SOCIAL AIDE FROM IKE’S WHITE HOUSE DIES AT 106
JUNO BEACH — Mary Jane McCaffree Monroe, social and press secretary to first lady Mamie Doud Eisenhower, died in Juno Beach on July 23. She was 106.
Born in New York on Oct. 28, 1911, Monroe worked her way up the secretarial ladder for various organizations before she made it to the White House. She was the secretary for higher-ups in the New York World’s Fair in the late 1930s, the Rustless Iron and Steel Corp. of Baltimore, Schenley Distillers and World Wide Development Corp., according to her biography in a White House Staff Book from 1953 to 1961.
In 1952, the year Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected as the 34th president of the United States, Monroe was office manager for the Citizens for Eisenhower campaign headquarters. The day after Eisenhower’s inauguration, she became White House social secretary and the personal secretary to the first lady.
The job of a social secretary is exactly as it sounds: being in charge of planning and coordinating the social and professional events for the presidential family, according to the White House Historical Association.
Social secretaries in the White House date to 1901, the association notes, with Isabella Hagner listed as an executive clerk to first lady Edith Roosevelt. Men had previously been assigned to do these tasks.
But it wasn’t until Monroe that the position became a permanent fixture in the presidency, the association said. She was listed in the Congressional Directory as “Acting Secretary to the President’s Wife.”
So how did she gain the trust to hold such an important position? Monroe told The Palm Beach Post in 2000 that during a campaign stop in Michigan, Mamie Eisenhower needed a new hat.
“She liked things simple and cheap,” Monroe told The Post. “She never spent a lot of money on anything. They were frugal people.”
Monroe hopped off the train, found the town center and picked out a velvet hat she felt the future first lady would like. But she missed the train, so Monroe hired a taxi to get to the next stop as fast as possible.
“I got there just as the general was finishing his speech,” she told The Post. “The cab fare was $26. I had just enough money to pay and just enough time to push my way through the crowd. I just made it. When Mrs. Eisenhower saw me, she said: ‘Where have you been?’ And before I could answer, she said, ‘Did you get my hat?’ ”
She never did get reimbursed for the whirlwind task, but she did get the job.
As social secretary, Monroe was close enough to the first lady to recall intimate details. In an interview with author Carol Hegeman, she recalled how Eisenhower could remember meeting a single person after weeks of shaking hundreds of hands, and how she received thousands of letters a week.
“People felt something about her. They felt toward her like a next-door neighbor,” Monroe told Hegeman of the first lady’s popularity.
After Eisenhower’s presidency, Monroe was a protocol specialist in the Office of the Chief of Protocol in the U.S. Department of State. She later co-authored “Protocol: The Complete Handbook of Diplomatic, Office and Social Usage,” according to her obituary.
After living in Maryland and Washington, Monroe moved to Palm Beach in 1988. She is survived by her nephews, Burnham C. McCaffree Jr. in Alexandria, Virginia, and Robert Fleming in Putnam Valley, New York. Her first and second husbands, Floyd Emery McCaffree and Harry A. Monroe Jr., both predeceased her.
She will be interred at St. Gabriel’s Cemetery in Potomac, Maryland.