“Oprah Winfrey sat in my office and said, ‘Are you going to write a book? These stories are just amazing!’”
Questions like that prompted Melinda Bates to write White House Story: A Democratic Memoir (Ense-DeVere Publishing, 2008), and to develop a lecture series on the history of entertaining at the White House.
Bates describes herself as the “ultimate White House insider,” a title she claims to have come by honestly because she was the only person to serve as director of the White House Visitors Office for all eight years of an administration – in her case, something she “proudly did for Bill and Hillary Clinton.”
Bates was a classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University – he was in the School of Foreign Service, she in the Institute of Languages and Linguistics – both graduating in 1968. It was during alumni weekend at Georgetown that Bates spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about entertaining at the White House and her recent book.
White House history
Learning the history of the White House quickly became part of her job, Bates said.
She realized early in the administration that she “was going to have to give tours to special guests, VIP guests, of the President and First Lady. That’s when I began to study White House history, because I had to make it interesting.”
She was not interested in “how many bathrooms” the White House has. Instead, she said, she was interested in “who lived in this house, how did they use it, where did that painting come from, who sat in that chair, what did they do here? Those kinds of stories were interesting to me, so that’s the research that I did.”
The most unexpected thing she came across in her research was the feeling that everything old is new again.
‘Most political house in the country’
“We were told that the things that the President and Mrs. Clinton wanted to do ‘had never been done in the White House before’ or couldn’t be done. It was just not right, or undoable for some reason, which I accepted in the beginning because we were new and I figured that the people that were telling us that had the institutional memory and they would know.”
As she became more settled in her job, however, Bates “began to collect books about the White House and occupants of the White House, written by former ushers and butlers and so on, and I discovered that the White House had always been used exactly the way the Clintons wanted to use it -- that everything we were telling the butlers and ushers we wanted to do was entirely doable.”
What bothered Bates at the time was “this very strange idea that somehow took traction in the press that the White House should not be political, when in fact the White House is the most political house in the country. It’s entirely appropriate for political things to go on there, but that idea took traction in the press and we just couldn’t seem to beat it back. We [were] criticized for doing things that were common and, in my opinion, completely appropriate. That was surprising.”
Social criticism
Bates notes in her lecture that various Presidents and First Ladies have come in for criticism for their entertaining practices. Mary Todd Lincoln and Nancy Reagan, for example, were both criticized for their purchase of new White House china.
There have been other, more socially piquant, criticisms as well.
Bates pointed out that Theodore Roosevelt “was the first President to invite an African-American [Booker T. Washington] to come to a social event at the White House. There was a firestorm of criticism about it because the South was just not ready for that to happen.”
Years later, when “Marian Anderson was forbidden permission to perform at the DAR [Constitution] Hall,” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt intervened and "made sure that Mrs. Anderson could sing on the steps of the [Lincoln] Memorial, which was a much better venue.”
Some of the criticisms seem trivial in retrospect.
Jacqueline Kennedy, for instance, changed the way people were seated at formal White House dinners. Previously, guests sat at a long, U-shaped table in the style of European royal dining halls. Mrs. Kennedy changed that set-up to individual round tables that could fit eight or ten guests.
“I was born in Washington [and] lived here all my life,” Bates exclaimed, and “I remember the papers reporting it as the end of civilization as we know it, that Mrs. Kennedy was going to entertain at the White House in such an informal and inappropriate way.”
That style today is accepted as normal.
‘Backstage at the White House’
Bates said that her motivation in writing her book was to provide a look at the White House from a perspective that is often overlooked.
“I wanted to make a history of a part of White House life that doesn’t normally get recorded,” she said.
“The policy people write books. The speechwriter wrote a book,” she noted, but “I had an experience that was so extraordinary.”
She wrote her book, Bates said, because “I really wanted people to go backstage with me. That was my goal. What I hear from readers is that they never imagined being able to go backstage at the White House the way they can in the stories that I tell them.”
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