During the eight years in the White House, Lewis was a whole regiment of Swiss guards--always on duty and alert. “Keep William B. Lewis to ferret out and make known to you all the plots and intrigues hatching against your Administration, and you are safe,” was Jackson’s advice to Polk when the latter was entering the White House. We shall find him implicated in some of the most important events of his time, making history, and yet escaping the historian. His great advantage was his perfect understanding of Jackson’s character. He often became a buffer, protecting the President against unpleasant revelations. If he thought a disclosure necessary as a protection to the grim old warrior, he told his secret; if he thought it would merely arouse to useless wrath, he buried it; and sometimes, as in the case of the Crawford letter, he bided his time for months before revealing it. All the politicians of his day passed in review before him, Democrats and Whigs, Nullifiers and Nationalists, friends and enemies, and he silently catalogued them through a Bertillon system of his own. His advice to Jackson was that of a friend to a friend, seated about the blazing White House hearth, discussing politics and men in the midst of the tobacco smoke, as they might have done in the private life of the Hermitage. He did not possess Kendall’s genius for programmes, nor Blair’s for propaganda, but he was invaluable in the field of personalities. He alone of the three sometimes doubted and drew back in fear. When Jackson vetoed the Maysville Bill, Van Buren found Lewis’s countenance “to the last degree despondent.”[350] He dreaded and doubted the effect of the veto of the measure rechartering the Bank, and later, the withdrawal of the deposits. Having been Federalistic himself, in other days, he had a fellow feeling for Louis McLane when that politician found himself in trouble. But doubting and trembling though he sometimes was, Van Buren has testified that “no considerations or temptations, through many of which he was obliged to pass, could weaken his fidelity to the General or his desire for the success of his Administration.”[351] In the early stages of the Bank controversy, he alone of the members of the Kitchen Cabinet maintained friendly relations with Biddle.[352] Concerning his status among the Jacksonian leaders, biographers and historians have radically disagreed. Even among the later writers this disagreement persists, and where one dismisses the theory that he was a politician, far-sighted and astute, as without sufficient evidence,[353] another concludes that “in a day of astute politicians, Major Lewis was one of the cleverest.”[354] The truth appears to be that while he was not a moulder of policies and creator of programmes, he was one of the most clever manipulators of men and masters of personal intrigue who ever served a President. In the Kitchen Cabinet he was the personal manager--the political secretary. III