I remember shaking his hand and saying, “Hey, good luck with the Hamilton thing.”
In any given day, we were exposed to so much. Glamour, excellence, devastation, hope. Everything lived side by side, and all the while we had two kids trying to lead their own lives apart from what was going on at home. I did what I could to keep myself and the girls integrated into the everyday world. My goal was what it had always been—to find normalcy where I could, to fit myself back into pockets of regular life. During soccer and lacrosse seasons, I went to many of Sasha’s and Malia’s home games, taking my place on the sidelines alongside other parents, politely turning down anyone who asked to take a photo, though I was always happy to make small talk. After Malia started tennis, I mostly watched her matches through the window of a Secret Service vehicle parked discreetly near the courts, not wanting to create a distraction. Only when it was over would I emerge to give her a hug.
With Barack, we’d all but given up on normalcy or there being any sense of lightness in his movements. He attended school functions and the girls’ sporting events as he could, but his opportunities to mingle were limited, and the presence of his security detail was never subtle. The point, in fact, was to be unsubtle—to send a clear message to the world that nobody could harm the president of the United States. For obvious reasons, I was glad for this. But juxtaposed against the norms of family life, it could be a little much.
This same thought would occur to Malia one day as Barack and I were heading with her to one of Sasha’s events at Sidwell’s lower school. The three of us were crossing an open outdoor courtyard, passing a group of kindergartners in the middle of their recess, swinging from a set of monkey bars and running around the wood-chipped play area. I’m not sure if the little kids had spotted the squad of Secret Service snipers dressed all in black and spread out across the rooftops of the school buildings with their assault rifles visible, but Malia had.
She looked from the snipers to the kindergartners, then back to her father, giving him a teasing look. “Really, Dad?” she said. “Seriously?”
All Barack could do was smile and shrug. There was no ducking the seriousness of his job.
To be sure, none of us ever stepped outside the bubble. The bubble moved with each one of us individually. Following our early negotiations with the Secret Service, Sasha and Malia were doing things like going to friends’ bat mitzvahs, washing cars for the school fund-raiser, and even hanging out at the mall, always with agents and often with my mom tagging along, but they were now at least as mobile as their peers. Sasha’s agents, including Beth Celestini and Lawrence Tucker—whom everyone called L.T.—had become beloved fixtures at Sidwell. Kids begged L.T. to push them on the swing set during recess. Families often sent in extra cupcakes for the agents when there were classroom birthday celebrations.
All of us grew close to our agents over time. Preston Fairlamb led my detail then, and Allen Taylor, who’d been with me back in the campaign, would later take over. When we were out in public, they were silent and hyperalert, but anytime we were backstage or on plane rides, they’d loosen up, sharing stories and joking around. “Stone-faced softies,” I used to call them, teasingly. Over all the hours we spent together and many miles traveled, we became real friends. I grieved their losses with them and celebrated when their kids hit significant milestones. I was always aware of the seriousness of their duties, what they were willing to sacrifice in order to keep me safe, and I never took it for granted.
Like my daughters, I was cultivating a private life to go along with my official one. I’d found there were ways to keep a low profile when I needed to, helped by the Secret Service’s willingness to be flexible. Rather than riding in a motorcade, I was sometimes allowed to travel in an unmarked van and with a lighter security escort. I managed to make lightning-strike shopping trips from time to time, coming and going from a place before anyone really registered I was there. After Bo expertly disemboweled or shredded every last dog toy bought for him by the staff who did our regular shopping, I personally escorted him over to PetSmart in Alexandria one morning. And for a short while, I enjoyed glorious anonymity while browsing for better chew toys as Bo—who was as delighted by the novelty of the outing as I was—loafed next to me on a leash.
Anytime I went somewhere without a fuss, it felt like a small victory, an exercise of free will. I was a detail person, after all. I hadn’t forgotten how gratifying it could be to tick through the minutiae of a shopping list. Maybe six months after the PetSmart trip, I made a giddy incognito run to the local Target, dressed in a baseball cap and sunglasses. My security detail wore shorts and sneakers and ditched their earpieces, doing their best not to stand out as they trailed me and my assistant Kristin Jones through the store. We wandered every single aisle. I selected some Oil of Olay face cream and new toothbrushes. We got dryer sheets and laundry detergent for Kristin, and I found a couple of games for Sasha and Malia. And for the first time in several years, I was able to pick out a card to give to Barack on our anniversary.
I went home elated. Sometimes, the smallest things felt huge.
As time went by, I added new adventures to my routine. I started to meet friends occasionally out for dinner in restaurants or at their homes. Sometimes I’d go to a park and take long walks along the Potomac River. I’d have agents walking ahead of and behind me on these excursions, but inconspicuously and at a distance. In later years, I’d begin leaving the White House to hit workout classes, dropping in on SoulCycle and Solidcore studios around the city, slipping into the room at the last minute and leaving as soon as class was done to avoid causing a disturbance. The most liberating activity of all turned out to be downhill skiing, a sport with which I had little experience but that quickly became a passion. Capitalizing on the unusually heavy winters we’d had during our first two years in Washington, I made a few day trips with the girls and some friends to a tiny, aptly named ski area called Liberty Mountain, near Gettysburg, where we found we could don helmets, scarves, and goggles and blend into any crowd. Gliding down a ski slope, I was outdoors, in motion, and unrecognized—all at once. For me, it was like flying.
The blending mattered. The blending, in fact, was everything—a way to feel like myself, to remain Michelle Robinson from the South Side inside this larger sweep of history. I knit my old life into my new one, my private concerns into my public work. In D.C., I’d made a handful of new friends—a couple of the mothers of Sasha’s and Malia’s classmates and a few people I’d met in the course of White House duties. These were women who cared less about my last name or home address and more about who I was as a person. It’s funny how quickly you can tell who’s there for you and who’s just trying to plant some sort of flag. Barack and I sometimes talked about it with Sasha and Malia over dinner, the fact that there were people, children and adults, who hovered at the edges of our friend groups seeming a little too eager—“thirsty,” as we called it.
I’d learned many years earlier to hold my true friends close. I was still deeply connected to the group of women who had started gathering for Saturday playdates years earlier, back in our diaper-bag days in Chicago, when our children blithely pitched food from their high chairs and all of us were so tired we wanted to weep. These were the friends who’d held me together, dropping off groceries when I was too busy to shop, picking up the girls for ballet when I was behind on work or just needing a break. A number of them had hopped planes to join me for unglamorous stops on the campaign trail, giving me emotional ballast when I needed it most. Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses like these, swapped back and forth and over again.
In 2011, I started making a deliberate effort to invest and reinvest in my friendships, bringing together old friends and new. Every few months, I invited twelve or so of my closest friends to join me for a weekend at Camp David, the woodsy, summer-camp-like presidential retreat that sits about si
xty miles outside Washington in the mountains of northern Maryland. I started referring to these gatherings as “Boot Camp,” in part because I did admittedly force everyone to work out with me several times a day (I also at one point tried to ban wine and snacks, though this got swiftly shot down) but more importantly because I like the idea of being rigorous about friendship.
My friends tend to be accomplished, overcommitted people, many of them with busy family lives and heavy-duty jobs. I understood it wasn’t always easy for them to get away. But this was part of the point. We were all so used to sacrificing for our kids, our spouses, and our work. I had learned through my years of trying to find balance in my life that it was okay to flip those priorities and care only for ourselves once in a while. I was more than happy to wave this banner on behalf of my friends, to create the reason—and the power of a tradition—for a whole bunch of women to turn to kids, spouses, and colleagues and say, Sorry, folks, I’m doing this for me.
Boot Camp weekends became a way for us to take shelter, connect, and recharge. We stayed in cozy, wood-paneled cabins surrounded by forest, buzzed around in golf carts, and rode bikes. We played dodgeball and did burpees and downward dogs. I sometimes invited a few young staffers along, and it was trippy over the years to see Susan Sher, in her late sixties, spider crawling across the floor next to MacKenzie Smith, my twentysomething scheduler who’d been a collegiate soccer player. We ate healthy meals cooked by the White House chefs. We ran through drills overseen by my trainer, Cornell, and several baby-faced naval staffers who called us all “ma’am.” We got a lot of exercise and talked and talked and talked. We pooled our thoughts and experiences, offering advice or funny stories or sometimes just the assurance that whoever was spilling her guts in a given moment wasn’t the only one ever to have a teenager who was acting out or a boss she couldn’t stand. Often, we steadied one another just by listening. And saying good-bye at the end of each weekend, we vowed we’d do it all again soon.
My friends made me whole, as they always have and always will. They gave me a lift anytime I felt down or frustrated or had less access to Barack. They grounded me when I felt the pressures of being judged, having everything from my choice of nail-polish color to the size of my hips dissected and discussed publicly. And they helped me ride out the big, unsettling waves that sometimes hit without notice.
On the first Sunday in May 2011, I went to dinner with two friends at a restaurant downtown, leaving Barack and my mother in charge of the girls at home. The weekend had seemed especially busy. Barack had been pulled into a flurry of briefings that afternoon, and we’d spent Saturday evening at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where in his speech Barack made a few pointed jokes about Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice career and his birther theories. I couldn’t see him from my seat, but Trump had been in attendance. During Barack’s monologue, news cameras zeroed in on him, stone-faced and stewing.
For us, Sunday nights tended to be quiet and free. The girls were usually tired after a weekend of sports and socializing. And Barack, if he was lucky, could sometimes squeeze in a daytime round of golf on the course at Andrews Air Force Base, which left him more relaxed.
That night, after catching up with my friends, I arrived home around 10:00, greeted at the door by an usher, as I always was. Already, I could tell something was going on, sensing a different-from-normal level of activity on the ground floor of the White House. I asked the usher if he knew where the president was.
“I believe he’s upstairs, ma’am,” he said, “getting ready to address the nation.”
This is how I realized that it had finally happened. I knew it was coming, but I hadn’t known exactly how it would play out. I’d spent the last two days trying to act completely normal, pretending I didn’t know that something dangerous and important was about to take place. After months of high-level intelligence gathering and weeks of meticulous preparation, after security briefings and risk assessments and a final tense decision, seven thousand miles from the White House and under cover of darkness, an elite team of U.S. Navy SEALs had stormed a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, looking for Osama bin Laden.
Barack was coming out of our bedroom as I walked down the hall in the residence. He was dressed in a suit and red tie and seemed thoroughly jacked up on adrenaline. He’d been carrying the pressure of this decision for months.
“We got him,” he said. “And no one got hurt.”
We hugged. Osama bin Laden had been killed. No American lives had been lost. Barack had taken an enormous risk—one that could have cost him his presidency—and it had all gone okay.
The news was already traveling across the world. People were clogging the streets around the White House, spilling out of restaurants, hotels, and apartment buildings, filling the night air with celebratory shouts. The sound of it grew so loud and jubilant it roused Malia from sleep in her bedroom, audible even through the ballistic glass windows meant to shut everything out.
That night, there was no inside or outside, anyway. In cities across the country, people had taken to the streets, clearly drawn by an impulse to be close to others, linked not just by patriotism but by the communal grief that had been born on 9/11 and the years of worries that we’d be attacked again. I thought about every military base I’d ever visited, all those soldiers working to recover from their wounds, the many people who’d sent family members to a faraway place in the name of protecting our country, the thousands of children who’d lost a parent on that horrible, sad day. There was no restoring any one of those losses, I knew. Nobody’s death would ever replace a life. I’m not sure anyone’s death is reason to celebrate, ever. But what America got that night was a moment of release, a chance to feel its own resilience.
23
Time seemed to loop and leap, making it feel impossible to measure or track. Each day was packed. Each week and month and year we spent in the White House was packed. I’d get to Friday and need to work to remember how Monday and Tuesday had gone. I’d sit down to dinner sometimes and wonder where and how lunch had happened. Even now, I still find it hard to process. The velocity was too great, the time for reflection too limited. A single afternoon could hold a couple of official events, several meetings, and a photo shoot. I might visit several states in a day, or speak to twelve thousand people, or have four hundred kids over to do jumping jacks with me on the South Lawn, all before putting on a fancy dress for an evening reception. I used my down days, those free from official business, to tend to Sasha and Malia and their lives, before going back “up” again—back into hair, makeup, and wardrobe. Back into the vortex of the public eye.
As we moved toward Barack’s reelection year in 2012, I felt that I couldn’t and shouldn’t rest. I was still earning my grace. I thought often of what I owed and to whom. I carried a history with me, and it wasn’t that of presidents or First Ladies. I’d never related to the story of John Quincy Adams the way I did to that of Sojourner Truth, or been moved by Woodrow Wilson the way I was by Harriet Tubman. The struggles of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King were more familiar to me than those of Eleanor Roosevelt or Mamie Eisenhower. I carried their histories, along with those of my mother and grandmothers. None of these women could ever have imagined a life like the one I now had, but they’d trusted that their perseverance would yield something better, eventually, for someone like me. I wanted to show up in the world in a way that honored who they were.
I put this on myself as pressure, a driving need not to screw anything up. Though I was thought of as a popular First Lady, I couldn’t help but feel haunted by the ways I’d been criticized, by the people who’d made assumptions about me based on the color of my skin. To this end, I rehearsed my speeches again and again using a teleprompter set up in one corner of my office. I pushed hard on my schedulers and advance teams to make sure every one of our events ran smoothly and on time. I pushed even harder on my policy advisers to continue growi
ng the reach of Let’s Move! and Joining Forces. I was focused on not wasting any of the opportunities I now had, but sometimes I had to remind myself just to breathe.
Barack and I both knew that the months of campaigning ahead would involve extra travel, extra strategizing, and extra worry. It was impossible not to worry about reelection. The cost was huge. (Barack and Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who would eventually become the Republican nominee, would each raise over a billion dollars in the end to keep their campaigns competitive.) And the responsibility was also huge. The election would determine everything from the fate of the new health-care law to whether America would be part of the global effort to combat climate change. Everyone working in the White House lived in the limbo of not knowing whether we’d get a second term. I tried not to even consider the possibility that Barack might lose the election, but it was there—a kernel of fear he and I carried privately, neither of us daring to give it voice.
The summer of 2011 turned out to be especially bruising for Barack. A group of obstinate congressional Republicans refused to authorize the issuing of new government bonds—a relatively routine process known as raising the debt ceiling—unless he made a series of painful cuts to government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which he opposed because they would hurt the people who were struggling the most. Meanwhile, the monthly jobs reports published by the Labor Department were showing consistent but sluggish growth, suggesting that when it came to recovering from the 2008 crisis, the nation still wasn’t where it needed to be. Many people blamed Barack. In the relief following the death of Osama bin Laden, his approval ratings had spiked, hitting a two-year high, but then, just a few months later, following the debt-ceiling brawl and worries about a new recession, they’d plunged to the lowest they’d been.
Becoming Page 42