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What was it like to grow up in a home where some of the most important political decisions are being made at the same time as you are trying to pass your driver's license exam? We all remember our childhood firsts, but for most of us, these quintessential memories did not take place in one of the country's most famous
Music has been an essential part of life in the White House from the earliest days of our nation, not only as a "companion" to divert, delight, and "sweeten many hours," as Thomas Jefferson professed, but also as an element of the pageantry accompanying international diplomacy. Through the years the United States Marine Band has musically represented the nation before
President Taft, a frequent theater goer, was seated in his box at the National Theatre with his aide Archibald Butt, when he rose and said, “Archie, this is hot!” He led the way out, believing it undignified for the president of the United States to appear to condone a risqué show.Nearly all the presidents have enjoyed theatrical performance and sough
Mobility is essential to the presidency. The necessity of reaching the far-flung corners of the U.S.A. seems a requirement. It always has been achieved to the extent the times permit. For George Washington travel seems to have been a simpler matter, although the nation was smaller, the roads muddier. He journeyed by coach to the east and on
The national parks preceded the National Park Service, but the first great natural park was a state park. California’s Yosemite State Park was established in 1864, by a federal cession approved by President Abraham Lincoln, and on October 21, 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes toured California’s Yosemite in an open carriage. On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant had approved the establishment of Y
By the summer of 1946, President Harry S. Truman needed a vacation. Catapulted into the presidency by the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, the former vice president had presided over the end of World War II that spring and summer and the uneasy peace that followed. During that time, U.S. relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated as
Prior to President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Panama in 1906, no American president had set foot outside the country during his tenure in office, not even crossing a bridge to Canada or Mexico. In an August 1906 letter to Andrew Carnegie, President Roosevelt bemoaned the “ironclad custom which forbids a President ever [going] abroad” that kept him from engaging in dir
The People's House: Although John Adams was the first to occupy the Executive Mansion in November 1800, it was Thomas Jefferson who first celebrated the Fourth of July at the White House in 1801. Jefferson opened the house and greeted diplomats, civil and military officers, citizens, and Cherokee chiefs in the oval saloon (today’s Blue Room). The Marine Band played in th
On a July afternoon in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt exchanged the sizzle of a Washington summer for the ocean breezes of Oyster Bay, New York, and forever transformed the nature of the presidential vacation. Theodore Roosevelt single-handedly invented the modern presidential vacation. While earlier chief executives traveled with just a clerk or two, TR moved key White House staff members and a