The White House version of "wrecking ball".

• Author: Klara, Robert
• Position: USA Yesterday

As June heat-baked Washington, D.C., and Pres. Harry Truman tongue-lashed the Republicans at every whistle-stop, a troupe of engineers and architects cracked the White House open like a walnut.

Though Douglas Orr and Richard Dougherty nominally were in charge, they were also based in cities to the north, so it would be Lorenzo Winslow and W.E. Reynolds who would get the plaster dust in their hair. Helped by a team of assistants, the men bored holes in the walls to inspect the studs, pried up baseboards and flooring, and chipped away the stucco over the interior brick walls to see where all the cracks originated. Most everywhere they looked, the men discovered something that disturbed them--and then, days or hours later, they would find something that disturbed them even more.

With the rugs rolled back and the furniture moved aside, the men finally could get a good look at the floors. As James West, an assistant usher, recalled, "The floors sagged and sloped like a roller coaster." As workmen chipped the plaster off the brick walls, the usher also noticed that "many walls were cracked on the inside"--meaning that the cracks were not cosmetic, but structural. In the northwest corner of the West Sitting Room, engineers followed the zigzagging path of one crevice right up through the ceiling--the crack was two stories tall.

The men proceeded slowly, not only because they had begun to fear the frailty of the house, but because they were working blind. Apart from the drawings Winslow had (which he apparently had made himself), most all the blueprints for the house had vanished years or decades before. The White House was the nation's most important dwelling, but almost no documents had survived to show how the place had been put together.

Peering into the dark cavity below the floors, the men discovered splits that had worked their way clear through some of the support beams. They found more of those deep notches, too, which caused "the uncut portion to receive many times its normal stress," a later report indicated. Winslow's men discovered careless and foolish maneuvers that a first-year architecture student never would never have made, including doors cut carelessly through load-bearing walls, and horrifying relics entombed inside the walls themselves. There were wood shavings and sawdust--decades-old detritus from one alteration or another--piled high between the studs.

The highly combustible sawdust sat just inches from the electrical...