Becoming Page 40

  Lloyd stood in the doorway, looking unfazed.

  “I thought you said they were sedated!” I yelled.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am,” he called back. “We’ve got a contingency plan for exactly this scenario!” He stepped to one side as Secret Service agents swarmed past him through the door, carrying what looked to be guns loaded with tranquilizer darts. Just then, I felt Sasha slip out of my grasp.

  I turned back toward the lawn, horrified to see my family being chased by wild animals and the wild animals being chased by agents, who were firing their guns.

  “This is your plan?” I screamed. “Are you kidding me?”

  Just then, the cheetah let out a snarl and launched itself at Sasha, its claws extended, its body seeming to fly. An agent took a shot, missing the animal though scaring it enough that it veered off course and retreated back down the hill. I was relieved for a split second, but then I saw it—a white-and-orange tranquilizer dart lodged in Sasha’s right arm.

  I lurched upward in bed, heart hammering, my body soaked in sweat, only to find my husband curled in comfortable sleep beside me. I’d had a very bad dream.

  * * *

  I continued to feel as if we were falling backward, our whole family in a giant trust fall. I had confidence in the apparatus that had been set up to support us in the White House, but still I could feel vulnerable, knowing that everything from the safety of our daughters to the orchestration of my movements lay almost entirely in the hands of other people—many of them at least twenty years younger than I was. Growing up on Euclid Avenue, I’d been taught that self-sufficiency was everything. I’d been raised to handle my own business, but now that seemed almost impossible. Things got handled for me. Before I traveled, staffers drove the routes I’d take to venues, timing my transit down to the minute, scheduling my bathroom breaks in advance. Agents took my girls to playdates. Housekeepers collected our dirty laundry. I no longer drove a car or carried things like cash or house keys. Aides took phone calls, attended meetings, and drafted statements on my behalf.

  All of this was marvelous and helpful, freeing me up to focus on the things I felt were most important. But occasionally it left me—a detail person—feeling as if I’d lost control of the details. Which is when the lions and cheetahs started to lurk.

  There was also much that couldn’t be planned for, a larger unruliness that paced the borders of our every day. When you’re married to the president, you come to understand quickly that the world brims with chaos, that disasters unfurl without notice. Forces seen and unseen stand ready to tear into whatever calm you might feel. The news could never be ignored: An earthquake devastates Haiti. A gasket blows five thousand feet underwater beneath an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, sending millions of barrels of crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Revolution stirs in Egypt. A gunman opens fire in the parking lot of an Arizona supermarket, killing six people and maiming a U.S. congresswoman.

  Everything was big and everything was relevant. I read a set of news clips sent by my staff each morning and knew that Barack would be obliged to absorb and respond to every new development. He’d be blamed for things he couldn’t control, pushed to solve frightening problems in faraway nations, expected to plug a hole at the bottom of the ocean. His job, it seemed, was to take the chaos and metabolize it somehow into calm leadership—every day of the week, every week of the year.

  I tried as best I could not to let the roiling uncertainties of the world impact my day-to-day work as First Lady, but sometimes there was no getting around it. How Barack and I comported ourselves in the face of instability mattered. We understood that we represented the nation and were obligated to step forward and be present when there was tragedy, or hardship, or confusion. Part of our role, as we understood it, was to model reason, compassion, and consistency. After the BP oil spill—the worst in U.S. history—had finally been contained, many Americans were still rattled, unwilling to believe it was safe to return to the Gulf of Mexico for vacation, causing local economies to suffer. So we made a family trip to Florida, during which Barack took Sasha for a swim, releasing a photo to the media that showed the two of them splashing happily in the surf. It was a small gesture, but the message was bigger: If he trusts the water, then so can you.

  When one or both of us traveled somewhere in the wake of a tragedy, it was often to remind Americans not to look too quickly past the pain of others. When I could, I tried to highlight the efforts of relief workers, educators, or community volunteers—anyone who gave more when things got rough. Traveling to Haiti with Jill Biden three months after the 2010 earthquake there, I felt my heart catch, seeing pyramids of rubble where homes had once been, sites where tens of thousands of people—mothers, grandfathers, babies—had been buried alive. We visited a set of converted buses where local artists were doing art therapy with displaced children who, despite their losses and thanks to the adults around them, still bubbled with hope.

  Grief and resilience live together. I learned this not just once as First Lady but many times over.

  As often as I could, I visited military hospitals where American troops were recovering from the wounds of war. The first time I went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, located less than ten miles from the White House, I was scheduled to be there for something like ninety minutes, but instead I ended up staying about four hours.

  Walter Reed tended to be the second or third stop for injured service members who were evacuated out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Many were triaged in the war zone and then treated at a military medical facility in Landstuhl, Germany, before being flown to the United States. Some troops stayed only a few days at Walter Reed. Others were there for months. The hospital employed top-notch military surgeons and offered excellent rehabilitation services, geared to handle the most devastating of battlefield injuries. Thanks to modern developments in armor, American service members were now surviving bomb blasts that would once have killed them. That was the good news. The bad news was that nearly a decade into two conflicts characterized by surprise attacks and hidden explosive devices, those injuries were plentiful and grave.

  As much as I tried to prepare for everything in life, there was no preparing for the interactions I had at military hospitals and Fisher Houses—lodgings where, thanks to a charitable organization of the same name, military families could stay for free while tending to an injured loved one. As I’ve said before, I grew up knowing little about the military. My father had spent two years in the Army, but well before I was born. Until Barack started campaigning, I’d had no exposure to the orderly bustle of an Army base or the modest tract homes that housed service members with families. War, for me, had always been terrifying but also abstract, involving landscapes I couldn’t imagine and people I didn’t know. To view it this way, I see now, had been a luxury.

  When I arrived at a hospital, I was usually met by a charge nurse, handed a set of medical scrubs to wear, and instructed to sanitize my hands each time I entered a room. Before opening a new door, I’d get a quick briefing on the service member and his or her situation. Each patient, too, was asked in advance whether he or she would like a visit from me. A few would decline, possibly because they weren’t feeling well enough or maybe for political reasons. Either way, I understood. The last thing I wanted to be was a burden.

  My visits to each room were as short or long as the service member wanted them to be. Every conversation was private, with no media or staff observing. The mood was sometimes somber, sometimes light. Prompted by a team banner or photographs on the wall, we’d talk about sports, or our home states, or our children. Or Afghanistan and what had happened to them there. We sometimes discussed what they needed and also what they didn’t need, which—as they’d often tell me—was anyone’s pity.

  At one point, I encountered a piece of red poster board taped to a doorway, with a message written in black marker that seemed to say it all:
>
  ATTENTION TO ALL THOSE WHO ENTER HERE:

  If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received, I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery.

  This was resilience. It was reflective of a larger spirit of self-sufficiency and pride I’d seen in all parts of the military. I sat one day with a man who’d gone off young and healthy to an overseas deployment, leaving behind a pregnant wife, and had come back quadriplegic, unable to move his arms or legs. As we talked, their baby—a tiny newborn with a pink face—lay swaddled in a blanket on his chest. I met another service member who’d had a leg amputated and asked me a lot of questions about the Secret Service. He explained cheerily that he’d once hoped to become an agent after leaving the military, but that given the injury he was now figuring out a new plan.

  Then there were the families. I introduced myself to the wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, cousins and friends I found by the bedside, people who had often put the rest of their lives on hold in order to stay close. Sometimes they were the only ones I could talk to, as their loved one lay immobilized nearby, heavily sedated or asleep. These family members carried their own weight. Some came from generations of military service, while others were teenage girlfriends who’d become brides just ahead of a deployment—their futures now having taken a sudden, complicated turn. I can no longer count the number of mothers with whom I’ve cried, their distress so acute that all we could do was lace our hands together and pray silently through tears.

  What I saw of military life left me humbled. As long as I’d been alive, I’d never encountered the kind of fortitude and loyalty that I found in those rooms.

  One day in San Antonio, Texas, I noticed a minor commotion in the hallway of the military hospital I was visiting. Nurses shuffled urgently in and out of the room I was about to enter. “He won’t stay in bed,” I heard someone whisper. Inside, I found a broad-shouldered young man from rural Texas who had multiple injuries and whose body had been severely burned. He was in clear agony, tearing off the bedsheets and trying to slide his feet to the floor.

  It took us all a minute to understand what he was doing. Despite his pain, he was trying to stand up and salute the wife of his commander in chief.

  * * *

  Sometime early in 2011, Barack mentioned Osama bin Laden. We’d just finished dinner and Sasha and Malia had run off to do their homework, leaving the two of us alone in the residence dining room.

  “We think we know where he is,” Barack said. “We may go in and try to take him out, but nothing’s sure.”

  Bin Laden was the world’s most wanted man and had eluded detection for years. Capturing or killing him had been one of Barack’s top priorities when he took office. I knew it would mean something to the nation, to the many thousands of military service members who’d spent years trying to protect us from al-Qaeda and especially to all those who’d lost loved ones on September 11.

  I could tell from Barack’s grim tone that there was much still to be resolved. The variables were clearly weighing heavily on him, though I knew better than to ask too many follow-up questions or insist that he walk me through the particulars. He and I were sounding boards for each other professionally and always had been. But I also knew that he now spent his days surrounded by expert advisers. He had access to all manner of top secret information, and as far as I was concerned, most especially on matters of national security, he needed no input from me. In general, I hoped that time with me and the girls would always be a respite, even though work was forever close by. After all, we literally lived above the shop.

  Barack, who’s always been good at compartmentalizing, managed to be admirably present and undistracted when he was with us. It was something we’d learned together over time as our work lives had grown increasingly busy and intense. Fences needed to go up; boundaries required protecting. Bin Laden was not invited to dinner, nor was the humanitarian crisis in Libya, nor were the Tea Party Republicans. We had kids, and kids need room to speak and grow. Our family time was when big worries and urgent concerns got abruptly and mercilessly shrunk to nothing so that the small could rightly take over. Barack and I would sit at dinner, hearing tales from the Sidwell playground or listening to the details of Malia’s research project on endangered animals, feeling as if these were the most important things in the world. Because they were. They deserved to be.

  Still, even as we ate, the work piled up. I could see over Barack’s shoulder to the hallway outside the dining room, where aides dropped off our nightly briefing books on a small table, usually as we were in the middle of our meal. This was part of the White House ritual: Two binders got delivered every evening, one for me and a much thicker, leather-bound one for Barack. Each contained papers from our respective offices, which we were meant to read overnight.

  After we tucked the kids into bed, Barack would normally disappear into the Treaty Room with his binder, while I took mine to the sitting area in my dressing room, where I’d spend an hour or two each night or early in the morning going through what was inside—usually memos from staff, drafts of upcoming speeches, and decisions to be made regarding my initiatives.

  A year after launching Let’s Move!, we were seeing results. We’d aligned ourselves with different foundations and food suppliers to install six thousand salad bars in school cafeterias and were recruiting local chefs to help schools serve meals that were not just healthy but tasty. Walmart, which was then the nation’s largest grocery retailer, had joined our effort by pledging to cut the amount of sugar, salt, and fat in its food products and to reduce prices on produce. And we’d enlisted mayors from five hundred cities and towns across the country to commit to tackling childhood obesity on the local level.

  Most important, over the course of 2010, I’d worked hard to help push a new child nutrition bill through Congress, expanding children’s access to healthy, high-quality food in public schools and increasing the reimbursement rate for federally subsidized meals for the first time in thirty years. As much as I was generally happy to stay out of politics and policy making, this had been my big fight—the issue for which I was willing to hurl myself into the ring. I’d spent hours making calls to senators and representatives, trying to convince them that our children deserved better than what they were getting. I’d talked about it endlessly with Barack, his advisers, anyone who would listen. The new law added more fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy to roughly forty-three million meals served daily. It regulated the junk food that got sold to children via vending machines on school property while also giving funding to schools to establish gardens and use locally grown produce. For me, it was a straightforward good thing—a potent, ground-level way to address childhood obesity.

  Barack and his advisers pushed hard for the bill, too. After Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, he made the effort a priority in his dealings with lawmakers, knowing that his ability to make sweeping legislative change was about to diminish. In early December, before the new Congress was seated, the bill managed to clear its final hurdles, and I stood proudly next to Barack eleven days later as he signed it into law, surrounded by children at a local elementary school.

  “Had I not been able to get this bill passed,” he joked to reporters, “I would be sleeping on the couch.”

  As with the garden, I was trying to grow something—a network of advocates, a chorus of voices speaking up for children and their health. I saw my work as complementing Barack’s success in establishing the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which greatly increased access to health insurance for all Americans. And I was now also focused on getting a new effort called Joining Forces off the ground—this one in collaboration with Jill Biden, whose son Beau had recently returned safely from his deployment in Iraq. Thi
s work, too, would serve to support Barack’s duties as commander in chief.

  Knowing that we owed more to our service members and their families than token thank-yous, Jill and I had been collaborating with a group of staffers to identify concrete ways to support the military community and raise its visibility. Barack had kicked things off earlier in the year with a government-wide audit, asking each agency to find new ways to support military families. I, meanwhile, reached out to the country’s most powerful CEOs, generating commitments to hire a significant number of veterans and military spouses. Jill would garner pledges from colleges and universities to train teachers and professors to better understand the needs of military children. We also wanted to fight the stigma surrounding the mental health issues that followed some of our troops home, and planned to lobby writers and producers in Hollywood to include military stories in their movies and TV shows.

  The issues I was working on weren’t simple, but still they were manageable in ways that much of what kept my husband at his desk at night was not. As had been the case since I first met him, nighttime was when Barack’s mind traveled without distraction. It was during these quiet hours that he could find perspective or inhale new information, adding data points to the vast mental map he carried around. Ushers often came to the Treaty Room a few times over the course of an evening to deliver more folders, containing more papers, freshly generated by staffers who were working late in the offices downstairs. If Barack got hungry, a valet would bring him a small dish of figs or nuts. He was no longer smoking, thankfully, though he’d often chew a piece of nicotine gum. Most nights of the week, he stayed at his desk until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, reading memos, rewriting speeches, and responding to email while ESPN played low on the TV. He always took a break to come kiss me and the girls good night.