Facebook X Email Print Save Story On the bright and beautiful Wednesday morning after Election Night, downtown Washington, D.C., seemed a bit out of sorts.
Shops were boarded up; eight-foot temporary fencing surrounded the White House grounds; haggard commuters said things like “Not great!” into their phones. But the White House itself, despite an ungainly wooden construction project out front, looked as stately and gorgeous as ever. A group of visitors who had registered weeks earlier for a tour, perhaps hoping to bask in electoral glory, filed through security.
In the windowed East Colonnade, a video kiosk welcomed them. “I’m Jill Biden, the First Lady of the United States,” the video said. A man in a suit showing a couple around pointed toward the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.
Presumably referring to Melania Trump’s renovation of the Rose Garden, in 2020, he said, “When she came in, they ripped out all the roses.” On the tour, which was self-guided, with Secret Service posted throughout, art and artifacts seemed charged with meaning. A bust of an exhausted-looking Abraham Lincoln.
Aaron Shikler’s posthumous portrait of John F. Kennedy, arms crossed, head down. (“I wanted to show him as a president who was a thinker,” he said, in 1971.
“A thinking president is a rare thing.”) Photographs of Eleanor Roosevelt welcoming Marian Anderson to the White House, after Anderson’s racist snubbing by the D.A.
R.; Lyndon B. Johnson meeting with Martin Luther King.
