The White House on moving day: 'Lonesomest place'

There are no numbers left in the Rolodex, the file cabinets are empty, the desks and bookcases cleaned, and the computers don't work because the hard drives have been removed.

"The lonesomest place in the world," is how William Howard Taft remembered it.

That's what the inside of the White House will look like at noon on Jan. 20, as America's TV networks and press focus on the Capitol steps where Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president.

Mack McLarty, President Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, recalls entering the White House for the first time on Jan. 20, 1993, to find an empty room, white walls and not even a sheet of paper to write on.

"All the pictures had been removed from the walls, the papers were all gone, and the only thing on my desk was a bottle of champagne, and a note from (Reagan's secretary of state Jim) Baker, who I have known for years,'' McLarty said.

Ronald Reagan's campaign adviser, Edwin Meese, later to become attorney general, recalls a similar scene when Reagan's new administration took over the White House in 1981.

"I found desk drawers absolutely empty -- I think there was one paper clip -- and filing cabinets with no documents in them," he said.

What surprised Nancy Reagan's press secretary, Sheila Tate, was the absence of any phone numbers in her West Wing office, or any phone books that could provide them.

She said the one advice she has for a new president's staff is to bring their phone books and materials to the office with them Jan. 20. The transition "is the one time you have the attention of Americans in a non-partisan way," she said. "You can make a lot of headway if you do it correctly."

The clean-sweep of the White House between administrations is required under the language of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which requires departing presidents to take all their papers and memorabilia with them when they leave office, leaving empty offices for their successors.

Under the 1978 law, the records are the property of the American people, not the presidents who compile them. President George Bush's eventually will be located at his planned presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House 2001 project, an organization that studied that transition, said that while the new president is giving his Inaugural address, the nitty gritty of the transition is underway behind the White House as moving trucks take away the departing president's belongings, and bring in the new president's goods.

"The move itself normally takes place between 12 and 4 p.m. on Inaugural Day,'' she said, and sometimes is continuing as the president watches the last of the marching bands in his inaugural parade walk past the viewing stands built on the White House front lawn.

The work is done on the other side of the building, where the White House chief usher coordinates the transfers, trying to put the incoming objects in the right place.

White House usher Irwin Hoover captured the spirit of the occasion in a 61-page personal account of President Taft's last hours in office, and Woodrow Wilson's first.

"Taft out Wilson in," Hoover wrote in his March 4, 1913 diary, which was later given to the Library of Congress.

There have been glitches, including the time Woodrow Wilson had to sleep in his underwear because luggage containing his pajamas was lost in the move.

It is only after the parade that the new president has the White House to himself, and many presidents have been disappointed with their first impressions of the president's living quarters, located on the building's third floor, which first ladies have traditionally decorated to their own taste.

Ronald Reagan said he always wondered growing up in Dixon, Ill., what the private quarters of the White House looked like, "but I never imagined myself actually living there. If I could do this, I thought, then truly any child in America had an opportunity to do it." Some presidential wives were less impressed.

"It would be difficult to find such an assortment of rags and rubbish even in an Alms House,'' declared Louisa Adams, after John Quincy Adams moved into the White House in 1825.

Franklin Pierce was left to search for candles in the dark, and couldn't find his bedroom, while Theodore Roosevelt's wife hated the accommodations. "Edie says it's like living over the store,'' Roosevelt said. Eleanor Wilson just broke down in tears.

Jackie Kennedy compared the White House living quarters to a Russian prison, and was particularly upset that Mamie Eisenhower had painted the living quarters "Mamie pink" - a color Jackie despised. After Hillary Clinton was given an early tour of the White House, she asked that George Bush's aides leave a few days early so the building could be repainted for the Clinton's first day.

But after living there for years, some have been reluctant to leave. Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice buried a voodoo doll in the lawn to curse the new occupants. Francis Cleveland, who came to the White House as a 21-year-old bride, left at age 33 as a mother of three, and in tears.

Some transitions have not gone well.

Zachary Taylor won election thundering that President James Polk hadn't given him due credit for being a hero of the Mexican War, and Polk refused to meet with him. Ulysses Grant let it be known he didn't want his predecessor Andrew Johnson to accompany him to the swearing in, so Johnson spent the hours of the inaugural finishing up papers before bidding farewell to his staff, getting into a carriage, and leaving Washington for Tennessee without notice.

Some scrambled to make sure they weren't leaving something behind.

Nancy Reagan spent her last hours rechecking the drawers to see that everything had been packed for the move to California, while Ronald Reagan fed the squirrels outside the Oval Office for the last time.

Nancy's secretary assured her that she shouldn't worry about leaving something behind. "They'll send it to you. They have your address,'' she said.

When they left the White House, Reagan fished in his pocket, and pulled out a card that has the codes on it authorizing the military to use nuclear weapons.

"What do I do with that?'' he asked a military aide.

The card went to the new president.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)