The Origins of the Lincoln Bedroom

Adlai Stevenson held such reverence for Abraham Lincoln that on a visit to the White House the two-time Democratic Presidential candidate could not bring himself to sleep where his hero had slept. Instead, he bedded down on the couch. What he didn't know: Lincoln had never spent a night in the bed—but he had used the couch. Beauty queen and television star Phyllis George and her husband John Y. Brown Jr., governor of Kentucky, had a romantic evening in the bedroom during Carter's administration. Nine months later a son was born. They named him Lincoln. John Kennedy, rumor has it, loved the expanse of the bed for some of his trysts when Jackie was away.

Winston Churchill did not like the bed or the room and shuffled his considerable bulk across the hall to the Queen's Bedroom in the dead of night during WWII. He found it more suited to his taste and body. Queen Juliana of the Netherlandsclaimed she saw Lincoln's ghost wandering around. Harry Truman, who is most responsible for the creation of what has become America's most revered bedroom, swore that sometimes when he went to the room he noted that pictures on the wall were crooked, suggesting some mysterious force was in there.

Such are the wonderful tales told about one of our great national myths, the Lincoln Bedroom. They're all based on a misnomer. The room was never a bedroom in Lincoln's time; it was an office. The massive bed which gives the room its character was not moved there until long after Lincoln's assassination. It was here that Lincoln met with his cabinet, his generals, did his paperwork, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. A couple of office chairs and a mantle clock have survived from that time. They are included in the current bedroom So is Lincoln's handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address, offsetting a plasma TV included in an opposite corner.

Bedroom or not, the place looms large in our national imagination. For two years Laura Bush has been working quietly with funds from the White House Historical Association (no tax money involved) to return the room, which was plain, forbidding and a random repository for furniture, to some sort of historical authenticity. She kept the old colors of cream, green, gold and purple but lightened patterns in wallpaper and carpet, used her sensitive eye and good sense on other matters. "I know there is no documentation that the chandelier was here in Lincoln's time," she told me one day. "But it fits. I see no reason not to leave it." The room needs a finishing tuck or two but so far critics are approving.

Laura and her group of experts from the Committee for the Preservation of the White House and Curator William Allman, did some intriguing detective work from sparse documentation to produce the new look. Mathew Brady's photographs of Lincoln in his office revealed the wall paper and carpet patterns and the arched mantle piece for replication, the original long gone. The photos from Brady's studio, from 1864, are the only ones taken of Lincoln inside the White House.

While Lincoln never slept in the huge bed, which was originally used in the State Bedroom down the hall, he had some anguished connections to it, according to historian William Seale. Willie Lincoln, 11, died there from typhoid fever in 1862. The autopsy and embalming of the murdered President in 1865 was done on a cold table at the foot of the bed, the ball from assassin John Wilkes Booth's pistol popping out of Lincoln's body and falling to the floor. It rolled across the floor while doctors scrambled for it and a crowd of onlookers gawked and Mrs. Lincoln wailed from across the hall.

Herbert Hoover probably planted the idea of a special room for Lincoln. He gathered books and other materials about Lincoln and put them in the by-now bed chamber. Truman assembled what furniture he could from the Lincoln time and the myth began to grow. The Lincoln Bedroom is on the second floor of the White House, in the private quarters that are not open for public tours. But to get the privilege of staying in the room is one of today's most coveted social and political awards.

All Presidents of the last half century have talked of the special meaning found in the Lincoln Bedroom and at times have lingered there thinking of the man who bore the the greatest national burden in our history. Ronald Reagan stood at the window and visualized Lincoln watching the signs of Civil War swirling around the White House. George H. W. Bush often wandered in and pondered the copy of the Gettysburg Address which Lincoln had copied from his original. Lyndon Johnson once in the depths of the Vietnam War led three guests into the room and asked them to sit on the bed and think about where they were. Then he walked over to the portrait of Lincoln on the wall and, looking up, uttered more of a prayer than anything else, "I sure hope my generals are better than the ones he had."

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