Last month, security officials looked rattled when a small Cessna airplane breached the closely guarded White House compound and without warning crashed under the president's bedroom.
But the same security officials took Saturday's shooting in stride, declaring only a few hours afterward that the gunman was so inept that his barrage could not even be considered a serious threat on the president's life."I would not characterize this as an assassination attempt at all, no way," said Richard Griffin, assistant director for protective operations at the Secret Service.
The two incidents highlight the strengths and vulnerabilities of the security system around the 18-acre White House compound. They suggest that the president and others in the White House are more vulnerable to an airborne attack than to someone taking potshots with a rifle from Pennsylvania Avenue.
A senior White House official said that, in contrast to the midnight flight of Frank Eugene Corder last month, Saturday's assault had no chance whatever of harming the president because he was in a building with thick walls and with bulletproof glass on all windows that count in terms of presidential security. In the West Wing press room, one window that is standard glass was shattered. But the official said the windowpane closest to the rostrum used by Clinton and other senior officials is bulletproof.
Corder, by contrast, showed that if a confused, intoxicated man with limited flying skills could almost manage to hit the president's bedroom with no resistance, then a determined, skilled assassin could inflict far greater damage with such an approach.
In part, the difference reflects experience. For more than 40 years, the Secret Service has planned extensively for assaults involving guns. The security concern goes back to at least 1950, when two Puerto Rican nationalists tried unsuccessfully to shoot their way into Blair House, the official guest residence, and assassinate President Harry S. Truman. He had been staying there during renovations on the White House.
The difference also results from the security strategy during an assault. Because the White House sits in the middle of a city, security is more defensive than offensive. The usual approach for protecting the president in an assault is to move him, because sharpshooters and Secret Service agents are reluctant to fire their weapons into the crowded streets around the compound.
However, with an airport moments away from the White House, an assassin intent on flying into the building would be difficult to detect quickly.
Even after concrete barriers were placed around the White House to prevent car bombings, the Secret Service has continued to ask permission to close Pennsylvania Avenue to traffic. To some security officials, the easiest way to protect the president would be to put him in a hermetically sealed bubble.
"This is a stark reminder to the president and his party of how vulnerable they are," said John Gaughan, a former director of the White House military office. Given the location of the White House, he said, the risk is "there day in and day out."
But the White House has resisted closing Pennsylvania Avenue because, as chief of staff Leon E. Panetta explained again on Saturday, it does not want to project the image that the president's residence is inaccessible to the public.