Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  At dinner Jane sat at the same table with philanthropist Mary Lasker, who had meant so much to Mrs. Johnson’s beautification-of-America campaign. As happens to everybody at some time or another, Mrs. Lasker spilled a drop of wine down the front of her gown. Jane Engelhard quickly took off one of her big diamond earrings and pinned it over the wine spot on Mary’s dress.

  But after dinner they became separated. When everybody moved into the East Room for the entertainment, Mary Lasker took a seat in the center of the third row and the Engelhards stayed at the back of the room.

  “We have to get our jet out of National Airport before 11:00 p.m.” Jane told me, “because they’ve got a noise pollution ban on jet traffic after that time.” At about ten, the Engelhards left their seats and slipped into the Green Room where I was standing.

  “We want to leave now,” Jane whispered, “but Mary Lasker has one of my earrings on the front of her dress. Do you think you could retrieve it without all the press ladies noticing?”

  Seeing Bess Abell standing against the East Room wall, I passed the word along to her, thinking it would be less conspicuous for her to unpin the jewels. Agreeing, Bess sidled into the third row, whispered to Mary, palmed the earring and dropped it into my closed fist. I took it to the Green Room and handed it to Jane.

  “Do you know the value of what you just held in your hand?” Mrs. Engelhard asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “$100,000,” she announced.

  “More like two hundred thousand dollars,” her husband corrected, hurrying her toward the door.

  “I should have walked right out the front door,” I told him.

  During the Johnson years, we geared up for more entertaining than at any other period. And each party was uniquely Johnsonian.

  The President absolutely refused to wear white tie and tails; his most formal social occasions called for black tie. Bess Abell, a long-time friend of the Johnsons, knew how to shape White House entertaining to fit their informal, expansive Texas style.

  Invitations, except for State occasions, might come in every color, every style of printing. For the after-dinner entertainment, the printed programs were mighty fancy, as in a regular theater. Some were covered in red velour, some in green silk, and some contained cartoons or drawings.

  Many times, Bess set themes for her parties with decorations. Sometimes there were big paper flowers for a “Mexican” party; other times the trees wore live flowers.

  Once Lynda had a dinner dance in the East Room and we moved in trees, “planting” them in wooden tubs around the room, trying to achieve a garden effect. There were potted geraniums, cherry blossoms stuck on the trees, and greenery hanging from the chandeliers.

  In planning for these affairs, I was on the phone with Bess Abell sixteen times a day, for Bess was indeed the White House social director. In addition to directing the thirty-person social office, handling the traditional duties of guest lists, calendar, and correspondence, Bess was the impresario of the Johnson White House. We called her Sol Hurok.

  Utilizing a crew of knowledgeable outside advisors, she garnered performing artists from concert stage to Indian tribes, directed rehearsals, perfected timing, and set up dressing rooms for the after-dinner entertainment. She designed theater programs, named the dishes on the menu, selected gifts for State visitors, decorated the State rooms, coached the military social aides, and acted as assistant hostess at all the parties, introducing guests, starting conversations, choreographing the crowds from one room to another.

  Her instruction sheets were called scenarios, and the staff performed according to instructions like actors on a Hollywood set. Because the gregarious Johnsons used all the house all the time, combining official business with entertaining, Bess was on duty all the time. She coordinated menus with the chef, gave instructions to the housekeeper, directed the activities in the flower shop.

  The evolution of the White House social secretary has paralleled the growth of the mansion as an institution. When I first went to work at the White House, Edith Helm served, simply, as a secretary for social occasions. She worked only in the mornings, went home for lunch and returned only if she’d been asked to help pour afternoon tea. Her main responsibility was to have her staff find the correct addresses of the people who were to be invited, instruct calligraphers to write the invitations, keep records of the acceptances and rejections, and provide the social calendar to the newspapers. She appeared at the White House parties only if she’d been invited.

  “She invites the people,” Mr. Crim told me. “After they come in the door they’re our responsibility.”

  Mrs. Helm knew social Washington from one end to the other, having served as social secretary to Mrs. Woodrow Wilson as well as Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Truman. She had memorized Emily Post and the New York Social Register and the Washington Green Book, and the guest lists stayed rather closely within those confines.

  Mrs. Truman depended on Mrs. Helm and her knowledge of Washingtonians for most of her guest lists, as well, and because Mrs. Truman didn’t follow Mrs. Roosevelt’s precedent of weekly press conferences, Mrs. Helm met with the newspaper ladies to announce social occasions, describe Mrs. Truman’s clothing, and fend off questions about Margaret’s beaux.

  Mary Jane McCaffree followed the same format and served as Mrs. Eisenhower’s personal secretary, as well. Mrs. Eisenhower, of course, was her own social director, decorator, guest-list selector, seating arranger. She worked directly with the Usher’s office.

  But Mary Jane came to every party, “mixing” with the guests, keeping an eye out for reporters taking notes (a military social aide would quickly appear and ask the lady to stow her notepad), making introductions and organizing conversations. Before every State dinner, Mary Jane would usher in the press ladies—asking them please not to step on the rugs—to show off the table settings and guest lists.

  (The working press was not invited to the Eisenhowers’ affairs. “I think it ruins the party to have some questioner running around,” Mrs. Eisenhower told me.)

  Tish Baldrige didn’t enter into the decorations, but she ran around like a stage director while a party was going on. She’d even have the girls in her office get dressed up and come over to State dinners, to see if guests were being taken care of, talked to, danced with. Tish was the first social secretary in charge of programming for the East Room, but her great flair for directing activity sometimes came in conflict with Mrs. Kennedy’s.

  Bess Abell directed everything. She was in on everything for the Johnsons’ private parties as well as for official entertaining. She dreamed up the decorations, she told the chef how to cook, told the housekeeper what needed to be cleaned and where the ashtrays should be placed. She did for Mrs. Johnson what Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy had done for themselves.

  After our first open house for Congress, miraculously put together in just a few hours, Bess was amazed at the instantaneous response of government agencies, and private companies as well, to White House requests.

  “Mr. West, I never realized what power went along with the title ‘Social Secretary of the White House.’ You ask for something and it’s delivered immediately, if not sooner!”

  From then on, Bess never hesitated to use that power.

  The entertaining bills were higher under the Johnsons because there simply was more entertaining. Some months the bill might run $10,000 or even $12,000. More than 200,000 guests received invitations to the Johnson White House during the five years they lived there. The Democratic National Committee picked up the tabs for some political evenings, and we tried to keep as many parties as possible “official,” under the auspices of the State Department and its budget.

  “Official” entertaining came out of the President’s travel account, because with the Air Force now paying for his transportation—on Air Force One or the smaller Jet Star—we had no more need for White House Pullman tickets.

  Mrs. Johnson, however, almost always traveled by commerc
ial airliner, paying her own way, grabbing the shuttle to New York like everybody else. Jerry Kivets, her Secret Service agent, made the arrangements.

  Over in the west wing, there was a public austerity campaign going on, with Marvin Watson in charge. Marvin was the President’s right-hand man for a wide range of duties, ranging from issues of state to carrying out the President’s slightest passing whim. In matters of White House expenses, he was known as the President’s tight fist.

  While the President carried on about the electricity bills, Marvin cut down on salaries, travel, telephones, even newspaper subscriptions. The east wing was always up in arms about some new directive from the west wing. Bess soon learned, like Jacqueline Kennedy, that the only way to operate under the west-wing limitations was by devious methods. One crafty move was the time she sneaked a promotion for Jeff.

  The most popular man in the social office, Fred Jefferson worked as a messenger and driver. He carried memos from the east wing to the west wing and all over the house, he drove around town delivering invitations and printing orders and anything else. Full of dignity and kindness, the tall, lanky messenger also worked extra in the mansion as a butler, filling in at parties in any capacity he was needed. He’d been there since the Eisenhowers; Tish had adored him, and Bess thought he was great. Jeff was indispensable, Bess told me, and she thought he deserved a raise. She went to Marvin Watson (the social office came under west-wing jurisdiction; it was not my bailiwick, although I could vouch that Jeff was a very good butler) to request a promotion. Marvin denied the request. He said, in effect, that there just wasn’t any place to which he could promote Jeff.

  Not to be outdone, Bess pulled as neat a bureaucratic coup as I’d ever seen. She wrote a very stiff and formal memo about how badly she needed an “assistant to the social secretary,” and how the member of her staff she’d like for the position had been performing above and beyond the call of duty. She sent the request through regular channels and it came back “approved.”

  After the State of the Union message in early 1967, the Johnsons were having a little party on the second floor, just for family, friends, and close staff. Marvin Watson was there.

  “How do you like your new assistant?” he asked Bess.

  “Just fine! In fact, here he is now,” she said sweetly, as Jeff served Marvin his ginger ale.

  As one staff member said, “It’s more important to keep the President and Bess Abell happy around here than it is the First Lady.” It wasn’t just that Bess assumed more authority than the previous social secretaries, she’d been granted that authority by Mrs. Johnson. The “Chairman of the Board” approved or disapproved all Bess’s written plans and scenarios with a “yes—CTJ” (Claudia Taylor Johnson, as she signed her checks), or “no—CTJ.”

  And although she didn’t get involved in the details, the final word of the First Lady always counted.

  When Marvin Watson was appointed Postmaster General, Bess set up a noon reception in the east garden as a farewell party. Mrs. Johnson, housekeeper Mary Kaltman and I were in conference in the Lincoln sitting room, discussing the month’s finances. The First Lady, looking out the window, noticed butlers carrying tables out to the garden.

  “Oh, that’s right. I have to be downstairs to say farewell to Marvin at twelve o’clock,” she said. “What are you serving?”

  “Canapés, sandwiches and liquor,” I answered.

  “Oh my gosh, no!” she exclaimed. “Marvin Watson is probably the only teetotaler among our friends.” I quickly had the bar removed.

  When we set about to select the new White House china, which would be known to future administrations as the Johnson china, “CTJ” became very much involved. The new china, a set of 220 rather than 120 (because, since the Kennedys, we’d been using the Blue Room as well as the State Dining Room for dinner parties), was made by Castleton through Tiffany and Company. It was to be a gift to the White House from a generous, anonymous donor.

  Mrs. Johnson decided first on a cream background for the dinner service, then they came up with suggestions for designs for the plates. They’d leave mock-ups of the patterns for the First Lady to look over. And look them over she did. She would even come down at night and try the “dummies” in the dining room, just to see what it was going to look like under candlelight.

  She finally decided that she wanted a border of wild flowers for the base plate, and right away, they came up with a design that she approved. The design was duly affixed, and we ordered 220 each of the service plates, dinner plates, salad plates, soup bowls, coffee cups and saucers, and demitasses. For the dessert plates, she suggested that they use the state flowers from each of the fifty states.

  But when those arrived, somebody had goofed. There was a big blob of color, hardly recognizable as a flower, in the center of each dessert plate.

  “I’m just sick about it,” said Mrs. Johnson.

  “They look like the dime-store special,” said Bess Abell.

  “Rotten!” said Jim Ketchum.

  “Just terrible,” said Jane Engelhard, who was advising.

  “Back to the drawing board,” said the Chief Usher.

  There was no question that the plates had to be redesigned. “They’re certainly not representative of our work,” agreed Walter Hoving, the president of Tiffany’s, seeing them for the first time.

  But the Johnsons had learned, with a certain portrait of the President, what a delicate matter it is to turn down something you’ve commissioned. We couldn’t just say “no thank you” and ship them back. We didn’t want Tiffany’s to have them; we didn’t want anybody to have them. But Bess solved the problem.

  “Come down to the lower basement,” she stopped by my office to say. I followed along, trying to decipher her mischievous look. We stopped at the ground floor Curator’s office, now tucked into Harry Truman’s old broadcast room. Bess beckoned to Jim.

  “We’re going to a party,” she told him, and picked up Carol Carlyle, Connie Carter, and Bonner Arrington along the way.

  In the basement, Bess led us to a storeroom with reinforced concrete walls. In the center of the floor, neatly stacked, were the dessert plates. And on the wall was a poster, with freshly painted caricatures of Bess’s favorite Presidential assistants.

  “Heave away!” she shouted—and we had the time of our lives.

  It took us less than an hour to smash all 220 pieces of china against the concrete walls. We aimed at our targets with unadulterated glee. And I must say, it was totally satisfying. The china had to be destroyed by law. But perhaps we also were letting off steam at the end of an era.

  The broken pieces were sent to the incinerator, and Jim asked Connie Carter, a researcher from the Library of Congress, to help him select good source pictures of the state flowers for Tiffany’s artist. In due time, Mrs. Johnson approved all fifty flowers.

  6

  AS I LEARNED WITH my own Kathy and Sally, the transformation from girl to woman can occur almost overnight. It happened to both Lynda and Luci during the Johnson White House. Within the same five years, they grew up quickly, married, and had children of their own.

  By 1966, Luci, the tiny brunette with her own ideas about everything, had embraced Catholicism (her mother was Episcopalian, her father a member of the Disciples of Christ), was a student nurse at Georgetown University, worked part-time in an optometrist’s office, and, since Christmas, was engaged to be married to Patrick Nugent.

  Luci’s was my first White House wedding, and even though she was married in the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, near Catholic University, the White House was decorated to the hilt for her reception. Bess Abell decorated, choreographed, stage-directed, rehearsed. Liz Carpenter dangled tidbits of information to the press about every possible detail involving the wedding, with the exception of the wedding gown.

  Luci’s gown was such a closely guarded secret—she thought it would be bad luck for the groom to see it before the wedding day—the Secret Service met designer Priscilla o
f Boston at the plane. The designer hand-carried the big box into the White House and locked it in the Lincoln bedroom. No one was permitted to go in there, not even to dust.

  A few days before the wedding, which was scheduled for August 6, Bess called me.

  “Can everybody stay put for a while? Luci wants to be photographed in her wedding dress in the East Room, and she doesn’t want anybody to see her.”

  “Right,” I answered. And at one o’clock, we shut off the entire house. There was tighter security than there’d been during the Roosevelts’ air-raid drills or the Cuban missile crisis. For an hour and a half, everyone stayed in his own position, in her own spot. No one was permitted to move on the elevator or walk through the corridors while Luci Johnson posed for her wedding portrait.

  It had been a whirlwind week. In the midst of all the bridesmaids and buffet suppers, we’d had a full-scale State dinner for Israeli President Shazar in the State Dining Room.

  The last two days before the wedding, I held the White House together, staying late at night, seeing to the setup of the white canopy tent in the garden, the installation of hundreds of flowerpots in the hallways, and banks and banks of flowers in all the State rooms.

  The morning of August 5, I asked Bess to walk around the house with me, inspecting every room, going over the reception scenario, being sure there were to be no changes. I was planning to make an escape that afternoon, and I didn’t want any last-minute phone calls about details.

  I’d had a call from Mrs. Paul Mellon, inviting me to attend a surprise birthday party for Jacqueline Kennedy, at the Mellon estate in Osterville, Massachusetts.

  “You’ve got to come,” she urged. “I’ll make all the arrangements for you.”

  So off I went, on the eve of the biggest event in the Johnson White House to date, on the Caroline with Bobby, Teddy, the Robert McNamaras, and Kay Graham, publisher of the Washington Post.