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

Rogers describes their relationship with the staff as simply “very, very cordial,” the new president was considerably more reserved and less chatty than his immediate predecessors. Some staffers said they missed the easy camaraderie they had established with presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush. “With the Bushes, they wanted you to feel close to them,” Chief Usher Rochon said. With the Obamas, “you had to keep it completely professional.” Yet the Obamas have formed friendships with some of the men and women who work behind the scenes, and Butler James Jeffries said there’s an unspoken understanding and respect between the Obamas and the largely African American butler staff about the realities of being black in America. President Obama acknowledged this when he said that part of the butlers’ warmth to his family is because “they look at Malia and Sasha and they say, ‘Well, this looks like my grandbaby, or this looks like my daughter.’”
    Doorman Vincent Contee, eighty-four, worked every Monday and Tuesday from 1988 to 2009, escorting the president to and from the Oval Office on the elevator. “We got along swell,” he recalls. “I would see him in the mornings and he would talk and ask me how my day was going.” During his twenty-one years at the White House, Contee couldn’t afford to get too starstruck, in addition to talking to presidents on a regular basis, he also escorted icons like Nelson Mandela and Elizabeth Taylor on the elevator to meet the president in the family’s private quarters. He says even presidents can’t hide their exhaustion sometimes. There would come a point when every president he served would turn to him during that short elevator ride and sigh, “I just wish I could go back to bed and sleep all day.”
    On the way to the Oval Office, Obama would talk sports withContee. “He knew I was a football fan. I’m a Redskins fan. He would tell me when they got beat, you know, what they didn’t do or what they should do.” Sometimes Obama would ask him to take their Portuguese water dog, Bo, out for a walk on the grounds. When they were done, Contee would bring Bo back up to his room on the third floor.
    Still, the Obamas proved an especially private family, and Chief Usher Rochon sensed a certain distance between the staff and the new president. The Obamas seemed “uncomfortable,” he said, having “so many butlers and housekeepers waiting on them hand and foot.” For a couple who’d only recently finished paying off their own student loans, the level of personal service afforded by the White House staff must have been unnerving. “You have to give them their privacy,” Contee told me. “You’d talk to them momentarily and then they would be on their way and you would be on your way.”
    The Obamas were especially anxious to raise their daughters in as normal an environment as possible, even while living in a household staffed with dozens of cooks, butlers, and maids. In 2011, Michelle Obama told an interviewer that her older daughter, Malia, who was thirteen at the time, was going to start doing her own laundry—and that her own mother, Marian Robinson, who lives in a suite on the third floor, would teach her. “My mother still does her own laundry. She doesn’t want strangers touching her intimate wears.” The first lady’s former stylist, Michael “Rahni” Flowers, confirms that “Michelle is a no-nonsense kind of mother—and so is her mother. All they have to do is give you that eye, it will turn you into stone, it will stop you in your tracks.”
    Katie McCormick Lelyveld remembers how the first lady made the ground rules clear to her daughters. “While she appreciated that there are staff there to pay attention to those details, those staff are not there for the girls.” Michelle reminded her daughters: “Don’t get used to someone else making your bed, that’s on your chores list.”
    Still, after two grueling years on the campaign trail and a