Spoken from the Heart (38 page)

The White House was now literally cut off. Any letter or package being sent was entombed in an off-site facility. Letters could not reach us, not even ones from fourth-grade girls. It was impossible to send any kind of envelope to the White House grounds. For years, the mail sat in sacks, unopened and waiting to be irradiated. Even the finished art by Adrian Martinez that we had chosen back in the hot months of summer to adorn our holiday card vanished for three years inside those mail sacks. Hallmark had mailed it back, along with the final proof for the card. They had to rush to create another proof, and the president of Hallmark met me on the tarmac of the airport in Waco, Texas, during a stopover so I could approve the proof before the final printing began.

The mail was the last severed link to much of the outside world. During the spring and summer, after we had moved in, I would occasionally sit in my small, private upstairs office and gaze out at the lines of tourists streaming through the White House doors, people who had waited in line for hours to see the East Room, the State Dining Room, the Blue, Red, and Green rooms. But since September 12, the doors had been closed. There were no tours; the grounds were deserted except for the clusters of sharpshooters who paced the roof and patrolled among the trees. I grew accustomed to heavily armed men in black combat gear walking in through the doors from the Rose Garden and bomb-sniffing dogs making their rounds in the previously placid corridors of the East Wing. Sharpshooters hung out the windows of our convoys, and helicopters hovered above our destinations. The flak jackets that we had worn for the trip into Kosovo seemed like a quaint memory; we were now living with danger all around us, so that every errant sound, every fast-moving plane made me lift my eyes to scan the sky.

Inside the White House, the stillness was almost deafening. Gone now was the tan and brown folding screen that had been routinely spread across the ground-floor Cross Hall, allowing the president or me, or anyone else coming from the upstairs residence, to pass through the corridor unseen by tour groups or other visitors. In this emptiness, there was no longer any need for a protective screen.

When George and I were visiting the Blairs at Chequers the previous summer, Gary Walters, the head White House usher, had called to tell me that painters and plasterers had found a false wall in the large upstairs Cross Hall in the residence. The Cross Hall had not had a new coat of paint since the Reagan administration. The White House walls are plaster with canvas stretched on top, so this time when they repainted they removed the canvas to repair the plaster, and at the entry to the Yellow Oval Room found bookshelves dating from Truman's term that had been covered, probably by Jackie Kennedy. The shelves emerged, looking freshly painted and perfectly preserved, although no one on the staff had known that they were there. They also discovered delicately carved shells in niches above two doors along the hallway. The White House is a home that gives up its secrets one by one.

Although it was George Washington who chose the site for the White House, the first president to live inside its walls was John Adams. But little of the Adams era survives; the house was torched by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812, and had to be rebuilt. Its first major renovation was by Theodore Roosevelt, who tore down great glass conservatories erected to grow fruits and flowers for the first family and built the West Wing offices in 1902. He also transformed the ground floor from a cooking and laundry area with bedrooms for White House servants and staff, including a separate room for the fireman who manned the house's enormous furnace, into receiving and reception rooms for the president and his guests. By 1948, the house's interior was so fragile it was in danger of collapsing. Harry and Bess Truman moved across the street to Blair House, and the building was gutted down to its original brick walls and completely rebuilt. Jackie Kennedy updated many of the interior decorations and made changes to the family living quarters, and subsequent first ladies have added their own personal touches, transforming carpeting and wall and window coverings, moving furniture, and adding art.

But above all, the White House is a living, breathing place; even in the public rooms, there is always some flux. The Green Room, now a formal sitting room on the State Floor, began as a bedchamber and then a breakfast room for Thomas Jefferson; James Monroe made it into a card parlor. Many commentators hated its various iterations of green color, particularly Andrew Jackson's. Only in 1962 did Jackie Kennedy select its well-known waterfall green silk wall coverings. The State Dining Room was originally Thomas Jefferson's office, and even after it became a dining room, Theodore Roosevelt hung large mounted moose heads on its walls. The Map Room, which we frequently used as a waiting place for formal receiving lines, was the room where FDR monitored the progress of U.S. forces during World War II. Before that, it had housed Woodrow Wilson's billiard table. I knew whatever I did was temporary; it was merely to keep and care for the house. Other administrations would make changes of their own.

When we first arrived, I had set about redoing the girls' rooms and the Treaty Room (in the residence). But that was only the start. The White House is a home, but a home that accommodates more than 100,000 people a year. Hundreds alone came for small events upstairs in our residence quarters. Butlers, maintenance staff, and White House staff and employees also walk across the carpets and hallways, because it is a place of business as well as a residence. And it is an old, historic home, making the need to refurbish almost constant. Painters literally walk around with cans and brushes, constantly touching up scuff marks, streaks, and nicks on the walls.

So it was a strange incongruity that, as the White House was being emptied of all but essential personnel, I was going room by room to see what was in need of repair.

When my father-in-law was president, Bar and I would walk the house some nights, in the quiet dark, switching on lights, exploring the Red, Green, and Blue rooms in a kind of perfect stillness, wondering who else had, on other nights, also walked there. For days after we moved in, I found that each room in the residence reminded me of Bar and Gampy, of some moment or memory that we had made during their four years.

Indeed, despite its museumlike atmosphere, the White House remains a home. Until the Kennedys arrived, many presidential families did most of their living downstairs, amid the vintage furnishings. They ate their meals in the old Family Dining Room, a small, square space that abuts the large State Dining Room. George would sometimes host working lunches and dinners for foreign leaders there; otherwise, it is a quasi-storage room used to plate the food for official dinners and other functions.

The upstairs, until the time of Theodore Roosevelt, had housed the president's office space--the famous Lincoln Bedroom actually served as Lincoln's office; his aides occupied a room across the hall, and visitors congregated in a small sitting area in between. Just a doorway away from the offices was the corridor for the family bedrooms. Our room was the traditional first lady's bedroom, while the president's bedroom was our sitting room. Not until Gerald and Betty Ford took up residence at the White House did the custom of a separate presidential bedroom officially end. Before that, a host of American presidents--from Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon--chose separate but usually adjoining rooms for themselves and their wives.

I decorated our room in a soothing blend of pale celadon green and cream, covering the walls, headboard, and curtains in a fabric designed by Peter Fasano, with wide, round tables by the bedside to hold books for reading. George's table was stacked with history books. We were at home in the past almost everywhere we turned.

Jenna's room had also been the bedroom for Caroline Kennedy, who liked to creep down the massive marble staircase nearby and peek at her parents' guests through the balusters, as well as for Lynda Bird Johnson, and Chelsea Clinton, and President Taft's sons, Robert and Charles, while Barbara's room next door had rested the sleepy heads of John F. Kennedy Jr., Luci Johnson, Tricia Nixon, and Amy Carter. The room that Jackie Kennedy had designated as the upstairs presidential dining room was once the bedroom where Alice Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, remembered having her appendix removed. By the late 1940s, the room's floor was so unsound that a leg of Margaret Truman's piano broke through the boards.

Over time, the upstairs residence became a collection of sitting and guest rooms. In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt's large family necessitated going up into the attic, which had its dusty spaces partitioned to create a few new, small bedrooms. Calvin and Grace Coolidge oversaw the replacement of the White House roof in 1927, building in the process an entire finished third floor, which was enlarged and redone by Harry and Bess Truman. Married presidential children, including the Fords' and the Carters', made their Washington homes in suites of rooms up there, and Hillary Clinton's mother and my mother were most at home in a third-floor room tucked under the eaves.

Under doctor's orders to get out of the Oval Office during the middle of the day as World War II raged, FDR would eat lunch in the third-floor "sky parlor" added by Grace Coolidge. The Trumans transformed it into a rectangular solarium. President Eisenhower liked to barbecue on the parapet outside when he and Mamie weren't eating their dinner on TV trays downstairs in the West Sitting Hall, sitting side by side, each watching his or her own television. Mamie preferred
I Love Lucy,
while Ike chose westerns. Both did sometimes watch the news. The solarium was also the room where Lynda and Luci Johnson entertained their teenage friends and where Caroline Kennedy for a while had a tiny, private preschool and an at times solitary playroom. And over the years, it became a favorite place for male guests and sometimes presidents to smoke cigars.

Each room that I entered had a history, each piece of furniture a past, whether it was the antique English canopy bed that had been finished in 1775, a year before American independence, or the table and bookcase made from the original 1817 wood used to finish the White House roof after British troops had set it aflame, or the collection of framed silhouettes, including one of President John Tyler that had survived a shipwreck in the English Channel. And it was not just the intimacies of the daily lives of other first families that we felt as the years passed, but their private sufferings that were also contained within these walls.

Every day I walked by the room where Willie Lincoln had died in February of 1862 after a two-week battle with a typhoidlike illness, probably contracted from contaminated water in a nearby canal, water that was drunk at the White House and a canal where children played. Mary Todd Lincoln spent hours at his bedside as he was plied with everything from Peruvian bark to beef tea. The night that he took sick, the Lincolns were hosting a party in the East Room. The orchestra strains rose up to the room as Willie's parents scurried back and forth between his bedside and their guests. The last ones departed late into the night, and as their coaches clattered off, Willie's fever was rising. After his death, Mary Todd Lincoln refused ever again to enter that room, or the Green Room, where his body had been embalmed. The Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg would write that there were thirty-one rooms in the White House, but Lincoln was not at home in any of them. And Willie Lincoln was not the only child to die while residing in the White House.

The Coolidges lost their sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr., to blood poisoning, or septicemia, in July of 1924. He had developed an infected blister after playing one of his favorite sports, tennis, on the rear grounds of the White House. The Coolidges stayed at their son's bedside, but doctors could offer them nothing. "When he was suffering, he begged me to help him, but I could not," Coolidge later wrote. On July 4, as workers were readying the White House grounds for celebrations and fireworks, Calvin Jr. was rushed to Walter Reed. He died three days later. Coolidge openly wept in the Oval Office and later said that if he had not been president, his son would not have suffered a raised blister playing lawn tennis on the South Grounds. Jackie Kennedy had lost an infant son just three and a half months before her husband was assassinated. And three first ladies--Letitia Tyler, Caroline Harrison, and Ellen Wilson--died while they lived in the White House. Presidents suffered too. After his own stroke, Woodrow Wilson, his left side paralyzed and barely able to write his name, retreated to the East Room, where with curtains drawn, he spent hours watching the flickering reels of silent films lent by a local theater. He was just sixty-three years old.

I was always aware of the brave faces that other families had placed on their personal tragedies and on the way that the demands of the White House gave no time for grief, even less for reflection. "The funeral is a very solemn affair," wrote William Stoddard, an aide to President Lincoln about Willie's funeral in the East Room, where cabinet secretaries, senators, ambassadors, and soldiers choked back tears. "But it cannot be permitted to interfere overmuch with work. The burden is increased rather than laid aside."