RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
out to Cincinnati to the Ohio Valley Exposition and back to Washington as quickly as a long programme of speeches and hospitalities could be disposed of.
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 the7
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