Letters to His Children

Letters from a father who happened to be President: drawings of bears in the margins, advice about ponies and Latin, reports on the White House cats, and gossip about kings. Roosevelt wrote them over more than twenty years to his six children, often when they were away at school, and Joseph Bishop published them in 1919, the year Roosevelt died. They are the least official document of any American presidency and the only one that is funny on purpose. Fifty-nine paintings of children at home and at play, by Mary Cassatt and Eastman Johnson among others, keep the family warmth of these letters in view.