But when the book tour ended, if you had asked me if I would be working in the media in ten years, I would have told you emphatically, “No way!” With an exclamation point. If you had asked me if I would work with the same group of people that had once plastered those hideous freshman-fifteen pictures of me everywhere, the answer would be no!
One of the Today Show executives called me and asked if I was interested in being a correspondent. Today may have been ready to give me a tryout opportunity, but I wasn’t ready to try out for them. I had a job teaching at the SEED school in Baltimore, which I loved. I was newly married, and I hadn’t studied journalism. I didn’t even have time to watch the Today Show. I said, “Thank you, but no.” Periodically, though, I would hear that they were still interested. When they called again in 2009, I went up to New York to see what they were proposing.
I sat down with Jim Bell, the executive producer, in a room with comfy director’s chairs, and he showed me a highlight reel of Today Show moments—and at the end of the video of all of the best moments there was a picture of me. When I walked back into his office, I was unexpectedly greeted by my future NBC family: Brian Williams, Meredith Vieira, Matt Lauer, and Al Roker. They were sitting in a semicircle, and I wasn’t sure if this was a welcome-to-the-media meeting or an intervention.
I was completely overwhelmed. When they said, “What questions do you have for us?” I couldn’t think of a single one. I began to sweat. Fortunately, they asked me what I wanted to do, and I said that I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to tell education stories, women’s issues stories, and every response was, “Great. We’ll let you do that.” It was as if anything that I wanted to do was possible; it felt like taking the job was the right thing. I started out just sticking my toe into the water. I kept teaching part-time in Baltimore and then racing to take the train up to New York to prepare my segments.
The job wasn’t easy. I knew the basic outline: I had to get up early, sometimes at 4 a.m., to be on the set, and on the weeks that I was preparing segments, I traveled across the country reporting. But Today did give me the opportunity to tell stories, which I loved, especially those of ordinary people who are making an extraordinary difference. I’ve also had the chance to sing karaoke with Céline Dion, had members of One Direction question if I was a cougar, and develop incredible friendships.
I’m often asked to pick my most meaningful interview. It is hard to choose just one, but a favorite of mine was with the late poet Maya Angelou. We spoke about her memoir of her mother. After the camera stopped rolling, I stayed to chat with her. Sitting across from her at the antique wooden table in the kitchen of her Harlem brownstone, I asked for her advice: What’s the best way to parent? She was older, relied on an oxygen tank, and often had to take breaks. She spoke about how her mother had many jobs, and brought “little Maya” along to learn and experience everything. When she became a mom herself, a single mom, she had that same adventurous attitude. As I listened to her thoughts on unconditional love and independence, I touched my pregnant belly, wondering what type of mother I would be. Could I raise a strong woman? Sadly, Maya Angelou died a year after we spoke.
When I started at Today, I knew how I wanted to conduct interviews. I understood how it felt when someone had interviewed me and arrived with an open mind, versus when the interviewer had a preconceived notion about who I was before I ever said a word. I remembered all the times I had been typecast as the loud one or the wild one or the shallow one, sometimes just because it was easier or faster than trying to get to know the real person. I knew what it was like to be asked questions that made me deeply uncomfortable or were based on assumptions about my parents or my grandparents. I didn’t want to do those types of interviews. I wanted to capture the true essence of who people are.
Ironically, there were times when I brought the media spotlight to the White House. On a few occasions, I interviewed First Lady Michelle Obama for the Today Show. The place where I had run from cameras was now the place I was returning to, with camera crew in tow. As we approached 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the crew asked me for directions—how to get to the right gate. I had no idea where to go. In my twelve years in and out of this famous address, I had never been to the press gate, only the smaller personal gate on another side of the building. I also had never been to the White House briefing room.
After I finally arrived at the right entrance, some of the ushers, who had been there with my parents and even my grandparents, were waiting to give me a hug and to ask if I wanted my usual, oatmeal and a latte. I couldn’t make myself that comfortable; I had gone to Starbucks with the rest of the crew.
We set up to interview Mrs. Obama in the Blue Room, the same room where my mom had done so many interviews when she was first lady. When we sat down, Mrs. Obama asked me if I wanted to go upstairs and see my old room. I was worried that I wouldn’t look professional, so I said no, but I thought it was so generous to ask.
It was the period when much of the press was focused on Mrs. Obama’s arms and her fashion styles. I wasn’t going to ask her about any of that. Her strength reminded me of my grandmother, and her grace reminded me of my mom, and I hoped people would see through the camera all the sides of her that I saw. (When I posted a photo of the two of us on Instagram, I had to remove some unkind comments below, saddened that just because our families came from two different political parties some believed we couldn’t share things in common.) I hoped I could help viewers to see that beyond any titles, there are real families and real people who live in this home called the White House. But the difference was, that didn’t just have to be my hope. Sitting in the interviewer’s chair, it was now my job to talk to Mrs. Obama in a way where I could do just that.
Following our first interview, we became periodic pen pals, writing each other letters every once in a while, such as when my babies were born. After the 2016 election, I reached out to her, thanking her for her service, asking for advice about how to talk to my daughters. She wrote back, saying: “One of the many gifts I have received from my tenure as First Lady is getting to know you and Barbara…and of course your mom and dad. You all are wonderful people who Barack and I love, respect, and admire.”
Many of my colleagues say that their biggest fear is leaving an interview without having asked the tough questions. My biggest fear is that I won’t represent the person I’m interviewing accurately, that I won’t show who they really are. I never want them to come across as one-dimensional. That’s true for me as well. Whether I am in front of the camera or away from it, I am the same person, living an unscripted life.
Political DNA
BARBARA
By sixth grade, I was a nonconformist conformist. Like most thirteen-year-olds, my style had gone AWOL. The most prized piece in my wardrobe was a raspberry velvet Jessica McClintock dress with an attached pearl choker—my favorite feature. Only I could make a Jessica McClintock dress look Goth. I wore it anytime I wanted to look chic (let’s define “chic” very loosely), until the velvet took on a balding sheen from too much dry cleaning. Beneath it, my legs were nicked but had been strategically Band-Aided following my novice clumsiness with a razor.
My daring was limited to slumber party antics that never got past the planning stages. We would hatch elaborate plots to dress up in black and toilet-paper another middle schooler’s house, but by midnight, we would fall asleep in our “criminal gear” before we could sneak out. In other words, there were no early clues that I was anything but docile, eager to be more mischievous than I was, in spite of a very real obsession with vamp nail polish and Courtney Love.
So it must have come as a bit of a surprise to my parents when I started to discover and voice my own strongly held opinions. At the dinner table, I argued against the death penalty over my mom’s chicken and rice, feeling my way around a newly formed opinion, one that differed from my parents’. By high school, I passionately supported gay rights.
In seventh grade, I met my best friend, Matthew, a wild
, hilarious, artistic, tie-dye-wearing eighth grader, full of a whole lot of not caring what other people thought. Our older family friends from New York City had sent Jenna and me the aforementioned Chanel vamp nail polish for our birthday. We were ecstatic—did this somehow make us city girls? Matthew commented on my nails in the hallways of St. Andrews and a friendship, now lasting twenty-two years, was born. We hung out every chance we could, lazing the summer away jumping on his trampoline or listening to Tori Amos. I always assumed Matthew was gay, I just never knew if he’d be comfortable enough to share it.
One night during our sophomore year of high school, we lay in the dark talking on Austin’s public golf course. After thirty minutes of stumbling and small-talking, of trying to share, Matthew came out to me. I was not surprised by his news, but I was surprised by his fear. His worry of being accepted. His worry of what others would think. Everybody knew Matthew. Everybody loved Matthew. Nothing would change. Or would it?
My first attempt to broach the subject of gay rights with my dad was a particularly heated debate that ended with my storming away from the table. With the absolute certainty that comes when you are sixteen, I believed that one conversation would be all it took to change my father’s mind. My dad, to his credit, kept his calm and simply asked me questions to understand my thought process. Usually the fastest eater at the table, when he is deep in thought, my dad slows down. That night, he almost stopped eating as we had our back-and-forth, him asking, me insisting. I knew my dad as accepting and tolerant. Unlike me, though, he was not comfortable with the idea of gay marriage and its implications. In retrospect, I realize that with those questions, he was helping me to hone my argument, or at least to think out loud as I went along. Healthy family debating was surely in effect. That said, I was not entirely unsuccessful. During a brief pause, my mother interjected, with a slight raise of her eyebrows, “It looks like your daughter has backed you into a corner.” My dad may not have changed his mind that evening, but neither did he try to change mine. We didn’t end up in a bitter relationship-ending feud; rather, we started a dialogue with each other that would continue for years to come.
Perhaps to most people there is an expectation that policies and opinions will be passed down in political families like eye color and height, encoded in our shared DNA. Or that party loyalty is interwoven or even synonymous with family loyalty. While that may be true for some families, it isn’t true for ours. Our dinner table never resembled a Model UN conference or a game of Risk; we don’t analyze obscure congressional races. On the contrary, we are a freewheeling, not always polite, ask questions, and explain your point of view type of family. We are a bunch who can’t quite be pigeonholed, probably in the same vein that any famous actor’s family can’t be painted as dramatizing Shakespeare at every gathering. We adhere to the “time and place model,” which lots of times means apolitical conversations. My dad can, and has, sat down to a meal with a restorer of antique barns and spent the entire time asking him about the preservation process. We talk books, sports, movies, and health care in Rwanda, not to mention relationships and the more mundane details of what is going on in our lives. Twice a year, like clockwork, someone invariably retells the story of my dad and Uncle Marvin’s epic tennis game in the 1970s where they ended up in a fight—a line call argument that has persisted for decades. Whether the ball was out or in remains unresolved. Undisputed, my dad jumped over the net, chasing Marvin up a nearby fence where he waited in fear. In that way, our dinner table is a lot like tens of thousands of others: toggling between interesting and insular.
Even the concept of politics as a family business doesn’t quite fit. I suppose there will be more Bushes who may want to run for elective office, but, early on, despite a failed run for Congress, the business our dad most wanted to follow his dad into wasn’t even the presidency, it was baseball. Gampy was a college baseball player whose Yale team made it to the College World Series in 1947 and 1948. As captain of Yale’s baseball team, he greeted the legendary Yankee Babe Ruth when the Babe came to Yale to donate a signed copy of his autobiography to the campus library. Gampy passed on his love of the game to my dad. As a little kid in Midland, dad would play baseball for hours in the yard and read over the inning-by-inning box scores of Gampy’s college games, which Ganny had neatly recorded as she sat in the stands. Although he loved Little League and sandlot ball, my dad’s love (or talent, depending on who you ask) wasn’t enough to make him pro-anything on a major-league team. Instead, he translated this shared love to the business side.
Even if politics is not our universally shared family vocation, however, none of us can completely avoid living a political life. One day in DC, as Jenna and I were leaving the gym, we spotted a bumper sticker slapped across the back of a car. We would have missed it had we gotten there twenty minutes later or parked in a different spot or just looked the other way. But we didn’t. It was white on black, with a red Texas flag, and informed us, “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot.” Well, that idiot was our dad. For a second, the words stung, but then we looked at each other and burst into unstoppable laughter. While it was awful to us, it was also funny—bravo to that joke writer. Now this line comes up regularly when we want to rib our former-leader-of-the-free-world father: “Well, somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot…”
That moment also underscores how from the beginning our political lives involved a unique type of choice regarding the negativity—to be upset or to laugh it off. It was up to us to decide how we would react. In a way, being forged in that environment helped us figure out the issues that mattered most to us—the ones that rose above the noise of pundits, tabloids, and political commentaries; the ideas we just couldn’t get off our minds.
Another assumption is that because you come from a political family, you can somehow sway a parent’s (or Congress’s) decisions or serve as the perfect vehicle to deliver a message. In one humanities class at Yale, I received mediocre grade after mediocre grade no matter how hard I tried on my papers. I nervously signed up for office hours with my TA to get to the bottom of what I was doing wrong. She replied she’d give me an A if I convinced my father not to go to war in Iraq. Whoa there. I was unsure how to respond to her insinuation that my phone call home would somehow sway an entire government, that my twenty-year-old opinion would have affected anything. We were not political pawns. I didn’t drop the course, but I was left with the profound discomfort of wondering how many other people thought a presidential daughter should be held responsible for any beliefs other than her own.
How do you find your own voice when you come from a public family, where people are asked to comment on everything from trade policy to their favorite flavors of ice cream? How do you go about speaking in your authentic voice? How do you stake out what matters to you? I started down my own public path in 2011. That year, I was asked to make a brief video in support of gay marriage. I had reached an age, twenty-nine, when my friends were getting married; my own sister had already wed. I believed all my friends should be able to marry, straight or gay. I wanted Matthew to be able to marry. It was an issue that spoke to my core beliefs. Julianne Moore and Whoopi Goldberg had made videos before me. I looked theirs up on YouTube and saw that they had about seventy views each. I’m camera-shy, I don’t love extra attention, but a few views on YouTube didn’t seem like such a big deal. What I didn’t realize was that as the daughter of a former president who had publicly opposed gay marriage, this video was going to be a big deal. The video was covered on the front page of the New York Times and made its way to the backseat TVs of thousands of NYC taxis—I’d climb in and see my face speaking out, “Everyone should have the right to marry the person they love,” right after a Sandy Kenyon movie review. My video received more than 520,000 views on YouTube.
I was unprepared for the number of casual friends, passing acquaintances, and even perfect strangers who would stop and congratulate me, adding, “How very brave.” Or go so far as to say, “How
very brave of you to betray your family by speaking your beliefs.” I would flash a passive smile, but underneath I gritted my teeth. To me, betrayal is the worst thing you can do to another person. Cross that with family and it’s incomprehensible. My parents have never felt betrayed by anything I have said or done. It wasn’t in any way an act of bravery—I was following the basic guidance my parents had given me: Raise your voice when something is important to you. I was being a good daughter, politics aside.
My dad knew I was interested in filming the video beforehand, and he was supportive because it was what I believed was right. Dad is motivated by the concept that “to whom much is given, much is expected.” It was because of him that I was given a voice, even if I was using my voice to speak out on an issue upon which we differed in opinion. For him, it meant he had done his job as a father. In the years since, I’ve periodically spoken on other issues, including global health and Planned Parenthood; I’ve even been to the occasional political fund-raiser.
I’d like to think that may be my ultimate family DNA: Be true to your heart. It’s harder than ever to talk about politics these days. If you love someone, sharing different political views shouldn’t be seen as a personal betrayal. Rather, it’s a chance to hear and consider your loved one’s point of view, while still maintaining your own beliefs. Do not fear doing what you believe is the right thing regardless of who is listening in the wings (or even the West Wing, in my case).
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