Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  Eleanor Roosevelt was very communicative. She wrote for magazines, talked over the radio, went on lecture tours, pouring out millions of words to the patient Miss Thompson. During the process, the two of them would cook up enough work to occupy the White House staff for the next 48 hours. It had to be done in eight, of course.

  The President’s wife delegated responsibility, requiring the same efficiency from her staff as she did of herself. Once she had given an order, she immediately forgot about it. There was no checking back with her for clarification. She didn’t have time to give instructions twice.

  She must have scribbled a million notes during her years in the White House—notes which had all the legibility of a doctor’s prescription. One day Mr. Crim came down with two gold wristwatches. “Send the watches to the engraver,” he told me. “Mrs. Roosevelt wants them to be sent out as gifts. Here are the inscriptions and the addresses.” I tried all morning to read the instructions but couldn’t make head or tail of them. Neither could Mr. Crim, which I suspect is why he turned them over to me.

  Finally I went up and asked Mrs. Roosevelt’s personal secretary. “Tommy” knew what to expect from her boss. “I’m not going to take those watches back to her,” she said. “You’ll have to do it yourself.”

  Embarrassed, I took the watches in to Mrs. Roosevelt’s sitting room and found her at her desk, scribbling away. The First Lady looked up, then frowned. By that time she had quite forgotten which watch was for whom. She was not amused. “You are supposed to get things right the first time,” she said.

  One of the watches, it turned out, had been selected by Joe Lash as a gift to his future wife.

  Although she dealt with thousands of details every day, Mrs. Roosevelt wanted trivial matters handled with dispatch. There were more important things on her mind.

  She didn’t have much time for housekeeping problems either, and the mansion suffered because of it. Even to me, an Iowa boy with little experience in such matters, it seemed dingy, almost seedy. She left things up to the housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, who was more country gentlewoman than dirt chaser. Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t pay much attention to White House food, either, but the President did. He couldn’t stand it.

  “I wish we could do something about Mrs. Nesbitt,” he said to Mr. Crim, in mock surrender, “but Mrs. Roosevelt won’t hear of it.”

  Henrietta Nesbitt prided herself on her friendship with the First Lady, and blithely instructed cook Elizabeth Moore to carry out her menus, no matter what the President requested.

  “The food around here would do justice to the Automat,” the President said.

  On the third floor, they installed a diet kitchen, where meals for the President were prepared by his mother’s old Hyde Park cook, Mary Campbell. As the years went by, the President ordered almost all his meals cooked there, separate from the White House kitchen.

  Her feelings ruffled, Mrs. Nesbitt complained to Mr. Crim, “Mary Campbell’s kitchen is so dirty, I’m concerned about the President’s health.” Mr. Crim, alarmed, reported the complaint to the President.

  “You tell Mrs. Roosevelt I’ll get rid of Mary Campbell when she gets rid of old lady Nesbitt!” the Chief Executive shot back.

  And Mrs. Nesbitt stayed on. Once, during a White House luncheon where she was a guest, she looked up at a chandelier and remarked to the woman next to her, “My goodness, isn’t that filthy?”

  “As if she were a guest instead of the housekeeper,” Mr. Crim sniffed.

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s personal maid, Mabel Webster, lived on the third floor and took care of the First Lady’s clothing and personal laundry. Mabel had come down from Hyde Park with the Roosevelts, but was now on the government payroll. All the Roosevelts’ servants were treated with great deference by the White House staff. They ate with the other domestics in the servants’ dining room on the ground floor, which was decorated with paintings by WPA artists, but when Mabel Webster entered the dining room, the White House servants rose to attention, as if the First Lady herself had walked in.

  The First Lady’s table was more democratic. Neither the President nor Mrs. Roosevelt liked to sit at the head of the table, whether in the State Dining Room or in the small Private Dining Room. Instead, they were seated across from each other, on either side of the table, where they’d have a chance to be near, and talk with, more of their guests. Mrs. Roosevelt also sat in the same central position at her luncheons, having worked out her seating arrangements on a chart in the Usher’s office.

  After the Private Dining Room had been cleared from Mrs. Roosevelt’s luncheons, the First Lady herself went back upstairs with “Tommy” to her office for an hour or two, then came down again to greet official visitors.

  When she received those appointments in the formal State rooms on the first floor, we had them lined up in every room. She might come down to meet someone in the Red Room, while others were waiting in the Blue Room, the Green Room, the East Room, and even in the Lobby. Each visitor garnered about fifteen or twenty minutes of her time. At the end of that time, one of us would go in and announce her next appointment, so that her present visitor would know it was time to leave.

  When Mrs. Roosevelt served tea in the Red Room, pouring herself, she could see many people in a short period of time. Tea was an important ritual in her life. Eleanor Roosevelt, educated in England, was of an era, of a social class, where a young lady learned the niceties of serving tea at an early age, and expected to preside at a tea table as part of her daily life. She was also a strict teetotaler, the only one among my First Ladies, and tea was the one beverage she could offer graciously—and briefly.

  For the huge teas, Edith Helm, her social secretary, sat at one end of the long table in the State Dining Room, Miss Thompson at the other, serving the hundreds of guests. On one occasion the efficient “Tommy” was presiding behind the silver urns at the south end of the table. Among the honored guests was the British Ambassador.

  “Coffee, tea, or cocoa?” Tommy asked routinely.

  “Madam, I was invited for tea!” the gentleman replied.

  In the West Sitting Hall upstairs, Mrs. Roosevelt served tea every afternoon at five for family, personal friends, and houseguests. Eleanor Roosevelt had tea even on the rare occasions when she was alone, sitting at a table covered with a lace cloth, pouring from a silver teapot.

  The First Lady served tea to the women attending her regular press conferences in the Monroe Room. Next door to the old Lincoln office, where Harry Hopkins slept, the Monroe Room was filled with reproductions of the original Monroe furniture—which President Monroe had taken with him. When Mrs. Roosevelt had parties for the entire Washington press corps, however, they served beer in the foyer and danced the Virginia reel in the East Room.

  Mrs. Roosevelt held conferences in the East Room, too, meetings mainly concerned with public welfare projects. Seated in the front row, knitting away, she spoke out whenever an idea caught her imagination. During those conferences, she turned out more baby blankets than she had grandchildren, and began passing her handiwork along to her friends. Knitting, scribbling notes, marking a passage in a book, Mrs. Roosevelt had the busiest hands I ever saw.

  She believed in physical exercise, and encouraged all her staff to square-dance or do calisthenics. Besides her walking, which was always to somewhere, she often rode horseback in Rock Creek Park, either alone or with her good friend Elinor Morgenthau, wife of the Secretary of the Treasury.

  I’ll never forget my first sight of Eleanor Roosevelt in her riding habit, jodhpurs, boots, striding into the Usher’s office, calling for her horse. I would call the White House stable, at Fort Myer, Virginia, and they’d put the horse in a van and take him to Rock Creek Park. There Mrs. Roosevelt, who had arrived in a White House car, would mount, and trot around in the woods along the shallow creek. She refused to take a Secret Service man along when she rode—or when she walked or took the train. Despite the great passions she aroused pro and con, the agents bowed to her wishes
and let her roam around by herself.

  When she returned from her ride, tired, disheveled, and smelling of horse, Mr. Crim always turned up his nose a bit. I had the feeling that, despite his protestations of neutrality, he slightly disapproved of Mrs. Roosevelt’s breezy informality. The Chief Usher, a stern and proper gentleman of the old school, was accustomed to the strict life of the Herbert Hoovers, who dined regally in formal attire in the State Dining Room even if they were alone. He never quite recovered from the shock of one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s early-morning visits to the Usher’s office.

  “I was sitting in my office with the door open, and there she came padding down the back stairs—barefoot. She had on a yellow bathing suit! She came up to me with some letters and said she was on her way to swim, and wouldn’t I please mail these—.” Eight years later, Mr. Crim was still aghast.

  Mr. Crim had an ally in Sara Delano Roosevelt, the President’s mother. During her visits the staff snapped to attention, and the service was as formal as if a queen were being entertained—even though the atmosphere was somewhat tense. A formidable matriarch, the elder Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t take to her daughter-in-law’s collection of friends, and she let everyone know it. Sara Roosevelt enjoyed Mr. Crim’s company, however, and she often stopped by to chat with him.

  One morning during my early days, she was sitting in our office when Naval Officer Earl Miller walked through the hall. A frequent overnight visitor and great comrade of the First Lady, Miller’s friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt dated from earlier years, when her husband served as governor of New York. At that time, he had been a private in the New York State Police. Then later he guarded the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park. Now he was a lieutenant commander in the Navy.

  Sara Delano Roosevelt recognized him.

  “First it was Private Miller. Then it was Sergeant Miller. Then it was Commander Miller. Now it’s Earl, dear,” she sniped, imitating the First Lady’s high-pitched voice.

  “Mrs. Roosevelt, Senior,” as the telephone operators called her, also let Mr. Crim know how she felt about Mrs. Roosevelt’s determination to integrate the White House domestic staff. She disapproved.

  Eleanor Roosevelt was deeply involved in fighting for human rights for Negro Americans, and though her efforts seem, in today’s world, naïve and even conservative, she shocked the New York socialites with whom she had grown up, and infuriated Washington, D. C., a very segregated town.

  She begged, cajoled, pleaded with her husband to integrate the Armed Services, to propose sweeping civil rights legislation, and to integrate the defense industry. Perhaps his zeal was not so great as hers, perhaps he had other priorities before the Southerners in Congress, but she was continuously far ahead of Franklin D. Roosevelt on that subject.

  She aroused the wrath of Washington, and of her mother-in-law, but raised the hopes of millions of Americans by inviting blacks to the White House. Most notable of these was her friend Mary McLeod Bethune, the distinguished Negro educator.

  When Mrs. Bethune arrived, Mrs. Roosevelt always went running down the driveway to meet her, and they would walk arm in arm into the mansion. Few heads of State received such a welcome.

  In those days, my job had very little to do with entertaining, however, so I glimpsed the famous visitors only as they went in and out of the White House. One day Mr. Crim caught me gazing out the window of our cubicle.

  “See those people out there,” he pointed to the crowd walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. “They’d give anything to be in here looking out.”

  Actually, I had little time to look out the window. Handling Mrs. Roosevelt’s travel arrangements was a full-time job. Back and forth she crossed the country by train, bus, and car. Even though air travel was very limited in those days, she wanted to take commercial planes as often as possible to dispel the public’s fear of flying.

  She would go to the most remote places—to coal mining towns in West Virginia, to public works projects in Oregon or Arizona, to New York innumerable times. I had traveled only from Iowa to Washington, so I received quite a geography lesson as I pored over maps and train schedules. Many times, after I’d spent days arranging a complicated schedule, she would cancel her plans and go somewhere else.

  Her close friend Elinor Morgenthau often accompanied her on those trips. One of my first jobs involved a complicated change of reservations for a West Virginia trip. Mrs. Roosevelt had gone on ahead, and Mrs. Morgenthau was to board the train at Union Station, planning to join the President’s wife. It was after dark when I finally cleared the reservations, so I met Mrs. Morgenthau at Union Station and gave her corrected tickets for Mrs. Roosevelt. Even though the reservations were secure, I felt that people like to have correct tickets in hand before undertaking a journey. I didn’t think anything about it, but Mrs. Roosevelt was quick to appreciate any small favor other people did for her. She thanked me profusely, and I guess it was then they decided that I could stay.

  One night as I was working late over her schedules, she wandered into the office and said, “Poor Mr. West—I change my plans so many times….”

  Mrs. Roosevelt, like most in her social strata, believed in the “city in winter, the country in summer,” and ordered her train tickets for the family’s estate in Hyde Park, New York, accordingly.

  Every summer she’d come by the Usher’s office, and say to Mr. Crim, “I have the President’s permission to send one car, one driver, and one maid to Hyde Park for the summer.”

  The car, filled with her suitcases and files, followed her to the estate, where the driver and the White House maid stayed with Mrs. Roosevelt in her cottage, “Val-Kill.” (The President’s mother lived in the “big house” at Hyde Park.) When the President joined her, he would travel on the special Presidential railroad car, which was equipped with a bedroom, dining room, and even its own galley.

  Usually, the White House almost shut down in the summers, the heat was so intense. Even though the First Family fled to the Hudson River, we had to keep the place halfway decent for the few sightseers who straggled through. But in 1941 the President spent more time in Washington than on vacation, because of his concern over the buildup of the war in Europe. Since May of that year, the President had declared an unlimited national emergency, due to the German military successes in Europe, the Balkans, and Africa. Mrs. Roosevelt came back from Hyde Park on June 17, to welcome Crown Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard of Holland, who had just escaped from their war-torn country, which Hitler had invaded. And in August she received the Duke of Kent.

  The pattern of White House living was different in 1941 for personal reasons as well. On September 7, the President’s mother died. Nineteen days later, Mrs. Roosevelt’s brother, Hall, died in Walter Reed Hospital, and there was a quiet family funeral in the East Room.

  With those two deaths, Mrs. Roosevelt, an orphan, had lost her closest relative, Hall, and her major nemesis and critic, her mother-in-law. An era had ended in her life, and because of the threat of war, a new one was beginning.

  Mrs. Roosevelt threw herself into her new volunteer job that fall, in the Office of Civil Defense. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York was the titular head of the organization, which had been established in May, for “civilian protection and volunteer protection and morale responsibilities.”

  The President’s wife got into hot water with the Congress, however, for her idea of Civil Defense included nutrition, housing, medical care, education, and recreation for all Americans. She hoped to use the organization to launch programs fulfilling her special hopes for society. The incident that incensed Congress was her appointment of Mayris Chaney, a dancer who was a frequent White House visitor, as director of the physical fitness program. The Congress thought it was pure frivolity, and hounded Mrs. Roosevelt about her “fan dancer.”

  But the President’s wife kept marching up Connecticut Avenue dressed in the blue-gray coverall she had designed for Civil Defense, saving White House gasoline and getting exercise besides. Although ominous
headlines proclaimed that war was not far off, Mrs. Roosevelt still shunned Secret Service protection.

  As a new employee, unfamiliar with workings at the top level in government, I had thought Mrs. Roosevelt’s pace so frenetic, I wondered how she could possibly get anything done. But now, after months of observation, I realized that her life was filled with planned, purposeful activity, her motion directed toward specific goals. She was propelled by dedication.

  Even though the Usher’s office handled the President’s appointments in the House and Mrs. Roosevelt’s travel, our concern was not with politics or international affairs. We were often too busy to keep up with the world. Nevertheless, certain developments relating to the White House could not escape our attention.

  * This same Joseph Lash, in the 1970s, published an intimate, two-volume, prize-winning biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

  * Miss LeHand was never able to return to her duties; she died in 1944, in Boston’s Lahey Clinic.

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  ON FRIDAY, MARCH 14, 1941, I wrote in my short-lived diary: “Saw Justice Frankfurter today, after his conference with the President. The President went to the office this morning but returned to meet the Japanese Ambassador at 4:30. Learned that the visit of the Japanese Ambassador was so secret that the Secret Service men made a list of everyone who saw him come in or leave—of course, that is a rather ticklish situation! It will be interesting to see future developments.”

  The future developments reached me on that Sunday nine months later, as I sat in my one-room apartment in the Pall Mall on Sixteenth Street. Sunday was a lazy day—I was usually so tired after my six-day (and sometimes six-night) work week at the White House, I didn’t have much time to be lonely on my one day off.

  On December 7, I woke up in the afternoon and turned on the radio. Every station was screaming about Pearl Harbor.