Word: truman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that? Gore did, too. The networks told everyone that "fact" on the morning of November 8, and Gore nearly conceded as a result. I figure that if you voted for Tom Dewey in 1948 and picked up your morning paper saying your guy had won, you probably thought Harry Truman subsequently stole the whole thing...
...renovators go, no one quite measures up to Harry Truman. He rebuilt the White House, gutting it and replacing ancient timbers with steel and concrete. To much public displeasure, he added a balcony off the private quarters on the third floor. Like many Presidents, Truman considered himself an amateur architect and used to inspect the construction progress, leading the likes of freshman Congressman Gerald Ford through the building chaos, explaining history and design with his usual irreverence. Truman also dispensed bits and pieces of the old White House to political cronies like Speaker Sam Rayburn, whose Bonham, Texas, library still...
...Truman introduced the first television set to the White House, a harbinger of the presence of TV cameras and 24-hour cable journalists, who constantly haunt the grounds today. But the White House was always an experimental ground for new, in particular domestic, technology. Jefferson had two flush toilets; Andrew Jackson got running water and the first shower; Martin Van Buren brought in central heating; and Polk did away with candles and oil and lighted his chandeliers with gas. An early form of air conditioning was improvised for the dying James A. Garfield in the summer of 1881. Rutherford...
...there was a grand dinner and 16 toasts by Freemasons from Georgetown after they laid the White House cornerstone over a brass marker. The location of stone and plate was quickly forgotten. No one is certain where it is today, despite high technology and old-fashioned dowsing rods. Truman did not find it during his renovation. And no modern President wants to cut into the sacred walls. That cornerstone, wherever it is, will lie undisturbed, one hopes, for at least another two centuries...
Beginning with a description of modern speechwriting's origins (George Washington's Farewell Address was in fact written by Alexander Hamilton), Waldman stressed the importance of the president's "bully pulpit." From Harry Truman's 88 speeches a year, presidential loquaciousness has increased to Bill Clinton...