The List March 2013

The Big House

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Harry S. Truman called it a “glamorous prison” and “the great white jail.” (“You never feel at home,” his daughter, Margaret, later elaborated. “Not if you have any sense.”) Over the years, the White House—America’s oldest still-inhabited federally funded mansion—has attracted an astonishing array of negative reviews from its residents. As the Obamas begin another term behind the wrought-iron gates, a roundup of the more pointed digs:


Gerald R. Ford: The best public housing I’ve ever seen.


Bill Clinton: I don’t know whether it’s the finest public housing in America or the crown jewel of the prison system.


Lyndon Johnson: It’s not the kind of place you would pick to live in.


Grover Cleveland: I have been thinking a good deal lately how nice it would be to have a little home a few miles away and live there.


Ronald Reagan: You’re a bird in a gilded cage.


Jackie Kennedy: I felt like a moth hanging on the windowpane.


Michelle Obama: One fantasy I have … is to walk right out the front door and just keep walking.

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Garance Franke-Ruta is a senior editor covering national politics at The Atlantic. More

She was previously national web politics editor at The Washington Post, and has also worked at The American Prospect, The Washington City Paper, The New Republic and National Journal magazines. At The Prospect she won the 2007 Hillman Prize awarded to its group blog, "Tapped."

In 2006, she was fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Mass., and in 2007, a summer fellow with The Iowa Independent, based in Des Moines, Iowa.

Garance has lectured at the Kennedy School, the Harvard Art Museums, Williams College, Wellesley College, Brandeis and Georgetown Universities, and taught in Georgetown's Master of Professional Studies in Journalism program. She also has made numerous appearances on national and regional television and radio programs.

Born in the South of France, Garance grew up in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico; New York City, New York; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has resided in Washington, D.C., since graduating from Harvard in 1997.

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