It is the most famous house in America. Almost nobody knows what it is actually like to live there. The exterior is one of the most recognized buildings in the world. The Oval Office has been photographed 10,000 times. The press briefing room, the Rose Garden, the South Lawn Arrivals. These are the images of the White House that the world knows because these are the images the White House produces for public consumption.
What the White House does not produce for public consumption is the experience of actually living there. the specific quality of what it is like to wake up in the building. To manage the morning with the kitchen that is also a state institution, to navigate the 18 acres of permanent surveillance and security apparatus, that is the domestic context of the family that occupies it.
The former first families who have described this experience describe it consistently as unlike anything else they had imagined, in ways that were sometimes extraordinary and sometimes simply strange. The building is not a house. It is a compound, an institution, a museum, a military installation, and a government office that also happens to have bedrooms in it.
The people who live there are not homeowners. They are temporary occupants of the most complicated domestic situation in the world. Here are 15 weird facts about what life inside the White House is actually like. Fact one, the first family pays for their own groceries. The president of the United States pays for the food consumed by the first family out of personal funds.
The White House kitchen and its staff are funded by the government and the food for official functions, the state dinners, the official receptions, the meals served to visiting dignitaries is paid for from the White House operating budget. The food the first family eats in the private residence for their own meals is charged to the president personally.
This surprises most people who learn it and it surprises most presidents when they learn it for the first time, which is typically during the transition briefings before inauguration. The arrangement reflects a principle that the public should not pay for the personal meals of the occupants of the building. That every administration has maintained regardless of the apparent absurdity of the most powerful person in the world receiving a monthly grocery bill.
The bill is produced by the White House Kitchen, which tracks what the family consumes from the White House pantry and refrigerators and submitted to the first family’s personal accounts. Former presidents have described the experience of receiving the bill as one of the more peculiar realities of the transition from private life to the White House.
The discovery that the building takes care of everything except things you assumed it would take care of. Jackie Kennedy had been receiving grocery bills for the Kennedy family from the White House kitchen throughout the administration. She had not been entirely pleased with the arrangement. Though it was the one financial claim on the household, she had not found a creative way to manage.
Fact two, the building has 132 rooms and the first family uses a fraction of them. The White House contains 132 rooms spread across six floors, including 35 bathrooms, a tennis court, a bowling alley, a movie theater, a jogging track, a swimming pool, a pudding green, a tennis court, a basketball court, and a variety of other amenities that different administrations have added over the years and that few administrations have had time to use fully.
The first family occupies the second and third floors of the executive residence, the central section of the building as their private living space. This amounts to a significant and comfortable private residence by any reasonable standard. It is a fraction of the total building, most of which is devoted to official functions, public spaces, administrative offices, and the support infrastructure required to maintain both.
The floors below the family residence, the first floor stateooms, the ground floors, offices and service spaces are the public and official White House. Tours run through them regularly. State functions are held in them. They are managed as the official institution of the building. The floors above the family residence, the third floor living spaces, and the roof contain additional family rooms, guest rooms, and the specific domestic spaces that the White House staff maintains whether or not they are in use. The building has been expanded,
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modified, and renovated continuously since the original construction was completed in 1800. The White House that exists today bears a limited physical resemblance to the building that John Adams became the first president to occupy. And the building that exists in another generation will likely bear a limited resemblance to what exists today.
Fact three, the White House has a full-time staff of about 100 people dedicated to the building’s operation. The White House residents staff the people whose job is specifically the domestic operation of the building as a home for the first family members. Approximately 100 people working in shifts maintaining the building around the clock every day of the year.
The staff includes chefs, butlers, ushers, maids, florists, calligraphers, electricians, plumbers, and the various specialists required to maintain a building that functions simultaneously as a private residence. a museum with a permanent collection of historical significance, a working government office, and an event venue that hosts several hundred official functions per year.
The resident staff are among the most discreet people in the federal government. They serve across multiple administrations. Some individual staff members have served through five or six presidencies, developing the specific institutional knowledge of the building that a single 4-year or 8-year administration cannot accumulate. They observe the private domestic life of the first family with a proximity that makes privacy in the conventional sense essentially impossible.
Former first families universally describe the experience of being served by the White House resident staff as one of the most extraordinary and most disorienting features of the first months in the building. People appear when things are needed. People disappear when not needed. The building manages itself in ways that are simultaneously impressive and unsettling for families accustomed to the ordinary management of a private home.
The staff has occasionally published memoirs after their service, producing some of the most intimate accounts of White House private life available in the historical record. The discretion they maintain during service does not always survive the retirement. Fact four, the temperature of every room is monitored and controlled centrally.
The White House has a building management system that controls the temperature, humidity, and lighting conditions of every room in the building from a central facility managed by the White House engineering staff. The conditions in the official spaces are maintained at specific standards regardless of what the weather outside is doing.
Because the preservation of the historic furniture, artwork, and documents that constitute the White House permanent collection requires specific and stable environmental conditions. The first family’s private rooms are also climate controlled, though the family has more discretion over the specific settings in the private residence than the preservation requirements of the official spaces allow in the public rooms.
The building systems are extremely old in their infrastructure and extremely modern in their management. The result of decades of renovation and upgrade to the underlying systems while maintaining the historic character of building surfaces and public spaces. The pipes that carry the heating and cooling through the walls are not the pipes that were installed in the 19th century, but they are concealed behind walls that look as they did in the 19th century.
The engineering staff who maintain these systems are among the most specialized people in the federal workforce individuals with specific expertise in the management of a building that is both a historic preservation site and fully functional modern residence and office. They work largely invisibly. The building maintains its conditions because they maintain the building.
FAC5 Every object in the public rooms is cataloged and insured and cannot be moved without approval. The permanent collection of the White House, the furniture, artwork, silver, china, and decorative objects that constitute the building’s historical holdings, is managed by the White House Historical Association and the Office of the Curator of the White House, a permanent federal position whose occupant is responsible for the maintenance, documentation, and development of the collection. Every object in the public
rooms of the White House is cataloged with a specific inventory number, documented with photographs and provenence records, ensured at a specific value, and subject to the curatorial authority of the curator’s office regarding its placement, handling, and condition. The first family cannot rearrange the furniture in the state rooms without the curator’s involvement.
They cannot hang a different picture on a wall in the blue room without the approval of the curatorial process. The public rooms of the White House are managed as the museum they functionally are with the professional standards that museum management requires. The private residents the second and third floors occupied by the family is different.
The first family can decorate the private residence according to their own preferences using their own furnishings or selecting from the White House collection and the decoration of the private residence has reflected the aesthetic sensibilities of the occupants in ways that the official spaces cannot. Jackie Kennedy’s redecoration of the private residence was the first systematic and professional standard renovation of the family spaces in the building’s modern history.
The residence she produced was, by accounts from the staff who managed it, the most completely inhabited domestic space the building had contained in the modern era. Fact six. The White House kitchen operates around the clock. The White House kitchen, the main kitchen on the ground floor of the building, operates around the clock, 7 days a week, every day of the year.
It is staffed by a team of professional chefs who can produce anything from a simple breakfast for the first family’s children to a state dinner for 150 guests on whatever timeline the official schedule requires. The kitchen scale and capability are determined by the range of functions it is required to serve. A state dinner requires the production of a multi-course meal of fine dining quality for a large number of guests simultaneously.
Served with the timing and the precision that formal diplomatic occasions demand, a Tuesday morning requires a softboiled egg, the chefs who work in the White House kitchen are among the most carefully vetted culinary professionals in the country. Subject to extensive background checks, security clearances, and the specific trust that comes from being in the first family’s immediate domestic environment every day.
They maintain discretion about the family’s preferences and habits that the resident staff maintains about the family’s domestic life. Generally, the specific dietary preferences, allergies, and requirements of each member of the first family are known to the kitchen staff and accommodated without the members of the family being required to explain themselves each time.
The kitchen learns the family quickly and serves the family according to what the family wants without requiring the family to manage the relationship between their desires and the kitchen’s capabilities. Fact seven. There are tunnels under the White House that most people don’t know about. The White House is connected to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door and to other federal facilities in the immediate area by an underground tunnel system that was developed primarily during and after the Second World War. When the vulnerability
of the president to air attack and other threats made secure underground movement a priority, the tunnels allow the president and key staff to move between the White House and adjacent federal buildings without surface exposure. They are also connected to a presidential emergency operations center, a hardened underground facility beneath the east wing of the White House that serves as a secure shelter and command post in the event of a threat to the building surface.
The tunnels and the underground facility are classified in their specific details. Their general existence is documented in historical accounts and in the testimony of former officials who have described them in general terms. The specific layout, the specific connections, and the specific capabilities of the underground facilities are not public information.
During the September 11 attacks, Vice President Cheney was moved to the presidential emergency operations center where he spent several hours as the situation was managed. This is one of the documented instances in which the underground facilities were used in response to an actual threat and it confirmed what the engineers who built the system had designed it to do.
The tunnels are the least visible and most operationally significant feature of the building that almost nobody discusses. Fact eight. The Secret Service monitors every room, including some that the First Family considers private. The Secret Service protective detail that is responsible for the president of the United States is not confined to the perimeter of the White House.
It is present inside the building on every floor in the immediate vicinity of the president and the first family at all times. The specific monitoring arrangements, the cameras, the sensors, the communication systems that allow the protective detail to maintain awareness of what is happening throughout the building are not publicly disclosed in detail.
What is publicly known is that the Secret Service presence inside the White House is comprehensive enough to constitute a form of surveillance that no previous domestic arrangement has prepared most families for. Former members of the first family have described the adjustment to this reality as one of the most significant and most sustained challenges of White House life.
The absence of genuine privacy, the awareness that the building is monitored in ways that the family cannot fully map or control is a feature of the White House that persists regardless of how well the family comes to know and trust the protective detail. The protective agents are professionals who maintain their own discretion about what they observe in the course of their protective function.
The observation is not judgment. The presence is not intrusive in the conventional sense. It is simply there consistently and comprehensively in a way that becomes the background condition of the life rather than an acute disruption except for the moments when the family remembers that the background condition is actually happening.
Fact nine state gifts to the president belong to the government not the president. The gifts that foreign governments and foreign dignitaries present to the president of the United States. The ornate boxes, the ceremonial weapons, the jewelry, the artwork, the various diplomatic presents that the tradition of gift exchange between heads of state produces do not belong to the president.
They belong to the United States government. The Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act requires that gifts to federal employees above a minimal value threshold, currently $390, be turned over to the federal government. For the president, this means that virtually every significant gift received from a foreign source must be turned over to the General Services Administration, which maintains them in the Federal Gift Collection and eventually transfers them to the National Archives or to the presidential library of the relevant administration. Presidents who wish to
keep a specific gift may do so by purchasing it from the government at the fair market value the government has assessed. Presidents who do not make the purchase return the gift to the federal collection. This arrangement has produced various awkward situations across the history of the modern presidency.
The discovery by an incoming first lady that the extraordinary jewelry presented to her predecessor by a foreign head of state is not the predecessors to take when she leaves the building. The realization that the ceremonial sword in the Oval Office has a price tag attached to it if it is to go to the ranch after the term ends. The gifts are for the office.
The person in the office receives them on behalf of the office. When the person leaves, the gifts stay. Fact 10. The White House florist produces thousands of fresh flowers per week. The White House florist, a permanent position within the resident staff, is responsible for the floral arrangements that appear throughout the building’s public and private spaces.
During normal operations, the floral staff produces thousands of fresh flowers per week, arranging them in the specific styles and compositions that the White House’s aesthetic standards and the current administration’s preferences require for major events, state dinners, official receptions, holiday decorations. The production scale increases dramatically.
The holiday decorations that the White House deploys each December, organized around the first lady’s chosen theme, involve tens of thousands of ornaments, wreaths, trees, and the specific visual elements that make the White House holiday display one of the most elaborate and most visited temporary installations in official Washington.
The flowers in the White House are real flowers, not artificial. They are sourced from suppliers who maintain the specific quality standards that the White House requires, delivered on the schedule that the florist’s production calendar demands, and disposed of when they have passed the point of their best condition.
The building is never without flowers in the public spaces. The florist who manages this operation is a person who works everyday around every official occasion. With the specific horicultural and design expertise that the scale and the standard of the White House floral program requires, it is one of the most specialized and least publicly discussed positions in the resident staff. Fact 11.
The White House receives approximately 6,000 visitors per day. On a typical public tour day, the White House receives approximately 6,000 visitors who move through the public rooms of the building in groups guided by the Secret Service and the White House Visitors Office. The tour covers the ground floor and first floor of the building, the rooms that are maintained as the public museum of American presidential history and does not include access to the family residence or the working offices of the west wing. The tours move through the
east wing entrance through the series of stateooms and exit through the north portico. The experience has managed to move the volume of visitors through the building in orderly groups without disrupting the official functions that are occurring simultaneously in other parts of the building.
Public tours were suspended after the September 11 attacks and resumed in a modified form in subsequent years. The tours are arranged through congressional offices and are subject to availability, security clearance procedures, and the specific scheduling of official events that may close portions of the building to public access.
The 6,000 daily visitors are in the same building as the president and the first family, separated by floors and security perimeters. The first family can be eating breakfast on the second floor while tourists are photographing the blue room directly below them. It is the only house in America where this is the ordinary Tuesday morning. Fact 12.
The bowling alley was built for Harry Truman and has been used by every administration. The two-lane bowling alley located in the basement of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House was installed for Harry Truman in 1947 and has been used with varying degrees of enthusiasm by every administration since.
Richard Nixon was the most devoted presidential bowler. He is documented as having used the alley more than any other president, sometimes bowling alone in the late evenings as a form of stress relief during the most demanding periods of his administration. Nixon’s relationship with the bowling alley has become one of the more notable footnotes in the history of presidential recreation.
Partly because the image of the most embattled president in modern history, bowling alone in a basement at midnight, has a specific quality that is difficult to ignore. George HW Bush had the lanes relocated to the main White House building in 1994 after his term ended and they were subsequently moved back.
The specific location of the bowling alley has been one of the more actively managed of the White House’s recreational facilities. Presidents who bowl publicly while in office tend to invite the comparison with their scored games. Gerald Ford was documented bowling a 122. The press was informed. The public was informed. The bowling score of a sitting president is apparently newsworthy in the specific way that few other recreational activities achieve. Fact 13.
The White House has its own doctor, dentist, and medical facility. The White House medical unit, a military medical team permanently assigned to the White House, provides comprehensive medical care to the president, the first family, and the White House staff. The unit is led by the White House physician, a military officer of flag rank who is responsible for the president’s medical care and who accompanies the president on all travel.
The White House has a medical facility with diagnostic and treatment capabilities staffed by military medical personnel with the specific skills required to address the range of medical situations that might arise in the building or in the immediate vicinity of the president. The facility is not a hospital, but it has the capability to stabilize and treat conditions before transfer to a medical facility if necessary.
The White House physician who accompanies the president on all travel carries a medical kit with the equipment and medications necessary to address medical emergencies in the field. The physician is present at every public event, standing in a position that allows immediate access to the president if needed. The president’s medical records are maintained by the White House medical unit and are protected by the same medical privacy protections that apply to private individuals with the specific exception that the president’s physician provides periodic
public updates on the president’s health as a matter of transparency about the fitness of the person holding the most demanding office in the world. The dentist is less dramatic but equally available. Fact 14. The first family can never be alone in the building in the way private homeowners are alone in a house.
The specific quality of solitude that a person experiences in a private home. The genuine aloneeness of the house in the evening when the day is over and the building is simply yours is not an experience available to the first family in the White House. The building is never unoccupied. The resident staff is present in some form around the clock.
The Secret Service is present in some form around the clock. the military aids, the communication staff, the engineering and facilities, people who maintain the building systems. Some configuration of these people is present and active in the building at every hour of every day of every year. The first family can retreat to the private floors of the residence and be alone in the sense that no one is immediately in the same room.
They cannot be alone in the sense of being the only people in the building. There is always someone in the building. There is always someone in the immediate vicinity. The building is a managed institution and managed institutions do not go quiet in the way that private homes go quiet. Former members of First Families describe the adjustment to this reality.
The discovery that the private home feeling is simply not available inside the White House. That the building is always occupied in ways that the family can feel even when they cannot see the people occupying it. As one of the features of White House life that takes the longest to become simply the background condition of existence there.
Fact 15. Every first family has said it was not what they expected and everyone has been right. The accounts from former first families that have accumulated across the administrations of the modern presidency are remarkably consistent. On one point, the experience of living in the White House was not what they expected.
This is true across administrations with very different characters, styles, and relationships to the building. The Obamas were surprised. The Clintons were surprised. The Bushes were surprised. The Reagans were surprised. The surprises take different forms. The grocery bills. The lack of genuine privacy. The constant presence of staff.
The impossibility of the solitude that private home life provides. The specific quality of living in a building that is simultaneously a home, a museum, a government office, and a permanent public event. But there is also the specific quality of what the building provides that has not always been anticipated. The extraordinary competence of the staff who manage the household at a standard that no private household of comparable size achieves.
The specific beauty of the building and its grounds which are maintained to a standard that makes them genuinely extraordinary. The specific access to history. The sense of walking through rooms where the most significant decisions of the previous two and a half centuries were made. And for the families that find it something more particular, the specific quality of the building as the one arrangement in which the most demanding public life in the world and the ordinary domestic life of a family with children can coexist in
the same space. Jackie Kennedy had called it the most beautiful prison in the world. She had also called it the one place that made the whole arrangement bearable. Both things were true. Every family that has lived there has found both things true in the specific forms their specific lives have taken in the specific years they have occupied the building.
The White House is not what anyone expects. It is also for the people who find the mercy in it, not entirely what anyone could have imagined either. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe. There is always more to the story. There’s always more to the story. There’s always more to the story.
is all.
