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June 22, 1997 contents

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The room at the top

The Clinton's interior designer says the president "wanted an upbeat, strong office that reflected the energy and the youth of his administration, and certainly of him as president. (Globe Photo / Yunghi Kim

The first impression is that of light - pouring through the immense windows behind the president's desk, flowing into the French doors that open to the Rose Garden, dappling the rich blue rug, and dancing across the matching sofas. Then there is the immediate, palpable sense of history, of permanence. George Washington's portrait hangs above the fireplace, not just as decoration but as a reminder of lineage. Rutherford B. Hayes first sat behind the grand mahogany desk, and it has been used by all but four presidents since. Franklin D. Roosevelt christened the office in 1934. Dwight D. Eisenhower left cleat marks on the cork floors, constantly running inside from the putting green to answer his telephone. Young John F. Kennedy Jr. played underneath his father's desk. Jimmy Carter, in the final days of his presidency, paused during his successful, round-the-clock negotiations over the release of the American hostages in Iran to grab catnaps on one of the striped sofas.

The Oval Office is more than a symbol of executive power. How it is managed can determine a president's place in history.

The Oval Office, tucked into the southeast corner of the West Wing of the White House, protected from the outside world by iron gates, guarded by a phalanx of armed agents, is seen by few but known by many. It is a mysterious place in an age of dwindling mystery. It is among the most mystical places in America, in an age when mystique has long since surrendered to the floodlights of television. Wars have been declared from this office. Peace has been announced. Mammoth social programs such as the New Deal and the Great Society took form here. It provided the setting for the Watergate tapes. Congressional or foreign adversaries arrive at the office planning to argue a point and find themselves awed, then verbally crippled, unable to utter anything but platitudes and concessions. ``You can't help but look around and say to yourself, `My God, this is probably the most powerful office on the face of the earth,''' says Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff. ``You think of all those who have gone there before you.''

Beyond the mystique, however, beyond even the history entwined with virtually every important event in modern America, there is something else, an unmistakable urgency that is as much a part of this office as the snow-white moldings that rim the room, accenting the pale-yellow walls.

Occupants know from their first day, when they arrive on a usually raw January afternoon at the end of their inaugural parade or in the mournful wake of a predecessor's death or resignation, that their time is limited. They also know that their performance will be measured at every turn, first by journalists, then by the electorate, and, finally, by historians. Sit in the Oval Office alone in the quiet of a late afternoon, as Bill Clinton often does, with history behind you and ahead, and there is a sense of time passing by. The loud ticking of a Boston-made, Thomas Seymour tall-case clock fills the room - a ticking so loud that the pendulum must be stopped when television crews come inside. CNN correspondents broadcast each hour's developments from the north lawn. White House aides are bidding for a moment of the president's time. ``I only get eight years,'' Clinton recently said.

Which explains why management of the office is so crucial - who comes and goes, the amount of information a president should receive on a given issue. To manage the Oval Office is to manage access to the president, to gingerly tread the narrow ground between inundation and isolation, to refine the way decisions are made. To lead a country, a president must manage a presidency. Good, sound management, as most political scientists believe Ronald Reagan had in his first term, leads to focus, and focus reaps accomplishment. Poor management - Clinton's first year and a half is often cited - brings disarray and squandered opportunities, lost time never to be recovered. ``The most limited commodity in the American government is the time of the president, and Oval Office time is the most limited of all,'' says John Sununu, former chief of staff to George Bush.

In the end, presidents have found the Oval Office to have a life of its own - sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes more like a prison, something to be revered as well as controlled. Most presidents have reveled in the space, especially the man who uses it now. ``I love the Oval Office,'' Clinton says in a Globe interview. Later, he adds, ``Various presidents have apparently found some almost psychological reinforcement in that oval room.''

At the beginning of his second term, Clinton is learning the art of being president, at least within the walls of the West Wing. He started his presidency with a friend from kindergarten as his chief of staff; now he has a multimillionaire businessman who takes the kind of pride in running a tight, on-time meeting that most people have in watching a child graduate from college. These next 3 years will determine if the president can maintain progress, translate it into significant accomplishments, and add to the history with which the office is so inextricably linked.

The Oval Office is one of those rare places where reality matches - perhaps even exceeds - perception and expectations. Ask people who have been there, and they'll tell you - the Oval, as White House aides now call it, is a study in dignity and beauty. ``It has a serenity about it that is absolutely wonderful,'' says Ted Sorensen, who spent his fair share of time in the office as a speech writer for John F. Kennedy. ``It has this cool, quiet, calm appearance that has a certain majesty to it.'' Adds Sununu: ``You could stand me in there with my eyes closed and not tell me where I was, and I could probably sense it was the Oval Office.''

Yes, it is oval in shape, roughly 40 feet by 30 feet in size. It was completed in 1934, after the previous oval-shaped office was destroyed in the 1929 fire that gutted most of the West Wing. Ever since, the office has been a stage for public men to engage in public acts - prime-time speeches, meetings with foreign rulers, interviews with members of the news media. But it has also been an enclave, the site of enormous personal triumph and almost unimaginable heartbreak, all of it so very human despite a tendency to deify or demonize the people who become president.

John Kennedy often allowed his two young children to run through the office, creating a markedly informal feel. Ronald Reagan was so awed by the office that he rarely removed his suit jacket, even while working at his desk. ``I've never seen him in there without his coat on, except maybe once on a Saturday morning,'' says Edwin Meese, his former aide.

Lyndon B. Johnson, a news junkie, set up a bank of three television sets to the left of his desk, as well as a pair of wire tickers with the latest news from the Associated Press and United Press International. Every hour, on the hour, he would turn his radio to CBS News to hear the latest headlines. Late at night, with the rest of the West Wing quiet, he would sit at his desk opening the stacks of mail that poured into the White House from soldiers in Vietnam and members of their families. ``He would get letters from mothers who lost their sons,'' says George Christian, Johnson's former press secretary. ``He'd read them aloud. It was sort of a catharsis for him.''

When he first pulled into the White House on Inauguration Day, Carter, with his wife, Rosalyn, took an abbreviated tour through the mansion before making a beeline for the Oval Office to revel in the setting where history awaited. A little less than four years later, Carter was alone in his office the morning after his defeat to Reagan. ``He was standing behind the desk in there,'' recalls Jody Powell, his former aide and press secretary. ``He looked up and said, `Hi, Jody. You know what?' I said, `What, Mr. President?' He said, `I woke up this morning, and I realized that I no longer had a burning desire to be president.'''

Nixon regarded the office as too formal, and used to steal away to a second space he established in the Old Executive Office Building, overlooking the White House, where he had an easy chair with a hassock that allowed him to recline and read and jot notes on a yellow legal pad. ``It was more comfortable, more homey,'' says Ray Price, Nixon's speech writer and consultant, of the second office. Other presidents, including Bush, liked to duck into a smaller study, just off the Oval Office, where there is a stereo and a desk.

Gerald Ford recalls the ``tremendous burden'' he felt when he walked into the Oval Office after Nixon boarded his helicopter, gave his final victory salute, and ascended for a life as a former president. Not long after, Ford was sitting in his office early one morning, as he tended to do, before even the secretaries arrived. The telephone rang, and he answered it. It was Mayor Richard Daley, of Chicago. ``I'm a loyal hard-nosed Democrat, but I want you to know, don't be scared by those liberals giving you a hard time about Vietnam,'' Daley said, according to Ford. Still later, in April 1975, Ford had a television set wheeled into the office to watch the American evacuation of Saigon, the rough treatment the people received. ``That was a sad, sad day that was indelible in my mind,'' Ford says in a telephone interview. ``I sat there and watched, and it was devastating.''

Same setting, different war: Bush summoned his top advisers to the Oval Office late one night in January 1991, to plot a crucial strategy decision in the ground strike against Iraq. It was cold outside, raw, and Bush, while directing the meeting, lit the kindling beneath the perfectly stacked pile of wood in the fireplace. As Bush continued talking, smoke began billowing into the room, though his aides were loath to mention it. ``No one wants to interrupt the president,'' says Marlin Fitzwater, Reagan's White House spokesman, who was at the meeting. Finally, the smoke became so thick that all nine men began groping, without success, along the walls, looking for the lever to open the flue. An engineer had to be called at home and rushed to the White House to show the nine men directing the war how to operate the fireplace.

Walking through the double doors, visitors are met with a rich medley of coordinated colors. The rug, which covers most of the walnut-and-oak hardwood floor, is a spirited blue. At the far end of the oval, the draperies are a rich yellow. At the near end, the two red-striped couches face each other before the fireplace. The adjacent chairs, one of which is where Clinton typically sits in large meetings, are a golden yellow. ``He really wanted an upbeat, strong office that reflected the energy and the youth of his administration, and certainly of him as president,'' says Kaki Hockersmith, the Little Rock, Arkansas, interior designer who redid much of the White House for the Clintons.

The walls and tables are adorned with a collectors' wish list of national treasures mixed with personal mementos. ``A Portrait of Washington From Behind the Navy Yard,'' by George Cook, is on display, as is Clinton's favorite painting, ``The Avenue in the Rain,'' by Childe Hassan. A photograph of the late Ron Brown, Clinton's friend and former Commerce Department secretary, sits on a table on one side of the fireplace. A copy of Hillary Rodham Clinton's It Takes a Village is displayed on a table on the other side.

Clinton has stocked the bookshelves with first editions and volumes detailing the works of those who came before him. He has Jefferson's Complete Works, the History of the American People, by Woodrow Wilson, biographies of Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson. Also scattered about the room: busts of Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin, and John F. Kennedy, among other statesmen.

Clinton's desk, as well as a display table behind it, serves as his personal museum, offering visitors a peek at his collection of buttons, medals, pens, photographs, and a model of a vintage Ford Mustang. One pin shows Clinton tipping a cowboy hat, with a caption that reads: ``President Clinton, a man of the people.'' Aides say he constantly moves his possessions around, repositioning them, straightening them out, like a curator. ``If you have a spare hour and a half, he'll show you his button collection,'' White House press secretary Michael McCurry once said with Clinton sitting nearby. The humor was lost on Clinton, who took the suggestion as a good idea. ``You can come in and look at it,'' he immediately replied, sounding like a boy peddling the wonderment of his insect collection. In a display case in a private corridor just off the Oval Office, Clinton keeps dozens of buttons from political campaigns that date back decades. When a visitor told Clinton that she had a unique Dole/Kemp button that she wanted to give him, Clinton's eyes widened, and he said, ``God, I'd give anything for that.''

In many ways, Clinton, a student of history, can't help himself. Ask him about his office, and he gushes. ``All I can tell you is from the day I walked in there, I loved it,'' he says. ``I love working there. I like it in the early morning. I like it in the nighttime. I like it in all the hours in between.'' The office, he says, ``always gives you an expansive feeling. It gives you an enormous sense of history.''

There was a time, in the first crucial months of the new administration ...