White House Today: A Living Museum In Transformation
Over the last few decades the White House has changed from a private residence to an increasingly public one. During the Nixon administration, for example, protesters blanketed the lawn south of the White House to protest the war in Vietnam. The office has increasingly been seen as fair game for such rallies. The introduction of television and mass media has given the American public a more intimate and immediate knowledge of events at the White House than Washington or Jefferson could have ever imagined. Late twentieth-century presidents have complained that the office of the president is under an increasingly-scrutinized microscope -- in other words, life in a fishbowl. It is no surprise that First Families still look forward to retreats to their summer homes.
In an environmentally-progressive trend, Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton have hoped for a "greening of the White House." Clinton, who is asthmatic, banned smoking in the house. They also invited a team of environmentalists, design professionals and architects to "green" the white house by using non-toxic paints, solar panels, formaldehyde-free wood products and efficient lighting.
The Clinton White House is also the first to go on-line on the Internet, so that Americans and people the world over with access to E-mail (electronic mail) can send their complaints, suggestions, opinions or the like to the president. Surely, the president has readers, the same way presidents have always had employees to read their traditional mail. But access to the President on the Information Superhighway is as representative of the link to the 200-year-old philosophy of a White House as belonging to all the American people. It is in keeping with the motto of a president as a "man of the people" -- or perhaps someday, a woman of the people -- as much as it is a window to the future of American leadership.
