The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (21 page)

“Sir, I’m sorry.”

“It’s no big deal,” he told her, laughing it off.

All that panicking for nothing
, she thought.

According to Skip Allen, the Clintons weren’t always consistent in their requests. “When they asked for something and you gave it to them, it wasn’t what they really wanted,” Allen said. “They didn’t know how to ask for exactly what they wanted, so they kept asking for things they thought they’d like but didn’t.”

Allen remembers one phone call from Hillary Clinton. The kitchen had brought out a particular chicken dish too often, she said, and she wanted the chef to stop serving it. “So I called the chef and I told him we have to take the chicken dish off the menu, that they didn’t want it anymore. And a couple of months later I get a call from the first lady saying, ‘Ask the chef, how come he never serves that chicken dish we like so much?’” He exhaled loudly. “That’s the way it went for eight years.”

The Clintons were just the opposite of the Reagans, staffers say. If they were up at one or two o’clock in the morning and couldn’t sleep, they would start rearranging furniture. According to Allen, who also oversaw the Curator’s Office, this furniture shuffling was a nightmare for the curators, who log every piece of furniture in the White House collection each year. “They just took it upon themselves to move a lamp from one room to the next, or a table or chair. Then, when the curators went up to take inventory, [the records] would say, so-and-so chair is in the study, and they [would] have to look all over the house for that chair because the Clintons had moved it up to the third floor in one of the guest rooms. . . . It just made everything so complicated.”

The Clintons also seemed oblivious to the protocols involving mealtime—and everyone was too scared to tell them. Chef John
Moeller, who worked in the kitchen from 1992 to 2005, never knew when the first family wanted to eat, or how many people he would need to serve. “With the Bushes we consistently got a call ahead of time saying something like, ‘Two for lunch at twelve-thirty.’ With the Clintons, we wouldn’t know what was going to happen until it actually happened!”

A week after the Clintons moved in, Butler Buddy Carter ran into the kitchen in a panic to tell Moeller that the family was seated and ready for their dinner—
now
. “I have it, but I’ve got to get it hot, give me a minute,” Moeller told him. From then on he would always have a meal at the ready around lunch and dinnertime.

The Clintons’ friends and political aides also liked to give the staff advice, sometimes steering them in the wrong direction. “They told us that Mrs. Clinton used a certain type of shampoo and deodorant, so we went out and we bought maybe twenty containers,” Limerick recalls, laughing. “I learned how stupid that was because then [Hillary Clinton] said to me, ‘Chris, I don’t like this stuff.’”

Sometimes efforts to please the first family put White House guests in peril. Every year the holiday season brings an internal debate about how best to decorate the State Floor. Head Florist Nancy Clarke liked to place dozens of votive candles on the buffet tables, but Chef Mesnier insisted it was a fire hazard.
But Mrs. Clinton wants them
, Clarke insisted.

“One particular year, we had this lady wearing a fox around her neck. She leaned over the table to grab some cookies, and of course the votive ignited the fox because she came too close. Thank God we had a quick butler there who yanked the fox away from her and threw some water on it and extinguished the fire,” Mesnier recalled. “Of course after
that
, there were no more votives on my tables!”

CHAPTER V

Dark Days

He said when he got up in the middle of the night he ran into the bathroom door. But we’re pretty sure she clocked him with a book.

—RESIDENCE WORKER ON LIFE IN THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE DURING THE MONICA LEWINSKY SCANDAL

T
here was blood all over the president and first lady’s bed.

A member of the residence staff got a frantic call from the maid who found the mess. Someone needed to come quickly and inspect the damage.

The blood was Bill Clinton’s. The president had to get several stitches to his head. He insisted that he’d hurt himself running into the bathroom door in the middle of the night. But not everyone was convinced.

“We’re pretty sure she clocked him with a book,” one worker said. And who would know better than the residence staff? The incident came shortly after the president’s affair with a White House intern became public knowledge—clearly a time of crisis in the Clintons’ marriage. And there were at least twenty books on the bedside table for his betrayed wife to choose from, including the Bible.

In November 1995 Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-two-year-old White House intern. He had almost a dozen sexual encounters with her over the next year and a half, most of them in the Oval Office. When the affair became public more than two years after it started, the media firestorm consumed the rest of his presidency. The revelation stemmed from more than four years of investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr that looked into other charges, including the Whitewater land deal and the firing of several longtime White House employees in the Travel Office, a scandal known as Travelgate. Although they were not part of the residence staff, Usher Skip Allen says he remembers how upset some of his colleagues became after the dismissals in the Travel Office. After all, most of the residence staff had devoted their entire careers to their jobs at the White House and some were starting to feel vulnerable. “The mood in the house was a little on the tense side, because everybody was career and you never can tell, if it ever got going, how many people or who they would fire.” Career government employees are like professors with tenure who are very hard to fire, he says, and it was shocking to see them dismissed so summarily. The Clintons were also battling criticism that they had used the Lincoln Bedroom to woo wealthy donors.

On August 17, 1998, Clinton became the first president to testify as the subject of a grand jury investigation. Chief Electrician Bill Cliber, who helped set up the power for Clinton’s marathon four-and-a-half-hour testimony—conducted via closed-circuit television—recalls that the president was “in a really bad mood” that day. Later that evening, Clinton confessed to the “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky in a nationwide television broadcast. Four months later, in December, the Republican-led House voted to impeach him, though he was acquitted after a five-week trial in the Senate.

The public did not learn about Monica Lewinsky until January 1998. But some residence workers knew about the affair when it
was still occurring, between November 1995 and March 1997. The butlers saw the president and Lewinsky in the family movie theater, and the two of them were seen together so frequently that the workers started letting one another know when they’d had a Lewinsky sighting. The butlers, who are closest to the family, zealously guard such secrets, but from time to time they share fragments of stories with their colleagues—because the information could be useful, or sometimes just to prove their access.

One household staffer, who asked not to be named, remembers standing in the main hallway behind the kitchen that was used by East Wing and West Wing aides. “That’s her—that’s the girlfriend,” a butler whispered, nudging her as Lewinsky walked by. “Yep, she’s the one. She was in the theater the other night.”

Nearly two decades later, many residence workers are still wary of discussing the fights they witnessed between the Clintons. But they all felt the general gloom that hung over the second and third floors as the saga dragged on throughout 1998.

The residence staff witnessed the fallout from the affair and the toll it took on Hillary Clinton, but West Wing aides had long suspected the kind of drama that was playing out on the second floor of the executive mansion. “She would have hit him with a frying pan if one had been handed to her,” said the first lady’s close friend and political adviser Susan Thomases in an interview with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia for their collection of oral histories documenting Bill Clinton’s presidency. “I don’t think she ever in her mind imagined leaving him or divorcing him.”

Betty Finney, now seventy-eight, started as a White House maid in 1993. She spent most of her time in the family’s private quarters and remembers well how things changed in those final years. “Things were definitely more tense. You just felt bad for the entire family and what they were going through,” she says. “You could feel the sadness. There wasn’t as much laughter.”

Florist Bob Scanlan was less guarded about the atmosphere: “It was like a morgue when you’d go up to the second floor. Mrs. Clinton was nowhere to be found.”

And when it wasn’t eerily quiet, the mansion was the scene of intrigue and heated arguments. One incident occurred around Christmas 1996, while the president’s affair with Lewinsky was still ongoing.

The Housekeeping Shop was going about their usual assignment of wrapping presents for the first family. Sometimes they were asked to wrap more than four hundred gifts for friends, relatives, and staffers. Gift wrapping was an elaborate process, beginning in the Reagan administration (when standards were particularly exacting), with careful logs recording details of each present that was wrapped. (These logs were shredded each time a new first family moved in.) The staffers who wrapped the presents always included a gift tag and a description of what was in the package, discreetly tucked underneath a ribbon. They then placed the wrapped gifts on a designated table in the West Sitting Hall or in the Yellow Oval Room.

That holiday season, one staffer remembers noticing an unusual gift, a copy of
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman, which she was asked to wrap. She put the wrapped book on the table and thought nothing more of it. A couple of months later, in February 1997, the president gave Lewinsky a gift: a copy of
Leaves of Grass
. Only later did the staffer learn that the present she had wrapped was most likely the same one that was given to the president’s mistress.

After the holidays, the staffer said, the president desperately wanted to retrieve a book from the Clintons’ bedroom, but the first lady was not yet dressed, and no one wanted to disturb her. “Betty Currie [the president’s secretary] called the valet, and he came to me and asked me if I’d go in and I said, ‘
No way
,’” the worker recalls. (When the door to the first couple’s bedroom is shut, it is the equivalent of a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on a hotel door.) “Finally, I think Betty Currie called Mrs. Clinton directly.”

Moments later, a book came flying out of their bedroom. Hillary had hurled it into the hallway. The president’s valet picked it up and brought it to Currie. It’s not certain whether the book the first lady threw out of their bedroom was the same book that the president gave Lewinsky, but the staffer’s memories paint a picture of the tension.

Florist Ronn Payne remembers one day when he was coming up the service elevator with a cart to pick up old floral arrangements and saw two butlers gathered outside the West Sitting Hall listening in as the Clintons argued viciously with each other. The butlers motioned him over and put their fingers to their lips, telling him to be quiet. All of a sudden he heard the first lady bellow “goddamn bastard!” at the president—and then he heard someone throw a heavy object across the room. The rumor among the staff was that she threw a lamp. The butlers, Payne said, were told to clean up the mess. In an interview with Barbara Walters, Mrs. Clinton made light of the story, which had made its way into the gossip columns. “I have a pretty good arm,” she said. “If I’d thrown a lamp at somebody, I think you would have known about it.”

Payne wasn’t surprised at the outburst. “You heard so much foul language” in the Clinton White House, he said. “When you’re somebody’s domestic, you know what’s going on.”

Payne tested positive for HIV while working at the White House and became very ill, losing forty-three pounds at one point. He wanted to take a leave of absence, but he was told he had one of two options: quit or retire. He chose to retire early. He hoped to be able to return when he got his health back, since he said that several other retired workers had come back to work. “You can imagine what I looked like. I know they wouldn’t want me upstairs,” he says. “I wanted to get my strength and my weight back.” Once he did feel up to working again, however, he was told he couldn’t return because he had retired with disability. He was never told explicitly
that he was fired because he was HIV-positive, and he doesn’t know who was ultimately behind the decision—it almost certainly did not rise to the attention of the Clintons—and he did not formally challenge it. But it had been a standing rule for several years, including during previous administrations, that staff with HIV were not allowed to have any exposure to the first family. “I saw them make it very difficult for other people who became HIV-positive,” Payne says. “Some were put down in the basement to work in the laundry room. Others were put out on the lawn.” And florists are in every room of the executive mansion, including the family’s bedrooms, so returning to his old job was impossible. He was heartbroken about the painful way his White House career came to an end, and is remembered fondly by many of the colleagues he left behind.