Personal Dork Assistant

A Great Man In The White House

Thank goodness the elections are finally over (give and take a runoff or a recount here and there), and the country has been made safe for me to return to the States some day. I couldn't be bothered to cast an overseas ballot, since I figured Cali and the Bay Area was a lock. So it looks like Proposition 8's passage was the result of my apathy, for better or worse.

Ever since Eisenhower, there has been the token black or two in each Administration. But one suspects the one African-American person most familiar to the Presidents would be someone like Mr. Eugene Allen.

For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land.

He trekked home every night, his wife, Helene, keeping him out of her kitchen.

At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than to the large desk in the Oval Office. Helene didn't care; she just beamed with pride.

President Truman called him Gene.

President Ford liked to talk golf with him.

He saw eight presidential administrations come and go, often working six days a week. "I never missed a day of work," Allen says.

His is a story from the back pages of history. A figure in the tiniest of print. The man in the kitchen.

One may imagine that seeing a humble, industrious black man at work every day may have inspired the Presidents to push through the Civil Rights policies, just a little bit.

Mr. Allen worked his way up to the position of matire d' before retired in 1986 after 34 years of service in the White House with personal thank-you notes from the Reagans. But the prospect of an Obama presidency is exciting to the Allens, even in their 80s, watching from afar.

Interviewed at their home last week, Gene and Helene speculated about what it would mean if a black man were actually elected president.

"Just imagine," she said.

"It'd be really something," he said.

"We're pretty much past the going-out stage," she said. "But you never know. If he gets in there, it'd sure be nice to go over there again."

I won't spoil the end of the story, published on the front page of the Washington Post on the day after the election, since Mr. Haygood's article deserves to be read in its entirety. Suffice it to say that the conclusion ties together the up-close-personal and grand-historical threads together in the most dramatic way.