The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House by Kate Andersen Brower

know.” (Nancy Reagan said her husband loved the luxury of the residence, referring to it as an eight-star hotel. She agreed. “Every evening, while I took a bath, one of the maids would come by and remove my clothes for laundering or dry cleaning. The bed would always be turned down. Five minutes after Ronnie came home and hung up his suit, it would disappear from the closet to be pressed, cleaned, or brushed.”)
    In her memoir, Barbara Bush offers a rare glimpse of how sheltered the first family becomes after years of having cooks, maids, and butlers. The Bushes had spent decades in public service andwere famously not accustomed to buying groceries. (During his 1992 reelection campaign, Bush was ridiculed after he marveled at a supermarket scanner.) Not long after leaving office, Barbara Bush says, her husband took his first trip to Sam’s Club and “bought the world’s biggest jar of spaghetti sauce and some spaghetti” for dinner.
    While he sat down to watch the evening news, the former first lady started to cook. She accidentally knocked the enormous jar of sauce off the counter, sending it crashing onto the kitchen floor. Their dinner plans ruined, they scrambled for an alternative. “That was the night George and I made an amazing discovery: You can call out for pizza!”
    Sometimes the good-byes are funny. Lyndon Johnson’s youngest daughter, Luci, now sixty-seven, entered nursing school while she was living at the White House, and for months she kept the cat fetus she used for dissection in class in the third-floor Solarium’s refrigerator. She fondly referred to the fetus as “Crunchy” because it was housed in a crunchy peanut butter jar. On the day she left, one staffer, a maid named Clara to whom she had grown particularly close, thrust the jar into her hands and said, “This is the only good thing I can think about you leaving.” The two hugged and “cried our eyes out.”
    “I knew it would never be the same,” Luci said. “I knew that she would be turning those energies and that deference and that grace just as quickly as I walked out the door to trying to help the Nixon girls feel just as much at home as she had made me. The allegiance that the White House domestic staff feels toward the White House and toward the president and his family who occupy it is something that makes you feel very proud to be an American.”
    White House Electrician and Dog Keeper Traphes Bryant, who was skeptical of LBJ when he first moved into the residence so full of bluster, was devastated when the Johnsons moved back to Texasin 1969. “It was over. It was really over. It was a relief. It was not a relief. It was as if someone told me I would never see a member of my family again,” he wrote in his memoir. “I had known LBJ and felt closer than a brother. And now if we met again, we would be almost like strangers. I felt lost. Then free, as I realized I wouldn’t have to take his guff anymore.”

    S OME TRANSITIONS ARE easier than others. President George W. Bush and his family brought only one chest of drawers and some family photos, because, Laura Bush said, “part of the fun” of living at the White House is going to the warehouse in Maryland and picking out pieces from the White House collection to furnish the house. It helped that the Bushes already knew the layout of the house. “You could hardly take a breath and it was done,” Bob Scanlan said of their move-in.
    Before the Bushes could start choosing furniture, however, they had to deal with a most unexpected complication: the 2000 recount, which kept the outcome of the election a mystery until December 12, more than a month after the votes were cast. Perhaps no one, aside from the candidates themselves, was watching the unfolding drama of the election quite as closely as the residence workers. Between Election Day and the day the Supreme Court upheld Bush’s victory, Walters scoured the news constantly, anxious to learn whom they would be