Did you spot it? On the afternoon of Jan. 20, 2021, newly inaugurated President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden arrived at the North Portico of the White House. Joined by their family, they waved to media and spectators, then turned around to enter the building — but the doors didn’t open for another fifteen seconds. It would later come out that the Bidens’ counsel had unexpectedly fired Trump-appointed White House Chief Usher Timothy Harleth during the inauguration, while Harleth had been overseeing the move of the Biden household into the White House Residence. In the sudden absence of a chief usher, nobody was around to signal the Marine sentries to ceremonially open the White House doors. Journalist Kate Brower, author of bestselling books on the White House Residence and first ladies, points to the inauguration incident as a significant moment of partisanship. “It was really shocking,” Brower told HPR, “for people to see the awkwardness of that moment and how it’s representative of the change in our culture where everything is about whose team you’re on.”
The quick ousting of Harleth (whose LinkedIn profile now reads “former White House history nerd”) offered a brief, revealing glimpse into the discreet world of the White House Residence — the actual white neoclassical mansion within the eighteen-acre White House complex, in which the president and his family lives. Secluded and largely secretive, maintained by a devoted career staff, the Residence often finds itself academically and popularly marginalized in conversations on the presidency. But by considering it within the context of the president’s role as head of state instead of a flawed public-private sphere methodology, we can consider the many broken “norms” embodied by recent administrations’ conflicts with career staff and disruptions to White House traditions. In questioning the broader historicity of a “stable” American presidency, then, we can ask the big question — can the White House as we know it “survive”?
‘Norms,’ the Residence, and the Presidency
Make no mistake, the president’s living situation within the White House is weird: simultaneously a system of “perks” provided to the head of government for his convenience and a much more elaborate public performance of head-of-statehood under intense national scrutiny. The Residence boasts roughly ninety-two full-time career staff who indiscriminately serve the president and family in their private life as well as for state functions. There are ushers, butlers, florists, housekeepers, valets, doormen, chefs, electricians, carpenters, and more — all are tasked with running the Residence like an aristocratic house of old. There, the president lives “above the shop” — living on the private second and third floor, above the State Rooms (which are open to tourists during working hours, and in which the president performs state functions like hosting dignitaries), a stone’s throw away from the West Wing and Oval Office. No other American political leader is given similar privileges: vice presidents have a much more low-key system of Navy stewards serving them at the Observatory; congressional opposition killed a plan to designate D.C.’s historic Cafritz mansion as an official residence for the Secretary of State in the 1990s. Note that, for example, the Speaker of the House — second in line to the presidency — is not provided taxpayer-funded housing or other residential perks. (At the time of writing, November 2023, I can only imagine what a disaster that could stand to be). The Residence is idiosyncratic, privileged, and often uncomfortable. Presidents have called it a “gilded cage” and “the finest jail in the world.”
Faced with this unique living situation, scholars have trended towards marginalizing it. In academic and popular scholarship, one can identify a significant tension about what to do with “all that other stuff” — the non-governance substance of presidents. Some occupy entire books: historian David Greenberg’s “Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image” artfully argues for the centrality of image-making and presidential symbolism to ole’ Tricky Dick and his successors. Certainly, personality, family drama, and hobbies add color to biographies. But the job of presidential governance is always central, often demanding that the non-governmental subject matter be relegated to a lesser “private sphere,” assumed to be the domain of first ladies and their own (primarily female) historians. The public-private sphere framework is fatally flawed. A biographer of any given first lady is motivated to assume that first ladies exist solely in a private sphere as a baseline because it allows their book to prove that that First Lady XY was actually a secret feminist, or underappreciated political actor, or what-have-you. Their individualized theses run into problems when faced with a succession of first ladies who supposedly defy the rules set by their traditionalist predecessors. If we are to believe that every president’s wife exists on a stage of exception, how are all of them meant to be exceptional simultaneously? For first ladies and presidents alike, the current structure just won’t cut it.
Instead, it would be productive to consider the president’s role as head of state to understand all that “other stuff.” Presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky identifies a trio of hierarchical roles occupied by a president: “head of party,” “head of state,” and “head of executive branch.” As head of their political party, the president pursues a partisan agenda, and as head of the executive branch, he leads a two-million-strong, mostly career federal workforce — but as “head of state” (in other nations, a position occupied by a ceremonial president or a monarch) the role is more obscure, more often considered in the context of hosting foreign leaders or acting as a face of the nation. The role remains in flux: in an interview with HPR, Chervinsky points to Biden’s recent visit to a United Auto Workers picket line in Michigan, a first for a modern president, as a significant move. Previous presidents have invoked their position as head of state, in which they are expected to represent the entire nation, to avoid taking sides in labor disputes.
So what happens when there’s a decay in the president’s ability to act as head of state? Media and the social sciences are full of discussion on “democratic norms” — separation of powers, an independent judiciary, a multi-party system, checks and balances, and the peaceful transition of power. But within that context, curiously, are the functionally aesthetic gestures taken as indicators of these less tangible democratic norms being upheld. Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election and subsequent decision to skip the inauguration of his successor, for example, meant that the state rituals indicating a peaceful transition of power — the Trumps hosting the Bidens for a White House visit; tea in the Blue Room and a tour of the Residence; the outgoing and incoming president traveling to the inauguration together — were absent. The Trumps’ choice to sleep in separate bedrooms (allegedly, Melania kept the primary suite) and his many publicized extramarital affairs generated public outcry. It’s notable, then, that backlash to more public norm-breaking has been taken in a similar vein. The administration’s refusal to host the unveiling of the Obamas’ White House portraits, a “tradition” dating back to the Carter administration, was not without context: Trump perpetuated the “birther” conspiracy and alleged without evidence that Obama had ordered spying on his 2016 campaign. More pointedly, presidential historians and commentators expressed outrage when Melania Trump announced an overhaul of the White House Rose Garden, which fixed long-standing drainage issues and made the garden wheelchair accessible for the first time with the addition of paved walkways. In cases where the Trump administration failed to carry out traditions, neglected White House history, or experienced personal strife, the public outcry took similar tones. The modern White House is full of indicator-norms of all stripes.
This also prompts the interesting historical note that most norms are newer than we might imagine and that most of it is the Kennedys’ fault. Probably no modern White House resident has been more influential to the structure and traditions of the White House, both internally and externally, than First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. We’re obsessed with Jackie. Brower points to nostalgia for her romantic ‘Camelot’ image — with its violent, televised end — as the key to understanding our national Jackie-mania. She told HPR: “You have this juxtaposition of a beautiful family, bringing a newborn into the White House for the first time since the Cleveland administration, and an idyllic marriage,” she says, “And in the Zapruder tapes, you could see the president’s head being blown off.” Kennedy directed a massive restoration of the White House, which acquired antiques and designed the State Rooms in Early Republic decorative styles. Betty Monkman, who served as White House Curator during the Clinton and Bush administrations, notes that Kennedy established major historical initiatives, commissioned the first visitor’s guidebook, and hired the first Office of the Curator. Among tourists visiting the White House in subsequent decades, Kennedy’s restoration of the White House historic rooms was taken as a baseline upon which no successors had improved. She told HPR that “there was a real idea, for many years, that this was ‘Jackie Kennedy’s White House’ frozen in time.” In a sense, formal White House history ‘began’ with Kennedy, and her two-and-a-half-year tenure seems fated to be relitigated in the discourse surrounding every subsequent presidential administration. Melania Trump’s Rose Garden restoration didn’t just tear out the dying crabapple trees but Jackie Kennedy’s dying crabapple trees, first planted at her request by horticulturist Bunny Mellon in 1961. The Trump administration’s proposed Air Force One redesign would have done away with Jackie Kennedy’s choice of steel blue livery and Caslon font. For her romantic image and contributions to White House historiography, Kennedy’s White House and first ladyship has become the ideal. Trump himself made the comparison, dialing into Fox and Friends to tell the anchors, “We have our own Jackie O, it’s called Melania, Melania T.”
New Norms; New Stories
At face value, “methodologies in presidential studies” is a weird, niche quibble that matters to basically nobody. But in the context of understanding aesthetic or indicator norms — when we hear on the news that Trump once again defied X, Y, and Z tradition — it becomes worthwhile to think about the relationship between “public” and “private.” A “head of state” framework is ideal for that conversation.
Awareness of “White House historicity” will be critical to broader, more innovative academic and popular studies of the presidency, but our governmental and pseudo-governmental institutions haven’t particularly encouraged it. Anything of note to be found through the Freedom of Information Act or in researching the archives of presidential libraries (the many challenges with which one could fill another article) is subject to either a years-long wait or insurmountable classification. The White House Historical Association, a nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 1961 by — who else? — Jackie Kennedy, functions almost like a collections-less archive. Beholden to donors sentimentally tied to recent presidential administrations, the WHHA has little structural incentive to critically analyze modern White House “history” as it might be traditionally understood. Although it has recently moved to analyze long-gone early presidents’ abhorrent ties to slavery, more modern presidencies are marveled at rather than analyzed. To the WHHA’s eyes, presidents cannot break norms, only create new ones. It perpetually runs the risk of acting like the nonprofit version of Nixon’s famous quote to David Frost: “If the president does it, then that means it is history.”
Yet to ask if the status quo can “survive” feels like the wrong question to ask when the Residence continues to drag itself along, partially alive and partially a corpse. The White House’s many failing institutions have proved remarkably resilient: chief among them the United States Secret Service, which has faced wide-ranging controversies in the past decade; from a “jumper” who scaled the White House fence, kicked down a door, and made it inside the Residence before being tackled by an off-duty officer to such severe reports of far-right ideology held by Trump’s Presidential Protective Division agents that they were replaced with more senior agents from Biden’s time as vice president. The Bidens have moved to restore White House traditions, hosting the Obamas’ portrait unveilings — though it seems unlikely that they will also host their immediate predecessors’ unveilings, and Jill Biden (to her credit) has resisted chronically online Democrats’ urging to undo Melania Trump’s Rose Garden restoration. Had Biden made a show of bringing back the crabapple trees, she would have made a classic pseudo-historical appeal to the Kennedy era, which itself would be taken as the embodiment of the imagined, unbroken White House history. An administration that gestures towards Kennedy establishes its president as a chain in the continuity of the head of state-ship and makes claims about his moral righteousness.
But the Trump era has done its damage to the building’s — metaphorical — structural integrity. Brower suspects that there will be fewer leaks emerging from the Residence, and, as a consequence, fewer journalists will report on it. In recent years, the staff is believed to have signed NDAs — a departure from decades of merely relying on staff discretion to protect the presidents’ privacy. “There’s a lot more secrecy,” Brower says. “We’ll just know a lot less and have a less human view of the Residence.” The institution has begun to slip away. It risks being rendered secretive, broken, and obsolete in our brave new post-Trump world.
