Washington Winter Show 2012

47 President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office, 1967 Credit: LBJ Library Photo by Yoichi Okamoto President Johnson speaks on the telephone while watching three TV sets. His ticker-tape machines are disguised in the white box, left center. The Oval Office of President Barack Obama, 2010 Credit: White House Historical Association The setting for White House TV broadcasts by all presidents since Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61), the Oval Office’s décor is tied to each chief executive’s image. Before the Nixon presidency, the space was simply known as the “president’s office.” It was the White House press corps that dubbed it the “Oval Office” early in the Nixon administration. In White House staff parlance, it is simply “the Oval.” President Nixon redecorated the Oval Office as has each of his successors. The reason has less to do with taste than television. President Truman, living temporarily in Blair House, sensed TV’s future importance to the presidency. The reconstructed White House featured a broadcast room for TV and radio in a remodeled ground floor space once the banquet kitchen. President Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61), following Truman, gave his first White House television address there. He later used various other locations in the White House complex to deliver his addresses, including the Oval Office. Later, Kennedy used the Oval Office for TV broadcasts frequently, as did Johnson, Nixon and all their successors in office. Hence, the desire to identify its décor with their respective television personas. Television has made the Oval Office an icon. A former White House usher recalls that, after a diplomatic presentation in the Blue Room, a new ambassador said, “My family wishes to be photographed in the Oval Office. Is that possible?” Of course it was. 6 William Seale is the author of several books on the White House, including The President’s House: A History ( 2d ed., 2008) in two volumes, and The White House: History of an American Idea (2001). He is editor of White House History, the journal of the White House Historical Association. 1. A “bow-room” is a room with an apse or elliptical end. 2. See Edward Lawler Jr., “The President’s House in Philadelphia: The Rediscovery of a Lost Landmark,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 126 (January 2002) 5–95, and Lawler, “The President’s House Revisited,” ibid., 129 (October 2005) 377–410. 3. Record Group 42, National Archives, contains vast documentation of the physical White House, including inventories for nearly every administration. For Van Buren’s time of particular use are the annual invoices from Charles Alexandre for putting up and removing curtains, carpets, etc., seasonally, as well as the decorating of rooms. Alexandre was an upholsterer in Washington from the 1820s to the 1850s who worked for the White House. 4. For a thorough account of the Kennedy redecorations, see James A. Abbott and Elaine M. Rice, Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration (New York: Van Nostrand Rhinehold, 1998) . 5. The actual act of Congress was passed on inauguration day, “An Act for additional accommodations to the building erected for the offices of the president, and for each and every purpose connected therewith.” Full records of the project, including architectural drawings, are found in Record Group 42, National Archives. 6. Author in conversation with Gary Walters, Chief Usher, May 2000. This page is sponsored by Carol Barth, Linda Bogaczyk and Jane Brookins