Focus on the White House

After every White House state dinner, there’s a moment when the president takes off his shoes.

And there are moments when even the most refined first lady has to eat lunch on a bus.

Those moments, when the handlers are gone and the guard is down, are when photographer Harry Benson clicks.

Benson’s candid scenes and formal portraits of presidential families make up “First Families: An Intimate Portrait from the Kennedys to the Clintons.” The traveling exhibit opened Saturday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum and continues through July 31.

Benson’s images from 35 years and eight presidencies are endearing--”I don’t take mean pictures,” he said--but also concisely revealing.

When Benson photographed Jimmy Carter hosing down the White House tennis court in rubber boots, he depicted Carter’s work ethic along with his reputed habit of micromanaging. A close-up of Hillary Rodham Clinton guarding her cards during a game of rummy shows a first lady more relaxed than in her public appearances but also suggests a shrewd woman who plays her cards close to the vest.

Many of the photographs in Benson’s exhibit should be familiar; he created them to accompany cover stories in such magazines as Life, People and GQ. Two of Benson’s photos of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, shot in June 1998 for Vanity Fair, are among the few published since the former president announced he had Alzheimer’s disease.

Benson had three minutes and 20 seconds to photograph the couple at their Bel-Air home. He knows, because he times all his sessions. “It’s a superstitious kind of stupid photography thing,” he said.

A native of Scotland--you hear it in his voice--the 69-year-old Benson came to the United States in 1964 on assignment to follow the Beatles on their first trip to New York City.

Manhattan became Benson’s home, but his career has taken him and his camera around the globe and frequently through the side door of the White House.

On those trips, Benson said, he aims to get the shots that the pack of White House photographers do not see.

“Whatever the boys are doing,” he said, “I’m going to do the opposite.”

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Benson remembers John F. Kennedy as “a prince.” Lyndon Johnson was Benson’s least favorite president, but the most distinguished-looking, he said. Richard Nixon gave him generous access, even during the dark days of Watergate. Gerald Ford was easygoing and would offer him coffee.

With Carter, “what you saw is what you got,” Benson said. Reagan was the perfect subject who could look natural in any outfit or setting. George Bush was unassuming. And when Bill and Hillary Clinton are together, he said, “there’s a love affair. . . . And I don’t think it’s an act.”

For a man who must work his way into the family quarters of the White House with the hope of being asked back, Benson can be quite candid about the leaders he photographs and their families.

“If they step out of line, I’m going to zap them,” he said. “Whoever said I was a friend?”

Discussing presidential contenders for 2000, Benson said, “I hope it’s not Gore . . . because [he and his wife, Tipper, are] not as nice as they make out.”

He agrees with news reports that Elizabeth Dole is wooden and closely scripted. And George W. Bush, who strikes a fighter’s pose in one Benson photograph, is “a coarser version of his father.”

But regardless of what Benson may think of his subjects, he said he tries to make them comfortable.

“I want to be asked to stay for dinner,” he said. “I want to be asked to hang around. That’s when you get good pictures.”

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And Benson is convinced that any way he could portray a first family would benefit them. The Clintons, whom he photographed recently as the president’s impeachment trial came to a close, could particularly use a Harry Benson photo session, he said.

“A picture of Hillary, Chelsea and the president having breakfast with Buddy, the dog--that’s a picture I would love to take, and it would do them good,” Benson said.

Informal pictures of presidents, be they with their family at the breakfast table or shoeless in the Oval Office, humanize them, Benson said. “And it does them more good . . . than the photo opportunity.”