Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

Which is not to say that she felt no stress or sense of obligation. Her role may have been unpaid, but she was the same i-dotting, t-crossing Michelle who had stayed up late to finish her high school homework and hated to fall short at anything. “I have a huge responsibility to use this platform in a way that’s going to make a difference,” she told a student questioner in 2011. “In a way that I feel like I don’t want to disappoint my parents, I wouldn’t want to disappoint the country. Sheesh, that’s a burden.… I want to be good at what I do.… I want to look back and say I did something good for a bunch of people because I was in this position.” The student had asked whether being an African American first lady added to the pressure. Michelle replied that her feelings about the job were “not unique to me because of my race” and reported that other first ladies saw the job in similar terms. “None of us chose the position. You get it because of who you’re married to and you don’t get a paycheck or a title, but you feel like you want to make the most of it and do some good things.” She concluded, to laughter, “Thank you for that question. It’s like a therapy session.”

  IT WAS A TRICKY ROLE, being first lady. There was no script, although there were certainly many models. Modern first ladies were as different in style and substance as their husbands. The woman she succeeded, Laura Bush, had cut a gracious, amiable, and sure-footed figure. She spoke up for the No Child Left Behind education policy and traveled to sixty-seven countries in her husband’s second term, playing substantive roles on such issues as political freedom in Burma, women’s rights in Afghanistan, and AIDS in Africa. A former school librarian, she was steady and low-key in an administration famous for swashbuckling, her position fortified by the knowledge that she had pushed her husband to stop drinking and save his career. “I’m not here for me, I’m here for George,” she told Anita McBride when interviewing her for the job of East Wing chief of staff. “Whatever I do here is to help the president’s goals for the country.”

  An earlier White House occupant, Barbara Bush, Laura’s mother-in-law, kept order and fired the occasional verbal dagger on her husband’s behalf, while Nancy Reagan combined a steely loyalty and a passion for palace intrigue with a fashion sense that sometimes clashed with the zeitgeist of the 1980s. First ladies were variously known for White House portfolios, real or imagined, and their causes. Lady Bird Johnson had beautification and the War on Poverty, Laura Bush had literacy, Nancy Reagan had the “Just Say No” anti-drugs campaign. Rosalynn Carter attended high-level meetings, taking notes quietly. “There’s no way I could discuss things with Jimmy in an intelligent way if I didn’t attend Cabinet meetings,” she once said. In the margins of policy papers and memos, the president would sometimes write, “Ros. What think?” The pressure of the White House, meanwhile, weighed on Betty Ford, who had been popping pills and drinking heavily long before the summer day when Richard Nixon resigned and made her husband, former Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, the president. Her poll numbers rose when she discussed on national television an earlier mental breakdown and spoke up for abortion rights, calling Roe v. Wade a “great, great decision.” She revealed a bout with breast cancer and wore a political button in 1975 urging passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She said her children probably had smoked marijuana: “It’s the type of thing that young people have to experience, like your first beer or your first cigarette.” Betty Ford bridged the gap between the presidential cocoon and the rest of the country, wrote author Kati Marton. Americans “saw an open, honest woman talking about issues they were dealing with every day.”

  As Michelle prepared for the move to the White House, she found herself compared with first ladies from three separate eras, each with a distinctive style. The three—Jackie Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and Eleanor Roosevelt—could hardly have been more different, illustrating the dilemmas Michelle would face in crafting the style and substance of her own role. Each came to be known best by her first name. Jackie Kennedy was just thirty-one years old when her husband was elected and thirty-four when he died. Her public face was all about style, the arts, and the gauzy image of a new Camelot, fueled by a media bored with the stolid Eisenhower era. John Kennedy himself was only forty-three when he entered the White House, a dashing and philandering father whose two young children would become known to the world in joy and mourning. Hillary Clinton came of age in the tumultuous years after John Kennedy died. A politically minded child of the Chicago suburbs, she was elected president of the Young Republicans before moving to the left in the late 1960s. She graduated from Yale Law School and worked as a lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas, as her husband climbed the political ranks. Her reputation was rooted in her formidable intellect, her independent career, and her early tendency to speak her mind, or something close to it. She landed in the briar patch with her campaign trail assertion that she was not the type of woman to stay home and bake cookies and, later, with her stewardship of a botched health care overhaul—a policymaking role that Michelle and her team made a conscious decision not to emulate. When she took a more traditional tack and stood by her feckless husband after his most recent sexual affair, this one with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, her popularity grew. Whether due to admiration or sympathy or a combination of the two was a matter for debate.

  It was Eleanor Roosevelt, however, who provided the most intriguing point of comparison for Michelle, and the most difficult standard to meet. Brave, singular, a progressive force operating before the media spotlight shone so brightly, Roosevelt created an independent identity while working to shape the thirty-second president’s agenda, at one point even seeking a federal job. She held press conferences for women reporters and wrote a popular syndicated newspaper column, “My Day.” She joined the Washington, D.C., chapter of the NAACP, supported anti-lynching legislation, and resigned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution when the organization refused to allow Marian Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall. Not that she was happy when she arrived at the White House. “The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great,” she wrote in 1933. Rather than be called first lady, she said she preferred “Mrs. Roosevelt.” Franklin Roosevelt wrote, in verse, of her predicament:

  Did my Eleanor relate

  all the sad and awful fate

  of the miserable lives

  lived by Washington wives

  Eleanor often left town. She traveled on her own, sometimes setting out by car and reporting back to her husband on what she found. She was a moral, prodding force in the White House, and she was ahead of her husband and party on matters of poverty, racism, and social justice. In 1943, Chicago publisher John H. Johnson asked if she would contribute a column to his “If I Were a Negro” series in Negro Digest, which predated the launch of his glossy magazines, Ebony and Jet. “If I were a Negro today, I think I would have moments of great bitterness,” she wrote. “It would be hard to sustain my faith in democracy and to build up a sense of goodwill toward men of other races.” Although African Americans had been “held back by generations of economic inequality,” she continued, “I would know that I had to work hard and to go on accomplishing the best that was possible under present conditions.… I would not do too much demanding. I would take every chance that came my way to prove my quality.”

  The column was a huge success. Johnson reported that his circulation spiked by fifty thousand, doubling the usual press run. “She said, ‘If I were a Negro, I would have great bitterness,’ and all the northern papers picked that up,” Johnson recalled. “But she said, ‘But I would also have great patience,’ and all the southern newspapers picked that up.” Three years after her death, writer Claude Brown dedicated his memoir of life in Harlem, Manchild in the Promised Land, to Roosevelt. He cited her support of the Wiltwyck School for Boys, a Hudson River reform school that became a refuge for needy and sometimes troubled or delinquent children. It was Wiltwyck, he said, that turned his life around.

  MICHELLE TURNED INITIALLY to what spoke to her, just as she had done during the campai
gn. One of her first public roles was morale booster. Daughter and granddaughter of government workers, she made a tour of federal agencies, thanking federal employees for their anonymous service to the nation. “Everything you do, every piece of blood, sweat and tears you pour into the work is going to make the difference in our nation, in our planet,” she told Environmental Protection Agency workers in February. “Just know that we value you, that America values you,” she told Transportation Department staff. She mentioned her uncles who had been Pullman porters and praised their labor union as a “trailblazer in civil rights.” At the Agriculture Department, she talked up community gardens, renewable energy, and the expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. “We are going to need you in the months and years to come,” she said. “The challenges that we face are serious and real and it’s going to take quite a long time to get this country back on track.” More able to get out and about than her husband, Michelle told a packed auditorium of Education Department workers that she aimed “to learn, to listen, to take information back where possible.”

  Michelle and her team laid out a series of early priorities. Even then, as she was struggling to find her feet, her concerns had a shape familiar to those who knew her biography. In an echo of her work at Public Allies and the University of Chicago, she spoke up for expanded federal funding of national service programs, illustrated by the Serve America Act signed by Barack in April 2009. During a visit to the Corporation for National and Community Service, she recalled that unpaid internships were beyond her reach as a young woman, “a luxury that a working class kid couldn’t afford.” Everyone, she said, should have a chance to volunteer and benefit, “regardless of their race or their age or their financial ability.”

  To spotlight diversity in what she called “my new home town,” Michelle explored the vibrant and sometimes troubled Washington in the shadows of the federal government and the downtown tourist attractions. She set out to share her story and the president’s with fresh audiences, particularly children of color from less-than-elite backgrounds. She saw her younger self in them, and she wanted to play a role in “opening the doors and taking off the veil.” The White House, she said, would be the people’s house. “You know, there’s a playbook in Washington about what you’re supposed to do,” her friend Sharon Malone said. “Well, she’s not following the playbook. She’s doing it the way she wants to do it, by being very involved in the community.” On March 19, two months into the first term, Michelle drove across the river to Anacostia High School, located in an impoverished African American neighborhood within sight of the Capitol dome. It would take less than an hour to walk there from, say, Emancipation Hall, but the two worlds rarely intersected. “One of those schools that was basically forgotten,” said Roscoe Thomas, dean of students, recalling his first impressions. Michelle gathered students around her and explained that when she began to envision her time as first lady, she realized that she wanted to spend “a whole lot of time outside in the D.C. community.” The motivation was her own recollection of how distant the University of Chicago felt to her as a working-class black girl, even though the campus was close to her home. “I never set foot on it. I didn’t get to attend any classes. And I think the assumption was … that place was different,” she said. “It was a college, and it was a fancy college, and it didn’t have anything to do with me.”

  At Anacostia, Michelle talked with girls—and a few boys, to whom she said, “You brothers are lucky, because you got to sneak into this.” They were chosen to meet her for a reason. “Each of you has struggled with something, but you’ve overcome it, you’ve pushed to the next level. And that for me, that was important. I didn’t just want the kids who had already arrived, but kids who were pushing to get to the next place,” she said in an echo of what she valued when recruiting for Public Allies. She spoke of her own hard work as an adolescent, and how her mother made clear that Michelle needed to take responsibility if she expected to succeed. “I ran into people in my life who told me, ‘You can’t do it, you’re not as smart as that person.’ And that never stopped me. That always made me push harder, because I was like, I’m going to prove you wrong.” As intended, the event drew news coverage. It caught the eye of Jasmine Williams, a D.C. public charter school senior who had already asked Michelle to speak at her graduation. “She told them how a lot of people told her she spoke like a white girl,” Williams said. “I don’t know what that means, but I’ve been told that, too.”

  Michelle was just one woman of distinction who ventured into D.C.-area schools that day, part of a White House celebration of Women’s History Month. In what would become a template, the East Wing deployed an array of accomplished women, sending them to eleven local schools and welcoming them back to the White House to break bread with Michelle and various girls invited to meet them. That day, the guest list ranged from singers Alicia Keys and Sheryl Crow to gymnast Dominique Dawes, former astronaut Mae C. Jemison, and the first female four-star general in the U.S. military, General Ann E. Dunwoody. When the day was over and the guests had gone home, Michelle told her staff that it was their best event yet. The experience would fuel the East Wing’s creation of a mentoring program.

  To Michelle, mentoring was a pursuit and a philosophy that infused her agenda throughout the White House years. She drew satisfaction from sharing her stories and she found that they resonated with young audiences, especially African American girls. “She really wanted to think about how to engage young people and to engage young people from all walks of life, not just the expected schools,” said Jocelyn Frye, a Washington native and Harvard friend who steered the project as Michelle’s policy director. The role seemed to come naturally, and it fulfilled her bedrock determination to reach back. “In every phase of my life, whether I was in high school or Princeton or Harvard or working for the city or working at the hospital, I was always looking for somebody to mentor,” Michelle said when she took the project to Detroit in 2010. “I was looking for a way to reach out into my neighborhood and my community and pull somebody else along with me, because I thought, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ ”

  The program paired twenty high school sophomores and juniors with women who worked in the Obama White House. Michelle wanted the students to experience “substance and fun.” They saw Air Force One. They went to Anacostia. They went to the Supreme Court. They accompanied Michelle to see the Alvin Ailey dance company. They met Judith Jamison, the powerful and ethereal dancer who was one of Michelle’s childhood heroes. The program was small, but its architecture reflected a determination to invest in activities tethered to a clear purpose. In a realm of infinite options and limited time, there would be no tilting at windmills in Michelle Obama’s East Wing. “It’s not sufficient to say we’re going to do an event on childhood obesity. There has to be a reason for it. It has to have a beginning and an end and be part of a broader strategy,” explained Frye, who said of the first Anacostia visit, “We didn’t want it to be a one-shot deal, where we appear for a photo and not appear again. She wants us to have a plan, so we don’t just go from event to event by the seat of our pants.”

  OVER IN THE WEST WING, it was difficult to exaggerate the calamities that Barack inherited. There were worries about terrorism during preparations for the inaugural festivities, as if the new president and his family needed any reminder of the perils ahead. Just hours before he took the oath of office, aides updated Barack on intelligence reports that Somali extremists might detonate bombs during his address to the nation. The celebration passed without incident, but the demands of the presidency were soon made plain. The economy, in free fall since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, lost an estimated 741,000 jobs in January alone. Another 651,000 jobs disappeared in February and 652,000 in March. The housing market was imploding, causing millions of people to lose their homes or a large chunk of the income they had counted on for retirement. The $236 billion budget surplus at the end of the Clinton years had turned into a
$1.3 trillion deficit under George W. Bush, thanks to substantial Republican-inspired tax cuts for the wealthy and a pair of wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, churning along without end. When Barack took office, 144,000 soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen were deployed to Iraq. Another 34,000 were stationed in Afghanistan, a figure that would nearly triple on Barack’s watch. The threat of terrorism, meanwhile, continued to lurk across an unsettled globe. When Barack Hussein Obama placed his hand on the Lincoln Bible and took the oath, wrote Peter Baker of The New York Times, he inherited “a nation in crisis at home and abroad.”

  The rueful joke told by some Obama supporters was that the country was going to hell, so of course they gave the job to a black guy. Being president sometimes felt like standing in a vast maze facing an endless sequence of blind turns leading to one set of choices after another. Each decision blended the consequences of the last one with a mind-bending array of considerations about the ones to come. Politics, principle, and practicalities all factored in, as did the inevitable pronouncements of the commentariat. It was no wonder that Barack liked to turn to ESPN, the sports channel, to escape. Michelle sometimes offered her opinions, not least on personnel. Chicago friend Marty Nesbitt called her the most “do what’s right” person in Barack’s circle, representing true north. “She’s just very pragmatic and straightforward. She doesn’t sugarcoat her perspective or dance around the issues. She just calls it like she sees it.” Valerie Jarrett, who moved into a West Wing office as a presidential adviser, agreed and said Michelle played an essential role. “She is completely honest. There are very few people you can say that about. She tells the president exactly what she thinks. She doesn’t hold back.” Susan Sher added that Michelle tended to speak up about public opinion. “She likes to say, ‘This is not what people care about. They care about this.’ ”