February 27, 2007
Decorators-in-Chief IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:15 PM EST Alexander Burns writes about how open the White House was when the Lincolns were in residence, how casual everything was, and how lax was security—if it can even be said security existed at all. He writes, “One can hardly imagine a similar scene in any recent White House.” Things weren’t that casual in recent years to be sure, but they were still remarkably casual by the standards of today. The late journalist David Brinkley, in his memoirs about his early days in Washington just before the Second World War, recalled a couple driving a convertible down Pennsylvania Avenue when it started to rain. The man simply swung into the driveway of the White House and stopped under the porte-cochère in order to put up the top. The doorman came out and helped, the man thanked him, got back in the car, and continued his drive down Pennsylvania Avenue. Today, of course, one cannot even drive past the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, let alone into the driveway, because of security concerns.
February 27, 2007
Decorators-in-Chief III Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon addresses the question of presidential decor and points out that we owe a debt to Jacqueline Kennedy for making the White House the majestic building it is today. He also mentions the White House’s long history of shoddy treatment at the hands of earlier Presidents and points out that Mary Todd Lincoln ended up outspending the Clintons in her efforts to restore the seat of American executive power. I’d like to continue discussing this last point, regarding the Lincolns’ redecoration. Mr. Gordon is surely right that “the nation had other calls on its treasury” when Mary Lincoln decided to refurbish the White House. In fairness to Mrs. Lincoln, her redecorating was rather less selfish than the Clintons’ (or the Reagans’). Rather than just redecorating the presidential residence, Mrs. Lincoln refurbished the entirety of the White House. Furthermore, in 1861 the White House was a much more public place than it is today. One of the reasons that Lincoln had to spend so much money to improve the building was that it hosted many more uninvited guests than one might imagine. Doris Kearns Goodwin describes this in her recent work, Team of Rivals: “The White House family quarters were confined to the west end of the second floor. . . . The rest of the mansion was largely open to the public. . . . [Secretary of State William] Seward reported to his wife, ‘the grounds, halls, stairways, closets’ were overrun with hundreds of people, standing in long winding lines and waving their letters of introduction in desperate hope of securing a job.” One can hardly imagine a similar scene in any recent White House. Like Mr. Gordon, Goodwin acknowledges that the wartime footing of the nation left Mrs. Lincoln’s renovations open to criticism as frivolous expenses. The outcome of the renovations was widely applauded, though, and the public response to mansion’s new appearance was one of pride. In a time when the White House was both a symbol of national dignity and a landmark that the public could enjoy, cosmetic expenditures might have seemed rather more forgivable. I imagine (though I don’t know) that the secretary of war would have felt differently.
February 26, 2007
Decorators-in-Chief II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Alexander Burns mentions Deval Patrick’s early stumble as governor of Massachusetts, spending the people’s money a little too freely on curtains. This is a common problem, it seems to me. When David Dinkins became mayor of New York, in 1988, he caused an uproar by ordering up a new bed for Gracie Mansion that cost, if I remember correctly, $8,000. Mr. Burns notes that the Reagans got a group of supporters to pay for a redecoration job and the Bushes—typical WASPs—were happy with what they inherited from the Reagans. He also notes that the Clintons spent $400,000 of government money to refurbish the private quarters of the White House when they moved in, in 1993. Of course, that was only one of a remarkable number of early stumbles by the Clintons. There were the Travel Office firings, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that managed to offend just about everybody, the legendary haircut by some overpriced Hollywood hairstylist on Air Force One that shut down LAX while Osgood of Rodeo Drive, or whatever his name was, snipped. There was the seemingly endless number of unknown half brothers—courtesy of the President’s traveling-man father—who kept emerging from the woodwork. And then there was my favorite, the two Clinton aides who commandeered a marine helicopter to take them out to a golf course for an afternoon of fun. At least the aides got canned for that stumble. Things only settled down when Bill Clinton brought in Washington veteran David Gergen—a Republican!—to provide a little adult supervision. Much earlier, Mary Todd Lincoln famously went over budget redecorating the White House in 1861, when the nation had other calls on its treasury. The budget was $25,000, which, factoring in inflation, means she spent more than the Clintons did. Thomas Jefferson thought the White House large enough for “three kings, two emperors, and a pope,” but moved in anyway. He never seemed to have noticed that Monticello is not exactly a one-room shack. In fact, of all the world’s official residences for heads of state, the White House is perhaps the most modest. It would probably fit in one of the courtyards of Windsor Castle and is far smaller than Buckingham Palace. But unlike those two residences, the White House has often been treated by its residents as though it had no history. Departing families carted off furniture and paintings and often redecorated the rooms in the mode of momentary fashion. Photographs of the White House principal rooms in the late nineteenth century can make the least fashion conscious wince to look at them. So perhaps the only person to gain credit rather than criticism for redecorating the White House was Jacqueline Kennedy. When the Kennedys moved in, in 1961, the furnishings were both tacky and in bad shape, as though they had been ordered up from a department store and then not cared for, which in large measure was exactly the case. Mrs. Kennedy made it a major project to bring the state rooms up to a high level in keeping with the style of the building. She worked with the well-known decorator Sister Parish and Henry du Pont, the founder of the Winterthur museum, and wrote personally to people who owned furniture that had once been in the White House, asking for it to be donated. She arranged for a bill in Congress that would make the White House furnishings the property of the Smithsonian so that future presidential families wouldn’t take them home, as so many previous families had done. The result was a triumph and culminated in a widely watched tour of the White House by the First Lady and Charles Collingwood of CBS that changed the way the country thought about the White House. Today, the state rooms of the White House are not only beautifully decorated but drenched in history as well, with almost every piece of furniture, painting, light fixture, and knickknack having a story to tell. We owe that transformation to Jacqueline Kennedy.
February 26, 2007
A Historian at the Helm Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:35 PM EST It has always been characteristic of the news media to focus on the scandalous, embarrassing, and tragic. As Fred Smoler wrote a while back, many reporters tend to live by the maxim “If it bleeds, it leads.” It was consequently unsurprising to me that there was relatively little media coverage of Harvard University’s decision, earlier this month, to name the historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its new president. When I say “relatively little” coverage, I mean relative to the national frenzies that broke out intermittently over the last two years as then–Harvard President Lawrence Summers stumbled his way into early retirement. In contrast, the naming of Faust as president-designate was noted in a number of news stories, most of which focused on her gender and the university’s apparent retreat from Summers-style leadership. This is unfortunate, as Faust is a more intriguing character, and the calculus of her appointment seems more complicated, than most articles suggested. First, it is significant that Faust, currently the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is a historian. A few weeks before her appointment, I spoke to a former Summers aide about the presidential search and asked who he expected would be the next president. He said he wasn’t sure who, specifically, the search committee would choose, but confessed he expected it to be a scientist. Harvard has not had a scientist as president since James Conant vacated the office in 1953. While this is a source of understandable frustration to the science faculty, it is a good thing for the rest of the university that this streak will continue. These days, it is awfully easy to act as though anyone studying something non-utilitarian is wasting her time. It is fortunate that Faust, a distinguished scholar of Civil War history, will not bring such narrow intellectual values to University Hall. It is unfortunate that virtually none of the discussion of Faust’s appointment, even on campus, has taken her scholarship into consideration. There’s been fairly vigorous debate here over whether she is well suited to the job of president, but so far as I have seen, few commentators have seen fit to seriously consider the content of her academic work. I’ve only had time to read a few of her papers, but from what I have seen her work is both thorough and provocative. Her writing on the Civil War is, admittedly, more in the realm of social and cultural history than of military or political history. It does not appear, though, to be as soft or insubstantial as cultural history can be. In a 2001 essay in The Journal of Southern History, Faust examined how the Civil War “violated prevailing assumptions about life’s proper end—about who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances.” The subject may be a little vaguer than, say, the second day’s events at Gettysburg, but the primary evidence Faust musters is extensive, and the historical content of the work is serious. My deepest reservation about Faust’s appointment is that it is undoubtedly a safe choice for the university. She is unlikely to cause unnecessary controversy, like Summers, but she also seems less likely to risk ruffling faculty feathers, as Summers did and as other possible presidential choices, like Law School Dean Elena Kagan, might have done. My unease in this area is somewhat calmed by the willingness to provoke that is evident in some of her earlier scholarship, such as a 1990 paper in which she asserted: “It may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War.” It may not be surprising for a feminist professor to focus on the historical contributions of women, but it is a bolder task altogether to so overtly assail the tightly held cultural assumptions about Southern culture and womanhood. The president of Harvard is treated as an international academic leader. I hope Faust brings the same originality and iconoclasm to that role that she has brought to her historical scholarship.
February 26, 2007
Decorators-in-Chief Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:10 PM EST There is a heated controversy unfolding up here in snowy Massachusetts regarding the personal expenditures of Governor Deval Patrick. Inaugurated last month, Patrick is the first Democratic governor of this state since Michael Dukakis. He is only the second African-American governor ever elected in the United States. He was elected after running an insurgent, liberal primary bid against two better-known candidates and then dispatching the extremely well financed incumbent lieutenant governor in the general election. Patrick is apparently just as prone to amateur mistakes as other new executives. It seems that he has been spending an awful lot of money on private perks, like $12,000 drapes for his office and a $72,000-a-year private secretary for his wife, who is a partner at Boston’s biggest law firm. In the midst of a media firestorm, Patrick backed off of these expenses, agreeing to cover the cost of drapes himself and paying, out of pocket, for the difference in price between his new Cadillac and the previous governor’s car, a Crown Victoria. He also apologized for his poor judgment, although obviously without enthusiasm. The media’s furor has not totally subsided, though, as yesterday’s edition of the Boston Herald bore a caustic editorial from the conservative firebrand Howie Carr, titled “Draped in Controversy, Is It Curtains for Deval?” As one would expect, Patrick is not the first newly elected politician to stumble over such expenditures as these. When Bill Clinton was elected President, he and the First Lady planned a $400,000 renovation of the presidential quarters in the White House. To make matters worse, they hired an unknown decorator from Arkansas named Kaki Hockersmith to oversee the renovation. Given the decorator’s obscurity, newspapers remarked at the time, “the big price tag seems surprising.” Like so many questionable things they did in office, the Clintons got away with this. But the public wasn’t happy about it. The Clintons’ predecessors in the White House, the Bushes, were not terribly interested in redecorating, but the Reagans most certainly were. The fortieth First Family, however, approached the task of redecoration rather differently from the Clintons (and Patricks). They set up a private fund under the supervision of Nancy Reagan’s chief of staff, Peter McCoy, to pay for alterations to the presidential residence and raised nearly $400,000 for the project. During a one-month period in early 1981, 167 donors contributed $375,529 for the White House remodeling, which McCoy claimed “was designed to re-establish the dwelling, the edifice,” and would benefit future presidential couples as well as the Reagans. The Reagans’ approach was not without its own problems. The private fund, while allowing the Reagans to refurbish their living quarters without using taxpayer money, also provided a convenient way for wealthy Americans to give indirect personal gifts to the President. While McCoy asserted that the project was intended to benefit the White House, and not just the Reagans, it was clear who the fund’s most immediate beneficiaries would be. Furthermore, the names of McCoy’s 167 donors were not made public, which led to complaints about a lack of transparency. If political executives want to redecorate their living and work spaces, they obviously have to negotiate a tricky set of public interests in order to do so. Reading over the Deval Patrick affair, I have to wonder why more leaders can’t, in this regard, be a little more like George H. W. and Barbara Bush—and leave the decorating to the next guy.
|
