Sailor in the White House: My 11 Years of Service to Three Presidents

Sailor in the White House, first published in 1962 as White House Sailor, is author William Rigdon's fascinating account of his 11 years of personal service to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. As Rigdon states “with two of the three Presidents under whom I served, I was to make at least forty trips away from Washington working as their secretary, mess officer, mailman, baggageman, banker, storekeeper, photographer, custodian of secret files, and keeper of official logs. I went with Roosevelt to Cairo, Teheran, Great Bitter Lake, Yalta, both Quebec conferences, Honolulu, and the Aleutians. I was with him, too, on his inspection and political trips within the United States, on his mysterious fishing vacation to Georgian Bay in Canada, at Bernard Baruch's place in South Carolina where the President went to recuperate after Teheran. And there were many weekends at Hyde Park and trips to Shangri-La, the President’s mountain hideaway in the Maryland mountains. On these and other occasions I saw close-up such famous figures as Prime Minister Churchill, Generalissimo Stalin, King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, and many others. Also, on these trips away from Washington I served Harry Hopkins as secretary, when my duties with the President allowed.

When President Truman took over I served him exactly as I had served President Roosevelt, going in his party to the Berlin Conference, where he met with Generalissimo Stalin, Prime Minister Churchill, and his successor Prime Minister Clement Attlee. I was with him en route home when he received King George VI in the cruiser Augusta, and in mid-Atlantic when he announced the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.” Included are 8 pages of photographs.

Commander William M. Rigdon (1904-1991) served as the Assistant Naval Aide in the White House from 1942 to 1953.