Book of Secrets (2007)
The Resolute Desk, Oval Office
From the film · 00:58:00
“There's something on Page 47 I need to ask you about.”
The White House, the Oval Office, a presidential birthday tour Ben has personally engineered
What we know
The Resolute desk used by every president since Hayes (with three exceptions), and a small compartment behind a kneehole panel
The Resolute desk has been the Oval Office desk for nearly every president since Rutherford Hayes received it from Queen Victoria in 1880 — Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford preferred other desks; everyone else has kept the Resolute. The kneehole-panel modification was designed in 1945 by White House architect Lorenzo Winslow at Franklin Roosevelt's request and installed during Truman's first year, carved with the Presidential coat of arms. The panel has, since installation, been called "the trapdoor"; the Kennedy children peeked through it. The film proposes that behind the panel — or in a similar compartment — is a hidden niche containing the second Olmec plank. We retrieve it. We retrieve it during a sanctioned, public, pre-arranged White House visit. I am, in the strict sense, doing this for history.
The Puzzle
Borglum was a Freemason. The carving is a seal as much as a monument. The eagle’s hand — a five-fingered formation in stone — sits somewhere in the four faces. Pour water on the cleft and the keystone resolves. Click where the eagle holds the door.