Adding To A Perfect White House

MY FFIRST IMPRESSIONS of the White House were formed, like everything else within me, during the Kennedy administration, and especially after his death. His death triggered my interest in politics, what with all the activity involved in transitioning to a new president, administration, policies, and national direction. I became a politically precocious little kid, growing to love the White House like all Americans. In my late teens I got to see the wonderful old building in person. My father and I drove halfway across the country to visit my sister, who was newly inlisted in the military and needing a little support from home, and we continued up and down the east coast, seeing Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. We stayed for one night in a hotel a mere two blocks from the White House, at 14th and Pennsylvania. It was at about this time that President Ford made his famous mistake, referring to his address as fourteen hundred, not sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. The president, claiming to live in a hotel. I couldn't sleep that night, being so close to the most famous building in the world. In the middle of the night I decided to get out of bed, dress, and take the two block walk. I can't even remember telling my father. I think I simply left the hotel, and returned before he awakened. It was a moderately warm evening in March. I walked entirely around it, and lingered at the black iron fence along the way, often grabbing the bars with my hands, like being in jail. Nobody else was on the street, at two in the morning. All quiet. The president, as I recall, was not in residence, but out of town. This was 1975, fifty years ago. The house was surrounded by four small guard buildings of the sort you see at the entrance to exclusive gated communities. In each tiny telephone booth-like building was ensconced a uniformed officer of some sort, and each of the four gave me his full attention as I passed by, and even more when I stopped, lingered, and grabbed the bars. They spoke on phones to each other, or to somebody as I passed, ominously. As I recall, I was sporting the dirty faded blue jeans sandals and T shirt with long hair look of your average teenaged boy of the American nineteen seventies. A suspicious character for sure. By today's standards, with streets blocked off and razorwire everywhere, the White House surrounding area security in those days seems almost.....tame...(in those dyas you could take actul tours of the White House)....It may be that reactions to Trump's big ballroom project are divided along party lines, Republicans for, Democrats against. Ironic, since, by any evaluation, the "progressive" position is pro ball room, and the "conservative" position is against the monstrous thing being built. I have a conservative streak in me: I hate changing anything I love, such as the Yankees pinstripes of the White HOuse building and grounds.I want the Rose Garden back, and I do not want a monstrous ball room, twice the size of the White House itself, to stand next to the sacred old house, looming over it, dominating it, reminding me of Trump. For just this one issue, we have flipped sides, conservatives abandoning tradition, progressive Democrats embracing it. We the American people, whose house it is, should be making the decision, or at least brought in to consult on it. We could have a lot of fun; a national conversation, polls and surveys coming out of our ears, debates,the whole works. But Trump is trying to deprive us of all that, of course, unless the courts stop him somehow. As with everything else with Trump, its all wrong, and a great tragedy. Maybe we can somehow repair his damage, to our White House and to our great nation, when he is, at long last, gone.