by The President's House: 1800 to the Present : The Secrets;History of the World's Most Famous Home
No one put the mystical side of the White House more succinctly than President Grover Cleveland. A big, bulky, blunt-talking lawyer from Buffalo, New York, he seemed the last man in the world to notice such things. But after a few months in the White House, he told a friend: “Sometimes I wake at night . . . and rub my eyes and wonder if it is not all a dream.” If someone as commonsensical as Cleveland could be spooked, what chance do ordinary mortals have in the grip of this special atmosphere?
IX
My father, another commonsensical man, was convinced that the old house was haunted. Let me give you an excerpt from a letter he wrote to my mother.
Night before last I went to bed at nine o’clock after shutting my doors. At four o’clock I was awakened by three distinct knocks on my bedroom door. I jumped up and put on my bathrobe, opened the door, and no one was there. Went out and looked up and down the hall, looked into your room and Margie’s. Still no one there. Went back to bed after locking the doors and there were footsteps in your room whose door I’d left open. Jumped up and looked and no one there! Damn place is haunted sure as shootin’. Secret Service said not even a watchman was up here at that hour.
I told Dad, “You better lock your door and prop up some chairs and next time you hear knocks, don’t answer. It may be Andrew Jackson in person!”
Lillian Rogers Parks, working in the small room in the northwest corner of the house (later my bedroom), next to a larger room where Lincoln’s bed and other furniture were at that time, heard footsteps approaching the door between the two rooms. Every time she opened it, there was no one there. She asked the houseman on duty why he was walking back and forth in that room without coming in the door.
“I just came on duty,” he informed her. “That was Abe you heard.”
He was “perfectly serious,” Mrs. Parks added.
X
One reason for the disorienting effect of the White House is the incredible power it emanates. That alone can induce strange behavior in men and women. The day after my father became president, he summoned his old friend, business executive Eddie McKim, to the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a job in his administration. Dad and Eddie had been in the army together during World War I. They had been close friends for twenty-five or thirty years. Yet when Eddie stepped into the Oval Office, a kind of mental and emotional paralysis seized him. He kept calling Dad “Mr. President” and stood at virtual attention before the big desk.
Dad told Eddie to call him “Harry”—and sit down. “I can’t do that Har . . . Mr. President,” Eddie said. Reluctantly, Dad decided it might be better if Eddie supported the Truman administration as a private citizen.
An opposite variation on the effect of power on personality is a syndrome my father christened “Potomac fever.” Its main symptom is a ballooning self-importance that runs roughshod over anyone and anything in its way. PF can and does afflict almost everyone in the Washington, D.C., power structure, but it is especially prevalent in the White House. The mere ability to get on the telephone and say “This is the White House calling” is enough to make anyone’s judgment go squishy.
The White House as a power center is by no means all bad. Presidents need power to get things done and the White House is one of their strongest assets. My favorite story in this department is a little gathering Lyndon Johnson hosted at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a group of congressmen who had been voting against him much too often. “Nice place, isn’t it?” LBJ said. “Take a good look around. If you guys don’t change your votin’ habits, it’s the last time you’ll see it while I’m president.”
XI
More than one president has told me that on his last day in the White House, he walked through all the rooms on the first floor, from the East Room to the State Dining Room, remembering moments of pride and pleasure. The harrowing memories—Dad once wrote to his mother that he barely had time to eat his meals as he raced from crisis to crisis—fade away. What remains is the central meaning of the White House and the unique satisfaction of winning a place in its history.
If I had to put that meaning into one word, I would choose glory. I don’t think even the most cynical newspaper or TV reporter, who knows the worst failings of presidents and first ladies, would deny that in the long run, glory is what the White House is all about. Everyone who has ever lived or worked there has a piece of the glory of this vanguard nation, the United States of America. Even for those who found more unhappiness than happiness in the White House, the glory is still there—a consolation and a reward.
Questions for Discussion
Why is living in the White House a special experience?
What are some of the ways in which a close connection to the White House might affect people?
What makes the White House different from other public buildings?
This 1807 print is the earliest known picture of the White House. You have to study it closely to realize it’s the same building. Credit: White House Historical Association (The White House Collection)
2
From Palace to Mansion to Powerhouse
THE WHITE HOUSE has 132 rooms, 32 bathrooms, 5 full-time chefs, a tennis court, a jogging track, a movie theater, a billiard room, infrared electric sensors that can detect any movement on the grounds, a SWAT team standing by on the roof every time the president enters or leaves the building, a digitalized locator box that tracks each member of the first family anywhere in the world, and a Situation Room that can monitor troop movements by satellite, retrieve reports electronically from key government agencies, and otherwise deal with almost every conceivable crisis in our terror-ridden modern world.
Two centuries separate this high-tech house from the building that Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French engineer and architect, designed in 1791 while simultaneously laying out the plans for Washington, D.C. L’Enfant envisioned a palace about five times the size of today’s White House standing in an eighty-acre President’s Park complete with terraces, fountains, and formal gardens.
II
President George Washington believed that L’Enfant’s design would lend dignity and importance to the new government. Not everyone in his administration agreed. A new political party, the Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, considered the palace a monstrosity that might inspire its occupants to behave like royalty. L’Enfant’s concept proved to be short-lived for reasons more personal than political. The Frenchman managed to alienate everyone he worked with, including George Washington, and he soon found himself unemployed.
A competition was held to find a new architect for what was now being called the President’s House. The winner was a Charleston, South Carolina, man, Irish-born James Hoban. Among the losers was a gifted amateur architect, Thomas Jefferson, who had submitted his design under the pseudonym A. Z.
Hoban’s building was smaller and plainer than L’Enfant’s palace. Washington requested that it be made larger and grander. He also wanted it built of stone but the cost was prohibitive, so the inner walls were made of brick. The outer walls were sandstone, which had to be whitewashed to keep out the moisture. Before long, people were calling the place the White House.
III
George Washington, who had been so involved in the design of the President’s House, never got to live in it. On November 1, 1800, his successor, John Adams, became its first occupant. The day after his arrival, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”
Abigail Adams, who arrived two weeks later, may have shared his sentiments, but she was not oblivious to the shortcomings of their official home. About half of the thirty-six rooms were still unplastered and only six were fit to live in. Abigail found the house cold and dark and so large, it would take thirty servants to run it. In a letter to her daughter, she wrote: “the great unfinished audience-room, I make a drying-room of, to hang up the clot
hes in.”
IV
As a Democratic-Republican, John Adams’s successor, Thomas Jefferson, might have been expected to refuse to live in the President’s House. Although Jefferson described the house as “big enough for two emperors, one pope and the grand lama,” he not only moved in, he set to work to make the place more habitable. His first order of business was removing the wooden privy that stood beside the house in full view of passersby. It was replaced by two water closets (toilets) installed at each end of the second floor.
Jefferson also commissioned the construction of wings on the east and west sides of the mansion to house the president’s coaches, servants’ quarters, and other important but not necessarily attractive areas. The wings were one-story extensions connected by colonnades to the basement of the White House, which was at ground level.
The President’s House took another step closer to becoming the elegant residence George Washington wanted it to be when James and Dolley Madison arrived in 1809. The Madisons liked to entertain, and they set about turning the mansion into a suitable setting for their parties.
Dolley focused her attention on three rooms along the south side of the house. Jefferson’s former office became—and still is—the State Dining Room. A sitting room next to it was converted into Mrs. Madison’s parlor. (It is now the Red Room.) The oval-shaped Elliptical Saloon, the present Blue Room, became the main drawing room.
The splendid rooms provided a superb backdrop for the Madisons’ parties, which were the most glittering in Washington. Nothing short of a grave illness could keep people away.
V
James Madison’s first term marked the high point of the President’s House thus far. His second term, which coincided with the War of 1812, marked the low point. In the summer of 1814, a British army burned the Capitol, the President’s House, and several other government buildings.
Rebuilding the President’s House became a matter of national pride. Congress appropriated the necessary funds, and the original architect, James Hoban, was invited to reconstruct his mansion and to finish its still unbuilt north and south porticos as well.
The work was still going on when Madison’s successor, James Monroe, arrived in 1817. Monroe ordered the work speeded up and was particularly insistent that the East Room be ready for the large receptions he planned. The workmen had gotten as far as replacing the whitewash on the outside walls with white lead paint (which made the White House an even more popular name), but the north and south porticos were still under construction and the inside was a mess.
Nevertheless, the Monroes moved in and Elizabeth Monroe set about decorating the house with furniture they had ordered from France. If the workmen’s materials were removed, the President’s House would at least be fit to entertain in. James Monroe gave the order, the materials were stashed away, and on New Year’s Day, 1818, the president and first lady invited the public to a gala reception. When it was over, the materials were replaced and work on the house resumed.
The Monroes continued this practice whenever they entertained, but the work stopped when the country was hit by the Panic of 1819 and did not resume until the economy improved. The building was finally completed in 1830, not long after Andrew Jackson moved in, and thirty-eight years after it was started.
VI
For almost a hundred years, the president’s office competed for space on the second floor with the chief executive’s family. This meant that visitors to the mansion were constantly trekking up and down stairs, allowing first families little privacy. As the responsibilities of the president increased, particularly during the Civil War, more work space was needed, impinging still further on the first families’ living arrangements.
With President Benjamin Harrison’s arrival, however, additional space became crucial. The Harrison household included their daughter, her husband, and their two-year-old son and baby daughter; Mrs. Harrison’s ninety-year-old father; and a widowed niece. With so many people in residence, there was little room and even less privacy. Caroline Harrison tried to free up space by using the state rooms as family sitting rooms, but it soon became apparent that the only solution was expanding the building itself.
Mrs. Harrison consulted an architect, who drew up a plan that would add wings at either end of the mansion. The one on the west would provide office space for the president, leaving the entire second floor available for his family.
The plan got a warm welcome in the Senate but it came to a dead stop in the House. The Speaker, brooding about the fact that President Harrison had failed to appoint one of his friends to a federal job, refused to bring it to the floor.
VII
In 1900, as part of the program celebrating the centennial of Washington, D.C., a symposium was held to discuss the need for improving the city’s appearance. In the years since Pierre L’Enfant laid out his plan for the Federal City, public buildings had been put up in a variety of architectural styles. Vacant land was overgrown with ratty-looking patches of grass and fouled by grazing livestock. Railroads ran up and down the streets and crisscrossed the Mall, and there were a half-dozen different terminals scattered around the city.
Prompted by the symposium, Senator James McMillan, a member of the Committee on the District of Columbia, appointed a commission to develop and improve the city’s parks. Its members, who were among the leading tastemakers of the day, quickly recognized that a lack of parks was only the beginning of the city’s problems.
The commission drew up the McMillan Plan, based on Pierre L’Enfant’s original design for Washington, which called for a city of stately buildings, beautiful vistas, and manicured lawns and parks. L’Enfant, who had been booted out in disgrace a little more than a hundred years earlier, would have been delighted to learn that he had suddenly become a hero and that his vision of the nation’s capital would finally be realized.
Essentially, the McMillan Plan created the Washington of today, with federal buildings clustered around the Capitol, and Union Station replacing the street-level railroad tracks and individual terminals. The Arlington Memorial Bridge was designed to line up with the Custis-Lee Mansion across the Potomac, and the yet-to-be-built Lincoln Memorial would be situated in a direct line with the Washington Monument and the Capitol.
The White House, possibly the most prominent building in Washington, was high on the McMillan Commission’s list of items that needed attention. One suggestion, resurrecting the plans drawn up by Caroline Harrison’s architect, had already been vetoed. The projected east and west wings were almost as large as the White House itself. Worse yet, they were capped by glass domes, adapted from the French style that was popular at the time.
Another suggestion, also tabled, was to convert the White House into an executive office building and build a new presidential home on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, where the official residence of the vice president now stands.
VIII
The McMillan Commission’s activities were suspended after President William McKinley’s assassination in 1901. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, had no immediate interest in revamping his new home except to issue an order changing its official name from the Executive Mansion to the White House.
The president’s indifference to his living quarters was short-lived. With six children and an assortment of pets, the Roosevelts were squeezed into a home that had too few bedrooms, bathrooms, and closets. The kitchen was old-fashioned and grimy, the State Dining Room was too small, and the floor had to be propped up with ten-by-ten-inch timbers whenever there was a large party in the East Room.
The president asked Congress to appropriate $16,000 for repairs and redecorating and Edith Roosevelt sought the advice of Charles McKim, a member of the McMillan Commission and a partner in the renowned New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White.
After a careful inspection of the building, McKim reported that the $16,000 appropriation would not even come close to covering the cost of everything that needed to be done. With t
he support of Senator McMillan, McKim persuaded Congress to vote a staggering $475,000 to remodel the White House and build a separate executive office building for the president and his staff.
Charles McKim’s 1902 renovation produced the look that characterizes the present-day White House. The remains of Thomas Jefferson’s east and west wings were rebuilt, and a complex of greenhouses on the west side of the White House was replaced by a “temporary” Executive Office Building— today’s West Wing.
McKim’s work on the inside of the house was even more extensive. He transformed the gloomy utility areas in the basement into a series of rooms that could be used for social functions and converted the attic into servants’ quarters and workrooms.
McKim took a dim view of most of the furnishings purchased during previous administrations and had them carted off to be sold at auction. If the architect had had his way, the Victorian furniture that is now in the Lincoln Bedroom would have been hauled away as well. But Edith Roosevelt liked it and her husband respected its historical significance. Thus, the old-fashioned rosewood bed was saved, along with a dresser, wardrobe, and circular table.
Theodore Roosevelt, with his strong sense of history, continued to work in the White House, as presidents had been doing since John Adams’s day, and used McKim’s temporary Executive Office Building as headquarters for his staff.
William Howard Taft would have preferred to continue this tradition, but he recognized the value of having the entire executive branch in a single location. Shortly after he took office in 1909, Taft hired an architect to enlarge McKim’s Executive Office Building. A key part of the plans was an Oval Office for the president, its shape chosen in homage to James Hoban’s design for the Blue Room.
