Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  On Monday, I received a big envelope from Hyannis, where Mrs. Kennedy and the children had spent Thanksgiving. It contained ten pages of notes on the familiar legal-size yellow paper, written in Jacqueline Kennedy’s unmistakable scrawl. “These notes are about the operation of the White House,” the former First Lady wrote me. “Please send them on to Mrs. Johnson.”

  I smiled to myself. Even in her grief, Mrs. Kennedy was sure to be thinking of cigarette boxes, flower arrangements, maids—the infinite details of the White House.

  Mrs. Johnson phoned that same morning, finding me in the West Sitting Hall, supervising the removal of the Bouvier desk, the De Gaulle commode, and the Kennedy family pictures so we could put in White House furniture from the warehouse.

  “Could you come back to The Elms?” the First Lady asked. “I’d like to finish discussing the servants’ arrangements.”

  Again, as I entered the big house, with its off-white expanses, muted greens and yellows, rich rugs and silk draperies, I was struck by the French elegance. This time I was ushered up to Mrs. Johnson’s study on the third floor, past a houseful of her friends—Senators’ wives, ladies from Texas, Vice Presidential secretaries—who were helping to answer her already voluminous mail.

  Lady Bird Johnson was alone in the small, tidy room. She smiled, shaking her head in wordless amazement as I handed her the thick manila envelope. She had already spent two hours alone in the White House with Mrs. Kennedy on the afternoon after our first meeting, touring the second floor, discussing the staff, the rooms, the art.

  “How can she be so thoughtful of me at a time like this?” Mrs. Johnson murmured.

  The First Lady quickly switched to the business at hand. Once again, Mrs. Johnson asked me if it were “okay” to place her personal servants on the White House payroll.

  “Every President has done so,” I assured her, naming Lizzie McDuffie, Vietta Garr, Rose Woods, the Moaneys, Provy and George.

  “There’s no way you could be subject to criticism, since the positions are vacant, and quarters for them on the third floor as well,” I added.

  She smiled, much relieved. “We’d like to bring Zephyr Wright, our cook, and Lee Gregg, our maid, who won’t be living in, and Helen Williams, my personal maid, who will need to live at the White House,” she said, emphasizing that Helen’s and Zephyr’s husbands were hired as messengers in the President’s office. “They’ve already been investigated, because they were working for the Vice President.”

  “You’re saving the government money already,” I told her, noting that a new Secret Service investigation can cost up to several thousand dollars per person.

  “Will we need to adjust their salaries?” she asked, following the same train of thought.

  “It’s very flexible,” I replied—then I suggested that they be paid exactly what they were presently receiving.

  Because, I explained, “If their salaries are raised substantially, it might be difficult to get them to go with you when you leave the White House.” Mrs. Johnson laughed and agreed, but later I found that I’d have to contend with Zephyr about that suggestion, again and again.

  During our meeting that day, Liz and Bess opened the door, then, seeing me in conference with Mrs. Johnson, quickly backed out.

  “I like working in a room with one door so I can control my privacy,” Mrs. Johnson said.

  In the five years that lay ahead, I would learn the significance of that remark—how Lady Bird Johnson could remain a very private person at the same time she involved herself in a swirl of public activity.

  It took a week to pack the Kennedys’ belongings—furniture, photographs, paintings, toys, animals—everything except Caroline’s third-floor classroom, which Mrs. Johnson had graciously agreed to keep in operation until after Christmas. We sent the things to the commercial warehouse where Mrs. Kennedy’s own furniture had been stored.

  Mrs. Kennedy came back from Hyannis, with two additional requests for me. Dressed in black, a worn, strained look on her face, she handed me a small note.

  “Mr. West, can you have a little plaque made, and place it here on my bedroom mantel?” She pointed to a spot near the brass marker stating that Abraham Lincoln had slept in the room.

  I looked at the note:

  “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy with his wife, Jacqueline—during the two years ten months and two days he was President of the United States—January 20, 1961—November 22, 1963.”

  “Of course,” I said, but I knew we didn’t have time for brass engraving before she moved out. Bonner cut a little three-by-six-inch piece of plexiglas, Rudy Bauss of the Park Service incised the inscription on it, and Joe Karitas painted it off-white to match the mantel and glued it on the next day.

  Her next request was simpler. “The Kennedy family has selected this to leave in the White House,” she said, indicating a beautiful Monet painting of a waterscape, in lavender, blue and green, “Morning on the Seine.” The small bronze plaque would read:

  “In the Memory of President John F. Kennedy by his family.”

  “Can you have it hung in the Green Room? That was his favorite room.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” I said.

  On Friday, December 6, the second floor was empty, the last truckful of Kennedy clothing was delivered to the Averell Harriman home on N Street. Mrs. Kennedy had said her goodbyes.

  At about noon, President Johnson conducted an Alliance for Progress awards ceremony in the State Dining Room. Suddenly Mrs. Kennedy appeared on the back elevator.

  “May I watch?” she asked. And unseen by anyone, she stood behind a screen in the Private Dining Room, looking on as the new President carried out one of her late husband’s wishes.

  Just before the ceremony ended, she slipped out quietly through the Rose Garden to the car where her children were waiting.

  When the ceremony was over, Lady Bird Johnson walked down the State floor corridor with Mrs. Angier Biddle Duke, wife of President Kennedy’s Chief of Protocol. I stood waiting by the elevator door.

  “Mrs. Johnson, you may move in at any time,” I informed her. “Mrs. Kennedy has moved out.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I think we’ll probably wait until after Pearl Harbor Day.” The Johnsons, with a strong sense of history, preferred not to enter the White House on that “date which will live in infamy.”

  But I had a feeling they might be coming by earlier, so I stayed at the White House that evening. Sure enough, Mrs. Johnson, bathing suit in hand, showed up at the President’s office at the end of the day, and they went for a dip in the White House swimming pool!

  At about eight o’clock three buzzers, indicating the arrival of the President, sounded off. I quickly ordered every light in the house turned on so they could find their way around. Then I watched the elevator go up as they went straight from the ground floor to their new second-floor home.

  After about half an hour, I thought I might be helpful to answer any questions, so I went upstairs.

  As I stepped off the elevator, I heard President Johnson’s voice booming, “Where’s Mr. West?” Mrs. Johnson was standing in the West Hall, with a few members of the President’s staff.

  “Here he is now,” she called in to the President’s bedroom. I hurried down the hall, where I found him sitting on the edge of President Kennedy’s king-sized four-poster bed.

  He jumped up and, waving his long arms around the room and pointing out to the halls, asked, “Who pays for all these lights?”

  “The government does,” I answered.

  “How much does it come to a month?”

  “Approximately $3,000,” I said, neglecting to tell him that the bill included air conditioning, kitchen appliances, and all the fancy electronic equipment.

  As he walked out of the bedroom, the President reached over and switched off the light. Rather emphatically, I thought.

  I walked down the corridor with Mrs. Johnson, talking about moving, with one ear to the President, now in the kitc
hen opening pantry doors, now in the bathroom trying faucets.

  “We’ll be moving in tomorrow after all,” Mrs. Johnson said.

  “Lucy has John-John’s room, and Lynda, when she comes home from college, will be in Caroline’s. But they will both need much more closet space.”

  I showed her Miss Shaw’s little room, where Rose Woods had pressed Mrs. Eisenhower’s dresses in the years before. “We could turn this into closet space,” I suggested.

  “That would be ideal,” Mrs. Johnson smiled.

  The commercial moving van arrived from The Elms bright and early the next morning, a Saturday. I stayed on the second floor, directing traffic, setting up the rooms.

  Shortly after noon, a white convertible zoomed into the South driveway, and out jumped Miss Lucy Baines Johnson (who became Luci shortly thereafter), with two frisky beagles on a leash.

  Immediately following was Mrs. Johnson, with Bess and Liz, in the big, black White House Cadillac. The President’s wife was clutching a large, framed photograph of the late Sam Rayburn.

  I was waiting at the Diplomatic Room door.

  “Welcome to the White House,” I said to my fifth First Lady.

  “What shall we do with the dogs?” Mrs. Johnson asked me.

  “I’ll call Mr. Bryant, the electrician,” I said. “He took care of Pushinka and Charlie.”

  “Ours are just Him and Her, for right now,” she said. “I’ll think of better names for them later on.”

  Noting all the identical monograms on the luggage upstairs, I thought they’d surely be Lord and Lady Beagle Johnson, but Him and Her they remained.

  I accompanied the ladies upstairs, saw Liz and Bess stake out their headquarters in the east wing, and saw Luci to her new bedroom, now outfitted with her own bed, a clutch of stuffed animals, her clothes neatly hanging in the closets. The bouncy sixteen-year-old’s eye took in her new room, spying first her bedside telephone.

  “Does this extension go just to my room or does it go anywhere else?” she asked.

  I explained that each White House phone had a direct line to the switchboard, and to no other phone on the floor.

  “Oh, good! In our house all our extensions were connected, and my Daddy was always listening in on me,” she lisped, in what her mother called her “little girl voice.”

  I left the Johnsons alone in the White House that night and all the next day, which was Sunday. It was my first day off since November 22.

  On Monday, December 9, Airman Paul Glynn, who’d been assigned to the White House as the President’s valet, phoned me just as I walked into my office. “The President wants the Usher to please meet him at the ground-floor elevator landing.”

  The President stepped off the elevator. “Mr. West, if you can’t get that shower of mine fixed, I’m going to have to move back to The Elms.” He didn’t sound as if he were joking.

  There had been no complaints from the Kennedys. And everything in the house had been doublechecked by the engineers after Mrs. Kennedy moved out, as is usual for a change of tenants. I couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong.

  “It doesn’t have enough pressure,” he complained. “It’s a terrible shower, that’s what it is. Now my shower at The Elms …,” he went on to describe the special, multinozzled fixture that could direct spray up, down, sideways, wide, narrow, and powerful. Then he repeated, “If you can’t get it fixed, I’ll just move back to The Elms.” And without a smile, he turned on his heel and walked away.

  Immediately we charged upstairs to check the shower. Nothing seemed to be wrong except that it wasn’t what he was used to.

  A few minutes later, Mrs. Johnson called, asking me to come to the second floor. She was seated in the Queen’s sitting room, a small room with one door.

  “I guess you’ve been told about the shower,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am,” I smiled.

  She smiled back. “Anything that’s done here, or needs to be done, remember this: my husband comes first, the girls second, and I will be satisfied with what’s left.”

  Out to The Elms we went, with the White House engineer and plumbers, to study the shower. It was an unusual one, but by contacting the manufacturer we felt sure that it could be duplicated. Not so. Word came down from the second floor that the replacement we had installed just didn’t work the same. Out it came. Before the second installation, we invited engineers from the factory to look at The Elms bathroom, to provide an exact duplication. They, of course, jumped at the opportunity to custom-build a shower for the President of the United States.

  But shower number three wouldn’t do either. Nor number four, nor number five. The problem was water pressure. We even put a special water tank in the stairwell closet, with a pump of its own, just for Mr. Johnson’s shower. The Park Service was called in. Rex Scouten, now the White House liaison officer there, jumped into the shower in his bathing trunks to test the pressure. It was strong enough for Rex, but not for the President. We kept designing, redesigning, tearing out, installing, and fooling with that shower until Lyndon Johnson moved out of the White House. Despite all the talk of savings in electricity, we spent thousands and thousands of dollars, not counting the man-hours, trying to build a shower to please him. It was the strongest, most elaborate shower we’d ever had, with about six different nozzles at different heights, directing spray at every part of the body.

  Mrs. Johnson’s telling me that “My husband comes first” was a real clue as to how the LBJ White House would operate. More so than in any other administration, it became, as is imprinted in gold on the white souvenir matchbooks, “The President’s House.” President Johnson was all over the house. With his ever-present Secret Service agents, he roamed up and down the halls, poking his head in doors to find out what people were up to, using all the rooms in the mansion for one purpose or another. He had telephones installed in every room—in the bathrooms, underneath the dining room table—and he kept the lines hot.

  It was clear from the beginning that President Johnson was concerned about the lights—and it seemed to us, more than just as a symbol of the budget reductions he’d ordered in all the executive departments during his first month in office.

  Since the Eisenhowers, we’d kept the lights on in the State rooms until midnight every night, even when the rooms weren’t being used because, as Mrs. Eisenhower had told me, “My friends drive by here at night and they complain because they think nobody’s home. Let’s keep the lights on!”

  But President Johnson wanted them turned off. If there were lights on in a room, he’d call to find out who was in there; if nobody was, we’d hear from him. He’d even prowl around the house at night, turning off lights himself, and we’d hear from him then, too.

  One night, though, he heard from one of his employees.

  Isaac Avery, a carpenter who’d worked at the White House since the year one, was planing away down in the carpenter shop one night, when suddenly the shop was plunged into pitch-darkness.

  “Goddammit, who turned off that light?” Avery stormed at the top of his lungs.

  “I did,” a deep voice boomed back.

  The irate carpenter flipped on the light switch, stomped into the hall—and there, flanked by two agents, stood President Johnson.

  “I didn’t realize you fellows worked so late,” Mr. Johnson said.

  “I was finishing the frames for all those pictures you sent over,” Isaac Avery stammered.

  But Avery never did find out what the President of the United States was doing in the carpenter’s shop in the middle of the night.

  President Johnson’s nocturnal habits concerned his wife, who worried about his erratic dinner hours—sometimes at 10:00 p.m., sometimes at midnight or after—and she worried about the staff waiting around to serve him dinner.

  One morning, after a particularly late dinner the night before, when the butlers had gone home at midnight, Mrs. Johnson called me up to her dressing room.

  “I am so distressed about the servants havin
g to stay so late,” she told me. “I’ve long since given up on my husband eating dinner at a decent hour. Can’t we just have Zephyr fix something that can be kept warm—or I’ll go in and warm it up for him—or if I’m asleep he can easily serve himself? Then we can just send the butlers home at eight o’clock every night, the way they’re supposed to.”

  “I’ll see what I can arrange,” I told her, and passed her suggestions along to the head butler, Charles Ficklin, who went straight through the roof.

  “The President of the United States having to serve himself dinner? Never!”

  The other butlers were equally indignant.

  “We’ve served the Presidents and First Ladies every meal in formal service as long as I can remember,” said John Ficklin. “Even if it’s a cheese sandwich or a bowl of chili or a boiled egg. That’s a tradition. Let’s just work it in shifts.”

  I went back to Mrs. Johnson. “We’re about to have a butler’s revolt on our hands,” I told her. “They insist upon serving the President, no matter what time.”

  “I’ve never seen such a house.” Mrs. Johnson laughed in amazement. “First it takes two engineers to light the fireplaces—they won’t let me do it. And now the servants don’t want to go home at night.”

  But she realized, as I did, not only that the butlers were proud of their status, but also that traditions, once broken, are difficult to reestablish. The White House staff has maintained a certain continuity of operation through the years, flexible to the demands of the Presidency, yet separate from those demands.

  President Johnson’s erratic hours (I think he worked all the time, and seemed to require less sleep than most people), his impulsive, impromptu entertaining, and the way the Johnsons used the White House kept us all on our toes—as we first found out on December 23, the day that official mourning for President Kennedy came to an end.

  Bess Abell called over from the east wing at about two in the afternoon.