Please note that the following is a digitized version of a selected article from White House History Quarterly, Issue 60, originally released in print form in 2021. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.org No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All photographs contained in this journal unless otherwise noted are copyrighted by the White House Historical Association and may not be reproduced without permission. Requests for reprint permissions should be directed to rights@whha.org. Contact books@whha.org for more information. Š 2021 White House Historical Association. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions.
In the Beginning: The Founders REMEMBER The Creation of the White House Historical Association
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carson glass had no idea that the assignment he received in the spring of 1961 would change the trajectory of his career and become a turning point in the history of the White House. The young lawyer from Texas knew only that his boss, Washington superlawyer Clark Clifford, had given him an unusual legal task: figure out how to create an organization that would help the new first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, raise funds to restore the State Rooms of the White House, and do it quickly. To accomplish that goal, Glass assembled a small army of professionals who would spend the next eight months doing the legal and organizational spadework to create what would become White House Historical Association (WHHA) and much of the rest of their careers developing and sustaining it. In the process, many of these “founders” would become close personal friends united by their love of the White House and respect for its history. Theirs is “a story of people who were deputized to work out a way to serve the historic interest of the White House,” said the oral historian Emily Soapes, who interviewed them in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “They were eminent in their fields. They all knew how to get things done . . . how to take an idea and create something enduring.”1 Thanks to their efforts, what began as one first lady’s dream has sixty years later grown into a major nonprofit organization with a three-fold mission: to preserve, protect, and provide public access to the White House.2
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opposite On the eve of Mrs. Kennedy’s historic White House restoration, a workman prepares the Oval Office for incoming President John F. Kennedy, January 1961. right Contemplating the scope of her impending restoration, Mrs. Kennedy reviews blueprints of the State Floor, July 1961. previous spread
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The Association’s founders rose to the challenge when asked to quickly figure out how to create an organization that would help First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy (seen here during her televised tour of of the White House, 1962) raise funds to restore the State Rooms of the White House.
JACQUELINE KENNEDY’S VISION Jacqueline Kennedy never forgot her first visit to the White House in the spring of 1941. Then the Executive Mansion seemed “bleak” to the 11-yearold, who recalled receiving “nothing . . . to take away, nothing to teach one more about that great house and the presidents who lived there.”3 Twenty years later nothing had changed except her status. Now she was the incoming first lady whose new home looked more like a mediocre hotel than the historic residence of the leader of the free world. Long before her husband was even elected president, Mrs. Kennedy had decided that the restoration of the White House would be her major project if she were to become first lady.4 Her goal was ambitious. She wanted “to establish the President’s residence . . . as unequivocally the nation’s house and transform it into a house of which the nation could be thoroughly proud,” wrote historian and White House special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr.5 There was only one problem. The White House
did not have the budget to restore the mansion or refurnish the State Rooms with the museum-quality pieces Jacqueline Kennedy thought were necessary. What money there was had already been spent to refurbish the family quarters on the Second Floor. Mrs. Kennedy was undaunted. “Never mind,” she told the White House chief usher, J. Bernard West. “We’re going to find some way to get real antiques into this house.”6 Realizing that her plan to “make the White House the first house in the land”7 could be controversial, particularly if public monies were involved, Jacqueline Kennedy began looking for allies in the arts and preservation communities as soon as she moved into the White House.Two of her earliest supporters were David Finley,8 chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a congressionally chartered group that advised the federal government on artistic matters and guided the architectural development of Washington, D.C., and John Walker III, director of the National Gallery of Art. Both were enthusiastic, Finley so much so that he
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CLARK CLIFFORD’S TASK
Jackie has an idea that she would like to bring up with you. . . . She has the notion that she’s going to change the White House. She wants to make it a living museum, and she wants to have authentic antiques and furnishings in there. And she wants to upgrade it, rehabilitate it. She wants to get started and get money from private sources, not tax money. . . . She has the idea that she would like to write about this. She’d love to have a story in Life magazine.11 Life could then pay her and start a fund. . . . What do you think? Sidey, by now totally awake, enthusiastically agreed.
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NASH CASTRO’S PROPOSAL Nash Castro was still new to his job as National Park Service (NPS) liaison to the White House when he came up with the idea of a nonprofit group to support the Executive Mansion. He and J. B. West and John Walker had already been discussing revenue-generating proposals for the White House restoration, including the first lady’s idea for a White House guidebook, but they needed an organizational vehicle to handle the funding, distribution, and sale of such a product. Recalling his previous experience at an NPS site in Hawaii, Castro proposed the creation of a nonprofit cooperating association similar to those the NPS had established in its other locales, which produced and
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made the first donation, an eighteenth-century highboy, which the first lady placed in the president’s bedroom.9 Walker, who had known the first lady since her youth, quickly became, with West, a kind of go-between or, as he put it, Jacqueline Kennedy’s “lieutenant.”10 Another early recruit was the journalist Hugh Sidey, who joined courtesy of President John F. Kennedy. Sidey, Time magazine’s Washington correspondent, was napping on a wintry Sunday afternoon shortly after Kennedy’s Inauguration when the president, who had known the journalist since his days in the Senate, called with a proposal:
Clark Clifford, Glass’s boss and the Kennedys’ personal lawyer,12 was impressed with the first lady’s vision for the White House when he met with her in the early spring. However, he was dubious about its prospects. He had been a member of President Harry Truman’s staff during the White House renovation of 1948–52, and his memories of the controversy over what became the Truman Balcony were still vivid. “It almost led to a civil war,” Clifford recalled of the dispute over the president’s plan to add the structure to the south side of the mansion.13 Despite his reservations, Clifford said he and the first lady “had a long visit together. She asked a lot of questions about [the house]” and its past. A few days later Clifford heard from the president, who said he was “uneasy” about his wife’s plans. He invited the lawyer to lunch at the White House so the three of them could discuss the project. At that meeting he expressed his concerns. “This is one of those ideas that sound great when you start it, but as time goes on it’s just trouble,” Clifford remembered Kennedy saying. “The public will . . . be watching with considerable concern. . . . I just want to be sure that this is done right. . . . I just don’t want to leave it up to a number of ladies who have gotten interested in it.” The president turned to Clifford. “Clark,” he said, “I will ask you to get in this matter, get in it all the way. And I will not agree to enter this enterprise until you assure me that it’s going to be reasonably free from trouble.” “President Kennedy didn’t want any mistakes made,” recalled Glass. “There was no room for error.”14
David Finley showed his enthusiasm for Mrs. Kennedy’s restoration program by donating an eighteenth-century highboy to the White House Collection. He is seen (left) viewing the gift with President Kennedy in the president’s bedroom.
US CODE
Founder Carson Glass consulted with Justice Department lawyers, who developed a bill that made it possible for private donations to be made to the White House. Passed September 22, 1961, Public Law 87-286 also specified that “articles of furniture, fixtures, and decorative objects of the White House,” including those acquired in the future, would be “considered to be inalienable and the property” of the Executive Mansion.
sold “maps, postcards, slides . . . and other materials in the national parks” to pay for “items that the government never provided for.” He wrote a memorandum to Jacqueline Kennedy outlining his proposal, which the first lady approved in principle.15 However, when Castro met with Glass to discuss the idea, Castro was “startled” to learn that the association could not be incorporated because “nowhere in the law was the White House identified as a unit of the National Park System” even though the Park Service had maintained the grounds since 1933. “Nobody knew who owned it,” said Glass. “The White House had no parentage; it was just something that developed from the days of the founding of the country.”16 The White House’s uncertain legal status also had major implications for Jacqueline Kennedy’s plan to raise funds and
accept donations of antiques from private citizens. Knowing that potential donors would want the cachet of giving money and furnishings directly to the mansion, the first lady wanted all such gifts made directly to the White House. However, federal law at that time specified that all such gifts had to be made to the National Park Service.17 To remedy this situation, Glass worked with lawyers in the Justice Department to put together a bill that Representative J. T. Rutherford (D-Tex.) and Senator Clinton Anderson (D-N.Mex.) introduced in August, to establish the White House as a national monument.18 President Kennedy objected, saying he did not want to live in a national monument, so the legislation was revised to place the White House under the direct administration of the Park Service and designate the mansion’s
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THE FINE ARTS COMMITTEE
quality furnishings and raise funds to purchase them as gifts for the White House. According to Clifford, her “attitude was each piece of furniture in the White House should be the best that we can find of that particular type and period.”20 To ensure the quality of the donated objects and to blunt possible criticism of what would be essentially a volunteer effort, Jacqueline Kennedy persuaded Henry F. du Pont, the owner and creator of Winterthur, the nation’s foremost museum and research center for American decorative arts, to become the committee’s chairman. Finley and Walker were members of the group along with a number of other individuals, some of them friends of Mrs. Kennedy. All were knowledgeable about antique furnishings and the decorative arts and had access to dealers, collectors, and potential donors.21
While Glass and Castro were working on the problem of the White House’s legal status, Jacqueline Kennedy moved ahead as though it had already been resolved. In February she had announced the formation of the White House Fine Arts Committee with a mandate to locate authentic, museum-
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Ground Floor and the First Floor public rooms as a museum. To prevent future presidents from auctioning off White House furnishings as had been done in the past, according to former White House Chief Usher Rex Scouten, the legislation also made the mansion’s “furniture, fixtures, and decorative objects . . . inalienable and the property” of the White House whenever the president declared them “to be of historic or artistic interest.” The museum designation meant that all donations could now be made directly to the White House and would automatically become the property of the nation. They would also be tax deductible. This clarification of the Executive Mansion’s status removed a major stumbling block to the creation of the WHHA.19
Jacqueline Kennedy listens to Henry du Pont (left) as she poses in the Green Room with members of her Fine Arts Committee, December 1961. The appointment of the committee was announced by the White House with a press release issued February 23, 1961 (opposite). The release explained that the “purpose of the Committee is to locate authentic furniture of the date of the building of the White House . . . and the raising of the funds to purchase this furniture as gifts to the White House.” A list of the committee members accompanied the press release.
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JFK PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
Long before the Fine Arts Committee began compiling its wish list and reaching out to potential donors, Jacqueline Kennedy had begun scouring the nooks and crannies of the White House and its warehouse looking for furniture and decorative objects that once graced the rooms of the Executive Mansion.22 She allowed Sidey and a photographer to accompany her on one of these forays to the subbasement of the White House. The photo session was unsuccessful (“the light wasn’t right”), but as they toured the mansion Sidey did get one memorable quotation from the enigmatic first lady. As they stood in what became the Yellow Oval Room, he recalled her saying, “This is the most beautiful room in the house. . . . This is what the presidency is all about symbolically. These men who devote their lives to politics and fight so hard for this job. Here it’s all summed up. . . . All the meaning is right here.” Sidey left convinced that the first lady would soon send him her article. However, nothing happened. Summer came. Sidey still had no draft. The Kennedys went to their home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Finally, at her request, he flew there, but “something happened; she couldn’t see me.” He went back to Washington and decided to take a vacation with his family. However, no sooner had
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the Sideys arrived at his parents’ home in Greenfield, Iowa, than a call came through saying the first lady had a draft and could he come back. “So, I flew back to Hyannis. . . . It was raining. And I sat there for two or three days . . . and for some reason she couldn’t see me again.” Eventually the two connected, and when they did, Jacqueline Kennedy gave Sidey a handwritten draft on rolled up yellow legal paper. “She unrolled it on the floor and got down on her hands and knees and showed me what was what and what was where,” he said. “It wasn’t very good. . . . It was kind of a rambling account . . . and . . . it was going to need some help.” Sidey, who thought the pages resembled a modern-day version of “the Dead Sea Scrolls,” took the manuscript and rewrote it. His editors rewrote his work and then sent the manuscript back to the first lady for a final edit, a process that was not unusual in magazine journalism except for her involvement. The final article, which appeared in the September 1, 1961, issue of Life, described the project in glowing terms. “Jacqueline Kennedy has set out to bring back the furnishings and the art of America’s illustrious past” “to bring to the interior of the White House the purity, beauty and the strong feel of national tradition implicit in the building’s noble exterior lines.”23
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Journalist Hugh Sidey (above) with President Kennedy in the Oval Office, worked with Mrs. Kennedy on the article describing her plans for the White House restoration, which appeared in Life magazine (opposite) in September 1961.
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HUGH SIDEY AND LIFE MAGAZINE
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M A R K S H AW C O L L E C T I O N
Castro and Glass had been busy, too. Once Congress approved the legislation making the White House a museum and after Jacqueline Kennedy approved the Park Service’s formal proposal for the creation of a cooperating association for the White House, the two men began working with Dyer Justice Taylor, a lawyer in the Department of the Interior, to draft the legal paperwork. According to Glass, they used the standard NPS cooperating association templates, because “they were tested; and they worked,” and they penciled in “whatever the new association was to be called, adding any necessary changes.” Then Taylor took the paperwork back to the Interior Department’s legal office to be vetted.24 By this time Glass had become “a clearinghouse for the project,” communicating regularly with Clifford and others in the network he had developed. “Most of the calls that I had were very easy,” he recalled. “[People] were calling to tell me what was going on, what they were doing, and get my approval. . . . That was not a very difficult thing to do because all these men were experts.” The work may have been pleasant and easy, but that did not mean it was not time consuming. “I spent many, many hours on [the legal issues] simply for my love of doing it,” Glass said of the pro bono effort. “And I put in a full day on almost everything else.” In early September, Clifford, Glass, Castro, Taylor, Walker, and West met and decided to establish the new entity as a nonprofit organization under the laws of the District of Columbia. “That way we would have the freedom to do things that we could not do . . . in government because government regulations would have tied our hands,” Glass said. The charter specified that the work of the nonprofit group would be “historical, scientific, literary, and educational” in nature. It allowed the Association to raise money by preparing, publishing, and selling materials related to the White House and to use those funds to acquire “furniture and furnishings of historical interest and significance” and “assist” in their “preservation and refurbishing.” The Association was also empowered to accept both financial gifts and donations of actual objects.25 The Association’s efforts would be managed by a sixteen-member Board of Directors, which would include four ex officio members—the director of the National Park Service, the chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the director of the
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National Gallery of Art, and the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution—as well as members-atlarge. The director of the Park Service would also designate an “official” of the Park Service to be the group’s executive secretary.26
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A L L I M A G E S T H I S S P R E A D : T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N
PREPARING THE CHARTER
opposite Attorney Carson Glass provided months of pro bono legal work preparing the Association’s first charter. Seen here in the late 1990s while recounting the experience for the Association’s oral history project, Glass recalled he took on the timeconsuming effort simply for the “love of doing it.”
right The original five-page charter incorporating the White House Historical Association provided that “the period of its existence is perpetual” and that its purpose would be “exclusively . . . historical, scientific, literary, and educational.”
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A L L I M A G E S T H I S S P R E A D : T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N
The charter provided that in furtherance of its purpose the Association would “Sponsor, prepare, publish and make available to the White House visitors . . . suitable historical and other books, pamphlets, folders, maps or other literature interpreting the history of the White House and the persons and events associated with it.” This provision allowed the Association to raise money and to use those funds to acquire on behalf of the White House “furniture and furnishings of historical interest and significance . . . and assist in the preserving and refurbishing of such furniture and furnishings.”
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A L L I M A G E S T H I S S P R E A D : T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N
The charter specifies that the affairs of the Association would be “managed by a Board of Directors.�
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At First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s request, the charter was signed by Clark Clifford, David Finley, and John Walker, the incorporators.
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C L I F F O R D : A P I M A G E S / F I N L E Y A N D WA L K E R ; N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A R T A R C H I V E S
Jacqueline Kennedy relied heavily on her advisers (clockwise from top left) Clark Clifford, David Finley, and John Walker.
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THE INCORPORATORS As for the organization’s name, different people have different recollections of its origins. According to a 1983 article written for White House History, the Association’s journal, Castro claimed to have come up with the name White House Historical Association.27 Clifford, however, recalled that the name of the organization evolved. “It was quite a little while before we gradually all agreed on the name,” he said. “The words were familiar to everybody, and as time went on there was just kind of a general agreement that was it.” What was not in dispute was who the incorporators of the new organization would be. “I don’t remember anybody saying, ‘I will pick [John] Walker and [David] Finley,’” Clifford said. “We had been working together, and Jackie had something to do with it and felt that Walker brought something; Finley brought something. Apparently she thought that [I] brought something. So we were selected as the three incorporators. . . . They were very good choices and the public reacted well to them.” There was also little discussion about who would lead the fledgling organization. Finley, who “was older than the rest of us,” was “just an especially good man for the job” of chairman, Glass recalled. In addition to his age and obvious professional qualifications, “he was a real gentleman and somebody that everyone respected and admired.” He was also devoted to Jacqueline Kennedy, sharing with her a love of the past and a subtle, soft-spoken style. Walker who, with West, worked so closely with the first lady, became the organization’s first treasurer, and Castro, its first executive secretary and the Association’s first administrator. It fell to Glass to file the paperwork to make incorporation official, a process that turned out to be surprisingly simple. On November 3, 1961, he took a taxi from his office to the District of Columbia Courthouse, where he submitted the paperwork and paid a $4 filing fee. After eight months of sustained effort, Jacqueline Kennedy’s dream had come true. The White House Historical Association was born.
REFLECTIONS Looking back, what struck Glass was the high level of support and enthusiasm the project engendered. “And really the amazing thing about it was
the almost 100 percent cooperation that everyone gave [Jacqueline Kennedy]. Everybody was happy to take time” to work on the project. “It was almost a group endeavor. We all felt like we were contributing something.” The other striking aspect about the Association’s founders was the high level of volunteer commitment they sustained as they stewarded the infant organization through its early years. Finley, for example, served as the Association’s president until his death in 1977. Clifford became a Board member in 1962 and served in that capacity and informally as the Association’s legal counsel for many years thereafter. After sharing the Association’s legal duties with Clifford, Glass joined the Board in 1976 and retired as president in 2001. Sidey was elected to the Board in the early 1980s. He became president in 1998 and chair of the Board in 2001. Castro would serve as the Association’s first administrator and twice briefly thereafter, and he eventually joined the Board as well. “The fact that they gave freely of their time over a period of years is remarkable,” said Soapes. “They were all busy men. They could have said ‘no.’ [Instead] they gave the nation a form of service, just as if they had been in the military.”28 All the WHHA’s founders felt privileged to be a part of its creation and considered their work with the Association a high point in their careers. Many described their long commitment as “a labor of love.” What made the experience so unique, Sidey said, was the “absence of rancor, the quality of the people, the good humor, and the cause. . . . It’s so positive.” The fact that the White House today is a museum-quality showcase of American history and culture, a fitting backdrop for the presidency, and a worldwide symbol of democracy owes as much to the men who created the White House Historical Association as it does to Jacqueline Kennedy. She brought historical knowledge, passion, and vision to the project of making the Executive Mansion “the first house in the land.”29 The men she inspired were equally far-seeing. They provided the technical expertise to create an organization that would preserve and protect the White House and make it accessible to all Americans long after the Kennedy administration ended. Sixty years on, their joint legacy endures.
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notes The interviews on which this story is based were conducted in two phases: the first in 1995–96 and the second in 2003. They were part of a larger effort on the part of the WHHA Board of Directors to document and preserve the record of the Association’s founding and early history. All the quotations, unless otherwise noted, come from these interviews. Besides Carson Glass, Nash Castro, Clark Clifford, John Walker III, Hugh Sidey, Rex Scouten, and James Ketchum, the other interviewees were former WHHA presidents Robert Breeden, George Elsey, and George Hartzog; WHHA Board members Elmer Atkins, Jim McDaniel, and J. Carter Brown; WHHA legal counsel Leonard Silverstein; former White House curator Clement Conger; former WHHA staff members Donald Crump and Bernard Meyer; and WHHA historian William Seale. Gilbert Grosvenor, former chairman of the National Geographic Society and former editor of the National Geographic magazine, was included to discuss the role of his father, Melville Grosvenor, who died in 1982. 1.
Emily Soapes, telephone interview by Mary Jo Binker, April 25, 2019, White House Historical Association Archives, Washington, D.C.
2. The WHHA has also served as the model for the creation of the United States Capitol Historical Society and the Supreme Court Historical Society. 3. Quoted in Carl Sferrazza Anthony, As We Remember Her: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the Words of Her Friends and Family (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 23. 4. Mrs. Kennedy described her effort as a “restoration” based on scholarship rather than redecoration because she hated the term “redecorate.” Quoted in Sally Bedell Smith, Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (New York: Random House, 2004), 23. 5. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 669. 6. Quoted in J. B. West, Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), 200. 7. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House,” in Jacqueline Kennedy, The White House Years: Selections from the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, ed. Hamish Bowles (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 4. 8. Finley was an institution in his own right. He was the founding director of the National Gallery of Art and vice chairman of the Roberts Commission during World War II. In 1947 he helped found the National Trust for Historical Preservation and served as its first chairman. Wolfgang Saxon, “David E. Finley Dies; Art Gallery Leader,” New York Times, February 2, 1977, 17; Jean R. Hailey, “David Finley, 1st Director of National Gallery, Dies,” Washington Post, February 2, 1977, B6. 9. David A. Doheny, David Finley: Quiet Force for America’s Arts (Washington, D.C.: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2006), 306. 10. Besides advising Jacqueline Kennedy on a range of issues related to the restoration, including the content of the White House guidebook, Walker helped raise funds to purchase historic furnishings for the Executive Mansion. John Walker III interview; Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy to John Walker III, August 15, 1961, White House memorandum from Letitia Baldrige to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, January 27, 1962, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy to John Walker III, January 30, 1962, all in John Walker III Papers, box 9, J. Kennedy Correspondence, 1961–1969, ref. copies file 9-30, National Gallery of Art Archives, Washington, D.C. 11. Time, a weekly news magazine, and Life, a weekly news magazine that emphasized photography, were two of the most influential and widely read mass-market periodicals in twentieth-century America. In 1961, Time’s circulation was around 2.5 million copies per week. Life’s circulation averaged almost 7 million copies a week. “Time, Inc., Profit Declined in 1961,” New York Times, March 17, 1962, 29.
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12. In addition to being the Kennedys’ personal lawyer, Clark Clifford had also directed the transition between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. John Acacia, Clark Clifford: The Wise Man of Washington (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2009), 210–12. 13. Opponents of the balcony believed it would be historically inaccurate and “disrupt the facade” of the original structure. William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008), 2:260. 14. From time to time, Clifford would update Kennedy on the project’s progress. For example, on March 11, 1961, he wrote the president describing his efforts to determine the government’s “statutory authority” to accept donations and cash gifts to purchase or restore furnishings for the White House. Years later in an oral history for the Kennedy Library, Clifford described Kennedy’s involvement, saying the president “stayed in it [the restoration] enough to give the prestige of his office behind it.” Clark Clifford to John F. Kennedy, March 11, 1961, Clark Clifford Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston; Clark Clifford oral history, December 17, 1974, ibid. 15. Nash Castro, “The Association’s Twentieth Year,” White House History 1, no. 1 (1983): 23–24. 16. Ibid., 24; Barbara A. Perry, Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 112; Seale, President’s House, 2:177. 17. Perry, Jacqueline Kennedy, 112–13. The Glass interview by Soapes, April 27, 1995, provides the clearest explanation of the legal issues. 18. Jacqueline Kennedy personally lobbied Clinton Anderson, who chaired the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. Initially reluctant to meet with her, he was soon converted to her cause saying, “I can’t let this gal down. . . . Sometimes in politics one agrees to do something—and never does it—but this was different.” Quoted in Carl Sferrazza Anthony, First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power, 1961–1990 (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 2:29–30. 19. The legislation also specified that “any such article, fixture, or object” not used or displayed in the White House be loaned to the Smithsonian Institution “for its care, study, and storage or exhibition.” An Act Concerning the White House and Providing for the Care and Preservation of Its Historic and Artistic Contents, Public Law 87-286, September 22, 1961, available online at the Office of the Law Revision Council United State Code website, www.uscode.house.gov; Perry, Jacqueline Kennedy, 112–13. 20. Dorothy McCardle, “Authentic Furniture of 1802 Era Will Be Restored to White House,” Washington Post, February 24, 1961, A1. 21. Beside du Pont, Finley, and Walker, the other members of the Fine Arts Committee were Charles Francis Adams, a direct descendant of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams; Phyllis Dillon, spouse of Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon; Jane Engelhard, a member of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art; Mary Lasker, a philanthropist, trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and a collector of French art; John S. Loeb, a New York City financier, benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a collector of French Impressionist paintings; Rachel (“Bunny”) Mellon, a highly regarded amateur authority on horticulture and landscape design and a close friend of Jacqueline Kennedy; Dorothy (“Sister”) Parish, a noted New York decorator who had worked with Jacqueline Kennedy to redecorate the family quarters in the White House; Gerald Shea, a businessman and founding member and trustee of the Society for the Cultivation of Long Island Antiquities; Katherine Warren, former trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and the founder of the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island; and Jayne Wrightsman, Metropolitan Opera board member, collector of eighteenth-century French paintings and furniture, and a longtime friend of the Kennedy family. List of committee members in ibid.; Perry, Jacqueline Kennedy, 105; James A. Abbott and Elaine Rice Bachman, Designing Camelot: The Kennedy Restoration and its Legacy (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2021); “Gerald Shea, Antiquarian,
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Headed Chain of Movies,” New York Times, June 2, 1974, 63; “Katherine U. Warren, 79, Dies; Newport Preservation Leader,” New York Times, April 20, 1976, 33; press release, Office of the White House Press Secretary, The White House, February 23, 1961, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis Personal Papers, Textual Materials, Pamela Turnure Files, Press Files: Releases—White House Restoration, JBKOPP-SF017-005, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Shea is listed in Abbott and Bachman, Designing Camelot, but not in the White House press release. In March Mrs. Kennedy hired Lorraine Pearce, a graduate of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, to be the White House’s first curator. Pearce’s appointment is noted in Frances Lewine, “First Lady Picks Curator,” Washington Post, March 30, 1961, C16; Richard Sandomir, “Lorraine Pearce Dies at 82; First White House Curator, Hired by the Kennedys,” New York Times, April 7, 2017, A23. 22. Former White House curator James Ketchum, then a curatorial assistant, said the first lady “just was unbelievable in terms of time, energy, effort, knowledge.” In an interview for another publication, he recalled her excitement when new donations arrived. “As the pieces came in,” Ketchum said, “she would sometimes run down to the delivery area. Once, dressed in her jeans, she surprised the moving men by jumping in and lifting a heavy mirror.” Quoted in Anthony, As We Remember Her, 140–41. 23. Hugh Sidey, “The First Lady Brings History and Beauty to the White House,” Life, September 1961, reprinted in White House History, 13 Summer 2003, 6-9. 24. Castro, “Association’s Twentieth Year,” 25–26. 25. Certificate of Incorporation of the White House Historical Association As Amended, November 3, 1961, White House Historical Association Archives. 26. Ibid. 27. Castro, “Association’s Twentieth Year,” 24. 28. Soapes interview. 29. Schlesinger, “Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House,” in Jacqueline Kennedy, ed. Bowles, 4.
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