It was 1988, and the height of the presidential election campaign between George Bush Sr and Michael Dukakis. The Bush campaign had an image problem: Mr and Mrs Bush just didn’t seem to click on camera. So the candidate sent his wife a memo.
”Sweetsie,” he wrote to Barbara Bush. ”Please look at how Mike and Kitty do it. Try to be closer in more — well, er, romantic — on camera. I am practicing the loving look, and the creeping hand. Yours for better TV and more demonstrable affection. Your sweetie pie coo coo. Love ya, GB.”
The exchange is taken from one of 184 documents charting the human — as well as the bureaucratic — side of the relationships between presidents and their first ladies printed in My Dear President: Letters Between Presidents and Their Wives. Each letter appears in its entirety with the original spelling and grammar intact.
Described as ”an inspiring collection of correspondence”, the book, which came out last week, includes dozens of letters that have never been published before.
”Touch you I must or I’ll burst,” Ronald Reagan wrote to Nancy, who he referred to as his ”middle size muffin”, three years before he became the governor of California.
”I worship you so that it seems almost desecration to touch you,” college graduate Teddy Roosevelt wrote to his fiancée Alice Lee, five days before they were married.
Lyndon Johnson showed less restraint. ”This morning I’m ambitious, proud, energetic and very madly in love with you,” he told his sweetheart, Bird Taylor, when he was a mere Texas congressman. She was later to dismiss his affairs as a ”speck on a wedding cake”.
The book was edited by Gerard Gawalt, a curator of the papers of presidential families at the Library of Congress for the past 30 years, and follows on from an earlier book by the same author — First Daughters: Letters Between US Presidents and Their Daughters.
The 184 documents in the latest book are culled from between 4 000 and 5 000 letters, telegrams and cables in the papers of 23 presidents held by the Library of Congress, presidential libraries or kept by their families.
Arranged thematically into categories such as love, war, politics, travel and sorrow, the book runs the entire gamut of presidential emotion.
”One line to say that we are occasionally remembered will be gratefully received,” the first lady Mary Lincoln wrote to her husband Abraham in 1862.
Dwight Eisenhower had an equally snippy response to his wife’s questioning of the formality of their exchanges when he was in Europe in August 1944. ”I’m a bit puzzled over your outburst about me sending messages via aides and secretaries,” he wrote. ”Naturally I cannot go to telegraph offices myself whenever the spirit might move me.”
John Adams’s wife, Abigail, questioned the subjugation of wives as her husband was drafting the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion that ”all men” are treated equal.
”That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth,” she wrote in March 1776. ”Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.”
A little over a hundred years later, matters had not noticeably improved.
”I have slept a little now and can speak more clearly than I did last night, when my need, my fathomless need, was crying out in me,” Woodrow Wilson wrote to his fiancée, Edith Bolling Galt, in 1883.
”I, of course, acted like a man brute,” Harry Truman wrote to his intended, Bess, after she had visited him at a military training camp in 1923, 22 years before he became president.
”I wanted to go home with you so badly last night, I could hardly stand it.” – Guardian Unlimited Â