Watching that wrecking ball take down the East Wing last month was like chopping off my left arm. Remembrances of things from my White House past flooded my inner inbox.
I had an office in the East Wing from 1981 until 1983, when I was deputy press secretary to the reigning first lady, Nancy Reagan, and it was heaven. I never got over the excitement of driving up to that big white confection of a building every morning, in my white Fiat Spyder convertible, and pulling into the parking space just outside the East Wing, reserved for Mrs. Reagan’s staff. I’d be warmly greeted as I entered, running up the flight of stairs to my tiny but perfect square of an office.
It felt like, and was, an eight-foot-square box, and I was free to decorate it any way I wanted. So I immediately had them construct a tall, double-door entrance (it echoed the long window opposite), painted the walls a sunny yellow with high-gloss white trim, and chose a Louis XVth-style table desk to sit in the middle. All symmetry and just enough room for me and the 18th century French chandelier that I’d brought along. It had belonged to Uncle Amos, on whom W. Somerset Maugham had based a character in The Razor’s Edge, its ruby and crystal beads looping around an ormolu structure like Marie Antoinette’s petticoats. It was so feminine, so East Wing. When I left to join the National Endowment for the Arts and to become Washington Editor of House & Garden, I took the chandelier with me. Now, it’s happily hanging in my library.
So how did I get to the East Wing? By way of David Gergen, who brought me to the White House. Dave was the rarest of rare political geniuses. He advised nearly every president, Democrat or Republican, from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton, surviving from administration to administration. (The only one he missed was Jimmy Carter.) I met him at the American Enterprise Institute, the Republican-leaning think tank (as opposed to the more liberal Brookings Institute), where he was hanging out during Carter’s presidency. When Reagan was elected, Dave was appointed deputy to the president and he brought me under his wing. I was in my late 20s, and here I was, in the White House.
But that was the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB), both on the president’s side of the house. My dream was always to work in the first lady’s office, which was the East Wing. When I got there, I wrote speeches (not the famous one in which she said, “Just say no!”—that was my friend Landon Parvin, who was one of the president’s speech writers) and talking points and whatever else she might need, and she delivered them with the impersonal politeness that characterized our relationship.
#Corner #East #Wing
