Racy Presidential Love Letters: ‘I Take a Long, Deep, Wild Draught on Your Lips’

Credit…Library of Congress ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE STORM OF LOVE MAKING? Letters of Love and Lust From the White House , by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler One day in 1904, Grace Goodhue looked out the window. In the building across the street, she saw a man shaving while wearing long underwear and a derby hat to keep his hair out of his eyes. She laughed so loud that he heard her and so, to apologize, she sent him a potted plant. They began trading cheerful letters, back and forth across the street, nearly every day. In one, he thanks her for sharing some candy with him. In another, he invites her on a sleigh ride. In a third, he makes an apology that isn’t an apology at all. “I really didn’t mean to call on you last night, but when I saw you sitting in the window, I couldn’t help it. If you don’t want to tempt me you best keep out of sight.” That young lover was the famously taciturn Calvin Coolidge, who would one day occupy the White House with Grace as his wife, and his notes are part of “Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?,” a charming new collection of presidential love letters edited by the husband-and-wife writing team of Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler. Featuring presidents from Washington to Obama writing about courtship, marriage, war, diplomacy, love, lust, loss and eggs — yes, eggs — it answers the question “What does a president in love sound like?” with a refreshing “Just as dopey as anybody else.” Calvin Coolidge’s meet-cute is just one of the book’s many revelations. We learn that the famously cruel Andrew Jackson was also an insufferable cheeseball who wrote his beloved the nauseating sentence “May the Goddess of Slumber every evening light on your eyebrows and gently lull you to sleep, and conduct you through the night with pleasing thoughts and pleasant dreams.” We hear of Dolley Madison’s habit, late in life, of hefting her elderly husband onto her back and romping around the room with him, “whenever she […]

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