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.
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