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 onesided 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. Theyre 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 couldnt. 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. Its 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 youre 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. Thats 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 cant. She looks up again and now is truly moving. So she summons the assistant ussher over and, please go upstairs and find out whats 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 dont 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. Thats how ive just target. Obviously im 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. Thats him right there in the glasses, and he sent another letter to richard, head of the American Society of civil engineers. Thats 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 dont mean little cracks like what happens in old wood. If you look at this brace here, you can make out a crack. If you cant, well 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. Lets consider what we have. We have a president thats been hastily moved across the street to the blare house, and thats him there on the front steps. We have the single most important piece of the United States architecture heritage about to collapse, and, perhaps, youre thinking, what everybody in the United States was thinking at that moment. Who was to blame . Who was to blame . Well, since were talking about washington, d. C. , i thought wed adhere to local custom and blame some people. Ill start with names of men you probably already know. Well 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, youre inconveniencing the president , hurry up. Ripped down what they had to, hacked through, and then cover it up. Thats 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 dont need an engineering degree to know thats 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 houses 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 its not easy to see, but narrow in as best you can, its instructive. This is the brick pier on the ground floor level of the white house. Thats 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 . Thats called rubble work. Its 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 mans 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. Thats another problem. So back to the blame game not to kick mud on people. Isnt the real culprit the one who design the white house in 17922 . No, its 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 gentlemans house. It was perfectly suitable for the time. It was not suitable for 1950 as one of trumans assistants put it, the white house was, quote, designed as a comfortable late 18th century home, but its become the nerve center of the world. Okay. Lets 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, im 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 thats another 6 it 2 tons 62 tons or so. Okay. Do we understand why theres 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, lets 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 thats 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. Thats 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 redeco