Travel: Washington DC, USA

ALL the presidents’ memories are evoked on a trip to the White House

In a backlit glass cabinet at the visitor centre on George Washington’s estate at Mt Vernon, Virginia, is a piece of cherry branch said to be from the tree that features in the one story about the first American president that most visitors already know – that a six-year-old George took his hatchet to it, then confessed his little act of vandalism with the immortal words: “I can’t tell a lie, Pa. You know I cannot tell a lie.”

The tale is almost certainly fanciful; but after a couple of hours in the graceful yet modest mansion and blossomed grounds of Washington’s estate, 16 miles south of the city he founded, you’re almost ready to believe it. The first president didn’t acquire the “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen” tag for nothing. His tomb, set a little way down the Mt Vernon hillside in woodland bordering the mighty Potomac river, is a national shrine.

Washington the revolutionary war hero and, later, the leader who eschewed all titles in favour of plain “Mr President”, thought of himself as a farmer first, and a pioneering one at that: he introduced crop rotation and fertilisers, and had an experimental seed garden. These days the estate to which he retreated after the war, and again after refusing a third presidential term, boasts formal gardens, a cherry orchard and a model farm.

Nearer to the house is a reconstruction of the cramped quarters provided for Washington’s slaves – the women who worked six days a week, spinning and weaving, laundering and cooking for the household’s constant stream of visitors; and the men who worked the fields, shoed guests’ horses and generally kept the estate running. One record lists more than 300 slaves on the property, but in his will the farmer-president, in a move that was hotly debated when he died in 1799, set them free.

We pondered that act, on a glorious spring morning back in Washington DC, as we looked out from the bay windows of the Blue Room at the White House. With the country’s first black president bidding for a second term, were we seeing a nation finally comfortable with its ideal of equality, and a voice, for all?

First Lady Michelle Obama, daughters Malia and Sasha, and First Dog Bo were said to be in residence in the private rooms above us. No-one would say whether the president himself was on the premises, and anyway, there was no chance we’d catch a glimpse of him. The Oval Office – indeed, the whole West Wing – is out of bounds and out of sight on the tour.

Visitors have trooped through the public rooms of the White House for most of the two centuries since it was built, but these days American citizens must apply via their congressman or woman to be entered in a ballot. Everyone else has to go through their embassy. We applied nearly six months in advance, but getting on the visitors list was only the first hurdle. Gaining access to the building, post-9/11, involves several passport checks, an encounter with a huge, keyed-up, explosives-sniffing canine operative thankfully on the other side of a metal grille, and an airport scanner. About the only things we were allowed to take in with us were cash and a switched-off mobile phone. And, as we realised once we were through security and couldn’t turn back, there are no public toilets in the building – the nearest is in the visitor centre out on Pennsylvania Avenue, where those not picked in the ballot can enjoy a virtual tour, in complete comfort.

Only eight rooms at the White House are open to the public – this is not a National Trust stately home experience – but the excitement for a non-American comes from little things. Such as discovering that the secret service men and women with their dark suits and plastic earpieces are a mine of information about everything from Sèvres porcelain to silver samovars.

Then there’s the thrill of the famous China Room, and the discovery that Laura Bush’s taste in dinnerware (white Lenox china with a light green basket-weave motif) is subtler than that of her mother-in-law, and a lot less in-your-face than Nancy Reagan’s red-crested accent plates. (Jacqueline Kennedy’s wine glasses, displayed nearby, must have been the height of chic in the early 1960s, but to today’s eye they’re more Ikea than iconic.)

In the East Room, the largest in the White House, we saw where the bodies of seven presidents have lain in state. In the Green Room, we admired a coffee urn owned by John Adams, the first president to take up residence here, in 1800. In the Red Room, we heard how President Franklin Pierce established a tradition that has lasted 150 years, ordering up daily fresh-cut flowers. In the State Dining Room, we learnt how President Harry Truman’s upstairs piano-playing brought a chandelier crashing down in 1948 and caused panic about the state of the building – which was then closed for four years for reconstruction. It was Jackie Kennedy who in 1961 had the Dining Room redecorated in its original colours, starting a trend towards restoration that has led in the decades since to the tracking down of many early presidential pieces auctioned off, or hidden in the attics, by successive first ladies.

Early presidential consorts may be blamed for the constant and expensive programmes of refurbishment at the First Mansion as fashions and tastes changed, but it was First Lady Dolley Madison, we learnt, who saved one of the fledgling nation’s principal treasures, in 1814, when the British – in retaliation for an American attack on Canada, it should be said – set fire to the White House. Dolley, so the story goes, rolled up the canvas of Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait of George Washington and fled the burning building with it under her arm.

We left the White House via the Cross Hall, where a Steinway grand piano – a gift to President Roosevelt in 1938 – stands sentinel, its sides decorated with a frieze of dancers, and giant golden eagles serving as legs. It is not a thing of beauty; but it’s bold and patriotic, like so much else in the US capital.

Outside in the spring sunshine, under tulip magnolias in full bloom, we joined the huddles of visitors taking snaps on their phones of the familiar Corinthian columns. Down on the Mall we paid homage at the Lincoln Memorial, with its gigantic seated statue of the president who brought slavery to an end, and looked out across the Reflecting Pool (currently under reconstruction) beside which First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt invited Marian Anderson to give a concert when the African-American singer was refused entry to Constitution Hall. In the distance, the towering Washington Monument and, beyond that, the striking white dome of the Capitol building, glinted in the sun. Then on to the 19ft-tall bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson, in its neoclassical temple beside the Tidal Basin.

The city’s famous cherry trees – a gift from Japan exactly 100 years ago – were ready to burst into flower. George would have felt very much at home.

THE FACTS Return flights from £584, www.aa.com; White House Visitor Center, 1450 Pennsylvania Ave, NW Washington, DC, 7:30am-4pm. Admission free. British citizens can request a place on a White House tour by visiting pentagon.afis.osd.mil and giving the British Embassy address: 3100 Massachusetts Ave NW Washington, DC 20008.