WHITE HOUSE TOUR LEADER COURTED AND CRITICIZED (original) (raw)
U.S.|WHITE HOUSE TOUR LEADER COURTED AND CRITICIZED
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/30/us/white-house-tour-leader-courted-and-criticized.html
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- Aug. 30, 1981
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August 30, 1981
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Six thousand visitors troop through the White House each day, and there are days when an equal number must be turned away. A Brownie troop from Indiana, an elderly group from Des Moines, 1,500 members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Gay Men's Chorus from San Francisco, a needlepoint club from Detroit, 350 contestants in the National Spelling Bee and 30,000 Boy Scouts in town for their National Jamboree - all want the tour. Saying no is not easy.
''I'm always in tears,'' Carol McCain, head of the White House Visitors Center, said with a smile and a shake of her head, ''but I love the job. I'm really having a ball.''
Mrs. McCain, 43 years old, met Ronald and Nancy Reagan in 1973 shortly after her husband, Capt. John McCain of the Navy, was freed from a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam. The two couples became friendly, and Mrs. McCain worked for Mr. Reagan in the 1976 Presidential primary in Florida, where the McCains were then living. They were recently divorced.
In the fall of 1979, Mrs. McCain signed on again, doing scheduling and advance work for Nancy Reagan, working on arrangements for the Republican National Convention and the inauguration. Being Courted and Criticized
The plum at the end of that political sojourn was a job in which she would find herself courted and criticized, sought after and denounced.
Almost everyone who comes to Washington wants to visit the White House, which is open for tours Tuesday through Saturday from 7 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. The early-morning guided tours, available only through Congressional offices or other Federal agencies, are limited to 1,200 people each day. Mrs. McCain's phone rings continually with the special pleas, and it is often the Representative or the Cabinet officer on the line.
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