A Capitol Tour IX: Tragedy Strikes the Capitol, Again
The Capitol's first floor, beneath the Rotunda and its legislative chambers, has a few surprises, including how the "new" Visitor Center came to reality
Links to the first eight installments can be found here.
Visitors to the nation’s capitol typically begin their tours at the 580,000-square-foot Capitol Visitor Center, which opened to the public in 2008 for about $621 million ($350 million over the original budget). How that finally came to be built is a story unto itself.
As sometimes happens, it takes a tragedy.
Aside from being the chief legislative, administrative, and financial officer of the US Senate, the Secretary of the Senate also has responsibility for educating the public on the historical significance of the “upper body.” With top-flight professional staff responsible for most of the other functions, and as a former journalist and professional communicator, I took a particular interest in the “public” part of my responsibilities.
I was struck by watching hundreds of visitors lined up for Capitol tours for extended periods in the blazing sun on the shade-less asphalt extending from the Capitol’s East Front. On any given day, the Capitol Attending Physician’s office told me, six or more tourists would collapse from the heat and require treatment. Then, some four to five million visitors made their way to the Capitol every year, especially during Spring break and Summer. The number grew until the pandemic and “J6,” when then-Speaker Pelosi closed and barricaded the Capitol to the public. New Speaker Kevin McCarthy has reopened it.
The Architect of the Capitol tells the history. “The proposal for a Capitol Visitor Center began to crystallize in the mid-1970s with the issuance of the Architect of the Capitol's report "Toward a Master Plan for the United States Capitol." In 1991, Congress authorized funding for a visitor center's conceptual planning and design. In 1995, the design report was issued.”
I was Secretary when that report was issued, calling for a $125 million visitor center, built mainly underneath the Capitol’s east front lawn extended from what is known as The Crypt, immediately below the Rotunda. I strongly endorsed it, testifying before the US Senate Rules Committee in support. We desperately needed a place for visitors to gather and improve the visitor’s experience. We didn’t have the essential tools nearly every museum in the world used at the time, such as audio guides, other than the famous yet often overwhelmed “red coat” tours that still provide visitors a basic introduction to the Capitol, a working building. There was resistance to the proposal over the cost.
Then Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid even complained about smelly tourists. "In the summertime, because (of) the high humidity and how hot it gets here, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol," Reid said.
Unfortunately, it took a tragedy on July 24, 1998, 19 months after I’d left the Senate, for Congress to get serious about a new Visitor Center. On that afternoon, at what was known as the “Document Door” entrance of the Capitol, a deranged gunman entered at a busy time as police were screening and helping tourists trying to enter the building. Randal Weston walked around security, pulled out a gun, and shot Capitol Police officer Jacob Chestnut in the back of the head at point-blank range.
Weston then exchanged fire in the busy corridor, wounding another officer trying to find a wheelchair for one of the tourists entering the Capitol. Weston ran down the first hallway he could find to then-House GOP Whip Tom DeLay’s office. After yelling at the staff to get beneath their desks, Capitol Police Detective John Gibson was confronted by Weston. They exchanged gunfire. Gibson’s wound was mortal, but he fired four shots into Weston before collapsing.
Senate Majority Leader and Dr. Bill Frist (R-TN) resuscitated Weston on his way to the hospital, unaware until later that he was the gunman.
It was the first time Capitol Police had been killed in the line of duty. Both were honored with services in the Capitol Rotunda. Soon afterward, work began designing and constructing a new underground Visitors Center. After years of redesigns, cost overruns, and delays, it was completed with new meeting rooms, a restaurant, and a large auditorium fortified to serve as a House chamber in case the current chamber is “unavailable.”
It reminds me of a story for a future post: How the Washington Post in 1992 exposed the presence of a Dwight Eisenhower-conceived secret underground “bunker” at the Sulphur Springs, West Virginia Greenbrier Resort designed to ensure the continuance of government in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.
A terrific video tour of the Capitol focused on the new Visitor’s Center and its “Emancipation Hall” was produced by the Capitol's Architect. The Document Door entrance on the Capitol’s East Front, on its first floor, has been permanently closed. A plaque marks the corridor where the tragedy happened.
Weston was found incompetent to stand trial due to his untreated schizophrenia. He was committed to a mental institution, where he still resides. The corridor is a largely vacant, non-descript, but still solemn place, a reminder of how all law enforcement put themselves on the line every day for our protection and safety.
I don’t typically include the new Visitor’s Center on my tour other than point to the escalators leading down to it from the crypt. Still, I encourage visitors to linger there to see videos, visit the gift shops, and peruse many of the Capitol’s collections of statues previously mentioned.
The Crypt, located immediately beneath the Rotunda and the Capitol’s nine million-pound iron dome, is an engineering marvel. Its 40 columns and arches support a lot of weight. It also features statues from the 13 original states. Actually, 12 - Virginia’s Democratic governor and legislature removed Robert E. Lee’s statue in 2020 and will soon be replaced by Barbara Johns, a civil rights activist.
In tribute to presentism, Virginia Democrats are doing everything they can to erase the memory and history of Robert E. Lee, especially US Senator Tim Kaine and US Rep. Don Beyer. They’ve introduced legislation to eliminate Arlington House’s “Robert E. Lee Memorial” designation. Arlington House was Lee’s home until Virginia seceded from the Union.
As time permits, I lead my tours downstairs to another room just below the crypt that was never used for its original purpose - a tomb built for George Washington and his family.
Immediately after Washington died in 1799, Congress resolved to entomb him in the Capitol. His widow, Martha, until she died in 1802, supported the concept even though Washington had provided in his will to be buried at his beloved Mount Vernon. Congress didn’t begin to make plans for the tomb until 1832, the centennial of Washington’s birth. By that point, Mount Vernon’s new owner, John Washington, strongly opposed upsetting Washington’s “perfect tranquility” at Mount Vernon, where he and Martha rest today.
Backtracking, we don’t arrive at the Crypt until visiting the Allyn Cox corridors and stopping at the statue of Senator Edward Dickinson Baker (R-OR), the only sitting US Senator to have died in combat.
Cox was the third painter who, in 1953, finished the famous historical frieze that circles the Rotunda. After leaving the infamous site where reporter Charles Kincaid shot and killed former US Rep. William Taulbee (D-KY), we slowly walk down the Cox corridors to appreciate his murals of American history. The Capitol Historical Society’s website on the Cox Corridors is worth your time.
Cox also painted the portrait of former House Speaker and US Senator Henry Clay (Whig-KY) in the Senate Reception Room and a mural of the Challenger Space Shuttle crew in the Brumidi Corridors (more about that in our next post).
I make sure to stop at a personal favorite, Cox’s mural depicting Washington’s first inauguration in New York. Holding the Bible for a presidential inauguration now customarily falls to the new President’s spouse. But for Washington, it was the first Secretary of the Senate, Samuel Otis. The Senate serves as the official host of the inaugural ceremony, led by the Chair of the Senate Rules Committee.
Otis still holds the record for the most extended service as Secretary, spanning 25 years until his death.
Senator Edward D. Baker has a fascinating history. An attorney from Springfield, Illinois, he defeated his friend, Abraham Lincoln, for a seat in the US House of Representatives in 1846 (Lincoln would win the seat in 1848). Baker soon resigned his seat in Congress to fight in the Mexican-American War. He moved to Oregon and was elected by their state legislature to the US Senate in 1860. Baker, in full uniform, gave a stirring speech in support of the Union before helping to raise a regiment that fought under General George B. McClellan’s Army.
He would only serve 19 days in the US Senate.
Shortly after the Union’s disastrous defeat at the First Battle of Manassas in June 1861, Senator Baker, a Union colonel, joined several thousand troops along the Potomac River in Maryland, about a 45-minute drive from Washington, DC. The American Battlefield Trust tells the story.
On the evening of October 20, 1861, Union army commander George B. McClellan ordered Gen. Charles Stone to send a scouting party across the Potomac River to identify the positions of Confederate Col. Nathan Evans’s troops near Leesburg. In the darkness the party’s inexperienced leader, Capt. Chase Philbrick, mistook a line of trees for a line of tents, and reported that he had stumbled across an unguarded Confederate camp. Early the next day, Col. Charles Devens was sent across the river to attack the camp, and after realizing that the supposed “camp” was nothing but a line of trees, his men encountered a company of Mississippi infantry and a skirmish began. Col. Edward Baker, a U.S. Senator, decided to reinforce Devens, but with only four small boats available to transport men, Union reinforcements arrived slowly. Evans used the Federal delay to organize his men, and when Col. Baker was killed in the afternoon, Union resistance crumbled. The victorious Confederates drove the Yankees over the bluff and into the Potomac, where many drowned and hundreds surrendered rather than risk escape into the river. The battle, while small in scale, had major political implications that would haunt the Union army for the rest of the war.
Out of 3,500 equally-divided troops engaged at the Battle of Balls Bluff, over 1,000 Union troops perished, compared to 155 confederates. Upset over the combined losses at Manassas and Leesburg, Congress created a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.
As we make our way back up the steps to the Crypt, we take a left turn towards the Brumidi Corridors, the penultimate stop on our tour. We finish up with photos on the east front steps of the US Senate.