DOWNSTAIRS AT THE WHITE HOUSE

A man recounts his time as a teenager working in the White House during the Richard Nixon administration in this memoir.

While a freshman at the American University in Washington, D.C., Stinson landed a job at the White House or, to be more precise, the Old Executive Office Building. This distinctive structure shares the famous address and has “its own breathtaking story to tell.” The author had set his sights on working on Capitol Hill, but the position he won was “not exactly a poor consolation prize.” He had no idea that within 18 months the nation would be rocked by one of its worst scandals in history—the Watergate affair—“the first circus I had the chance to watch from a ringside seat.” Stinson quietly, almost anonymously, watched grand events unfold, a naïve witness—“woefully short in the dashing department”— to “a certain madness in the air” that overtook the country. He provides a conventional history of those turbulent times, wisely leaving the “lengthy and often intricate details that led to President Nixon’s resignation” to scholars and other authors. Instead, he furnishes his own idiosyncratically personal perspective, brimming with tantalizing gossip, character portraiture, and the astute, if green, observations of an inexperienced youth. He reservedly allows readers to form their own opinions about Nixon and his legacy, choosing to supply his own impressions of the man at the time, movingly conveyed: “Just listening to him was exhilarating, like punching the accelerator on a Lamborghini. Perhaps I felt that way because I was very young and hadn’t yet learned to demystify the people and things we think are larger than life.” Likewise, he paints a lively picture of Vice President Spiro Agnew as well as an array of other key political figures, domestic and international.

Stinson’s prose is unfailingly clear and his tone endearingly self-effacing, though his relentless quips eventually become more grating than ingratiating. His unique perch—sort of an insider given his proximity to it all but also an outsider by virtue of his professional insignificance—is simultaneously the memoir’s chief strength and weakness: “The truth about being ‘in the know’ was that most of us at the bottom of the food chain weren’t. Ever. We rarely knew more than what we read in the newspapers or saw on television unless we stumbled across something by accident or somebody said something they shouldn’t have.” Especially because he so admired Nixon and Agnew, readers will keenly feel the weight of the author’s disappointment when both resigned. The remembrance is filled with extraordinary anecdotes—on the last evening of Nixon’s tenure, while the president was composing his resignation speech, Stinson mistakenly attempted to deliver a communication to the Oval Office intended for the flower shop. Problematically, the book often loses focus and delves too deeply into granular, quotidian details; readers really don’t need to know how the author became a Pepsi drinker.

A captivating account of a historically momentous time told from a refreshingly uncommon perspective.