A MAGNET FOR ODD INTRUDERS

• Share

The black humor at week's end around the White House was that terrorists, intruders and pranksters were going to have to get tickets and line up just like the 1 1/4 million tourists who come every year to view and pay homage to the world's most famous building.

In one week's flurry, the White House became more protected and yet more of a magnet for intrusion. Only three days after Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was abruptly closed to vehicular traffic as a caution against a truck-bomb attack, the first of two interlopers challenged the security sytem. A troubled graduate student in psychology carrying an old, unloaded pistol climbed the 8-ft.-high iron fence on the east side of the White House on Tuesday night and rushed 60 yds. across the grounds. In the struggle to subdue him, a guard fired a shot that wounded the intruder and a Secret Service agent, each in the arm. Leland Modjeski, 37, of Falls Church, Virginia, was treated at George Washington University Hospital, where he was detained for questioning concerning his yet unknown motive.

On Friday morning unarmed Andrew Jopling, 24, in front of dozens of astonished tourists who had quietly lined up for their White House tour, hoisted himself over the fence and was immediately and rather quietly handcuffed by officers who hustled him into a guard booth for questioning, believing for the moment that he was just a prankster. Funny? Perhaps in days gone by, when Eleanor Roosevelt could complain sweetly about couples parking on the untended White House drive for a little smooching. But no more.

"It's the theater," lamented William Webster, former head of the fbi and a member of the White House security review committee that recommended closing Pennsylvania Avenue as well as a dozen other measures to tighten protection. Angry people seeking notoriety of all degrees find the stage they want at the White House. For years peaceful protesters have sometimes camped across from the White House, but the rising stridency of the disaffected and the real terrorism in the U.S. have changed the environment.

Webster and a fellow committee member, William Coleman Jr., a former Secretary of Transportation, resisted the idea of closing the two-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue when the study was begun after the apparently deliberate crash of a light plane at the mansion last September. "The only way terrorists succeed is to get the government to do something that makes the government look unstable," declared Webster. "The more you change things, the more they can be encouraged." During the discussions, when it was pointed out that Chelsea Clinton's bedroom was on the vulnerable Pennsylvania Avenue side of the White House, the first response was to suggest that she be moved to the south side, where the huge lawn is a buffer. But secret reports of threats to the President and his family and the chilling calculations of the damage from a truck bomb were overwhelming. "It had to be done," said Coleman. "It would have been irresponsible not to have taken the action."