President’s responses to letters recounted
On Christmas Eve in 2014, Ashley DeLeon attempted to restrain her father, Rosendo DeLeon, while he shot up their family home.
“He just kept shooting and kept shooting.”
A decorated Marine veteran who had served 22 years before retiring as a master sergeant, Ashley’s father suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. After he was admitted to the hospital, on Christmas Day, Ashley wrote a 2 - page letter to President Barack Obama.
“I didn’t care if I died Mr. President. I’m 21 years old, and I would sacrifice myself without a second thought to save the man who raised me from taking his own life.”
When she received a handwritten response a few weeks later from the president himself, she was shocked: “Please know that beneath the pain, your father still loves his daughter, and is surely proud of her.”
Who writes letters to the president of the United States, and what happens to these letters after they’re sent?
In her latest book, “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope,” Jeanne Marie Laskas — the author of eight books, including “Concussion” — follows the path of constituent letters to the White House and what happens after.
The book offers a little about how previous administrations handled constituent mail. George Washington replied to the five or so letters he received every day. William McKinley spearheaded the creation of the Office of Presidential Correspondence to manage the hundreds he received every week. Bill Clinton read a stack every few weeks. George W. Bush seemed more • “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope” (Random House, 416 pages, $28) by Jeanne Marie Laskas
interested in reading the replies the correspondence office sent on his behalf than the letters themselves.
When Obama moved into the White House in January 2009, he instituted a formal policy to read 10 letters a day — “10LADs,” as they became known.
The 10LADs came from the unemployed (“My generation was always told that if we worked hard and did well in school and stayed out of trouble, we’d have secure futures. We were lied to, or at the very least, misled”); the undocumented (“I feel like you voted for me with DACA and all your efforts with the DREAM act. Thank you”); and those pleading for marriage equality (“I kept telling myself that I ‘knew’ you supported us, even if it didn’t make political sense for you to say so”).
In the mail room of the correspondence office, an operation that ran as seamlessly as a ballet, 50 staff members, 26 interns and hundreds of volunteers categorized and curated the 10,000 letters they received daily. The 10LADs sent to the president reflected the joys, fears and struggles of Americans. Every night, Obama took them to the residence wing, where he either penned replies on White House notecards or gave them to the writing team to respond.
“To Obama” is an insightful study of a president who listened to even his harshest critics with grace and humility.
“I know things are tough out there right now,” Obama replied to an unemployed letter-writer, “and I won’t try to pretend that I’ve got a guaranteed solution to your immediate situation.”
This is a story, too, about the keen judgment of the staff who appreciated the intimacy and the power of the written word and who knew their president well enough to recognize what he not only wanted to read but also needed to read.
Curiously absent from the book are letters the correspondence office must have received from birthers, tea partyers and other pre-MAGA prototypes questioning Obama’s U.S. citizenship and misidentifying his religion — possibly bigoted missives capturing the racial hatred and resentment many harbored for the black president in the Oval Office. (Letters containing direct threats to the president and his family were delivered to a specific full-time staff member for assessment.)
The correspondence office might have refused to share such letters with Laskas, or perhaps the letters’ writers refused to grant permission to print them. Regardless, their inclusion would have provided insight into that particular constituency.
If there is a singular lesson about the White House letters during the Obama administration, though, it is that for eight years the distance from a constituent’s abode to the Oval Office was short and that the president who signed his name with a rotund “B” and a generous “O” approached correspondence from the people with tenderness, awe and respect.