POTUS

A revealing look inside the archives of the American presidency, from Hoover to Obama

Every four or eight years, at exactly 12 p.m. on January 20, a fleet of unmarked trucks can be seen idling outside the White House. These are moving trucks, and the movers are engaged in a race against time: they have until noon that day to carry off the last vestiges of one presidency before another begins. Their destination is the National Archives, where every document and every object the president, their family, or administration touched during their time in office will be systematically processed and stored until the former president completes construction of their presidential library.

In POTUS, photographer Peter Adams takes readers inside the archives—and lives—of modern American presidents dating back to the 1929 presidency of Herbert Hoover. For five years, Adams turned his lens towards the artifacts housed within the network of presidential libraries run by the National Archives in order to explore the processes, personalities, and history that shaped most powerful office on Earth.

Using striking photography along with short historical narratives and anecdotes that bring each artifact to life, Adams takes us on a tour of hundreds of iconic objects and documents—some of which have rarely, if ever, been seen by the public.

Barack Obama’s Blackberry smartphone. Franklin Roosevelt’s lucky fedora. The safety plug of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The telephone used by Richard Nixon to speak with the Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Dwight Eisenhower’s written orders to Allied troops on D-day and the note he prepared in case the invasion failed. These are just a handful of the visually stunning objects, memos, notes, memorabilia and mementoes that stand as reminders of events that shed light on who the presidents really were—especially when the cameras weren’t rolling—or that, quite literally, shaped the world as we know it.