by J. B. West
As the restoration progressed, Mrs. Kennedy noticed more lampshades to replace, more footstools to cover, and again realized that the problem of money would not be solved entirely by gifts.
One day, while having lunch with John Walker, director of the National Gallery of Art, she hit upon an idea.
“They don’t even have a brochure for all the tourists who go through here,” she reported back to me. “But if we could sell one, we could finance the restoration!”
There was no precedent, except at the National Gallery of Art. President Kennedy, at first, was opposed to the idea. It seemed to him like profiteering, and he was touchy on any subject that might cause unfavorable publicity. Yet, eventually, he was won over by John Walker’s assurance that all the books and reproductions of paintings sold by the National Gallery had only enhanced the Gallery’s reputation as a great museum—and by Jacqueline Kennedy’s saying plaintively: “I want to make the experience truly memorable for everyone who comes here. I want to make a truly impressive guide book.”
So Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, collector of antiques and art and restorer of White House rooms, became an editor.
She set up the White House Historical Association* as a nonprofit organization to research and publish the guidebook. The Association contracted with the National Geographic Society for its design.
She knew exactly what kind of book she wanted—educational rather than political, and of a high print quality. The editor of the National Geographic, after much time and effort, showed her some sample color photographs of White House rooms, livened by people.
“I want photographs of rooms and articles, not people,” Mrs. Kennedy replied. “This should be a guidebook which can last from administration to administration with a minimum of change.” Back to the drawing board went the layouts—as did every word of the copy she did not approve. She was the editor in every sense of the word. And a shrewd businesswoman, it turned out. The book entirely financed the restoration.
With priceless art and antiques filling the State rooms and living quarters, the White House was fast becoming a full-fledged museum.
In the early spring of 1961 Mrs. Kennedy took her children to the Kennedy summer home in Hyannisport for the week. Before she left we took a walk through the rose garden. The sun beamed on rows of tulips, not roses. Our greenhouse genius managed to produce and transplant blossoming flowers of every season for the White House garden.
“Please see if you can’t do something about the grass,” she murmured. “The President is after me again.”
“We’re going to have an opening in the Usher’s office this summer,” I reminded her. “Have you anybody in mind?”
She brightened.
“Oh, Mr. West, do you think you could get me a little curator, instead?”
“We’ll look into it,” I promised. I knew that the inventory of furniture was becoming too much for me to handle, and that, as a result of the restoration, both the social office and my office had to refer a great amount of mail to Mr. du Pont at Winterthur, his museum of American furnishings in Delaware, causing great delays for the sender. So I called the director of the Smithsonian, to ask for recommendations.
And, with a great deal of fanfare, we selected Lorraine Pearce, who’d trained at Winterthur, as the first curator of the White House. Perhaps there was too much fanfare.
Mrs. Pearce immediately won popularity on the Washington lecture circuit, and became the primary news source for stories on the restoration. At first, Mrs. Kennedy was highly pleased with her new curator—and insisted that Mrs. Pearce write the text to the White House guidebook, even though the prestigious John Walker himself had offered to do so.
“It needs to be written by a trained curator,” Mrs. Kennedy scrawled on one of her innumerable memos to me. “Lorraine can do it.”
The “little curator,” however, wasn’t about to be content sitting in a cubbyhole, cataloguing the White House furnishings. From the beginning, Lorraine was determined to build a position out of her job.
“I must have a secretary,” she demanded, “and an assistant.”
I explained to her that the government would not allow us to create satellite positions around her job because, technically, she was on loan from the Smithsonian.
“But, Mr. West,” she argued. “Surely you can see the necessity of a permanent curator’s office, if the White House is to be preserved properly.” I had to agree, knowing that otherwise the responsibility for keeping records on those priceless antiques would be mine.
Inevitably, Mrs. Pearce became the one casualty, besides the Truman furniture, of the restoration—for breaking the unspoken White House rule: One does not provoke the First Lady.
First, Lorraine acted rather grandly toward Mrs. Kennedy’s social staff in the east wing, expecting them to do the secretarial work she needed. Second, she felt free to talk to the press without consulting the press office, and twice made public statements on behalf of the First Lady that contradicted Mrs. Kennedy’s personal feelings. Third, her interpretation of “what Mrs. Kennedy really wants” was at odds with Tish Baldrige’s interpretation of what Mrs. Kennedy really wanted.
As the donations of antiques and paintings increased, so did pressure on Lorraine, and so did the tempers of the ladies in the east wing. One day Mrs. Kennedy stopped me as I walked past the bolts of cerise silk piled on the floor in the Red Room. “What is going on with Lorraine, Mr. West?” she murmured. “I’m getting notes about her from Pam, Janet, Tish, and everybody. I do like her work, though. Do you think you can solve this?”
“Perhaps you could ask Lorraine for a memo outlining her thoughts about the curator’s job,” I answered, since I had been receiving many such a memo from the new curator.
So the memo was requested, written, and received. Twelve pages long, the letter poured out all the frustrations of its writer, and ambitions for the office of curator.*
Mrs. Kennedy called me up the second floor to show me the letter. She was seated in the West Hall at her father’s desk.
When I finished reading it, she said, “Well, this settles it. She’s come down with White House-itis. [White House-itis was our private term for the disease that swept through the mansion periodically, claiming a few victims among the employees. Its symptoms were enlargement of the cranium and a sudden desire for assistants.] But she must finish the guidebook.”
That afternoon, I called Mrs. Pearce to my office.
“Since your principal job is writing the text for the guidebook right now,” I said, “Mrs. Kennedy suggests that it might be best for you to isolate yourself, and write full time….”
“Oh, I certainly agree,” she broke in. “It’s so hard to get anything done here, with all this furniture coming in, that has to be looked at, and—”
“So we’re setting up an office for you in the Department of Interior,” I continued, “where you’ll be much better able to write.”
By the time she finished the copy for the guidebook, Lorraine realized that her duties as curator had been taken over by Bill Elder, who soon was replaced by James Ketchum, a personable young man whose interest lay in American history. The entire broadcast room, across from the Diplomatic Reception Room became his curator’s office. Soon he had both an assistant and a secretary and, ironically, the “little curator” job began to carry all the weight and responsibility that Mrs. Pearce had hoped for.
But even in easing Mrs. Pearce out, the First Lady wanted to appear kind, as well as politically tactful. After reading my proposed letter telling the curator of her reassignment, Mrs. Kennedy noted to me: “This is a little strong … put in a couple of softening sentences regretting to see her go, or something…. Announce her departure in terms most flattering to her. It has all gone so well. We don’t want the last letter to make it bitter.”
In a letter to John Walker, she wrote, “They should have sent Mr. West to Geneva with Gromyko.”
And Mrs. Kennedy, along with everybody else, was delighte
d with the guidebook.
At the end of a year, the transformation of the house was well on its way. One January afternoon, in 1962, Mrs. Kennedy, Boudin, the carpenters and I were in the Green Room with a “new” painting, J. F. Kensett’s “Niagara Falls.”
Boudin suddenly sank onto Daniel Webster’s own New England sofa, newly upholstered in creamy silk.
“The Benjamin Franklin—he must be alone,” the tired little decorator insisted.
The carpenters duly took the fine old portrait from above the Cézanne landscapes, and placed it above the mantel.
“Madame, the proportion is all wrong,” he said for the hundredth time. “These should not be so—dainty!” He indicated Mr. du Pont’s white Federal sofas, Martha Washington’s armchair and looking glass.
“But the wall covering is lovely,” Mrs. Kennedy said gently. The green watered-silk had been Boudin’s choice. “Now let’s go into the room you like,” she smiled, “for I have something to tell both of you.”
It was nearly 5:30 when we walked into the newly finished Red Room.
“That’s all for today,” she told our patient picture-hanging carpenters, “and please send a butler in here.”
She ordered Daiquiris for herself and for Boudin and me.
“Happy anniversary,” she said. “We’ve been at this for one year.”
“May it go on forever,” said Boudin, raising his glass.
We sipped our drinks in our favorite of the downstairs rooms, the cerise-and-gold nineteenth-century parlor. President Kennedy had been nervous about changing the color from the traditional fire-engine red, but Mrs. Kennedy and Boudin won, as usual.
Presidents Jefferson, Truman, F. Roosevelt, T. Roosevelt, and Hoover, along with Alexander Hamilton, looked down from the rosy walls.
“I’m going to be a television star,” Mrs. Kennedy announced. “What do you think?”
Boudin and I both drank to that.
On February 14, the publicity-shy First Lady put on her public face and brought millions of people into the State rooms of the White House via CBS television. As she and Charles Collingwood toured the rooms, pointing out the changes, discoveries, and additions of the Fine Arts Committee, I stood behind the door, ready to supply any information. But, like the wheelchair when she toured the mansion with Mrs. Eisenhower, I wasn’t called for.
Immediately after the taping, we all went downstairs to the movie theater to watch the program.
“CBS is going to give us $10,000 for the Fine Arts Committee,” Mrs. Kennedy whispered to me as she came through the door.
President Kennedy sat in the front row to watch the show.
After the runthrough, he asked me, “What do you think?”
“I think it’s great,” I answered.
“Oh, he would,” Mrs. Kennedy laughed, meaning I don’t know what.
“It’s terrific,” said the President. “Terrific. Can we show it in 1964?”
Mrs. Kennedy evidently thought it was all right, too. Or else they’d have had it to do over.
* Members of the Fine Arts Committee: Mrs. C. Douglas Dillon, Mrs. Charles Engelhard, Mrs. Henry Ford II, Mrs. Albert Lasker, Mrs. Henry Parish II, Mrs. George Henry Warren, Mrs. Paul Mellon, Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, Charles Francis Adams, Leroy Davis, David Finley, John L. Loeb, Gerald Shea and John Walker.
* Its Chairman, James Fosburgh, did the collecting and he assigned ten art connoisseurs throughout the country to be his scouts. Members of the Special Paintings Committee: Mrs. Joseph Alsop, Mrs. J. Cheever Cowdin, Mr. Lawrence Fleischman, Mrs. Walter Halle, Mr. Stanley Marcus, Mrs. William S. Paley, Mr. Joseph Pulitzer, Mr. Vincent Price, Mr. Nathaniel Saltonstall, Mr. Whitney Warren and Mrs. Susette Morton Zurcher.
* Board of Directors were: David E. Finley, chairman, John Walker, treasurer, Clark M. Clifford, Melville Bill Grosvenor, Leonard Carmichael, Conrad Wirth, and T. Sutton Jett, executive secretary.
* Ironically, the office of Curator eventually surpassed Mrs. Pearce’s ambitions. In 1964, an Executive Order of the President established a permanent office of Curator and the Committee for the Preservation of the White House.
6
THE MILLIONS OF AMERICANS who were “invited in” during Mrs. Kennedy’s hour-long television special had only a taste of what it was like to be a guest of the White House with Jacqueline Kennedy as hostess. With her official guests, she was as correct, as cool, as formally gracious as she appeared to her television audience. Even so, White House entertaining under Mrs. Kennedy was much less formal than it ever had been, and her style was vastly different from Mamie Eisenhower’s.
During the Eisenhower years, we had proudly perfected State dinners down to the second: Always white tie, always one large E-shaped banquet table in the State Dining Room, always a great deal of pomp and circumstance, with the polish of a precision drill team. With the Kennedys, the atmosphere was younger, more glamorous, more informal, because the Kennedys were younger, etc. But it took much more planning to achieve that appearance of spontaneity.
During the Eisenhower administration, I prepared a detailed schedule for every facet of a State function, showing who was to stand where and when, the precise timing of entrances, the orderly procedure from room to room. The President and his wife would study the plan carefully, as would all the military aides, butlers, cooks, doormen, and band.
President Kennedy felt such detail was unnecessary.
On February 14, 1961, for example, at his first State luncheon, President Kennedy entertained the Prime Minister of Denmark, with additional guests. The President received his guests of honor privately, upstairs in the Oval Room. The plan was for them to walk together from the elevator directly to the Blue Room, where the guests were assembled.
At approximately the correct moment, the President and his guests came down on the elevator. Instead of stepping into the Blue Room, however, John F. Kennedy marched his guests directly into the pantry! With his usual aplomb, the President laughed and backed out again. “Oh, this is another room I wanted to show you,” he said to the Danes. After that, we had to station an aide outside the elevator door (President Kennedy didn’t like walking up or down the curving staircase because of his painful back trouble) to precede the President into the right room.
Mrs. Kennedy made her own rules for protocol and arrangements, mostly thoughtful ones. After the third State function, a dinner for the Prime Minister of Australia, she sent me a memo:
Mr. West—
Will you tell whoever it is—After this, at every occasion where they play Hail to the Chief & just announce Pres—to please also say the V.P. of U.S. and Mrs. Johnson. It is so embarrassing to have them not announced, & just disappear like maids….
The tone of the Kennedy entertaining was lighter, gayer, more fun: Black tie rather than white tie; for the first time, cocktails before dinner; and smoking was allowed. (Despite the denials of such a possibility to the press, our staff even worked out instructions for detecting and removing overindulgent guests. We never had to carry them out, however.)
They had a formal receiving line only at State dinners. At the few large receptions they held, President and Mrs. Kennedy mingled among the guests and “received” as they walked through the room. We set up buffet tables, with roast beef, canapés, salmon and chicken, and served cocktails—a more sumptuous spread than the punch and finger-sandwiches of the past twenty years.
The huge State dinners were fewer in number and were usually restricted to those honoring foreign visitors. René added great variety to the menus with his gourmet cooking.
The Kennedys cut down on the number of courses at meals and changed the tone of after-dinner entertainment (Eisenhowers: 6 courses, with 21 items, followed by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. Kennedys: 4 courses, with 8 items, followed by the Metropolitan Opera Studio). Gone was the formal E-shaped banquet table. Instead, Mrs. Kennedy selected fifteen round tables seating ten each for the State Dining Room. For larger affairs, we set up additional round
tables in the Blue Room. Delicate, multicolored flower arrangements, yellow organdy tablecloths and candlelight highlighted the formal entertaining.
The powerhouse behind the glittering evenings at the White House was the First Lady’s social secretary, Letitia Baldrige. Tish was really a social director, with a background in the diplomatic service, who selected menu, guests, entertainment, decor, and seating arrangements. In one respect she lightened my burden considerably, but in another her creative entertaining set the entire White House spinning.
“If you locked that woman in a closet for twenty-four hours, she’d have enough work to last you a month when she came out,” Usher Rex Scouten exclaimed one morning, after Tish had swept through our office.
Messengers trotted upstairs with her “urgent” folders so often that Mrs. Kennedy complained to the President that she could get nothing else done all day. He suggested a solution.
“My husband thinks that I should look for a place for a little office in the east wing near the social office,” she told me. “I might spend a couple of hours a day over there, and not be bothered with all the folders all day long. Mr. West, will you take me there now?” she asked.
I walked with her down the glassed-in ground-floor corridor where tourists enter, past the White House police offices, and up the stairs again to the east wing. The First Lady’s staff, her correspondence office, files office, press office, and social office cannot be approached from the State floor nor from the family floor.
“I’d have to time my trips over here to avoid the tourists,” she noted.
We walked in on Tish’s operation, looking for a likely little office for the First Lady. Phones were ringing, papers flying, secretaries zipping from office to office, pacing their moves to Tish’s mock hysteria.
“Isn’t this a madhouse?” Barbara Keehn asked, apologetically.
No one knew why we were there.
Six-foot Tish propelled herself into the hall, directing a silent orchestra with one arm.
“Oh, I’m so glad I caught you,” she said to Mrs. Kennedy. “We’re going to have to change the seating for tomorrow’s luncheon because the Prime Minister has brought two more in his entourage than we expected. Now if you’ll just look at the chart, I think we can squeeze them in….”
