Oval Office: Seat Of Power In United States -- Recent Presidents Have Given Room A Personal Touch

WASHINGTON - The Oval Office. It is such a simple title for a room fraught with so much history, so much power, so many American remembrances.

Dwight Eisenhower practiced his golf putting here. Richard Nixon uttered the expletives that were so famously deleted. John Kennedy's young children romped on the furniture. Harry Truman made clear that on the most urgent national questions, "The buck stops here."

Over six decades, the Oval Office has become not only a supreme symbol of American energy and strength but also a mirror of the personality and character of the occupant.

Ten presidents have paced its floors; one rolled his wheelchair through doors built wide for that purpose. All 11 have used this place as an inner sanctum - and as a stage for advancing policies and politics.

Built 60 years ago in the midst of a crippling economic depression, the Oval Office is 35 feet long by 28 feet wide, large enough, but in fact smaller than an average elementary-school classroom.

Hidden lights illuminate a high ceiling incised with the presidential seal. The seat of power is a desk handpicked by each president, banked by a curving wall of windows that look southward toward green lawns first sculpted by Thomas Jefferson.

The memories of this presidential cockpit are legion.

Franklin Roosevelt fought the Depression from here and charted the nation's course in World War II.

Truman countered aggression on the Korean Peninsula as the Cold War flared hot. Kennedy suffered disaster at Cuba's Bay of Pigs and stared down the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis.

Lyndon Johnson planned the Great Society from here, watched his presidency founder under the weight of the Vietnam War and announced in an Oval Office speech that he would not stand for re-election.

The office witnessed Nixon's foreign-policy triumphs and his disgrace and resignation in the searing firestorm of Watergate.

It saw Jimmy Carter working tensely through the last night of his presidency on the negotiations which brought the Iran hostage crisis to a close.

Ronald Reagan stood watch against the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union. George Bush captained the Persian Gulf War from the Oval Office.

And this spring, when legions of aides had given the president their advice on the selection of a Supreme Court nominee, Bill Clinton asked that the Oval Office be cleared and the doors to the West Wing be closed. The president made up his mind alone.

Theodore H. White, the author, found it a space almost too calm, too quiet "to echo the ominous concerns that weigh upon the man who occupies it."

"Its great French windows, eleven and a half feet high, flood it with light, so that even on somber days it is never dark," White wrote in "Making of the President, 1960."

ROOM WITH A VIEW

"From the south windows the president can, in leafless winter, see through the trees all the way to the Washington Monument and beyond."

It is a good view but perhaps, in truth, not the city's best.

But to American politicians with the highest aspirations, all other views are second best.

For all of the 19th century, the presidential office was located on the second floor of the White House, steps away from the family quarters.

The area just to the west of the executive mansion was occupied by stables and a row of glass greenhouses.

An expanding presidency was a catalyst for change and in 1902 the greenhouses gave way to an office wing ordered by Theodore Roosevelt.

The new West Wing was expanded and made permanent under President Taft in 1909. For the first time it was given a distinctive oval shape.

(Humorists said the rotund Taft had placed his personal stamp on this first Oval Office by stretching out on the lawn so the architects could draw the outline around his vast form.)

By 1934, with the largest staff in White House history, Franklin Roosevelt needed more room.

TOOK OVER LAUNDRY YARD

The West Wing was extended, and the Oval Office was moved from the building's center to its secluded southeast corner. It occupied the yard where for decades the presidential laundry had been hung out to dry. It retained the marble mantle of the earlier Oval Office used by Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and, briefly, FDR.

Architect Eric Gugler used Jefferson's covered colonnade to link the White House with the columned porch of the new Oval Office, making it fully accessible for Roosevelt's wheelchair.

During World War II the windows were fitted with bulletproof glass.

Headlines from 1934 read, "President's New Oval Office - Carefully Planned For Beauty," but the name had little general use until the Nixon era.

William Safire, the columnist, remembers "Oval Office" coming into its own during the Nixon administration as "a phrase used to describe decision making by the president without using his name."

As in, "That's an Oval Office decision."

Each president has put a personal stamp on the room.

Clinton's Oval Office is a small museum of the American presidency and a symbol of his own optimism.

Busts of his presidential heroes line the shelves near their writings in leather-bound volumes. A sign on the table behind his desk reads, "It CAN be done."

The table holds busts of Franklin Roosevelt on the left and Abraham Lincoln on the right and is framed by the two flags that are in every president's Oval Office - the flag of the United States and the personal gold-on-blue flag of the president.

Franklin Roosevelt held Oval Office news conferences, his desk often surrounded by 200 reporters. His office had naval prints and ship models.

When Kennedy moved in, he was amused to find the Oval Office floor marred by hundreds of scars from Eisenhower's golf cleats. Soon the room bore the stamp of the young president, including a coconut he carved with an SOS message after the sinking of his PT boat near a Pacific island.

Johnson had television consoles and news-service tickers and a desk telephone with two dozen buttons.

AND THEN THERE WERE THOSE TAPES

Nixon installed a secret voice-activated taping system to record his Oval Office visitors, a profound discovery to the Senate Watergate Committee.

Carter fought an Oval Office battle with a mouse that had the misfortune to die inside the White House walls.

To Carter's astonishment, the General Services Administration claimed its responsibility ended at the inside wall while the National Park Service contended its authority stopped at the outer wall. And neither had authority to actually remove the mouse.

When the president got angry enough, aides finally solved the problem and Carter triumphed over the mouse, if not the bureaucrats.