November 17, 2008
Washington always stirs when a new First Family is installed at the White House, and this time the interest is at fever pitch. The reasons aren’t hard to fathom: A president-elect who is African-American. A president-elect who is a Democrat in a Democratic city. A president-elect with adorable young children. A president-elect who is a fresh face on the political scene. Finally, not to put too fine a point on it, a president-elect with the surname of neither Bush nor Clinton—for the first time since Ronald Reagan was in office. And so, as if to distract ourselves from war and recession, we listen for clues to burning questions. Where will Malia and Sasha go to school? Where will Barack and Michelle attend church? What will be the name of their family dog? One fact we already know, however, and with this knowledge comes the quiet confidence that becomes us as Americans. We know where the new president and his family will live.
Image Courtesy: C-SPAN
The great house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue stands as a monument to our nation and system of government, and to the flow of history itself. The “President’s house,” as it was initially called, is as resilient as the people who own it. It had better be—the British torched it in 1814, and today’s terrorists have revealed their evil designs upon it. Speaking of resilience, this is a trait exhibited by most of the people who have taken up residence there, from John and Abigail Adams, who arrived on November 1, 1800 to a half-finished building amid a doomed re-election campaign, to George and Laura Bush, who needed pillows over their ears on Election Night 2008 to drown out the rowdy revelers who assembled outside to show their preference for the newly chosen elected chief executive.
Mild treatment, to be sure, compared to that given Lyndon Johnson, whose family had to endure many days of loud and very personal anti-Vietnam War chants from Lafayette Park across the street. Later, Lady Bird Johnson put it this way when discussing the place that was her home for five years “This house is only on loan to its tenants. We are temporary occupants linked to a continuity of presidents.”
That observation comes courtesy of the fine people at C-SPAN, who have chosen this transition time to produce a documentary called The White House: Inside America’s Most Famous Home, which is to air in mid-December during a week-long bloc of programming on the old house. (It begins December 14; I’ll list the detailed schedule in a subsequent post. ) “This is the story of a house located at the center of a nation’s identity,” intones the film’s narrator. As someone who covered the White House for 15 years, and has written thousands of stories (and a couple of books) about the occupants of that building, this struck a chord with me. So I called Mark Farkas, C-SPAN’s executive producer for history programming; I’ll post some of his thoughts in a Q & A format on tomorrow’s blog. In the meantime, you can click here to see the trailer yourself. There’s a surprise in it, which I won’t reveal.
On second thought, I will, too, tell: Richard Nixon has the most poignant quote about the White House. “This isn’t the biggest house,” Nixon said. “This isn’t the finest house. But it’s the best house. This house has a great heart.”
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