John Beaulieu
He Liked Ike
Letter from thirteen-year-old John Beaulieu written in Braille to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the fall of 1956. |
John Beaulieu is interviewed in the Public Vaults exhibition as his wife, Toni, and son, John Jr., watch with pride. |
As part of an effort to promote the National Archives permanent exhibition, the “Public Vaults,” which opened in November 2004, I began to search for some of the people who were featured in the exhibition. We hoped to find some of the “unsung American heroes” who wrote to Presidents, petitioned Congress, or applied for benefits—regular people who created some of the 1,100 original records that are used in the exhibition.
At the outset, I had many questions.
Since the exhibition spans the length of American history, how far back should I go—30 years? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? How far back is a “reasonable” amount of time? Were these people still alive? Had their names changed? Did they still live in the United States? If I did locate them, how would they respond? Would they remember the letters they wrote, or the pictures they posed for? Would they object to being included in an exhibition?
Armed with copies of documents, photographs, and letters—and using Internet search engines as tools—I began my search.
I was intrigued by the letters from children in the “Dear Uncle Sam” section of the “Public Vaults.” This section consists of children’s letters to government officials, often offering tips or guidance. One unusual letter in the stack interested me a great deal—a letter written in Braille to President Dwight D. Eisenhower from a young boy in the fall of 1956.
Thirteen-year-old John Beaulieu offered the President the following campaign stump speech: “Vote for me. I will help you out. I will lower the prices and also your tax bill. I also will help the negroes, so that they may go to school.”
The return address listed Perkins School for the Blind (Helen Keller's alma mater) in Watertown, Massachusetts. After my Internet searches led nowhere, I called the Perkins School but was not optimistic. After all, John had not been a student there for nearly 50 years. Much to my surprise, a helpful staffer at Perkins turned up a current address and telephone listing for John! One day later, I spoke with John for the first time. He clearly remembered the letter and explained how it evolved from a sixth grade government class project in which students presented mock stump speeches and voted.
John’s mock Eisenhower stump speech was a hit with the class, and his teacher suggested he share his speech with the President. John wrote a careful letter in Braille, and his teacher wrote out the words over the Braille.
A few weeks later, a Perkins teacher found John while he was eating lunch, and said: “You have a letter from the White House. Would you like me to read it to you?” John later recalled “there was excitement all over the school” and that classmates gathered around as the teacher read the letter from President Eisenhower himself, who wrote: “It was nice of you to send me a little speech to help win the election. Your good luck wishes for November mean a lot to me too, and I am very grateful to you for them.”
John rushed to the woodshop at Perkins and made a wooden frame for Eisenhower’s response. The framed letter from the President has been a Beaulieu family treasure since 1956.
For John, the call from the National Archives was another wonderful surprise, albeit nearly 50 years later. John is now a father of four and grandfather of five. The boy who once suggested that the President pledge to lower taxes worked for the Internal Revenue Service! He and his family spent a week in Washington at the Public Vaults opening events, during which he proudly shared his story with archival staffers, invited guests, and the media.
Right before the visit, he wrote: “I am on cloud nine…I can hardly believe that this is really happening to me… I am as psyched as a man could be!”
John’s elation was infectious. Featured stories ran in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service, as well as in the IRS Northeast News, the Perkins school magazine The Lantern, and his hometown paper, The Townsend Times. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described not only the story, but also the scene at the exhibition opening: “Television cameras trained on him, Beaulieu gave one interview after another, then nudged a companion, enthusing, ‘Cool, huh?’”
“It is absolutely amazing to think that something I did as a child would get this kind of recognition. I still find it hard to believe, but I know that it’s real because I was there,” he later said.
When I walk through the “Public Vaults,” I recognize the faces and hear the voices of the people who participated in the opening of the exhibition—people such as John Beaulieu—who shared their lives and their stories.
The records that the National Archives holds in trust for us not only belong to us, but they are also about us—they tell the story of our lives, our jobs, our families. And the “Public Vaults” exhibition clearly reflects this in the stories that it tells.
