The 22-Year-Old Who Wrote Barack Obama’s Letters
In a small office on the top floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a young woman sat at a desk covered with letters to the president of the United States. There were hundreds, each stamped with Back from the OVAL and crowned at the top with “Reply” in Barack Obama’s handwriting.
Most White House staff members didn’t even know of this tiny office, accessible primarily by staircase and home to the writing team for the Office of Presidential Correspondence (OPC). Composed of nine staff members—a very small portion of the overall OPC—the writing team was in charge of answering the 10,000 letters and messages that arrived each day for the president.
While the majority of these letter writers received personalized form letters, 10 of them were chosen for Obama’s daily reading and, depending on the president’s wishes, required a personal reply, a process Jeanne Marie Laskas describes in a new book, to be published next month, To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope. Laskas pulls back the curtain on this impressive letter-writing machine to reveal not a wizard but a would-be Dorothy, Kolbie Blume. In her first job out of college, swamped at her desk with letters to the president in need of reply, Blume served as the president’s voice.
Her job, as Blume explained to me in a recent interview, was to understand not only the letter writer, but also how thes in the parlance of the OPC, that Obama read religiously each night.
