Ann Whitman

About Ann Cook Whitman

The Latin root of the English word secretary is "one entrusted with secrets." As personal secretary to President Eisenhower, Ann Whitman epitomized that definition during every day of his eight-year presidency. Mack Teasley of the Eisenhower Library refers to her as "the ultimate professional woman" and her biographer, Robert J. Donovan, claims she "had a passion for life at the top." Both statements are grounded in truth, but her life at the White House was one of seven-day weeks starting every twelve hour day very early and ending late.

During the eight years, she attended only one embassy party, usually ate lunch at her desk and sacrificed her marriage in the process. Those were the days before Xerox copiers and word processing computers. Memos and letters had to be perfectly typed, often through as many as four carbon papers, and the most minor edit meant starting the document all over again. She had secretarial assistants, but the president would only dictate correspondence to her and required that only she could handle sensitive papers.

During the Eisenhower Presidency she produced the 15,000 page diary that he asked her to keep and her office produced another 250,00 typed documents that are now housed in the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene. Considering that Eisenhower routinely went through several drafts of speeches and two or three drafts of important letters, the number of completed papers is staggering.

After leaving the White House, Whitman worked for George Hinman, an adviser to New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller. In 1965, Whitman became Rockefeller's executive assistant. She was appointed his cheif of staff when President Gerald R. Ford named him vice president in 1974. Ann Whitman retired in 1977 and passed away in 1991.