Touring the White House ... and Eleanor Roosevelt's Dinnergate
You’re Invited “Inside The White House” Posted by on November 9, 2010 at the White House blog.
Thousands of visitors tour the White House each day. It's been a long time in the making and today, we're pleased to invite you on our new interactive White House tour.
With some incredible behind-the-scenes photos from the Photo Office and our best Inside the White House videos, you’re invited to do everything from cook with the New Orleans Saints in the White House kitchen, to peek inside the Situation Room, to watch the Jonas Brothers perform in the East Room and tour the first ever beehive on White House grounds with beekeeper Charlie Brandt — plus a lot more.But before you take the tour, we're excerpting a couple of paragraphs from a Gourmet magazine (when will we see the renaissance of this wonderful magazine once again?) article by Laura Shapiro about Eleanor Roosevelt and the art — or lack of it — of White House cuisine:
"At the center of what nobody at the time thought to call Dinnergate was Henrietta Nesbitt, the White House housekeeper, a friend of Eleanor’s from Hyde Park who had worked with ER in local Democratic politics and happened to be a talented baker. When FDR was Governor of New York, Eleanor hired Nesbitt to supply the Governor’s mansion with doughnuts, pies and fruitcakes. Then, after FDR was elected president, Eleanor asked Nesbitt to take on a job for which she had no qualifications whatsoever — housekeeper at the biggest and busiest home in the country. Nesbitt’s high-handed ways made the White House staff loathe her; and it was soon apparent that apart from dessert, the meals she oversaw were going to be dreadful."
"But ER wouldn’t hear of firing her. Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of the brilliant, richly detailed biography Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933 by Blanche Wiesen Cook, offers the theory that Eleanor’s stubborn loyalty to Mrs. Nesbitt was a kind of weapon, wielded consciously or not against FDR as she jostled for power in the course of a complicated and often painful marriage. Effective though they were as a public team, the Roosevelts led separate personal lives; and FDR always had other women around him. These friends and relatives, especially his devoted secretary, Missy LeHand, were happy to serve and amuse him — unlike the strait-laced, politically demanding ER. The tension in her role as wife, according to Cook, brought out a passive-aggressive streak in Eleanor."
"Underscoring this analysis, Cook describes another peculiarity of Eleanor’s that seems antithetical to her usual warm thoughtfulness: her habit of taking along a beloved but vicious dog or two wherever she went. The dogs used to bite friends and strangers alike; nonetheless, ER insisted on keeping them with her, until finally she was forced to give them up."
Further, the Library of Congress notes that " Alison Kelly, a reference librarian in the Science, Technology and Business Division (ST&B) at the Library of Congress, has compiled Presidential Food: Selected Resource Guide for reporters, culinary historians and the interested public. The guide can be viewed online at www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/SciRefGuides/presidentialfood.html.
"The eight-page guide provides reference to books, magazine articles and Internet resources chronicling the culinary history of the chief executive and his family both in and out of the White House."
We highly recommend Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Mrs. Roosevelt,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933 by Blanche Wiesen Cook, which we've thoroughly enjoyed. (In 1999 we interviewed Ms. Cook about her knowledge of Eleanor on a Lake Placid toboggan trip down an Olympic course for a brief article we were working on at Time Magazine.) We purchased
Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2, The Defining Years, 1933-1938 and are looking forward to the third volume by Ms. Cook.
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