The most powerful house in the world has some of the strangest rules in the world. Some of them make immediate sense when you understand the context, the security requirements of protecting the most powerful person in the country, the preservation demands of maintaining a building that is simultaneously a home and a national museum, the specific protocols of a diplomatic institution that receives heads of state and foreign dignitaries on a regular basis, and some of them make no sense at all, even with the context.
>> >> The rules of the White House have been shaped by 225 years of occupants who each arrived with their own preferences, their own fears, their own particular relationship with power, and their own determination to make the building work for them. Some rules were established for sensible reasons and have outlasted the reasons that produced them.
Some were established by a single eccentric president and quietly discontinued when the next one moved in. Some have been maintained across administrations that disagreed about almost everything else. The result is an institution that operates by a set of rules that are partly rational, partly historical, partly the accumulated oddities of the specific people who have occupied the building across more than two centuries.
Here are 15 of the craziest ones. Fact one: For years, no one was allowed to walk on the White House lawn except the president. The South Lawn of the White House, the broad expanse of carefully maintained grass that extends from the back of the building toward the ellipse, and that is the location of official arrivals, outdoor ceremonies, and the Easter egg roll that has been an annual tradition since Rutherford B.
Hayes was, for a significant portion of White House history, effectively off-limits to everyone except the president himself. The rule was not a formal security protocol. It was a maintenance rule. The lawn was a piece of landscaping that required the specific quality of consistent care to maintain the standard the building required, and foot traffic.
Even the foot traffic of staff who worked in the building degraded the turf in ways that the groundskeeping operation found unacceptable. The specific form of the rule varied across administrations. Some presidents were stricter about the lawn than others. Some extended the prohibition broadly.
Others allowed limited access for specific purposes. The rule has been significantly relaxed in the modern era, when the South Lawn hosts events and activities that require extensive foot traffic. But for much of the White House’s history, >> >> the most famous lawn in America was the lawn that almost nobody was permitted to walk on.
Maintained in a condition of manicured perfection for the viewing of the one person who could not have the ordinary human pleasure of walking on a well-kept lawn in their own backyard. Fact two, Andrew Jackson let anyone walk in and the White House became a disaster. The democratization of White House access reached its most extreme expression at the inaugural reception of Andrew Jackson in March of 1829.
>> >> When Old Hickory, committed to the principle that the people’s house should be open to the people, invited the public to his inauguration celebration. >> >> The public came, several thousand of them, in a matter that contemporary accounts described with consistent horror, poured into the White House and proceeded to consume the food and the liquor that had been prepared, >> >> break the China, stand on the furniture, tear the curtains, and generally behave in the manner of several thousand people who had been
given access to the president’s house with no particular guidance about how they were expected to behave once inside it. >> >> Jackson himself, unable to move through the crush, escaped out a window and spent the night elsewhere. The furniture was brought out to the lawn to draw the crowd outside.
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The China and the glassware were destroyed on a scale that required extensive replacement. The carpets and the upholstery sustained damage that took significant time and resources to address. The reception became one of the most documented events in early White House history, cited repeatedly in the subsequent century and a half as the specific example of what happened when the access rules were insufficient for the occasion.
It produced, in the short term, the establishment of considerably more specific rules about public access to the building. In the longer term, it produced the understanding that democratizing the White House was a principle with practical limits that the China testified to. Fact three. Thomas Jefferson shook hands with anyone who arrived at the White House.
Thomas Jefferson arrived at the presidency with a specific and principled objection to the formality that the Washington and Adams administrations had imported into the executive function, the bowing, the formal receptions, the ceremony that Jefferson considered monarchical in character and incompatible with Republican values.
His solution was the handshake. Jefferson introduced the presidential handshake, the direct egalitarian exchange between the president and the person greeting him as the specific alternative to the bow that the previous presidents had accepted. The handshake was the democratic alternative. It placed the president and the person in physical contact on terms that were, at least symbolically, equal.
Jefferson took this seriously enough to shake hands with essentially anyone who arrived at the White House during his open office hours. Foreign diplomats who arrived expecting the formal reception protocol they had experienced at every other head of state’s residence, found instead a man in a dressing gown offering his hand.
The informality was deliberate and was noted by contemporary observers with a mixture of admiration for the democratic principle and discomfort at the diplomatic irregularity. Some foreign visitors appreciated it. Some found it baffling. Jefferson maintained it regardless because the principle mattered more to him than the comfort of guests who expected something more ceremonious.
The handshake he introduced has been the standard presidential greeting ever since. The dressing gown has not. Fact four. Calvin Coolidge required his staff to be completely silent at breakfast. Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president, was not known for his conversational flexibility at any time of day. >> >> He was known as Silent Cal for reasons that the historical record amply documents.
A man of few words who deployed the few words he used with exceptional economy, and who appeared to regard verbal communication as a resource to be conserved rather than expended freely. At breakfast, the economy became a rule. >> >> Coolidge required the people present at his morning meals to be silent. Not restrained, not quiet, >> >> silent.
The breakfast was consumed without conversation in the specific atmosphere of a meal conducted by a man who considered the morning hours a time for nutrition rather than social interaction. The staff who served the breakfast learned quickly. Visitors who were present for breakfast meals in the Coolidge White House describe the experience with the specific quality of people describing something they had not expected >> >> and were not sure how to characterize afterward. A meal in the White House in
perfect silence. With the President of the United States eating his oatmeal with the focused attention of a man who had decided that breakfast was not for talking. Mrs. Coolidge was reported to find the breakfast silence trying. The historical record does not preserve her response to this with any specificity, which may itself be evidence of the prevailing atmosphere.
Fact five. No one was allowed to mention the word assassination. Around Abraham Lincoln, the specific word assassination was banned from use in Abraham Lincoln’s presence during his administration on the grounds that the President found the topic sufficiently disturbing that the mention of it affected his ability to function in the normal conduct of the day.
The rule was established by the staff and maintained by the people who worked around Lincoln as an informal but consistent practice. The threat of assassination was real. Lincoln received extensive threatening correspondence and the security arrangements around him, such as they were by the standards of the era, reflected a genuine awareness of the danger.
The decision to remove the word from the conversational environment was the attempt to to him from a specific form of the anxiety that the reality produced. Lincoln was murdered at Ford’s Theatre in April of 1865, shot from behind by John Wilkes Booth during a performance he had attended over the objections of his security detail, who would have preferred he remain at the White House that evening.
He was the first American president to be assassinated in a building where the word had been avoided for years. The rule was one of the more extreme examples of the human tendency to manage anxiety about a specific possibility by removing the linguistic of the possibility rather than by addressing the possibility itself. It was well-intentioned, faithfully maintained, and entirely insufficient.
Fact six, Lyndon Johnson >> >> had specific rules about his own hair. Lyndon Johnson’s vanity about his physical appearance was not the quiet private vanity of a man who cared about how he looked without wanting anyone to know it. It was the specific and performative vanity of a man who cared about how he looked and communicated that care to the people around him with the directness that characterized his communication about everything.
His hair was a particular concern. Johnson had developed across his political career a specific way of managing the thinning of his hair through the careful arrangement of what remained, and he had specific and detailed requirements about how the arrangement was to be executed and how it was to be maintained across the day. The White House barber who served Johnson during the administration was one of the most frequently consulted people in the building >> >> because the arrangement required regular attention and because Johnson’s
tolerance for the arrangement being wrong was minimal. Staff who were present for Johnson’s morning preparations described a man who monitored the state of his hair with an attentiveness that the most demanding subjects of the era’s beauty culture would have found relatable. The rules about the hair extended to the photography of the hair.
Johnson was specific about which angles were and were not acceptable in press photography, and the communication of these preferences to the White House press corps was direct and consistent. He was the most powerful man in the world. He was also a man who cared very much about the back of his head. Fact seven, John Adams established the rule that no one could enter the Oval Office without being announced.
John Adams, the second president and the first to actually occupy the White House, established the protocol that access to the president’s workspace required formal announcement, that visitors could not simply appear in the presidential office, but had to be introduced through the appropriate channels before their presence was acknowledged.
The rule reflected Adams’ pacific sensibility about the dignity of the executive function, his belief that the president’s time and attention were resources that required management, and that the random appearance of unannounced visitors in the president’s workspace was incompatible with the conduct of the business of the Republic.
The protocol has been maintained and elaborated across every subsequent administration. The modern appointment system, the layers of staff that manage access to the Oval Office, the specific and carefully managed process by which a person secures time with the president, all of it descends from the principle Adams established that the president’s workspace was not a public space and that access to it was controlled by the president’s office.
The elaboration of this principle across two centuries of increasing presidential complexity has produced the most extensively gated access in the American government. Getting to the Oval Office requires navigating layers of staff, security, and scheduling that Adams would have found gratifying in their thoroughness >> >> and that probably exceed what he imagined when he established the basic principle.
Fact eight, Theodore Roosevelt’s children were allowed to bring live animals into the White House and they did. Theodore Roosevelt’s White House was the most comprehensively animal populated residence in the building’s history, a situation that resulted from the combination of Roosevelt’s genuine love of the natural world, his six children’s shared enthusiasm for animals of every description and the specific parental indulgence that allowed the children to bring their menagerie into the building.
The Roosevelt White House contained, at various points during the administration, a bear, a badger, a pig, a macaw, a one-legged rooster, several dogs, numerous guinea pigs, a rat, a kangaroo rat, various snakes, a lizard, a coyote, a barn owl, and a pony named Algonquin, who was memorably brought into the White House elevator by Roosevelt’s son, Archie, to visit his brother who was ill in bed upstairs.
The staff managed this situation with the professionalism that White House staff have always applied to the preferences of the first family, however unusual those preferences may be. The housekeeping challenges produced by a bear and a badger in the White House residence were addressed. The diplomatic complications produced by the unexpected presence of a macaw in the vicinity of visiting dignitaries were managed.
Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, did not maintain the menagerie. He did maintain a cow on the White House lawn for fresh milk, which was its own category of agricultural decision. Fact nine. Jackie Kennedy established a rule that no photographer was allowed to photograph the children without her permission. Among the rules that Jacqueline Kennedy established within the White House during the Kennedy administration, the one that was most aggressively maintained and most consistently enforced was the prohibition on unauthorized photography of Caroline and
John Kennedy Jr. She had established the principle from the earliest days of the administration. The children’s personal lives were not the public’s property and no photographer from the White House press corps or otherwise would have access to the children for photography without her specific authorization.
The authorized photographs were released through the channels she had established. Everything else was prohibited. The rule was enforced through the White House press secretary, through the Secret Service, and through the specific understanding that the first lady would be informed of any violation and would respond to it with the directness her other rules were enforced with.
The press corps understood the rule and maintained it. Partly because the Kennedy administration’s management of its press relationships was sophisticated enough to make the cost of violating the rule clear. The photographs of the Kennedy children that appeared in the press were photographs Jackie Kennedy >> >> had decided the press could have.
The much larger category of potential photographs, the children on the South Lawn, the children in the residence, the children in contexts that their mother considered genuinely private, did not appear because she had established and maintained the rule that they would not. Fact 10. Herbert Hoover required that his staff not be seen by him.
Herbert Hoover, the 31st president, established one of the most unusual personal protocols in the history of White House staffing. The requirement that the domestic staff who served the building not be visible to him during his movements through the White House. The specific implementation of this rule required that when Hoover was moving through the White House, walking the corridors, entering rooms, transitioning between the official and the private spaces of the building, the staff who were working in those spaces were required to step out of
sight, behind doors, into adjacent rooms, or otherwise remove themselves from his line of sight before he passed. The staff managed this through an informal communication system that gave them advanced notice of the president’s movements, allowing them to position themselves in the manner the rule required before his arrival in any given space.
The system required the coordination of the staff who worked throughout the building and the specific attention to the president’s schedule that allowed the coordination to function. The reasoning behind the rule has never been entirely explained in the historical record. >> >> It may have reflected a personal preference for the feeling of being in a space without the awareness of being attended to.
It may have reflected a specific sensibility about the relationship between the president and the domestic staff. Whatever its origin, it was one of the more logistically demanding of the personal rules that any White House occupant has imposed on the institutional apparatus of the building. Fact 11.
The no photography rule in the Situation Room is absolute and has produced some of the most famous photos. Anyway, the White House Situation Room, the conference and intelligence facility located in the basement of the West Wing, established by John Kennedy in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs revealed inadequacies in the existing intelligence management infrastructure, has a no photography rule that is both absolute and historically occasionally violated by the White House’s own photographers.
The rule reflects the specific security requirements of a space that handles the most sensitive intelligence information in the American government, a room where classified communications are received and transmitted, where the most sensitive national security discussions occur, and where the specific content of the room’s walls and equipment at any given time is itself classified information.
The most famous photograph ever taken in the Situation Room, the image of President Obama and his national security team watching the operation to kill Osama bin Laden in real time in May of 2011, was taken by the White House photographer Pete Souza >> >> using the presidential photographer’s unique access to document the historic moment for the historical record.
>> >> The photograph was released publicly after the operation was complete. It has become one of the most recognized images of the Obama administration >> >> and one of the most examined photographs in the history of presidential communications, with observers noting the specific expressions and postures of every person in the room.
>> >> The no photography rule remains in effect. The presidential photographer’s access is the specific exception that produces the specific images that the rule would otherwise prevent. It is in its own way the rule and the exception being administered by the same institution simultaneously.
Fact 12. Woodrow Wilson kept a flock of sheep on the White House lawn during World War I. During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson installed a flock of sheep on the White House lawn, a decision that was motivated by the dual purposes of reducing the groundskeeping labor required to maintain the lawn >> >> at a time when the labor pool was reduced by wartime demands, and of providing a visible demonstration of wartime conservation measures, the sheep grazed the South Lawn for approximately 2 years from 1918
until the end of Wilson’s wartime austerity program. There were 18 of them including a ram named Old Ike, who was reportedly a tobacco chewer, a habit he had apparently acquired from the proximity to White House visitors, and that the ground staff managed with the same equanimity they applied to every unexpected feature of the Wilson administration’s agricultural arrangements.
The wool from the sheep was harvested and auctioned to benefit the Red Cross, raising approximately $100,000 for wartime charitable purposes. The sheep were a functioning part of the wartime economy, and their wool contributed directly to the war effort. The lawn maintenance advantages of the sheep were somewhat offset by the other consequences of having a flock of sheep on the most famous lawn in America.
The ground staff addressed these consequences. The sheep continued to graze. No subsequent administration has maintained livestock on the White House lawn, though Taft’s cow predated Wilson’s sheep as evidence that the White House grounds have historically been understood as more versatile than their modern ceremonial function suggests.
Fact 13, the rule about the presidential seal cannot be violated under any circumstances. The presidential seal, the specific and detailed design that appears on the floor of the Oval Office, on the presidential podium, on official White House documents, and in a range of official contexts, is protected by specific law from unauthorized reproduction and from specific uses that the law considers inappropriate.
One of the more interesting formal restrictions on the presidential seal is the rule that no one is to walk on it when it appears on the floor of the Oval Office. The seal on the Oval Office floor, a woven version of the design that is part of the rug of whichever rug design the current administration has chosen is walked around rather than walked across by the staff and visitors who move through the office.
The rule reflects a specific sensibility about the dignity of the national symbol that the seal represents. Similar to the norms around the American flag, walking on the presidential seal is the symbolic equivalent of walking on the office itself, a violation of the specific respect that the symbol commands in the context where it appears.
Presidents themselves do not walk on the seal. Visitors are directed around it. The specific choreography of movement through the Oval Office, when the Oval Office has a floor seal, reflects the ongoing management of a rule that is never formally stated because it is never violated in the presence of anyone who might need to have it stated.
Fact 14, every president since Eisenhower has had a rule about not being alone in a room with a non-family woman. The rule that has been informally maintained by many presidents and explicitly adopted as a formal personal rule by some, >> >> most notably Vice President Mike Pence, who extended it to meals of not being alone in a private setting with a woman who is not a family member, has its practical origins in the specific environment of the modern presidency.
The specific concern is reputational and legal. The most powerful person in the world being alone with a person in a position of lesser power creates conditions in which allegations of inappropriate behavior become possible, regardless of whether inappropriate behavior occurred. And the specific vulnerability of the presidency to reputation-damaging allegations has made the management of the president’s private access to non-family women a matter of deliberate protocol for many administrations.
The rule has been applied in varying ways by different presidents with varying degrees of strictness and varying levels of formal acknowledgement. Some presidents have maintained it as a practical matter without publicly discussing it. Some have made it a stated principle. Some have applied it specifically to private settings while maintaining normal professional contact in office contexts with staff present.
The rule is one of the more pragmatic White House practices, driven by the specific vulnerabilities of the specific position, rather than by any formal protocol. And it has been maintained across administrations of different political characters for reasons that cut across the political differences. Fact 15, the most strictly enforced rule in the White House is the one that has no written form.
The most consistently maintained and most aggressively enforced rule in the White House across all administrations is a rule that has never been codified in any document, never appeared in any formal protocol, and is never explicitly stated to the people who are required to follow it. It is the rule of discretion. Every person who works in the White House, every staff member, every intern, every contractor, every person whose work brings them into the building and into the proximity of the first family’s daily life, operates under the
understanding that what they observe in the White House stays in the White House. Not because anyone has told them this in specific terms, though they are told it in specific terms, because the culture of the institution, maintained across more than 200 years of occupancy, has produced the understanding so completely that it functions as the organizing principle of how the building operates.
The people who have violated the rule, the memoirists, the anonymous sources, the disgruntled former employees who have sold their accounts, have done so understanding that the violation was the exception rather than the norm, that the majority of the people who have observed the same things have not spoken about them, and that the specific trust of the institution >> >> was what they were breaking.
The rule has never been perfectly maintained. No rule in any institution is perfectly maintained. It has been maintained well enough and consistently enough that the private life of the first family retains a quality of genuine privacy that the physical impossibility of genuine privacy inside the building would otherwise make impossible.
It is the rule that nobody wrote down. It is the rule that everyone follows. It is in its own way the most important rule in the building. The White House works because the people inside it have agreed without being asked formally to agree that what happens in the White House stays in the White House until the memoirs come out.
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