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Dinty The White House: Three Days in September, 2001 |
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Perhaps if I simply compared it
to other extraordinary houses— The Washington Monument and the
Lincoln Memorial are easily more majestic; the Old Executive Office Building
next door is noticeably larger, far more ornate; the Capital or Supreme Court
both serve as better, more imposing symbols of command and muscle. The White House, from certain angles, resembles
nothing more than an astonishingly luxurious high school—quite nicely
landscaped, remarkably clean, but basically a squat building with thick
pillars and a big front door. Or maybe that’s not right. Maybe
it just looks exactly like what it is: an ostentatious, overstated American
mansion—the Clampett family showing off for the
neighbors. The building itself suffers
from a clear confusion of purpose. Part residence, part office space, part
museum, the White House must house a family, accommodate a remarkable flurry
of business activities, and provide tours to some 6,000 daily visitors. It is neither this nor that;
neither here nor there. Presidents themselves have
never been fond of the place, many of them fleeing the historic hallways at
any possible chance. Harding insisted the White House was “a prison.” Taft
called it the “lonesomest place in the world.” The current President never
bothered to hide his antipathy. In his first seven months in office, the new occupant spent 63 days residing
elsewhere: either at his 1,600-acre central Two-hundred years old, 132
rooms, but not a happy home. On I am loitering by the front
fence. The
humidity hangs heavy this morning, like the interest on our national debt,
and the sky is washed in dull federal gray. But the President has better reason
than just dismal weather to take wing; the morning papers announce an economy
in free fall, rising unemployment, plummeting corporate profits. The
President tells reporters that his tax cut will be enough to “get the economy
going again,” but many, even in his own party, are expressing grave doubt. Adding insult to injury, Newsweek
is fresh on the stands with revived talk of the suggested illegitimacy of the
President’s hold on power. “The sands of history will show Bush won by
a single vote, cast in a 5-to-4 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court,” the
magazine reports. “One justice had picked the president.” Worse, Justice
David Souter offers the opinion that if he’d had “one
more day—one more day,” the vote might have gone otherwise. Even
the President’s neighbors have been giving him trouble. As a gesture
of friendship for Mexican president Vicente Fox, the President capped off a
lavish state dinner with a surprise 15-minute fireworks show. The unexpected
explosions awakened and alarmed area residents, who subsequently complained
to the Police, to the White House switchboard, to their D.C. Council
representatives. The First Lady
had to apologize. Who wouldn’t look for the
suitcases? Who wouldn’t leave town? Most of us, I think, would leave, and
never come back. Except for this:
crushing news, vicious attacks, complex problems, are a mere matter of course
for our heads of state, not an exception. One scandal is quashed, a fresh
crisis set aside, and a new one erupts, and then another. In the final equation, despite
the grim economic news, and Newsweek, and the angry neighbors, this
September day is pretty much a day like any other day at the White House. We are not at war. Approval ratings are acceptably at mid-range.
Off and on, a light rain falls
off along Invariably, the routine is the
same. Tourists approach the fence, squint past the black rails for ten
seconds or so, then scramble for the camera. The picture is the thing. After
the photo, some strain their eyes for a moment longer, as if they might see
the President or his cheerful wife hanging around on the porch, but soon
enough they realize this isn’t going to happen. They move along, pushing
strollers, consulting maps. At one point, a man steps up
onto one of the squat concrete barricades placed at the perimeter of the
White House to deter truck bombers. He is trying to get a better look. But a
second or two later, a deep voice comes out of nowhere: “Get down. Sir, get down from
the barricades. Now.” Somewhere down the street, a
D.C. police officer is talking into a microphone. I loiter near the fence longer
than most people that morning, formulating my architectural opinions. Inevitably,
tourists begin handing me their cameras. “Can you get a shot with all
three of us?” some ask. Others, probably not English speakers, simply point
and smile, the intent clear enough. I take about thirty shots in an
hour, and when handing back the cameras, seize the opportunity to ask people
what they think. “It looks small,” a young woman from The bearded father of a large
family group from A few visitors are more
positive. “Oh, I like it. Of course, I like it very much,” a man gushes in
thickly-accented English. He and his five friends, he tells me, are from In my sixty-minute pose as
friendly American cameraman, I meet people from seemingly all corners of the
world— Rain continues to fall off and
on. Across from the White House
fence, at “I don’t know what it is about the squirrels
that makes me like them so much,” he tells me, tossing peanuts here, there,
and everywhere. “It must be the tails. I hate rats, you know. I hate to look
at a rat. But the tail, now I like the
tail. I like the squirrels.” Frank is out here nearly every
day, he explains with an extra-large grin, because “retirement is great.” He
likes squirrels, he likes “Like they are going to let him
get to the White House.” Frank laughs, opening his umbrella for a new shower.
“I saw a picture of him in the paper. They had him
tackled, all down on the ground and everything, within seconds.” Frank likes this sort of
excitement. What he doesn’t like is the way
the White House looks. “See that,” he says, pointing to the north façade. “In
one window, the shades are open. In another they are closed. One window has
the lights on and the other has them off. They should be able to do better
than that. You’d think they could get it so that all the windows look the
same.” One of the few people to spend
more time across from the White House than Frank is Concepcion
Picciotto. Picciotto—Connie
to the handful of other regular peace protestors who help care for her—has
been sitting outside the Presidential residence for more than twenty years,
outlasting Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. While others come and go, Connie
lives here, residing round-the-clock on a small patch of sidewalk in Connie is a tiny woman, with
dark, deep-set eyes and a prominent nose. Her face and neck are tanned and
leathery from daily exposure to the sun. I have to squat to speak with her,
because she is huddled from the day’s rain under a thick plastic tarp,
sitting on the milk crate that serves as her only chair and upright bed. Her tiny quarters are cramped,
filled with boxes of the photocopied leaflets she passes out to tourists and
with the painted rocks she exchanges for small donations. “You really live here?” I ask. “I would not say living,
because I don’t have any living accommodations. I struggle for survival.” Born in “I must sleep sitting up,” she
explains to me, because the National Park Service has outlawed “camping.” She
averages just three hours of sleep a night. Another regulation states that
someone must stay within
three feet of the signs at all times, or the Park Service can take them down,
so only when friends come to briefly spell her can she ride her bike to the
local fast food restaurant to use the free bathrooms. She has been arrested “about
seven or eight times.” Connie shrugs
off this occasional harassment by Park Police. “At night time they don’t leave you alone either. If it is not
one thing it is another. They watch me more than they watch the House.” “So why do you stay so long?” I
ask. “Why are you still here twenty years later?” “I am here like Joan of Arc,”
she answers quickly. No doubt she has answered this question thousands of
times. “I am here to make people think. Here, warning people of the danger we
have with mass destruction weapons. But they don’t care”—she points a crooked
finger toward the White House—”they only care about orgies, lavish
lifestyles, sexual scandals. The situation is very bad.” “Have you ever seen the
president?” I ask. “Of course not.” I take a few more tourist
pictures, and when one visitor suggests to me that “maybe it looks bigger
around the back,” I follow her around. But the White House doesn’t look
bigger here; in fact, the fence on this side keeps us even farther away. The E Street side of the White
House, closest to the Mall and the The security measures are
impressive, but they don’t catch everyone. Tomorrow, About the time that I am
considering all of this, a D.C. Police officer comes along and rapidly clears
the sidewalk. “You’ll have to move,” he orders, his tone suggesting that we
would do best to move rather briskly. “You’ll have to get across the street.”
A young black woman with two
children is having trouble—her youngest is refusing to get back into his
stroller. I expect the white officer to help her, but he is too intent on
getting us out of the way. “You have to leave the sidewalk, m’am,” he insists. “You have to leave now.” She grabs her
son by the elbow and yanks him along, panic in her eyes. It is not clear why we are
being moved so abruptly, but once I manage to cross E Street to where the
thirty or so tourists have regrouped, I see hands pointing to the White House
roof. Sharpshooters have appeared. Inside the White House
gates—though I only learn this later—the President is presenting Australian
Prime Minister John Howard with a 250-pound ship’s bell from the USS
Canberra, a memento of the 50-year military alliance between the US and
Australia. The ceremony ends, the President shouts “I’m going to The southeast gate is surrounded
by motorcycle police, squad cars, Park Service jeeps, and police officers on
foot. Suddenly everyone is on high alert. “He’s coming out,” someone says, so
we head in that direction. The police use their arms to show how close we can
come, and where we dare not go. Moments later, the motorcade
starts to roll, including two long black limousines, sporting American flags.
In the second limo, through
darkened windows, I catch a glimpse of the President himself, smiling a bit,
waving to us from the back seat. He is
slumped down, shorter than I expect, or maybe the seat itself is low in
respect to the limousine window. Whatever the reason, the
President looks small, insubstantial. My first glimpse of him is just like my
first glimpse of his postcard House. *
The following morning,
I wake up in the Washington Wyndham Hotel, five blocks from the White House,
and grab the remote by the bed, to check the morning news. The President has
landed safely in I had gone to bed the previous evening
confident that I knew exactly what I would be saying about the White House,
secure that I had enough of a focus to write an interesting essay along these
lines: The House seems small. The
President seems small. The place has a way of shrinking a man. I was going for irony. An hour later, I leave the
Wyndham and drive a mile north to pick up my friend E. Ethelbert Miller. Miller,
a prominent African-American poet, will be reading and talking to my students
back in central We head north on But we don’t know any of this. My car radio is off because
Ethelbert and I are busy talking. We are both interested in politics, and
talk naturally turns to the performance of the new President. We give him mixed
marks. Both of us are worried about
the situation in the “I think a full-scale war might
break out in Ethelbert, though, doesn’t
expect war. He is more inclined to believe that terrorism will escalate. “What you have to watch for is a change in
the profile of the terrorists,” he tells me. “If the faces of the terrorists
change, that will tell you something. If the extent of the terrorism goes
beyond where it is now, that will tell you something too.” We have absolutely no idea what
is going on in the world. Then we stop for lunch in a
small Greek restaurant, and I begin to hear vague snippets of the newscast on
a kitchen radio: “Heightened sense of
security,” “burning debris,” “the President is in the air, heading for an
undisclosed location.” I ask the waitress “what the
hell is going on,” and she is shocked that we don’t know. She has to repeat
the news three times before I will believe her. Ethelbert’s mother lives in the Tribeca section of “Mom, are you all right?” She is well, it turns out, and
amazingly calm. An hour later,
Ethelbert and I meet my students for class. We are in shock. They seem so too. We talk a little about poetry, but my
students can’t concentrate. Neither can I. All of my
thoughts, my ideas about the White House and the man who lives inside, are a
jumble now. Nothing seems ironic anymore. *
On Wednesday, I return to Official sources are now
reporting “real and credible evidence” that the third terrorist plane may
have intended to hit the White House. Only at the last minute did the
American Airlines 757 take a sharp turn, veering off for the Pentagon. Perhaps, I’m now thinking, the relative smallness of the Presidential
residence is why the terrorist pilots could not find it. Yes, the building is
large, but many that are far larger surround it, and this building would be
difficult to pick out from the air. Especially in a plane moving quite
swiftly. Unlike the dreary, rain-filled
Monday two days before, this morning is crisp, clear, with temperatures in
the comfortable, sunny 70s and just a wisp of white cloud arching over The White House is open for
business, but the differences are clear—SWAT team members in black flak
jackets guard each gate, Park Police on horses roam the streets and
sidewalks, the flags are at half-staff. And there are no planes overhead. The
airports remain closed. The President is inside today,
holding emergency meetings with his national security team and members of his
cabinet. Monday was just a normal day at
the White House. This is a day like no other. On the evening news, the night
before, I watched a large mass of people rapidly fleeing the White House
grounds. I worried and wondered at the time about Concepcion
Picciotto. But of course, she is still
here. The police moved her, too, so
fast that she had to leave her signs and possessions behind. She didn’t know
why she was being moved—it all happened in an instant—but she later learned
the reason, and by “Were you concerned for your
own safety?” I ask her. “No, no,” she shakes her head. “That
part is not important.” Is she worried about her future
security, what might happen in the coming days? “The only security would be if
they stopped being the police of the world,” she answers, pointing across the
street, “if they started getting along with the world.” Connie is undaunted. She has
added new signs to the front of her protest spot, signs condemning “Do you think these events will
change “Well if they don’t change,
they will perish,” she tells me, nervously twisting a piece of red cloth in
her hands. “They will perish, that’s all.” There is no sign of Frank, the
squirrel feeder. But slowly, as the morning develops,
tourists begin to return. They take the same pictures; I handle a few cameras.
Smiles are few and far between,
replaced instead by a tight look of urgency. Again, I ask them what they
think. But today they mainly just shake their heads, at a serious loss for
words. I notice that many of those visiting the
fence are not tourists, though. They are local residents, |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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