Opinion: My neighbor found Lincoln's hair in his basement. I found a mystery.

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Opinion | My neighbor found Lincoln’s hair in his basement. I found a mystery.

By Matt Bai
Contributing columnist | Follow
March 14, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT



Ledge King's collection of artifacts at his family home in Bethesda, Md. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)

In decades of covering campaigns, I’ve seen plenty of historical relics: collections of rare buttons and bumper stickers, boxes full of yellowing convention passes. But none of that prepared me for the morning last fall when my dog was running around with her pack of neighborhood playmates, and my friend Ledge turned to me and asked a question so bizarre that for a moment I was sure I’d misheard him.

“Hey,” he said, “did I tell you I have John Marshall’s gallstones?”

Ledge King is a well-known reporter and editor who just joined National Journal. Although we’ve worked in the same business for decades, we got to know each other after we both adopted puppies during the pandemic.

John Marshall was the fourth chief justice of the United States, secretary of state under John Adams and his friend George Washington’s biographer. You can still visit Marshall’s house in Richmond, where any mention of a troubled urinary tract is conspicuously missing.

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Ledge King holds a small box containing bladder stones of Chief Justice John Marshall. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)

The mystery begins in the 1950s, when Ledge’s mother, then in her 20s, befriended a young woman named Judy Haviland in Paris. When Ledge was born in 1963, Aunt Judy, as he came to know her, became one of his four godparents.

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Opinion by Matt Bai
Matt Bai, a Washington Post contributing columnist, is a journalist, author and screenwriter. He spent more than a decade at the New York Times, where he was chief political writer for the Sunday magazine and a columnist for the newspaper. Twitter https://twitter.com/mattbai