If the powder-room soap embossed with White House doesn’t give it away, then surely the framed photo of Catherine S. Fenton’s young son, Nicholas, romping in the East Room with First Dog Barney Bush will do the trick: This suburban mom has connections. Fenton’s gracious manner certainly helped her perform her job, which was to make very important visitors feel comfortable at America’s most prestigious address, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Until she left Washington in January 2005, Fenton was the White House social secretary for the President and First Lady Laura Bush.
Statuesque and elegantly coiffed, Fenton is content for now to stay at home with eleven-year-old Nicholas, tend to her garden, and occasionally play golf or tennis at Cherry Valley Country Club near Princeton. But her understated ways belie her clout.
Before working for Laura Bush, Fenton was the deputy social secretary for Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, who describes Fenton as “the perfect person to be the social secretary to the First Lady—always a perfect lady with great taste and a quiet, gentle sense of humor.” In 2001 Washingtonian magazine named Fenton one of the 100 most powerful women inside the Beltway, a distinction she shared with Sandra Day O’Connor, Hillary Clinton, Lynne Cheney, Maureen Dowd, and her boss, Laura Bush. “As far as many people are concerned, a great, warm, shining light was extinguished when Cathy Fenton left Washington,” says Letitia Baldrige, herself a social secretary and chief of staff to Jacqueline Kennedy during her White House years. “Not only did she perform her job, all of the protocol minutiae included, with excellence, but she had the kindest, nicest, most gracious personality in the administration. We miss all that now.”
In service to her country, Fenton has shaken hands with kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers. She’s invited the likes of Frank Sinatra and Itzhak Perlman to play any musician’s dream gig. And she’s enjoyed front-row seats at historic events, including the first visit to the White House, in 1987, by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, during which he and Ronald Reagan signed missile treaties. Fenton says that the White House resembled “a three-ring circus” during the missile talks, with security agents everywhere—especially the no-nonsense KGB variety.
For Fenton, who turned 52 in January, witnessing history was part of a day’s work. She fielded frantic phone calls on the day Reagan was shot in March 1981 and evacuated the White House through its large wrought-iron gates on September 11, 2001. One September morning in 2003, she greeted the Dalai Lama at the South Portico. “I had never seen him in person, so I was taken aback by how big and strong he was and by his deep baritone voice,” Fenton says. “He was dressed in gorgeous, richly colored silk robes of orange and red with gold trim. And, of course, sandals.” She escorted the Tibetan spiritual leader, via private elevator, to the Bushes’ residence, where the President and First Lady served their visitor coffee, tea, and his favorite chocolate-chip cookies.
When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, Fenton returned to Washington from the G8 Summit in Sea Island, Georgia, to help plan the seating for a state funeral at Washington National Cathedral. She saw Mrs. Reagan only briefly that day, when their eyes met as the former first lady followed her husband’s casket down the aisle. “She smiled, and for that brief moment she knew I was there,” Fenton says.
When Bill Clinton took up occupancy in the White House in 1993, Fenton went to work as social secretary for the Japanese ambassador in Washington. But soon after she gave birth to Nicholas, and her husband, Tim, took a job in New Jersey as director of international marketing relations for a medical sales company, she became a full-time mom. And she remained one until December 2000, just weeks before George W. Bush was to be sworn in as the nation’s 43rd president, when she was offered the job of social secretary to the first couple. The offer surprised her, as she had yet to be formally introduced to Mrs. Bush.
Fenton’s was not your run-of-the-mill job interview. She met with the soon-to-be First Lady, who took her to the White House (her tour guide was the incumbent, Hillary Clinton). Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s chief of staff, suggested that they drop in to say hello to the President-elect at the nearby Madison Hotel. “It will be great for Nicholas to have his mom in the White House,” Bush told her.
Fenton planned all of the Bushes’ social events at the White House, from intimate dinners with friends in the private residence to state dinners with world leaders. “You are in the middle of this nonstop whirlwind,” Fenton says. “What you’re reading about in the newspapers is happening all around you.”
No two days were ever alike. With a staff of eight, including four calligraphers, Fenton helped plan Christmas parties, Easter-egg rolls, bill signings, Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremonies, Cinco de Mayo celebrations, Veterans and Memorial Day breakfasts, movie night for the Bushes and their friends, the Congressional Ball, and state dinners, the most formal events at the White House. She coordinated guest lists, invitations, menus, seating, entertainment, floral arrangements, and security clearances, and she catered to the particular requests of guests, making sure always to serve butternut squash soup to Elizabeth Taylor and honoring Gerald Ford’s 90th-birthday request for carrot cake with butter-pecan icing.
Fenton attended to even the tiniest details: Are there enough chairs for the press? Is it too hot to serve lemonade in the Rose Garden after the bill signing? Should that guest be addressed as Ms. or Mrs.? Does that visiting head of state eat meat? What about carbohydrates, food allergies, and dietary restrictions? “But if you’re going to be entertaining,” she says, “it’s the best place in the world to entertain.”
The Reagans brought Hollywood glamour to the White House. “Seeing Gregory Peck was so exciting,” Fenton says, “because one of the first movies I ever saw was To Kill a Mockingbird. I was really starstruck.” She was front and center in the East Room when Sinatra sang “I Get a Kick Out of You” during a sound check for a performance later that evening. “Pleasant and gentlemanly,” she says of Sinatra, “but all business.”
The Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremonies, presentations of the nation’s highest civilian award, were perhaps her favorite occasions. She remembers Margaret Thatcher, once the most powerful woman in the world, who, after accepting her award in 1991, turned to Fenton and asked, “Was I all right?”
The Fentons lived in Virginia for most of Bush’s first term, but they returned to Cherry Valley in the summer of 2004, and Fenton commuted to Washington during her last six months on the job. Contrary to press speculation that Fenton and other staffers, including the White House chef, were forced out when the First Lady cleaned house for a second term, Fenton says that she had given her notice to Laura Bush in July 2004, so that she would have ample time to find a replacement.
These days Fenton still maintains a presence in Washington social circles. Last May she returned to the capital for a black-tie benefit for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that honored Mrs. Reagan, and the following month she attended a celebration at the British Embassy for a fellow social secretary. Last fall she helped the White House florist decorate for the holidays.
Even at home, Fenton can’t seem to relinquish a certain access to power: Last year she advised a Republican candidate for the Montgomery Township Committee, and at Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart, where Nicholas is a fifth-grader, she serves as—what else?—secretary of the parents’ association.
Contributing writer Nancy Erickson wrote about the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq in May 2005.