John Legend and Chrissy Teigen walk through the East Wing to attend a state dinner in December 2022. Photo / Getty Images
It’s played second banana to the West Wing, but the home of the first lady’s office has been the source of quiet power and influence.
It’s a saying famously attributed to Betty Ford: “If the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart.”
The East Wing is now gone – both literally and figuratively. Beyond the outraged social media posts, the stark images of a wrecking ball to the White House and the optics of President Donald Trump erecting a US$300 million ($519m) ballroom in the midst of a government shutdown is the loss of a historic part of one of the most famous buildings in the world. What does it all mean, exactly?
Physically, it means that the offices of the first lady and her staff have been demolished. The office of the social secretary – which oversees all entertaining and social events at the White House – was located there. Those elegant invitations created by calligraphers? Painstakingly created in the East Wing. The grand entrance for guests visiting the White House? Gone. The intimate family movie theatre adjacent to the East Colonnade was also razed, according to the Hollywood Reporter, as well as the bunker underneath the East Wing footprint.
Symbolically, it’s the end of an era, and has been seen as a slight to the traditional respect for the Office of the First Lady. The President’s wife has the demanding, unpaid, fulltime job of representing the United States throughout the globe. It’s soft power, reflecting both the priorities and influence of the President’s most trusted and valued partner – and it was centred in the East Wing.
It’s unclear what first lady Melania Trump thinks of all this, or whether she was consulted. A spokesperson said that she has not commented on the project publicly and would not do so for this story. The White House did not respond to a request for further comment.
The original East Wing was created in 1902 as a place for visitors to enter; in 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt had an underground bunker built on that space and expanded the offices above. They quickly became the power centre for Eleanor Roosevelt and her staff. It functioned informally as the domain for all first ladies that followed, until Rosalynn Carter officially created the Office of the First Lady in 1977 when she moved into the White House.
Traditionally, these offices were where the First Lady and her team decided priorities, gave interviews and planned trips, state dinners, holiday decorations and more. It was the operational centre for all her work, which was often more popular than the President’s. The First Lady and the East Wing became interchangeable in the public discourse.
“The East Wing was a wonderful place to work,” said Anita McBride, chief of staff for First Lady Laura Bush. “All of us had the privilege of working on issues of purpose and service while being in the most beautiful, inspirational surroundings. … I personally loved sharing the hallways with visitors on the public tours and seeing their awe at walking in those East Wing doors.”
“We were kind of stealth,” said Rickie Niceta, White House social secretary during the first Trump term, who worked closely with Melania Trump. “We were a tight little bubble, and it was a happy bubble.”
Compared with the West Wing, the East has always been seen as the less important side of the White House – and that’s not an unfair or sexist comparison. The President is elected and makes policy; the First Lady is unelected and serves a supporting and secondary role in any administration. But, unlike the West Wing, the East was often defined by common purpose and loyalty to the First Lady, less infighting and jockeying for power.
“In my own personal experience, if the First Lady was interested in an issue, her views carried a lot of weight,” said Tevi Troy, a former senior aide to George W. Bush who often conferred with Laura Bush. “She wasn’t involved in every issue, but in the issues that she cared about, she had a lot to say. And I think that’s true across multiple administrations.”
Troy, now a historian and author of five books on the presidency, said that delineation between the two wings can be convenient: early in Trump’s first term, in a Wall Street Journal story, a spokeswoman for Melania Trump denied that she was influencing her husband by claiming, “The First Lady is focused on her own work in the East Wing.” It also allowed the often warring factions of the Reagan White House to point fingers. White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan blamed a disastrous hire by saying it came “directly from the East Wing” – a not-so-oblique reference to Nancy Reagan.
In 1993, there was a public outcry when Hillary Clinton was given an office in the West Wing in addition to the traditional space in the East Wing. It was seen as confirmation that the first lady was overstepping into areas reserved for the president and his staff.
The East Wing was also the place to hide controversial or problematic figures, Troy said. Because of the general perception that what happened in the East Wing was less important, anyone housed there was marginalised. So the rivalry between historian Arthur M. Schlesinger jnr and presidential adviser Ted Sorensen during the Kennedy administration played out over the two wings: Sorensen and his allies mocked Schlesinger for his office “on the other side of the mansion, in the East Wing”. (Schlesinger had the last laugh – A Thousand Days, his book about the Kennedy presidency, won him his second Pulitzer Prize.)
President Bill Clinton stashed adviser Dick Morris in an East Wing office – but that allowed Morris to meet with the President undetected by West Wing staffers. And Anthony Scaramucci, who never met a camera he didn’t like, requested that he exit his short-lived White House communications director gig via the East Wing to attract less attention.
In the first 108 days of Trump’s second term, Melania Trump had spent fewer than 14 days at the White House, reported the New York Times.
Three or four dozen White House staffers have been working in the East Wing since January 21, and it is unknown where they will be permanently relocated. Some are currently working inside the main part of the White House, and others have been placed in the Executive Office Building.
Trump has never been impressed with the size or decor of the East Wing. “It was never thought of as being much. It was a very small building,” he told reporters Wednesday. The loss of that space, he added, was a small price to pay for what he called “the finest ballroom ever built”.
Trump’s obsession with ballrooms is well known. In 2010, then-citizen Trump called Obama adviser David Axelrod, disparaging the tents that the administration used for large events and offering to replace them with a huge ballroom. “He said, ‘You know, I build ballrooms. I build the greatest ballrooms and you can come down to Florida to see them,’” Axelrod told NPR this summer. The White House didn’t follow up, a slight Trump never forgot. The President said earlier this year, “I offered to do it, and I never heard back”.
Now he’s realising his vision of a grand, gilded space even bigger than the main part of the White House itself. He presumably could have built the ballroom anywhere on the South Lawn, but decided he wanted it adjacent to the executive mansion. The original announcement of the privately funded ballroom said that it would be built next to the East Wing without touching it. At some point, that changed: “In order to do it properly, we had to take down the existing structure,” Trump explained as it was being demolished.
The symbolism of tearing down the West Wing or any part of the original White House would have created an even bigger backlash. But typical renovations are minimal; this is the first alteration that involved demolishing a significant portion of the current structure, and the images have been jarring and controversial.
“The White House is something that constantly changes, but it doesn’t change that quickly,” Troy said. “I don’t know exactly what’s being destroyed. I don’t know exactly what the ballroom is going to look like. … Demolishing the East Wing without a second thought sounds bad, but I need information.”
Former East Wing staffers were devastated by the news that their former workplace was on the chopping block and tried in vain to stop the teardown. Michael LaRosa, press secretary to former first lady Jill Biden, told East Wing Magazine that it was “a gut punch”. Pat Nixon’s staffers appealed to the National Capital Planning Commission to no avail. The lack of formal process and approvals has appalled historians, but the demolition took just four days. “My heart is breaking for the evident loss of prestige for the first ladies and their staffs,” Penny Adams, Nixon’s radio-television coordinator, told the magazine.
Farewell, East Wing. Gone but never forgotten. History is the persistent guardian of memory.