Her job, as Blume explained to me in a recent interview, was to understand not only the letter writer, but also how the president must have felt reading the letter, which she often gathered from punctuation he added or sentences he underlined. She didn’t consider herself “the voice of the president,” but rather someone who pulled together Obama’s language from his books, speeches, letters, and other material, trying to achieve a tone, not unlike her own, that combined the president’s idealism and humility. Her official bureaucratic title, from August 2015 to the end of Obama’s second term, in January 2017: director of writing for sampled correspondence. In other words, Blume wrote personal letters to citizens on behalf of the president, responding to the sacred 10 letters a day, or 10LADs, in the parlance of the OPC, that Obama read religiously each night.

On a warm day in September 2015, with the country gearing up for the second Republican presidential-primary debate and the pope’s visit to Washington, one of the letters on Blume’s desk had come from a woman named Sheryl. “Dear President Obama,” began the letter, which is featured in Laskas’s book. “The year was 2000, we had a small apple orchard in Eastern WA, a bright eyed 4 year old came into my house … I fell in love with that little 4 year old and have followed her life since that day … Yesterday she called me sobbing that her dad had been taken away.”

Sheryl explained that the girl’s father was an undocumented immigrant. “I feel such sadness, like I have lost one of my sons, but the grief this family, mom, sister, brother are feeling is immeasurable. I ask that you could please do anything in your power to assist the people of our country who are here undocumented who are just looking to make a better life and work become legal citizens.”

Blume would often look out her window after reading a letter, gathering her thoughts. The Renwick Gallery, armed in renovation scaffolding three years ago, filled the narrow frame. The White House was on the other side of the building. It had taken nearly six months for Sheryl’s letter to reach the top of Blume’s pile, considering the quantity of letters received and the time it took for all of them to wind their way through the correspondence labyrinth. Averaging about 10 letters a day, Blume would read each letter several times before opening a Word document on her computer to begin drafting. Though she had never met Obama, his voice reeled through her mind. What would the president say?

Each president has had a different relationship with mail, as Laskas details in her book. George Washington handled his five letters a day by himself; William McKinley felt the need to create the original OPC with the arrival of his 100 letters a day, a mammoth quantity thanks to the steamboat, railroad, and postal systems. Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the floodgates for half a million letters in the first week he spoke on the radio. The letter writers thanked “Frank” for his transparency or condemned his “latest piece of glorified propaganda—miscalled fireside chats.”