Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  The very formal, very correct Chief Usher went back to Mrs. Eisenhower with my answer. Mr. Crim was made a special assistant to the President, until his retirement in eleven months, and I was promoted to Chief Usher immediately.

  Mrs. Eisenhower had only one reservation about the arrangement.

  “What about Gettysburg?” she asked me.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of Gettysburg first,” I assured her.

  In January, President Eisenhower was inaugurated twice. Because Inauguration Day, January 20, fell on a Sunday, a small, private ceremony was held at the White House, with only the Eisenhowers, their relatives, Vice President Nixon and his family. Only forty-eight people gathered in the East Room of the White House to witness Chief Justice Earl Warren administer the solemn oath of office. The ceremony was repeated the next day at the Capitol, followed by the traditional luncheon, the parade, and two gala Inaugural balls. The Eisenhowers entered his second term glowing.

  Their energy for entertaining was limited, though. The President was concerned about Mrs. Eisenhower’s health, as well as his own. At 60, she began her husband’s second term with her usual flourish, but he soon stopped her practice of shaking hands with the thousands of reception visitors. “She insists on talking to everyone,” he complained. “It’s a strain on her.”

  But Mrs. Eisenhower learned how to conserve her strength well. Although she had been quite ill with rheumatic fever as a child, and had contracted a heart murmur as a result, she had learned to discipline her time and energy so that, after a strenuous day as a hostess or traveling, she always collected adequate rest for herself.

  “I believe that every woman over fifty should stay in bed until noon,” she said, quite seriously.

  Rejuvenation—at Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance farm in Arizona—was among her projects. She spurned physical exercise, hated to go outdoors. “I’m not an outdoor girl,” she laughed. Instead, she depended on the masseuse who came to the White House three mornings a week to give her a good workout. Taking such good care of herself paid off. She didn’t have one wrinkle in her face. Most of our women visitors commented on Mamie Eisenhower’s smooth, unlined complexion.

  * Herbert Brownell, Leonard Hall, John Foster Dulles, Henry Cabot Lodge, Sherman Adams, General Wilton Persons, George Humphrey, Arthur Summerfield, James Hagerty, Howard Pyle, Thomas Stephens, and the President’s brother, Milton Eisenhower.

  8

  IT SEEMED THAT WE’D saved all the entertaining for Queen Elizabeth.

  Our most glittering—and strenuous—occasion of 1957 came in October, when the Queen of England and Prince Philip came with a party of fifteen for a State visit.

  It was the first visit to the White House for the young Queen. It was as Princess Elizabeth that she had stayed at Blair House during her last visit, when she had presented President Truman with a gift from her father, an antique floral over-mantel with mirror, now in the State Dining Room. This time she slept in the Queen’s Room, Prince Philip in the Lincoln Room, and their various ladies and men-in-waiting in the second-floor and third-floor guest rooms. The highlight of their visit was a State dinner, for which we’d brought out all our formal regalia.

  Strictest protocol was to be followed, White House elegance to be unsurpassed. This was very important to Mrs. Eisenhower, who had been entertained by the Queen’s parents in Europe, and wished to return the honor in the grandest manner.

  Timing was of the utmost concern. To us the logistics of clearing the State Dining Room after dinner became a major matter, for which we held many a strategy session.

  There was to be a concert in the East Room after dinner, to which two hundred additional guests had been invited. As soon as the President and Mrs. Eisenhower led their hundred dinner guests out of the State Dining Room, we were to close the doors, remove the elaborate place settings, flowers, linens, and banquet chairs, dismantle the big banquet table, and take everything, piece by piece, out onto the terrace.

  Then, while the audience sat enthralled by the strains of Fred Waring’s orchestra and chorus at the other end of the House, we’d set up the dining room with a small table for a champagne reception after the musicale.

  It was quite an operation, one that required swift, delicate, and silent movement. We’d labored over it for days, rehearsing carpenters, butlers, and housemen for their part in the transformation. The carpenters, normally unaccustomed to State dinners, were to wait outside on the terrace, then enter the room through the terrace doors to dismantle the banquet table.

  “Wait until everybody leaves the room and we’ve closed the doors to the main hall,” I instructed them. “Be ready to move, and move fast as soon as the room gets quiet—I’ll signal you, but remember, the main thing is to move fast!”

  Up to a point the dinner went beautifully. Through all the courses, the butlers performed smoothly, Mrs. Eisenhower smiling her approval. After dessert, the President rose and proposed a warm, lengthy toast to the Queen, and the guests applauded.

  Queen Elizabeth has a very soft voice, and when she spoke, returning President Eisenhower’s toast, the room became breathlessly silent. I was standing discreetly in the corridor, looking in, when I heard the terrace door begin to rattle. My heart sank, as I realized the carpenters had taken the silence to be their cue. They were trying to get into the room! Then, just before I had a heart attack myself, I remembered that I’d locked the door from the inside.

  Now, if they don’t decide to break the door down, we’ll be safe, I thought, holding my breath.

  When the toasts were finally over, and the guests had all filed out to the Red and Green Rooms for coffee and liqueurs, I ran to unlock the door.

  “We thought you weren’t coming!” exclaimed “Tojo” Benton. “We thought we’d have to bust in.”

  When I told him how perfect his timing nearly was, his face turned as white as his carpenter’s overalls.

  “You mean I nearly broke in on the Queen of England!” he said. “God save her!”

  The next morning, when I went up to see Mrs. Eisenhower, she was propped up in her king-sized bed, radiant.

  “Everything was just perfect last night,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve ever performed more smoothly.”

  I threw all my papers down on the floor and sat down, shaking my head.

  “What’s the matter?” Mrs. Eisenhower said.

  “If you didn’t see the things that went wrong—or that almost went wrong—I’m not going to tell you,” I said. And I didn’t.

  We found out later that morning that our First Lady sometimes required more in the way of service than did the Queen of England.

  It had been, after all, a very late evening. But as usual, Rose Woods stayed up until her mistress retired, undressing the First Lady, taking her diamonds and carefully locking them in the bedroom safe, then rinsing out the little items of personal laundry.

  As I left the jubilant First Lady’s conference, pleased that she’d been so delighted with the State dinner, I ran into the White House maid who’d been assigned to straighten the Queen’s Room. Wide-eyed, she told me, “Queen Elizabeth sent her personal maids to bed early last night—she told them not to wait up for her because she’d be so late!” Then, in utter astonishment, she described the morning scene in the Queen’s Room: The fabulous diamond tiara, the heavy diamond necklace, the beribboned medals—all the precious jewels Elizabeth II had worn the night before—tossed casually on a dresser. Her gown and underthings were folded neatly on a chair. The Queen of England had undressed herself.

  The President thoroughly enjoyed the visit of the young monarch and her husband, even though their rigorous four-day schedule left everyone else huffing and puffing.

  After the couple said their last goodbye at the door of the White House, before moving on to New York and a United Nations visit, the Eisenhowers waved to them until the limousine disappeared out of sight.

  Still flashing his big grin, the President turned to me.

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bsp; “If they’d stayed a day or two longer we’d soon be calling them Liz and Phil!”

  Despite President Eisenhower’s geniality with his royal guests, however, the burden of government had begun to fall heavily on his shoulders. The apparent lull that had quieted the nation after the cessation of hostilities in Korea seemed to be over.

  The fall of 1957 brought with it a deluge of national and international problems to confront the President of the United States. The American economy floundered in the midst of a recession which left millions unemployed. The school integration issue reached its most serious crisis as Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order and the President dispatched federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to assure peace at Central High School. Constant crises brought the threat of renewed war in the Middle East. And the Soviet Union severely shook U.S. self-confidence by launching Sputniks I and II, the first man-made satellites to orbit the earth.

  Nevertheless, by November, the President appeared to have weathered the strain. The afternoon of November 25 was dreary, not our favorite weather for a party, because Mrs. Eisenhower worried so about the rugs.

  “Be sure that the rubber mats are out along the North Portico and outside the Diplomatic Reception Room,” she called down to caution me, although the long, black runners were already in place.

  Extra door-openers, with umbrellas, were detailed to the south entrance, extra coat-checkers and racks were installed, to take care of dripping raincoats. All our stormy-weather plans rolled into action before the State dinner.

  At 3:15, I checked the State Dining Room, where the butlers were putting on finishing touches. The E-shaped table was set with the Truman china and vermeil flatware. Huge tureens of wine-red carnations, arranged according to Mrs. Eisenhower’s own color scheme for the evening, were waiting in the bouquet room refrigerator, to be centered on the tables just before eight o’clock. The First Lady had spent her usual long time preparing for the dinner, which was to honor the King of Morocco.

  Less than an hour later, we began to sense that something had gone wrong.

  There’s always a swift undertone of communication among the staff when there is trouble in the White House. Perhaps it is our years of intuition, second-guessing the comings and goings of the First Family, that prompts our coded signals to one another. The first indication that things might be amiss that afternoon came from our buzzer, touched off with three rings by a policeman when the President enters the mansion, to alert the ushers and doormen all over the house.

  This buzzer rang at 4:00, when the President, accompanied by his military aide, returned from his office. That was slightly unusual in itself, because President Eisenhower was a man of habit, and walking slowly back to the White House in the middle of the afternoon was not part of his daily ritual.

  Our second signal was General Snyder, President Eisenhower’s physician, flying down the ground-floor corridor from his office to the elevator, heading for the second floor.

  Moments later, Mrs. Eisenhower called me, her voice trembling.

  “Can you come up right away?” she asked.

  It was serious, I knew immediately, because John Eisenhower, who now served as his father’s aide, was at his mother’s side in the west sitting hall. The President’s dressing-room door stood ajar, and I could see the President, in pajamas and a robe, seated on the edge of his bed, talking with his doctor.

  “The President has taken sick,” Mrs. Eisenhower explained gravely. “We must be prepared to cancel the dinner this evening.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” I murmured. “I’ll wait for your instructions.” By now, we had only a few hours before the guests were to arrive. I began mentally disassembling all our arrangements; first, call the social office; second, call the maître d’; third, call….

  The President, obviously in an argument with General Snyder, came to the door.

  “The dinner will not be….” He couldn’t seem to finish his sentence.

  “… canceled?” Mrs. Eisenhower asked.

  The President nodded vigorously.

  “Sir, you will not be able to attend,” General Snyder told his old friend.

  President Eisenhower looked straight down at his wife, and with great difficulty—his tongue seemed to be thick—said, “The only way I won’t is if Mrs. Eisenhower attends.” Turning he went back to his bed.

  The First Lady looked at me, raising her hands in defeat.

  “Continue as planned,” she said. “I’ll call Vice President Nixon to act as host.”

  Walking with me the few yards to the stairway, she said rather formally, as if organizing herself, as if I had not been witness to the previous scene, “The President has had a slight stroke, but he insists on going ahead with the dinner, so I will just act as hostess.”

  At 6:20 the President’s press secretary, James Hagerty, gave a terse announcement: President Eisenhower is suffering from a chill, and will not be able to attend the dinner tonight.

  It was a ghostly-white Mamie Eisenhower who descended the elevator with Vice President and Mrs. Nixon that night. She sat in her throne-like chair at the head of the E-shaped banquet table, visibly nervous, obviously wishing to be at her husband’s bedside.

  She went upstairs immediately after dinner, pausing to file an unusual complaint with me.

  “The State Dining Room looked so dull, tonight. Those red carnations were much too dark,” indicating the flowers she’d chosen for the banquet table. It seemed to me that the room may have seemed dull because the light of her life lay ill upstairs.

  She stayed with the President until midnight, and her son sat watch in his bedroom, all night.

  It was not until the next day that Press Secretary James Hagerty made the announcement about the President’s cerebral hemorrhage. The stock market dropped $4,000,000 in twenty minutes. But it quickly recovered, and so did the President.

  After three days he was well enough to attend Thanksgiving services at the National Presbyterian Church, determinedly carrying on his duties thereafter—even flying to Paris to participate in a NATO heads-of-government meeting.

  During the next three years, his physical stamina and mental skills were put to more severe tasks than he had faced before, as he set out, by plane and by diplomacy, on a search for peace in the world. At the same time, he was meeting threats from the Soviets with a firm show of American military strength. And that fall, he hosted what had to be one of the strangest State dinners I ever witnessed.

  Nikita Khrushchev and his wife, daughter and son-in-law arrived in Washington on September 15. For weeks, Mrs. Eisenhower had worked on the menu for that evening’s State dinner, which turned out to be a “typically American” offering of curry soup, roast turkey with cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and tossed green salad.

  Out on the south lawn that afternoon, the President was preparing to take his visitor for a sightseeing tour of Washington by helicopter. Mr. Eisenhower had judged the machines safe enough for Presidential use during a civil defense drill in 1957; since then, the fascinating whirlibirds had practically become a fixture, hovering over the south lawn to carry the President back and forth to Andrews Air Force Base, to the Gettysburg farm and now, with Chairman Khrushchev, on a tour of the nation’s Capitol.

  I stood in the door with Mrs. Eisenhower, watching the helicopter take off.

  “They’ve refused to dress for dinner,” Mrs. Eisenhower said. “Did you know that? They’re going to wear business suits and street dresses to a formal State dinner.”

  Then, with a little laugh, she said, “My husband would just as soon dress that way, too—if I’d let him.”

  But for the Khrushchevs, the President was decked out in white tie—we certainly wouldn’t bow to the Russians’ wishes—and Mrs. Eisenhower wore a long, sweeping gold brocade gown with diamond earrings and a diamond-and-pearl necklace.

  The atmosphere at the State dinner was edgy. Mr. Khrushchev’s after-dinner statement was part toast, part boast. And after Presi
dent Eisenhower treated his guests to a performance by his favorite musicians, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, everybody let out a general sigh of relief as the Eisenhowers escorted the uneasy Russians to the front door.

  To the disappointment of the diplomatic community and most of the women’s press corps, the Eisenhowers canceled that winter’s formal social season. As the Trumans had done in 1948, the Eisenhowers placed other matters before official hospitality. The steel industry was entangled in a crippling strike, the economy slowly climbing out of the deep recession. The President had lost two trusted friends from his official family in 1958: Secretary of State Dulles had died, and Assistant to the President Sherman Adams had resigned under fire. Facing a hostile, Democratic-controlled Congress for the fifth year since the 1954 Congressional elections, Mr. Eisenhower was struggling to push through his domestic programs. Although his health was his own concern as well as the country’s, the President decided that his first priority was attending to business, his second priority was taking care of himself.

  On December 3, the President with his son, John, and his daughter-in-law, Barbara (Mrs. Eisenhower, terrified of flying in the new jet planes, chose to stay at home), took off on a “peace and goodwill” tour which took them nineteen days and 22,000 miles into eleven countries.

  When the party returned, Mrs. Eisenhower, with the Nixons, drove out to the airport to greet them. The White House glowed with all her Christmas decorations, but a bigger glow came from Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue, where a midnight crowd had gathered to greet the President with thousands of sparklers.

  Inside, another welcome was staged on the second floor, in the West Hall, where General Gruenther, George Allen, Bill Robinson, and Ellis Slater sat around their usual bridge table.

  President Eisenhower reported: “As we came in, Al Gruenther turned around slightly and said ‘Hi,’ turned back to his bridge hand and said, ‘I double.’”

  It was a warm homecoming.