The Best Moments From Jackie Kennedy’s Famous TV Tour of the White House Inline
1/7“Well, I really don’t have one [a plan] because I think this house will always grow and should. It just seemed to me such a shame when we came here to find hardly anything of the past in the house, hardly anything before 1902.”
2/7“[This is] where we do all our furniture restoring and upholstering. . . . It’s much quicker and more practical. It’s so exciting to see things grow every day. Also in this room we have three ladies on loan to us from the National Park Service who catalog every single item in the White House, so we’ll be sure nothing is lost track of again.”
3/7“No, I think it’s lovely [the East Room]. I hate to make changes really, so when you find a room like this it’s wonderful. . . . This piano was designed by Franklin Roosevelt with the eagle supports, and this is the end of the room where Pablo Casals played for us, where we had a portable stage built when we had the Shakespeare players. . . . I just think that everything in the White House should be the best.”
4/7“This is where all the state dinners and lunches are given; it can seat 102 people. . . . The china is the Eisenhower gold china. So many of the beautiful old services the presidents had were destroyed and broken.”
5/7“Everything in this room [the Red Room] is Empire. The style of the room is dictated by the mantelpiece, which is Empire. This is one of the only two remaining mantels in the White House from 1817.”
6/7“Yes, the view from here [the Blue Room] is so pretty—you can see the Washington Monument. The most interesting thing is that this window used to be the door in the olden days. All the carriages would come to the south entrance and people would come up the stairs because Pennsylvania Avenue wasn’t paved until the Civil War.”
7/7“It [the Lincoln Bedroom] was where we lived when we first came here, when our rooms at the other end of the hall were being painted. I loved living in this room—it’s on the sunny side of the house and one of Andrew Jackson’s magnolia trees is right outside the window . . . . The most famous [of the furniture] is the Lincoln bed. . . . Theodore Roosevelt slept in it, so did Calvin Coolidge; it’s probably the most famous piece of furniture in the White House.”
