Five-years, 50,000 miles and 1,000 Pictures of Presidents
You can learn a lot about people by looking at the things they save. Personal effects speak to their personality. Keepsakes and mementos mark formative events. Scribbled notes or a box of saved letters can clue us into their state of mind. Taken together, these artifacts help us better understand the life someone led.
For the past five years, I’ve been searching for those very things, not in the attic of a loved one, but inside the archives of the American presidency—specifically at more than a dozen presidential libraries operated by the National Archives.
Barack Obama’s Blackberry smartphone. Franklin Roosevelt’s lucky fedora. The safety plug of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The telephone used by Richard Nixon to speak with the Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Dwight Eisenhower’s written orders to Allied troops on D-day and the note he prepared in case the invasion failed. The reading copy of the speech Ronald Reagan famously delivered at the foot of the Berlin Wall.
These artifacts are only a fraction of what I found. In total, I carefully photographed more than 1,000 objects and documents left behind by modern presidents, from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama. Each of those images tells a story. Some reveal who these presidents were when the cameras weren’t rolling. Others mark moments that literally shaped the world. Many are so steeped in history that you can almost picture the president holding them in their hands.
This newsletter and my forthcoming book (stay tuned!) are where I’ll be sharing how these artifacts, and the history they represent, shaped the American presidency in ways that continue to effect our lives today.
More to come.
-Peter