Description

Upstairs. When the President awakens in his four-poster mahogany bed, his eyes may travel out over the verdure of the White House park to the massy shaft of the Washington monument, which gleams pink at sunrise. If he goes to his south window and peers to the right, he may also see a corner of the State, War & Navy Building. In his room is the bed that was built for Abraham Lincoln, so huge (6 1/2 ft. by 9 ft.) that four Roosevelt children could be comfortably tucked away in it crosswise.

The First Lady's room adjoins the President's on the east. On the other side is the dressing room where stood the Coolidge mechanical horse, and where the standardized blue serge Hoover suits, the standardized Hoover shoes, the tall stiff standardized Hoover collars, will be adjusted.

Dressed, the President passes down a broad centre hall to the main staircase, or to the automatic elevator, which is nearer. On his left are guest rooms, furnished with tester beds, highboys, oldtime "wash-stands," rockers, clothes presses. On his right is the circular family sitting room, flushed with sunlight, a room with a generous fireplace, favorite easy chairs, favorite books, personal keepsakes--a warm home-like chamber.

East of this room is the President's private office, or study, for generations the old Cabinet room. Here on the flag-flanked "Resolute" desk, a long-ago gift from Queen Victoria, wait the morning papers. It is a cheery room, with bookcases marching up the walls. Here the President receives his favored visitors.

At the east end of the hall are three abrupt steps up. Beside them, in the hall's southeastern corner, once sat "Bill" Price of the Washington Star, first of all Washington newsgatherers to make a serious enterprise, under McKinley, of "covering" the President. All newsmen have long since been banished from the inner White House. Until Roosevelt's time, the President's executive offices were up the three steps, filling all second-story space over the East Room. The East Room's extra height elevates the second floor here, thus lowering the sills of the upstairs windows and necessitating window bars for safety.

Downstairs. In the many-colored state apartments are held the great social functions of the Presidency--the 75-place dinners on gold plate, the four crowded receptions with 2,500 officials and ladies invited to each.

Important reception guests draw up in front, under the White House porte cochere, and march directly in past the President's Seal embedded in the floor of the main foyer.

Less important guests go to the east entrance, on East Executive Ave., and reach the White House through a long corridor-cloakroom.

The reception line forms in the basement and crawls up a red-carpeted stairway to the main floor (see cut), where it turns left into the foyer. Vast mirrors double the crowd. Light sprays from a huge bronze lantern overhead and from countless bronze standards about the walls.

On the west side of the foyer, in a grove of potted palms, the red-jacketed Marine Band blares martially. Young military aides ply softly up and down, keeping the line of guests moving decorously but swiftly into the State Dining Room, where the faint may refresh themselves with clear ice water from a mahogany sideboard.

From the diningroom walls, President and Mrs. Coolidge, in oils, gaze coolly down upon the throng. (Taft and Wilson are in the foyer; Roosevelt in the hall. All the Presidents except Harding hang somewhere in the White House.)

The parade turns into the Red Room, with its hot velvet wall covering and over-stuffed furniture. Conversation dwindles as the Presence is approached.

The guest steps next into an oval room done in blue and gold. Formal gilt chairs stand at attention along the silken walls. The north end of the room is roped off with a plush cord, behind which, beholding the spectacle, stands an especially splendid group of persons, the prime guests of the evening.

At the south end of the room, unsurrounded, in careful formation, stand four people. The reception guest suddenly recognizes the President. The next figure is, of course, the First Lady. Between them and the guest is a military aide, and behind the aide, at the President's elbow, a bodyguard.

"Name, please?" whispers the aide, and repeats the answer to the President, who says "Good evening" and gives the guest's hand one firm vibrant grip, with a little final jerk which draws the guest in front of the First Lady almost before he can realize that his moment has come and passed. The First Lady repeats her husband's greeting and offers her hand.

The guest bows--and soon finds himself in the Genoese velvet Green Room. Just beyond is the spacious, cream-paneled East Room with gold damask draperies and twelve AEsop's Fables in low relief. Here amid more potted palms, the line of march disperses.

The guests may mingle, talk, admire the gilded Steinway piano where a Miss Grace Goodhue, tourist, tinkled roguishly one day when she could never have dreamed of becoming First Lady.

At 10 p.m. the President and his Lady, preceded by aides, and followed by the Cabinet et ux., march sedately out of the Blue Room, across the hall, up the broad stone steps to the upstairs sitting room. Sliding metal gates on the stair click shut behind them.

The Marine Band now moves into the East Room. The guests may dance or wander about--until 10.30.

Executive Offices. Stepping hopefully from his taxicab, a Job-Seeker enters a square yellow-walled lobby. Ahead of him he sees a fireplace (but never, during the Coolidge Era, a fire). A White House guard directs him up a corridor leading off the right side of the lobby. He is eyed as he advances by a Secret Service man seated or lounging at the corridor's end. Across from this sentinel sits a watchdog, Doorman Pat McKenna. Credentials are inspected and the Job-Seeker is shown through a heavy white door into the President's No. 1 Secretary's office (see cut).

If the Job Seeker is an oldtimer, he now gets a handshake. Otherwise No. 1 Secretary listens very briefly to his case and waves him down on a deep leather couch to wait anywhere from five to 50 minutes.

A buzzer buzzes. Up jumps the Job-Seeker. No. 1 Secretary goes to investigate. If all is well, he opens another white door for the Job-Seeker to pass, through a short passage, into a large green oval room with three bay windows at one end, a marble fireplace (with fire) at the other. At a flat-topped mahogany desk sits the President.

The President's chair is a wicker-backed swiveller. A Presidential nod seats the Job-Seeker in a green leather armchair, edged close to the desk. He begins his earnest plea. . . . The Presidential eye reverts occasionally to an ornate gilt clock under glass upon the mantel. Every tick is treasured. The Job-Seeker rises to go. . . .

He does not leave by the door opposite where he came in. If he did, he would find himself in the President's telephone ("Main 6") and cloakroom or, beyond that, in the Cabinet Room with its long low reddish table, set about with black leather chairs.* Instead, he marches right rear to a door letting him into another corridor. Now he must turn to the left. To the right is the way the President goes when returning to the White House (via the basement) or when going out to his posinground to be photographed.

Elated or dismayed, the Job-Seeker travels back to the lobby. This time he is approached and surrounded by the press, rising from benches, emerging from their cubby-hole quarters, flocking about to ply him with artful questions. He calls them "Boys" and, if wise, conceals all the President has said.

A guard in blue whistles for a cab and off, to the immense admiration of the throng of mere tourists waiting outside, goes the Job-Seeker.

*Cabinet members pay $85 each to take their chairs with them out of office.