The White House that George and Laura Bush are moving into this week is very much a home.
As outgoing First Lady Hillary Clinton reminded at one of her glittering farewell East Room receptions last month, “Families live here.”
Indeed, red carpet rugrats with such memorable last names as Lincoln and Roosevelt have whooped and hollered in its halls. First Daughters have thrown tantrums and wed husbands on its premises.
It has been the setting for thousands of formal dinners, but also a cozy place where Ronald and Nancy Reagan would settle down in pajamas over macaroni and cheese at TV tables to watch sitcoms, and where Bill and Hillary Clinton hosted friends for popcorn and movie nights. Daughter Chelsea hosted pizza parties for her friends in the State Dining room.
However cozy, it is still one of the few single-family residences in America with a security system that includes ground-to-air guided missiles, machine guns, motion-detection sensors buried beneath the lawn and tank traps in the driveway.
It celebrated its 200th birthday last year, but the White House is far from being the oldest or most historic house in the country, as George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate just down the road will attest. Neither is it the grandest residence in the nation, a title that better belongs to the 250-room Biltmore mansion near Asheville, N.C. But it does have 132 rooms, 32 bathrooms, 412 interior and exterior doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, seven staircases and three elevators. Counting the sub-basements, it has six levels.
In addition to providing living quarters, the White House also must function as an entertainment center (up to30,000 guests a week under the Clintons), guest lodging, an art and history museum, a major Washington tourist attraction drawing 1 million visitors a year, and, of course, as the administrative nerve center of the most powerful nation on Earth.
Like any old house, it bears the marks and remembrances of its many previous inhabitants. But–whether popular or despised–these were the most important Americans of their time.
“Nothing could prepare me for the sense of awe I felt when my family arrived at the White House in 1993,” Hillary Rodham Clinton noted. “Wherever we looked there was something–a clock, a chandelier, a painting, a chair–that told a story about the people and events that have shaped our country’s history.”
Some First Families have left a much deeper mark on the place than others. The White House has undergone three major renovations. President James Madison, for one, reluctantly allowed himself to be pushed into the War of 1812 by congressional leaders bent on annexing Canada, and was rewarded by having his official residence burned and gutted by the British two years later.
Called the “Presidential Palace,” “President’s House” and “Executive Mansion” during the first half of its existence, it was officially named “the White House” by President Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1901 literally took the place apart. He tore down the grand staircase at the west end of the house to enlarge the State Dining Room to its present commodious size. Among other changes, he leveled the vast greenhouses that had produced all the flowers and potted plants for the mansion in Victorian times and built in their place the office complex known as the West Wing.
After a piano leg went through the floor while his daughter Margaret was playing the instrument, President Harry Truman ordered a complete demolition of the deteriorating White House interior, replacing ancient, rotting wooden beams with steel ones. He also added a second-floor addendum to the South Portico now enjoyed as “the Truman balcony.”
Stripped joint
During the administration of the first President Bush, more than two dozen coats of paint were stripped from the White House exterior so that the original sandstone could be given a new luster–though the leeching agent used is suspected to have contributed to George and Barbara Bushes’ thyroid problems.
As White House curator Betty Monkman has richly detailed in her recently published and lavishly illustrated coffee table book, “The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and Families,” the presidential residence always has tended to reflect its times as much as its occupants.
Like the new capital city, the official residence was very primitive and unfinished when its first tenants, John and Abigail Adams, moved in on Nov. 1, 1800, to find only half the rooms plastered. According to Monkman, the present-day Blue Room was then furnished with only a single table and rug. Mrs. Adams hung laundry to dry in the East Room.
With the aid of a then very generous $14,000 gift from Congress, and regular appropriations thereafter, the place eventually came to be handsomely fitted out. By the time James and Dolley Madison were in residence, its interior was as elegant as a palace, with highly fashionable furnishings of the then-au courant Greek and Roman Neoclassical or Empire style.
Vive le France
French styles in White House decor reigned through the first half of the 19th Century, even in the egalitarian era of “People’s President” Andrew Jackson. By Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s time, the White House was full-blown Victorian. By the late 19th Century, it had taken on the heavy-handed, potted-palm look of a robber baron mansion, complete with ornate glass screens and other interior decor by Louis Comfort Tiffany.
The 20th Century brought simpler styles and a revival of a Colonial period style, with some modern touches and the occasional appearance of Depression-era Works Progress Administration handicraft pieces.
An indoor swimming pool was installed, to the great benefit of polio victim Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was later used for discreet skinny-dipping parties by President John F. Kennedy. The less adventurous Richard Nixon, however, had it floored-over and transformed into the present-day, much overcrowded press room. A new pool was installed on the White House grounds during the short tenure of athletic President Gerald Ford, who loved doing his laps.
Finally, Jackie
The transformation of the White House to the Federalist style of its initial years began after the massive Truman renovation and continues today, with much of the impetus having come from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, the most important friend the Executive Mansion has had in recent decades.
She rescued the house from a dowdy, if not decrepit, state of disrepair, helped create the preservationist White House Historical Association and established the full-time post of White House curator to oversee its immense and continuously growing collection of historic and largely American art.
Her work was carried on in a major way by First Lady Pat Nixon, though she received little attention or credit for it.
But every first lady has put a bit of herself into the place. Nancy Reagan’s fondness for the color red became apparent in her selection of new (and controversial) White House china and in the decor of the upstairs apartments (such as myriad red birds on the wallpaper in the TV room). Barbara Bush brought in heaps of the cozy chintz so popular among New England’s upper and upper-middle classes.
Hillary Clinton, frustrated in her desire to impose Modern art upon this presidential Federalist museum, did undertake renovation of the Blue Room and some upstairs chambers, emphasizing very bright, vivid colors and ornate detail.
“The White House has never been a static house frozen in time,” wrote Monkman. “Its rooms and collections change as do its occupants.”
If George and Laura Bush enter their new home through the South Portico, hard by the South Lawn where presidential helicopters land, they will encounter what was once a basement full of work and storage rooms but is now home to some of the most elegant rooms in the mansion.
The grand tour
The principal chamber on this Ground Floor is the Diplomatic Reception Room, with Federalist period furniture including a musically chimed grandfather clock and panoramic wallpaper depicting America in the 1820s. This is the first room one enters from the lawn and was where Franklin Roosevelt gave his famous radio “Fireside Chats.”
Beyond is the very grand Ground Floor Corridor, lined with life-sized portraits of former First Ladies. (It was Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt who decided in 1902 that the spousal portraits would go on this lower level while the portraits of presidents would be displayed on the main floor above.
Off this corridor is the Library, with actual books, Duncan Phyfe furniture and also portraits and remembrances of George Washington, his aide General Henry Knox and the Marquis de Lafayette.
Nearby is the Vermeil (or Gold) Room, intended as a Ladies’ Sitting Room and home to the exquisite, evening-gowned Aaron Shikler portrait of Jackie Kennedy; and the China Room, showcasing a rich collection of White House dinnerware and dominated by crimson colors and a splendid portrait of the elegant Grace Coolidge. The neighboring Map Room is where FDR did much of his World War II planning. The last situation map he used in 1945 is on display.
The North Entrance includes the spacious foyer where music is played during White House entertainment and where dancing is held at the end of State Dinners. Just beyond it, entered through a row of widely spaced marble columns, is the famous Cross Hall, which runs from the East Room to the State Dining Room and which was where official state banquets used to be held until Teddy Roosevelt expanded the Dining Room.
The Cross Hall is lined with presidential portraits and is spacious enough to accommodate large, milling swarms of guests during some of the more major receptions.
Though the forests of potted plants epidemic in the 19th Century are long gone, dwarf Palmetto trees are often set here (one was famously almost knocked over by the late Douglas Fairbanks Jr., when backing away from a President Bush who was trying to get him to dance with then-Second Lady Marilyn Quayle).
Overlooking the foyer is the Grand Staircase used by presidents on formal occasions. It was once just a secondary staircase but was brought into prominence after Teddy Roosevelt got rid of the original.
A favorite with everyone is the huge East Room, where the body of Abraham Lincoln once lay in solemn state but where now the most festive White House parties are held, as well as concerts and gospel sing-a-longs. Decorated in 18th Century classical style, with three enormous cut-glass chandeliers and two fireplaces, it is otherwise sparsely furnished–principally with a 1938, gilt-edged Steinway grand piano and two priceless paintings: the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington that Dolley Madison rescued from the British pillage of 1814, and John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Teddy Roosevelt.
Through a side door from the East Room is the cheery, very Federalist Green Room, which was once a guest bedroom, later Thomas Jefferson’s dining room and ultimately the sitting room that is there today.
“Jimmy Madison, who was very quiet and shy, used to wait in there during White House receptions while his vivacious wife Dolley would go and round up important people he needed to speak to,” said historian William Seale, author of “The President’s House” (White House Historical Association, $40), the official White House history commissioned by the Reagan administration. “He was kind of like a spider in his web.”
After that, facing the front door of the house, is the Blue Room, the central chamber on the main floor and one of three oval rooms in the White House (not counting the Oval Office). Refurbished by Mrs. Clinton in 1995, the chamber is furnished in very regal French Empire style, with rather outsized and garish presidential seals on the backs of the several chairs.
This is the room where Presidents and First Ladies traditionally receive the VIPs among their guests at State Dinners and at other occasions, and it possesses one of the house’s best views, looking toward the Potomac, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial.
At one point, this chamber actually served as a sort of throne room. Martin Van Buren’s daughter-in-law Angelica Singleton Van Buren, a 6-foot-tall beauty who also served as his First Lady, became a good friend of the young Queen Victoria while living in England and adopted some of her royal ways. Mentored by her older cousin, Dolley Madison, Angelica took to staging tableau vivants in the Blue Room, in which she’d adorn herself in an extravagant headdress, seat herself in a throne on a raised dais and surround herself with ladies in waiting.
“They’d pose like that for visitors to the president who were walking by,” said Seale. “They were supposed to look in and admire them.”
One of the big issues that cost Van Buren reelection was his alleged extravagance.
Next is the Red Room, where the likes of Sylvester Stallone and girlfriend were once seen admiring the art (“These people had bad teeth,” he remarked).
“After dinner, Ulysses Grant would gather in there with his old Civil War generals,” Seale said. “They’d get down on the carpet and fight old battles with toy soldiers.”
An 1842 portrait of Angelica, who wears a feathered headdress and whose reputed beauty was not exaggerated, hangs over the white marble fireplace of the Red Room.
After that is the State Dining Room, which seats 140 guests, usually at tables for 10. Above one of its two fireplaces is the famous George P.A. Healy portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Carved into the mantel beneath it is an inscription taken from a letter by John Adams written on his second night in the White House: “I pray Heaven to Bestow the Best of Blessings on THIS HOUSE and on All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but honest and Wise Men ever rule this roof.”
During Teddy Roosevelt’s tenure, this stately chamber also served as trophy room for the mounted heads of many of the wild animals TR killed on his continual hunting sprees. Mrs. Clinton said that, as part of her refurbishing efforts, members of her staff had suggested restoring the State Dining Room to its decapitated TR glory.
“I have some prerogatives,” she said. “I said `No.'”
Going up . . .
On the second floor above are nine rooms, used both as family and guest quarters and for formal and informal entertaining. These include a very gracious Yellow Oval Room, situated just above the Blue Room and done in Louis XVI, late 18th Century style, where presidents and first ladies often entertain smaller parties.
At either end of the floor are the East and West Sitting Halls (noted for their semicircular windows), as well as the President’s Dining Room, where the family usually eats. The Queen’s Bedroom, down the hall, was named for a royal visitor from Britain named Elizabeth and was where Maureen Reagan lived as First Daughter (she was said to be highly reluctant to leave).
Also on this floor is the famous Lincoln Bedroom, in which is displayed one of the original drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation. This was actually Lincoln’s office during his presidency, a time when job-seekers and even the general public were allowed to wander the hall outside.
There is an actual secret passage on this floor (opened by pressing a wall panel next to a painting). It leads to the family’s very private quarters above. The Reagans used to maintain an exercise room down the hall.
Barbara Bush’s principal sewing room was a former bedroom at the southwest corner of the house, from which she could look across the Rose Garden and down into the windows of the Oval Office while her husband was at work there.
Mrs. Bush also had another second-floor bedroom converted into a homey upstairs office for the president, its antique-style furniture actually containing a multiscreen television console, all manner of communications equipment and his personal computer.
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the president, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft would have meals served up there, conducting the military campaign against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in these pleasant surroundings while Mrs. Bush sat and did her needlepoint.
In her just-published book, “An Invitation to the White House,” Mrs. Clinton reveals some of what went on in both private and public quarters during the two terms of the presidency, including a costume party in which she and her husband dressed up as James and Dolley Madison, and teenage sleepovers in which Chelsea and her friends bunked in sleeping bags all over the Third Floor.
Mrs. Clinton also had the government create a private “livable kitchen” on the second floor, where she and the president could dine a deux and raid a refrigerator for snacks.
Though she failed to intrude much Modern art on the two State Floors of the White House, she did add a painting by 19th Century African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner to public view, and had revolving exhibitions of highly contemporary and sometimes eyebrow-raising sculpture on display for months at a time in the East Wing First Ladies’ Garden.
On the public/private second floor, she also installed Modern works by Willem de Kooning and Vasily Kandinsky. How much these appeal to Laura Bush should become apparent soon.
HOME IMPROVEMENTS
Whether bringing Modern art into the White House as did First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, or making sure one’s favorite color (red, in the case of First Lady Nancy Reagan) became a part of the presidential digs’ decor, or ordering a complete demolition of the deteriorating interior as did President Harry Truman, the 41 first families have left their marks. “The White House has never been a static house frozen in time,” writes White House curator Betty Monkman.
