* * *
Sometime during Barack’s campaign, people had begun paying attention to my clothes. Or at least the media paid attention, which led fashion bloggers to pay attention, which seemed then to provoke all manner of commentary across the internet. I don’t know why this was, exactly—possibly because I’m tall and unafraid of bold patterns—but so it seemed to be.
When I wore flats instead of heels, it got reported in the news. My pearls, my belts, my cardigans, my off-the-rack dresses from J.Crew, my apparently brave choice of white for an inaugural gown—all seemed to trigger a slew of opinions and instant feedback. I wore a sleeveless aubergine dress to Barack’s address to the joint session of Congress and a sleeveless black sheath dress for my official White House photo, and suddenly my arms were making headlines. Late in the summer of 2009, we went on a family trip in the Grand Canyon, and I was lambasted for an apparent lack of dignity when I was photographed getting off Air Force One (in 106-degree heat, I might add) dressed in a pair of shorts.
It seemed that my clothes mattered more to people than anything I had to say. In London, I’d stepped offstage after having been moved to tears while speaking to the girls at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, only to learn that the first question directed to one of my staffers by a reporter covering the event had been “Who made her dress?”
This stuff got me down, but I tried to reframe it as an opportunity to learn, to use what power I could find inside a situation I’d never have chosen for myself. If people flipped through a magazine primarily to see the clothes I was wearing, I hoped they’d also see the military spouse standing next to me or read what I had to say about children’s health. When Vogue proposed putting me on the cover of the magazine shortly after Barack was elected, my team had debated whether it would make me seem frivolous or elitist during a time of economic worry, but in the end we’d decided to go ahead with it. It mattered every time a woman of color showed up on the cover of a magazine. Also, I insisted on choosing my own outfits, wearing dresses by Jason Wu and Narciso Rodriguez, a gifted Latino designer, for the photo shoot.
I knew a little about fashion, but not a lot. As a working mother, I’d really been too busy to put much thought into what I wore. During the campaign, I’d done most of my shopping at a boutique in Chicago where I’d had the good fortune of meeting a young sales associate named Meredith Koop. Meredith, who’d been raised in St. Louis, was sharp and knowledgeable about different designers and had a playful sense of color and texture. After Barack’s election, I was able to persuade her to move to Washington and work with me as a personal aide and wardrobe stylist. Very quickly, she also became a trusted friend.
A couple of times a month, Meredith would roll several big racks of clothing into my dressing room in the residence, and we’d spend an hour or two trying things on, pairing outfits with whatever was on my schedule in the coming weeks. I paid for all my own clothes and accessories—with the exception of some items like the couture-level gowns I wore to formal events, which were lent to me by the designers and would later be donated to the National Archives, thus adhering to White House ethics guidelines. When it came to my choices, I tried to be somewhat unpredictable, to prevent anyone from ascribing any sort of message to what I wore. It was a thin line to walk. I was supposed to stand out without overshadowing others, to blend in but not fade away. As a black woman, too, I knew I’d be criticized if I was perceived as being showy and high end, and I’d be criticized also if I was too casual. So I mixed it up. I’d match a high-end Michael Kors skirt with a T-shirt from Gap. I wore something from Target one day and Diane von Furstenberg the next. I wanted to draw attention to and celebrate American designers, most especially those who were less established, even if it sometimes frustrated old-guard designers, including Oscar de la Renta, who was reportedly displeased that I wasn’t wearing his creations. For me, my choices were simply a way to use my curious relationship with the public gaze to boost a diverse set of up-and-comers.
Optics governed more or less everything in the political world, and I factored this into every outfit. It required time, thought, and money—more money than I’d spent on clothing ever before. It also required careful research by Meredith, particularly on foreign trips. She’d often spend hours making sure the designers, colors, and styles we chose paid proper respect to the people and countries we visited. Meredith also shopped for Sasha and Malia ahead of public events, which added to the overall expense, but they, too, had the gaze upon them. I sighed sometimes, watching Barack pull the same dark suit out of his closet and head off to work without even needing a comb. His biggest fashion consideration for a public moment was whether to have his suit jacket on or off. Tie or no tie?
We were careful, Meredith and I, to always be prepared. In my dressing room, I’d put on a new dress and then squat, lunge, and pinwheel my arms, just to be sure I could move. Anything too restrictive, I put back on the rack. When I traveled, I brought backup outfits, anticipating shifts in weather and schedule, not to mention nightmare scenarios involving spilled wine or broken zippers. I learned, too, that it was important to always, no matter what, pack a dress suitable for a funeral, because Barack sometimes got called with little notice to be there as soldiers, senators, and world leaders were laid to rest.
I came to depend heavily on Meredith but also equally on Johnny Wright, my fast-talking, hard-laughing hurricane of a hairdresser, and Carl Ray, my soft-spoken and meticulous makeup artist. Together, the three of them (dubbed by my larger team “the trifecta”) gave me the confidence I needed to step out in public each day, all of us knowing that a slipup would lead to a flurry of ridicule and nasty comments. I never expected to be someone who hired others to maintain my image, and at first the idea was discomfiting. But I quickly found out a truth that no one talks about: Today, virtually every woman in public life—politicians, celebrities, you name it—has some version of Meredith, Johnny, and Carl. It’s all but a requirement, a built-in fee for our societal double standard.
How had other First Ladies managed their hair, makeup, and wardrobe challenges? I had no idea. Several times over the course of that first year in the White House, I found myself picking up books either by or about previous First Ladies, but each time I’d lay them down again. I almost didn’t want to know what was the same and what was different about any of us.
I did, in September, have a pleasant overdue lunch with Hillary Clinton, the two of us sitting in the residence dining room. After his election and a little to my surprise, Barack had chosen Hillary as his secretary of state, both of them managing to set aside the battle wounds of the primary campaign and build a productive working relationship. She was candid with me about how she’d misjudged the country’s readiness to have a proactive professional woman in the role of First Lady. As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary had kept her job as a law partner while also helping with her husband’s efforts to improve health care and education. Arriving in Washington with the same sort of desire and energy to contribute, though, she’d been roundly spurned, pilloried for taking on a policy role in the White House’s work on health-care reform. The message had been delivered with a resounding, brutal frankness: Voters had elected her husband and not her. First Ladies had no place in the West Wing. She’d tried to do too much too quickly, it seemed, and had run straight into a wall.
I myself tried to be mindful of that wall, learning from other First Ladies’ experience, taking care not to directly or overtly insert myself into West Wing business. I relied instead on my staff to communicate daily with Barack’s, exchanging advice, syncing our schedules, and reviewing every plan. The president’s advisers in my opinion could be overly fretful about appearances. At one point several years later, when I decided to get bangs cut into my hair, my staff would feel the need to first run the idea past Barack’s staff, just to make sure there wouldn’t be a problem.
With the economy in rough shape, Barack’s team was const
antly guarding against any image coming out of the White House that might be seen as frivolous or light, given the somberness of the times. This didn’t always sit well with me. I knew from experience that even during hard times, maybe especially during hard times, it was still okay to laugh. For the sake of children, in particular, you had to find ways to have fun. On this front, my team had been wrangling with Barack’s communications staff over an idea I’d had to host a Halloween party for kids at the White House. The West Wing—particularly David Axelrod, now a senior adviser in the administration, and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs—thought it would be perceived as too showy, too costly, and could potentially alienate Barack from the public. “The optics are just bad” was how they put it. I disagreed, arguing that a Halloween party for local kids and military families who’d never seen the White House before was a perfectly appropriate use for a tiny slice of the Social Office’s entertaining budget.
Axe and Gibbs never fully consented, but at some point they stopped fighting us on it. At the end of October, to my great delight, a thousand-pound pumpkin sat on the White House lawn. A brass band of skeletons played jazz music, while a giant black spider descended from the North Portico. I stood in front of the White House, dressed as a leopard—in black pants, a spotted top, and a pair of cat ears on a headband—as Barack, who was never much of a costume guy even before optics mattered, stood next to me in a humdrum sweater. (Gibbs, to his credit, showed up dressed as Darth Vader, ready to have fun.) That night, we handed out bags of cookies, dried fruits, and M&M’s in a box emblazoned with the presidential seal as more than two thousand little princesses, grim reapers, pirates, superheroes, ghosts, and football players traipsed up the lawn to meet us. As far as I was concerned, the optics were just right.
* * *
The garden churned through the seasons, teaching us all sorts of things. We grew cantaloupes that turned out pale and tasteless. We endured pelting rainstorms that washed away our topsoil. Birds snacked on our blueberries; beetles went after the cucumbers. Each time something went a little awry, with the help of Jim Adams, the National Park Service horticulturist who served as our head gardener, and Dale Haney, the White House grounds superintendent, we made small adjustments and carried on, savoring the overall abundance. Our dinners in the residence now often included broccoli, carrots, and kale grown on the South Lawn. We started donating a portion of every harvest to Miriam’s Kitchen, a local nonprofit that served the homeless. We began, too, to pickle vegetables and present them as gifts to visiting dignitaries, along with jars of honey from our new beehives. Among the staff, the garden became a source of pride. Its early skeptics had quickly become fans. For me, the garden was simple, prosperous, and healthy—a symbol of diligence and faith. It was beautiful while also being powerful. And it made people happy.
Over the previous few months, my East Wing staff and I had spoken with children’s health experts and advocates to help us develop the pillars on which our larger effort would be built. We’d give parents better information to help them make healthy choices for their families. We’d work to create healthier schools. We’d try to improve access to nutritious food. And we’d find more ways for young people to be physically active. Knowing that the way we introduced our work would matter as much as anything, I again enlisted the help of Stephanie Cutter, who came on as a consultant to help Sam and Jocelyn Frye shape the initiative, while my communications team was tasked with building a fun public face for the campaign. All the while, the West Wing was apparently fretting about my plans, worried I’d come off as a finger-wagging embodiment of the nanny state at a time when controversial bank and car-company bailouts had left Americans extra leery of anything that looked like government intervention.
My goal, though, was to make this about more than government. I hoped to learn from what Hillary had shared with me about her own experiences, to leave the politics to Barack and focus my own efforts elsewhere. When it came to dealing with the CEOs of soft drink companies and school-lunch suppliers, I thought it was worth making a human appeal as opposed to a regulatory one, to collaborate rather than pick a fight. And when it came to the way families actually lived, I wanted to speak directly to moms, dads, and especially kids.
I wasn’t interested in following the tenets of the political world or appearing on Sunday morning news shows. Instead, I did interviews with health magazines geared toward parents and kids. I hula-hooped on the South Lawn to show that exercise could be fun and made a guest appearance on Sesame Street, talking about vegetables with Elmo and Big Bird. Anytime I spoke to reporters from the White House garden, I mentioned that many Americans had trouble accessing fresh produce in their communities and tried to remark on the health-care costs connected to rising obesity levels. I wanted to make sure we had buy-in from everyone we’d need to make the initiative a success, to anticipate any objections that might be raised. With this in mind, we spent weeks and weeks quietly holding meetings with business and advocacy groups as well as members of Congress. We conducted focus groups to test-market our branding for the project, enlisting the pro bono help of PR professionals to fine-tune the message.
In February 2010, I was finally ready to share my vision. On a cold Tuesday afternoon and with D.C. still digging out from a historic blizzard, I stood at a lectern in the State Dining Room at the White House, surrounded by kids and cabinet secretaries, sports figures and mayors, along with leaders in medicine, education, and food production, plus a bevy of media, to proudly announce our new initiative, which we’d decided to name Let’s Move! It centered on one goal—ending the childhood obesity epidemic within a generation.
What was important to me was that we weren’t just announcing some pie-in-the-sky set of wishes. The effort was real, and the work was well under way. Not only had Barack signed a memorandum earlier that day to create a first-of-its-kind federal task force on childhood obesity, but the three major corporate suppliers of school lunches had announced that they would cut the amount of salt, sugar, and fat in the meals they served. The American Beverage Association had promised to improve the clarity of its ingredient labeling. We’d engaged the American Academy of Pediatrics to encourage doctors to make body mass index measurements a standard of care for children, and we’d persuaded Disney, NBC, and Warner Bros. to air public service announcements and invest in special programming that encouraged kids to make healthy lifestyle choices. Leaders from twelve different professional sports leagues, too, had agreed to promote a 60 Minutes of Play a Day campaign to help get kids moving more.
And that was just the start. We had plans to help bring greengrocers into urban neighborhoods and rural areas known as “food deserts,” to push for more accurate nutritional information on food packaging, and to redesign the aging food pyramid to be more accessible and in line with current research on nutrition. Along the way, we’d work to hold the business community accountable for its decision making around issues impacting children’s health.
It would take commitment and organization to make all this happen, I knew, but that was exactly the kind of work I liked. We were taking on a huge issue, but now I had the benefit of operating from a huge platform. I was beginning to realize that all the things that felt odd to me about my new existence—the strangeness of fame, the hawkeyed attention paid to my image, the vagueness of my job description—could be marshaled in service of real goals. I was energized. Here, finally, was a way to show my full self.
22
One spring morning, Barack and the girls and I were summoned downstairs from the residence to the South Lawn. A man I’d never seen before stood waiting for us in the driveway. He had a friendly face and a salt-and-pepper mustache that gave him an air of dignity. He introduced himself as Lloyd.
“Mr. President, Mrs. Obama,” he said. “We thought you and the girls might like a little change of pace, and so we’ve arranged a petting zoo for you.” He smiled broadly at us. “Never before has a First Family participat
ed in something like this.”
The man gestured to his left and we looked. About thirty yards away, lounging in the shade of the cedar trees, were four big, beautiful cats. There was a lion, a tiger, a sleek black panther, and a slender, spotted cheetah. From where I stood, I could see no fences or chains. There seemed to be nothing penning them in. It all felt odd to me. Most certainly a change of pace.
“Thank you. This is so thoughtful,” I said, hoping I sounded gracious. “Am I right—Lloyd, is it?—that there’s no fence or anything? Isn’t that a little dangerous for kids?”
“Well, yes, of course, we thought about that,” Lloyd said. “We figured your family would enjoy the animals more if they were roaming free, like they would in the wild. So we’ve sedated them for your safety. They’re no harm to you.” He gave a reassuring wave. “Go ahead, get closer. Enjoy!”
Barack and I took Malia’s and Sasha’s hands and made our way across the still-dewy grass of the South Lawn. The animals were larger than I expected, languid and sinewy, their tails flicking as they monitored our approach. I’d never seen anything like it, four cats in a companionable line. The lion stirred slightly as we drew closer. I saw the panther’s eyes tracking us, the tiger’s ears flattening just a little. Then, without warning, the cheetah shot out from the shade with blinding speed, rocketing right at us.
I panicked, grabbing Sasha by the arm, sprinting with her back up the lawn toward the house, trusting that Barack and Malia were doing the same. Judging from the noise, I could tell that all the animals had leaped to their feet and were now coming after us.
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