, using White House entertaining in a more personal way than any other President I worked for. The principal target was Congress.

  Instead of the traditional Congressional reception every winter, the Johnsons held eleven different “working parties”—two for the Senators and their wives and ten separate occasions for the 435 members of the House of Representatives and their spouses. Mrs. Johnson and her staff entered in with much preparation and planning to entertain the Congressmen’s wives.

  We set up the East Room as a meeting room for the men (and Senator Smith of Maine and the women in the House). The President spoke to them, then brought on members of his Cabinet to brief them on the world situation, the economic situation and, incidentally, his own programs and problems.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Johnson took the wives to the theater, where they viewed movies on the history of the White House, or on its art, and then took a tour of the family quarters. The Congresswomen’s husbands, of course, were invited, and the social office held high-level planning sessions on the subject of entertaining them. “Should we segregate?” Bess asked, fearing that the few gentlemen might be overwhelmed by such a large majority of Congressional wives.

  “Let’s just let them decide whether or not they want to attend,” said Mrs. Johnson.

  One who did—John Mink, husband of the Representative from Hawaii—had a marvelous time, as did all the ladies, who, even though many had been to occasions on the State floor for years, never had been invited upstairs at the White House.

  On other occasions, Mrs. Johnson presented programs for the Congressmen’s wives in the Queen’s Room upstairs. We would remove the bedroom furniture and install fifty or more of the small gold banquet chairs to make it a meeting room. Mrs. Johnson recruited speakers who were knowledgeable about the White House, as well as previous residents. Children and grandchildren of Presidents, such as Margaret Truman Daniel, Sistie Dall, Anna Roosevelt Halstead, Charlie Taft, Barbara Eisenhower and Lynda Johnson, told personal stories about their lives there.

  On one of those evenings, Mrs. Johnson had just begun to take the ladies on their tour of the second floor when Bess ran up to Jim Ketchum and me with Mary Kaltman in tow.

  “The Connallys’ luggage is in the Lincoln Room
and the bed is turned down—the President suddenly invited them to spend the night,” Bess said. The then Governor of Texas John Connally and his wife were among the Johnsons’ closest friends, and were apt to drop in anytime.

  We didn’t have time to summon a maid, as the President’s wife and the Congressional ladies were in the Treaty Room next door.

  “Quick, we’ve got to make up the bed,” Bess whispered, and she and I drew the sheets up over Abraham Lincoln’s Victorian bed. While Mary Kaltman put on the white-embroidered spread, we flew around storing suitcases in the closet, and cosmetics in the heavy mahogany dresser and had the room in order within seconds. Just then Mrs. Johnson walked in, to describe the historic room to her guests, and found Bess, Mary, Jim, and me standing innocently beside the bed. She gave us a most puzzled look.

  Butlers served cocktails to the wives upstairs as well as to their husbands downstairs. Our only problem arose when the briefings went on too long (President Johnson was confined to no time schedule when he was busy reasoning with Congress), and some of the ladies, who weren’t used to such long cocktail hours, began to bob and weave down the halls. Mrs. Johnson soon passed the word to the head butler: “John, the next time, please water the drinks!”

  Afterwards, the two groups converged in the State Dining Room for a buffet supper, then swung out to the lobby to dance to the ever-present Marine Corps orchestra.

  These evenings were far more costly than the traditional one-shot Congressional reception had been, a fact to which the President was always highly sensitive. When the Chicago Tribune reported that they’d spent $5,000 a month for entertaining, the eagle-eyed President saw the article and immediately summoned me upstairs.

  “They’re saying that we’ve spent more than anybody else has here,” he said. “Is that true?”