The Contemporary Presidency: The "Flying White House": A Travel Establishment within the Presidential Branch

One Sunday morning in the spring of 1946, Harry Truman decided he should fly home to Missouri. He slipped out of the White House with a pair of Secret Service agents en route to nearby Bolling Field, where the presidential aircraft was kept. After takeoff, Truman asked his pilot, Major Hank Myers, to make a dive run on the White House, as though Truman's plane was strafing the Executive Mansion. Myers complied. Truman strapped himself into the jump seat and Myers lunged full throttle toward the White House, down to within 500 feet, before pulling back on the stick, regaining altitude, circling around, and doing it again (terHorst and Albertazzie 1979, 154-56). Myers would later write, "Six people telephoned the field that a crazy pilot was on the loose and should be arrested at once" (Myers 1947, 88). There was a minor stir in the press, but no congressional hearings were held and no courts martial were convened. The whole matter was written off to the president's famous incorrigibility. In the twenty-first century such a stunt would be unthinkable, partly because public expectations have changed but also because presidential travel has evolved from the rough-and-ready adventures of Truman's day to a massive, tightly structured institution that specializes in risk avoidance. This article outlines the history of presidential travel, and in doing so it questions scholarly conceptions of the "presidential branch" that focus exclusively on the Executive Office of the President (EOP). The symbolic features of presidential travel have been noted by scholars (Cohen and Powell 2005; Darchy and Richman 1988; Erickson 1998; Simon and Ostrom 1989), but the institutional implications have not. This omission is striking. First, the cost of military assistance to the president, the vast majority of which is devoted to presidential travel, accounts for roughly one third of the operating budget of the White House. (1) Second, contemporary presidents spend a significant portion of their tenure on the road. Richard Nixon was outside of Washington 44 percent of his days in office and George W. Bush had roughly the same average during his first term (U.S. News and World Report 1978; Young 2004). Although presidential travel has become a central function in presidential efforts to "go public," political science scholarship lacks an understanding of its history and conduct. The dearth of scholarship on presidential travel may be due to the practical challenges of research. Little serious historical work has focused on the logistics of travel and much of the raw data are not released to the public. Moreover, no readily identifiable organizational lines mark the boundaries of the travel establishment. The bureaucracy of presidential travel is distributed beyond the EOP. While a sequence of events is coordinated by a staff scheduler in the White House Office, the hands-on work is undertaken by the military, the Secret Service, and a cadre of earnest volunteers who perform carefully scripted routines in service to the president. The rise of the presidential travel establishment--drawn here from the written record and my former experience on the White House staff (2)--reveals the complexity of the presidential branch. First use of the term is commonly attributed to Polsby (1983), who noted that White House staff members had, since the 1930s, begun to supplant the independence of cabinet agencies (see also Halperin 1976, 2). Later, Hart gave the term legalistic boundaries when he equated the presidential branch with the EOP (1995, 5). Dickinson has noted that this definition "is somewhat misleading" because "the locus of staff growth is centered within the White House Office, not the outlying executive branch departments and staff agencies" (1997, 2, fn 7). Dickinson's comment underscores the classic, narrowly circumscribed meaning of the presidential branch as the bureaucracy that holds the president's closest advisors. …