The Letter-Perfect Staff at the White House

If you didn’t get your “autographed” photograph of President Reagan’s dog, Rex--in color, complete with paw print--it’s too late. The nation’s children have demolished the White House’s supply.

But if you have a birthday, wedding, a baby, 100th birthday, become an Eagle Scout or need a proclamation before Jan. 20, you’re in luck.

The Office of Presidential Correspondence, which handles those tasks, has more than enough autographed greetings (featuring presidential seal embossed in gold) and color photos of the President and Nancy Reagan (together, on horseback, in the Oval Office or offering a toast) to last through the final weeks of this presidency.

“It’s been a tremendous eight years. . . . The President has taken such a personal interest in the mail,” said Anne Higgins, who has run the White House office since 1981.

In those years, Higgins, who held a similar position in the Nixon Administration, has watched her staff of 90 full-time employees and 500 volunteers handle a record number of letters that are testimony to Reagan’s continuing popularity.

This year, the presidential mail will total about 3.5-million letters. That is a drop from the peak of 8.2-million letters that Reagan received in 1985, the year he first underwent cancer surgery, but more than enough to assure his place in history as the nation’s most-addressed President.

Four Deliveries a Day

Delivered by the truckload four times a day to Higgins’ ground-floor suite in the Old Executive Office Building, the letters ask for everything from a handout (“You won’t miss the money”) to a pair of the President’s old shoes. Those requests were turned aside, as was a letter warning Reagan in red ink that the world would end March 4, 1989. A team of 30 Postal Service workers, who screen the President’s mail, immediately recognized the return address as that of a Missouri mental hospital.

But many of the pleas are not ignored. Stamped with a red dot (for immediate action), such letters are sent to a little-known government liaison office that Higgins established to replace an old system of dispatching letters in bulk to various agencies.

“This is where ‘As the World Turns’ lives,” Higgins said as a staff of four assistants worked telephones, seeking to ferret out the cause of governmental inaction or enlist private agencies to help people who have turned to the White House for help.

The son of a poor Kentucky farmer, dying in a hospital there, recently called the White House, seeking financial aid for a sister who lived in Anchorage. She could not afford an airline ticket to visit her father, who was on the verge of slipping into a coma.

Special presidential assistant Charlene Cozart got Delta Air Lines to agree to pay part of the fare and private social agencies to handle the rest. “The caller said he’d tried everything.

“But a sister told him, ‘You have to call the President, because he comes across as so compassionate,’ ” Cozart said. “You can get that at any time. Every example of a hardship in this country has come across this desk.”

In all, the liaison office handled 33,600 cases last year, funneling most requests to other agencies and tracking responses on a computer system. Among agencies that the White House workers say provide the best responses: the Federal Council on the Aging, the Social Security Administration and the Salvation Army. “We can’t sing their praise enough,” Cozart said.

Children Write

Most of Reagan’s mail has been “loving, positive and kind,” said Nancy Theis, who runs an office that handles the 4,000 letters the White House typically receives daily from children. Even so, it isn’t easy to determine what some of the children mean, she said.

“My favorite interests are baseball, basketball and incest,” one recent letter said. Theis said the child probably meant to say “insects.” Another child, who urged Reagan to “bomb the lesbians,” actually wanted the President to attack Libya, she said.

Every Wednesday afternoon, Higgins culls about 30 letters from the thousands her office has received and takes them to the Oval Office. “It’s important that the President be exposed to people--real people,” she said.

The letters do just that. Reagan responds with a handwritten reply on a yellow legal pad, down to the ZIP code of the letter writer. “He’s a secretary’s dream,” Higgins said.

When he finds a secretary has made a typo on the resulting letter, Reagan will try to correct the error with his pen, she said. “He doesn’t even want to ask us to retype a letter.”

The correspondence office’s 500 volunteers, many of whom are retired federal workers or former campaign workers, soon will be asked to donate an extra six hours to help with the year’s biggest mailing: about 120,000 Christmas cards. The office is updating its mailing list-adding and deleting about 15,000 names, all by hand.

Higgins said she has never doubted that the letters are important to Reagan, a lesson she learned early in his Administration. She had received a letter from a 70-year-old Hollywood acquaintance of the President, a former stuntman eager to soar into space aboard a shuttle. Frustrated and fearful of telling a presidential friend that his idea was outlandish, Higgins sent the letter to Reagan.

“Reagan wrote him a beautiful letter, saying, ‘If anybody can do it, you can do it,’ and promising to put in a good word for him. He was not going to burst that guy’s bubble.”