Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

but I finally coaxed Bill out of the Midwestern Ball at the Sheraton Hotel when the musicians started packing away their instruments. We headed back to the White House well after two in the morning.

When we stepped out of the elevator into the second floor residence, we looked at each other in disbelief: this was now our home. Too tired to explore these grand new surroundings, we crashed into bed.

We had been asleep for only a few hours when we heard a brisk knock on the bedroom door.

Tap, tap, tap.

“Whuh?”

TAP, TAP, TAP.

Bill bolted up in bed, and I groped for my glasses in the dark, thinking there must be some sort of emergency on our very first morning.

Suddenly the door swung open and a man in a tuxedo stepped into the bedroom carrying a silver breakfast tray. This is how the Bushes began their day, with a bedroom breakfast at 5:30 A.M., and it’s what the butlers were accustomed to. But the first words this poor man heard from the forty-second President of the United States were, “Hey! What are you doing here?”

You never saw anyone back out of a room so quickly.

Bill and I just laughed and settled back under the covers to try to steal another hour of sleep. It struck me that both the White House and we, its new occupants, were in for some major adjustments, publicly and privately.

The Clinton Presidency represented generational and political change that would affect every institution in Washington. For twenty of the previous twentyfour years, the White House had been a Republican domain. Its occupants had been members of our parents’

generation. The Reagans often ate dinner in front of the television on TV trays and the Bushes reportedly awoke at dawn to walk the dogs, and then read newspapers and watch the morning news shows on the five television sets in their bedroom. After twelve years, the dedicated permanent staff was used to a predictable routine and regular hours.

Children hadn’t lived there fulltime since Jimmy Carter left office in 1981. I suspected that our family’s casual lifestyle and roundthe-clock work habits were bound to be as unfamiliar to the staff as the formality of the White House was to us.

Bill’s campaign had emphasized Putting People First, so on our first full day in the White House we wanted to make good on that promise by inviting thousands of people for an open house, many selected by lottery. They all held tickets and many had lined up in the dark before sunrise to meet us and the Gores. But we hadn’t anticipated how long it would take to greet everyone and hadn’t scheduled enough time. The lines stretched across the grounds from the East Gate to the South Portico, and I felt terrible when I realized many of the people waiting outside in the cold wouldn’t make it inside to the Diplomatic Reception Room before we had to leave. The four of us went outside to tell the hardy souls remaining how sorry we were that we could not stay to greet them, but that they were still welcome to visit their house.

After our other obligations ended late that afternoon, Bill and I were finally free to change into casual clothes and have a look around our new home. We wanted to share these first days and nights in the White House with our closest friends and family. There were two guest rooms on the second floor, referred to as the Queen’s Room and the Lincoln Bedroom, and seven other guest rooms on the third floor. In addition to Chelsea and her friends from Little Rock, our parents, Hugh and Dorothy Rodham and Virginia and Dick Kelley, and our brothers, Hugh Rodham (and his wife, Maria), Tony Rodham and Roger Clinton, were staying with us. And we had also invited four of our best friends, Diane and Jim Blair and Harry and Linda Thomason, to spend the night.

Harry and Linda produced and wrote several television shows, including the hugely successful Designing Women and Evening Shade, but their hearts never left the Ozarks.

Harry had grown up in Hampton, Arkansas, and started out as a high school football coach in Little Rock. Linda came from a family of lawyers and activists in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, just across the Arkansas State line. The only other famous person born in that patch of Missouri, Linda told us with a laugh, was Rush Limbaugh, the rightwing radio host who was one of George Bush’s biggest cheerleaders. Linda’s and Rush’s families knew each other and had a long-standing, amiable rivalry.

After a whirlwind week of inaugural festivities, it felt good to relax with people we had known for years and trusted completely. At the end of the evening, we decided to raid the small family kitchen off the West Sitting Hall. Harry and Bill checked the cabinets while Linda and I opened the refrigerator. It was empty except for one item: a halffull bottle of vodka. We used the contents to toast the new President, the country and our future.

Our parents had already gone to bed, and Chelsea and her guests were finally quiet.

The night before, the girls had come back early from the inaugural balls and had a great time going on a scavenger hunt staged for them by the curators and ushers. I thought it would be a good way for her to have fun and get familiar with her new environment. The curators came up with all sorts of historical clues, such as find “the painting with the yellow bird” (Still Life with Fruit, Goblet and Canary by Severin Roesen, in the Red Room) and find “the room where it is sometimes said a ghost has been seen.” (The Lincoln Bedroom, where guests have reported cold breezes and spectral figures.) I don’t believe in ghosts, but we did sometimes feel that the White House was haunted by more temporal entities. Spirits of administrations past were everywhere. Sometimes they even left notes. Harry and Linda were given