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

she can remember them ever having. “We have to move December seventh, Bird,” Johnson told his wife. “Lyndon, any day but that. Any day but that,” her mother pleaded, but in vain.
    When the Johnson family finally arrived, their daughter Luci brought their beagles, “Him” and “Her,” in her convertible. Lady Bird and Bess and her press secretary, Liz Carpenter, brought breakable items, along with a portrait of House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a fellow Texan who was Johnson’s mentor.
    At first the Johnsons seemed to treat the White House gingerly, as though they were impinging on sacred ground. But the residence staff, unlike Kennedy’s political aides, never made them feel like interlopers. “I never felt a sense of, ‘How could you be here?’” Luci told me. “It was, ‘Oh, how tough to have you come here this way. How can we help? How can we teach?’”
    Not everyone was welcoming. After Kennedy’s assassination,Traphes Bryant, an electrician who started caring for the first family’s dogs with the Kennedys (they had nine dogs at one point) and didn’t stop until the Nixons, was wary of President Johnson. “I was losing a dog and gaining a president I didn’t know. Not only didn’t I know him, I didn’t think I wanted to know him. He wasn’t boyish or good-natured or quick-witted like Kennedy, and I heard him cussing out the help when things weren’t done fast enough.” Bryant describes the abrupt shift at the White House to accommodate the new president: “Terriers were out and beagles were in. Jackie pink was out, Lady Bird yellow was in. Chowder was out and chili was in.” He hoped that one thing would remain the same, that Johnson would appreciate the way that he trained presidential dogs to greet their owners on the South Lawn when they returned from a trip on the marine helicopter. President Kennedy thoroughly enjoyed the tradition. He always gave a broad smile and greeted the waiting dogs “as if they were his distinguished hosts.”
    After the Kennedys’ abrupt departure he writes touchingly, “Toddlers were out and teenagers were in,” referring to Caroline and John-John’s successors at the White House, the Johnsons’ teenage daughters, Luci and Lynda. Ultimately, though, Bryant would grow to love the Johnsons.
    In her memoir, Lady Bird Johnson described the impossible task of trying to replace Jackie, marveling at the “element of steel and stamina” that must have flowed through her predecessor’s veins. She said she felt as though she were “suddenly onstage for a part I never rehearsed.”
    While the new president was working in his temporary quarters, the White House staff had quietly made arrangements for the transition. Just four days after the assassination, Chief Usher J. B. West visited Lady Bird at the Johnsons’ Washington mansion, known as the Elms, where they discussed what furniture the Johnsons would bring with them to the White House.
    Later that afternoon, Mrs. Johnson had tea with JFK’s widow at the White House. The outgoing first lady graciously showed her successor the second floor, allowing her to consider how her furniture would fit into the bedroom and sitting room Mrs. Kennedy had occupied for almost three years. “Don’t be frightened of this house—some of the happiest years of my marriage have been spent here—you will be happy here,” Jackie said. Lady Bird said she told her this so often during her tour that it felt “as though she were trying to reassure me.”
    Jackie told her that J. B. West and Curator Jim Ketchum were the most dependable members of the residence staff. Ketchum, who served as the White House chief curator from 1963 to 1970, fondly recalls his first meeting with Lady Bird shortly after the family moved in. As one of four people on the curatorial staff, Ketchum was in charge of cataloguing and protecting every piece of furniture and artwork in the White House’s private collection, ranging from masterpieces by John