Margaret Truman by The President's House: 1800 to the Present : The Secrets, History of the World's Most Famous Home Page A

Nancy Reagan called the White House an eight-star hotel.
Credit: Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library
    8
    Frontstairs, Backstairs
    SOME OF THE most important people in the White House are all but invisible except to the families who live there. I’m talking about the household staff—the hundred or so men and women who prepare and serve the meals, vacuum the floors, polish the silver, repair the plumbing, check the wiring, and do whatever else is needed to keep the President’s House in perfect condition.
    Overseeing this large and varied assortment of workers is the chief usher, who is basically the general manager of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He—so far they have all been men— works directly with the president and first lady and conveys their requests to the rest of the staff.
    Every change in administration brings a spate of new requests. The day after Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House, he demanded that Chief Usher J. B. West do something about his shower. “If you can’t get it fixed,” he snapped, “I’m going to have to move back to The Elms”—a reference to the house he and his family had lived in during his vice presidency. West, with a couple of White House plumbers in tow, went up to inspect the offending shower. They found it in good working order, but it was not the superfancy model the president was used to. There was no way to regulate the direction and force of the spray.
    Accompanied by the plumbers and the White House engineer, West went out to The Elms to study the shower. It was unlike any they had seen before, but they got in touch with the manufacturer and were able to order a duplicate. The new shower was no sooner installed than the president was on the warpath again. This one wasn’t right either. West called the manufacturer again. This time they sent the company engineers to check out The Elms shower and make one that would be exactly the same.
    The new shower still didn’t satisfy the president so another one was ordered and when that one didn’t work, it was replaced by yet another one. The engineer decided the problem was water pressure, so a special tank with its own pump was installed just for the president’s shower. But it still wasn’t strong enough. West and his staff kept designing and redesigning LBJ’s shower, and spending thousands of dollars and untold man-hours in the process, trying to find one that would satisfy him. They ended up with a complicated fixture that had a half dozen different nozzles and sprays, but by the time they finally achieved perfection, Johnson was on the verge of moving out.
    When LBJ gave his successor, Richard Nixon, a tour of the White House, he made a point of extolling the wonders of his shower. After one encounter with LBJ’s maximum force spray, the new president called the chief usher’s office and said,
    â€œPlease have the shower heads all changed back to normal pressure.”
    II
    The job title chief usher dates back to Benjamin Harrison’s administration. There are various explanations of why it was adopted, but the most plausible one is that in the old days, the top man at the President’s House was the man who ushered people in to see the chief executive.
    The most durable chief usher in White House history has to be Irwin Hood Hoover, who went by the nickname Ike. Hoover was a twenty-year-old employee of the Edison Company when he was sent to the White House in 1891 to install the first electric lights for Benjamin Harrison. When he was finished, he got a letter from the commissioner of public buildings, offering him a permanent job as the house electrician. Hoover accepted the offer and he soon figured out why it had been made. President Harrison and his family were afraid to touch the light switches for fear of being electrocuted!
    Ike would turn on the lights in the downstairs rooms in the evening and turn them off when he came to work the next