What’s the first ever presidential email?
19 years ago today, US president Bill Clinton responds to an email from space by astronaut and Senator John Glenn.
It’s November 7, 1998. Imagine being in space for a NASA mission and receiving an email message from the president…
Dear John,
Thanks for your message. Hillary and I had a great time at the launch. We are very proud of you and the entire crew, and a little jealous. We can’t wait for you to get home so we can have a first hand report. Meanwhile back on earth, we’re having a lot of fun with your adventure. At a camp rally in Queens, I asked an 83 year old lady what she thought of your trip. She replied that it seemed like a perfectly fine thing for a young man like you to do! I hope your last few hours go well. Give my best to the rest of the crew.
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
Well… That email — that Bill Clinton later identified as his “first (ever!)” in a 2014 tweet — was in response to a message by astronaut and Senator John Glenn from aboard the Discovery.
Dear Mr. President,
This is certainly a first for me, writing to a President from space, and it may be a first for you in receiving an E mail direct from and [sic] orbiting spacecraft.
In any event, I want to personally thank you and Mrs. Clinton for coming to the Cape to d/see [sic] the launch. I hope you enjoyed it just half as much as we did on board. It is truly an awesome experience from a personal standpoint, and of even greater importance for all of the great research projects we have on Discovery. The whole crew was impressed that you would be the first President to personally see a shuttle launch and asked me to include their best regards to you Hillary. She has discussed her interest in the space program with Annie on several occasions, and I know she would like to be on a flight just like this one.
We have gone almost a third of the way around the world in the time it has taken me to write this letter, and the rest of the crew is waiting.
Sincerely,
John Glenn
The email exchange — recorded in a August 15, 1999 White House memo and published in the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, William J. Clinton, 1998, Book 2, July 1 to December 31, 1998 — is a rare example of early Presidents using emails.
In fact, according to Clinton himself, he only ever sent two emails during his administration.
“I sent a grand total of two emails as president,” he said in February 2011 at the WIRED for Change conference in New York. He added: “One to our troops in the Adriatic, and one to John Glenn when he was 77 years old in outer space.”
According to Fortune, Clinton also said that when he took office in 1993 “there were about 50 sites on the Internet, and cell phones were so heavy that they were best used for bicep curls.”
Laptop too were super heavy. And the Toshiba Satellite Pro used to send that email to Glenn was auctioned off in 2014, alongside photos and documents signed by both Clinton and Glenn.
The Toshiba laptop, as reported back in 2014 by BuzzFeed, belonged to the White House physician, Commander Robert G. Darling.
“The event was unplanned — writes BuzzFeed — and when Clinton heard Glen wanted to exchange letters, White House staffers had to scramble to find a computer.”
The two emails Clinton cited as his only emails ever might have actually been the only two emails he typed as president. Clinton signed a much earlier email in response to an email sent by then Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt.
It’s not clear whether Clinton typed the email himself. A 1994 report by the New York Times states that “In an E-mail exchange with the Prime Minister of Sweden last month, Mr. Clinton’s message was COMPOSED ENTIRELY OF CAPITAL LETTERS, a cardinal breach of netiquette.”
The email, dated February 5, 1994, reads as follows:
Dear Carl:
I appreciate your support for my decision to end the trade embargo on Vietnam and thank you for all that Sweden has done on the question of the POW/MIA’s.
I share your enthusiasm for the potential of emerging communications technologies. This demonstration of electronic communications is an important step toward building a global information superhighway.
Sincerely,
BILL
The original message sent by Bildt reads:
Dear Bill,
Apart from testing this connection on the global Internet system, I want to congratulate you on your decision to end the trade embargo on Vietnam. I am planning to go to Vietnam in April and will certainly use the occasion to take up the question of the MIA’s. From the Swedish side we have tried to be helpful on this issue in the past, and we will continue to use the contacts we might have.
Sweden is — as you know — one of the leading countries in the world in the field of telecommunications, and it is only appropriate that we should be among the first to use the Internet also for political contacts and communications around the globe.
Yours,
CARL
As I noted in my 2015 book Digital Diplomacy: Conversations on Innovation in Foreign Policy: “The brief email exchange between the two leaders, Clinton and Bildt, focused in part on how the internet was changing the political and foreign policy arena and communications around the world.”
In a January 2010 Washington Post op-ed on Internet freedom, Bildt — at the time foreign minister of Sweden — called that first email exchange as “groundbreaking.”
“A decade and a half ago, when I was prime minister of Sweden, then-President Bill Clinton and I had the first e-mail exchange between heads of state. Already our two nations were at the forefront of the technological revolution about to transform our world,” he wrote.
He added: “We had just left an era in which communist dictatorships had tried to control fax machines and the Moscow phone directory was a closely held secret. Today, fax machines are definitely yesterday, and classical phone directories are more or less out of business.”
A signed and framed copy of the email exchange was donated in 2013 by the Embassy of Sweden USA to the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomacy Center and is now part of their collection. A signed copy was also donated to the Newseum in Washington DC.
I love how the Associated Press reported the exchange back in 1994: “President Clinton has exchanged the first-ever electronic messages with another head of government.”
The article refers to “electronic messages,” and the article stated that “the computer messages, commonly called e-mail, started Feb. 4 with a ‘Dear Bill’ electronic letter from Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. Clinton responded the next day with a ‘Dear Carl’ e-mail.”
