Late in the recent presidential campaign, Kamala Harris made a prediction whose outcome was a sure thing. Offering a challenge to voters, she said, “It’s either going to be Donald Trump or me sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.”
Things turned out badly for her, and soon it’ll be Trump who reigns from behind the Resolute, a 1,300-pound behemoth that symbolizes the authority and stature of America’s presidency.
History and whimsy have long been spun at the desk, where countless bills have been signed, Ronald Reagan consoled the nation after the Challenger explosion, and Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 race.
JFK’s toddler son famously peeked out from the kneehole, and Barack Obama once took heat for propping his foot up on this mainstay of the Oval Office.
During his previous tenure, Trump made news when he used the iconic desk to display and endorse: kidney beans.
That happened after the Goya company’s CEO praised the president during a White House event honoring Hispanic Americans. Trump arranged a variety of Goya products on the desktop and followed up with a tweet exclaiming, “people are buying like crazy.”
The ornately carved desk has evoked disparate views over the years, from respect and awe to the derision of one pundit who called it a “hulking hunk of horrible.”
If you think of the Resolute as an anchor for the ship of state, you’d have the right metaphor. The desk is built of timbers salvaged from the British vessel Resolute, abandoned by the Royal Navy in the early 1850s while it was icebound in the Arctic.
When a thaw came two winters later, the crewless Resolute turned ghost ship, drifting 1,200 miles before an American whaler came across it in 1855 and brought it to New London, Conn.
The times were tense; England and America had already fought two wars, and the British were pressing the U.S. to abolish slavery.
As a good will gesture, Congress voted to return Resolute to the mother country, an action that sparked celebrations there and even produced a shipboard visit by Queen Victoria.
When England finally decommissioned the ship in 1879, Victoria had three desks made from the best of its wood, one of which she sent to the White House in 1880 as a gift to President Rutherford B. Hayes.
There it occupied various rooms at the whim of presidents and their wives before Jacqueline Kennedy suggested it for the Oval Office in 1961.
Most presidents since have used it, but not Lyndon Johnson, whose 6-foot, 4-inch frame was too big for it. Presidents Nixon and Ford also eschewed it, but Jimmy Carter returned it to the Oval Office in 1977.
Attitudes expressed by the men who have used this sea-oriented desk range from humbleness to hubris.
JFK, whose own vessel, PT 109, was rammed and sunk in the Solomon Islands during World War II, displayed a plaque on the Resolute that kept humility at hand. It was inscribed with the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer, “O, God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”
That’s in contrast to Trump‘s prideful declaration during his failed 2020 campaign that “I am the chosen one.“
Now – at least politically – that’s true, and Trump prepares to retake his place behind a desk whose oak timbers once plied the high and frigid seas.
Only time will tell where we shall sail under his command. But his rhetoric, plans, and dark promises indicate there’s many an iceberg dead ahead.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.
