Bed and Board

By Judy Fayard

UPSTAIRS AT THE WHITE HOUSE by J.B. WEST

381 pages. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $8.95.

When the young J.B. West first went to work as assistant to the chief usher at the White House in the spring of 1941, he found his boss busy making a room ready for F.D.R.'s son John Roosevelt, who was just getting out of the hospital.

"Is he very ill?" asked West. Indeed not, replied the chief usher. John had nothing more than a medium case of the sniffles. You see, he explained, "this goldfish bowl is made of magnifying glass."

West went on to become chief usher himself. Now retired, after 28 years of service to six First Families, he has applied his own magnifying glass to the everyday detail of life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and produced a dignified, yet down-home look at a series of tenants who moved in with a four-year lease but sometimes stayed on longer.

As chief usher--the title is left over from the days when the job consisted of "ushering" visitors in to see the President--West was in a unique position to observe his First Ladies. If no man is a hero to his valet, no lady can remain unknown to the man who controls the management, the personnel and the purse strings of her household. West's efforts to keep a diary were short-lived, but he has an observant eye and an astonishing memory for detail. Eleanor Roosevelt, he recalls, was "never once alone in the same room with her husband." Mamie Eisenhower, pink ribbon in her hair, propped up against her personally designed pink-tufted headboard, grandly issued commands at her daily bedside staff meeting like a general preparing for Dday. Jacqueline Kennedy instructed West to run the house as he would "for the chinchiest President ever elected." Why? Because, she confided, "we don't have nearly as much money as you read in the papers." Bess Truman spent long evenings with H.S.T., editing his speeches, discussing his policies, and entering into "nearly every decision the President made."

West is no tattletale. Nothing here to set tongues clucking, despite the author's dutiful one-paragraph references to the sleeping habits of the various presidential couples. (The Eisenhowers were the only pair to share a bedroom, "so I can reach over and pat Ike's old bald head any time I want to," Mamie once explained.)

Still, with more than due respect and the grandfatherly twinkle of one who has seen 'em all come and go, West offers the reader a fly-on-the-wall view of such things as a housemaid and F.D.R., in turn, discovering House Guest Winston Churchill's proclivity for stomping around his rooms, chomping his cigar, stark naked. West recalls Harry Truman's unreconstructed Southern mother's downright refusal to sleep in Lincoln's bed. Lyndon Johnson's specially installed, multinozzled, Texas-strength shower nearly knocked the newly elected Nixon clear out of the bathroom.

Although West obviously harbors a special regard for the Kennedys, their portraits seem less revealing than the others, perhaps because the public heard so much about Camelot when it was in flower. Still, few readers will forget Jacqueline Kennedy after the President's funeral: the stunned widow, about to leave the White House, pleadingly questioned West, "My children are good children, aren't they? They're not too spoiled?"

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