In a story that went little noticed last fall, when the media were consumed with the delicious prospect of President Trump’s impeachment, first lady Melania Trump broke ground on a new White House tennis pavilion. It promises to dress up the South Lawn court. Back in October, she tweeted an illustration for the new building. It reminds me of the neoclassical pool cabana at the Lord mansion in The Philadelphia Story.
It’s all but assumed that presidents will golf. But their personalities and upbringings find expression in the other games they choose to play. Barack Obama favored basketball, Richard Nixon bowled, the Bushes played tennis. What may come as a surprise, since he didn’t project the Bushes’ country-club bona fides, is that Jimmy Carter was a serious tennis player, fitting in a set or two whenever he could. (Carter, however, liked the solitary sports of fishing and hunting best — “I guess I’m antisocial,” he told an adviser.)
Some of the savviest power players over the years have used the White House tennis court to demonstrate their pride of place. In his new book about White House staff power struggles, Fight House, Tevi Troy notes that Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, “played tennis on the White House tennis court with Carter more than any other staffer.” James A. Baker III, who served variously as secretary of state, treasury secretary, and chief of staff under Ronald Reagan and the elder Bush, was George H.W. Bush’s doubles partner for years. That’s real access.
If you ask people what they know about tennis at the White House, they are likely to cite two things — one sad, the other pathetic. First, the sad: In 1924, 16-year-old Calvin Coolidge Jr. played tennis with his brother. Whether he overdid it or simply neglected to wear socks, Cal Jr. developed a blister on one of his toes. It became infected, and a week later, the boy was dead.
Next, the pathetic: Most politicos know that Carter brought his notorious attention to trivial details to the White House tennis court, personally scheduling who could play and when. That story had its origin in an Atlantic tell-all by James Fallows, who had been Carter’s head speechwriter but quit before the term was over. According to Fallows, Carter would “personally review all requests to use the White House tennis court.”
To his credit, Troy doesn’t simply repeat this hoary tale. He notes that the story was challenged by Carter’s domestic policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat. Challenged may be too gentle a word: Eizenstat called Fallow’s account a “lie” that was politically and personally damaging to the president from Plains, Georgia. “Fallows’s botched account of the president as a detail freak followed Carter not just through the election, but for the rest of his life,” Eizenstat wrote.
If anyone had an obsession with White House tennis, Eizenstat added, it was Fallows, who “was an especially avid player and frequently used the court.” Eizenstat added a taste of snark: “I am glad he had the time for such indulgences, courtesy of the president. I certainly did not!”
Eizenstat was putting some spin on the tensions with tennis-playing at the White House. On the forehand, nothing speaks a desirable ease with power like trading ground strokes on the South Lawn; on the backhand, nothing speaks the exercise of power like being too busy to trade ground strokes on the South Lawn.
Which brings us to the question of the right amount of tennis. The smart manager is one who discourages staff from trying to prove their importance by never leaving their desks. Lou Cannon, in his essential account of the Reagan years, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, tells of Frank Carlucci’s effort, as the new national security adviser, to make his team behave like normal human beings. Told by his trusted right-hand man, Lt. Gen. Colin Powell, that the National Security Council staff worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, Carlucci put a stop to that nonsense. “Henceforth we go home at six at night and we don’t work weekends,” Carlucci told his team.
He “set the example,” Cannon writes, “by walking out of his office at 6:00 P.M. his first day on the job with a tennis racket under his arm.”
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
