Gary Walters managed the president’s official residence for 37 years – now he’s sharing his most vivid recollections
Gary Walters has a “special feeling” about the White House East Wing. He met his future wife Barbara when she worked in the visitors’ office there. But asked to contemplate the wing’s destruction by Donald Trump, the former chief usher evidently still believes that discretion is the better part of valour.
“All the presidents and first ladies have made changes in one manner or another – some larger than others,” Walters, 78, says with the measured cadence of a man who has spent a lifetime guarding privacy. “One of the things that I have seen not commented on was back to when the West Wing was built.
“It used to be on the west side of the White House there were large glass conservatories and stables for a short period of time. Those were all torn down, which allowed the colonnades to the west side and then the building of the West Wing. Nobody’s talking about that, but that was just as large a project.”
It is a typically diplomatic response from a man who spent 37 years serving seven presidents and their families and trying not to upset the apple cart. His book White House Memories 1970-2007: Recollections of the Longest-Serving Chief Usher, published on Friday, strikes a rare bipartisan chord by praising Democratic and Republican presidents alike.
