The Presidents' Table

Thirteen presidents, from Washington to Eisenhower, share a table they never shared in life. Between the first inauguration in 1789 and the last of these in 1953 the office passed through a war for the Union, two world wars, a depression and the arrival of the country as a world power, and the men who held it agreed on very little. Jefferson and Adams stopped speaking for eleven years. Jackson and Lincoln would not have recognized each other's parties. What they had in common was the chair, and the habit of handing it on.

Leonardo's Last Supper was painted for a dining hall. It fills the end wall of the friars' refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, some fifteen feet high and twenty-nine wide, and the table in the picture was meant to read as one more table in the room. Nobody in it looks out at us. All the drama runs sideways, hand to hand and face to face, along the length of the cloth.

The hall is paneled in warm gold, and the Capitol dome shows through the middle of three windows. Lincoln sits beneath it in black, hands open on the cloth, the only man not talking. Washington is at his right hand; Jefferson and Jackson are further down that side, both in mid-argument. At his left Theodore Roosevelt leans in with a grin, Franklin Roosevelt tips his head back, Kennedy turns to make a point, and Eisenhower anchors the far end. A candle, a bowl of apples and a closed book lie among the water glasses.

It is the last of three tables in this collection, and the only one where the argument is still going on. Read along it and you are reading the office itself.