Becoming Read online

  He now had about fifty staffers reading and answering his mail. He had Marine helicopter pilots standing by to fly him anywhere he needed to go, and a six-person team that organized thick briefing books so he could stay current on the issues and make educated decisions. He had a crew of chefs looking after his nutrition, and a handful of grocery shoppers who safeguarded us from any sort of food sabotage by making anonymous runs to different stores, picking up supplies without ever revealing whom they worked for.

  As long as I’ve known him, Barack has never derived pleasure from shopping, cooking, or home maintenance of any kind. He’s not someone who keeps power tools in the basement or shakes off work stress by making a risotto or trimming hedges. For him, the removal of all obligations and worries concerning the home made him nothing but happy, if only because it freed his brain, allowing it to roam unfettered over larger concerns, of which there were many.

  Most amusing to me was the fact that he now had three personal military valets whose duties included standing watch over his closet, making sure his shoes were shined, his shirts pressed, his gym clothes always fresh and folded. Life in the White House was very different from life in the Hole.

  “You see how neat I am now?” Barack said to me one day as we sat at breakfast, his eyes mirthful. “Have you looked in my closet?”

  “I have,” I said, smiling back. “And you get no credit for any of it.”

  * * *

  In his first month in office, Barack signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which helped protect workers from wage discrimination based on factors like gender, race, or age. He ordered the end of the use of torture in interrogations and began an effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay within a year. He overhauled ethics rules governing White House employees’ interactions with lobbyists and, most important, managed to push a major economic stimulus bill through Congress, even though not a single House Republican voted in its favor. From where I sat, he seemed to be on a roll. The change he’d promised was becoming real.

  As an added bonus, he was showing up for dinner on time.

  For me and the girls, this was the startling, happy shift that came from living in the White House with the president of the United States as opposed to living in Chicago with a father who served in some faraway senate and was often out campaigning for higher office. We had access, at long last, to Dad. His life was more orderly now. He worked a ridiculous number of hours, as he always had, but at 6:30 p.m. sharp he’d get on the elevator and ride upstairs to have a family meal, even if he often had to go right back down to the Oval Office afterward. My mother sometimes joined us for dinner, too, though she’d fallen into her own sort of routine, coming down to say hello before accompanying Malia and Sasha to school but mostly choosing to leave us in the evenings, instead eating dinner upstairs in the solarium adjacent to her bedroom while Jeopardy! was on. Even when we asked her to stay, she’d usually wave us off. “You all need your time,” she’d say.

  For the first few months in the White House, I felt the need to be watchful over everything. One of my earliest lessons was that it could be relatively costly to live there. While we stayed rent-free in the residence and had our utilities and staffing paid for, we nonetheless covered all other living expenses, which seemed to add up quickly, especially given the fancy-hotel quality of everything. We got an itemized bill each month for every food item and roll of toilet paper. We paid for every guest who came for an overnight stay or joined us for a meal. And with a culinary staff that had Michelin-level standards and a deep eagerness to please the president, I had to keep an eye on what got served. When Barack offhandedly remarked that he liked the taste of some exotic fruit at breakfast or the sushi on his dinner plate, the kitchen staff took note and put them into regular rotation on the menu. Only later, inspecting the bill, would we realize that some of these items were being flown in at great expense from overseas.

  Most of my watchfulness in those early months, though, was reserved for Malia and Sasha. I monitored their moods, quizzing them on their feelings and their interactions with other children. I tried not to overreact anytime they reported making a new friend, though inwardly I was jubilant. I understood by now that there was no straightforward way to arrange playdates at the White House or outings for the kids, but slowly we were figuring out a system.

  I was allowed to use a personal BlackBerry but had been advised to limit my contacts to only about ten of my most intimate friends—the people who loved and supported me without any sort of agenda. Most of my communications were mediated by Melissa, who was now my deputy chief of staff and knew the contours of my life better than anyone. She kept track of all my cousins, all my college friends. We gave out her phone number and email address instead of mine, directing all requests to her. Part of the issue was that old acquaintances and distant relatives were surfacing from nowhere and with a flood of inquiries. Could Barack speak at somebody’s graduation? Could I please give a speech for somebody’s nonprofit? Would we come to this party or that fund-raiser? Most of it was good-hearted, but it was too much for me to absorb all at once.

  When it came to the day-to-day lives of our girls, I often had to rely on young staffers to help with logistics. My team met early on with teachers and administrators at Sidwell, recording important dates for school events, ironing out processes for media inquiries, and answering questions from teachers about handling classroom topics involving politics or news of the day. As the girls began making social plans outside school, my personal assistant (or “body person,” as it’s called in political parlance) became the point of contact, collecting the phone numbers of other parents, orchestrating pickups and drop-offs for playdates. Just as I always had in Chicago, I made a point of trying to get to know the parents of the girls’ new friends, inviting a few moms over for lunch and introducing myself to others during school events. Admittedly, these interactions could be awkward. I knew it sometimes took a minute for new acquaintances to move past whatever ideas they held about me and Barack, whatever they thought they knew of me from TV or the news, and to see me simply, if possible, as Malia’s or Sasha’s mom.

  It was awkward to explain to people that before Sasha could come to little Julia’s birthday party, the Secret Service would need to stop by and do a security sweep. It was awkward to require Social Security numbers from any parent or caregiver who was going to drive a kid over to our house to play. It was all awkward, but it was all necessary. I didn’t like that there was this strange little divide to be crossed anytime I met someone new, but I was relieved to see that it was far different for Sasha and Malia, who went dashing outside to greet their school friends as they got dropped off at the Diplomatic Reception Room—or Dip Room, as we came to call it—grabbing them by the hand and running giggling inside. Kids care about fame, it turns out, for only a few minutes. After that, they just want to have fun.

  * * *

  I learned early on that I was meant to work with my staff to plan and execute a series of traditional parties and dinners, beginning most immediately with the Governors’ Ball, a black-tie gala held every February in the East Room. The same went for the annual Easter Egg Roll, an outdoor family celebration that had been started in 1878 and involved thousands of people. There were also springtime luncheons I would attend in honor of congressional and Senate spouses—similar to the one where I’d seen Laura Bush smiling so unflappably while having an official photo taken with every single guest.

  For me, these social events could feel like distractions from what I hoped would be more impactful work, but I also started thinking about ways I might add to or at least modernize some of them, to bend the bar of tradition ever so slightly. In general, I was thinking that life in the White House could be forward leaning without losing any of its established history and tradition. Over time, Barack and I would take steps in this direction, hanging more abstract art and works by African Americ
an artists on the walls, for example, and mixing contemporary furniture in with the antiques. In the Oval Office, Barack swapped out a bust of Winston Churchill and replaced it with a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. And we gave the tuxedoed White House butlers the option of dressing more casually on days when there were no public events, introducing a khaki and golf shirt option.

  Barack and I knew we wanted to do a better job of democratizing the White House, making it feel less elitist and more open. When we hosted an event, I wanted everyday people to show up, not just those accustomed to black-tie attire. And I wanted more kids around, because kids made everything better. I hoped to make the Easter Egg Roll accessible to more people—adding more slots for city schoolchildren and military families to go with the tickets guaranteed to the children and grandchildren of members of Congress and other VIPs. Lastly, if I was going to sit and lunch with the (mostly) wives of the House and the Senate, couldn’t I also invite them to join me out in the city for a community service project?

  I knew what mattered to me. I didn’t want to be some sort of well-dressed ornament who showed up at parties and ribbon cuttings. I wanted to do things that were purposeful and lasting. My first real effort, I decided, would be the garden.

  I was not a gardener and never had been in my life, but thanks to Sam Kass and our family’s efforts to eat better at home, I now knew that strawberries were at their most succulent in June, that darker-leaf lettuces had the most nutrients, and that it wasn’t so hard to make kale chips in the oven. I saw my daughters eating things like spring pea salad and cauliflower mac and cheese and understood that until recently most of what we knew about food had come through food-industry advertising of everything boxed, frozen, or otherwise processed for convenience, whether it was in snap-crackle TV jingles or clever packaging aimed at the harried parent dashing through the grocery store. Nobody, really, was out there advertising the fresh, healthy stuff—the gratifying crunch of a fresh carrot or the unparalleled sweetness of a tomato plucked right off the vine.

  Planting a garden at the White House was my response to this problem, and I hoped it would signal the start of something bigger. Barack’s administration was focused on improving access to affordable health care, and for me the garden was a way to offer a parallel message about healthy living. I saw it as an early test, a trial run that could help me determine what I might be able to accomplish as First Lady, a literal way to root myself in this new job. I conceived of it as a kind of outdoor classroom, a place kids could visit to learn about growing food. On the surface, a garden felt elemental and apolitical, a harmless and innocent undertaking by a lady with a spade—pleasing to Barack’s West Wing advisers who were constantly concerned about “optics,” worrying about how everything appeared to the public.

  But there was more to it than that. I planned to use the work we did in the garden to spark a public conversation about nutrition, especially at schools and among parents, which ideally would lead to discussions about how food was produced, labeled, and marketed and the ways that was affecting public health. And in speaking on these topics from the White House, I’d be offering an implicit challenge to the behemoth corporations in the food and beverage industry and the way they’d been doing business for decades.

  The truth was, I really didn’t know how any of it would go over. But as I directed Sam, who’d joined the White House staff, to begin taking steps to create the garden, I knew I was ready to find out.

  My optimism in those first months was primarily tempered by one thing, and that was politics. We lived in Washington now, right up close to the ugly red-versus-blue dynamic I’d tried for years to avoid, even as Barack had chosen to work inside it. Now that he was president, these forces all but ruled his every day. Weeks earlier, before the inauguration, the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh baldly announced, “I hope Obama fails.” I’d watched with dismay as Republicans in Congress followed suit, fighting Barack’s every effort to stanch the economic crisis, refusing to support measures that would cut taxes and save or create millions of jobs. On the day he took office, according to some indicators, the American economy was collapsing as fast as or faster than it had at the onset of the Great Depression. Nearly 750,000 jobs had been lost that January alone. And while Barack had campaigned on the idea that it was possible to build consensus between parties, that Americans were at heart more united than divided, the Republican Party was making a deliberate effort, in a time of dire national emergency no less, to prove him wrong.

  This was on my mind during the evening of February 24, when Barack addressed a joint session of Congress. The event is basically meant to be a substitute State of the Union for any newly inaugurated president, a chance to outline the goals for the coming year in a speech televised live during prime time, delivered in the hall of the House of Representatives with Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, military generals, and members of Congress present. It’s also a tradition of high pageantry, in which lawmakers dramatically express their approval or disapproval of the president’s ideas by either leaping to their feet in repeat standing ovations or remaining seated and sullen.

  I took my seat that evening in the balcony between a fourteen-year-old who’d written a heartfelt letter to her president and a gracious veteran of the Iraq war, all of us waiting for my husband to arrive. From where I sat, I could see most of the chamber below. It was an unusual, bird’s-eye view of our country’s leaders, an ocean of whiteness and maleness dressed in dark suits. The absence of diversity was glaring—honestly, it was embarrassing—for a modern, multicultural country. It was most dramatic among the Republicans. At the time, there were just seven nonwhite Republicans in Congress—none of them African American and only one was a woman. Overall, four out of five members of Congress were male.

  A few minutes later, the spectacle began with a thunderclap—the beating of a gavel and the call of the sergeant at arms. The crowd stood, applauding for more than five minutes straight as elected leaders jostled for position on the aisles. At the center of the storm, surrounded by a knot of security agents and a backward-walking videographer, was Barack, shaking hands and beaming as he slowly made his way through the room and toward the podium.

  I’d observed this ritual many times before on television, during other times with other presidents. But something about seeing my husband down there amid the crush made the magnitude of the job and the fact he’d need to win over more than half of Congress to get anything done suddenly very real.

  Barack’s speech that night was detailed and sober-minded, acknowledging the grim state of the economy, the wars going on, the ongoing threat of terror attacks, and the anger of many Americans who felt the government’s bailout of the banks was unfairly helping those responsible for the financial crisis. He was careful to be realistic but also to sound notes of hope, reminding his listeners of our resilience as a nation, our ability to rebound after tough times.

  I watched from the balcony as Republican members of Congress stayed seated through most of it, appearing obstinate and angry, their arms folded and their frowns deliberate, looking like children who hadn’t gotten their way. They would fight everything Barack did, I realized, whether it was good for the country or not. It was as if they’d forgotten that it was a Republican president who’d governed us into this mess in the first place. More than anything, it seemed they just wanted Barack to fail. I confess that in that moment, with that particular view, I did wonder whether there was any path forward.

  * * *

  When I was a girl, I had vague ideas about how my life could be better. I’d go over to play at the Gore sisters’ house and envy their space—the fact that their family had a whole house to themselves. I thought that it would mean something if my family could afford a nicer car. I couldn’t help but notice who among my friends had more bracelets or Barbies than I did, or who got to buy their clothes at the mall instead of having a mom who sewed everything on the cheap usi
ng Butterick patterns at home. As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.

  We lived in the White House now. Very slowly, it was starting to feel familiar—not because I’d ever grow accustomed to the vastness of the space or the opulence of the lifestyle, but because this was where my family slept, ate, laughed, and lived. In the girls’ rooms we’d put on display the growing collections of trinkets that Barack made a habit of bringing home from his various travels—snow globes for Sasha, key chains for Malia. We began to make subtle changes to the residence, adding modern lighting to go with the traditional chandeliers and scented candles that made the place feel more like home. I would never take our good fortune or comfort for granted, though what I began to appreciate more was the humanity of the place.

  Even my mother, who’d fretted about the museum-like formality of the White House, soon learned that there was more there to be measured. The place was full of people not all that different from us. A number of the butlers had worked for many years in the White House, tending to every family that came through. Their quiet dignity reminded me of my great-uncle Terry, who’d lived downstairs when I was growing up on Euclid Avenue, mowing our lawn dressed in wingtips and suspenders. I tried to make sure that our interactions with staff were respectful and affirming. I wanted to make sure they never felt invisible. If the butlers cared about politics, if they had private allegiances to one party or another, they kept it to themselves. They were careful to respect our privacy, but also were always open and welcoming, and gradually we became close. They instinctively sensed when to give me some space or when I could stand some gentle ribbing. Often they were talking trash about their favorite sports teams in the kitchen, where they liked to fill me in on the latest staff gossip or the exploits of their grandchildren as I looked over the morning headlines. If there was a college basketball game playing on the TV in the evening, Barack came in sometimes to join them for a little while to watch. Sasha and Malia came to love the convivial spirit of the kitchen, slipping in to make smoothies or pop popcorn after school. Many of the staff took a special shine to my mother, stopping in to catch up with her upstairs in the solarium.