Sincerely,
Bethany Kern
Partlow, Va.
This pile, that pile, another pile over there; pull from the middle if you want. The narrative was sloppy and urgent, America talking all at once. No filter. The handwriting, the ink, the choice of letterhead—every letter was a real object from a real person, and now you were holding it, and so now you were responsible for it.
Mr. President,
My wife and I very recently lost our 22-year-old son, David Jr. He took his life with a handgun that he purchased. Our son was precious to us. He could have done anything he chose to do.
I am writing because our son was suffering from mental illness yet still was able to purchase a gun. He had been involuntarily hospitalized when he was 17, yet Pennsylvania allows people with this on their record to purchase a gun.
The sadness we are feeling is overwhelming us. We are trying to be strong for our other three sons, but we are breaking down every day….
Thank you.
David Costello
Philadelphia
“You’ll need a pencil,” said a woman seated next to me. She looked like an intern, but it turned out she was one of Fiona’s deputies, Yena Bae. She was in her midtwenties, and there was a lightness to her, a welcoming glow, like your first kindergarten teacher. I noticed Fiona had disappeared; apparently she had passed me off to Yena. There would be a whole lot of orchestration like that going on during all my time at the White House, somebody always keeping watch.
On a whiteboard at the far end of the room was the countdown: “You have 99 days to make a difference in the life of a letter writer,” someone had written, referring to January 19, 2017, the last full day of the Obama administration and the last day for this OPC staff, nearly all of whom were political appointees and would no longer have a job at the White House when the new administration took office. The election was less than a month away. “Our time is, like, ticking,” Yena told me. “We want to put our letter writers in good shape for the next administration. We want them to be in good hands.
“Team little people,” she said. “That’s what we call ourselves.” She said the mailroom might seem like the least prestigious place to work in the White House, yet the ethos here was that it held a kind of secret superpower. “You’ll see.”
Ten letters from this room would, after all, land on the president’s desk that night. Part of the work of the mailroom staff was to sift through the thousands of letters that had just come in that morning and pick which ten Obama should see.
“The 10LADs,” Yena said, handing me a pencil.
“You have to code,” one of the interns said.
The first task in the hard-mail room was to code each letter with a “disposition” on the top left corner (in pencil). What was the person writing about? Gun Violence, Healthcare, Drone Strikes, Domestic Violence, Ukraine, Taxes. Put your initials under the code. Code a stack, then stand to stretch your neck and your legs and take your stack over to “the wall,” a tan shelving unit stuffed with paper, shelf after shelf labeled with corresponding dispositions. Gitmo, Mortgage Crisis, Immigration, Bees. (Bees?) The codes corresponded to more than a hundred different form-response letters from the president that the OPC writing team, a group of nine, worked to constantly update. In the meantime, all the letters from kids went into a separate bin to be picked up by the kid team upstairs; requests for birthday, anniversary, and baby acknowledgments went to the greetings team; gifts went to the gifts team. A casework team of six across the hall handled letters that required individual attention from a federal agency. Maybe someone needed help getting benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs, for example; a caseworker could step in and investigate. There were a few more codes to be aware of. Sensitive meant someone was writing to the president about a loss, a sickness, or other personal trauma. Those went over to Jack Cumming, a quiet guy in beige who spent his days reading letter after letter about small and large tragedies suffered by strangers across the country and who often needed a break from the unbearable sadness, and so he liked to hang out in the hard-mail room. “It’s nice to come in here and just…read,” he said.
A lot of people who worked in OPC would tell me that. The hard-mail room was where you went when the rest of your job got difficult, or annoying, or boring. It had a way of re-centering you, reminding you why you were here. Sit down and read. The bins were never empty. America had a lot to say, and without you, there would be no one to listen.
Interns in the hard-mail room were expected to get through three hundred letters a day, and this group had learned to move quickly, everybody scribbling on the corners, distributing into piles.
I told Yena I was still stuck on the first one I’d picked up. A guy in Colorado. He had some problems with heroin. He was writing to the president to say he’d gotten clean.
“Yeah, we get those,” Yena said.
He relapsed. He was not comfortable with his own sexuality. His father died. He contemplated suicide. His mom never gave up on him. It was a long letter. The deeper I got into it, the more uncomfortable I felt reading it, as if I were intruding on a private friendship.
“He got clean again,” I told Yena. I looked at the stack of letters she had to get through and the piles in front of all the others reading. Were all the letters going to be like this?
“If you want to, you can just go ahead and sample that one,” Yena said.
“Sample” was shorthand for: Put the letter in the pile for consideration to be included in the 10LADs, the ten letters that would go to Obama that evening.
I thought about Obama reading about this guy’s heroin problem. Should he? Who was I to say? Who were any of these people to say?
“You just write ‘Sample’ on it,” Yena said when I asked her how to sample a letter. You wrote it on the top left corner. In pencil. Small print. (Respect the letter.) You then took it and dropped it in the wooden inbox with a sticker on it that said, “Samples.” Fiona would collect them at the end of the day, sift through, and decide. About 2 percent of the total incoming mail, two or three hundred letters a day, ended up in the sample bin.
I tapped my pencil, looked at the letter again. It was typed. The grammar was precise. The guy seemed to have put a lot of time into it. He said he’d been meaning to write for a long time but had wanted to wait until the time was right. He wanted Obama to know he’d been sober a year. Which was great. But did Obama need to know that? Did this stand for something larger? Was someone going to have to prepare a brief asking for more funds for the opioid addiction crisis or something to go along with this letter?
“Don’t overthink it,” Yena said.
She told me that Fiona kept the bar deliberately low. Does the letter move you in some particular way? Don’t overthink it. Sample it. These were people writing, and you were a person reading, and the president was a person. “Just keep remembering that, and you’ll be fine,” Yena said.
Dear President Obama,
…I am an undocumented immigrant. I came to the United States when I was 14 years old….In my mind I am as American as it comes. I still have my first pair of Air Jordans. There are very few pop cultural references I do not understand.
…I did not become aware of my status until I was finishing up college and had gotten accepted to medical school and realized I did not qualify for funding.
…Until recently with the passing of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals I basically walked on eggshells every day and truly was not sure how safe I was or what path my life would follow….
I would like to say although I did not vote for you…mainly because I could not…I feel like you voted for me with DACA and all your efforts with the DREAM act. Thank you.
Sincerely yours,
Dare Adewumi, M.D.
Redlands, California
“Y
ou get attached,” the intern sitting next to me said. Her name was Jamira. She had her hair bundled tightly on top of her head and wore a pretty print top. She said that one time she had opened a letter from a woman who was writing the president to say she had lost a family member to gun violence. “She had enclosed photos. Just blood all over in a car…” She tapped her eraser on the table, up and down on the table.
“Everybody has that one letter,” Yena said. Letters could take a toll. Unlike most other shops at the White House, OPC offered monthly counseling sessions to anyone who felt the need.
The most important code everyone needed to know about was Red Dot. Red Dots were emergencies. These were from people writing to the president to say they wanted to kill themselves or someone else, or they seemed in some way on the edge. You wrote “Red Dot” on the top of the letter if you got one of those, and then you immediately walked it across the hall and gave it to Lacey Higley, the woman in the back corner more or less in charge of rescuing people.
“Do you need a break?” Yena asked me. “Do you need cookies? We have cookies.” She reached for a tub of oatmeal-raisins and slid it over.
I asked her if she had ever red-dotted a letter.
“Oh my,” she said. Some two hundred letters a day were red-dotted.
I asked her if she had a letter like Jamira’s, one that haunted her.
“It was an email from a mother who missed her son,” she said. She pushed her hair behind her ears as if having to prep herself for this one. She said in the email the mom explained that her son had been kidnapped overseas, and at the time the investigation was still under way. Yena read the letter a dozen times, stunned by details in it that, for reasons of OPC confidentiality—and national security—she could not reveal to me. “Everything was hush-hush.” She alerted the authorities, then felt helpless because there was nothing more she could do. Weeks later, she was watching CNN, and that was how she learned the son had been killed. It was national news. It was an international incident, and his mom had reached out, and Yena had been on the receiving end of her desperate pleas. And now he was dead.
“I just lost it,” she told me. “I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.” It was a Sunday. She came in to the office and sat at her computer. “What if his mom wrote again?” She told me the experience changed the direction of her life and her sense of her place in the world.
Jamira was leaning in to hear Yena tell the story of the mother and the lost son. She had put her pencil down. “It’s weird. I’m going to go from this to being back at school,” she said. “It’s hard to explain all this to my friends.”
“You can’t,” Yena said.
“I never thought about how powerful a letter was.”
“Did you even know we had a correspondence office before you came here?” Yena asked her.
“I had no idea.”
“You think you’re going to be the mail lady or something.”
“We’re in the mailroom.”
“The mailroom.”
In the end I didn’t sample the letter from the guy who had conquered his heroin problem; I didn’t sample any of the ones I read, in part because I wanted to sample all of them and then got overwhelmed by the weight of the responsibility. I surrendered my stack, adding it back in the pile for reconsideration by the group. Later when I saw Fiona, I told her about the guy with the heroin and about some of the other letters I had read, and I wondered if there was something I could do to put my finger on the scale so that if any of them ended up in her daily sample pile, she would give them special attention when she sat down to pick the day’s 10LADs.
I learned that pretty much everyone felt that way. You got attached. You became an advocate for your letter. And if yours got picked as one of the 10LADs, it would make your day. And if the president actually wrote back to the person, you felt high. And if something from one of your picks ended up in a speech or a policy decision, well, it was time to throw a party.
When Fiona interviewed people for jobs in OPC, one of the tests she had them do was writing their own letter to the president. Not for her to find out what they had to say. But so they got a chance to know what writing a letter to the president felt like.
The capacity to occupy a stranger’s head and heart—that was the key competency needed to land a job in Fiona’s mailroom.
January 21, 2009
Dear President Obama,
My name is Thomas J. Meehan III, the father of Colleen Ann Meehan Barkow, age 26, who perished on September 11 2001 at the WTC. Colleen was an employee of Cantor-Fitzgerald, working on the 103rd Floor. Her upper torso was found September 17th, 2001, the date of her first wedding anniversary. In the days and months afterwards there were to be additional discoveries of her, a total of six, which still did not amount to a whole body, but was more than what some other families affected have been given back, Families still speak in terms of body parts found and not found, and what will never be found.
In the past seven years, my wife and I have been committed to the issue of the ashen remains of those lost that day, which have been interred (bulldozed) into the 40 acres of land known as the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, New York. For the one thousand families who did not receive any remains, this is the final resting place, an un-holy, un-consecrated landfill. The lives lost are there with garbage beneath them and construction fill above them, an unbefitting resting place for those we called heroes and took an oath never to forget.
While this issue has been before the courts, and the remains may in fact be permanently interred at the landfill, parents, spouses, siblings, extended family members must live with the knowledge that their loved ones lie in what was the world’s largest dump. How we as a society will be judged in the treatment of those lost, only history will record.
My wife and I mourn the continued loss of American lives in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan while we still await the apprehension and trial of those we hold responsible for the death of our daughter and almost 3000 other American and international citizens.
While we understand the reasons for the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, we urge you to allow the trials of those defendants charged in connection with the attacks of September 11, 2001, to go forward, and complete the judicial process and give some small measure of Justice to all of the 9/11 family members, while we still await the capture of Osama Bin Laden.
Our lives have been forever changed by the events of September 11, 2001, and yet life goes on, we now have two granddaughters, Brett Colleen, age four an and Ryann Elizabeth, age two, we hope that their lives will be in a better world that the one which claimed their aunt. And they will have the opportunities to live their lives to the fullest and live in a safer world, free of the threat of terrorism.
I share these facts with you so that you will understand why these issues mean so much to us, and ask that you not forget the promise “Never To Forget,” and will bring to justice those responsible for September 11, 2001.
God Bless You and You’re Family,
May the Peace of the Lord Be Upon You and Remain With You,
Respectfully,
Thomas J. Meehan III & JoAnn Meehan
Toms River, New Jersey
CHAPTER 4
Thomas and JoAnn Meehan,
January 21, 2009
TOMS RIVER, NEW JERSEY
Thomas Meehan started writing letters soon after the towers came down. He needed an outlet. One of the first letters he wrote was to the navy. He remembers this part so well. A lot of other things are fuzzy. He is seventy-four years old, and the main thing lately is to get everything recorded before his memory goes altogether south.
JoAnn, his wife, lets out a polite chuckle, as you do. But she knows it’s true about Tom’s memory. The stents, the tranquilizers, the strokes—they’ve taken a toll.
They’re sitting at
the dining room table on a hot July morning in their home in Toms River, New Jersey, not far from the ocean and the Pine Barrens. The little dog’s name is Chewy. JoAnn has a piece of white marble from Tower 1 she would like to show you. It’s from the floor of the lobby, a gift from first responders. “Always remember Colleen. Ground Zero. 9/11/01,” they wrote on it. She also would like to show you a piece of window glass they gave her.
“Look how thick,” she says. “Maybe an inch thick, for the air pressure.”
“It’s so thick,” Tom says.
One time Colleen took them to watch the fireworks from her floor. The 103rd floor. You would not believe the elevators. The time it took to get all the way up there. Three separate elevators.
“I was like, ‘Where are we going, to heaven?’ ” JoAnn says.
The whole reason Colleen left college to work in New York was because she got to work in the World Trade Center. That’s how JoAnn remembers it. (“Also a romance played a part.”) JoAnn was not in favor of Colleen’s quitting college; a straight-A student leaving school made no sense. But Colleen told her mother an opportunity like that might never come again. The company needed women. Colleen learned how to read blueprints when they sent her to Ohio to train, and they sent her to London a few times to learn design. She was young and in love and basking in the hustle-bustle. Her job was in facilities. She designed a cafeteria for the 103rd floor of Tower 1 so everyone didn’t have to go all the way down all those elevators for lunch. She even made a smoking room with big fans sucking out the smoke. She was extremely proud of that cafeteria.
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