This Old House

By Hugh Sidey

The White House is 200 years old and renewing itself every hour, a great work still in progress. On a typical morning it is a village of 6,000 busy souls: the President, butlers, gardeners, journalists, clerks, economists, cooks, cops, one dog, one cat, and guests and tourists in some kind of harmony on 18 acres.

Workers are washing the outside walls now, while painters stand by to brush on a fresh coat of white paint for a fresh President and his family, come Jan. 20, 2001. On that afternoon, as the Inauguration parade winds down Pennsylvania Avenue, 120 men and women will move the Clintons out and the new First Family in, lock stock and canary if there is one. And the old mansion will be aglow in the winter light and ready to write a new chapter, with its 132 rooms cleaned and polished, its tennis court, jogging track, putting green, basketball hoop, swimming pool, theater, bowling alley and weight room fit for exercise. And in its offices, the fate of the world will continue to be deliberated, amid 500 priceless paintings and sculptures that tell the story of the great American adventure and the men and women who made it happen.

The idea of a "President's palace" quite naturally captured the expansive mind of transplanted Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant, who had grown to manhood at Versailles, the most magnificent monument to power and wealth--and self-indulgence--in Europe. In the fall of 1791, the new Federal City designed with his regal touch would be named Washington.

The human Washington, President George, had a better grasp of the nature of his countrymen and chopped the house plans to one-fifth the original size. And the name was downgraded from "President's palace" to "the President's House." A few years after its completion, the no-nonsense Americans were calling it as they saw it--the White House. Still, George Washington, with a lingering bit of the kingly itch, made sure the house would be grand enough for the Chief Executive of the new Republic. Even the ascetic New Englander John Adams, the new nation's second President and the first in residence at the White House, wanted a touch of majesty. "Neither dignity, nor authority," he wrote, "can be supported in human minds...without a splendor and majesty, in some degree proportioned to them." Big country, big dreams.

The White House had been a struggle to raise. Funds ran out, materials and workmen ran thin. Scottish stone carvers had to be enticed to America. A whorehouse sprang up among the construction shacks, and federal commissioners wanted it torn down, only to drop the complaint when carpenters protested. President Washington made sure the White House was built, bolstering his determination with inspections of the site.

Though the final building designed by James Hoban had dramatically shrunk from L'Enfant's original dream house, it was still the biggest in America when Adams moved in on Nov. 1, 1800. His arrival at about noon from Philadelphia caused little stir when he came down Pennsylvania Avenue in a nondescript carriage, one manservant on horseback behind him. Adams did some routine work in a makeshift office on the first floor of the still unfinished structure, ate supper, then took a candle to make his way up a servants' winding staircase to his bedroom. The main staircase was not finished.

Few if any people could envision the authority and symbolism that would come to inhabit the White House in the next 200 years. Today it is the world's most important stage, where power is brokered and crises confronted, where national policies are born and tendered, where a national spirit is nurtured. It is the production studio for a crucial device for governing--the media. And it remains the coveted stop for almost every other power holder in the world.

Before November 1800, however, even though work was under way on the Capitol, there was yet little sense of a Federal City. The only evidence of habitation was about 600 modest houses strewn across the marshy but beautiful landscape, which had inspired L'Enfant as he worked at his drawing board in a dim room in Suter's Fountain Inn in Georgetown. The unlikely figure of Adams, embodying the presidency, would bring the spark of life to the new city simply by taking up residence in the house. And though the President's House still stood mostly silent and dark, the new society's reason for being was now in its midst. On the second night he was there, Adams wrote his wife Abigail, who was back in Quincy, Mass.: "I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof." Nearly 150 years later, Franklin Roosevelt had those words carved into the mantel in the State Dining Room; Jacqueline Kennedy had it redone during her redecoration.

That declaration would be tested from the start, as nobility, folly and frailty would play out with the President's House as a grand proscenium arch. On Jan. 1, 1801, the Adamses held the first public reception attended by the few dozen interested citizens who lived in the infant city, and instantly the new building was claimed to be the people's house. The inhabitants were sized up, their fashions noted, the drinks and food assessed and the influence peddlers who had migrated with the presidency from Philadelphia whispered their enticements. The elements of the democratic struggle were all in place at the start--political officeholders, special interests and the people at the gate.

Many of the early Presidents were not especially happy in the White House. Thomas Jefferson found his sojourn there a chore, and he called the presidency itself "a splendid misery." The first child born in the White House was Jefferson's grandson, James Madison Randolph, delivered in an upstairs bedroom in 1806. The second birth was a reminder of the nation's grim legacy: a child born in the basement quarters to two of Jefferson's slaves, Fanny and Eddy. No name is recorded for the child, who died before reaching age 2. The child's funeral was probably the first in the White House.

The greatest physical trauma in the life of the White House was its burning in 1814 by the British troops who marched nonchalantly down Pennsylvania Avenue; ate the meal prepared for James Madison, who had fled to Virginia; watched their commander, Rear Admiral George Cockburn, brandish Dolley Madison's chair cushion, declaring it would help him remember Dolley's "seat." The British sailors then torched the place.

The flames engulfed the building, the city was lighted by the eerie spectacle, the grand stairway acting like a flume to build the heat. Frightened residents watched into the night until the blaze was extinguished by a violent rainstorm. Next morning the White House was a blackened sandstone shell--but a legend was born.

Redoubtable First Lady Dolley Madison had watched for the progress of the British marauders through White House windows with a small telescope. When she saw the smoke from the fire at the Capitol, she ordered the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington cut from its frame and rolled up, put in a cart with other valuables and trundled off to Virginia. That is the image of Dolley Madison that lives on in history. But in the immediate aftermath of the sack of Washington, the press vilified both her and her husband for cowardice even as the new nation experienced a depressing--but temporary--sense of its own vulnerability.

The White House got some new coats of white paint and was made habitable in a rushed three years. An impatient James Monroe opened it with a rousing reception on New Year's Day 1818. The place was packed. Writes historian William Seale: "The heavy odors of wet plaster and paint must have rivaled society's usual smells of rouge and plaster and pearl powder, camphor and macassar hair oil." The powerful newspaper the National Intelligencer was uplifted: "It was gratifying to be able once more to salute the President of the United States with the compliments of the season in his appropriate residence."

The elegant Monroe, who had been Minister to France, and his beautiful wife Elizabeth, a New Yorker, gave the White House a French cast in decoration and furniture. Though some of the furnishings were dispersed and lost in subsequent Administrations, the idea that the White House was best as decorated by the Monroes was resurrected by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961. The Monroe idea reigns today.

Each of the White House rooms would gain its own history of important events and important people. Today the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room are probably the most famous chambers because of the deliberations of war and peace in the past half-century. The East Room and the State Dining Room have always been halls for mingling, feeding and entertaining hundreds of people. Ulysses S. Grant, summoned to Washington to command Union armies, arrived when Abraham Lincoln was in the midst of an evening reception. Grant stood on a sofa in the East Room so that the worshipful guests could see him and he could speak to them. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last communist leader of the Soviet Union, ate in the State Dining Room with George Bush, surrounded by the leading capitalists of the U.S. The Air Force Strolling Strings serenaded the jovial guest with Moscow Nights.

But the Yellow Oval Room and the adjoining room on the second floor may have spawned the most intimate and exotic stories. Adams gave that first public reception in that Oval Room, and it became Andrew Jackson's family parlor. First Lady Abigail Fillmore moved in her piano and her daughter's harp. When Congress anted up $2,000 for books, she established the first White House Library.

And it was in James K. Polk's Cabinet Room, next door to the Yellow Oval Room, that one of the most fateful discoveries in U.S. history was confirmed. There on Dec. 7, 1848, Secretary of War William Marcy put a heavily laden tea caddy on the table and stepped back for Polk's scrutiny. The caddy contained 230 oz. of gold dust and nuggets from California, proof of the wild and heady stories that had seeped back East.

The most intense era for the White House came in the Civil War. "That's when it really got its soul," says historian Seale. And that soul has the face of Abraham Lincoln. The President stalked the building during the Civil War, often feeling like a prisoner of the war. His speeches and declarations were the glue for the riven nation. And with armies clashing nearby, and with the news updated hourly by telegraph, the White House became the national nerve center.

Lincoln's White House was crowded with distraught parents, favor seekers, war contractors and staff members who brought the war news, much of it discouraging. So that Lincoln might speak to the crowds that gathered beneath the North Portico, candles were put in a narrow passageway that led from the private quarters to a window overlooking the drive. From there he could talk to the people below in relative safety, and often he did, his face outlined in flickering light. The corridor remains a tiny shrine in the modern White House.

The sense of Lincoln still permeates the mansion. There are more paintings and busts of Lincoln than of any other President and more bits of legend about his life in the White House, including the lone ghost preserved in myth. No President has yet claimed to have seen it, but consummate showman Ronald Reagan said two of his guests sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom saw the misty figure on two separate nights. On being discovered, the ghost turned and walked into the darkness.

A quarter-century after Lincoln's death, the innocent but mindless inside maneuverings of Caroline Harrison, wife of Benjamin, would jeopardize the White House with an element war could not: grandeur. She loved the White House but wanted more space. She rallied Cabinet officers and engineers to produce a plan for massive buildings attached to the existing White House and an enclosed quadrangle in the French Neoclassical mode. She had public and official support but not that of House Speaker Thomas B. Reed. Miffed by a postal appointment, he refused to let the authorization bill come to the floor. All that is left are preposterous drawings.

As far as renovators go, no one quite measures up to Harry Truman. He rebuilt the White House, gutting it and replacing ancient timbers with steel and concrete. To much public displeasure, he added a balcony off the private quarters on the third floor. Like many Presidents, Truman considered himself an amateur architect and used to inspect the construction progress, leading the likes of freshman Congressman Gerald Ford through the building chaos, explaining history and design with his usual irreverence. Truman also dispensed bits and pieces of the old White House to political cronies like Speaker Sam Rayburn, whose Bonham, Texas, library still has an original marble mantelpiece.

Truman introduced the first television set to the White House, a harbinger of the presence of TV cameras and 24-hour cable journalists, who constantly haunt the grounds today. But the White House was always an experimental ground for new, in particular domestic, technology. Jefferson had two flush toilets; Andrew Jackson got running water and the first shower; Martin Van Buren brought in central heating; and Polk did away with candles and oil and lighted his chandeliers with gas. An early form of air conditioning was improvised for the dying James A. Garfield in the summer of 1881. Rutherford B. Hayes introduced the telephone, and Benjamin Harrison had the White House rigged for electricity, though he would not touch the switches.

There is a story that Woodrow Wilson was working on neutrality papers in the Oval Office when he heard what he thought was a housefly and jumped up to get a swatter. Wilson then looked out the window and saw a biplane zooming down on the White House, with Lincoln Beachey perched at the controls. Beachey, then considered the best pilot in America, buzzed the White House again and again and flew stunts around the Washington Monument, to the awe of Wilson. Today the airspace above the White House is designated P-56 by the FAA--the P standing for "prohibited area"--and it is rigidly policed by air-traffic controllers.

The White House remains a remarkable combination of home and office. That unique mix may be one factor in the success of U.S. democracy. Richard Nixon used to relate how visiting heads of state, many of them still doing business in ancient fortresses lined with cannons and battle lances, liked its warmth and informality. George Bush noted that even amid crises, he could glance out his office windows and see his grandchildren playing with his dogs or the gardeners digging in the flower beds. "It reminded me of what being President was all about," said Bush.

Like all homes, it has its lost treasures. In 1792 there was a grand dinner and 16 toasts by Freemasons from Georgetown after they laid the White House cornerstone over a brass marker. The location of stone and plate was quickly forgotten. No one is certain where it is today, despite high technology and old-fashioned dowsing rods. Truman did not find it during his renovation. And no modern President wants to cut into the sacred walls. That cornerstone, wherever it is, will lie undisturbed, one hopes, for at least another two centuries.