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But their packets are comparatively small. Stacked up against them, the size of alps, are the letters that ought not to have been written. Oscar Wilde's salacious letter to "Bosie" (Lord Alfred Douglas), for instance, with its reference to "red rose-leaf lips," which was read aloud in court where Wilde's homosexuality was at issue. "Suppose," asked the opposing lawyer, "a man who was not an artist had written this letter, would you say it was a proper letter?" Wilde answered: "A man who is not an artist could not have written that letter." Which was true and witty. And Wilde went to jail.
In our own backyard, Jackie Onassis was stung by the publication of her "Dearest Ros" letter to Roswell Gilpatric, which was said to have driven Ari to Callas behavior. Billie Jean King's recent revelations were due less to a spasm of candor than to more than 100 letters she wrote her secretary. So it goes, from post to pillory. Lee Marvin made legal history a few years back when he lost a "palimony" suit to Michelle Triola Marvin. One of his letters to Michelle closed: "Hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby." It proved that he loved her.
Yet the damage done by love letters is peanuts compared with what letters have wrought in the spheres of politics, especially when love and politics collide. Warren G. Harding had a close shave in his quest for the presidency thanks to a love affair with Mrs. Carrie Phillips—or "Carrie Darling Sweetheart Adorable," as Harding once addressed her. Luckily for Harding, his fellow Republicans were able to buy off Mrs. Phillips and send her on a vacation that extended through the campaign. Yet even the passionate Harding must have had an inkling of danger when he wrote the adorable Carrie: "Destroy these letters!"
The mail piles up. There was the incident when Grover Cleveland was made to appear a lackey of Great Britain because Sir Lionel Sackville-West, then British Ambassador, was tricked into writing a letter stating that in the election of 1888 England favored the Democrats. There was the famous (and forged) Zinoviev letter, supposedly a directive from Moscow to the British Communist Party, that toppled the government of Ramsay Mac Donald. There was the Zimmermann telegram that pushed the U.S. into the first World War, and the letter General Douglas MacArthur sent Congressman Joe Martin from Korea indirectly attacking the Truman Administration, after which Truman directly attacked the general, and fired him. Truman of course wrote a splendid impulsive letter to Paul Hume, the Washington Post music critic, after Hume had savaged a concert of Margaret's. But the impulse was canny since Truman knew that every father in the country would be steaming on his side.