THE PRESIDENT’S DESK
Eighteen presidents have used the Oval Office since William Howard Taft moved in in 1909. In all that time, only six desks have served as the “First Desk.”
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It wasn’t long after Theodore Roosevelt moved into the White House in 1901 that he realized the building would not be big enough to accommodate both his large family and his presidential staff. So he ordered the construction of a West Wing that would serve as office space for himself and his administration, freeing up some second-floor offices in the Executive Mansion to be converted into more living space for the First Family. But TR’s West Wing office was rectangular. It wasn’t until his successor, William Howard Taft, doubled the size of the West Wing in 1909, that a new, oval-shaped office was added to serve as the president’s office. It was the first Oval Office.
The (Theodore) Roosevelt Desk
Though Teddy Roosevelt never occupied the Oval Office, his desk did. When Taft moved into the newly completed office in October 1909, he continued to use the desk he’d inherited from Roosevelt: a sturdy but plain mahogany desk built in the Federalist style that he set in front of the large windows that faced south.
The Hoover Desk
Roosevelt’s desk served as the presidential desk through the administrations of Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and into Herbert Hoover’s term. But after a Christmas Eve fire caused extensive damage to the West Wing in 1929, Hoover accepted the gift of a 17-piece set of art deco office furniture, including a desk (made entirely of American woods and faced with maple burl veneer) that was donated by an association of furniture makers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Roosevelt desk, which suffered little damage from the fire, was put in storage.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Hoover and became president in 1933, he kept Hoover’s desk—rather than his fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt’s desk—and used it for the entire 12-plus years of his presidency. (During extensive renovations, he also moved the Oval Office to its present location in the southeast corner of the West Wing, a location that permitted him to come and go quietly, without attracting the attention of his aides.) Then, after FDR died in office in April 1945, his successor, Harry Truman, had the Hoover desk and other personal items sent to Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, New York. The Hoover desk remains on display in a re-creation of FDR’s Oval Office at the site, which is now the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. To replace it, Truman had the (Theodore) Roosevelt desk pulled out of storage. It remained the president’s desk through both the Truman and the Eisenhower years (1945–1961).
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The Resolute Desk
Of all six desks to serve as the president’s desk in the Oval Office, the Resolute desk has the longest history in the White House, though it wasn’t moved into the Oval Office until after John F. Kennedy became president in 1961. It was made from timbers taken from the HMS Resolute, a British Royal Navy ship that became trapped in ice in the Canadian arctic in 1853 and had to be abandoned. By the summer of 1855, the Resolute had floated free of the melting ice, and it was found adrift on the open sea by an American whaling ship and sailed to Connecticut. There, the U.S. government paid to have the ship repaired, and returned it to England in 1856 as a gesture of “national courtesy.” The ship remained in service until 1879. After it was scrapped, Queen Victoria had some of the salvaged English oak timbers made into an ornate desk that she presented as a gift to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, in thanks for returning the HMS Resolute in 1856.
President Hayes used the Resolute desk in his private study in the White House residence, where it remained in use for the next 80 years. Originally the “kneehole” was open, and visitors to the White House could see a president’s legs when he was seated at the desk. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt was sensitive about being seen with the steel leg braces he’d worn since being crippled by polio in the early 1920s, so he commissioned the desk’s most prominent feature: a wood “modesty panel” in front that featured a carved presidential seal. The modesty panel covered the kneehole and would have concealed FDR’s legs from view had he lived long enough to use it, but he died before work on the modesty panel was completed.
By 1961 the Resolute desk had been relegated to the White House’s ground-floor Broadcast Room; that was where First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy found it while working on an ambitious project to redecorate the White House and restore its historic character. She thought the desk’s unique maritime history would appeal to JFK, so she had it moved to the Oval Office in February 1961. (In one famous picture taken of the desk in 1962, a young John F. Kennedy Jr. can be seen peeking out through the open modesty panel while his father sits at the desk.)
The Johnson Desk
After JFK was assassinated in 1963, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, removed the Resolute desk from the Oval Office and replaced it with the mahogany desk that he had used as U.S. senator and vice president. Johnson later had four buttons installed in his desk. If he pushed the first button, an aide brought him coffee; pushing the second button meant he wanted tea; the third button would bring him a Coke; and the fourth meant that LBJ wanted his favorite soft drink, Fresca.
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The “Wilson” Desk
LBJ only loaned his desk to the White House; when he left office in 1969, he took it with him back to Texas. Today it is on display in the replica Oval Office at his presidential library in Austin. That left his successor, Richard Nixon, without a desk, so Nixon picked a large mahogany desk that he had used when serving as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president. He liked the desk because he believed that it had been used by President Woodrow Wilson, whom he admired. But that was untrue, and the name is a misnomer: no one named Wilson ever used the desk.
Rather than settle for buttons that brought beverages, Nixon had the Secret Service install five hidden microphones in the desk, which Nixon used to secretly record Oval Office conversations. When the existence of the recordings became known during the Watergate scandal, they helped seal Nixon’s fate and forced him to resign the presidency in 1974.
The C&O Desk
Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford, continued to use the Wilson desk. But when Ford left office in 1977, his successor, Jimmy Carter, opted to bring the Resolute desk back into the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan also used the desk, but when his term ended in 1989, his successor, George H. W. Bush, wanted the desk he’d used while serving as Reagan’s vice president: a walnut desk built in 1920 for one of the owners of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. To date, Bush is the only president to use the C&O desk in the Oval Office; after he left office in 1993, Bill Clinton went back to using the Resolute desk. It has remained in use in the Oval Office by every president since then. (One “improvement” made by Donald Trump: a red LBJ-esque button in a small box decorated with the presidential seal. The box sits on the desktop and whenever Trump pushes the button, an aide brings him a Diet Coke.)
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