Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  The First Lady liked Mrs. Johnson’s bedroom.

  “I’ll have to have a room of my own,” she confided to me in her mellow, throaty voice. “Nobody could sleep with Dick. He wakes up during the night, switches on the light, speaks into his tape recorder or takes notes—it’s impossible,” she laughed.

  But although the new President kept two dictaphones by his bedside, he quickly got rid of most of the electronic equipment, wiring, and recordings in Mr. Johnson’s bedroom.

  On a first tour around the living quarters, President Nixon peeked underneath the oversized four-poster bed Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had used.

  “What on earth is all this?” he asked, amazed at the cat’s cradle of electric wires, all tangled on the floor.

  I explained that they were telephone connections, from the elaborate, console phone system of dozens of direct lines that Mr. Johnson had used, remote control wires to the television sets, tape-recording devices, and heaven knows what else.

  “I don’t want any of that under here,” Mr. Nixon told me. “Take it all out, whatever it is. All I need is one line to the operator. She can find anyone else for me.”

  We took out all the phone extensions from the bathrooms, the West Hall, and the dining room. The three television sets went, too, right away. And the Rube Goldberg shower. Mr. Johnson had proudly pointed out that shower to his successor, describing its pleasures in great detail.

  “Please have the shower heads all changed back to normal pressure,” the new President requested after the first blast of Johnson-strength spray had almost knocked him right out of the bathroom.

  And Mrs. Nixon eliminated the big television set in the West Sitting Hall.

  “What did Mrs. Kennedy have here?” she asked me.

  “Nothing,” I replied. “She used a portable set in her bedroom.”

  “Then let’s get rid of this,” she said.

  Like Lady Bird Johnson, Mrs. Nixon loved Jacqueline Kennedy’s favorite Yellow Oval Room.

  “It was the Trophy Room when Dick was Vice President, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  It was indeed, I assented and smiled to remember the Trumans with their night work in that room, and Franklin Roosevelt with his ships’ prints, when it was the President’s study.

  Now three First Ladies had agreed it was the loveliest room in the house.

  “I’m crazy about the French furniture,” Pat Nixon said, indicating the sofas, commodes, tables and chairs chosen so carefully by Boudin, Mrs. Parrish, and Mrs. Kennedy.

  “Do you have some French bedroom furniture in storage that we could use in Tricia’s room?”

  “No,” I replied. “The Altman reproductions are strictly Grand Rapids.”

  The First Lady leaned against a yellow silk sofa, arms across her chest.

  “Then we’ll have to order some from New York.”

  But the Catlin Indians, the oil paintings Mrs. Kennedy had borrowed from the Smithsonian and hung in the center hall, had to go. After Mrs. Nixon requested that they be removed, Jim Ketchum and I went up to hang replacements for the fierce-looking chieftains.

  Blond, petite Tricia Nixon stepped out of her bedroom. As usual, she was dressed to the nines.

  She saw us removing the paintings.

  “Oh, I’m so glad to see those things go,” she said. “I felt like I was about to be scalped every time I walked down the hall!” And tossing her long hair over her shoulders, she rang for the elevator.

  I seldom saw Tricia during her first few weeks in the White House. When she was “in residence,” she remained behind closed doors. When she went out, she requested that no one enter her room, except for the maid.

  Her sister, Julie, a junior at Smith College, was living in Massachusetts with her bridegroom, David Eisenhower. (President Nixon once introduced himself jokingly as “General Eisenhower’s grandson’s father-in-law.”)

  Her mother, looking at the floor plans I’d given her, thought we’d be able to make a little sitting room for Tricia in the tiny room adjoining her daughter’s bedroom, the room that President Eisenhower had used for painting portraits, that Bess Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt had used as an office.

  But when the Kennedys put in the kitchen, part of the room was sacrificed to divert traffic from the elevator to the kitchen. Now the small room was little more than a passageway.

  “I’m disappointed,” the First Lady told me. “It looked like a cozy little room and very private.”

  The President found his spot of privacy at the other end of the hall, in the Lincoln sitting room. Directly across from Mrs. Johnson’s retreat, the Queen’s sitting room, it, too, “has only one door.”

  At night, or on weekends when he took work home, Mr. Nixon worked there alone, sometimes listening to music from the stereo set Mrs. Nixon had rigged up for the little room. I believe he listened to classical music most of the time.

  At first, there were only a few changes. Mrs. Nixon promptly had installed in her bedroom an historic marble mantelpiece, which had been designed by Benjamin Latrobe. Out, and into storage with the old mantel went the little plaque that Mrs. Kennedy had requested on her last day there, “In this room John Fitzgerald Kennedy lived with his wife Jacqueline …,” and the Kennedy family gift, the Monet landscape which she’d hung in the Green Room “because that was his favorite room,” was banished to an obscure place in the ground-floor vermeil room. The Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, which Mrs. Johnson had dedicated and which Mrs. Kennedy—by now Mrs. Aristotle Onassis—never came to see, became the “First Lady’s Garden.”

  It seemed to many that there was a concerted effort to de-Kennedyize the White House. As time went by, Mrs. Nixon hired a new Curator, Clement Conger of the State Department, who became, it appeared, decorator as well, and one by one, the Boudin touches disappeared. The color scheme went back to Truman renovation, the restoration became Mrs. Nixon’s. But Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would be the first to agree that each First Lady should, certainly, decorate the White House any way that suits her.

  “I never intended for Boudin’s work to remain in the White House forever,” she told me. “Every family should put its own imprint there.”

  After all, it had been six years, and the walls were getting streaked, the upholstery threadbare. The White House gets a lot of use and did so, especially, during the Johnsons.

  It was the antique furnishings, the paintings, the sculpture that Jacqueline Kennedy wanted so much to remain a part of the national treasure. And they have. As for Mrs. Nixon’s decor, the former First Lady liked it. She and her children came to dinner privately with the Nixons, her first visit to the White House since leaving in 1963.

  “I think it looks lovely,” Mrs. Onassis told me afterwards.

  Of all the changes that have been made in the old mansion from one administration to another, the only one that affected me was removal of the swimming pool.

  I’ve always contended that the First Family could ask me to have their quarters painted purple with pink polka dots, and I’d do so without question, for the house, so far as I’m concerned, belongs to the President in residence.

  I think all the First Families would agree with me. When the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, Mrs. Nicholas Longworth, ate dinner with the Nixons in the upstairs family dining room, someone remarked that she was eating in her old bedroom.

  “I wouldn’t say it was my bedroom,” Mrs. Longworth replied. “Helen Taft had it. And I suppose the Wilson girls did.” Lorena Hickok slept there, too, I could have added. And Margaret Truman and Mrs. Doud.

  The house “belongs” to whoever lives there.

  But I hate to see history disappear. When a tree dies on the White House lawn, a tree planted by some earlier President, it is removed very quietly and replaced to keep the continuity. Most people don’t even notice that the old tree is gone.

  For that reason, I was sorry to see the swimming pool go. It was not in the mansion proper, nor was it in the west wing, but rather between the two
. It was a gift to President Roosevelt from the schoolchildren of America who collected millions of dimes to pay for constructing the heated indoor pool, which that President used every day in his first years of office for post-polio therapy. I remember President Truman swimming there, his glasses all fogged up, as part of his fitness regimen; the Eisenhowers’ grandchildren, coming over on weekends, splashing around with the greatest glee; the mural, a colorful sailing scene, commissioned by Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and painted by artist Bernard Lamotte, that brightened up the walls for the swimming races between President Kennedy and his Cabinet; the scores of bathing trunks hanging from the hooks for President Johnson’s guests—in all sizes from King Farouk to Mahatma Gandhi.

  I miss that swimming pool, which President Nixon tore out to make way for the Fourth Estate. Congress should have let President Truman make that addition onto the west wing—so there’d be room for the press over there.

  2

  PRESIDENT NIXON PUT THE press in the swimming pool; he put the preachers in the East Room.

  On their second evening in the White House, the President and his family asked for a “historical” tour by Jim Ketchum and me.

  As we went from room to room, Mr. Nixon asked a hundred questions—about each piece of furniture, about how each room had been used. His wife was strangely silent, saying little about the State rooms, reserving her comments for the living quarters. But President Nixon seemed to be making plans for his White House.

  When we got to the State Dining Room, I mentioned the official events that had taken place there. And he nodded in recognition, remembering State occasions when he was Vice President.

  “Have any of the Presidents used this dining room just for family?” he asked, indicating the long, classical table with its James Monroe mirrored plateau centerpiece and gold compotes and candelabra.

  “Herbert Hoover dined at this table every night, even when he was alone,” I answered.

  The President laughed. “That figures,” he said.

  The tables were set with the small gold banquet chairs Mrs. Kennedy had ordered for her round-table entertaining.

  “I don’t really like these,” he said, lifting one easily. “They don’t really look very comfortable.”

  “Sometimes they aren’t too stable, either,” I said, telling him about a few instances where they’d come crashing to the floor during Johnson dinners.

  “Do we have any other kind of chairs?” he asked, as we walked down the marble hall. “You know, we are going to have church services in the East Room.”

  Appropriately, after that announcement, the President and his family went down to the movie theater to watch Shoes of the Fisherman.

  The next day, I ordered samples of all our chairs brought out to the East Room—Mrs. Kennedy’s French banquet chairs and Mrs. Truman’s bentwood chairs that Mrs. Eisenhower had called “fit for a children’s party.”

  I also brought up the altar we’d rigged up for Lynda Bird Johnson’s wedding, but President Nixon decided against an altar.

  “No, the services are going to be interdenominational,” he pointed out. “I don’t want an altar, just a podium.”

  But by the time we set up the room with Mrs. Truman’s bentwood chairs for a congregation of 200, we discovered we’d have to put in risers for the choir and bring in an electric organ.

  The Reverend Billy Graham, evangelist friend of my last three Presidents, as George Allen had been the humorist friend of my first three, preached the first East Room sermon, his longtime soloist George Beverly Shea singing “How Great Thou Art.”

  Except for Mass before President Kennedy’s funeral, and services for Franklin Roosevelt, the only time I’d seen church services in our Grand Ballroom, the East Room, was at President Roosevelt’s last Inaugural.

  All my Presidents were churchgoers, some more than others. There were special ramps in St. John’s Episcopal Church for President Roosevelt’s wheelchair, although his bodyguards “walked” him to his pew. President Truman often walked to the First Baptist Church on 16th Street, while Mrs. Truman and Margaret attended St. John’s Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House. More often they took turns, one Sunday after another, and all went together, first Baptist, then Episcopalian.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower never joined a church until after he was elected President. Thereafter, to the great delight of his wife, he attended the National Presbyterian Church regularly, and confessed that he made some White House decisions “on his knees.” John F. Kennedy went to Mass every Sunday without fail, usually in the little churches in the Virginia countryside or Massachusetts seaside where they spent their weekends.

  Lyndon Johnson, like Harry Truman, was a fundamentalist married to an Episcopalian. He belonged to the Disciples of Christ (Christian) Church but kept popping up in any church, any denomination in town. In the late evenings, sometimes, he’d go with Luci to a small monastery in southwest Washington to pray.

  President Nixon, a Quaker, who was not a member of a meeting in Washington, added a new chapter in the social history of the East Room.

  In most other uses of the State rooms, it appeared that the influence of Mamie Eisenhower was to be felt. Her particular style of formal entertaining was brought back by the Nixons.

  On her first full day in the White House, January 21, Pat Nixon stood on a black-carpeted stage in the East Room and told a thousand Republican campaign workers, who’d come in for the inaugural: “You’ll all be invited back. We’re going to have our friends here, instead of all the bigshots!” she told them.

  Gerry Van der Heuvel, the First Lady’s new press secretary, winced.

  “I wish she wouldn’t use that phrase,” she whispered to me.

  “Of course, all our friends are bigshots,” President Nixon quickly broke in.

  Mrs. Van der Heuvel and Lucy Winchester, the First Lady’s social secretary, took a little time to get in step with Mrs. Nixon’s wishes. For that first official reception, at ten in the morning, they’d ordered champagne.

  Remembering Mrs. Johnson and Marvin Watson, I checked with Mrs. Nixon before sending word to the wine cellar.

  “Oh, definitely not! I don’t think we want to serve alcoholic beverages in the morning,” she told me.

  Instead, the butlers served coffee to the Inauguration-weary campaigners.

  For the first, back-to-formality white tie affair, the diplomatic reception on January 31, Lucy and Gerry walked off the State floors with me, arranging to place the Nixons in the Green Room, the Agnews in the Blue Room, the William Rogerses, the new Secretary of State, in the Red Room to receive the 115 ambassadors and chiefs of mission and their wives.

  “Mrs. Nixon would like the Marine band in the State Dining Room,” Lucy told me.

  “But how could the guests hear each other talk?” Mrs. Nixon said, when I asked her. We’d placed the long, narrow table against the west wall to serve hot and cold buffet to the guests.

  As it turned out, we stationed the Marines in their usual spot in the foyer and sent a combo to the East Room.

  “She’d like white linen tablecloths on the buffet table, just like Mrs. Eisenhower’s,” the social secretary reported.

  Mrs. Eisenhower had called this white linen “bed sheets” and directed that the tablecloths be draped with smilax.

  When Mrs. Nixon came down to look at the table, I questioned her about the smilax, too.

  “Oh, heavens, no,” the First Lady said. “That would keep people from getting up close to the table.”

  The reception, like those during the Eisenhowers, began at 9:00 and Mrs. Nixon, like Mrs. Eisenhower, received with a gloved hand.

  All that week, the Nixons entertained at small, seated dinners in the family dining room.

  One night there was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Secretary of State and Mrs. Rogers, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Assistant to the President and Mrs. John Ehrlichman, Mrs. Longworth, and longtime Republican hostess Mrs. Robert Low
Bacon.

  The next night they invited Secretary of Defense and Mrs. Melvin Laird, Consultant “Bud” Wilkinson, and the Apollo Eight astronauts and their wives.

  Mrs. Nixon had asked Chef Haller to “surprise us” with a menu.

  After the first dinner, Henry Haller came running into my office. “The President came into the kitchen tonight and told me it was delicious! Can you imagine?” The chef was so happy I thought he would burst into tears.

  “The President himself,” he repeated, almost unable to believe it. “That never happened before.”

  Mrs. Nixon’s first seated luncheon in the State Dining Room on February 18 was for ladies of the press. Everybody drew numbers for a seat at the table, and Pat Nixon drew a number, too.

  The First Lady had just announced that she’d have no White House “projects”; instead, she would like to instigate a national recruitment program, to enlist hundreds of thousands of volunteers to “help others.”

  Some of those volunteer projects, she told the press women that day, might include teachers’ aides, home care for the mentally retarded, services for the ill in hospitals and institutions, and volunteer bookmobiles to serve the aged.

  But I never got to watch Mrs. Nixon carry out those plans—for my thirty years in government service were coming to an end (I’d spent two years in the Veterans Administration before joining the White House Staff in 1941).

  Mrs. Johnson had told Mrs. Nixon of my impending retirement during that first visit, when we all pored over the White House blueprints in the West Sitting Hall.

  Mrs. Nixon’s reaction did please me.

  “Oh, but Mrs. Eisenhower has recommended you so highly,” she said. “And so has everybody else.”

  Rex Scouten was the perfect man for the job of Chief Usher, I thought. He’d been through all the paces. He knew the house—he’d been an usher during the Kennedy administration; he knew the grounds—he’d gone from the White House to the National Park Service; he knew the Fine Arts collection—he’d come back as executive secretary for the Committee for the Preservation of the White House; and he knew the Nixons—he’d been their Secret Service agent when Mr. Nixon was Vice President.