Last Full Day in DC - Tuesday

Last full day of tourist fun. Disappointment came when I learned that my White House tour wouldn't happen. It is all Justin's fault. I knew it needed planning ahead and he didn't remember to follow up on my early pestering. He says it is a new excuse to come back again. That's true, but boy is he better prepare for serious pestering for weeks before that trip.

Started today at Ford's Theatre. It has been fully restored and actual has about 5 plays a year. Went through the museum before getting the ranger's talk telling the story of the assassination. Visitors are rarely allowed in the actual box, but you can see it pretty well from the balcony and, as usual, the park rangers do a great job detailing the event. I skipped the trip across the street to see where Lincoln died. Instead, I talked to a ranger about when the box gets visited, for example, by political VIPs. He kind of hedged on who would for sure get to see it, but he did tell me that big donors could very probably get into the box. He explained that they do open it at times to the general public, but it is very tight and hard to get people in and out. He also told me how they have to close when there are stage productions in rehearsal and how that when the president comes for an annual event held at the theatre it results in closing the place for a full month. I love talking to park rangers. They know really neat stuff.

Next I headed off to Union Station to meet up with my grad school friend Neil who works for GAO these days. I'd not seen him in years. We were to meet at a place across the street from the station in the same building as the Postal Museum. (No Janet, I didn't go to the postal museum.) Before he got there I had time to see what the railroad station looked like in its conversion to a mall. They've done a very nice job. That station still serves the Metro and Amtrak and the mall is quite full and very busy. Kansas City could probably learn from it for its Union Station. The KC Union Station is nice, but has nothing on this lively place.

After lunch and a great visit with Neil, I walked with him back to the GAO and he told me the best way to get to my next stop...The International Spy Museum. This is a private museum and costs $18 to go through. It really wasn't worth the money. It did have some neat displays of actual spy stuff, but, in general, if you knew the basic history of spying this wasn't going to add much to you knowledge. No real exploration of the gray areas of spying at all. A bit on the excesses of the Soviet Union and the Red Scare in the US during the post-World War II days but little else. If this was a Smithsonian museum it would raise questions of the conflict between secrecy and democracy. Best thing I saw in the museum was something I saw while standing in line to buy a ticket. It was a statistic stating that over 2,000,000 Federal officials had the authority to mark something "secret." So if like to look at the spy toys go ahead. If a more questioning view of spying is desired, then skip this one. Just go to the museum store which has street access. Buy a spy movie or TV show DVD. Get a Spy v Spy t-shirt or, as I did, get your own folder stamped "Top Secret."

After the disappointment of a private museum it was back to public space. It has been a couple of decades since I've been to the National Archives and there is more to it now. There is still the Declaration, original Articles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to see under 21st Century preservation displays that allows them to be out all the time. Plus, next to them is information on questions that went into the Constitution and events such as the Marbury v Madison rule and the addition of the Civil War Amendments changed the Constitution. However, there is also a wonderful display called "The Public Vaults" that gives you an idea of all the materials within the Archives. It includes items that range from letters from Washington and records of other Revolutionary War Army, detailed records that recorded who among the Cherokee were forced to move along the "Trail of Tears," and archived records of the relatively new but constantly changing whitehouse.gov. Great stuff.

Finally the Archives had a display called "BIG." This included a survey map of the Gettysburg battlefield that was in about 15 sections that took up most of the floor of a room. "The Long Telegram" was displayed in full as was the Articles of Confederation. Not surprisingly, those failed Articles are much longer than the current Constitution even with 27 amendments. But my favorite is pictured below.

At the end of the day I walked up the mall toward the Capitol on my way to Sen. Dorgan's office in the Hart Building where Justin works. As I did, I kept looking back toward the Washington Monument and remembering the millions of folks who crowded into the mall for Obama's inauguration. It was very cool on TV and in pictures, but to stand on that space and see how far it is from the Capitol to the Washington Monument and how it was full of people is simply amazing. I decided as I got to the reflecting pool that I needed to finally figure out who was on the statue facing the mall. It is easy to see it was a Civil War Monument, but I couldn't tell who was the general on the horse. Not surprisingly it is Grant. This makes perfect sense unlike other things around the Capitol. Directly to the north across the street from the Senate and just before you get to the Senate Office Buildings is a park with a clock tower. In front of that tower is a statue of a modern-dressed man. I had to go find out who got this prime piece of property.

It was Robert Taft.

Robert Taft. Really.

Known as "Mr. Republican" and once a real favorite among anti-New Deal, isolationist, conservative Republicans, he may have been the first Republican to begin the tradition of calling the President of the United States a socialist. He did serve in both the House and Senate, but he is not known for accomplishing much. He would have been one of the "Do Nothing" Republicans who helped re-elect Harry Truman. Okay, that was a good thing, but it didn't rate a place next to the Capitol. Did he get it because he died while serving as Senate Majority Leader just as President Garfield got his Capitol Hill statue because he got shot by a nut case? I suspect this may be it as a website on the memorial indicates that the effort to raise money for the memorial was passed only two years after he died.

Clearly then the goal of a politician who wants to get a statue is to die suddenly while you are still serving. You wonder how JFK only got his name on a Center for Performing Arts.

Enough of that... on to some photos:




Taft's Bathtub in a display of "BIG" things in the National Archives





One of Nixon's tape recorders. Hurray for good evidence.




Lincoln's Box at Ford's Theater. He sat on the right.







Booth's .44 caliber gun that he left in the box.





Actual poster from Lincoln's re-election campaign in 1864.