“Kings live in park enclaves,” Thomas Jefferson said, in one of his Jeffersonian moods, “presidents live on streets.” Not nowadays. Nowadays the American president lives in a very nice house on a two-block stretch of abandoned roadway in downtown Washington, D.C., with imposing concrete blockades disguised as planters at either end. In between is a spread of pavement that used to form part of Pennsylvania Avenue, bordered to the south by the White House and to the north by Lafayette Park. It’s a shadeless expanse roamed by weary tourists, anti-nuclear fetishists, homeless drunks, harried pedestrians, roller-blading exhibitionists, and skateboarding truants — a mosaic of city life “rich” and “vibrant” enough to delight the most hardened New Urbanist and leave the rest of us unmoved. Kings, what few remain, may live in park enclaves, but in the new millennium the American president lives on the edge of a roller rink.
Like most terrible things, the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was President Clinton’s doing. But there’s a chance, as the new administration takes office, that this particular terrible thing will soon be undone. “President-elect Bush would like to reopen the avenue,” says transition spokeswoman Juleanna Glover Weiss, “and he looks forward to working with the Secret Service to do that.”
Privately, Bush has said the same, in less uncertain terms. And the Republican party, in its platform passed last year in Philadelphia, made a firm commitment: “We will reopen Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House as a symbolic expression of our confidence in the restoration of the rule of law.” If the Bushies make good on their pledge, they will be reversing one of the signal decisions of the last eight years — local in its practical effect but much larger in its symbolic scope.
The method by which Pennsylvania Avenue was closed was an expression of almost imperial arrogance; Clintonian, even. For most of its history the avenue had served as a major crosstown artery in the capital, linking the east side of town to the west and to Georgetown and suburban Virginia beyond. Crucial to the flow of residents and commuters, it was even more valuable to tourists, who could cruise by in buses and private cars for a Kodak-moment view of the White House, set 300 feet back behind an iron rail fence: a house on a street, inhabited by a president. According to D.C. traffic statistics, roughly 30,000 cars a day passed along the two-block stretch in front of the executive mansion between 15th and 17th Streets NW.
By 1995, the Secret Service had been agitating to close that portion of the avenue for at least 50 years, to no avail. It remained open, and traffic flowed unimpeded, during world wars, assassinations and assassination attempts, urban riots, and the Gulf War, as each president in his turn refused entreaties to shut it down for the sake of his own safety. But with a rash of unrelated incidents — well, three unrelated incidents — in 1994, the Secret Service redoubled its campaign. In September, a man flew a light aircraft onto the South Lawn of the White House, and in the following months two separate lunatics opened fire on the mansion from the street.
In protecting the president, federal statute gives virtually unlimited authority to the Treasury secretary, who oversees the Secret Service. “He could close down National Airport if he wanted to,” says one congressional staffer who’s researched the law. But he requires some “finding of fact” to justify his actions, and so in late ’94 the Treasury Department undertook a “security review” of Pennsylvania Avenue. The review itself was classified, but its conclusion was not: The avenue in front of the White House should be closed, even though closing the avenue would not have prevented the incidents that inspired the review. Perhaps for that reason, the review languished until April 1995 and the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
What happened then is murky; some accounts say the Secret Service again pressed the Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, who took his case to the president, who then authorized the secretary to act; others say that the secretary acted unilaterally. (Trying to straighten it out is like trying to figure out when the president said what to Betty Currie.) In any case, after the close of business on Friday, May 19, 1995, Rubin signed a letter to the head of the Secret Service, directing him to close the avenue “to ensure the protection of the President and others in the White House Complex from explosive devices carried by vehicles near the perimeter.” At once flatbed trucks appeared at either end of the two-block stretch, and workers began unloading massive concrete “Jersey barriers” in the dark. By midnight the avenue was closed.
“We had no warning, no signal, nothing,” says Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s congressional delegate, who, ex officio, was called with the news, but only as the trucks were being unloaded. Reaction from all quarters — the Washington Post editorial page, the D.C. city council, the metropolitan police department, area businesses, cab drivers, even the curate of neighboring St. John’s Episcopal Church — was negative, with the exception of members of the skateboarding and rollerblading communities, who by Saturday morning had staked out the avenue as totally rad. The closing required a Herculean redirection of traffic downtown; the much narrower east-west streets parallel to the old Pennsylvania Avenue saw a 30 to 50 percent increase in cars and trucks. Relatively simple crosstown trips lengthened by 15 minutes or more. Five years later, the congestion is only worse.
But the symbolism of a White House under siege rankled people even more. “The real problem, quite apart from the traffic, is the image this conveys of our democracy and our openness as a society,” said the Washington architect Arthur Cotton Moore. “Closing Pennsylvania Avenue,” said the Post, “pulls the shades over a symbol of our open democracy that has endured since the founding of the Republic.” “We have nothing to promote if we become a fortress society,” said Senator Pat Moynihan. “The only triumph of terrorism is if we become terrified.”
Now, this argument from symbolism, especially when expressed in such deep, Moynihanian shades of purple, has its limits, as defenders of the closing point out. After all, we already are terrified of terrorism; anyone who doubts it should try to take a quick walk (good luck) through any large airport. Even before the Pennsylvania Avenue shutdown, the White House wasn’t much of a “symbol of our open democracy.” What it was, was a large mansion with bulletproof windows set back across 100 yards of open lawn studded with surveillance cameras and motion detectors and swarming with armed sentries led by bomb-sniffing police dogs. Those who would open the avenue should fess up and make the more realistic argument: We may be a fortress society, but we don’t have to look like one.
This is the implicit point of a RAND Corporation study commissioned by the Federal City Council, one of a dozen or more civic, local, and federal entities who have an interest in a reopened avenue. The RAND researchers attacked the closing on a number of practical fronts. The threat of terrorism, according to people declared expert in the matter, seems to be diminishing, even as our capacity to counter it is more sophisticated than ever. But the fait accompli by the Secret Service allows for no continuing review of the decision to close the avenue, in light of either diminishing threats or improved technology. More immediately, said the Rand report, the Murrah building bombing was never likely to have been duplicated at the White House. The Oklahoma City bombers parked their truck nine feet away from one of the building’s four structural pillars; it was this fortuity that made the bomb so devastating. “By comparison,” says the report, “the White House is set some 350 ft. back from the south curb of Pennsylvania Avenue: a distance more than thirty five times greater from where the Murrah building truck bomb was situated.” Even State Department guidelines require that newly built U.S. embassies be only 100 feet from facing streets.
To these arguments, the Secret Service responds — well, it doesn’t really respond. Citing security concerns, the service refuses to engage in public debate about its decisions. It has briefed D.C. officials and members of Congress and congressional staff on closing the avenue, and not all of them have come away convinced. “I didn’t buy it,” says D.C. council member Jack Evans, whose district includes the neighborhoods around the White House. “What they were doing was using simulated computer models of how an explosion of x magnitude, in x-sized Mack truck, would cause x damage to the White House. Totally unrealistic. They were bluffing their way to justify an action they were going to take any way.” Delegate Norton is only slightly kinder. “The danger is not imaginary,” she says. “But they’re pursuing a zero-risk strategy, which is simply not possible. There will always be risk. The question is what’s reasonable, in light of other concerns.”
The Federal City Council has proposed the most comprehensive plan to reopen the avenue, while still frustrating the intentions of truck bombers. (See illustration.) It calls for narrowing the existing street and bending it northward, to the Lafayette Park side, to extend the distance between the south curb and the White House. At either end of the two-block stretch, a pedestrian bridge would be constructed low enough (less than eight feet high) to block any vehicle larger than an SUV — any vehicle, that is, large enough to carry an explosive that could conceivably reach the White House. Such an alternative, says the council, would restore traffic flow to its pre-1995 levels, reduce the risk of a truck bomb to near-zero, and reconnect the White House to the larger life of the city.
The plan has problems. Why pedestrians would use the foot bridges instead of simply crossing the street is a mystery, and the bridges themselves, thanks to President Bush’s Americans with Disabilities Act, would require ramps extending more than a hundred feet in either direction for wheelchair access. But these are scarcely insurmountable. Arthur Cotton Moore, for example, suggests substituting decorative and reinforced gates for the foot bridges, with security kiosks at either side.
As the skateboarders would say: whatever. For now, the avenue sits abandoned. Congressional Republicans, upset at Rubin’s high-handed order, have refused since 1995 to authorize funding for any but the most rudimentary improvements. No one is satisfied with the status quo — not even the Secret Service, which would like to see the roadway turned into a park. Not even President Clinton, who by many accounts approved the closing in the first place.
“He’s been quite clear about this with me in our conversations,” says Norton, who is of course a great admirer of the president. “He tells me he never wanted the avenue closed in the first place — absolutely not. He said if it had been left up to him, it wouldn’t have been closed. But the Secret Service . . . he’s just very clear on this.”
Clintonian, as I say. Time to open it up.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
