Former President Barack Obama became emotional when speaking to MS NOW’s Michele Norris about his favorite exhibit at his new presidential center in Chicago, which is set to hold its grand opening on Thursday.
The former president said the display, located outside a replica of his Oval Office, features a sampling of some of the letters he received from Americans during his eight years in the White House, which he estimated included as many as “40,000 pieces of correspondence” every day.
“We had an entire letter correspondence office just responding to the public’s letters,” he shared. “And that office would select 10 representative letters for me to read each day. They’d put it in my folder at the top of my briefing book, and I’d usually save those for after I was finished with reading all the stuff I had to read.”
Obama said that the daily process became “a way of staying in touch with people, especially early on when we were going through so many difficult decisions.”
Along with a display of some of those letters, the former president told Norris that the exhibit included a short video, which he said often leaves him “choked up.”