The White House is now off-limits
In the aftermath of America going to war seven decades ago, presidential secretary Grace Tully reported for work at the White House on December 8, 1941, to find the place transformed.
“The grounds were under guard of a special detachment of Military Police,” she would write, “and sentry boxes were being set up at intervals inside and outside the fence.”
As William Seale notes in his history of the Executive Mansion, the war which began in Hawaii brought with it a new perception of reality: fighting in the streets of Washington seemed eminently possible.
“Bombs and bullets seemed very near,” Seale says.
Among other measures, security experts advised President Franklin Roosevelt to ring “the White House and Executives Offices” with a 15-foot-high sandbag barricade.
To thwart air attacks, they suggested the president’s house undergo a change of colors – its slate roof painted black and its walls done up in camouflage; as Seale puts it, “in standard Army Air Corps camouflage.”
FDR rejected these recommendation and others, including placing “steel rolling curtains” along the colonnade that leads from the residential portion of the White House to the Oval Office in the West Wing.
“All he agreed to at first was doubling the White House guard force, insisting over the phone to [Treasury Secretary] Morgenthau, ‘As long as you have one about every one hundred feet around the fence, that’s all.'”
President Roosevelt knew what he doing. The White House had been transformed, by 1941, into one of the symbols of American democracy. It had become a place where Americans gathered in times of crisis.
A “misty, indistinct” moon, according to Richard Ketchum in his magnificent book The Borrowed Years, hovered over the White House on the night of December 7, 1941.
“By evening, people were standing five and six deep beyond the tall iron fence around the White House grounds,” Ketchum writes, “peering at the lighted windows … watching intently the arrival of each automobile… “
Longtime cabinet member Harold Ickes “noticed especially how quiet and serious the crowds were.”
Let us move forward to last Monday. It was a hot, sweltering afternoon in the nation’s capital and the White House was ringed not by expectant, worried Americans but by fencing and empty acres. The White House of old was a kind of memory. Grace Tully’s sentry boxes had been replaced by layers of security.
The White House was barricaded by distances of up to a thousand yards.
Close to 2 p.m. the columnist was standing behind fencing on Constitution Avenue, so far away from the White House that it was at first hard to discern the helicopter — Marine One — waiting on the south lawn to whisk the president to the airport and departure for a trip to North Carolina.
A car drove slowly past with a woman hanging out the passenger-side window. She was speaking to someone in the back. “Behind the trees, that’s the White House,” she said, trying to be helpful.
A father arrived, pushing a stroller and speaking to the little boy by his side. “Can you see?” he said to the boy who was no older than five. Soon, mom arrived and the family pivoted across the street to the Washington Monument.
To the north, the public was sequestered behind security fencing on the far side of LaFayette Square. In the middle of the park the statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback was protected by even more fencing.
Clipped to the outer fencing were photographs of black Americans, presumably killed by police somewhere in America. A crude shelf of cardboard stood against the fence, almost on the sidewalk. It read, “No one is free until all are free.”
Korryn Gaines, August 1, 2016, and Keith Childress, December 31, 2015, were among those commemorated in the Washington neighborhood of the now more-famous-than-ever St John’s Episcopal Church, the “church of presidents” since 1816.
The fences and the gates. The rings of fencing and the guards. The White House barely visible.
“Damn, it’s come to this,” a man from Lansing, Michigan said on the Treasury side of the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue, a weather-washed likeness of Albert Gallatin close by. “After three years, this is the way it is.”
“It’s politics,” he continued, “sure it is.”
Harold Ickes penned a note reminding Harry Truman that “‘the president house’ … is the most famous and highly cherished building in the whole country…. Indeed, the White House is a shrine … for what it represents in the hearts of the people.”
Now, seven decades later, you couldn’t get near the place.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book “JFK Rising” can be purchased on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.