He is tearing down a national monument.

[IcyPeas]

7. Former White House East Wing Staffers Shocked and Saddened By Demolition of Their Cherished Workplace

(I posted this in another thread too. Its a nice article. References a bunch of previous first ladies who worked there who actually took the job of first lady seriously) the link goes to "East Wing Magazine"

Nice bit of history. Some pictures in the article too. I would bet the current first lady doesn't give a hoot.

Former White House East Wing staffers used words like “jarring,” “a gut punch” and “revolting” in their reactions to images of a backhoe toppling the facade of the White House East Wing on Monday.

Other East Wing staffers who worked for former First Lady Pat Nixon tried desperately in a last ditch effort to intervene in recent weeks to stop the expansion.

“In our small, little way, some of us from Mrs. Nixon’s staff have been trying to push back on this devastation,” Penny Adams, Mrs. Nixon’s radio-television coordinator, tells East Wing Magazine in an email Monday evening.

She describes the efforts of Debby Sloan, then assistant to the social secretary, who wrote a letter to the National Capitol Planning Commission (NCPC) about the importance of keeping the East Wing intact. Adams followed up by calling the NCPC several times where she finally reached the general counsel, she says. A commission meeting was expected to be held on September 4, according to Adams, who was told that the commission had not received anything from the White House about the ballroom project. Then, Susan Dolibois, also an assistant to the social secretary for Pat Nixon, and Adams joined Sloan’s letter-writing campaign to the NCPC to do whatever they could in protest to “this horrible project” to no avail.

“I literally [cried] as I could see my old office window,” Adams says in response to the demolition images she saw. She even recognized the window on the second floor where she worked all those decades ago. “It was my office from 1969 to 1973.”

Adams describes an addition to the East Wing that made it function more like a home for the East Wing women of her era.

During the Nixon administration, there was no bathroom with a shower on the second floor, Adams says. It was a bit of a conundrum for the staffers like Adams who commuted from Maryland and worked all day and then had to change into evening gowns to work State Dinners and evenings at the White House.

“Connie Stuart, who was Mrs. Nixon’s chief of staff and press secretary, was able to get a shower installed in the bathroom so we could be fresh for the evenings’ events,” Adams recalls

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