Tall and kind-faced, Alonzo Fields was the first African American to serve as head White House butler, having gotten the job under Herbert Hoover thirteen years earlier, just before the Roosevelts moved in. In the basement, the White House’s nervous chief of mails, Ira Smith, carefully inspected all incoming packages with a staff of twenty-two. “Cranks are just as likely to use the postal service as any other method of trying to get explosives into the president’s office,” Smith admitted.
