During the centuries between the original block of cheese and today’s version, White House security became far tighter. Threats and dangers, and questions about the safety of its residents, gradually chipped away at the idea of an open house of the people and for the people. Fences got stronger. Gates became locked and fortified. A lone “watch box” for sentries built during Jackson’s presidency became a security force thousands strong—including an impressive group of canines.
World War II saw the end of free public access to the grounds. Following the bombings of the Marine barracks and U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983, concrete Jersey barriers, later replaced by bollards, went up around the White House complex. As a result of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the portion of Pennsylvania Avenue flanking the north grounds of the White House complex was permanently closed to vehicular traffic.
Until 9/11, people who wanted to tour the White House could show up during open times and walk in. Tour demand became high enough that in 1976, a booth was set up for first-come, first-served tickets.
After 9/11, access dramatically changed. The current system of applying through congressional representatives and being screened through a security process means would-be visitors have to apply at least a few weeks ahead of their intended visits.
But whether entry to the White House involved few barriers or many, there have always been people who didn’t want to play by the rules.
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Agents and officers have heard it all.
“You’d be amazed how many people have appointments with the president,” jokes Bill. “For some reason, they’re not usually on his calendar.”
Some genuinely think they can walk in and tell the president what’s on their minds. They ask officers or agents how they can be let in through the gate and into the White House to speak with the president. When they discover that it’s not how it works, there’s disappointment, sometimes embarrassment, occasionally anger.
Others don’t ask. They just find a way to get in. These men and women usually make headlines now, but the White House has been dealing with such interlopers since the beginning.
In 1800, John Adams became the first president to live in the White House. It didn’t take long for a deranged man to walk into the White House and threaten to kill him.
There would be no Secret Service for sixty-five more years, and it wouldn’t be until 1901 that the agency began its mission of presidential protection. Still, the second president of the United States could have cried out for help and found able-bodied assistance. Instead, he sat down with the man in his office and calmed him on his own. The man, he would later note, never returned.
Tightening security through the years hasn’t stopped those intent on making their way into the Executive Mansion. Some have appeared quite sane and proven perfectly harmless.
In 1930, a well-attired man strode into the White House and interrupted the dinner of President Herbert Hoover before the Secret Service apprehended him. He turned out to be a curious and intrepid tourist.
During World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was watching a movie in the White House with some guests. “When the lights came on, a neatly dressed young man, a complete stranger, was standing next to FDR,” Margaret Truman wrote in her book The President’s House. The man asked for the president’s autograph, which FDR gave to him before the Secret Service escorted him away.
The intrusions that stir the most public concern tend to involve people jumping over the fence, or crashing into it, or flying aircraft over or onto the property.
The 1970s saw some of the most dramatic breaches.
In 1974 an Army officer stole a helicopter and ended up landing it on the South Lawn after the Secret Service opened fire. On Christmas Day the same year, Marshall Fields, the son of a retired American diplomat, crashed his Chevy Impala into a White House gate. He was wearing “Arabic style clothing,” according to reports, and said he was the Messiah. He wore what he claimed were explosives strapped to his body and negotiated for four hours with the Secret Service until he surrendered. The explosives turned out to be flares.
The next year, on the night before Thanksgiving, Gerald Gainous Jr. managed to scale a wall on the south grounds and evade detection despite setting off alarms. He spent between an hour and a half and two hours on the grounds and was caught only after approaching President Gerald Ford’s daughter, Susan, as she unloaded photography equipment from a car.
It wouldn’t be Gainous’s last attempt. By the following August, he had scaled the fence three more times.
In 1976, a Secret Service officer fatally shot a cab driver wielding a three-foot metal pipe while the president was in residence.
Dennis Martin, who would go on to become an inspector with the Secret Service’s Special Operation Division, is still haunted by an event that took place during the Carter administration when he was posted at the White House as a Uniformed Division officer.
“We were like human dogs. We would wait and wait and wait, and somebody would come over and you get that crash alarm at the White House and then you get this adrenaline rush and you go like a dog after him to get him.
“Back in the day when Pennsylvania Avenue was open, people would ram the fence with vehicles. The fence was reinforced in the 1970s, but a lot of people didn’t realize this. One night a guy with an Oldsmobile Delta 88, he is out on Pennsylvania Avenue going about thirty-five miles an hour. This is probably nine thirty at night. There’s nobody out in the street but I remember that car turned to the fence and hit it. The force catapulted the car back to Pennsylvania Avenue.
“I ran out there and pulled my gun and grabbed the guy and put him against the column and started handcuffing him. Then I heard another door open on the car. I was out there alone and there’s a door opening and I see there’s a little girl, maybe five years old, coming out from under the dashboard. He had brought his daughter with him. What was he thinking?
“I remember the guy saying, ‘I want to see the preacher! I want to see the preacher.’ He was talking about President Jimmy Carter.”
The man did not get an audience with Carter, but he did get charged with destruction of property and unlawful entry. Martin still wonders what became of that frightened little girl, and what, if anything, she remembers from that night.
Each breach of the White House grounds causes the Secret Service to review security to see how it can be improved. Fence reinforcement was a result of this kind of review. If it hadn’t been strengthened when the man rammed his heavy car into it, the situation could have ended very differently.
Secret Service canines have been part of the answer to bolstering White House safety since dog teams began working there in 1976. Canines have been an integral part of the security plan for decades, greatly increasing in job scope and number since the program’s inception.
Handlers from the program’s pre-9/11 years say the policy about how they could use their dogs on the White House property was much more conservative than it is today. They could release their dogs to apprehend intruders only under dire circumstances.
“Either I had to be in fear of my life or I needed to be able to articulate that someone else’s life was in danger when that individual came over the fence,” says former handler Sergent.
They never had to release a dog on the grounds to apprehend a suspect. The main job of dogs after a fence infiltration was to check the grounds to make sure the suspect hadn’t left behind anything that could do harm. They also made sure no one else had charged in and hidden while officers were distracted with the other suspect.
Because the patrol and apprehension portion of the dogs’ skill set wasn’t being used much, in 1997, the dogs went from dual purpose to single purpose, focusing entirely on detecting explosives. Noses were in, teeth were out. At least for a few years.
But after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent U.
S. engagement in Iraq, the Secret Service examined the frightening reality of what the White House could face at the hands of suicide bombers or other terrorists. The Emergency Response Team was tapped to beef up its presence with a program that would put badass dogs with badass ERT members outside the White House.
“The idea was that if we did encounter a suicide bomber, we could utilize this new tool to intercept the guy, and either cause a premature detonation or at least get our team more time and slow the guy down to get prepared and get in position to mitigate the threat,” says Jim S.
“It’s about putting pressure on the guy and making sure he doesn’t harm the president,” he says. “It’s all for the presidents and their families.”
The ERT Tactical Canine Unit began in 2003. These dogs wouldn’t be trained in bomb detection at all. Their main purpose is to stop bad guys in their tracks. The dog teams, in the words of Stew, “detect [people], extract, apprehend, and deter.”
Dogs are considered a less-than-lethal force. “We aren’t trigger-happy,” Stew says. “No one wants to shoot anyone. These dogs provide additional protection for the White House, team members, and even the suspect.”
In other words, without a dog to help stop someone who looks like a threat, a lethal weapon might become the next option.
Of course, circumstances dictate how and if dogs will be used during a given situation. Anyone who comes over the fence is taken very seriously.
“Every one of our deployments could be a suicide bomber,” says Stew. “We don’t want to kill anyone, we’re not a bunch of cowboys. When we deploy, you have to think these people are coming to take my or my protectee’s life. You can’t assume anyone is safe. Maybe that person who got over really is just an old woman. But she could be a diversion, or strapped with explosives.”
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The Secret Service walks a fine line when it comes to protecting the White House. Yes, anyone could be a terrorist. But in reality, many White House intruders or would-be White House visitors are mentally ill, and often not armed or dangerous.
Most of the prospective uninvited visitors with mental illness suffer from some kind of schizophrenic disorder—usually paranoid schizophrenia. Gainous was eventually diagnosed with this and committed to the ward at St. Elizabeths Hospital, the usual destination for such “visitors” at the time.
These men and women were known by psychiatrists and the Secret Service as “White House cases.” They were usually held at St. Elizabeths for one to three weeks, with the goal of getting them properly medicated so their psychoses came under control.
Many people with paranoid schizophrenia hear voices. (Some who try to get to the White House think the voices are messages from members of the Secret Service.) They may believe they are being spied on 24/7, or that great harm is going to come to them or important people. In an effort to make everything better, they set off to get help from the most powerful person they know: the president of the United States.
“Most of those who are White House Cases consider the president a benevolent authority, and they typically come to ask for some intervention on their own behalf, or to advise or warn the President in some way,” according to a 1985 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry, cowritten by David Shore, MD, a top researcher in the field.
E. Fuller Torrey, MD, a research psychiatrist specializing in serious mental illnesses, says some of the mentally ill who seek an audience with the president suffer from bipolar disorder. During periods of grandiosity, they might think they have a direct link to the president, and that they belong in the White House. Others suffering from delusions may think they’re being called by the president, or that the president simply must hear about an important idea or invention of theirs.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Torrey was in charge of the ward at St. Elizabeths where most of the White House cases ended up. Around that time, the cases numbered about one hundred per year—so many that right next to the “name” field on the hospital’s standard admissions form was a yes/no box to check for “White House case.”
Torrey recalls one woman who insisted she was married to President Ronald Reagan.
“She would sit across the street in Lafayette Park day after day, expecting to be let into the White House because she was the president’s wife,” says Torrey, author of American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System.
She was eventually brought to St. Elizabeths, held for a few days, put on medication, deemed relatively harmless, and released. She didn’t stay on her meds and went back to being the “other” Mrs. Reagan.
The men and women who became White House cases flocked to the nation’s capital from across the United States, deeply driven to see the president.
Eugene Stammeyer, chief psychologist at St. Elizabeths at the time, gave this colorful if heartbreaking description of a few White House cases to the Washington Post in 1977:
They really do come barefoot, some of the time. One lady sold her blood to get here. A man lived outdoors near the Lincoln Memorial for six months, eating out of garbage cans behind restaurants, because he spent every penny he could scrounge on phone calls to the President. There was a man who brought a roll of toilet paper all the way from California to give to President Nixon because he was sure Nixon couldn’t afford his own.
St. Elizabeths has been taking in White House cases almost since it opened its doors in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane. The number of mentally ill inpatients peaked at seven thousand to eight thousand in the 1950s.
The introduction of the first effective antipsychotics in the mid-1950s primed the pump that would end up purging patients from hospitals over the next few decades. By the 1970s, St. Elizabeths had only about three thousand live-in patients. Today it has fewer than five hundred.
White House cases are no longer called White House cases, and they’re reportedly rarely seen at St. Elizabeths. The Secret Service declines to talk about what happens now when people who appear to be mentally ill need further evaluation, but in 2014, The Atlantic reported that the agency transports them to one of the local hospitals where they can get an emergency psychiatric examination. They may be involuntarily committed for a short time while a treatment protocol is worked out.
The “White House cases” moniker may be gone, but there’s likely no shortage of people who fit the description.
“I will be very surprised if in fact the White House cases are fewer than they were thirty years ago,” says Torrey. “We now have more homeless who are mentally ill, more people in jails and prisons who are mentally ill, and the quality of public services for people with serious mental illness has deteriorated markedly. White House cases have almost surely increased as well.”
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Dozens of men and women have scaled the White House fence since the ERT Tactical Canine Unit began its watch outside the Executive Mansion in 2003.
At least one was a repeat offender. A man who reportedly believed his family was being terrorized and poisoned thought President George W. Bush was the only person who could help. Brian Patterson, of New Mexico, jumped over the White House fence four times between 2004 and 2006 in an effort to meet the president, tying Gainous’s attempts at entry.
An Arkansas man who jumped the fence in 2005 wasn’t intent on an audience with President Bill Clinton, but rather with his daughter, Chelsea. Shawn Cox thought she still lived there (she didn’t) and that he was destined to marry her.
“He insisted that Chelsea Clinton was in the White House as well as President Bush and described how former President Bill Clinton had told him that [Cox] was ‘going to marry my daughter’ when he had met him in Arkansas,” a psychologist wrote in a court document, according to a news report. The document also stated that Cox said his head was “a cell phone implanted by Jesus.”
In 2007, Catalino Lucas Diaz, a spry sixty-six-year-old m
an, scaled the fence and claimed he had a bomb and he would throw a missile. The Secret Service used a water cannon to destroy the package he brought with him. It contained nothing dangerous.
On the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, a twenty-six-year-old man wearing a Pokémon hat and carrying something in his hands—which turned out to be a Pikachu doll—jumped over the fence and was quickly subdued. The man’s mother said the doll was his best friend since childhood. She said he had been suffering from mental illness for years, and that he may have become despondent when his health insurance wasn’t accepted where he was seeking care.
“He went to talk to the president about his insurance and health care,” she said.
Among the others ending up on the wrong side of the fence since the introduction of ERT dog teams have been a Code Pink protestor who was on a hunger strike for two months, and a Japanese man wearing “military style camouflage clothing,” who later said he was in the U.S. on a visa and had run out of money a couple of days earlier.
In 2014, a toddler managed to squeeze through the bars of the fence just before President Barack Obama was going to brief the press on Iraq. The brief was delayed while the matter was resolved. It didn’t take long.
“We were going to wait until he learned to talk to question him, but in lieu of that he got a timeout and was sent on [his] way with [his] parents,” joked Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan.
The toddler is probably the only fence infiltrator the Secret Service hasn’t been too concerned about, but it’s a safe bet that someone made sure the toddler wasn’t being used as a distraction for something bad going down elsewhere on the grounds.
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