Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  Margaret, too, hated to use the limousines. “I’m so embarrassed to drive up to school in that big car,” she told me. That big car was a Mercury.

  Another time she called down to ask if I thought it would be all right to use a White House limousine to take her friends somewhere. “There are so many of us we can’t fit into a regular sedan,” she apologized.

  “The White House cars are always at your disposal,” I answered.

  Margaret Truman was probably the most unspoiled of all the Presidents’ children I have known. She was also the most over-protected.

  At twenty-one, the President’s college-senior daughter had her choice of escorts. She seldom went out on school nights that first year, but on the weekends her mother waited up for her when she was out on a date—even though two Secret Service agents had accompanied her every step of the way.

  “I bet she gets it if she stays out past her curfew,” Mr. Crim chuckled, when I told him of the First Lady’s weekend vigils. Margaret herself despaired of any romance in the White House. “I ask you to consider the effect of saying good night to a boy at the door of the White House in a blaze of floodlights with a Secret Service man in attendance. There is not much you can do except shake hands, and that’s no way to get engaged,” she wrote.

  Nevertheless, the bright, petite young woman appeared to enjoy her life in the White House.

  Margaret’s friends came often, and the second floor began to look like a college dormitory, with record players, bridge games, pincurls, corsages, and movies and slumber parties. The “formidable trio”—as the servants referred to Drucie Snyder, Jane Lingo, and Annette Wright—were almost part of the family.

  Once, soon after the Trumans moved in, the girls decided to spend the night in Lincoln’s bed—sleeping on the hard, lumpy, oversized mattress that every Presidential family just has to try out, for history’s sake.

  The President, much taken with the stories of Lincoln’s ghost, decided to give the girls a fright, and asked Mays, the lanky, dignified black doorman who also doubled as the President’s barber, to dress up in stovepipe hat and lurk in the corner of the bedroom. But Mays called in sick on the day of the charade.

  “I didn’t feel right about impersonating Mr. Lincoln,” Mays told me.

  2

  PRESIDENT TRUMAN LIVED IN the White House alone most of that first summer, except for his trip to Potsdam, but he rarely used the house to entertain his friends. During this period, he found that he had to surround himself with a new Cabinet, because the New Deal administrators all seemed to regard him as President by accident. One by one, he chose his own men to take their places. Mrs. Truman soon followed suit.

  When Mrs. Truman and Margaret left for Mrs. Wallace’s home in Independence, Missouri, at the beginning of June, the White House began to steam from the summer heat. The housekeeper, Mrs. Nesbitt, heaved a sigh of relief that her eagle-eyed boss was away.

  From the beginning, Mrs. Truman had let it be known that she wanted the house kept clean!

  “How does the housekeeping work?” was the first question she’d asked me.

  “Well, technically the housekeeper works under the supervision of the Chief Usher—but actually, she works very closely with the First Lady. And that’s the way it should be,” I added.

  “And how about the present housekeeper?”

  I took a deep breath. Even Franklin Roosevelt hadn’t been able to get rid of Henrietta Nesbitt.

  “Usually, the First Family prefers to hire its own housekeeper,” I said carefully. “Mrs. Nesbitt was brought in by the Roosevelts at the beginning—a country woman from Dutchess County. She will probably be all right with supervision.”

  Mrs. Truman nodded. “Does she give instructions to the maids, or do I?”

  “Theoretically, she does. But as I mentioned, she’ll need close supervision.”

  I passed the word along to Mrs. Nesbitt, who let it be known that she had been more concerned with the food end of the housekeeper’s job, and that she was sure that the housekeeping staff was extremely efficient, because they had been there a long time.

  However, Mrs. Truman soon found that the staff had fallen on easy ways, because housekeeping had been at the very bottom of the list of all Mrs. Roosevelt’s varied interests. And since the housekeeper also was more interested in food than furniture, the cleaning staff went through the house with a “lick and a promise,” as Mrs. Truman told me.

  “They do a lot of turning down of beds at night, but I found cobwebs in the corners,” she complained.

  I passed the word along to Mrs. Nesbitt. “Mrs. Roosevelt never complained,” she sniffed. “Anyway, they do like the food.”

  However, the White House kitchen was not exactly a gourmet’s dream in those days, either, according to the Trumans. So when Margaret, her mother, and Mrs. Wallace, accompanied by Mrs. Wallace’s long-time cook, Vietta Garr, escaped to Missouri for the summer, Mr. Crim and I had numerous conferences on how to handle the housekeeping. Then we called in Mrs. Nesbitt.

  “We need some men upstairs to do that cleaning,” Mrs. Nesbitt told us, “because the maids just do what they want, anyway, no matter what you tell them.”

  We explained that there was no budget for housemen upstairs—that our Congressional appropriation only allowed thirty positions, all of which were filled. And the maids would just have to do better.

  “Well, I don’t see how keeping house for three people should be more difficult than keeping house for the Roosevelts,” said Mrs. Nesbitt.

  When the confrontation finally came between the First Lady and the imperious housekeeper, it was over a stick of butter.

  Mrs. Truman was off to a pot-luck luncheon with her bridge club. Her assignment was to bring a stick of butter, and she stopped by the White House kitchen to pick it up. Mrs. Nesbitt was there.

  “Oh, no!” exclaimed the housekeeper to the First Lady. “We can’t let any of our butter go out of the House. We’ve used up almost all of this month’s ration stamps already.”

  That was the last straw. All the weeks of unwanted brussels sprouts at every meal, cobwebs, and general sluggishness from the staff came to a head in that one quarter pound of butter.

  Mrs. Truman summoned Mr. Crim, as close to fuming as we ever heard her. “Our housekeeper tells me I can’t take a stick of butter from the kitchen!”

  “Why, of course you can,” sputtered the horrified Mr. Crim. “She is entirely out of order!”

  “Then I think it’s time to find a new housekeeper,” said Mrs. Truman.

  And Mrs. Nesbitt, at the end of that summer, went the way of Secretaries Stettinius, Morgenthau, Stimson, Biddle, Wickard, and Wallace.

  Mrs. Truman was no fussier than her predecessor, nor did she want to make life difficult for Mrs. Nesbitt. It was just that she had been brought up to be house-proud. But Mrs. Truman had never managed a large staff before. In their small apartment, she did all the cooking and Harry Truman wiped the dishes.

  It frustrated her that people couldn’t seem to keep the White House as clean as she had kept her own apartment, or as Vietta had kept her mother’s house in Independence.

  Actually, she had a point, because the White House is not the most efficiently run establishment in the country, no matter how hard we tried. Some years were cleaner than others, because some housekeepers had a daily list of duties, and a daily check to see if they’d been carried out. But unless each task were followed through and inspected, more than likely the domestic staff slipped right back into the easy way out.

  Individually, the domestic workers in the White House were some of the most loyal, conscientious employees any government could have. But as a work force, they were considerably less effective than their counterparts in any private house in America. What Mrs. Truman discovered was that their role was so ill-defined (their real role in the scheme of things, rather than their function as listed in the job description) and their hope for advancement so limited, that they had to establish their own
code. This code was a subtle “we’ll be here after you’re gone” attitude that characterized the staff’s relationship with every First Family. As eight-hour-a-day, time clock employees, the domestic staff were bureaucrats pretending to be old family retainers. And you simply can’t be both at the same time.

  Which is how Bess Truman ended up performing the duties of an assistant housekeeper at the White House. She’d stop a maid in the hall: “Could you take care of the fingerprints on the woodwork?”

  The maid would stop dusting to wipe the doorsill—then, of course, it would be time to go home. The next day, Mrs. Truman found new fingerprints on the woodwork, and again she’d remind the maid to clean it.

  Even after Mrs. Nesbitt left and things ran much more smoothly, the First Lady continued to “get in behind” the help until she wearied of the job.

  Mary Sharpe, an assistant in the housekeeper’s office, took over the job Mrs. Nesbitt left vacant, and spent much more time with Mrs. Truman herself. Her personality more nearly meshed with the First Lady’s, and her wit soon reflected the Trumans. It first surfaced at Thanksgiving.

  “We’d like to have Thanksgiving in the White House,” Mrs. Truman told me. “A good traditional menu, but not too rich, just for the Truman and Wallace families from Missouri—very quiet and no publicity.”

  No sooner had Mrs. Truman said this than her politician husband had accepted as a gift a live turkey—from the newspaper carriers of Boston—and the presentation ceremony was carried out with great fanfare and picture-taking on the White House lawn.

  As always happened, this kind of announcement brought a horde of questions to the publicity-shy Mrs. Truman. Each reporter, searching for an angle for the morning papers, thought up endless questions about the forthcoming dinner. The President’s office referred all questions to Mrs. Sharpe.

  Poor Mary was already overloaded trying to get the house in shape for the social season and to give it Mrs. Truman’s concept of “a very thorough housecleaning.”

  But the phones kept ringing all day—reporters wanting to know the recipe for the stuffing, whether the President preferred light meat or dark, where the cranberries came from.

  Finally, some newspaperman called and asked how she had killed the bird. Then, searching for detail, he went on, “In some South American countries they pour whiskey down the turkey’s throat to make it tender.”

  “We pour whiskey down the guests’ throats and they just think the turkey is tender!” Mary replied wearily.

  Bess Truman, hearing Mrs. Sharpe’s report of the conversation, roared with laughter.

  The President of the United States gets to sleep in the White House free of charge, and the salaries of the servants are paid by the government, but he has to pay for his own meals and those of his guests. Before 1945, the President also fed the servants out of his own pocket, but when the Trumans came, we realized this system couldn’t continue. Mr. Truman had no vast personal resources like the Roosevelts. So Mr. Crim’s first order of business was to extract a little appropriation from an understanding Congress to feed the help. The Trumans had few guests and it didn’t take much to feed them, but the First Lady investigated every item on the grocery list.

  “How in the world could we have used so many dozens of eggs?” she asked me. And I had to bring the housekeeper in to account for every item used.

  The First Lady was every bit as scrupulous in accounting for White House expenditures as she was in her own set of books. She had no personal maid, and although Vietta Garr, the family cook from Independence, Missouri, had been placed on the White House payroll, Vietta’s main duty was to care for Mrs. Truman’s mother. Whenever the family went back to Missouri to visit, Vietta went with them.

  Mrs. Truman, however, always insisted that Vietta be taken off the White House payroll during the time she was gone—something no other First Lady ever did, although all of them took White House servants along on weekends and summer vacations.

  The Trumans also paid for refreshments they served on the Presidential yacht Williamsburg, which was operated by the U. S. Navy, and which they used often on weekends. Once, when Mrs. Truman was out of town, the President invited his poker-game companions to sail down the Potomac. He asked Mrs. Sharpe to send food from the White House kitchen.

  The housekeeper looked in the refrigerator. There, melting (we had no freezer in those days), sat a large ice-cream cake that a friend had sent over as a gift for the President’s birthday. It was made from the special, extra-rich ice cream formula used only for the White House.

  Serving this will save money and please Mrs. Truman, Mary thought. As it was a warm day, she ordered dry ice to pack the cake for the trip to the Williamsburg, which was docked at the Washington Navy Yard.

  Nothing escaped Bess Truman’s eagle eye. When she was going over that month’s bills, the First Lady called Mrs. Sharpe in.

  “How did we happen to spend twenty-five cents for dry ice?” she asked. She was a very frugal lady.

  There is absolutely no budget for official entertaining at the White House, nor has there ever been. The simple reason is that the word “entertaining” has always had a frivolous connotation with the Congress, from whose fists we have to pry our annual appropriation. Entertaining is done, of course, but it is merely paid for from the President’s travel budget (which was raised from the Roosevelts’ $25,000 to $40,000 during the Trumans).

  Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, every President has been allotted this personal travel allowance, over and above his salary. However, beginning with the Trumans, the Presidents began traveling by plane, at the expense of the military, and we discovered that we could find a little money for entertaining in the travel fund.

  The President’s expense account, another $50,000 above his salary,* goes into his own pocket (nobody can spend it except on the President’s authorization), and is taxed like regular income. This “expense account” was initiated because President Truman couldn’t afford to live in the White House. He had no outside income when he suddenly succeeded President Roosevelt, and the law stated that a President’s salary cannot be increased during his term of office. So, to get around the law, the Budget Bureau convinced Congress to add the $50,000 expense account for President Truman’s living expenses in the White House—a bonus continued for future Presidents who were considerably more affluent than he. Harry Truman didn’t spend much money in the White House, and I’d guess that he probably saved all the bonus, except for taxes.

  The Trumans usually celebrated Thanksgiving in the White House, but they spent most Christmases in Independence, quietly, with their families. And every year they instructed the kitchen help to prepare two full Christmas meals to go to two needy families in the District of Columbia—and to tell nobody.

  Especially at holiday time, when Margaret could put down her schoolbooks and invite her friends over for Christmas caroling, but actually all year around, music was a main ingredient in the Trumans’ home life at the White House.

  “Mr. West, do you think we could roll the little spinet piano into my sitting room just for tonight?” Margaret asked me one morning. “Annette Wright is coming over to spend the night and we’d like to try a duet.”

  Her own piano, a baby grand, was a permanent and often-used fixture in Margaret’s suite.

  The spinet, purchased by Eleanor Roosevelt so there could be informal music in the State Dining Room to entertain the crowds of servicemen, was wheeled in and out of the Wedgwood-blue sitting room for Margaret and her friends as long as the Trumans were there.

  President Truman sometimes played the piano there, sometimes played the baby grand piano in his own study, and even was known to use the concert grand Steinway in the East Room.

  The piano people were overjoyed to find an aficionado at the White House. The Baldwin company had been rather miffed at the to-do when President Roosevelt helped design the elaborate, eagle-legged Steinway. Then, someone criticized the fact that the White House was displaying a G
erman piano (even though it was actually an American-made Steinway). The Baldwin Company seized the opportunity and presented President Truman with a big, black “American” concert grand, which he promptly placed in the opposite end of the East Room, to the great displeasure of the Commission on Fine Arts.

  But nobody played either piano, officially, that winter.

  It’s the custom, when the Supreme Court begins its session in the fall of each year, for the nine Justices to call upon the President at the White House, to announce that the Court is in session. It had always been a strictly formal afternoon occasion, with the Justices and the President dressed in formal day wear—striped trousers and club coats.

  That first autumn, President Truman got all dressed up in his new outfit, having been schooled in the ceremony by Mr. Crim. But the Supreme Court, to everybody’s surprise, appeared in regular business suits.

  The jaunty Mr. Truman was not fazed in the least.

  “I see I’m outvoted,” he said, as the Justices left. “We’ll just all dress in suits next year.”

  We soon discovered that Harry Truman, the former haberdasher of Independence, enjoyed clothes. His suits were impeccable, always bandbox fresh and “matched-up,” from his overcoat, hat, and gloves, down to his necktie and socks. In the White House, he never wore a sport shirt, nor even a sport jacket. Not once did we ever see him in his shirt sleeves, as we’d seen Mr. Roosevelt so often. In the most informal situations, or even at the end of the weariest day, Harry Truman wore a suit, white shirt, and necktie. Only on vacations, such as fishing at Key West, did he put on casual clothing and sport shirts.

  But after the Supreme Court came to call, the President retired his club coat. Nor did he wear white tie and tails that first winter. There was too much war-devastation in the rest of the world to enter into a gala White House social season. More often than not, the State Rooms were dark night after night. Upstairs, behind the closed doors of the President’s study, the sounds were not piano music, but papers rattling. At the same time that the President grappled with Congress and the new postwar economy, he was attempting to juggle Communist ambitions with allied national interests in Europe, while groping toward a new, definable American foreign policy.