The chief usher became the man responsible for running the White House: making its occupants comfortable, caring for guests, arranging dinners, arranging for flowers, fixing the plumbing and the roof and the air conditioning, organizing and justifying the budget, arranging for the 2 million tourists who visit it each year, safeguarding the treasures that decorate it, supervising everything that has to do with making it a residence, a national monument and an office. His principal duties included making up the president's appointment calendar and ushering distinguished visitors into his presence.īy the time Mr. (Ike) Hoover, who served from 1891 to 1933. But there was more to it than that, just as there is more to the job of being chief usher at the White House than the term implies. "I do what I'm told to do," he would say. "What does the chief usher do?" he was sometimes asked. Roosevelts, the Trumans, the Eisenhowers, the Kennedys, the Johnsons and the Nixons. He himself retired in 1969, having worked for the Franklin D. West began his career in the Executive Mansion on March 1, 1941, as an assistant to Howell G. He had undergone surgery for a lung ailment. Bernard West, 70, a discreet, self-effacing and efficient Iowan who had the extraordinary job of chief usher of the White House and served under six presidents, died of respiratory failure July 18 at Northern Virginia Doctors Hospital.
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