All the Presidents' Pets

by Mo Rocca

  Only Millard Fillmore didn’t have a pet.

  Then there were the exotic or just plain weird pets. The flamboyant Martin Van Buren had tiger cubs, a gift from the Sultan of Oman. (Sadly for Van Buren, Las Vegas’s Mirage Hotel would not open for another 110 years.) The Marquis de Lafayette brought President John Quincy Adams an alligator, which the sixth President kept in the East Room, far from his and wife Louisa’s collection of silkworms. Coolidge, in second place with thirty-three pets, also housed at various times a pygmy hippo, a wallaby, an antelope, a large white goose named Enoch, and a raccoon named Rebecca. And George Washington had a jackass named Royal Gift, a gift from the King of Spain and the progenitor of Mount Vernon’s line of acclaimed “supermules,” the best draft animals in Virginia.

  Lincoln’s dog Fido, the first presidential pet to be photographed. Animal lover Abe also had two goats named Nanny and Nanko, among other pets.

  Benjamin Harrison’s goat His Whiskers with Harrison’s son Russell, three presidential grandchildren, and presidential dog Dash. The President himself had to chase down His Whiskers one day, after he raced off with the kids trailing in his cart.

  Since World War II the pets were fewer and far less unusual. The best known was FDR’s Scottie Fala, a gift from his cousin Margaret Suckley in 1940. Fala was not only beloved, he was a witness to history. He observed the Atlantic Charter summit aboard the USS Augusta alongside Churchill’s poodle Rufus. Fala missed Yalta but he never missed a press conference. When Republicans charged that a naval destroyer had been sent, at great taxpayer expense, to retrieve Fala in the Aleutian Islands after being accidentally left behind in 1944, FDR shot back: “These Republicans have not been content with attacks on me, my wife, or my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.” It was a strategy aped—er, copied—by Vice President Richard Nixon in his famous Checkers speech in 1952.

  President Woodrow Wilson’s sheep, including the tobacco-chewing ram Old Ike, kept the South Lawn shorn while the staff gardeners went off to battle during WWI.

  Of course I loved any excuse to indulge my passion for all things presidential. And there were moments during my weeklong cram when I thought the subject of presidential pets might add up to something more than a collection of quirky factoids. But I quickly clipped my own wings. This assignment was simply an entryway to a more serious beat somewhere down the line, I hoped.

  With First Pet trivia overcrowding my head, I walked down Connecticut Avenue, cut through Farragut Park, and turned onto 16th Street. The small but stately Hay-Adams Hotel stood on my right; St. John’s, also known as “the church of the Presidents,” on my left. And in front of me, across Lafayette Square, was the White House.

  Since 1800 it stood there, burned by the British in 1814, gutted for renovation by Harry Truman in 1948, targeted by Al Qaeda in 2001. But the outer walls had never given way. (Truman had insisted that the original exterior remain intact during the reconstruction, for the important symbolic value. For his efforts he treated himself to a South Portico balcony, henceforth named the Truman Balcony.) Irishman James Hoban’s neoclassical design for the Executive Mansion won out over the others—which, by the way, included Jefferson’s—because it was dignified, not extravagant like that of a European monarch’s palace.

  Abigail Adams, the first First Lady to live there, had to hang her laundry in the East Room. And on the mantel down the hall in the State Dining Room a quotation of her husband’s was still inscribed: “I Pray Heaven Bestow the Best of Blessings on This House and All that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under this Roof.”

  I stopped for a moment, and, staring at the People’s House, I felt a lump in my throat.

  As I headed toward the northwest gate I thought of a deodorant ad from my childhood: Never let them see you sweat. I had to be confident, I told myself, as a few members of the press corps filed in ahead of me.

  Easier said than done. The White House reporters wouldn’t suffer fools gladly. They’d likely sneer at my beat—these were people covering America’s political nerve center. But I had to believe I could win their respect. I knew a few of them socially, so that was some comfort. The ones who didn’t know me would soon discover that I had a genuine interest in the inner workings of the presidency; that covering Barney was simply my way in, my dues paying.

  I flashed my freshly laminated credential. The sergeant buzzed me in. I pushed open the wrought-iron gate, then made my way through the metal detector. Suddenly I was on the grounds. On my right was a phalanx of video cameras on tripods, where television correspondents did their live stand-up shots from a patch of ground known as Pebble Beach. (The area used to be covered in gravel.) It was a short walk up the driveway and past the fountain on my left. If I’d kept going straight I’d have run right into the sentry guarding the Oval Office, at the end of the West Wing. The distance was surprisingly short so I cut sharply left and entered through the French doors.

  I was standing in the Briefing Room. The first of the day’s two briefings, known as the gaggle, would not begin for at least ten minutes so I quietly disappeared into the pressroom next door.

  This room, which contained the reporters’ “offices,” was underwhelming—just three short rows of cubicles, some more decorated than others, mostly unoccupied. The room was lined on three sides with booths for each of the broadcast networks and a few radio networks. I was struck first by the quiet, then by the smell, a combination of sweatsocks and stale French fries. The kitchen area stank. Downstairs, things were even dirtier.

  I wasn’t going to be given my own workspace, at least not anytime soon, so I timed my entrance so that I wouldn’t have to stand awkwardly for too long. Upstairs I backed up against the beige-ish wall, hoping to blend in.

  “Hey there, kiddo!” I turned to my left and down a bit to see a big smiling face.

  “Andrea!” I hadn’t seen NBC’s pint-sized Andrea Mitchell in at least two years. “How are you?”

  “How are you? I’m glad you survived Traficant.”

  “Just barely. Let’s just say I’m happy for the furlough.” She laughed, harder than she had to. She was a respected network reporter; I was from the bastard cable cousin. But she knew I needed the confidence boost. What I didn’t need was the gratuitous brush of her hand against my backside. (I’d forgotten how everyone called her “Grabbyhands Mitchell” or “Handrea,” for short.) I’d always wondered if her husband, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, had any idea how aggressive she could be. No matter, she was probably sweeter than anyone else in the press corps. In 1997 when I threw up at Jim Lehrer’s Christmas party, she was the one who brought me upstairs and gave me a sponge bath.

  “So you’re covering the President,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s right.” I was, in a way.

  “Good for you!” she cheered as she looked me up and down. “Nice to see you’re working out,” she added with a squeeze of my biceps. Before this could go any further a voice announced over the PA that the press briefing was beginning in two minutes.

  I followed the crowd back into the James Brady Briefing Room, a space I’d seen countless times on television. It used to be the pool where FDR would swim for exercise. President Nixon had the floor boarded over and carpeted for briefings. The room certainly had a temporary feel. Six rows of eight high-school-auditorium-style seats were bolted into the uneven floor, which was covered in a stained carpet of indeterminate color (somewhere between gray and brown). The chairs faced the familiar press secretary’s lectern, which was backed by a cheap blue curtain at the head of the room. A sign stuck on the drape read “The White House.” The stucco ceiling hung low. Camera stands lined the sides and cluttered the back of the room. The walls were otherwise bare, except for one picture of Ronald and Nancy Reagan congratulating a wheelchair-bound former press secretary James Brady on the naming of the room. (At first glance I thought it was Larry Flynt.)

  The room was so small, unimpressive
, and uncomfortable. Nixon was smiling from his grave. This was his gift to the press corps.

  As luck would have it, I did know some of the crowd that started trickling in, including Fox News’s Jim Angle, who greeted me heartily.

  “If you think it smells now, you should have been here yesterday. A dead muskrat was stuck behind one of the vending machines and, man, did it stink. I guess someone took care of it,” he said. “So what do you think?”

  As underwhelmed as I was by the surroundings, I couldn’t help but think of the history that had taken place here. “To think that Roosevelt used to swim here does hit you kind of hard. Can you imagine the stress he was under?”

  “Yeah, well maybe if he’d spent a little less time swimming and a little bit more time studying up on his ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin, he wouldn’t have given away Eastern Europe for the next forty-five years,” he said.

  Jim wasn’t one of those conservatives still fighting the Cold War. He was busy battling the League of Nations. But he was also a nice guy and a big-time gambler. When I’d gone undercover as a blackjack dealer in Atlantic City I’d watched dumbstruck as he nearly cleaned out his buddy Bill Bennett. Afterward he’d taken me out drinking. I liked him.

  “Glad to have my wingman on board. Just don’t let the Clinton News Network people poison your mind,” he said. “Oops, hope no one heard me,” he added playfully.

  “Put a sock in it, Angle,” shot back CNN’s Candy Crowley, Jim’s sparring partner and one of the people I was looking forward to seeing most. “How’s my boy?” Candy asked, slapping me on the back. I instantly felt much more at home.

  Candy. She always played it sober and serious in interviews. In fact she had a biting, ribald wit and a heart of gold. She was an old-fashioned broad, the kind of woman Maureen Stapleton used to play, but saucier.

  I’d met her at the 2000 Republican convention. I’d been sent by the Early Show to file a report on how delegates were keeping in shape. That’s as close as they’d let me get to political coverage and I was very depressed. I met Candy at O’Flaherty’s, an old Irish bar, and the hangout for Philly’s political fixers. She was throwing back a sixth crème de menthe and she had the bartender in stitches, telling the story of how she’d run away from Bryn Mawr to follow a cowboy to Texas. It had been culture shock for a girl from a Main Line Philadelphia family who promptly disowned her, but she was in love. And yes, the ten-gallon hat she was wearing in the bar belonged to Chet.

  Chet had died, though, she explained to everyone listening. Before long she had the whole joint in tears. Not Candy, though. “Why all the long faces?” she said.

  That’s when she noticed me. “You got a nice sensitive quality to you, kid. Kind of like Sal Mineo.” We connected right away. Candy sympathized with my professional frustration. After a couple more drinks she pulled out her keys. “How about we go for a ride?”

  An hour later Candy and I were flooring it through Amish country, the red top down on her Cadillac Eldorado, blaring Waylon Jennings. Candy loved outlaw country and Southern rock. I felt so alive with her.

  She was an inspiration when I needed it—a true individual who’d risen through the ranks of a profession that often rewarded conformity. Eyebrows were raised when she took up with Pasquale, a young dishwasher she’d met at D.C.’s Florida Avenue Grill, but she didn’t care. “He’s the one,” she said, even though she knew damn well that this wouldn’t be the last in her long line of December-May romances—and that’s the way she liked it.

  When I found out that Candy packed heat—a pearl-handled revolver she’d been given by Chet’s mother—I wasn’t surprised. Interestingly she also had one of the Washington area’s biggest collection of Hummel porcelain figurines. “I like delicate pretty things.” Indeed Candy had the most beautifully manicured hands I’d ever seen.

  She’d tried to quit her two-pack-a-day Benson & Hedges habit—alternating between the patch and Nicorette—but any weakness she still had only made you like her more. She was the anti–John King. (King was CNN’s other White House reporter, an ultra-fastidious squeaky-clean control freak. “That man’s favorite book is The South Beach Diet,” Candy once said.)

  I hadn’t seen Candy in ages, so I was thrilled when she sat down next to me in the middle of the room. “Good to see you’re alive, pal. Traficant as big a bruiser as I’ve heard?”

  Candy was off and running. As happy as I was to see her, I knew I’d get tired fast of her prison-rape jokes. “No, Candy,” I sighed, “Traficant never laid a hand on me. But I can’t say I’m sorry that the show’s over.”

  “Is that what he called it? A ‘show’? When I interviewed Rostenkowski in the pen he called it ‘initiation.’ Off the rec, of course. So,” Candy continued, “you’re finally covering el Presidente.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “What’s ‘uh, yeah’? Already phoning it in on your first day, amigo?”

  “Well, Candy,” and I lowered my voice, “I’m actually covering Barney. The dog.”

  Candy turned serious. “Oh, boy, you’re gonna have a time of it getting access. Dhue’s up that dog’s ass like nobody’s business. You know, tonight’s the big party for her book. Fifty-two weeks on the best-seller list. Everyone is caught up in the hype.” I found that hard to believe. The public might be Barney-crazy but official Washington, and surely the press corps, weren’t going to be swept up so easily.

  And yet as I looked around, the briefing room looked less like the newsroom in All the President’s Men and more like the scene in my high school cafeteria.

  A hierarchy was brutally apparent. “Those are the popular kids,” said Candy, pointing to the first two rows, where reporters from the broadcast networks and the major dailies sat. NBC’s cool redheaded Norah O’Donnell gossiped with the Washington Post’s wickedly funny Dana Milbank. ABC’s blond and perky Kate Snow flirted with the tall, dark, and handsome correspondent from Agence France-Presse.

  Meanwhile varsity TV reporting studs David Gregory and Terry Moran jock-talked about the previous day’s Redskins game.

  “If they like you enough, they might even invite you to join their spring-break house in Cancun,” Candy said about the clique.

  The third and fourth rows weren’t so bad—the New York Daily News and NPR were here—but the last two rows were glum. “Loser city,” said Candy, pointing to reporters from the Akron Beacon Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel, both of them slumped in their chairs eating crumb cake. The reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch passed gas audibly. “Real nice,” said Terry Moran. The guy from the Sacramento Bee just scratched himself, then fell back asleep.

  John King trailed in seconds later. He’d been finishing his morning crunches in an empty cubicle down the hall.

  “So I guess everyone will turn it loose when Scott McClellan gets here,” I said to Candy, pointing to the door that the press secretary used to enter the room.

  Candy laughed. “You are adorable, kid. Sorry to say, not a lot gets turned loose around here, except the old girl over there,” she said, turning her head toward Helen Thomas. “Poor thing.”

  While we were looking toward the back of the room, legendary White House reporter Helen Thomas had taken a free seat on the side and was furiously taking notes. A living breathing institution sat a few feet from me.

  I didn’t know any more about Helen Thomas than you could learn from any kid on any street corner in America—that since joining the White House press corps in 1961, the five-foot-three raven-haired Detroit-raised daughter of Lebanese immigrants had covered an unprecedented nine presidents, grilling them with hawklike determination and earning the moniker “Dean of the White House Press Corps.” After her boss at UPI, Merriman Smith, died on April 13, 1970, she became the first female chief correspondent covering the White House, then the first female president of the White House Correspondents Association. Notoriously dogged, she was the only print reporter who accompanied Nixon to China.

  Since then she’d never shirked her respon
sibility to ask uncomfortable questions. Ford called her methods a “fine blend of journalism and acupuncture.” Clinton called her “the embodiment of fearless integrity.” And every presidential press conference ended with her saying, “Thank you, Mr. President.” Every press conference, that is, until March 6, 2003, when President Bush not only refused to call on her to ask a question, but also ended the press conference himself.

  But that’s really all I knew about her.

  Helen Thomas, Dean of the White House Press Corps.

  For some time Helen had been portrayed as something of a crazy old lady, the Norma Desmond of the White House press corps. Mind you, she was still the same notorious hard worker, who trudged into work at 6:30 A.M. most days. Yes, she’d left UPI in 2000, but she was now writing a syndicated column for Hearst.

  I’d never met Helen Thomas but I’d always wondered: Did the press secretary’s increasingly mocking responses to her questions bother her? At most she seemed bemused by his sarcasm. Many reporters I’d met cruelly mocked her behind her back. They said they teased her because they loved her. I could only imagine how the “popular” reporters treated her. Our eyes met for a moment and I turned away.

  As everyone took their seats a fresh-faced Laurie Dhue rushed in, escorted by CBS’s John Roberts, the John Davidson–handsome heir apparent to Dan Rather. They looked like a star quarterback and head cheerleader. A buzz went through the room as John whispered something in Laurie’s ear and she tossed her head back with a laugh. Norah O’Donnell shot them a jealous look from behind her makeup compact. It was hard not to be envious: Laurie looked amazing. In her red gingham dress she was more radiant than Kim Novak in Picnic.

  Finally the door behind the lectern opened and press secretary Scott McClellan walked in followed by four press aides. Three of the aides were absolutely unremarkable-looking. The fourth was hard to miss.

  “Candy, who is that?” I asked.