A Change From Truman’s Time : President’s Life Is No Quiet Walk in Park--at Least, Not Anymore

Harry S. Truman liked to take a walk every morning, a habit he didn’t abandon even after Franklin D. Roosevelt died.

Promptly at 7 a.m., the President, a fedora on his head and usually a cane in his hand, would set off from the White House at a brisk 120 paces a minute.

The route varied--sometimes across Lafayette Square and up Connecticut Avenue, sometimes on a circuit of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.

Taxi drivers would shout their hellos. Sometimes the President paused to sign an autograph for a tourist.

Often a reporter or two showed up, joining the President and his brace of Secret Service men.

A few weeks ago, President Reagan went two blocks along one of Truman’s walking routes to dedicate the newly rebuilt Army and Navy Club. Here is what happened:

When the motorcade of nine White House cars and an ambulance, escorted by District of Columbia police cars and motorcycles, pulled up at the club at 10:30 a.m., the President’s limousine pulled into an unadorned side entrance leading to a loading dock.

Club officials had wanted Reagan to come in the elegant front door, but a White House advance team had vetoed the idea in a meeting with club officers two weeks earlier. Too dangerous.

Stepping from his limo, the President walked to a freight elevator, carpeted for the occasion, through a loading dock area that had been cleared of clutter.

From the elevator, the White House had first proposed that the President pass through the first-floor kitchen. Club officers, however, wanted the President to see some of the memorabilia--the cannon seized in the Spanish-American War, the preliminary casting of the Iwo Jima memorial, the busts of Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower--that line the long second-floor hall they call The Parade. So they ended up greeting the President on the second floor.

In a routine that had been rehearsed for days, Brig. Gen. James D. Hittle, the retired Marine officer who is the club president, was supposed to open a door to guide Reagan into the main ballroom.

As they reached the door, Gray Terry, deputy director of the Office of Presidential Advance, whispered to Hittle, “Not in here! The door’s locked!” Hittle opened another door into the ballroom, a few yards down the hall. Then the President was taken down a circular staircase to pass through a receiving line of club officials and their wives and to cut a ribbon.

Hittle then escorted the President into the dining room. The other officers had already taken their places.

It had all been rehearsed, with Terry playing the part of Reagan. The second of the two steps that led up to the dais had been marked with adhesive tape as a precaution against stumbling. The white drapes in the windows, normally drawn back, were lowered. The window at the end, where the President would speak, was protected by a bulletproof glass shield.

“In the old days, I’m told, the Army and Navy Club often invited their neighbor, the President, to all their parties,” Reagan said in his remarks. “I’ve also heard that Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland walked over for a toddy or two. Oh, for the good old days.”

Those days are gone forever.

This simple presidential visit, planned since the club’s invitation was accepted months before, had required the initial meeting with 16 White House people two weeks earlier, at least two walk-throughs, a number of rehearsals, several more meetings on the site and constant telephone calls. For more than a week beforehand, the White House had been working on communications for the President and his staff. A holding room was needed for the President, a place where he could receive or make a telephone call if needed.

Club officers proposed an office just off the lobby, but the lobby was too crowded. “The second time they were over, they asked, ‘Is there a better place?’ ” Hittle said. Finally, they chose a modest security room near the loading dock. Half an hour before the President arrived, traffic on surrounding streets and access to the building were sealed off.

Every moment that he is before the public, the President is backed up by a script that spells out his every motion, a staff that looks after his protection and his image and an aerial fleet that can carry limousines and tons of communications equipment anywhere in the world.

No other leader, not even the Pope in Rome in some respects, is accompanied by quite the pomp and circumstance that follow the President of the United States wherever he goes.

Some Presidents have chafed at this structured life. It seems to fit Reagan like a glove.

The trappings help fend off possible danger. They keep the President in constant touch with Washington and other world capitals. They make his public appearances come off smoothly.

They also insulate the leader of the world’s premier democracy from the people he leads.

“Every one of these guys becomes a little more isolated,” said Bill Gulley, former director of the White House military office, who served under Presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to Jimmy Carter.

“I think the isolation of presidents is dangerous stuff,” said James David Barber, a Duke University political scientist and leading student of the presidency.

Barber said the President does not get the advice he needs “when you have the argument going on only in a limited closed-in coterie.”

This is particularly true with a President, he said, “who like Reagan is very much tuned in to those in the same room with him--who are right next to him.”

Not for Reagan the freedom to browse in bookstores, as French President Francois Mitterrand likes to do, or to stroll on a neighboring street such as Pennsylvania Avenue, as Mitterrand recently did on the Champs Elysees.

A couple of months after his inauguration in 1981, the President and First Lady Nancy Reagan did take a walk, on a sunny March Sunday, across Lafayette Park to attend church. The next day, Reagan was wounded in an assassination attempt outside a Washington hotel. He hasn’t taken a walk in public since.

Recent Presidents have reacted differently to the increasing amount of fuss and security.

“The only time that I ever knew a President to get out of the corral was Johnson,” Gulley said. “He set his own agenda. This guy would not only tell me what airplanes to use, he would tell me who was going to be on the airplane. He made up the manifest.

“When (Richard M.) Nixon came along, everything was orderly,” Gulley said. Nixon also introduced white tunics, black trousers and shiny black hats for White House policemen. After protests and ridicule, the officers were allowed to return to workaday police outfits. But another Nixon innovation, the use of a Marine guard in splendid dress uniform as doorkeeper for the West Wing, is still in effect.

Nixon experimented with having smartly uniformed trumpeters, their horns draped with banners, signal the arrival of the President at social occasions. Jimmy Carter cut out the traditional playing of “Hail to the Chief” altogether. Reagan, the performer with a flare for the theatrical, brought it back.

Still Takes Direction Well

The President, with his background as an actor with a reputation for taking direction well, still takes direction well.

He has said of his Sacramento period: “For eight years, somebody handed me a piece of paper every night that told me what I was going to be doing the next day.” He has made similar statements about his White House existence.

At his annual summertime party for the press in Santa Barbara, he goes by the book, entering the grounds and walking to a specified spot, then taking a specified route through the crowd and going at a specified time to a bandstand to make off-the-record remarks.

“His time is scheduled very precisely, much more precisely than I would have ever thought,” said James C. McKinney, who came to the White House last year as director of the military office. “There was a book printed for the Gorbachev visit, and that ran only 2 1/2 days. The book was approximately an inch thick, a minute-by-minute rundown of who goes where, when, who accompanies the President, who rides in which elevator. It’s the kind of a book that we get if we even go to make a speech in Jacksonville, Fla., to a bunch of high school kids.”

White House Goes With Him

When the American President travels, the White House goes with him. It’s set up in the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara, or in Tokyo or Venice.

“You can get two helicopters on and get the ground crews for them on a C-5A,” Gulley said. “You also take a car, a backup and a follow-up for Secret Service. And in my time, it took about 20 communicators and 6,000 pounds of communications equipment for each stop. That would be whether he goes for 15 minutes or whether he goes overnight.”

Even if the President goes to a private dinner at the home of friends, it takes a 15-car motorcade with a cluster of military and security aides, a doctor and other staff.

“It’s usually no problem and people expect it,” said Gary Foster, chief of press advance for the White House. “Once in a while it’s an inconvenience. It’s just that so many people come with him that sometimes they have a hard time knowing what to do with them.”

Wherever the President travels, the Army Signal Corps sets up its own telephone switchboard and installs special phones for all his aides.

No other country does exactly the same thing.

Some Come Close

Still, some of the other leaders come fairly close.

When Pope John Paul II travels abroad, the Vatican flies two bulletproof, glass-enclosed “Popemobiles” ahead. The pontiff’s entourage numbers as many as 30 people, including top prelates, security men, a valet and a photographer. The Pope does not have his own plane, however. He travels on chartered jets, taking Alitalia from Rome and making the return leg on an airliner of the country he visited.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s summit visit to Washington in December gave Americans a chance to compare the entourages of the U.S. and Soviet leaders.

“I think there are an awful lot of parallels,” McKinney said. “Their motorcade is even larger than ours. I have never seen motorcades as large as the Gorbachev motorcades. The longest one was some 50 vehicles.”

Gorbachev took four Ilyushin jetliners with him to Washington. KGB agents prevented a U.S. television crew from filming the extensive wardrobe being rushed up the gangway for him and his wife.

Guarded by Elite Unit

Although motorcades in Moscow are usually only two or three cars, special lanes are reserved for official cars and uniformed police often halt traffic for their passage. Members of an elite unit wearing electric-blue shoulderboards guard the Kremlin.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl travels abroad on one of three Boeing 707s reserved for top government officials. There is no equivalent to Air Force One. Hans-Peter Gaertner, a chancellery spokesman in Bonn, said no West German chancellor has ever taken a limousine abroad.

“After the war, Konrad Adenauer adopted a modest style that was suited to the time, and since then other chancellors have followed suit,” Gaertner said. “Now that is what Germans expect of their chancellors.”

France has a reputation for grandeur, and the Elysee Palace provides one of the world’s most splendid presidential settings, but things are simpler when Mitterrand is traveling. He usually flies in the supersonic Concorde, primarily as a plug for the French aerospace industry. He gets around Paris in a short motorcade, and streets are blocked a few minutes before he is scheduled to pass. He generally spends the night at his Left Bank apartment, not in the palace on the Right Bank.

Security around British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has increased since an IRA assassination attempt in 1984, but is still slight compared to the ring around Reagan.

She uses one of three look-alike official limousines at home, but when abroad rides in either a British Embassy limousine or one supplied by her hosts. The prime minister’s movements are no longer announced publicly in advance but members of the public are free to, for example, walk into a hotel where she is giving a speech.

As for the U.S. President, Nixon White House aide John D. Ehrlichman, in his book, “Witness to Power,” gave this summing up: “We wonder at the man in the White House who is so strangely different from the rest of us. We fail to recognize that he is an animal which has been groomed to run a special race and has forgotten how to do almost everything else.”

Following a rigid schedule is nothing new to Reagan who, for the last 20 years, has visited the same couple in Palm Springs, Calif., over the New Year’s holiday; who, during his annual California vacation in August, routinely visits the same acquaintances in the same order on a trip to Los Angeles.

“I think he’s got a personality that’s responsive to this type of thing,” said Gulley, who observes the White House now from the vantage of a Washington consultant.

Even in the most rustic settings, the trappings of power are there. On one of their Easter vacations, the Reagans helicoptered from their hard-to-reach California ranch to a more accessible neighboring spread to join a motorcade to go to church.

As the helicopter landed, a Marine in dress uniform, who flies on the copter to be ready to open the emergency exits if needed, stepped out. He was joined by other Marines sent from Quantico, Va., as a ground crew, also in dress blues for Easter.

There they were: the Reagans, off in the Santa Ynez Mountains living the simple life the President so often extols; the Marines in their resplendent outfits standing at attention, saluting smartly, as the President and First Lady made their way down a dusty tire-track road to the limousine.

“The Founding Fathers made one big mistake,” said political scientist Barber. “They should have made Ben Franklin king and George Washington prime minister, so that he would have had some kind of royalty at the top to gather all of this emotion that now feeds into our White House, all this ceremonial jazz.”

On the other hand, Stephen Hess, a former Eisenhower and Nixon aide now with the Brookings Institution in Washington, said: “Let’s start with the proposition that Presidents do get shot at, and on occasion killed. A lot of these trappings really have, in part, a protective purpose. Secondly, the trappings of our country are really not only not out of line with other countries, but in some regards quite modest. The White House, for example, is relatively small compared with the mansions and the palaces that other heads of state live in. So we do have to put that in some perspective.”

In whatever perspective, all this ceremonial jazz comes to an end for Reagan in January, when he steps aboard Air Force One for his last flight home to California. Then the country will see how the next President responds to it.