The Story of Presidential Doodles (from the Epilogue)

Presidential Doodles began as a whimsical idea tossed out during a 2002 editorial meeting at Cabinet Magazine: to gather and publish a small portfolio of doodles by some famous figures of the twentieth century. A quick preliminary search turned up exactly two inveterate doodlers—John F. Kennedy and Jack Kerouac. Although we could have spent the next several years searching for doodles by Kerouac and other literary stars, the chuckle-inducing collision of the words “president” and “doodle” had an immediate and irresistible appeal. We dropped Kerouac and focused on finding more doodlers-in-chief. The research task we set out to accomplish—locate doodles by as many U.S. presidents as possible—was daunting. Beginning with Herbert Hoover, every president has a dedicated library administered by the National Archives and staffed by career archivists familiar with the holdings of the library. The records of earlier presidents are even more centralized; the vast majority are preserved in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress and have been microfilmed for easy research. Indeed, our first presidential library visit, to the Kennedy Library in 2002, was simple beyond belief: when we mentioned “doodles,” the archivists nodded knowingly and led us to a large folder labeled as such. We simply flipped through the folder, marveling at JFK’s bizarre word combinations and interlocking squares, and left with enough photocopies for an entire book. We did not realize until later that Kennedy doodle research was an exception. Kennedy was known for his doodles—they had even been exhibited in 1964—and the files we browsed were well-thumbed. We found to our chagrin that few other presidential archives had such a conveniently labeled file. At times, we caught a whiff of doodle discrimination: an archivist once referred to one of our most sought-after doodles as “a bit of doggerel,” and another wrote a bit too emphatically that indeed Carter made many notes but we could rest assured that they were all business. In the Eisenhower library, we found evidence that certain conspicuous doodles had been erased, perhaps by Eisenhower himself or maybe by an abashed archivist. Even more mysterious, our request to the William Clinton Foundation for doodles (we appealed directly to the foundation because the Clinton Presidential Library did not open to the public until 2006) was turned down by Clinton’s press office. We can only speculate why… We had a mind-boggling amount of ground to cover. Each of the twelve presidential libraries houses millions of pieces of paper. The size of the collection depends on many factors: whether the collection was damaged at any stage; to what extent papers were sold for profit or otherwise dispersed; whether the president took office before or after the invention of the copy machine; whether he instructed his secretaries or assistants to save everything or only things of a certain importance; and finally, whether the president was of a mind to destroy his papers on leaving office (a practice thankfully outlawed by the Presidential Records Act of 1978). Chester Arthur is the most notorious case of a president bent on leaving no paper trail—the night before his death, Arthur burned three garbage pails of his papers, each four feet high. So thorough was the destruction that, for many years, the Library of Congress’s Arthur Collection consisted of a single manuscript. In contrast, there were presidents like George Washington, who carefully removed his papers from New York City in 1776 in anticipation of a British attack; or Theodore Roosevelt, a historian and biographer himself, who put great stock in primary sources and preserved accordingly; or James Garfield, whose papers overflowed the house he had designed to accommodate them—papers were “corded up like firewood” even in the bathroom. Some papers fell victim to purposeful destruction, but others were lost by unfortunate happenstance or carelessness. Ulysses S. Grant, for instance, was prone to misplacing papers (and even entire manuscripts), whereas James Madison liked to pass them on as gifts to his family. War took a great toll on many presidential paper collections. John Tyler’s plantation was ransacked by the Union Army, as was the home of Zachary Taylor’s son. In both cases, the plunder included invaluable papers that were destroyed or sold. When Confederates seized Andrew Johnson’s Tennessee plantation in 1864, soldiers reported to their commanding colonel the presence of a large wooden box in Johnson’s library. Knowing of Johnson’s liking for aged rye whiskey, the colonel ordered that the box be brought to him immediately. To his disgust, he found it contained papers, not whiskey, and ordered that the contents be destroyed. Every so often, a doodling president’s collection was both large and well-organized, as is the case with the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, which houses hundreds of doodles. Although such an organized and bounteous collection as Johnson’s was a godsend to our project, we could not help but be amused by the stacks of doodles meticulously collated, stapled, dated, and labeled “doodles from the president’s bedroom,” “doodles from the Oval Office coffee table,” “doodles from Air Force One trip,” and so on. We imagined a secretary who trailed the president all day long, scooping up every scrap of paper his hand touched and squirreling it away. Archivists were crucial to our search. Some were intrigued by the unusual research query; others were befuddled by our interest in what seemed to them a trivial subject; and still others were a bit defensive, as if they perceived a hidden insult in the question. But in all cases, their assistance was invaluable. They directed us toward promising files, advised with questions of authorship, deciphered illegible handwriting, and provided much-needed context. At presidential libraries far from home—in West Branch, Iowa, for example, or Austin, Texas—they also kindly recommended places to eat and things to do when the library closed. The collection of images in this book comprises the best of our research. Of course, not every doodle drawn by our leaders has been included in Presidential Doodles. But the persistent preoccupations, the artistic skills or lack thereof, the startling obsessions, the meticulous drawings, and the harried, anxious marks are amply represented. Everything is here in all its trivial glory, and perhaps it is not so trivial after all. Sasha Archibald and Sina Najafi Cabinet Magazine back to top

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