Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  Every afternoon, while the President napped in his dressing room, Mrs. Eisenhower avidly followed the adventures and perils of her soap-opera heroines. She wouldn’t miss a program for anything! I learned to avoid the second floor at that time if I possibly could, for if I went up there I’d be trapped with “As the World Turns.” You just can’t say, “I’m sorry, I have more important things to do,” to a First Lady—especially to Mrs. Eisenhower.

  When they moved from the official, ceremonial world of the Presidency to the private world of their families and close friends, the pomp and circumstance which the Eisenhowers seemed to enjoy and accept as a highly important part of their official roles gave way to a very easygoing, informal style of living. They were just being Mamie and Ike at home.

  The Eisenhowers were great weekenders in the White House. In the mornings, President Eisenhower was up early to tee off. Wearing a jaunty golf cap, he’d hit a drive from the garden just outside his office to the south grounds, where the faithful Sergeant Moaney retrieved the golf balls. We always had to turn off the fountains during those practice sessions.

  In good weather, it was golf for the President at Burning Tree Country Club, where he often took his young grandson, David, and several old friends to make a foursome. Then back to the White House for cards.

  Their weekend guests were old friends, not official friends, and card-playing was the Eisenhowers’ main form of private entertaining. The lively games went on all afternoon, at two tables—one in the Monroe Room for the President and his bridge group, the other in the solarium for their wives, who played Bolivia, a form of Canasta.

  After the game, President Eisenhower, dressed in an open-collared sport shirt, treated his guests to a cook-out on the White House roof, flipping hamburgers and Kansas City steaks on the charcoal broiler. In the wintertime, he boiled up a pot of stew in the third-floor diet kitchen.

  “Ike’s stew,” a recipe passed reverently around official Washington, was known unofficially at the White House as “Moaney’s stew.” The good-natured sergeant chopped up the meat and onions in the diet kitchen on the third floor, assembled all the ingredients, and stood patiently beside the pot like a surgical nurse, handing the President parsley, paprika, garlic, as Mr. Eisenhower asked for each.

  At first, the Eisenhowers spent most all their weekends at home.

  To Mamie Eisenhower’s way of thinking, the decor at Shangri-La, the Presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, left a great deal to be desired. Because the Trumans rarely went to the mountains, preferring the yacht Williamsburg* to the lodge, the latter still looked as it had when President Roosevelt escaped there on weekends, only shabbier. It was rustic, paneled in rough wood and furnished with big, heavy pieces.

  “It would be nice if we only had the money to redecorate it,” Mrs. Eisenhower said wistfully to Mr. Crim.

  “The Navy still operates the lodge,” he explained, “and I don’t see why they couldn’t pay to have it redecorated.”

  Mrs. Eisenhower’s eyes sparkled at the idea. “I think I’ll just pass a hint along to the Commander-in-Chief,” she said.

  Soon came the order for the Navy to redecorate Shangri-La, with Mrs. Eisenhower as consultant, and the rustic lodge soon took on a “1950s modern” look, in greens, yellows, and beiges.

  When it was finished, the President renamed the retreat “Camp David,” in honor of his little grandson, and there the Eisenhowers spent many weekends, held some Cabinet meetings, and entertained foreign visitors until their Gettysburg remodeling project was finished.

  Whether at Camp David or at the White House, Mamie Eisenhower kept to one steadfast rule when entertaining her friends: No liquor was to be served before 6:00 p.m. And she always insisted that dinner be served promptly at 7:00.

  “Don’t give them time to have more than one drink,” she instructed Charles, thinking not only of her guests’ sobriety but also of a frugal liquor cabinet. A persistent, vicious rumor to the contrary, Mrs. Eisenhower was a very moderate social drinker. Occasionally President and Mrs. Eisenhower would take one scotch and soda (his) and one bourbon old-fashioned (hers) in the evening, before their dinner trays were set up. Before State dinners, cocktails were never served in the Eisenhower White House. The butlers poured only American wines at the table, with dinner. Neither were drinks offered at the large receptions. Mrs. Eisenhower followed the White House tradition of serving a “spiked” punch at one end of the State Dining Room table, a nonalcoholic fruit punch at the other end.

  Even when her closest friends came to play cards in the afternoon, Mamie Eisenhower served only coffee, colas, and mixed nuts.

  Those afternoon card games with “the girls” gave Mrs. Eisenhower considerable pleasure during her White House reign. In the 1950s, Mamie Doud Eisenhower had a passion for Bolivia. Practically every day, after the big public receptions at noon, after her private time watching television, a group of her old friends appeared at “her” Diplomatic entrance. Sometimes, dressed in her customary hat and gloves, she’d take the limousine to their homes. But more often, they’d come to the White House, playing cards and chatting merrily in the Monroe Room or the solarium.

  The same group had been playing together for years, the game having been their main diversion while their husbands were overseas.* At the White House, the Bolivia players usually took a break for tea at 5:00 p.m., and sometimes they’d stay for dinner. Afterwards, a frequent treat for the friends was a movie in the ground-floor theater—usually a light, romantic comedy. Mrs. Eisenhower confessed to enjoying sentimental love stories as well.

  The President’s taste in movies, however, was more restricted. Providing Mr. Eisenhower with enough Westerns became a major task for the Usher’s office—because he’d seen them all, perhaps three or four times. Every night the projectionist prepared a list of the films available from the motion-picture distributors for White House screening.

  “Can’t you find a new Western?” President Eisenhower kept asking. And we hunted through the amusement ads in the newspapers, the Library of Congress film collection, or approached the producers themselves.

  Colonel Schulz, the military aide, had the same assignment to search for reading matter. Mr. Eisenhower escaped into Western novels, whodunits, and cookbooks. Every four years, the American Booksellers’ Association sent several hundred new books for the White House library. But when it was reported that the President’s favorites fell into the Western category, we were flooded with paperbacks of all sorts, guns blazing on the covers, most of which the President read after dinner, while Mrs. Eisenhower concentrated on popular magazines and romantic novels.

  The President’s pride and joy was his putting green, a gift from the American Public Golf Association, installed on the south lawn just outside his office window. He liked to stop by on the way home from the office to practice his shots.

  Keeping that green in perfect condition became an obsession with Dwight Eisenhower. He ordered the gardeners to flick the dew off the green with fishing poles every morning. The squirrels, that Mr. Truman had almost tamed by feeding them scraps under the table, infuriated Mr. Eisenhower because they buried acorns and walnuts in the putting green.

  “The next time you see one of those squirrels go near my putting green, take a gun and shoot it!” he thundered to the faithful Sergeant Moaney.

  But the quick-thinking Secret Service talked him out of that order. “If there’s shooting out here, we’d have to first inform the police,” they explained, “and it’s not exactly as if the squirrels were facing a firing squad and we could schedule it in advance, so there’d be bound to be some fuss made, the press would get hold of it, and the humane societies would never let you forget it. Couldn’t some traps be set instead?”

  Somehow the gardeners caught most of the offending animals in nets. They were evicted by White House van to Rock Creek Park.

  The ubiquitous squirrels found a friend in the President’s little grandson, David Eisenhower, and a foe i
n David’s terrier, Skunky. Skunky chased the squirrels around the south lawn on weekends and holidays, when the children came to visit, and David chased Skunky.

  Mrs. Eisenhower took great delight in her four grandchildren—David, Barbara Anne, Susan, and Mary Jean—the children of their only son, John, and his wife, Barbara. (John’s older brother, Dwight Doud, had died of scarlet fever at the age of three, a great tragedy in the Eisenhowers’ life.)

  “Every moment I spend with my grandchildren is the best moment in my life,” Mrs. Eisenhower once said.

  When the Eisenhowers had moved in, John, then a major in the Army, was stationed in Korea, and his young family lived in Highland Falls, New York. We first met the younger Eisenhowers in 1953, when President Truman ordered John flown back to Washington for his father’s Inauguration, and John and Barbara slept in the Queen’s Room.

  David was only five then, Barbara Anne three, and Susan one. Wide-eyed on his first visit, little David asked his grandmother, “Mimi, why do you live in such a big house?”

  Thereafter, Barbara and the children came down frequently on weekends until 1955, when her husband was assigned to nearby Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and then to the White House as an aide. The youngsters came much more often to visit “Mimi,” as they called their grandmother. The children always stayed in the third-floor bedrooms. But Mrs. Eisenhower decided, after the first Inauguration, that only a Queen should sleep in the Queen’s Room on the second floor, so John and Barbara had to sleep elsewhere in the house.

  The “White House baby,” born in 1955, was Mary Jean. Barbara Eisenhower’s doctors recommended that the birth take place in a hospital rather than in a bedroom upstairs in the White House, but Mary Jean managed to be christened in the Blue Room.

  Those Eisenhower children were exceptionally well behaved—their grandmother insisted upon good manners. Although they had no nurses or nannies to look after them, they caused no trouble for anybody. They swam in the big Roosevelt swimming pool, practically the only time it had customers during the Eisenhower years, rode their tricycles up and down the ground-floor corridor and their little battery-operated cars outside on the circular south driveway. Mrs. Eisenhower kept a good supply of their dolls, electric trains, and toys stashed away in a room on the third floor.

  The children were a special joy also for their great-grandmother, Mrs. Doud, who joined in all the family gatherings. President Eisenhower appeared to be especially fond of his wife’s mother. Teasing her unmercifully, he always called her “Min,” after a character in the old Andy Gump comic strip. Mrs. Doud played the harmonica in her room and sometimes accompanied her Mamie, who played, by ear, a small electric organ in the West Hall.

  Mrs. Doud was a permanent resident in the White House, although another daughter, Frances, Mrs. George Gordon Moore, whom everyone called “Mike,” also lived in Washington. Mrs. Moore and her daughters, Mamie and Ellen, frequently dropped in on their famous relatives.

  Although her mother, sister, son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren were often around the house, Mrs. Eisenhower took great precautions that none of them would appear to be taking advantage of her position. The First Lady stressed that if any White House services were needed by her family, she’d be the one to request them.

  One morning, as I was in conference with the First Lady, Mrs. Doud came into the bedroom and mentioned that she had a dentist’s appointment at 11:30 and would like a car, if possible. “Certainly,” Mrs. Eisenhower said.

  When I went downstairs, I ordered a car to be there for the First Lady’s mother. About thirty minutes later, Mrs. Eisenhower called me.

  “Who ordered the car for Mother?”

  “You did,” I answered.

  “Why, I just called the garage and they said it had already been ordered,” she said.

  I explained that I called her order into the garage after I’d heard it mentioned in her room. “Oh, good,” she said, “just so the order came from me!”

  She rode in a Chrysler limousine, which was replaced by a new model every year. Those White House cars always came under the special scrutiny of Mamie Doud Eisenhower. Every time the manufacturer sent down a new model for our approval, she’d try it out first. “The seat is too high” or “The seat is too low,” she’d report, among other assessments, after a spin around the block. And back to the factory went the new limousine.

  “She’s the best critic we’ve ever had,” the Chrysler representative told me one day, waiting for her to return from a test-run.

  * President Eisenhower retired the yacht soon after taking office.

  * Many were the wives or widows of military officers, like Mrs. Everett Hughes, Mrs. Walton Walker, and Mrs. Ruth Butcher; others were Mrs. Pell Miller, Mrs. James C. Black, Mrs. George E. Allen, Mrs. Howard Snyder, and Mrs. Eisenhower’s sister, Frances “Mike” Moore.

  5

  MORE THAN ANY OTHER task I performed for the Eisenhowers, I liked working at Gettysburg. It was a change of pace from the White House routine, the 160-mile ride back and forth through the Pennsylvania countryside was scenic, and the creative process involved in building or rebuilding had always excited me.

  The huge farm, near their friend George Allen’s farm, became the only permanent home the Eisenhowers had ever known. Although they’d purchased it in 1950, when they came back from Europe, they began to remodel the farmhouse after they moved into the White House. Since 1954, I had been commuting back and forth from the Usher’s office to Gettysburg.

  The farmhouse was small, more than 200 years old, and in pretty bad shape. Over a period of three years, the Eisenhowers had it expanded and remodeled into a large, attractive, rambling two-story white brick and natural stone home with seven bedrooms, and plenty of space for the guards and Secret Service in the barn.

  “You’re my general supervisor at Gettysburg,” Mrs. Eisenhower laughingly told me, but added firmly, “I don’t want anybody working up there—decorators, carpenters, anybody—unless either you or I are there.”

  My job at the farmhouse was to make certain that the contractor followed Mrs. Eisenhower’s wishes—covering over a window here, cutting through a door there, enclosing the porch with sliding glass panels so the President could have a light-filled painting corner.

  The Eisenhowers paid for every piece of material used in connection with the Gettysburg house and kept careful records of their expenditures. For every house gift they received, they made a public ceremony or statement of acceptance. However, some of the work—kitchen cabinets, bookshelves, and other fine woodwork—was done in the White House carpenter’s shop, as was our own house gift, two large glass-enclosed “Louis XV” curio cabinets.

  Sometimes, during the three-year project, White House carpenters and electricians accompanied me to Gettysburg, Mrs. Eisenhower scrupulously paying all their expenses—though not their salaries for the time they put in. A White House car always was at our disposal, and occasionally I had a chance to ride along with Sergeant Dry, the Army driver assigned to the First Lady.

  As the house neared completion, I spent even more time at Gettysburg, because Mrs. Eisenhower wanted to be sure, with last-minute changes such as new wallpaper on the stairway, that workmen didn’t traipse over the rugs or tear the draperies.

  Because the trip took about an hour and a half each way, I often stayed from Monday until Friday. Mrs. Eisenhower urged me to stay in the house, but I preferred a motel in town. Even though I knew that the First Lady regarded me as a friend and confidant, I still felt it more proper that I separate myself from the personal lives of any Presidential family.

  One evening, after a long day at the farmhouse, I said goodnight to Mrs. Eisenhower, and put on my overcoat.

  “I want you to call your wife and thank her for lending you to me,” Mrs. Eisenhower called down from upstairs.

  “I will,” I answered, laughing.

  “No, you call her right now, where I can hear you,” she insisted. So I picked up the living room phone, placed the cal
l to Virginia, and relayed her message to Zella. (“That’s all right,” Zella replied. “Tell her she can lend me Ike for a day or two.”) Only then could I head for my motel.

  Sergeant Dry, however, always stayed in a room on the third floor at Gettysburg, when the Eisenhowers were in residence. He served as the operating engineer, caring for the air conditioning, furnace, and mechanical equipment.

  After early 1955, when the house was comfortable enough for occupancy, the Eisenhowers spent almost every weekend there, as well as most summer vacations. In addition to Sergeant Dry, they brought along Sergeant Moaney, whose wife, Delores, became the cook at Gettysburg, and Rose Woods, all of whom had rooms at the main house; two Filipino housemen, Enrique and Lem, who stayed in Navy barracks at Camp David and commuted to the Gettysburg farm; the President’s doctor, General Snyder; several Secret Service men; and, of course, the Signal Corps, who stayed in motels in Gettysburg.

  For the first time since I’d been working for the White House, getting away had become quite a cumbersome proposition for the President. Having to take that number of staff around, seeing to their food and housing was an operation in logistics—far different from the days when Eleanor Roosevelt needed a single train ticket.

  We had to pack White House linens for each trip, ship them back by truck daily for laundering, take food from each of the mansion’s refrigerators for the help and the Eisenhowers, and, if there was official business, from the White House storerooms. When the Eisenhowers came home, everything was packed up and brought back again.

  When Mrs. Eisenhower went up to the farm alone, she took along Dr. Walter Tkach, General Snyder’s assistant. The young Air Force physician was quite a violinist, and during the quiet afternoons he played the fiddle in his second-floor bedroom.

  It was not music to Mrs. Eisenhower’s ears, however. “Please tell him if he has to play, please go to the barn,” she laughingly told Delores in exasperation.