The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

She's the queen of Pennsylvania Avenue again, maybe the nation's most historic private premises, the newly restored Willard Hotel. After 18 empty and derelict years, she will reopen this week, glittering with all her former glory, and more. Developer Oliver Carr poured in $120 million, searched the history books for authenticity, matched the marble in Italy, added an office building and retail complex and retained the building's classic stateliness with bull's-eye windows and mansard roofs -- and the legends of a small, raw country becoming a great republic.

President-elect Franklin Pierce took up residence at the Willard in 1853 and stayed there until the day he marched to the inaugural stand with Millard Fillmore. It was Fillmore who then came back to the hotel and moved into his successor's old quarters. Once, when the water supply in the neighborhood became tainted, Henry Willard sent a couple of barrels of drinking water from his splendid well over to James Buchanan in the White House, just a stroll away.

Washington's grandees, sensing the approach of civil war, had one last fling in 1859, and it was in the Willard. Among the 1,800 guests: Sam Houston, Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglas, William Seward. They raised glass after sparkling glass of champagne as the night -- and peace -- ebbed. It was claimed that this was the last time North and South met on friendly ground. On the day Jefferson Davis was sworn in as President of the Confederacy, delegates from 21 of the 34 states gathered quietly in Willard Hall to try to avert disaster. They failed.

Abraham Lincoln sneaked into the Willard one dawn just a year later, his bodyguards having cloaked his movements from Illinois because of rumors of assassination. When the President-elect took his boots off in his second-story suite, he found he had forgotten his slippers. Henry Willard had some, but they were not big enough for Abe. Willard's grandfather, William Bradley, just then visiting, had huge feet and slippers to fit. He sent them over to Lincoln's rooms.

Julia Ward Howe heard marching, singing soldiers beneath her Willard window and wrote the words for The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Walt Whitman aimed a sharp arrow at what he saw in the Willard:

There you are, shoulder straps, but where are your companies? Where are your men?

Speak, blow, put on airs in Willard's sumptuous bar, or anywhere!

No explanation will save you. Bull Run is your work!

The London Times's famed war correspondent William Howard Russell marveled at the hostelry. "The great pile of Willard's Hotel probably maintains more scheming, plotting, planning heads, more aching and joyful hearts, than any building of the same size ever held in the world."

Ulysses Grant and his son checked into the Willard in 1864, and the clerk, so used to the high and mighty, did not recognize the man who commanded nearly a million troops. As President, Grant would often wander out of the loneliness of the White House and come to the Willard, which offered him a leather chair in a secluded place in the lobby where he could watch the passing show. Even then he was pestered by people with petitions and pleas. He called these intruders "lobbyists," and the term stuck.

Calvin Coolidge, waiting to move into the White House after Harding's death, apprehended a cat burglar in his Willard room. He let the fellow go after extracting a promise to reform.

The current Willard is the twelfth new building or major renovation on the site since 1816. Charles Dickens stayed in one of those early incarnations, then called Fuller's City Hotel. Viewing the squalid streets around him, he dismissed Washington as the "city of magnificent intentions." But with a lot of help from the Willard, it fulfilled its dreams. The lovely partnership is ready for renewal.