WHITE HOUSE PUTS HELIPAD SEND-OFF CROWD AT 40,000, CALLS IT “LARGEST IN SOUTH LAWN HISTORY”
WASHINGTON — The White House said Tuesday that the crowd the President acknowledged while crossing the South Lawn helicopter pad on Monday numbered 40,000 people, making it the largest send-off gathering in the history of the facility and, the Press Secretary said, “possibly in the history of departures.”
Video released Monday showed the President, en route to Marine One for a trip to Wichita, where he campaigned for Senator Roger Marshall, stop for roughly thirty seconds on the newly renovated pad and wave, salute, and bow toward a section of the lawn. His aides approached the aircraft from a different direction. No crowd is visible in the footage. The White House said the crowd is plainly visible in the complete, unedited footage, which will be released at a future date.
“The President does not wave at nothing,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “He was waving at 40,000 American patriots who came out on a Monday afternoon, on short notice, to see him off. It was a beautiful crowd. Many people are saying it was the most beautiful crowd ever to stand on that lawn.”
Asked how the figure was reached, Leavitt said the White House crowd office had counted the gathering “in sections, the way you count any crowd,” and that the total included the people on the other side of the fence, the people in the trees, and the people watching from indoors, “who were also waving.”
The President’s bow, Leavitt explained, was directed to the families in the front rows.
At his rally in Wichita that evening, the President told supporters that the send-off crowd had been “enormous, maybe bigger than this one,” and that Washington had never seen anything like it. The Wichita crowd cheered. Its size was not estimated by the White House.
A researcher in crowd dynamics, asked to assess the figure, noted that 40,000 people on and around the pad would require a density at which “several thousand of the attendees would necessarily have been inside the helicopter, and the President would have been saluting, in part, the rotor assembly.” The White House said the researcher’s invitation to future briefings was under review. A pool photographer who covered the departure referred all questions about the crowd to the White House.
“The President sees these crowds everywhere he goes,” a senior White House official said. “That is the point of the crowds.”
By Tuesday, the White House said, the crowd had dispersed and could no longer be documented. “Crowds disperse,” Leavitt said. “That is what crowds do.” The President, she said, had already thanked them for coming — at the pad, in person, for approximately thirty seconds.
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