by J. B. West
“Is there any precedent for this?” he asked.
Mr. Crim replied, hesitantly and a bit uncertainly, “Mr. Coolidge put on a new roof and a third floor, but they got a special congressional appropriation.”
“Can we get this out of our own budget?” the President countered, in a determined voice.
“If it doesn’t cost over $10,000 it can come out of what Congress left us for this year,” Mr. Crim replied.
At which the President broke into a gleeful smile. “I’m going to preserve the general architectural scheme of the White House any damn way I want to!”
He first studied the original plans for the White House (with no balcony), and even all the other plans that had been submitted, including Thomas Jefferson’s design for the Presidential Palace, which had won second prize in the original architectural contest. When Mr. Truman announced his balcony plan to the Fine Arts Commission (who advise and approve architectural plans for the nation’s capital), however, the staid old committee went up in smoke. They started a hullabaloo through the entire country about that balcony and how it would destroy America’s heritage. They called it “Truman’s folly.”
Mr. Crim chuckled at the furor.
“And all that because the President wants to eat supper on his back porch without traipsing through the Red Room,” he said.
Mr. Truman called in an architect who swore that classic Georgian mansions had two balconies, the better to break up the line of the great columns. But Gilmore Clark, chairman of the commission, was not mollified.
“The President cannot make that change without the approval of the Fine Arts Commission,” he thundered.
“The hell with them; I’m going to do it anyway,” Mr. Truman told us. And he did. And Gilmore Clark was replaced, at the first opportunity, as chairman of the group.
That was the way Harry Truman was. He didn’t have any fancy airs or pretensions, but he also wasn’t cowed by experts, or people who had far more education than he did. He had the confidence to act on his own beliefs.
Ironically, after all the historical protests and Presidential determination, the balcony received very little use. Mrs. Truman would sit out there every now and then and watch a baseball game on the ellipse in front of the Washington Monument, and they sat on the balcony a few times at night. But they found it to be too public for comfort. Crowds would gather at the end of the south lawn and gape at them as they sat there. So after all that fuss, the Trumans went back to eating on the South Portico, off the first floor, underneath their controversial balcony.
But sparring about the balcony and added offices was nothing compared to what came next. The Trumans soon noticed that the old mansion had begun to quiver and quake.
Actually, the telltale signs had been brought home to us earlier in the winter as Mrs. Truman held an afternoon reception for the D.A.R. The First Lady was receiving her guests in the large oval Blue Room.
Suddenly, she heard a strange tinkle of glass. Looking straight above her head, she saw the huge crystal chandelier swaying, clinking the hundreds of prisms back and forth.
Still smiling, still greeting the ladies, she motioned to an aide and sent for me. “Would you please find out what in the world is going on upstairs?” she asked urgently.
The Blue Room is directly below the President’s oval study.
I hurried upstairs trying to imagine what kind of scuffle was going on that would rattle the White House. No earthquakes had ever occurred in Washington to my knowledge, and nobody had been given instructions to move around any heavy furniture that day.
Fields, the head butler, stepped out of Mr. Truman’s bedroom.
“What’s going on up here?” I asked.
Fields looked puzzled. “The boss is taking a bath,” he said, “and he asked me to get him a book from the study.”
Before the horror set in, I had to laugh.
“Fields, you need to go on a diet!”
He was the biggest man on the staff, six feet four and well over 200 pounds. He walked with a sturdy bounce, and when he stomped in and out of the pantry, dishes rattled. But we’d never known him or anyone else to make chandeliers tremble.
As he retraced his steps across the President’s study, the floor creaked ominously beneath the thick carpet.
“This place has been squeaking like this for years,” Fields said nonchalantly about the house, which was built in the 1790s.
By this time the reception was over and Mrs. Truman had joined us, with Mr. Crim in tow. Mr. Truman emerged from his bedroom and we all stomped across the floor, in an unscientific search to explain the shimmering chandelier.
“I was afraid the chandelier was going to come right down on top of all those people,” Mrs. Truman said.
“And I would have come crashing through the ceiling in the bathtub, right in the laps of the D.A.R.,” the President laughed. “That would have been something.”
Later Mr. Truman told us, “You’d better get some engineers in here. They might have to shore up the floors.”
Within a month, the Commissioner of Public Buildings, who had made a cursory structural survey, reported that we were indeed in trouble. He found that some of the timbers under the second floor had been notched out about five inches, causing the floor to incur many times its normal stress.
President Truman immediately formed an investigating committee, made up of the presidents of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Institute of Architects, the Commissioner of Public Buildings, and the Chief Usher.
The first thing the committee discovered was that the White House was a fire hazard.
It was a wonder that we hadn’t burned to the ground—and there was ample precedent to give us warning. Fire was part of the building’s history—the British burned it in 1814. A favorite story of that fire is how Dolley Madison ran bravely into a State parlor, cut the portrait of George Washington out of its frame and ran for her life, leaving her own precious things behind.
More recent and pertinent were the pictures of flames and smoke when the west wing caught fire on Christmas Eve, 1929, but I suppose we really didn’t think through all the conditions that could lead to a holocaust.
We soon were forced to think about at least some of those multiple hazards. The wiring had been put in in 1891 and had been patched and added to ever since. And so we instituted a few emergency safety procedures.
Our first order was to cut down on the use of electricity on the second floor. When Mrs. Truman heard there would be even less vacuuming, she threw up her hands in mock defeat.
Our second order was that a really thorough study had to be made. One engineer told us that the whole building had to go.
“Before that happens,” the President replied, “I’m going to have the most thorough study ever made of every nook and cranny, beam and pipe in this old house.”
And the Congress, which had been simmering over the Truman balcony, suddenly got generous and provided $50,000 for such a study. Perhaps the Congress thought that the coming 1948 election would take care of its Truman problem and there would be a new man in the White House.
“This may be an inconvenience,” I told the President. “They’ll be drilling into the walls, tearing off plaster, and we’ll have to put scaffolding in the East Room to hold up the ceilings.”
“Don’t worry about us,” the President replied. “We’re going to Missouri to gather up strength, and then, after the Democratic Convention, we just may be charging around all over the place.”
The President had been planning ahead about a lot of things, including taking his family on the famous “Whistle-Stop” campaign of 1948, 21,928 miles on the Presidential railroad car, the “Ferdinand Magellan.”
The whistle-stop tour, which became the vehicle the President used to turn around a nation, was appealing to Mr. Truman not only as a technique to reach people at the grassroots, but also because it was inexpensive.
The whistle-stop was an economy move that paid off
. The private railroad car had been a gift (a $1 purchase actually) to President Roosevelt from the Association of American Railroads. The President took along a cook, a couple of waiters, his wife and daughter, and a seventeen-person campaign staff. The Trumans brought their own food, so all they had to pay for was the railroad tickets.
The rest of the seventeen cars were filled with newsmen whose newspapers paid for their tickets, and thus bore most of the cost of the train trip.
There also was a Signal Corps communications car. Whether the President travels by railroad, airplane, helicopter, limousine or mules, the Army Signal Corps always goes with him to keep in constant touch with the command post in the basement of the White House. The Secret Service preceded the train in two cars pulled by their own engine.
At each town, the President, Mrs. Truman and Margaret spoke to the crowds from the train’s rear platform. Back in the White House, reading about their progress through the small towns and cities of America, I could imagine how people would come to hear him. In those days, anybody would go down to the station to see a President. I recalled how we’d turned out in Creston to see President Roosevelt—even the rock-ribbed Republicans among us.
I will always remember Harry Truman, standing out there on that platform and talking to people the way he talked to us in the White House—a plain man expressing his convictions in plain language. He wasn’t concerned about his image or about developing a new one. He hadn’t time to be. And besides there was no television set bouncing back his speeches to make him self-conscious. The audiences roared “Give ’em hell, Harry,” and he did.
The entire campaign cost the Democrats only $1,368,058, and gained Mr. Truman 24,179,345 votes, to the surprise and embarrassment of all the pundits and prognosticators—the New York Times, the Gallup Poll, and Time Magazine, which had referred to Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey as “the next President.”
The victorious Trumans rode their train into Washington November 5, and a huge crowd, estimated at 750,000, roared its greeting as he motored from Union Station to the White House.
The next morning when I appeared at Mrs. Truman’s study, she was beaming. I’d never seen such a broad smile on her face. Before I could congratulate her, she leaned way back in her chair—unlike her usually erect posture—and waved over her head a copy of Time Magazine with Dewey’s picture on the cover.
“Well, it looks like you’re going to have to put up with us for another four years,” she said.
It must have been a tremendous personal victory for the Trumans. They had come through together against all the odds, and despite all the criticism. I guess there were a lot of people out there who liked Harry Truman’s directness as much as I did.
But unfortunately, we had bad news for the victorious Trumans. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to move out right away,” I said. “The house is actually in very dangerous condition.”
The President, who had joined us, was on his way to meet with Mr. Crim and the engineering committee. But he was still in an exhilarated mood.
“Doesn’t that beat all!” he said. “Here we’ve worked ourselves to death trying to stay in this jailhouse and they kick us out anyway!” But after he met with the committee he grew much more sober about the prospect of getting out—quickly.
While the Trumans had been living in a railroad car, the President’s bathtub had actually begun sinking into the Red Room ceiling. And one leg of Margaret’s piano nearly went through the floor. In fact, the only safe place in the mansion was Mr. Truman’s new balcony!
The White House, which had been under “improvement” with modern conveniences for almost 150 years, had chosen to collapse during the Truman administration.
The investigating committee found some really shocking engineering errors. In all the years Presidents had been living there, nobody had taken the trouble to review the entire structure.
There was no support for the interior walls, only soft clay footings. And on those walls hung a weight of 180,000 pounds. Any collapse of the interior walls would plunge everything into the basement. And it looked as if failure were imminent, because doors had been cut through the supporting walls.
The exterior, however, was in good shape. It had, after all, survived the British, and still sat firmly on a foundation of stones from Aquia Creek in Virginia.
In their haste to rebuild after the War of 1812, the young Americans just neglected to put strong footings under the interior walls. Nor did they plan for the technological revolution that would put wires and pipes of all varieties in those walls.
Inside those walls—certainly not planned for by the original architect James Hoban—we found heavy lead pipe that had been installed in 1840 for the first water system, gas pipes for lighting in 1848, pipes for the first hot-air heating system in 1872, and, of course, pipes for the current heating system supplied by the government’s central heating plant in southwest Washington. The hundreds of yards of pipe from former systems increased the weight and undermined the building’s stability.
Exploration of the walls turned up another fire hazard. Inside the walls were piles of woodshavings left by successive workmen during the various modernizations. A single spark could have lighted that tinder.
On top of those old walls, shoving the mansion down into Foggy Bottom, sat the third floor and the heavy slate roof.
As the engineers sifted through the place, they found a frightening split in a beam in the State Dining Room. In Margaret’s sitting room, another beam was split badly, which may have occurred as long ago as the days Lincoln slept there. Many walls were cracked on the inside, and the floors sagged and sloped like a roller coaster.
Mr. Truman was understandably upset.
“My heart trembles when I think of the disasters we might have had,” he said, “with 1,400 people downstairs at a reception, none of them knowing that tons and tons of ceiling might drop on their heads at any moment.”
Our next problem was to find a place for the President of the United States to live. Mrs. Truman, at first, ruled out Blair House.
“We need to keep it as a guest house,” she said. “We’ve already invited six foreign visitors.”
And Mr. Truman spoke up.
“Wherever we go, it has to be a government house,” he said. “It can’t be somebody’s private home. I’ve read about the criticism the Coolidges got when they moved into somebody’s house on Dupont Circle.” The President quickly let us know he didn’t want to be beholden to any private individual for any favor as big as a place to live.
So we took Mrs. Truman around on a quick tour of “government” houses. First we went to the Peter Mansion, out in Bethesda, Maryland, on the grounds of the National Institutes of Health.
Mr. Crim and I thought it would do well except that it was located so far away from the oval office. “It’s a very nice house,” Mrs. Truman agreed. As we drove out the driveway, however, a dump truck let fly with a cloud of dust that almost blinded the driver.
“Is that an everyday occurrence?” Mrs. Truman asked, glancing at the big construction project going on next door. They were just beginning to build a huge office building and hospital for the N.I.H. The noise and dirt of construction would have been bothersome, if not unbearable. Besides, it would be a long commute from the office for an afternoon nap.
Then we looked at the Naval Commandant’s house, on the grounds of the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue at the end of Embassy Row, which would have been much closer to the White House than the Peter Mansion. But the big frame house just wasn’t set up to take care of all the entourage of the Presidency.
So then we looked at Blair House again—it had been our choice in the first place—and suggested to the Trumans that we connect it to Blair-Lee House, next door, on all the floors. Lee House was also owned by the government, and the two row houses together made one large residence. The Trumans finally agreed.
“We’ll just have to put the President of Brazil and the other visito
rs someplace else,” Mrs. Truman said.
Now confident that they’d have a roof over—and not on top of—their heads for the next four years, the Trumans packed up and went to Key West to recuperate from the campaign, while we set about making an alternate White House across the street.
Blair House, in my opinion, is one of the loveliest homes in Washington. Its scale, architecture, and its furnishings reflect the best of nineteenth-century American design, and like the White House, it, too, has figured in American history.
Built in 1824 by Dr. James Lovell, the first Surgeon General, the house was sold in 1836 to Francis Preston Blair, whose descendants held the home for a century. It was Blair’s daughter, Elizabeth, who married a grandson of Richard Henry Lee, for whom Blair-Lee House next door was named.
The Blairs not only entertained the Presidents who lived across the street—Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, William Howard Taft—but they also rented out the house to various Cabinet officers over the years. Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster were frequent visitors. It was in Blair House that Robert E. Lee, a relative of the Lee side of the family, was asked—and refused—to command the Union Army.
The Blairs were concerned with keeping the house as a memorial to their family’s place in history, and, in 1942, sold it to the State Department.
Blair House was exquisitely furnished, with genuine period pieces, unlike the hodgepodge in the White House, and Mrs. Truman remarked to me more than once how comfortable the house had been during the first two weeks of the Truman Presidency. “Everything except the plumbing,” she added.
Making it comfortable as a permanent home was something else again. In the two weeks before Thanksgiving, we mustered all the White House carpenters, painters, electricians—and particularly plumbers—plus others from GSA. Every bathroom in the house was supplied with new fixtures. Doors were cut through on every floor, joining the houses together.
We didn’t touch the furnishings in Blair House. But the adjoining annex, Blair-Lee House, was in pretty bad shape. It had been used mainly for overflow, to house a foreign visitor’s retinue of servants, and had earlier been used for government offices.