Bruce Feiler: July 2007 Archives

Now's the time to plan that birthday party on Tybee Island, once lovingly known by residents as Seedy Savannah Beach, my home away from home since I was a child and the name of one of my twins. Forget the real estate glut and renourishment problems. My brother sent along this news from the latest City Countil Meeting: "The council voted unanimously to amend the city's animal control ordinance to allow ponies at birthday parties without permits."

Our instructions were to show up at the Northwest Appointment Gate at 8:55 AM on Friday morning. My parents had flown up from Georgia; Mrs. Feiler Faster and I had made our way down from New York. My Dad had booked us two rooms at the Hay-Adams hotel, across Lafayette Park from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, “where nothing is overlooked but the White House.” My wife had asked what she should wear. “Not pants,” I said, remembering Bush’s admonition that all guests to the Oval Office should be dressed appropriately. “At my age, you wear what’s comfortable,” my Mom responded, who wore a pantsuit. One of the first things I noticed after we passed through security was a sign that said:

Those not appropriately dressed and wearing the following will not be allowed to tour the West Wing: jeans, sneakers, shorts, mini skirts, t-shirts, tank tops, flip flops

We were met by an extremely charming White House aide. She led us up the drive, past “Pebble Beach,” where the networks have their permanent cameras for stand-up, through the front door of the West Wing, which was manned by a Marine, and into what she described as a “holding room.” The holding room, in this instance, turned out to be the Cabinet Room.

The familiar table filled most of the room, and you could look through the windows and see the Rose Garden, which was surprisingly bereft of roses. The Charles Wilson Peale portrait of George Washington hung on one wall, with a hand-tucked-into-his-coat pose later made famous by Napoleon, and opposite was a marble bust of Washington looking like Caesar. There was a painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a portrait of Eisenhower, and, oddly I thought, the bust of a non-president: Benjamin Franklin.

The chairs were by far the most telling part. Each leather chair had a brass plate on the back depicting the title of the person who sat there, like “The President,” with the date he first occupied it. Josh Bolton’s chair had two plaques, one for his job as head of Office of Management and Budget, another for Chief of Staff. The most plaques belonged to Cheney’s chair: “Vice President,” “Secretary of Defense,” and “Chief of Staff,” with the dates he held each of those jobs. Given the problems plaguing the Attorney General, someone joked it might be time to be making a new chair.

There were several other groups waiting to make their way into meet the president, and we were instructed to expect a brief period of time. At 9:30 AM, Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Georgia, arrived to accompany to us. About ten minutes to ten, we were moved to the dark lobby just outside the Cabinet Room, and a few minutes later, through the open door, into the Oval Office.

My first impression was how light the room was, and how heavy the air. Part of this is an architectural trick. I renovated an apartment a few years ago and my architect talked about the power of making small, ante-rooms darker, so that the large room you enter has even more impact. That’s exactly what happens when you enter the Oval Office. Given the warren of enclosed, window-less rooms you have to make your way through before you get to the Oval Office, the act of entering a room with so many windows, with an illuminated, white ceiling, and bright, almost stage lighting inside, is very dramatic. Mike Deaver was the first to relight the room, I had read, and the effect on your irises, if nothing else, is intense. Putin, upon entering, apparently uttered, “Oh, my God.”

The other source of intensity, of course, is the person entering the room. You bring a lot of the emotion with you – the nervous anxiety, the twisting of hands, the sense of history. And I wasn’t coming to make a major decision, or negotiate a bill, or apply for a Supreme Court judgship. I could only imagine the emotion of some of those visitors.

One of the ways I experienced the entire morning was as a boy who had grown up talking about politics around the breakfast table, studied American history, and been reading that week about the burning of the White House in 1812 and Abraham Lincoln giving speeches from the second floor. For that part of me, entering the Oval House was a thrill, and I had made the appropriate fuss. I had gotten my suit pressed, my shoes shined, and when I found out that morning that my collar was lacking a stay, I took a Q-tip, circumcised it with a nail clipper, and inserted it into my collar. That’s right: I wore a Q-tip to the Oval Office.

As we were leaving the White House, I asked if we could see the new press digs, and we were escorted into the room, which is no larger than the old room, of course, but much fancier, with leather seats and the new, high-tech backdrop. Later I learned that Stephen Colbert must have been there a few minutes after we left.

The backsplash is growing!

PepsiCo Inc. will spell out that its Aquafina bottled water is made with tap water, a concession to the growing environmental and political opposition to the bottled water industry.

According to Corporate Accountability International, a U.S. watchdog group, the world's No. 2 beverage company will include the words "Public Water Source" on Aquafina labels.

"If this helps clarify the fact that the water originates from public sources, then it's a reasonable thing to do," said Michelle Naughton, a Pepsi-Cola North America spokeswoman.

In my reading pile this weekend from my father: An excerpt in Smithsonian of a new book about the unlikely man who discovered the Epic of Gilgamesh and made the connection between the oldest flood epic ever uncovered and the story of Noah. I wrote about this quite a lot in WALKING THE BIBLE but I never knew that much about the founder, George Smith, who today we call a high-school dropout who discovered the story quite by accident while working at the British Museum in 1872.

What he had uncovered would become known in the West as The Epic of Gilgamesh, the 3,200-year-old account of the eponymous hero's exploits and one of the oldest works of literature in the world. It constituted one of the most sensational finds in the history of archaeology. Smith would go on to become the world's leading expert in the ancient Akkadian language and its fiendishly difficult script, write the first true history of Mesopotamia's long-lost Assyrian Empire and publish pathbreaking translations of the major Babylonian literary texts. All that from a self-taught laborer who had never been to high school, much less college.

Where are the moderate Muslims? Everywhere, apparently. A new study by Pew shows that support for suicide bombings has been cut in half in many parts of the Muslim world. Most notably, the survey finds large and growing numbers of...

A few weeks ago I complained (joining what turned out to be a chorus of complainers) when Angelina Jolie besmirched the legacy of Danny Pearl by imposing absurd media-restrictions on her interviews to promote "A Mighty Heart." Now it turns...

It can happen to anyone, even the most experienced traveler. One of Lonely Planet's most well-traveled writers, Clem Lindenmayer, has been found dead on a Chinese mountainside, three months after he was reported missing. Mr Lindenmayer, 47, had set out...

Here's one of the more exciting stories I've seen in a while. One of the most common questions I get when the subject turns to interfaith relations is, "What about the people who don't want to talk?" Well, it looks...

In February, I received a call from my father one day, "The president of the United States just mispronounced your name on national television." With a little digging, I soon learned that at the end of an interview with...

Kudos to my brother for pointing out on Saturday night what I've now seen elsewhere on the web. TIME has a provocative cover this week showing a helicopter airlifting the A(merica) out of I-R-A-Q. The image is clearly evocative of...

I just returned from a weekend at the beach on Tybee Island with my two-year-old twins girls. My wife, having just come through a skin cancer scare, has imported long-sleeve, UV-protected bodysuits for them from Australia. Looks like she...

The bottled-water bottlers must be feeling the heat. For newcomers to Feiler Faster, I've been on something of a tirade against the addiction many Americans have to bottled water. And it's not just because Mrs. Feiler Faster is one of...

Heard last night, somewhere between Charlotte and LGA, in the seat next to me, from a very cute two-year-old , with her hands over her ears, describing as best she could what it felt like to have her ears pop....

In the spring of 2005, when my wife was around eight months pregnant with identical twin girls, we took the mandatory tour of the hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where she was going to deliver (naturally!) our...

In March 2001, on the eve of the publication of Walking the Bible, I started a website, www.brucefeiler.com. I did it on a whim. "Authors should have websites," I thought. It changed my life. Not just my professional life. My...