When the White House Historical Association was founded in 1961 by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, its mission was to not only restore and preserve the Executive Mansion but to inspire Americans to explore and engage with its history. Now, more than 60 years later, a significant way we carry on that educational mission is through our audio and video podcast. The driving force behind each episode of The White House 1600 Sessions is to bring to life the people, places, and stories that make up the legacy of the People's House. We are tasked with preserving that legacy and sharing the experiences of those who have built, lived, and worked there, making them available for generations to come. By releasing our episodes on both audio and video, we are working to meet people where they are and engage them in any way possible.
We are in the business of sharing history. We have unique access to people, places, and images that are not often available to the wider public. It is our duty to share these things with the world at large because that is what we were tasked to do when the Association was founded.
This year we ventured beyond the studio more than we ever have before. We have a reliable audience so our goal was to continue to give them high quality storytelling but engage a broader group of followers by going to places where the stories we wanted to tell could come to life.
We started creating podcast documentaries with high production values that include on-site location filming, top of the line camerawork, and integrating some of the most fascinating and rare photos which might have been lost to time. Here are a few examples of the stories we told:
One of our challenges was making sure we captured the stories of people who bore witness to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy sixty years ago. Our most popular episode of the year, we captured the remembrances of Luci Baines Johnson, the daughter of then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson who was in a high school class when she heard the president had been shot; former secretary of the Navy, John Dalton, who marched as a midshipman with the United States Naval Academy in President Kennedy’s funeral procession; and Robert McGee, the son of a United States senator who was a friend of the president, shares his account of witnessing First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and daughter Caroline as they paid respect to their husband and father as he lay in state at the Capitol rotunda.
In another episode we toured the home of the late Bunny Mellon, the designer chosen by the Kennedys to renovate the White House Rose Garden. Here we met Thomas Lloyd, her grandson, who shared his grandmother’s personal gardens which inspired her plans for the White House, as well as a rare look at the scrapbook personally made by Mrs. Kennedy to thank Mrs. Mellon for her hard work.
We convinced the current owner of the historic landmark yet private residence of the home once occupied by the Ford family to let us inside. After President Nixon resigned it took time to move out of the Executive Mansion, so President Ford's home in northern Virginia became the temporary White House. We brought presidential daughter Susan Ford Bales back to the home, the only one she knew before her family moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was an emotional homecoming as she had not been there in decades.
We also did episodes on the first textbook written about U.S. First Ladies, as well as a rare behind-the-scenes tour of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building which was challenging since it is a working office for most of the White House staff and not typically open to the public - a worthwhile effort to share with our followers!
In 2022 we were tasked with improving The White House 1600 Sessions' reach and visibility. We did so by increasing the quality of our product's production and narrative values. There is no question that our team met the challenge. By increasing the quality of our podcast we have seen our impact and reach increase exponentially over the past year. On average, our listeners consume 87% of each audio podcast episode which has been consistent for several years. In 2023 we posted four of our ten top most viewed episodes on YouTube since the series started in 2017. We also started posting full video episodes directly to our Facebook channel in the last year. We definitely see our success, but we are also striving to tell more challenging and interesting stories in the years ahead.
