CHAPTER XVII
RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
THE members of my family, and especially my children, are prone to indulgence in good-natured personalities and they like to make the most of my serious attitude toward my domestic responsibilities, saying that I make them three times as difficult as they need be by a too positive insistence on my own methods.
Perhaps I did make the process of adjusting the White House routine to my own conceptions a shade too strenuous, but I could not feel that I was mistress of any house if I did not take an active interest in all the details of running it. The management of the White House is, of course, a larger task than many women are ever called upon to per- form, and, incidentally, the same "white light that beats upon a throne" sheds its sometimes uncomfortable radiance upon the usually unprepared heads of America's Chief Ex- ecutive and his family. Accustomed as I had been for years to publicity, yet it came as a sort of shock to me that nearly everything I did, and especially my slightest inno- vation, had what the reporters call "news value."
I have lived too much in other countries ever to under- estimate the importance of outward form, yet I think I may claim a wholesome regard for and a constant acquiescence in the principles of democratic simplicity, though not the kind of "democratic simplicity" which is usually written in quota- tion marks.
I made very few changes, really. As a matter of fact no President's wife ever needs to unless she so desires, because the White House is a governmental institution thoroughly equipped and always in good running order. Each new mistress of the house has absolute authority, of course, and
can do exactly as she pleases, just as she would in any other
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