The public cheese

While the personal security of leaders has been a concern at least since the days when Julius Caesar went to visit the Roman Senate for a little high-level arm-twisting, today's presidential security regime has grown up over a century and a half, well-watered by violent disasters. That makes the recent crashing of a White House state dinner by uninvited "performance artists" an almost unbelievable lapse on the part of White House staff and the Secret Service. No doubt, there will be pink slips in a number of Christmas stockings.
But the White House has a much more open, if equally disastrous, history. Jefferson was gifted with a mammoth wheel of cheese (1200-1600 pounds), that stood as public provender for two years until replaced by an equally mammoth, but less smelly, loaf of bread. 15 years after being burned down by uninvited British guests, the White House was ransacked by a crowd of 20,000 who followed Andy Jackson home from his inauguration. In order to recapture the people's house, his aides dragged washtubs full of whiskey screwdriver out onto the grounds. Not having learned his lesson, Jackson also favored the monster cheese--with 1400 pounds being consumed by the public in two hours at one party. Lincoln bemoaned the number of job seekers hanging around outside the office while he was trying to work. Still, the White House remained open to the general public up until 1885, open to public holiday receptions until the 1930s, and open to casual guided tourism up until 9/11.
Having wandered DC as a tourist, food is now very hard to come by in the government parts of town. I've been tempted to drop by the White House for a little gnosh myself.