The Butler: A Witness to History Read Online Free PDF Page B

last lady of the land.” President Truman, inside the White House, erupted over Powell’s disparaging remark and referred to Powell as “that damn nigger preacher.” The public weighed in; letters poured into the White House. One missive addressed to Bess Truman spotlighted the plight of blacks in battle: “In light of their sacrifice it is a shocking fact to realize that you refused yesterday to give up a cup of tea and a box of cookies to support the thesis for which they died.” There were those who thought Powell had embarrassed the White House. “On the other hand, Powell has certainly seized a dramatic way to strike at prejudice,” a Missouri newspaper noted, “and like Cato (who hadwarned of the cracking of the Roman empire) is serving the nation by calling attention to danger.”
    Among the first tasks Eugene Allen was given inside the White House kitchen when he was hired as a pantry man was washing the cups and saucers from which President Truman and Bess Truman drank their daily tea.
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    T HE W HITE H OUSE butlers who happened to be Negro operated in a private world inside the White House. It must have been a great responsibility—perhaps somewhat of a burden—for them to carry all those secrets with them through the years. Wives and relatives constantly needled them about what went on inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Were there secret escape tunnels in the White House? Was Jackie Kennedy nice—or snobbish? Did LBJ use the word “niggers” ? (By all accounts, the greatest president on civil rights since Lincoln did use that word.)
    Once outside the White House, there was another private world that awaited these butlers. That world was the one populated by ambassadors, famous actors, publishing tycoons, and the moneyed gentry who lived up and down the East Coast. They were families in Washington, New York City, in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Newport, Rhode Island; they werethe swells who summered out on Long Island. They held soirees and lavish parties for their friends flying in from the West Coast, and they often turned to White House butlers to work those parties.
    These Negro butlers—and a good many of them had been trained by Eugene Allen himself—were in such demand during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that they formed the Private Butler Membership Club. They were known for their punctiliousness and their professionalism, which made them prized recruits for these social affairs. “Those men were jazz and bebop cats who had their own swagger and suited up at night to serve world leaders as the invisible ones,” recalls Daphne Muse, whose father, Fletcher Muse Sr., and uncle, George Allen Muse, were members of the Private Butler Membership Club. Both men had been hired as contract butlers at the White House, where they first met Eugene Allen. “It was a tight circle of men,” adds Muse. When they ventured to out-of-town assignments, the butlers would often arrive back home laden with bags of delicacies. “A twenty-five-pound bag of blue crab meat would be considered leftovers,” says Muse. But it was their discretion that some prized above all else. Muse chuckles at one particular memory of a certain butler who told her, late in his life, what went on at an out-of-town private function: sex, and plenty of it. The affair turned out to be an orgy, and the butler was forced to tiptoe—tray in hand—around the gyrating bodies.
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    I N LOOKING BACK over my own writing life, it seems now that Eugene Allen was a kind of capstone to all those fascinating figures I had interviewed in years past who had a link to turmoil inside the White House.
    Scenes from this writer’s life:
    It’s 1986 and I’m sitting in a motel room on the edge of Little Rock, Arkansas, with a frail man launching a campaign for Arkansas governor. He is not just any man; he is Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas during the 1957 Little Rock school crisis. He’s another old pol who can’t let go. He has been talking