 Life could be as easy for them as possible, but I remember one day she called me up and I went up to see some damage that had been sustained by those porcelain birds again, those Dorothy Dowdy birds. And she said, I'd like to see if you could get them repaired. And I said, oh, I can do that right away. Well, maybe not today, Mrs. Johnson. Maybe not until tomorrow because I didn't bring the car today. And she said, oh, you don't need to, you just call. You don't have White House car privileges. And I said, well, we did until yesterday. But I said, Mr. Watson has decided that we're no longer on the list to be able to call and have a car immediately. And so as a result of this, I'll have to make other arrangements. Oh, she said, never mind. Just take my car. That's perfectly all right. I'm not going anywhere for a while. And if anybody in Marvin's office raises any questions about it, I asked you to take my car. So I said, well, that's fine. And so took her car and we went up to Mario's, which was located here at Dupont Circle. And we went through all the things. And by the time I got back, there was a call to call Marvin, who said there must have been some misunderstanding that there was no reason at all why we should have been demoted to the C list, and that we would certainly, henceforth, be very much back where we had been on A minus, minus, or whatever it was. But I remember sharing that with Ashton and perhaps Bess afterwards. And we all got a great, great chuckle because, of course, all of us were dealing with a Chancellor of the Exchequer over there on certain occasions, really the East Wing more than I was, because we had, our whole program didn't take a penny of tax dollars. Even my salary was a donation from the White House Historical Association and all of the monies that went into the Fine Arts, Decorative Arts programs at the White House came from either revenues from the sale of the first series of guidebooks and then the Living White House, which was the book that Mrs. Johnson was responsible for originating. And I didn't have to put on the few occasions that I did, I realized that we were up against somebody who was heady green over there in the West Wing looking at every single penny and making sure that they could be squeezed until that old buffalo squealed. And it happened to me on that occasion. Anyway, you, again, with her staff, you worked with them and you played with them as well. And it was, I don't know, we probably met each other coming and going sometimes as far as, but you never seem to grow tired. It reminds me of once going to a party out in Bethesda when I first came to Washington in which everyone there was an officer with the Central Intelligence Agency or their spouse. And nobody talked about what anybody did. It was all this very strange world. Well, we had the, I can see why they would get together socially, we had the freedom of not only talking about what we did, but of laughing about each other's mistakes. And while nobody else was overhearing this, it certainly was a great catharsis, no two ways. If you were involved in the Shattering of the Plates episode, tell me if we were to put it back. Bethesda's already told me. Yeah, she told me. Well, she probably mentioned there's a law in the books that said that White House tableware has to be destroyed. And this goes way back to, it's a law that originated in the 19th century. Apparently there used to be visitors at those New Year's receptions who were carrying off the plate and so forth. And the problem was that as breakage would occur in a state service, the entire state service would be withdrawn and would be disposed of, usually dumped in the Potomac River. We have any number of pieces today at the White House which came out of 20th century dredging of the Potomac River. Well, this was built into the contract with Casselton and Tiffany when Mrs. Johnson's service was being ordered. There were approximately 220 place settings of which the dessert service would be all 50 states represented with a state flower. I remember when we first started talking about it. First, somebody mentioned state trees and we finally somebody threw out state dogs only in jest, believe me, but at that point I wasn't quite so sure maybe there was some seriousness to that. And finally with state flowers because Mrs. Johnson had very much set upon doing a wildflower on the base plate and then the dinner plate the would have an eagle from the Monroe service on the center, but it would all be very much out of the same palette and of the same design process. Well, a young French designer by the name of André Pietra, those French were back to get us obviously, did the dessert service. He'd worked on the other and he came up with what we saw in drawing form to be quite reasonable and very pleasant. I mean, what can you do with Yucca? You can do good things with bluebonnets, I suppose. You can do good things with violets, a little harder with magnolias, but on and on. But when you've got all 50 states and that was what we were going to do, we were going to have the District of Columbia all 50 states and somehow we'd have extra from Texas and maybe from Minnesota, I'm not sure, but we were going to get up to 220, but the basic 50, 50, 50, 50 plus those extra 20 would be filled in. And when the desserts, the china came down, the bowls were magnificent, you've seen the pieces at the library. Wonderful until we saw the dessert plates and it looked like something that even F.W. Woolworth or Nisner would not be able to unload on the consuming public. I mean, no two ways about it. So, Walter Hoving, who was then Chairman of the Board of Tiffany and Company, came down and we lined the dessert service up in our office and he came in. We'd already done the final showing of the Peter Herd in our office, so we now had something else to share and he said this is just not Tiffany. It absolutely isn't Tiffany at all and we'll begin again, which they did. And we got the Library of Congress and a botanist from the Library of Science and Technology staff involved and we went through it and we saw every last decal, decal committee is the process, so every decal has to be printed and when they're fired at 2,200 degrees or thereabouts, sometimes the colors tend to change more than slightly, so all this has to be factored in. So we went through all of it and it took forever. I think the dessert service was finally delivered the second year of the Nixon administration. I think I was still there when that came in. But anyway, we were left with 220 dessert plates that we had to destroy. And so Beth said, I know how I want to destroy them. We're not going to go in the Potomac and they're not going to be broken up by some Park Service machine that is brought front and center. And so we took a room that we had down in the basement where we had cataloged Linda and Lucy's wedding presents and Beth's arrived with this giant poster which had not only bullseye but names and I think little sketches of certain individuals over in the West Wing. And J.B. West, Connie Carter, who was the botanist of the Library of Congress who was involved with the new service, Carol Carlisle, yours truly. And Beth, like Admiral Dewey, said, fire away! And she hurled the first plate, which literally I think tore into poor Marvin, but I'm not sure about that. And on and on and on and on we went. And by the time we were through 220 plates were lying in rubble on the floor. And I mean it was just, it was penance for me to have to be a part of that. I agonized because I could see these examples no matter how awful they were. They still had a story to tell. And I had not, I've been very honest and above board. I had not taken one of each out and hidden them someplace. Not in the least, but it was the way that the law was upheld. And Devere Pearson, whoever was looking over our shoulder in the West Wing as far as our contractual obligations were concerned, I suppose was satisfied. But I was not. Yes, certainly you could venture spleen in wonderful ways, but I didn't really have that much against anybody over there. So I really could not perhaps feel the full brunt of it as maybe bested. But that's that's my recollection of that whole situation. But just to round this out, what I'm going to ask first of all, at the end of this, go over anything you think that is in your memory and your mind, we haven't covered. No, I'd like to have you reflect a little on the career of Jim Ketchum. How did you, how did it all begin? And how many administrations were you looking for? I was there for Kennedy Johnson and into, I left in the middle of the second year of the next administration, dumb luck. There's no other way to describe it. Harry, I came down fresh out of college as an enrolling law student at Georgetown. I had to make up my mind between Stanford on the West Coast and Georgetown here. And I came down, got a job with the Park Service. I was a counterfeit confederate, as you may recall, with General Lee over at Arlington House. And in 1961, the program began at the White House, and Mrs. Kennedy turned to the Park Service for staff in the Curator's Office. And I went over to, it would have been perhaps late spring or so, to, I had an application in for a job I was sent over actually by a personnel person in Interior, a National Capital Region. They had a registrar's spot that had opened up or was being created. And I went over and did not get the job. And about two weeks later, got called back for a supporting job to the Curator's position, and went over and that job I got. But by the time they'd finished with the Fulfilled Security and so forth, we're talking about the, we're getting on into 61 into the fall of the year. So I started, my first job was dealing with all the correspondence that came in from a Life Magazine cover story that they did in early September of 61 of Mrs. Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy, a picture that Nina Lean took of her out on the Truman balcony. And inside it just a series of black and white shots showing her everything from moving mirrors to you name it. And then, as we continue down, we started to get ready for what CBS was going to be doing the following winter. Actually, the show was taped in late January of 62, and it was shown on Valentine's Day. And then following weekend, all three networks resumed on CBS. Perry Wolfe was the producer. So I'm working with two other people in a relatively small operation that suddenly is catching on like wildfire, as far as the American public is concerned. And so I had, after my first year of law school, I had decided that I was going to take a year off and see what was happening when I was going to the White House. And I finally, because my time usually was about eight o'clock at night by the time I was through and my law school hours were anywhere from about six o'clock, it seems to me, until about nine o'clock in the evening. By the time I'd spent a year at the White House, I said the heck with it, I'm going to go on and do graduate work in art history and with concentration on American painting at GW, which was just down the street. And if I could work up some independent projects, independent study projects, I would do that. And that's really what I did. Like the man who came to dinner, from 61 through 70, there I was in the summer of 1963, we'd had the curator was having a second child and she retired. And Bill Elder, who had been registered, moved up into her situation. And in the summer of 63, he was offered the top job at the Baltimore Museum. And he was a native of Baltimore, and that was really something that he very much wanted to do. Mrs. Kennedy was up at the Cape that summer expecting Patrick. And she asked if I would hold down the fort until after the baby was born when she came back. And I said, Sure, when she came back, she said, I really would like you to try this. And I said, Mrs. Kennedy, I really don't think I'm the person for the job. There are too many other people out there whose qualifications are eminently better. And she said, Yes, but you've been here. And, you know, we know you, you know us type of thing. I said, I'm too young. And she said, Don't worry about that, we can take care of that. And I didn't really understand what she meant until the press release that came out announcing that I had taken the curatorial spot. And instead of being 24 years old, I was now 29 years old. And I sent a copy of the press release to my parents, knowing that this would delight them to no end, that they had not been married at the time of my birth, and that this took care of all kinds of questions, as far as who shook the family tree. I remember Dorothy McCartle, I was up in New York State with Barbara, visiting our families when the announcement came out. And she somehow tracked me down up there. And she's reading the release to me saying, Is this true? Is this true? Is this true? And she got to the age thing. And I gulped three times and said, Yeah, that's fine, go on. I thought, you know, for somebody who was going to have to go to confession on Saturday, three different ways to confess this one, I'm not quite sure how it's going to come across. But that's how it started. And we did certainly seem to get things done. And when Mrs. Johnson arrived, I mean, I really give her credit more than any other individual. And for the president's backing for making this whole program, as we have know it today, and it still relies very much on the private funding that it gets from the proceeds of the books and so forth. She, as the responsible party, it would have been so easy for her to say, Look, it's over. I don't want to even try to compete on that plane whatsoever. But instead, she, from beginning to end, got herself involved in every single meeting of the committee for the preservation of the White House. President Johnson issued the executive order in March of 1964, doing two things, setting up a permanent group to oversee the White House collections and their preservation and also to make the office of curator a permanent part of the White House. Up until then, it was a started out as kind of a Smithsonian stepchild, and it went through all kinds of changes. The first curator had to report both to the Smithsonian every week and also to Mrs. Kennedy whenever. And he straightened that out beautifully. And it really meant that once you had the second act, namely what Mrs. J was doing, and then she said, Where are our needs? And for the first time, had a very developed sense of finding representations by American painters who, until then, had not seen the White House. And I'm thinking of people like Winslow Homer and Thomas Aikens and Thomas Sully. And on and on and on, the list continued. And any number of portraits of presidents and their spouses. Elna Roosevelt, for example. Mrs. Truman and the Schumatoff copy of FDR that Schumatoff was painting at the time of his death. I mean, the wonderful example of all this is I went through what must be about the 18th edition of the White House guidebook recently. And I looked at everything that was being featured. And of course, they're only going to let surface what they think are the best and the most historic of the pieces that have been acquired. And the majority of the pieces that were there came during the Johnson administration that were being featured. And I thought, if anything is a true test, and I mean this is a book that is being edited by people who don't even remember these kids when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. So there are all kinds of things about the program that I was associated with, that I can only tip my hat and say thank you so much for the time, effort and interest that was shown from the very beginning. Is that program going to endure today? It sure does. Extremely successful continues. And I think so much so that it will endure 50 years from now. And hopefully as long as the president is living in the White House, that may change. He may find himself in a bunker down the Potomac someplace, but we shall see. Well, I'll work on special projects from time to time, but really just more keeping in touch with them. They still have questions about things that happen back during my watch. I try to make myself available both to this program and the program up on the hill, working, for example, with portrait commissions and things of that type, where you're looking at various painters. The White House Historical Association has done an awfully good job in making certain that the money is there for the important commission, such as presidential and first lady. But so much of what has gone on has far surpassed, I think, anything that we could have imagined even during my time. The development, the publications, the Historical Society has started to live up to its name in many more ways than it could in the very beginning, when it was really a vehicle for funding more than anything else and to be able to copyright materials that otherwise would have been in the public domain. Did your name that has not come up yet, Nash Castro? We did, yeah. He was, of course, the liaison between the White House and the Park Service, right on up through, let's see, Nash finished out with the Johnson administration, but he certainly was gone early in the Nixon administration. He may have even left in the last months of the Johnson administration. I'm not sure, but we certainly did work very closely together. My leaving, well, are a couple of things. One, I realized the writing was on the wall. I was having going round and round with Haldeman on money that was being spent for social, basically, busloads of ladies from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who were part of the Grand Rapids Republican Women's Group, were coming to the White House and they were being entertained. And Haldeman felt it was only appropriate that, since they were seeing the White House collection, that the monies which had been set aside for conservation and preservation funds could go to the entertainment side. And I was not able to sign off on this. And I knew, after going around with him a couple of times on this, that my life expectancy was not going to be that great. I also think I was probably too closely tied to Democratic administrations. There's no doubt about it. So after a year and a half of this, I had been, oh gosh, approached twice before by Mansfield to work on setting up a program on the Hill. And I knew that, as our kids started coming along, that I would love to be able to get home at a decent hour. I mean, there were times, for example, the Johnson administration when we would do these receptions for members of the Senate and members of the House two a week, Tuesdays and Thursday nights, that would begin with my telling anecdotes to the wives down in the theater, president up in the east room with Bundy and Rusk and McNamara. And then we'd take the wives up on the elevator and we'd go up to the second floor and tour the family quarters. I remember a horrible experience that happened. Best of all, I told you about this when the conleys who came all the time, he often came by himself, but she was often along as well. And they always were assigned as the Lincoln bedroom. And J.B. West and Mary Kultman and Bess and I were kind of in the advanced guard of Mrs. Johnson's tour and we would also break up and spend time, each of us would station ourselves in the room so as the spouses would come in and out. And we happened to check the Lincoln bedroom and my god the clothes were laid out and it was obvious that somebody was there and we looked and we discovered it was the conleys and nobody, the Usher's office apparently had not known or J.B. had not known about it at that point and so we quickly closed the door to the Lincoln bedroom and I remember Mary Kultman shoving some things in the closet. We made the bed, I was on one side and Bess was on the other. Everything that we could whisked away things went into the dresser drawers and the bathroom door was closed and so forth. And just as we finished we're all standing around the bed. Mrs. Johnson throws open the door and looks and sees four of us, two men and two women standing by the Lincoln bed. And I mean there was certainly a very strange, at least it seemed to me a very strange look on her face but we just nodded and said just making sure everything's fine ma'am and then they came and I thought you know what was the film Bob and Alice, Ted and somebody? Well here we were only it was Lincoln bedroom one-on-one. Harry what was your question? I'm sorry. About the departure. Oh my departure. Right. Anyway I do feel that I had probably pushed my luck about as far as it would go. So anyway I asked a mutual friend of Mansfield's and mine if indeed that program on the hill was still going forward. Meantime I had had a couple of conversations with George Hartzog and George had just the perfect idea. We need somebody to go up to Thomas Edison's studio in the Oranges who the world of every invention in the world and pull it all together. Apparently there were thousands and thousands and thousands of things that had never been catalogued and everything else and this for somebody who barely got through high school physics this was not going to be my day in the sun and the more I thought of it the more I realized that I wanted to certainly stay where I was in D.C. if I possibly could and I would like to do something that would allow me to be home maybe at seven o'clock in the evening and Mansfield very kindly said sure we still are looking for somebody and if you will come up so I went up and spent the next 25 years on the hill and again never should probably have been paid for any of this because it was just the pleasures were amazing and it's true I mean granted you had your I remember taking a very sullen earth a kit this was before she ever appeared at the women's doers lunch and through and a Jaeger Gabor who I spent two hours with her and three days later when she went on Johnny Carson and described it it was as if it was a totally different world not only did she not see the president with me the president wasn't even in town but on Carson's show there was the president of the United States who took her around I've been confused for Billard Scott but never for Lyndon Johnson so there are always these little side things that were happening in your life that you kind of shook your head and said stranger than fiction but all in all when it comes right down to it you don't miss what it does to your schedule but you sure as hell missed the people that you've been dealing with and I especially the Johnson folks but since they had departed seen and I really hadn't tried to get to know the Nixon people in any great shape or means I mean we pretty much stayed intended to our knitting I found that it was probably all for the best that I was going to see the writing on the wall I told you that story of going to the Nixon White House Sunday service and I won't go into this right now but you remember the tale about Barbara being pregnant with Sarah and the Nixon's inviting the folks to well Nixon it was the war and he did not want to go out into St. John's or any Sunday services because the protestors were gathering around the doors of the churches and so he decided that he would hold a ten o'clock service every Sunday in the East Room of the White House and then people would gather in the State dining room for some juices and sweet rolls and so forth and so on so on a particular Sunday in July the memo had come around they'd gone through cabinet sub-cabinet and they were now getting into White House staff to invite me and my wife and any children that we had to go to be present and accounted for on Sunday morning at ten o'clock and Barbara was about three or four or five months four months ago so long with Sarah at that point and John was all of about three and a half years old and when you work in the White House and you have a three and a half year old you don't really stress for them doing a little bit of mother goose or poetry but rather they seem to pick up on other things for example John was in the White House enough to go around and see every presidential portrait and when he would see them he would imitate them so he had a Lincoln and he had a Washington pose and he had all poses but he didn't have a Nixon pose because a Nixon portrait was not hanging in the White House but he had a February 1969 cover of Life Magazine. Nixon's first trip you may remember abroad was Romania and in the back of the old Queen Mary the Secret Service car was Nixon hands up throwing his head back in the V for victory and this was what John had in his collection at home along with the book that the White House Historical Association put out on the presidential portraits so that was his Nixon pose anyway we went through the service which was about 45 minutes in the east room and Barbara was a little uncomfortable but John seemed very happy looking at the Gilbert Stewart of Washington that was hanging over on the wall and when we finished we went down the cross hall the long corridor connecting the state dining room with the east room we went into the state dining room and President Mrs. Nixon were standing in front of the Lincoln the Healy portrait of Lincoln receiving the folks who had just gotten God in the east room and we went through the line and were approaching the line and as you may recall in those days the male preceded the wife and Barbara had John by the hand and as we got just about where I am now in relationship to you, you being Richard Milhouse Nixon Barbara let go of John's hand for a moment and he came stood out and looked at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln and kind of went into his Lincoln pose and then he looked up at Richard Nixon and at that point he threw both arms up in the air rolled back his eyes having seen Richard on television and did a complete pirouette right in front of Nixon with every aid in the world ready to pounce and everyone looking in fact the aid who got to him first took his hand gave it back to Barbara who was absolutely so undone that it's a wonder she didn't have Sarah right there in the state dining room. We made the most amazing exit going through the line saying thank you, no thank you and so forth and getting out of the White House so quickly that I shook all the way home and the next day delivered to every single office in the White House was the fact that if children are under age 12 they would not be expected nor would they be invited to any services in the White House Sunday service henceforth. We killed it for them once and for all. It's a wonder that I lasted another year or whatever from that but in any event that was my memory of Nixon and Nixon staffers we have known. My favorite memo of H.R. Haldeman was when and he loved to send memos to the staff all the time but it was next Tuesday the Brunswick bowling ball man will be here to fit Tricia and Mrs. Nixon for new balls. Please be aware of the fact that the bowling alley will not be open at that point and believe me the Xerox machine that was down in the east wing it was the only one we had at that time burned out that day. I could imagine it did. Jim is there anything that we haven't covered that did? Probably about five years worth and I apologize for going down again and talking about going down highways and byways that are off the beaten path but no Harry you really you make it a pleasure and you've got me to think about things that I haven't really considered in a long long time. Your reminiscences are going to be important and I'm very glad that we have this on tape now but before we I'd love to put if there is anything running around through your brain that. Oh gosh. Not I mean they're sure there's a lot but there's nothing that I think I've probably touched upon as many of the aspects of life in the Johnson White House it was like no other. I mean as someone who considers himself a student of White House social history and how earlier administrations existed under that roofline I don't think that anything ever existed that was even close to what I saw during that during that five-year period absolutely not. All right it's a great place to stop. Okay.