Recollections of full years - Helen Herron Taft

The political skies were then beginning to cloud up in earnest; he had a Democratic Congress to prepare messages for, and I suppose the approaching winter looked anything but alluring to him.

For the first time in the history of the Executive Mansion it was turned into a bachelors’ hall during my various absences. My husband always had one or more men staying with him, he would move his aides and secretaries into the White House, and so arrange things that my frequent desertions of him never weighed very heavily on my conscience.

When he arrived in Washington this time he organised a Cabinet House Party so that Washington and the newspaper correspondents had something to worry about for quite a while. He gathered all the members of his Cabinet under his roof and kept them there where he could have three Cabinet meetings a day besides the ones he called in the Executive Offices. People made wild guesses at all kinds of crises and at all manner of important disclosures to be made, but it was only a house party after all. There were a great many problems to be solved, proposed legislative measures to be discussed, and with every woman in the Cabinet off summering somewhere it was an excellent opportunity for the Executive branch of the Government to do extra work.

The distinguished gentlemen had to “double up” in rooms, too, so I have often imagined that they got very little rest at any time. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury had the southeast room; the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of the Interior had the northeast room; the Attorney General and the Secretary of Commerce and Labour had the northwest room; the Postmaster General had Robert’s room; the Secretary of Agriculture had the housekeeper’s room, and the Secretary to the President had my son Charlie’s room. I think probably as a house party it was unique, but if there had been any more Departments of Government the President would have had to fit up a dormitory.

At this point in Archie Butt’s record I find the note: “Mrs. Taft left this morning for New York to fit her son Charlie out in long trousers.”

That brings up unpleasant memories. Like any sensible woman I never would admit that I had reached the high point in life as long as I had one son still in knickerbockers, but with one son at Yale, with a young lady daughter ready to be presented to society, and with Charlie going into long trousers I felt that the day was approaching when the unhappy phrase “getting on in years” might be applied to me.