Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  But the bed was a mess. All over the sheets, covers, pink dust-ruffle, headboard, everything, were big black spots—or, to be exact, dabs and blotches and swipes of indigo.

  “What on earth can we do?” the First Lady wailed.

  Miss Walker began jerking the sheets off the bed herself. “I’ll take these down to the laundry room to soak, and one of the maids will bring up some spot-remover for the rest,” she said.

  Once the housekeeper had disappeared with the soiled linens, Mrs. Eisenhower began to explain.

  “You see, my nose was all stopped up,” she began, “and I had a jar of Vicks on my bedside table. So during the night when I woke up, I reached over to put some in my nostrils. Well, it seemed to just get drier, instead of moister,” she went on, “so I kept applying more and more. I didn’t want to wake up Ike, so I didn’t turn on the light. Then this morning, I discovered that I was using ink to cure my cold.”

  She had begun the conversation very earnestly, but now, knowing that it could all be set right, she began to smile.

  “But you should have seen me,” she laughed. “Black and blue all over—and the President, too.”

  I held down the chuckle that rose up in my throat. The President and the First Lady, in all their dignity, covered in ink.

  “I don’t think anything is permanently damaged,” I assured her. “I’m sure it will all come out in the wash.”

  “Now don’t you tell a soul,” she admonished, still laughing.

  “Certainly not,” I promised, and beat a hasty retreat. Not since Harry Truman’s four-poster broke down had I heard such a good bedtime story.

  If Bess Truman had an eagle-eye for the housekeeping, then Mamie Eisenhower had a built-in microscope. But where Mrs. Truman’s main concern was the woodwork, Mrs. Eisenhower focused her attention on the rugs.

  Perhaps being closer to the ground than most people (at slightly under five feet four, Mrs. Eisenhower gave the impression of being much tinier), she got a closer look at the floors.

  Footprints, especially, bothered her. The carpets, all new and thickly piled, did show shoemarks when people walked on them. Before every party, with the housekeeper in tow, she made a thorough inspection of the State floors.

  “Have this rug vacuumed one more time,” she’d point out, until finally, she hit upon the idea of brushes. “The last thing to be done, before the guests arrive, will be to brush the rugs,” she directed. “Not one footprint must be showing when they walk into this room!”

  She even ordered a separate brush for each color of rug. And at the last minute, as the butlers dimmed the lights for the evening, the Filipino housemen scurried around behind them, brushing away their footprints.

  The biggest carpet culprit, however, was Heidi, the irrepressible Weimeraner somebody had presented to the President.

  Heidi lived in a little doghouse outside the President’s oval office, and gave Mr. Eisenhower a great deal of pleasure, bounding over the south lawn to retrieve a stick, or toy, or golf ball. But Heidi was not always well behaved.

  One Sunday I was relaxing at home when Mrs. Eisenhower called me, in great distress:

  “Mr. West, can you come down right away? We have a terrible problem in the Diplomatic Reception Room.”

  It took about twenty minutes before Brooks, my indispensable driver, pulled up to the White House. Mrs. Eisenhower was waiting in her entrance off the south grounds, the only one she ever used, where her friends came in. It was called the Diplomatic Reception Room because earlier Presidents stood there to receive credentials from foreign ambassadors. During the Truman renovation, the room had been outfitted with a brand-new, pale green oval rug.

  Now, two of the housemen were down on their knees, scrubbing at a big yellow spot near the door.

  “Heidi!” Mrs. Eisenhower wrung her hands in agitation. “I’m just sick about it.”

  “Let me see if I can rouse any cleaning experts,” I offered, and I finally found a dry cleaner at home. He was pessimistic. “No solution known to man will completely remove that stain.”

  We summoned all the male strength in the house—butlers, doormen, housemen, engineers, to move out the furniture, pick up the rug, turn it completely around to try to hide the spot. But there was nowhere that it wasn’t highly visible. The next day, we sent the rug out to be dyed. The spot came back only slightly diminished in hue.

  Shortly thereafter, Heidi went to live on the Eisenhower farm at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, banished forever from the White House for her felony.

  Later, when the National Society of Interior Designers presented to the White House a refurbished Diplomatic Reception Room, Mrs. Eisenhower was delighted with the new rug, specially woven with the seals of the 50 states in its border. At the ceremony where she graciously accepted the gift, she shot me a knowing glance. “You and I know how much we appreciate this,” she whispered.

  * Even the President tried to help. He met me in the hall one day, and explained that he had a “little money” left over from his office appropriation. “Couldn’t we use it to do some of the things Mrs. Eisenhower wants to do in the White House?” I had to explain that it would be fiscally impossible and illegal to transfer funds from the President’s office to the President’s house. Ours is a separate appropriation.

  4

  SHE WAS EVERY BIT as frugal as Bess Truman. Mamie Eisenhower could think up infinite ways to cut corners, in handling her own budget and making suggestions for ours. And the lengths to which she went soon became the talk of the Washington business community.

  Every morning, she perused the newspapers, looking for bargains in foods and household items. Shopping by telephone from those newspapers, she always called the head of the department store, who must certainly have been startled to take an order from the First Lady of the land. “When you go into a store, go straight to the top,” she advised all of us. “Don’t fool around with some clerk.”

  Time after time, she’d notice some “special” in a chain-store ad, and dispatch the storekeeper’s truck to the local grocery, where a Secret Service man would hop out and purchase the desired item.

  Although the White House traditionally did its grocery shopping wholesale, sending an unmarked truck with a daily list to the old market area of Washington, where the security guard and a security-cleared employee of the establishment picked the food off the shelves, Mrs. Eisenhower was horrified at the cost.

  The wholesalers provide us with the finest quality of meats and vegetables, we explained, and therefore their prices are apt to be higher than the weekly “loss leaders” at the chain stores. So the thrifty Mrs. Eisenhower still insisted on shopping for bargains, for the White House as well as for her own personal use. The truck sped all over Washington, from the supermarket to military commissaries, to seek savings.

  Charles Ficklin, who’d taken over as maître d’ when Alonzo Fields retired, always joined us at Mrs. Eisenhower’s morning bedside sessions. Not only did the First Lady scrutinize every item on his menu list, she questioned the source of supply, freshness of the lettuce, compatibility of the combinations. She practically squeezed the tomatoes by remote control.

  And she kept careful track of the leftovers. “I don’t want one morsel wasted around here,” she told Charles. Every morning she asked for a list of food that hadn’t been eaten the previous day. “Three people turned down second servings of Cornish hen last night,” she’d remind Charles. “Please use it in chicken salad today.” The cooks learned to turn out lots of casseroles and ground-meat dishes. And fortunately the Eisenhowers were fond of hash.

  Although she had never learned to cook herself, she was an avid reader of advertising and wanted the cooks to try out everything new on the market.

  “Have you tried the new cake mixes?” she asked Charles. “They’re infinitely more economical than doing it the old way,” and promptly stocked her private pantry, as well as the official kitchen, with cake mixes.

  Taking advantage of the new “walk-in
” freezers in the renovated White House kitchen, she set up vegetable gardens at the Gettysburg farm. Soon fresh corn, beans, spinach, squash came to us in truckloads each summer, to be frozen and served on the Eisenhowers’ wintertime trays or at their private dinner parties. It had been many a year since a President grew his own food, but this economical family managed to cut corners in every possible way.

  Although the Eisenhowers were comfortably well-to-do when they came to the White House, they did not have a limitless outside income. Mrs. Eisenhower soon realized that White House living could quickly eat into their resources, and she tailored her budget accordingly.

  Their food bills were never over $100 a month, and this was mainly for staples. The meat they used came from a friend in Kansas City, the vegetables from their farm, and wild game for the President’s stag luncheons from his hunting trips.

  Mrs. Eisenhower always scheduled luncheons and dinners so they wouldn’t interfere with anything else. And she insisted that the kitchen and pantry not be overworked—she wouldn’t let them have a dinner one day and a luncheon the next day.

  “The staff needs a breathing space between functions,” she said. More than just consideration for the staff, however, this was to ensure good performance. “If you constantly operate on a large scale, you’re not putting out top-quality anything,” she told me one morning, smoothing the sheets that covered her nightgown.

  The housekeeper, Mabel Walker, began to attend our bedside staff meetings, because Mrs. Eisenhower didn’t give orders to the maids; she knew that people, like soldiers, respond more readily to their next-in-command. She knew perfectly well what a domestic staff was supposed to do, and she held Miss Walker accountable if it weren’t done.

  At the White House, the beds are fully changed, with clean, fresh sheets, every time they’ve been occupied—if only for a catnap.

  During the Roosevelt and Truman years, the sheets sometimes found their way to the sewing-room, for a little careful mending here and there. But not for Mrs. Eisenhower.

  “Please see that the best bed-linens are used at all times,” she’d say to Miss Walker. “I don’t want to see mended linens again!”

  The White House was easier to operate during Mrs. Eisenhower’s regime. She knew her own mind, and we appreciated it.

  Furthermore, despite all her demands, all her commands, Mamie Eisenhower was personally a most thoughtful First Lady.

  When a State dinner had gone especially well, she was lavish with compliments. And although she squeezed pennies in her household, she was more than generous to her employees. There was a personal touch to her kindness; it was not done by rote or in a perfunctory manner. She came to know a great deal about us all, and her knowing revealed her interest in those who served her, as human beings with lives outside the White House.

  The personal lives of her domestic employees seemed to intrigue Mamie Eisenhower. Drawing them into lengthy discussions about their activities, their families, their homes, their state of health, she seemed, for a First Lady, to bestow an unusual amount of concern. When anybody got sick, she always sent flowers from the bouquet room; even if she heard that one of our relatives were ill, she sent flowers, too.

  “She wants to be everybody’s godmother,” said Mr. Crim.

  I’ve never seen anybody so happy as Mamie Eisenhower spending her first Christmas at the White House. She had selected something for everybody in the House—for all the domestic staff as well as the carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.

  “Well, I’ve finally done it,” she said, when the gaily wrapped boxes were at last all piled under the tree in the West Hall. “It’s been my desire, all of my life, to be able to give a Christmas gift to everybody who works for me!” On Christmas Eve, she invited all the employees up to the second floor, in small groups, to present us our gifts.

  She had even bought presents for my wife and my daughters.

  One morning, she opened a small white box on her bedside table.

  “Isn’t this pretty?” she said, showing me a pearl-and-rhinestone necklace, bracelet, and earrings set. “I want to give this to your wife for Christmas.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” I began. But she hardly heard me. “Now, you should go out and buy her a ring to match.”

  “I will,” I nodded.

  “Bring it back and show it to me!”

  Realizing that I was in a bind, I hurried to a store on Connecticut Avenue and selected a gold ring with a cultured pearl for Zella. When I brought the ring back for her inspection, Mrs. Eisenhower said, jangling her own bracelet with its “Ike” charms—helmet, tank, five stars, map of Africa—“That’s perfect. I couldn’t do better if I had shopped for it myself.”

  But on one occasion Mrs. Eisenhower’s ideas about gifts contrasted rather sharply with my family’s income and needs. She had ordered a mink stole for inspection, then decided it wasn’t right for her. “Why don’t you buy it instead and give it to your wife?” she suggested. I replied that my next gift would have to be a new washing machine. Mrs. Eisenhower made a wry face. “Ike had better not give me any household appliance for a gift!” she said.

  Over the years, she was extremely generous to me. One year she gave me a battery radio, another year a Polaroid camera. Then a set of trays, a silver salad bowl, a silver silent butler, a set of eight silver julep cups (two each for four years), and a brass tray table, and finally had the President present me with an original oil painting signed “D.E.”—all gifts that I could use, and which I still treasure.

  Every Christmas she sent each of my little girls a U.S. Savings Bond. Kathy, born during the Roosevelts, and Sally, who arrived during the Trumans, thought Mrs. Eisenhower was their best friend.

  One afternoon I came home to a wonderful fragrant kitchen. “Daddy,” Sally yelled happily, “we’re making some cookies for Mrs. Eisenhower.”

  The next day I told the First Lady about her gift, which I’d forgotten to bring. She immediately wrote the girls a little thank-you note, telling them how much she looked forward to tasting their cookies.

  But when I proudly brought the note home, the girls shrieked in horror.

  “We ate them all up!” wailed Kathy.

  But they cooked up another batch, which Mrs. Eisenhower shared with us at the next morning’s conference.

  The First Lady insisted that the housekeeper keep a “birthday calendar” along with the household records. Every time a member of the household staff celebrated a birthday, Mrs. Eisenhower ordered a cake baked in the White House kitchen. She personally selected a birthday card to accompany it.

  All our children were treated to presents from the “toy room,” a great storage closet on the ground floor filled with gifts provided by toy manufacturer Louis Marx. And at Christmastime, when Mrs. Eisenhower was overwhelmed by thousands of letters from poor families throughout the country, she directed Miss Walker and me to dip into the toy room to supply as many requests as we could fill.

  For the maids, butlers, housemen, everyone with whom she was in daily contact, she sent Christmas and birthday gifts as well, which she chose from her bulging “gift closet” on the third floor, stocked from calls to department stores, from gifts she’d received herself, or from one of her out-of-town shopping expeditions.

  On those excursions to stores (she especially loved the five-and-dime), she was always accompanied by her Secret Service agents. “I’ve never seen anything to beat it,” agent Stewart Stout told me. “She always insisted that I buy my wife a present. Every single time we stop at a store.”

  I soon discovered that the new vogue for television dictated certain aspects of life in the Eisenhower White House.

  Although two television sets had been installed during the renovation, one in the West Sitting Hall and one in the President’s study, the Trumans hadn’t cared much for the electronic novelty. Now, however, the medium had begun to come of age, and it fascinated the Eisenhowers.

  In the evenings, President and Mrs. Eise
nhower, with Mrs. Doud, took dinner on their tray-tables in the West Hall, while watching the television news. Along with the rest of the country, they were that caught up in the new TV mania.

  For the first time, this major revolution in American communications had begun to influence national politics, as well as the life style of the First Family. The first two Eisenhower years in office were also years of dominance for Senator Joseph McCarthy and for the phenomenon that became known as McCarthyism. Without question, television fueled the controversy of McCarthy’s Communist “witch hunt,” making internal security in government a political issue with which President Eisenhower had to deal constantly.

  Television also provided an effective medium for President Eisenhower. His wide smile, his proud, erect posture, his direct manner were magically carried to homes around the country by the TV cameras. With much ado, he made the first telecast from the White House ground floor broadcast room in May, 1953. (Thereafter, actor Robert Montgomery came in to advise him on his performances.) Then Mr. Eisenhower became the first President to hold televised press conferences, giving the public its first opportunity to watch how a chief executive handles himself under pressure of questioning. His critics came away pleased that President Eisenhower indeed appeared to be fallible. They saw his flashes of anger and his occasional twisted syntax. But for most Americans, these qualities only showed that the popular Ike was also human.

  Even more than the press conferences or the TV dinners, “As the World Turns” initiated the Television Era in the White House. Watching the daytime serial was a daily ritual for Mrs. Eisenhower, as I found out early in the administration.

  I’d been out to lunch, and when I returned there was a note to “see MDE upstairs.” But when I knocked on her bedroom door, the First Lady pointed me toward the pink overstuffed chair, never taking her eyes off the television set.

  “Let’s just wait till this is over,” she said. And I watched while one tragic dialogue after another unfolded on the twelve-inch screen. Not even during the commercials could I find out what she wanted from me.