It was October 2016. Hurricane Matthew had just rolled out to sea, Samsung phones were catching fire, Hillary Clinton was up by double digits in the national polls and the unthinkable was still unthinkable. Shailagh Murray had spent two terms in the White House helping to lead the administration’s communications strategy and it appeared to have taken its toll. With Obama just a few months away from leaving office, journalists wanted exit interviews; they wanted to be first, biggest, loudest. She was sick of the egos, the same old questions.

The letters, she said, served as a respite from all that, and she offered to show some to me. She chose a navy blue binder, pulled it off the shelf, and opened it, fanning through page after page of letters, some handwritten in cursive on personal letterheads, others block printed on notebook paper and decorated with stickers; there were business letters, emails, faxes and random photographs of families, soldiers and pets. “You know, it’s this dialogue he’s been having with the country that people aren’t even aware of,” she said, referring to Obama’s eight-year habit of cor­responding with the American public. “Collectively, you get this kind of American tableau.”

Obama had committed to reading 10 letters a day when he first took office, becoming the first president to put such a deliberate focus on constituent correspon­dence. Late each afternoon, around five o’clock, a selection would be sent up from the post room to the Oval Office. The “10 LADs”, as they came to be known – for “10 letters a day” – would circulate among senior staff and the stack would be added to the back of the briefing book the president took with him to the resi­dence each night. He answered some by hand and wrote notes on others for the writing team to answer, and on some he scribbled “save”.

President Barack Obama reads a letter from a member of the public at a desk in the Private Residence in 2009. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

Starting in 2010, all physical mail was scanned and preserved. From 2011, every word of every email fac­tored into the creation of a daily word cloud, dis­tri­buted around the White House so policy makers and staff members alike could get a glimpse of the issues and ideas constituents had on their minds.

In 2009, Natoma Canfield, a cancer survivor from Medina, Ohio, wrote in, detailing her staggering health insurance premiums in a letter Obama framed and had hung in a corridor between his private study and the Oval Office: “I need your health reform bill to help me!!! I simply can no longer afford to pay for my health care costs!!” It stood in for the tens of thousands of similar letters he got on the healthcare issue alone. They saw spikes in volume after major events such as the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Charleston, South Carolina; the Paris terrorist attacks; the government shutdown; Benghazi. You could see these spikes in the word clouds. “Jobs” might grow for a time, or “Syria”, or “Trayvon”, or a cluster such as “family-children-fear” or “work-loans-student” or “Isis-money-war” surrounding a giant “help” – the most common word of all.

“You should go to the mailroom if you want the full effect,” she said. “Just sit there and read. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”

“We will begin with a tour,” said Fiona Reeves on welcoming me at the White House security gate. In emails she had said I would have to agree to certain terms before I would be allowed into the post room. These mostly had to do with privacy concerns – I couldn’t disclose the contents of any letter I read unless it was cleared with its author – but the forti­tude with which she announced the rules made the larger point: Reeves cared deeply about people who wrote letters to the president.

“Why don’t you sit down and read?” she said. Ten interns were crowded around two long tables, but there was an extra seat.

A girl doesn’t want her mum to be deported, and can the president please help? A guy finally admits to his wife that he’s gay, and now he would like to tell the president. A car dealer writes to say his bank is shut­ting him down, and thanks for nothing, Mr President. A vet who can’t stop seeing what he saw in Iraq writes a barely intelligible rant that makes his point all the more intelligible: “Help.” An inmate admits to selling crack, but he wants the president to know he is not a lost cause: “I have dreams Mr President, big dreams.” A man can’t find a job. A woman can’t find a job. A teacher with advanced certification can’t find a damn job. A lesbian couple just got married; thank you, Mr President. A man sends his medical bills; a woman sends her student loan statements; a child sends her drawing of a cat; a mother sends her teen­ager’s report card – straight As, isn’t that awesome, Mr President?

This pile, that pile, another pile over there; pull from the middle if you want. The narrative was sloppy and urgent, America talking all at once. No filter. The hand­writing, the ink, the choice of letter­head – every letter was a real object from a real person, and now you were holding it, and so now you were responsible for it. In total, the Office of Presidential Correspondence required the orchestration of 50 staff members, 36 interns and a rotating roster of 300 volunteers to keep up with about 10,000 letters and mes­sages every day. As the director of the entire operation, Reeves was the one who kept it all humming along.

¶

Reeves and I met again in March 2018. It was a windy day, and we were about to head over to meet with Obama in the post-presidency office he maintains in Washington. I had spent months tracking down the people who had written letters, following up on their stories, finding out how hearing from the president had changed their lives.



Since leaving the White House Reeves had become a mother. She told me about a meeting she’d had, before she left, with the White House staff secre­tary for President-elect Donald Trump. He asked about the post room, how it worked, and Reeves told him about the transition materials, the binders, and she did her best to summarise. “Ten letters a day,” she said, as if that would simply be the normal order of business. The president would be expected to read his mail and answer it. The meeting was maybe 20 minutes. The staff secretary said some­one would be getting back to her for more information. No one did.

Obama had been largely absent from public life since he left office, working on his foundation and his book, offering no comment on the cascading tumult that characterised the US’s new political landscape. At that point, he had done just three interviews: one about his early days as a community organiser, another that brought David Letterman out of retire­ment, and a third with Prince Harry. And now he would do one more: a conversation about the post room.

His suite was bright, airy and colourful. Large images of the Pacific Ocean adorned the waiting area, along with a set of Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves that had been on display in the Oval Office dining room. Head­­ing down the wide centre hall toward Obama’s office brought you stead­ily closer to a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. The image was of King’s back as he stood before a crowd – the point of view of the speaker, not the listener.

Many of the staffers, about 12 in all, had worked for Obama in the White House, and most of them knew Reeves; people stepped out of their offices to greet her. Obama app­eared just like the rest of them, smiling widely. You don’t realise just how lanky he is until you see him in person, a long, flat physique; he looked fit, even youthful, his hair cut short so that all the grey he’d famously acquired during his presi­dency was less pronounced. He walked up to Reeves with his arms outstretched and asked about her family, and she sheepishly stepped in for a hug.



Related: Obama’s letters to fellow Americans – in pictures

“I’m great. She’s great. We’re just great … ”

“Well, we’ve got babies popping out,” Obama said. “It’s the best thing. I’ve got all these staff who started with me when they were like 20. And now suddenly it’s like they’ve got kids everywhere. It’s sweet. And a bunch of them, you know, a number of them met on the campaign or at the White House. But nobody yet has named a child Barack.”

“A lot of letter writers did,” Reeves offered, perhaps too quietly for him to hear.

“I’m a little frustrated about that,” Obama continued with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘Come on, people!’”

We followed him into his office. He offered us a seat on the couch, and he sank into the chair at the end. He was in jeans and a light blue shirt unbuttoned at the top. He put his feet up, crossed his legs at the ankles. Pete Souza’s book of photographs was on the coffee table; family pictures were everywhere, on end tables, on the walls; and Obama’s expansive desk on the other side of the room was covered in paper and books. He mentioned the book he’s been working on, said it was difficult. “Writing is just so hard. Painful. It’s – everybody thinks it’s, you know. But it’s work. It’s like having homework all the time. Yeah, it’s hard.

“I should mention to you, by the way, Fiona,” he said, as we were getting settled, “we’re still getting like 250,000 letters a year. It’s a lot.”

I noticed that over by his desk, on a wall, he had hung the framed letter from Natoma Canfield; Obama had said she reminded him of his mum, who died at 52 of a similar cancer. The letter had stood as a reminder to him of his commitment to healthcare reform.

“The only instruction I gave was that I wanted every packet to be representative,” he continued. “And understanding that it wouldn’t be perfect. It didn’t mean that, you know, out of every 10 letters, there had to be two positive and two negative and three neutral and one funny. It wasn’t formulaic like that. But that was the one thing I insisted on – that this is not useful to me if all I’m getting are, you know, ‘happy birthday’ wishes. And I think they did a won­derful job of channelling the American people in that way.”

“It wasn’t just me,” Reeves said. “It was this big group. And folks in the office came from different backgrounds. We had our volunteer workforce. And there were some old people in the mix, too. So we had a lot of people putting stuff forward for you, a lot of people interpreting what ‘representative’ meant.”

“I will say this does also have to do with a culture that we tried to develop early on in the campaign,” Obama said. “Which was putting a lot of confidence in a bunch of young people to fairly, meaningfully, and passionately reflect the people they were inter­act­ing with. Whether that was on a campaign or in the office.”

I asked if he had any sense of the power of his response to the people who wrote to him.

“I think I understood that if somebody writes a letter and they get any kind of response, that there’s a sense of ... being heard,” he said. “And so often, espe­ci­ally back in 2009, 2010, 2011, a lot of people were going through a lot of hardship. And a lot of them felt alone in that hardship. They were losing their homes, or they’re dealing with somebody at the bank and the bank say­ing: ‘There’s nothing we can do. You’re going to lose your house.’ Or they’ve got a pink slip, and they’ve lost their job, and they’re going to interview after interview after interview. Over time, I think it’s easy for folks to feel a little invisible, as if nobody’s paying attention. And so I did, I think, understand that if I could at least let them know that I saw them and I heard them, maybe they’d feel a little bit less lonely in those struggles.

“Certainly what I learned during the presidency was that the office of the president itself carries enormous weight,” Obama went on. “And, sadly, probably where I learned that best was in moments of tragedy where you’d visit with grieving families. Sometimes they were in places where – I think it’s fair to say – I didn’t get a whole lot of votes. You know, after a tornado or a flood or a shooting. And what was clear was that my presence there signified to those families that they were important. Their loved ones were important. The grief they were feeling was important. That it had been seen and acknowledged.”

“That notion of being heard,” I said. “It seemed to be embedded throughout all of this.”

“I still believe it,” he said. “I think this whole letter-writing process and its importance reflected a more fundamental vision of what we were trying to do in the campaign and what I was trying to do with the presi­dency and my political philosophy. The foun­dational theory, it probably connects to my early days organising. Just going around and listening to people. Asking them about their lives, and what was import­ant to them. And how did they come to believe what they believe? And what are they trying to pass on to their children?”

He looked straight ahead, at a spot somewhere near his feet propped up on the coffee table.

“I learned in that process that if you listen hard enough, everybody’s got a sacred story,” he said. “An organising story, of who they are and what their place in the world is. And they’re willing to share it with you if they feel as if you actually care about it. And that ends up being the glue around which relation­ships are formed, and trust is formed, and commu­nities are formed. And ultimately – my theory was, at least – that’s the glue around which democracies work.”

“Listening,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t want to suggest that I would have necessarily described it in a sort of a straight line from when I started running. But I do think that that was pretty embedded in our campaign philosophy. I think that’s how we won Iowa, by having a bunch of young kids form those relationships because they were listening to people. It wasn’t us selling a policy mani­festo, and it wasn’t even because we were selling me. It was because some young person in a town they’d never been to went around and talked to people, and listened to them, and saw them. And created the kinds of bonds that made people want to then try to work together.”

He was talking about Reeves and all the people like her who knocked on doors.

“It’s the power of empathy not as an end-all, be-all,” he said. “Because even after you’ve listened to some­body or seen them, they still have a concrete problem. They’ve lost their house. They’ve lost their job. They disagree with you on abortion. They think that you’re pulling troops out of Afghanistan too soon and, you know, potentially betraying the sacrifices that have been made by the fallen. There are all these concrete issues that are real. And there are real conflicts and real choices.

“But what this form of story sharing and empathy and listening does is it creates the conditions around which we can then have a meaningful conversation and sort through our differences and our challenges, and arrive at better decisions because we’ve been able to hear everybody. Everybody feels heard so that even if a decision’s made that they don’t completely agree with, then at least they feel like: ‘OK, I was part of this. This wasn’t just dumped on me.’

Meeting with six-year-old Alex Myteberi, who wrote to Obama in 2016 after seeing a injured Syrian boy on the news. Photograph: Bloomsbury

“It goes both ways, right?” Obama said. “I want to emphasise the degree to which this was important and useful to me doing my job.

“There was a sizable percentage of the letters where, if they were critical, I’d read them and say: ‘Well, that’s not fair. I don’t think that’s true. They obviously don’t know this.’ But there were times where somebody would write a letter, and I’d say: ‘I can see their point.’ And I’d circle it, and I’d write it on the margins: ‘Is this true?’ or ‘Can you explain why this is?’ or ‘Why don’t we fix this?’”

The last time we had talked he was still in the White House and we’d discussed some of the mail he got in the wake of the 2016 election. “There was a lot of anxiety and sadness I had to respond to,” he said then. “I remember one that said: ‘Pack up your bags because, thank goodness, we’re about to undo everything you’ve done; it couldn’t have come a moment too soon,’ some­thing along those lines. I don’t think I responded to that one ... ”

I had asked him how he might advise President-elect Trump on what to do with the mail.

He had laughed. I think it was more out of awk­war­d­ness than because of any sort of image the question may have conjured.

“But, um, it, ah,” he said about the idea of Trump reading the mail. “You know what, this is a great habit. I think it worked for me because it wasn’t something I did for anyone else. I did it because, as you said, it sustained me. So maybe it will sustain others in the future. OK?”

OK. But I never used the word “sustained”. I remember wondering how that word had popped up.

“I can tick off the bills and the policies and the accomplishments. But I tell you one of the things I’m proud of about having been in this office is that I don’t feel like I’ve ... lost myself.” Like everything else, that thought came out slowly. “I feel as if – even if my skin is thicker from, you know, public criticism, and I’m wiser about the workings of government, I haven’t become ... cynical, and I haven’t become callous, and I would like to think that these letters have something to do with that.”

The letters as sustenance came up again during our second meeting. “I will say, selfishly, that the number of people who would write letters acknow­ledging the meaningful difference that a policy had made in their lives – making it real as opposed to abstract – was sustaining.

“The numbers are telling you 20 million people got healthcare through the ACA [Affordable Care Act]. But that’s not the same as a mom writing a letter saying: ‘My son got insur­ance. He got his first physical in a decade. They caught a tumour. It’s out. He’s fine.’ And you go: ‘OK, that is the work we’re doing.’”

We talked about another letter writer, Marjorie, who wrote about trying to expel the racism she believed was lodged like poison in her heart. She had discovered it and wanted to get rid of it.

“She was writing to tell you that she was listening to you.”

“It’s a beautiful letter.”

“And now here’s Marg starting a chapter of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] in her town,” I said.

“What a great story.”

“She went for it. She wanted to tell you that.”

“It makes me proud,” he said. “My grandmother, who loved me more than anyone, had an initial reaction like Marg to young black men approaching.”

Obama had told the story about his grandmother back in the earliest days of the presidential cam­paign, in a speech during the 2008 primaries against Hillary Clinton. He had been criticised for his can­dour about a topic as sensitive as unconscious bias. In a radio inter­view later, he tried to explain what he had meant, which only made it more contro­versial. “The point I was making,” he said to the host, “was not that Grand­mother harbours any racial animo­s­ity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reac­tion that’s been bred in our experi­ences that doesn’t go away and that sometimes comes out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”

“Typical white person.” You’re not supposed to say stuff like that, especially not as the first black candi­date ever to run for the office as a major party’s candidate. The Clinton campaign pounced. Obama was clearly new at this game.

Now all that listening he’d been talking about – eight years of it – was just history. All those letters he’d rece­ived during his presidency had been shipped off to the National Archives. They’ll live on, artefacts for a mus­eum exhibit someday. Here are the voices of America, from 2009 to 2017.

But the letters offer more. They remind you that government can work and that people committed to public service really do exist. We had this, which means we can have it again.

“And, you know, right now,” Obama said, “a lot of people who have worked with me in the past or supported me or voted for me, you know, can get discouraged by the news day to day. And that’s understandable. I always have to be careful in not sounding as if I am Pollyannaish about the future.”

The future. America was not, as of late, ageing gracefully. Did he feel responsible?

“A better future is earned,” he said. “It’s hard work. And democracy in a country this big, with such a diverse population, is especially hard. And compli­cated. And there are times in our history where we’ve had bad, ugly stretches. And so it’s important not to ever forget and to recognise that the ideals and the best version of America isn’t preordained.

“But I do think that when you hear someone like Marjorie, at her age, just take a leap of faith like that, then you can’t help but feel as if it is worth the effort.

“If we duplicate enough of those moments, enough of those interactions, enough of those shared stories, over time we get better at this thing called democracy. And that is something that all of us have the capacity to do. That’s not the job of the president. That’s not the job of a bunch of professional policy makers. It’s the job of citizens.”

• This is an edited extract from To Obama: With Love, Joy, Hate and Despair by Jeanne Marie Laskas, published by Bloomsbury on 18 September.