It’s the place where Marlin Fitzwater informed the world that “the liberation of Kuwait has begun” and Ari Fleischer announced the opening salvo in the U.S. war on Afghanistan.
It’s also the place where Secretary of State Alexander Haig rushed after President Ronald Reagan was shot to announce: “I’m in charge.”
The legendary White House press briefing room, recreated in countless movies and TV shows (usually inaccurately), will close this week for a long-overdue renovation that will banish reporters from the West Wing for upward of a year.
The nation’s view of the James S. Brady briefing room is usually limited to the famous lectern in front of a royal-blue curtain and official White House seal. It’s a dignified tableau that belies the dumpiness of the rest of the room, which has all the ambience of a bus station.
The cramped, cluttered chamber is jammed with broken seats, battered aluminum ladders and snarls of television cables. After the daily briefing by the press secretary, cameramen can be seen snoozing amid discarded newspapers.
“I mean, the place is awful,” said C-SPAN’s Steve Scully, president of the White House Correspondents Association. “It smells, it’s crowded, it’s antiquated.
“The heating and air-conditioning system cannot even be fixed, it’s so old. The electrical wiring has the potential for so many different problems that we’ve just got to gut the place and start all over.”
Between the podium and Helen Thomas’s front-row seat is a trap door that leads to a subterranean swimming pool.
The pool was built so President Franklin Roosevelt could exercise his crippled legs, but it was covered up by President Richard Nixon, who was said to dislike swimming so much that he once wore a business suit to a beach. Instead of water, the pool is now filled a tangle of electrical wires that would mortify the most jaded fire inspector.
The wiring, along with the rest of the room, will be brought up to code by workers who will gut the room and rebuild it from scratch, incorporating such high-tech improvements as video screens that can be used asvisual aids by a speaker at the lectern.
Also getting a face-lift will be the warren of minuscule offices and work spaces occupied by White House correspondents who toil just east of the briefing room. Reporters will move to temporary quarters about 100 yards away in a building next to Lafayette Park.
“We’ve had every assurance that we’re going to be moving back into a better, brighter, state-of-the-art, 21st-century briefing room,” Scully said. “So if it’s a short-term pain for long-term gain, then it’s well worth it.”
