With all my love, Mr. President

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Presidents and their wives have been an amorous lot, their White House years coming at the pinnacle of lives entwined. The men pursued and loved these women as intensely as they clawed to power and unleashed armies. Every day seemed like St. Valentine's Day.

"Touch you I must or I'll burst," Ronald Reagan wrote to Nancy three years before he became California governor.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, then a young congressman from Texas, declared to his valentine, Lady Bird, mere weeks after they had met, "This morning I'm ambitious, proud, energetic and very madly in love with you."

Theodore Roosevelt put Alice Lee on a pedestal, telling her five days before they wed, "I worship you so that it seems almost desecration to touch you."

A new book of letters between presidents and wives fleshes out momentous periods of history with the full range of human emotion -- love, longing, snippiness, betrayal, loss, lust.

These men turned a resolute face to the world. In private, they were mush and goo. The women were easily their match in exchanging heart-racing prose and pulled no punches on tough stuff.

Even as John Adams was in Philadelphia working on the Declaration of Independence and its assertion that "all men" are created equal, his loving spouse, Abigail, sent the future second president a blistering letter about the subjugation of wives.

"That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth," she wrote. "Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex."

She was a flirt, too. "If you want more balm, I can supply you," in a letter written the spring before they married in October 1764.

The correspondence in "My Dear President: Letters Between Presidents and Their Wives," by Library of Congress historian Gerard W. Gawalt, captures some of the couples in the first blush of their romance and follows them into the White House.