Henry Haller, chef for five presidents, dies at 97
Henry Haller’s entree to the White House came in late 1965, after the executive chef hired by the Kennedys had quit, finding it beneath his dignity at long last to prepare food like the spare ribs, spoon bread and mashed garbanzo beans requested by the subsequent White House occupants, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson.
Haller, a pragmatic and versatile Swissborn chef, had impressed Johnson by preparing meals for him at the Ambassador Hotel during the president’s trips to Manhattan as a senator. He got the job and would go on to become the longest-tenured executive chef in White House history.
From 1966 until his retirement in 1987, Haller catered to five presidents of varying politics, temperaments and palates, whipped up comfort food for their families, oversaw 250 state dinners and endured several tempest-in-a-fondue-pot controversies.
Haller, who lived in the Washington suburb of Gaithersburg, Maryland, died Nov. 7, his family said. He was 97.
The White House kitchens were originally run by slaves, then an assortment of military stewards and mostly unremarkable professional chefs, each brought in by whatever president was in office. That all changed in 1961, when Jacqueline Kennedy reorganized management of the Executive Mansion to reflect its status as an international showplace. She hired French-born René Verdon as White House chef, the one who lasted two years into Johnson’s presidency before resigning in frustration.
Stellar cooking skills were by then a prerequisite for the job. What set Haller apart was his flexibility — culinary, personal and managerial — which allowed him to thrive in the hottest kitchen of all. As he told historian Richard Norton Smith for an oral history project in 2010, “Whatever they wanted, that’s what they’re going to get.”
Haller was typical of the Swiss, his wife, Carol Itjen Haller, said in a phone interview. “With an Englishman, they act one way,” she said. “With a Frenchman, they’ll act another way. They are an adjustable people.” Henry Haller was born on Jan. 10, 1923, in Altdorf, Switzerland, near Lake Lucerne, to Emile Haller, a factory supervisor who was active in the local Red Cross, and Rosa (Furter) Haller, who cooked with vegetables harvested from the family vegetable patch.
His father told him that a life in the kitchen would allow him to travel the world, Carol Haller said. After serving a stint in the Swiss army, he attended the prestigious culinary training school at the Hotel des Balances in Lucerne, which led to a job as chef in the five-star Hotel Bellevue Palace in Bern.
Like many other young Europeans right after World War II, Haller saw a brighter future in the New World. He made his reputation as a superb sous-chef in Phoenix before moving to New York, where he rose to top positions in hotel restaurants, which were hotbeds of culinary stardom before the era of celebrity chefs.
He met his wife-to-be in the early 1950s, when both were working summer jobs in Martha’s Vineyard.
The Johnsons would test Haller’s mettle. They were proud of Texas cooking and encouraged the use of canned and frozen food to save money. (Verdon, his predecessor, would have none of it, complaining to a reporter, “You do not serve barbecued spareribs at a banquet with the ladies in white gloves.”)
Haller saw no reason a chef couldn’t steer a middle course between haute and downhome. He was unfazed by Lady Bird Johnson’s warning, during his one-hour interview for the job in late 1965, that pleasing the president would not be easy,