[War] US: Welcome Back!

[pentaj2 at Scranton.edu]

"Welcome back!"
18 September 2006
President John Williams
United States
========================
It was a Monday, a fairly boring Monday for the POTUS. He'd grown more 
and more confident in his decision not to do a lot of the PR stuff that 
had grown associated with the Presidency over previous decades; What 
had been a decision born out of the need to respond to a sudden 
assumption of the office had turned out producing better work from the 
White House staff and had enabled him to mold the office to himself.

As he was going to do right now.

In walked Mark Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service; Williams 
had built up an amiable relationship with his detail and the Secret 
Service chief. Granted, he strained against the bounds and they tried 
to keep him from getting himself killed, but it worked, and the detail 
would as often bw surrounding him looking for threats as they would 
just be chatting with him.

"Mark, thanks for coming in. Siddown," Williams greeted. "You saw my 
questions, I take it?"

"Yes sir. There's...nervousness, yeah. If it were our choice, you'd 
travel in a tank and live in a bunker and wear level IV armor."

"And similarly, if it were my choice, security would be minimal. OK, 
granted. Real-world though, the White House as a complex presents an 
image. How does it look if this place becomes a fortress? How distant 
do we become from the folks who pay the bills?"

"Yeah."

"OK...I had the carpentry shop build a 3D model of the grounds which we 
can use to visualize this. C'mon, let's take a look," Williams noted, 
gesturing over to a table.

They were in the Oval Office study; Before them, on a table, was a 
model of the White House grounds in full detail.

"OK, here's what I'm thinking. One...How much do we *need* to block 
vehicular access to the surrounding streets?" Pennsylvania Avenue had 
been blocked to vehicular traffic since the Oklahoma City bombing, a 
restriction made permanent after 9/11. Granted, they'd done some 
remodeling and renovating of the street which had made it at least look 
better, but still.

"We'd prefer it never be opened, bluntly. Truck bombs."

"The truck bomb that could blow past the setback to do more than blow 
out windows - normal windows, not the blastproof ones we have - would 
have to be a small nuke, anf in that case we'd be screwed anyway," 
pointed out the President.

Kayleigh (the Penn Ave redevelopment project had been one of Mrs. 
Bush's initiatives, and so it remained under FLOTUS officially) spoke 
up, too. "And, real-world. We do lose a lot in PR if we keep it 
barricaded off, don't we?"

"OK, points taken."

"Now, the redesign is good. I do not dispute that we may, on occasion, 
see a need to close Penn to vehicular traffic. But on a permanent 
basis, no," John noted.

"More to the point, the redesigned Pennsylvania Avenue allows for us to 
have either. It wouldn't be hard to retrofit it to allow for vehicular 
access, maintain free pedesterian movement, and on occasion shut it 
down if we need to," Kayleigh pointed out.

"OK...What about anti-air?"

"I think we can be safe there. Yhe Flight Restrictions around DC are 
something we can't decide on our own."

"Next, tours. Do you guys *really* want to loosen up the security that 
much?"

"Yes," POTUS responded.

FLOTUS nodded vigorously. "Yeah. We're living in a gilded cage here. At 
least the tours make it...not so isolating."

"Point taken, I can see how that could be hard to deal with."

"Yep," POTUS nodded.

"So..."

"Here's my thought process. Daily public tours, free, but you sign up a 
day in advance."

"Why?"

"So that we have 24 hours to run you through the databases and make 
sure you aren't on a watchlist."

"Fair point."

"OK, so...We reopen the street and prepare for visitors."
---
Sources:
[1]http://www.whitehouse.gov/firstlady/initiatives/pardonourdust.html
[2]http://www.whitehouse.gov/pennproject/index.html
---
Actions:
1. FLOTUS, POTUS, and the Secret Service work on reopening Pennsylvania 
Avenue to vehicular traffic, looking first at what sort of retrofits 
are needed to Pennsylvania Avenue to allow for vehicular access in 
normal situations, but also to allow access to be stopped when 
necessary in a graceful manner.
2. The White House gets reopened for public tours on the following 
basis: To get a ticket, you have to sign up for a specific date and 
time at least one day in advance. You must, in that signup sheet, 
provide enough data so that security checks can be performed over the 
following 24 hours.