The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington D.C.

The White House is the home of the Invisible President, and the headquarters of the Government Conspiracy. It's heavily guarded by men in black. A Government Procedural may call it home. Scary Dogmatic Aliens may destroy it with their Wave Motion Gun; friendly Aliens and Monsters will land on the lawn and ask to speak to the being in charge. Our Hero may be called to The White House to be recruited for a top-secret mission, or to be decorated for preventing The End of the World as We Know It.

The building itself is nice-looking, and fairly big, but not incredibly so; it's certainly a lot smaller than the literal palaces that most heads of state around the world live in. The grandeur in American government architecture was saved for the Capitol, home of Congress;^[1] the Supreme Court didn't even get its own building until 1935 (before, it shunted about various rooms in the Capitol). You can see what the founders of this country were going for...

On British Telly, Whitehall (or sometimes 10 Downing Street) is the Establishing Shot equivalent of The White House, and the P.M. speaks to the Invisible President by trunk call.

Examples of The White House include:

Anime

• The I-jin attack it in the original Read or Die OVA.
• The Presidential mansion in Gundam Wing Endless Waltz bears a strong resemblance to it...despite being located in Brussels, Belgium.

Comics

• Doonesbury has some portions take place in and around the White House, or uses exterior shots if Trudeu hasn't settled on a symbol for the Invisible President.
• Blown up twice in Give Me Liberty.
• Shows up from time to time in Captain America (comics) comics.
• During the time in Superman comics when Lex Luthor was president, the white house showed up a lot.

Film

• The movie Dave, where the title character (played by Kevin Kline) acts as a look-alike for the President.
• Signature Scene of Independence Day was the destruction of the White House.
• It is the eponymous house in House of Re-Animator and it was supposed to have Herbert West resurrecting the suddenly died President with hilarity ensuing. Unfortunately, it's stuck in Development Hell.
• Female staffer is found dead there in Murder at 1600 and Wesley Snipes investigates it.
• Aliens attack it in Mars Attacks!! when two protagonists are visiting it.
• Wild Wild West sees our two heroes head on up to meet with the president. You can easily walk right up to the front door without being bothered and their are goats on the lawn.
• National Treasure requires Ben and co to break into the oval office to open the president's desk, to get an ancient Indian clue to the lost city of gold.
• In X-Men 2, Nightcrawler breaches security at the White House and comes within an inch of stabbing the president before being winged by a Secret Service agent, allowing him to break his mind control.

Live Action Television

• The West Wing.
• Commander in Chief.
• Veep, the upcoming American adaptation of The Thick of It, is to be set at the office of the Vice President. While the VP has his own residence (Number One Observatory Circle), that is almost exclusively a residence, and his office tends to be in the West Wing, so this show will probably be set there.
• Cory in The House had the The White House as it's main setting.

Theater

• Much of the second act of Of Thee I Sing.

Video Game

• In the late '90s, there was a trend of First Person Shooters set in detailed recreations of the White House and surrounding environs, a gimmick which probably wouldn't go over very well nowadays:
  • Duke it out in D.C., an Expansion Pack in which the president has been kidnapped by aliens, are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?
  • Prime Target, a game based on the Marathon-engine in which a senator has been murdered by Western Terrorists on the orders of Corrupt Corporate Executives as part of a coverup by the pharmaceutical industry, and as her friend, you avenge her and expose them by singlehandedly killing everyone. There are ninjas involved.
    • Oddly, this game averts the Moral Dissonance trope - when you find the senator halfway through the first level, you overhear a conversation where the CCE's plan to frame you for the crime instead of their previous plan - "After all, who are they going to believe? A senator, or a guy off the street who just killed half a dozen men?"
  • Deus Ex, a tactical stealth game, was originally going to have a level requiring you to infiltrate the White House. Sadly, it ended up on the cutting room floor.
  • Subverted in Fallout 3: While the Capitol building, National Mall, an many other places are all intact and explorable, the Whitehouse proper is bombed beyond recognition, and bathed in radiation.
• Hitman: Blood Money had 47 kill the Vice-President here.
• Subverted in The Conduit. While one stage is set at the White House, it is not the headquarters of the Government Conspiracy.
  • Although a former resident is...
• The Modern Warfare 2 level Whiskey Hotel features a Army Ranger assault on the captured White House.
• Command & Conquer games feature the White House with some fequency.
  • In the Nod ending of Tiberan Dawn, you can target the White House for an Ion Cannon strike.
  • White House appears the Washtington DC missions in both Soviet and Allied Campaigns in Red Alert 2.
  • In Tiberum Wars, capturing and liberating the White House is an objective of Nod and GDI respectively. By 2047, it has lost its political importance due to GDI absorbing the US government (alongside many others). It is still a strong cultural and historic symbol though.
• Streets of Rage 3 Had the two final levels on the bad ending path take place outside and inside the White House, although sloppy censoring by Sega referred the White House as City Hall.
• Metal Wolf Chaos starts at the outskirts of the White House. It is fought as a boss fight later on.
• Splinter Cell Conviction has the finale level here, as you try to stop a coup.

Web Original

• In the Alternate History Decades of Darkness, it is burned down by the Halifax Powers (Britain and New England) and rebuilt in the new capital of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Western Animation

• Futurama has a White House with an elevator leading to another White House in a cavern underground.

1. ↑ D.C. construction codes prohibit any building from being built that would be taller than the Capitol the Heights of Buildings Act of 1910 restricts new building heights to no more than 20 feet (6.1 m) greater than the width of the adjacent street.