Along the park's border, other homeless and jobless men battle all day and sometimes into the night on cement chessboard tables.
'Everyone has the right to demonstrate'
>"This is the Super Bowl; this is where the strong play; this is where you'll find the Russian masters," boasts N. S. Kolchak, 46, a.former Louisiana resident who has played chess here, sometimes for cash, since 1978.
"It's a complex game. It's a stupid game," he laughs. "It's an excuse not to have a life."
Maj.. James McLaughlin, former commander of the special forces branch and now a National Park Service official, recalls violent, antl-war demonstrations of 10,000 people in front of the White House, and says Lafayette is a far quieter refuge today.
"I've seen it all" he says. "There's no political issue I haven't heard there. But this is America and everyone has the right to demonstrate."
On the morbid side, demonstrators have brought a dead fetus (for an anti-abort protest) and the body of a dead adult in a coffin (for an anti-AIDS protest), accompanied but a mortician, McLaughlin says.
"This used to be a nice park, where people would sun themselves. . . but it's changed a lot over the years. It's very sad. People come from all over the world to see the White Home and say, 'Oh God. I can't believe I came all this way and it looks like this."
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