Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  When she saw me, Mrs. Kennedy came as close to a shriek as I’d ever heard her.

  “Mr. West! What’s Luci doing?”

  I just smiled.

  Grinning wickedly, she chided, “If this were the French revolution you’d be the first one on the guillotine!”

  The party—and I with it—lasted until three. I slept for two hours at the Oyster Bay Harbor Club, jumped into the limousine Mrs. Mellon had sent, rode to the Hyannis Airport, took a plane, chartered for me, to the Boston airport. At eight a.m., I just barely boarded a jet for Washington, where I hurried home in time to change clothes for the wedding.

  I must say, as Zella and I left the White House after the reception, that I did feel a bit heady. It was a fabulous twenty-four hours.

  Zella and I were perplexed about one thing: What do you give a President’s daughter?

  Luci received gifts from all over the world. We had cleared two large storage rooms in the basement, lining the walls with shelves to display the gifts, and installed two desks, one for a secretary to work at cataloguing the gifts, and one for Luci to write thank-you notes.

  Our gift, an antique Chinese export porcelain plate, to my surprise rated a telephone call at home from Mrs. Johnson, a few days after the wedding. “How did you ever think of such a lovely gift?” she asked.

  We have two daughters the same age as Luci and Lynda who are just beginning to appreciate such things, I explained, and we thought Luci might, too.

  But however much Mrs. Johnson appreciated our gift, I appreciated her thoughtful call much more.

  In December, 1967, December 9, to be exact, Bess had another wedding on her hands. Lynda, marrying her color guard captain, Charles Robb, was the first President’s daughter to be married in the White House in fifty-three years. In the days before the wedding, the house was full of Robbs, bridesmaids, hairdressers, and TV cameramen, all trying to stay out of the way of Bess and her crew of assistants, florists and electricians, all of whom were trying to decorate the East Room for a Protestant ceremony and the entire State floor for a wedding reception.

  Mrs. Johnson didn’t want television, really, but with the press demanding coverage it was difficult to shut them out completely. We had to figure out a way to hide the lighting equipment. Finally, the poles were all wrapped in white to match the walls of the room. The networks were permitted to shoot twenty minutes of film during the procession and the beginning of the reception, and then they had to clear their equipment from the rooms so they wouldn’t look cluttered, all in five minutes’ time.

  Half the employees in the house stood in for Lynda and Chuck at one time or another, to help Bess Abell choreograph crowd movements from one room to another.

  From the East Room military ceremony, where Lynda and Chuck marched out through a tunnel of crossed swords, the crowd of 640 or so moved into the State Dining Room for a buffet and champagne, and spilled out onto the terrace into a big, pink, electrically heated tent, while we furiously dismantled the East Room wedding altar and installed Peter Duchin and his orchestra, who played for dancing.

  It was at that wedding that we observed how Mrs. Johnson could “handle” her husband. As the bride and groom and all their relatives lined up in the Yellow Oval Room to be photographed, out wandered Luci’s little white dog, Yuki, dressed in his best red velvet sweater.

  President Johnson reached for the dog, a friendly mongrel who accompanied him everywhere. He’d taught it to “sing”—and, in fact, often knelt down to sing along with the dog.

  “We’ve got to get Yuki in the picture,” said the President. “We can’t have a family portrait without him.”

  Lady Bird Johnson drew herself up to her full five feet three and backed off until she could look her husband in the eye.

  “That dog is not going to be in the wedding picture,” she said.

  The President started to argue. But Mrs. Johnson whipped out a most Lyndon-like command.

  “Mr. Bryant, get that dog out of here right now! He will not be photographed!”

  Nobody, not even the President, stood up to that tone in her voice. And Lynda, the bewildered bride, breathed a great sigh of relief and everybody smiled for the wedding camera.

  The next day, wedding debris had disappeared, the huge blue spruce Christmas tree was up in the Blue Room and the White House once again absorbed another Grand Event.

  For a short while, the Johnson White House was without daughters. Then, they both came back, Luci with her funny white dog, Yuki, and her baby son, Patrick Lyndon, and Lynda, who was pregnant. Their soldier husbands had gone to Vietnam.

  The most dramatic and publicly startling event of the Johnson Presidency really did not surprise those of us in the White House who had learned to sense or guess at the President’s moods and thoughts. The President went on television, March 31, 1968, and announced he would not seek reelection. The public’s growing disenchantment with the seemingly endless war in Vietnam had cut into the President’s popularity at the polls. It looked as if his own political party would be torn apart by bitter disagreement over the war. If he sought reelection, the New Hampshire primary indicated, he would have to fight for the nomination.

  I think President Johnson sensed that his efforts to lead, personally and publicly, had started turning sour. The war in Vietnam was a large part of the problem. But the President’s overwhelming effort at wooing the media and projecting himself on television may have backfired. Because the press, and through it the public, began to see this President’s outsized flaws as well as his virtues.

  Lyndon Johnson had shown the news media his scar from gallbladder surgery and his image never seemed to heal after that. He kept switching back and forth on those three television sets but he less often found a satisfying picture.

  I had thought almost from the beginning that the President’s and Mrs. Johnson’s advisors had overscheduled them, had stretched publicity efforts to the point where they overexposed their bosses. And, of course, Lyndon Johnson seldom cooperated even when his staff finally decided to cut back on his public exposure. I can remember those afternoons when I was called to a south window to see the President, pursued by a horde of reporters and television cameramen, walking rapidly round and round on the broad circular driveway surrounding the vast “backyard.”

  When he found the personal publicity and war news increasingly unfavorable, the President for lengthy periods stopped seeing the press.

  Lyndon Johnson didn’t like to lose.

  But I would also say that he had worked at a hectic pace for five long years in the most pressure-filled, demanding job in the world. The President was determined to spend his last nine months in the White House trying to gain a negotiated peace with honor in Vietnam.

  But after his momentous announcement, a whole series of events spread shame, violence, confusion, and even further discord through the country, making it extremely hard for the President to glimpse peace at the end of his journey. The spring and summer were filled with events that cast a pall over life in the White House. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the constant concern about the lives of 500,000 American sons in Vietnam, including the Johnsons’ two sons-in-law, the Senate rejection of the Johnsons’ close friend Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the souring of the economy as the President fought desperately to stop inflation with a tax hike without utterly demolishing the domestic programs he had hailed as the goals of a “Great Society,” the violence and discord at the Democratic National Convention. The splendid misery of the Presidency seemed to have turned to just plain misery.

  The difficulties of Lyndon Johnson and the times we lived in were brought home to me when Charles Lindbergh and three astronauts visited the White House. Their respective feats of lonely bravery spanned a good portion of my lifetime. There was a difference, of course. The Lone Eagle had braved the Atlantic virtually alone, while the astronauts were backed up with all the sophisticated technology of the computer age.
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  But the computer age, I thought, could not master the mysterious essence of man’s relation with man. The computers did not keep Lyndon Johnson from becoming sucked into the most tragic, divisive conflict since the Civil War. And during the last nine months in office, this oversized man, with all his arts of persuasion, could not get us out of that war in Vietnam.

  I have seldom seen the fortunes of the Presidency change so rapidly in a brief five years—from the courage with which he took office and rallied the country, to his landslide election and historic domestic legislation, to the quagmire war and a bitterly divided America.

  But the Johnsons left office as they entered, with their heads held high. After Richard Nixon won the 1968 election, the President and Mrs. Johnson immediately made clear that they planned to leave with dignity and with utmost courtesy to their successors.

  On November 11, just six days after the election, Mrs. Johnson invited her successor to the White House, beginning the most orderly transfer from one occupant to another I had witnessed. Mrs. Johnson briefed Mrs. Nixon on everything and instructed Curator Jim Ketchum and me to provide as many details as possible. She was determined that the new First Lady should get a thorough advance orientation to help smooth her transition to her new life. And Mr. Nixon, with the help of a new law and appropriation, had a staff especially to handle the transition of the Presidency.

  During the last two Johnson months in the White House, there were few State dinners and little pomp and circumstance. Rather, the Johnsons appeared to be reaching back for their roots in the hill country of central Texas. They invited droves of Texas friends up to spend the night with them, giving those Texans a thrill of White House glory but giving the Johnsons perhaps much more. The owner of the chili parlor in Johnson City came, as did Mrs. Johnson’s hairdresser from the small town nearest the LBJ ranch.

  Mrs. Johnson expressed a great desire to get back to the ranch, but I could tell she hated to leave. They all do.

  It is difficult to imagine the deference that is paid to the First Lady every day that her husband is in office. All the Presidents’ wives I have known appreciated the services and status that went with their role, no matter how much they yearned to be out of the spotlight of the glass White House.

  Mrs. Johnson left the White House a somewhat different person than when she had arrived.

  She had developed self-pride in her own accomplishments and won greater respect from her husband. She had come to the White House admitting frankly that she had been cast in a role for which she had not rehearsed.

  She mastered the role, and yet she retained the same sense of inner privacy, which kept all but her family at a respectful distance. She had been far more accessible to the press and to the public than anyone since Eleanor Roosevelt. She survived the tempests of her husband’s life and of the times. And, yet, when she finally walked out the White House door for the last time, Lady Bird Johnson still wore an invisible screen.

  The Nixons

  1

  AND ONCE AGAIN, THE changing of the guard. Inauguration Day, that greatest American festival, always turns Washington upside down. Hundreds of thousands of citizens pour into the city for the swearing-in and celebrations, hoping somehow to get a glimpse of the man they helped elect President of the United States.

  On January 20, 1969, I worked in the White House as usual, directing the astonished staff to arrange the most unusual transfer of power any of us had witnessed.

  From election day onward, the transition of administrations had been carried out without a hitch. The mood of the switchover was evident from that first greeting between Claudia (Lady Bird) Johnson and Thelma (Pat) Nixon on November 10, at the White House door. They embraced and kissed each other.

  The Nixons were back several times before the Inauguration, visiting, measuring, planning their lives there. You could hardly believe that they were of different political parties, much less that Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson had once been bitter campaign opponents.

  This changing of the guard felt different to me in another way. It was to be my last as Chief Usher of the White House.

  In my twenty-eight years in the White House I never saw the President take the oath of office at noon on the Capitol steps, never watched the marching bands strut smartly down Pennsylvania Avenue, never saw the elaborate floats roll by the parade stands while the new President and his family stood shivering but radiant in their glass-enclosed booth, never dressed in my tuxedo to take Zella to the mad crush of bejeweled ladies and thirsty gentlemen to search for an inch of dance floor at one of six hotels or two exhibition halls during the Inaugural balls.

  I reflected a little that morning, in the midst of checking the supply of orange juice for the morning’s reception. In all my years in the mansion this was the fifth time I’d seen the government change hands. Two Presidents had died in office; their two successors had already been living in the White House when they were elected; one had been elected to two terms. This was only the third time we’d changed tenants on Inauguration Day.

  The atmosphere had been considerably chillier during the other two transfers—when General Eisenhower rode down to the Capitol with President Truman and, later, with President Kennedy.

  Now, as the thirty-seventh President was about to take office, the thirty-sixth had invited him and his family for breakfast.

  The night before, the Nixons had slept at the Statler-Hilton Hotel but their dogs spent the night at the White House.

  The family, the President, Mrs. Nixon, Tricia, 22, Julie, 20, and the same David Eisenhower who’d asked “Mimi” why she lived in such a big house, stepped out of their limousines at the North Portico at 10:30 on Inauguration morning. But before Bruce, the elegant senior doorman, could bring them in with his usual flourish, out ran Pasha the yorkshire, and Vicky the poodle, to greet their masters.

  “A dog’s welcome to the White House—that’s what they’ll write,” muttered one staff member.

  But nobody did.

  The Nixons, the Johnsons, the Agnews, the Humphreys—all gathered in the Red Room to drink orange juice and coffee, and nibble on sweet rolls and toast. At 11:30, laughing and cordial, the group set out for the Capitol. President Johnson, who had delivered his own Inaugural address in a business suit, even wore a cutaway coat and striped trousers to please Mr. Nixon.

  As he repeated the Oath of Office, Mr. Nixon laid his hand on a verse from Isaiah in his family Bible: “And he shall judge among the nations and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they study war any more.”

  The new President had pledged to end the war in Vietnam.

  While Richard M. Nixon delivered his speech in that dreary, freezing weather, the truck from New York pulled up to the south entrance, and maids began unpacking trunks and boxes of the Nixons’ clothes. Not until one minute after 12:00 could we ever do this.

  When they came back into the house after the parade, their rooms were ready—Tricia in Lynda’s bedroom, Julie and David in the Queen’s Room.

  But the real queen—some of the staff now called her the Dowager Empress—didn’t spend the night in the White House. Mamie Eisenhower, beaming in delight, joined the Nixons for coffee in the State Dining Room but she went back to Walter Reed Hospital to the side of her General.

  The former First Lady, regal as always, had definite ideas for the new administration. As she came in from the parade, accompanied by her son, John, and his wife, she gave me a big kiss, then said, right off, “I think it’s terrible the way they’ve been using the East Room in this House—using it like an office. Can’t you do something about it?”

  “Why don’t you?” I said, smiling.

  “Well, don’t think I won’t!” she said, with her old “I’m in charge here” look, and a twinkle in her eye.

  About a hundred Nixon relatives milled around in the State Dining Room, then lef
t for their own hotels to dress for the Inaugural Ball.

  And Pat Nixon’s first White House request threw the kitchen into a tizzy.

  Chef Haller and Mary Kaltman stood by, tense as we all are on the first day of a new administration, to order the President’s first dinner in the White House. It was well after dark when Mrs. Nixon called to the chef.

  “Tricia, Julie, David, and the President would like steak for dinner in the upstairs dining room,” she said. “I’d just like a bowl of cottage cheese in my bedroom.”

  Steaks we had—juicy, fresh, prime filets carefully selected by the meat wholesaler, waiting in the White House kitchen for a family who, we’d heard, loved steak.

  But cottage cheese?

  Chef Haller called to request a White House limousine.

  “For two weeks we’ve laid in supplies in the kitchen,” he wailed. “I think we could open a grocery store in the pantry. We’ve tried to find out everything they like…. But we don’t have a spoonful of cottage cheese in the house. And what in the world would be open at this time of night—and Inauguration night to boot?”

  So the head butler, in a White House limousine, sped around the city of Washington until he found a delicatessen open with a good supply of cottage cheese. The kitchen never ran out, after that.

  I’d worried that Mrs. Nixon was so thin. Now, I realized, she intended to stay that way.

  Later that evening, we saw them off to the inaugural balls, Mrs. Nixon wearing a long-sleeved yellow satin gown with a jeweled jacket, the President in white tie and tails.

  At the last of the six crowded affairs, at all of which he declined to dance, the President announced, “They gave me the key to the White House—I have to see if it fits.”

  It did, of course. The White House always adjusts to its new occupants.

  The only initial change was the President’s bedroom.

  “Take out the big canopied bed and put in a simple double bed,” Mrs. Nixon requested. We went to the storehouse, and there we found President Truman’s old bed, the one that also had been in the room during the Eisenhower Administration, but seldom was used by the President then.