The Queen of the Restoration
When Jackie flew back to Washington in mid-January, she left the children in Palm Beach, watched over by Maud Shaw and Secret Service Agent Clint Hill. As they wouldn’t be returning until February 4, Jackie had two weeks after the inauguration to recover her health and spirits, and to prepare for her family’s life in the White House. “My first impression of Mrs. Kennedy was, to be perfectly frank, that here is a young woman who has a lot to learn about an institution like this,” admitted Isaac Avery, the White House carpenter who started in 1930 and would serve six presidential administrations before his death in 1967. “But she learned it rapidly and gracefully.”
When the Kennedys moved in, the White House was, in the words of Sarah Bradford, “a gaunt, unloved mansion.” “I can recall,” wrote columnist and frequent Kennedy guest Joe Alsop, “the peculiar combination of vomit green and rose pink that Mrs. Eisenhower had chosen for her bedroom and bathroom.” Worse, Jackie’s toilet didn’t flush and her shower didn’t work. Public drinking fountains were built into the halls of the third-floor guest rooms. The room where the Eisenhowers ate dinner on trays featured twin portholes built into the wall, which concealed his and hers television sets. (The two preferred to eat together, while watching separate television shows.)
According to White House chief usher J. B. West, “there was not a kitchen or a dining room on the second floor in the family quarters. As a matter of fact, when the Eisenhowers were there, if they wanted to eat upstairs, they ate off trays in front of the television set.” (Or sets, as it were.)
During the Truman administration, parts of the White House were found to be structurally unsound. According to Barbara Perry, “Because the process of gutting and reconstructing the White House interior was so expensive ($5.76 million), period antiques were beyond the government’s budget. In any case, Truman was not a connoisseur of antique furnishings and thought them impractical for the high-traffic state rooms.” The Eisenhowers had made their own changes as they entered it in 1952.
“It was filled with a lot of reproduction furniture which was not to Mrs. Kennedy’s liking,” J. B. West explained. The Eisenhowers hadn’t felt the need for bookshelves or wastebaskets.
Jack and Jackie, the first president and first lady of a new generation, and having young children, would have made striking changes to the White House, even if Jackie had not set herself to the restoration. The alterations Jackie requested for their second-floor living quarters were unprecedented. Avery remembered that when the Kennedys moved in,
for the first time we were faced with the necessity of providing for a family with small children. . . . Immediate changes had to be made in the House to accommodate the children particularly, and the convenience of Mrs. Kennedy in looking after them. Bedrooms were to be altered, dining rooms to be altered, playrooms to be supplied, and nursery school equipment to be installed.
Jackie had spent much of the interregnum thinking about making the White House comfortable for Jack and the kids, and she coordinated with J. B. West to see that her designs were implemented to her satisfaction. She worked with the decorator who had helped her with her N Street home, Sister Parish, to produce the look she was hoping to achieve. “Mrs. Kennedy came in frequently to keep herself informed as to how much progress we were making,” Avery said. “She had a habit of writing little notes, and she would also pick up the phone and call you. Usually, if it was not quite satisfactory, you’d get the note. If she was quite happy, you’d get the phone call.”
The “little notes” to which Avery referred were Jackie’s famously numerous and exacting memos. J. B. West wrote that “Jackie’s wish, murmured with a ‘Do you think . . .’ or ‘Could you please . . .’ was as good as a command. When she told you to jump, you jumped.”
Between the paces she put West, Avery, and Sister Parish through, she burned through the entire $50,000 allocation for White House redecoration in two weeks—on the residence alone. But her ambitions went far beyond the presidential family residence. “When I learned I would be living in the White House how could I help but think of restoring as much of its past as possible,” Jackie wrote in 1963. “It would have seemed criminal of me not to—and I cared terribly about it. Here is a house that all Americans love and almost revere—and practically nothing in it earlier than 1948.”
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead,” she told J. B. West. “I want to make this into a grand house!” She had to find a way, without spending her own money, to make the White House the kind of place in which she wanted to live, and a place that Americans would be proud of. “I know we’re out of money, Mr. West,” Jackie said. “But never mind! We’re going to find some way to get real antiques into this house.” She told Time magazine at the time, “I would write 50 letters to 50 museum curators if I could bring Andrew Jackson’s inkwell home.” Europe had shown Jackie how a nation’s history and artistic traditions could be emblems of its greatness. She imagined how the White House could provide an image, in microcosm, of America’s depth, beauty, and history. She saw the potency of placing such strong, resonant history and imagery in the very seat of American power. And she saw the importance of placing her husband’s New Frontier in the tradition of American progress.
“I knew funds would be needed and that one could not possibly ask Congress for them,” she wrote in 1963. “So the obvious solution was a committee. It had to be fairly small to start with as we had to work hard and together and the task seemed Herculean—if not impossible.” She told Life magazine correspondent Hugh Sidey, “It would be a sacrilege merely to redecorate—a word I hate. It must be restored, and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.”
To this end, she created the Fine Arts Committee for the White House. Unveiled on February 23, its purpose was, she said, to locate “authentic furniture of the date of the building of the White House and the raising of funds to purchase this furniture as gifts for the White House.” She used her family and society connections, and no small amount of charm, to recruit scholars and curators, as well as wealthy, powerful, and like-minded people to participate.
One of her most important recruits was Henry F. du Pont, whom she chose to chair the committee. The eighty-year-old du Pont was one of the nation’s foremost connoisseurs of early decorative American art, and he had turned his own home, Winterthur, into a museum. The 175-room mansion, situated on a thousand Delaware acres, was the nation’s finest collection of Americana. Jackie needed his expertise, his connections—and his collection.
Jackie and du Pont peopled her committee with seven women and four men with “extensive curatorial and/or collecting experience.” Among them: Sister Parish, the decorator that Jackie used on N Street; David Finley, former director of the National Gallery of Art; and Mrs. Albert Lasker, a collector of French art and trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. For all their expertise, the value of most committee members was in their connections and their ability to wrest from those connections money and donations. (One of Jackie’s masterstrokes was to have the White House declared a national museum; thereafter, donations of art and furniture were tax deductible.) The true academic core of the committee belonged, in true Washington fashion, to a subcommittee dubbed the Fine Arts Advisory Committee, which consisted of sixteen museum curators and two scholars. The Advisory Committee produced a paper arguing for an expansive view of the restoration: “To furnish the White House uniformly in the eighteenth century style current when it was built would give a static even monotonous air to a house whose history is by no means finished. . . . It will therefore be necessary to be eclectic.”
This pronouncement fit well into Jackie’s plans. While restoration is an indisputably accurate term for what she did to many of the rooms in the White House, the work of the committee also simply gave her and her decorators unparalleled access to the sort of antiques she coveted for the redecoration of the rest of it, whatever term she chose to use. That’s not to detract from the amazing restorative work she did bring to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Without question,” Barbara Perry wrote, “she redecorated all of the White House rooms, and some she restored to particular historical eras through furniture, wall, floor, and window treatments, and lighting. The Blue Room took on the air of its Monroe-period, Francophilic incarnation; the Red Room depicted early nineteenth-century Franco-American Empire; the Green Room displayed Federal-era furniture; the Treaty Room and the Lincoln Bedroom exhibited Victorian decor (Mrs. Kennedy’s least favorite style but one she felt compelled to represent); the East Room and State Dining Room preserved many of the 1902 McKim elements.”
The three biggest players in her restoration effort turned out to be du Pont, Parish, and a French decorator named Stephane Boudin, each with expertise, reputation, and ego to match. The three were often at cross-purposes, and Jackie was to use every ounce of her charm, diplomacy, and cunning to keep them in detente, if not harmony. Jackie had a great working relationship with Sister Parish, but “her classic country, chintz-laden interiors were simply not suited to the stately public rooms of the White House,” Perry wrote. “Consequently, her work was primarily confined to the second-floor hallways and family quarters. . . .” Du Pont, as the nation’s foremost expert on US decorative arts, was invaluable, but Jackie’s tastes tended to run more toward the Continental than his. Enter Boudin, who’d decorated stately homes (including for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor) throughout England: He stood in as proxy for Jackie’s tastes. Where most rooms ended up displaying a combination of Boudin’s and du Pont’s influences (one usually dominant), Parish’s designs, except for the Yellow Oval Room, were mostly redone by the end of 1963.
By the time JFK’s administration ended—early, tragically—in November 1963, the White House decor had been transformed by Jackie’s savvy mix of advocacy, politicking, and simple hard work. Her more lasting contribution was to create the official methods and safeguards to ensure that the White House will always remain a showplace and repository for all that is finest in America’s decorative tradition, a house of which all Americans can be proud. She also started a restoration movement, according to Corinne “Lindy” Boggs, a Democratic party power player and friend of both JFK and Jackie. Boggs praised “the inspiration that [Jackie] was to so many remarkable restorations, rehabilitations, renovations of historic buildings and places, sites, [when] she made the White House a little museum. And she certainly encouraged the uplift and the renovation of thousands of buildings all over this country.”