{"id":1198,"date":"2008-11-12T09:24:05","date_gmt":"2008-11-12T08:24:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1198"},"modified":"2008-11-12T09:24:05","modified_gmt":"2008-11-12T08:24:05","slug":"my-visits-to-the-white-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1198","title":{"rendered":"My visits to the White House"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Seeing pictures of President-Elect Barack Obama visiting the<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/White_House\"> White House<\/a> this week took me back to my own visits to this most iconic of political buildings. I believe that, since 9\/11, the general public has not been ableto visit the White House but, before then, I had done so on three occasions.<br \/>\nThe first time was on 19 September 1970 when I was  aged 22 and a university student spending a three-month summer in the United States. After a very short wait, I was in the White House and noted in my diary: &#8220;Saw only a few of the 132 rooms &#8211; East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room, and State Dining Room&#8221;.<br \/>\nThe second time was on 23 August 1980 when I was aged 32 and on a telecommunications study visit to the USA. There was a system of timed ticket entry. It was a 20-minute self conducted tour and I saw the same rooms as on my previous visit but noted in my diary that there had been some renovation.<br \/>\nThe third time was on 19 April 1984 when I was  aged 35 with my wife and (almost) eight year old son. We queued for 50 minutes and spent 20 minutes on the official tour. I noted in my diary: &#8220;This time there was more security (there are barriers round to prevent suicide attacks) and the North Side is being cleaned&#8221;.<br \/>\nI can&#8217;t imagine that I&#8217;ll ever be there inside the White House again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seeing pictures of President-Elect Barack Obama visiting the White House this week took me back to my own visits to this most iconic of political buildings. I believe that, since 9\/11, the general public has not been ableto visit the White House but, before then, I had done so on three occasions. The first time [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}