Yours Ever (17 page)

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.

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:

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.

Whenever anyone in the family falls ill, Jefferson recommends scientific knowledge, so despised by the Tories’ clerical allies, as the proper source of hope. He influences all his progeny toward a graphic frankness about the medical occurrences that are so much a part of their letters. Ellen must be consoled by the immunity-producing benefits of her whooping cough (“You will learn to bear it patiently when you consider you can never have it again”), and at eleven years old she is neither too young nor too ladylike to profit from a clinical description, complete with suppuration, of presidential toothache. Writing of measles to his daughters, or kidney stones to a brother, Jefferson makes concrete knowledge not just the antidote to fear but the instrument of his own power over events. He relishes letters as physical conveyances, kissing the paper he sends his granddaughter and, during a smallpox outbreak, enclosing a “scab of vaccine which I have this moment received from Dr. Worthington.” He concerns himself with the speed of his letters’ delivery and the implements with which they get written, even helping to develop the “polygraph,” a mechanical hand for producing ink copies. In the Library of Congress one can still distinguish its work from Jefferson’s originals by the more uniform pressure of the “off pen.”

When his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph goes to Philadelphia to study medicine, the president offers, along with advice on
how to take lecture notes, some admonitions concerning general deportment and the boy’s particular position. He lets loose a warning in biblical imagery that’s been improved by his own scientific diction: “You will be more exposed than others to have these animals shaking their horns at you, because of the relation in which you stand with me and to hate me as a chief in the antagonist party your presence will be to them what the vomit-grass is to the sick dog a nostrum for producing an ejaculation.” A week later, young Thomas thanks him for the advice and postscripts his own warning: “The cover of the letter you inclosed from Mother bore evident marks of having been broken open as likewise several others.” Whether enemies and curiosity seekers had tampered with Jefferson’s letters—or the president himself had rifled a family communication he was only supposed to be forwarding—remains unclear.

To this grandson, Jefferson recommends a writing style that’s “all pith,” but this doesn’t keep many of his own letters from expanding into loose, ruminative essays on everything from the proper layout of cities to the nature of religion. On political questions, he variously offers a tidy version of manifest destiny (“advancing compactly as we multiply”); thoughts on the possibility of two American confederations, one Atlantic and the other on the Mississippi; musings on African colonization (“Could we procure lands beyond the limits of the US to form a receptacle for these people?”); and a chilling vision of the American Indians’ future. He closes his letter on the last subject with a request that the recipient, Governor (and later President) William Henry Harrison, keep it under his cocked hat: “For their interests and their tranquillity it is best [the Indians] should see only the present age of their history.”

Much of what he writes in these productions has the hypothetical sweep of present-day “future studies.” These essay-letters, which lack the specific marching orders in his family correspondence, offer Jefferson the chance to display a different sort of mastery: the intellectual control that comes with not having to see an idea’s executions and consequences. A century and a half after the president’s death, another patrician Democrat, Dean Acheson, would judge him greatly gifted, but “as much interested in words as
in the reality behind them. The more solid, less glittering qualities of General Washington are what it took to get the country started.” Acheson’s thoughts were conveyed in a letter to Richard Nixon, a former foe who had gone to the White House and was at the time, 1971, beginning to exhibit, in letters and other media, a distinctly Jeffersonian preoccupation with his enemies.

THE BULK OF
Richard Nixon’s presidential papers, more or less seized by Congress in 1974, have spent their quarantine inside the National Archives’ glassy annex in College Park, Maryland. Even a brief perusal of them makes clear the inseparability of Nixon’s personal and official lives.

During World War II, when he was newly married and stationed in the South Pacific, Nixon’s letters to his wife Pat had revealed both deep affection and status-conscious insecurity: “You’ll never know how proud I was to show [your picture] to all the fellows. Everybody raved—wondered how I happened to rate! (I do too.)” Thirty years later, having so long clawed after the presidency, losing and winning it by a hairsbreadth, he has
earned
it in a way he can never quite make others see. His time in office becomes to some extent
about
his having become president, a dangerously self-referential operation whose most important and personal letters are internal memoranda. He can now deploy his own initials in a message to Pat about office equipment for the White House residence: “with regard to RN’s room, what would be most desirable is an end table like the one on the right side of the bed which will accommodate
two
dictaphones as well as a telephone.”

His memoranda to desks in the West Wing call frequent attention to “the RN come-back theme” that has brought him to the White House. Even when dispatching some re-election campaign advice to his daughters (members of what he elsewhere calls “the RN family”), he urges them to talk about “the comeback after the defeat in California.” The definite articles give a feeling of obsessive rehash. But, unlike Jefferson, Nixon doesn’t do his real complaining to his daughters. He saves that for his voluminous memos
to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman—naked, repetitive displays of self-assertion, authentic cris de coeur, selected by Bruce Oudes for a volume called
From: The President
. On a Sunday in May of 1971, the president tells Haldeman why he’ll never attend another dinner of that “disgusting group,” the White House Correspondents’ Association, some of whose members were that year being honored for anti-administration stories. “I had to sit there for 20 minutes while the drunken audience laughed in derision as the award citations were read … What I want everybody to realize is that as we approach the election we are in a fight to the death for the big prize.” The third paragraph of the memo’s several pages begins “I’m not a bit thin-skinned,” but it is Nixon’s lack of any skin at all, his agonized translucence, that makes these communications so raw and weirdly moving. Nixon is always talking to Nixon; as soon as the memos are written, they’ve already been delivered.