There are also little examples around the White House of people trying to lead their regular lives again. Karen Hughes, counselor to the president, left a little early last Friday to make her son’s soccer game. But the White House also started stringent new security measures. As chief of staff Andy Card put it recently, “We’re back to business, but it’s not business as usual.”
Life hasn’t changed too much for reporters who have a “hard pass,” which requires an FBI background check. I flash mine at the outside gate to get buzzed into the guard station. Then I scan my pass and plug in my ID number at the inside turnstile while my bag goes through an X-ray machine. From there, I can still walk unescorted to the lower press office (and thanks to heavy lobbying from the press shop, I can also walk unaided to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s office in the upper press office). Yesterday, there was an extra step: a guard handchecked my bag. A reporter ahead of me, who had brought her laptop, had to turn her computer on for inspection.
At Andrews Air Force Base things have definitely changed. I used to be able to drive my car right up to the airport on base. But last week, those of us going with Bush to Chicago on Air Force One, were asked to leave our cars at a flea market down the street and board a bus to caravan over. At the base entrance, we all got off so a dog could sniff the bus and our stuff. A young soldier standing guard nearby never took his hand of his M-16.
These are minor inconveniences for reporters, but the changes have been major for the staff. Anyone who doesn’t have a hard pass now has to be personally escorted from the White House gates by someone from the lower press office. There are usually three of them on duty, so that’s a lot of walking back and forth. It isn’t just visiting reporters who need escorts, but even those who work next door in the Old Executive Office Building (where much of the White House staff works). New more restrictive passes have been issued. Staffers who used to travel freely with their old passes–travel office employees, communications aides, everyone with the exception it seems of Budget Director Mitch Daniels–now need escorts to enter the White House. A heavy metal gate has gone up at a main passageway between the Old Executive Office Building (now named the Eisenhower Building, though few call it that) and the White House. All of the OEOB offices facing 17th Street have been abandoned–and not just those with windows. Employees are doubling and tripling up in already small offices. If staffers park in the vicinity, bomb dogs sniff their cars every day, which is normally reserved for when foreign dignitaries visit.
There have always been Counter Assault Team agents (the ones who wear black and carry automatic MP-5s) lurking in the shadows around the White House. But now the uniformed guards who visibly patrol the grounds have made a sobering move: some have strapped gas masks to their calves. “In order to get back to normal we have to do some things that don’t feel normal,” Hughes told me last week. She was talking about airports and the use of National Guard to help police them. But she might as well have been talking about life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
