Becoming Read online

  “I’m proud of you, no matter what happens,” I said. “You’ve done so much good.”

  He lifted himself out of his seat and put his arms around me. “So have you,” he said, pulling me close. “We’ve both done all right.”

  All I could think about was everything he still had to carry.

  * * *

  After a family dinner at home, we got dressed up and rode downtown to watch election returns with a small group of friends and family in a suite the campaign had rented for us at the Hyatt Regency. The campaign staff had cloistered itself in a different area of the hotel, trying to give us some privacy. Joe and Jill Biden had their own suite for friends and family across the hall.

  The first results came in around 6:00 p.m. central time, with Kentucky going for McCain and Vermont for Barack. Then West Virginia went for McCain, and after that so did South Carolina. My confidence lurched a little, though none of this was a surprise. According to Axe and Plouffe, who were buzzing in and out of the room, announcing what felt like every sliver of information they received, everything was unfolding as predicted. Though the updates were generally positive, the political chatter was the last thing I wanted to hear. We had no control over anything anyway, so what was the point? We’d leaped and now, one way or another, we’d land. We could see on TV that thousands of people were already amassing at Grant Park, a mile or so away on the lakefront, where election coverage was being broadcast on Jumbotron screens and where Barack would later show up to deliver one of his two speeches. There were police officers stationed on practically every corner, Coast Guard boats patrolling the lake, helicopters overhead. All of Chicago, it seemed, was holding its breath, waiting for news.

  Connecticut went for Barack. Then New Hampshire went for Barack. So did Massachusetts, Maine, Delaware, and D.C. When Illinois was called for Barack, we could hear cars honking and shouts of excitement from the streets below. I found a chair near the door to the suite and sat alone, surveying the scene in front of me. The room had gone mostly quiet now, the political team’s nervous updates having given way to an expectant, almost sober kind of calm. To my right, the girls sat in their red and black dresses on a couch, and to my left, Barack, his suit coat draped elsewhere in the room, had taken a seat on another couch next to my mother, who was dressed that evening in an elegant black suit and silver earrings.

  “Are you ready for this, Grandma?” I heard Barack say to her.

  Never one to overemote, my mom just gave him a sideways look and shrugged, causing them both to smile. Later, though, she’d describe to me how overcome she’d felt right then, struck just as I’d been by his vulnerability. America had come to see Barack as self-assured and powerful, but my mother also recognized the gravity of the passage, the loneliness of the job ahead. Here was this man who no longer had a father or a mother, about to be elected the leader of the free world.

  The next time I looked over, I saw that she and Barack were holding hands.

  * * *

  It was exactly ten o’clock when the networks began to flash pictures of my smiling husband, declaring that Barack Hussein Obama would become the forty-fourth president of the United States. We all leaped to our feet and started instinctively to yell. Our campaign staff streamed into the room, as did the Bidens, everyone hurling themselves from one hug to the next. It was surreal. I felt as if I’d been lifted out of my own body, only watching myself react.

  He had done it. We’d all done it. It hardly seemed possible, but the victory was sound.

  Here is where I felt like our family got launched out of a cannon and into some strange underwater universe. Things felt slow and aqueous and slightly distorted, even if we were moving quickly and with precise guidance, waved by Secret Service agents into a freight elevator, hustled out a back exit at the hotel and into a waiting SUV. Did I breathe the air as we stepped outside? Did I thank the person who held open the door as we passed by? Was I smiling? I don’t know. It was as if I were still trying to frog-kick my way back to reality. Some of this, I assumed, had to be fatigue. It had been, as predicted, a very long day. I could see the grogginess in the girls’ faces. I’d prepared them for this next part of the night, explaining that whether Dad won or lost, we were going to have a big noisy celebration in a park.

  We were gliding now in a police-escorted motorcade along Lake Shore Drive, speeding south toward Grant Park. I’d traveled this same road hundreds of times in my life, from my bus rides home from Whitney Young to the predawn drives to the gym. This was my city, as familiar to me as a place could be, and yet that night it felt different, transformed into something strangely quiet. It was as if we were suspended in time and space, a little like a dream.

  Malia had been peering out the window of the SUV, taking it all in.

  “Daddy,” she said, sounding almost apologetic. “There’s no one on the road. I don’t think anyone’s coming to your celebration.”

  Barack and I looked at each other and started to laugh. It was then that we realized that ours were the only cars on the street. Barack was now president-elect. The Secret Service had cleared everything out, shutting down an entire section of Lake Shore Drive, blocking every intersection along the route—a standard precaution for a president, we’d soon learn. But for us, it was new.

  Everything was new.

  I put an arm around Malia. “The people are already there, sweetie,” I said. “Don’t worry, they’re waiting for us.”

  And they were. More than 200,000 people had crammed into the park to see us. We could hear an expectant hum as we exited the vehicle and were ushered into a set of white tents that had been put up at the front of the park, forming a tunnel that led to the stage. A group of friends and family had gathered there to greet us, only now, due to Secret Service protocol, they were cordoned off behind a rope. Barack put his arm around me, almost as if to make sure I was still there.

  We walked out onto the stage a few minutes later, the four of us, me holding Malia’s hand and Barack holding Sasha’s. I saw a lot of things at once. I saw that a wall of thick, bulletproof glass had been erected around the stage. I saw an ocean of people, many of them waving little American flags. My brain could process none of it. It all felt too big.

  I remember little of Barack’s speech that night. Sasha, Malia, and I watched him from the wings as he said his words, surrounded by those glass shields and by our city and by the comfort of more than sixty-nine million votes. What stays with me is that sense of comfort, the unusual calmness of that unusually warm November night by the lake in Chicago. After so many months of going to high-energy campaign rallies with crowds deliberately whipped up into a shouting, chanting frenzy, the atmosphere in Grant Park was different. We were standing before a giant, jubilant mass of Americans who were also palpably reflective. What I heard was relative silence. It seemed almost as if I could make out every face in the crowd. There were tears in many eyes.

  Maybe the calmness was something I imagined, or maybe for all of us, it was just a product of the late hour. It was almost midnight, after all. And everyone had been waiting. We’d been waiting a long, long time.

  Becoming More

  19

  There is no handbook for incoming First Ladies of the United States. It’s not technically a job, nor is it an official government title. It comes with no salary and no spelled-out set of obligations. It’s a strange kind of sidecar to the presidency, a seat that by the time I came to it had already been occupied by more than forty-three different women, each of whom had done it in her own way.

  I knew only a little about previous First Ladies and how they’d approached the position. I knew that Jackie Kennedy had dedicated herself to redecorating the White House. I recalled that Rosalynn Carter had sat in on cabinet meetings, Nancy Reagan had gotten into some trouble accepting free designer dresses, and Hillary Clinton had been derided for taking on a policy role in her husband’s administration
. Once, a couple of years earlier at a luncheon for U.S. Senate spouses, I’d watched—half in shock, half in awe—as Laura Bush posed, serene and smiling, for ceremonial photos with about a hundred different people, never once losing her composure or needing a break. First Ladies showed up in the news, having tea with the spouses of foreign dignitaries; they sent out official greetings on holidays and wore pretty gowns to state dinners. I knew that they normally picked a cause or two to champion as well.

  I understood already that I’d be measured by a different yardstick. As the only African American First Lady to set foot in the White House, I was “other” almost by default. If there was a presumed grace assigned to my white predecessors, I knew it wasn’t likely to be the same for me. I’d learned through the campaign stumbles that I had to be better, faster, smarter, and stronger than ever. My grace would need to be earned. I worried that many Americans wouldn’t see themselves reflected in me, or that they wouldn’t relate to my journey. I wouldn’t have the luxury of settling into my new role slowly before being judged. And when it came to judgment, I was as vulnerable as ever to the unfounded fears and racial stereotypes that lay just beneath the surface of the public consciousness, ready to be stirred up by rumor and innuendo.

  I was humbled and excited to be First Lady, but not for one second did I think I’d be sliding into some glamorous, easy role. Nobody who has the words “first” and “black” attached to them ever would. I stood at the foot of the mountain, knowing I’d need to climb my way into favor.

  For me, it revived an old internal call-and-response, one that tracked all the way back to high school, when I’d shown up at Whitney Young and found myself suddenly gripped by doubt. Confidence, I’d learned then, sometimes needs to be called from within. I’ve repeated the same words to myself many times now, through many climbs.

  Am I good enough? Yes I am.

  The seventy-six days between election and inauguration felt like a critical time to start setting the tone for the kind of First Lady I wanted to be. After all I’d done to lever myself out of corporate law and into more meaningful community-minded work, I knew I’d be happiest if I could engage actively and work toward achieving measurable results. I intended to make good on the promises I’d made to the military spouses I’d met while campaigning—to help share their stories and find ways to support them. And then there were my ideas for planting a garden and looking to improve children’s health and nutrition on a larger scale.

  I didn’t want to go about any of it casually. I intended to arrive at the White House with a carefully thought-out strategy and a strong team backing me. If I’d learned anything from the ugliness of the campaign, from the myriad ways people had sought to write me off as angry or unbecoming, it was that public judgment sweeps in to fill any void. If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others. I wasn’t interested in slotting myself into a passive role, waiting for Barack’s team to give me direction. After coming through the crucible of the last year, I knew that I would never allow myself to get that banged up again.

  * * *

  My mind raced with all that needed to get done. There had been no way to plan for this transition. Doing anything ahead of time would have been viewed as presumptuous. For a planner like me, it had been hard to sit back. So now we went into overdrive. My top priority was looking out for Sasha and Malia. I wanted to get them settled as quickly and comfortably as possible, which meant nailing down the details of our move and finding them a new school in Washington, a place where they’d be happy.

  Six days after the election, I flew to D.C., having set up meetings with administrators at a couple of different schools. Under normal circumstances, I’d have focused solely on the academics and culture of each place, but we were far past the possibility of normal now. There were all sorts of cumbersome new factors to be considered and discussed—Secret Service protocols, emergency evacuation setups, strategies for protecting our kids’ privacy now that they had the eyes of a nation upon them. The variables had become exponentially more complex. More people were involved; more conversations needed to be had before even a small decision could be made.

  Thankfully, I was able to keep my key campaign staffers—Melissa, Katie, and Kristen—working with me during the transition. We immediately set about figuring out the logistics of our family’s move while also beginning to hire staff—schedulers, policy experts, communications pros—for my future East Wing offices, as well as interviewing people for jobs in the family residence. One of my first hires was Jocelyn Frye, an old friend from law school who had a fantastic analytic mind and agreed to come on as my policy director, helping to oversee the initiatives I planned to launch.

  Barack, meanwhile, was working on filling positions for his cabinet and huddling with various experts on ways to rescue the economy. By now, more than ten million Americans were unemployed, and the auto industry was in a perilous free fall. I could tell by the hard set of my husband’s jaw following these sessions that the situation was worse than most Americans even understood. He was also receiving daily written intelligence briefings, suddenly privy to the nation’s heavier secrets—the classified threats, quiet alliances, and covert operations about which the public remained largely unaware.

  Now that the Secret Service would be protecting us for years to come, the agency selected official code names for us. Barack was “Renegade,” and I was “Renaissance.” The girls were allowed to choose their own names from a preapproved list of alliterative options. Malia became “Radiance,” and Sasha picked “Rosebud.” (My mother would later get her own informal code name, “Raindance.”)

  When speaking to me directly, the Secret Service agents almost always called me “ma’am.” As in, “This way, ma’am. Please step back, ma’am.” And, “Ma’am, your car will be here shortly.”

  Who’s “Ma’am”? I’d wanted to ask at first. Ma’am sounded to me like an older woman with a proper purse, good posture, and sensible shoes who was maybe sitting somewhere nearby.

  But I was Ma’am. Ma’am was me. It was part of this larger shift, this crazy transition we were in.

  All this was on my mind the day I traveled to Washington to visit schools. After one of my meetings, I went back to Reagan National Airport to meet Barack, who was due in on a chartered flight from Chicago. As was protocol for the president-elect, we’d been invited by President and Mrs. Bush to drop by for a visit to the White House and had scheduled it to coincide with my trip to look at schools. I stood waiting at the private terminal as Barack’s plane touched down. Next to me was Cornelius Southall, one of the agents heading my security detail.

  Cornelius was a square-shouldered former college football player who’d previously worked as a part of President Bush’s security team. Like all of my detail leaders, he was smart, trained to be hyperaware at every moment, a human sensor. Even then, as the two of us watched Barack’s plane taxi and come to a stop maybe twenty yards away on the tarmac, he was picking up on something before I did.

  “Ma’am,” he said as some new piece of information arrived via his earpiece, “your life is about to change forever.”

  When I looked at him quizzically, he added, “Just wait.”

  He then pointed to the right, and I turned to look. Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts. The presidential motorcade. It was at least twenty vehicles long, moving in orchestrated formation, car after car after car, before finally the whole fleet rolled to a quiet halt, and the limos stopped directly in front of Barack’s parked plane.

 
I turned to Cornelius. “Is there a clown car?” I said. “Seriously, this is what he’s going to travel with now?”

  He smiled. “Every day for his entire presidency, yes,” he said. “It’s going to look like this all the time.”

  I took in the spectacle: thousands and thousands of pounds of metal, a squad of commandos, bulletproof everything. I had yet to grasp that Barack’s protection was still only half-visible. I didn’t know that he’d also, at all times, have a nearby helicopter ready to evacuate him, that sharpshooters would position themselves on rooftops along the routes he traveled, that a personal physician would always be with him in case of a medical problem, or that the vehicle he rode in contained a store of blood of the appropriate type in case he ever needed a transfusion. In a matter of weeks, just ahead of Barack’s inauguration, the presidential limo would be upgraded to a newer model—aptly named the Beast—a seven-ton tank disguised as a luxury vehicle, tricked out with hidden tear-gas cannons, rupture-proof tires, and a sealed ventilation system meant to get him through a biological or chemical attack.

  I was now married to one of the most heavily guarded human beings on earth. It was simultaneously relieving and distressing.

  I looked to Cornelius, who waved me forward in the direction of the limo.