The whole family [of President Theodore Roosevelt] were fiends when it came to reading. No newspapers. Never a moment was allowed to go to waste; from the oldest to the youngest they always had a book or magazine before them. The President in particular would devour a book, and it was no uncommon thing for him to go entirely through three or four volumes in the course of an evening. Likewise we frequently saw one of the children stretched out on the floor flat on his stomach eating a piece of candy with his face buried in book.

I did a draft not apparent in the final version of Roosevelt’s great speech to the Teamster’s Union, which seemed as we heard the magnificent delivery of it, the turning point in the [1944] campaign. I can still hear the laughter about Fala (but at Dewey) in the lines FDR sang out at the Statler banquet: "The Republican leaders have not been content to make personal attacks upon me or my wife or my sons they now include my little dog Fala. Unlike the members of my family, Fala resents this. When he learned that the Republican fiction writers had concocted a story that I had left him behind on an Aleutian Island and had sent a destroyer back to find him at a cost to the taxpayer of two or three million dollars his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself but I think I have a right to object to libelous statements about my dog."

All the social functions were discontinued at the White House [during World War I], and Mrs. Wilson inaugurated meatless days, heatless days, Sunday gasless days meaning no Sunday pleasure drives and she spent many hours before her sewing machine making pajamas for the soldiers in the hospital wards, to be distributed by the Red Cross. Conservation was the by word around the White House; eight sheep were soon gracing the lawns . . . many thousands of dollars were raised for the Red Cross through the auctioning of wool. Two pounds of wool were sold for each state when the sheep were fleeced of almost a hundred pounds of raw wool.

It seems that the White House is haunted. This was a most interesting piece of news to me, for it seemed to me to be the only thing wanting to make the White House the most interesting spot in the United States. . . . The ghost, it seems, is a young boy¾ from its description, I should think about fourteen or fifteen years old. The housekeeper, a spooky little person herself, informs me that he has been felt more often than he has been seen, but when I remonstrated with her that ghosts have not the sense of touch, at least those self-respecting ghosts of which I have heard, she insisted that it was this manifestation of the Thing which caused such fright among the servants.

You never knew what to expect when you went around back in those days. One day I found [tennis stars] Bill Tilden, Little Bill Johnston, R. Norris Williams, and Dick Washburn playing tennis on the White House courts, while the President [Harding] watched. Once I brought the car around to the front door to take him golfing, and he appeared with two utter strangers, one of them was a dark-visaged man who looked like a Balkan spy. He was Ring Lardner. The other man was Grantland Rice. One day he turned up with a pair of very pretty girls. They were Hope Hampton and Viola Dane, two of Hollywood’s brightest stars at the time.