“The damned place is haunted, sure as shootin.’”
President Harry Truman wrote that to his wife Bess
in 1946. He was talking about the White House. “You and Margie [their
daughter Margaret] had better come back and protect me before some of
these ghosts carry me off.”
Truman had fun with the idea
that the executive mansion — he called it “the great white jail” — was
populated by the spirits of president past. “The floors pop and the
drapes move back and forth,” he wrote Bess. “I can just hear old Andy
and Teddy having an argument over Franklin. Or James Buchanan and
Franklin Pierce deciding which one was the most useless to the country.
And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show
the din is almost unbearable.”
In reality, those popping floors were the sound of an old
house slowly falling apart, a potential catastrophe that was averted by a
complete gut rehab that took some three years and forced the Trumans to
move into Blair House across the street on Pennsylvania Avenue. Still,
it’s amusing to think about those presidential specters continuing to
roam the halls. Doubtless Buchanan and Pierce have settled their
argument and determined that Dumbass Trump wins the title of “most
useless pretender” hands down. Now they’re just betting the over/under
on impeachment.
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