Book Chronicling Life of Gene Allen, White House Butler, Released Today

Wil Haygood's book, "The Butler, a Witness to History," is available today.

Wil Haygood’s book, “The Butler, a Witness to History,” is available today.

Today, Wil Haygood’s book, The Butler, a Witness to History, will be released in area bookstores. It chronicles the life of Eugene Allen, the butler who served 8 presidents while working at the White House. Haygood’s Washington Post 2008 article about Allen was also the basis for the movie schedule to be released on August 16th.

If you want a copy of the book and would like to meet the author, Haygood will be at Politics and Prose tonight at 7 p.m.

The following excerpt from the Barnes & Noble Web site sums up the book well:

…. While serving tea and supervising buffets, Allen was also a witness to history as decisions about America’s most momentous events were being made. Here he is at the White House while Kennedy contemplates the Cuban missile crisis; here he is again when Kennedy’s widow returns from that fateful day in Dallas. Here he is when Johnson and his cabinet debate Vietnam, and here he is again when Ronald Reagan is finally forced to get tough on apartheid. Perhaps hitting closest to home was the civil rights legislation that was developed, often with passions flaring, right in front of his eyes even as his own community of neighbors, friends, and family were contending with Jim Crow America. …

Gene Allen passed away in 2010. His Washington residence is located at 710 Otis Place, NW.

Explore posts in the same categories: History, People

Tags: , , ,

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.

2 Comments on “Book Chronicling Life of Gene Allen, White House Butler, Released Today”


  1. car insurance agents franklin tn

    Book Chronicling Life of Gene Allen, White House Butler, Released Today | Park View, D.C.

  2. Bette Says:

    I’m not sure why but this website is loading extremely slow for me.
    Is anyone else having this problem or is it a problem on my end?
    I’ll check back later and see if the problem still exists.


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s


%d bloggers like this: