are the 40 and overs? >> than the traditional establishment, well, for instance, the president gave a speech in may in which he said the two states, israel and palestine, need to be based on the '67 lines, the pre-1967 border between the west bank and israel with some swaps. we think that's exactly right. the president took a great deal of heat from organized jewish groups and other voices. we believe he should have gotten a great deal of support because that's the only way that israel is actually going to survive as a jewish and a democratic country, is if it does achieve a two-state solution on that basis. >> palgrave macmillan published "a new voice for israel." jeremy ben hami, founder of j street s the author. >> up next, eli saslow reports on the letters that are sent to president obama from the american public, ten of which the president reads every night.

this is about 45 minutes. [applause] >> thanks, guys. appreciate it. um, i hope nobody who's here was here browse reading because if you were, this is going to be like a total disappointment. brad sings -- yeah, exactly. brad sings, he takes requests. you guys would all leave immediately if i tried to do that. i appreciate you guys coming. there are a lot of people here who have been supportive of me during the whole process of writing the week, people who edited, people who traveled out to montana to read pages on our couch out there and people who helped with my reporting, so i really appreciate you guys being here and showing your support here again tonight. so the idea of this book actually was, it was sort of borne out of frustration. and the idea crystallized for me the first and only time that i flew on air force one. i'd taken this job for "the washington post" where i'd been working for a while where it was

my assignment to write sort of more personal, intimate stories about the presidency and what the president's life is like. and it only took me, like, maybe a week of doing that job to realize that the president doesn't really have personal, intimate moments, certainly none that i was going to get access to. i mean, everything about his life is outsourced in this, you know, really crazy way. i mean, he has 94 butlers and maids serve the family in the white house, six calligraphers write anything he wants written, 78 people make his schedule every day. i mean, it's this huge army that sort of helps him operate in this day-to-day way, and his schedule is subdivided into these 15 minute chunks, and there's a secretary who sits outside the oval office which actually has a reverse peephole so she can look in through the door at him and make sure that things are running on schedule. you know, he calls that, he calls it the bubble, and i think sometimes it really drives him crazy. and in the few weeks that i'd

been doing this job, it had been driving me crazy, probably also my editors crazy because i was probably not writing as many stories as they were hoping i was going to write and not getting to those sort of really personal moments in obama's life. so, you know, finally after doing this for, you know, it'd probably been a few months at this point, by money -- turn -- my turn came up to fly on air force one. the way it works, pretty much everybody that covers the president, your name is put into this huge database, and every time the president goes on a trip, you know, they move through this database, and eight more people get their turn to fly on air force one. so my name came up, and i finally thought, all right, this is the moment where i'm going to see something, i'm going to be up close and, like, i'll have a chance to sort of experience what this is like a little bit for him. so, you know, got dressed up. obama flies out of a private air force base in virginia. you know, got dressed up, i actually rented a car to drive over there because rachel and

i's car at the time was, like, a battered pontiac grand am that we'd managed to keep functional by jerry rigging the hood down with parachute rope. it didn't feel appropriate to pull onto the tarmac next to air force one. rented a car, i'm sure they gave me a volkswagen bug. drove over there, waited with, like, these eight other reporters as we waited for our turn to board the plane. we waited for maybe, i don't know, an hour, and then they let us up. there are two entrances on air force one, they led us up this back one that's kind of back by, you know, the far rear of the airplane. we walked up the stairs, we sat down, and they said, okay, wait here. we're waiting for the president to arrive at the airport. so we waited for maybe a half an hour, then we heard, okay, the president is arriving at the airport. and you've never seen reporters move this fast. there was a mad scramble to get back off the plane to watch the president's motorcade arrive, and then we saw him walk six

steps up the separate entrance of the plane to the front of the plane. so, you know, those six steps were very illuminating. we saw, like, what he was wearing and what he was doing, and we all were frantically taking notes about it. we got back on the plane, we flew to new hampshire. we scrambled off the plane as fast as we could to watch the president walk those six steps again back into his motorcade. we followed behind separately in a different car to the event. this event, actually, there was not enough time or space for the press to go into the event with him, so we were off site in a satellite location where we watched the speech on, like, closed circuit tv, and, you know, we're taking notes off the event that way. so i was sitting there feeling, you know, honestly, just really frustrated with trying to write about the presidency in any kind of meaningful way, and i was listening to his speech, and i heard him say something that i'd heard him talk about before but, you know, it just sort of clicked. he talked about these ten

letters that he reads every night which are a sampling of the 20,000 letters that come into the white house every day. and, you know, he talked about how these letters were what he felt like were his only direct connection left to people out in the country and the people that he governed. and he said that the letters were the thing that sometimes kept him sane when he felt like he was so barricaded from some of the other things. and, you know, i realized pretty quickly then that that was something that seemed personal and real and genuine, and that was something that i wanted to try to write about. so that's what i did. it started with a story for the post. i wrote a longer piece about the process of getting these ten letters to his desk. then the paper was generous enough to give me a leave for a year where i did go out to montana, and i think they've totally eliminated the distinguished from that professor title now, but, so went out there and wrote. and at the end of this year, finally did get time on the president's schedule where that

secretary was looking in through that reverse peephole at us while we talked about the letters. and i'll read, i'll read a brief part of the book now that sort of, you know, from that half hour i had with him about what this mail means to him. the president said the hardest letters for him to read were the ones that made him feel remote, even powerless. people tended to write to their president when circumstances turned dire, sealing a prayer into an envelope as a matter of last resort. what resulted each day inside obama's purple folder was an intimate view of hardship and personal struggle, a wave of desperation capable of overwhelming the senses. so many writers needed urgent help, obama said, and yet the act of governing was so slow that it sometimes took years before legislation could actually improve people's lives. a few times during his presidency obama had been so moved by a letter that he had written a personal check or made a phone call on the writer's behalf, believing it was the only way to insure a fast

result. it's not something i should advertise, but it has happened, he said. many other times he had forwarded letters to government agencies or cabinet secretaries after attaching a standard handwritten note that read, can you, please, take care of this? these letters can be heartbreaking, just heartbreaking, he said. some you read and you say, gosh, i really want to help this person, and i may not have the tools to help them right now. and then you start thinking about the fact that for every one person who wrote describing their story, there might be another 100,000 going through the same thing. so there are times when i'm reading the letters, and i feel pain that i can't do more faster to make a difference in their lives. he said his nightly reading in the white house sometimes made him pine for his days as a community organizer back in the 1980s when he was making $10,000 a year and working on the south side of chicago. he had just graduated from college, and he purchased a used car for $2,000 and spent his days driving around the city's housing projects to speak with residents about their lives.

he became familiar with many of the same issues that would flood his mail 25 years later; housing calamities, chronic unemployment and struggling schools. obama's fellow organizers in chicago considered him a master of hands-on, granular problem soing. he was skinny and boyish, a good listener if still a bit naive, and some of the older women in the housing projects made a habit of inviting him into their homes and cooking for him. he looked around their apartments, keeping a log of maintenance issues and delivering that list to the landlord. he helped arrange meetings with city housing officials to talk about asbestos problems, he established a tenants' right organization, founded a job-training program and led a tutoring group that prepared students for college. when he left for harvard law school after three years in chicago, obama had set his path for his future. he wanted to become a politician, a job that would allow him the to listen to people's problems and enjoy the simple satisfaction of solving them. now, he was the most powerful politician of all, and yet fixing problems seemed more

difficult and satisfaction more elusive. the people were right there in front of me, and i could say let's go to the alderman's office, or let me be an advocate in some fashion, obama said. and here just because of the nature of the office and the scope of the issues, you're removed in ways that are frustrating. sometimes what you want to do is pick up the phone and say tell me more about what's going on, and let me see if i can be your social worker, be your advocate, be your mortgage adviser, be your point counselor. so what i have to constantly reck reconcile in my mind is i have a specific role to play in this office, and i've got to make a bunch of big decisions that you hope wind up having a positive effect over this many lives, but you can't always be certain. that was one of the reasons obama had taken to responding by hand to a few letters each night. he still liked the satisfaction of providing at least one thing immediate and concrete. so what i would do when i picked a relater that i was -- a letter that i was going to write about

and, really, the part i enjoyed the most was i would go and spend a week, more than that sometimes, with these people who'd written to the president and received back responses from him, watching their problems unfold. and, you know, that was by far, i guess, the biggest privilege in this for me was getting the chance -- the mail that comes in to him and that comes in that folder of ten letters every night, it is so remarkably diverse. it comes from all kinds of people, people who despise him, people who love him, mostly just from people who are writing about what's going on in their lives and these really sering ways. they're sort of like these journal entries. they're so personal because people don't necessarily expect he's ever going to read them. and then for me to be able to go spend time with those people and, you know, be there with them while they were, you know, trying to reform a school or filing for bankruptcy or making these big decisions in their

lives was a huge privilege to see sort of how that works on a small scale while watching how the president's trying to deal with those problems in this big, sweeping way. so the bulk of the book really is stories of these people's lives and, you know, narrative journalism of watching how things for these people go. so the other, the other passage i'm going to read before i hope taking some questions is a slightly longer passage, but i think it'll just give you a feel for what this book really is like. this is a couple that wrote a letter to the president when they were just going through a brutal stretch. it's a woman and her husband, they lived in monroe, michigan, which is this really bleak town in michigan halfway through, halfway from toledo and detroit and, actually, you'd rather be in either toledo or detroit than either of these places. and jen, the woman, had lost her job. her husband, jay, ran a pool business. he'd lost that job. she'd then been diagnosed with

cancer, and she wrote a note to the president just sort of kind of telling him what things were like for them there. he wrote back a pretty sort of inspirational note to her, and they decided once they got this note, the president sort of told them things could get better for them, and they should take step toss make things better. and what they decided to do, the only way they could think things would be better was they decided they needed to file for bankruptcy and try to get a fresh start on this tremendous debt that had mount inside the their lives. so i went there with them while they were going through this process, and this passage that i'm going to read, um, is the scene of their bankruptcy hearing. this day. they woke at -- they awoke at six on the morning of the bankruptcy hearing looking as if they'd never slept. jen had broken her ankle the day before in another stroke of bad luck when she tripped going down the stairs, and now all she could think about was a vicodin and a cigarette. jay had a headache that was threatening to become a

migraine. he walked out of their bedroom to discover three loads of unfolded laundry spread across the floor, crusty dishes on the kitchen table, and their 2-year-old son jaden awake and wailing because of an ear ache. jay checked on the ear ache and escaped to the back porch. this was their latest concession to the economic collapse, to smoke each marlboro medium in two shifts. the plan was meant to cut their consumption in half, but instead they were smoking twice as often, still burning $13 a day on two packs and wasting gas to drive ten minutes to a walmart that offered the best cigarette prices. jay smoked his half cigarette down to the edge of the filter and flicked it into the air. i don't know if i can do this, he said. you have to, jen said. i've got five hours of work left to finish this pool, jay said. aye got the late shift tonight at the airport. we've got one kid screaming and another going on a field trip, but i have to drop everything and drive all the way to ann arbor just so i can prove that

we're broke? i'm sorry, jen said. there's no choice. jay went back inside and searched through his closet for an outfit. the last time he'd dressed up was for their wedding, five months and 15 pounds ago, and now his favorite pair of slacks refused to button. he found another pair of wrinkled khakis in the back of the closet and smoothed them with an iron. they fit, but he couldn't find a belt to match. he tried to knot a tie once, twice, three times and still the thing ended up dangling above his belly button. dammit, he said. he threw the tie back in the closet and went in to the living room to show jen his partial outfit. you look good, she said. i feel like an idiot, he said. jay disappeared into the closet again. this time when he came out, he didn't ask for feedback. he was wearing skateboard shoes, jeans, a frayed cloth belt, an oversized detroit tigers t-shirt and a baseball hat stained white

with sweat marks. he tucked a cigarette behind each ear and grabbed his car keys. this will have to work, he said, and then he kissed jen good-bye before she could object. he drove across the street to order a coffee with three creams and three sugars, then he pulled onto the highway and headed for ann arbor. jay kept the radio turned off while he drove and thought about the other times he traveled this highway. he'd lived in ann arbor for a few years in his early 20s, dated a college girl and worked on swimming pools when the economy was booming. customers had often paid him in cash, so he travel with the a stack of $20 bills in his pocket. he'd celebrated a friend's birthday at the fanciest steakhouse in town where waiters refolded his napkin when he went to the bathroom, and the $8 salad looked like yard debris. now he parked in front of the courthouse. framed photos of obama and vice president joe biden hung on the wall of the entrance. just beyond the metal detectors, directly above those photos was a printed sign, "bankruptcy

proceedings," it read, with an arrow pointing up the courthouse stairs. jay followed the sign to the second floor lounge where bankruptcy hearings had taken place every other wednesday for a year because the courtroom was always overbooked. it looked like the waiting room at a doctor's office with fake flowers at the entrance, four televisions hanging from the ceiling and back issues of fortune magazine -- an ironic choice -- spread across coffee tables. forty chairs were arranged around the room. the officiant, essentially the judge, sat in a suit at a white folding table. jay found a chair and surveyed the people sitting around him. there was an elderly black man wearing mismatched tennis shoes, one red, one white. a motorcyclist in a harley davidson t-shirt with a grizzly beard. an obese woman whose jeans worn too low forced mountains of flesh to spill into plain view. many of these people had been advised by their lawyers to look

as destitute as possible. it was the unspoken rule of bankruptcy court; dress to depress, not to impress. in the his stained baseball hat, jay was the most dapper client in the room. his lawyer, whom he had never met, arrived 20 minutes late, mumbled an apology about bad bankruptcy traffic, and pulled jay into the hallway for a consultation. thanks for coming, sir, jay said. the lawyer had his hair slicked back with gel, and he casually tossed a pen into the air with his right hand. sure, sure, he said, glad to help. it was a good day for the lawyer. he would represent four other people for bankruptcy, earning $1300 per case. jay and jen had already started sending him monthly payments incurring one new debt in an attempt to erase the others. so remind me again why you're filing, the lawyer asked. lots of reasons, jay staid, but mainly because my pool business went under. really?

my brother just bought an inground pool, and it's costing him 30 grand. we didn't get many orders like that, jay said. the lawyer shrugged and handed jay a one-page form to fill out. jay grabbed a pen and started to write. under 2008 income with spouse he wrote 14,000. under 2009 income, 23,000. he checked a few boxes, signed the bottom of the form and handed it back to the lawyer. okay, the lawyer said. here's how this is going to go. the officiant will call us up, and he'll is ask you a few questions. keep your answers short and polite. there shouldn't be anything too confusing. if all goes well, you'll be granted your bankruptcy. don't be nervous, i do this all the time. trust me, this is a piece of cake. jay nodded, and they went back into the lounge where the officiant stood to announce the beginning of the proceedings. the room fell silent. jay leaned forward in his seat to listen. one by one people filing for bankruptcy walked to the front of the room and sat across from the officiant at the white table.

they raised their right hands, swore under oath and offered their testimony. the soundtrack of a recession. case one, the primary reason i'm feeling for -- finalling for bankruptcy is i was the owner/operator of a truck business. that went bad. now i have no truck and no business. case two, i'm in sales, and there's no commission anymore. i sell copiers and printers. a full-time job and, sir, i made only 11,000 last year. case three, my son's on welfare and not doing so good, so now i'm supporting all five of to grandkids. thirty minutes into the hearing, the officiant stood up and called for jason stanley klein. jay walked to the front of the room with his lawyer, and they sat side by side at the white folding table. the officiant, doug, stared back at them. he was a muscular man with a crew cut, a clenched jaw and dark circles under his eyes. he'd been processing bankruptcy cases every other wednesday for 21 years, supervising what he called a nonstop parade of

misery. it had always been a hard job, but lately doug had started to wonder if it was becoming unbearable. bankruptcy cases were at an all-time high with more than 1.57 million people filing for it nationally ending at the end of 2010. doug had processed 1700 bankruptcies in 2009, his busiest year ever, and he was on pace towards 50% more in 2010. the preparation for each case required 60 pages of paperwork, but no amount of groundwork made the face-to-face meetings any easier. people filing for bankruptcy seemed more desperate than ever, he thought, and more likely to snap. they shouted, they cried, they slammed their fists on the table. lately, doug had been forced to call in the court-martial to handle l violent outbursts about once a month. he thought of his job as similar to that of an emergency room physician. after a while you've seen a lot of the same pain and suffering, he said. you know the stories, people are sick, unemployed, homeless.

i don't want to say you become jaded necessarily, but you have to look at their problems objectively and move forward in an efficient manner to the next case. now doug looked across the table at the next case. jason stanley klein, case number 1045682. so, doug said, what caused the bankruptcy? i went into business at a bad time in a bad location, and a lot of my debts stem from that, jay replied. doug looked down and studied jay's bankruptcy filing. not long ago doug had believed most bankruptcies resulted from avoidable mistakes. now he wasn't so sure. he signed jay's paperwork, a familiar combination of bad luck, poor wages and unemployment. the story of michigan's economy at the beginning of 2010. sometimes doug studied a case and thought immediately of one of his favorite expressions; there but for the grace of god go i. he continued to do his job, he said, because the paycheck kept him on the right side of the white table.

he looked across at jay. is everything you filed here accurate, doug asked? yes, sir, jay said. then i have no further questions. that completes your exam. jay stood up and walked out of the courtroom. the lawyer followed him into the hall and squeezed his shoulder. no further questions means they're going to grant you the bankruptcy, the lawyer said. jay nodded. he shook the lawyer's hand, walked out to his car and crowe back to monroe -- drove back to monroe. he called jen from the road. it's done, he said. let's celebrate. they met at a mexican restaurant in monroe where the lunch entrees cost $4.95 and came big enough to split. jen leaned her crutches against the wall and wrapped her arms around jay. they smoked their half cigarettes and went inside to order, a beer for him and a margarita for her. it was 11:15 a.m. jay had to work later that night at the airport, jen had to take jaden to the doctor to check on the ear ache. the restaurant was empty. mare yap chi music played in the background. they sat on the same side of the booth holding hands.

jay took off his hat, smirked and raised his glass. to bankruptcy, he said. to fresh starts, she said. to 2010, he said. so, um, you know, the book, i think it reveals a holt of what was -- a lot of what was going on in the country over the course of that year that i was reporting. for jen and jay, you know, one of the heavier stories in the book, over the course of the year they filed for bankruptcy, they got bankruptcy, their debts continued to mount because of her medical bills, things did not get better. and at the end of the year and at the end of the book in this really heartbreaking moment, they decided they were going to take their first trip to new york city because an autograph dealer there had been, you know, writing them again and again and again, a dealer who knew they'd gotten a letter from the president and eventually jen and jay drove to new york, sold this letter for $10,000 so that they could pay off these debts. so that was one very direct case where this, you know, this exchange had a pretty profound

impact on these people's lives. and be other stories in here are certainly more hopeful, um, and, you know, the mix in that envelope rages from sort of -- ranges from this sort of devastation to kids writing who are inspired by obama and end up running for class president themselves and doing well because of it. but one of the things that i find just astounding about this process every day, the fact that, you know, the president reads these ten letters every day, i mean, for me reading that for a year and having no control over everything, i mean, it's pretty humbling in terms of just, you know, what people are going true in their lives in the -- through in their lives in the country, and people tend to write when things are, you know, things are difficult for them. as a georgeist, i know that most of the feedback i get is people who write because they're upset about something, and i think, you know, what he reads reflects that. so, but i also think he's, it is, it is a fixture of what he does, and he'll continue to read all ten as long as he's in

office. i mean, so far the mix of letters in there has not gotten easier to read, it's probably in some ways gotten more difficult, so we'll see how that mix changes in the time to come. but i'd love to talk, questions, anything. you guys want more uplifting stories, we can switch into that mode. [laughter] yeah. >> i've got a bunch, so i'll try to limit it. you say he gets 20,000 a day or a week? >> a day. yeah. >> how does that get down to ten? >> it is a crazy process that requires, basically, an army. so mail used to be handled inside the white house itself before the anthrax scare. and then they decided it was too big a risk to have all this stuff coming in there, so they took over this office building in downtown where on the ninth floor of this building 50 employees, like 100 interns and 1500 volunteers sort through this deluge of mail that comes in every day. and they're very specific about measuring the metrics of the mail. so e-mails are, like,

automatically categorized into one of 75 folders that people are likely to write about. you know, and they measure every day, okay, today we got 20% of our mail about occupy wall street. half of it was negative, half of it was positive. you know, and they, they take these metrics, and they make sure that the ten they give to obama reflect the general feel of what's coming in. so pretty much the people who select these letters for him are these, the staffers in that office, it's, you know, it's people who it's their first job in d.c. they maybe worked on the campaign. they go in, they read 300 of these letters a day, they pick five over the course of the day that are representative of sort of the main issues that are coming in but also stand out in some, you know, that stick with them. then those letters go to the director of the office's desk who looks at 100 of these potential letters to go to his desk and picks ten that he feels like represents what came in that day. so, yeah, it requires an army.

yeah. >> and how many did you read over the course of this, and how did you pick your ten? were you looking for ten that were representative, or were you just looking for the really amazing stories? >> i mean, luckily, i could kind of do both. there were -- it was sort of a reporter's dream in that you could take one day and just by the fact that 20,000 letters have already been reduced to ten, those are going to be ten really, probably, pretty good, compelling stories. so to then be able to pick, i was able to read hundreds of letters over the course of the year. so to be able to pick from this huge wealth of letters, it was, it was hard to pick the ten that i wanted to follow. i did, i mean, the few things for me were i wanted to pick, i wanted a mix. i wanted, i wanted stories like jen and jay, but i also wanted stories that were, letters that were funny or fun or, um, so that was one thing. also i was looking for letters that impacted his presidency in a profound way. and some of these letters, some of the letters in the book, um,

really have been transformative for him and also for the people who wrote. i mean, letters that he has used to pass major bits of legislation by talking about the letter again and again and again. or times where he's responded to a letter writer and then gone to that person's hometown to give a major speech. so i was looking for things like that. also, and this is a little bit like maybe inside journalism shoptalky, but i was looking for stories that i could still watch things unfold. the book, i think, would be a very static book if i was just going back and reporting on this person wrote because of this and this person wrote because of this. i wanted the letters to sort of be a beginning point for me where somebody's writing about something they're going through, and i could go watch and be there while they're going through this. so -- flush other questions? thoughts? criticisms? open to all things. yeah. >> i thought that the -- i've read the book. >> with oh, cool, thanks. >> i thought it was, i thought it was excellent.

i thought it was something that should be read in schools because i think that was a very -- i think that was one of the messages that sort of came out of it is that, you know, is that you can, you can connect, you can, you know, make your voice heard. but i thought the story about the health care, about the woman in ohio who was so ill and the fact that her story would kind of clinch that health care deal and was absolutely amazing. >> oh, thanks so much. i really appreciate that. yeah, the story that she's referencing in the book which probably is the letter that over the last three years has had the most profound impact on the president, it came from a cleaning woman in ohio who wrote a letter to say, base basically, my health care premiums have skyrocketed, i can't afford to pay them anymore. i've had to choose between being able to keep my house or pay my

health insurance, i'm giving up my health insurance. the president immediately recognized sort of the potential of this letter. he was just beginning to try to pass his health care reform. and so at the white house they talked about, well, maybe we should bring this woman here and have her talk to some major health insurance companies. so they called her to see if she'd be willing to do that. at that point two weeks had passed, during these two weeks right after she'd given up her health care she had been diagnosed with leukemia and given a 35% chance to live. so, you know, it was this really, um, you know, sort of impactful moment for if both the president and this woman whose name is natoma canfield. he then decided, okay, instead of trying to get her to come here, i will go there. he gave a major speech there and turned her into this major icon for his health care reform bill. and, you know, they wrote back and forth measure once, and for -- more than once, and for

me the sort of most moving and hard part of this, probably the hardest chapter to report because i was then there with natoma while she was -- her immune system was so fragile that she was essentially barricaded in her own house, and her sister and i spent time with her and went to chemo with her as she was just scrapping tooth and nail for her life. and really what fortified her during that stretch was not only these letters that she was getting from the president, but also because she had become kind of this icon of health care reform, she then was getting letters from all across the country, people writing to recommend eat mashed potatoes if you struggling with the chemo, people sending checks, and for her, i think it kept her alive. i'm sure she thinks it kept her alive, and she's still alive. still in and out of the hospital. but, yeah, that was a case that really impacted the president and her in a pretty profound way. thanks for reading. i really appreciate it. yeah. >> i was really struck by the

access people gave you to their lives, and i'm sort of imagining you, you know, at the breakfast table. it seemed like you were right there for all these moments. what does that look like? you just show up and interact with them for a period of time? >> kind of, yeah. it's a tremendous privilege to be able to do, and it's kind of what i usually do for the paper too. so in this case i'm always amazed just as a journalist in general by how willing people are to open up their lives to a writer. i mean, which is not an easy thing to do. to have me, you know, to have me go to your bankruptcy hearing with you, it's like a very, it's a lot to ask of -- >> or your chemo. >> yeah, or your chemo. in this case i think people write to the president often times because they want, they want to know that their lives matter and that their stories count and that somebody's listening to them. and so then in these cases when i called and said, you know, the president did read this letter, what you're going through does matter and i want to come and i

want to write about it because, you know, i want to write about it in this up close, honest way, across the board people were totally open and willing to having me do this. and, you know, just in terms of how those trips usually go, and there are other people in the room who do them, my experience with them is the first, the first day of a trip like that can be, um, a little bit awkward or hard. people are nervous and, you know, it's -- those days are the hardest. usually by, like, the second or third day that you're there you kind of stop being the writer/reporter, and you start being eli or joe or whoever, and that's when i think you really get to the best stuff because you're at this level of intimacy that you need to be there to get. which is why i knew i wanted letters where i could go spend time with these people. because just going back and reporting on why people wrote, you can get, you can get to a certain layer of depth. i think just being there while things are unfolding, it's a

different kind of thing and kind of helps you get to that next level. >> i'm glad you add the epilogue, because before i finished the book i was looking on the internet with natoma, see how she was doing. you know, you get invested. >> yeah, sure. thanks. >> did anybody turn you down? >> nobody turned me down. and that, honestly, it made, it made it hard to pick the letters i was going to write about. so usually in picking a letter the other thing i was looking for, there were some big issues over the course of the year that i knew e wanted. i wanted a letter about the oil spill. so finding -- sometimes i would say, okay, here are ten letters i could pick about immigration. and then i would call, you know, ten of those people and have these initial sort of half hour, 40-minute conversations just to kind of get a feel for this if it was going to work. and sometimes narrowing those six, seven, eight, ten to one was, yeah, brutal. and, you know, i feel like i could have written a hundred

letters. nobody would have read it after the first ten. [laughter] but, you know, it was hard to narrow it down to that number. yeah. >> so were there, did you take ten trips? so was it ten trips, or did you spend time with people who didn't make it into the book? >> i never -- um, good question. i never made, i never went out of town for a long trip and then said, okay, this is going to be on the cutting room floor. i made more than ten trips because sometimes just because of what people were going through, i would go for a few days and then come back and then go again for, you know, to be there for a big, a bankruptcy hearing, a first day of college. so it ended up being more than ten trips in that way, but i never, you know, i never went somewhere and felt like this really isn't going to work. and, you know, also just in my job for the paper where i do the same kind of thing, that doesn't happen very often, and i don't think it's because i get there and i'm getting incredible material and, you know, i'm not

good at what i'm doing. i think a lot of it is that people are just, people are really interesting. and if you get to that level, i think with almost anybody, people's lives are really interesting. and if you can write about them in textured ways, there are very few people whose lives you go and find, jeez, this is just really boring. i think -- [laughter] if you are feeling that way, you're probably still at, like, a very surface level. so, yeah. yeah. >> did the white house approve the ten letters that you selected? >> they did not, no. i had to battle with them for access to be able to read letters and say, basically, i want to do this book, and we need to work it out so that i get to read the letters he reads. that was a process and a long process. but i, once i had that access, um, you know, they were not -- i picked whatever letters i wanted to pick which i think, honestly, that that worked for them because what, why the president

likes to talk about these letters, i think, and why they like to talk about these letters so much is they want to show that he's listening to everybody. so the fact that i knew i wanted to write about, you know, one of the letters in the book is from a republican in texas who writes this really angry e-mail late agent night. -- at night. i knew i wanted something like that in the book. but for them they wanted to show that, yeah, he hears that person too. he reads whatever comes in. so that made it work out. >> looks like this book would really inform teaching journalism and poly-sci. seems like it ought tock. >> i don't know if it is. i hope it'll be. you know, maybe i can pull some strings at montana and have one class of 15 kids read it. [laughter] but that's probably the extent. but thank you. yeah. >> has the president read the book? >> i don't know. he's got an copy. um, i doubt he's read the book. just in terms of, like, how much he has going on and, also, i was

thinking about in the other day because in, like, a more like thinking, wow, like maybe he's read the book moment i was just thinking about what he reads, and then i remembered that everything he reads is like very, very public, and they release -- the white house o asian -- occasionally releases here's the president's reading list, and it would probably look really weird, he's reading reads book about the mail he reads. it would look a little conceited, so there are probably -- >> other things. >> i'm sure he does. but, yeah, i sent him a copy, and i sent him a handwritten note. i don't know if it got through the mail room but, no, i think it did. so he has a copy. i don't know if he'll read it or not. yeah. >> hi. my name's bishop. >> hi. >> and i haven't read the book, but i'm planning on reading it. >> cool, thanks. >> i was just wondering, were you in contact with the president throughout when you were writing? i know you said you had an interview, but were you -- >> i was in contact with his staff, and there are some people, very few people, but

there are some people who work in his administration who i know well enough at this point that i could sort of, if i was writing -- the book was kind of an education for me because these chapters are about, they're all about different issues. so one of my challenges was, like, to learn about, for instance, education policy and learn about it enough that then you can write about education policy in an interesting way. it's hard. so during that i would be talking to people like, you know, arne duncan and people on his staff and trying to learn about what they were trying to do with education and learn that way. i wasn't talking with the president about any of it until the end. >> right. >> um, and be then i went in and had, you know, 30 or 40 minutes to sort of talk in general about the letters and also talk specifically about the letters in the book. >> did you ever get to visit the office? >> i did, yeah. which is just a crazy and really cool place. i mean, it's, it's like this building is this filter between

the public and the president. and so if you send an e-mail, it lands on one of the computers there. if you send a letter, it goes there. if you call the white house comment line, there are 35 people that sit at a phone bank and pick up the phone and try to keep all those calls to two minutes. there is by far the most fascinating, there's a gift room. like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people send the president gifts which is sort of a strange instinct. and they send these really, really weird things. [laughter] sometimes like, you know, just like when he was interested in getting a dog, the white house received a handful of different puppies that were mailed -- >> oh! >> yeah. i mean, it's this -- and it used to be worse. in the reading about the history of this mail room, the presidents who were big game hunters would sometimes receive gifts from across the world of big game animals, tigers, different things like this that would just land at the white house. so the gift room is probably the coolest place. it's really strange. yeah, the gift room. [laughter] exactly.

exactly. spend some time with a tiger. yeah. [laughter] could be a book. that room is really cool. >> so i have a question with the -- i'm sure there were letters of threats that he would receive. what do they do with those letters? >> yeah. so the first thing that happens to any mill is it goes through this weeklong screening process where it's scanned for, you know, chemical threats, radiological threats. so that happens first. then it comes into this office, and the reason that they have this huge staff is there's a rule there that every single letter has to be read because who knows, you know, buried in one of these letters could be some kind of credible threat. so that's why they've decided we need to make sure that a person reads every single one of these letters. and letters that are threats are flagged immediately, and, you know, go places much higher than to me. but also like on the comment line, even people calling in to the white house, all those phones have a red button that

automatically transfers both suicide calls and threats which is, was astounding to me that enough people call the white house with either because they're going to commit suicide or because they're calling with this threat that they have a button on every phone that automatically transfers it. so, yeah, it is sad. i mean, people call there for all kinds of things. yeah, crazy place. you know, it was, it's just i think that whole building is like this window into, you know, the window, this window into the relationship between the public and the president and, you know, both the fact that things get to him which is, um, great and also what it takes to get things to him which is really illuminate anything this other way too. so any other questions? >> i don't remember if you talked about this in the book or not, has the volume increased with obama? because i know, you know, there is this because he has talked about the letters and he has, you know, complained about not being able to have his own blackberry and that kind of

thing, and is so my guess would be that people feel as though he's somehow more accessible. is -- >> i think definitely the l volume, especially at first the volume was, like, more than they had ever seen. like, right when he was sworn -- >> of any president? >> of any president. i think that's, you know, partly the historic nature of his election, partly, you know, partly it's that letters, especially e-mails, are much easier to send now. people can go, you know, letters are one thing. e-mails, like you can go to the white house web site, and you can send an e-mail very quickly, and people do, you know, thousands of people a day. so the volume at the beginning was, like, skyrocketing high. and it stayed, you know, it came down a little bit, but it stayed very steady, and i actually had coffee with the director of the mail room today. he said that they've noticed it's already climbing again, and she thinks that for the next year before the election it's going to be crazy in there. and, you know, people, people