Obama had committed to reading ten letters a day when he first took office, becoming the first president to put such a deliberate focus on constituent correspondence. Late each afternoon, around five o’clock, a selection would be sent up from the mailroom to the Oval Office. The “10LADs,” as they came to be known—for “ten letters a day”—would circulate among senior staff, and the stack would be added to the back of the briefing book the president took with him to the residence each night. He answered some by hand and wrote notes on others for the writing team to answer, and on some he scribbled, “SAVE.”
Everyone on the senior staff knew the importance of the letters, but Shailagh had taken an interest in the story they told in the aggregate, what they said about the country and her boss. She told me she would sometimes put her feet up and devour the material, as if it were a history project and she were a scholar intent on mastery.
“So this is January 23, 2009, right after the inauguration,” she said, choosing a letter at random from the binder. “ ‘I’m a seventy-three-year-old owner of a manufacturing company. My husband and I started from nothing…put every dime back into the business. We’ve had no orders or inquiries for over three months now…still recovering from open-heart surgery….We’ve got this house. Our mortgage is nine hundred seventy-nine dollars and seventy-one cents. We still owe a hundred twenty thousand dollars. What are we going to do?’
“You know?” she said. “That kind of stuff. All these signs. Because at that point, it wasn’t clear. The job losses hadn’t really started yet. There’s page after page after page of people venting about the big banks. I mean, that’s the other thing: You see the rage. You see the terror. Just the vulnerabilities that people are feeling that so transcend at that point what the fundamentals even looked like. So right at the beginning when Obama took office, he’s hearing—he’s hearing, like, Larry Summers, the director of his National Economic Council, and then he’s hearing, you know, Francis and his wife Collette from Idaho. You know? It’s like a running dialogue with the American public.
“You know?” Shailagh said, as if she was pleading with me to get this.
I told her I did, or at least I was trying to.
“Did I tell you about the letter from the guy in Mississippi?” she asked.
No, she hadn’t.
“Oh my God—”
She stood, headed back to the bookshelf to get a different binder. “Wait till you see this one.”
* * *
—
Presidents have dealt with constituent mail differently over the years. Things started simply enough: George Washington opened the mail and answered it. He got about five letters a day. Mail back then was carried by foot or on horseback or in stagecoaches—not super high volume. Then came steamboats, then rail and a modernized postal system, and by the end of the nineteenth century, President William McKinley was overwhelmed. One hundred letters every day? He hired someone to help manage the flow, and that was the origin of the Office of Presidential Correspondence. It wasn’t until the Great Depression that things got crazy. In his weekly fireside chats, Franklin D. Roosevelt began a tradition of speaking directly to the country, inviting people to write to him and tell him their troubles. About a half million letters came pouring in during the first week, and the White House mailroom became a fire hazard. Constituent mail grew from there, and each succeeding president formed a different relationship with it. By the end of his presidency, Nixon refused to read anything bad anyone said about him. Reagan answered dozens of letters on weekends; he would stop by the mailroom from time to time, and he enjoyed reading the kid mail. Clinton wanted to see a representative stack every few weeks. George W. Bush liked to get a pile of ten already-answered letters on occasion. These, anyway, are the anecdotal memories you get from former White House staff members. Little hard data exists about constituent mail from previous administrations. Historians don’t focus on it; presidential libraries don’t feature it; the vast majority of it has long since been destroyed.
President Obama was the first to come up with a deliberate practice of reading ten letters every day. If the president was home at the White House (he did not tend to mail when he traveled), he would be reading constituent mail, and everyone knew it, and systems were put in place to make sure it happened. The mail had currency. Some staff members called it “the letter underground.” Starting in 2010, all physical mail was scanned and preserved. Starting in 2011, every word of every email factored into the creation of a daily word cloud, its image distributed around the White House so policy makers and staff members alike could get a glimpse at the issues and ideas constituents had on their minds.
In 2009, Natoma Canfield, a cancer survivor from Medina, Ohio, wrote in, detailing her staggering health-insurance premiums in a letter Obama framed and had hung in a corridor between his private study and the Oval Office: “I need your health reform bill to help me!!! I simply can no longer afford to pay for my health care costs!!” It stood in for the tens of thousands of similar letters he got on the healthcare issue alone. They saw spikes in volume after major events like the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Charleston, South Carolina; the Paris terrorist attacks; the government shutdown; Benghazi. You could see these spikes in the word clouds. “Jobs” might grow for a time, or “Syria,” or “Trayvon,” or a cluster like “family-children-fear” or “work-loans-student” or “ISIS-money-war” surrounding a giant “HELP”—the most common word of all. After a gunman opened fire on police officers in Dallas in 2016, the word “police” ballooned, surrounded by “God-guns-black-America” with a tiny “peace” and even tinier “Congress.”
* * *
—
At one point during my visit to Shailagh’s office that day, there was some commotion out in the hallway, and I followed her to the doorway to see what it was.
“Hey! How you doing?
“Hey, man!
“This guy! How you doing?
“There she is. How are you?”
It was Biden. The VP zooming through the West Wing, zooming toward us, flanked by serious-looking men in black suits. “Hey, how you doing?” he said to me in his Joe Biden way. He shook my hand in his Joe Biden way—the net effect is always like you’re a neighbor who just won some big bowling tournament, and he’s so pleased! He gave Shailagh a quick hug and kept on zooming.
“Yeah, I know,” Shailagh said when we sat back down in her office. Neither of us even needed to say it out loud. Biden may have been behaving like…Biden, but he didn’t look like the person we were used to seeing. He looked thin. Brittle. Pale and exhausted. I wondered if perhaps that was just the look of a seventy-three-year-old man who had decided to pass up a lifelong dream to be president.
“I’d say it’s more complicated than that,” Shailagh said, and for a moment we reminisced.
Biden was how Shailagh and I had become friends in the first place; she was his deputy chief of staff and communications director back in 2013 when I was profiling him for a magazine. She invited me to fly on Air Force Two to Rome for the pope’s inauguration, where she and I and a team of patient reporters watched Biden in his aviator sunglasses hobnob with world leaders. I was grateful for the opportunity, but afterward I told Shailagh I didn’t really have anything to write about beyond: Here is what it feels like to stand with a bunch of patient reporters watching Biden in his aviator sunglasses hobnob with world leaders. That’s how those press trips work. There’s a rope: the powerful on one side, the curious on the other, everybody smiling and waving. You couldn’t get at how anyone thought, what gave them nightmares, what private moments anybody cherished or even cared about. You couldn’t get close.
Shailagh thought about that. “We should go to Wilmington,” she said. “Let me ask the VP.”
And so that’s what we did, the three of us, romping through Biden’s Delaware hometown as he relived his childhood th
ere. “It’s really muddy back here,” Biden said, plowing through the woods to find the old swimming hole, the Secret Service guys trying to keep up. “Shailagh, you will not believe— Come here, Shailagh. I told you about this, didn’t I, Shailagh?” He took us past his first girlfriend’s house, his second girlfriend’s house, his favorite girlfriend’s house; we stopped at his high school and the hoagie shop he loved, and we sat together on the neighborhood stoop where, as a kid, he’d filled his mouth with rocks, attempting to cure his debilitating stutter. We went to the cemetery where his first wife, Neilia, and his baby Naomi were buried—he didn’t want to get too close—and we found ourselves peeking into the front window of his boyhood home so we could see the dining room hutch where his sister, Valerie, used to hide. “Do you see what I’m talking about, Shailagh? Now, if only these people were home, I could show you my room.” All day long the two of them laughed and bickered like father and daughter; it was a privilege to witness the tenderness and to begin to see the ways in which a White House operates like a family. Or at least this part of that one did.
I remember asking Shailagh back then if there was a chance Biden would make a run for president in 2016. “Oh, he would never get in the way of Hillary,” she said, and that was that—nothing worth talking about. It seemed kind of sad, a guy spending his whole life aiming for the presidency and getting so close but now answering a call to duty that involved shutting up and not mucking up the chance for the country to finally see a woman serve.
That day in her office, after we saw Biden zooming down the hall, Shailagh told me about the toll Beau Biden’s brain cancer had taken on everyone; the vice president’s son had lost the battle and died at forty-six on May 30, 2015. Shailagh said that was why Biden looked the way he did; she said anyone urging him to launch a presidential bid during his time of grief, as some were doing all the way up through the 2016 primaries, didn’t know him or didn’t love him.
She let it go at that, like you would if it were your dad suffering.
“God, this early stuff,” she said, returning to the letters. She flipped through a red binder. “Oh, I remember this woman. Yeah, we ended up inviting her to a speech.”
* * *
—
I suppose nostalgia was the main reason Shailagh thought to tour me through some of the letters that day. The administration ending, everyone getting ready to pack up and leave, all those letters left over. What would become of them? History is…big. History is sweeping. History is supposed to be a record of momentous occasions, not so much the tiny, insignificant ones.
“These are the voices in the president’s head,” Shailagh said. And I suppose that got to the heart of the matter. “He internalizes these things. Some of these letters he carries around and stews over. Especially the critical ones. It’s a private space he’s been able to preserve. Which suits him, you know?”
I got the sense that the letters were kind of Obama’s Wilmington. A path toward understanding. A back door swinging open. Here was a chance to get to know Obama in a way most people hadn’t. The tiny stories that stuck. The voices that called. The cries and the howls of the people he had pledged to serve. Here was the raw material of the ideas that bounced through his mind as he went about his days in cabinet meetings, bilateral summits, fundraisers, the Situation Room, and to his bed at night.
“Foreclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure,” Shailagh said, flipping through some early letters. “I mean, the housing crisis just kind of unfolds in real time in these things. People were coming up against these balloon mortgages that they didn’t even know they had. You can see the confluence of the economic crisis and the healthcare crisis happening at the same time. The loss of faith that people have in everything. The banks are collapsing; the Catholic Church is reeling. It’s like all these institutions are letting them down. And here’s this new president, this person who comes in on a change mandate, that has established a connection with them.”
Some of the letter writers would turn into iconic heroes to staffers, Shailagh told me, their stories the stuff of speeches and State of the Union addresses. “As time went on, we often had letter writers at events; letter writers often introduced him. When the president’s out traveling around the country, he visits places and has lunch with letter writers. I mean, we didn’t want to turn it into a schlocky thing. It’s—we tried to be respectful of it. Because it’s essentially a series of private relationships he had with these folks. And I think that’s what makes them so impactful. The private nature, the vulnerability of these people.”
She yanked her glasses off, propped them on her head, stood to get a different binder. “The guy in Mississippi,” she said, “I really need to find you that one. He wrote about the calluses on his hands. How the journey of his hands was actually this whole journey of the country at that moment. I’ll find it—
“You don’t see the cynicism, you know? You don’t see the kind of dystopian view of government in these letters that we’re so used to seeing. They’re almost from another time, like conversations from another era, when people looked to government and to their leaders not just for stuff and not just to vent, but because they really wanted the president to understand what their problems were. They really wanted him to understand what their lives were like. And so it’s very—you know, against the backdrop of all the polarization and cynicism and negativity and just the onslaught of opposition that we face day to day in the White House, these letters are a constant reminder that some people do view government as essentially a force for good. Or want it to be a force for good, want it to be better at what it does. Want it to serve veterans better, want it to deliver better healthcare.
“So that’s been really kind of spiritually uplifting, seriously. In a period, against a backdrop, of just this brutal, you know, day-to-day combat.”
I asked her if she thought the letters served a similar purpose for Obama.
“I just think letters suited him,” she said. “I mean, the Obamas are, you know, a lot like the Reagans were and the Bushes were, for that matter. They are, like, inherently conservative, normal, traditional people, right? They fully occupy the office. They are as big as the office. They fit it. You know? You know what I mean? It’s like the suit fits.”
And the letters fit. Like mothballs, and good posture, and proper table manners, and no swearing. “The letters have this kind of otherworldly feel to them that doesn’t seem part of the moment that we’re in,” she said, “even though what people are saying is very much in the moment. But the format feels otherworldly to me. It feels old to me. It feels very…Evelyn Waugh.”
Like the letter from the guy in Mississippi. She was still looking for it. She had moved on to a green binder. “I know it’s here….It was just so well written. It felt like a page falling out of a novel. It’s so interesting that people take the time. What compelled him to write that letter, that perfectly crafted little one-page letter?”
I told her that’s what I was wondering. Who writes to the president? Not since my Santa Claus days would it have occurred to me to do something like that. Who were all these people? What did they get out of it? Moreover, I wondered about the nature of the experiment itself. Whose idea was it to have Obama read ten letters a day? I wondered what the letters meant to him, and I wondered how, if at all, constituent mail influenced his presidency.
My initial impulse was to meet some of the letter writers, to hear their stories firsthand. And while I would do plenty of that, what I didn’t count on was the journey inside the mailroom itself. The people who kept the machine in motion. You couldn’t tell one story without the other, an interdependent relationship that serves to tell the story of the Obama administration through the eyes of the people who wrote to him.
Shailagh didn’t find the letter she was looking for that day. She promised me she would. The letters came in by the millions, and those in the binders in her office were but a tiny sam
ple, a few thousand of her favorites she liked to occasionally revisit. “You should go to the mailroom if you want the full effect,” she said. “Just sit there and read. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”
I asked her where the mailroom was. She sat back, thought for a moment. “There’s a person there who runs it. Her name is Fiona. You’d have to get past her.”
I asked if perhaps she could introduce me? She nodded but not convincingly, more as if a scheme was forming in her head.
I made the point that if she could get me on Air Force Two to go to the pope’s inauguration with the vice president, surely she could score me a visit to the mailroom.
“You don’t know Fiona,” she said.
Bobby Ingram
Oxford, MS
Apr. 16, 2009
Mister Obama—My President,
In 2007 I was proud of my hands. They had veneered calluses where my palms touched my fingers. Cuts and scrapes were never severe. Splinters and blisters merely annoyed me. With a vise-like grip and dextrous touch my hands were heat tolerant and cold ignorant. I was nimble when whittling or when sharpening an axe. I could exfoliate with an open palm when my wife’s back itched or my cat arched for a rub. My nails were usually stained after a chore; they were tougher, not cracked, seldom manicured. My hands defined my work, passions, my life.
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