George W. Bush, the oldest son of President George H. W. Bush, was as picky an eater as his father was but in a different way. He did not care for soup, salad, or “any green food,” though he did eat broccoli. Nor did he care for “wet fish,” by which he meant poached, steamed, or boiled swimmers of any kind. He had a taste for ballpark hot dogs or a grilled cheese sandwich made with white bread and Kraft Singles. And he liked to snack on pretzels or homemade Chex Mix. Acceptable dinner items included grilled beef tenderloin, firm-fleshed fish that had been fried, grilled, broiled, seared, or stir-fried, and anything Tex-Mex.
His wife, Laura Welch Bush, liked food that was “generous, flavorful, and identifiable.” That meant steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast and enchiladas, poached salmon, tomato aspic, and other classics later in the day. She had no time for fusion cooking (“too highbrow”), finely diced vegetables (“you can’t tell one from the other”), aged balsamic vinegar reductions (“pretentious”), or foods arranged in sculptural structures (“piled on top of each other”)—that is, the kind of food the Clintons liked to eat and that Walter Scheib liked to cook. In contrast to her predecessor’s questing palate, Mrs. Bush’s “taste was defined and set,” Scheib wrote. She “wanted…country club food—conservative, traditional American fare.”
Laura favored light lunches of, say, grilled salmon with an endive and watercress salad. The president liked a PB and J or a BLT sandwich with a side of Lay’s potato chips. For dinner, the First Couple liked chicken pot pie or chicken with vegetables on buttermilk biscuits. It was the kind of food Scheib could make in his sleep. “Food wasn’t much of a priority,” he lamented. Their “disdain for the Washington social scene was so well documented…[that I] knew that entertaining wouldn’t be” important in the George W. Bush White House.
Scheib considered his collaboration with the Clintons a “historic” leap forward, but now felt lost. “I’m not going to lie: When [they] left the White House, a piece of me went with them.” But in the next breath, he reminded himself that his “singular objective” was the First Family’s happiness: “You have to check your politics and ego at the door.” If Mrs. Bush wanted to serve fried catfish and hominy casserole instead of Scheib’s barbecued duck with root vegetable coleslaw on jalapeño corn bread, so it was. “By definition she was right,” he reminded himself.
Like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, George Walker Bush was born in the summer of 1946. Raised in hot and dusty Midland, Texas, W. (pronounced “dubyuh”), as he called himself, was educated on the green campuses of Andover and Yale, then earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. (He is the only president with an MBA.) In 1977, he met Laura Welch at a backyard barbecue. He was a hotheaded partyer; she was a devout teacher and librarian. They married and settled in Midland. In 1981 they had twin girls, Barbara (named after his mother) and Jenna (named after her mother).
In those days W. was a charming rake who never quite lived up to his potential. Known as “the Bombastic Bushkin,” he was partial to “the four Bs—beer, bourbon, and B&B.” Though not a clinical alcoholic, he was the kind of social drinker who did not stop once he started. Bush was close to his mother, Barbara, but had a complicated relationship with his father, the then–vice president, George H. W. Bush. Once, a buzzed W. smashed his car into a neighbor’s garbage can, then challenged Bush Sr. to a “mano a mano” fistfight. “Alcohol,” W. admitted, made him “say foolish things.”
When W. turned forty years old in 1986, he swore off booze and embraced the church. He credits his wife: “She is just a very calm and loving person who reminded me in a mature and sobering way that going to a party and…[drinking] four bourbons on the rocks [was] not all that smart.” With the help of the reverend Billy Graham, W. reengaged with his faith and attended Laura’s Methodist church. “If you become more spiritual, you begin to realize the effect of alcohol is over-consuming because it begins to drown the spirit,” he said. “If you change your heart, you can change your behavior.”
A well-timed sale of his struggling oil company, Spectrum 7, that year netted W. more than $300,000. He parlayed that into a share in the Texas Rangers baseball team, which eventually garnered him a $15 million fortune. With lifetime financial security in place, he joined his father’s presidential campaign and began to plot his own career in politics. By the time of his Texas gubernatorial run in 1994, W. went to bed early, ran an eight-minute mile, and was rigidly punctual. Routine seemed a way to control his berserker impulses.
After defeating Al Gore in the disputed election of 2000, Bush Jr. was sworn into office in January 2001. He gave himself a new nickname, 43, to distinguish himself from his father, the forty-first president, called 41.
In Midland, W. was known for wearing scuffed loafers and a robe. But for a Texas-themed inaugural party in Washington he donned a tuxedo, shiny cowboy boots, and a white felt cowboy hat. Some sniggered at the costume, but others embraced it as a sign that a cocky, Reaganesque posse was back in town. The point was underlined when Bush served two and a half tons of beef brisket and twenty thousand pounds of shrimp that night.
W.’s efforts to portray himself as an easygoing Regular Joe were more successful than his father’s. Bush 43 seemed an affable guy’s guy, “the kind you could have a beer with” (his teetotaling notwithstanding), many said. One way he enhanced this image was through baseball. While many presidents have used America’s pastime as a sign of their regularness, few have identified themselves with the game as closely as Bush. President Washington played rounders, an early version of baseball at Valley Forge, while Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy were photographed at ball games, usually eating hot dogs. But as an owner of a major-league team, and the first Little Leaguer in the White House, Bush 43 trumped them all.
Sandlot-themed meals became a signature of 43’s administration. The first took place on February 7, when he hosted a dinner for legends of the game such as Cal Ripken Jr., Joe Torre, Don Baylor, Billy Beane, and Tom Glavine. That morning, a man brandishing a gun at the White House was shot in the leg by Secret Service agents, but the baseball dinner went ahead. Held in the Old Family Dining Room, on the mansion’s first floor, it was one of Scheib’s first official meals for the Bushes. He cooked a hearty “male menu” of pan-seared sea bass with saffron risotto and caponata sauce. The guests ate it up, then autographed baseballs for the president, who added them to his collection of more than 250 signed balls.
A month later, Bush hosted lunch for Hall of Famers like Yogi Berra, Johnny Bench, and Sandy Koufax, along with the baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, in the State Dining Room. It started well, when Bush paid homage to Berra’s malaprops (“Ninety percent of this game is half mental”) while poking fun at his own tortured syntax (“They misunderestimated me”), saying some think Berra “might be my speechwriter.” But when the first course—crisp shrimp and roasted artichokes with fennel and wild sorrel soup—arrived, the president barked, “What’s this? Something that washed up on the shore?”
The room fell silent. Panicking, the butlers quickly cleared the plates away. The Hall of Famers were baffled, and the kitchen was horrified when the untouched food suddenly flooded back. Scheib realized that the green soup and sautéed pink shrimp—a menu he had planned with Mrs. Bush—looked “wet” and represented everything 43 couldn’t stomach. The Casa Blanca Gang scrambled to cook porterhouse veal steaks with garlic polenta, fiddlehead ferns with spring vegetables, and a wild mushroom sauce. The plates were eaten clean, but Scheib was left a nervous wreck.
On May 6, Bush invited two teams of kids to play T-ball on the White House lawn. As the Junior Red Sox faced off against the Junior Rockies, every child had a chance to hit, there were no outs, and everyone won. It was a feel-good moment, except for one important detail: the kitchen had prepared a ballpark menu of grilled hot dogs and the president made it clear that “ball park dogs are steamed, not grilled.” Nevertheless, the event was repeated—with steamed hot dogs—that summer, until the innocent fun was cut short.
On September 5, 2001, the Bushes hosted their first state dinner. The guests of honor were old friends, the Mexican president, Vicente Fox, and his wife, and while there were many Texans and Bush donors there, the only celebrity was Clint Eastwood. The menus were decorated with the American flag crossed over the Mexican flag: printed electronically, they were hand-painted by White House calligraphers, and were the first to use both Spanish and English. Scheib created a bicultural menu, which opened with Maryland crab, chorizo pozole, and vegetables; an entrée of pepita-crusted bison—“the perfect metaphor,” Scheib said, because bison range from southwestern states into Mexico and back; and a red and gold tomato salad. The assistant usher Dan Shanks, a former restaurant sommelier, served the California Chardonnay Mi Sueño (My Dream) with the crab. Roland Mesnier created a mango and coconut ice cream dome with peaches, a red chili pepper sauce, and a tequila sabayon for dessert. President Bush toasted the Foxes with a glass of 7UP, while President Fox referred to his host as Jorge and told rambling stories. It was a night of bonhomie and cross-cultural friendship.
Six days later, Walter Scheib was preparing peppered beef tenderloin for a western-themed congressional picnic. Mesnier was decorating watermelons with cattle horns. It was a gorgeous blue-sky day, with the late summer heat tempered by a cool breeze.
“Well, that’s two,” a worried usher said.
Scheib stared at the television in disbelief. The World Trade Center towers in New York spewed flame and dank clouds of smoke. Other hijacked planes were said to be heading for Washington. Walkie-talkies crackled and people yelled, “Get out of here!” Hundreds of tourists and military personnel streamed out of the White House and a burly emergency response team armed with machine guns encircled the grounds. At 9:37 a.m., a jet accelerated overhead, and after a percussive thump! smoke rose in the distance. It was American Airlines Flight 77, which had been hijacked and flown into the Pentagon, killing almost two hundred people.
The streets were gridlocked. Cell phone networks crashed. A prayer circle formed. A woman stumbled toward the White House, zombie-like, until a guard pointed a shotgun at her and shouted, “Halt!” She kept coming, and he said, “Goddamit lady…I’m going to have to shoot you.” She turned and melted into the crowd.
In the White House kitchen, Scheib sent his sous-chefs John Moeller and Cristeta “Cris” Comerford home. But the grounds were crawling with police and Secret Service, and they were hungry. So, he fired his grills and began to cook. Food for a thousand picnic guests was stored in mobile refrigerators on the driveway, and as butlers hauled provisions inside, the chef sizzled the tenderloins, then sliced and plated them as fast as he could. Dan Shanks dressed bowls of salad. Soon, a dozen security personnel lined up. Then 50 more, then 150. The skeleton crew sweated in the grease and smoke and worked robotically. By the evening of September 11, they had served eight hundred meals.
For weeks after the attacks, White House employees drifted through the hallways with blank faces. Even President Bush blinked back tears. Then someone mailed letters containing anthrax to senators and media outlets. Worried, Scheib kept a watchful eye on his car mirror, gauging if he was being followed. He reminded his wife and boys, “Don’t talk to anyone whom you don’t know about what I do. If [they] ask, just say I work for the Park Service.”
Roland Mesnier suffered “extreme anxiety” after 9/11. “So many dead!” he mourned, causing him to become “far more cautious.”
The chief usher, Gary Walters, offered the staff psychological counseling, but Mesnier and Scheib declined to participate: the former had lived in Paris during periods of unrest and trusted his own wits; the latter considered therapy “a waste of time.” But months later, Scheib realized he was edgy, and perhaps suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which smoldered inside him like buried ordnance. “I didn’t realize…how life-altering the experience” of the terrorist attack was, he conceded.
All White House social events were canceled, though the president held working lunches with world leaders to coordinate the War on Terror. Adapting to the mood, Scheib kept his menus simple: a single course with a side, such as garlic-rosemary chicken on polenta with asparagus, or fillets of beef with a bean salad. “We could have served [them] ham sandwiches,” he recalled, “and they would’ve continued on with their work without a word.”
Before 9/11 it would have been very difficult to poison the First Family, and afterward it was virtually impossible. For years, people had sent unsolicited cheeses, salmon, brownies, and other goodies to the president, and the chefs frequently sampled them. No longer. After 9/11 every homemade pie, commercial bottle of Florida orange juice, promotional jug of Vermont maple syrup, or Alaskan king crab leg was destroyed.
A new protocol created a firewall around the procurement, delivery, storage, and preparation of meals. The cooks were barred from shopping in markets and had to order food by fax. The list of approved grocers dropped from thirty-five to ten. When Scheib needed unusual ingredients, vendors would order them from third parties who had no clue their food was destined for the president’s kitchen. Part-time cooks and waiters were subjected to extensive background checks.
Overnight, Scheib noticed, Americans began to eat differently: “Right after 9/11…the food changed from being very eclectic and very forward-thinking, to going back into very safe food. Your mother’s table, if you will….[T]he country was very confused…and…wanted to grab onto an anchor, and in this case, that was food.” (This ethos may have spurred the locavore and Slow Food movements, he speculated.)
Not surprisingly, the attack prompted a surge of patriotic fervor. As always, food was intertwined with politics, sometimes to a farcical degree. Consider the battle over French fries. Long popular in Europe, deep-fried potato sticks became a hit in America in 1802, when Thomas Jefferson enjoyed “potatoes served in the French manner,” and by 2003 fries were a ubiquitous snack. But when France opposed Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the Republican representatives Bob Ney of Ohio and Walter B. Jones of North Carolina demanded that the French toast and French fries served in congressional cafeterias be renamed “Freedom toast” and “Freedom fries.” It was a jingoistic stunt, and a hat tip to Hoover’s rebranding frankfurters “hot dogs” in World War I. Ney declared it was “a small but symbolic effort to show strong displeasure…with our so-called ally.” The French embassy huffed that it was focused on the “very serious issues of war” and not “on potatoes.”
The food fight was too delicious to ignore, and Freedom fries became a staple for satire. “In France, American cheese is now referred to as ‘Idiot Cheese,’ ” Tina Fey announced on Saturday Night Live. In 2005, the cook Anthony Bourdain launched a food and travel show called No Reservations. In the pilot episode, “Why the French Don’t Suck,” he gloried in Parisian cuisine in a pointed riposte to Freedom fries. After Ney was imprisoned for corruption in 2007 Congress quietly reverted to using the name French fries on its menus. Asked about the scuffle, Jones said, “I wish it had never happened.”
As the initial shock of 9/11 wore off in the winter of 2001, the Bushes began to host small receptions and parties. While the Clintons invited glossy celebrities and important dignitaries for conversations about Big Ideas and led midnight raids on the fridge, the Bushes invited Texas friends and donors and hit the hay by 10:00 p.m.
At first glance, Clinton and Bush seemed to be polar opposites who had swapped identities. Clinton was raised poor by a single mother in Arkansas, aspired to a rococo, Kennedyesque lifestyle, and summered on salt-breezed Martha’s Vineyard among the “white-wine swillers,” as W. put it. Bush 43 was a Yankee blueblood raised amid Texas oil wealth who affected a down-home persona; though his parents summered on the Maine coast, he retreated to an air-conditioned ranch in Crawford, Texas. The political messaging was stark. But upon closer inspection, the two presidents were not so different.
“There was no red-state food and no blue-state food,” Scheib said. Meals were the “only time [presidents] can be just normal…a husband, a father, a friend. So our goal was really to give them a home to come to.” The menus at the Clinton and Bush White Houses “didn’t delineate along party lines, but [they did] delineate very closely along gender lines,” the chef continued. He would “cook to the taste and the style of the First Lady. And then the President, if he was wise, he’d go along with it. The President runs the world, but the First Lady runs the house.”
Like many of their predecessors, Clinton and Bush would eat light, healthy meals with their wives, but the minute Hillary and Laura left town, the men would indulge in meaty feasts. Clinton’s guilty pleasure was a twenty-four-ounce porterhouse steak with béarnaise sauce and a side of fried onion rings. Bush also liked a thick steak, or huevos rancheros for brunch, and bags of Lay’s potato chips. Both men were fans of barbecue, though they split along regional lines: Clinton’s Arkansas barbecue was slow-cooked pork swimming in sauce and pulled apart; Bush’s Texas ’cue was dry-rubbed beef brisket that was grilled, sliced, and served with sauce on the side. There are few subjects that get eaters more agitated than barbecue, with partisans insisting their version is the “real” one.
“You might be considered a presidential assassin the way you cooked for these guys,” the TV journalist Chris Cuomo ribbed Scheib. “Well, I tell you, the first ladies didn’t care for it when they heard about it,” the chef replied.
Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Bush also shared tastes. Both were hot sauce aficionados: Hillary amassed sixty varieties in a cupboard called “the hot sauce zone.” Though Laura tended to use just one type of hot sauce at a time—her favorite was Yucatan Sunshine Habanero Pepper Sauce—she applied it to nearly everything she ate. More surprisingly, both women favored organic vegetables. While this was an obvious choice for Mrs. Clinton, a devotee of Alice Waters’s, Mrs. Bush’s insistence on organics was less expected in light of her country-club tastes and the president’s ties to corporate interests.
Organic food was synonymous with lefty, elitist, anticorporate politics, something the Republican Party avoided like kryptonite. Mike Johanns, Bush’s secretary of agriculture, was a corn ethanol booster (a controversial, heavily subsidized crop); Johanns’s chief of staff was the former chief lobbyist for the beef industry; and the head of Bush’s FDA came from the National Food Processors Association, a food trade group. In other words, organic food didn’t fit W.’s image.
Mrs. Bush did not publicly disclose her preference for organics, but Scheib revealed that she had relied on them since living in the Texas governor’s mansion. The first Whole Foods Market (originally called Safer Way, a spoof on Safeway supermarkets) was founded in Austin, which has a vibrant food scene. “Mrs. Bush was adamant about organic foods,” Scheib said. “It goes counter to her perceived personality, but it was never important to her that the information be released.” And President Bush never addressed the disconnect between his family’s food choices and his administration’s food policies.
The Bushes liked other “elitist” foods, too, especially the handmade pretzels from the Hammond Pretzel Bakery, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But then one almost got the best of the president.
At 5:35 p.m. on Sunday, January 13, 2002, W. was munching a Hammond pretzel and watching the Miami Dolphins play the Baltimore Ravens in a football playoff game. The Secret Service had granted him a rare moment of privacy, and he was alone with his dogs, Barney and Spot. Laura was in another room, when a chunk of pretzel lodged in the presidential throat, triggering a “vasovagal syncope”—a sudden drop in heart rate—causing him to black out. Bush tumbled off the couch and hit the floor, bruising his cheek and bloodying his lip. Lying unconscious, he coughed, which dislodged the biscuit, and he came to.
Bush 43’s collapse-by-pretzel was reminiscent of Bush 41’s fainting episode almost exactly a decade earlier in Japan. Normally, such an accident would be ignored, but this was the American president after 9/11, when the nation felt vulnerable. “I hit the deck,” Bush said with a chuckle. “The dogs were looking at me a little funny….If my mother is listening, mother, I should have listened to you: always chew your pretzels before you swallow.” Reporters glommed on to the story “like…mustard on pretzels,” The Washington Post punned. And Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said, “You’re not going to get us to cough up” details of the incident.
In fact, Hammond pretzels had been introduced to the White House by the sous-chef John Moeller, who hailed from Lancaster. After Bush’s near asphyxiation, Moeller almost suffered his own syncope, and worried, “Am I going to be working here tomorrow?”
He kept his job, though the pretzel incident underscored a more “volatile” tone. When he joined the staff in 1992, public interest in presidential food was minimal. A decade later that had changed, and the press jumped at any whiff of gossip in the First Kitchen. This added a new edge, and cooks could be terminated for something as minor as recommending the wrong snack. (I spoke to a part-time cook who said she was fired after making a joke about Hillary Clinton.)
Even as the Bushes’ socializing gained momentum in 2002, Scheib found his role “drastically reduced” and repetitive. When Mrs. Bush decided she liked his pea soup with mint, for instance, she asked for it again and again, and the chef worried she’d tire of the dish. She did not tire of the dish. After Bush won reelection in 2004, the First Couple’s food orders grew plainer and plainer. “My work had ceased being fun,” Scheib recalled. “I hadn’t been truly tested in about four years. We had a routine, our menus were routine, and executing them was routine.”
Things hit a culinary nadir at a congressional picnic in June 2004, when the Bushes served ready-made spareribs, turkey, dirty rice, and other prepackaged rations. Reduced to “oven technician,” Scheib had no role in creating the menu, a job taken over by the food service giant KC Masterpiece, whose founder, Dr. Rich Davis, was a Bush donor. Roland Mesnier was pressed to serve an amateurish pound cake with strawberries and whipped cream. It was dispiriting and an example of the bland corporatization of White House food.
“I was…one part private chef and one part chef of a midsize suburban restaurant,” Scheib recalled, acidly.
Just before Christmas of 2003, Mesnier had tendered his resignation. After twenty-five years, he was tired, and noticed that his fine motor skills and creativity were waning. He had written a book and, unlike his brother, a pâtissier in France who had worked himself to death without taking a break, he looked forward to enjoying life. Mrs. Bush graciously accepted the news, but W. worked him over: “What’s your book called, How to Kill a President with Calories?…What if your book flops?…Why leave? There’s no point….Reconsider your decision. You understand?…Think about it.”
At the summer solstice, Mesnier served a special dessert at the annual lunch for Senate wives—a dome of pistachio cake coated in a rich marquise (a chocolate mousse–like confection) sculpted into the shape of a dress worn by an elegant woman of the French ancien régime, whose head and torso were rendered in blown sugar. It was a fitting, spectacular grand finale, and on July 30 he handed in his security badge and left the White House.
Mesnier had hoped his assistant pastry chef, Susan Morrison, would succeed him. He and the Bushes were impressed by her talent and work ethic. But the top job was grueling, and, he wrote, Morrison declined the promotion because she felt she lacked “the strength” for it. She remained as an assistant, and after a “bake-off” between three candidates, the Bushes chose Thaddeus DuBois as the new executive pastry chef. DuBois was a bespectacled, round-faced Los Angeleno. The Bushes offered him $120,000 a year—significantly less than he was making at an Atlantic City, New Jersey, hotel—but the White House has a gravitational pull on relatively young, unknown chefs. DuBois lasted two years.
In March 2006, Mrs. Bush decided that he was not a good fit and persuaded Mesnier to rejoin the kitchen, temporarily. He agreed, and the spring and summer sped by. But as December loomed—it is the pastry kitchen’s busiest month, with a relentless schedule of holiday parties that require weeks of work to prepare thousands of cookies, pies, cakes, and a gingerbread White House—Mesnier felt the old pangs return. He needed to find a skilled pastry chef who was capable under pressure and could succeed him, stat.
Leafing through Food Arts magazine, Mrs. Bush and her social secretary, Lea Berman, admired photos of desserts made by a New York pastry chef named Bill Yosses and invited him to apply for the job. “I never imagined I’d get that call,” Yosses, an old friend of mine, said. “It was such an honor, but of course I knew it was a long shot.” A native of Toledo, Ohio, he was raised on beef Stroganoff and Mamie Eisenhower’s cheesecake. Earning a master’s in French literature at Rutgers University led him to France, where he did a stage at the three-star Moulin de Mougins restaurant and discovered the art, challenge, and sugar high of refined patisserie in the 1980s. Captivated by the big white plates decorated with dime-sized desserts and colorful swirls of sauce made famous by nouvelle cuisine, Yosses fell in love with “the precision of pastry,” but adds, “I love the aesthetics more. I’m proudly superficial—I like pretty pictures!—plus I love a good dessert.”
Settling in New York, Yosses helmed the pastry station in some of the trendiest, most sanity-challenging restaurants, including the Polo, Montrachet, and Bouley. He was working at Tavern on the Green when the White House called.
One afternoon in the fall of 2006, Yosses auditioned his pastries for Laura Bush and her staff. “I wanted the job, and put everything I could into the presentation,” he said. After tempting the Bush twins, Jenna and Barbara, with platters of canapés, petits fours, and fruit panna cottas, he unveiled his secret weapon: double chocolate cookies. Every crumb disappeared within seconds, and all that remained was the sound of smacking lips. The twins gave Yosses a secret thumbs-up, and he “sighed in gratitude” when he was hired the next day.
Yosses is a slim, bald sprite with glasses, a mischievous grin, and a sharp wit leavened by a warm intelligence. He is a history buff who has taught food science at Harvard. He’s also gay and married, which did not bother the conservative Bushes. “I felt welcomed,” he said.
The December holidays were upon them, and only half joking Yosses said, “Eighty percent of the White House pastry job is dealing with Christmas.” He was put right to work making confections for a rush of breakfasts, lunches, teas, and banquets for the cabinet, Congress, religious leaders, and on and on.
In explaining her approach to hostessing, Laura Bush expected a high degree of professionalism, but added, “I don’t want the White House to feel like a hotel. I want people to feel like they are in a home. It’s a special treat to come here, and everybody remembers it.”
Lea Berman, Mrs. Bush’s social secretary, had previously worked the same job for Lynne Cheney and was married to the sugar lobbyist and Bush fundraiser Wayne Berman. Scheib described Lea Berman as a coldhearted, stiletto-heeled socialite who lived in a thirteen-thousand-square-foot mansion on Embassy Row, as if she was a Lady Macbeth dressed in Versace. They clashed the moment they met.
When Berman suggested he make food like Marco Pierre White, the enfant terrible of British dining known for braised pigs’ trotters, Scheib thought, “I’m not sure [the PB-and-J-loving Bush] is going to be big on that.” When she suggested he cook dishes from Martha Stewart Living, wrote “Yuk” on his menu, or declared, “Your vegetables…are always overcooked,” he fumed. “I [am] fairly certain I wouldn’t have made it this far…if I didn’t know how to cook vegetables.”
It was Christmas 2004, the season of good cheer, that proved Scheib’s undoing. When the Texas interior designer Ken Blasingame arrived to decorate the White House, he and Berman squabbled over how many tulips should decorate a platter of food: he wanted just one; she wanted a dozen; the kitchen crew was caught in the cross fire. “You’re scaring the kids,” Scheib blurted out. Berman glared at him, and Scheib sensed that, “right then and there, she stopped paying attention to me.”
(As I will explain later, I had a different experience with Berman.)
In late January 2005 the Bushes hosted a wedding party at the White House for the son of a friend. It was a joyous affair, a reminder that the mansion was a private home. The dinner—wild mushroom soup, rack of lamb with tomato and corn custard, and a salad with Roquefort-walnut dressing—was given high marks. At the end of the night, Laura Bush called out to the kitchen, “Guys, that was just about perfect!” Those were the last words Scheib heard from her.
On February 2, the chief usher, Gary Walters, said, “The First Lady has decided that she’s going to go in a different direction.” Scheib understood he was being let go. He told himself it was for the best, that he had become stuck “in denial [about] an unhealthy relationship,” and that it was time to move on. Still, the rejection stung.
One of the unspoken rules of the White House is that when someone is pushed out, they are expected to respond maturely and self-deprecatingly. Scheib did not subscribe to this fiction. He was angry and hurt. When someone leaked word of his dismissal to The Washington Post, the media demanded to know why and who was responsible. A Bush press secretary incorrectly said the chef was “already gone,” and Scheib blew a gasket. “I was fired,” he told The New York Times. “We’ve been trying to find a way to satisfy the first lady’s stylistic requirements, and it has been difficult. Basically, I was not successful in my attempt. The failure is a loss. And I hate to lose because I am super competitive.”
With that, his bridges were burned. Scheib was told not to return to the White House and that Mrs. Bush would not write him a job recommendation. Reflecting on his eleven years as executive chef, he said the job meant “being the most famous anonymous person you’ll ever meet….It was a great period…but I live my life in the windshield and not in the rearview mirror.”
He went on to write a book, win on Iron Chef in 2006, and regale audiences with tales from his years in the Executive Kitchen. But the loss pained Scheib in the way that one-term presidents struggle with electoral losses. No experience can match life at the President’s House. He missed the camaraderie, the pressure, the thrill of being at the center of things. He called the experience of working on “the biggest stage” an “honor and privilege,” and, “a narcotic.”
Walter Scheib suffered a difficult withdrawal. His marriage ended; he moved to Florida, then to Taos, New Mexico. On June 13, 2015, Scheib went for a hike above Taos Ski Valley and disappeared. Police and aircraft searched the steep trail but found nothing; when a rainstorm lashed the mountains, the search was suspended. A week later, troops with rescue dogs discovered Scheib’s body hidden by dense vegetation in a drainage ditch. He was sixty-one years old and in good shape, and the autopsy revealed he had drowned in the desert.
His death was national news, and rumors swirled. Some believed he had been murdered, while others said it was suicide. Under the headline “Dark Mysteries Behind Clinton Chef’s Drowning,” the National Enquirer alleged without proof that Scheib had been privy to nefarious activities among the Clintons—“intimate secrets that threaten to derail Hillary’s presidential run,” the tabloid hyperventilated. Taos locals had a simpler explanation: Scheib had hiked a challenging trail, it began to rain while he was in a steep canyon, and a flash flood swept him away. It was an all-too-common occurrence, especially for those who were ill-prepared or had lost their way.
After Scheib was fired, Laura Bush and Lea Berman conducted a wide-ranging search for his replacement. In the meantime, the sous-chef John Moeller was named acting executive chef. With his Filipina colleague, Cristeta Comerford, he prepared everything from huevos rancheros for the president’s brunch to oysters and spinach au gratin for the First Lady’s Shakespeare-themed lunch. The kitchen worked smoothly. Moeller kept his head down and hoped his promotion would be permanent.
Hundreds of chefs applied for the job. As usual, it was difficult to attract top talent: the salary of $80,000 to $100,000 a year with no overtime was well under what a chef could make at a successful restaurant, and opportunities in television or book and endorsement deals were not allowed. But it wasn’t just a question of money. The kitchen was small, the full-time staff of five was scant, the hours were long, and it was no state secret that the job could be mundane at times.
The East Wing office conducted dozens of interviews with cooks across the country and whittled the list down to a handful of prospects. Alice Waters didn’t offer advice this time. “I look for an open door” to such conversations, she told me; “the door was not open” with the Bushes. The search took on a political charge when Women Chefs and Restaurateurs—which represents two thousand culinary professionals—demanded the White House hire a female chef. “Throughout our history women have been at the helm of feeding American families,” the group declared. “Now is the time to have a woman…feeding America’s first family.”
In June, two of the finalists—Chris Ward of the Mercury Grill in Dallas, and Richard Hamilton of the Spiced Pear in Newport, Rhode Island (both male)—were invited to audition for Mrs. Bush. She was looking for “sophisticated restaurant food” and said barbecue and Tex-Mex would not be a priority, Hamilton reported. Her staff “wanted to be wowed.” In midsummer the job was quietly offered to Patrick O’Connell, who had earned two Michelin stars at the Inn at Little Washington, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But like Patrick Clark in 1994, O’Connell declined the offer, presumably for the usual reasons.
On August 14, 2005, Laura Bush made a momentous if not entirely surprising announcement: the nation’s seventh executive chef would be Moeller’s sous-chef Cris Comerford. “I am delighted,” the First Lady said. “Her passion for cooking can be tasted in every bite of her delicious creations.”
A naturalized American citizen born in the Philippines, Cristeta Gomez Pasia Comerford was the first female, the first ethnic minority, and the first cook hired from within the kitchen ranks to be anointed executive chef. Comerford was forty-two years old, a short, solidly built woman with broad cheeks, full lips, a laser look in her dark eyes, and a good fit. She had cooked at the White House for a decade, was universally liked, made the kind of food the Bushes enjoyed, and was an exemplar of the American dream.
The tenth of eleven children, Comerford was born in a working-class neighborhood of Manila. Her father was a school principal; her mother, Erlinda, was a dressmaker who read culinary textbooks for fun, but cooked by instinct rather than from recipes. She raised her children on Filipino cuisine—an amalgam of Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish traditions, with the odd American ingredient, such as Spam (introduced by U.S. troops during World War II) thrown in, reflecting the nation’s history.
Known as Cris in the kitchen, and Teta to her siblings, Comerford was focused and “so driven. So ambitious,” one of her sisters said. She studied food technology but quit school at twenty-three to join an older brother in the Filipino community in Morton Grove, a Chicago suburb. There, she found a job as a “salad girl” at a Sheraton near O’Hare International Airport. After stints at a Chicago hotel and French restaurants in Washington, she polished her credentials as a chef tournant (revolving chef) at Le Ciel, in Vienna, Austria.
Walter Scheib recruited Comerford as a part-timer in the White House in 1995, then hired her full time. She was steeped in classical French technique but mostly cooked American or ethnic dishes. She impressed Laura Bush by whipping up a BLT lunch for the president at midday and a dazzling state dinner that night—chilled asparagus soup with lemon cream, and pan-roasted halibut and basmati rice in honor of the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh. That “little family dinner,” as Bush called it, was the first state dinner of his second term and only the fifth of his presidency. It memorialized a controversial Indo-American nuclear energy deal and won Comerford the job as top chef.
John Moeller was disappointed, but bore no grudge against his friend Cris. A few months later he quit, opened a catering company, and wrote a cookbook-memoir. “After thirteen years,” he explained, “I figured it might be a good segue to just move on and start to do my own thing.”
In hiring Cris Comerford, the Bushes had once again subverted their profile as rigid traditionalists. Even Alice Waters cheered the decision: “I’m glad it’s a woman,” she said. “That…makes a beautiful statement.” Women Chefs and Restaurateurs applauded the Bushes for sending “a message around the world. Women make up more than 50 percent of food service workers, but hold less than 4 percent of the top jobs. And this is the top job.”