Residence staffers are government employees but they serve at the pleasure of the president and can be hired and fired at his or her discretion. (Clinton’s aides say that if she wins, First Gentleman Bill Clinton will not take on all of the traditional duties of the First Lady, which include picking out floral arrangements and china instead, Clinton will choose a very experienced social secretary to do the job.) When staffers say that a decision is coming from “the second floor,” they mean it’s coming directly from the First Lady, because the family’s private living quarters are on the second and third floors of the White House. They would have the most interaction with Melania Trump and whomever Hillary Clinton chose as her social secretary. More precisely, they worry about spouses and attendants. Like the rest of the country, they wonder about the chances of a President Donald Trump or a President Hillary Clinton. There is chatter in the locker room where the butlers keep their tuxes and in the staff kitchen where the maids, florists, and engineers gather for lunch. Now, they worry about serving a different potential First Family. “It was going to be a potential nightmare-a nightmare you have to get up with every day,” says White.
They watched the 2004 presidential election with great concern because they worried that John Kerry would win and that his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who was deemed “a loose cannon” in the press, would be the First Lady. I would say I voted for the president, no matter who it was.”īut they always keep one eye on the presidential election, and in hushed tones they sometimes even express opinions to each other. Worthington White, who was a White House usher from 1980 to 2012, tells me, “I was an independent Republicrat. Residence staffers are devoted to the institution of the presidency and stay on from one administration to another, regardless of political party. The butlers, maids, cooks, plumbers, engineers, and florists who work at the White House have been here before, of course-every four years, actually. Whomever the voters choose in November will become more than these staffers’ president-he or she will be their new boss. Perhaps no one is watching the 2016 presidential race more closely than the nearly 100 permanent-residence staffers who work in the White House.
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