“You have something lovely,” Kit Dobelle said. “I don’t know why you would go to the trouble and expense to make it ugly. It’s just inconceivable to me.”
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PITTSFIELD — Kit Dobelle has many fond memories of the White House Rose Garden.
During the administration of President Jimmy Carter, she served as Chief of Protocol of the United States and later chief of staff to First Lady Rosalynn Carter, while her husband, former Pittsfield Mayor Evan Dobelle, served as Chief of Protocol directly before her. Over their years at the White House, Kit Dobelle recalls the president walking right out of the Oval Office onto the garden’s surrounding grass, often to sit with visitors outdoors.
Pittsfield’s Kit and Evan Dobelle both served in the administration of the late former President Jimmy Carter. On Monday, they recalled his legacy and the personal qualities that made him a one of a kind in presidential history.
In the springtime especially, she said, the flowers were “spectacular” — the garden itself, “extremely well-maintained,” providing a stunning venue for meetings with diplomats, award ceremonies and press conferences over the years. Of relevance to the Dobelles, President Carter hosted former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in the Rose Garden in 1980 shortly after a peace treaty Carter brokered between Israel and Egypt went into effect.
Seeing pictures of the Rose Garden now, after that grass was uprooted in favor of white stone paving by the administration of President Donald Trump, she can’t quite understand why anyone would go to such lengths to change it.
“You have something lovely,” Kit Dobelle said. “I don’t know why you would go to the trouble and expense to make it ugly. It’s just inconceivable to me.”
“You have something lovely,” Kit Dobelle said of changes made by the Trump administration to the Rose Garden. “I don’t know why you would go to the trouble and expense to make it ugly. It’s just inconceivable to me.”
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The Rose Garden now stands lined with patio tables and yellow umbrellas, resembling, in some ways, Trump’s Mar-A-Lago Club in Florida. The Rose Garden was first established in 1913, but its modern iteration was ushered in by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and garden designer Rachel Lambert Mellon. For the past six or so decades, it has stood as a platform for and symbol of the office.
The drastic alteration is just the latest in a long line of aesthetic changes at the White House. Trump’s gilded redesign of the Oval Office has seen opulent decorations splashed around its confines. For his next project, Trump intends to build a $200 million ballroom in the east wing of the White House.
Evan Dobelle said Trump’s makeover of the White House, replete with golden ornaments and baubles, channeled the Rococo style of King Louis XIV. Just as much, it emulates the aesthetic from Trump’s hotels, resorts and personal living quarters, according to reporting from The New York Times.
“Kings always love places like Versailles,” Evan Dobelle said.
Evan Dobelle said Trump’s remodel of the garden seemed like a “needless expense,” especially as people in some parts of the country face jeopardized voting rights and loss of access to Medicare. In Pittsfield terms, Evan Dobelle likened it to paving over Park Square: “Why destroy something beautiful because you can?” he wrote in a message.
“I find the whole thing to be absurd,” Evan Dobelle said.
To Evan Dobelle, it all rang of a distraction from Trump’s personal issues and policies — the consequences of which we may soon see in the economy, he said. While he finds the changes at the executive mansion regrettable, he is far more concerned with the administration’s mass deportation efforts, and characterized the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as Trump’s “personal army.”
Responding to an “imperial presidency”
Despite the radical change, Kit Dobelle maintains some hope that the Rose Garden might be restored as it was one day. After all, she was there when the Carter administration got to work reversing the aesthetics of President Richard Nixon’s “imperial presidency” design choices.
While the ultimate lynchpin in Nixon’s presidency was the Watergate scandal, it included his redesign of the White House guards in a sort of “Prussian” uniform, infused with the ornament of European monarchy. The change rubbed many voters the wrong way, Kit Dobelle said. The Carter administration, in many ways, tried to represent the opposite of that, she said.
Those design choices were ultimately undone, with the help of a number of permanent, dedicated staff who were loyal to the presidency above all else, she said. Regardless of who was in the office, a number of talented professionals are retained to give the residence a certain level of “elegance and beauty.”
Kit Dobelle did lament, however, what seemed to be the loss of continuity and history that most administrations had maintained from previous presidents. While presidents get their pick of the furniture and trappings around the White House, she said there’s usually some effort to respect its past.
“It seems to be a sense that has very regrettably been lost in this time,” Kit Dobelle said.
All that to say, the Rose Garden’s future may not be set in stone. Change is a constant at the White House, and future administrations will have their own chances to redecorate.
But for Kit Dobelle, there is a certain sadness in knowing that the Rose Garden is no longer as she remembers it.
“I guess we’ve learned not to take things for granted,” she said.
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