99% Invisible - 235- Ten Letters for the President

Episode Date: November 8, 2016

People who write the White House know that the president himself will most likely not see their message. Many of their letters start with phrases like, “I know no one will read this.” Although someone does read those letters. And … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When you send a letter to the President, it first passes through the office of presidential correspondence. The office was started under President McKinley in 1897, who had been receiving about 100 letters per day. By the time Herbert Hoover was President, that number had gone up to about 800 letters per day. Today, the President of the United States gets tens of thousands of letters, parcels, and emails every day.

Matt President, as we produce this story, is still Barack Obama. Dear Mr. President. Dear Mr. President. Dear Mr. President. We met once. You came to my hometown of Tuscalo, and I was writing each day in regards

to our relationship with Canada. And if you're one of those letter writers, you must imagine that the odds of the president actually reading your letter are pretty slim. That's Jacob Brogan, a writer for Slate.com and host of Working, a Slate podcast. And you'd be right, those chances are pretty slim. People often begin with a reflection on, I know no one will read this. I mean, that is a really common open. But someone does read your letter or email. And sometimes that person is Fiona Reeves,

Director of Presidential Correspondence at the White House. We are the office that handles all the incoming correspondence from regular people to the president and the White House. So we're a group of small offices made up of 45 staffers, 35 interns, and about 300 volunteers who come and go. Every day, Fiona and this small army of people read through thousands upon thousands of letters addressed to the president. President Obama has requested that 10 letters be passed on to him to read every night, and its fjowness job to decide which 10 it will be. The president has asked since day one to read 10 letters from regular people that represent

what's coming in. These letters, I think, do more to keep me in touch with what's happening around the country than just about anything else. That's a clip from a 2009 video put out by the White House. Some of them are funny, some of them are angry. A lot of them are sad or frustrated about their current situation. Sometimes people reach out about being fired, or when they're down to their last scraps of savings,

or their concerns about gun violence or climate change. So a lot of the stories are heartbreaking. People who work hard, a lot of times they'll say, I've never written to a president before, I'm not looking for a handout. All I want is just a fair shake. And it ends up being a powerful motivator for me. You know, it is crazy to think that you are holding this piece of paper that was in the person's hand

when they were reaching out to their government. And it is crazy to think that the president holds those pieces of paper. Of course, these days, letters don't always arrive on paper. Fiona and her staff also have to sort through all the emails that come in through the White House's web form at whitehouse.gov slash contact. Truth is, we're an email office for the most part, but we have a room that really looks like what you think of as male at the White House.

It talks to some boxes of male and shelves of topics and lists of what kind of agencies. Fiona works in the executive office building, located just west of the White House. We are scattered throughout this building and whichever rooms happen to be available. I can tell you we are tightly packed here. We sit very close together. And the staff sitting side by side in the Office of Presidential Correspondence carries on an old tradition of opening, reading, and sorting letters for the president. I would say our paper processing system cannot be very different than it was a hundred years ago.

Before letters arrive at the White House, they go through a screening process. So when the office of presidential correspondence receives them, they've already been opened by Secret Service, you know, checking for anthrax or explosives. Paper letters are clipped to the envelopes they arrived in. But then it's up to the staff and interns and volunteers to dig through the letters and emails and figure out which ones to pass up the chain to Fiona. How many do you have to read a day?

It varies depending on the day, but I would say on a general day the number that gets sort of passed to me can be from 200, 400 emails and letters. And you read that many emails and letters every day, roughly? Every day that the president is in town, he only gets the 10 letters a day when he's in Washington. Fiona and her team are looking for a range of opinions and styles that express what Americans are thinking about. We want to give him male that is representative of incoming male that is geographically diverse. We also look for different writing styles and different levels of writing and ways of communicating. The office also puts some thought into where the president is heading in the coming weeks and what issues he'll be discussing. To try to maybe make him better equipped

to spend time in that community, or to discuss an issue that maybe he doesn't have or like a personal perspective on, sort of a way of giving him more advisors. And the letters don't just inform and influence the president. Fiona makes sure the entire White House gets a chance to see what people are writing and about. Each day, our team does something with the help of volunteers called a random daily sample.

So we look at all the email that just came in and put together a list of topics and four in a post. And we circulate that list throughout the White House to a pretty broad distribution group to give folks a sense of what the American people are saying that day. They also put together a word cloud that shows the most commonly used terms across all forms of communication. The biggest word is help because generally when you're reaching out to your government, you are looking for help with the issue that matters most to you. There are times though, like you can see right now, the biggest word is gun, where there's a conversation

that has risen above every other topic. So in that case, Fiona will make sure the president gets a letter about guns. But when we do that, we make sure he sees both sides and we think a lot about the order in which things are given to him, you know, how you read sides and we think a lot about the order in which things are given to him. You know, how you read something and I think affects the way it hits you. And after Fiona chooses the ten letters, she hands them off to someone who scans them

and then hands them to the person who puts together the president's briefing book. So each night he takes home sort of a homework binder and it has information on what he'll be doing the next day. And every night includes the 10 constituent letters. Unlike almost everything else that reaches the president, these letters have not been fact-jector committee reviewed. There's some of the most direct communication he receives. When people are writing a memo to the president, you know, if they are touching on a policy topic,

then everyone who has a hand in that or who may have information to add that could add value kind of takes a look at it and adds their two cents. And so by the time the president sees it, it has gone through so many eyes, but our correspondence is really like someone sits down at their kitchen table and they send in a piece of their mind. And then that is basically two sets of eyes in the White House. It's this volunteer who thought, hey, the president should read this. And then it's me saying, like, yeah, I agree with that.

And because these letters are so direct and unfiltered, a lot of them are pretty intense and deeply personal. Our office deals a lot in emotion and empathy because we are absorbing so much of what people hope and fear and what they're expressing to both the president of the United States but also Barack Obama and the way they see themselves in Barack Obama and that I think makes our workplace quite an emotional one. A lot of people write about where they're writing from or what time they're writing.

You know, I'm staying up late at night because I can't stop thinking about this. I was sort of open that transports you immediately into what are they gonna say? Or, you know, from my kitchen window, I can see these mountains that we call, and then you're like in that person's kitchen with them. We also recently have seen more and more letters

that begin with something like, I've been meaning to write this for seven years. I think, yeah, as the days dwindle down, we're getting a lot of under the wire. Here's what I've been meaning to tell you. There was one letter that went to the president yesterday from a man who wrote that he feels like because of the presence or the pervasive nature

of gun violence in the US, despite being a gay man in the United States felt like he would rather live somewhere that didn't recognize same-sex marriage than a place where he could be discriminated against at the end of a gun, of sort of his, um, his angle there. And we just gave out to the President last night so I don't know how that hit him when he read it, but when it hit me, it hit me hard. Are there any, are there any of them ever that are funny They're funny that are the kind of the other side of things. Yeah.

We get some funny letters. One that I have with me is from a young woman who was running for a class president of her junior class. And she wrote in that she wanted some speech writing advice. President Obama actually responded to that letter. His advice, keep speeches short. And some of them he responds to by hand. Some of them he writes something like,

Neil, can you look into this? That is sort of to ask someone on his team to take a look at it. And on others, he writes reply, but then he writes sort of some drafting guidance. The White House has a team of writers who elaborate on the president's notes and turn them into letters, which they then hand back for the president to sign. And because he's responded personally to so many letters over the years, the writers often have a really good sense of his voice. And often his margin notes are so extensive, he's practically responding to the letter himself.

We end up serving as really more of typists than writers. When the president does engage with the letter, whether by replying or by extending an invitation to a White House event, or to highlight a specific letter in a public way, the White House usually gets in touch with the author. Sometimes, Fiona gets to be the one to make that phone call. And the truth is, we don't always

need to make those phone calls. We make them because they're really energizing. It's just so exciting when someone has taken this crazy long shot of writing something to Barack Obama and putting it in a mailbox. Do people flip out when you call them? Sometimes people flip out. I generally make those phone calls, and I sound sort of more serious than I feel when I

make them. You know, I say I'm con for the first one and so I have to confirm your address when in my heart. I'm like, can you believe it? Fiona's excitement is palpable. She's been a part of this administration a long time and it's played a huge role in her life. She met her husband while they were sorting Obama's mail. And the job has had a real impact on the White House and the

people who work there. I think it shapes policies that the White House pursues. I think also it shapes the humans who work here. You know, you can't help but think about it. When I think about the outputs of our office. One is we have this pretty big team of young people who will go on to do other things and will go on with this much broader perspective. And in some cases, a very deep and personal perspective on what people who they haven't necessarily met feel and expect from their government. And Fiona is about to be one of those many people who have passed through the office because her job is ending with the administration. And what's next for you?

I don't know. Are you guys hiring? I have no idea. I have truly no idea. I think it's a funny place to work because the institution has existed for so long, work because the institution has existed for so long, but you begin again every four eight years and so then when you are getting ready to leave you feel like you've just sort of figured it out and are nailing it. The White House is keeping their contact us form open to the last day of the administration, January 19th. Even if you write a letter on January 19th, it can reach Obama. He'll be receiving 10 letters on his last night in the Oval Office. A version of this piece originally aired on Slate's Working Podcast as part of a series

on jobs at the White House, produced by Jacob Rogan and Mickey Kapper. The 99% invisible team who worked on this episode includes Avery Troubleman, Sharif Useff, and Katie Mingle. With Kurt Colstead, Sam Greenspan Emmett Fitzgerald, Terran Mazza, Delaney Hall, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7K ALW San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook.

You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI orc. We're on Instagram and Tumblr too. But every day, I read 10 messages sent through the contact page at 99pi.org. you