Margaret Truman

II

Men bearing that unique title, president of the United States, the office my father called “the greatest in the history of the world,” have paced the White House's darkened halls in periods of national crisis.

In the basement and attic rooms are the memories of the hundreds of other people who lived a large part of their working lives in this unique house. Some, I regret to say, were slaves. But the house, paradoxical as always, gradually became a place where free African-Americans demonstrated their right to equality.

Maggie Rogers began working as a White House maid when William Howard Taft became president in 1909. Her daughter, Lillian Rogers Parks, was hired as a seamstress at the White House in 1929 and worked there until the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1961. Growing up, Lillian once asked her mother if she would be happier (and better paid) at some millionaire's mansion elsewhere in the capital. Maggie Rogers scorned the idea. “Heavens no, child! Be it ever so elegant, there's no place like the White House. Why, I'm living history!” There was black pride and White House pride achieving a magical fusion.

Also worth commemorating are the efforts of the dedicated and courageous men who have struggled to keep presidents and their families alive. We know them now as members of the Secret Service. But their predecessors are equally memorable, standing guard at the White House's doors in loosefitting suits that concealed their pistols.

Few people know about the many acts of kindness these protectors perform for presidents and first ladies. Perhaps the most touching story comes from the sad days of President Woodrow Wilson's decline in 1919. Felled by a stroke, he sank into near despair as Congress rejected his dream of world peace embodied in the League of Nations.

When the crippled president went for a ride in the afternoon, the Secret Service used to round up a small crowd of government employees and strolling tourists, who waited at the White House gate to cheer him when he returned. It was a testament to how much these men cared about the president.

III

Among the most intriguing White House denizens are the men and women who have worked beside presidents as their spokespersons or confidential advisers. For many of them, the experience was more than a little harrowing—and in a few cases, fatal.

I am thinking of one of my most heartbreaking White House memories—the death of my father's boyhood friend and press secretary, Charlie Ross. Charlie went through high school with Harry Truman and went on to become a top-ranked Washington, D.C., reporter for the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch
. When my father turned to him for help in 1945, Charlie gave up a comfortable salary and rational hours for the ordeal of a White House in which clocks and sensible schedules ceased to exist. Five exhausting years later, Charlie Ross collapsed and died of a heart attack at his desk. A weeping Harry Truman said the country had lost a great public servant—and he had lost his best friend.

IV

That memory leads us to another cadre of White House inhabitants, although many presidents and their families might be reluctant to bestow that title on them: the men and women of the media. They, too, participate in the aura of the White House—to the point that they sometimes act as if they run the place.

My favorite White House media story comes from my friend President Gerald Ford. Jerry says he and veteran newswoman Helen Thomas were strolling on a street near the White House when he saw one of those old-fashioned scales that gave you your fortune and weight for a penny. Jerry read the little fortune card aloud: “You are a marvelous orator and leader of men. Your future in your chosen career could not be brighter.”

Helen, looking over his shoulder, said: “It's got your weight wrong, too.”

As the wife (now widow) of a newspaperman, I recognize the necessity for such irreverence. As the daughter of a president, I don't have to like it. But I am prepared to include it, somewhat ruefully, in the White House's story.

V

The White House is far more than the place where presidents and hundreds of staffers work and presidential families live. It is also the place where America's pride and dignity are displayed. At official dinners and receptions, when the president enters the room to the U.S. Marine Band's resounding “Hail to the Chief,” people recognize not only a powerful man but the nation, the United States of America. The immense amount of time and effort that is devoted to entertaining visitors from around the country and the world is a fascinating and important story. It, too, is part of the White House aura.

What a roster these visitors constitute! They range from the king and queen of England, whose snobbish servants started an uncivil war with the White House staff, to Russian grand dukes and Japanese noblemen, from world renowned politicians such as Winston Churchill, who gave himself a mild heart attack trying to open his bedroom window, to Cherokee and Creek and Sioux Indian chiefs, who did war dances on the lawn. Marvelous musicians such as pianist Vladimir Horowitz, soprano Jessye Norman, and cellist Pablo Casals have filled presidential ears with beautiful music. Entertainers such as Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand have made the place sound, for a few hours, like Broadway. Thick-necked political bosses have more than once converted the president's second-floor study or the Oval Office into smokefilled rooms, where political careers were empowered—or destroyed.

VI

Admission to the White House has never been restricted solely to the elite. From the earliest days, presidents recognized its symbolic importance as a place where they greeted anyone and everyone who wanted to come in the door. Several of these early receptions turned into mob scenes that threatened to ruin the rugs and wreck the furniture—and even made one or two chief executives fear for their lives.

Presidents and their staffs soon learned they had to set limits to White House access if they wanted to have time to conduct the nation's business. But the tradition of the White House as the people's house lived on—and is alive and well in contemporary Washington.

You used to be able to stroll by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue any day you chose, and see a long line of tourists—some of the million and a half Americans who streamed through the first-floor public rooms each year. As a small
d
as well as a large
D
democrat, that statistic has always gladdened my heart. Visiting the White House in person is a little like meeting a celebrity face-to-face. You get impressions and feelings that a newspaper or TV show—or even this book—can't communicate. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and during the war with Iraq in the spring of 2003, tours were temporarily suspended because of concerns about security. Group tours, which have to be arranged in advance, were eventually reinstated. I hope it won't be too much longer before the tours for the general public will also be resumed.

VII

The idea that the White House is the people's house has caused fierce quarrels every time a president or first lady tried to change the building in any significant way. John Quincy Adams was denounced for buying a billiard table. Millard Fillmore was attacked for putting in a bathtub.

Grace Coolidge caused an uproar when she tried to redecorate the family quarters with furniture in the style of the period in which the White House was built. Ironically, Jacqueline Kennedy did the same thing for the public rooms some thirty-eight years later and was wildly acclaimed for her efforts. When my father added a balcony to the South Portico, you would have sworn from the screams that impeachment was just around the corner.

Then there are the media and congressional snipers who are ready to open fire if they detect the slightest hint of snobbery or pretentiousness in the president's lifestyle. Their salvos were largely responsible for depriving at least one president, Martin Van Buren, of a second term in the White House.

Van Buren had served as Andrew Jackson's vice president, which all by itself made him a ripe target for the Whigs (forerunners of the Republicans) who were against anyone or anything connected with Jackson. On top of that, Van Buren liked to live, dress, and entertain in style, which made it easy to cast him as a decadent aristocrat.

In the spring of 1840, a few months before Van Buren began his campaign for reelection, the House of Representatives was considering a bill to allot funds for landscaping the grounds and repairing the furniture in the President's House. Whig congressman Charles Ogle of Pennsylvania took advantage of the occasion to launch a passionate attack against Van Buren. Taking his listeners on an imaginary tour of the “Presidential Palace,” Ogle commented on its “regal splendor.” He condemned the president's bonbon stands and green glass finger bowls and assailed him for serving fancy French food instead of such old-fashioned favorites as “hog and hominy” or “fried meat and gravy.”

Ogle's harangue went on for three days and included more than a few comments about the down-home virtues of the Whig presidential candidate, William Henry Harrison. The oration kicked off one of the most vitriolic campaigns in American history, and sent Martin Van Buren home to New York.

Van Buren's ordeal may have been on Franklin D. Roosevelt's mind when he was planning a state dinner for the king and queen of England during their visit to the United States in 1939. FDR wanted to serve a typical American dish, terrapin à la Maryland, as the first course, but maître d'hôtel Alonzo Fields informed him that the White House had no terrapin dishes.

Fields took advantage of the opportunity to mention that the White House's gold flatware was missing some crucial pieces. There were no soup spoons or fish knives, and the salad forks had to be washed between courses so they could double as dessert forks.

FDR was sympathetic. “But you know,” he told Fields, “if we were to ask for all those things you say we need, the politicians would make headlines out of the gold tableware being bought for the White House.”

Although Roosevelt was too astute a politician to go for the gold, he did manage to squeeze a set of terrapin dishes into the White House budget.

VIII

For anyone living or working in the White House, or visiting it, or merely touring the place, everything seems larger than life. One reason for this effect is factual: The house is ten times larger than your ordinary dwelling and considerably larger than most mansions. George Washington, the man who saw the future greatness of America when it was a mere collection of quarrelsome former colonies, insisted on building it that way.

History is another reason for the White House's aura: It virtually oozes from the walls. You find it impossible to forget you are walking halls and climbing stairs where Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt trod before you.

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?