Issue 67- Television

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY

The White House and &

the white house historical association

Board of Directors

chairman

John F. W. Rogers

vice chairperson

Teresa Carlson treasurer

Gregory W. Wendt secretary

Deneen C. Howell president

Stewart D. McLaurin

Eula Adams, John T. Behrendt, Michael Beschloss, Gahl Hodges Burt, Merlynn Carson, Jean Case, Ashley Dabbiere, Wayne A. I. Frederick, Tham Kannalikham, Metta Krach, Martha Joynt Kumar, Anita McBride, Barbara A. Perry, Frederick J. Ryan, Jr., Ben C. Sutton Jr., Tina Tchen

national park service liaison

Charles F. Sams III

ex officio

Lonnie G. Bunch III, Kaywin Feldman, Debra Steidel Wall (Acting Archivist of the United States), Carla Hayden, Katherine Malone-France

directors emeriti

John H. Dalton, Nancy M. Folger, Janet A. Howard, Knight Kiplinger, Elise K. Kirk, James I. McDaniel, Robert M. McGee, Ann Stock, Harry G. Robinson III, Gail Berry West

white house history quarterly founding editor William Seale (1939–2019) editor Marcia Mallet Anderson editorial and production manager Elyse Werling

senior editorial and production director Lauren McGwin senior editorial and production manager Kristen Hunter Mason editorial coordinator Rebecca Durgin consulting editor

Ann Hofstra Grogg consulting design Pentagram editorial advisory

Bill Barker

Matthew Costello

Mac Keith Griswold Scott Harris

Joel Kemelhor Jessie Kratz

Rebecca Roberts Lydia Barker Tederick Bruce M. White

the editor wishes to thank The Office of the Curator, The White House

contributors

mary jo binker is the author of If You Ask Me: Essential Advice from Eleanor Roosevelt and What Are We For? The Words and Ideals of Eleanor Roosevelt. She is a fre quent contributor to White House History Quarterly.

rebecca durgin kerr is the editorial coordinator at the White House Historical Association and a regular contributor to White House History Quarterly.

In a March 1963 episode of The Lucy Show, Lucy and her friend Vivian help their sons’ boy scout troup build a White House with sugar cubes. The president is so impressed that he invites all of them to the White House to unveil it, but chaos follows after the model is dropped on the train.

the Sparkle

mallet anderson

TELEVISION DEPICTS US PRES IDENTS AND THE WHITE HOUSE

t. walsh

COMES TO THE WHITE HOUSE TO STAY rebecca durgin kerr

WEST WING TAKES TELEVISION INTO THE WHITE HOUSE

the Scenes Memories of the Reinvention of Political Theater

freeman

TO SESAME STREET WITH THE FIRST LADIES

and Set Design

shogan

JACQUELINE KENNEDY’S TELEVISED TOUR OF THE WHITE HOUSE mary jo binker

UPSTAIRS AT THE WHITE HOUSE WITH TRICIA NIXON The Making of the 60 Minutes Televised Tour

F. CALDERONE

IT’S ACADEMIC AND WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Through the 60-Year Lens of the Longest Running Quiz Show on Television

kemelhor

MORE THAN A PHOTO-OP: PRESI DENTIAL PILGRIMAGES TO DISNEY PARKS

bemis

REALISM OF DESIGNATED SUR VIVOR A Story of Presidential Succes

stewart d. m c laurin

foreword

marcia mallet anderson editor, white house history quarterly

In a September 1970 episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, the Clampetts travel to Washington, D.C., in an attempt buy the “mighty big” White House from the president for $1 million.

HOW TELEVISION Depicts U.S. Presidents And the White House

KENNETH T. IRRWALSH

william seale, founding editor of the White House History Quarterly, has written that the White House “is probably the most richly docu mented house in the world, and the premier sym bol of the American presidency.”1 A fundamental reason for this reputation is television. Television has depicted the presidency and the White House so frequently and, in many cases, so positively, especially in its entertainment programming, that it has led the way in shaping perceptions of these institutions. Perceptions of real and fictional pres idents and the White House as conveyed on televi sion tend to run deep and endure. Everyone knows that the president of the United States, the most powerful person on earth, lives in the White House. And the desire to learn more about this fabled piece of real estate and its chief occupant appears to be insatiable. Ever since it became widely available in the 1950s and 1960s2 television’s collective narra tive of the American presidency has reflected the ideals, successes, and failures of the United States and in many ways the culture and social norms of the country in the modern era.

Television popularized the president as a star, America’s “celebrity in chief,” and showed the White House as the place where decisions are made that fundamentally affect our lives and can transform the world. There is also a public desire, fueled by TV, for information about the first lady,

above President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy congratulate Pablo Casals as guests applaud following his performance in the East Room, November 29, 1961.

left Television cameras focus on First Lady Jackie Kennedy in the State Dining Room as she leads a televised tour of the White House, 1962.

previous

Phil Hartman, as Bill Clinton in 1992, and Dana Carvey, as George H. W. Bush in 1990, are two of many actors who mastered good natured presidential impersonations on Saturday Night Live

above

Among the iconic entertainers who performed in the East Room during the Barack Obama presidency were Aretha Franklin (top), 2015, and B.B. King (bottom), 2012.

the president’s children, presidential hobbies, food and beverage preferences, friends, leisure activities, reading choices, and even presidential pets.

Jacqueline Kennedy introduced millions of Americans to the White House on February 14, 1962, when she led CBS News on a tour of the Residence and the furnishings she had acquired to showcase American history. The tour, guided knowledgeably by the elegant and soft-spoken first lady, drew a huge TV audience of 80 million Americans, and it enhanced Mrs. Kennedy’s reputation as a cultural icon—successful, modern, beautiful, charismatic. She also generated massive attention to the White

House by organizing showy dinners and glam orous social events attended by featured famous writers, artists, scientists, and musicians such as cellist Pablo Casals and composer and pianist Igor Stravinsky.3

This tradition has continued, with the broadcast and cable networks providing breathless coverage of such extravaganzas. Among the most notable in recent years were the concerts organized by Barack and Michelle Obama, which featured iconic entertainers, especially African Americans such as Aretha Franklin, B. B. King, Patti LaBelle, John Legend, and Usher. The Obamas, the first African Americans to serve as president and first lady, said they wanted to demonstrate that the White House was open to everyone, including Black people who might have felt shut out in the past, and the pub licity helped them make this point. Many of the concerts were televised in full or in part.

Television contributed to the rise of a new breed of American leader—a charismatic, telegenic indi vidual who understood that a public figure’s image on TV could be vital to his or her success or failure. And television helped to make the White House one of the most recognizable buildings in the world, associated with American power, democracy, and leadership and forever connected to the individual presidents who lived there.

Media-savvy presidents have tried to link

themselves to the country through television in many ways. Richard Nixon, for example, started out effectively using television for his own purposes, such as with his Checkers speech, when, facing cor ruption allegations, he told a TV audience that he had done nothing wrong and saved his vice pres idential spot on Dwight Eisenhower’s ticket. He failed to impress TV viewers in his televised debates with John F. Kennedy in 1960, but in 1968 Nixon manipulated the medium with staged events and controlled access and persuaded the nation that there was a “new Nixon,” kinder and more engaging than the Nixon of the past. Part of his effort was an appearance on the popular and irreverent TV show Laugh-In, in which the straitlaced candidate played against type by reciting one of the show’s signature lines, “Sock it to me.”

Other presidents followed. As I pointed out in my book Celebrity in Chief, “Democratic challenger Bill Clinton achieved a new level of coolness in the 1992 campaign when he appeared on Arsenio Hall’s TV show and played the saxophone while wearing sunglasses.” President George H. W. Bush “was aghast. It wasn’t ‘presidential,’ he told aides, and he said he wouldn’t do such a thing.”4 But most recent presidents used television to great advantage. President Obama was a pathbreaker in dealing with television. He expanded presidential use of the medium to include not only appearing on the news casts of the broadcast networks ABC, CBS, NBC, and the cable news networks of CNN and MSNBC but also on daytime programs such as The Ellen DeGeneres Show and The View. And he appeared on the comedy TV shows of Jon Stewart, Jimmy Fallon, and David Letterman. As I have written, “Through it all, he . . . projected an image of an unflappable leader, a nice guy and family man, reinforced by nearly everything he has done.”5 Obama and his media strategists understood that the media in the United States were fractured and, to be an effective communicator to as many Americans as possible, he needed to appear on a variety of TV shows that appealed to diverse audiences.

The cultural historian Fred Inglis says that Hollywood created “the star” as a central figure in American culture by relentlessly promoting movie actors and actresses as charismatic and fascinat ing. John F. Kennedy, the first true “TV president,” claims Inglis, “achieved the same goal for himself

left Richard Nixon, while campaigning for the vice presidency in 1952, explained an $18,000 expense fund on national television. The appearance was nicknamed his “Checkers” speech because of the reference to his daughters’ cocker spaniel, seen here with the Nixon family at their Washington, D.C. home.

opposite

In an effort to portray himself as more engaging during his presidential campaign in 1968, Nixon famously appeared on an episode of Laugh-In, delivering the comedy show’s signature line, “Sock it to me!” The show’s hosts Dan Rowan and Dick Martin are seen (top left) on the set of the show. In response, Nixon’s supporters wave “Sock it to ‘em, Nixon!” signs during a campaign rally (top right).

above Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign is remembered in part for his unconventional saxophone performance on Arsenio Hall’s late night show.

right

Barack Obama, seen here on the Jimmy Fallon show in 2008, appeared on many daytime and late night programs during his campaign for president and during his time as president..

through the use of television to generate a spe cial aura around the White House and its prime occupant.”6

As I discussed in Celebrity in Chief,

Presidents are the repository for America’s dreams. Each is both the head of government and the ceremonial leader of the United States. . . . Presidents also are using some of the same techniques as entertainers, such as in-house TV producers and directors, stagecraft experts, makeup artists, advance teams, and writers. The goal is to create favorable images of the president and generate positive impressions, just as press agents and “personal managers” do for Hollywood stars.7

And the White House has become a prime source of material for the entertainment industry, especially television.

Presidents and White House officials are intent on projecting the best image possible. They have been brought up with television, something they have in common with nearly every other American. And they want TV to show appreciation of what they do and are very disappointed when that does not happen. Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer told the Washington Post that journalists also want to gain favorable attention from televi sion, sometimes by playing themselves. “People in Washington are super insecure,” Pfeiffer said, and “also almost universally nerds growing up,” and they seek approval from “cool” Hollywood.8

I saw this dynamic firsthand at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, an annual gala in which the worlds of journalism, politics, govern ment, and entertainment combine for an evening of cozy comradeship. I served as president of the WHCA for a term and was on the board for many years. One incident stands out. Martin Sheen, star of the TV series The West Wing, attended several years ago as my guest. He showed up a bit late in the lobby of Washington Hilton Hotel, where the dinner was scheduled, and he could not resist shak ing hands with well-wishers at a rope line near the red carpet, with TV cameras capturing the inter actions. He broke into a huge grin when the spec tators shouted to get his attention—not using his own name but the name of the character he played on TV, “President Bartlet!” At a reception after his arrival in the lobby and just prior to the dinner,

Sheen was greeted warmly by the large crowd, many of whom sought photos with the famous actor. After a few minutes, Bill Clinton, the guest of honor, arrived and both he and Sheen noticed each other across the room. The crowd parted as Sheen and Clinton walked slowly toward each other like gunslingers in the Old West striding toward a showdown. At the last moment Clinton extended his hand with the greeting, “Mr. President,” and Sheen extended his hand and used the identical greeting, “Mr. President.” They shook hands and the crowd of journalists, politicians, government officials, and entertainers cheered. These insiders were delighted at the Clinton-Sheen connection, which blended government and politics with show business and TV.

Television has, by and large, projected a respect ful view of the presidency and individual presidents, both real and fictional. Of course, day-to-day tele vision news coverage of presidents and the White House is in a different category from that of enter tainment-oriented depictions of presidents on television, such as made-for-TV dramas, comedy programs, and documentaries. News coverage is dominated by the American tradition of adversary journalism in which reporters and editors are in a constant tug-of-war with presidents over how chief executives are portrayed as the media pur sues its watchdog role and tries to hold presidents accountable.

Television news coverage is certainly critical of the presidency, in keeping with the watchdog func tion and independence guaranteed to the Fourth Estate by the Constitution. But there is still an underlying respect for the office that even the most cynical journalists generally maintain. I know this firsthand. I was a White House correspondent for thirty years and have seen this respectful dynamic play out day after day. Reporters like to think of themselves as essentially critics and even scolds, but there is also a deep respect for the office of president and the White House as hallowed ground where history is made. Critical news coverage is often couched in the idea that a president is not living up the expectations for the office or not “act ing presidential.” Rarely is the office itself criticized. It is often idealized.

On the entertainment side of TV, the depictions of the presidents generally reflect public attitudes toward each leader at the moment. But it is almost always undergirded by a respect for the office

Kenneth Branagh stars as Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 2005 television movie Warm Springs, which tells the story of the future president’s battle to regain the use of his legs after contracting polio in the 1920s.

and, by implication, the democratic process, with recognition that the choice of every president is based on a vote of the people and the official elec tors. Overall, depictions of the real commanders in chief have been sharp-edged but not mean-spir ited. Take a look at the Saturday Night Live oeuvre and you’ll see what I mean, notably the brilliant impersonations of Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump, Will Ferrell as George W. Bush, Darrell Hammond and Phil Hartman as Bill Clinton, Dana Carvey as George H. W. Bush, and Hartman as Ronald Reagan, and Dan Aykroyd as Jimmy Carter and Nixon, and Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford.

President Kennedy probably has received the most positive attention across the board from tele vision. He has been played by fine actors, including Martin Sheen, William Devane, James Marsden, and Rob Lowe, and the portrayals mostly under score his charisma, good judgment, and inspira tional qualities.9

Franklin D. Roosevelt also has been treated pos itively. Consider Kenneth Branagh’s 2005 portrayal of him in Warm Springs, a made-for-television drama. The program focused on Roosevelt’s unsuc cessful attempts to regain the use of his legs, which were paralyzed from polio, and his commitment to

turn a resort in Warm Springs, Georgia, into a reha bilitation center for polio victims. This is where he learned empathy, which the drama accurately depicts.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has often been portrayed negatively, as overbearing, bully ing and self-indulgent, but at the same time char ismatic. President Joe Biden, who took office in January 2021, so far has not provided the comic fodder or exhibited the charisma of some of his pre decessors. He has been less of a regular presence on television, including both entertainment and news shows. His image is a work in progress.

Fictional presidents have generally gotten pos itive treatment. Their TV portrayals often turn out to be tough but not overly harsh, reflecting Americans’ realistic view of their top leader as flawed but worthy of respect. The fictional presi dents are also more diverse than the real presidents, reflecting an idealized, aspirational view promoted by TV writers, actors, and directors. The list of the most popular White House–centric shows in recent years includes several women presidents, an African American, and a Latino. Among the notable depictions of fictional presidents on TV series were Martin Sheen as President Josiah (“Jed”) Bartlet on The West Wing (which aired 1999–2006); Jimmy Smits as President Matthew Santos on The West Wing; Geena Davis as President MacKenzie Allen on Commander in Chief (which aired 2005–06); Cherry Jones as President Allison Taylor on (which aired 2001–10); Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer also on 24; Kevin Spacey as President Frank Underwood on House of Cards (which aired 2013–18); Robin Wright as President Claire Underwood on House of Cards; Julia LouisDreyfus as President Selina Meyer on Veep (2012–19); and Kiefer Sutherland as President Thomas Adam Kirkman on Designated Survivor (2016–19).

Among the highlights: President Bartlet as played by Sheen was idealistic, hardworking, and decent. On Veep, President (and, earlier in the show, Vice President) Selina Meyer played by Louis-Dreyfus was venal, preoccupied with power and perseverant as she struggled to overcome her limitations. Frank Underwood, played by Spacey in House of Cards, was cunning and clever though menacing and ruthless.

I have had the opportunity to interview Sheen twice for public programs offered by the Smithsonian in Washington, and he explained

Julia Louis Dryfus as President Selina Meyer on Veep, 2015.

Robin Wright as President Claire Underwood on House of Cards 2018.

above Geena Davis as President MacKenzie Allen on Commander in Chief, 2006. right Kevin Spacey as President Frank Underwood on House of Cards, 2014.

opposite William Devane as President John F Kennedy in the made for television movie The Missiles of October, 1974.

above and right Author Kenneth T. Walsh discusses The West Wing with Martin Sheen during a public program at the Smithsonian Institution (above). Sheen will always be remembered for his role as President Josiah Bartlet on The West Wing (right).

how he tried to give his character a higher purpose.

Sheen wanted President Bartlet to be a committed Roman Catholic, as Sheen is in private life, so the commander in chief would always be grounded in morality and a clear set of values. Sheen’s por trayal is the most memorable and influential of any TV-series president because he reminded viewers of what the presidency could be and his character was infused with idealism. I was impressed that both Smithsonian programs with Sheen were sold out, and many attendees were young people. The show still has strong resonance across the generations.

It is clear that television has helped to make the presidency and the White House vital parts of our experience as Americans. And this connection will remain a fact of national life as we move deeper into the twenty-first century.

NOTES

1. William Seale, “White House History Quarterly Mission Statement,” provided by the White House Historical Association, April 2021.

2. “Number of TV Households in America,” table online at American Century website, www.americancentury.omeka.wlu. edu.

3. Kenneth T. Walsh, Celebrity in Chief: A History of the Presidents and the Culture of Stardom, With a New Epilogue on Hillary and “The Donald” (New York: Routledge, 2007), 98.

4. Ibid., 9.

5. Ibid., 11.

6. Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4, 10–11.

Walsh, Celebrity in Chief, 11.

Quoted in Hunter Schwarz, “Real-Life White House vs. Hollywood White House, According to Dan Pfeiffer,” Washington Post, March 12, 2015.

Greg Gilman, “16 Actors Who Played JFK, from Patrick Dempsey to Michael C. Hall,” posted June 5, 2018, The Wrap website, www.yahoo.com.

house

TELEVISION

Comes to the White House To Stay REBECCA DURGIN KERR

television has been a staple in American homes since the late 1940s and 1950s,1 and the White House is no exception. Presidents and first families placed TV sets in the West Wing and in rooms throughout the Residence so they could have up-to-the-minute news—and images—of current events even as they used broadcast television to communicate with the American people.2

In 1950, 9 percent of American households had televisions; by 1960, the number had grown to 87 percent.3 The technology had been a long time coming. It began in 1910 with the French inven tor Edouard Belin’s experiments for transmitting photographs, and it was he who began using the term “television.”4 In 1912 the Washington Herald explained that “television” means “seeing at a dis tance.”5 World War I paused the development of television, but improvements in radio and wire communication continued to be refined during that time.6 During the 1920s Washington, D.C., inventor C. Francis Jenkins worked on a devise that could use radio signals to transmit images, and on June 13, 1925, he demonstrated his “radio vision” machine to U.S. officials, including the secretary of the navy. The Sunday Star stated that “it was heralded as the first time in history that man has literally seen far-away objects in motion through the uncanny agency of wireless.”7 In 1929, Jenkins flew an airplane over Washington and used the

“aerial eye” camera to transmit overhead images of the city’s monuments and buildings via radio waves to a transmitter in a laboratory.8 Experiments in Europe were also successful in transmitting images at this time.9

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose radio broadcasts, called fireside chats, spoke directly to the American people,10 was the first president to be televised. On April 20, 1939, his speech commu nicating the opening of the New York World’s Fair was broadcast in the New York area.11 The demon stration of this new technology excited Americans, but prices for TV sets were much too high for most people and uniform standards for broadcasting and viewing had not yet been established. The Federal Communications Commission announced that television “commercial service could begin on or after 1 September 1940,” 12 and some thought that the presidential Inauguration in 1941 would be broadcast; that did not happen until a decade later.13 World War II interrupted television broad casts, but technological developments during the war helped advance television after the war, and by the end of the 1940s the boom in television sales had begun.14

President Harry S. Truman was the first to allow television cameras in the White House. He gave the first televised speech from the White House on October 5, 1947, urging Americans to

right George Hastings, Secretary to President Herbert Hoover, examines an early television receiver in his office at the White House, July 8, 1931.

previous spread Place holders may change

conserve food to help prevent starvation in post war Europe. The three local Washington, D.C., stations combined their equipment to broadcast the speech to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Schenectady, New York.15 In 1949 President Truman also became the first to have his inaugu ral celebrations televised.16 During the renovation of the White House (1948–52), wiring for televi sion was installed in just about every room. The Evening Star stated, “In bedrooms and other rooms television sets could be plugged in for programs from practically anywhere in the country, carried over special wires. The screens were tuned in by a special dial arrangement connected with a central control system.”17 At the end of his term, on May 3, 1952, President Truman gave a televised tour of the completely renovated White House.

By the time of the 1952 presidential election, Americans were accustomed to seeing the pres ident on television but were just getting used to televised campaigning.18 Some attributed Dwight D. Eisenhower’s win to his TV commercials.19 The Inauguration on January 20, 1953, was televised

above

Viewers watch as President Harry S. Truman addresses the United Nations, October 25, 1946.

above and right

A family gathers around an early RCA television to watch President Truman’s Inauguration—the first Inauguration to be televised, January 20, 1949.

white house history quarterly

opposite Schoolgirls in New York City view President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s televised Inauguration during their lunch period, January 20, 1953.

right President Eisenhower consults with television adviser Robert Montgomery following a radio and television report to the nation, June 27, 1960.

below President Eisenhower announces that he will run for a second term during a broadcast from the White House, February 29, 1956.

and demand was high for Eisenhower to appear on television during his first year in office.20 The Key West Citizen stated, “We think the televising of some of the President’s press conferences would not only be educational for the average citizen, but would be an extremely interesting show.”21 After film and television actor Robert Montgomery was brought to the White House to advise Eisenhower on how to present himself on television, presi dential press conferences began to be televised. Montgomery served the president as a media con sultant for seven years.22

Through television, Eisenhower spoke directly to the people at times of crisis, an expectation that continues to the present day. In September 1957, when mobs threatened to prevent the court-or dered integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, he returned from vacation in Newport, Rhode Island, to address the nation from the White House

I could have spoken from Rhode Island, where I have been staying recently, but I felt that, in speaking from the house of Lincoln, of Jackson and of Wilson, my words would better convey both the sadness I feel in the action I was compelled today to take and the firmness with which I intend to pursue this course until the orders of the Federal Court at Little Rock can be executed without unlawful interference.23

white

In his 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy used television to reach a wide audience, and his poise on camera during the presidential debates helped him defeat Richard Nixon, who appeared less comfortable on television.24 As pres ident, Kennedy had a television set, which he called “that little gadget,” installed in the Fish Room (now called the Roosevelt Room) in the West Wing,25 and on a small television he and members of his admin istration watched the lift-off of Astronaut Alan B. Shepard’s flight into space. In 1961, Kennedy began televising live press conferences.26 To improve his on-air image, Kennedy rewatched press confer ences and brought in Franklin Schaffner, a film and television director, to assist in the setup of cameras and lighting.27 Taping sessions were orchestrated like movie productions. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy went on television to address the American people directly during crises over school desegregation.28 But perhaps the most famous televised event of the Kennedy administration was First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s tour of the White House in February 1962.29 Photographs from the Private Quarters show that by the next year there were console tele vision sets in the Lincoln Sitting Room and the president’s bedroom.

TOP: GETTY

BOTTOM: AP IMAGES

opposite top Senator John F. Kennedy makes a charismatic appearance during a televised presidential debate with Vice President Richard Nixon, October 21, 1960.

opposite below President and Mrs. Kennedy are joined by Vice President Lyndon Johnson and others in the president’s secretary’s office to watch as Alan Shepard takes off in the Mercury capsule Freedom 7 to become the first American to make a suborbital flight, May 5, 1961.

right President Lyndon Johnson watches coverage by three networks on his bank of televisions in the Oval Office as the Saturn 1B rocket lifts off, October 11, 1968.

President Lyndon B. Johnson had not one but three television sets installed in his bedroom and in the Oval Office, so he could watch the news on all three networks at once. His reliance on television to provide him with current information was so acute that his secretarial staff noted in his Daily Diary on September 18, 1966, when Johnson was aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia, that “the televi sion reception was not good, and at one point the President thought he might go back to Washington so he could get good TV reception.”30 By Johnson’s time, it had become conventional for presidents to use television to speak directly to the American people at times of crisis. He addressed the pub lic often, particularly regarding the course of the Vietnam War, and on March 31, 1968, during one of these addresses, he stunned viewers by announcing that his would not run for reelection as president.31

Following television’s slow introduction to the White House in the 1950s and 1960s, its service to presidential ambitions has increased rapidly and its relationship to the presidency become ever more complex. By the end of the Johnson adminis tration, its role in the American presidency was well established. Like Johnson, subsequent presidents,

to a greater or lesser degree, watched television news and commentary to get a sense of public opinion. They went on television to reassure the American public in times of crisis and to impress the American people as well, with events that were carefully staged. Kennedy had watched Shepard’s lift-off into space; subsequent presidents had themselves televised as they watched astronauts in space on White House televisions and spoke to them in messages meant for all Americans, who were also watching. With the arrival of cable news networks, coverage and analysis of the presidents were pretty much 24/7. From the White House, presidents could watch not only space launches but congressional debates, hearings, and votes, all in live time on flat-screen TVs, ubiquitous throughout the West Wing and the Private Quarters but often hidden behind cabinet doors. And, with the arrival of social media, presidents no longer needed to rely on television addresses to get their messages to the American people. With the arrival of video confer encing, they no longer needed to meet with world leaders in person. As new technologies develop, we can expect that future presidents will continue to adopt them.

Richard Nixon, having been upstaged by John F. Kennedy during the televised debate in 1960, took a different approach to winning the 1968 presi dential election. Capitalizing on his reputation for being stiff in front of TV cameras, he appeared in a brief segment of the popular television comedy show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, looking stu diously perplexed and repeating one of the show’s favorite lines as a question: “Sock it to me?” One of the first things Nixon did as president was to move Johnson’s three-monitor television to the Executive Office Building (EOB).32 In 1971, President Nixon created the White House Television Office to work along with the television networks to showcase the president’s daily routine for the American public. He and his staff appeared on news and talk shows, and the wedding of his daughter Tricia was tele vised, as was his 1972 trip to China.33 From the Oval Office, in July 1969 Nixon watched the Apollo XI mission on two television sets, one pulled toward the desk and the other closer to the wall. In 1973, Nixon announced to the American people that he would resign the presidency.

At the suggestion of his press secretary, Ron Nessen, President Gerald Ford held an outdoor televised press conference in the Rose Garden in 1974.34 Like his predecessor, Ford watched the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project crew July 18, 1975, on television from his desk in the Oval Office, and he communicated with them via radio-telephone. Also like his predecessor, Ford appeared on a TV com edy show, delivering the famous opening line, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night,” from the Oval Office for the April 17, 1976, episode of Saturday Night Live 35 President Ford enjoyed having break fast in his private dining room while watching tele vision on a portable set that could be moved around or hidden from sight.

Adapting the informality of President Roosevelt’s radio fireside chats to television, President Jimmy Carter televised his first fireside chat on February 2, 1977. He and his family enjoyed watching television, both upstairs in the Residence and in the so-called “Little Theater,” where they watched the Voyager spacecraft’s Jupiter encounter on closed-circuit television.36

Two televisions are set in place in the Oval Office near President Nixon’s desk ahead of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Dr. Henry Kissinger watches a video of Richard Nixon’s televised 1972 trip to China while touring the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, October 14, 2016.

above President Gerald Ford often watched a small portable television that could be moved from room to room. right President Jimmy Carter on television during his first fireside chat at the White House, 1977.

President Ronald Reagan’s acting experience in film and television earned him the title “Great Communicator,” for his skill in using the medium of television throughout his presidency.37 During a May 18, 1985, interview with Chris Wallace, he described his technique for reading the tele prompter in the Oval Office,38 where he often held large press briefings in front of multiple cameras. Evaluating his performances, he was able to watch himself on television on sets placed on carts that could easily be moved from room to room in the White House and West Wing. He announced the government-supported advent of closed caption ing, which permitted hearing-impaired Americans to experience television: “The recent initiation in March 1980 of closed-captioned television, which opened this important communications medium to millions of deaf and hearing-impaired Americans, is a significant achievement toward this end.”39

President George H.W. Bush, too, watched tele vision on a small TV set that could easily be moved around. By this time war itself was televised, and on January 16, 1991, President Bush watched the

commencement of Operation Desert Storm from the Oval Office. He used the platform of televi sion to broadcast public service announcements and was proud that he appeared on tv to talk to young Americans about not taking drugs.40 First Lady Barbara Bush often watched her husband’s television appearances in the Private Quarters of the White House.

Like some of his predecessors, Bill Clinton used television as a campaign tool when running for president, making forty-seven appearances on talk shows, the most notable of which was when he played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show 41 As president, he took advantage of the nearly 24/7 news broadcasts to watch, for example, the tele vised debate between Vice President Al Gore and Ross Perot on the North American Free Trade Agreement and then the vote in Congress on the treaty. Clinton’s 1997 Inauguration was the first time the internet was used to broadcast the events live.42 Scandals involving President Clinton and the resulting impeachment proceedings were heavily televised.

above President Ronald Reagan evaluates a recent televised appearance by viewing televisions set up on carts in the Cabinet Room, October 16, 1986.

AP IMAGES

right President George H. W. Bush watches television coverage of Operation Desert Storm in the in the study adjacent to the Oval Office, January 16 1991.

above Bill Clinton appears on Florida Talks to Clinton: A Town Meeting, in one of many televised appearances made during his campaign for president, September 1992.

TOP: GEORGE H. W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY / BOTTOM:

Communicating with space crews from the Oval Office continued during the George W. Bush pres idency. From the Roosevelt Room, he was able to wave to the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery while talking to them on the phone. A remote cam era provided overhead views of President George W. Bush welcoming Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon to the Oval Office on January 13, 2008. Sharing a meal, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney watched television coverage of xxx [?] on February 7, 2008. Continuing the tradi tion to speaking directly to the American people through television at times of crisis, President Bush appeared on television to reassure the American people after the events of September 11, 2001, and to inform the public of the progress made during the Iraq War.

From his private study off the Oval Office, President Barack Obama was able to watch Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’s first press briefing on January 22, 2009. He was also able to watch as First Lady Michelle Obama broke ground for the White House vegetable garden on March 20, 2009. This was on a flat screen TV displayed in a wall cabinet. President Obama often conducted televised inter views in the Map Room of the White House. When he watched the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on July 8, 2011, he was able to see split screen cov erage, a great advance over the triple televisions of the Johnson era. In addition to televised interac tions, the Obama administration was the first to use the social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat to reach a wider audience on the internet.43

President George W. Bush waves to the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery August 2, 2005, during a phone call from the Roosevelt Room.

With televisions available throughout the White House, President Obama could follow the news throughout the day. He watches television coverage of his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, breaking ground for the White House vegetable garden (top), March 20, 2009. And he catches the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on a television in the Outer Oval Office (bottom), July 8, 2011.

TOP

Before he was elected president, Donald J. Trump had extensive network television experi ence.44 As president Trump participated in vari ous television interviews at the White House and a Meet the Press interview was taped outside in the garden on June 21, 2019. He was also an avid follower of the TV coverage of his administration. During the coronavirus crisis, his task force pro vided lengthy televised updates daily. Television news programs regularly published President Trump’s Twitter posts to reach those viewers that did not follow him on social media. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, President Trump and his suc cessor, Joe Biden, relied on video conferencing dis played on televisions to communicate information from health officials directly to the American peo ple. President Biden employed video conferencing to preform virtual swearing in ceremonies of top aides and officials. This procedure not only legal ized the oaths of office but followed the health man dates of all parties involved during the pandemic. Looking towards the future, the White House will continue to keep pace with the changes in television technology and the broadcasting of vital informa tion to the American public and the world at large.

right President Donald Trump makes a televised address from the Oval Office as the first measures to combat the coronavirus are put in place, March 11, 2020.

below President Joe Biden delivers a televised speech announcing the banning Russian energy imports following the invasion of Ukraine, March 8, 2022.

TOP: GETTY

IMAGES / BOTTOM: WHITE HOUSE PHOTO

notes

1. Susan Briggs, “Television in the Home and Family,” in Television: An International History, ed. Anthony R. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 192.

2. John Anthony Maltese, Spin Control: The White House Office of Communications and the Management of Presidential News (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 5.

3. “Number of TV Households in America,” table online at the American Century website, www. americancentury.omeka.wlu. edu.

4. “Seeing by Wire,” Deseret Evening News, April 12, 1910, 6.

5. “What of the Future in Electricity?,” Washington Herald, March 17, 1912, magazine sec. 6.

6. Albert Abramson, “The Invention,” in Television, ed. Smith, 18–19.

7. “‘Radio Vision’ Shown First Time in History by Capital Inventor,” Washington Sunday Star, June 14, 1925, 1.

8. “Television’s New Aerial ‘Eye’ for War and Peace Broadcasting,” New Britain (Conn.) Herald, August 23, 1929, 25.

9. Philip Kerby, “Gangway for Television!,” Washington Evening Star, March 12, 1939, 4, 11.

10. “Communicator-in-Chief: How Presidents Use the Media,” interview by Ted Koppel, Sunday Morning, CBS, May 10, 2020. www/cbsnews.com.

11. “April 1939 Franklin D. Roosevelt Day by Day,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, available online at http://www.fdrlibrary. marist.edu; The Associated Press, “McLean Is Re-Elected As President of Associated Press,” Washington Evening Star, April 25, 1939, A-5.

12. Quoted in Abramson, “Invention,” 19.

13. Kerby, “Gangway for Television!,” 4, 11; Brian Wolly, “Inaugural Firsts,” posted December 17, 2008, Smithsonian Magazine, www. smithsonianmag.com.

14. Les Brown, “The American Networks,” in Television, ed. Smith, 265.

15. “First Televised Speech from the White House, Sunday, October 5, 1947,” Harry S. Truman Library, available online at https:// www.trumanlibrary.gov; “Three D.C. Stations to Televise Truman Food Plea Tomorrow,” Washington Evening Star, October 4, 1947, 1.

16. Wolly, “Inaugural Firsts.”

17. “White House Rewiring to Facilitate TV Use,” Washington Evening Star, January 26, 1950, A-28.

18. Harry MacArthur, “Here’s How the TV Cameras See the Presidential Candidates,” Washington Evening Star, January 27, 1952, C-8; Mary Ann Watson, “Television and the Presidency: Eisenhower and Kennedy,” in The Columbia History of American Television, ed. Gary R. Edgerton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 211.

19. “Communicator-in-Chief.”

20. Watson, “Television and the Presidency: Eisenhower and Kennedy,” 214.

21. “Publicizing Eisenhower’s Press Conferences,” Key West Citizen, April 13, 1953, 3.

22. Watson, “Television and the Presidency: Eisenhower and Kennedy,” 205, 214–15. See also Martha Joynt Kuman, “Dwight David Eisenhower: The First Television President,” White House History, no. 20 (Fall 2007): 4–17.

23. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Little Rock,” September 24, 1957, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

24. Charles L. Ponce de Leon, That’s the Way It Is: A History of Television News in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 54; Watson, “Television and the Presidency: Eisenhower and Kennedy,” 222–25.

25. The White House: An Historic Guide (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2022), 212–13.

26. Maltese, Spin Control, 5.

27. Watson, “Television and the Presidency: Eisenhower and

Kennedy,” 225–26.

28. John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

29. Ponce de Leon, That’s the Way It Is, 54.

30. Lyndon B. Johnson, President’s Daily Diary, September 18, 1966, available online at Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum website, www.lbjlibrary.net.

31. Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s Address to the Nation Announcing Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam and Reporting His Decision Not to Seek Reelection,” March 31, 1968, American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

32. Maltese, Spin Control, 59, 76 145, 222.

33. Ponce de Leon, That’s the Way It Is, 54; Kathryn Cramer Brownell, “Gerald Ford, Saturday Night Live, and the Development of the Entertainer in Chief,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 46, no. 4 (December 2016): 925.

34. Gerald R. Ford, The President’s News Conference, October 9, 1974, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency. ucsb.edu/documents/the-presidents-news-conference-78. Brownell, “Gerald Ford, Saturday Night Live, and the Development of the Entertainer in Chief,” 925;

35. Brownell, “Gerald Ford, Saturday Night Live, and the Development of the Entertainer in Chief,” 925.

36. Joel S. Schwartz, “The Promise of a Politician Scientist: President Carter and American Science,” in The Presidency and Domestic Policies of Jimmy Carter, ed. Herbert D. Rosenbaum and Alexej Ugrinsky (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 264.

37. Robert E. Denton Jr., The Primetime Presidency of Ronald Reagan: The Era of the Television Presidency (New York: Praeger, 1988), 3, 73.

38. President Reagan and Nancy Reagan, interview by Chris Wallace, NBC Special, May 18, 1985, Courtesy of Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, available online at, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=EhIeW-fbYiM.

39. Ronald Reagan, Proclamation 5008—National ClosedCaptioned Television Month, December 29, 1982, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/ research/speeches/122982b.

40. George H.W. Bush, Remarks to Schoolchildren at the White House Halloween Party, October 31, 1989, George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/ public-papers/1116.

41. Michael Tracey, “Non-Fiction Television,” in Television: An International History, ed. Anthony R. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 141.

42. Wolly, “Inaugural Firsts.”

43. Kevin Freking, “Obama Uses Social Media to Engage and Persuade,” AP News, January 4, 2017, available online at, https:// apnews.com/02a341c7ab814f0e903c681c5659af11/obama-usessocial-media-engage-and-persuade (accessed on May 12, 2020).

44. White House Historical Association, Donald J. Trump, https:// www.whitehousehistory.org/bios/donald-j-trump

THE WEST WING Takes Television Into the White House

Behind-the-Scenes Memories of the Reinvention of Political Theater

MARC FREEMAN

no one wants to watch political dramas , or so thought every major network executive in the late 1990s. Lawyers, guns, and money, sure. Lobbyists, gun control, and monetary policy? Not so much. Yet when The West Wing premiered in September 1999 in an environment designed for its failure, it somehow managed to change television and people’s opinions about public service.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Emmy-winning ER creator John Wells, and Emmy-winning director Thomas Schlamme joined forces to take audiences out of court and operating rooms and into the world of the great experiment of self-government designed by our Founding Fathers.

Foreign and domestic. Legislative and judicial. The show touched it all as seen through the eyes of the executive branch. Along the way, The West Wing delivered thought-provoking entertainment with attitude and style, giving us a glimpse into government’s potential.

So, how did it all come to pass? Some of the leading creative talent behind the scenes of the transformational program recently shared their memories with me. Their insights reveal how they helped reinvent political theater.

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL (writer/executive pro ducer): We never talked out loud about this but we were building a little house the shape of which no one had ever seen.

PAUL REDFORD (writer/producer): We were breaking the rule that you can’t make a successful drama on network television that isn’t some variation of cops, lawyers, or doctors responsible for saving lives. There can’t be any stakes less than that.

ELI ATTIE (writer/executive producer): Nuclear warheads. Housing and education. I think there’s no realm in which the stakes are greater. There’s no reason why a world of intensity and selflessness shouldn’t be a fascinating character drama.

DEBORA CAHN (writer/executive producer): You could talk about things that were meaningful in the world in a way where the entertainment and content are satisfying.

Previous attempts at political drama failed in part because they ignored partisan politics. The West Wing’s characters embraced their beliefs.

THOMAS SCHLAMME (executive producer/ director): The one thing you know when you go to Washington is people don’t hide their politics. It mat ters enormously. It’s where their passion comes from.

Nobody on the show was going rah-rah Democrats. Some of our biggest fans were Republicans. I think Washington thought we were trying to honor the public servants who were there.

KEVIN FALLS (co-executive producer/writer):

And we made the opposition party formidable, with mostly rational and informed arguments. No straw men.

above Martin Sheen during a script read-through. Executive Producer and Director Alex Graves recalled that the cast never failed to be blown away by Aaron Sorkin’s scripts.

left Thomas Schlamme and Aaron Sorkin at work behind the scenes during Season 1.

previous spread

The Season 3 cast of The West Wing gathers in front of the Presidential Seal and on the set of the Oval Office. Left to right on page 34: Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborn; Dule Hill as Charlie Young; Stockard Channing as Abbey Bartlet; Allison Janney as Claudia Jean (“C.J.”) Cregg; Martin Sheen as President Josiah (“Jed”) Bartlet; Richard Schiff as Toby Ziegler; John Spencer as Leo McGarry; Janel Moloney as Donna Moss; and Bradley Whitford as Josh Lyman.

right

Rob Lowe, as speechwriter Sam Seaborn, made the potentially boring government work seem glamourous and fun to watch.

ATTIE: At the end of the day, Aaron’s and the show’s goal was to be entertaining first, second, third, and fourth.

To help Sorkin accurately capture the president’s workplace, he amalgamated atypical television writ ers with experienced political experts, like O’Donnell who had been a congressional aide to New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and staff direc tor for the Senate Finance Committee and later, Attie who worked in Clinton’s White House and as a senior speechwriter for Al Gore.

O’DONNELL : The problem for a TV political drama is that the most important work in govern ment is the most difficult to film because it’s the most boring.

ATTIE: I was always trying to tell Aaron, speech writing’s not anywhere near as glamorous as you’re depicting it here. First of all, it’s Rob Lowe (Sam Seaborn). Second of all, women are swooning at his rhetoric. This is not something a speechwriter ever experienced, but that was the fun of it.

The writers focused on feeding ideas into the Sorkin supercomputer, which would spit out twenty-two cinematic episodes every season about White House senior staff finding love, purpose, and family in their work.

GRAVES: Aaron was like Mozart. I don’t think when he was on the show that there was ever a readthrough where you didn’t just end up being blown away.

REDFORD: Every time he’d deliver a script it was like Christmas. I so looked forward to reading those drafts because they were just flawless.

FALLS: Some mornings I’d follow his car onto the Warner’s lot and he’d be talking to himself. I knew he was going through the scenes in his head, acting them out, finding the musical rhythm.

To balance out the playwright-in-residence came Schlamme, Sorkin’s artistic director. Schlamme and his family had been fortunate enough to spend two nights in the Clinton White House. That visit had an enormous impact on his vision for the show.

SCHLAMME: I remember being outside the Oval Office. The doors open and Henry Cisneros, George Stephanopoulos, and a couple other people come out talking. I was thinking, “That meeting’s still going on.” They could have been ordering lunch, it didn’t matter to me. It felt like, “Oh my god, there’s so many things being juggled. It’s got to continue.” That was the impetus for the idea on the show that meetings never end.

CAHN: People don’t have time to stop and have a conversation. They’re always on their way some where. Everybody is doing three things at a time and thinking about nineteen.

Schlamme captured that essence with his “Walk and Talk” camera style—long Steadicam shots of charac ters drifting though endless winding hallways. He’d successfully used the technique before on The Larry Sanders Show and Sorkin’s Sports Night, but with cinematographer Thomas Del Ruth, he took it to a new level here.

SCHLAMME: I would be on set for hours when no one was there, doing dialogue, trying to figure out if you go through this door and out that door and then

you stop here, because this is an important beat that you’ve got to hear. The goal wasn’t to get it techni cally proficient. The goal was to get it performance proficient. Once we got it on its feet and did it where it all sort of flowed, I ran to Aaron’s office because I couldn’t wait to show him that this works.

That camera style appears in the first scene of the pilot.

SCHLAMME: This is where Leo (John Spencer) takes the audience by the hand and says, “I’m going to show you what this show is.”

It became a trademark of the show, but that didn’t make filming it any easier.

GRAVES: We used to do three-minute takes with fifty extras with props, lines, comedy, and surprises. Directors would come in and say it was going to be

great. You’d be like, “You’re not nervous enough.”

To design the show’s canvas, Schlamme and pro duction designer John Hutman blended existing White House floor plans, such as the Kennedy-era lobby, with their own blueprints, like replacing the Roosevelt Room’s plaster walls with floor-to-ceiling windows.

SCHLAMME : For the most part, there’s trans parency. That’s what we were trying to emotionally relate to. You see people across from people across from people. If you look at when Sam is talking out side the Roosevelt Room, C.J. (Allison Janney) is in the background going into Toby’s (Richard Schiff) office.

The Oval Office, however, demanded authentic ity. They found it in Simi Valley, where Schlamme tracked down a leftover set from Sorkin’s film, The

left President Bartlet is surrounded by his staff in one of the many iconic “Walk and Talk” scenes created by Schlamme, who was inspired by the idea that meetings never end.

opposite

With the idea of transparency in mind, the set designers opened the interior workspaces replacing solid walls with glass. They maintained, however, with precision, the realism of the iconic Oval Office.

American President.

O’DONNELL: I was stunned by the accuracy of the Oval Office. It was truly spooky because it really was the room. It had no ceiling and that stuff outside the windows was fake. But I realized right away, instantly, that this room is really what’s number one on the call sheet.

On the Warner Brothers lot, the actors brought Sorkin’s words and Schlamme’s vision to life.

REDFORD: They were all new to television but at the same time they were very experienced with their own processes, which they brought to Aaron’s writing.

O’DONNELL: I used to say that every script we sent down to that set they made better and they never changed a word.

GRAVES: One of the things I learned was not to direct them until they had acted. I would construct shots, but the flip side was John or Allison would do something that you never thought could happen and you’d throw out your whole shot list and redo the scene.

The producers reached out to some major Hollywood names to play President Jed Bartlet, making offers to Sidney Poitier and James Earl Jones. Neither expressed an interest.

REDFORD: One that got me excited, but I think he was already ill, was Jason Robards, if only because it would have drawn a direct line from The West Wing to All the President’s Men, which I think is the screen play, maybe more than any, that influenced Aaron in his writing about politics.

SCHLAMME: Hal Holbrook was cast for an eve ning. And then Aaron and I thought that’s not quite

right. Hal’s an extraordinary actor, but he wouldn’t be a person who owned a very expensive bike in the Northeast. We both felt we made a mistake, not about Hal, our mistake. And that’s when Martin Sheen entered the conversation.

Sheen’s personality, in certain ways, seemed to mir ror that of a president.

GRAVES: Martin liked to come in and shake every one’s hand on set and say, “How are you friend?” We would lose like fifteen minutes every time we brought Martin to set.

CAHN: It’s in one of the episodes. You can’t tear Bartlet away from a rope line. The fact that Martin found that kind of joy in making everyone feel wel come created a set environment where it stopped being a place where actors come to perform and turned into this thing that had everybody’s soul attached to it.

The casting of Communications Director Toby Ziegler presented a different obstacle: Two amazing actors, Schiff and Eugene Levy, were vying for the same role, from vastly different perspectives.

SCHLAMME: To get Richard to come back to read for the network was so out of the realm of, “You’re so lucky you get to read for the network.” This was not the way Richard saw it. He was like, “I don’t know if I’m going to show up.” All I could say to him was, “I certainly hope you do.” Eugene came in and was fascinating. He’s a really smart guy. I remember his network reading. He was sitting in a chair and I said, “Eugene are you ready? Let’s go.” And there was the longest pause and I thought, “Is this a choice?” You’re always scared to break the moment. I finally went, “So, Eugene, you have the first line. When you’re ready . . .”. He said, “I’m sorry. I was just contemplating a different profession.” It broke up the room.

Sometimes, an actor’s influence changes the course of their character.

REDFORD: Look at the pilot. C.J., ineptly flirting with someone at the gym, falls off the treadmill. It’s very classic and screwball, and you do not see that C.J. ever again. Allison came with such authority and natural ease that that wasn’t C.J. anymore.

Janel Moloney took her role as Donna Moss one step further.

O’DONNELL: There was no part there. Donna Moss was an assistant functionary who was going to help move Josh (Bradley Whitford) from one scene to another. But then Janel Moloney steps into the frame and steals the moment. She becomes some thing much more interesting than she is on the page. She was in effect forcing us to write to her.

GRAVES: There was a funny phrase the crew had: “Three and eight, we’re going late.” On the call sheet, Brad was three and Janel was eight. If they had a Josh and Donna scene there was going to be some work involved because there’d be a great take one, but the choreography wasn’t perfect, or we didn’t get a story nuance, so we’d go again. By the second sea son, you knew that somewhere between take 12 and 25 this thing was going to happen, a kind of kismet, magical, Hepburn and Tracy thing.

Richard Schiff, in the role of communications director Toby Zigler, is seen above on the set of the Roosevelt Room.

Actress Janel Moloney as staff assistant Donna Moss and Bradley Whitford as Josh Lyman had a Hepburn and Tracy chemistry.

Unfortunately, some characters failed to trans late from the page to the stage. Such proved the case with Lisa Edelstein’s character (female escort Brittany [“Laurie”] Rollins) and media consul tant Mandy Hampton (Moira Kelly).

O’DONNELL: Lisa’s character worked in the pilot but I didn’t see a reason to continue it unless she was going to grow into something else. Moira’s great but I knew right away that she had a prob lem. If the show is a workplace drama and you don’t work in the workplace, they’re going to run out of stories for you. It’s an absolute rule.

Every episode balanced multiple character sto rylines, some connected, some standing alone.

FALLS: What was most refreshing is Aaron didn’t want to lock into a network structure. A-story this, B-story that, cliff-hanger act-outs. A character didn’t have to be in every act and a story could take an act off. He gave credit to his audience that they were smart enough to follow.

CAHN: Because the characters were talking about the most important things in the world every second of their life, Aaron usually threw in some piece of profoundly insignificant life stuff. In the pilot, it’s Leo’s frustration with the misspelling in the cross word puzzle. That Aaron was able to metabolize both of those things at the same time gave his stories such a humanity.

The West Wing world proved similar yet different to our own.

REDFORD: I joke about it but the secret stakes of every West Wing were, we have to get a guy’s signa ture. It was the process—passing a law, making an executive order, starting a war. Something.

ATTIE: I always said the prototypical West Wing scene I think Aaron was aiming for was two smart principals, with totally different POVs [points of view], and both of them are right. Whereas the pro totypical Soprano’s scene was two dumb, deluded people arguing and they’re both wrong, which is

also really hard to write.The West Wing world proved similar yet different to our own POVs.

REDFORD: We arbitrarily decided there’d be this rip in the space-time continuum. I don’t even think we named the president who was before Bartlet until after Aaron left.

CAHN: Aaron didn’t need the audience to follow those kind of things. He needed the audience to believe in the authenticity of the environment they were in.

SCHLAMME: It’s a really brilliant hand-eye misdi rection. It gave us the liberty to make The West Wing not necessarily the way it looks today.

ATTIE: The writer’s room joke was that there was a Kennedy Center but it was named after George Kennedy.

FALLS : We even used fictional countries, like Qumar and Equatorial Kindu.

ATTIE: There’s an episode (“Dead Irish Writers”) where the border of Donna’s hometown is read justed so that she’s retroactively a Canadian citizen, which was an idea of mine that was kind of ridicu lous. Aaron just loved it, however. I remember Aaron pitching Tommy that story. Tommy said, “Is that real?” Aaron and I said at the exact same time, “Real enough.”

Sometimes, scripts ran short, like in the Season 1 episode, “In Excelsis Deo,” forcing Sorkin to add a last-minute monologue for the president’s secretary, Mrs. Landingham (Kathryn Joosten).

GRAVES: The pages come down and go around the set. It’s Mrs. Landingham talking about how her sons were killed on Christmas in Vietnam. I’m busy lining up the shot, so, I don’t read them immediately. Then I start to look around the set and everyone’s crying. The dolly grip’s crying. Catering is crying.

REDFORD: That’s one of the things I love about Aaron’s writing. They beat into every TV screenwriter that you can’t do moments like that. It’s a playwright who has an actor say it in one monologue. But what’s wrong with using that here if you have the actor to play it?

Once in a blue moon, an episode ran long, such as in the Season 3 finale, “Posse Comitatus,” in which the president greenlights the assassination of a foreign leader.

GRAVES: Aaron wrote a teaser where Bartlet cuts himself and takes a towel with the Presidential Seal on it and wipes off the blood. The last shot is the towel dropping and there’s blood on the seal. It’s fantastic but Tommy had to cut something. I was like, “If you cut that teaser I will kill myself and leave an ad and say it’s because of you.” I got over it.

No one however, ever touched the rhythm of Sorkin’s dialogues.

FALLS : Oliver Platt (Oliver Babbish) told me that when he met Aaron on his first day of shoot ing, Aaron said, “Have fun, make the role yours.” So Oliver goes back to his trailer with his script, scrib bles some word changes for his character, and then goes to sit and watch John and Martin rehearse. John says to Aaron, “Is it okay if I change ‘and’ to ‘but’ here?” Aaron looks at his script and gives him a respectful, “No.” Oliver went back to his trailer and learned his part as written.

CAHN: The cast became so used to that. The first time that I had a script shooting, Martin came up to me and said, “Can I talk to you for a second?” There was some line like “It’s going to be difficult” and Martin wanted to change it to “It is going to be dif ficult.” He asked me if that was okay. And I was like, “Martin Sheen, whatever you want is okay.”

For the most part, the network left the producers alone, and yet . . .

SCHLAMME: They did some focus groups when our ratings started to come down a little bit. I remember getting a note from them that maybe the president would get in a plane crash with the first lady and then he’d have to start dating.

Sorkin would accept any idea that intrigued him. The writers did lots of research to peak his interest.

REDFORD: Aaron made a vow early on that we all tried to abide by: that every episode would tell the audience something they never knew before about the White House. Like the term POTUS [president

President Bartlet with a cane after his MS diagnosis in Season 2.

of the United States]. In the pilot, nobody knows what POTUS is. That was a total bit of inside infor mation Aaron had picked up when he was doing research for The American President.

ATTIE: There was a historical anecdote I gave about the origin of red tape. After the Civil War, people’s pension documents were bound up in red tape. When widows would come to get the pen sions, they’d cut the tape to open their papers.

FALLS: I had a total Hail Mary. The president gets medical clearance to have sex with the first lady after his assassination attempt. It started out as a joke in the room, but I decided to pitch it to Aaron and then duck. He initially hated it, then came around. It turned into a hilarious scene between Martin and Stockard Channing in the episode “And It’s Surely to Their Credit.”

REDFORD: I burst the origin of Bartlet’s whole MS [multiple sclerosis] story, his secret deal with

the first lady to hide it, and his not running for a second term because then the MS would start to become symptomatic. That’s all based on real his tory. Bartlet’s MS was the story of hiding FDR’s polio. Harry Truman had a deal with Bess Truman not to seek another term because Bess hated the White House.

O’Donnell and Attie mined their Capitol Hill experi ences to help trigger ideas.

ATTIE: There was a storyline in “Swiss Diplomacy” about Josh being squeezed by his former bosses and feeling like everyone was guilting him about his alle giances. That was based on my experiences with [Dick] Gephardt and [Al]Gore, when both of them were looking to run in 2000.

O’DONNELL: The episode Debora wrote about appointing judges (“The Supremes”) was taken directly from some points I made about the unique approach Senator Moynihan had for appointing judges. He’d made a deal with the Republican senator from his state that even when there was a Democratic president, the Republican senator would always get a share of judicial appointments as long as Senator Moynihan always got a share of judicial appointments when there was a Republican pres ident. This worked out fabulously well for Senator Moynihan when we went through twelve years of Republican presidents.

Political consultants, like Gene Sperling, Dee Dee Myers, Pat Caddell, and Marlin Fitzwater also added to the idea cauldron or answered questions.

CAHN: I talked to four different former chiefs of staff for an episode I did about C.J.’s first day as chief of staff (“Liftoff”). The luxury of getting four of those people on the phone was just outrageous.

FALLS: The best consultants are the ones who say, “Well, it wouldn’t go down like that. But here’s a way around your problem that gets you to the same place.” Our consultants were hardwired like that already. Afterall, their job is politics and governing.

Much as the writers loved interacting with real poli ticians, so too did the actors.

SCHLAMME: Clinton came to visit and said he would use the Roosevelt Room more if it was like this because it felt open and available.

GRAVES: Madeleine Albright would come by when we were shooting in Washington and be like, “Alex you should do a story about what’s going on with AIDS in Africa.” And I’d be like, “Sure, Madeleine Albright.”

The actors loved talking politics, too.

ATTIE: Brad was always obsessed with real poli tics. I remember starting to get more interested in Hollywood and going to the set one day with a copy of Variety tucked under one arm. Brad came up to me in between takes and said he woke up in the mid dle of the night worrying about the deficit projections and I’m literally trying to hide my Variety.

At the end of the fourth season, Schlamme and Sorkin left, leaving Wells as show-runner. He wasted little time leaving his imprint.

REDFORD: The head of the network came to hear our pitches for Season 5 and said, “Whatever you do, please don’t do that Middle East story. We’ve done

all the polling and the public does not want any story about the Middle East.” After he left, Wells turned to the room and said, “We’re doing the story about the Middle East.”

GRAVES: I was at Camp David filming an episode and they said John John (Wells) is going to fly out and have dinner with you. I thought, am I being fired? He said they had this idea that maybe we would run again with two new candidates. What happens a lot on campaigns is that the current White House will fragment to support candidates running. If we do that we could depict the campaign process in a way we never have.

The two candidates ended up being moderate repub lican Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) and democratic minority candidate Matthew Santos (Jimmy Smits).

O’DONNELL: There were different possibilities of where this character (Santos) could go but once it was definitely going to be Jimmy Smits, I started to think about Henry Cisneros because I wanted to think about the reality of a Hispanic politician rising to that level.

ATTIE: I had to write the first two full episodes in

Republican presidential candidate Arnold Vinick (played by Alan Alda) and Democratic candidate Matthew Santos (played by Jimmy Smits) meet with President Bartlet in the Oval Office during Season 7.

Sorkin added interior windows to the Roosevelt Room, a conference room just outside of the Oval Office, opening up the space.

which we really fleshed out the character, so I was looking for any kind of analogue. This is in early ’04. Obama was still a state legislator but already a phenomenon. I’d read in the New York Times that my old friend David Axelrod was his strategist. So, I called David, and he told me a bunch of stories about what life was like for Obama when he exploded as a candidate.

The death of Spencer and seven years on television brought the show to a graceful conclusion in 2006. Sixteen years later, the show continues to resonate.

O’DONNELL: I thought the mission of the show was to be entertaining television. It turns out there were some kids who found their lives in that show and went on to become a speechwriting team for Barack Obama.

FALLS: The most rewarding thing wasn’t how the show elevated me professionally. No, it’s when I hear people say they were inspired by the show to get into government.

CAHN: This whole generation of people exists who are now policy wonks working in D.C. because they wanted to grow up and be these people.

O’DONNELL: I find myself not just impressed with the show but in awe of it, that it could deliver that kind of inspiration to people who would then do something at the highest level of government.

notes

Author’s interviews with Eli Attie, July 12 and 18, 2022; Debora Cahn, August 25, 2022; Kevin Falls, email message, July 18 and 27, 2022; Alex Graves, July 23, 2022; Lawrence O’Donnell, July 26, 2022 and August 11, 2022; Paul Redford; June 14 and 16, 2022; and Thomas Schlamme, April 15, 2022.

come

Getting to Sesame Street With the FIRST LADIES

DIANA BARTELLI CARLIN

Can you tell me how to get, how to get from Sesame Street to the White House?

take an 8-foot canary, several endearing puppets known as Muppets, animation mixed with live videos of a diverse group of preschoolers, catchy tunes often resembling advertising jingles, a cast of human characters in a welcoming neigh borhood, and an ordinary looking street—and what you have is a formula for one of the most enduring and successful examples of television’s power to teach as well as entertain. Sesame Street, through its beloved characters, has long found a place in the White House that cuts across political party lines. Sherrie Westin, current president of the nonprofit Sesame Workshop and a member of the George H. W. Bush administration, explains why the partner ship works: “I think it’s been because we’ve always focused on the needs of young children, and so that’s not a partisan issue. That’s something we can all agree on. I think it’s because we’ve stayed true to our mission and focused on what is in the best interest of preschoolers, and with particular pro grams, it is a natural alignment. There is no politi cal focus on one administration over another.”1

When Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969, it was the product of a collaboration between award-winning documentary producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist and Carnegie Corporation vice president. Inspired by a dinner party conversation about Morrisett’s daughter’s infatuation with television—including the test patterns ahead of the real show—the two set out to answer this question: Do you think tele vision could be used to teach young children?2 At the time, Carnegie was funding research on early childhood education, especially for children from disadvantaged environments who were unpre pared for school success. Through Carnegie fund ing, Cooney consulted with experts on television’s teaching potential and created a concept that has educated children and helped adults educate chil dren, including through White House collabora tions, for more than fifty years. [?]

The rich history of the intersection of Sesame Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue demon strates the ongoing commitment of presidents and first ladies to children and their recognition of television’s power to enhance that commitment. Cast and characters’ visits to White House holiday parties and special events align with Sesame Street’s mission to promote literacy and basic math and sci ence skills. Appearances by first ladies on the show enhance the show’s mission and advance White

House projects. Even after presidential families leave the White House, collaborations continue.

THE BEGINNINGS

Less than two months after Sesame Street first aired, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, counselor to the presi dent and member of the Domestic Policy Council, sent a memorandum to President Richard Nixon’s staff secretary with a suggestion that began the long relationship between the children’s televi sion show and the White House. Moynihan wrote: “The new program called Sesame Street on National Educational Television has already shown itself to be so popular and so well done that I think the President would want to send a note to its director. We would be happy to provide additional informa tion if you like.”3

Three weeks later, Nixon sent a letter to Cooney:

The many children and families now benefiting from Sesame Street are participants in one of the most promising experiments in the history of that medium. The Children’s Television Workshop certainly deserves the high praise it has been getting from young and old alike in every corner of the nation.

This administration is enthusiastically committed to opening up opportunities for every youngster, particularly during his first five years of life, and is pleased to be among the sponsors of your distinguished program.4

This letter was not a perfunctory congratulatory message. Moynihan, an academic, understood the show’s potential societal impact. The administra tion’s proponents included First Lady Pat Nixon, whose office arranged for the first Sesame Street White House visit. One memorandum indicated that Mrs. Nixon’s staff requested a performance by several Muppets, but Sesame Street staff thought they were too small to be seen by the large crowd and offered Big Bird and possibly Oscar the Grouch.5 The White House news release about the event provided background on the show’s develop ment and mission and announced, “Sesame Street, TV’s gift to children, will be a special Christmas gift for the children attending the annual Diplomatic Children’s Party on Tuesday, December 22 [1970], at the White House.”6 The five hundred attend ees were treated to a twenty-minute program in the East Room. The event produced an iconic

opposite Big Bird meets First Lady Pat Nixon on his first visit to the White House, December 1970.

previous spread First Lady Barbara Bush was the first first lady to appear on Sesame Street. She is seen here in Episode 2660 with Big Bird, the Count, and children reading Peter’s Chair, 1989.

First Lady Michelle Obama, seen here with Elmo in 2013, often welcomed the muppets to the White House.

RICHARD

LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

photograph of a smiling Pat Nixon looking up at Big Bird while holding one of his feathers. President Nixon sent a thank-you letter to Jason L. Levine, director of public relations for the Children’s Television Workshop, describing the performance as “a special pleasure” and “a highlight of our party for Diplomatic Children.”7

The next three administrations—Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—followed the Nixons’ lead and provided a venue for the program to display its special brand of tested learning strat egies in a spotlight only the White House can pro vide. Sesame Street appeared at the 1976 and 1978 Diplomatic Corps children’s party and at a chil dren’s holiday program during the Reagan admin istration. The Reagans also included Muppets and their human friends as part of the annual Easter Egg Roll. With hundreds of children in attendance and media coverage, the Easter Egg Roll is a natu ral event for collaborations. In addition to eggs to roll, there are books for characters and cast to read, games to play, and songs to perform.

It was during the Reagan administration that the show’s cultural and diplomatic power were emphasized. Prior to attending a summit in Geneva

with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation from the Oval Office. In describing his hopes for his “mission of peace,” he expressed the belief that greater trust could be built on personal contact between ordinary citizens of both countries. He imagined what it would be like if, for example, “peo ple in our Nation could see the Bolshoi Ballet again, while Soviet citizens could see American plays and hear groups like the Beach Boys. And how about Soviet children watching Sesame Street.”8 Today, children in former Soviet states along with children in 150 countries, including thirty with international versions, are watching Sesame Street

Big Bird is greeted by First Lady Betty Ford and First Lady Rosalynn Carter (above) on return holiday visits to the White House to entertain children of the Diplomatic Corps in 1976 and 1978, and he dances with muppets in the East Room during a holiday children’s party hosted by First Lady Nancy Reagan (opposite).

TOP LEFT: GERALD R. FORD PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

RIGHT: JIMMY CARTER PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

RONALD REAGAN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

BARBARA BUSH : ANOTHER LEVEL

If Sesame Street were tailor made for collaboration with a single administration, it would be that of George H. W. Bush. With First Lady Barbara Bush’s emphasis on literacy and establishment in 1989 of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, the continued partnership was all but guaranteed. Mrs. Bush chose literacy as her emphasis because she connected many of the domestic problems her husband’s administration confronted, such as pov erty, addiction, and crime, to a lack of literacy, an inability to “read, write and comprehend.” 9 The Bush administration’s commitment was sealed in 1991 with passage of the National Literacy Act, which assists adults in completing secondary school enabled adults to return to school. [?] While Sesame Street is for preschoolers, Westin explained that “part of the genius of Joan Ganz Cooney was that she deliberately had [adult] music and humor, and she knew the learning would be deeper if an adult were watching as well as the child.”10 [?] Mrs. Bush’s foundation emphasizes the family role in literacy for both children and adults, and Sesame

First Lady Barbara Bush is joined by Count von Count and Big Bird as she reads to children on the set of Sesame Street, 1989

SPREAD: GEORGE H. W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

This photograph of Kermit the Frog with President-elect Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton made front page news. The Clintons are seen singing with Kermit during a pre-inaugural children’s event at the Kennedy Center, January 19, 1993.

Street reinforces that dynamic.

The White House–Sesame Street partnerships expanded to the production itself when Barbara Bush, surrounded by Muppets and neighborhood children, appeared on the show reading Peter’s Chair by Ezra Jack Keats. She later lent her sing ing talents to the documentary Sing! Sesame Street Remembers Joe Raposo and His Music by joining in for a rendition of “Sing.” Mrs. Bush’s appear ance began a tradition that continued through the Barack Obama administration.

THE CLINTON YEARS

Even before Bill Clinton was officially president, he and Hillary Rodham Clinton signaled their inten tions to partner with Sesame Street. As part of the preinaugural activities, they hosted an Inaugural Celebration for Children at the Kennedy Center that featured Kermit, Gonzo, and Rizzo. The con cert ended with a group sing during which puppe teer Steve Whitmire “crouched down behind the Clintons, perching Kermit up on Hillary’s shoul der as they sang. The camera held for a minute or

so on this scene, and an AP photo of Kermit on Hillary’s shoulder appeared on front pages around the nation,” reported the website Muppet Wiki [?]. Two years later, Hillary Clinton hosted Big Bird and Alice Snuffleupagus among the sculptures in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden to call attention to the value of public broadcasting at a time when federal funding for public television was under fire in Congress.11 She appeared on the show in 1993 to talk about healthy life-styles, and her photograph with Big Bird appeared on the cover of TV Guide

The Clinton years saw the highly popular book series about careers featuring Muppets add I Want to Be President, by Michaela Muntean. It follows Muppet Betty Lou’s imaginary rise to the presi dency after being inspired by watching the “real” president give a speech. In the book, Betty Lou performs many of the typical presidential tasks, including hosting the Easter Egg Roll. In 1995, in a demonstration of the show’s importance and impact, President Clinton presented Joan Ganz Cooney with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in an East Room ceremony.

First Lady Laura Bush meets cast members from Galli Galli Sim Sim, the Indian version of Sesame Street, at their studio on the outskirts of New Delhi, March 2006.

IMAGES

Mrs. Bush talks with Egyptian Sesame Street character Khokha before taping a segment in Giza, May 2005.

Mrs. Bush laughs with Big Bird and Elmo while taping Sesame Street in New York, 2002. The children, Sydney Martines and Sienna Jefferies, read a book with Mrs. Bush for the show “Reading Fundamentals: Books, and Cultural Appreciation.”

THE GEORGE W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION

If the first Bush administration elevated the stature of Sesame Street and further enhanced the mutual benefits of collaborations, the sec ond Bush administration went even further; The George W. Bush administration’s priorities included a portfolio of educational initiatives. Both the president and First Lady Laura Bush saw the value of using Sesame Street characters when they rolled out an early childhood learning program called Ready to Learn. In his remarks, President Bush made humorous references to the letter “W,” in the same way the show teaches individual letters, by joking that his mother used to say, “The trouble with W.”12 [?] Laura Bush, a former teacher and librarian who also stressed literacy, often included cast and characters at the National Book Festival, which she co-founded in 2001 with Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. Sesame Street char acters also read, sang, and greeted attendees at the annual Easter Egg Roll. The Bushes invited char acters to join them at children’s holiday receptions and Christmas tree lightings. In 2002, in an Oval Office ceremony, President George W. Bush pre sented Cooney with a second award, the National Endowment for Humanities National Humanities Medal.

The Bushes also recognized Sesame Street’s growing worldwide influence, and Laura Bush was

at the forefront of promoting the program’s global reach. The alignment between Sesame Street val ues and White House priorities focused on two issues—education and literacy, and global health— according to Mrs. Bush’s former chief of staff, Anita McBride. McBride noted that the long-standing relationship with the program brought Sesame Street “to the White House to create these char acters around these two issues to be inaugurated or established or unveiled in several countries.”

Through visits to India, Pakistan, and Egypt, Mrs. Bush found a way “to amplify the foreign policy objectives of global education and global health, particularly in India where the marginalized pop ulation would see these characters on TV who were not from the upper crust of society. It was helpful in breaking some barriers,” said McBride. 13 [?]

Back in Washington, on May 9, 2006, Mrs. Bush and Jordan’s Queen Rania Al-Abdullah posed with Elmo and Khokha, a Muppet from the Egyptian program, to highlight the Mosaic Foundation’s [?] partnership with Sesame Workshop that aimed to expand the program in the Arab world.14 Mrs. Bush wrote about her international work with Sesame Street in her memoir Spoken from the Heart. Her visit to Alam Simsim, the Egyptian co-production of Sesame Street, reached “85 percent of Egypt’s pre schoolers and 54 percent of their mothers. . . . An appearance there had the potential to reach more ordinary citizens than high-level summitry.”15

THE OBAMA YEARS

The first first couple to grew up watching Sesame Street were the Obamas. Mrs. Obama relished her experiences with the characters at the White House and on the set. She called her first appearance on the show, on May 9, 2009, “probably the best thing I’ve done so far in the White House,” even though she had met Queen Elizabeth II and was speaking at the United Nations that same day.16 Her appear ance taught kids how to plant a garden like hers at the White House and emphasized the importance of nutrition and healthy eating. Five years later she appeared again discussing the importance of a healthy breakfast with Grover. In 2011 she and Dr. Jill Biden, the wife of the vice president, appeared to promote Joining Forces, a White House initiative to support military families [?] Elmo and Grover

each visited the White House to promote healthy eating, and Big Bird was at the White House to tape one of two public service announcements promot ing the Mrs. Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to curb childhood obesity. Elmo and Rosita joined the first lady in the State Dining Room for a news conference about the campaign as part of Sesame Workshop’s decision to allow the Muppets to help market fruits and vegetables to children.

In 2019 Mrs. Obama received the Joan Ganz Cooney Award at the Sesame Workshop fund-rais ing gala as part of the program’s fiftieth anniver sary celebration. Commenting on growing up with the show and watching her daughters do the same, she described the program as “genius, all of it—not just feel-good TV but some of the smartest, savviest developmental tools you can offer your child.”17

Clockwise from left: Elmo joins Mrs. Michelle Obama for a “Let’s Move” announcement in the East Room, 2013; Mrs. Obama reads with Miss Piggy during the 2015 Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony; and Kermit the Frog joins Mrs. Obama prior to a screening of Disney’s “Muppets Most Wanted” movie as part of the Joining Forces initiative.

above

President and Mrs. Barack Obama pose with children and guests who joined in the 2016 harvest of the White House Kitchen Garden. Among the guests are Elmo and Rosita, astronaut Kjell Lindgren, NBC’s Al Roker and Sam Kass, and basketball star Alonzo Mourning, right

Rosita helps Mrs. Obama harvest broccoli in the White House Kitchen Garden, 2013.

POST–WHITE HOUSE COLLABORATIONS

Presidents and first ladies remain in the public eye long after they leave the White House and, through their foundations, continue their public service. Connections made while in office often continue as well, including those with Sesame Street. Laura Bush and Rosalynn Carter supported a USO–Sesame Street partnership started in 2008 to pro vide resources for military families that inspired the creation of the character Katie, who tours with the USO show. In 2017, Laura Bush recorded “A Special Message from a Sesame Friend” for mil itary families, acknowledging the difficult tran sitions children can face with a parent’s deploy ment or return.18 The Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving (RCI) partnered with Sesame Workshop’s Operation Family Caregiver (OFC), a program designed for the needs of military fami lies. As a former military wife with young children, Rosalynn Carter could relate to the project.19

After leaving the White House, Laura Bush, together with Hillary Clinton, continued sup port of Sesame Workshop through Georgetown University’s U.S.–Afghan Women’s Council, serving as honorary co-chairs with Afghanistan’s first lady, Rula Ghani. Sesame Workshop’s Westin is a council member. Through their efforts, Sesame Workshop completed a project in Afghanistan started during the Bush administration. McBride, another council member, noted, “We knew from the data, obviously, from our own country the impact that this kind of program had on young kids for lifelong learning,” and it enabled the council and Sesame Workshop to “convey [messages] on global health, global lit eracy, access to education, and conflict resolution at young ages.”20

Current First Lady Jill Biden began her Sesame Street partnership when she was second lady. Westin noted that “Dr. Biden continued working on military families through the Biden Foundation and was an advisor for another one of our military family initiatives that helped military families tran sition back into civilian life and dealt with caregiv ers, which is such an important issue in terms of children’s well-being. . . . I hope that we will be able to work with her again on Joining Forces.”21 Dr. Biden appeared from the White House in ABC’s documentary on Sesame Street’s impact, 50 Years of Sunny Days, which aired April 26, 2021. In a

Zoom-like conversation with Muppet Rosita about the pandemic, Dr. Biden told Rosita there was room for optimism about life starting to return to normal. She was also shown in a clip on the show’s importance during a time when children were learning virtually.

Sesame Workshop took on the nation’s addic tion problem through a new Muppet named Karli, whose mother suffered from addiction. Workshop researchers contacted the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, a nonprofit addiction treatment cen ter, for advice, Westin said.22 Mrs. Ford had helped launch the foundation’s children’s program in 1983.23

One of the Clinton Foundation’s areas of empha sis is improving public health. In alignment with Sesame Street priorities, former President Bill Clinton assisted with World AIDS Day for UNICEF in 2006 by engaging in a conversation with Muppet Kami, who is HIV positive. Kami asked Clinton if he would “tell everybody that it is okay to hug someone who is HIV positive like me.” The former president assured her he would pass along the message and gave her a hug.24 Senator Hillary Clinton recorded a message with Elmo and Rosita for the Healthy Habits for Life initiative in 2005, and in 2014 she was featured in an episode of Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN program, discussing early childhood learn ing and why Sesame Street works with Rosemarie Truglio from Children’s Television Workshop [?] 25

below During her husband’s vice presidency, Jill Biden joins Sesame Street characters for a USO and Sesame Street event honoring National Guard members and their families, in 2011.

above Dr. Biden is accompanied by Sheep-ret Service agents on the set of Sesame Street, 2022.

THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS

It is doubtful that Moynihan, Nixon, or even Cooney and Morrisett, imagined what Sesame Street has become. It has reached far beyond its original target audience to a much broader world audience, including, most recently, a new initiative for children in refugee camps. Children learn more than letters and numbers or how to be kind to one another. They tackle some of the thorniest socie tal problems impacting children’s lives, including divorce, homelessness, foster care, addiction, and race relations. The relationship with the White House has evolved as well. According to Westin, “The power of our influence when you have the first lady [or president] on the show is about raising awareness of an issue through the lens of a child. But raising that awareness with an adult as well, which is a really powerful opportunity.”26

As new residents occupy the White House over the next decades and Sesame Street addresses new issues, neither will pass up powerful opportunities to educate the nation’s and world’s children, and bring a few adults along with them.

notes

The author thanks Nicholas Herold, archivist at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, for assistance in locating documents; Nancy Kegan Smith, former director of the

Presidential Materials Division of the National Archives and Records Administration, for assistance in researching electronic archives and for editorial comments on drafts; Anita McBride and Sherrie Westin for granting interviews; and her husband G. Joseph Pierron for editorial advice.

The epigraph of this article is adapted from the Sesame Street theme song, “Sunny Days.”

1. Sherrie Westin, telephone interview by author, March 9, 2021.

2. Michael Davis, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 15.

3. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, memorandum to staff secretary, January 7, 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Papers, Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, Calif., available online at www.nixonlibrary.gov.

4. Richard M. Nixon to Joan Ganz Cooney, January 28, 1970, Moynihan Papers, ibid.

5. [?] Stuart to Lucy Winchester, [?] Murray, and PN [?] Press Staff, November 23, 1970, folder Diplomatic Children’s Party (THIS) [?] December 22, 1970, [?] box 7, White House Central Files: Staff Member and Office Files, Nixon Library.

6. Press release, Office of the Staff Director to Mrs. Nixon, December 10, 1970, folder 12/22/70– [?] Diplomatic Children’s Christmas Party, box 86, White House Central Files: Staff Member and Office Files, First Lady’s Press Office, Nixon Library.

7. Richard Nixon to Jason L. Levine, January 4, 1971, folder EX SO 6, Receptions 1/1/71–1/31/71, box 20, White House Central Files, Subject Files: SO [Social Affairs], Nixon Library.

8. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on the Upcoming SovietUnited States Summit Meeting in Geneva,” November 14, 1985, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, Simi Valley, Calif., available online at www.reaganlibrary.gov.

9. “About Us: Access for Opportunity for All,” Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy website, www.barbarabush.org.

10. Westin interview.

11. “Hillary Clinton,” n.d., Muppet Wiki website, www.muppet. fandom.com.

12. Press release, The White House, “President and Mrs. Bush Promote Early Childhood Education Initiative,” April 3, 2002, www.georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov.

13. Anita B. McBride, telephone interview by author, March 8, 2021.

14. Press release, The White House, “Mrs. Bush’s Remarks at the Mosaic Foundation’s Ninth Annual Benefit Gala,” May 9, 2006, www.georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov. [?]

15. Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart (New York: Scribner, 2010), 324.

16. NBC News, “First Lady: ‘Sesame Street’ Tops Everything So Far,” May 5, 2009, www.nbcnews.com. [?]

17. Michelle Obama, “Remarks of Michelle Obama at Sesame Street’s 50th Anniversary Benefit Dinner,” May 29, 2019, transcript and video online at www.sesameworkshop.org.

18. Oname Thompson, “Former First Lady Laura Bush Records Message for Sesame Street for Military Families,” August 31, 2017, video on USO website, www.uso.org.

19. Press release, Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers, “RCI, Sesame Workshop Reporting for Duty to Support Military Kids,” May 6, 2020, www.rosalynncarter.org.

McBride interview.

Westin interview.

Ibid.

Press release, Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, “Hazelden Betty Ford Expert Is Key Advisor on New Sesame Workshop Initiative,” October 10, 2019, www.hazeldenbettyford.org.

24. “President Clinton and Muppet Kami Share HIV/AIDS Message,” December 1, 2006, UNICEF video, www.youtube.com.

25. “What Sesame Street Really Teaches,” September 30, 2014, CNN video, www.youtube.com.

Westin interview.

THE REALISM OF Designated Survivor : A Story of Presidential Succession and Set Design

COLLEEN SHOGAN

the abc-turned-netflix political drama Designated Survivor aired for only three seasons, yet this television show garnered consider able attention for its fast-paced portrayal of a national doomsday scenario. The pilot episode, which in 2016 debuted to more than 10 million viewers, depicted the complete destruction of the United States Capitol Building during the State of the Union Address, invoking the elevation of the lone “designated survivor” in the presidential line of succession. Enter Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Tom Kirkman (played by actor Kiefer Sutherland), who finds himself the new president of the United States following the most devastating terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. As reality sets in, Kirkman realizes he faces the daunting prospect of reconsti tuting the leadership of the entire federal government.

CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHENTICITY

Understanding the critical importance of portray ing the situation as realistically as possible, the producers, directors, and writers of Designated Survivor aimed to capture the intense drama of the moment while making sure the script reflected actual practice and procedure. The “designated survivor” protocol is far from fiction. When politi cal leaders who occupy the line of presidential suc cession gather together, such as during the annual State of the Union or the inaugural ceremonies, a designated survivor must be chosen. The person must fulfill the constitutional requirements of the presidency, notably being at least 35 years of age and a United States born citizen. Designated survivors have existed since the 1960s, but their identities have been made public only since 1984. The first publicly known designated survivor was Samuel R. Pierce, who was, coincidentally, the secretary of housing and urban development. The most frequent cabinet member selected for “des ignated survivor” status is the secretary of the

interior, followed by the secretaries of agriculture, commerce, veterans affairs, and energy.1

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the operational protocol concerning the designated survivor changed to reflect the increased likeli hood of a potential doomsday scenario. Instead of remaining in the Washington, D.C., area, the selected cabinet official is relocated to a secure site away from the nation’s capital.2 This practice is at odds with the portrayal of events in the pilot episode of Designated Survivor, which includes a poignant scene in which Tom Kirkman watches the Capitol burn from a location across the river, likely the Virginia suburb of Arlington. For planning purposes, the designated survivor is also selected days ahead of time, enabling the Secret Service to coordinate strategic movements with the chosen cabinet member. In the pilot episode, Kirkman finds out the day of the State of the Union Address that he has been selected as the designated survivor.

For the past decade, a “designated survivor” pro tocol for succession has been implemented not only

above

The fictional designated survivor, Tom Kirkman, watches the U.S. Capitol burn from a location across the Potomac River in Virginia. In reality, designated survivors are relocated beyond the D.C. Metropolitan Area for the duration of the official event for which they have been safeguarded.

previous spread

The ruins of the U.S. Capitol are seen in episode one of Designated Survivor (left) and Keifer Sutherland is seen on set as President Kirkman (right).

below

On his second day in office, President Kirkman is joined by his wife in the Oval Office as he researches constitutional law.

within the executive branch but also the legislative branch. Designated Survivor gets this detail right. Early in the season, Tom Kirkman learns that he has a partner in rebuilding the government, namely the new Speaker of the House, Kimble Hookstraten (played by actress Virginia Madsen). The legislative branch designee is selected by the leadership of the opposition party, ensuring that the party not occu pying the White House has an elected leader with a legitimate voice as the government is reconsti tuted. For example, in 2018, Speaker Nancy Pelosi selected Representatives Mike Thompson and Doris Matsui to serve in this capacity, and therefore, they did not attend the State of the Union speech that year. 3

The presidential line of succession, as outlined in United States Code, Title 3, Chapter 1, Section 19, is not without controversy. According to the stat ute, if both the president and vice president cannot fulfill their duties, then the Speaker of the House becomes president. The next elected leader in the line of succession is the president pro tempore of the Senate. After that, the appointed cabinet sec retaries follow, from the order in which the depart ments were originally created, with the secretary of

state as the first official on the list.4 President Harry S. Truman strongly advocated for the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, which returned members of Congress to the line of succession and placed them ahead of cabinet secretaries. Truman felt that members of Congress belonged higher in the line of succession since their governing authority originates from democratic elections rather than appointments. Some legal scholars question the constitutionality of the law, citing that an “officer” for succession purposes (Article 2, Section 1) refers to either judicial or executive branch officials, not to legislators.5 However, none of these issues mat ter within the fictional plot of Designated Survivor since every person in the statutory line of succes sion was killed by the destruction of the Capitol, except Housing and Urban Development Secretary Tom Kirkman.

Later in the series, President Kirkman finds himself embroiled in a controversy involving the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. In the second season, the newly appointed and confirmed vice president and cabinet secretaries question Kirkman’s mental fitness for office after audio notes from his therapy sessions are mysteriously leaked to the American public. According to Section 4 of the amendment, the vice president and a majority of cabinet mem bers can invoke a claim of disability concerning the president. Ultimately, if the president disputes the claim of disability, Congress decides the mat ter within twenty-one days, requiring a two-thirds vote in both houses to remove the president from office. The disability clause is intended to address the circumstance of a president who is seriously wounded or mentally incapacitated, providing a constitutional procedure other than impeachment to remove a president from office.

However, Designated Survivor made some errors in its Twenty-Fifth Amendment storyline. In the show, a conversation between President Kirkman and the vice president incorrectly states that once the cabinet voted to declare the president incapacitated, the president would be removed from office permanently. The actual the process for removal of a president is much more complex, however, as detailed above. Popular Hollywood depictions have often gotten the thorny details of Section 4 wrong, leading some viewers to believe incorrectly that removal under the provisions of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is simpler than it is.6

The Designated Survivor Oval Office set is seen under construction (opposite) and completed (above). The set decorators endeavored to build an accurate recreation of the historic space by researching and carefully replicating measurements, moldings, and fixtures. The set was also designed to accommodate a wide array of camera angles.

SET DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE

In addition to focusing on constitutional procedure related to presidential succession, disability, and removal, Designated Survivor aimed for an authen tic looking set design and architecture. The show was shot in Toronto on a television production stage built to replicate the West Wing. The design team, led by production designer Cabot McMullen, made three separate research trips to Washington, D.C., before building the set. The final trip included a visit to the Oval Office inside the White House. McMullen explained how he utilized his time inside the West Wing to improve plans for the set.

I wasn’t allowed to take photos in the West Wing, so I walked around with a sketchpad and drew little details as fast and as furiously as I could. . . .Doors are quite short and the ventilation is archaic, but somehow, it creates this overall aesthetic—like walking through a working environment and a museum all at once 7

The set decorator, Enrico Campana, engaged

in considerable research about the history of the White House. He obtained historical architec tural plans from White House files so the design ers could match the dimensions of the moldings and fixtures on the set to the actual Oval Office. McMullen claimed that the Designated Survivor set “is probably the most accurate version of it on TV right now.”8

The accuracy is vitally important, since other television shows, such as The West Wing, Madam Secretary, House of Cards, and Veep have made exclusive locations such as the White House seem familiar to viewers, even if they have never seen the actual building in real life. McMullen explained, “You have to start from a place of complete realism.”9

The set had to also accommodate filming and camera placement, so in addition to accuracy, there needed to be room for a wide array of shots from various angles. Corridors, entrances, and other walls needed to accommodate the maneuverability of cameras, actors, and others working on the set. This made the construction of sets involving White House locations a legitimate design jigsaw puzzle,

with the goal of maximizing reality while simulta neously guaranteeing functionality. Building the office itself was challenging, given its unusual archi tectural oval shape.10

It is difficult to match the decor of the Designated Survivor version of the Oval Office to a particular president because the design created by the show’s experts deliberately blended elements from a vari ety of administrations. The monochromatic color palette of the Ronald Reagan years was adopted, while drapery from Franklin Roosevelt’s Oval Office was imitated. The designers used the geo metric wall patterns of the Barack Obama White House as an inspiration for the lattice pattern used in President Kirkman’s office. McMullen and his team located a rug in an antique shop that had been used to film The Kennedys miniseries. The propor tions fit the replica Designated Survivor Oval Office precisely, and only the Presidential Seal needed to be added.11

Hilbert Hakim, the longest serving producer for

Designated Survivor, explained the rationale for creating a realistic set of the White House: “A set is not just a space or backdrop, but an important visual supporting character. Just like a film score that helps set the emotion and pace of a scene, a good set design can be transformative and inspir ing.” Since the White House’s Oval Office is indeed one of the most recognizable spaces in the world, the challenge for set designers increases exponen tially. According to Hakim, the goal of the design was to “create the most authentic White House set possible.” 12[?]

The show’s production team consulted regularly with the White House Historical Association as set designs for particular White House rooms were crafted. Alexandra Lane, the Association’s director of digital resources, explained, “If they had ques tions about how the rooms should be depicted, or what pieces were in the rooms, we were able to generate image albums for them based upon the Association’s research. They relied on images of

The Designated Survivor Oval Office set blended elements of the decor from several presidencies, including the monochromatic color of the Reagan era.

The set designers were inspired by the geometric wallpaper pattern of the Barack Obama Oval Office. A Presidential Seal was added to a rug previously used to decorate an Oval Office set for The Kennedys miniseries.

past presidencies and how the White House looked, so we were able to provide them with photos and illustrations, too.”13

The Association’s Digital Library proved the most valuable resource for the set designers.14 According to Lane, many of the show’s designers created Digital Library accounts so they could gather images and other materials that might be helpful when attempting to replicate a room in the White House.15 In addition to serving as historical consultants, Association staff members provided those working on the set with images of artwork that has hung in the White House. A good example is the high-resolution file of the painting, Signing of the Peace Protocol Between Spain and the United States, August 12, 1898 by Théobald Chartran (1899) in the White House Cabinet Room. After obtaining the digital file and signing a contract with the White House Historical Association, the production designers printed the image on canvas, framed it, and placed the replica artwork in the

appropriate place on set.

The replication of various White House rooms often had to occur within a matter of only two or three days after a script was released. Such a short turnaround timeframe meant that the Association’s support of the show played a critical role. Once the desired artwork was identified, it was crucial for contracts for use were processed almost imme diately so that set construction could commence. Hakim commented on the working relationship between the White House Historical Association and the show’s production team: “The Association was hugely instrumental in creating a sense of real ism about the White House for us.”16 [?]

The White House Historical Association also pro vided the Designated Survivor team with early plans for the construction of the United States Capitol, assisting plot development for scenes in which FBI Special Agent Hannah Wells (portrayed by Maggie Q) seeks to identify the true perpetrators of the bombing.

While making sets look as realistic as possible

left The Situation Room as it appears on Designated Survivor.

opposite

The sets created for Designated Survivor were based on actual rooms and furnishings in the White House. Clockwise from top left: the Situation Room; the Treaty Room (the president’s office) on the Second Floor of the Residence, was depicted with a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant from the White House Collection; the East Sitting Room features a realistic reproduction of the majestic fan window that defines the actual space; and the Queens’ Bedroom, occupied by President Kirkman’s daughter, is furnished with a four poster bed inspired by the twentieth-century decor of the room.

improves the viewing experience, it can also influ ence the quality of acting. On a television set, according to Hakim, “Actors are responsive to their environment.” He cited the example of Kiefer Sutherland, an executive producer on the show and “a consummate professional.” Sutherland, said Hakim, “appreciated the touches of reality on the set. . . . To play the president of the United States, you need every bit of assistance you can when you walk into the Oval Office or walk along the hallways of the White House. It invigorated him as an actor.”17 Kal Penn, who played speechwriter Seth Wright on Designated Survivor, brought an unusual background to his role. He had worked in President Barack Obama’s administration as the associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. Penn frequently consulted on script details but was likewise impressed by the realistic portrayal of various White House rooms on the show, said Hakim.18

Attention to detail, including the selection of colors, artwork, and objects, made the Oval Office a “place of reverence” on the production set. Even though it was a replica, those who worked on Designated Survivor, including those who were not U.S. citizens, tended to revere the space as if they were inside the actual room, said Hakim. He observed, “I felt like I was working in the White House for three years. That’s how real it was to me.”19

THE WHITE HOUSE ON TELEVISION

Designated Survivor joins a growing list of tele vision programs focused on the White House, its daily operations, and the people who work and live there. Americans may disdain politics, but a fas cination with the nation’s most enduring symbols remains strong. No list of “must see” locations in Washington, D.C., fails to include the White House as a top destination. The burden on television pro grams like Designated Survivor is a heavy one. Realism matters in popular depictions of revered institutions and historic locations because visual portrayals serve a pedagogical function, educating viewers about places they may never visit in per son. These places also have the ability to inspire the next generation of historians, public servants, archivists, and even future occupants of the White House itself.

notes

1. “Cabinet Members Not in Attendance (“Designated Survivor,” from 1984), and Frequency by Department,” American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

2. Grace Panetta, “Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo Is Staying Behind for Biden’s State of the Union: Here’s How Past Designated Survivors Spent Their Evenings Under High Security,” updated March 1, 2022, Business Insider, www. businessinsider.com.

3. Colleen Shalby, “Trump’s Designated Survivor for State of the Union Is Agriculture Secretary Perdue,” Seattle Times, January 30, 2018

4. See the exact text of the U.S. Code at https://uscode.house.gov.

5. Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar, “Is the Presidential Succession Law Constitutional?,” Stanford Law Review 48 (1995–96): 116.

6. Brian C. Kalt, “How TV Taught America Bad Constitutional Law,” Atlantic, December 24, 2019.

Vibhu Gairola, “How Designated Survivor’s Designers Built a Replica Oval Office in Toronto,” Toronto Life, December 13, 2016.

Quoted in ibid.

Quoted in Dani Di Placido, “Cabot McMullen on Creating the Look Behind ‘Designated Survivor,’” posted November 6, 2016, Forbes, www.forbes.com.

Hilbert Hakim, telephone interview by author, July 2, 2020.

Gairola, “How Designated Survivor’s Designers Built a Replica Oval Office in Toronto.”

Hakim interview.

Alexandra Lane, telephone interview by author, June 29, 2020.

The Digital Library is available at the White House Historical Association’s website, www.whitehousehistory.org.

For examples of artwork replicas on the set of Designated Survivor, see the photo gallery in ibid.

interview.

JACQUELINE KENNEDY’S Televised Tour of the WHITE HOUSE

MARY JO BINKER

on a cloudy winter day in january 1962, eight bulky CBS television cam eras, “five tons of lighting equipment,” “acres of cables,” and a gaggle of technicians and production people arrived in Washington to film a documentary at the White House. They knew they were doing something unusual; they just did not realize what a milestone it would become. Today their final product, A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, is considered a landmark in the Executive Mansion’s history. That one television broadcast changed Americans’ perception of the White House, making it a national focal point and a must-see destination, distinctions still enjoyed more than sixty years later.1

At a time when television was common though still relatively new, the program also made broad cast history as the “first network documentary with a woman as a star”—but not just any woman. Even before John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Jacqueline Kennedy’s style, taste, and ele gance had captivated the American public. Her subsequent effort to restore the White House and make it a symbol of American power and prestige had generated widespread public interest. However, her reluctance to grant interviews or pose for pic tures had made her something of a mystery to her fellow Americans. This televised tour allowed many of them to see and hear her. “This was the country’s first view into this elegant woman,” said Perry Wolff, the producer for the documentary. “It anointed her as queen of America.”2

Part public appeal and part progress report, A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, produced by CBS News, showcased the first lady’s vision and accomplishments in the year since the Kennedys had moved into the White House. As she walked through the various rooms, discussing the objects they contained and the people who had lived there, Mrs. Kennedy brought history to life while cementing her own reputation as a discerning student of American culture and civilization and an advocate for historic preservation. On a more per sonal level, she felt the broadcast had bolstered her own image. As she later reflected, “Suddenly, every thing that’d been a liability before”— her clothes, her ability to speak French, her refined (and expen sive) tastes— “became wonderful because anything the First Lady does that’s different, everyone seizes on.”3

A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy also made diplomatic history as a path breaking example of soft power. Widely distributed abroad, the documentary gave audiences in Europe, Africa, and Asia an intimate and appealing view of American history and influence at a critical time in the Cold War.

Ironically, given the documentary’s success, Mrs. Kennedy had initially been reluctant to par ticipate even though there was historic precedent for such a broadcast. In 1952 President Harry S. Truman had allowed CBS to televise his tour of the then newly renovated White House. Now, nearly a decade later, another opportunity had arisen to showcase the Executive Mansion, and Wolff, whom CBS President Frank Stanton considered one of

the network’s “best producers,” thought television would be the ideal medium to tell the story of the Mrs. Kennedy’s restoration project. “There had been a lot of talk in the press about the project and it was obvious it would look much better were it on tv,” Wolff recalled later.4

To overcome Mrs. Kennedy’s reluctance, Wolff enlisted the aid of Blair Clark, then general man ager and vice president of CBS News. Clark, a friend and Harvard classmate of President John F. Kennedy, “went down to Washington . . . talked with her and then with [the president], who had doubts as to whether she should do it. I said she would do it well and it would be good for them,” Clark recalled.5

When Mrs. Kennedy finally agreed, Clark was euphoric, promising her “the best, most imaginative and scrupulous production a TV program has ever had.” The black and white broadcast (color televi sion was then in its infancy) would be unsponsored

Jacqueline Kennedy’s televised tour of the White House made the cover of the February 10–15, 1962, TVGuide.

Mrs. Kennedy is seen leading the tour through the East Room in a video screen grab from the program.

previous spread

opposite President Harry S. Truman makes a point about the Diplomatic Reception Room during a televised tour of the White House with CBS commentator Walter Cronkite, 1952.

right

Ten years after Truman’s tour, Mrs. Kennedy is interviewed by CBS broadcast journalist Charles Collingwood during her own televised tour of the White House, 1962.

and the network would absorb the cost of its pro duction which, according to Wolff, amounted to approximately $130,000 ($1,274,908.28 in 2022 dollars).6

Once he had the Kennedys’ approval, Wolff had to assemble the production team. To direct the doc umentary, he chose Franklin J. Schaffner. Schaffner, a television pioneer, had directed sports coverage, political conventions, news broadcasts, and live drama for such iconic programs as CBS’s Studio One and Playhouse 90. He also directed more than two hundred episodes of the popular television interview program Person to Person. By the early 1960s the future director of such Hollywood films as Patton and Papillon had already won two Emmys for his work in live drama and was well known for his strong visual sense and his innovative use of a moving camera—skills that would be critical to the success of the White House broadcast.7

To interview Mrs. Kennedy, Wolff chose veteran CBS broadcast journalist Charles Collingwood. A Rhodes scholar, Collingwood had been one of the

famous “Murrow Boys”— a group of radio journal ists hired by pioneering CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow to cover World War II in Europe. After the war Collingwood became the network’s first United Nations correspondent before moving over to become White House correspondent. In 1959 he succeeded Murrow as host of Person to Person. A skilled reporter who, according to fellow CBS news correspondent Dan Rather, could “smell stories and work sources,” Collingwood was witty, urbane, and always impeccably tailored: his nick name at CBS was “The Duke of Collingwood.” He was familiar, having been a Georgetown neighbor of the Kennedys.8

While Wolff was assembling his team, President Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, was fending off the angry pleas of CBS’s rivals, ABC and NBC, whose executives were outraged that a “story of such great national interest” had been given to just one network. They demanded copies of the broadcast for a simultaneous telecast on all three networks. Salinger refused. The program belonged to CBS. The network had developed the idea and sold it to the White House. If ABC and NBC wanted to do broadcasts, they should come up with their own proposals. ABC and NBC refused to budge. The pressure grew so intense that Salinger finally took the issue to the president. Kennedy, who con sidered the White House to be in the public domain, “overruled” his press secretary and said ABC and NBC could have copies, a decision that pleased no one, the press secretary recalled. CBS had to share its work with competitors “who had absolutely nothing to do” with it Salinger said, while ABC and NBC “had to give CBS full credit on the air.” 9

Salinger’s problems with the networks paled in comparison with the production issues Wolff and his team faced, beginning with the schedule itself. CBS’s time in the White House would be limited because of the White House’s public tour schedule. The whole production would have to be filmed between noon Saturday when the Executive Mansion closed to the public and noon Tuesday when it reopened for tours.10

Then there were t he technical problems of lighting and photographing fragile, inanimate objects in a historic house. But the major difficulty was whether Mrs. Kennedy, a broadcast amateur, could sustain a compelling performance over an extended period of time. “A non-professional’s performance is at its peak the first or second time,”

Wolff later noted in a book based on the documen tary. “Rehearsal and repetition tend to diminish his intensity and believability, and lead to rapid physi cal and emotional fatigue.”11

Mrs. Kennedy’s inexperience was compounded by the fact that Wolff and his team did not work directly with the famously shy first lady. Instead, Wolff and his team spent two months working by mail with Mrs. Kennedy and her press secretary, Pamela Turnure, determining the number of rooms and the objects she would discuss, the historic music to be used, and other production issues. They met just once and then briefly-—for fifteen minutes the day before she was to appear on camera.12

Based on these written “conversations,” plus additional research, Wolff prepared multiple ver sions of the script, none of which Mrs. Kennedy used. Instead, she did her own research, decided what she wanted to say, and committed it to mem ory. Separately she also recorded a brief history of the White House that opened the program as well as voice-overs to describe some of the paintings fea tured in the program and introductions in French and Spanish for the foreign language versions of the broadcast.13

To preserve the vitality of the first lady’s perfor mance and allow the television crew maximum flex ibility, Wolff decided to use videotape. Videotape would allow the cameramen to film the rooms and objects before and after Mrs. Kennedy described them. Her segments would be shot separately. All the segments could be done in any order and later, in the editing room, combined into a single coher ent whole.14

In television parlance, the White House was the “set” and each room to be photographed was considered a “scene.” Tape was placed on the floors to indicate where the first lady would stand and move and a “stand-in”—a model who resembled Mrs. Kennedy complete with a “Jackie hair-do”— was brought in to duplicate her movements. To minimize visual clutter and facilitate movement, the first lady would wear a small battery-operated microphone and transmitter under the jacket of her red dress. Aerials concealed behind draper ies and doors and another worn by Collingwood would pick up the signals. To reduce verbal confu sion Collingwood and Shaffner were the only CBS people allowed to speak directly to Mrs. Kennedy.15

Before filming her comments, Mrs. Kennedy and Collingwood would “rehearse” discussing

how she would move through a specific room and what she would say. Then, when the time came to shoot the scene, to keep the focus on Mrs. Kennedy, Collingwood stood off camera and cued the first lady, by asking her questions that would allow her to talk about the room or its contents.16

Wolff and Collingwood found Mrs. Kennedy knowledgeable and professional. “She knew her stuff,” Wolff recalled. “She was not being coached. She did not use cue cards. She would go into a room and tell us roughly what she was going to do and then we’d just do it,” he said.17 Mrs. Kennedy may not have needed notes or a teleprompter, but she did have backup in the form of White House Chief Usher J. B. West, who “stood behind the door, ready to supply any information,” should the first lady need it.18

“She never pushed us, although there were din ner guests coming,” said Collingwood. “She didn’t worry about her makeup or ‘best’ camera angles. When the director gave her instructions, she fol lowed them exactly, just as though she had done nothing else all her life. If she was tired, she didn’t complain and didn’t show it.”19 Only her constant

below Mrs. Kennedy speaks with Charles Collingwood a CBS crewman during the filming.

opposite

The CBS camera captures Mrs. Kennedy in the East Room beside the Steinway grand piano.

opposite Mrs. Kennedy pauses by the Bellangé pier table during a segment of the televised tour in the Blue Room.

left The State Dining Room table was set for thirty people with the Eisenhower State Dinner Service, vermeil flatware, and the glassware Mrs. Kennedy had purchased from a West Virginia firm.

smoking between takes betrayed her nervousness. “She kept missing the ashtray,” said Wolff, “and flick ing the ashes onto the expensive silk covering of the bench she was sitting on. I knew there was tension there.”20

Despite the meticulous preplanning, glitches invariably occurred. Even before taping began, a case containing the lenses for the CBS camera set up on the South Lawn was mistaken for the pres ident’s weekend luggage and inadvertently loaded onto a presidential helicopter. When Kennedy left, so did the lens case. The segment in the Red Room had to be reshot at Mrs. Kennedy’s request because she had “confused the Nelly Custis sofa with the Dolley Madison divan” while “popping noises” from the roaring fire in the room’s fireplace had inter fered with the microphones.21

The most terrifying moment occurred when the production crew heard a loud crash while moving the lighting towers from the State Dining Room to the East Room via the Entrance Hall. The pro duction staff froze. There were two large historic cut-glass chandeliers in the hallway. “Someone said, ‘See if it’s ours or theirs,’” Wolff recalled. Thankfully it was CBS’s. “A large light bulb had fallen out of a reflector,” and the crew finished the taping and left

the White House without “breaking or marring a single object.”22

In early 1962, the White House restoration was very much a work in progress. Only the Red Room, which Wolff said in his book had “a flash of fire,”23 had been completed, but many of Mrs. Kennedy’s innovations to make the Executive Mansion look “lived-in” were already apparent. Fires burned in the main reception rooms, and attractive flower arrangements and ash trays were much in evi dence.24 The table in the State Dining Room had been set for thirty people using the Eisenhower china, the vermeil flatware, and the glassware Mrs. Kennedy had purchased from a West Virginia firm. Other rooms, such as the curator’s office, the tem porary upholstery shop, and the unfinished Treaty Room, were shown as is with donated items on tables, upholstery work in progress, and swatches of historic wallpaper pinned to the walls.25

As Mrs. Kennedy moved through the rooms, she described the history of the house and its occupants as well as what had been done and what she hoped to do in a way that “really gave the romance behind everything in the White House,” recalled Social Secretary Letitia Baldrige. At the same time, Mrs. Kennedy also provided other more practical details

such as the names of donors who had given furni ture or paintings to the house.26

The finished program began with the first lady walking alone down the Ground Floor Corridor from the East Wing to the curator’s office, where she met Collingwood and talked generally about the restoration. After her brief prerecorded history of the White House, they moved to the Diplomatic Reception Room and on to the upholstery shop. They then went upstairs to the State Floor, where Mrs. Kennedy took viewers into the East Room, the State Dining Room, the Entrance Hall, the Red Room, the Blue Room, and the Green Room. From there they went upstairs to the Private Quarters, ordinarily off-limits to tourists, to view the Lincoln Bedroom and the newly renamed Treaty Room (for merly the Monroe Room). The televised tour ended in the latter space, which Mrs. Kennedy was in the process of restoring as a Victorian sitting room. Asked during rehearsal why she was restoring the room, Mrs. Kennedy replied, “It’s really to get the Cabinet out of the living room.” On camera she soft ened her statement saying, “All the men who wait to see [the president] now sit in the [center] hall with the baby carriages going by them. They can sit in here and talk while waiting for him.”27

The program itself ended with an appearance by President Kennedy. His last-minute decision to participate generated some confusion for the CBS team. The production notes for the broadcast capture the crew’s deliberations as to whether or how they could go upstairs to the Treaty Room to meet him. (They had just finished filming the Green Room.) Once there, they had to do a quick, unscheduled repositioning of the lights and cam eras to accommodate the president.28

While they worked, Kennedy, who had just fin ished a press conference, went over his remarks with Collingwood. In his segment, the president praised the first lady’s efforts “to bring us much more intimately in contact with all the men who lived here” and expressed the hope that the number of visitors, especially young people, would increase. “Some of them may want to someday live here them selves . . . even the girls.” In a nod to the exigen cies of the Cold War, he noted that when America was founded, “there was a king in France, a czar in Russia, an emperor in Peking. Today all that’s been wiped away—and yet this country continues.” He called the nation’s history “a source of strength” and said that “anything which dramatizes” the nation’s past “as I think the White House does—is worthy of

left

The tour began on the Ground Floor.

Mrs. Kennedy walked down the hall and into the Curator’s Office (today’s Map Room) and then continued into the Diplomatic Reception Room before crossing the hall and ascending the stairs to the State Floor.

top

Once on the State Floor, Mrs. Kennedy led the tour into the East Room and then down the Cross Hall to the State Dining Room, the Red Room, Blue Room, and Green Room. She then took the Grand Staircase to the Second Floor.

below

The tour of the Second Floor included the Lincoln Bedroom and concluded in the Treaty Room.

the closest attention and respect by Americans.”29

The president’s appearance capped a long day for the production crew, which had been at work since 7:00 a.m. that morning. They were exhausted, but Mrs. Kennedy was still alert and engaged. She had offered to work through lunch—an offer that was politely declined—and still had enough energy for a small dinner party that night followed by a review of the recorded tapes from the day’s shoot ing. These the Kennedys and their guests watched on a television set in the mansion’s private theater. President Kennedy sat in the front row with his arm around the first lady. “When the lights went up, the President looked at her with adoration and admiration,” said Wolff. “It was a real look of love. He was so proud of her, and she was so happy that he was proud.”30 He was not as proud of his own performance, however, and asked to repeat it the next day. 31

While Mrs. Kennedy’s performance might strike a modern viewer as stilted, her contemporaries were enchanted, Wolff said, “with her combina tion of sophistication and ingenuousness,”32 when the program aired on February 14. Despite the late hour—the program was televised at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time—A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy was a smashing success. An esti mated three out of every four Americans watched the broadcast on CBS or NBC (citing cost overruns, ABC did not participate).33

Mrs. Kennedy received ten thousand letters, including one from future First Lady Barbara Bush, and requests for tours skyrocketed. “The entire United States of America wanted to come and see

[the White House], the next day,” recalled Baldrige. “We had the opposite problem of keeping them away and scheduling tours at ten o’clock at night to get in all these people, and too many heads of state want ing to come and pay official visits. It was all because of that televised tour.”34

The critics were enthusiastic as well. The Chicago Daily News called the program “television at its best.” The Washington Post noted that “there can be no doubt that many Americans . . . never really saw the White House in the proper historic focus until they viewed the building through Mrs. Kennedy’s knowing eyes.” The New York Times called the program “the most extensive public view of the White House ever shown” and described Mrs. Kennedy “as a virtuoso among guides.”35 Ironically, Mrs. Kennedy did not share that appraisal. Although the broadcast earned her a special Emmy

above President John F. Kennedy joined the tour in the Treaty Room. This page from his notes for the segment includes his observation that a tour of the White House reminds people that the presidents were real people who “ate and slept and worked and suffered.”

RIGHT: CBS ARCHIVE / LEFT: JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

right

A sampling of telegrams from the more than ten thousand viewers who wrote to Mrs. Kennedy following the airing of the tour. The messages, which came from across the country, are filled with appreciation and praise for the program.

Award, she considered her performance “awful.”36

Foreign response was equally positive. In Britain, the reviewer for the Daily Mirror wrote, “She almost made me feel ashamed that the British burned the [White] House in 1814.” Israeli jour nalists who saw the film “commented very favor ably on Mrs. Kennedy’s cultured ways, her obvious deep love for American history and her under standing of artistic values.” They only wished the program had been in color. In Karachi, Pakistan 27,000 people saw the documentary in forty-four different showings. In Bombay (modern Mumbai), India, the facility showing the film was “forced to a nightly ‘saturation’ schedule that appeared would continue indefinitely as Indian women’s requests for invitations to the showing continued unabated.” Even in the Soviet Union, where relations between the United States and the USSR were chilly at best, the cultural attaché at the American embassy in Moscow “was besieged with requests for informa tion materials on the U.S.” after the film was shown there.37

In the United States, A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy cemented the first lady’s image as a woman of elegance, taste, and sophis tication who had used her knowledge and love of American history to make the White House a monument to American civilization and a fitting backdrop for the American presidency. At a time when the Cold War was at its height, the broadcast also made a powerful statement about the power, prestige, and permanence of the American republic. “She . . . understood that the White House itself was a powerful symbol of our democracy and wanted to make sure it projected the best of America to stu dents and families who visited, as well as to foreign heads of state who were entertained there,” said her daughter, Caroline Kennedy.38

The documentary also elevated the White House in the minds of many Americans and contributed to a growing awareness of and appreciation for his toric preservation generally. In addition, the broad cast showcased television’s power to tell a story and as such became “one of the landmarks of this infant business,” as Collingwood wrote the first lady.39

A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy became a landmark in White House his tory as well. By allowing television cameras into the Executive Mansion, the first lady simultane ously demystified the White House and elevated its importance. The rooms and the objects they

contained became both more familiar and more important. After A Tour with the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, the White House became more than just the home of the president. It became a home for the nation.

notes

1. “Area, National Weather,” Washington Post, January 15, 1962, B2; “First Lady Takes Tour of Home, for TV Cameras,” Washington Post, January 17, 1962, C2; Perry Wolff, A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 82; Mary Barelli Gallagher and Frances Spatz Leighton, My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy (New York: D. McCay, 1969), 187. An online video of the tour is available: “Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House Tour,” posted by ABC News, May 9, 2012, www. youtube.com.

2. Walter Cronkite, introduction, and Perry Wolff, interview, in A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, DVD, produced by CBS, 2004. The major commercial television networks began producing historical and investigative documentaries in the early 1950s. Among the best-known of these early broadcasts were NBC’s Victory at Sea (1952–53), ABC’s The Big Picture (1953–59) and CBS’s Air Power (1956–57) and The Twentieth Century (1957–70). The first investigative documentary, See It Now (CBS), began in 1951. Christopher Sterling, “Documentaries, Television,” in Encyclopedia of Journalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2009), 458–462)

3. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy; Interviews with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., 1964 (New York: Hyperion, 2011), 141.

4. Frank Stanton, oral history, August 26, 2002, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass.; Wolff interview, DVD. A pioneer in the development of the television documentary format, Wolff produced more than six hundred hours of news and cultural programming during an almost forty-year career with CBS. In addition to A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, his producing credits included the seven-part series Of Black America (1968), The Selling of the Pentagon (1971), and The Vanishing Family (1986). The recipient of fifteen Emmy Awards, fourteen Peabody Awards, and numerous other honors, he was dismissed from CBS in 1990 after a change in ownership. He

Mrs. Kennedy prepares for the camera to roll in the Diplomatic Reception Room.

later worked for PBS, producing a series on art history. His 1996 film on the French artist Henri Matisse was nominated for an Academy Award for best short documentary. Matt Schudel, “Perry Wolff, TV Documentarian Who Took Viewers Inside the White House and Pentagon, Dies at 97,” Washington Post, February 27, 2019; “Biography/History,” Perry Wolff Papers, 1945–1989, Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections, Madison, Wis., available online at https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu.

5. Blair Clark, quoted in Sarah Bradford, America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (New York: Viking, 2000), 190.

6. Blair Clark, quoted in Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer, Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 326; Wolff, Tour of the White House, 239. In his 1975 memoir, the journalist Ben Bradlee, who with his wife, Tony, watched the finished broadcast with the Kennedys, put the cost of the production at $255,990 ($2,325,185 in today’s dollars). Benjamin C. Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 54.

7. “Franklin J. Schaffner,” IMDb database, www.imdb.com. Schaffner would win an Academy Award in 1970 for his work on Patton “Oscar-Winning Film Director Franklin J. Schaffner Dies,” Washington Post, July 4, 1989, B6; “Franklin J. Schaffner,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, www.britannica.com.

8. Robin Toner, “Charles Collingwood Is Dead; CBS Correspondent Was 68,” New York Times, October 4, 1985, D19; quotation in Dan Rather, “Collingwood’s Dash with History,” Washington Post, October 5, 1995, D1, D5; Sally Bedell Smith, Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (New York: Random House, 2004), 251.

9. Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 116.

10. As it turned out, the CBS crew needed several hours on Tuesday afternoon to disassemble and remove all the equipment. Wolff, Tour of the White House, 245.

11. Ibid., 240.

12. Ibid., 245.

13. Ibid., 243. An early version of the script contains such notes as Mrs. Kennedy will seat herself at the head of the table in the State Dining Room (she did not) and suggested places where she might elaborate on particular objects such as the Monroe plateau in the State Dining Room or rooms such “as her favorite anecdote about the Lincoln Bedroom.” The script itself carried a disclaimer from Wolff that “all statements attributed to Mrs. Kennedy are not to be taken as accurate quotations or necessarily reflections of her idea[s].” Perry Wolff, “The White House, with Mrs. John Kennedy,” script draft 4, January 13, 1966, 2, 18–19, 38, Wolff Papers.

14. Wolff, Tour of the White House, 240.

15. Gallagher and Leighton, My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy, 187; Wolff, Tour of the White House, 85, 138, 248.

16. Wolff, Tour of the White House, 243; A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, DVD.

17. Quoted in Schudel, “Perry Wolff”; A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, DVD.

18. J. B. West, with Mary Lynn Kotz, Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), 253.

19. Quoted in Ralph G. Martin, A Hero for Our Time: An Intimate Story of the Kennedy Years (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1983), 367.

Quoted in Smith, Grace and Power, 252.

Wolff, Tour of the White House, 245, 243.

Ibid., 248, 135.

Ibid., 126.

Ibid., 151.

Ibid., 97, 98, 100, 224. A temporary upholstery shop had been set up on the Ground Floor, where newly acquired items could be repaired and reupholstered. See James Archer Abbott and Elaine Rice Bachmann, Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration and Its Legacy (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2021), 58, 59.

26. Letitia Baldrige oral history by Richard Norton Smith, December 5, 2007, White House Historical Association Archives.

Quoted in Wolff, Tour of the White House, 228, 226.

28. Ibid., 233; “A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy,” rough transcript, n.d., 25, Wolff Papers.

29. Wolff, Tour of the White House, 229–31. In his remarks, Kennedy referred to his wife as Jackie, the first time he had done so publicly. Martin, Hero for Our Time, 367.

30. Wolff, Tour of the White House, 139 ; Wolff, quoted in Smith, Grace and Power, 252. According to White House Chief Usher J. B. West. who watched the rough cut with the first family and their guests, the president called the production “terrific” and asked, “Can we show it in 1964?” West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 253.

31. Wolff, Tour of the White House, 233.

32. Quoted in Smith, Grace and Power, 252.

33. Barbara A. Perry, Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 125; Jack Gould, “Mrs. Kennedy TV Hostess to Nation,” New York Times, February 15, 1962, 1, 18. Even before the program aired, CBS announced plans to rebroadcast it on March 25 at 4:00 p.m. The network did so, said CBS News president Richard S. Salant, “to make [the broadcast] available to young people and others who might not be able to see the first program.” Quoted in Lawrence Laurent, “TV Tour of White House Being Shared by Networks,” Washington Post, February 14, 1962, B11.

34. Perry, Jacqueline Kennedy, 125; Baldrige interview.

35. Chicago Daily News quoted in Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy, 54; Maxine Cheshire, “JFK Gets Last Word on White House Tour,” Washington Post, February 16, 1962, C1; Gould, “Mrs. Kennedy” ; John P. Shanley, “Julie Harris, as Victoria, Wins TV Emmy,” New York Times, May 23, 1962, 91.

36. John P. Shanley, “Julie Harris, as Victoria, Wins TV Emmy,” New York Times, May 23, 1962, 91. Quoted in William F. Buckley, in Jacques Lowe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, A Tribute (New York: Jacques Lowe Visual Arts Projects, n.d.) 18–20.

37. Quotations in “Reactions to Direct Projection,” report accompanying memorandum from Donald M. Wilson to Pierre Salinger, June 21, 1962, United States Information Agency Papers, January–June 1962, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Mass.

38. Caroline Kennedy, foreword to Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations, xvi.

39. Hamish Bowles, “White House Style,” in Jacqueline Kennedy, The White House Years: Selections from the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, (New York: Little, Brown, 2001), 71.

UPSTAIRS

At the White House With Tricia Nixon

The Making of the 60 Minutes Televised Tour leslie f. calderone

tricia nixon, the eldest daughter of president richard m. nixon and first lady pat nixon, stood beside the large, halfmoon window in the West Sitting Hall answering questions from reporters Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner of 60 Minutes. The three were in the mid dle of a tour of the Private Quarters on the Second Floor of the White House on April 25, 1970. The segment titled “Upstairs at the White House with Tricia Nixon” for the then-nascent television news magazine would be the first televised tour of the White House since First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy famously showcased the historic public rooms eight years earlier.1

The 60 Minutes segment, which focused on the largely unseen Second Floor, reflected the public’s increasing appetite for more information about the residential areas of the White House and the lives of those who lived there. Starting at the Truman Balcony, the three made their way through the Yellow Oval Room and down the Center Hall before arriving in the West Sitting Hall, a favorite room among first families for its privacy and comfort. In anticipation of the tour, Reasoner had told TV Guide, “That house is one of the Nation’s two or three most luxurious houses, although most people would think it is nice to visit, but wouldn’t want to live there. Hopefully, we will find out what it is like to live there.”2 So at this point the reporters asked a question so many members of the public have wondered: Can you really feel at home living in the White House? Tricia Nixon, just 24 years old, answered coolly, with a hint of a smile: “I think that when you are living in the White House, you are on display . . . a lot and it is a bit like a goldfish

bowl, but it’s really more like a goldfish bowl when you are out of it than when you are in it. So that when you come home, and this is our home while my father is serving the nation, we really feel that we can relax here.”3

Like so many, I have long been intrigued by the secrets of the White House’s seldom-seen Second Floor and the life of the first family there. Today I am the Director of the Digital Library at the White House Historical Association where I have had the opportunity to learn more about the secrets that have interested me. In my first years with the Association, for example, I would often notice a light in a window in the northwest corner of the Second Floor as I departed from our offices on Lafayette Square each night. This same light can be seen in nighttime aerial shots of the White House and in many public images. I assumed that the room likely belonged to the Secret Service or was perhaps a stairwell. I later found out that it was the Family Kitchen, a room rarely seen by the public, but one we have photographs of in the Association’s Digital Library.

In fact, the Digital Library has proved to be a source of much information about the White House’s Second Floor.4 In addition to images of the historic rooms, such as the Yellow Oval Room and the Lincoln Bedroom, there are more than 140 behind-the-scenes photographs that document Tricia Nixon’s “Upstairs at the White House” seg ment for 60 Minutes. These candid photographs, taken with slide film by James E. Russell during the filming of the show, capture spaces almost never seen by the public and are published here for the first time.

opposite Tricia Nixon with 60 Minutes producer and creator Don Hewitt (right) and host Harry Reasoner (left) in the West Sitting Hall. Observing the view of the Old Executive Office Building, Tricia noted that it would be a shame to tear down the beautiful building, which was then in disrepair. It has since been restored.

left

Tricia Nixon is seen as the tour begins on the Truman Balcony outside of the Yellow Oval Room. As the camera panned the landscape, she pointed out the tennis court, where she had been learning to play, and the putting green, which her sister Julie enjoyed. She also noted that family often returned the waves of tourists in the distance from the balcony.

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Tricia Nixon leads the tour from the Queens’ Bedroom towards her father’s study in the Lincoln Sitting Room.

THE STORY BEHIND THE TOUR

When 60 Minutes approached the Nixon White House about filming a tour of the Second Floor, First Lady Pat Nixon saw the importance of having the segment filmed but was not interested in giv ing the tour herself.5 She was conscientious about how she spent her time as first lady, recognizing the growing significance of the role since she had been second lady in the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. She believed the influence of a first lady should be used “cautiously and responsibly.” 6 Julie Nixon Eisenhower, in her biography of Mrs. Nixon, wrote, “My mother, with her love of order and harmony, at times felt inundated by too many functions, coming too closely together, one after another. And so she concentrated on the present, not the past or the distant future.”7 She was also a gracious and humble woman. “Mrs. Nixon really didn’t look for opportunities to showcase herself for the work she did,” says Bob Bostock, a consul tant for the Richard Nixon Foundation. “She really wanted to let the results of what she did speak for themselves.”8

Yet the 60 Minutes tour was in line with Mrs. Nixon’s belief that the White House should be open to every American. Throughout her tenure as first lady, she dedicated herself to making the White House more accessible. She oversaw the installa tion of ramps at the entrance to the East Wing and the exit on the North Portico for those with acces sibility needs, arranged special tours for those with impaired vision, provided multilanguage transla tions of brochures,9 and opened the White House Grounds for biannual tours in 1973, a tradition that continues today.10 “Mrs. Nixon, and both Julie and Tricia, really wanted to share the house with as many people as they could, in as many different ways as they could. And I think that’s why . . . they did 60 Minutes,” says Bostock.11

So Mrs. Nixon asked Tricia Nixon to step in for her as the tour guide. Tricia first declined, but when her mother asked a second time, she agreed to host.12 Tricia had the credentials to step in as tour guide: she had been a history major at Finch College (though she graduated from Boston College with a BA in English) and enjoyed learning about the history of the White House. She also collected Meissen porcelain, which gave her a special affin ity for the china and glassware in the White House Collection.13 The fine and decorative arts were an

As the tour progressed, Tricia Nixon pointed significant examples from the White House fine and decorative arts collections. While in the Center Hall she noted that Carl Schurz Park, New York, (above and left) by William Glackens, depicts a view she fondly remembered from her school days in New York City. She also highlighted the collection of porcelain birds by E. M. Boehm (seen on the shelves at left). During a stop in the President’s Dining Room she identified the Eisenhower china on the table and described the scenes in the Revolutionarythemed wallpaper.

interest of the Nixon family.14 Under Mrs. Nixon’s oversight, more than six hundred pieces of fine and decorative arts were added to the White House Collection.15 This appreciation for the White House and its history is evident throughout the filmed tour, as Tricia was intentional in pointing out pieces in the collection to Reasoner and Wallace. Though the tour was unrehearsed,16 it is clear Tricia prepared by researching the history of the rooms and care fully considering which pieces in the White House collection to highlight.17

Wearing a contemporary white lace Gino Charles dress with pastel blue and pink satin ribbons tied at the waist18 and a bouffant blond hairstyle perfectly flipped at her shoulders, Tricia clearly demon strated composure and confidence during the tour. Perhaps her poise was the result of a life spent in the public eye as the daughter of a politician who was first elected to the House of Representatives the year she was born. Even though she spent much of her life in front of cameras, it is hard to not be impressed by her poise. Today it is rare to see the children of a president take on such a public role with the press and media, but Tricia—and her younger sister, Julie—saw White House events and functions as opportunities to advocate on behalf of their parents’ work and to be representatives of their father’s presidency. Tricia and Julie “spent a huge amount of their time doing things in support of their father and their mother. A lot of events, a lot of traveling, at the White House and out on the road,” says Bostock. “They were always involved as a family in supporting, particularly their father, and trying to help him in any way that they could.”19

Mrs. Nixon was respectful of Tricia’s need for privacy and gave her the freedom to make her own decisions, especially while she lived in the White House.20 Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote in her mother’s biography, “Although Tricia did not attend every White House function, she hosted quite a few events on her own, and occasionally substi tuted for my mother when she had to be away from Washington, earning at one point from Newsweek magazine the title ‘Assistant First Lady.’”21 Though Tricia took on the role of hostess at the White House, she was careful in selecting her activities, perhaps because of her desire for privacy as well as her generally reserved nature. President Nixon publicly referred to Tricia as an introvert, writing in Ladies’ Home Journal, “She does not like the limelight, she has a passion for privacy—like me.”22

BEHIND THE SCENES

Watching the “Upstairs at the White House with Tricia Nixon” tour is a very different experience from exam ining the behind-the-scenes photo graphs. On a first pass through the photo collection, I was struck by the apparent pace of filming on location in the White House as well as its more mundane moments. In many of the photographs, Tricia Nixon seems to be standing at the ready waiting to be told, “Action!” In one particularly humorous photograph, Reasoner and Wallace sit at ease on the Truman Balcony, waiting for something—anything—to happen. These captured moments stand in stark contrast to the more glamorous 60 Minutes segment replete with playful banter between the hostess and her guests. The photographs in combination with film serve as com plementary records of this moment in White House history, providing a more complete look at the day’s events.

opposite

Many of the tour photographs preserved in the White House Historical Association’s Digital Library capture the activity between takes while the crew set up the shots. In the Queens’ Bedroom Tricia Nixon helps direct the placement of a chair (top). In the President’s Dining Room she stands at the ready for the filming to begin (bottom left) and she pauses in the East Sitting Room (bottom right) with producer and creator Don Hewitt to wait for the next take to begin.

above and right

The full ashtray beside Harry Reasoner suggests a long wait on the Truman Balcony with Mike Wallace and a member of the crew (above). As the filming progresses to a wait in the Center Hall he passes the time with another cigarette.

In comparison with the broadcast tour, the photographs represent an array of disconnected moments. As part of the 2017 slide digitization project, the Digital Library team worked to bring context to the slides of Tricia Nixon’s tour, con sulting old editions of the Association’s publica tions and using resources available at presidential libraries. It became important to know the order in which the photographs were taken, particularly as we could not derive a chronology of the tour from the presumably edited broadcast.

For one lone photograph, we could not identify the room. The photograph lacked sufficient light ing, but from what we could see of the blue and white wallpaper and window trimmings, it did not resemble any of the more familiar and well-docu mented rooms in the Residence. After a close view ing of the 60 Minutes tour, I was thrilled to discover the room depicted in the photograph was actually the first lady’s sitting room, which Mrs. Nixon used as her office. Given that this room is such a private and personal space, I did not expect that there would be an image of it in the Digital Library. The room itself is a part of storied lore relayed by previous first ladies over the years, as recounted

First Lady Pat Nixon is seen at work in her office (above). Tricia Nixon’s tour of the Private Quarters included a segment in this room, although only one photograph of the scene can be found in the Association’s Digital Library.

GETTY

BOTTOM: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

Although Tricia Nixon’s visit to her father’s study in the Lincoln Sitting Room included a discussion of his favorite chair, no photographs of the segment can be found in the Digital Library’s collection. A screen capture from the film (below) shows the well worn green chair, which was brought to the White House from the Nixons’ New York apartment. The president is seen at work in the chair, December 1971 (right).

in First Lady Michelle Obama’s recent memoir, Becoming. During administrative transitions, it has become tradition for a departing first lady to show the room to the incoming first lady and point out the view from the west-facing window toward the Oval Office. Of her tour of the room with outgoing First Lady Laura Bush, Mrs. Obama wrote, “Hillary Clinton, [Laura Bush] said, had shown her this same view when she’d first come to visit the White House eight years earlier. And eight years before that, her mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, had pointed out the view to Hillary. I looked out the window, reminded that I was part of a humble continuum.”23

Watching the 60 Minutes broadcast, I also dis covered that the photographs did not cover the entire tour. The segment ends with Tricia, Reasoner, and Wallace in the Lincoln Sitting Room, which President Nixon used as a study. In a strikingly personal touch, Tricia points out a well-worn, soft, velvety green chair and footrest that her father was so fond of that he had them moved from their New York apartment to the Lincoln Sitting Room, alongside the room’s historic furniture. Although the Digital Library has a few photographs of the Lincoln Sitting Room during the Nixon administra tion, none show the old green chair. Tricia explains

BOTTOM: RICHARD NIXON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

opposite Tricia Nixon presents the Queens’ Bedroom during the tour.

right Tricia Nixon received high praise for her performance and the tour was featured on the cover of the May 21–29, 1970, edition of TV Guide.

to her guests that the chair is where her father con templates the problems of state before jokingly adding that the shabby chair is “obviously is not part of the White House Collection!”24 Through personal family anecdotes and the gentle teasing of her father, Tricia Nixon proved to be a charm ing host and guide; she was able to humanize and personalize the tour in a way only a daughter could.

RECEPTION OF THE TV TOUR

Television critics who reviewed the broadcasted 60 Minutes segment when it aired on May 26, 1970, responded positively. One review in the Washington Post boldly claimed. “It may be trea son to the fashionable world to think so, but Tricia Nixon is a lot better on the televised tour of the White House . . . than Jacqueline Kennedy was when she started the genre with a tour of the state rooms in February of 1962.”25 Other reviews praised Tricia, calling her a “charming, lively and poised hostess”26 and a natural, capable of a career in tele vision if she wanted.27 The New York Times claimed, “Interesting as were the glimpses of the President’s private quarters, it was Miss Nixon who stole the show.”28 Tricia Nixon proved to be a gracious host ess. As she told TV Guide, “Yearly, almost a million and a half visitors literally walk through history

as they tour the famous first-floor rooms. But the White House is also the home of the President. Thirty-five Presidents and their families have lived and worked here while serving the Nation. It is this less public, yet personally fascinating side of the White House that I look forward to sharing.”29

notes

1. “Tricia Nixon’s White House,” TV Guide, May 23–29, 1970, 14.

2. Ibid., 17.

3. “Tricia Nixon on 60 Minutes: Upstairs at the White House (1970),” video posted by the Richard Nixon Foundation, www. youtube.com.

4. Since March 2017, the Association, in partnership with Amazon Web Services, has digitized more than twenty thousand 35 millimeter slides previously kept in cold storage. They span six administrations, from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush, and, among others, represent the work of photographers with the National Geographic Society for early editions of the Association’ premier publications, The White House: An Historic Guide and The Living White House.

5. Bob Bostock, consultant for the Richard Nixon Foundation, telephone interview by author, January 15, 2021.

6. Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Pat Nixon: The Untold Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 254.

7. Ibid., 254–55.

8. Bostock interview.

9. Bob Bostock, “Patricia Nixon’s Visitor Friendly White House,” White House Historical Association website, www. whitehousehistory.org.

10. Bob Bostock, “The White House Garden Tours: A Legacy of First Lady Patricia Nixon,” ibid.

11. Bostock interview.

12. Bostock interview.

13. Marie Smith, “The Private World of Tricia Nixon,” Washington Post, May 18, 1969, H1.

14. Bostock interview.

15. Bostock, “Patricia Nixon’s Visitor Friendly White House.” See also Kathryn L. Beasley, “Pat Nixon and Her influence on the White House Collection,” White House History Quarterly, no. 53 (Spring 2019): 50–63.

16. Bostock interview.

17. Betty Monkman, former curator of the White House, telephone interview by author, January 14, 2021.

18. Trudy Owett, “Tricia Nixon: A Bouquet of Summer Fashions,” Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1970, 58.

Bostock interview.

Eisenhower, Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, 256.

Ibid.

Richard M. Nixon, “My Daughter Tricia,” Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1970, 57.

Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York: Crown, 2018), 291.

“Tricia Nixon on 60 Minutes.”

Judith Martin, “She Tops Jackie on TV,” Washington Post, May 26, 1970, B1.

Jack Gould, “TV: White House Guide,” New York Times, May 27, 1970, 95.

27. Maxine Cheshire, “A ‘Natural’ for Television,” Washington Post, May 24, 1970, K1.

28. Gould, “TV: White House Guide.”

29. Quoted in “Tricia Nixon’s White House,” 17.

IT’S ACADEMIC and White House History

A Personal View Through the 60-Year Lens of the Longest-Running Television Quiz Program JOEL KEMELHOR

OPENING QUESTION: WHAT IS THE WORLD’S LONGEST-RUNNING TV QUIZ SHOW ?

In 2021 the Guinness Book of World Records confirmed It’s Academic as the longest-running TV quiz show.1 It was first telecast on October 7, 1961, from Studio A at WRC-TV (now NBC4) on Nebraska Avenue, NW, in Washington D.C. Teams of three students from three area high schools com peted in a game show format, answering questions in topics such as history, literature, science, math, mythology, sports, and current events.2

Headline news that week was focused on nuclear war and baseball. On October 1, Roger Maris hit his sixty-first home run, controversially breaking the single-season record of Babe Ruth. Five days later, President John F. Kennedy urged Americans to build fall-out shelters in response to the Soviet nuclear threat. Both topics were soon included in questions for student contestants in Studio A. The year 1961 was the first year of the Kennedy administration and also the first season of the new Washington Senators franchise. It also saw the establishment of the White House Historical Association.

On October 7, 1960, exactly a year before that first quiz match telecast, the same Studio A had hosted the second of the Kennedy-Nixon debates.3 Both men were already familiar with the place,

The first President to visit Studio A was Dwight D. Eisenhower. On May 22, 1958, he was there to dedicate NBC’s new Radio-TV facilities. While this was not the first color broadcast, his appearance

It

is also an example of Eisenhower’s formal speaking style, as he says he must “. . . felicitate the National Broadcasting Company for this particular step in developing the communications industry of our

ing but also public perception of presidents and the first family changed due to political and social

WHAT WAS THE ROLE OF MAC MCGARRY?

The original host of the program, NBC staff announcer Maurice J. (“Mac”) McGarry, had a link to White House history years before his half-century of quizzing students in Studio A. In 1950, sent to the West Wing for the radio network pool, McGarry introduced Harry S. Truman for a

top left Assistant producer and the author of this article Joel Kemelhor (left) confers with producer Susan Altman (second from left) and Mac McGarry, the host from 1961 to 2011 (center), ahead of taping a show during the fiftieth season. The longest running quiz show on television, the show was established in 1961, the year the White House Historical Association was also established.

left Sophie Altman developed the concept and format for It’s Academic in the late 1950s, and remained actively engaged in the show’s production until her death in 2008.

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A view of the It’s Academic set in 2019 captures the format of the show in which three teams of three from three area high schools compete to answer academic questions. Hillary Howard, who became the permanent host in 2011, is seen with the tall mascot of Jefferson High School at back left.

. Along with their presidential predecessors and successors, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon would figure over

below

It’s Academic was originally telecast from Studio A at WRC-TV, where the second KennedyNixon debate, as well as Meet the Press, were hosted.

presidential broadcast at the start of the Korean War.4 McGarry was selected as quizmaster in 1961 by Sophie Altman, the founder and producer of It’s Academic.

By the 1970s, McGarry was known both as a quizmaster and as the announcer of Washington’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. This role was likely the reason he was invited during the Gerald R. Ford administration to a White House reception for a visiting Irish taiosech (prime minister).5

McGarry was also known to at least one fictional president. In the 1993 Hollywood film Dave, actor Kevin Kline plays a stand-in chief executive in a plot owing something to The Prisoner of Zenda. McGarry’s voice can be heard booming from a prop White House television as he introduces The McLaughlin Group: “From the nation’s capital . . . an unrehearsed program . . .”.6

DURING HOW MANY ADMINISTRATIONS HAS THE SHOW BEEN ON THE AIR ?

We shall get to that at the end of this article.

ARE WHITE HOUSE SCANDALS INCLUDED IN QUESTIONS ?

While presidential deeds are a major source of question material, It’s Academic is cautious about misdeeds. The historian Robert Dallek claimed in a 1999 essay that “public scandals are America’s favorite parlor sport,”7 but both propriety and the

passage of time limit what has been asked of teen agers on It’s Academic.

Richard Nixon has served as a gold standard for political scandal, not just for Watergate but going back decades to his Checkers speech (and there’s an easy board game clue in the question). A further advantage for students is that Nixon is embedded in the electronic age—in radio, television, and video games. Beyond the printed word, his sixplus crises can be seen and heard directly, unlike, say, Ulysses S. Grant’s Black Friday Scandal, which lacks familiar images. Today the term Black Friday is more closely associated with frenzied discount sales the day after Thanksgiving than with gold speculators. The Iran-Contra Affair was headline news back when our current contestants’ parents were in elementary school, but it can still be used with clues for potential answers (Iran / Reagan / Nicaragua).

Scandals in the private lives of chief executives rarely tiptoe into questions. At least the Peggy Eaton Affair does not need to be explained; it still works because it caused Andrew Jackson’s cabinet to resign, advancing the career of Martin Van Buren. We are also lucky that Warren G. Harding can be linked to Teapot Dome instead of Nan Britton, and there are many lead-ins for Grover Cleveland besides “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” Yet despite serving two full terms, Bill Clinton is an anomaly because, setting aside the Lewinsky affair—and we did—the general public retains few memories of his administration. We can pinpoint him as the forty-second president or note his middle name is “Jefferson,” but not much else: citing a 1998 Clinton budget surplus does not set pulses racing.

Yet the main reason scandals do not endure as questions is simply the cycle of life: succeeding gen erations are diverted by different fads and follies. Had we shown that Robert Dallek quotation from 1999 to teenagers in recent years, someone might say the word “exterminate” in a Doctor Who robot voice, while others would wonder just what a “par lor” is.

HOW HAVE PUBLIC IMAGES OF PRESIDENTS CHANGED?

Even while presidential questions focus on recorded events, they cannot completely ignore social context—ever more a factor in classroom teaching about U.S. history. Consider the case of our twenty-eighth chief executive. While it’s true

that the journalist H. L. Mencken did mock him as “the sainted Woodrow,” by and large that sanc tity was endorsed in twentieth-century high school textbooks, usually written by historians impressed that Wilson had been president of Princeton University, governor of New Jersey, and a historian himself.

It’s Academic teams were long expected to know that Wilson was commander in chief in the First World War, that he wished to make the world “safe for democracy,” that his hopes for the League of Nations were thwarted by “isolationists.” However, his resegregation of the federal government, his military interventions in Mexico and the Caribbean, and his reluctant support for women’s suffrage, were rarely topics in school classrooms or in the TV studio. Among District officials who fostered participation was Dr. Vincent Reed, who became the first Black principal of Woodrow Wilson High School—and was later honored when the school was re-named Jackson-Reed8 An example of a school whose presidential name has been altered instead of scrapped is the former Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, now called Washington-Liberty.

HAS THE SHOW MIRRORED THOSE SOCIAL CHANGES?

The four children of It’s Academic founder Sophie Altman were Wilson High School graduates. Because the student body was until 1967 deter mined by demographics of surrounding neighbor hood, there were then few Black students at the school. In contrast, the teams competing weekly on It’s Academic in the 1960s did present diver sity. All of the District high schools were invited, and there were well-prepared teams from most, including the historically “elite” Lawrence Dunbar High School and Anacostia High School. Among District officials who fostered participation was Dr. Vincent Reed, who later became the first Black principal of Jackson-Reed High School, what was then Woodrow Wilson High School. In the 1950s, prior to It’s Academic, Altman Productions had presented integrated student groups on TeenTalk, seen on WRC on Sundays after the political talk shows. It’s Academic executive producer Susan Altman, Sophie Altman’s daughter, recalls that school desegregation was indeed a topic within the polite discussion format of those telecasts.9

In 1961–62, Northern Virginia presented a

different picture of integration. In that first season of It’s Academic, the team from Hammond High School in Alexandria was drawn from a student body that was exclusively white. Until 1964, the city’s Black high school students [?] were limited to Parker-Gray High School.10 [?] Hammond’s quiz team members in that segregated spring of 1962 included Gus King, the future U.S. Senator Angus King (I-ME).11

DOES IT’S ACADEMIC HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT FIRST LADIES?

First ladies are much less likely than presidents to be featured in questions. Any current White House hostess, such as Jill Biden, is a sure bet. Her predecessors earned their places as much through memorable names (Dolley Madison, “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes) as through activities apart from their spouses (Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson). For current high school contestants, Hillary Clinton is remarkable for being perhaps better known than her husband, William Jefferson Clinton. After all, she was a first lady, a U.S. senator, a secretary of state, and first alternate for her It’s Academic team at Maine South High School in Chicago in the 1964–65 school year.12 Three decades later she recorded a White House video for the open ing game of the thirty-fifth season of It’s Academic. Citing the yearbook photograph of her school’s seven-member squad, she noted, “That’s me in the second row, second from left.”13

HAVE OTHER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES BEEN ON IT’S ACADEMIC TEAMS ?

Hillary Clinton remains unique as both a White House resident (1993–2001) and a presidential candidate (2008 and 2016).There were, however, other White House hopefuls who competed on the show, many years after high school.

In the 1978–79 school year, It’s Academic hosted a charity telecast with three competing teams: Republican U.S. senators, Democratic U.S. senators, and journalists. The Republicans were John Heinz III of Pennsylvania, Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, and John Danforth of Missouri. They competed against Democrats Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, Alan Cranston of California, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. The press trio were Jessica Savitch of NBC News, columnist David Broder of the Washington Post, and humorist Art

The first alternate for her high school’s It’s Academic team in the 1964–65 school year, First Lady Hillary Clinton (right, second from left in back row) made the cover of the Washington Post TV Week (below) in 1995 when she recorded a video to open the show’s thirty-fifth season. A former classmate described her as the “brightest person I ever knew” for a Washington Post feature in 2016.

above

A 1979 It’s Academic charity telecast pitted Republican senators against Democratic senators and journalists. The Republicans (right) were John Heinz III, Lowell Weicker and John Danforth. The Democrats were Lloyd Bentsen, Alan Cranston, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (left).

left Host Mac McGarry interviews Vice President Hubert Humphrey during a game telecast in 1967.

MAC MCGARRY FAMILY / BOTTOM: IT’S ACADEMIC

below

Sheet music for the campaign song

“Get On the Raft with Taft!”

Buchwald. [?]

Almost all of those senators unsuccessfully sought the White House or had other links to pres idential history. Weicker (in 1980) and Cranston (in 1984) were declared candidates for their par ty’s nomination. After seeking the top job in 1976, Bentsen ran for vice president in 1988 on the Michael Dukakis ticket. Moynihan had worked in the West Wing for Richard Nixon as counselor to the president, 1969–70. Danforth, an ordained Episcopal minister, would conduct the state funeral for Ronald Reagan at Washington National Cathedral in 2004. While Heinz did not seek national office prior to his death in a 1993 plane crash, the Studio A audience for his It’s Academic game included his wife Teresa Heinz.14 In 2004, the presidential campaign of John Kerry, her second husband, brought her to prominence as a potential first lady.

Another presidential hopeful with a link to the quiz show was Hubert Horatio Humphrey. As vice president, he was interviewed by McGarry in the game telecast on September 23, 1967. The follow ing year, after Lyndon Johnson declined to seek

another term, Humphrey became the Democratic nominee, losing the White House to Richard Nixon. In Studio A at NBC, Humphrey had his picture taken with the student teams. The 1967 team from Anacostia High School included Allen Chin, and his autographed photograph with Vice President Humphrey was seen again in 2021, when Chin’s grandson Noah competed on a team from McLean High School.

WHAT DETAILS DO KIDS STILL REMEMBER ABOUT PAST PRESIDENTS?

Robert Tupper of Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland, is now the longest-serving coach of an It’s Academic team. Although retired from teach ing, Mr. Tupper remains a coach for the team— now forty-seven years. In preparing students for questions about presidents, he continues to cover their numerical sequence, home states, years of election, and locations of presidential libraries. Tupper notes the increasing emphasis in schools on the “process of history” rather than history as a sequence of events. He maintains that facts are

opposite A September 1967 advertisement in the Washington Post featuring eager student contestants announces Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s upcoming appearance on It’s Academic.

below Joel Kemelhor is seen with his Woodrow Wilson High School team on the set of It’s Academic, spring 1969.

“anchor points” of knowledge, so gathering and test ing them remains valuable in classrooms as well as for TV quizzes.15

Personal lives and physical characteristic of White House residents have rarely been described in questions. That James Monroe was the shortest or Abraham Lincoln the tallest might be mentioned but not offered as major clues. James Buchanan used to be identified as “the bachelor president,” but in recent decades he’s more often pinpointed as the fifteenth chief executive or for his advance notice of the Dred Scott decision. Buchanan still appears, tilting his head to one side in old photographs, but in recent telecasts some students have called him “BUCK-uh-nin,” because they never heard the name pronounced. For a couple of decades fol lowing the 1960s, everyone knew that “LBJ” was Lyndon Johnson; that is less sure today. By con trast, questions about Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy are often still answered as “FDR” and “JFK.” From the beginning, It’s Academic sometimes mentioned Franklin Roosevelt in the context of his polio illness and resulting paralysis. One wonders: would questions mentioning his physical condition have been avoided were there a comparable quiz on

the radio back in the 1940s?

WHAT POLITICAL FIGURES DO TEAMS FORGET ?

Vice presidents. While any presidential admin istration, even William Henry Harrison’s, can be invoked with effective clues, vice presidents fade from view unless they are incumbents or later occupy the Oval Office. Because he had been a presiding officer of the Senate, there’s a marble bust of Spiro Agnew in the Capitol Building, but Nixon’s running mate has slipped from memory even here in Washington and does not figure in questions. George Clinton, although not recalled as vice president for both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, has better quiz potential as the first such to die in office (and in 1812, a good year for a clue). Unless cabinet members were later chief executive, they become obscure for the purposes of a high school quiz as soon as they leave office.

APART FROM THE WHITE HOUSE, WHAT PRESIDENTIAL HOMES ARE IN QUESTIONS?

Very few. It is no longer likely that a picture of Monticello by itself will prompt the name of Thomas Jefferson’s estate. The Long Island man sion of Theodore Roosevelt is lucky to be located on Oyster Bay, the bivalve being a likelier clue than Sagamore Hill. The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port has sailed off into history. Camp David, the Catoctin Mountain compound used by presidential families, does remain in the news. However, do not bother with the original name FDR gave it, Shangri-La. The James Hilton novel that name came from is long lost from the horizons of school reading lists.

Mount Vernon, the first and most hallowed residence, is now officially under brand control as “George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” Such an identification should not be needed in the National Capital region, but what about the rest of the coun try’s public schools, with curricula increasingly removed from colonial history? In 2007, a study by the Manhattan Institute included this statistic: “Of almost 3,000 public schools in Florida, five honor George Washington, compared with eleven named after manatees.”16

ARE CAMPAIGN SLOGANS AND SONGS REMEMBERED ?

Starting with “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” in 1840, every national campaign has been promoted with slogans. Along with dying after a month in office, William Henry Harrison’s nickname ensures him a place in the quiz file. Franklin Roosevelt’s many lasting claims on public memory include his “New Deal.” However, the slogan shelf life of those short est-serving and longest-serving presidents is sel dom equaled.

“54-40 or Fight” has to be explained in a question, but might be a link to both James Knox Polk and U.S. geography. At the same time he was keeping the government segregated, Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection with the effective reminder “He Kept Us Out of War.” Both slogans have survived.

Most other campaign catch phrases drop from contention: “Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge” was a crowd-pleaser in 1924 but now leaves little to ask about except that election year. “I Like Ike” still stirs memories, but “Madly for Adlai” needs more clues if students are to think of Eisenhower’s opponent. In 1988, the Dukakis campaign claimed “He’s on your side!” but not enough voters joined him there. In his first White House run, in 1992, Bill Clinton was more successful; however, “Building a bridge to the twenty-first century” quickly lost timeliness.

Popular songs used in campaigns do seem to favor Democrats. FDR’s rallies featured “Happy

Days Are Here Again,” while fans of his successor claimed “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” The latter song came from the Broadway show Shuffle Along, co-authored by ragtime composer Eubie Blake17 (who as “James Hubert Blake” names the Maryland high school noted for several championship It’s Academic squads). A preamble to Joe Biden’s entrance at some rallies was the Staple Singers’ “We the People,” but that tune was scarcely heard above the din of the 2020 campaign.

Not for the original reasons, the most enduring campaign song for a Republican chief executive goes back to 1908, when songwriters Abe Holtzman and Harry Kerr exhorted voters to “Get On the Raft with Taft!” While few ever knew the lyrics prais ing the nominee, the notion of a crowd joining the 300+ pound Taft on his watery platform can still bring a smile to a listener.18

WHICH TWENTIETH-CENTURY PRESIDENT WAS CALLED “THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR”?

An easy question—if you’re over 40 years old. Ronald Wilson Reagan. The fortieth chief executive honed that talent first as a radio announcer, movie actor, and TV host before seeking political office. While it is not known if he watched It’s Academic during his years in Washington, he did record a

President Ronald Reagan tapes a message in the Diplomatic Reception Room to air on It’s Academic to help celebrate the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary, 1985.

video message for the show’s twenty-fifth broad cast season. On April 17, 1985, in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House, Reagan genially read through two and one-half minutes of congratulations to the student contestants, the producers, sponsors, broadcast stations: no group tied to the series escaped his praise. Listening to his words thirty-six years later, I find that his descrip tion of It’s Academic previews the education poli cies of more recent Republican administrations.

Reagan’s text states that his administration works to “promote cooperation between the public and private sectors in furthering the cause of edu cation.” He also mentions that the It’s Academic quiz teams are from “public, private and parochial” secondary schools.19 This silver anniversary mes sage was arranged through the office of Patrick J. Buchanan, who was then President Reagan’s direc tor of communications.20 As a graduate of Gonzaga College High School in Washington, he was famil iar with the show and socially acquainted with host Mac McGarry. Buchanan, who had earlier been a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, began to seek the Republican nomination for president for himself in 1992 and actually won the New Hampshire pri mary over Senator Robert Dole in 1996.

A later, less ambitious White House commu nications director, George Stephanopoulos, was a contestant on Academic Challenge, the Altman Productions’ series on WEWS in Cleveland. Stephanopoulos competed for Orange High School in late 1970s and later told NPR host John Donvan that it was “one of the greatest memories of his life— except for the fact that he didn’t win!”21

LAST QUESTION: DURING HOW MANY ADMINISTRATIONS HAS THE SHOW BEEN ON THE AIR?

It’s Academic concluded its sixty-first season on June 25, 2022. From Kennedy to Biden, it has been telecast in the Washington area during the White House years of twelve U.S. presidents.

notes

1. “Longest Running TV Quiz Show,” 2021, Guinness World Records, www. guinnessworldrecords.com.

2. “History of It’s Academic,” It’s Academic website, www. itsacademicquizshow.com. The success of the show inspired spin-offs in many other cities, including New York and Chicago, some under different names.

3. Michigan State University, G. Robert Vincent Voice Library Collection: “U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower speaks at the dedication of a new high-tech studio at the NBC building in Washington, DC.”

3. Plaque in Studio A at NBC4, 4001 Nebraska Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.

4. Jim Handly, “Remembering NBC Broadcasting Pioneer Mac McGarry,” published September 8, 2013, NBC4 website, www. nbcwashington.com.

5. Mark McGarry, son of Mac McGarry, telephone interview by author [is this correct?] November 22, 2020.

6. Announcer’s opening text, archive video of The McLaughlin Group, May 1, 1992,

7. Robert Dallek, “Scandalocracy,” Nation, July 8, 1999.

8. In 2022, it became Jackson-Reed High School. Edna B. Jackson was the first African-American teacher at Wilson High School. Vincent Reed’s role with District schools and It’s Academic is on page xx.

9. Susan Altman, telephone interview by author, February 24, 2021.

10. “History of Alexandria’s African American Community,” City of Alexandria website, www.alexandriava.gov.

11. Video of the first season of It’s Academic, archive 1961–62, author’s DVCPro tape.

12. Southwords, student newspaper of Maine South High School, November 13, 1964.

13. Author’s recall of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 video text, which he wrote.

14. Author’s recall of 1987 meeting w ith Teresa Heinz at videotaping of match with her husband on the Republican team.

15. Robert Tupper, telephone interview by author, March 27, 2021.

16. J. P. Greene, “What’s in a Name? The Decline in the Civic Mission of School Names,” Manhattan Institute, Civic Report 51 (July 2007), online at www.manhattan-institute.org.

17. Dwight Blocker Bowers, “American Musical Theater,” album notes for Smithsonian Collection of Recordings, LPs issued 1989.

18. Keith Melder, Hail to the Candidate (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992).

19. “Remarks by President Reagan During Videotaping Session for It’s Academic, Diplomatic Reception Room,” April 17, 1985, audio provided to author by Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, March 17, 2021.

20. Patrick J. Buchanan, telephone interview by author, March 23, 2021.

21. Quoted in John Donvan, “Quizmaster Reflects on 50 Years of It’s Academic,” Talk of the Nation, January 19, 2012, transcript and audio online at www.npr.org.

More Than A Photo Op Presidential Pilgrimages to DISNEY PARKS

left

During one of his visits to Disneyland, vice president Richard M. Nixon is joined by his family in a spinning teacup, August 11, 1955.

previous spread

With Walt Disney World’s Cinderella Castle as a backdrop, President Barack Obama delivers his “We Can’t Wait” speech announcing an initiative to create jobs partly through boosting travel and tourism, January 19, 2012.

harry truman visited in 1957 , John F. Kennedy in 1959, Dwight Eisenhower in 1961. Richard Nixon visited four times between 1955 and 1968. It is where Ronald Reagan’s 1985 President’s Inaugural Bands Parade was held and where Barack Obama chose to make a 2012 announce ment on tourism and the American economy. One could be forgiven for thinking “it” must be a his torically ceremonial location such as the National Mall, Independence Hall, or even Mount Vernon, but the place, or rather places, in question are actually the Disney theme parks—Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Disney parks are not typically recognized as presidential sites, and yet since they were built (Disneyland in 1955 and Walt Disney World in 1971), every president with the exception of Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump has made the American pilgrimage to a Disney park at some point in his political lifetime.

From the beginning, Walt Disney created his parks to be showcases of American identity, declaring in a 1953 presentation “Disneyland will be the essence of America as we know it . . . the nostalgia of the past, with exciting glimpses into the future.”1 Disney parks present a “particular vision of America’s collective memory” that lean heavily on ideals of small-town values, optimism,

and innovation.2 At the opening celebration for Disneyland on July 17, 1955, Walt Disney “set the tone for Disneyland as an embodiment of American idealism that offered a mixture of fantasy, fun, curi osity and optimism, on the one hand, and a strong affirmation and celebration of a mainstream view of American values and culture, on the other,” in the words of historian Henry Giroux.3 With this dis tillation of American identity into a physical place, Disneyland and Disney World quickly became touchstones of American collective memory, pil grimage sites Americans visit to reconnect with the dominant cultural idea of “who we are and who we are becoming.”4

Since the opening of the first Disney theme park, presidents—and those wishing to become president—have visited these cultural touchstones. These visits produce a reciprocal reinforcing of the status of the Disney parks, individual presidents, and the office of the presidency as icons and influ encers of American identity. A visit from a govern ment representative legitimizes a Disney park as a place of official national memory and importance, while the parks themselves offer what one Richard Nixon staffer deemed a “relaxed, but very positive forum” for presidents and candidates.5 As a jour nalist wrote on the occasion of a visit by George H. W. Bush to Disneyland, “They’re not exactly the

below Former President and Mrs. Harry S. Truman take a 10 cent trolley ride during a 1957 visit to Disneyland. Because elephants are the Republican Party symbol, Truman famously refused to pose with Dumbo but offered to pose with a donkey.

White House, ‘Hail to the Chief’ and the American eagle. But Disneyland, ‘Zippity Do Dah’ and Mickey Mouse work just fine when you’re running for president and want to be associated with national symbols.”6

THE 1950S: “GOOD TASTE” AND IN “THE AMERICAN TRADITION”

Disneyland opened during the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, but the first presidential representative to visit was then Vice President Richard Nixon. Nixon was a fitting emissary for the Eisenhower administration given that he was a Southern California local and Disneyland was practically in his backyard. Nixon would go on to become the president with the most Disney park visits in his lifetime—at least six.7

On August 11, 1955, less than a month after its grand opening, Disneyland hosted the vice

president and his family. Though the visit was ostensibly “strictly a family day,” it provided good PR for both parties. Nixon “signed innumerable autographs, shook hundreds of hands and flashed that wide, familiar smile wherever he went. He was followed by scores of Disneyland visitors.” 8 Disneyland’s own Vice President, C. V. Wood Jr., presented Nixon with a key to Disneyland in a cere mony on the steps of the park’s City Hall. The image of the nation’s chief executive offices having a “key” to Disneyland would prove symbolic.

Two years later, former president Harry Truman came to town “for politics and pleasure” and toured Disneyland along with his wife Bess and several Democratic leaders.9 The group was serenaded by the Disneyland Band playing familiar tunes such as “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Truman, trailed by photographers, carried a red Mickey Mouse Club flag around the

park and delighted onlookers by refusing to pose with Dumbo, quipping, “Make it a donkey and I’ll do it.”10 He referred to his time in the park as “a grand education.”11

The year 1959 saw two prepresidential Disneyland visits: Nixon (for trip number two) and John F. Kennedy. The Nixon family came at the personal invitation of Walt Disney, who asked that Nixon and his family be Disneyland’s “hon ored guests” at the inaugural ceremonies for sev eral attractions opening for the park’s fifth year of operation.12 When the Nixons agreed, Disney wrote again to assure the family that, as befit ting both their political status and the status of Disneyland as an American icon, “this entire affair will be handled in good taste and in the American tradition.”13 The Nixon daughters cut the ribbon for the new Disneyland-Alweg Monorail,14 rode the Matterhorn bobsleds, and were the first guests aboard the Nautilus submarine attraction on June 14, 1959. During the dedication ceremony the jour nalist Joan Winchell accidentally sat in the vice president’s VIP box and felt “a wave of it-could-on ly-happen-in-America pride” when she viewed the show alongside “three public heroes”: Walt Disney, Richard Nixon, and composer Meredith Wilson.15

On November 2, 1959, just a few months before officially announcing his presidential bid, then Senator John F. Kennedy “sauntered down the streets of Disneyland . . . shaking hands and prov ing to Gov. Edmund (Pat) Brown that he is no mean campaigner.”16 Kennedy held an official half hour “summit” with the president of the African Republic of Guinea Ahmed Sékou Touré. The two discussed the relationship between the United States and Africa. The blending of good old-fashioned hand shaking in a public space and the conducting of offi cial business proved a campaign hit for Kennedy, with the Daily Boston Globe declaring “the senator scored big in the children’s kingdom” under the headline “Sen. Kennedy Shows Savvy.”17

THE 1960S: “FREE PEOPLE, FREE NATIONS, FREE ENTERPRISE”

Two years later Disneyland also received two polit ical visits, one more public than the other. Walt Disney wrote to invite familiar guest Richard Nixon in May 1961, saying that he had heard that the fam ily would be in town around the time Disneyland planned to dedicate the extension of the Monorail, which they had opened two years previously, and

asked if they would be able to repeat their perfor mance.18 While the former vice president’s office responded that Nixon would not, in fact, be in town in time, he did bring his daughter Tricia for a short, unpublicized father-daughter visit that September.19

Dwight Eisenhower made his way to Disneyland during a vacation in December 1961, eleven months after leaving office and three months after his for mer vice president’s last visit. He told reporters that he and Mamie had “heard about Disneyland for years” and “almost dropped in a time or two” but “something always came up.” 20 The Eisenhowers took their grandchildren around the park, paused for a photo op with Disneyland’s Fire Engine No. 1, and took an afternoon break in Walt Disney’s pri vate apartment above Disneyland’s fire station. In a thank-you note to Walt Disney for his company’s hospitality, Eisenhower wrote, “I congratulate you not only on the imaginative but realistic exhibits, and assure you that as much as I have heard about Disneyland, it exceeded all my expectations.”21 Presidential candidate Richard Nixon brought his campaign to Disneyland in August 1968, although the Secret Service interrupted some of his photo ops in the name of safety. Agents told

Senator John F. Kennedy visited Disneyland shortly before announcing his run for the presidency in November 1959. During the visit he met with Ahmed Sékou Touré, president of the African Republic of Guinea, seen here beside the future president.

During a holiday visit to Disneyland, former President and Mrs. Dwight Eisenhower are joined by their grandchildren Mary Jean, Barbara, and David for a ride Walt Disney’s personal Runabout, December 26, 1961.

his campaign, for instance, that he could not stand on the top deck of riverboat Mark Twain to greet crowds.22 After winning that election, now President Nixon acknowledged the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971 by sending Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman to present a flag that had flown over the White House to Roy O. Disney to fly over Main St., U.S.A.23 The president had initially planned to go to the event himself but decided to stay at Camp David instead, as he felt that it would be too politically risky to attend a press event before he was ready to unveil an anticipated announcement about troop withdrawals in Vietnam.24

Despite missing the opening, Richard Nixon was the first sitting president to pilgrimage to Walt Disney World, attending the 1973 Annual Convention of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association held at Disney’s Contemporary Resort adjacent to the Magic Kingdom. Broadcast live across the nation, Nixon’s speech and responses to questions afterward, in which he infamously declared “I am not a crook” while denying involve ment in the Watergate scandal, certainly over shadowed the location in popular memory. 25 Nonetheless, it began a tradition of sitting pres idents conducting business on the grounds of

Disney theme parks.

Gerald Ford was the first and thus far only sit ting president to visit Disneyland. He appeared at the Disneyland Hotel in September 1975, giving a televised address to the Annual Convention of the National Association of Life Underwriters.26 However, Ford and his family displayed a clear preference for appearances at Florida’s Walt Disney World. A few months before Ford’s Disneyland appearance, his daughter Susan had taken a “semi private” trip to Disney World. The trip was not for any specific event, but photographers were allowed to capture the first daughter at one of America’s top vacation destinations.27 Susan Ford visited the Hall of Presidents, where Audio-Animatronic ver sions of all the presidents pay homage to the office and nation, and she called the likeness of her father there “remarkable.”28 Susan Ford was invited back a year later to represent the Ford administration in the opening of a new Disney World recreation area, River Country. When dedicating the water park, she “poured some of that sparkling Potomac River water into the million-gallon ‘swimming hole.’”29

There were rumors that Ford himself would visit Disney World in 1976, but though Walt Disney Productions Chairman Donn B. Tatum said Ford had “expressed great interest” during a presentation on Disney’s plans for the Epcot theme park and that Ford “hoped to be down in the near future’” for golf on Disney’s two renowned courses, Ford did not make it to Disney World during his presidency.30 While a congressman Ford had been hosted twice at the theme park by a lobbyist for U.S. Steel, once in 1972 and again in 1973, and photos showed him quite happy.31 But in 1975, sources in Ford’s campaign office feared that “photos of the President on the golf course would not improve his image among voters concerned with inflation and recession problems.”32

Ford would eventually get to golf on Disney World’s courses, but not until he left office. Like Nixon, he attended an event held by an outside group, Beatrice Foods, at the Contemporary Resort on September 11, 1979.33 After speaking at the event, Ford golfed the Magnolia course on Disney prop erty with Beatrice Foods executives, writing them later, “I had a wonderful time on the golf course.”34

President Jimmy Carter visited Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom for a dual birthday cele bration—Walt Disney World’s seventh and his own fifty-fourth—on October 1, 1978.35 After a meeting

with the secretary general of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, at the Contemporary Resort, Carter attended the opening ceremony for the World Conference of the International Chamber of Commerce, which was held in the forecourt of Cinderella Castle, with a reception following inside. Standing in front of Disney World’s most iconic symbol, the castle that writer John Schultz has referred to as the “hub of American myths,” Carter affirmed his belief in a free market system, in “free people, free nations, and free enterprise.36 It was a fitting location for these ideas, given that Main Street, which leads to Cinderella Castle, is repre sentative of the American ideal of free enterprise, and Liberty Square, steps away from the castle, is a stirring homage to “free people” and “free nations.”37

1980S: “THE DREAM OF PEACE”

A prepresidential Ronald Reagan had been on hand to host television coverage of opening day at Disneyland in 1955. At that time it would have seemed far-fetched to imagine that Reagan would return to visit an as-yet-unbuilt Disney park as the sitting president of the United States. But in fact Reagan visited Walt Disney World twice during his presidency, once in 1983 and again in 1985.

Reagan’s March 8, 1983, visit saw him at Epcot, taking in the park’s American pavilion, which acts as “host” country to Epcot’s perpetual World’s Fair. He spoke to a group of students participating in the President’s International Youth Exchange ini tiative via Walt Disney World’s World Showcase Fellowship Program, which brings international students to work at Epcot. 38 Reagan praised Disney’s program as beneficial to international rela tions, calling Epcot Center “‘a celebration of tomor row’ that is ‘setting the stage for the dream that has lived with mankind from the first and earliest days of history . . . the dream of peace.’”39

Reagan’s 1985 visit took place on Memorial Day weekend, but actually celebrated his second Inauguration. All outdoor inaugural events had been canceled that January due to frigid tem peratures, so Disney extended an invitation to all the high school bands that had been scheduled to perform in the Inaugural Parade to do so at Epcot instead.40 The president flew to Orlando after a morning wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery and, after thanking the band mem bers who had come out to celebrate him, used his podium at Epcot to announce that he intended

to soon outline a tax proposal that, in his words, would “launch a new American revolution.”41 Thus Reagan’s new American revolution was announced not from the White House or from Philadelphia, the seat of the original American Revolution, but from Disney’s vision of our colonial collective mem ory, the American Adventure.

Vice President George H. W. Bush kicked off the home stretch of his 1988 presidential cam paign at Disneyland, participating in a parade to send off U.S. Olympic athletes.42 Bush’s campaign brought him to Disneyland in part to “portray him as the candidate of peace, prosperity and main stream American values.” 43 The campaign was careful to ensure that his association was with the theme park itself and not its cartoon icon, Mickey Mouse. Barbara Bush reported that she kept herself between Bush and Mickey at all times to avoid any pictures that might lead to Bush being labeled a “Mickey Mouse candidate.”44

1990S: “CELEBRATE THE AMERI CAN SPIRIT”

In January 1990, almost a year after assuming the presidency, Bush, “continuing a long presiden tial practice of visiting the kingdom that Mickey, Goofy, and Donald built,” took a tour of Epcot’s The Land and Living Seas, pavilions that focus

above Minnie Mouse and Mickey Mouse welcome President Reagan and Mrs. Nancy Reagan to the Epcot Center, May 27, 1985.

below

During his 1988 presidential campaign, Vice President George H. W. Bush is joined by the seven dwarfs as he speaks at an event to send the U.S. team off to compete in the Olympics.

on the relationship between humankind and the earth and sea.45 Bush was particularly focused on the innovative farming techniques displayed in The Land, fitting as he had just come from a meeting of the American Farm Bureau Association.46 The following year “President Bush and Mickey Mouse joined forces” to celebrate the recipients of his administration’s Points of Light award, which rec ognized individuals for serving their communities. “Sharing” their twentieth anniversary celebration, Disney provided hospitality for nearly all of the 575 winners up to that point.47 At the celebration

Bush commended the volunteers and noted that they had gathered in an “extraordinary place” for an “extraordinary day” to “celebrate the American spirit” as it lived in the “American heroes” as well as “here at Epcot.”48

In a nonpublicized stop, President Bill Clinton stayed overnight at the Disney Institute in Orlando, Florida, during a visit to the state in September 1996.49 The Disney Institute was at the time a new resort that offered guests a “New Age take on the Disney experience, with classes in the arts, gour met cooking, and other topics.” The resort was not performing to capacity, and the Orlando Sentinel suspected Clinton had been invited because “a presidential visit—and a moment in the national spotlight—could help.” 50

Whether it helped or not (the Disney Institute resort closed in 2003), it did mark another visit to Disney theme park property from a sitting presi dent—the sixth in a row.

2000S: “RECOGNIZED ALL AROUND THE WORLD”

George W. Bush’s brush with Disney property was much briefer than those of his father. Gearing up for his reelection campaign in November 2003, Bush attended a fund-raiser for Republican donors at the Grand Floridian Resort and Spa at Walt Disney World, where, it was reported, “600 supporters munched Mickey Mouse–shaped Rice Krispies treats.”51

President Barack Obama made two trips to Walt Disney World in the same year, for both busi ness and campaign purposes. In January 2012 Obama appeared at a press conference in front of Cinderella Castle in the Magic Kingdom, promot ing American tourism and poking fun at himself, saying “I confess, I am excited to see Mickey. It’s always nice to meet a world leader who has bigger ears than me.”52 Obama also emphasized both the reason presidents are drawn to Disney parks and what their visits reinforce: “a place like Disneyland represents that quintessentially American spirit. This image is something that’s recognized all around the world.”53 In June of that same year, Obama was on the campaign trail. He and his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, both made their way to the Contemporary Resort to speak to a meeting of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials convention.54 Obama used this visit to praise diversity, hard work, and risk-taking

as American values, but took a moment to acknowl edge his location, saying, “It is nice to be at Disney World. This is now the second time I’ve come to Disney World without my daughters. They are not happy with me.”55

In 2019 it was announced that President Trump would be the speaker at that year’s Republican Statesman’s Dinner, to be held at Walt Disney World’s Grand Floridian. Before Trump could become the latest in a line of sitting presidents to visit the theme park, however, the dinner was moved to another location.56

While current president Joe Biden visited Walt Disney World as the sitting Vice President in 2011 (for a fundraising dinner), he has yet to visit as pres ident.57 First Lady Jill Biden had been scheduled to appear at Walt Disney World to deliver remarks at the Warrior Games there but had to cancel at the last minute due to testing Covid positive.58 It remains to be seen whether the Biden administra tion will continue the presidential tradition of a Disney visit.

SECULAR PILGRIMAGE SITES

In total, eleven of the last thirteen presidents have visited a Disney theme park in their lifetime, eight of them while holding office. Since Nixon, every sitting president has made at least one appearance at one of America’s foremost secular pilgrimage sites. Over the last sixty-five years, the Disney parks have become more than just sites for presidential photo ops, handshaking. and meet and

greets that showcase a president in touch with the people. They are also sites where presidents trans act business, meet with political, economic, and cultural leaders, and announce and promote policy. In hosting presidents at their theme parks, Disney gains some sense of authority in representing the United States. Presidents, in turn, find in the theme parks a positive forum with which to connect to the public. They are certainly some of the most publicly popular and excessively photographed presidential sites around.

notes

1. Disneyland pre-opening presentation, quoted in Marty Sklar, “Walt Disney World Background and Philosophy,” 6, 1967, Harrison “Buzz” Price Papers, University of Central Florida Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives, https:// digital.library.ucf.edu.

2. Bethanee Bemis, “How Disney Came to Define What Constitutes the American Experience,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 3, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-disneycame-define-what-constitutes-american-experience-180961632/

3. Henry Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 35.

4. John Schultz, “The Fabulous Presumption of Walt Disney World: Magic Kingdom in the Wilderness,” Georgia Review 42, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 286. For more on Disney parks as pilgrimage sites, see the work of Stephen Fjellman, Richard Francaviglia, Margaret King, and Alexander Moore.

5. Robert H. Finch to H. R. Haldeman, memo, August 10, 1970, box 6, folder 48, Contested Materials Collection, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, Calif.

6. Mitchell Locin, “Candidates Seek Right Setting,” Chicago Tribune, September 6, 1988, 1.

7. Nixon visited Disney parks in 1955, 1959, 1961, 1968, 1973, and 1982.

8. “Nixon Takes Time Out for Disneyland,” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1955, 2.

9. Truman’s official business in town was a Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner. “Truman Quips Way Through Disneyland,”

Although her summer 2022 visit to Disney World was canceled due to Covid, First Lady Jill Biden had the chance to meet the Coast Guard’s Captain Minnie at the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Miami, February 18, 2022.

Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1957, A.

10. Quoted in ibid.; Lou Jobst, “Wisecracking, Winking HST Has Big Time at Disneyland,” [add city] Independent Press-Telegram, November 3, 1957, 1.

11. “Trumans Are Serenaded,” Tampa Tribune, November 4, 1957, 4.

12. Walt Disney to Richard Nixon, May 8, 1959, image in George Savvas, “A Look Back at June 14, 1959: Grand Opening of the Disneyland-Alweg Monorail System, Matterhorn Bobsleds and Submarine Voyage at Disneyland Park,” posted June 13, 2014, Disney Parks Blog, https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog.

13. Walt Disney to Richard Nixon, May 19, 1959, ibid.

14. Well, they tried to cut the ribbon, but the scissors were not sharp enough. Walt Disney ended up tearing it. “Disney’s Unforgettable Ribbon Cuttings,” posted December 21, 2013, D23: The Official Disney Fan Club, https://d23.com.

15. Joan Winchell, “Second Visit to DL,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1959, A1.

16. Robert Healy, “Sen. Kennedy Shows Savvy,” Daily Boston Globe, November 2, 1959, 35.

17. Ibid.

18. Walt Disney to Richard Nixon, May 12, 1961, image in Savvas, “Look Back.”

19. “Nixon Takes Daughter on Disneyland Tour,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1961, D3.

20. Quoted in “Six Hours of Fun: Eisenhowers, Family Guests at Disneyland,” Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1961, 2.

21. Dwight Eisenhower to Walt Disney, December 27, 1961, image in “When President Eisenhower Visited Disneyland,” posted February 17, 2014, D23: The Official Disney Fan Club

22. “Police Coordinate,” Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1968, OC1; Detail Staff Schedule for the Nixon Family’s August 16, 1968 San Diego to Knott’s Berry Farm to Disneyland to San Diego Visit, box 18, folder 1, White House Special Files Collection, Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

23. Jean Yothers, “30,000 See Wonders of Opening Day,” Orlando Sentinel, October 25, 1971.

24. OVAL 594-2, October 18, 1971, White House Tapes, Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

25. President’s Daily Diary, November 17, 1973, President Richard Nixon’s Daily Diary, November 16–30, 1973, Nixon Presidential Library and Museum; “Transcript of Nixon’s Question and Answer Session with A.P. Managing Editors,” New York Times, November 18, 1973, 62.

26. President’s Daily Diary, September 21, 1975, box 77, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI.

27. Schedule, “Proposed Schedule, Susan Ford’s Visit to Florida,” Sheila Weidenfeld files, box 43, folder: “Ford, Susan-Events6/27/75-Operation Sail Flagship Christening,” Ford Presidential Library.

28.

Quoted in Mark Hanebutt, “Mickey n’ Mates Meet Susan,” Orlando Sentinel, June 30, 1975, 1D.

29. “Personalities,” Washington Post, June 21, 1976; Sheila Weidenfeld files, box 44, folder Ford, Susan-Events-6/20/76Walt Disney World, Ford Presidential Library.

30.

Quoted in “Ford May Visit Disney in 1976,” Orlando Sentinel, December 23, 1975, 10.

31. At the time, Ford was the House minority leader, and there was some slight controversy over his acceptance of the trips during his 1976 presidential bid. “U.S. Steel Lobbyist Says He Hosted Ford,” Southern Illinoisian, September 23, 1976, 2.

32. “Ford May Visit Disney in 1976.”

33. President Ford’s Schedule, September 10, 11, 12, Disney World box B41 PPOF, Ford Presidential Library.

34. Gerald Ford to Kenneth Barnaby, October 29, 1979, ibid.

35. President’s Daily Diary, October 1, 1978, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, Atlanta, online at www. jimmycarterlibrary.gov.

36. John Schultz, “The Fabulous Presumption of Walt Disney World: Magic Kingdom in the Wilderness,” Georgia Review 42, no. 2

(Summer 1988): 283; Jimmy Carter, “Orlando, Florida Remarks at the Opening Session of the 26th World Conference of the International Chamber of Commerce,” October 1, 1978, online at American Presidency Project, ed. Gerhard Peters and John T. Wooley, www.presidence.ucsb.edu.

37. Bethanee Bemis, “How Disney Came to Define What Constitutes the American Experience,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 3, 2017, online at www.smithsonianmag.com.

38. Presidential Briefing Papers, March 8, 1983, Office of the President, Presidential Briefing Papers: Records, 1981–1989, case file 127508, box 27, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, Calif., online at www.reaganlibrary.gov.

39. Quoted in “President Visits Epcot Center’s World Showcase,” Orlando Sentinel, March 18, 1983, 81.

40. Anne Groer, “Inaugural Bands Get 2nd Shot at Epcot,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, May 15, 1985.

41. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks to Participants in the President’s Inaugural Bands Parade at Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center Near Orlando, Florida,” May 27, 1985, Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, online at www.reaganlibrary.gov.

42. Locin,“Candidates Seek.”

43. “Bush Puts Emphasis on Patriotism,” Hartford Courant, September 6, 1988, A1E.

44. Quoted in Brady MacDonald, “George H. W. Bush Dodged Photos with Mickey Mouse During a Presidential Campaign Visit to Disneyland,” Orange County Register, December 3, 2018.

45. Vicki Vaughan, “Presidential Visitors Not New for Disney,” Orlando Sentinel, January 9, 1990, 10.

46. Anne Groer and Vicki Vaughan, “Epcot Visit: Peppers, Exotic Fish,” Orlando Sentinel, January 9, 1990, 1.

47. Michael Sznajderman, “President Promotes Values,” Tampa Tribune, October 1, 1991, 148.

48. George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at the Daily Points of Light Celebration in Orlando, Florida,” September 30, 1991, George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, College Station, Tex., online at https://bush41library.tamu.edu.

49. Office of Scheduling and Advance, “President Clinton’s Daily Schedule for September 1996,” William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, Little Rock, Ark., online at Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us.

50. Christine Shenot, “Clinton Visits Disney Institute—But Cooking Class Not on Agenda,” Orlando Sentinel, September 6, 1996, 56.

51. Jennifer Loven, “Bush Milks Florida’s Cash Cow,” Tallahassee Democrat, November 14, 2003, 17.

52. Barack Obama, “Remarks at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida,” January 19, 2012, online at American Presidency Project, ed. Peters and Wooley, www.presidency.ucsb. edu.

53. Ibid.

54.

Bianca Prieto, “Obama, Romney May Snarl Traffic near Airport, Disney,” Orlando Sentinel, June 21, 2012, A8.

55. Barack Obama, “Remarks at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida,” June 22, 2012, online at American Presidency Project, ed. Peters and Wooley, www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

56. Greg Angel, “Florida GOP Moves Fundraiser with Trump From Disney to Miami,” Spectrum News, November 19, 2019, https:// www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2019/11/19/florida-gopmoves-annual-statesman-dinner-with-trump-from-disneyworld-to-miami.

57. Scott Powers, “GOP getting in way of change, Biden tells Democrats and teachers union,” Orlando Sentinel, October 28, 2011, , https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2011-1028-os-dem-convention-biden-20111028-story.html

58. “First Lady Jill Biden coming to Orlando to speak at Disney World’s Warrior Games on Thursday,” Fox 35 Orlando, August 12, 2022, https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/first-lady-jillbiden-coming-to-orlando-to-speak-at-disney-worlds-warriorgames-on-thursday

reflections Title

STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

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