Mr. President
Volume 2

"Here’s a story that happened in Washington a few years ago. Listen closely, and see if you can tell who the President was…"

The premise of "Mr. President" - a dramatic series heard over ABC Radio from June 26, 1947 to September 23, 1953 - was devastatingly simple. Each week, the half-hour show dramatized little-known incidents "of the men who have lived in the White House -- dramatic, exciting events in their lives that you and I rarely hear." The uniqueness of the program lay in the fact that the President was never identified during the proceedings; the great man’s name would only be revealed in a brief epilogue at the story’s end. Faithful listeners were challenged to guess the Commander-in-Chief from the tiny clues frequently inserted into the scripts.

Created by Robert G. Jennings and written by a team that included Jean Holloway, Bernard Dougall and Ira Marion, "Mr. President" earned kudos from students and scholars of American history for its accurate and fact-based dramatizations. These plays benefited from the work of an impressive staff of researchers and fact-checkers, dedicated to unearthing information from the four corners of the globe. One program, for example, offered a true story about Grover Cleveland; the exact details had long been a mystery but, thanks to diligent research, the facts were finally pieced together thanks to an obituary notice found in a Paris newspaper. Another episode relied on eyewitness accounts preserved in Navy records that revealed details of a mutiny fomented by the son of a former Secretary of War. When originally aired, "Mr. President" was considered essential homework for the nation’s youth, with scripts from the show being sent out to schools in over a hundred cities throughout the country for educational use.

The show’s producers tagged character actor Edward Arnold to play the role of the weekly President since, according to Radio Life, they were looking for a thespian with "the aggressiveness of Teddy Roosevelt, the warmth and humility of Abe Lincoln, and the tenacity of Andrew Jackson." Arnold, who had demonstrated marked improvement as a radio actor since the days of "Good News" and "The Charlotte Greenwood Show," made no apologies about the fact that all of the presidents sounded like…well, himself. "They’re all Edward Arnold," he once observed, "or else there’d be no guessing game on the show." Arnold was ably supported with performances by many of Radio Row’s usual suspects, including Bea Benaderet, Gil Stratton, Hans Conreid, Lurene Tuttle and Herb Butterfield. Owen James handled the announcing chores and Dick Woolen was the show’s producer-director, with Basil Adlam providing the music.

Actress Jeanette Nolan, who made frequent appearances on the program, once commented in an interview that "Mr. President’s" studio audience often included a "know-it-all" in the front row. "We would hardly announce the first paragraph about the man and he was already knowing." This ‘Quiz Kid’ aside, many of the stories broadcast were so devoid of specificity that American history scholars often found themselves stumped. When you consider that at the time of the show’s run there were only thirty-two men who had held that high office - and a total 214 episodes broadcast - it’s astounding how the show’s creative staff were able to generate so many stories. (By the way, thirty-second President Harry Truman was a big fan of both the show and Edward Arnold and often had the actor as a guest at the White House -- despite the fact that Arnold was on "the other side of the aisle." Truman also respectfully referred to his Republican friend as "Mr. President.")

To modern-day ears, "Mr. President" holds up extremely well; its charm and appeal is not that far removed from contemporary audio books. And, since our first collection of shows from the series was so well received, Radio Archives is pleased to present a second volume of twenty shows, transferred directly from American Broadcasting Company 16" safety master recordings originally from the collection of writer Jean Holloway. Seventeen of the twenty broadcasts offered here have not been heard since their original broadcast and are, in fact, likely the only recordings of these shows still in existence.