Dear Mr. President - NYTimes.com "The Letters of John F. Kennedy," to be published on Tuesday, includes correspondence to and from Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Nikita Khrushchev, about nuclear weapons, the Cuban missile crisis and other momentous subjects. It also contains responses like the one Kennedy wrote to a young girl in 1961, which begins, "I was glad to get your letter about trying to stop the Russians from bombing the North Pole and risking the life of Santa Claus." Martin W. Sandler, the book's editor, estimates that two million letters came in and out of the White House during Kennedy's presidency. "Of course I didn't read two million letters," he told me in a telephone interview, "but I went blind reading a hell of a lot of them." Kennedy already knew the power of a letter when he was 12. "My recent allowance is 40¢," he wrote to his parents at that age, looking for a raise. This I used for areoplanes and other playthings of childhood but now I am a scout and I put away my childish things. So he couldn't have been surprised when 13-year-old Mary Lou Reitler wrote to him in 1962 to criticize the space program: "I think it is all just a waste of time and money when many talents could be put to better use in many ways, such as making our world a better place to live in." "I've learned in all the talks I've given," Sandler said, "never follow a kid on stage. The same is true in letters. Oswald's Believers in Belarus Peter Savodnik's new book, "The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union," is reviewed this week. In reporting, Savodnik spoke with people in Minsk, the Belarussian capital, who knew Oswald during his time there. In an e-mail interview, I asked Savodnik whether they had strong opinions about assassination theories. He said everyone he met there "believes that Oswald either did not assassinate Kennedy or that he was a puppet of the people who are really responsible." For one thing, "it's very hard for them to reconcile their memories of him with the assassination." But Savodnik also pointed to a possible cultural reason. Many Russians, he said, "tend to assume . . . that they are being lied to, that the world is a much darker and more complicated place than Americans realize. And Galchen Makes 10 In this week's Bookends, the back-page feature we introduced last month, Rivka Galchen and Pankaj Mishra consider the notion that nonfiction is more "relevant" than fiction. With Galchen's contribution, all 10 Bookends columnists have now made their appearance. Galchen has written both fiction and nonfiction for many publications, including Harper's and The New Yorker, which selected her for its list of "20 Under 40" American fiction writers in 2010. She is the author of the novel "Atmospheric Disturbances," and her second book, a story collection titled "American Innovations," will be published in May.