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  ON THE MORNING of his resignation, during a rambling and sometimes mawkish farewell to White House staffers, Richard Nixon quoted the young Theodore Roosevelt’s grief-shattered reflection upon the death of his first wife: “And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.” This portion of Nixon’s remarks is usually regarded as downright dissociative—equating the loss of a wife with the end of a mere presidency. Actually, the comparison had the sort of raw sincerity that Nixon-haters always judged the man incapable of demonstrating; he used the quotation as evidence of things being never as dark as they seem. Nixon was already plotting his comeback, a reputational one this time, and his model only happened to be a politician. In the twenty-five-year-old Roosevelt, he had a spectacular model of personal renewal, a man whose painfully restarted pursuit of happiness turned into a gaudy shower of familial joy.

  The whole TR story—asthmatic childhood; gym regimen; widowing; flight to the Dakota; big second family and Sagamore Hill; all of this before Rough-Riding and trust-busting—used to be better known to children than it is now. Perhaps it’s just too remote, or maybe polio and PT boats make for better legends. But once it really gets going, nothing rivals Teddy Roosevelt’s story for speed. In the space of three years he went from San Juan Hill to the White House, with time enough to be governor of New York and vice president of the United States in between.

  When he moved his six children into the Executive Mansion, they ranged in age from three to seventeen. His fatherly letter writing was made necessary by the boys’ absences at school or his own presidential progresses. For all that he dismisses his traveling routine (“I had the usual experience in such cases, made the usual speech, held the usual reception, went to the usual lunch, etc., etc.”), it doesn’t seem that he resisted it much. In her long and admiring introduction to A Bully Father, her selection of the paterfamilas’s correspondence, Joan Paterson Kerr quotes Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice: “Father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.”

  He was also the most popular attraction in a self-assembled zoo. Throughout his letters he is either pampering animals (“I am acting as nurse to two wee guinea pigs”) or slaughtering them (“P.S.—I have just killed a bear”). The children’s pets—terriers, macaws, flying squirrels, kangaroo rats—seem to have outnumbered the live humans and mounted taxidermy around them, and their father proved a sharp and entertaining observer of the creatures’ ways. He observes that a guinea pig (another one, not the two above) is “squirming and kicking and looking exactly like Admiral Dewey,” and solemnly reports to Archie on a new dog: “The kitchen cat and he have strained relations but have not yet come to open hostility.”

  “Cunning” is a favorite word of Roosevelt’s for pets and children alike; in fact, any line between the human species and the rest of them is barely detectable. Roosevelt calls his offspring “bunnies,” and plays “bear” to them with such terrifying gusto that his wife demands the activity no longer be conducted after supper. There are pillow fights and “scrambles,” all part of a need to be treated by his children “as a friend and playmate.” Mrs. Kerr points out the observation of Cecil Spring Rice, a British diplomat: “You must always remember that the President is about six.”

  Modern theorists of “parenting” would applaud the way in which the roughhousing paternal grizzly could so easily metamorphose into something distinctly feminine. Quentin is “Quenty-Quee,” and Archibald, in the year he turns ten, “Blessed Archie-kins.” Their father likes a good game of “tickley,” and adopts the title “vice-mother” when the First Lady is away. On occasion he seems more like auntie: “Doctor Riley is along, and is a perfect dear, as always.”

  Parental instruction of the epistolary kind is often a starchy, backfiring affair. There are those famous, awful letters from the earl of Chesterfield to his son, excruciating in their self-regard and sheer obviousness: “Do you use yourself to carve ADROITLY and genteelly, without hacking half an hour across a bone; without bespattering the company with the sauce; and without overturning the glasses into your neighbor’s pockets?” Chesterfield complains about his boy’s “exceedingly laconic” communications, recommends the letters of Madame de Sévigné as models and urges that he write as if “conversing freely with me by the fireside.” Ah, what a relaxed hearth that must have been, considering how the previous summer the lord had written his Grand-Touring boy with “fair warning, that at Leipsig I shall have an hundred invisible spies about you; and shall be exactly informed of everything that you do, and of almost everything that you say.”

  By contrast, Roosevelt proceeds via gentle indirection, telling one of the boys how he’s had to discipline another. To Kermit: “I have just had to descend with severity upon Quentin because he put the unfortunate Tom [a kitten] into the bathtub and then turned on the water. He didn’t really mean harm.” To Archie: “I have just had to give [Quentin] and three of his associates a dressing down—one of the three being Charlie Taft.” (They’d put spitballs on some White House portraits.) He raises the children with the same cheerful definiteness he used in steering those “turbulent little half-caste civilizations.” The sea bores him; the past is overrated; discouragement is the enemy: “Don’t worry about the lessons, old boy. I know you are studying hard. Don’t get cast down. Sometimes in life, both at school and afterwards, fortune will go against any one, but if he just keeps pegging away and doesn’t lose his courage things always take a turn for the better in the end.”

  Character must trump intellect and athletics. Roosevelt’s limited enthusiasm for school sports is a frequent theme, though one has to remember that an apostle of the strenuous life is bound to have an exceptional notion of what not overdoing it means. To Ted at Groton: “To have you play football as well as you do, and make a good name in boxing and wrestling, and be cox of your second crew, and stand second or third in your class in the studies, is all right.”

  He seems to have viewed the presidency as an opportunity for personal development, a chance to mix it up with Japanese wrestlers and contemporary poets. He enjoys the job (“I like to do the work and have my hand on the lever”) but appears to work no harder at it than Ronald Reagan did:

  We almost always take our breakfast on the south portico now, Mother looking very pretty and dainty in her summer dresses. Then we stroll about the garden for fifteen or twenty minutes, looking at the flowers and the fountain and admiring the trees. Then I work until between four and five, usually having some official people to lunch—now a couple of Senators, now a couple of Ambassadors, now a literary man, now a capitalist or a labor leader, or a scientist, or a big-game hunter. If Mother wants to ride, we then spend a couple of hours on horseback.

  He can worry over “attack and misrepresentation,” and seek comfort in Lincoln’s letters, but by and large there is no awesome burden; no malaise; no funk. He may not have liked “kodak creatures” or the press, but he took pleasure in the White House (its usher had the prescient name Ike Hoover), and he enjoyed Washington itself. He succeeded by making people adapt to his manner, instead of the other way around. There was no reason he couldn’t meet with legislators while watching the boys in their sandbox, and none that the Speaker couldn’t deal with the leg-grabbing of a kitten: “Mr. Cannon … eyed him with iron calm and not one particle of surprise.”

  Roosevelt’s human preoccupations almost certainly made him a better president. Probably no one who’s held the job before or since has left behind a more spontaneous bundle of correspondence—with the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, who for months on end would neglect his job to type besotted love notes (we’ll get to them in Chapter 5) to a woman across town. Both men lived in the last hours of a civilization that used letter writing not just to record the private life, but to conduct it. There are 126 letters in Joan Paterson Kerr’s selection; Theodore Roosevelt died at the age of sixty after having written 150,000 others.

  JUST AS THE pri
vate life began losing letters to the telephone, letters began losing a bit of their own privacy. Great numbers of early-twentieth-century magazines and newspapers started featuring advice columnists who would offer mass-circulation responses to the intimate, if pseudonymous, woes of their correspondents.

  The phenomenon of the “agony” column is mordantly dramatized by Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, in which the despairing son of a Baptist preacher—assured by his editor that advice columnists are “the priests of twentieth-century America”—must answer harrowing mail from such correspondents as the woman afraid she’ll die if her husband forces her to have another child; the sister of a deaf-and-dumb girl who has been raped; and the lovelorn girl born without a nose, who ends her communication with the straightforward query: “Ought I commit suicide?” “Miss Lonely-hearts” will wind up recommending just that course to another letter writer, in the hope that it will get him fired. But his editor is only moderately upset: “Remember, please, that your job is to increase the circulation of our paper. Suicide, it is only reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose.”

  By the 1950s, advice columns began moving, along with much else in journalism, in a professional direction. The admirable Ann Landers (Eppie Lederer) started her half-century syndicated run in a voice that was equal parts Midwestern clubwoman, Jewish mother and Rosalind Russell-style dame: “I think when a boy is old enough to ask for a redheaded baby-sitter, he is old enough to stay home alone.” All three parts were her real-life components, not just personae. Briskly certain of her chance to do good, Lederer played things down the middle, loosening up the country when it came to divorce and homosexuality, keeping it on the straight and narrow over drugs and drink. She employed scads of assistants; sought information from a mighty Rolodex of doctors, clergy and lawyers; and received much abuse along with requests for help: “I’ve been told to drop dead, get lost, stop playing God, and quit making up crazy letters,” she reminisced in the introduction to one collection of her columns. “I’ve been called a crummy broad, a square from Iowa, and a broken-down museum piece. The cocktail set insists I am a reformed drunk who is determined to dry up the world. I’ve been accused of being a public relations agent for the American Medical Association and a mouthpiece for the American Psychiatric Association.” She owed her long success to sustained seriousness and a natural American literary style (as recognizable on the page as Will Rogers’s), and also to the framework of the letter. Its illusion of intimacy, and the you-asked-for-it nature of epistolary response, always kept her columns free from the sermonizing sound of the editorials going unread a few pages away.

  Her successors, a more strident and self-centered bunch, arrived a decade or so ago. Over the last decade, Dan Savage (Savage Love), Paige Stein (The Nuisance Lady) and Mickey Boardman (Ask Mr. Mickey) have generally substituted insult for empathy and spent a lot of time making clear their relief not to be the kind of losers writing to them. Often enough, this seems to be just what the letter writer—not to mention the column reader—is after. In a report on these newer, teardrop-resistant shoulders, William Grimes quoted Robert Levy, the executive editor who used to syndicate Ann Landers for United Features: “The younger generation these columns appeal to is sick of advice. They’re almost looking for anti-advice, or the sheer kick of an in-your-face response.” The new columns work in “the same way that … Letterman is anti-television.” The hip authors are too ironic to take their own abusiveness seriously, but they do make public use of the opportunity letter writing has always afforded to those seeing letters as weaponry—slim, sharp instruments of revenge, and even sadism.

  Gingerly, and gloved, it’s time to open some of those.

  CHAPTER FOUR Complaint

  FUCK YOU. STRONG LETTER TO FOLLOW.

  Legendary telegram, Anonymous

  WHEN THINGS AT HOME got to be just too much for Sister—when she could no longer bear all the fussing of Stella-Rondo and Mama and Shirley-T. and Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo—she remembered her “position as postmistress of China Grove, Mississippi” and went off to live at the P.O.* It might be “the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi,” but as Eudora Welty’s heroine saw things, that was just the point:

  it’s ideal, as I’ve been saying. You see, I’ve got everything cater-cornered, the way I like it. Hear the radio? All the war news. Radio, sewing machine, book ends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp—peace, that’s what I like. Butter-bean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.

  Of course, there’s not much mail.

  A blessing, for Sister’s sake, since so much of what goes in and out of any post office is filled with the kind of complaint she could find at home.

  Sister left her family “on the Fourth of July, or the day after,” her own declaration of independence, the original of which was authored by a man so contentious that the envelopes he sealed could scarcely contain the din he sometimes dispatched inside them. Thomas Jefferson was a man who could quarrel about anything, the mails included: in an essay he wrote two years before the Declaration, Jefferson asserted that the establishment of a post office in America “seems to have had little connection with British convenience, except that of accommodating his Majesty’s ministers and favorites with the sale of a lucrative and easy office.”

  Diaries have proved unsuitable to all but a handful of American presidents. A readership waiting somewhere in posterity feels too distant, too abstract and unpollable to interest the political animal who would be writing for it. Letters, by contrast, with their actual and immediate audience, offer presidents a kind of flesh to be pressed, recipients who can be wheedled, ordered about, asked for approval, burdened with confidences. Against all this, the diary’s effortless candor is a bore.

  Between 1801 and 1809, the man who made the “pursuit of happiness” a political entitlement appears almost constantly miserable in his personal correspondence. Having wrested the government from the Federalists (“the enemies hands”), President Thomas Jefferson feels himself to be “the personal object for the hatred of every man.” By 1806, the “Hydra” of the opposing party may be down to two heads (Connecticut and Delaware), but some of its members remain candidates “for a mad-house.” Along with the Federalists, two budding perennials of presidential grievance—the press and leaks—provoke fits of allergic sneezing from Jefferson. With newspapers constantly displaying their “abandoned prostitution to falsehood,” his letter to John Norvell, who wants advice about starting one, must go out with a warning “that this hasty communication may in nowise be permitted to find its way into the public papers.”

  The archivist who superintends Jefferson’s letters in the Library of Congress that he helped to establish will point out to a visitor that our third president saved his own political venom for private correspondence, keeping it out of his above-the-battle public speeches. In fact, the first thing a present-day reader notices in the letters is a contempt for the presidency itself: “I am tired of an office where I can do no more good than many others, who would be glad to be employed in it. To myself, personally, it brings nothing but unceasing drudgery & daily loss of friends.” Even the Fourth of July is “always a day of great fatigue”—something he might have thought about before writing his most famous piece.

  Forced to maintain neutrality of the seas, he would prefer cultivating his own Virginia lands. He swears that the affairs of Monticello interest him more than the presidency’s, and brief trips back to Virginia only make Washington, D.C. “more intolerable” than before. The barely built capital, a burgeoning antithesis of the agrarian society Jefferson has ideally realized at home, is still literally a swamp, full of fever but lacking in ladies and other diversions. Politics is “our only entertainment here,” and after five years, the president’s “confinement” grows still more “disgusting” by the day. He’d rather be “the hermit of Monticello”—but what choice do “the unlimited calumnies of the federalists” leave him, other than to run
for a second term?

  Until he can return to them, Jefferson runs the affairs of his family like a government in exile. Over his private realm the founding father is uninhibited by any checks or balances or Tories. When he wants his married daughters to visit Washington, the wishes of their husbands, always “Mr. Randolph” and “Mr. Eppes,” are decidedly secondary. Mary Jefferson Eppes, who likes a bit of flattery as much as her father, may protest that she has become too countrified to be comfortable receiving “the civilitys and attentions which as your daughter I should meet with and return,” but Jefferson refuses her any left-handed compliments. He replies with some diagnostic advice: “I think I discover in you a willingness to withdraw from society more than is prudent. I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes.” There will be no hermiting for her.

  The dominant image of Jefferson in the modern citizen’s mind is the president as an American da Vinci. This picture of his polymathy was drawn by John F. Kennedy, who famously remarked that a dinner for Nobel Prize winners was “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” And yet, whatever brilliance may lie in Jefferson’s letters, the citizen reading them today is disinclined to approach the man’s table and pull up a chair.

  The president’s grandchildren are a whole little colony ripe for rule. He writes to three of Martha Jefferson Randolph’s offspring: “the more I perceive that you are all advancing in your learning and improving in good dispositions the more I shall love you, and the more every body will love you.” He expects results, and his daughters know it. The following year Martha assures Jefferson that young Ellen is reading during “every lucid interval” of a fever.