Posted Apr 21, 2010 5:30 AM CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss

Shelly Hubner.
Photo courtesy of Sedgwick.

San Francisco lawyer Shelley Hubner was an industrious child.

John F. Kennedy was a hero to her, and she wrote to the president often. Sometimes she asked about current issues, such as international relations, and sometimes she sought advice on more personal issues.

“I recall asking him how I could get my parents not to fight as much, as if he could answer that,” says Hubner, now a special counsel at Sedgwick. During her summer at summer camp, she remembers asking Kennedy “how we could improve camp spirit, as if he were the guru.”

Kennedy’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, dutifully replied, sending photographs of the president and his family that Hubner posted on her wall.

After Kennedy was assassinated, Hubner wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson in a quest for more photos for her treasured collection. The letters and photos, placed in a box for safekeeping, have long since been lost, and Hubner’s memories of the details are beginning to fade.

The memories came back on Saturday, as Hubner toured the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum with the leadership of the ABA Health Law Section. Hubner chairs the section’s Breast Cancer Initiatives Task Force and is its liaison to the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession.

The library archivist, Bob Tissing, explained that the museum houses more than 45 million pages of documents that are catalogued and easy to retrieve. Tissing asked if anyone in the group had ever written to Johnson, and Hubner raised her hand.

Within minutes, Tissing had retrieved a box full of 30 to 40 documents and began to go through it, looking for Hubner’s letter, written under her maiden name of Kushnick. “I just kind of rolled my eyes, thinking, not a chance,” Hubner tells the ABA Journal. And then there it was—a letter in her handwriting. It read:

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to request for pictures of you, Lady Bird, Lucy and Linda. I would be very proud to have them on my wall next to the pictures of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s family. My class and I quote your words whenever we are about to have a test. We say we are “preparing for the worst but hoping for the best.”

I am in the high sixth grade and am 11½ years old. My hobby is collecting letters and pictures from the first family. I have many letters from President Kenenedy’s private secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. I hope I may continue my hobby and add your letters and pictures to my collection also.

Sincerely,

Shelley Kushnick

A reply was attached from LBJ’s personal secretary, Juanita Roberts, telling Hubner that it was “friendly of you to write the president” and sending along his best wishes.

Hubner was stunned. “I was absolutely touched to tears,” Hubner says. “I think the reason was not so much that the letter was found, but that there was an opportunity to be reunited with that part of my childhood, which was such a unique period for me and I think all Americans.”

Hubner says her family was involved in Democratic politics, kindling her own interest. Feeling comfortable with the political process, she says, sparked an interest in the law. “I think that being a part of things and being an individual who mattered to public officials made a difference,” she says.

Now Hubner is writing to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in hopes that she will find more letters. And she learned of another link to the past during the Health Law Section meeting in Austin, Texas.

Lyndon Johnson’s granddaughter, Catherine Robb, works in the Austin office of Hubner’s law firm, just down the street from the library and museum.