How Eugene Allen, butler to eight presidents, helped break down
racial barriers
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By
LARRY GETLEN
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Last Updated: 3:32 AM, July 28, 2013
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Posted: 10:55 PM, July 27, 2013
The Butler:
A Witness to History
37 Ink/Atria
In The days immediately following the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy, the sense of sadness in the White House was, as one might
expect, all-encompassing — particularly for the devastated widow, Jackie
Kennedy, and her two young children, John and Caroline.
To help alleviate,
even briefly, the unbearable tragedy, a party was arranged for the children.
The man who arranged it was one whom the residents of the White House could
count on — time and again, administration after administration — to serve those
residents with all the dedication any American could expect.
Eugene Allen, the
White House butler since the Truman administration, “told the White House chef
to whip up some goodies; he was going to have a party for John and Caroline and
some of their little friends.”
Soon, if even for just
a short time, the children were laughing and smiling; in the shadow of
violence, there was “the cacophony of little voices squealing with delight.”
By the time he retired
in 1986, Allen had spent 34 years serving eight presidents — every single one
from Truman to Reagan — witnessing history along the way, and developing his
own personal relationships with an incredible succession of the most powerful
men on earth.
Allen is about to be
immortalized on the big screen, in a film based on the article by Haygood. “Lee
Daniels’ The Butler,” out Aug. 16, stars Forest Whitaker in a role based on
Allen’s life, with Oprah Winfrey playing his wife and, in some creative casting
choices, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Reagan played by,
respectively, Robin Williams, James Marsden, Liev Schreiber, John Cusack and
Alan Rickman.
Haygood first wrote
about Allen in 2008, when, in the wake of what seemed a likely victory in the
presidential election by Barack Obama, he sought out an African-American who
had served in the White House in the days of segregation and beyond.
When Haygood first met
Allen in the home the retired butler shared with his wife, Helene, he noticed
only one photo of any prominence on the walls, which was of the couple on a
White House receiving line. There were none around of Allen with presidents or
anyone else of note.
Allen shared his tale
with Haygood, how he was born in 1919 on a plantation in Scottsville, Va., and
“grew up working as a house boy for a white family.”
He was employed at a
country club in Washington, DC, when he met Helene in 1942 and married her the
following year. In 1952, he got his first job at the White House, as a pantry
worker making $2,400 a year.
While
African-Americans were already working as butlers in the White House around the
turn of the last century, the first to join a president for dinner there was
Booker T. Washington, who dined with President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901. That
news burned through the South, with Tennessee newspaper The Memphis Scimitar
writing that, “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any
citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he
invited a [N-word] to dine with him at the White House.”
Even Harry Truman, the
first president Allen served, was hardly devoid of racist sentiment. After a
dispute with Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Truman was heard
referring to him as, “that damn [N-word] preacher.”
Given the status of
black Americans at the time, Allen’s employment at the White House was a
remarkable point of pride for the “vivacious” Helene, and she was “quick to
drop [that fact] on neighbors and fellow churchgoers.”
Allen’s position led
to personal relationships with some of the most powerful world changers of the
20th century and to his time and again being a front-line witness to history.
During the Eisenhower
administration, Allen was in the room as the president dealt with some of the
harsh racial conflicts of the day, including “watch[ing] President Eisenhower
argue with Arkansas governor Orval Faubus” during a famous dispute over
desegregation in Little Rock. Allen felt a personal sense of pride when the
president sent in federal troops to protect black students.
Allen grew close with
Eisenhower, and the two stayed in touch after Ike left office. Allen recalled
to Haygood how he would take vacation days to visit the former president, and
how the two would “stroll the Gettysburg battlefield” together. “They genuinely
seemed to have missed each other,” Haygood writes.
Allen watched Kennedy
send federal troops to Mississippi to defend the right of African-American
student James Meredith to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1962. The
following year, Allen was there as JFK marked the 100th anniversary of the
Emancipation Proclamation with an event at which “the butlers had never seen so
many blacks at the White House at one time,” with “upwards of 800 floating
about,” including Langston Hughes and Sammy Davis, Jr. (“One of the black
guests,” Haygood writes, “cracked it was like Uncle Tom’s cabin.”)
That November, when
news reached the White House that the president had been shot, Allen and the
other butlers grieved while waiting for the crestfallen family and others from
the president’s traveling party to return.
“He remembers First Lady Jackie Kennedy being
in a near-catatonic state,” writes Haygood, “and there were the low-pitched
voices of the Kennedy children that seemed particularly sad.”
Allen thought that
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was “brave, if somewhat vulgar with his
language.” But while Allen’s admiration for Kennedy had been unequivocal, his
feelings toward Johnson were more conflicted since, at the time, Allen’s only
child, son Charles, was fighting in Vietnam.
“There were times,
plenty of times,” writes Haygood, “when Eugene Allen wanted to march right up
to President Johnson and tell him about his boy, Charles, who had been sent to
Vietnam, who was sweating in jungle darkness, who was trying to stay alive and
get his ass back home.”
But of course, as a
White House employee whose job was to serve the president, that was not an option.
(Charles survived the war intact.)
Allen didn’t have much
of a relationship with President Nixon, the book implies, although he did
recall the president “pacing the corridors of the White House, deliberating
inner-office turmoil and his distrust of the press.”
Following Nixon, Allen
not only shared a love of golf with President Gerald Ford, but the two shared
the same birthday, leading to First Lady Betty Ford calling out, when they
would bring out a birthday cake for the president, “It’s Gene’s birthday, too!”
During the Reagan
administration, Allen, who was promoted to maître d’ in 1980, recalled the day
that Nancy Reagan called him over as they prepared for a state dinner for West
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. First, Reagan stunned Allen by informing him
that his services “would not be needed at the state dinner.” She then stunned
him again by telling him why — that he and Helene were to attend the dinner as
guests of the president, “in honor of his decades-long service to the White
House and the presidency he served.”
“He was deeply
touched, could barely move,” Haygood writes. “He was the first butler in the
history of the White House to be invited to a state dinner as a guest.”
For the first time,
Allen entered the White House not through the servent’s entrance in the rear,
but through the front door with the rest of the dignitaries.
Part of Allen’s
success in the position was due to his understanding of the discretion
required. Given the societal upheaval for African-Americans throughout the Civil
Rights era, Allen’s neighbors “would want to rush from their porches and plead
with him for information.”
But “Helene had
trained these neighbors well over the years — a perceptible nod, a few pointed
words in the grocery store aisle: Eugene couldn’t talk; he had to be discreet;
he was no one’s gossip.”
After hours of Allen
sharing stories during Haygood’s first visit with the couple, Helene said to
her husband, “You can show him now.”
Eugene brought Haygood
to a locked basement door. He opened it, then led the writer down a dark
stairway. When they made it downstairs and clicked on the light, Haygood found
himself surrounded by Allen’s history — framed photos galore of Allen with so
many of the most distinguished politicians and other citizens of his era. Allen
with Presidents Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Nixon; with Sammy Davis Jr., with Duke
Ellington, him and Helene with Ella Fitzgerald. There was even a painting made
for him personally by President Eisenhower.
“It was like being
dropped into a museum. There were hundreds and hundreds of pieces of
memorabilia,” Haygood writes. “These were treasures, likely bound for a museum
someday.”
Eugene Allen passed
away on March 31, 2010. While his last few years may have been filled with
sadness after the loss of his longtime love Helene two years before, there was
at least one moment of glory, as Allen — who served at the White House at a
time when the president of the United States would still openly refer to an
African-American by using the N-word — got to attend the inauguration of the
nation’s first black president.
As he watched our new
president come into view, Allen, “clearly overjoyed,” said, “I’m telling you,
it’s something to see. Seeing him standing there — well, it’s been worth it
all.”
