I was just about ready to pass out from the anxiety when Barack came trotting up the stairs, wearing his big old confident grin. His worries were well behind him already. “We’re kicking butt,” he said, looking surprised that I didn’t know it already. “It’s basically done.”
It turned out that downstairs, the mood had been jubilant all along, the basement TV pumping out a consistent stream of good news. The problem for me was that the cell service on my BlackBerry had somehow disconnected, never sending out my messages or downloading updates from others. I’d allowed myself to get trapped in my own head. Nobody had known I was worrying, not even the people in the room with me.
Barack would win all but one of the battleground states that night. He’d win among young people, minorities, and women, just as he had in 2008. Despite everything the Republicans had done to try to thwart him, despite the many attempts to obstruct his presidency, his vision had prevailed. We’d asked Americans for permission to keep working—to finish strong—and now we’d gotten it. The relief was immediate. Are we good enough? Yes we are.
At some late hour, Mitt Romney called to concede. Once again, we found ourselves dressed up and waving from a stage, four Obamas and a lot of confetti, glad to have another four years.
The certainty that came with reelection held me steady. We had more time to further our aims. We could be more patient with our push for progress. We had a sense of the future now, which made me happy. We could keep Sasha and Malia enrolled at school; our staff could stay in their jobs; our ideas still mattered. And when these next four years were over, we’d be truly done, which made me happiest of all. No more campaigning, no more sweating out strategy sessions or polls or debates or approval ratings, ever again. The end of our political life was finally in sight.
The truth is that the future would arrive with its own surprises—some joyous, some unspeakably tragic. Four more years in the White House meant four more years of being out front as symbols, absorbing and responding to whatever came our country’s way. Barack and I had campaigned on the idea that we still had the energy and discipline for this sort of work, that we had the heart to take it in. And now the future was coming in our direction, maybe faster than we knew.
* * *
Five weeks later, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and started killing children.
I had just finished giving a short speech across the street from the White House and was scheduled to then go visit a children’s hospital when Tina pulled me aside to tell me what had happened. While I’d been speaking, she and several others had seen the headlines start to come up on their phones. They’d sat there trying to hide their emotions as I wrapped up my remarks.
The news Tina gave me was so horrifying and sad I could barely process what she was saying.
She mentioned she’d been in touch with the West Wing. Barack was in the Oval Office by himself. “He’s asking for you to come,” she said. “Right away.”
My husband needed me. This would be the only time in eight years that he’d request my presence in the middle of a workday, the two of us rearranging our schedules to be alone together for a moment of dim comfort. Usually, work was work and home was home, but for us, as for many people, the tragedy in Newtown shattered every window and blew down every fence. When I walked into the Oval Office, Barack and I embraced silently. There was nothing to say. No words.
What a lot of people don’t know is that the president sees almost everything, or is at least privy to basically any available information related to the country’s well-being. Being a fact guy, Barack always asked for more rather than less. He tried to gather both the widest and the most close-up view of every situation, even when it was bad, so that he could offer a truly informed response. As he saw it, it was part of his responsibility, what he’d been elected to do—to look rather than look away, to stay upright when the rest of us felt ready to fall down.
Which is to say that by the time I found him, he’d been briefed in detail on the graphic, horrid crime scene at Sandy Hook. He’d heard about blood pooled on the floors of classrooms and the bodies of twenty first graders and six educators torn apart by a semiautomatic rifle. His shock and grief would never compare with that of the first responders who’d rushed in to secure the building and evacuate survivors from the carnage. It was nothing next to that of the parents who endured an interminable wait in the chilly air outside the building, praying that they’d see their child’s face again. And it was nothing at all next to those whose wait would be in vain.
But still, those images were seared permanently into his psyche. I could see in his eyes how broken they’d left him, what this had done already to his faith. He started to describe it to me but then stopped, realizing it was better to spare me the extra pain.
Like me, Barack loved children in a deep and genuine way. Beyond being a doting father, he regularly brought kids into the Oval Office to show them around. He asked to hold babies. He lit up anytime he got to visit a school science fair or a youth sporting event. The previous winter, he’d added a whole new level of delight to his existence when he started volunteering as an assistant coach for the Vipers, Sasha’s middle school basketball team.
The proximity of children made everything lighter for him. He knew as well as anyone the promise lost with those twenty young lives.
Staying upright after Newtown was probably the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. When Malia and Sasha came home from school later that day, Barack and I met them in the residence and hugged them tight, trying to mask the urgency of our need just to touch them. It was hard to know what to say or not say to our girls about the shooting. Parents all around the country, we knew, were grappling with the same thing.
Later that day, Barack held a press conference downstairs, trying to put together words that might add up to something like solace. He wiped away tears as news cameras clicked furiously around him, understanding that truly there was no solace to be had. The best he could do was to offer his resolve—something he assumed would also get taken up by citizens and lawmakers around the country—to prevent more massacres by passing basic, sensible laws concerning how guns were sold.
I watched him step forward, knowing that I myself wasn’t ready. In nearly four years as First Lady, I had consoled often. I’d prayed with people whose homes had been shredded by a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, huge swaths of the town turned to matchsticks in an instant. I’d put my arms around men, women, and children who’d lost loved ones to war in Afghanistan, to an extremist who’d shot up an Army base in Texas, and to violence on street corners near their own homes. In the previous four months, I’d paid visits to people who’d survived mass shootings at a movie theater in Colorado and inside a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. It was devastating, every time. I’d tried always to bring the most calm and open part of myself to these meetings, to lend my own strength by being caring and present, sitting quietly on the riverbed of other people’s pain. But two days after the shooting at Sandy Hook, when Barack traveled to Newtown to speak at a prayer vigil being held for the victims, I couldn’t bring myself to join him. I was so shaken by it that I had no strength available to lend. I’d been First Lady for almost four years, and there had been too much killing already—too many senseless preventable deaths and too little action. I wasn’t sure what comfort I could ever give to someone whose six-year-old had been gunned down at school.
Instead, like a lot of parents, I clung to my children, my fear and love intertwined. It was nearly Christmas, and Sasha was among a group of local children selected to join the Moscow Ballet for two performances of The Nutcracker, both happening on the same day as the vigil in Newtown. Barack managed to slip into a back row and watch the dress rehearsal before leaving for Connecticut. I went to the evening show.
The ballet was as beautiful and otherworldly as any recounting of that story ever is, with its prince in a
moonlit forest and its swirling pageantry of sweets. Sasha played a mouse, dressed in a black leotard with fuzzy ears and a tail, performing her part while an ornate sleigh drifted through the swelling orchestral music and showers of glittering fake snow. My eyes never left her. My whole being was grateful for her. Sasha stood bright-eyed onstage, looking at first like she couldn’t believe where she was, as if she found the whole scene dazzling and unreal. Which of course it was. But she was young enough still that she could give herself over to it, at least for the moment, allowing herself to move through this heaven where nobody spoke and everyone danced, and a holiday was always just about to arrive.
* * *
Bear with me here, because this doesn’t necessarily get easier. It would be one thing if America were a simple place with a simple story. If I could narrate my part in it only through the lens of what was orderly and sweet. If there were no steps backward. And if every sadness, when it came, turned out at least to be redemptive in the end.
But that’s not America, and it’s not me, either. I’m not going to try to bend this into any kind of perfect shape.
Barack’s second term would prove to be easier in many ways than his first. We’d learned so much in four years, putting the right people into place around us, building systems that generally worked. We knew enough now to avoid some of the inefficiencies and small mistakes that had been made the first time around, beginning on Inauguration Day in January 2013, when I requested that the viewing stand for the parade be fully heated this time so our feet wouldn’t freeze. In an attempt to conserve our energy, we hosted only two inaugural balls that night, as opposed to the ten we’d gone to in 2009. We had four years still to go, and if I’d learned anything, it was to relax and try to pace myself.
Sitting next to Barack at the parade after he’d renewed his vows to the country, I watched the flow of floats and the marching bands moving in and out of snappy formation, already able to savor more than I had our first time around. From my vantage point, I could barely make out the individual faces of the performers. There were thousands of them, each with his or her own story. Thousands of others had come to D.C. to perform in the many other events being held in the days leading up to the inauguration, and tens of thousands more had come to watch.
Later, I’d wish almost frantically that I’d been able to catch sight of one person in particular, a willowy black girl wearing a sparkling gold headband and a blue majorette’s uniform who’d come with the King College Prep marching band from the South Side of Chicago to perform at some of the side events. I wanted to believe that I somehow would have had the occasion to see her inside the great wash of people flowing through the city over those days—Hadiya Pendleton, a girl in ascent, fifteen years old and having a big moment, having ridden a bus all the way to Washington with her bandmates. At home in Chicago, Hadiya lived with her parents and her little brother, about two miles from our house on Greenwood Avenue. She was an honor student at school who liked to tell people she wanted to go to Harvard someday. She’d begun planning her sweet-sixteen birthday party. She loved Chinese food and cheeseburgers and going for ice cream with friends.
I learned these things several weeks later, at her funeral. Eight days after the inauguration, Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed in a public park in Chicago, not far from her school. She and a group of friends had been standing under a metal shelter next to a playground, waiting for a rainstorm to pass. They’d been mistaken for gang members, sprayed with bullets by an eighteen-year-old belonging to a different gang. Hadiya had been hit in the back as she tried to run for cover. Two of her friends were injured. All this at 2:20 on a Tuesday afternoon.
I wish I’d seen her alive, if only to have a memory to share with her mom, now that the memories of her daughter were suddenly finite, things to be collected and hung on to.
I went to Hadiya’s funeral because it felt like the right thing to do. I’d stayed back when Barack went to the Newtown memorial, but now was my time to step up. My hope was that my presence would help turn the gaze toward the many innocent kids being gunned down in city streets almost every day—and that this, coupled with the horror of Newtown, would help prompt Americans to demand reasonable gun laws. Hadiya Pendleton came from a close-knit, working-class South Side family, much like my own. Put simply, I could have known her. I could have been her once, even. And had she taken a different route home from school that day, or even moved six inches left instead of six inches right when the gunfire started, she could have been me.
“I did everything I was supposed to,” her mother told me when we met just before the funeral started, her brown eyes leaking tears. Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton was a warm woman with a soft voice and close-cropped hair who worked in customer service at a credit rating company. On the day of her daughter’s funeral, she wore a giant pink flower pinned to her lapel. She and her husband, Nathaniel, had watched over Hadiya carefully, encouraging her to apply to King, a selective public high school, and making sure she had little time to be out on the streets, signing her up for volleyball, cheerleading, and a dance ministry at church. As my parents had once done for me, they’d made sacrifices so that she could be exposed to things outside her neighborhood. She was to have gone to Europe with the marching band that spring, and she’d apparently loved her visit to Washington.
“It’s so clean there, Mom,” she’d reported to Cleopatra after returning. “I think I’m going to go into politics.”
Instead, Hadiya Pendleton became one of three people who died in separate incidents of gun violence in Chicago on that one January day. She was the thirty-sixth person in Chicago killed in gun violence that year, and the year was at that point just twenty-nine days old. It goes without saying that nearly all those victims were black. For all her hopes and hard work, Hadiya became a symbol of the wrong thing.
Her funeral was filled with people, another broken community jammed into a church, this one working to handle the sight of a teenage girl in a casket lined with purple silk. Cleopatra stood up and spoke about her daughter. Hadiya’s friends stood up and told stories about her, each one punctuated by a larger feeling of outrage and helplessness. These were children, asking not just why but why so often? There were powerful adults in the room that day—not only me, but the mayor of the city, the governor of the state, Jesse Jackson Sr., and Valerie Jarrett, among others—all of us packed into pews, left to reckon privately with our grief and guilt as the choir sang with such force that it shook the floor of the church.
* * *
It was important to me to be more than a consoler. In my life, I’d heard plenty of empty words coming from important people, lip service paid during times of crisis with no action to follow. I was determined to be someone who told the truth, using my voice to lift up the voiceless when I could, and to not disappear on people in need. I understood that when I showed up somewhere, it appeared dramatic from the outside—a sudden and swift-descending storm kicked up by the motorcade, the agents, the aides, and the media, with me at the center. We were there and then gone. I didn’t like what this did to my interactions, the way my presence sometimes caused people to stammer or go silent, unsure of how to be themselves. It’s why I often tried to introduce myself with a hug, to slow down the moment and shuck some of the pretense, landing us all in the flesh.
I tried to build relationships with the people I met, especially those who didn’t normally have access to the world I now inhabited. I wanted to share the brightness as I could. I invited Hadiya Pendleton’s parents to sit next to me at Barack’s State of the Union speech a few days after the funeral and then hosted the family at the White House for the Easter Egg Roll. Cleopatra, who became a vocal advocate for violence prevention, also returned a couple of times to attend different meetings on the issue. I made a point of writing letters to the girls from the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in London who had so profoundly moved me, encouraging them to stay hopeful and keep working, des
pite their lack of privilege. In 2011, I’d taken a group of thirty-seven girls from the school to visit the University of Oxford, bringing not the high achievers but students whose teachers thought they weren’t yet reaching their potential. The idea was to give them a glimpse of what was possible, to show them what a reach could yield. In 2012, I’d hosted students from the school at the White House during the British prime minister’s state visit. I felt it was important to reach out to kids multiple times and in multiple ways in order for them to feel that it was all real.
My early successes in life were, I knew, a product of the consistent love and high expectations with which I was surrounded as a child, both at home and at school. It was this insight that drove my White House mentoring program, and it lay at the center of a new education initiative my staff and I were now preparing to launch, called Reach Higher. I wanted to encourage kids to strive to get to college and, once there, to stick with it. I knew that in the coming years, a college education would only become more essential for young people entering a global job market. Reach Higher would seek to help them along the way, providing more support for school counselors and easier access to federal financial aid.
I’d been lucky to have parents, teachers, and mentors who’d fed me with a consistent, simple message: You matter. As an adult, I wanted to pass those words to a new generation. It was the message I gave my own daughters, who were fortunate to have it reinforced daily by their school and their privileged circumstances, and I was determined to express some version of it to every young person I encountered. I wanted to be the opposite of the guidance counselor I’d had in high school, who’d blithely told me I wasn’t Princeton material.
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