Wilson desk

Wilson desk

Gerald Ford sitting at the Wilson Desk with George Meany in 1974, before his redesign of the Oval Office décor.
Date	1898
Materials	Mahogany
Sold by	W.B. Moses and Sons
Height	31 in (79 cm)
Width	80.75 in (205.1 cm)
Depth	58.25 in (148.0 cm)
Collection	United States Senate

The desk in the Vice President's Room of the United States Capitol, colloquially known as the Wilson desk and previously called the McKinley-Barkley desk, is a large mahogany partner's desk used by U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the Oval Office as their Oval Office desk. One of only six desks used by a President in the Oval Office, it was purchased in 1898 by Garret Augustus Hobart, the 24th Vice President of the United States, for the Vice President's Room in the United States Capitol.

Nixon chose this desk for the Oval Office because of his mistaken belief that former President Woodrow Wilson had used it there. In 1971 Nixon had five recording devices secretly installed in the Wilson desk by the United States Secret Service. These recordings constitute some of the Watergate tapes. Upon Jimmy Carter's ascent to the presidency, he moved the Wilson desk back to the Vice President's Room, preferring to work at the Resolute desk.

Nixon referred to the desk in 1969 in his "Silent majority" speech, stating: "Fifty years ago, in this room and at this very desk, President Woodrow Wilson spoke words which caught the imagination of a war-weary world."^[1] In actuality, the desk was never used by Wilson in the Oval office. Nixon was informed by one of his speech writers, William Safire, that the desk was actually used by Vice President Henry Wilson during President Ulysses S. Grant's administration. This is also untrue since the desk was purchased 23 years after the former's death.