The unexpected things I miss about working in the White House

No one ever talks about the smells of the White House.

On a crisp autumn or cold winter day, one can take a call or walk along the North Lawn driveway and breathe in the smell of burning wood.

It’s typically coming from the chimney of a fireplace in the chief of staff’s office, the crackles and pops of the wood no doubt a relaxing sound no matter who occupies the oval-shaped room down the hall.

If you’re lucky, your morning arrival or return from lunch on a hot summer day will coincide with the hum of a US Park Service lawnmower circling around the fountain near Pennsylvania Avenue. The smell of freshly cut grass offers always-scurrying-to-the-next-story reporters our own moment of peace – especially given how the current occupant of that oval-shaped office enjoys, shall we say, a little chaos now and again.

Though we all but trample each other to get a prime seat in the Rose Garden, if you get just the right one on just the right day in the spring, even this cynical scribe has caught himself appreciating the flowers in full bloom.

Inside the press area is like any other office. Right down to the smells. Someone’s lunch in the one microwave of leftover this or that. Turn the corner and a TV producer is carrying a tray of coffees for their team, leaving a delicious aroma in their wake.

Turn another corner and descend a staircase to the basement. Mould. The carpet has been through a lot down there, from breaking news stampedes to many a mini-flood after a heavy Washington rain.

After working from my abode for over three months, I must confess: I miss those smells, each and every one. Yes, I even miss that mouldy carpet.

I miss the chaos that follows the voice on the overhead speaker: “Press to the Palm Room doors. Now!” President Trump does that sometimes, decides he has something to say. I miss the camaraderie of my colleagues, the dark “reporter humour” – what’s said in the basement, folks, stays in the basement. It’s a sacred code.

I miss discussing the day’s news and scuttlebutt with my colleague and friend Brian Karem, the Playboy magazine White House columnist with a wit as sharp as his next question for the president. I miss picking the brain of Martha Kumar, the professor who studies presidents and the media closer than anyone – if she hasn’t seen it all, she has spent time talking to someone who has.

I miss laughing and trading stories from the beat on the way back from grabbing a mid-afternoon bite with Karem, two journalists from different eras who, somehow, are equally cynical about everyone and every ridiculous thing we cover in Washington. Those walks through Lafayette Park seem like a lifetime ago.

I would walk through that very park a few times each day over the last five years when I was working out of the White House basement. Now the park I see on TV is almost unrecognisable. Police in riot gear. Angry protesters. Chains affixed to the statue of Andrew Jackson, trying to rip down the seventh president and former army general now infamous for displacing as many as 60,000 Native Americans.

Something called “pepper balls”. And the tear gas.

The chemical smell that choked some of my colleagues a few weeks back when the president decided to walk to a nearby church for a Bible-hoisting photo op is one smell no one is going to miss.

Yours,

John T Bennett

Washington DC Bureau Head