Following the Truman renovation of the White House from 1948 to 1952, the Resolute Desk was moved to the Broadcast Room on the Ground Floor. The move placed one of the White House’s most historically significant furnishings in a setting associated with the expanding role of radio and television in presidential communication.
The double-pedestal partners’ desk was made from oak timbers of HMS Resolute, a British Arctic exploration vessel. After the abandoned ship was recovered by an American whaling vessel and returned to Britain, Queen Victoria presented the desk to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 as a gesture of friendship between the United Kingdom and the United States.
For much of its early White House history, the desk stood on the Second Floor of the Executive Residence. It served in the president’s office until the presidential office moved to the new West Wing in 1902, after which it remained in the President’s Study. In 1945, the desk’s rear kneehole received the now-familiar panel carved with the Presidential Coat of Arms; Harry S. Truman was the first president to use the desk in that altered form.
After the renovation, the desk’s placement in the Ground Floor Broadcast Room aligned it with a new era of presidential communication. President Dwight D. Eisenhower used it there for radio and television broadcasts, before First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy discovered the desk during the Kennedy White House restoration and had it brought to the Oval Office in 1961. President John F. Kennedy was therefore the first president to use the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
That interim Broadcast Room period is important because it shows that the desk’s modern symbolism was not inevitable. Before it became the familiar visual emblem of the Oval Office, it occupied a working White House media space—linking a nineteenth-century diplomatic gift to the twentieth-century transformation of presidential communication.
