A wonderful book was released last week by Harper Collins, called, Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation. The book is a collection of 200 of the more than 1.5 million letters sent to Jackie Kennedy following JFK’s assassination. Most were destroyed, but some 200,000 pages remained untouched for more than 40 years at the Kennedy Library in Boston. University of New Hampshire history professor Ellen Fitzpatrick discovered them while researching another project at the library.
She described the find to AP reporter Holly Ramer: “It was like the roof came off the building, the wall dropped away, the floor came out from under me… I have been teaching American history for 30 years, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a collection as powerful and that represented so many ordinary people speaking from the heart about their views about American society, and politics and the president.”
The letters are poignant expressions of sadness, disbelief and sympathy from a grateful nation trying to comfort the first lady and itself. They remind me of what James Fallows says in a terrific piece (“How America Can Rise Again”) in the Jan/Feb issue of the Atlantic magazine: that Americans are a good and a great people.
Before he even heard whether Kennedy had died or not, the AP story tells us, Larry Toomey of Upper Darby, Penn., wrote, “My dear Mrs. Kennedy, even as I write this letter, my hand, my body is trembling at the terrible incident of this afternoon. I am watching the CBS-TV news report. No official word as yet.”
In another letter, “Eighth-grader Mary South described learning that the president had been shot just as she sat down to play the church organ at her Catholic school in Santa Clara, Cal. She wrote, ‘I tried to tell myself that he would be all right, but somehow I knew he wouldn’t… The tears wouldn’t stop. The slightly damp keys were hard to play…but I offered it up that the President might live.’”
And another, “’I’m just an average American — average mentality, average housewife, average housing, average size family, a year younger than you and perhaps a little more sensitive than some, but I will always have a warm spot in my heart for both of you as long as I live,’ wrote Marilyn Davenport of New York, who included her phone number ‘if you ever want to talk.’”
Finally, the shortest letter, written by Martin Rosenberg, a student at the University of Massachusetts, “Dear Mrs. Kennedy: I have never seen our football players cry…but today, they did.”
I’m reminded that in our time, these condolences might have been sent as e-mails, tweets or blog posts. And that today’s business leaders are well served if they take to heart the advice and ideas communicated from their customers and employees in these ways.
When Lou Gerstner, Jr. came from RJR Nabisco to run IBM in 1993, one of the first things he did was read all the e-mails employees sent him about what was wrong and right with the business.
In his book, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround, Gerstner says that although he thought he had come to make financial improvements to a company on the brink, the e-mails told a different story. He discovered it was the IBM culture he was there to change.
He writes, “There was a kind of hothouse quality to the place. It was like an isolated tropical ecosystem that had been cut off from the world for too long. As a result, it had spawned some fairly exotic life-forms that were to be found nowhere else.”
Gerstner’s success in changing the IBM culture eventually saved the IBM Company.
What might you, as a business leader, learn from the e-mails, blog posts and tweets you receive?
Take it as a given that your customers and employees know things you may not know about how to do things better, faster, cheaper and smarter.
Wisdom, creativity and problem-solving skills are inherent in those you work for (your customers) and those you work with (your employees). It’s smart business to systematically capture and evaluate that collective wisdom, and use it to move your company to the next level.
You never know, the e-mails, blogs or tweets you read might just blow the roof, walls and floor off your “mental” building, like the JFK condolence letters did historian Ellen Fitzpatrick.
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Dear Cynthia, having not yet seen it, I think that book will be interesting and rather emotional. I am sure that your point that our new technologies have some potency is true. I am curious as to how commentary similar to what was generated on paper as a result of the Kennedy assassination will be recorded and codified in future via these technologies should there be another traumatic event of a similar nature. In theory, it should be an elegant process, given the various means by which communications via the Internet can be captured, managed and stored.
Gone are the days of Fawn Hall and Oliver North, who used to print out emails and then shred them, oblivious to the fact that they were still sitting on a hard drive somewhere.
But in practice, the process of aggregating a lot of such input can be like mucking the Augean stables. Much as I like our President Obama, and all the technology his staff employed to popularize him and his views, he and they launched Internet-based initiatives during and after the election that totally crashed and burned (”Join my team!” being one of them). Not a lot of talk about that, for obvious reasons. Anyway, it is refreshing to know that some ink and paper from November 1963 has neither crashed nor been burned.
There may be similar archeological finds among Ethel Kennedy and Coretta King’s files.