White House Diary

“There will be five thousand to tea...”
“The President of Iceland will have breakfast at nine in his room.”
These are the sort of messages Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt took in stride during her eleven years in the White House—one of the largest, most complicated, and most fascinating households in America. Her story is a succession of intimate anecdotes of the great and the near-great—Alexander Woollcott, Paderewski, the King and Queen of England, José Iturbi, Winston Churchill, and of course the Roosevelt family itself. It is also a salty and sprightly record of the world’s most demanding job of housekeeping.