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Nov 24, 2017 · 1:38. WASHINGTON — The vice president wasn’t offered an official residence until 1975 — and Nelson Rockefeller wasn’t interested. Walter Mondale, the first vice president to live in the ...
- Supreme Court Correspondent
- Rockefeller’s Bed
- Eleanor Mondale’s Ghost
- Secret Service Pranks
- Enjoying The Privacy
- Residential Mysteries
- Famous visitors
- Sharing The Grounds with History and Science
Although Nelson Rockefeller never lived in the residence, using it only for social functions, the bed in the master bedroom was the talk of the town. The vice president to then-president Gerald Ford personally chose the $35,000 “cage bed” by the surrealistic artist Max Ernst. Barbara Walters described it in a book as “covered in mink, watched over ...
Convinced she was being visited by a ghost one night, Walter Mondale’s teenage daughter Eleanor called the Secret Service to report a man in her room. When the agents burst in with guns drawn, Eleanor explained it was a fleshless man she’d sensed. “They requested I never do that again,” Eleanor recalled in a 1998 interview. (Years later, Dick Chene...
Secret Service agents were not above pranking each other during the long, and often tedious hours they spent protecting the Second Family. One agent, for example, convinced another it was perfectly fine to do his laundry at the residence. That came as a surprise to Barbara Bush, who at the time was Second Lady under Ronald Reagan, nonetheless found...
One of the main reasons vice presidents and their families enjoyed the residence is the relative privacy and seclusion it offered. Wanting to keep a low profile even when ordering pizza, the Quayle family appropriated the name of one of their Secret Service agents, Joe Petro. The tradition stuck. Even after leaving public office, the Quayles still ...
After the Bushes developed Graves’ disease, and their dog also acquired an autoimmune disease, water tests were conducted at the various homes they had lived before moving into the White House. And the eight years they’d spent at One Observatory Circle were the longest they’d lived anywhere. The water testing made the then-occupants, the Quayles, n...
Foreign dignitaries, political leaders, media heavyweights, and artists are among the luminaries who have socialized at the residence. When Andy Warhol attended a gathering Joan Mondale held for modern artists, the vice president’s press secretary got the bright idea of asking him to sign a can of Campbell’s tomato soup in honor of one of Warhol’s ...
The vice presidential residence is not the only noteworthy aspect of the 72-acre compound. The Naval Observatory provides the astronomical and timing data used by the Navy and other components of the Defense Department. The library, one of the nation’s top scientific libraries, holds more than 800 rare books, including works by Galileo, Copernicus,...
- Supreme Court Correspondent
Jan 21, 2021 · Vice President's residence.Stacy Zarin Goldberg for The Washington Post via Getty Images. According to author Charles Denyer, who has written one of the most detailed books on the property, titled ...
Jan 21, 2021 · Kamala Harris, 56, is now the eighth vice president to live in the six-bedroom, 9,150-square-foot mansion on the observatory’s grounds. The Queen Anne-style house was named the official ...
