In 1814, after the British burned the White House, James and Dolly Madison and their pet macaw moved into the Octagon for a stay of six months. The peace treaty officially ending the war of 1812, the Treaty of Ghent, was signed in the circular parlor over the main entrance. The house has a magnificent circular stairway, all its original mantels, most of its original woodwork, its original marble floor in the foyer. The architect was William Thornton, the first architect of the Capitol.
Reportedly there is also a secret tunnel in the basement leading to the White House. It is one of those old Washington stories you hear again and again, like the story of alligators in the sewers of New York. It is even given as gospel in the excellent American Guide Series book on Washington. But the tunnel doesn’t exist, sad to say. Nor apparently is there an Octagon ghost, as reported repeatedly. The original owner was a rich Virginia planter named John Tayloe. Supposedly he had a beautiful daughter who, thwarted in love, threw herself from the stairway to her death on that marble floor, and her ghost has haunted the house ever since. As it happens, Tayloe had fifteen children, none of whom is known to have committed suicide, and for twenty-odd years, anyway, nobody has heard or seen a sign of a ghost.
I can’t help but wonder about the spirits of Jefferson and Jackson, Lafayette, Daniel Webster, and others known to have dined or slept in the house. And what of Dolly herself, in her rose-colored Paris robe, her white turban with its tiara of ostrich plumes? An eyewitness to the signing of the Treaty of Ghent said that the “most conspicuous object in the room” was Mrs. Madison, “then in the meridian of life and queenly beauty…”
On the high rise of R Street in Georgetown is a palatial red-brick house with white trim, large as a small hotel and all very Italianate, which was once a summer residence for Ulysses S. Grant and later owned by Rear Admiral Harry H. Rousseau, one of the builders of the Panama Canal. In the 1930s it was taken over as bachelor quarters by a band of exuberant young New Dealers known as the Brain Trust, with Tom (“Tommy the Cork”) Corcoran as their leader. One of them remembers a night when a friend dropped by bringing his own grand piano. “A moving van arrived and three or four fellows got the piano up the stairs and into the living room. Tom and his friend played duets all evening. Then the boys packed up the piano and put it back into the moving van.”
There is John Kennedy’s house, also in Georgetown, at 3307 N Street, and the house on Massachusetts Avenue off Dupont Circle where for decades Alice Roosevelt Longworth held court. Across the street stands the monstrous, gabled brick pile that once belonged to Senator James G. Blaine, “Blaine of Maine,” a brilliant rascal who nearly became president in 1884. It was a puzzle to many of his time how somebody with no more than a senator’s wages could afford such a place.
The elegant headquarters of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, at 18th and Massachusetts, was once Washington’s most sumptuous apartment house. Andrew Mellon, who served three presidents as secretary of the treasury and who gave the country the National Gallery, occupied the top floor. On G Street on Capitol Hill, near the old Marine barracks, you can find the little house where John Philip Sousa was born. On the crest of the hill at Arlington, across the Potomac where the sun goes down, stands the columned Custis-Lee Mansion. From its front porch you get the best of all panoramas of the city.
Some of the history that has happened here I have seen with my own eyes. When John Kennedy’s funeral procession came up Connecticut Avenue, the foreign delegations led by Charles de Gaulle, I watched from an upstairs room at the Mayflower Hotel. It had been reserved as a vantage point by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, so that Barbara Tuchman might describe the scene much as she did the funeral of Edward VII in the opening chapter of The Guns of August. Marquis Childs of the Post-Dispatch, a friend, had been kind enough to include me. So I shared a window with Mrs. Tuchman. “Look at de Gaulle, look at de Gaulle,” she kept saying, as he came striding along in his simple khaki uniform, taller than anyone, his face a perfect mask.
On the afternoon when the Senate voted for the Panama Canal Treaties, I was watching from the gallery, and later that evening, as Washington was lashed by a regular Panama deluge, I was among the several hundred people who crowded into the State Dining Room at the White House to celebrate, to see Jimmy Carter enjoy one of the few happy moments of his administration.
Much of what I feel about the city comes from books I have loved. The story of the Brain Trusters and their piano, for example, is from a collection of reminiscences edited by Katie Louchheim called The Making of the New Deal. If the Wilson house stirs a chain of thoughts on my early morning ventures, it is mainly because of Gene Smith’s When the Cheering Stopped.
I am never in the National Portrait Gallery, once the Patent Office building, that I don’t think of Walt Whitman’s account in Specimen Days of how the wounded and dying men from the battles of Bull Run and Fredericksburg were crowded among the glass display cases for the patent models. Passing the Capitol as a new day is about to begin I think of how, in The Path to Power, Robert A. Caro describes young Lyndon Johnson arriving for work:
But when he turned the corner at the end of that street, suddenly before him, at the top of a long, gentle hill, would be not brick but marble, a great shadowy mass of marble—marble columns and marble arches and marble parapets, and a long marble balustrade high against the sky. Veering along a path to the left, he would come up on Capitol Hill and around the corner of the Capitol, and the marble of the eastern facade, already caught by the early morning sun, would be gleaming, brilliant, almost dazzling…. And as Lyndon Johnson came up Capitol Hill in the morning, he would be running.
Like millions of readers, my view of the Senate and its protagonists has been forever colored by Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. Lafayette Square, for all its obvious charms, means even more because it is the setting for the Henry Adams novel Democracy.
Then to read Louis J. Halle, Jr.’s beautiful Spring in Washington is to have your eyes and spirit opened to a world that has nothing to do with government people or official transactions or anything much connected with the human hive of Washington. Written in the last year of World War II, when the city’s sense of its own importance had reached a new high and the author himself was serving as an official at the State Department, the book is an informal, philosophical guide to the local natural history. It is a small classic still in print after forty years. “I undertook to be monitor of the Washington seasons, when the government was not looking,” the author begins modestly.
Sometimes when I go looking for places that figure in favorite books, the effect has considerably more to do with what I have read than what remains to be seen, for, alas, much in the city has been destroyed, torn down in the name of progress. In Specimen Days Whitman writes of standing at Vermont Avenue and L Street on August mornings and seeing Lincoln ride by on his way in from Soldier’s Home, his summer quarters. Lincoln, dressed in plain black “somewhat rusty and dusty,” was on a “good-sized, easygoing gray horse” and looked “about as ordinary” as the commonest man. “I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression,” writes Whitman. “We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.” A lieutenant with yellow straps was at Lincoln’s side. The rest of the cavalry escort followed, two by two, thirty men in yellow-striped jackets, their sabers drawn, everyone moving at a slow trot.
Waiting for the light to change on the same corner, on a thoroughly present-day August morning, I look in vain for Whitman’s Washington. The early traffic grinds by toward Lafayette Square. The buildings around, all recent and nondescript, include banks and offices and something called the Yummy Yogurt Feastery. Across the street, rearing above the tops of the cars, is a huge abstract sculpture made of steel. No signs of those other times. No sign of the man on the easygoing gray horse…. And yet, it happened here. This is no ordinary corner, never can be. “The sabers and the accout
rements clank,” Whitman says, “and the entirely unornamental cortege as it trots toward Lafayette Square arouses no sensation, only some curious stranger stops and gazes.” Maybe that’s me now, the curious stranger.
The most engaging guide to the city’s landmarks is Washington Itself by E. J. Applewhite, which is both well written and full of delightful, little-known facts. Thanks to Mr. Applewhite, a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency, I now know as I did not before that the statue of Winston Churchill in front of the British Embassy has one foot planted firmly in the extraterritoriality of the embassy’s Crown property and the other over the boundary in U.S. territory, in tribute to Churchill’s British-American parentage. I know that the Government Printing Office is the city’s largest industrial employer; that the eight glorious columns inside the old Pension Building are the tallest ever built in the Roman style, taller even than those at Baalbek; that the Mayflower Hotel is by the same architectural firm, Warren and Wetmore, that did Grand Central Terminal in New York.
If asked to name my favorite book about the city, I would have to pick Margaret Leech’s Pulitzer Prize—winning history, Reveille in Washington, first published in 1941, a book I have read and reread and pushed on friends for years.
It is Washington during the Civil War, a chronicle of all that was going on at every level of government and society. I read it initially in the 1960s, in those first years of living here, and it gave me not just a sense of that very different Washington of the 1860s, but of the possibilities for self-expression in writing narrative history. Like Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, it was one of the books that started me on the way, first reading Civil War history, then thinking more and more of daring to try something of the kind of my own—if ever I could find a subject.
The subject turned out to be the Johnstown flood of 1889, and the fact that I found it in Washington, found the work I wanted most to do, has, I’m sure, a lot to do with my affection for the city.
A number of old photographs were spread out on a big oak table in the Picture Collection of the Library of Congress at a point when my wife and I happened by one Saturday. They had been recently acquired by the library, and one of the curators, Milton Kaplan, took time to tell us about them. A Pittsburgh photographer had managed somehow to get into Johnstown with all his glass plates and heavy paraphernalia only a day or so after the disaster, when almost nobody was getting through. In one picture a whole tree was driven through a house like a javelin. I didn’t know it then, but I had begun my first book.
I had also “discovered” the Library of Congress, the greatest “treasure house” we have, and I have been drawn to it, I have been inspired and fortified by it ever since, no matter where I was living. Any city that has the Library of Congress is my capital. Some of the best, most productive days of my life have been spent in its manuscript collection or working with its newspaper files. It is one of the wonders of the world. The statistics are staggering—twenty million books, of which less than a fourth are in English, nearly six million pieces of sheet music, more than one million recordings of music and the spoken word, the papers of twenty-three presidents, the papers of Clara Barton and James G. Blaine, the Wright brothers, Clare Boothe Luce, Margaret Mead, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Sigmund Freud, Lillian Gish, and George Washington Goethals. Its Madison Building is the largest library building in the world. I prefer the old building, the Jefferson Building, as it is now known, with all its Beaux-Arts marble extravagance and beautiful workmanship. The domed Main Reading Room is one of the most spectacular interior spaces in America.
It was because he wanted to be near the Library of Congress that Woodrow Wilson chose to retire in Washington. Very understandable.
The combination of the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian, all within walking distance of one another, more than justifies the city’s reputation as an unrivaled center for research. And they are only the largest and best-known of numerous libraries and research facilities within the city limits. There are a half dozen universities with excellent libraries. The Folger Shakespeare Library is here. The Columbia Historical Society, devoted to the history of the District of Columbia and housed in a splendid old brewer’s mansion, has a library of fifteen thousand volumes, collections of maps, prints, manuscripts, memorabilia, many thousands of rare old photographs. The Society of the Cincinnati has a research library devoted to the Revolutionary War that includes some twelve thousand volumes and letters from nearly all the principal figures of the war.
At the main public library, the Martin Luther King Library downtown, you can now work with the morgue file of the defunct Washington Star, long the city’s leading paper. Each of the military services has its archives. As do the government departments and agencies. A new fourteen-story National Agricultural Library at nearby Beltsville, Maryland, has become the “most extensive collection of agricultural information in the free world: more than 1.8 million volumes and growing.” Should ever you wish to know about asphalt or child care, coal, cotton, firearms, drugstores, banking, peanuts, or civil engineering, or almost anything else you can think of, there is probably a national association to provide what you need. In the Yellow Pages I also find a National Academy of Astrologers.
A further source needs to be mentioned. It is the large supply of living memory, all that is tucked away in the minds of those older Washington residents who were witness to or actually took part in the events of earlier times. They are here in amazing numbers, and it has been my experience that they like to share what they know and remember. They will give generously of their time; and you don’t have to chase across half the country to find them.
In my work on Truman I have talked with perhaps fifty men and women who knew him or worked with him (or against him in some instances), all people living in Washington—retired journalists, former White House aides, senators and Senate staff, the wife and son of a former secretary of state. And I have more to see, since each invariably tells me of others I mustn’t overlook. And how much will be lost when these people are gone.
One man knew not only Truman but Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and Eisenhower as well. He is not one whose name you would recognize. Passing him on the street, you would take no notice. Part of his job was to be inconspicuous. He is a retired Secret Service agent. “You must have been asked to talk about these things many times,” I said somewhat apologetically about midpoint in our conversation. “No, Mr. McCullough,” he answered. “Nobody has ever asked me about any of this.”
Of nearly equal importance to the political historian or biographer, or anyone trying to understand the past, is what might be called the living model. People are the writer’s real subject, after all, the mystery of human behavior, and a historian needs to observe people in real life, somewhat the way a paleontologist observes the living fauna to better interpret the fossil record.
This is very important. And all varieties of the old political fauna of Washington past are around today, alive and mostly thriving—the gladhanders and nostrum sellers, the doctrinaires, the moneybags, the small people in big jobs, the gossips, the courtesans and power-moths of every kind and gender, as well as the true patriot, the devoted public servant, the good, gray functionary down in the bureaucratic ranks, who, so often, is someone of solid ability.
Harry Truman used to talk of Potomac Fever, an endemic disorder the symptoms of which were a swelled head and a general decline of common sense. Were you only to read about such cases, and not see them with your own eyes, you might not appreciate what he meant.
Ambition, the old burning need for flattery, for power, fear of public humiliation, plain high-mindedness, a sense of duty, all that has moved men and women for so long in this capital city moves them still. The same show goes on, only the names and costumes are different.
It helps to remember how much good creative work has gone on here down the years in so many fields. Washington was the home of Alexander Graham Bell, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., and the historian Frederic Bancroft, who also developed the American Beauty Rose. Bruce Catton wrote A Stillness at Appomattox here. Rachel Carson wrote The Sea around Us and Silent Spring.
Two further observations: First, I am struck more and more by the presence of Abraham Lincoln. He is all around. It is almost as though the city should be renamed for him. Most powerful, of course, is the effect of Daniel Chester French’s majestic statue within the Memorial, our largest and, I suppose, our most beloved public sculpture. But there are three other Lincoln statues that I know of, one in Judiciary Square, another in Lincoln Park, a third in the Capitol Rotunda. Elsewhere in the Capitol are two Lincoln busts, five paintings of Lincoln, and down in the crypt a colossal marble head, an extraordinary work by Gutzon Borglum that deserves a better place where more people will see it. Lincoln is at the National Portrait Gallery—in spirit upstairs in the grand hall, scene of his first inaugural ball, and on canvas in a portrait by George P. A. Healy that dominates the hall of the presidents. There is Anderson Cottage at Soldiers’ Home on North Capitol Street, Lincoln’s summer White House, where, until the time was right, he kept the Emancipation Proclamation locked in a desk drawer; and the so-called Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, where he never slept but where he signed the Proclamation. A duplicate of the Healy portrait, Lincoln pensive, his hand on his chin, hangs over the mantel in the State Dining Room. A duplicate of the Lincoln bed in the Lincoln Bedroom is the bed Woodrow Wilson died in at the house on S Street. Pew 54 at little St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, the Church of the Presidents, is marked with a silver plate as the Lincoln pew.
There is Ford’s Theater with its flag-draped Lincoln box and, downstairs in the basement, a Lincoln museum, containing the clothes and large black boots he was wearing the night of the assassination. Across the street, in the Petersen House, is the room where he died the following morning. Maybe his presence is felt most of all in the rise and dominance of the Capitol dome, which he insisted be completed during the Civil War to show that the Union continued.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 73