White Gloves Not Needed

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/style/jeremy-bernard-white-house-social-secretary-makes-his-mark.html



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.

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1. Recommended for Bernard.