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to the newly constructed West Wing. This desk remained, however, on
the Second Floor of the Residence in the President’s Study. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt requested that the rear kneehole be fitted with a
panel carved with the presidential coat-of-arms, but he did not live to
see it installed in 1945.
The Resolute desk was moved to the Oval Office in 1961 at the
request of President John F. Kennedy, After President Lyndon B.
Johnson selected another desk for his office, it was lent to a Kennedy
Library traveling exhibition, 1964-1965, and then to the Smithsonian
Institution for exhibition, 1966-1977.
The Resolute desk returned to the White House and the Oval
Office at the request of President Jimmy Carter in 1977 and has seen
been the desk of choice by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush,
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, among others.

Theodore Roosevelt writing at his desk, ca. 1905
This double pedestal partners’ desk, usually called the “Resolute Desk,” was made
The Colonial Revival-designed mahogany pedestal desk was from the oak timbers of the British ship H.M.S. Resolute as a gift to
designed in 1903 by Charles Follen McKim for the newly constructed President Rutherford B. Hayes from Queen Victoria in 1880.
West Wing (then called the Executive Office Building) and was one of photo by Bruce White, www.whitehousehistory.org
several pieces of furniture made specifically for the new interior spaces.
After the Roosevelt presidency, the desk continued to be used by no less
than five presidents up to when a fire damaged the Office in 1929, and
the desk was removed and placed in storage for over a decade.
After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, Harry S. Truman and Dwight
D. Eisenhower returned the Roosevelt desk to the Oval Office. After
briefly using the desk, John F. Kennedy switched to the Resolute desk
and moved the Roosevelt desk to the Vice President’s Ceremonial
Office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where it resides
today at the pleasure of the Vice President.
Beginning in the 1940s, each user of the desk signed the interior of
the center drawer at the end of his term in office. In 1974 it was noted
in a memo that the signatures of Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson (as
well as Truman and Eisenhower’s initials) were located in this drawer.
Since then, the drawer has been signed by vice presidents Nelson
Rockefeller, Walter Mondale, George H. W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Al
Gore, Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence.
The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in
Independence, Missouri has a replica of the Theodore Roosevelt desk
as part of a full-scale replica of the Oval Office as it was during
Truman’s presidency. The objects on the desk include both originals
and reproductions as seen in a series of images taken in August 1950. A
second replica of the desk is in White House Storage. This duplicate
was made between 1929 and 1930 after the original desk was damaged
in the 1929 Christmas Eve West Wing fire.

THE RESOLUTE DESK
The Resolute desk, also known as the Hayes desk, is a nineteenth-
century double pedestal partners’ desk made from the oak timbers of
the British ship H.M.S. Resolute as a gift to President Rutherford B.
Hayes from Queen Victoria in 1880. It has been used by every
president since Hayes, excepting Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford
(1964-1977).
It was used in the President’s Office on the Second Floor of the
Residence from 1880 until 1902, at which time the office was moved John F. Kennedy Jr. plays under the Resolute Desk on October 15, 1963

18 Journal of Antiques and Collectibles