By MARSHA MERCER
About midnight one spring night, a man climbed the iron
fence at the White House and tried to force his way into a rear entrance.
When caught, he was tugging frantically at the back door and
shouting, “Francesca, it is I.” The man, described as “hatless and clad only in
a coat of thin serge,” said he believed his murdered wife was inside.
“It required six men to place him in a cell,” The New York Times
reported on its front page. It happened May 12, 1905.
The century-old news story reminds us that the White House
has always attracted more than its share of nuts.
Sixteen people have jumped the fence in the last five years,
including six this year, Secret Service director Julia Pierson told a House
panel on Tuesday. The latest on Sept. 19 involved an Army veteran with a knife who
scaled the fence and sprinted to the front door and inside the White House.
I don’t know what was done to boost security after the 1905
incident. This time, technology to the rescue, the White House got brand new automatic
locks on the front door. Someone was trying to hand lock the door when Omar
Gonzalez burst in.
As the Secret Service investigates and members of Congress bloviate
about the Gonzalez incident, there’s talk of building yet another ring of barricades
and checkpoints around the White House. That’s a bad, knee-jerk, very dumb idea.
Everyone agrees the breach shows many layers of failed security.
But that doesn’t mean we need even more layers to keep citizens even farther
away. Secret Service agents evidently need better training to make sure
existing systems actually work. And no one should
turn off the alarm for the sake of convenience. New leadership at the Secret Service should improve morale and purpose.
The goal should be to ensure the safety of the president and
first family while preserving people’s access to The People’s House.
A bit of history: While the house was being built, so many
people strolled around the construction site that the city marshal ordered the
area closed to anyone without a written pass, according to the Treasury
Department’s 1995 “Public Report of the White House Security Review,” which traces
the separation of the people from the house.
The 1995 report followed an investigation of two security breaches
in 1994. In September of that year, a suicidal man piloted his Cessna all the
way to the grounds and crashed into the side of the White House. Six weeks
later, a gunman fired 29 semiautomatic rounds at the mansion.
From the beginning, the impulse was to make the president’s
house accessible to the people. Early on, the grounds welcomed an open market. In
Jefferson’s time, doors were closed only when the president was asleep or out
of town. People wandered around the State Rooms, looking at exhibits Lewis and
Clark had brought back from their expedition.
In the antebellum era, ”the iron gates to the White House
grounds were open at 8 in the morning and closed at sundown. Almost anyone was
likely to wander along the paths,” historian William Seale wrote in his
two-volume history, “The President’s House.”
Free access to the grounds during the day ended with World
War II, and security has been tightening ever since. The current 7 ½ foot iron
fence was constructed in the 1960s.
Following the terrorist attacks on the Marine barracks and
American Embassy in Beirut in the 1980s. concrete Jersey barriers were
installed, later replaced with reinforced bollards. Guardhouses dot the
grounds.
Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was closed to
vehicles in 1995, following the Oklahoma City truck bombing. President Bill
Clinton declared at the time: “I will
not in any way allow the fight against domestic and foreign terrorism to build
a wall between me and the American people.”
Then, E Street south of the White House was closed to
traffic after 9/11.
Presidents and citizens routinely lament “the bubble” presidents
inhabit. Widening the moat around The People’s House would only make it worse.
©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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