Frank Corder's flight in his tiny red-and-white Cessna exposed one of the White House's main vulnerabilities - an attack from the air.
"It finally happened," says Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary to former presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan. "Everybody has always speculated that someone could fly kamikaze-style into the White House. I don't think there's any way to prevent it."
If there is, Secret Service officials are hunting for it now.
President Clinton and his family were asleep at Blair House, across the street from the White House, when Corder flew over Washington's treetops under a sliver of moonlight, somehow evaded what's supposed to be the world's best security and crashed into an old magnolia tree two floors below the Clintons' empty bedrooms.
The worst damage: a cracked window.
But the "what ifs" surrounding the incident reignited ominous questions around the capital - questions that get to the heart of how tough it is to protect a president. What if the plane had been carrying explosives? What if terrorists had been piloting it instead of the inexperienced Corder?
The White House's occupants made light of the dramatic crash. "This has been quite an unusual day here at the White House," Hillary Rodham Clinton told guests.
Still, one fact loomed large: Monday's incident was the worst White House security breach in nearly two decades. In 1976, a man tried to ram a pickup truck through the mansion's gate; two years before that, an Army private landed a stolen helicopter on the South Lawn.
Some experts saw parallels with German Mathias Rust's 1987 landing in Moscow's Red Square. Others wondered if Corder was mimicking Debt of Honor, the newest suspense novel by Tom Clancy. In it, Clancy describes an attempt to crash a jetliner into the Capitol.
White House aides, terrorism experts and most everyone who saw TV footage of the crumpled plane wedged up against the executive mansion were asking the same question Monday: How safe is the White House?
"We don't really know," says Jody Powell, press secretary to then-president Jimmy Carter.
And the Secret Service, Powell says, can't tell us how safe Clinton is because to do so, they'd have to "talk about what they do and don't do - and they can't without making the president even less secure."
As recently as 1923, when Warren Harding lived there, visitors wandered freely in and out of the White House during calling hours. Although Secret Service officials refused to detail Monday what security measures have since been put in place, it has long been considered virtually impenetrable:
-- There are sharpshooters atop the White House.
-- Secret Service agents carry shoulder-fired anti-aircraftmissiles.
-- Radar is housed on the top floor of the adjacent Old Executive Office Building.
-- Walls are reinforced with steel, and windows are thick grenade-proof glass.
-- Bomb-sniffing dogs check every vehicle on the grounds.
-- Metal detectors are at every entrance.
None of it stopped Corder.
"If you don't want America to look like a banana republic and be laden with concrete barriers, tanks and everything else, then you've got to put up with risks to life and limb," says Robert Kupperman, a terrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The investigation of Monday's incident is sure to focus largely on control of the airspace over the White House. The Secret Service's control center in the Old Executive Office Building monitors planes that wander off the rigid flight path into National Airport, located just two miles away.
Flights below 18,000 feet are banned over the White House and other executive-branch office buildings. The ban extends from the Lincoln Memorial to just east of the Capitol.
Eyewitnesses said Monday that Corder's doomed flight was at a very low altitude as he approached the White House and ended silently, indicating he may have turned off his engine.
Former Federal Aviation Administration head Don Engen says it's difficult for even an experienced pilot to fly at very low altitudes for great distances, but Corder could have evaded radar. "When somebody's willing to die, it's very difficult to thwart them," he says.
But James Coyne, president of the National Air Transportation Association, finds it "hard to believe" a person like Corder with limited flying skills could duck under radar.
"There's no doubt in my mind that the radar capability in Washington was sufficient to detect this airplane," says Coyne, who worked in the Reagan White House. "Anybody should have been suspicious: It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that this was not a normal flight."
Secret Service spokesman Carl Meyer said Monday the plane was spotted by agents at the last moment and no shots were fired at Corder. Kupperman says they were faced with a split-second judgment call: "What in God's name would you do if a radar blip you were following was really the USAir shuttle to New York? To take it out on the Secret Service is futile."
After they complete their review, Secret Service officials will probably announce they've taken steps to enhance White House security. But only so much can be done - especially to protect this president, who can't resist wandering into crowds and usually wants to shake every hand, hold every baby.
Terrorism expert Neil Livingstone calls an air attack the Secret Service's "nightmare scenario," but says secret drills also have found the White House vulnerable to efforts to penetrate the water supply and ventilation systems.
People "would be surprised to know how extensive Secret Service surveillance of the surrounding area is," says Livingstone. "That said, it's still a near-impossible task to prevent a dedicated terrorist group, say with a planeload of explosives, from making a run at the White House. This is the equivalent of someone stepping out of a crowd and pointing a gun at the president, and that happens every so often."
Short of building a concrete dome over the White House - the kind that shelters nuclear reactors - experts agree the executive mansion cannot be made invulnerable.
"There comes a point," says Fitzwater, "when you just say you can't protect against every instance."
Clinton said Monday he takes the incident seriously "because the White House is the people's house."
But Monday's crash, says Livingstone, proves that even in the people's house, "We all know that there are vulnerabilities in the president's security."
Exclusion air zones
Planes are forbidden to fly within a quarter-mile of the White House, Capitol and other U.S. office buildings (and the vice-president's house) unless they are at 18,000 feet or higher. 1. Vice president's residence 2. White House 3. Lincoln Memorial 4. Washington Monument 5. Capitol building
