HOT STUFF, NOT MERELY SORDID

“ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE STORM of love making?,” Woodrow Wilson wrote. Yes, that Woodrow Wilson. This, from a new book by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler with this title and subtitled “Letters of Love and Lust from the White House.” 

Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?: Letters of Love and Lust from the White House, by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, Simon & Schuster, 2024.

W.M. Akers reviews the book in his “Executive Office Romance,” in The New York Times Book Review, February 18, 2024. He writes, “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.’ ”

This and a following image from The New York Times, February 18, 2024. 

What, no Trump? Tactfully, the Hooblers ignore this self-confessed groper and convicted sexual abuser. We’re talking love here, not sordidness. 

On the other hand, normal people, even presidents, reviewer Akers says, “are also human beings: petty, sappy and flawed. Seeing our presidents as lovers does not undo the evil that many of them presided over, but it adds color to characters too often rendered in black and white.”

Taciturn, But…. “One day in 1904,” Akers recounts a charming tale, “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….”

“That young lover,” Akers says, “was the famously taciturn Calvin Coolidge, who would one day occupy the White House with Grace as his wife….”

Expected Advice. Akers writes, “And sometimes we are not surprised at all, as when Theodore Roosevelt sends his intended, Alice, an almost incoherently giddy letter that includes an exhortation to exercise.” 

And Then There’s Warren Gamaliel. The book contains, Akers says, what may be the year’s best sentence: “If it’s sex you’re looking for, Warren G. Harding will meet your expectations.”

I agree, having cited no less than Harding’s father in “Mock the President-in-Wanting?” The elder Harding said, “It was a good thing Warren wasn’t a woman or he would always be in the family way.” 

Warren Gamaliel Harding, 1865–1923, 29th POTUS, in office 1921–1923.

Akers shares an inside story on Harding and one of his mistresses, Carrie Phillips: “Jerry and Mrs. Pouterson” were nicknames for his and Phillips’s private parts. 

A cable from Warren G. Harding to his mistress Carrie Phillips. 

This reminds me of William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies’ “Rosebud,” and Orson Welles’ recyling of the nickname in Citizen Kane.

And What of Eggs? Akers writes, “The best letter in the book may be one Franklin Roosevelt wrote to Eleanor in 1942. Though infidelity had effectively ended the marriage decades earlier, the Hobblers note, F.D.R. still wrote to his wife.”

“I do realize that the cost of food has gone up,” complained F.D.R. to Eleanor, “I would suggest that something drastic be done about the size of portions served. For instance, for my luncheons I have pleaded—when there is an egg dish—for only one egg apiece, yet four eggs for two people constantly appear.” 

Hmm… ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024