Earlier this morning I was browsing around the website for the White House Museum, which is chock full of interesting photos of the White House throughout history, when I came across this photo from 1992. George HW Bush is taking a phone call at his desk (not the Resolute desk, but the C&O desk, with drawers on both sides), while a few staffers I don’t recognize are sitting at chairs around him. Colin Powell is in the foreground, also taking a phone call - on a phone the cord of which extends into an open drawer on the side of the desk facing away from Bush. It’s hard to tell, but it looks like the entire inside of that drawer is taken up by some sort of console that the phone plugs into.
What’s the deal with that phone? The Wikipedia article on the C&O desk doesn’t mention the phone, and I didn’t find anything relevant when I Googled “C&O desk phone”. Is it just a second phone? Some sort of defense hotline? Are Bush and Powell having the most awkward conversation in history? I’d love to know if anyone knows what’s going on in this picture.
By the way, man sitting on the left is John Sununu, who I believe was Chief of White House Staff at the time. The man sitting with his back to us is, I think, Brent Scowcroft, who was National Security Advisor. It makes sense that he’d be in the room if Powell and Sununu were there. Anyone got any idea who the blond man is?
It’s probably a secure phone, which is why it’s larger than a regular phone. The white thing on the left corner of Bush’s desk with the cord going to the floor is about the same size, and looks like it could be the same model phone.
I’d guess it’s in the drawer just to be out of the way and for the desk to look nice.
I’m pretty sure the man with his back to the camera is Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of Defense. He’s fleshier than Scowcroft (or than Scowcroft was then) and used to wear those Aviator frames. A quick Google search doesn’t show Scowcroft wearing that type of frame–he didn;t wear glasses much at all back then I think.
That tears it. I was convinced it was Cheney, having spent a great deal of time looking at pictures of the man, but what appears to me in the picture to be the edge of a pair of eyeglasses must be a detail on the furniture beyond.
In the OP’s photo, the phone at Bush’s left elbow looks like a 1A2 phone. In 1992, that was a pretty darned old electromechanical phone system made by the former Western Electric.
I can’t tell what kind of phone is in the drawer, even though that was pretty much the OP’s quest.
On that huge page from DataX, most of the fairly plain looking black phones are AT&T/Lucent/Avaya (Corporate name identifies the age - the phones were made over a roughly 15-20 year span) MLX-10D or MLX-20L phones, either on a Merlin Magix system, or more likely, a Definity system.
The picture captioned “President Barack Obama talks with Alyssa Mastromonaco…” about halfway down the page shows an MLX-20L in the foreground next to a Raytheon IST secure phone with all those yellow buttons, and an MLX-10D is in the back, next to the TV.
It looks to me like the cord from Bush’s phone is also going down to a point below the surface of the desk, presumably to a base station in another desk drawer.
Electrospace MLP-2. The LCD window on the top is the giveaway. Pic 1Pic 2 (not my photos)
[/QUOTE]
Wow, that’s an ugly phone. I thought AUTOVON was mostly retired by that time, but it would make sense that if the network existed in any capacity, the White House would retain a connection.
