As the current president presides over historic cutbacks from the White House, the field of White House history has received a boost from philanthropy. In March, the White House Historical Association (WHHA) announced an $8 million gift from the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation to support historical scholarship and its dissemination, as well as to endow the WHHA’s two-year-old fellows program and a new staff position to oversee it. The money, which was pledged in 2024, has already helped the WHHA get closer to its fundraising goal for a newly created educational museum, The People’s House: A White House Experience, at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue.
This grant is a great example of how even a relatively small foundation can support the country’s continuity — not by investing in democracy per se, in this case, but in the ability to preserve an accurate record of the president’s house.
Jacqueline Kennedy’s vision of preserving White House history
The WHHA itself has a storied past. In 1961, then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy established the nonprofit to enhance the public’s appreciation and understanding of the executive mansion and preserve its art and artifacts. Also storied is the WHHA-Lambert family connection: On entering the White House, Kennedy had turned to her good friend Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon for help with decor. Mellon, the Listerine fortune heiress married to arts patron and philanthropist Paul Mellon, was known for her great design sense, among other things, and went on to redesign the White House Rose Garden for Kennedy.
Since its founding, the WHHA has acquired and preserved artifacts from each administration — historically significant artwork, furniture, China and other household items — and funded research and education on the White House and presidential history. It also does old-fashioned, non-tech-bro-takeover actions like the annual tradition of honoring White House designer/builder James Hoban with a gravesite wreath-laying ceremony.
The WHHA has long supported scholarship about White House history. Today, it’s a rare central Washington, D.C., institution entirely funded by private philanthropy — including the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation — and by the sale of books, products and an official White House Ornament each winter.
How the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation and Kennedy’s BFF supports an accurate historical record
In 1976, more than a decade after helping Kennedy at the White House, Bunny Mellon established the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation to honor her father, a St. Louis, Missouri-based industrialist, reader and World War I veteran. When Bunny Mellon passed away in 2014, she left her estate to the foundation, which then began its run as an active grantmaking institution (and created a separate entity to run her home and grounds in Virginia called the Oak Spring Garden Foundation).
The Gerard B. Lambert Foundation currently has an endowment of about $90 million, and makes multi-year grants to a variety of organizations, including the WHHA, World Monuments Fund, and the Bunny Mellon Healing Garden at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. It has four board members, including current foundation President Thomas Lloyd, a certified financial planner who is a grandson of Bunny Mellon; his brother and two others comprise the remainder of the board.
“Kennedy anchored the establishment of a permanent collection, and the idea that the White House itself needed its own collection and protection,” said Lloyd. “Up until Jackie becoming first lady, the White House had no policy or process for protecting its own furniture and things. The rule up to that point had been, you bring in what you want or leave it.”
The current $8 million grant to WHHA is part of the family’s long connection to the organization and to Jacqueline Kennedy. “My grandmother was instrumental in helping Jackie be the behind-the-scenes force for the redesign of the Rose Garden and of the White House itself,” said Lloyd. “There are a lot of letters from Jackie with ‘WWBD?’ — What would Bunny do? A lot of the influences that Jackie had were unique to herself, but they were instrumental in helping one another shape their aesthetics and help each other.”
One strategy for nonprofits: Create a program, then find funding for it
The WHHA has a fundraising approach that seems a bit like the philanthropy version of “if you build it, they will come” — the foundation occasionally launches a new program or initiative or museum, then looks for funding to continue it. Take the fellows program. For each of the past two years, budding scholars of presidential history have applied for one- or two-month research fellowships of $5,000 or $10,000 each to study and stay in D.C., using the city’s storied institutions, including the National Archives and the Library of Congress, to advance work on their dissertations, theses or book projects.
“We want to be that place that supports young scholars and creates a network of scholars interested in the White House,” said Matthew Costello, the WHHA’s senior historian, chief education officer and the director of the Rubenstein Center, the research, education and digital hub arm of the nonprofit. The Rubenstein Center oversees the fellows program, organizes public events and creates educational content for the robust website, including, for example, how the Obamas redecorated the family dining room in 2015, incorporating modern art and design.
The WHHA began offering these fellowships without a new dedicated funding source . Now, with the Lambert endowment, the program is guaranteed to last and hopefully grow.
“White House history is not something people learn about in school,” said Costello. “You have to find ways to talk about that type of content. Doing it through and with young professionals working on the presidency and the White House is a good way to make inroads with scholars and engage the next generation. In the long term, I would hope these scholars could be ambassadors for us and our mission.”
Or take the research department itself, which WHHA first created in 2010. The following year, philanthropist David Rubenstein gave $10 million to support the now-renamed Rubenstein Center. Costello’s own job at the Rubenstein Center is funded by the organization’s first endowed staff position, the Marlyne Sexton Chair in White House History. Costello will move into the new Lambert-endowed position, creating a job opening at the WHHA for the Sexton chair. “One strategy our development team has taken on is trying to secure endowed support for positions,” he said, noting that the Lambert grant will create the second such position.
Funding future scholarship of the White House
The recent Gerard B. Lambert Foundation grant was in the works for a number of years. “We want to make sure we are anchoring education and the support of scholars — taking White House history seriously — and ensuring that this organization has the ability to always have a proper educational component to it, where scholars and researchers can update, chronicle and accurately reflect the history of the White House and what it means to the American public,” said Lloyd. “We wanted to make sure the White House as an entity is independent of any specific administration. It’s its own place. It has its own history.”
How will the WHHA’s role change under this current president? “The White House Historical Association is relevant for all administrations,” said Lloyd. “Our stance is to look at this as an educational endeavor. We’re excited to make sure that it is properly recognized for what it is: a really important entity that Jackie Kennedy established and where every American can learn more about their history.”
This story was updated and corrected on April 4. It originally misstated Mellon’s role in the founding of WHHA. We regret the error.
