White Gloves Not Needed
From left: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press, Charles Dharapak/Associated Press
Jeremy Bernard makes sure
White House events like the state dinner for the British prime minister
are suitably elegant. Right, the place settings.
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: April 20, 2012
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Prime Spot (April 22, 2012)
Times Topics: White House (Washington, D.C.) | Barack Obama
SOME months after Jeremy Bernard became the first man and openly gay
person to be the White House social secretary, he visited an assisted
living center in suburban Maryland. There, he and Letitia Baldrige, the
86-year-old legendary social secretary of the Kennedy administration,
spent what Mrs. Baldrige fondly remembers as a convivial hour and a half
over a French white wine chatting about guest lists and other secrets
of the job.
Mrs. Baldrige said she also offered Mr. Bernard an important piece of advice: “Keep your mouth shut.”
And so he has.
Now more than a year into what has become a massive event-planning job
for the most famous couple in the world, Mr. Bernard, 50, has played a
crucial but largely silent role managing some of the biggest, showiest
parties in the history of the White House. He has overseen hundreds of
events, from this month’s Easter Egg Roll for a record 35,000
participants — Mr. Bernard kept watch from the sidelines, jauntily
chewing gum in dark sunglasses — to a stampede of Christmas celebrations
to three state dinners. At the most recent one, in honor of Prime
Minister David Cameron of Britain, 362 guests, including celebrities
like George Clooney and Elizabeth McGovern, dined on the South Lawn in
what the White House called a “tent” but was in fact a mammoth pavilion
theatrically lighted in magenta hues, with orbs of green hydrangeas
rising up from the tables on pedestal vases. Mr. Bernard had contracted
out the décor to Rafanelli Events, the planner behind Chelsea Clinton’s
wedding and events for clients like Giorgio Armani and Bain Capital.
It is safe to say that he is a long way from the white-gloved days of
Mrs. Baldrige or even Muffie Brandon Cabot, who as one of Nancy Reagan’s
social secretaries proclaimed a “tablecloth crisis” in the White House
and mended a tear in one herself. Mr. Bernard, who raised tens of
millions of dollars in Los Angeles gay circles for Mr. Obama in 2008,
has moved the position further into the realm of the corporate as he
carries out the Obamas’ vision: big celebrations that bypass large
swaths of the Washington establishment but open up the White House to
youth, military families and, in 2012, big contributors to the
president’s re-election campaign.
Known for his affable social skills, particularly among the tight
sorority of former White House social secretaries that has embraced him —
“He fits in beautifully,” said Amy Zantzinger, a social secretary in
the George W. Bush White House — it is Mr. Bernard’s fund-raising and
political skills that matter now. During this election year, he is
making sure that many of the White House guests are political donors, as
well.
In a city where White House guest lists are dissected like WikiLeaks
cables, insiders have already seen the hand of Mr. Bernard in the
presence at the dinner for Mr. Cameron of nearly four dozen “bundlers,”
or people who solicit campaign checks for Mr. Obama from their friends
and associates. Mr. Bernard has at the same time become an important
White House gatekeeper for prominent gay people, one of Mr. Obama’s most
important but impatient constituencies, which remains frustrated that
the president opposes gay marriage (Mr. Obama has said his views are
“evolving”). In recent months, the president has turned more and more to
gay men and women in search of new veins of large campaign donations,
particularly after antagonizing Wall Street, a traditional but now less
fruitful source of cash.
Many of the bundlers at the dinner for Mr. Cameron were friends of Mr.
Bernard, among them Chad H. Griffin, the incoming president of the Human
Rights Campaign, a national gay advocacy group. (Mr. Griffin and his
date, Jerome Fallon, got a seat with the Obamas at the head table.)
Other bundler friends of Mr. Bernard at the dinner included Dana
Perlman, a Los Angeles lawyer who is on the board of the Human Rights
Campaign and who brought his husband, Hugh Kinsellagh.
“I doubt he put anybody on that list just because they were friends,”
said a friend of Mr. Bernard who is an advocate for gay issues in
Washington and who asked not to be identified talking about what he
considered the sensitive topic of political donors and the White House.
“But he made very astute political calculations that were in the best
interest of the president’s future.”
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Prime Spot (April 22, 2012)
Times Topics: White House (Washington, D.C.) | Barack Obama
Equally noticeable were the gay couples at ease enough at the state
dinner for Mr. Cameron to walk hand in hand past the cameras set up for
guest arrivals — an evolution in attitudes and etiquette that Mr.
Bernard’s friends partly credit to him.
“He has had an impact on the obvious, which is the comfort of people who
he needs to support the president in the next election,” said Steve
Clemons, a foreign policy blogger and the director of the American
Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, who is an acquaintance
of Mr. Bernard.
By all accounts, Mr. Bernard has excelled at another part of his job,
which is remaining in a media deep freeze after the messy departure of
the Obamas’ first social secretary, Desirée Rogers, a stylish,
camera-cozy Harvard M.B.A. who was blamed when a pair of aspiring
television reality stars crashed her maiden state dinner. (A second
social secretary, Julianna Smoot, left after 10 months to become a
deputy manager for the Obama re-election campaign.)
Under orders from an East Wing nervous about another Desirée-like
debacle, he has turned down all requests for interviews. In a year in
the job, he is not known to have spoken to a single reporter, at least
not while on duty or on the record. Occasionally he can be spotted at
White House events — at last year’s Easter Egg Roll he was seen walking
and chatting with Mr. Obama, and at this year’s he had a big hello for
Valerie Jarrett, a senior White House adviser — but such sightings are
rare.
Mr. Bernard is by no means a recluse, however. In recent months he has
turned up at the media-heavy Washington premiere of the HBO film “Game
Change;” at a book party at the Georgetown home of Gahl Burt, a social
secretary in the Reagan White House; and at a black-tie dinner for the
National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. (He was wearing
Valentino, he told Women’s Wear Daily, adding “Thank you for asking.”)
“He knows the scene here,” Mr. Clemons said.
Mr. Bernard’s social outreach has extended to the former White House
social secretaries, who were invited to lunch in the White House last
fall. Everyone told off-the-record war stories, Michelle Obama dropped by to say hello, and Mr. Bernard sent them all home with bouquets.
“I adore him,” Ms. Burt said. “He seems totally to get it.”
JEREMY BERNARD grew up in San Antonio as the son of a lawyer, Herschel
Bernard, who did civil rights work and raised money for the presidential
campaigns of Robert F. and Edward M. Kennedy. The young Mr. Bernard
headed east to Hunter College in New York but never graduated, moved to
Los Angeles, waited tables and met David Mixner, a gay rights leader who
soon became his mentor and helped him raise money for Bill Clinton’s
first presidential run.
In the 1990s, Mr. Bernard went to work for Marc Nathanson, a billionaire
cable-television executive. “Jeremy is very social,” Mr. Nathanson told
The Daily Beast last year. “There was never a party he did not like to
go to.”
By 2007 Mr. Bernard and Rufus Gifford, his partner at the time, began
bundling what would be tens of millions of dollars for candidate Obama
through their consulting firm, B & G Associates. After the election
Mr. Bernard was rewarded with the job of White House liaison to the
National Endowment of the Humanities, where his lack of a college degree
would seem to have posed a problem.
“I thought it might, and I was proven totally wrong,” said Jim Leach,
the endowment’s chairman. Instead, Mr. Bernard “would give these
reports, and he would have these somewhat stolid academics in the palm
of his hand with cute observations.”
After two years Mr. Bernard crossed the Atlantic to help the American
ambassador to France and a friend from Los Angeles, Charles H. Rivkin,
dial up the wattage at embassy soirees in Paris. He had barely settled
in before he was summoned back to Washington to tackle parties at the
White House. By then he had broken up with Mr. Gifford, who is now the
finance director for the Obama campaign.
Multimedia
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Prime Spot (April 22, 2012)
Times Topics: White House (Washington, D.C.) | Barack Obama
He was hailed in the press as a “historic choice,” but friends said he was also an exotic one for Washington.
“Forget about the fact that he’s male and gay, it’s more that he’s
top-to-bottom Dolce & Gabbana and wildly flirtatious,” said an
acquaintance of Mr. Bernard who is active in the capital’s Democratic
fund-raising circles, and who did not want to be identified discussing
Mr. Bernard’s personality for fear of offending him. “He definitely adds
a little bit of sizzle to a position that traditionally has been about
which set of china are we using.”
In contracting out to Rafanelli Events, Mr. Bernard is stepping up a
practice begun by Ms. Smoot. Rafanelli, which features photographs of a
bat mitzvah and “love ball” among its work on its Web site, likes to
project light stencils called gobos as part of its décor. (For a state
dinner last fall for the president of South Korea, the event planner
projected stencils of autumn leaves all over the East Room ceiling.)
“Rafanelli loves gobos,” said Eddie Gehman Kohan, who chronicles the East Wing on Obama Foodorama, her Web site.
If Mr. Bernard’s (and the Obamas’) large-scale state dinners are not to
everyone’s taste, they do hew roughly along modern partisan lines:
Democrats, who promote themselves as the inclusive party of the “big
tent,” have state dinners so large they require a literal one (Obama and
Clinton especially); Republicans, who don’t see the point in inviting
people to the White House if they’re going to be fed on the lawn, hold
them to 120 guests to fit in the neoclassical confines of the State
Dining Room (Reagan and Bush I and II).
There are, of course, many exceptions.
“My own personal viewpoint is that those dinners for 500 people in a
tent are for the birds,” Mrs. Baldrige told Vanity Fair for an article
about Ms. Rogers and White House state dinners in 2010.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Baldrige proclaimed herself pleased with her successor, and still pleased Mr. Bernard paid a call.
“I was so eager to help him, and he was so eager to receive my help,”
she said. Then she added quickly: “Although, of course, he didn’t need
it.” COPY : http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/
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