COLUMN ONE : ‘People’s House’ or a Bunker? : The public should feel at home at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But recent attacks there may force changes that cut off access to the White House, making it a symbol more of the nation’s ills than of its virtues.

It is a brilliant autumn day. Diane Entzminger picks a spot along the black iron fence that runs along Pennsylvania Avenue to spend the noon hour gawking at this place where the President lives.

A Little Leaguer connecting well with the ball could hit one of the White House windows from where Entzminger is standing. She figures that she has been here a hundred times and has yet to glimpse a President. But this summer she scored a wave from Vice President Al Gore, so she keeps coming back.

This is America’s Main Street, site of the grand white mansion that is home to the leader of the free world, symbol of the nation, a place where--even so--a 37-year-old Maryland housewife can stand less than the length of a football field from where the President sleeps.

“It’s nice to just walk around and feel that you’re not seen as a threat. It’s a matter of trust,” said Entzminger, a mother of two so drawn to the White House that she has toured it five times.

But lately this is as much America’s mean street as its Main Street. And security experts are seriously questioning the wisdom of allowing so much access to an increasingly unpredictable public.

On Sept. 12, an unemployed Maryland trucker crashed a stolen Cessna 150 into the White House lawn in what appeared to be a bizarre suicide. Last Saturday, a dishonorably discharged Army veteran opened fire on the presidential quarters with more than two dozen shots from an assault rifle. Eight hit the White House.

The Secret Service has spent decades pressing for tougher security--once even suggesting that the glorious white walls be painted in camouflage colors. Virtually every President in memory has resisted.

Now security experts responsible for the President’s safety are drafting new proposals and dusting off old ones. Some wonder whether the dreaded steps so long resisted finally will render 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as much a monument to the nation’s ills as to its virtues.

“It’s a more dangerous environment and yet they’re still working under the same parameters that they have for years,” said Chuck Vance, president of a private security firm who was a Secret Service agent for 14 years. “They’ve changed the rules on sacking the quarterback and haven’t changed the rules very much on protecting the President.”

Clearly, this is about more than putting up some walls. The country’s emotional attachment to the White House is powerful. The First Family resides there courtesy of the American taxpayer, and President Clinton calls it “the people’s house.”

To the millions who come from around the nation to take a tour or merely stand in its grand presence, the White House is a symbol of democracy. If the Russians haven’t a clue where President Boris N. Yeltsin lives--such information is considered none of their business--scarcely an American has failed to learn the street address of the President of the United States.

To turn this graceful icon of Americana into a fortified bunker is to acknowledge that we have sunk to some new depth--a nation so armed and violent that the very place where the President is supposed to be safest cannot protect him from the people who put him there.

“In a country where the government is of the people and leaders are truly elected popularly, you shouldn’t have to protect them this way,” David Anthony, a Washington attorney in an elegant glen plaid suit, said this week as he gazed through the White House fence during a lunch-hour constitutional.

As recently as 1941, casual visitors were permitted to stroll the White House grounds by day and visit the mansion, merely leaving a calling card at the north door.

But the White House was gradually fortified as more sophisticated weaponry became accessible not only to hostile nations but to an unpredictable public. Still, the precautions have been painstakingly subtle, even invisible to the untrained eye, sustaining the pretense that the President can live among us, even if truly he cannot.

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It was not always this way. Abraham Lincoln considered it essential to meet his public. Most weekdays at noon, the White House doors were thrown open, admitting to the main floors crowds of the well-connected and the simply curious.

When Ulysses S. Grant’s wife, Julia, complained that she and her children were followed by “a crowd of idle, curious loungers” as they walked the White House paths, the south grounds were closed. But to compensate the public for this loss, another wall was cut to half its height so the President’s three children could be seen at play.

But by the 1950s, the mansion was becoming such a gilded cage that Harry S. Truman took pleasure in sneaking away for a walk downtown. During one such escape, he popped inside a church picnic tent and demanded: “Quick, buddy, gimme a shot of bourbon.”

The White House compound that Entzminger visits today is a product of decades of tension between presidents and the men and women who guard them. In the wake of last week’s shootings, White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, echoing a phrase uttered by generations of presidents and handlers, called White House security measures “a fine balance” between protecting the President and respecting the American people.

Since the executive mansion was first occupied by John Adams, the nation’s second President, there have been six recorded incidents in which its security has been breached. Perhaps the most dangerous was in 1950 when Puerto Rican terrorists unsuccessfully attacked Blair House, where Truman was living while the White House was being renovated.

And each new crisis facing the nation, whether global or domestic, has renewed efforts to raise the security hurdles surrounding the White House. World War II not only halted open visits, it closed forever the small street that had run along the west side within about 200 feet of the Oval Office.

The Cold War brought reports of heat-seeking missiles positioned on the White House roof. The Korean War added a bomb-proof sub-basement. The 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut spawned hundreds of bullet-shaped “bollards” on the sidewalk outside Pennsylvania Avenue, forming a barrier against would-be car-bombers.

Escalating street violence and crime put sharpshooters on the roof and $1.6 million worth of bulletproof glass in the mansion’s venerable windows. Today, the comings and goings of presidential helicopters and limousines are more likely to be decoys--aimed at foiling would-be assassins--than the real thing.

As terrorist incidents escalated around the world, the National Park Service evicted the small army of round-the-clock protesters from the sidewalk in front of the White House in 1984 and moved them across the street to Lafayette Square. They argued that terrorists could use the protesters’ large wooden placards both to hide explosives and as a means of scaling the White House fence.

But still, there were security measures that would not be taken, precautions that would not be allowed. The house behind the iron rail would hold on to the appearance of an in-town residential estate, rather than a fortified office. It would be on a street, rather than in a preserve. And it would be approachable--close enough to see and experience in all its grandeur.

During World War II, when the Secret Service proposed painting the White House in Army Air Corps camouflage and ringing it with a 15-foot high barricade of sandbags, Franklin D. Roosevelt harrumphed. “As long as you have one (sentry) about every hundred feet around the fence, that’s all (you need),” he told the Secret Service.

Now, in the wake of recent breaches of security, a new President is under pressure to put the people’s house well out of reach and further dim the illusion nurtured for so long.

Among the most sensitive suggestions is the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue between 15th and 17th streets, a four-lane thoroughfare that one veteran cab driver said he uses about 25 times in a typical day.

The move would block an artery linking Washington’s busy downtown with Capitol Hill, most of the federal government’s offices and the Virginia suburbs. But it also would hold car-bound tourists at a distance of about 500 yards from the mansion.

“The reaction would be quite negative,” said a former White House official now active in the revitalization of downtown Washington. “Symbolically, it almost would seem to be a concession of defeat. . . . This is the people’s house. And to make it inaccessible, physically or visually, is a huge concession nobody’s prepared to make.”

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The United States is not the only nation to wrestle with the symbolism of its national residence. Indeed, the physical qualities of a leader’s quarters are often a symbol of government itself.

Xhongnanhai, the lake-studded compound where China’s senior leaders live and work, is closed to the public and its paramount ruler, Deng Xiaoping, lives in a separate undisclosed location.

The People’s Palace in Damascus, Syria, is anything but, with security so prohibitive that people can’t get near it. And when Ferdinand E. and Imelda Marcos were ousted from the Philippines, the public storming of the Malacanang Palace was a palpable symbol that the people had reclaimed their government.

Small wonder, then, that Clinton and his predecessors have so forcefully resisted pressure to restrict the White House, which already is so guarded that the President jokingly calls it “the crown jewel of the American penal system.”

“I just don’t think in a free society you can have the President of the country hiding in the sand and just wall him off in the White House,” Clinton said after Saturday’s shooting. “We can put up protective glass or something.”

For a President whose first official act was to invite the nation into the White House to shake his hand, accommodating the concerns of the Secret Service will almost certainly be excruciatingly difficult.

Under Clinton, the White House has extended the hours for visits, created special open-visiting days for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in uniform and for members of the armed forces. Visitors queue up five mornings a week at the southwest gate, passing through a metal detector and surrendering handbags for inspection. In 1993, 1.5 million people made the tour--a 40% increase over the previous year.

“The President told us to make this the most open and accessible White House ever and we took him seriously,” said Melinda Bates, director of the White House Visitors Office.

Entzminger is counting on a continuation of that openness. Coming to this house, pondering its cool grandeur, she says, “makes you feel like you have some control over something.” But there are some forces on America’s Main Street, she notes sadly, that are beyond control.

If a Clinton order denies her the simple pleasure of holding on to this fence, she says with resignation, “it would be bad, but it wouldn’t be unusual. People are crazy and they’re getting crazier. You’ve got all kinds of Americans.”

Times staff writers Paul Richter, Robert L. Jackson, James Mann and Norman Kempster contributed to this story.