#Letters to Presidents

[deadpresidents]

Have you ever written a letter to a president and got a response?

I've been a Presidential history nerd since I was a little kid. I don't know when I first became interested in the Presidents or what specifically piqued that interest, but I know that I can't remember a time where it wasn't something I wanted to learn everything I could possible learn about it. So when we'd go to the school library in elementary school, my friends would check out age-appropriate kids books and I would check out full-fledged Presidential biographies.

So, yes, I absolutely wrote letters to Presidents and I still have some of the responses I received. As a kid, I sent a letter to the White House whenever there was a new President because I never forgot what happened the first time I wrote to a President. I was probably 7 or 8 years old and back when the phone companies would publish yellow pages and white pages, they would have sections with contact information for government officials. I saw that there was an address for the White House (1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW), so I wrote a letter to President Reagan. I have no idea what I wrote at the time, but I remember that I got a big envelope from the White House with a little note written on fancy paper with the Presidential seal and a signed photo of the President, as well as a little booklet about the White House. I don't have that first letter from Reagan, but after he left office, I had learned about the Presidential Libraries and the fact that former Presidents had post-Presidential offices. I wrote to former President Reagan at his office in Los Angeles and received pretty much the same thing I had been sent while he was still in office. I do still have that:

I wrote to President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton when they were in the White House, too. President Bush sent a letter and photo and President Clinton sent a photo:

Those were the last incumbent Presidents that I wrote to while they were in the White House. I turned 13 years old when President Clinton took office in 1993 (and I mean that literally -- believe it or not, my birthday is Inauguration Day) and while I was still interested in Presidential history, I was also interested in girls, so I kind of grew out of the letter-writing. But when I was a teenager, I did also write to former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter at their post-Presidential offices. Sadly, I didn't get around to writing to former President Nixon before he died in 1994, so I never received anything from him. I regret that I didn't write to him in time because that's around the time I wrote to former Presidents Ford and Carter.

But President Ford and President Carter really made my nerdy letter writing all worthwhile. The letters and photos I received from President Reagan, President Bush, and President Clinton were all signed by an auto-pen, as you would expect for someone responding to as much mail as the President of the United States does.

However, President Ford and President Carter sent me photos with their actual autographs! I remember Ford sent some packets of information about himself and a copy of an interview where he answered a bunch of questions about stuff that kids might be interested in. Carter also sent something like that, as well as a folder with information about the Carter Center and the work it does around the world. But the coolest thing to receive were the photos with their genuine autographs on them. I took advantage of that and actually wrote to President Ford several times when I was a teenager (I don't know why I seem to have written to President Carter only once) in hopes that his office would send me more autographs and they did!

Looking back, I wish I never would have grown out of writing letters to Presidents because those are all really cool little souvenirs, especially for a Presidential history fanatic. It would have been fun to have similar things from other Presidents. But if you have a kid or if you are a kid (if you are a kid, I sure hope you have parental permission to read my blog because I say bad words sometimes) with interest in the Presidents/Presidential history, it's really fun to write to the President or former President and get something back. At one point, you could just drop a letter in the mail addressed to "THE PRESIDENT, Washington, D.C.) and it would be delivered to the incumbent in the White House, but I'm not sure if they do that anymore. But it's super easy to find the mailing address to the White House or to the post-Presidential offices of former Presidents online. Presidents and former Presidents have franking privileges, so it's also cool to get a big envelope with a President's signature in the place of stamps. If you're a teacher of younger kids who are learning about the Presidents or Presidency, it's also a cool little project to do. When I was running afterschool programs many (way too many) years ago, I did that with my students and they all received photos from the President at the time (George W. Bush), along with a letter that was addressed to the entire group as a whole.

[paracosmicka]

i used to be into wax sealing like 5 years ago i didn’t even write letters i was just obsessed with stationary (is it stationery idk) and i thought it was fun

anyway i bought a new resin for my 3D printer that’s supposed to be high-temp resistant bc in the past i would try to print my own stamps but they just stuck to the wax, but now it looks like i can actually make my own stamps so here’s what that looks like lol

[martyr-mayhem]

An open letter from Mahmoud Khalil on March 18, 2025.

Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.💔

Link to letter here 👇🏻

Contact your representatives and free Mahmoud Khalil 👇🏻

[yeoldenews]

A mother's word for word transcription of the imaginary phone call her four-year-old made to Santa Claus in 1911.

(source: The Harbor Beach Times, December 22, 1911.)

Through some outrageous case of serendipity I found a recording of another phone call this same child made 60 years later. Though I have to say his choice of conversational partner is a definite downgrade from the first call.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 16, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 17, 2025

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was "the single most important economic issue of the day." But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[seasononesam]

why are they talking to the president of the united states like this...

[usmailnotforsale]

Mean boys are coming for your Post Office!

[rotzaprachim]

saw a list of “things to do INSTEAD of voting for president” get passed around yesterday and at least 1/3 of them were literally inseparable from policies that are on the docket this presidential election so uh that’s where we are with civic competence

Don’t vote! Just uh (checks notes) write letters to the mailman (who surely will not be affected by the outcome of a presidential election!) and volunteer at a library ❤️💕😘 (which surely will not be affected by the outcome of a presidential election) and bake cookies for the fire department ❤️💕 (who surely will not be affected by the outcome of a presidential election)

[never-was-has-been]

~posted on Facebook by Shalom Kane April 2nd 2020 "An Open Letter to the president" From the Drummer of Mötley Crüe, Tommy Lee

Dear Fucking Lunatic, At your recent press conference - more a word salad that had a stroke and fell down stairs, you were CLEARLY so out of your depth you needed scuba gear. Within minutes of going off air your minions were backpedaling faster than Cirque De Soliel acrobats… In India a week ago, i couldn’t get past the bit about your being the most popular visitor in the history of fucking India — a country of a BILLION human souls that’s only 3000 years old, give or take.!!! Trust me - Gandhi pulled CROWDS.. You pulled a cricket stadium and half WALKED out… Do you know how fucking insane you sound, you off-brand butt plug? That's like the geopolitical equivalent of “that stripper really likes me” — only 10,000 times crazier and less self aware. You are fucking exhausting. Every day is a natural experiment in determining how long 300 million people can resist coring out their own assholes with an ice auger. Every time I hear a snippet of your Queens-tinged banshee larynx farts, I want to scream! We are fucking tired. As bad as we all thought your presidency would be when Putin got you elected, it’s been inestimably worse. You called a hostile, nuclear-armed head of state “short and fat.” How the fuck does that help? You accused a woman — a former friend, no less — of showing up at your resort bleeding from the face and begging to get in. You, you, YOU — the guy who looks like a Christmas haggis inexplicably brought to life by Frosty’s magic hat — yes, you of all people said that. You attempted — with evident fucking glee — to get 24 million people thrown off their health insurance. You gave billions away to corporations and the already wealthy while simultaneously telling struggling poor people that you were doing exactly the opposite. You endorsed a pedophile, praised brutal dictators, and defended LITERAL FUCKING NAZIS! Ninety-nine percent of everything you say is either false, crazy, incoherent, just plain cruel, or a rancid paella of all four. Oh, by the way, Puerto Rico is still FUBAR. You got yourself and your family billions in tax breaks for Christmas. What do they get? More paper towels? Enough, enough, enough, enough! For the love of God and all that is holy, good, and pure, would you please, finally and forever, shut your feculent KFC-hole until you have something valuable — or even marginally civil — to say? You are a fried dick sandwich with a side of schlongs. If chlamydia and gonorrhea had a son, you’d appoint him HHS secretary. You are a disgraceful, pustular hot stew full of casuistry, godawful ideas, unintelligible non sequiturs, and malignant rage. You are the perfect circus orangutan diaper from Plato’s World of Forms. So fuck you Mr. President. And fuck you forever. Oh, and Pence, you oleaginous house ferret. Fuck you, too. You'll be as useful as a chocolate teapot against a medical crisis you Bible thumping cock socket." Anyone interested in what Tommy Lee would add this time? I sure am!

[joansiesbeloved]

I remember Joan did an interview years ago and I think she moved into a new house or something and interviewer said that she no photos up but did have a photo of JFK and I thought that was really sweet.

Yep! She only had a framed letter that JFK wrote to her hung up on her walls, and no pictures. It was when she moved into her new Boston apartment in 1979. This was also during the time when her and Ted were split-up, but not like 100% officially divorced. It was a good time for Joan because she finally was able to gain that independence and small break-away from the Kennedys (and just Ted in general, lol) where she could focus on herself and do the normal things that the average person does like grocery shopping, for example!

"I will never be number two again. To my husband, to politics or anything else but will seek balance in my life now that I am successfully recovering from alcoholism." - Joan in the formal press interview.

I just love how she still kept a piece of Jack with her despite getting her own apartment and finally being able to get away from all the Kennedy drama temporarily. It just really goes to show how much she loved him and he must have been very special to her for her to have only a framed letter that he wrote to her and nothing else. Very sweet indeed :)

[snowsinterlude]

❝letters for coriolanus snow.❞

(coriolanus snow x fem reader)

summary: going through your belongings after you married someone else, coriolanus found something that could've changed everything.

warnings: drama, songfic, sadfic, toxic relationship.

you were panem's brightest star. the one that brought pride over anything. it didn't matter, somehow you were famous enough for the entire panem to love you.

but not enough for coriolanus to notice you.

you, the star of panem, fell in love with coriolanus snow when you were still ten. something about him being your protector from other kids caused you to actually believe he was a good person. god, you were so wrong.

it's a shame you didn't notice it earlier. now, he was still obsessed with you even after your marriage with sejanus. his best friend.

it was three months before your marriage that you decided to send him a letter. it was the last humiliation that you were aching to pass through. and, with the mark of a kiss on the end of thy letter, snow only read it when it was too late.

"Dear Coriolanus,

I stopped caring about how you treated me badly after a while. Each time you mistreated me was enough for me to smile just because you gave me attention enough to be mean with me.

I am what's left of when we swam under the moon, now the rest of my days, I remember how your fingers traced tragedies over my skin. How you not even once gave me attention and how i kneeled myself to your feet, begging you to at least be mean to me. I was so used to being mistreated by you that I started smooking just because your kisses tasted like it.

Only God knows how much I wanted you. How I still want you even after all that. How humiliating it was to beg for your attention, for anything you had to offer me. I spent so much time wanting you and I was so tainted by whatever it is that you call love that I considered myself unworthy of anything good.

I could smell the truth in your words and God, you were such a liar. I was so slow to accept the truth; thus being that you didn't actually loved me. You were lying too."

fact is, he wasn't.

coriolanus had a very twisted sense of love. each time he was with you and you were on his feet, head lying on his lap as you cried for another rude thing you did or said, he loved you even more.

somehow, seeing you cry and humiliate yourself for him was like god's heaven-sent gift for him. a manner to say "sorry" for his poverty.

and yet, he recognized just how mean he actually was with you.

his white lotus whom shined so brightly when crying that he had your image burned into his brain.

and you were gone.

"I'm getting married within a few months, and god, Sejanus is like a gift for me.

He's caring, sweet, lovely and knows how to treat me right. He's a dream come-true for me.

And yet, you tainted me. You hurt me so bad that now, the one on his knees it's not me but him.

I hate you so much. And even though it is a lie, I hope for god's sake that I'll learn to hate you.

Xo, Y/N." and a kiss-mark.

if only he'd knew how much he affected you, you would be by his side now.

It didn't matter now. Not when his brain kept remembering of you in your wedding dress.

[deadpresidents]

Dear Mr. President:

Always there have been men who had contempt for the "word" although words have survived better than any other man-made things. St. John says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God." When you have finished using a weapon, someone is dead or injured, but the product of the word can be life and hope and survival. All of the greatness of our species rests on words -- Socrates to his judges -- the Sermon on the Mount, the introduction to Wyclif's Bible, later taken by Lincoln for the Gettysburg Address. And all of these great and irretrievable words have the bravery of fear and hope in them. There must have been a fierce but hollow feeling in the members of the Continental Congress when the clerk first read the words, "When in the course of human events --." Lincoln must have dwelt with loneliness when he wrote the order of mobilization.

In our history, there have been not more than five or six moments when the word and the determination mapped the course of the future. Such a moment was your speech, Sir, to the Congress two nights ago. Our people will be living by phrases from that speech when all the concrete and steel have long been displaced or destroyed. It was a time of no turning back, and in my mind as well as in many others, you have placed your name among the great ones of history.

And I take great pride in the fact that you are my President.

Yours in admiration, John Steinbeck

-- Letter from John Steinbeck to President Lyndon B. Johnson on March 17, 1965, two days after LBJ's monumental "We Shall Overcome" speech to a Joint Session of Congress urging the passage of the Voting Rights Act in the wake of "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Alabama

[ohyiyoung]

MIRACLE: LETTERS TO THE PRESIDENT (2021)

dir. Lee Jang-Hoon

[trevination]

i’m on cloud nine rn

[cyarskj1899]

The Arab-Americans who backed Trump in Dearborn, Michigan, sent him this letter today (but addressed to the White House…) urging him to fulfill his promises to the community and work on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon

File this under “BLACK PEOPLE TOLD YOU!!”” You are new to this, we’ve been dealing with them for over 400 years. Now the Palestine ppl are going to fade away due to genocide, hostages are being be abused if not executed, and Gaza gonna be a beachfront property for trump and his friends as the face eating leopards feast amongst your bodies!!

meanwhile the black ppl who WARNED you ingrates about this will just sit back and watch yall suffer don’t ask us for anything regarding the free Palestine movement again! Let’s go get some Starbucks

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

World Support For Ukraine After White House Ambush

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 28, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 01, 2025

Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office—his attendance at such an event was unusual—in front of reporters. Those reporters included one from Russian state media, but no one from the Associated Press or Reuters, who were not granted access.

In front of the cameras, Trump and Vance engaged in what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called a “mob hit,” spouting Russian propaganda and trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire and signing over rights to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals without guarantees of security. Vance, especially, seemed determined to provoke a fight in front of the cameras, accusing Zelensky, who has been lavish in his thanks to the U.S. and lawmakers including Trump, of being ungrateful. When that didn’t land, Vance said it was “disrespectful” of Zelensky to “try to litigate this in front of the American media,” when it was the White House that set up the event in front of reporters.

Zelensky maintained his composure and did not rise to the bait, but he did not accept their pro-Russian version of the war. He insisted that it was in fact Russia that invaded Ukraine and is still bombing and killing on a daily basis. His refusal to sit silent and submit meekly to their attack seemed to infuriate them.

Trump appeared to become unhinged when Zelensky suggested that the U.S. would in the future feel problems, apparently alluding to the new U.S. relationship with Russia. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that,” Trump erupted. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”

Zelensky answered that he was just answering the questions Vance was showering on him. “You are in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel,” Trump said. “We’re going to feel very good.”

Zelensky answered: “You will feel influenced.”

Trump disagreed. “We are going to feel very good and very strong.”

“I am telling you,” Zelensky said. “You will feel influenced.”

Trump appeared to lose control at that point, ranting at Zelensky that Ukraine was losing and that he must accept a ceasefire, but also complaining about former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama and echoing Putin’s talking points. When he could get a word in, Zelensky reiterated that he would not accept a ceasefire without guarantees of security and pointed out that Putin had broken a ceasefire agreement in the past.

Later, when a reporter picked up on that question and asked what would happen if Russia broke a ceasefire agreement, Trump became enraged. Among other things, he said: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt….” Trump referred to what he calls the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” that Russia had worked to elect him in 2016. That effort, though, was not a hoax: the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 released an exhaustive report detailing that effort.

One of the things Russian operatives believed Trump’s team had agreed to, the report said, was Russia’s annexation of the parts of eastern Ukraine it is now trying to grab through military occupation.

Then Trump continued to rant at the reporter, rehashing his version of the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop at some length, tying in former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) in a larger stew that brought up Trump’s history with both Russia and Ukraine and their roles in his quest to hold power. Clinton ran against Trump in 2016, when Russia worked to elect him, and Zelensky came across Trump’s radar screen when, in July 2019, Trump tried to force Zelensky to say he was opening an investigation into Hunter Biden in order to smear Biden’s father Joe Biden before the 2020 election. Only after such an announcement, Trump said, would he deliver to Ukraine the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion.

Zelensky did not make the announcement. A whistleblower reported Trump’s phone call, leading to a congressional investigation that in turn led to Trump’s first impeachment. Schiff led the House’s impeachment team.

After unloading on the reporter, Trump abruptly ended today’s meeting, saying it was “going to be great television.” Shortly afterward, he asked Zelensky and his team to leave the White House.

This afternoon, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) posted: “Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day—when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON