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.
To a surprising degree Nixon was, in the parlance of the time he dominated, in touch with his feelings. But the form he gave them was crucial: a memorandum, usually dictated into a machine and then typed up by someone else, offered the illusion that all this was strictly business, not the personal indulgence an ordinary letter might represent, and which “RN” would feel obligated to dismiss as unseemly. Urging Kissinger to speed up construction of the Pan American Highway, Nixon writes, on March 8, 1971: “We will transfer funds from other projects to this one and get this done so that this will be one part of the Nixon legacy (and a very vital project where the country is involved) which we will get accomplished while we are here.” No attempt is made to subordinate the embarrassing truth; what’s in parentheses is what’s parenthetical.
Early in the first term, when constituent mail comes stamped (6¢) with the smiling face of FDR, Nixon displays a lot of interest in the niceties of his presidential operation, requesting first-name salutations on thank-you notes, offering suggestions for redecoration. He declares himself uncomfortable with always being served first by the White House waiters, and sends usher Rex Scouten revised rules to cover a variety of situations: “If it is a mixed dinner, with a guest of honor, the wife of the guest of honor will be served first simultaneously with Mrs. Nixon, and then the guest of honor and I will be served second.” The new instructions are “to be followed explicitly from this time forward.”
The president’s memos often include peremptory warnings that his orders are final: “the decision is not subject to appeal or further discussion unless I bring it u
p myself;” “There is no appeal from this decision—I’ve thought it through and have concluded;” “There is no appeal whatever;” “Don’t discuss it with me further.” These admonitions are less authoritarian than shy, designed to avert face-to-face conflict. In the Archives, the President’s Personal Files (PPF) and President’s Office Files (POF) remained full of courtesy to subordinates, their dullest policy memos receiving Nixon’s enthusiastic compliments. He did not enjoy chewing people out. On November 20, 1972, two weeks after his landslide re-election, Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, sends him a note wondering if he “and the family might want to go to the Eisenhower Theatre (Kennedy Center) to see JOCKEY CLUB STAKES. It is supposed to be a great comedy (British) and is not trying to promote some cause or other.” But in RN’s emotional makeup, Kennedy trumps Eisenhower, and a handwritten refusal, perhaps to spare Miss Woods’s feelings, goes to Haldeman: “I don’t want to go to the Center for anything at any time unless it is an event I have to participate in.”
The nadir of presidential communication probably arrived with the “recommended-telephone-call” memo—staff suggestions to a president about whom to call, with “talking points” on what to say. “Hope she is feeling better each day” reads point number one in a March 1971 memo recommending a call to Mary Higgins, an administrative assistant on Capitol Hill then terminally ill with cancer. The automatism of the prescribed dialogue is decidedly creepy, and yet Miss Higgins got the call because she had touched Nixon’s proudest nerve, the comeback. The “Background” section above the “talking points” explains: “During the years 1960–1968 (when there [were] not too many strong loyalists on the Hill) she had an enormous picture of the President behind her desk and really stood up for him when many people asked why she had a picture up of ‘that has been,’ etc.”
The request for this phone call was put in by Rose Mary Woods, whose lasting fame will rest upon the suspicion that she created the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on one of the Watergate tapes. But Miss Woods contributed far more to Nixon’s accrual than his deletion: in addition to maintaining the PPF, she was part of a White House system that assembled a voluminous Handwriting File of materials personally annotated by Nixon and retrieved from staffers to whom they’d been sent. Nixon’s fountain pen leaves him oddly and more lastingly animate than the typewritten words to which he’s reacting. A letter from John H. Dawson, president of Adrian College in Michigan, congratulating him on the Paris peace accords, begins apologetically: “I’m well aware that you are now receiving a veritable deluge of letters from college and university educators …” Nixon underlines the sentence and writes a note to pass on to “H & K”: “If he only knew—at most a light drizzle—no deluge!”
On occasion, the president would draft an entire reply in the margins of a letter he was reading. Early in 1972, Joyce E. Kozielec, a secretary at the White House, wrote him an emotional, admiring letter of resignation in which she identified herself as “the young lady who clips signature blotters on all materials to be signed by you and follows through on your written requests from the Daily News Summary. As a secretary, I don’t believe I could have been closer to your personal thoughts.” Nixon’s response, “just a note to tell you how deeply I appreciated your letter of February sixteenth,” went out to Mrs. Kozielec not in the ink in which he first composed it—but as a typewritten letter, whose carbon copy, along with the presidential handwriting she never received, survives amid so much of the archival material only now being transferred to the Nixon Presidential Library in California.
What handwriting he did send had an odd tendency to slip toward the edge of the paper: as he went farther down the page, the left margin would widen, herding his words toward the right. He seems always in the process of making an exit, even when conducting his last, most personal, campaign, the one for rehabilitation. In March of 1982, he is making himself useful to Ronald Reagan, offering to cheer the president, during a bad polling patch, with a story more in Reagan’s style than his own: “Our grandson, Christopher, was three years old yesterday,” writes Nixon. “When playing with his dog, they knocked over & broke a vase. He looked up at Tricia and said: ‘Don’t worry, mommy, Reagan will fix it!’”
It was Nixon himself who broke the presidential inkwell. The installation of the taping system, a device more comprehensively revealing of the presidential mind than any letters or diary could be, ensured, by its discovery, that presidents would never again permit themselves the degree of self-revelation practiced, off and on, by two centuries of White House occupants. The special prosecutor now looms larger than posterity, and the potential “evidence” of a president’s letters is a more legal, and less historical, matter than it used to be. (As First Lady, Hillary Clinton explained in all seriousness that she did not keep a diary because of its vulnerability to subpoena.) Nixon chased his successors, not just himself, toward the margin and off the page.
FOR IMMEDIATE, crushing practicalities—not Jefferson’s distant hypotheticals—few letter collections can match the angry, agitated stream that Florence Nightingale sent home to England from Scutari at the height of the Crimean War. Dispatches by William Howard Russell to the London Times after the Battle of Alma had forced the British public to realize the terrific neglect of its wounded soldiers, and within days of Russell’s worst disclosures—still not even sure she could believe them all—Nightingale was organizing a “small private expedition of nurses,” and telling Eliza beth Herbert, wife of the secretary of war, just how she was going about it. Her syntax has an urgent brevity quite uncharacteristic of the Victorian lady-epistolarian:
I take myself out & one Nurse. Lady Maria Forester has given £200 to take out three others. We feed and lodge ourselves there, & are to be no expence whatever to the country.
After a few more clipped sentences like these, she breaks the paragraph and writes “Now to business”—as if she’s been anything but.
Her private funding, resented by the army’s officers and doctors, hasn’t been enough to clear the rats and a Russian general’s corpse from some spare rooms in the Barrack Hospital before she and her group of forty-two take up residence there. The casualties Nightingale finds are astronomical—“We now have 4 miles of beds—& not 18 inches apart”—and the conditions so unimaginably mean and filthy that a reader expects nothing but a sustained cry of horror in an early letter she sends home to Dr. William Bowman, a surgeon at King’s College Hospital. Instead, the electrified Miss Nightingale marches from sarcasm to humor to lyric affirmation in the course of a single page. From the beginning, she respects the ordinary suffering soldier, reserving her contempt for the complaining officers and whichever of the women prove inadequate to the job they came out to do:
I can truly say like St. Peter ‘it is good for us to be here’—tho’ I doubt whether if St. Peter had been here, he would have said so. As I went my night-round among the newly wounded that first night, there was not one murmur, not one groan the strictest discipline, the most absolute silence & quiet prevailed.
She refuses to treat the men as the “brutes” their superiors insist they are. Finding that the soldiers respond not only to kindness but to higher expectations, she secretly sets them to reading and to sending money home for their wives and mothers. She receives, in return, their hearty cheers and shyly proffered nosegays. On the six-month anniversary of her arrival, the wellborn thirty-five-year-old nurse can describe herself as being “in sympathy with God, fulfilling the purpose I came into the world for.” She has, in fact, performed a miracle, one that years later will stop even Lytton Strachey in his normally debunking tracks; he can only summarize Miss Nightingale’s first days at the Barrack Hospital in the rhetoric and rhythms of a fairy tale:
With consummate tact, with all the gentleness of supreme strength, she managed at last to impose her personality upon the susceptible, overwrought, discouraged, and helpless group of men in authority who surrounded her. She stood firm; she was a rock in the angry ocean; with h
er alone was safety, comfort, life. And so it was that hope dawned at Scutari.
Our enduring image of Florence Nightingale has her walking the ward with a glowing lamp. But she spent at least as much of her time in Scutari wielding a pen, its nib sharpened to a point that could puncture every obstruction and enemy. In the letters, she sizes up each of the women, mocking their trivial complaints—” ‘and if I’d known, Ma’am about the Caps, great as was my desire to come out as nurse at Scutari, I wouldn’t have come, ma’am’”—and discovering only one sheep for every three or four goats: “About ten of us have done the whole work.” Too many of the others have turned to drink and husband hunting for Nightingale to want any more than the forty she has to look after. Some nuns from Bermondsey prove invaluable—she thanks their Mother Superior “gratefully, lovingly, overflowingly”—but she can’t bear the Catholic nurses complaining to their priests and being held “scatheless by [them]—through any misconduct.”
Her pleadings with distant officialdom are always for more authority and less wasting of her time. The sympathetic correspondent she most frequently assaults is Sidney Herbert, the tactful war secretary who, back in London, presides over what Nightingale tells him is a “grand administrative evil,” a Circumlocution Office of paper and red tape that, at her remove, is pitifully irrelevant. Letters from Scutari thrust the conditions she’s found under Herbert’s eyes and nose:
Thirty were bathed every night by Dr. MacGrigor’s orders in slipper-baths, but this does not do more than include a washing once in eighty days for 2300 men.
The consequences of all this are Fever, Cholera, Gangrene, Lice, Bugs, Fleas—& may be Erysipelas—from the using of one sponge among many wounds.
Yours Ever Page 14
