Margaret Truman (13 page)

VI

Among the various animals that were sent to the White House during the Coolidge administration was a raccoon. It was intended to be the main course at Thanksgiving dinner, but Coolidge, a traditionalist, decided to stick with turkey. He took a liking to the raccoon and decided to keep her as a pet. He christened her Rebecca, installed her in a pen near the Oval Office, and gave her a steady diet of her favorite foods, shrimp and persimmons.

When Coolidge let Rebecca out of her pen, she would follow him around the White House, causing quite a stir among visitors, who thought there was a wild animal loose on the premises. They weren't entirely mistaken. Rebecca could be pretty wild when she wanted to be. Since raccoons have forepaws shaped like tiny hands, they are amazingly dexterous and can get into all sorts of mischief. Rebecca could unscrew lightbulbs, open cabinet doors, and unpot palms.

Being a nocturnal animal, Rebecca was at her best after dark. On pleasant evenings, she and the president used to take long walks together. It must have been quite a sight to see Coolidge strolling along with Rebecca on her leash waddling beside him.

Theodore Roosevelt's children shared their father's love of wild creatures. As a boy in New York, Teddy once met a friend of his mother's on a streetcar. As he tipped his hat politely, several frogs jumped out and landed in the woman's lap.

During their years in the White House, the young Roosevelts had an assortment of exotic pets including a parrot named Loretta, a blue macaw named Eli Yale, and a badger named Josiah.

Whatever you think of badgers, you'll probably agree that they are infinitely more appealing than snakes. The Roosevelt children had those, too. Quentin, the youngest of the Roosevelt sons, once went barreling into the Oval Office to show his father a pair of snakes he had found in the garden. The president, who was conferring with some of his cabinet members, directed him to wait outside.

Quentin retreated to the reception room and promptly struck up a conversation with a group of congressmen who had come to call on the president. The men displayed a great interest in the snakes until it dawned on them that they were real. By then, it was too late to retreat. When the president emerged from his meeting some minutes later, he found one of the congressmen gingerly helping Quentin retrieve a snake that had slithered up the man's coat sleeve.

The best known of the White House snakes (nonhuman variety) belonged to Roosevelt's teenaged daughter, Alice. She called it Emily Spinach “because it was as green as spinach and as thin as my aunt Emily.” Aunt Emily was her stepmother Edith Roosevelt's sister, Emily Carow.

According to Alice, the snake was affectionate and completely harmless, but the press made such a fuss about it that, as Alice said later, “one would have thought that I was harboring a boa constrictor in the White House.”

Unfortunately, Emily Spinach met an untimely end. Alice came home one day and found it dead in its box. Worse yet, it was lying in such an unnatural position that she had no doubt it had been killed. Alice was furious and would have found some way to exact revenge on the murderer, if only she had known who it was.

VII

Not all the animals that lived at the White House were kept as pets. In preautomobile days, there was always a stable full of horses, some for riding, others to pull presidential carriages. Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant also kept race-horses and Zachary Taylor brought along Old Whitey, the horse he had ridden during the Mexican War, although the poor steed was so ancient that he was good for very little except grazing on the White House lawn.

The only thing that could distract Old Whitey from his grazing was parade music. Every time he heard a brass band he would go looking for his place in the line of march. When the Marine Band appeared on the South Lawn for their evening concerts, Old Whitey had to be sequestered in the stables. Otherwise, he would have been breathing down the musicians' necks trying to find out when the parade was going to start.

I can understand horses at the White House, even Old Whitey, but cows? I have to keep reminding myself that keeping livestock in the backyard wasn't so strange in the nineteenth century. In those days, there weren't any supermarkets or convenience stores where you could pick up a quart of milk whenever you needed it.

The cows used to graze in an area just beyond the south fence (now the Ellipse), but they were locked up at night because for many years cattle rustling was a serious problem in Washington. The cows were milked by a cowman and the milk was stored in crocks for use in the White House kitchen.

The last cow to graze on the White House lawn was Pauline Wayne. She was sent to another pasture during President William Howard Taft's administration when commercial dairies became common and milk no longer had to be obtained directly from its source.

VIII

Other animals come and go but none of them have been able to edge dogs out of the White House spotlight. Almost every president has had at least one. Herbert Hoover had eight in addition to the famous King Tut. They ranged from a small black poodle called Tar Baby to a giant wolfhound named Shamrock.

Calvin Coolidge had almost as many dogs as Herbert Hoover. They included two chows named Timmy and Blackberry, and a pair of pure white collies named Prudence Prim and Rob Roy. Rob Roy was far and away the president's favorite, and the collie made sure everyone knew it. He accompanied Coolidge to his office every morning, walking directly in front of him looking neither to the left nor the right in a canine imitation of the Presidential Color Team.

Rob Roy's greatest claim to fame was having his portrait painted with Mrs. Coolidge. In the picture he's looking up at her with what I used to think was adoration on his face. I've since learned that she got him to pose by feeding him candy during the sittings. He may just be looking for another handout.

The portrait, by Howard Chandler Christy, hangs in the White House and has probably produced an acute case of jealousy in every other first dog who has seen it. I must say it's a remarkable painting not only because Mrs. Coolidge is so attractive, but because of the striking color scheme. The artist painted her wearing a bright red dress, which stands in vivid contrast to the snow-white dog at her side.

Calvin Coolidge had wanted his wife to wear a white brocaded satin gown that was one of his favorites, but Howard Chandler Christy objected. He felt that the combination of the red dress and the white dog would make a more pleasing picture.

The president deferred to the artist's judgment but not before offering one last argument: “She could still wear the dress and we'd dye the dog.”

IX

Traphes Bryant, who was the White House kennel keeper during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, rated Lyndon Johnson as the greatest pet lover of all our presidents. When the Johnsons moved into the White House, they brought along a pair of beagle puppies that had been given to their younger daughter, Luci. Their names were Him and Her and they were soon joined by another gift dog, a white collie named Blanco.

Lyndon often took time out from his busy schedule to play with the dogs and when he stepped out of his office and gave a whistle, they would come bounding over to him, each trying to be the first to get a pat on the head.

Her died when she was a little over a year old after swallowing a small rock she found on the White House lawn. A couple of years later, Him followed Her to the grave. He was indulging in his favorite sport, chasing squirrels, when he was hit by a White House car.

LBJ was heartbroken. He was not consoled by the fact that Blanco remained. Although Blanco was a fine-looking dog, he had very little to offer in the way of brains or personality. Then Yuki appeared.

Luci and her husband, Patrick Nugent, found him at a gas station in Austin, Texas. Nobody knew whom he belonged to so they took him home and when he and LBJ met, it was love at first sight. Yuki went back to Washington with the president and had the run of the White House. He hung out in the Oval Office, sat under the table at cabinet meetings, and was introduced to statesmen and celebrities. Yuki flew back to Texas with the Johnsons on Air Force One when LBJ's term was over.

What made Lyndon Johnson, whose dogs had always had impeccable pedigrees, become so attached to a homeless mutt? According to LBJ, there were two reasons: First, “He speaks with a Texas accent,” and second, but even more important, “He likes me.”

I've often thought how fitting it was that when Lyndon Johnson died suddenly of a heart attack in 1973, he was alone, except for Yuki.

X

Warren Harding's dog, Laddie Boy, once gave an interview to the Washington
Star
, but since then dogs have gotten even smarter. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush's English springer spaniel, Mildred Kerr Bush, actually wrote a book. She freely admitted that she didn't do it entirely on her own; she dictated it to First Lady Barbara Bush. The book became a best-seller and raised almost a million dollars for the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.

Millie was very much in the news during the Bush administration, particularly after she gave birth to six puppies at the White House in 1989. The Bushes got so many letters welcoming her brood that they had a thank-you card made up with their signatures and Millie and her offsprings' paw prints.

One of Millie's puppies went to George and Barbara Bush's granddaughters, Jenna and Barbara, in Texas. The girls named her Spot Fletcher after one of their heroes, Scott Fletcher, who played baseball for the Texas Rangers. When Fletcher was traded to another team, they dropped the dog's last name and now she is known simply as Spot.

In 2001, Spot followed in her mother's footsteps by moving into the White House, giving her the distinction of being the only second-generation presidential pet in White House history, and enabling her to feel quite superior to the first family's other dog, a Scottish terrier puppy named Barney.

XI

Speaking of Scottish terriers, no discussion of White House pets would be complete without some observations on the most famous one of all: Franklin D. Roosevelt's Scottie, Fala. He was not the first of FDR's dogs. There were several others before him but they all faded into the background when Fala came along in the spring of 1940.

Fala and the president became all but inseparable. The Scottie would sleep on a blanket in Roosevelt's bedroom and play on the grass outside the Oval Office. When the president went for a car ride, Fala was usually perched beside him on the seat. The Secret Service gave him the code name “The Informer,” because when Roosevelt traveled by train, the dog had to be walked, alerting everyone to the fact that the president was on board.

Fala was at home in the White House, in FDR's home at Hyde Park, and in Warm Springs, Georgia, where Roosevelt went to be treated for the polio that had paralyzed his legs in 1921. When FDR and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain met on a British battleship off the coast of Newfoundland in the summer of 1941, Fala went along and had his photograph taken with the two world leaders.

Fala was with Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia, when the president was stricken with, and died almost instantly from, a cerebral hemorrhage. The dog returned to the White House with the body of his master and was eventually taken to live with Eleanor Roosevelt. He died in the spring of 1952 and lies buried beside Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Hyde Park Rose Garden. He has also been immortalized in bronze at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, where he can be seen sitting at Roosevelt's feet just as he did in life.

Questions for
Discussion

How can a pet be an asset to a president?

Can you think of some reasons why goats and raccoons might not make good pets?

Why are dogs the most popular White House pets?

II

The war between the presidents and the press has been going on ever since the country began. President George Washington accused the journalists of his era of abusing him as if he were a “common pickpocket.” John Adams was certain the tribe of “scribblers” had deprived him of a second term.

To outwit his enemies in the press, Thomas Jefferson made one Washington newspaper, the
National Intelligencer,
the unofficial White House organ. Its editors frequently dined with the president, then rushed back to the printing presses to peddle the latest party line.

Andrew Jackson went Jefferson one better. He not only brought Kentuckian Francis Preston Blair to Washington to found the
Globe,
he made him a member of his “kitchen cabinet,” the group of unofficial advisers who met with the president at all hours of the night.

Francis Preston Blair gave his name to Blair House, which he purchased around 1830, giving him easy access to his patron and prime source of news. Needless to say, the
Globe
's loyalty to Jackson was total. When a cholera epidemic ravaged Washington, D.C., the Globe barely mentioned it. Blair was too busy filling his columns with pro-Jackson stories and endorsements.

III

Women were practically nonexistent in this dawn of White House journalism. For years I nurtured an admiration for one of the pioneers, a feisty female named Anne Royall, who published a newspaper called
Paul Pry
that was a forerunner of today's supermarket tabloids. (She lifted the title from a hit London comedy about a character who specialized in sticking his nose into other people's business.) Not a little of my admiration for Anne was based on the story that in the late 1820s she caught that ultimate presidential sourpuss, John Quincy Adams, swimming in the Potomac without a stitch on (something he did regularly). Anne supposedly sat on his clothes and refused to depart until he gave her an interview. Unfortunately, in the course of researching this book, I concluded the story (sigh) is not true.

Anne Royall nevertheless deserves a salute for her perseverance. Although her paper's circulation was never very high, she was a fixture on the Washington scene for forty years.

IV

By the time Anne Royall retired, things had begun happening in the newspaper world that made insider journalism passé. Steam-driven presses replaced the laborious hand-presses on which apprentices broke their backs, turning out one or two sheets at a time. Soon a journalist named James Gordon Bennett decided he could sell papers for as little as a penny a copy and still make money. That startling idea led Bennett to conclude he did not need a president's favor, or the backing of his enemies, to prosper. The era of the president as fair game for any and all reporters dawned.

Bennett became the owner and editor of the hugely successful New York
Herald
and a man almost as famous as the president, whoever he happened to be. His style of no-holds-barred reporting found one of its first targets in Martin Van Buren. According to Bennett: “Martin Van Buren and his atrocious associates form one of the original causes of the terrible moral, political and commercial desolation that spreads over the country.”

The
Herald
's abuse opened the door for similar attacks on succeeding presidents. James Polk, for instance, was called “Jim Thumb,” an uncomplimentary comparison to Tom Thumb, P. T. Barnum's famous midget.

Almost as startling as this casual abuse by the press is the access these scribes had to the president. One reporter described how he strolled into the White House “unheralded” and thrust himself into a reception President Pierce was giving for “a bevy of ladies.” The president greeted him “politely” and even introduced him to Mrs. Pierce. That did not stop the news hawk from launching into a diatribe against his host in the very next sentence.

V

In the crisis of the Civil War, the press acquired even more power. Thanks to the country's hunger for news, newspaper circulation soared and, with the invention of the telegraph and the rise of the railroads, stories could be quickly disseminated throughout the country.

That realistic man, Abraham Lincoln, saw newspapers as crucial to maintaining public support for the war. Lincoln seldom, if ever, turned away a reporter's request for information.

By the time the Civil War ended, newspapers had become so popular that succeeding presidents regarded them the way kings in the Middle Ages viewed dukes and barons—potential rivals for power, to be propitiated or outwitted or defied, depending on the circumstances. No less than 150 reporters were now permanently based in Washington, D.C., sending back news to their home papers.

Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's harried successor, gave long interviews to individual reporters, which did not save him from impeachment, though it may have rescued him from conviction. Ulysses Grant decided to tell reporters as little as possible. His wife, Julia, filled the gap and became the first presidential spouse to be interviewed by the press. When President James Garfield was shot in 1881, reporters were allowed to set up a press office on the second floor of the White House and transmit their stories from the telegraph room.

The steadily increasing power of the press was one of several reasons why Grover Cleveland appointed a former newspaper editor, Daniel Lamont, as his secretary. Lamont performed many of the duties that would later be taken over by the White House press secretary. Essentially he served as a buffer between the president and reporters, whom Cleveland lumped into a single epithet: “the dirty gang.”

VI

Grover Cleveland must have been appalled when a reporter appeared, quite literally, on his doorstep in 1896. William Price had come to the capital from a small town in South Carolina hoping to get a job on the
Washington Evening Star
. Looking for a way to get rid of him, the city editor sent him to the White House with orders to come back with a story. If he got one, the job was his.

As the editor well knew, the chances of getting any news from the Cleveland White House were almost nil. But Price was unfazed by the challenge. As the editor of a small-town weekly, he had gotten his news by hanging around the local train station and interviewing the people who arrived each day. Deciding to use the same strategy at the White House, he stood outside the North Portico and talked to the visitors who went in and out. “Fatty” Price—he weighed three hundred pounds—soon had a job at the
Evening Star
.

With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in the spring of 1898, the press finally managed to win working space in the White House. President William McKinley agreed to let Price and other reporters gather in the east hall on the second floor. There they could write their stories, interview visitors going in and out of the president's office, and badger his secretary for scraps of news.

Theodore Roosevelt ordered Charles McKim to include a pressroom in the new executive office building—today's West Wing. The scribes were even provided with telephones, eliminating the need for them to send their copy to Western Union by bicycle. There was something in all this for the president, of course. The press was instantly accessible anytime he wanted to barrage an opponent with hostile headlines.

VII

With Teddy Roosevelt, the country got a president who showed future Oval Office occupants how to handle the press and set the style for making the White House the red-hot center of the nation's politics. We have often heard about the way Theodore Roosevelt turned the presidency into a “bully pulpit,” but not many people realize how much manipulation of news and newsmen this involved.

Teddy (he hated the name) produced a gallery of presidential tricks still in use today. Bad news was released at the end of the day on Friday because many people slept late on Saturday and skipped reading the papers. Middling news was released in time for the Sunday papers, when hard up editors were likely to put it on the front page for lack of anything more interesting. TR was also the master of the trial balloon, an idea or proposal that he floated through some willing reporter and then might deny or even denounce if the public disliked it.

VIII

Woodrow Wilson's opinion of the press was on a par with Grover Cleveland's. “Those contemptible spies, the newspapermen,” he called them on one occasion. Nevertheless, Wilson became the first chief executive to hold regularly scheduled press conferences. Unfortunately, they were not very successful. The president, with his college professor background, lectured the reporters as if they were not-too-bright freshmen, and when their stories failed to get passing grades, he stopped seeing them almost entirely.

Although Wilson considered his press conferences a waste of time—and the reporters were inclined to agree with him— the fact that they had been established was an important step in the relationship between the White House and the press. The relationship was further formalized in 1914 when the newsmen organized the White House Correspondents Association. The move led to stricter rules about who could, and could not, attend presidential press conferences and created a forum where complaints by and against reporters could be heard.

IX

Although you would never guess it from all the stories about his taciturnity, Calvin Coolidge supplied more wordage to the press during his tenure than Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson combined. He was not only the first president to make radio addresses, he made them at the rate of one a month. He also met with the press twice a week.

Coolidge followed the presidential custom of accepting only written questions submitted to him in advance. That precedent was broken by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who let the reporters fire away. FDR also revived regular press conferences, which had all but disappeared during the Hoover administration. Roosevelt turned them into a Washington institution.

Once or twice a week, FDR would invite about twenty newspaper and radio reporters into the Oval Office and let them pelt him with questions that he sometimes answered and more often ducked, dodged, or joked away with his marvelous combination of charm and wit.

FDR's amicable relations with the press did not last. Some journalists grew disillusioned when he failed to cure the Great Depression. Others became skeptical after the outbreak of World War II when he barred them from covering such major stories as his 1941 meeting with Winston Churchill at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, and the 1943 Teheran conference with Churchill and Joseph Stalin. In both instances, British reporters broke the stories.

X

Meanwhile, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was changing White House coverage in a very important way. She started holding press conferences—for women reporters only. The Washington bureau chiefs, male to the last grizzled whisker, were thunderstruck. It meant they might have to let women start writing about something more important than the first lady's taste in china.

Mrs. Roosevelt's conferences were not replays of FDR's free-for-alls. The women reporters all wore hats and gloves—and that dreadful topic, politics, was forbidden. Mrs. R. sat among the women, often knitting while they chatted. Only gradually did the topics change from cooking, interior decorating, and White House entertaining to Mrs. Roosevelt's concern for the poor and neglected.

Though Eleanor Roosevelt often spoke up on behalf of black Americans, she never managed to reverse her husband's exclusion of black reporters from the White House, in spite of their frequent petitions. The president's press secretary, Steve Early, offered the not very convincing argument that the blacks represented weeklies, and White House correspondents were supposed to be from daily papers.

The blacks, good reporters, discovered that Early was letting in journalists from weekly trade papers and testily asked: How come? In 1944, after twelve frustrating years, black journalists finally joined the throng in the Oval Office.