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

knickknacks they brought with them from Little Rock, including a memorable collection of frogs. When Hillary and Bill were dating, it seemed, he had charmed her with a story from his childhood. The punch line was: “You can’t tell how far a frog will jump until you punch him.” Translation: You never know how far you can go until you try—an apt anecdote for the ambitious young couple. When her husband first ran for office, Hillary gave Bill a drawing of a frog being punched and jumping with the saying underneath. In 1993, for her birthday, Bill gave her a glass frog wearing a crown and a note that read: “This could have been me if you hadn’t come along.”
    To Hockersmith, initially unaware of their sentimental significance, the frogs looked like a mishmash of misguided gifts. “Somebody goes to your house and they think, ‘Oh they must like frogs.’ Then you’re given a frog for your birthday.” She did her best to make them work.
    When the first family returns to the White House from theparade viewing stands, Hockersmith recalls, “That’s when everyone else disappears.” The residence workers, who have been working to make the house perfect all day long, rush back to their respective shops to give the family some much-needed privacy.
    Hockersmith would become a White House fixture, staying in the Queens’ Bedroom off and on throughout Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House as redecoration efforts continued. Her guest room on the second floor was separated from their living quarters by pocket doors that close off the west end from the east end of the residence. She tried to make the house brighter, especially focusing on turning a drab second-floor Butler’s Pantry into an eat-in kitchen where Chelsea could do her homework. But the redecoration was met with mixed reviews, with Hockersmith’s elaborate Victorian furnishings in the Lincoln Sitting Room coming in for particular criticism.

    T HERE HAS BEEN no transition in modern memory as shocking as the sudden and violent upheaval that brought the arrival of Lyndon B. Johnson and his family to the White House. The residence staff had to help a devastated first lady and her two children move out, even as they were grieving themselves, and at the same time they had to help the Johnsons move in. And it all had to be done without making Mrs. Kennedy feel rushed, or the Johnsons feel as though they were being ignored. “I’ve been on panels with other social secretaries and they make it all sound so exciting when they got there,” says Lady Bird’s social secretary, Bess Abell, a Katharine Hepburn–esque presence who speaks with great affection about the Johnsons. “I moved into the White House on an entirely different occasion. Instead of coming in with the excitement and the thrill of an inauguration, we moved into a house that was covered with black crepe on all the chandeliers and the columns.”
    The new first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, often lamented the difficult position her family were suddenly thrust into. “People see the living and wish for the dead,” she’d say.
    Out of respect for the president’s widow, Lyndon B. Johnson—who was largely disliked by Kennedy’s staff—did not move into the White House until December 7, 1963. He started working out of the Oval Office on November 26; before then he worked out of Room 274 in the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House. Some of Johnson’s advisers argued that moving in to the residence on December 7, the twenty-second anniversary of the horrific attack on Pearl Harbor, would be disrespectful. Others simply wanted to give Mrs. Kennedy more time before leaving the White House. Every move the Johnsons made must have been excruciating since nothing they did could help endear them to President Kennedy’s heartbroken aides.
    Luci Baines Johnson, just sixteen years old at the time, remembers eavesdropping as her parents had what she called the “only argument”