In 1956, an 83-year-old woman named Carrie Phillips moved into a nursing home.

She left it to her lawyer to sort through all the stuff she still had stacked up in

her home in Marion, Ohio.

And he was digging through a closet when he found a box of letters, hundreds and hundreds

of letters, nearly a thousand letters, and they were all from former President Warren

Harding.

These were raunchy, steamy love notes that spanned years and years of a previously unknown

affair between Harding and Phillips.

While the lawyer hid them away until 1963 at his own house, and then he finally showed

them to someone at the Ohio Historical Society.

One of the letters soon spread and after many legal proceedings, the letters ended up in

the control of Harding's family.

But they were given to the Harding family on one major condition, that the family would

eventually give those letters to the Library of Congress instead of destroying them.

And so they did.

But when the family gave the letters to the Library of Congress, they made their own insistence,

and that was that the letters stay sealed for 50 years.

That's what happened.

The letters set at the Library of Congress for half a century, seal unbroken, contents

unknown.

Two years ago, the 50-year wait was over.

And when historians broke the seal, oh my gosh.

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