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The Empty Picture Frame in the Oval Office
A White House secret revealed!
So, I was at the White House the other day for a tour of the West Wing. (Did you know White House tours are self-guided? I didn’t. The movie Dave lied to me.)
While I was there, I got to peek into the Oval Office. I saw a moon rock, and the historic paintings and sculptures that Biden has decorated the office with. But one thing in particular caught my eye: an empty picture frame.
Behind the President’s chair at the Resolute desk, he has an assortment of framed personal photos. But one frame, more prominent than all the others, is just empty. It has no photo in it.
I wasn’t allowed to take pictures in the West Wing to show you, but thankfully there are plenty of public domain photos of the Oval Office taken by official White House photographers. And you can clearly see the empty frame in several of their images:
Why is it empty? What’s the significance?
Everything in the Oval Office is meaningful or historic. So what does this mean? Is it symbolic? Does it memorialize something? Is it a placeholder for a photo yet to be taken? A reminder that the future is not yet determined?
The empty picture frame wasn’t always there. When Biden first set up the Oval Office, he chose a bust of labor leader Cesar Chavez to be in that spot behind his chair. It made some of the photos taken in the office a bit awkward, with Chavez always peering over Biden’s shoulder:
It could look kind of creepy sometimes, like Chavez is stalking Biden:
So maybe that’s why they moved Chavez to a pedestal over by a window:
But why replace him with an empty frame?
I put on my Investigative Journalist hat and reached out to my contact deep inside the White House the guard who was standing a few feet away, just outside the Oval Office. I asked: Why is there an empty frame behind the President’s desk?
The answer: It’s a TV!
She told me that Biden is the first President to have a TV in the Oval Office. He wanted to be able to watch the news, and they put a frame around it so it would blend in when not in use. And sure enough, you can see the TV set turned on in a few photos:
A TV makes so much sense. In retrospect I feel like I could have guessed that. Did you figure it out before reading the answer?
But wait a minute.
Could Biden really be the first President to have a TV in the Oval Office? In the 83 years since FDR became the first President to be televised, none of the 14 Presidents since then have had a TV in the Oval Office?
Well, it turns out my source the guard gave me inaccurate information.
The first President to have a TV in the Oval Office appears to have been Harry Truman. I found a nice article about the recent death of a small-town Ohio TV repairman named Ernie Hirsh that includes this story he once told the reporter:
When I got out of the Army, all the colleges filled up with guys from World War II going on the G.I. Bill. There was a place in Washington D.C. that was teaching television. I went there, graduated and got a job with a company called Dawber’s that serviced all the appliances at the White House. It was 1947, TV broadcasts were being aired and they sent me over to put one in. A guy from the signal corps greeted me at the door and said, ‘Follow me.’ They never checked my toolbox. I could have had a bomb in it… and I’m just kidding. I installed Harry Truman’s TV in the Oval Office. They were remodeling the place, so he was living at the time across the street. Harry wasn’t there.
That sounds like the kind of tall tale a small-town appliance repairman might tell about the good ol’ days, but a 2009 Politico article confirms that Truman was the first.
And Lyndon Johnson definitely watched TV in the Oval Office. He even had a curved console built to fit in the office with three television sets so he could watch all three networks at once:
So which Presidents definitely did not have a TV in the Oval Office? I found a few.
A Washington Post article about sports journalist Bomani Jones’ visit to the Obama Oval Office notes:
Bomani Jones was … concerned with the absence of a television in the Oval Office. “How the President not have a flat screen in his office?” Jones asked … “It’s 2013.”
The Reagan Library has a photo of President Reagan watching television in the Oval Office Study. That study, a room just off the Oval Office itself, seems to be where other Presidents kept their TVs, too.
Donald Trump kept his TV in the study, according to an article in the Daily Mail about whether or not he watched his own impeachment hearing:
While the Oval lacks a TV set, Trump can watch cable news on a screen in his nearby private study. A West Wing aide said Wednesday that the president 'likely' tuned in.
And I assume that’s the same study where President Harding installed the White House’s first radio in 1922 to hear “the latest news or snatches of music.”
But that’s a topic for some other newsletter.
It looks like the White House is a few months behind in updating their online visitor logs, but I look forward to seeing my name there, preserved for posterity among the million other people who visit the White House each year (if anything in the movie Dave can be believed).
In the meantime, share this newsletter with someone who will appreciate it. And if you’re new here, please check out the archives and subscribe!
See you next time.
David
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