Upstairs at the White House by J. B. West & Mary Lynn Kotz

Author:J. B. West & Mary Lynn Kotz [West, J. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4938-1
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2013-09-04T22:58:00+00:00

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AFTER LUNCH, THE KENNEDY children were bedded down, the maids and houseman scuttled away, and silence reigned upstairs at the White House. For the President of the United States, after a dip in the pool, came home from the office.

Just after they first moved in, Mrs. Kennedy had walked with me down the ground-floor corridor, out the west door, and along the colonnade by the Rose Garden, to the President’s oval office in the west wing. A brisk January breeze whipped at us as we opened the door to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s heated swimming pool.

“Do you think we could have this colonnade enclosed in glass, like the east entrance is, so that the President can get back from the swimming pool without walking in the cold air?” she asked. “He doesn’t like to dress after a swim.”

Without even glancing at the budget, I knew we couldn’t stand that kind of expenditure, nor could I see changing the stately colonnade for one President’s pleasure.

Instead, we cut a door through the flower shop, another through the exercise room, and when President Kennedy left the office at 1:30 every afternoon, he stopped by the pool, shed his clothes, swam nude for half an hour, wrapped himself in a towel-robe, and padded through the exercise room, through the banks of flowers, through the ground-floor corridor, to an elevator which took him upstairs, where he shed his robe, climbed into bed, and ate lunch (usually a hamburger or a glass of Metrecal) from a tray. He closed the door, firmly.

Mrs. Kennedy dropped everything, no matter how important, to join her husband. If she had visitors in tow, they would be left for me to entertain.

During those hours, the Kennedy doors were closed. No telephone calls were allowed, no folders sent up, no interruptions from the staff. Nobody went upstairs, for any reason.

At about three, the President, showered and dressed, walked back to his west wing office. Mrs. Kennedy went outside on the south lawn with her children, and then back inside to resume her business with redecorating, or to have her hair done. Usually at 5:30 she came upstairs to read, paint, or relax, and at 6:30 she would spend an hour with John and Caroline in their bedrooms or the West Hall.

The President, on his way back from the office, stopped at the swimming pool, and went through the same ritual again—swimming nude, walking over in his bathrobe, then changing clothes for dinner. George Thomas, his valet, had been over to retrieve his morning suit and deposit another bathrobe. (Some of the servants had bets on what the President would do if George forgot to take over the bathrobe: Would he dress, again, in the clothes he took off, or would he stride through the flower room and up the elevator, stark naked?) John F. Kennedy wore three separate suits of clothes every day of his White House life.

While he swam, Mrs. Kennedy dressed for dinner, then joined her husband for cocktails upstairs.

Rather than

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