Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  That said, Michelle chose her moments. She explained that while she was “honest, absolutely,” there were times when a talking- to was not what Barack needed. “In a job like this, the last thing a president of the United States needs when he walks in the door to come home is somebody who is drilling him and questioning him about the decisions and choices that he’s made. So, there are definitely times when I may feel something, but I’ll hold back because I know he’ll either get to it on his own or it’s just not time.” Living a few steps away from the Oval Office did have its advantages in times of turmoil. “Now I can just pop over to his office,” Michelle said, “which sometimes I’ll do if I know he’s having a particularly frustrating day.”

  Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick said Michelle’s personality helped Barack open up emotionally, providing a space “where he lets himself feel the stuff that goes on in the office and not just think about the stuff and evaluate the stuff and consider his options around the stuff.” Patrick, who saw Barack in settings public and private, said the president was empathetic and able to show it behind the scenes, when meeting, for example, with wounded soldiers or victims of a tragedy. But in public, Barack was “very careful emotionally. He’s uncommonly analytical and self-contained, in the sense that he is going to let things roll off him that just wouldn’t roll off of others.” Michelle was able to draw him out. “She’s more confident about expressing her emotions, whether grief or anger or frustration or what have you,” Patrick said. “Not necessarily publicly, but in company with him, and I think that’s helpful for him. She makes him better.”

  WHILE BARACK FACED the recession, the deficit, the wars, and a hundred other problems, Michelle set out to manage the household. In the residence, there were thirty-six rooms, including five bedrooms on the second floor and six on the third, plus sixteen bathrooms. There was a household staff and an office staff. There were new family routines, a new private school for Malia and Sasha, and new duties, from party planning to official correspondence, plus the care and feeding of everyone who wanted a piece of her day. There was even a new dog, a purebred Portuguese water dog named Bo, promised to the girls as a post-campaign reward. Michelle often felt swamped and was not shy about confessing her unhappiness. She had always relied on her girlfriends for support, yet the challenges of Washington were compounded by having few close friends nearby. Sher, her old friend from City Hall and the University of Chicago, was in the White House counsel’s office. Desiree Rogers, the former head of Peoples Gas and ex-wife of John Rogers, was her social secretary. Plus she had Jarrett. “Valerie was the counselor. Valerie was the everything,” said Jackie Norris, Michelle’s first chief of staff.

  To help, the Chicago contingent made frequent trips to the nation’s capital, offering reassurance. “Do you still recognize me? Do I still feel like Michelle, or are you tripping?” she would ask when checking in with old friends. In search of equilibrium, the “most unexpected and uniform advice” she received from former first ladies was to go early and often to the presidential retreat at Camp David, about sixty miles north in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Park. “It’s one place you can go where you feel some level of freedom and an ability to breathe,” Michelle said. “I think every single first lady felt that was an important resource, an important opportunity, an important thing for the health of the family.”

  To shore up the home front, Michelle asked her seventy-one-year-old mother to move into the White House, where she could live on the third floor of the residence, help with the girls, and support the first lady. Marian was, to say the least, reluctant. “That I can do without. When you move in, you hear just a little bit too much,” she once said. Among other drawbacks, she worried that living in the White House would feel like living in a museum and she did not want to give up her car. She liked to drive. Michelle asked her brother to work on her.

  “My sister said, ‘You’ve got to talk to Mom. She’s not moving,’ ” said Craig, who knew that Marian prized her independence and had no use for the rarefied White House air or egos inflated by proximity to power. “She doesn’t want grand. She doesn’t want great. She would much rather stay home.” She was close to relatives and friends and had a routine that suited her. There were shopping trips with her sister, yoga at her brother’s studio, and a quiet life at home where she read the newspaper, did crossword puzzles, watched home improvement shows, played the piano, and shoveled her own walk. Her means and her needs were modest.

  But she relented. Marian locked the door on the Euclid Avenue house and became an integral part of the Obama household. In Washington, after accompanying Malia and Sasha to school in an SUV driven by the Secret Service, she would often return to the residence and, if Michelle were home, chat with her before heading to her third-floor quarters. At a White House tea, Michelle singled her out, declaring that Marian “has pulled me up when I’ve stumbled. She’s pulled me back when I’ve run out of line, talking a little too much. She’ll snap me up. She really does push me to be the best woman that I can be, truly, as a professional and as a mother and as a friend. And she has always, always, always been there for me. Raising our girls in the White House with my mom—oh, not going to do this,” Michelle said, starting to choke up, “is a beautiful experience.”

  As Marian found her way, she had the advantage of relative anonymity, allowing her to walk out the White House gates and stroll through downtown Washington, maybe stopping at the pharmacy, without creating a fuss. Once, when a passerby remarked that she looked just like Mrs. Robinson, she replied, “Oh, yeah, people say that.” And she kept walking. She slipped easily out of Washington, traveling to Chicago or to the Pacific Northwest, where she visited Craig and his family at Oregon State University. Of course, she also sat in the president’s box at the Kennedy Center, sometimes joined by her friend Bettie Currie, former White House secretary to Bill Clinton. She flew aboard Air Force One to Russia and Ghana. She met Pope Benedict and Queen Elizabeth. Michelle reveled in her presence and said, “I’m pretty sure the president is happy, too.” Barack credited Marian for bringing stories back to the White House from the outside world because, he said, “she escapes the bubble.”

  THE BUBBLE IS one of the strangest aspects of the modern presidency and a feature the Obamas especially lamented. In physical terms, the bubble is the security cordon that surrounds the president and his immediate family 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The Obamas could not go anywhere, ever, without being guarded by gun-carrying Secret Service agents. Eighteen months into his presidency, asked what he missed most, Barack answered, “Taking walks.” He regretted being unable to sit absently on a bench in a city park or go alone with his kids to get ice cream. Anonymity, he said, is “a profound pleasure that is very hard to experience now.” Beyond the physical cordon, the bubble also came to represent the isolation of life in the White House, which Harry Truman called in his 1947 diary “the great white jail.” Truman said the executive mansion was “a hell of a place in which to be alone. While I work from early morning until late at night, it is a ghostly place. The floors pop and crack all night long.” In the gloom, he saw the specters of his predecessors. “They all walk up and down the halls of this place and moan about what they should have done and didn’t.”

  Sixty years later, an otherwise simple dinner for two at a D.C. restaurant required a security sweep of the premises and a screening of patrons. A decision to spend a few days outside the capital triggered a far more complex and expensive choreography. Even a stroll through the White House and its grounds posed problems, given the presence of news photographers, staff, and guests in a sprawling mansion that served as government office, tourist destination, and private home. It was surreal. Barack left on trips vertically, from the South Lawn. “Once, someone on my staff e-mailed to tell me that the president was on his way,” Michelle said. “But you could already hear the helicopter, so it was like, well, no kidding.”

  During her first spring in Washington, Michelle approached the
Secret Service. She wanted to see the city’s glorious cherry blossoms, a simple outing in a season that drew tens of thousands of tourists and residents to the Tidal Basin and more secluded spots. Not so simple, it turned out, for a first lady. She put on a baseball cap and met Cindy Moelis, a Chicago friend from their time at City Hall who ran the White House Fellows Program. With an agent at the wheel, they drove to one destination, but the agent decided the crowds were too thick; Michelle would surely be recognized. They drove instead to a less popular place. The trees were in bloom, and they took a walk. Another time, Michelle was delighted to hear that she could walk to an event at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, only to discover that it was barely across the street from the White House complex. When she went to Target one time, a customer, not recognizing Michelle, asked if she would pull something down for her from a high shelf. She obliged. The first lady told friends that some white people simply did not “see” her, a black woman, when she was out in public and trying to be inconspicuous.

  Unlike her husband, Michelle was not trailed by a media pool during her private time. Without him, she could escape, albeit driven and escorted by the Secret Service. She discovered restaurants where she could eat unmolested. She went to the theater and ball games. She visited the homes of friends, who were instructed that informal visits were considered “off the grid” by the Secret Service command, for security reasons. No one was to say where Michelle was headed or when. If word leaked, the excursion might be canceled. Michelle did not like it, not one bit, but she adapted even when her staff told her no. “Just give me the rules. Just tell me. I’ll live with it,” Michelle said, according to Sher, who was struck by the fresh constraints. “Think of the shock to your system, in an incredibly short time.”

  How little had changed, even as so much had, in the world of first ladies. In 1789, the first year of the first American presidency, Martha Washington said she felt constrained by the role. “I never goe to any public place, indeed, I think I am much more like a state prisoner than anything else,” she wrote to her niece from New York, the temporary seat of government. “There is certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from and as I cannot doe as I like I am obstinate and stay at home a great deal.” Asked at a public forum with Laura Bush about Washington’s “state prisoner” reference, Michelle said, to laughter, “There are prison elements to it, but it’s a really nice prison.” Bush interjected, “But with a chef!” Michelle continued, “You can’t complain, but there are definitely elements that are confining.” In some ways, Michelle quickly discovered, the bubble was a fishbowl and she was the one swimming behind glass. Perceptions could be powerful and criticism withering in a life lived in the public eye. But there were advantages. When she wanted to draw attention to an issue, she knew that pens and cameras would be at the ready.

  DURING THE CAMPAIGN, Barack promised Michelle a date night in New York. It would be dinner, a show, just the two of them out on the town. But this was their new life and getting to Broadway was, well, a production. The Obamas, dressed in stylish stepping-out clothes, emerged from the White House in bright sunlight on the afternoon of May 30, 2009. As a pool photographer snapped photos, they strolled hand in hand across the South Lawn to a waiting helicopter, where a marine officer crisply saluted. The chopper took them to Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland, where they boarded a small air force jet to New York. A second helicopter was waiting there to fly them to lower Manhattan, where a motorcade was idling. They climbed into the presidential Cadillac limousine, called “The Beast,” a rolling fortress that weighed seven and a half tons, thanks to its titanium and steel armor, its bulletproof glass and its doors, as thick as a commercial airliner’s. The vehicle could be sealed from the outside air in case of a chemical weapons attack, and in the trunk it carried a supply of blood with the president’s type. As Michelle would joke about their attempts at date nights, “Barack has a 20-car motorcade, men with guns, the ambulance is always there. How romantic can you be?”

  Dinner in New York that night, reflecting Michelle’s foodie interests and tastes, was at Blue Hill, an upscale locavore haven housed in a former Greenwich Village speakeasy. “Perhaps no other restaurant makes as serious and showy an effort to connect diners to the origins of their food,” a New York Times food critic wrote in 2006. From the restaurant, the Obamas returned to the waiting motorcade, which included a media contingent—reporters, photographers, video teams—and drove to the Belasco Theatre, where New York police and the Secret Service had cordoned off an entire block of West 44th Street hours before the performance of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. The play, set in a northern boardinghouse during the Great Migration, depicted a search for livelihood and identity among dislocated black characters. As theatergoers flowed through metal detectors, the 8 p.m. curtain was delayed for forty-five minutes. Afterward, the Obamas passed throngs of people angling for a glimpse or a snapshot, then made their airborne way back to Washington, the South Lawn, and their permanently lighted, staffed, and secured home. Ticket sales for the show doubled the next day. The theater seats they occupied at the Belasco were unbolted from the floor and offered for sale at a charity auction.

  Michelle and Barack had not left New York before the Republican National Committee was criticizing the trip as extravagant and insensitive, with the economy in recession and General Motors days away from declaring bankruptcy. “Have a great Saturday evening,” RNC spokeswoman Gail Gitcho scoffed to her digital audience, “even if you’re not jetting off somewhere at taxpayer expense.” The political quandary the Obamas faced, with reporters recording their every move, would recur throughout their White House tenure. The West Wing foresaw trouble with the New York excursion and released a statement to reporters in Barack’s name. “I am taking my wife to New York City,” he said, “because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished.” As far as he was concerned, that should have been the end of the story.

  “IT’S A DERIVATIVE JOB. There’s so much there that you’re just supposed to do, that everyone’s been doing since 1952,” Trooper Sanders, an East Wing staff member, said of the role of first lady. To follow the familiar path would be relatively easy, Michelle and her team recognized early on, but it would turn the East Wing into a velvet coffin, comfortable but pointless. A first lady who allowed parties and traditional fare to define her days, Sanders said, would wake up four years or eight years later and say to herself, “I haven’t done anything.”

  Yet Michelle would discover that doing things differently could create its own trouble in hierarchical, tradition-bound Washington. Just as she chose where to play a role, she would choose where not to. Historic preservation, for example, at least in the early going. It was a typical engagement for first ladies, embraced by Hillary Clinton, who created the Save America’s Treasures program, and Laura Bush. But Michelle was not particularly interested and felt she brought nothing special to the table, despite a stint on the Chicago Landmarks Commission. When she concluded that it was a cause that could be championed elsewhere in the federal government, she disappointed the leaders of well-connected organizations who had expected more. Similarly, she faced questions about protocol and priorities when she sought to change the tone of the annual Congressional Club First Lady’s Luncheon, described by one aide as a “bastion of everything that made us cringe.”

  The first lady and her staff got a taste of what was to come when a luncheon organizer sent a swatch of fabric from the tablecloths so that Michelle could find a matching dress. Then there was the elevated catwalk, styled like a fashion runway and designed to showcase the guest of honor. Laura Bush walked the catwalk in 2001, her first year in the White House. She “politely declined” thereafter, commenting, “As first lady, I was accustomed to doing almost anything, but this was a bit too much.” Bush said the organizers besieged her staff long before the 2002 event, insisting that she use the catwalk. They also asked her to stay for the ent
ire four-hour lunch and honor specific requests about what to say in her remarks. Undeterred, she left the event early that year, hurrying to New Haven to help her daughter Barbara move out of her dormitory room at Yale.

  The “constant back-and-forth” over the congressional luncheon invariably reduced someone in her office to tears, said Bush, who reported that in previous years, members of Clinton’s staff had cried in frustration, too. Anita McBride sympathized. As Bush’s second chief of staff, she alerted Michelle’s team to the demands of the social calendar and the choices ahead. She left sample letters for the correspondence office, a list of contacts at every agency, and timelines for all kinds of events, including the annual White House Christmas card, a chore that fell to the first lady’s office. She also made sure to mention the challenge of dealing with what Bush called “the Congressional Club ladies.” McBride said she told her successors, “This is one of those things that is a have-to-do on the schedule but, you know what, this might be an opportunity to change what the requirements are. There are some have-to-dos, but it doesn’t mean the first ladies can’t set parameters.”

  Michelle quickly saw that she was not in Kansas any longer. This was Oz. Or maybe Kafka. Nowhere in her wedding vows did it say “for richer, for poorer, in the White House or in health.” On the one hand, she wanted to support the political spouses, “because she knows how hard that role is,” Norris said. On the other, there was surely a more meaningful option than a fancy lunch. “The one thing that she didn’t want to do was just do something because it had been done before.” Michelle compromised. She went along with the table linens and the dress, but she also invited the spouses to do a service project. More than 150 wives and husbands joined her on the 100th day of the Obama presidency to fill grocery bags, two thousand in all, at the Capital Area Food Bank.