Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  I called the office, first thing. “Do you need me?” I asked Mr. Claunch, who had drawn the Sunday duty.

  “No, Mr. Crim is on his way,” he replied. “They had the luncheon all right, but the President stayed upstairs the entire time. They’ve canceled everything else.”

  I spent the evening glued to the radio.

  Reporting for work at six the next morning, I thought all the policemen in Washington had gathered on the White House grounds. As I walked up the front steps, soldiers were coming in from Fort Myer to guard the Executive Mansion. Then I remembered my first day at work, when Mrs. Roosevelt hadn’t known what to say to the Japanese Ambassador. We all wondered if the White House would be bombed, too.

  My first call was from Mrs. Roosevelt, asking me to arrange a trip to the West Coast. She soon left by plane, to help Mayor LaGuardia set up the Civil Defense organization in California.

  Everyone was in and out of the mansion all day—the Cabinet, General Marshall, top military advisors, members of Congress. We watched as the President was lifted into his car to go to the Capitol for his declaration of war. We listened on the Usher’s office radio, as he proclaimed the “date which will live in infamy—when the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by Naval and Air Forces of the Empire of Japan.”

  Although the Roosevelts canceled the formal social season* for the duration, the wartime White House was by no means quiet for us. Presidential appointments in the mansion were still handled through our office. Quite often the Chief of Staff, Allied diplomats, and other officials would come for luncheon or dinner. And gold braid showed up at the Sunday night suppers.

  Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Army engineers came in with plans to build a bomb shelter. To disguise this secret project, there was much to-do about the need for extra Presidential office space, and the President requested a Congressional appropriation to build the east wing. Meanwhile, a tunnel was dug underneath East Executive Avenue to the Treasury Building, so that the President could go down beneath the North Portico and into a Treasury vault. This was set up as a temporary shelter until the permanent shelter beneath the new east wing was completed in September, 1942.

  The White House police force, which had been increased, moved into the basement of the east wing, and military aides, Secret Service, and social offices occupied the two new floors above.

  It is easy now to forget what life was like in the United States in the early days of World War II. There was genuine fear of military attack. The nation feeling threatened, precautionary measures were quickly organized everywhere. But the routine for the White House was especially stringent.

  The military office ran practice drills for the staff. Every now and then, I’d be working at my desk, only to be blasted out of my seat by the urgent clanging of fire alarm bells. Our air-raid wardens, selected from among the staff, then took over. We grabbed our gas masks, and everybody who could squeeze in headed for the small, cramped room underneath the North Portico. There we stayed, breathing at one another, until the “all-clear.”

  The White House endured food rationing just as everyone else in America did. Henrietta Nesbitt faithfully trotted her stamp books down to the District of Columbia ration board every month, stood in line for her White House allotment, and planned her menus accordingly.

  And with all the Roosevelts’ stamp books, used to purchase the $3,000 worth of food each month for family, personal friends, and domestic staff, the White House kitchen was able to come up with adequate meals.

  There were blackout curtains at the windows, and we went through all the blackout drills for Washington. But everybody from the President on down was adamantly opposed to the Army’s scheme to cover the exterior of the White House with black paint. “It would be less of a target for bombs,” the engineers argued. That idea went back to the Army engineers’ drawing board.

  The President canceled all White House tours, stationed machine guns on the east and west terraces, and supplanted policemen with a twenty-four-hour military guard. Soldiers roamed outside the house and grounds. They lived in temporary barracks behind the battleship gray State, War and Navy building next door. And I was officially inducted into the U. S. Navy, detailed to Headquarters, the Commander-in-Chief.

  Although Mrs. Roosevelt stayed away from the secret Map Room, and rather archly prided herself on not being privy to any military secrets, the war entered her life in a very personal way.

  James was on active duty in the Marine Corps; Elliott was in the Air Force; Franklin, Jr., and John were in the Navy; and son-in-law John Boettiger was also in the service, stationed in England.

  And her great friend Joe Lash had been drafted. The First Lady tried unsuccessfully to get him an officer’s commission. He was, however, stationed in the Air Corps at Bolling Field, near Washington, and retained his room at the White House. He commuted to his post in Mrs. Roosevelt’s official limousine, complete with chauffeur and footman. When he was finally sent overseas, she managed to visit him at his base in the Pacific.

  She was able to visit her sons, too, when she took wartime trips for the President. She traveled to England, visiting army camps and hospitals, to New Zealand and Australia, to Guadalcanal and other Pacific islands, to our bases in Latin America. Dressed in her Red Cross uniform, insisting on seeing “the boys” as well as the officers, she became a personal courier between individual servicemen and their families.

  She brought messages to the President, as well. When the boys in England complained of cold feet, she petitioned President Roosevelt for wool socks. When the boys in Australia complained of discrimination, she begged that Negroes not be limited to menial jobs. Her motherly instincts poured out to the fighting men, and she spent long hours answering their letters, writing their families, channeling their petitions to proper government agencies.

  When wounded servicemen began returning to Washington, Mrs. Roosevelt held afternoon teas for those who were able to travel to the White House. At her first servicemen’s tea, for soldiers from Walter Reed Hospital, some of the men asked her for a souvenir. Thereupon the First Lady began handing out the silver teaspoons—engraved “President’s House.”

  Mr. Crim was horrified. The Chief Usher is responsible, on personal bond, for every item in the White House, and he had visions of Congress, examining the austere wartime budget, and refusing to approve an appropriation to replace the silver teaspoons.

  “Please, Mrs. Roosevelt, could you give them matches or something instead of passing out the silver?” he pleaded—and immediately ordered plain spoons with no markings of any kind.

  The First Lady’s assortment of visitors actually increased during the war. Several times, walking back from the Capitol, she’d run into a serviceman and invite him into the mansion for lunch. We’d have a time trying to spell the astonished soldier’s name correctly on the place card.

  The most colorful visitor ever to appear at the wartime White House was Winston Churchill. His living habits are still the subject of White House staff gossip, and every visitor who sleeps in the Queen’s Room is compared to the crusty old Prime Minister.

  He first arrived secretly, just before Christmas in 1941. When the Secret Service passed the word that from two until three o’clock in the afternoon of December 22 no one was to leave his office, no one was to enter the halls, we knew someone important was coming. We had been told to prepare for a VIP, but we didn’t know who. It didn’t take long for the cigar smoke to announce Mr. Churchill’s presence.

  Mrs. Roosevelt had arranged for him to stay in the Lincoln bedroom, then located off the West Hall, the favorite of most male guests. However, he didn’t like the bed, so he tried out all the beds and finally selected the rose suite at the east end of the second floor.

  The staff did have a little difficulty adjusting to Mr. Churchill’s way of living. The first thing in the morning, he declined the customary orange juice and called for a drink of Scotch. His staff, a large entourage of aides and a va
let, followed suit. The butlers wore a path in the carpet carrying trays laden with brandy to his suite.

  We got used to his “jumpsuit,” the extraordinary one-piece uniform he wore every day, but the servants never quite got over seeing him naked in his room when they’d go up to serve brandy. It was the jumpsuit or nothing. In his room, Mr. Churchill wore no clothes at all most of the time during the day.

  One day the valet wheeled President Roosevelt up to the rose room, opened the door, and there stood his unclothed guest. The Prime Minister didn’t mind, but the President did. He quickly backed out into the hall until Mr. Churchill could get something on.

  One gloomy morning, little Diana Hopkins walked past the open door to the rose room, where Mr. Churchill was propped up in bed, this time in his undershirt, smoking one of his enormous cigars. The Prime Minister beckoned to the little girl. He mumbled something which she didn’t understand, and she walked right up to his bed.

  “Would you give us just a little kiss on the cheek?” he asked—and she complied, carefully avoiding the cigar clenched between his teeth.

  There was little need for Mr. Churchill to go out; people came to the White House to see him. He and the President spent most of their time conferring in the makeshift Map Room, for which Mrs. Roosevelt had surrendered her press conference space in the Monroe Room, and which was off-limits to the White House staff. A special security officer guarded the room twenty-four hours a day.

  At that meeting, the President and the Prime Minister began to plan the first steps on the long road back from defeat to victory. The United States would start reclaiming control of the Pacific in air-sea warfare in the Battles of Midway and Coral Sea. The two allies would start the counterattack in Europe with an invasion of North Africa.

  Mr. Churchill was in and out of the White House secretly several times during the war. Each time his departure was as sudden as his arrival. Many times the public had no idea he was in Washington.

  After Prime Minister Churchill’s twenty-four-day visit late in 1941, the Map Room was moved, under the greatest secrecy, from the Monroe Room down to the ground floor, adjoining the Diplomatic Reception Room. The room contained complete maps of the operations of the war all over the world, pointing out where the troops were, where the ships were, and where the next move was to be made. When the room was to be cleaned, the security guard covered the maps with cloth, standing duty while the cleaner mopped the floor.

  The Signal Corps took up residence in the new bomb shelter, underneath the east wing. It was simply a forty-by-forty-foot-square concrete room, with walls seven feet thick, and ceilings of nine feet of steel-enforced concrete. It had two of everything—alternate heating and lighting systems, first-aid stations, and could hold about one hundred people. The President hated the room, and always tried to beg off during air raid drills.

  The President himself enjoyed a great freedom of movement during the war years—freedom, that is, from public knowledge. For security reasons, the press agreed not to publish any of the President’s travels—where he was or what he was doing. He often would go to Hyde Park for the weekend, to Shangri-La,* the secret Presidential retreat operated by the Navy in the Catoctin mountains of Maryland, or to confer with someone in the Atlantic or Pacific, and no one ever knew it. From the beginning of the war, the American flag, indicating that the Chief Executive is in residence, was flown from the White House every day whether or not the President was there, a practice which still continues. (Before the war, the flag was hoisted only when the President was in residence. When he went out the White House gate, it was lowered.)

  Beginning in early 1942, we had a parade of royal refugees in and out of the White House. The Crown Princess of Norway, who was living in Maryland, came in January; King George and Queen Frederika of Greece and King Peter of Yugoslavia, in June; Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and her daughter, Princess Juliana, who lived in Canada, in August. Mrs. Roosevelt gave the Queens the rose suite, which Mr. Churchill had also claimed as his own, and from then on, the large bedchamber at the northeast end of the second floor, which also had been used by Elizabeth of Great Britain during a 1939 visit, was called the Queen’s Room.

  Except for small State dinners for the royal guests, there were no ceremonial functions attached to their visits. There was one small non-State ceremony in the White House in 1942, however. Harry Hopkins quietly married Mrs. Louise Macy in the President’s oval study, with only a token glass of champagne to celebrate.

  Though she was more often away from home than in residence, and had priorities other than running a household, Mrs. Roosevelt considered herself the only mistress of the White House. She was more than a little concerned about Mrs. Macy’s moving in under her roof, as is evidenced by the letter she wrote shortly before the wedding:

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington

  Dear Mrs. Macy:

  Since living as a guest in any house is always rather difficult, I think perhaps it will be easier for you if we have some things definitely understood.

  I should like you to feel that the sitting room, known as the Monroe Room, next to the rooms which you and Harry will use, is yours at all times, except on the mornings when I have a press conference in that room, or when my children are in the house, because at such times they use that room to see their friends, just as I hope you will use it at all other times.

  I hope you will feel entirely free to have anyone there for tea or cocktails at any time you wish to be alone.

  I know that Diana would love to feel that she is at home with you and Harry next winter and can go to day school instead of boarding school. She has her own room on the third floor, and I think if she is living in the house, it would be well for you to engage a maid whom you like and trust and who would look after both you and Diana, and perhaps take Diana to various things when you are not available.

  I would, of course, hope that you three would have breakfast together in your own rooms, and whenever possible, that Diana would have her supper somewhere where you could be with her, rather than upstairs alone.

  Of course, I shall be delighted to have you ask any friends to lunch or dinner when the service capacity of the house is not already overtaxed. I hope that when I am in the White House you will always let me know whenever you want to ask anyone, and when I am away that you will let the usher know. I will be perfectly frank if, for any reason, it is not convenient and I will tell the usher to be equally frank.

  It will probably often happen that the President will prefer to have Harry dine upstairs with him, even when I am there, and have other guests. In that case, of course, you will want to be with them. When I am away, the President usually has his meals upstairs and only those he wishes, like you and Harry, would be there. Of course, in this case, if you want to ask anyone else, you simply ask the President and then tell the usher how many there will be.

  In the winter months, when I am of necessity away, there may be guests of mine to be looked after, and I usually ask Miss Thompson or Mrs. Helm, the social secretary, to act as hostess for me at tea or at any meals. If you wish to join them, you just tell the usher.

  It will also be a help if you will remember to tell the usher in the morning whether you and Harry are going out for any meals during the day.

  Mr. Crim will try to arrange to let you have a car whenever possible, but he has only two cars for the use of guests in the White House, and they cover any calls that may be made on them by my secretaries, as well as the meeting of trains and use by transient guests. If at any time, it is impossible to let you have a car, Mr. Crim will get you a taxi, unless of course, Harry has an additional car assigned to him. We will have to talk over what arrangements can be made for getting Diana back and forth from school if she is to go to day school.

  I would suggest that you talk to Mrs. Nesbitt about some regular arrangements for your wash, so that you will know on what days it must be sent and when it will be returned to you, and wha
t it costs. Mrs. Nesbitt makes all those arrangements.

  If at any time you and Harry want people to stay in the White House, I hope you will let me know beforehand so that I can arrange with Mrs. Nesbitt about the rooms because I like, even when I am away, to know how they are being used. The White House telephone operators always know where I am.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  If Mrs. Hopkins, with her maid and her little French poodle, ever upset Mrs. Roosevelt, nobody ever noticed it. The new bride moved into the old Lincoln office with Mr. Hopkins, and her comings and goings were quickly absorbed in the general White House traffic.

  Taking a cue from the happily married Mr. Hopkins, I, too, brought a bride to Washington that year. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I went to Baltimore to meet the train from Iowa, to wed the incomparable Zella. We moved into a cramped efficiency apartment across the street from the Russian Embassy, lucky to find it in crowded wartime.

  In 1943, as the war raged on, the White House opened its doors to two most unusual official guests—Madame Chiang Kai-shek of China, and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov. The staff was nearly floored by each of them.

  On her first day in the White House, President and Mrs. Roosevelt received Madame Chiang for formal tea in the West Sitting Hall. Knowing how the Chinese are about tea, Mrs. Roosevelt had secured some very special Chinese tea, supposed to be a hundred years old, for the occasion.

  When the China doll, as Mr. Crim called her, sipped daintily without comment, Mrs. Roosevelt couldn’t resist telling her about it.

  “In my country, tea kept so long is used only for medicinal purposes,” Madame Chiang replied sweetly.

  Madame Chiang, who proved not to be so democratic as her publicity had us believe, traveled with an entourage of forty, many of whom were stashed away on the third floor, the others at the Chinese Embassy. With her on the second floor were her personal maid, and her closest aides, her niece and nephew, the Kungs. At first, we thought they both were nephews.