Suddenly, the most powerful office in the world has a muted feel. This week, the White House unveiled a new look for the Oval Office, which you might think of as the president’s workspace. Designed 101 years ago, ravaged by fire, rebuilt, enlarged and constantly redecorated, the Oval Office, like the American presidency itself, takes on the character and temperament of its occupant.
The new look fashioned for and by Barack Obama is a far cry from the decor chosen by the Oval Office’s first occupant, William Howard Taft, who favoured caribou hide for the chairs and a checkerboard design for the floor. The Obama changes include fresh paint, different wallpaper and new couches – red, white and blue threads, of course. But the most distinctive element is the new carpet, with five quotes stitched into the fabric.
Every time a new chief executive takes office, White House observers search for meaning in the furnishings he selects for his walls and tables. Harry Truman looked out on portraits of Simon Bolivar and Franklin Roosevelt. Ronald Reagan chose Andrew Jackson, George H.W. Bush selected Theodore Roosevelt. Mr. Obama installed busts of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
But carpet quotes are, as John Kennedy might have put it, a new frontier in presidential iconography – revealing much about the President’s view of history, the presidency and the character of leadership.
The President, pilloried by conservatives as a champion of big government, suffering from low approval ratings and facing grim prospects in this fall’s midterm congressional elections, pointedly did not select, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” (Ronald Reagan) or “Being a president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed” (Harry Truman) or “Democracy is not a polite employer” (Herbert Hoover). Instead, these were his choices:
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. This is the most famous line from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address. Delivered in the depths of the Depression, this remark is often regarded as the quintessential expression of American optimism, a presidential rebuttal to the near hopelessness that was pervasive amid a bank panic and with a quarter of workers unemployed. At a time when unemployment remains stubbornly at 9.5 per cent (or 16.5 per cent when discouraged workers and others are included), this is a particularly poignant choice.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people. This is an excerpt from the last sentence of perhaps the greatest speech in American history, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the cemetery at the site of the great Civil War battle in Pennsylvania in 1863. In this passage, Lincoln asked war-weary Americans to rededicate themselves to their founding principles. This speech took but a few minutes – which could stand as an inspiration to a president given to lengthy addresses – and included one remark that has been proven wrong by history: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.” Indeed, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was right when he said two years later that the speech at Gettysburg was more important than the battle at Gettysburg.
