Roosevelt's White House party too saw gatecrashers

Virginia couple Michaele and Tareq Salahi are not the first to crash a White House party as a group of teenagers also gave a slip to the US Secret Service way back in 1938 to get autographs of President Franklin D Roosevelt and the First Lady during a New Year bash.
    
This was stated by noted TV producer and writer Henry Morgenthau III, whose father Henry Morgenthau Jr was secretary of the Treasury for President Roosevelt.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Morgenthau III, now in his 90s, recalled a New Year's Party in 1938 where "around 11 pm, escorting Eleanor Flood and young Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady's niece, Robert and I headed to the White House after a night on the town to join our parents to see in the new year."

On that wintry night, wrote Morgenthau III, a 16-year-old high school student named Joe Measell, his date Beatrice White and his 14 year-old brother Donald had been dared to get autographs of the president and the first lady.
    
The Secret Service mistook Measell for a Morgenthau son and led the group upstairs into the White House.
    
While Measell was caught and ushered out before he could take the President's autograph, his girlfriend managed to get the First Lady's signature although Mrs Roosevelt warned the mischievous couple about entering the White House uninvited.

Morgenthau III also recalled an article that was published a few days after the incident, where Measell wrote, "I waited outside the room where Mr Roosevelt and his guests were watching a movie. When the lights went on, I walked in and said to the president, 'Excuse me, Your Honour, but I'm here on a dare from a party and would like to have your autograph."
    
In the op-ed, he said that Mrs Roosevelt in her My Day column - that appeared in scores of paper across the country -commented that "behaviour of this kind will make this young couple seem rather heroic" but added she "would not wish to have in my employ any young people who acted with so little thought and consideration for others."
    
Morgenthau III, whose op-ed came more than a week after the Salahis gatecrashed the first State Dinner hosted by president Barack Obama in honour of prime minister Manmohan Singh, said that "in this time for change, some things have not changed very much."

He also recalled that "a few weeks before his first inaugural ball, the president (Roosevelt) had narrowly escaped an assassin's bullet, which killed Mayor Anton J Cermak of Chicago, who was next to him."
    
Morgenthau III's grandfather Henry Morgenthau Sr was US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and became famous for urging the American government to act against the mass killings of the Armenians shortly after the outbreak of the First World War.