if we left you here to die. kidneys like that. why you all all. remember these things? well, coal can maim worse than roger bravely. go keep on pitching and breaking the ice hardy. i will. but right now i like you all you hotties to meet someone who also belongs in this picture. someone who can do a little pitching and preaching of his own. yes, i belong this picture. i'm heading and i've been through. you've seen only. i didn't know what to do. with.

so now without further adieu tonight, i am very excited to welcome dorothy and thomas, who were celebrating the release of are you prepared for the storm of lovemaking, letters of love and lust from the white house? our presidents loom so large in

history that we often forget they're human. are you prepared for the storm of lovemaking as a collection of handwritten love letters that offers a surprising and intimate portrait of the men who occupied the white house? from george washington to barack obama. these are not the presidents we see in the history books. instead, when they courted the women they wanted to marry or seduce women outside of their marriage. they often showed a side the public did not see. playful, passionate, tender. consumed by desire. dorothy and thomas hoover. hubler have written many award winning books for adults and young adults. the young adult mysteries set in medieval japan won an edgar award from the mystery writers of america, their ten book series on american ethnic groups published by oxford university press, received many favorable reviews from such publications as the new york times and the miami herald. the hoopla is other books for adults include the monsters, which tells the story of mary shelley and the four people who helped inspired her classic novel, frankenstein and the crimes of paris, a collection of famous french crimes that was

excerpted in vanity fair. dorothy has a master's degree in american history from the from nyu. and tom received his master's in education from xavier university. our authors tonight will be in conversation with mindy farmer farmer joined the national portrait gallery as a historian in 2022, as a member of the history department, she conducts research. propose proposals, exhibitions and writes biographies to accompany the portraits in the museum's collections. farmer is also responsible for developing programing for portal, the portrait gallery scholar center scholarly center, excuse me and prior to arriving to the museum, farmer worked at kent state university, where she served as an assistant professor of history and a director of the may four visitor center before that, farmer worked for the national archives and records administration as the founding education specialist and the richard nixon presidential library museum. please join me in welcoming to politics and prose dorothy and thomas hubler and mindy farmer.

so thank you all for being here. this is a night where we are all thinking about relationships. it's a topic of both conversation and in some cases, consternation. i don't know if your life is off. yes, it is. it is. yes. it's okay. yeah. you know, worries. i know you can hear me a little better. so thank you all for being here. i want to say things to the audience. thanks to c-span booktv for being here and thanks here to politics and prose. this is a really beautiful space, especially of discussions like these, and i hope we have many more fruitful conversations here. now, as i mentioned, there will be some time for q&a at the end, so please be prepared to indulge your curiosity. so think about your questions as we go through to get a started. i have a few questions i want to ask and we'll start with the title. i think it's safe to say that it

is a tension grabbing. what is the story behind the quote? are you prepared for a storm of lovemaking? okay. well, it comes from a letter from woodrow wilson who, contrary to his oh, sorry to contrary to his looks, like sort of a presbyterian minister, was really a very, very sexual being. and this was a letter that he wrote to his first wife. he had to lives with his first wife almost ten years after they'd been married. okay. i will. i'll read i'll read the letter now or sorry. it's coming out. oh, okay. so it says when you get back, y'll smother me, will you? my sweet little lover? and what will i be doing all the ile simply submitting to be smothered? do you think you can stand the innumerable kisses and the passionate embraces y will receive? are you prepared for the storm of lovemaking wi which you will be assaed? do you know by shakespeare eons

tohat lengths and extravagances of donstrative ness on your part hurries your intemperate lover. and are you prepar to take the risks? ohsweetheart, sweetheart, my precious, precious darling, what a terrible longing brings into my heart. how it makes all my pulses start while my heart itself seems to stand stillhen i think of having you in my arms again of being in your arms again touching your lips, aring you say y love me i'm sorry that the seeing the burning light in your eyes as we are strained close to each others embrace. if i were to all myself to think of it much, i simply could not stay here. your own withdraw now, he wrote. really? hundreds. there's there's thousands of pages of this letters that go on and on and on and, you know, you wonder how he got anything done because he really was constantly writing this kind of thing. and even during national

emergencies. so anyway, that was that was that was the first the first one. the answer to your question. there are many there are others in here that show the same thing for a second life. who would have thought woodrow wilson would be so spicy? yeah. so what is another letter that you read that when you were researching that you came across that genuinely surprised you? well, i think of the letters that surprised me most at first was the letter from richard nixon, because richard nixon's letters to pat are really poetic and very deeply touching. on his first date, he proposed to her. he said he fell in love with her. at first sight and you can see this is the letter he wrote afterwards. they met. they were they met in a amateur, dramatic present tation. they were both in a play together. okay. he wrote to her, and this is sometime in 1938.

and he was then a 25 year old lawyer. patricia, somehow on tuesday, there was something electric in the usually almost stifling air in whittier, california. that is. and now i know an irish gypsy who radiates all that is happy and beautiful. was there. she left behind her a note addressed to a struggling barrister who looks from a window and dreams. and in that note he found sunshine and flowers and a great spirit which only great ladies can inspire. he knew then why he felt so many fine things for this girl. he had learned to know and though he is a prosaic person, his heart was filled with that grandpa poetic music which makes us wish for those we love the realization of great dreams, of fulfillment, fulfill minix you say of all they desire. and though he knew he should not bore her with these thoughts, he sent them to her. because, you see, they were good thoughts wished for for her that

she might be forever happy --. and then somehow let me see you again in september. or maybe i thought that was particularly charming and that was it for the most. that was the most that was most secure. thanks. yes, but that was the most, i thought, just startling very different than you tend to think of. nixon. did you ever think you would admire richard nixon's love letters? no. that was why i found it very interesting, because sometimes it's the opposite of what you what you think. i'm sorry, i someone like jfk. who had wonderful speeches politically, had very little to say. i'm sorry. romantic glee. the only thing that he ever wrote to jacqueline before they were married was a postcard, which said, just simply wish you were here, jack. so that was that was that okay? yeah. we often don't think about nixon

in romance, but i think this is a really lovely picture up there. two of them in the east room of the white house. yes, that was that was at a wedding of of of. oh, i'm sorry. i always forget. i'm sorry. that was tricia's wedding, i believe. yeah. yeah. thank you for that. i also since this is valentine's day and since the president's, like all of us, experienced heartache, let's talk about him for a minute about one of the saddest stories in your book on this day in 1884, theodore roosevelt experienced the darkest day of his life. can you talk about this tragic anniversary and how it shaped the future president. actually, a lot of interesting things happened to theodore roosevelt on valentine's day. one of them was that he met

alice hathaway lee. she was the next door neighbor of a classmate of theodore's, richard saltonstall. and he began to call her sunshine. and because she seemed particularly cheerful. so he said, as long as i live, he wrote, later, i shall never forget h setly she looked. he proposed the following year, but alice waited eight months before saying yes. now. so i have two letters from him. e're not long. first one in 1880, august 15th, 1880. darling queenie, little sunshine. that's what he's calling her. i have been missing you more than i can tell. i perfectly long toolyou in myrmand kiss your sweet, bright face. you are never absent from my thghts now the other events of

valentine's day were not so happy. a little more than three years after their marriage, alice gave birth to a daughter. two days later, alice died at the age of 22. theodore, his mother, died the same day, and ironically it was valentine's day. roosevelt was grief stricken, grief stricken and seldom spoke about his wife afterward, not even to their daughter, who had also been named alice in a tribute to his wife. he later wrote, when my heart's dearest died, the light from my life went. the light went from my life forever. afterward, he never let anyone call him by the nickname thi that's thc, which he'd used when writing to alice. so his is first. marriage was short and he really resolved at the time not to

marry again. but met our man. and within a year or so he had his second wife. but more about her later on. what's in the next one? oh, i was just going to add probably the saddest story in the book is of jean pierce, franklin pierce's wife, she had lost two two sons before. they were five years old. and she was already kind of hysterical about her remaining son, benji. and it turned out that she was very, very on interested in politics. and was she actually prayed that her husband would not win the presidency? he did win. and they were coming home from a funeral for her uncle and they were in a train wreck. and her son benji was killed. she saw it and it was, you know, a ghastly, ghastly accident. she never recovered. she did not go to the

inauguration. and her husband did mention it at the inauguration that that he was a sense of tragedy. he did not he did not swear he was the only president that affirmed and said of war. and there was no bible. there's no bible for it. but she her story really was tragic. she spent most of her time in the white house writing letters to her dead son, which she continued doing until she finally died in 1863. it was really a tragic, tragic story when we found out that those letters that she was writing to her dead son were still available. we we included one in the book, even though it was the opposite of our initial determination to have president letters to their beloveds. and we touching. yeah. oh, no, it is. i mean, and we also figured people would want to see that because it was so tragic and so tied to it.

i've just read the book. sure. right. oh, sorry. it's hard to know. okay. that was my my, my precious child. i must write to you. although you're never to see it or know it. how well, how i long to see you and say something to you as if you were as you always have been. or my precious do these days. now see, my darling boy, and how i should have prized the days passed with you had i suspected they might be so short. but it goes on and on and she's that's what she spent her time doing, essentially. she was devoted and that she kept she kept these letters and mementos of all her chil dead children with her for the rest of her life when she traveled wherever she went, she took them with no and anyway, i just thought it was worth at adding that because that was i thought, the saddest thing. sorry. so we're going to write about.

religion. yeah, that is true. yes, yes. yeah. well, those were it's you can't talk about love without a little heartache and definitely a number of our presidents were shaped by grief. and i think it's important to talk about that in both of those cases. it really changed the course of their life. and we don't know exactly how it changed the presidency, but certainly have an impact and i don't know if you all know. but alice roosevelt has an amazing story. the joke is that roosevelt let her papa there, let her do whatever she wanted, even including having snakes in the white house. so she's the only daughter to have owned a pet snake in the white house. a little bit of trivia for you. and i think there's probably a great children's book. it's probably here that goes into detail about her story because it's really amazing to move to the next question there are other words of angst in the book. it took some time for harry.

it's truman and first lady. best to come to terms with the demands of the presidency. what did you learn from their letters? okay. well, a harry truman was devoted to bess truman from the time he was five years old and saw her in sunday school. he never loved anybody else. he was he, in fact, propose to her many, many times before she finally accepted. and he was devoted to her really his whole life. and he wrote her letters on virtually everything in the white house. politics is all life it was. he was just completely emotionally open to her. but there was one exception where he when he became when he became president, of course, he was covered. all of a sudden, he had all of these incredible problems after fdr died of what he was going to do. and he was not accepting. he wasn't really all that prepared. you hadn't been, in fact, given

that much information about some of the c of the agreements that roosevelt had made. but he when he and at christmas time of 1945, when he came home, it took a but it was a big snowstorm. he was late and bess was just upset about it and wasn't, i guess, very nice about it. he wrote this letter, which he was smart enough not to actually send, but his daughter margaret found years later. i might also add that when when bess found out that that fdr had died, she cried because she knew she would lose her privacy, because she always, even when he was a senator, she lived off and lived in independence in missouri because she preferred living in her own home and even when he was president much of the time was spent at her church, her home. but this was a letter that he wrote to her and did not send. okay, i'm going to try. and i.

okay, you this was december 28th, 1945. you can never appreciate what it means to come home as i did the other evening after doing at least 100 things i didn't want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion i value look at me like i'm something that cat dragged in and tell me i've come in at last. this head of mind should have been bigger and better proportions. there ought to have been more brain and a larger bumper ego that or something to give me an idea that there can be a number one man in the world. i didn't want to be. but in spite of opinions of the contrary, life and times say i am. if that is the case, you marhguy his daughter margaret, and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions must give me help and assurance. because no one ever needed help and assurance, as i do now. if i can get the use of the best brains in the country and a

little bit of help i have on the have i, i have on a pedestal at home. the job will be done. kiss my baby and have you in season and out. harry. okay, this letter, of course, was never send. but she best didn't outlive her, harry. by many years. and she kept the letters which she read regularly each day. she read some letters of his and so the was was a love affair. but when he talked about what they had, the good things that had happened to them from the time of their that was that was a letter. that was a letter. yeah. okay. just, you know, as you probably gather by now. yeah, i think it's time for you probably gathered by mindi introduced. no, no, no. i got one more thing about bess truman, as you gathered by now, we do have little anecdotes and things to liven up. and sometimes to explain the

letters. and one of my favorites was margaret truman, the daughter told about harry, her father coming in to their living room one day to find bess, throwing letters that he had sent them into the fire and he said, that's think of history. and she looked at him and said, i am. so i harry was very outspoken, as anybody who knows about him. so we can surmise only that he she was burning the letters that made her look, made, made her made him look a little more obstreperous than he actually was anyway, go ahead. i'm sorry to interrupt you. that's oh, that's a great anecdote. and i think one of the questions you can ask yourself as you read this book is, should they have burned that?

so we'll move on and we're glad they did. and i'm an historian, so please know that i'm on team don't burn. so you write that of the volumes of books about abraham lincoln, a few have fully investigated his relationships. how might that change our understanding of him as a person and a president? lincoln was a strange person. i think everybody who knows anything about him agrees on that. and there was there's nothing stranger, really, than his attitude toward women. i don't know whether i should tell all the stories, but i probably not. i think, you know, by the book and read them all, but. at one point when he was younger, a friend of his, a woman who was married, said that she was going to bring her daughter, her sister, into springfield, where they they both lived. and she wondered whether abraham

would like to to marry her. and abraham said, sure, sort of like it off the cuff. so we know what happened in a way from a letter he wrote to yet another woman in which he said, when the sister showed up, he said she she turned out to look a little bit like falstaff. he was not. so he thought she was going to be better looking or a little more to his liking. so but he said a bargain was a bargain and he prepared a proposal to her. and he as he told the other woman in the letter, he wrote to the second woman, she said no. so he was surprised this and he thought maybe it's just that she felt felt she had to do that for the sake of propriety.

but no, the more he asked, the the more she was convinced that she didn't want to marry him. so he said so i was lucky and got out of that. now that would be that would be one part of the story, because lincoln was a great storyteller and there's also exists two letters that he wrote to this woman that he was supposed to supposedly supposed to marry and that promise to marry. and what those those two letters contained are descriptions of springfield, the town that would make her make almost anybody afraid that they wouldn't want to come there to live. so he said, is is plot worked and he when he did propose, she turned him down. so there's two two ways of looking at that. there's the story he told of the first woman and the story that

we know that he told the woman he was supposed to marry because she saved that letter. incidentally, it was a happy ending for her because she later married and had four children. but not that a now the what was the other. oh yeah, the other part of this. mary todd, was a real catch. the woman he eventually married, she her her father was a wealthy man. she was regarded as quite beautiful. and she was also a very sort of talkative and whatnot. there are all sorts of reasons why you would want to marry her and as a matter of fact, you heard of the lincoln-douglas debates. douglass, the man he debated was another up and coming politician, and he proposed to

mary todd, but she turned him down at any rate, lincoln was then she accepted lincoln as a proposal, and they would do to get married when on the on the day of the marriage, he didn't show up. so he he had turned her down. he later told his law partner, from whom we get this story and some of the stories, the law partner tell about lincoln are a little bit in question. but he told the law partner that he had been to see a prostitute. he lincoln had been to see a prostitute, too. and he was afraid he had caught syphilis from the prostitute and he didn't want to marry mary todd and give her the disease. well, so a couple of years went by and then lincoln said he had decided that he wasn't going to give her the disease at all. he'd been taking something that

was some kind of medicine that they gave people to cure them of syphilis, doctors today kind of pooh pooh the idea that he could cure himself of syphilis and that consequently, since he didn't seem to have spread it to anyone, he probably never had it at all. so anyway, he proposed the second time to her and whether or not she really loved him is evident from the fact that she accepted. so the day of the second marriage came and one of mary todd's close friends came to quote, help lincoln get dressed. in other words, to make sure he showed up this time. and she brought along to her two children, a girl named salome, and a boy whose name was speed. this was later all written down by the by the woman whose children these were and speed

who was about six saw lincoln getting all dressed up and he says, where are you going, mr. lincoln? and lincoln thought about it for a minute and he said, to hell, i suppose. so. anyway. but they, he he showed up for this wedding. they got married and by all accounts, he was a good father to their children, but he wasn't necessarily a good husband to her. is that all right? yeah, i know. so everybody wants to hear a harding letter, so. oh, yeah. now, the harding. harding is the most notorious president we have in the book and probably ever. he not only was a tremendously well his is strayea lot from his wife the she was older than he was and she she ran the he originally was a newspaper editor and owner oa newspaper

in marion, ohio. and when he was sick, she took over the newspaper and managed to make it more much more profitable than it was. she initiated the idea there of having newsboys deliver the newspaper. one of the newsboys was oh, it was the what's his name? that was the the socialist cover back norman thomas. norman thomas. so he delivered newspapers for the hardings newspaper, the marion star. now, he also had many mistresses and some of them obeyed his caution that when he wrote them letters, they were supposed to destroy them all. but one of them did. a woman named keri phillips, and she saved the letters. and later, as indeed when he wa running for president, she

blackmailed him with the knowledge of her husband, who who knew all along what had been going on between harding and so another safeguard he had was to make a coal card that he sent her. that's a couple of pages long. but they were the code was to do, for example, the most notorious example was he called his --. jerry in the letters. so after he died, the, the whole story of the letters is rather long and checkered. but it wound up in the hands of the library of congress. and they finally got permission to publish the letters a few years ago. and those are ones that we some of the some of the ones we don't we don't give them all. and we don't have by any means the complete code.

i just said just that he was another one who went on for pages and pages of this. i mean sort of semi pornographic details of, of his adventures with the person with with or carry. i decided we would quote from a poem that he wrote another poem, poetry writing president. i don't know whether it's something that goes with the office or not. let's see what page was this? do 90. am i in there? it's there. it's. oh, it's. it's on page. 2 to 52. 50, 51 to 51. it's a pretty good poem. i mean, it's his three though. there's some obscene poetry goes. i love i love your poise of perfect thighs when they hold me in paradise eyes.

i love the rose your garden grows love seashell pink that over it glows i love to see your breath away i love to cling there long to say i love you garbed but naked more love your beauty to thus adore i love you when you open eyes and mouth and arms and cradling thighs if i had you today i'd kiss and fondle you into my arms and hold you there until you said or an o or an in a benediction of blissful joy. could i say one thing about bout about another one of the. oh, sorry about the most famous of of of his about what was known before, at least when i was in college, was the nan britton story because she wrote a book about having sex with him when he was a senator in the closets of the senate office building and and she claimed that she had a child by him.

and the forsey harding family said it wasn't true for four years, but it turned out that a dna test on the grandchild showed that, yes, warren was both a daddy of the child. she had been a fan of his ever since she was in high school, and he was a senator and she had a campaign poster for him in her room and her yearbook book has a lot of interesting details as well about their their love life. what else are we? oh, you're going to read your favorite. your favorite? oh, my favorite letter. yeah. how can i forget my favorite letter in the book. where? where are we here? who knew? you're going to get so much juicy presidential gossip. if. is from general grant or was president grant at the time this letter was written, i got the right one.

it's under adversity and it should be on page. yes, here it is. it's on page 202, two, oh two. right. grant had been elected president twice. his party urged him to run again because they knew he was so popular in the country that he couldn't be defeated. as a matter of fact, just as a sidebar, when we were looking for letters by grant, we found a large quantity of them in the university of mississippi library. you wouldn't think that mississippi would be that interested in the man who really won the civil war. but there it was. okay, this is june 29th, 1885. my dear wife, there are some matters about which i would like to talk, but about which i cannot. the subject would be painful to you and the children, and by

reflex, painful to me also when i see you and them depressed, i join in the feeling i have known for a long time that my end was approaching with certainty how far away i would not venture to guess. i had an idea, however, that i would live until fall or the early part of winter. i see now, however, that the time is approaching much more rapidly. i am concerned only losing flesh and strength. the difficulty of swallowing is increasing daily. the tendency to spasms is constant from three or four in the afternoon and relieved by morphine. i find it difficult to get breath enough to sustain me under these circumstances. the end is not far off. he actually had throat cancer. we are comparative strangers in new york city. that is, we have made it our home late in life. we have rarely had ever had serious sickness in the family. therefore, we have not made any preparations for a place of burial. this matter will necessarily

come up at my death and may cause you some embarrassment. i should myself select west point above all other places, but for the fact that in case west point should be selected, you would when the time comes, i hope far in the future be excluded from the same grounds women weren't allowed to be buried there. i therefore leave you free to select what you think the most appropriate place for depositing my earth earthly remains. look after our dear children and direct them in the paths of rectitude. it would distress me far more to think of one of them could depart from our firm an honorable, upright and virtuous life. then i would to know that they were prostrated on, a bed of sickness from which were never to arise alive. they have never given us any cause of alarm in their account. i earnestly pray they never will with these few injunctions and the knowledge i have of your love and affection and the

dutiful affection of all of our children, i bet you a final farewell or until we meet in another. and i trust a better world. us grant this way will be found in my coat after my demise and i have to turn the page because sometimes some 24 days later, after writing that letter, grant died within hours after hearing of his death, the mayor of new york city offered to build a suitable tomb for grant and his wife land was found in riverside park and julia joined her husband there after her death in 1902. some of the was it you told me that it's the largest mausoleum in the united states. yes. yeah. and visitors, obviously go there all the time just to see the. but what's their anyway? what have we got now? i was just just going to break it off, but i just wanted to do two very, very quick, quick

ones. yeah. starting with the first president we have george washington and the last one we have barack obama. the first one is george washington, writing to a woman that he'd had a crush on when he was a young man who lived in the neighboring who was married to a friend of his, who lived in a neighboring plantation, although he was certainly affectionate and cared. martha, it was never that kind of love match. but in the year before he died, after he left the presidency, he wrote to her. she had she and her husband had been loyalists and they'd gone to england to live and never came back. so this was 40 years later and he wrote her this this letter i'm sorry. it's hard for mto do, but five an20my dear madam, five and 20 years have nearly passed away since i've considered myself as a permanent residt this

place, or have been in a situation to indulge myself in a familiar intercourse with my friends by letter or otherwise during this period. so many important events have occurred and such changes in men and things have taken place as the corpus of a letter would give you but an inadequate idea, none of which events, however, nor all of them together, have been able to eradicate. from my mind the recollection of those happy moments happiest in my life, which i've enjoyed in your company. this was all under line, and the original letter worn out in a manner by the toils of my past labor. i'm again under my vine and fig tree, and it's a matter of sore regret when i cast my eyes towards belvoir. that was the name of the estate, which i often do to reflect the former inhabitants of it, with whom we lived in such harmony and friendship no longer reside there, and that the ruins can only be viewed as a memento of former pleasures. and then this is from the latest

president that we have in the book, barack obama, the only the only handwritten message we have of we found of the 44th president was a letter that he sent on january 17, 2017, to his wives for the 53rd birthday of michelle when they were courting. she said she was a telephone person and was it was not fast enough to get letters and he became a telephone person as well. okay this was and this was very short note. you're not only my wife and the mother of my children, you're in my best friend. i love your strength, your grace, and your determination and i love you more each day. happy birthday. two years later, barack obama had discovered twitter. he was the first president to do so on his wife's 55th birthday, he posted a picture of himself as a young man with michelle, and he recorded he tweeted this

message. i knew it way back then and i'm convinced of it today. you're one of a kind at michelle obama. happy birthday. so anyway, comments or questions? yeah. let's turn the audience. please do wait for the microphone. but if you have questions, we would love to hear them. you had questions before? yes. the lady in the green shirt. yeah. yes. i'm sorry. oh, thank you. yeah, i had just been interested to know how you obtained these letters. how did you get to them to be able to incorporate them book. well, go ahead. it took quite a while. but, you know, the presidential library and of course, we live in new york city. they have lots of the columbia library, the new york city library, and doing a lot of phone work and a little bit of travel. we we managed we managed to do it. it was fun to do it. certainly interesting to read letters and to try and find

things particularly personal things, because i think it is interesting to look at the personal side of people as well. some people are the same or not or have very there seemed pretty much the same as presidents. i mean, for example, lyndon johnson was pretty much a bossy man, as you know, as you people will remember, lyndon johnson, he was pretty much like that with his wife, too, after he got her to marry him, you know, but the beginning, he was very, you know, very, very kind. but once he got his way, you know, she had to do certain things for him, made it very clear who was the boss. so he was sort of the same, but then some people were quite different. it was interesting. it's always interesting, anyway, to read people's personal letters. who doesn't like to do that? it's like for people who are older, who remember there were party lines on telephones, you know, it was very interesting to see personal things. if you looked at the. place that, well, i haven't

worked at the car company years ago. i did. i did. i did research there on the pictures. but we we did really mindy is more is a more of a story. and that we did we did use books primarily and also getting correspond and that's from presidential libraries and different places. there's a lot available people like well woodrow wilson, you know, 25 volumes closed. that type. yeah he wrote oh you wrote all these letters to other people, too. i mean, it just kept a wonder because remember, these people wrote in, you know, they didn't weren't typing and they weren't dictating. it's pretty astonishing. wonder how they could do anything else but write. but you should maybe say more about the national archive. but yes, there are definitely some letters in the national archives. and one interesting thing to know is that a president is president. anything that's not personal belongs to you.

so anything a president produces in the office now since nixon, which is a story you can probably guess a little bit about something about watergate and destroying material since that point. now, those letters belong to you, so it's your right to ask. the only thing that holds it up is processing but there's new things released all the time. so if you want to learn about presidents, i every single president has stories to uncover. so please do i want to turn to we can only probably do two more questions. i see you have one and then we'll get to one other. but i know you'll all be around to ask where you can ask the questions one on one in to sign the book. so what do want to say? one thing? one thing about that? so we printed at least one letter from every president that we could get some of the presidency. you'll notice that the later presidents we tried over and over to get something from the

clintons but couldn't jimmy carter wrote a book of poems, one of which is titled rose rosalynn and because of the illness in the carter family, we couldn't get a permission to use any of those from there, from from the his publisher. so it isn't the if somebody left out. oh, and somebody like martin van buren, martin van buren's wife died 15 years before he became president and is not even mentioned in his autobiography. so as i say, if we could get them, we got them. well, i would apropos of that, though, people did believe earlier on that personal reasons, the personal life was not anybody else's business. so that they didn't see anything the matter with not mentioning their personal life. you did evidently write something nice in a an obituary

of him and the in the case of the hoover's they did destroy all of their correspondence. so there just seems not to be anything there. martha washington tried to burn all the letters she received from george during their long marriage. and people were i. historians, of course, are dismayed at this. but she gave a desk to her grand i think it's a grant graham daughter and the granddaughter found two letters in the in the in the desk and those are in the book. all right. let's go to your question. i was curious, what now from reading all these letters, what was the most interesting thing that you found that you chose not to put in the book because it wasn't on theme, but it was something interesting that you found. well, sometimes the letters would have interesting historical things. little, little details that you. it were interesting, but they

didn't seem to there was nothing there was no romantic thing involved in it. for example. well, there there were some there was a letter where had a description of attack on andrew jackson. there's one of those we have in our book. but that at least had a love something or because i thought it was very interesting because he this was john tyler who described it quite dramatically what it looked like because he was there and saw it. so there were there were there were also there were sometimes observer patients and maybe also because you didn't you we wanted to have an assortment of people. and obviously some people write better letters than others. i mean, you could have had many, many more truman letters. you could have had many more wilson letters. but we wanted to have just to have as wide an assortment as possible, because we thought that that that made the book more valuable.

no, let's i think we can actually take two more questions. so does anyone else have another. thank you. well, thank you. oh, very, very, very interesting. full of surprises. so you must have had tons and tons of material. how long did it take? the whole process of finding and selecting and finally getting the book published. about, what, six years? oh, don't forget, this was during the pandemic. yeah, at the time on our hands. and we were able, even though the columbia university library was closed for that, we we thanks to our daughter. oh, yeah. we we were able to get in there and borrow some books and use those as well. i mean they were, you know, libraries, whatnot.

we, you know, plumbed all the sources we could find, i would say more than six years. well, maybe. yeah. plus that, you know, some of the things we knew before and it was sort of in the back of your mind, but it was a, i think it was fun to do. we've done other historical project, but this one seemed to be it was really just fun. i mean, you really like reading people's letters. it's is quite and some were really quite charming i thought and quite revealing and it is interesting because they were written often before they went into politics so they didn't know they would be read. so it wasn't it wasn't the public persona. and that's sometimes very different than the private. i thought that was interesting. dot had an interesting observation. she found that when we considered how they married most of them married up. now lincoln, for example, and and mary todd, what's his name? oh, i think that was the majority actually did starting

with washington martha was the wealthiest widow in virginia and that was certainly was part of her appeal. and in fact, it was she had her her plantation was called the white house. that interesting little tidbit. but she was very well like the adams abigail's family. he was a he was a of a pastor and he came from farmers. they didn't definitely father. her father was the pastor. and in fact, married the two. the mother didn't approve of him. there's really many cases like that. very few did they marry down? and i guess that's a sign of the perhaps of the ambition to start out with, because you can use a i mean, look at how many were helped by the wives making money. i mean, mrs. lbj's wife had all made all that money in the tv and the radio station, and he couldn't have, you know, he couldn't have run all those

campaigns with them. and abigail took care of the farm and did different things to back his his career. anyway, that was the lesson there for all single people here on valentine's day. but thank you for that reminder. or did you have another day? i just wanted to follow up on what you just said, that they married up. did you find that even though there was some interest other than love, that many of the love even of those who married up, they were truly for love. oh, i think you could. i think that george really admired martha and loved her in a way, but it was a different kind of love. and he never forgot that particular attraction he had for the earlier woman because she was very attractive. she was older and she was very sophisticated. and i guess, you know, he major, but he was young. and, you know, you sometimes get these incredible attractions for

somebody. but it wasn't. but for a marriage, it seems to have been a happy marriage. you can have a happy marriage. obviously, without that to some degree. so as a young man, what washington didn't have the kind of education and neighbors he was. a not not as most of his as contemporaries went to england for an education and he did. his father had died, right? yeah. and so they they sort of gave him a trade that he was a surveyor, was the first job that he ever had. but and she this woman, sally, what's her name? yeah. yeah, it's the she sort of took him under her wing. he went to her house for parties or, was invited to her house for parties. and she was several years older

than he was. and so that explains some of the attraction there she was sophisticate and witty. she was very much a charming flirt, too. oh, yeah. yeah. all right. you get the last question. but before we get to that, i just want to ask you how long you all have been writing books together and working together? i guess since 1971. i have only one. oh, you're giving it away. yeah, that's. that's yeah, that's quite a long time. yeah, that's a, quite a long time. yes, we have. we've published what 102 books so that there's a lot on dots of different subjects though now i was always just to say that we're the most prolific authors that nobody's ever heard of. so that you know, well, not after tonight. all right. one window. what happened to fdr? letters. why did you not present him tonight or is he? oh, well, we have letters of fdr in there, and there's some

interesting ones. there's actually letters that, too, of letters that he was right. he wrote to eleanor when he was started having the affair. and and he you can see how he's trying to put her off the track of what he what he's doing. sorry. i think he went on a boating trip and his mistress was along on that. but she was amelia and but but she made it seem in the letter he wrote, eleanor, that she was the date sort of of another man who was on. yeah, right. well i think that's going to be our last woman question you can still ask questions every after the event, especially if you get your book signed. but do want to give you the last word. you had a question there, in fact. well, we look, we don't mind why he wrote the missing hand his mistress. you know, i know. there he oh, sorry. interestingly, she had her breakdown or when she finally

they had to hospitalize her really almost the exact same day that oh my my mind is gone. this the what's her name? oh, i mind, there's too many. what's the name of. oh i just, i'm so embarrassed anyway. are you thinking of first lady eisenhower? no, no, no, no, no, no, no. it's. oh, okay. this is lucy myerson. lucy mercer. who? he really love. he loved lucy mercer. through and through. after he met her. really through his life, they. she said to her, to the friend of hers who was the artist who did the portrait of him when which he was painting, when she when he died, they too were with them in the cottage that she had destroyed had almost all the letters them. so he had kept up with the correspondence. so she was at the best seats at

all his inaugurals and in the forties she started coming to the white house under an assumed name, and he would stop at this stop in new jersey to see her. all right. well, thank you. thank you both for being here. let's give them a round of applause. today, we're on to army explorers in the sort of interior west. so as i told you all last time, we've