‘Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making? Letters of Love and Lust from the White House’
Edited by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler
Simon & Schuster, 304 pages

The title is taken from a letter written by an incurable romantic, Woodrow Wilson, to his first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson. What? You don’t think the president had matinee idol looks or presented himself as such? The editors of this volume suspect he had at least one extramarital affair, and his second wife, Edith, made sure to keep her passionate husband under surveillance.

If Wilson’s letters surprise you, imagine Harry Truman and Richard Nixon writing the same way to their beloveds, Bess and Pat.

Truman: “I am more than glad to be your good friend for that is more than I expected. So when I come down there Saturday (which I’ll do if I don’t hear from you) I’ll not put on any hangdog airs but will try to be the same old Harry. … I may sometimes remind you of how I feel toward you I’ll try and not bore you to death with it.”

Nixon: “Every day and every night I want to see you and be with you. Yet I have no feeling of selfish ownership or jealousy. In fact I should always want you to live just as you wanted—because if you didn’t then you would change and wouldn’t be you.”

In both cases, the low-key but persistent approach prevailed.

Of course, not all presidents sound alike when in love. William Howard Taft, as the editors remark, never quite was able to address his intended without a bit of that lawyerly presentation of a brief for love. John Kennedy, who probably had more affairs outside of his marriage than any other president, could barely bring himself to write notes longer than what you’d find on a postcard and without any sort of endearments.

Does this book reveal anything, though, about presidents and the presidency? It is an unfair question, in the sense that it is enough, in this reviewer’s opinion, to learn more about presidents as human beings and not just as leaders and promulgators of public policies.

The editors of this volume make no effort to compare presidents, but instead want to categorize the types of love letters they wrote in sections titled: Romancing, Separation, Adversity, and Lovers.

More could have been done with suggesting the political implications of at least some of the letters, especially those of Warren Harding, who perhaps rivals JFK in his relishing of romance outside of marriage, with James Garfield in the runner-up category.

What is striking and even shocking about Harding’s letters is his response to a lover who decided to blackmail him as he was preparing to run for president. He treats the blackmail as a kind of business proposition, as simply a difficulty to be surmounted. He is not outraged or embarrassed and doesn’t seem threatened, but in the manner of a corrupt politician he tries to make an accommodation.

Harding enjoyed sex enormously, as his letters show. He referred to his penis as Jerry, and rather in the manner of a pornographic author lolled in the lubriciousness of his liaisons. So here is what happens when he gets into trouble with his mistress: 

“I can’t secure you the large competence you have frequently mentioned. No use to talk about it. I can pay with life or reputation, but I can’t command such a sum! To avoid disgrace in the public eye, to escape ruin in the eyes of those who have trusted me in public life—here I have never betrayed—will, if you demand it as the price, retire at the end of my term and never come back to [Marion, Ohio] to reside. … I’ll pay this price to save my own disgrace and your own self-destruction to destroy me. That is one proposal, complete, final, and covers all.” In the next paragraph Harding arrives at a figure he can afford: “$5,000 per year” so long as he is in public service.

A lot is to be learned about the psychology of presidents from these letters, some of which are published for the first time in this book.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.’