He attended Navy flight school and became a Marine dive bomber pilot and saw combat in the Pacific theater, where he was awarded 7 Distinguished Flying Crosses and received 21 Air Medals.

Upon graduation from Yale in 1947, Whitehouse joined the Central Intelligence Agency and worked in the Congo, Turkey, Belgium and Cambodia.

He moved over to the State Department in 1956 to serve as assistant to the undersecretary for economic affairs, and in 1959 he became a regular foreign service officer.

Eight months after he left Vientiane to take up his new post as ambassador to Thailand in Bangkok in April 1975, the Communists seized power and proclaimed the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

Whitehouse's arrival in Bangkok coincided with a crisis in United States–Thai relations that followed the collapse of South Vietnam, and which was aggravated by the Marine recapture of the SS Mayagüez, an American ship that Cambodian Communist gunboats had seized in the Gulf of Thailand.

It was also a time of serious political unrest in Thailand, which culminated in the bloody suppression of student demonstrations on October 6, 1976, and a military coup that overthrew the elected government shortly thereafter.

Whitehouse presided over the closing of the last American bases in Thailand in 1976, an action the Thais had requested.

[9] In 1988, Whitehouse was called out of retirement by Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci to become the first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict & Interdependent Capabilities, with the assignment of strengthening cooperation among army, navy and air force after a series of disagreements and botched operations.