Dear Mr. President: Letters to the Oval Office from the Files of the National Archives
by By Young, Dwight (EDT) and Williams, Brian (INT)
Category: History , United States , General

A mere toe-dip into the National Archives' vast holdings, "Dear Mr. President" presents a delirious potpourri of letters for perusal. The epistolary arts are every voyeur's secret pleasure, and the most public of public offices compels people of all walks of life, from children to the working man to the very famous, to put pen to paper. This carefully selected batch of letters, from over one hundred years of archiving letters to the President, includes such gems as the letter from a ten-year-old Fidel Castro to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 requesting ten bucks; an offer from Annie Oakley to President McKinley to raise a company of fifty American lady sharpshooters in the event of a war with Spain; a scrawled note on American Airlines in-flight letterhead from Elvis Presley to Richard Nixon offering his services to fight "The Hippie Elements;" and a very moving letter about the state of civil rights from Jackie Robinson to President Eisenhower. The book opens with a 5,000-word introduction by Thomas Mallon, a well-known figure who can place these letters in the American consciousness and give some further information on some of them. The letters themselves are reproduced where possible as full-size facsimiles and are accompanied with commentary to help the reader place them within historical events. Some archival photos will also run with the letters, in cases where we have photos of the writer and the President together.