白宫的秘密你知道多少?

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白宫是美国总统府所在地，坐落在首都华盛顿市中心区的宾夕法尼亚大街1600号。北接拉斐特广场，南邻爱丽普斯公园，与高耸的华盛顿纪念碑相望。 听写系统使用教程新闻词汇天天学恋爱英语必杀句

白宫的基址是美国开国元勋、第一任总统乔治·华盛顿选定的，始建于1792年，1800年基本完工。有趣的是，第一位入主白宫的总统并不是第一任总统华盛顿，而是第二任总统约翰·亚当斯。从此，美国历届总统均以白宫为官邸，使白宫成了美国政府的代名词。

白宫的设计者是著名的美籍爱尔兰人建筑师詹姆斯·霍本，他根据18世纪末英国乡间别墅的风格，参照当时流行的意大利建筑师柏拉迪的欧式造型设计而成，用弗吉尼亚州所产的一种白色石灰石建造。但当时并不称白宫。“白宫”是1902年西奥多·罗斯福总统正式命名的。1814年，英军攻占华盛顿时，将其付之一炬，后几经修复和改建，才成目前的规模。其中最大的一次扩建和修缮是在1948-1953年间，加修了一座二层阳台，安装了电视系统和空调设备，增建了双层地下室和坚固的地下防空室。白宫内部原有的具有历史意义的房间基本保持原貌，以作纪念。

Every new administration arrives heady with resolve to make history. Unfortunately, the Bush administration was also determined to hide a lot of it. It somehow deleted hundreds of days’ worth of official White House e-mail from the public record. Also gone missing are messages from top Bush appointees who improperly used private Republican Party e-mail accounts to conduct public business. All this underscores the need for legal protections to ensure that the nation’s increasingly electronic history is preserved.

A measure moving through Congress would strengthen the power of the National Archives to require that the White House and other related agencies preserve all of their electronic records. The office of the archivist would establish better procedures and would be required to check and certify that the systems are doing the job. This is crucial, since Congressional investigators found that archive officials backed off from inspections of e-mail storage during the last administration.

Bush officials pleaded faulty technology as the cause of the missing e-mail. Maybe it was an accident that entire workdays turned up blank at the offices of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Maybe it was a coincidence that hundreds of thousands of the missing e-mail messages went missing during the lead-up to the Iraq war — with its manipulated intelligence — and the outing of Valerie Plame and the decision to destroy C.I.A. interrogation tapes.

All such maybes are no substitute for the actual historic record. Congress must protect this priceless taxpayer property before any more history goes missing.