The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House by Kate Andersen Brower

Singer Sargent to porcelain dating back to George Washington.
    Lady Bird asked Ketchum to set up time after she moved in for “walk and learns,” so she could go through each room with him and learn more about its history and its furnishings. She said she needed to have a working knowledge of the residence so that she could take friends and guests on tours, one of her duties as first lady. She took her new role very seriously—not surprising, as she had earned a reputation as a pinch hitter for Jackie Kennedy during the previous administration. When Jackie didn’t feel like doing something, Lady Bird dutifully stepped in.
    Ketchum’s first meeting with the new first lady was not at all glamorous. When Lady Bird called down to the Curator’s Office and asked him to come upstairs, he recalls, “I found her in a closet, between her bedroom and sitting room, on her hands and knees with a cardboard box open in front of her,” he said. She was surrounded by about twenty porcelain birds all carefully wrapped andbrought from the Elms. He got down on the floor and began to help her unwrap each bird.
    “What neither one of us realized is that the light for the closet was in the door jamb. And as we started, and we had the birds kind of lined up on the floor, Bonner Arrington [the carpenter foreman] and one of his colleagues from the Carpenter’s Shop were moving a sofa and went right down this narrow corridor and of course closed the door. So there we were, playing touchy-feely, trying to protect the birds and figure out how one could get up without stepping on something,” he laughed. They managed to find the light switch and remarkably they left the birds unharmed.
    Soon after they moved in, the president and the first lady were invited to adviser Walter Jenkins’s house for dinner. Their absence gave “a breathing spell to the staff here at the White House who must have been carrying on with heavy hearts,” Lady Bird said.
    The Jenkins’s daughter, Beth, was a close friend of Luci’s, and she came to the White House that night for a sleepover. “All I had felt was the challenge and the burden of this transition,” Luci told me.
    Her room in the White House had a fireplace—“I’d never had something so delicious as a fireplace in my bedroom”—so she lit a fire. Neither girl knew anything about fireplaces, though, and the room soon filled up with smoke. Luci frantically tried using a juice glass filled with water, and then a trash can, to douse the flames. Finally she climbed up on her desk and opened a window to let the smoke out—and was horrified when she saw a White House policeman looking in at her in her nightgown. Once they realized what was happening, staff ran in to help.
    “My mother felt it was very appropriate that I help clean the smoke stains off the walls of my bedroom that first week,” she said, still embarrassed decades later. “It was literally a baptism by fire.” She scrubbed alongside the maids, none of whom made her feel guilty.

    A LITTLE MORE than a decade later, the residence staff found themselves once again confronted with a sudden and unceremonious transition, when President Richard Nixon announced his resignation on August 8, 1974.
    “The transfer of power was shockingly abrupt, yet orderly as it had been after the assassination of President Kennedy,” wrote Doorman Preston Bruce. Yet despite the fact that the Watergate scandal had been raging for two years, and calls for Nixon’s resignation had mounted through the summer, no one inside the White House was expecting it. After all, no president had ever resigned before. The staff had no clue until Pat Nixon called down, asking for some packing boxes.
    At seven-thirty on the morning after he announced his resignation, Nixon was in bare feet and pajamas when Executive Chef Henry Haller found him sitting alone in the Family Kitchen. He usually ate a light breakfast of cereal, juice, and fresh fruit, but that morning he ordered