she visited him, he visited her. through his letter stir will largely have his recollections, but there was an exchange shortly after the reelection but before the inauguration in which most of her letters disappeared. we only have a one-sided dialogue, but he was not very good at this relationship thing. a very clear. he spends three pages going into great detail about the election return and then says, by the way, what you mean when you said we were going apart. they're is a leather chair shortly before the inauguration which says, you know, i think not going to take that diplomatic post. and that he goes to sear. by the time he comes back his riding in telling him here is where the wedding will be. so very clearly the only way he could have got married was to get out of the white house because the secretaries were expected to live there and he couldn't. they went on to diplomatic posts nikolai stay there until 6869 and then came back. hey did a turn in paris and then came home. he kind of mark about at his parents' house and went to see william seward who got him a diplomatic post in vienna. he went back to madrid and did a year there and came home. also by this point he had done three diplomatic posts in new everybody. he came back and became the foreign affairs correspondent for the new york tribune making a lot of money living in new york. then he married a very wealthy woman from cleveland which is now the hay adams mansions got built. it was not with money from writing class. thank you so much, view, for coming out. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> wednesday night book tv in prime time featuring books about exploring america. at 8:00 peter stark on astoria >> on our next washington journal a conversation on prison sentencing. joining us from texas. a food company general mills announced last week and it was reversing plans to make consumers forfeit their right to sue the company. you will talk to the consumers union about the decision. later as part of our spotlight on magazine trends in the u.s. gambling industry. we will also get an update on the supreme court plus take your calls, and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. washington journal each morning. >> robert clair recounts the physical improvements made to the white house in 1948. the german families blair house. from new york city bar association this is just over an hour. [applause] >> thank you very much. thank you for inviting me. thank you all for turning down. it's nice to be here. this is, as you can surmise, something that is taken up the last three years of my life. in researching and writing this book which by the way encompasses a years, is no small chance to figure out how to present this to you all and still having you be conscious and unfinished. in a year story, i would have to cover roughly one day per second. if i were to do that i would already be terribly behind. so what i thought we would do instead is lot to think of this in terms of addressing two central questions. the first is how is it that the most important house in the united states of america, the symbol of the executive branch is allowed to deteriorate to the point where it nearly collapsed and killed the president which is a big question. in the second thing is -- the second thing i would like to address is how we got the white house we have today. when you look at the house you're seeing a house, but if you are to be fortunate enough to be invited and cytosine is to step through the front door you are not in a historical building anymore a standing is something that was built in 1950. that's quite a bit of engineering, and i want to try to cover the more interesting parts. so to kick this off every story in my experience needs a villain and like to introduce you to one of the balance. this is a 1902 factory photograph of a chandelier bill by calling company around 1901. it is number 11836, but they had a name for it. it was three and a half feet across and nearly 6 feet tall. my estimates are given all the bohemian crystal on that thing it probably wait around a thousand pounds. on a winter afternoon and early 1948 it was hanging here in the blue room of the white house. i would like to use your imagination and try to imagine about 100 women in this room sipping tea, 1948. and first lady standing directly beneath this chandelier making small talk and suddenly amid all the pleasant chatter she hears the sound and looks up and sees that chandelier start to sway. at first she tries to ignore it, but the sound got louder and she can't. she looks up again and now is truly moving. so she summons the assistant ussher over and, please go upstairs and find out what's going on. he raced up the stairs to the room directly above this one and finds nothing in this except for one thing. in the adjoining room which happens to be the president's back from harry s. truman is sloshing around in the bathtub. and i don't believe he was a particularly vigorous bay there, but apparently it was enough to get the been shaking and enough to shake this chandelier. so the guests go home, the daughters of the american revolution, no one is armed. bess truman comes upstairs to confront her husband and said to my was afraid that chandelier was going to come down on top of all of those people. and at that president truman burst out laughing. he thought that was fantastic. he thought it would be wonderful if it slid through the floor with him in it wearing nothing of it in his reading glasses and he could come down right in the middle of the daughters of the american revolution as one of his architects later put it delicately in a report to descend in the tub among police. but truman was a practical man. he said to the usher, you had better get some engineers in here to take a look around. so that is how my book starts. that's how i've just target. obviously i'm going to move a little bit faster now. truman had harbored suspicions about the white house is integrity almost to the point to $0.5 the point that the move again. he would work in his oval study lated night and was troubled by the sounds a kept hearing. there were creaking noises. the curtains would sway on their own even of the windows were closed. at one point in june of 45 he wrote to his wife, i sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, reed reports, and work on speeches all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway. the floors pop in the drapes move back and forth. this was the hallway. i have looked. over time german had heard so many sounds coming from the gasol way that he stopped thinking that goes might be the reason for the. at one. the chandeliers shaking and trembling started to get to be a regular thing which was very troublesome and at one time sherman also barred his doctors stethoscope and walked over a one of the walls and press the diaphragm against the plaster and could hear the house creaking slowly back and forth. this was a three story house, not a skyscraper, should not be making that noise. finally one morning truman wrote in his diary, the big fat butler brought me my breakfast and the force lagan moved like a ship see. that was a very serious warning sign. the floor was not just shimmying. it was truly moving. >> if there was evidence the white house needed it was falling apart, it came when my piano fell through. well, no kidding. president truman had not sat idle while the spooky things were going on. in february of 1947, he sent out confidential letters to douglas other of the more than institute of architects. that's him right there in the glasses, and he sent another letter to richard, head of the american society of civil engineers. that's him right there. he asked the two to come to the white house and kick around and please keep it a secret. they did. in fact, these gentleman and more and more engineers and architects from the billing administration visited the white house from 1947 into 48 and inspected, and word did not get out the public what they were finding. the truth came out only after truman was reelect the in 1948, but the moment that he was, literally, the moment, within a few hours, he was evacuated from the house as well as the family. the house was condemned. they were afraid if there were a minor tremor in washington, the entire house would come in. why would they evacuate the president of the united states? what on earth had they found? by this time, the gentleman, by the way, i should mention, formed into an official body known as the commission own renovation of the executive mansion, the body to oversee the work. what did they find? well, they found this. when they chipped away the plaster covering the interior brick walls, there were cracks, not in the plaster, but the bricks. some of the cracks were two stories tall. it was obvious what was happening to the engineers. the interior brick walls were actually pulling away from the outer stone walls of the white house. in some cases, they pulled away so far there was gaps big enough to get your arms through. the walls were, in fact, sinking into the ground. pulling everything down around them as they went, and it created absolute mayhem, including an incident one afternoon when the ceiling of the east room dropped six inches in about an hour. it became common practice for the carpenters to rush in and build scaffolding like this, and, soon, scaffolding like this was all over the house. they were desperate simply to keep the plaices standing. the wonder of this is how long the trumans lived with this scaffolding and the public did not know about it. what else did they find? cracks in the beams of the floors. dried out, rotten, never sealed, i don't mean little cracks like what happens in old wood. if you look at this brace here, you can make out a crack. if you can't, we'll go closer. maybe you see it now. this is the beam preserved in the library. truman had this cut out and set aside, possibly because he was worried people might not believe howry kick louse this was. that is a big crack. the engineers found not only this, but others massive notches cut into the beam, literally hacked into the beam. in some cases, there was only two inches of wood left that supporting tons of waste. the wonder is that the house did not fall in at all. by early 19 # 49, truman is safely reelected, they made the announcement that a complete gutting and rebuilding was what was necessary, literally, to save the house. let's consider what we have. we have a president that's been hastily moved across the street to the blare house, and that's him there on the front steps. we have the single most important piece of the united states' architecture heritage about to collapse, and, perhaps, you're thinking, what everybody in the united states was thinking at that moment. who was to blame? who was to blame? well, since we're talking about washington, d.c., i thought we'd adhere to local custom and blame some people. i'll start with names of men you probably already know. we'll start by blaming president jackson apologize pierson harris, arthur harrison, and taft. why? these gentleman brought in, what at the time, they called improvements to the house. every time science advanced and something new to make something easy y, well, of course, the president had to have it. is started with jackson who brought in water pipes and hallowed out logs. bringing in gaslights, pipes in hot water, johnson brought in the telegraph, heys the tornado watch, taft, the lower right here, a one ton bathtub. and that was the weight without mr. taft. [laughter] now, this seems reasonable, right? should be living comfort baling. bring running water into the white house. why not. well, there was a problem, actually. every time they brought in a system like this, they had to drill a hole through a beam, through a wall stud, and they were told to hurry up, the workman, come in, you're inconveniencing the president, hurry up. ripped down what they had to, hacked through, and then cover it up. that's what constituted the damage in the beams i referenced earlier. the other thing is the additions were heavy. they were cast iron. in a house that would be built today, bringing in a lot of steel pipes would not necessarily be a problem, but it was a problem in the white house, and i want to explain why. the white house had a very unusual system -- well, not for the time, but distinct system for drilling the weight load. the outer walls of the house, which i have here, looking down at the house here, they are in black. those were four feet thick. they were stone. they -- the foundations went five feet below the ground, and they capped off with pudding. think of decent anchoring for the time. the big problem was that the interior walls, which are red here, those were walls of brick, and they basically had no foundation at all. you don't need an engineering degree to know that's a problem. no foundation, seriously? seriously. i had a hard time believing this and the engineers were discover because by 1948, almost none of the white house's original drawings survived. they were thrown away or lost in the fire. i found this photo from 190 # it # in a congressional report, and it was picturing the installation of a new boiler for teddy roosevelt in 1902, and it's not easy to see, but narrow in as best you can, it's instructive. this is the brick pier on the ground floor level of the white house. that's a pier helping to support all of the house above it. what you see broken up here would be the very bottom of the house, and what you see here would be what they excavated. take note of the man there for scale. look at this. what is that? that's called rubble work. it's a very crude foundation. basically, they found stones that they dug, and they threw them down there, maybe with mortar, maybe not, and they built a brick pier on top of it. if you used the man's legs for scale, oh what do we have there? three feet or so? okay. you think, well, three feet of stone is not a bad foundation. maybe not. consider that on this pier and on every other pier in the basement, the white house was pressing down at 20 tons per linier foot, and the ground beneath the white house was sand. that's another problem. so back to the blame game not to kick mud on people. isn't the real culprit the one who design the white house in 17922? no, it's not. the study of mechanics did not exist yet, and he was only building the building that george washington asked him to, which was a country gentleman's house. it was perfectly suitable for the time. it was not suitable for 1950 as one of truman's assistants put it, the white house was, quote, designed as a comfortable late 18th century home, but it's become the nerve center of the world. okay. let's continue on with the damage. the culprit list, i add roosevelt on the left, who decided in 1902 #, she needed a bigger dining room. she had 50 feet, she wanted 107. the only way to give that to her was to take this wall and this staircase and rip it out. that is what poor charles mckim here, who also built outpatient here in new york, had to do, and so what did they do to replace the wall? well, mckim built a hanging truss in the floor above it to carry the weight instead of supporting it from below, hang it from above. it was perfectly fine until 1913 when they destroyed it by modifying the third floor and adding bathtubs, living quarter, and more tons of piping and iron. along came coolidge in 1927 who rebuilt the third floor and roof, and it needed to be done, but he rebuilt it out of cement. by the time this was done, the two upper floors of the white house rose to 180 tons, and then finally, i'm afraid i have to blame harry truman, much as i like the man, for adding a balcony to the south port koa here, even though he knew the house was in trouble. it was made of steel beams and concrete 18 inches thick. i calculated that's another 6 it 2 tons -- 62 tons or so. okay. do we understand why there's cracks in the wall? why the walls are sinking? these problems fell to these men. this is the commission who you saw assembled on the front lawn before. this is their meeting room in the east wing. they were trusted solving with a big problem, which is, what on earth will they do about this house? not only did they have to decide what to do about the house, but they also had to face off with those who at the time, you know, if the white house is in this bad a shape, let's rip it down. maybe we can -- who on earth? this man said something like that. this is congressman clarence cannon, chair of appropriations committee and believed 5.4 million dollars, the price tag to do the renovation work, was too high, and cannon argued, too, harry truman in a letter say, quote, the people want a new building. if you think that's a fringe opinion, consider that congressman cannon actually got the "washington post" editorial page to agree with him. fortunately the commission favored the plans drawn up by lorenzo, the architect that truman kept on, and on august 2, 1949, the commission voted they were going to preserve the house, and i want to explain what "preserve" means because preserve then means something what we understand it to mean today. what they were able to save was only the facade of the house. as far as those inadequate foundations, even on the outside walls, those were the original footings down five feet. they determined they have to bring them down another 2 it # feet before they hit a solid layer of gravel that the white house could sit on. they had to build these walls down by excavating literal columns and pouring cement into them, and then they had to dig out out of the earth inside, and then inside the house, they would erect a steel skeleton, not unlike what you see in a skyscraper. that's a big job. meanwhile, the white house purposeture sent over to the national gallery, took it out of the white house, this is the white house furniture and storage at the national gallery and looks like the national gallery, this was an up finished gallery that the security guards converted into a basketball court. i should mention that most of the personture was not worth very much. president's routinely redecoratedded. we are not looking at old chip and dales here. one in 1882, dropped 24wagon loads of white house furniture off to the auction house, and many presidents did this, and grace coolidge lamented when she was first lady that she had looked around for original pieces of furniture and just found a single chair that belonged to lincoln. there was not much to save. there were a few pieces, and they took out what they could and moved it to the national gallery. this is the state dining room before the renovation began, and i'd like you to imagine it without its furniture, without the locke portrait or lighting fixtures. anything else in this picture that looks possibly worth preserving if it were up to you? well, maybe all that nice carved oak paneling, perhaps, maybe that really nifty stone fireplace? the commission did not care about those things. they were ready just to demolish. luckily, for us, one man did care about this, and that was lorenzo, the white house architect. he took all of the beautiful carved fittings off the wall, had them all numbered, and he had them all shipped down to the warehouse on the right side down on b street. he had planned, once the renovation was finished, he thought, we'll have steel in place, and we'll just take these beautiful wooden interior panels and door frames, and windows and everything, and put it back to where it was. that was the plan. i'd like you to remember that because we'll come back to that. so the bids were opened, and the philadelphia based construction firm broke ground on the job two weeks before christmas. he's the man in the right in the photo with his hands folded in front of him right there. let me give you a better picture of him. there he is. john mcshane was a legend in washington known as the man who built washington. by this time, he built bureau of engraving and p printing, memorial, and pentagon which he put up in 14 months. he was a man who got things done, but with the white house job, most of the bids for the job, this was a cost-plus fixed fee contract. that probably means a lot to some of you. i had to look it up. he was bidding on his feet what would be the profit on the job. most of the contractors put in bids of half a million, three quarters a million dollars. mcshane bid $1 00,000. it was impossible for him to make a profit on the bid that loy. he did not care. he had already made his fortune, and his daughter, who is still with us, told us in an interview, basically, there was no way that daddy was not going to get that job. now things move quickly because john mcshane and the men have 6 # 60 days to gut the house, dig the new foundation, and raise the steel skeleton inside. here we have the second floor corridor a few days into the start of the demolition, and just to appreciate what men can accomplish with sledge hammers when they are paid and told to enjoy themselves, i thought we could do before and during photographs. this is the entrance hall before. with sledge hammers. this is what they did to the blue room. this is what they did to the east room. they were good, weren't they? mcshain lit rally mauled the house down to the outer walls. two months into the job, the white house looks like this, ground floor looking up what used to be the first floor in the east room. five months into the job, the house looked like this. truman wrote to his cousin back in missouri around this time, and he said, this is the summer of 1950, he says, the old building is nothing but a shell. there is not a thing in it from cellar to garret, and he was right. this is another question i get asked a lot. the white house had 1.3 million cubic feet of interior space, 66 rooms worth of glass, plaster, and brick. nobody counts the beams and wall studs, but they estimated there's something like a million bricks that came out of the house. where did they all go? what happened to it? well, believe it or not, the common debris, the bricks, the nails, all that, wound up in a steel warehouse in fortfire in virginia, there on the left in the big pile. it was chopped up and fed into the strangest government program in history. there's a lot of strange government programs in our history. this was the official white house souvenir program, and you could write in, and they would send you a catalog, and you can choose whatever souvenir you wanted. it was all free, just paid for postage. if you wanted a brick, it was a dollar. if you wanted bookends made of the actual stone from the house, well, that was only $2 #. if you were willing to pay the shipping for a hundred bucks, you got enough wood to -- stone to build a fireplace. quite a few people ordered it. how many of these are floating around right in my apartment. on the left, there's a paper that went for 50 cents and you got a nail and piece of foundation and white stone and authentication plate in case friends didn't believe you. on the right side, here's one of the book ends. that was only $2. how about the rest of it? some of the brick went to mount vernon, george washington's home to patch things up, and camp david received a plumbing and radiators which may still be there to this day. some of the stone wound up in georgetown to patch walls in the chez peek and ohio canals, and they had so much stone left over, some was just left on the ground. figuring maybe we'll need it later. i got permission to show you this photo in exchange for not telling you where it is located. back at the house, june of 1950, the job is finishing up, the bricks over here, bringing the foundation down 22 feet until they hit gravel level. see that, the stone face way to smooth cement. that is the foundation going down. once they got it, they had -- see the bulldozer there. they had to scoop out all of that earth, 22 p 0,000 cubic feet of earth. taken out. because the decision was made to keep the third floor, they had to build these temporary columns to hold the roof up. once you add those, they brought in lateral support beams that literally kept the his historic walls from caving in. once they got done with that, it was time for the structural steel to go in. i'm not spending time on that, but i wanted to show you the picture because i want you to look at the thickness of the this steel beam and consider this was going in to a three-story building. okay? if you've seen the times photograph of the construction of the empire state building, you see beams this thick; right? what on earth were they thinking? well, harry truman said this was going to be the last time the white house was ever going to be rebuilt. he was right. there were other things going on in the global stage that led to the decisions. it just so happened to be around this time. two events on the global stage that were important, and august of 1949, the soviets exploded their first atomic bomb. we did not know yet there was a mole. we called this joe one, a cute name, but nobody was laughing. this took us by surprise. in june of 1950, they cross the parol leal and invade the south korea using soviet tanks, making it clear that truman, the soviet union was willing to engage us. so the commission and truman's security men took a second look at the two new subbasement levels of the house once they were going to be used only for storage. this memo shows up. that is -- i'm not reading the whole thing, scan it if you'd like, but there's two yiewf mitches here. one is this is from admiral dennison informing the commission that part of the basement is going to now pass out of their control in order to create, quote, certain protective measures and, quote, protective characteristics. what does that mean? what you think it means. it means the bomb shelter. now, this gets tricky because the bomb shelter is still sensitive installation, and we don't know much about it, and we shouldn't. what i know is historical, which i'll share with you. we know from lorenzo's notes that in august of 1950, he was designing a shelter under the east terrace. that's what we're looking here. the east terrace a the narrow corridor connecting the mansion to the east wing. this happened to be the location of a bomb shelter that fdr constructed in the second world war, and it's logical extension to believe they appropriated that and expanded it. one thing is clear, they're building something here. now, if truman is in the oval office in the west wing and the bomb shelter's in the east wing, what do you do? well, this is the new two-level subbasement we see, and what they built for him was a steel reenforced concrete tunnel. it would percent him to get from one wing to the other. it was accessible from the house above. this is what it looks like to stand inside of it. that concrete is two feet thick. before i move on here, i want to make one point very clear. the bomb shelter was obsolete almost from the time it was built. as soon as the soviets tested a hydrogen bomb in 1953 moving from the kiloton to the megaton range, the idea of a president shelters in place became completely to postrows. the bombs too powerful. the other thing is truman never had intention of using his shelter, and he said so. he had told one of security men, and i'm quoting here, go ahead with all this planning and arrangements, but one thing, if a situation ever develops, i don't intend to leave the white house. i'm going to be right here. as it turns out, in my book, i relate this story, there, indeed, was a false alarm, and truman stayed upstairs and did not go to the shelter. he believed if americans didn't have a shelter, he shouldn't have one. i submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, we do not have presidents of that milk anymore. [applause] okay. so back upstairs. since mid-1950, this job started running seriously behind. i had mentioned the korean war. why is that a problem? well, it choked off the supply of labor and increased the cost of materials. this is the plan, and it's complicated, but this is the main floor, two points. the layout of the walls were considered is a cro sapght. it was so once you stepped into the white house, if you were jefferson, by some miracle, it looked familiar to you. he didn't want to move it around too much. he took a freer hand downstairs and upstairs. here on the second floor, movedded walls around a bit to give all the bedrooms their own bathroom and something the white house never had before this time, which was closets. as a manhattan regulated renter, i appreciate that. i don't have any. okay. for the first time in a long time, the house lookedded like a house again. this is the shortage of time and money and problems it would cause, and i want to explain that. i want to start with money. and more money given later, but we'll stay with that figure. the structure steel, all that, cost 1.it # billion, and after that, they had to pay an avalanche of bills. the roofing, masonry, painting, elevators, insurance, draftsmen, all of that. thin came the electrical and mechanical systems. that was another 1.3 million dollars. so when it came time to actually finish the interior of the house so it looked like an executive house, these bills were very problematic. par cay floors and mar bell and stone for 247,000, plaster 275,000, wood work 417,000. these are 1951 dollars. that wood work costs closer to $4 million today. why hit you with figures? well, at some appointment, they had to bring in a decorator, a guy to do the wallpaper, up policy try, and by the time that man entered the picture, and that's him, charles height, the deck rater for b. altman and company, the building is still down on 34th street if you know what i'm talking about, and he said, we'll do the decorating for free, all the labor's free. weal charge for cost of materials, which was a good deal; right? they saw marketing tie-in pretty well back then too, and when charles who assumed he would be begin a generous budget for the decorating met with the commission, he was in for a cold water chat. he was told we have $2 10,000 left. that comes down to 1590 per room. that's for everything, furniture, rugs, draperies, wall paper, lamps, everything. he said, quote, i can send your $210,000, the best spent at altman will not may recollect a penny that it is not enough. and it was not. winslow, remember,mentedded the house restoredded to the early 1800s, and the press office released this horrid release that declared that the white house would be the recreation -- said -- sorry, an american interpretation of the george, truth was that most of the furniture were colonial reproduction pieces from heritage, basically what you find in a traveling salesman's hotel. i don't think you need to be ab expert in the federal period to realize that's not something thomas jefferson would have done in his own hand; although, some pieces were nice and the mantelpiece is nice. she said, mr. truman showed me around the white house that looked like a hotel. kennedy, later said, famously, that the true interior design of the white house was early statler. the handful of pieces restored and put back, leaving the state floor looking respectable. they did their best. overall, the interior decoration was a disappointment, not remedied until kennedy redecorated in 1963, a separate story. i also mentioned that shortage of time, and that leaves us to the last portion here, and harry trymanmented to come back and live in the restored white house for a year. by the summer of 1951, he was realizing that was not terribly likely, and so he said to jb, the assistant usher, quote, i've been using a curry comb on the contractors to speed up reconstruction. he leaned on them saying, hurry it up. well, you'd expect the president to say that. unfortunately, that pressure and some other forces, but that pressure strurmt tally would exact a serious toll. remember i mentioned all of those beautiful interior finishings, the panels, doors, moving them to the warehouse where they waited. well, as it turned out, the woodworkers discovered making reproduction pieces was faster and cheaper, and that's what they started to do. a lot of the historic pieces would be marooned in the warehouse and not put back in the white house. i want to be clear that some of the interiors were put back, and i say "interiors," more like 190 it it # roosevelt interiors. this is the dining room with the original paneling back and same happened with the red, the green, and the blue rooms, but that was only four rooms out of 48 # that were dismantled. what happened to all the other historic stuff? where did it go? it was given away, and in some cases, it was thrown away. this is the penitentiary in virginia. it's know closed. this prison received the white house's ornamental ventlation grills, the fire backed, three crates of door frames, 12 crates of window trim, and 22 it crates of hardwood panel doors. prisoners are nicer looking rooms than the president did. unfortunately, it gets worse. much of what was leftover was buried. it was buried in the forty mire military base just across the river. you can visit these days, i don't recommend visiting with a shovel. the pr guy says don't dig, everything is now under 30 feet of topsoil. for the record, if you drive in here, park, walk, and you stand between the child development cementer and softball field, you'll stand where much of the white house was buried. mingled with the debris of the pentagon and dumped in a hole and covered up. now, i don't want to end on a downer. the fact is, december piet the reproduction purposeture, lost of artifacts, the house was saved, and much of the work that was done was truly first rate, and, i mean, the beautiful brocade wall covering there on the left, caldwell and company in business and restored their chandeliers. truman returned to the house in 1952, and while his private feelings about the job were mixed, he said he, himself, could have done it faster and for less money, just one of the things i love about harry truman, but he was also a constant politician. his public persona was, yeah, renovation, and he was in a position thanks to the new envenges called television to be the first president who could give a televised tour. yes, he did it before jackie did it. he took americans on a tour of the white house that they had paid to restore with their tax dollars. this is him talking to frank of cbs. at this point in the tour, they wondered into the blue room, fitting, because that's where the trouble started, and what truman is looking up at at this point is the shaped -- chandelier, where also a lot of the trouble started. it's a pity that the people at home couldn't see how beautiful the blue room was on their black and white television. it looked like this. you might also notice they cropped out the chandelier, and i doubt that was an accident, the one they put in was much smaller and lighter. i want to leave you with a closing thought, not an opening thought. 5.4 million dollars in 1949, the currency converter converts to over $51 million today. 51 million dollars today is roughly the cost of a single c-27j cargo plane for our government. given the history of government spending that we have in the country, i would argue that we actually get a good deal. i got a good deal because you guys have been extremely party with me, and i thank you all for coming. i'll take questions. if you have to go, fine, but thank you, all, for coming. [applause] >> you mentioned trumanmented to keep a scrt and instructed the commission or the first two members -- >> yes. >> why was that, why keep it a secret? >> he had a good reason. the question is, why did truman keep the disaster yows results uncovered by the architects and engineers uncovered by the public, which is something i should have explained. he was running for re-election at the tierm that these terrible problems were coming to light, and the fear was that if the public found out the state the white house was in, they would blame it on harry truman, and it's important to understand the context. harry truman, his own mother-in-law referred to him as a dirt farmer, and this was while he was president. he was from missouri. the east coast establishment, many of them, turned their noses up at him, and so did many people in the country. margaret later wrote in her books, she's written, confronting this several time, said, if the public found out about the condition that the white house was in, it would have become a metaphor for the truman administration itself, rotten @ core. they all kept the secret. the wonder is, in some ways, they kept the secret at their own physical expense, at their own peril because there were so many scaffoldings e legislated in the house at that time and the place was in such dire shape, that, really, the family should have been moved out sooner. the fact it was concealed from the public was a political decision. nip else? >> what happened to the chandelier? >> i asked. i've been looking for it to pop up on ebay, but it never -- [laughter] i wrote to the white house cure rater and -- curator and asked him, and i just thank the white house curator for his paishesz if he sees this. apparently, the chandelier was never put back in the house, even though they have plenty they circulate as needed because every time there's a new first family, they rekick rate as they wish. they had -- it's like a museum where you see part of the collection on the wall at any given time and most is in storage. same thing with the white house. the chandelier was put into storage after the rep vaition and never brought back out. i'm assured that it's been kept safe and it's still in find shape and has its crystals, but it's never been rehung inside the house. >> [inaudible] >> no, it wouldn't. this would be the time to put it back. you know, given the thickness of the beams you saw, they could put more than one up there now. you know, that chandelier, remember, was from the 190 # renovations, which is significant because mckim doing the decorating at the time, you know, he had a neoclassical as thetic when just so happened to agree with what winslow had in mind in 1948-49 because the federal of it, the american georgian period, if you will, also has a strong affinity for neoclassicism, but that might have translated to afluted column. that chandelier was way over the top, and, i mean, i wish i had found that as a quote. they said this is way over the top, can't put it in, but issue obviously, that's what they thought. it was too much. sir? >> in your research, did you have need to access the white house today or at least ask for permission to access the white house? >> that's a great question. if you want to tour the white house these days, you can pay a lot of money to go on a tour or write to your congressperson, and i wrote to my congressperson, but i couldn't arrange a time that was actually convenient and reasonable because i have a job. then i realized that in some ways, it really was not all that important for me to go. i say that for two reasons, actually, three. one, my folks took me when i was little. i remember it. two, they only take you to the old ground floor, and then they take you to the state floor, and naturally, as i say to everybody, the two most interesting spaces in any house in the basement and attic, two places where they were not going to take me, and so i thought, well, i'm not going to see the thing i'm curious, and i will not get to see the shelter, i thought, well, you know, maybe i don't need to, and, finally, it's important to remember that with every first family in there, even though they tend to leave the state floors relatively alone compared to the family quarters upstairs, but the state floor has changed very much since this time, and so i was afraid of seeing how the house would have looked like as the obamas have done it and having that as a mental picture because i really needed to discipline myself and not go past 1950. in some ways, it was important for me to the to see the white house. anyone else? yes, in the back. >> how was the support in congress for the funding? >> by today's standards, bipartisan, yes, but what's interesting is that it was very difficult to get the funding out of congress is the short answer, as you can imagine. congress first funded initial round of inspection $50,000; right? this was the congress who did not like harry truman much for a variety of reasons there's no time to get into. they were not friendly to him or eager to fork over the money, but they did fork over $50,000 to the initial inspection, and truman deliberately seventh an inspector up to capital hill to testify on what they had found, and i forget the gentleman's name, but i have the transcript, and he testified that the white house is staying up through force of habit alone. he basically scared the hell out of them and scared the funding out of them. if only it were that schism today, but, yeah, so they were rather antagonistic about it, and so there are instances of congressman who toured the house, winslow brought tours through the house and showed them, look at the cracks, the wall, and even then, there were congressmen who did not want to spend a dime on this house, which is -- gives pause. sir, did you have a question? >> yes -- [inaudible] >> yeah, i think fdr treated the knowledge of the white house more or less the way he treated the knowledge of his own health which was basically what he didn't want to know. i found a report that had come to fdr that warned him that the house was a fire trap, and he had done nothing about it. they were aware of it, though, we know this, because there's also, and i threw this in the book because i just couldn't leave it out. when the trumans were at blare house preparing to move into the white house in 1945, and eel nor was packing up and moving out and fdr already died a week earlier, all the moving vans were loaded and elenor went across the street to blare house to pay a visit to truman to say, hey, have a good time over there, and, by the way, the place is infested with rats. figured i'd tell you, and she left. [laughter] she didn't mean that metaphorically. there's app entire rat history with the white house. rats are in force. i don't mean a random rat, but i mean, like, union rat, you know? go all the way back, at least to the harrison administration, and there were reports of roosevelt, who would be in the family dining room with sons having din eric and they would put forks and knives down to chase rats out of the room, so the problems with the house were understood. the other answer to the question is fdr really loved old houses, and truman did too. he grew up on the farm. wood frame houses that creeked, probable they thought, oh, you know, not a big deal; right? you go up the stairs, and it creeks a little. the answer to the question is, yes, the roosevelts did know to a degree, but they certainly did not know that it was just this bad. sir? >> i remember when kennedy moved into the white house and she was horrified by the furnishings. >> mortified. >> the eisenhowers got things from sears, whatever, and -- >> thize p hours made it worse than the trumans, which i don't want to make personal judgments here, but -- >> went back again. does each president sort of like in the residential room just, like, -- >> do what they want? yes. -under-parly what you see, or what i saw is i don't know how they do it today. i assume it's an analogous arrangement, but the first lady is redecorating. what that means is that they hire a decorator who comes in with drawings, swatches, and says pick what you'd like. they try to harmonize it and make it fit, and the first lady gets the credit. that happened with beth truman; although, one interesting thing, they had live in the apartment building on connecticut avenue, the trumans, at the time that harry was vice president fowppedz passengers on the inside of the apartment, and they had these curtains, big flowers, and then i saw a picture of the curtains in the white house, and they were, like, the same flowers. obviously, that was beth's touch. they are given a considerable degree of latitude, but the important thing to give mrs. kennedy her due, first of all, you know, truman was -- her family had money, but she came from a relatively upper middle class background, merchant class background, and ios p hour was a military wife. these women would not have come off park avenue in new york into the white house, and so they had the taste, they had it with them, but kennedy was fancy, and she did something that -- and it baffled me why the commission did not do this, but they had almost no money for decorating, and welty, culture people wrote in saying we will give you things. would you like this high boy, the secretary, the chest of drawers? with only a few exceptions, the commission said to. i've not been able to answer that question to my stax. they didn't want things accumulating, and yetings you know, they fitted the entire second floor out to look like the park hyatt, and they could have done better, and that's really what mrs. kennedy did. her genius was deploying the private sector to give what i presume gifts tax deductible to the white house and view them with a wonderful sense of patriotism and furnish the big house, the things that belonged there. in some cases, bringing back pieces that were there before. we owe a lot to her. as far as what we owe the trumans, we owe it to them that the place did not fall down. the decorating? not so much. [laughter] >> before they were rebuilding, how serious was the idea they should knock it down and build another? >> that's a good question. >> [inaudible] >> yeah. the question was, how serious were they about tearing the house down? on paper, entirely serious. they debated this. there was a transscript that said they tossed the idea of moving the white house out to the suburbs. i don't know if they would have put them in a split level split house, i hope not. key question was this, clarence can notary public wanted the house demolished, but not many believed the house should be raised. there were some, because his point was, well, look, if it's in this bad a shape, truman was the victim of his own good arguments, you know, he made the case, hey, look, the place will fall down. there were some politicians, who said, well, don't let it fall on anybody, knock it down. the real question was not so much whether they should raise the place as it was whether they should keep the house as a museum and have the president live elsewhere or go for the big fix, and, ultimately, when the commission voted, there was only one member that voted not to go with the renovation plan. i tried to deal with this in the book. it was kind of a foregone conclusion because truman, remember, also had an enormous amount of weight he carried with the commission. there were six people on it, a lot of consult at that particular times, and he had a hands in everything. he had very heavy influence, and he wanted the place renovated. more than likely it would have been in any case, but what i found really disturbing was not withstanding the fact that the probability was low that they would rip the place down, i was detoured by the fact it was even a consideration. i think it's important to remember that this was 1948. we lost penn station in this city in 1963. it took us a really long time to learn that we needed to take care of what we had, and, of course, to this day, that's questions about, well, you know, i get asked this, could they have dope this in a way that would have been more sensitive to the integrity of what was in the house? those are very difficult questions to answer. the british burned the house down, and as i write in the book, some of that burned timber was put right back in when they rebuilt it. the heat from the fire weakened the bricks so badly that the bureau of standards determined they had only about 40% of the strength left, i believe that was the figure. they couldn't really leave those walls in place, and they certainly couldn't leave the floors in place, and so this is the slippery slope of restoration. you know, as was written, far more eloquently than i can put it, you don't really restore anything. you replace it. you know, when they say, well, this wallpaper is of the period, well, it is of the period, but it's new wall paper. what are you going to do? you can't have the president living in a ruin for the sake of keeping it. it's one thing to keep the acrop liz as a ruin, but nobody lives there. so, you know, they were very difficult questions they were gram ling with in a time when the understanding of what preservation meant was in the em bree yonic stage, and at that time, preservation met keep the outside of the building, and you're good. today, if you're familiar with our land marking process here in new york, you know that some buildings are landmarked on the outside and some have interior landmark, and some have, like, only the lobby is landmarked. you know, like, say, the osborn apartment up on 57th street. that amazing mosaic lobby is part of the landmark as is the exterior, but if you are fortunate enough to have an apartment there, they don't tell you you can't replace your kitchen sink. of course you can. where does restoration enand renovation begin? they are difficult questions. remember, they were rushing. truman was living across the street, and he was cranky. i remember, you know, john mcshain's daughter, a catholic nun, she told me, she said, truman was very hard on daddy. he was a difficult man. if the president says, finish my house, you finish the house. sir? >> what did it take to have a project like this? >> i'm crazy. i -- the first book -- first book i committed, and the train book, and because, and it overlapped with the truman administration, i had an opportunity to start -- i had to do truman research; right? truman was on board, fdr's future rail, i partnered with him, and i don't remember where i saw it, if it was a library or a book or kind of blurry to me now, but i remember coming across a photo of the inside of the gutted house, just those beams, and that bulldozer inside, and i didn't give it thought. i first thought it was a parking garage or a warehouse or something. i went back, and i read the caption that said white house, 1-9d 50. i thought, what? no, you know, i hadn't heard about that. i am fairly well read, and then i started a little trial balloon conversation. i found out nobody else knew about this either, and i figured, well, somebody wrote a book about this, but nobody had. i did it.