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The White House Put Its Cat on the Web

Abstract

The White House went online in two steps that are often merged into one. On June 1, 1993, President Clinton and Vice President Gore announced the first public White House email addresses, with a warning that replies by email were not yet possible. The website came sixteen months later: the domain whitehouse.gov was registered on October 17, 1994, and the site went public on October 20, 1994, as “Welcome to the White House: An Interactive Citizens’ Handbook”. It included a recording of Socks, the Clintons’ cat.

Email First

On June 1, 1993, a letter from the President and the Vice President announced that the White House could now be reached by electronic mail at PRESIDENT@WHITEHOUSE.GOV and VICE.PRESIDENT@WHITEHOUSE.GOV, over the Internet and through several commercial online services. The letter was candid about the limits: every message would be read and its receipt acknowledged, but “the White House is not yet capable of sending back a tailored response via electronic mail. We are hoping this will happen by the end of the year.” Clinton Library records describe the email of 1993 as mostly about connecting White House staff to the Internet and keeping the new mail account running. (Email inside the White House was older: the National Security Council staff began using IBM’s PROFS system in 1982, and PROFS notes that Oliver North and John Poindexter tried to delete in November 1986 survived on backup tapes and became evidence in the Iran-Contra investigation.)

Timelines that give 1993 as the year the White House went online are describing these addresses. Email reached the building a year and a half before the web did.

The Website

The site was built by a small team in the Executive Office of the President: David Lytel of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Tom Kalil of the National Economic Council, Jock Gill of the Office of Media Affairs, Paul Richard of the Office of the Staff Secretary, and Lynda Rathbone of the Office of the Counselor to the President, with testing help from Smart Valley Inc., an internet-infrastructure organization. According to Anthony Rutkowski, who took part, Eric Schmidt of Sun Microsystems (see Sun Microsystems) supplied the server hardware, and Tony Villasenor of NASA handled programming and operations. Gill’s motivation, in Rutkowski’s telling, included frustration with the slow Sprint email service, about which he complained that “a snake could cross Pennsylvania Ave carrying the messages faster”.

Whitehouse.gov was registered on October 17, 1994. Three days later, on October 20, Vice President Gore announced the site at a White House event on “The Future of Communications”. It presented the White House as a national monument, as the seat of the executive branch, and as the President’s home. The home part included audio of Socks the cat; Rutkowski credits his young daughter Kelly with insisting that any White House site had to feature him. The site also linked to other federal agencies, and its printed index showed agencies that were not yet online in a dull gray, meant to embarrass those agencies into putting up sites of their own.

The National Archives keeps archived White House websites for every administration from Clinton’s onward; the 1994 site is the first in the series.

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