The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House Read Online Free PDF Page B

mirrors—they’re hideous. Off to the dungeons with them,” Jackie joked, insisting that “everything in the White House must have a reason for being there.” She enlisted Henry Francis du Pont, a collector of early American furniture and an heir to the family fortune, to chair the White House Fine Arts Committee, which she created within a month of moving into the residence. Members of the committee were responsible for searching for museum-quality pieces around the country and for persuading their owners to donate them to the White House. She also established the Curator’s Office, ensuring that the house’s furnishings and artwork would be properly inventoried and cared for. When she gave the first-ever televised tour of the mansion, in 1962, it was watched by eighty million people and helped to make her one of the country’s most popular first ladies. She was only thirty-two years old at the time.
    The White House of today still bears Jackie Kennedy’s stamp. She took a building that had long seemed drab and made it fashionable, bringing to the job a blend of historical sensitivity and contemporary elegance. She breathed a new Continental style into theWhite House staff, hiring French chef René Verdon and appointing Oleg Cassini as official couturier. And her attentions extended to the private quarters: when the Old Family Dining Room downstairs felt too formal to serve as a gathering place for her young family, she took a second-floor space that had been Margaret Truman’s bedroom and remade it as a kitchen and dining room for them.
    Today the staff talks about the house with a reverence they usually reserve for their favorite first families. One residence worker said that every time he gave friends a tour of the White House he would end it by telling them to look around and soak it all in: “You have walked through exactly the same space as every president since John Adams was president.”
    Each time, he said, “It was thrilling.”

    T HE W HITE H OUSE staff delights in knowing every inch of the mansion, its little-known corners and historical secrets. The underground locker rooms where butlers keep their crisp tuxedos and maids house their uniforms (pastel shirts and white pants) are just a short distance from a bomb shelter under the East Wing that was built for President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II; this room is now the President’s Emergency Operations Center, built to withstand a nuclear detonation. The tube-shaped bunker is where the president may be taken in case of an attack. The Ground Floor Map Room was once a billiards room before it was transformed into the president’s top secret planning center during World War II; it was there, surrounded by maps tracking the movements of American and enemy forces, that FDR contemplated the invasion of Normandy. Few people were ever granted the authority to glimpse inside. “When the room was to be cleaned,” wrote Chief Usher J. B. West, “the security guard coveredthe maps with cloth, standing duty while the cleaner mopped the floor.” Decades later, Bill Clinton used this room to give his televised grand jury testimony during the Lewinsky affair; and today it is used as a holding area for holiday party guests waiting to be photographed with the president and first lady in the adjoining Diplomatic Reception Room.
    Other rooms tell different stories spanning centuries of American history. Abigail Adams used the grand but drafty East Room—the largest room in the White House, with ceilings more than twenty feet high—to hang laundry. The room, which later served as a temporary home for soldiers during the Civil War, now serves as the setting for most presidential press conferences. The State Dining Room, often used for highly choreographed state dinners in connection with the signing of significant military and trade agreements, was once Thomas Jefferson’s office. The Green Room, now a formal sitting room on the State Floor, began as