The presidency is documented more thoroughly than almost any other job in the world, which means the private moments end up preserved alongside the ceremonial ones. On September 11, 2001, White House chief of staff Andrew Card leaned into a second-grade classroom at Emma E. Booker Elementary in Sarasota, Florida, and told George W. Bush that a second plane had hit the second tower and that America was under attack. Card then stepped back deliberately so the president could not ask him a question in front of the press pool. Similar images exist across the modern era. Bill Clinton was hitting golf balls on the White House grounds on the night of November 4, 1995, waiting for word on Yitzhak Rabin’s condition, when national security adviser Anthony Lake came to tell him the Israeli prime minister had died. Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office preparing for that evening’s State of the Union when aides brought word that Challenger had broken apart seventy-three seconds after liftoff, killing all seven aboard; he moved to the adjoining study to watch the replay, postponed the address, and spoke to the nation instead at five o’clock. Barack Obama sat alone in a classroom at Newtown High School on December 16, 2012, rewriting his remarks after three hours spent privately with the families of the Sandy Hook victims. Grief in these photographs is not always political. George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara lost their daughter Robin to leukemia on October 11, 1953, roughly two months before her fourth birthday, after seven months of treatment in New York. Richard Nixon, a man who spent his career managing his public image, wept openly at his wife Pat’s funeral in 1993, the year their marriage reached fifty-three years. George W. Bush held his composure through twelve minutes of his father’s eulogy at Washington National Cathedral in December 2018 and broke only on the final lines, calling him the best father a son or daughter could have. These images survive because presidential photographers stayed in rooms where cameras would ordinarily have been asked to leave. Which photograph would you add to this list? #History #presidents #photography #america #historyfacts - @dailynewsbaby