Americans have always been fascinated by the presidency and the men who have taken on the role, despite our assertions that we care little for the trappings of power. A television drama based on the work of the president and West Wing aides has become a hit, upstaged only by the remarkable drama of the presidential electoral cliffhanger.
So there will be no small measure of relief (and some genuine fireworks rather than political) Jan. 20 as the first new president of the millennium takes the oath at the West Front of the Capitol and proceeds down Pennsylvania Avenue to his new office.
Mr. Bush’s place of business may be the same as it has been for many presidents. But the capital has changed much since the leadership last turned over in 1993. Washington is now, more than it ever has been before, a city in its own right, with a history and culture that carries on independent of politics.
It’s also a fine place to live. This may account–at least a bit–for the eagerness of presidential aspirants to take up residency in the White House. The house itself never looked better, despite turning 200 years old last November. Almost all the public rooms were redecorated for the occasion, a $1.78 million process that took eight years. The changes are subtle–flowered drapes for the State Dining Room, a trompe l’oeil wallpaper border in the Blue Room.
Hillary Rodham Clinton marked the birthday by ordering new china with a yellow border depicting the house itself, the first time the building has been featured on White House china. The new service debuted at a Nov. 9 dinner presided over by the first lady and senator-elect, on a day when confusion prevailed as to who would succeed the Clintons.
President Clinton noted how the “President’s Palace” had been built to survive turmoil: “The masons laid the stone foundation more than four feet thick. Like our nation’s founders, these men were building a monument to freedom, and they wanted it to last.”
Monuments to presidents past have been refurbished, too. The Washington Monument reopened last year after extensive improvements, including work on the observation deck, which is now less claustrophobic and offers better views.
The white marble Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials have been cleaned. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s memorial, the newest to honor a president, opened in May 1997 near the Tidal Basin. It is also the most unusual, with four outdoor “rooms” created by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. The rooms encompass the enormous events of his four terms, from the Depression through the New Deal to World War II and the Yalta Conference.
“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” reads a quotation etched above a George Segal sculpture of five men standing in a soup line at the memorial. “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provided enough for those who have too little.”
The city has an abundance of presidential monuments and museums, but it hasn’t had a proper museum exhibition on the presidency itself. This omission is odd, considering the fact that the first ladies’ inaugural gowns are the most popular draw at the National Museum of American History. Lawrence Small, the Smithsonian Institution’s new secretary, moved swiftly to rectify the situation last year. On Nov. 15, while the country was just one week into the struggle to determine who won the vote, “The American Presidency” opened at the museum. The exhibition draws on the considerable resources of the Smithsonian to show, as Small says, “the office as at once incomparably grand and irreducibly human.”
This turbulent history starts, appropriately, with the clamor of the campaigns. A ceramic cast of Abraham Lincoln’s hands, taken two days after he was nominated as the Republican candidate, shows his right hand so swollen from shaking the hands of well-wishers that he had to grasp a broomstick to steady it for the cast. The exhibit proceeds to inaugurations, where presidents since Theodore Roosevelt can be heard reciting the oath of office. Inaugural pennants fly next to a “Forward Together” Richard Nixon inaugural souvenir scarf.
Further on, George Washington’s sword is juxtaposed with Bill Clinton’s “football,” the briefcase that held the secret military codes with which he could conduct nuclear war. A somber section on assassinations, which includes the top hat Lincoln wore the night he was shot, emphasizes the terrible burdens of the office.
The exhibition emphasizes “the wonderful contradiction between the coronation and the celebration of democracy,” says political history curator Harry Rubenstein. “That contradiction is built into the roles of the presidency itself. When you combine the roles of the king and the prime minister in the presidency, you create those contradictions in the role.”
Those contradictions seep into the city itself: Is Washington a company town, or a real town? At expense-account restaurants like the Caucus Room, backed by legendary lobbyist Tommy Boggs (Cokie Roberts’ brother), the seats are filled with men in gray suits who eat strip steaks and creamed spinach and talk about how to spend billions–our billions. But a few blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue, at the new pan-Asian restaurant TenPhen, the crowd is more likely to be wearing black leather and pondering whether it’s time to quit working at America Online and join a start-up.
Indeed, most people in the Washington area no longer work for the government. The technology boom has changed that. The Maryland and Virginia suburbs are thick with office parks housing Internet and telecom firms like AOL and PSINet. On weekends, the dot-commers stream into the District to play, with the emphasis on parties, not politics.
Their playground has spread from Dupont Circle north to the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, a parade of bars and restaurants on 18th Street NW. It’s hard to imagine shoehorning even one more cafe onto 18th Street. Parking there is so tough on weekends that street people have taken to asking nightclubbers for “contributions” to “reserve” them a spot.
The next new thing is the “New U,” a neighborhood running east from 18th along U Street NW. Twentysomethings who go to hear Icelandic diva Bjork or P-Funk All-Star George Clinton at the alternative rock club 9:30, which relocated to 8th and V Streets from downtown, probably don’t realize the historical significance of the New U. Eighty years ago, well before the Harlem Renaissance, Pearl Bailey dubbed it “Black Broadway.” Washington’s black community, barred by segregation from the venues downtown, put on satin and pearls and made the area shine in the 1920s and 1930s. On weekends, so many people would flock to the Lincoln Theater and the clubs along U Street that traffic would literally stop.
D.C.-born jazz legend Duke Ellington debuted at the True Reformers Hall; Pearl Bailey worked at the Republic Gardens nightclub as a young dancer. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald would hang out at the Bohemian Caverns, at 10th and U, after their gigs.
“It was a time of greatness,” says Hedrick Smith, a former New York Times reporter who produced a PBS documentary on the area, “Duke Ellington’s Washington.” “But it’s a time whose story is almost forgotten.”
The end of Jim Crow laws dealt a blow to the neighborhood, with the black bourgeoisie moving to the suburbs. (It later became known as the Shaw neighborhood, after a school named for Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the white commander of the black 54th Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War.) But the greatest injury came during the 1968 riots after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: U Street burned.
Virginia Ali, co-owner with her husband of Ben’s Chili Bowl, a fixture on U Street since the 1950s, remembers people streaming into the cafe on the night of King’s death, their faces wet with tears. The Alis wrote “Soul Brother” on the restaurant’s window so it wouldn’t be burned, and the restaurant’s still there. Many of the stars who ate there are long gone, but Bill Cosby still comes in often. He courted his wife, Camille, there when they were students at nearby Howard University.
Ben’s is no longer the only reminder of U Street’s past. In 1999 the Republic Gardens reopened at 1357 U as a high-end dance club, with patrons including rapper Puff Daddy and Michael Jordan. The Lincoln Theater has been restored. The signature stalactites are back on the ceiling of the Bohemian Caverns, which once again presents national jazz acts. Duke Ellington welcomes visitors to the neighborhood from a mural painted above the U Street/Cardozo Metro stop. A new memorial to the black veterans of the Civil War, who made up 10 percent of the Union army, stands proudly at 10th and U.
The faces on the street are no longer just black; the cafes and secondhand bookstores and funky resale shops are owned by small-business people from all corners of the country, and of the world. The White House may symbolize America’s promise of equality and opportunity, but on U Street, just a half-mile away, the promise is being made real.
IF YOU GO
THE DETAILS
The White House is open for self-guided tours Tuesday through Saturday and is closed every Sunday and Monday. Call 202-456-7041 or visit www.whitehouse.gov in advance–tours are sometimes canceled during official events.
The FDR Memorial is at 1850 W. Basin Drive SW, near the Jefferson Memorial. It is the first memorial in Washington, D.C., that was designed to be completely wheelchair-accessible. For more information, call the National Parks Service Office of Public Affairs at 202-619-7222.
Timed-entry passes are required to see “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden” at the National Museum of American History at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Same-day entry passes to the exhibition are available free at the presidency kiosk on the museum’s third floor. Advance passes are available through TicketMaster at 800-551-SEAT (7328) or 202-432-SEAT (7328).
To learn more about the “Duke Ellington’s Washington” documentary, see www.pbs.org/ellingtonsdc.
For information on visiting Washington, contact the Washington Convention and Visitors Association at www.washington.org or 800-635-6338.
— N.S.
