Former White House East Wing Staffers Shocked and Saddened By Demolition of Their Cherished Workplace
Wrecking crews on Monday started tearing down where The Office of the First Lady is housed to make way for President Trump’s Grand Ballroom.
Former White House East Wing staffers used words like “jarring,” “a gut punch” and “revolting” in their reactions to images of a backhoe toppling the facade of the White House East Wing on Monday.
Images of the demolition first surfaced in the afternoon from The Washington Post after reporters gathered near the Treasury Department witnessed the beginnings of the historic building being torn down. President Trump was welcoming a collegiate baseball championship team to the West Wing at the time.
“You know, we’re building right behind us, we’re building a ballroom,” he said, adding they might hear construction going on periodically. “It just started today.”
Mr. Trump announced plans in August for a $200 million, 90,000-square-foot expansion of the East Wing that will contain the White House Ballroom, a formal dining area for 900 people. The construction is not taxpayer funded, but paid for through private donations, according to the White House.
For some who worked tirelessly over the years in the East Wing, the home of the Office of the First Lady, the images triggered a range of emotions.
“The photos were jarring when I first saw them,” Michael LaRosa, press secretary to former First Lady Jill Biden from 2021 to 2022, tells East Wing Magazine in an email Monday. “Initially, they felt like a gut punch. It was also a bit eerie and sad to see some of the interior reduced to rubble.”
Other East Wing staffers who worked for former First Lady Pat Nixon tried desperately in a last ditch effort to intervene in recent weeks to stop the expansion.
“In our small, little way, some of us from Mrs. Nixon’s staff have been trying to push back on this devastation,” Penny Adams, Mrs. Nixon’s radio-television coordinator, tells East Wing Magazine in an email Monday evening.
She describes the efforts of Debby Sloan, then assistant to the social secretary, who wrote a letter to the National Capitol Planning Commission (NCPC) about the importance of keeping the East Wing intact. Adams followed up by calling the NCPC several times where she finally reached the general counsel, she says. A commission meeting was expected to be held on September 4, according to Adams, who was told that the commission had not received anything from the White House about the ballroom project. Then, Susan Dolibois, also an assistant to the social secretary for Pat Nixon, and Adams joined Sloan’s letter-writing campaign to the NCPC to do whatever they could in protest to “this horrible project” to no avail.
“I literally [cried] as I could see my old office window,” Adams says in response to the demolition images she saw. She even recognized the window on the second floor where she worked all those decades ago. “It was my office from 1969 to 1973.”
The demolition is particularly difficult to watch, according to LaRosa because he also had the honor of working in the White House and specifically on that second floor of the East Wing. That experience he describes as a feeling unrivaled by any other feeling he’s felt about office space he’s occupied.
“I was always very aware of how special and unique—on good days and bad days—that working in the East Wing was,” he says, describing it as “the experience of a lifetime.”
He recalls how every morning he’d park his car on “Upper East” or walk up the carpeted stairs through the French doors to that single corridor and knew he would never occupy another work space as unique and rich with history as that place ever again.
“This will be a bit heartbreaking for those of us who have spent hours, days, weeks, months, and years of their time there,” LaRosa says. “It’s one of the more unique, mysterious, and rare parts of the White House that the public doesn’t see, but there were countless days and weeks that [it] felt like home to me during my time in Jill Biden’s East Wing.”
All day on Monday, Anita McBride, former chief of staff to First Lady Laura Bush, heard from alumni of the East Wing of multiple administrations who are understandably stunned by the images. First ladies’ staff lived and witnessed history within those walls and nothing can take away the memories of working in that extraordinarily special place of purpose and service, McBride tells East Wing Magazine in an email.
“Betty Ford had the best quote for how special the East Wing is: ‘If the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart,’ McBride says. “The walls may be gone, but those East Wing stories must be preserved and shared for future generations.”
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Adams describes an addition to the East Wing that made it function more like a home for the East Wing women of her era.
During the Nixon administration, there was no bathroom with a shower on the second floor, Adams says. It was a bit of a conundrum for the staffers like Adams who commuted from Maryland and worked all day and then had to change into evening gowns to work State Dinners and evenings at the White House.
“Connie Stuart, who was Mrs. Nixon’s chief of staff and press secretary, was able to get a shower installed in the bathroom so we could be fresh for the evenings’ events,” Adams recalls.
Joni Stevens, who worked on Mrs. Nixon’s staff and Former First Lady Betty Ford’s staff before becoming the confidential assistant to Director, White House Military Office (which was right next to the First Lady’s offices), describes in an email to East Wing Magazine Monday evening how during the George H.W. Bush administration additional bookcases were added to Stuart’s old office. This way the history of the Military Aide and office (dating to George Washington’s inauguration on April 30, 1789 to present day) could be showcased.
“We put a time capsule on the right side of the window facing the south grounds,” Stevens says, concerned it would just be tossed if even found.
In August, when the renovation was announced by President Trump, just how much of the East Wing would be impacted was unclear. Then, during a White House briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to a question asking if parts or the entire East Wing would be torn down by saying, “The necessary construction will take place and for those who are housed in the East Wing including the Office of the First Lady, the White House Military Office, the White House Visitors offices; those offices will be temporarily relocated while the East Wing is being modernized.”
In September, ground crews were seen cutting down trees and shrubs on the South Lawn in preparation for the expansion.
And on Monday evening, Leavitt on X pointed to past presidents’ changes to the White House including when Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing, when Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East Wing including a pool for himself, when Harry S. Truman gutted the entire White House and when Barack Obama added a basketball court.
“And President Trump is not costing the taxpayers a dime!” Leavitt said on social media about President Trump’s ballroom addition.
Mr. Trump, who also oversaw the now completed White House Rose Garden renovation, tapped McCrery Architects as the lead architect, a Washington, D.C.-based firm known for their classical architectural design. The construction team is headed by Clark Construction and the engineering work by AECOM, according to the White House. The expansion is believed to be the largest construction project on the White House grounds and is expected to be completed before the end of Mr. Trump’s term.
Watching the East Wing’s Office of the First Lady come tumbling down raises questions about whether the ballroom might be the only thing that rises in its place. Emails asking the White House about the future location of the Office of the First Lady have yet to be answered.
“My heart is breaking for the evident loss of prestige for the first ladies and their staffs,” Adams says.
The Office of the First Lady, for some scholars, is a time stamp of sorts for the Women’s Movement of the 1970s.
It was when Rosalynn Carter arrived at the White House in 1977 amid a second-wave Feminist Movement that operations in the East Wing changed. Press accounts make mention of her intentions to set up a permanent office in the East Wing with a sizable staff of 18 that Carter would personally direct. The “Office of the First Lady,” as it was dubbed, would include the departments of projects and community liaison, press and research, schedule and advance, and social and personal. Carter became the first, first lady to hire a chief of staff with a rank and salary equal to that of other White House staff.
Upon entering the White House, Carter initiated a structure around duties and causes. Real logistical questions about mail, for instance, had cropped up during the Nixon administration. It became a huge negotiation, according to MaryAnne Borrelli author of the 2011 book The Politics of the President’s Wife, because mail is a measure of popularity, and popularity is a measure of power.
“As you get the departmentalization of the first lady then you get specialization. Now you get space. The space follows the expertise,” Borrelli told East Wing Magazine in 2023 adding, “The emergent bureaucracy of the [first lady’s role] drives the spatial allocations because space in the White House is power.”
Yet, while LaRosa worked in the East Wing he says he never saw it as the symbol of a movement and adds that Dr. Biden “never saw it that way or as a place for her own advocacy.”
“It was an honor and privilege and we were certainly well aware of the history and progress made that came before us. But every president and first lady in history has left their footprint on the White House in one way or another and all of them are entitled to do that,” LaRosa says, pointing to the past expansions and teardowns. “That’s what is so great about our history and our democratic system. All first families can play a role in evolving and growing the physical infrastructure of the president and first lady’s home … It’s not a symbol of a movement rather than a symbol of a democratic system and institution that still works 249 years later.”