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Unwelcoming House
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There is a knot of people standing outside the Northwest Gate of the White House. They are cold and unhappy, clutching driver’s licenses and other forms of identification.
Taking his turn, one man shouts into a communications box. He has an appointment, but he is made to feel as though he is a rascal after the silver.
There are no welcome mats at this or any other gate to the White House. You feel under suspicion until you are cleared in–when you go from indignity to thrilling proximity to power.
There are no waiting rooms or seats at the gates. There is no one posted at the gates to welcome visitors.
Things go badly for visitors who are not carrying ID. Some years ago, singer Vic Damone and his wife, Rena Rowan Damone, showed up at the Northwest Gate. They had an appointment, but Mrs. Damone didn’t bring her purse and didn’t have any ID. No ID, no entry.
The Damone tableau is played out frequently. The People’s House is not people-friendly.
Worse, because entry is badly organized, and often excessively restrictive, neither visitors nor guards respect the system–a clue as to how the Bonnie and Clyde of social-climbing, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, got in to President Obama’s first state dinner without an invitation, and even spoke to the President.
Security at the White House gates has grown since the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Every subsequent administration has built on the excess security, and faux security, of the previous one.
The guards are members of the uniformed unit of the Secret Service. They complain about the job a lot. The problem seems to be pay; their beef contributes to the attitude faced by visitors.
The Salahi affair demonstrates how too much security results in a breachable wall. But there is too much faux security in Washington, too.
Since 9/11, a vast army of security people (rent-a-cops) has taken over corporate and government buildings in the nation’s capital. They sit at desks or in glass boxes in the lobby of almost every office building. They are there to get visitors to sign in and to show the dreaded ID.
But you can sign in as almost anyone and nothing happens. Any name is good enough in the world of faux security.
Every week I go to a particular radio studio, where I have to sign in and wait for a producers to escort me. The busy producers have to leave their consoles. The guards know this is a waste of time and effort. Everyone despises the charade and, therefore, disrespects the system.
At Voice of America headquarters, you have to produce a driver’s license and have your picture taken each time you enter the building. Taking pictures of all visitors is something even the White House does not require.
So which national secrets is Voice of America hiding that the White House is not? --For the Hearst/New York Times Syndicate
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A Farewell to Tony Snow
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Now we must turn down an empty glass for Tony Snow. The expression comes from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” as translated from the Persian by the English eccentric Edward FitzGerald. The FitzGerald translation also gave us “The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on . . .” and many other quotable lines.
Anyway at one time, journalists, particularly those who worked for newspapers, liked to treat “The Rubaiyat” as a kind of drinking song without music. It was very popular in saloons frequented by journalists, who insisted on being called newspapermen or women. It wasn’t until the rise of television that “journalist,” an old-fashioned term, reemerged probably because newspapermen and women were appearing more and more on TV.
When we lost one of our own, we’d turn down an empty glass. We’d also upend a few bottles as we mourned our loss; another good soul destined for that great newsroom in the sky.
Journalism is a soberer business nowadays, and the old practices have largely died out. Unfortunately in dismantling our vices, mostly drinking and a pervasive inability to handle money, we’ve also lost our ability to grieve collectively, to hug and to cry.
Even so, much of the Washington journalistic population, and the White House press corps in particular, are walking around shocked. Tony Snow is dead. We all feared it was coming, and also believed it wouldn’t happen. Not our Tony. Even the atheists among us hoped for some divine intervention; some triumph of the human spirit, so plentiful in Snow, over the evil of metastasizing cancer.
After all, we are a sentimental lot; conservative about our trade and profligate with our adoration, if we can find someone we feel worthy of it. There’s the rub. We live in a world of ambitious and disingenuous politicians who buy their opinions wholesale and will pirouette on a dime if there’s a vote or campaign contribution to be had. We are not cynical; we are lovelorn, short of people to admire–editors and proprietors, as well as politicians.
Tony was one of us and one of them, but fundamentally we thought he was one of us. Sure he’d written speeches for Reagan, subbed for the polemicist Rush Limbaugh, and wore the colors of George W. Bush. We didn’t care.
Snow knew that we go to the White House briefings and press conferences to get the facts, not to debate policy. He knew that everyone of us had an appointment with a word processor or a camera moments after he left the podium, He respected our struggle, and we respected his.
Sadly, the last time I saw Snow was at a funeral for CBS broadcaster Ivan Scott. Snow sat with my wife, Linda Gasparello, and me. Toward the end of the Mass, Snow went over to Scott’s widow, Sarah, and hugged her for the longest time, in a gesture made the more poignant because we all knew that he was fighting the same disease that carried off Ivan. Also, he appeared to be the only present or recent White House official who showed up. He was like that.
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The Middle East, the mid-term elections
September 3rd, 2010
Guest: Hans Nichols, Bloomberg; Bill Thomas, congressional candidate; and George Wilson, GW on the Hill
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Political words, phrases and their origins
August 20th, 2010
Guest: Paul Dickson, author
Richard Whittle discusses his book, “The Dream Machine: The Untold History Of The Notorious V-22 Osprey”
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Guest: Richard Whittle, author; Sharon Weinberger, AOL News
Things That Make Us Mad
August 6th, 2010
Guest: Bob Franken, syndicated columnist; Julie Mason, DC Examiner