Subtle Changes in the Oval Office

By HUGH SIDNEY

THE PRESIDENCY

A White House aide the other day was surveying the Oval Office, and he looked in where the sliding rear door had been, the secret route for the choicest of presidential aides. It had vanished. In place of the door was a plastered wall, and not a mark to indicate that there once had been a back gateway to power.

Immediately, the young man began to calculate. That meant there would be no privileged entree to the President, long one of the rituals of real influence. Anybody wanting to see Gerald Ford would have to enter his office from the corridors or the secretary's office or the porch, all doorways monitored and barred except by previous arrangement. It was a device to discourage empire builders or any staff man who felt he could occupy the presidential ear.

The Oval Office itself has been cleansed of the vivid blues and golds of the Nixon era. It is subdued now, a blend of soft green, rust and beige. It is not hard to see how the bright Nixon colors were inspired by the Southwestern states, while those in the Ford office are more the muted tones of the Great Lakes states where the colors shift with the seasons.

At one time 15 eagles were perched in the Oval Office. Eagles on the rug, on the flagpoles, on the walls. Their population and prominence have been considerably reduced. The pervasive influence in the decor now is Abraham Lincoln. There is a statuette of young Abe standing serenely on a pedestal against the wall. Looking out over the office from the bookshelves is a bust of Lincoln sculpted by Leonard Volk in about 1880. This is the creased and concerned President who held the nation together. In the hall just outside the office is a larger bust of Lincoln, a melancholy visage of courage and strength that catches the eye of anyone entering.

Those 307 battle streamers that commemorated military engagements from Ticonderoga to Viet Nam have been moved from behind the presidential chair to the Cabinet Room. Ford's own war ribbons and medals (he has ten battle stars) are in a modest case on the shelf. There is a whiff of the West about the place, just as there is about Ford. In the hall is a painting of Old Faithful done by Albert Bierstadt about the time that Yellowstone became a national park; Ford once worked there. And there is a magnificent view of a setting sun on snowcapped peaks of the Grand Tetons. Thomas Moran did the oil in 1895. To the right of Ford's desk in the Oval Office is Bronco Buster, a bronze by Frederic Remington of a cowboy straining to stay on the back of his plunging horse. Ford's son Steve is working as a cowboy in Montana.

The presence of other men pervades the place. Benjamin Franklin, looking like a benevolent old owl, watches from one wall. He was painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1785 when he came home after almost ten years in France. Peale also did the oil of George Washington that is over the mantel.

But the man who casts his spell over the Oval Office more than anyone except Lincoln is Harry Truman. A bust of Truman is just behind Ford's desk, where he can watch over the President's shoulder as Ford conducts the nation's business.

Across the hall in the Roosevelt Room, so named by Nixon to commemorate the two Roosevelt cousins who were Presidents, there is a flare of partisanship, but it is about the only one close to the center of things. There are seven pictures, busts and prints of Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican, and one modest plaque of Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrat.

It is hard too to find any trace of Richard Nixon. There are no busts or medals or oil portraits. The desk that Ford uses was Nixon's, but it was a lot of other people's too. About the only trace of Nixon that can be found are four volumes of his public papers. They reside on a lonely shelf in a breakfront in the Roosevelt Room. The fact that this story of Nixon runs out in 1972 may be another of those marvelous tidbits of history that tell us so much about the men of power and their ways.

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