Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?: Letters of Love and Lust From the White House

by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler (Simon & Schuster, $29)

Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler’s “charming” new collection of love letters “answers the question ‘What does a president in love sound like?’ with a refreshing ‘Just as dopey as anybody else,’” said W.M. Akers in The New York Times. “In addition to having perhaps the year’s best title—drawn from a letter of Woodrow Wilson’s—Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making? contains what may be the year’s best sentence: ‘If it’s sex you’re looking for, Warren G. Harding will meet your expectations.’” But the many revelations that the husband-and-wife co-authors provide extend beyond occasional lustiness to matters of war, diplomacy, and, thanks to FDR, personal concern about the high cost of eggs. Beyond that, focusing on these presidents’ communications provides a helpful reminder that “historical figures are also human beings: petty, sappy, and flawed.”

The Hooblers have uncovered “a trove of eyebrow-raising correspondence,” said Daniella Byck in the Washingtonian. In a 1758 letter to another man’s wife, George Washington proclaimed himself “a votary to Love.” Bachelor President James Buchanan confessed that he could imagine one day marrying a woman, provided that she “not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.” Harding had the misfortune of pouring out lascivious notes to a mistress who not only saved them but tried to use them for blackmail. George H.W. Bush had the misfortune, at 64, of signing one note to his wife as “Your sweetie-pie coo-coo.”

“It is striking how unguarded many of these men were, as if they forgot that history might come poking through their papers,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. “History did come poking, of course, and the result is a fuller picture of how these men felt and thought.” It turns out that Harry Truman was as winningly self-deprecating in private as on the public stage and the ruthless Richard Nixon we remember was once a vulnerable young suitor. “To read about one president after another, one letter at a time, gives a poignant sense of how brief is the flaring of an individual’s love and ambition when set against the sweep of generations.”