What am I talking about when I mention "the flying White House?"

Well, it is this: For the first 130 years of our nation, not a single president left the country while he was in office, except for Woodrow Wilson to Paris after World War I and Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 to Panama.

This all changed in World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt flew to North Africa to meet with Winston Churchill, prime minister of England, to plan the Allied invasion of Europe. FDR hated airplanes, but the Secret Service required him to go by air as German submarines were sinking American ships. He flew in a chartered Pan Am plane. This changed everything.

Within weeks of Roosevelt's historic journey, the U.S. Army Air Forces (prelude to the Air Force, as the Air Force was not established until after W

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