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Hail to the Chiefs
Presidential papers are hotter than ever.
By Dick Kagan

Deliver the Gettysburg Address to me and I'll give you $10 million," says autograph dealer Joseph Maddalena of Profiles in History, Beverly Hills, California. True, there are several versions of Abraham Lincoln's laconic dedicatory speech, but all were written after its delivery at the Pennsylvania battleground. The copy that Maddalena covets is the one that Lincoln supposedly wrote while "trying to gather his thoughts in a concise manner...on the back of an envelope...on the train to Gettysburg."

That a scrap of history only three paragraphs long, a sere remnant of presidential sentiment derided as cursory and jejune in its day, could command so much money is but one indication that words written by the hands of our First Gentlemen are in more demand than ever. According to "Investing in History," a brochure published by Profiles in History, there were about 2,000 serious autograph collectors in the United States in 1981; now it's estimated that there are approximately 20,000.

Essentially there are three major fields that attract autograph collectors: arts and entertainment (authors, composers, movie stars), sports (especially the athletes themselves), and politics (potentates, prime ministers, and presidents). Some collectors gravitate to all three; others are interested in specific subcategories, such as U.S. presidents.

Of course, there are number of reasons buyers have for wanting a presidential autograph or manuscript: Perhaps they'd like a bit of history to hang in the foyer; they were born on the same day that a certain presidential document was signed; they simply admire the man (this is often the case with those who seek the autographs and letters of forthright individualists such as Theodore Roosevelt); or maybe it's just that the price is right.
A business card bearing a personal note and signature penned by Richard Nixon or a campaign poster inscribed by John Kennedy may be had for just a few hundred dollars, while a brief note written and signed by Andrew Jackson or Thomas Jefferson occasionally might by available for about $1,000 and $2,500 respectively. Higher up the scale are impressive-looking documents signed by Lincoln or George Washington, the two most sought-after presidential autographs; they have been selling in the $6,000-to-$15,000 range at recent auctions held by autograph specialist Herman Darvick of Rockville Centre, New York.

But truly significant papers—letters that have great historical relevance or provide a penetrating insight into the presidential psyche—can run to the high six and seven figures. "Compared, however, to what you might pay for art, porcelains, or other collectibles," says Maddalena, "you can still buy something quite remarkable. Isn't a letter by Thomas Jefferson more important—and more interesting—than an old wrist watch?" Aside from pride of ownership, he says, there's also the potential for investment growth, since the number of presidential papers is finite and the number of collectors is growing.
Maddalena takes pride in the fact that bids submitted by his firm have set several auction records. In November 1992, for instance, they "shattered auction records" with the $1.32-million purchase at Christie's of the last paragraph from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. In an album that had belonged to a friend of Mrs. Lincoln's, Caroline Wright, the wife of an Indiana governor, the sixteenth president had inscribed the passage that begins, "With malice toward none; with charity for all..." only a month before he was shot.

That record price was in turn topped only a month later at Sotheby's. A leaf from one of the earliest drafts of a pre-Civil War speech in which Lincoln had referred to a nation half free and half slave as a "house divided" was knocked down for $1.54 million. The buyer was Gilder Lehrman Collection, which is on deposit at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. The collection—comprising some 150 Lincoln items, 120 Washington, 100 Jefferson, and about fifty each of John Adams, James Madison, and John Quincy Adams, and other presidential material—was assembled by two New York businessmen. Little is known about Richard Gilder, one of the assemblers of this hoard, but the other, Lewis Lehrman, is listed in Who's Who in America as an "investment fund manager," heir to a drugstore chain, and the Republican-Conservative candidate for governor of New York in 1982.

Other major collections of presidential autographs can be found at the James Copley Library in La Jolla, California; at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California; and at the Forbes Magazine Collection in New York. Individual collectors of renown are Barbra Streisand, father-and-son Texas real estate developers Trammel and Harlan Crow, and presidential gadfly and sometime candidate Ross Perot. In 1984, the Texas billionaire went head-to-head with Malcolm Forbes at a Sotheby's auction in what one observer described as being like a "Wild West shoot-out"; the two were bidding for one of the forty-eight known copies of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Lincoln. The hammer fell at Forbe's bid of $297,000. Today, the Forbe's Collection, perpetuated by sons Malcolm Jr. and Roberts, counts some 3,700 "mostly presidential documents."

While Maddalena and other collectors stalk the auction houses in quest of presidential autographs, Kenneth Rendell, a dealer who has showrooms in New York and Beverly Hills, as well as a research and preservation facility in Natick, Massachusetts, takes a different tack. "We buy almost nothing at auction," Rendell says. "We acquire most of our presidential autographs from descendents of the recipients or from collectors known to us."

The most expensive item Rendell ever sold was a four-page letter by George Washington in which the Father of Our Country expressed his fear that he could not live up to the great expectations of the electorate. This missive, written to Washington's close friend Edward Rutledge, a South Carolina lawyer who was a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was penned six months after the first president took the oath of office.
It was sold about two years ago "to a private collector" for 2.5 million, Rendell reports. "It's an incredible letter that shows Washington really being very human." A letter that Profiles in History snagged for $635,000 at a Sotheby's auction in 1992 reveals that Washington had trepidations even before he took office. Two days before he became president, he wrote to Henry Knox: "My movements to the chair of government will by accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to his place of execution." In view of the way the nation so often treats its commanders in chief, good or bad, Washington displayed a remarkable prescience.

As in everything else, there are trends in collecting presidential autographs: Rendell says interest in Harry Truman is currently running high: "Truman is one of the few Democracts who appeals to Republicans, too; it's his independent give-'em-hell attitude." Eisenhower is also being reassessed as a president and is popular with certain collectors." Currently on the wall of Rendell's New York gallery is a personal letter to Mamie Eisenhower that's dated July 22, 1944, and signed IKE. It was written several weeks after D-Day and Eisenhower laments: "We are terrible busy. Yet after a day is over on often asks what have I done?" The "I" is underscored twice.....