When Did the White House Press Get Their Own Room?

...The press room was born in its current location - attached to the West Wing and just steps from the Oval Office - in 1969, when the Nixon administration covered an indoor lap pool to make space for reporters who until then had jammed into an office inside the West Wing. The national security adviser now uses that space, and if current reporters are surprised at how physically close the press once was to the inner workings of the White House, that is nothing compared with the setup in the late 19th century.

At that time, reporters worked in a small office on the second floor of the White House residence (the West Wing was not completed until 1902), down the hall from the president's bedroom. Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University who tracks the relationship between the president and the press, said that their proximity reached extraordinary levels in 1881, when President James A. Garfield lingered for three months with a bullet in his back after an assassination attempt that July.

In August, Franklin Hathaway Trusdell, a National Associated Press reporter who kept a vigil on behalf of the rest of the press corps at night, wrote in a letter to his wife that he had wandered down to the open door of the president's bedroom, listened to his breathing and was able to file a bulletin that Garfield was still alive. Ms. Kumar, who has seen the letter, now kept in the White House curator's office, said that Mr. Trusdell also wrote of the"deep anxiety" that pervaded the White House. Garfield died in September.