Keeping the White House Open

Photograph by Kevin Lamarque  Reuters
Photograph by Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The most sought-after tour guides in Washington, D.C., are White House staffers. Beginning at 7:30 P.M. on weeknights—unless the President is still at work in the Oval Office—and on weekend afternoons and evenings, press aides and policy advisors can be found leading family members and friends, along with well-connected tourists, through the West Wing. Few staffers will admit it, but they cram for these tours as they would for a college history exam, and come prepared to tell you why the Roosevelt Room used to be called the Fish Room (or, by F.D.R., “the morgue”), and where Nixon’s taping system was installed, and why the eagle on the front panel of the President’s desk and the eagle on the ceiling of the Oval Office face in opposite directions.

During the Clinton Administration, when I gave many of these tours, I would end by escorting my guests out of the West Wing, past the Press Briefing Room, and through an entryway under the North Portico. There, just beneath the front door, is an archway that still bears scorch marks from the British burning of the White House in 1814—singed stone that offers blunt witness to the vulnerability of the building and its tenants. Visitors could see plenty more evidence of that: iron gates, concrete barriers, guard dogs, bomb-sniffing dogs, rooftop sentries, and, on the north façade, near a second-story window, pockmarks left by a gunman who, in October, 1994, pulled a semiautomatic rifle from his trench coat and fired multiple rounds through the White House fence, just yards from where Omar Gonzalez made his leap, last month, into public consciousness.

Tuesday’s hearing before a House oversight committee—during which Julia Pierson, the director of the Secret Service, failed to pacify members with her assurance that Gonzalez’s self-guided tour of the state rooms with a knife on him was the sort of breach that “will never happen again”—revived some very old questions about securing the People’s House, which also happens to be the President’s home. Despite the shocking laxity of the Secret Service, which, it was revealed yesterday, had no idea that a contract security guard who rode an elevator with President Obama in Atlanta last month was carrying a gun, no one is under any illusion about the manifold threats the White House faces: from Pennsylvania Avenue, which runs a hundred and eighty feet from the North Portico; from Constitution Avenue, farther but close enough to hit with bullets, as an assailant did in 2011; or, indeed, from above.

The White House has fortified itself by degrees. L’Enfant’s original plan for the site, in the eighteenth century, followed the European model: a pallace at the center of expansive, and therefore protective, grounds. The house we got instead—scarcely a quarter of the size of L’Enfant’s design—was a better fit for a young republic, but was dangerously exposed from the start. Monroe, afraid of assassins, put an iron fence around the perimeter and sharpshooters in the trees. Lincoln, during the Civil War, refused to make the mansion a garrison, but made quiet concessions to reality: plain-clothed sentinels patrolled the property. During the Second World War, F.D.R. closed West and East Executive Avenues, which bracket the building, though he rejected a proposal by a security panel that he foil nighttime air attacks by painting the White House black.

And so on and so forth: Fences grew higher and more imposing (if not imposing enough), gates were closed, windows were filled with bulletproof glass, walls were reinforced, security checkpoints were installed. In 1983, concrete barricades went up. In 1995, a month after the truck bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, President Clinton yielded to the Secret Service and to his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, and closed two blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicle traffic. And today, in what can only be seen as a symbolic response to the Gonzalez incident, the ornamental fence has now been seconded by a hastily built, sectional metal fence, draped with yellow caution bunting, giving the White House an additional five feet of breathing room.

It’s an “eyesore,” a tourist from Wisconsin complained to the Washington Post this week. It is more than that. It’s the latest affront to the ideal of an open society, and another lurch away from a tradition that used to coexist, if uneasily at times, with concerns about protecting the President. This is the tradition of Jefferson, who threw open the White House doors himself, and left them open unless he was asleep or out of town. This is the tradition of Julia Grant, the wife of President Ulysses S. Grant, whose “weekly audiences,” the Times observed in 1871, were “the most peculiarly republican gatherings” in Washington. “There the poorest working woman in the country can go, whether en train or in her plain work-day dress, touch the hand and gaze into the plain but kindly sympathetic face of the President’s wife,” have tea in the Blue Room, and then go “promenading” through the state rooms, “engaged in conversation, not exclusively upon the topics of fashion and dress.”

The 1899 edition of Baedeker’s U.S. travel guide advises that

The large East Room (80 ft. x 40 ft. x 22 ft.) is open to the public from 10 to 2. Two or three times a week the President receives all-comers here at 3 p.m., shaking hands with each as they pass him in single file.

It would be easy to dismiss this practice as a relic of a more innocent time, which, in a way, it was. But, in the thirty-four years before the book’s publication, the nation had seen two Presidents—Lincoln and Garfield—assassinated at close range. And still it was possible to come calling at the White House at 3 P.M. for a handshake.

Today the distribution of Presidential handshakes is strictly regulated. Even absent the lapses of recent weeks, it would be madness to suggest a slackening in the iron curtain around the President. The opposite is clearly in order—along with reform of the Service, or at least more vigilant management. But it is worth asking whether there is more we can or should do to fortify the White House. Short of shutting down the several-block area around the building, or putting the complex inside a massive wrought-iron cage, like a miserable bird, we might well have hit our limit.

And maybe that will have to do. At yesterday’s hearing on Capitol Hill, W. Ralph Basham, who was the Secret Service director from 2003 to 2006, told committee members that “the broader context in which the Service operates is not one which values security alone” or “security at all costs.” The White House, Basham added, “is an important symbol for the American people. It is obviously critically important that it be kept safe, but that security must be accomplished in a way that does not jeopardize the very values that we seek to protect.” Openness is one. And protecting that, too, requires vigilance.