A MAGNET FOR ODD INTRUDERS

By Hugh Sidey

The black humor at week's end around the White House was that terrorists, intruders and pranksters were going to have to get tickets and line up just like the 1 1/4 million tourists who come every year to view and pay homage to the world's most famous building.

In one week's flurry, the White House became more protected and yet more of a magnet for intrusion. Only three days after Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was abruptly closed to vehicular traffic as a caution against a truck-bomb attack, the first of two interlopers challenged the security sytem. A troubled graduate student in psychology carrying an old, unloaded pistol climbed the 8-ft.-high iron fence on the east side of the White House on Tuesday night and rushed 60 yds. across the grounds. In the struggle to subdue him, a guard fired a shot that wounded the intruder and a Secret Service agent, each in the arm. Leland Modjeski, 37, of Falls Church, Virginia, was treated at George Washington University Hospital, where he was detained for questioning concerning his yet unknown motive.

On Friday morning unarmed Andrew Jopling, 24, in front of dozens of astonished tourists who had quietly lined up for their White House tour, hoisted himself over the fence and was immediately and rather quietly handcuffed by officers who hustled him into a guard booth for questioning, believing for the moment that he was just a prankster. Funny? Perhaps in days gone by, when Eleanor Roosevelt could complain sweetly about couples parking on the untended White House drive for a little smooching. But no more.

"It's the theater," lamented William Webster, former head of the fbi and a member of the White House security review committee that recommended closing Pennsylvania Avenue as well as a dozen other measures to tighten protection. Angry people seeking notoriety of all degrees find the stage they want at the White House. For years peaceful protesters have sometimes camped across from the White House, but the rising stridency of the disaffected and the real terrorism in the U.S. have changed the environment.

Webster and a fellow committee member, William Coleman Jr., a former Secretary of Transportation, resisted the idea of closing the two-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue when the study was begun after the apparently deliberate crash of a light plane at the mansion last September. "The only way terrorists succeed is to get the government to do something that makes the government look unstable," declared Webster. "The more you change things, the more they can be encouraged." During the discussions, when it was pointed out that Chelsea Clinton's bedroom was on the vulnerable Pennsylvania Avenue side of the White House, the first response was to suggest that she be moved to the south side, where the huge lawn is a buffer. But secret reports of threats to the President and his family and the chilling calculations of the damage from a truck bomb were overwhelming. "It had to be done," said Coleman. "It would have been irresponsible not to have taken the action."

The secret part of the security committee's report contains no major structural surprises. Mostly it has plans for more bulletproof windows in the White House, detailed ideas for sequestering the First Family in secure areas within seconds of any aerial or ground threats, and more surveillance of the White House neighborhood, where terrorists might find a perch to fire something like a portable Stinger missile. There will be constant updating of the electronic sensors and night optics that the guards use. And the coordination between the Federal Aviation Administration and the Secret Service to spot suspicious planes straying into White House air space will be put on a split-second basis.

There were no serious discussions of making the White House a museum and moving the President's living quarters and offices out of Washington, though that and other suggestions have been around for almost all the White House's 200-year history. Indeed, after the initial and rather stealthy shutdown of Pennsylvania Avenue, which carried 26,000 vehicles a day, there was a kind of jubilation over the serenity and pedestrian access to the broad avenue between Lafayette Park and the White House. Hundreds of strollers, Rollerbladers and bicyclists invaded the asphalt with happy shouts.

White House historian and architectural consultant William Seale has always advocated closing Pennsylvania Avenue to make an expansive President's Park, as intended by Washington's original designer, Pierre L'Enfant. Seale would put gates and fences around the entire area embracing Lafayette Park, the White House grounds and the Ellipse behind, then add walkways and plants. Visitors could be filtered through the gates and see unmatched vistas of the grounds. Most of the more than 15 million visitors who come to Washington want to see the White House in some manner, but fewer than a tenth of them can have inside tours. It is Seale's view that every person truly interested in the White House could take a walk in an expanded park. "The only people who would be inconvenienced would be those who want to drive by and see the White House out of their car window," Seale declared last week. "That seems like a logical swap to me."