Bill would never know if the ruling had anything to do with his letter to the president; he wondered whom he would even ask. Did it matter? Quique would not have to go back to El Salvador. Quique had a new life. America had given him a second chance. It turned out that finding Quique was about more than finding Quique. For Bill, it was a journey to a whole new kind of patriotism.
Bill took Quique shopping for an engagement ring. Quique and Rebecca got married, and on their honeymoon they watched dolphins swim, and they got back in time to go to church, where Bill was leading the singing.
Bill bought Quique’s mom a refrigerator and a microwave, the first in the village.
CHAPTER 7
Fiona Picks the 10LADs
Fiona’s office was on the fourth floor of the EEOB, well off the main drag—through a narrow corridor, down a ramp, behind a heavy wooden door. It was a quiet space with a large window too high to reveal anything but a solid cornflower-blue sky, and when I found her there, on a Thursday afternoon, she was perched at the edge of a couch with letters strewn all around her—letters draped like doilies on the couch, letters in piles on the coffee table at her knees, letters on the floor, letters on her lap; the net effect was of the old lady who lived in a shoe with so many children she didn’t know what to do.
“It’s like a crowd all talking about different things at once,” she said. Every day at about four she sat down to do this, cull through the day’s samples—about two hundred of them between the letters the hard-mail team set aside and the emails forwarded to her from the email team—and pick which ten the president should read. And no, she didn’t want help. “I have to read,” she said, bouncing a stack of pages up and down and into order. She was the kind of person who wore her professionalism earnestly: a well-practiced posture, a sensible maroon dress, practical flats. You could imagine her becoming dean of a liberal-arts college one day.
She told me she had never had designs on the kind of life that involved serving a president, although she had grown up in a family loud with conversation about the way government works—her father is the presidential historian Richard Reeves, and her mother, who is no longer living, worked for the United Nations and once ran for the state senate in California. Her mom was the type to decide on a lark that it might be fun for the family to go on a thirty-day trip around the world, and that’s what they once did, hopping among sixteen countries, resting on the bank of the Nile, where they studied the clouds. Fiona went to boarding schools, the first of which, on a farm in upstate New York, she still regards as home. “My dad would visit about one weekend a month, and that was different than a lot of other kids, so I felt like my parents were a big part of my life.” High school was in England, in the Malvern countryside, and when she came back to the United States to go to Duke, she majored in public policy and African American studies. “I remember my mom really discouraged political science. She said there’s no science to politics—it’s such a sham. So I was naïve to the process, and I was naïve to the country; I hadn’t seen much of it. If President Obama hadn’t run for office, I and lots of other people my age wouldn’t have dipped a toe in public service.”
It was Obama’s 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, that first drew her in. Not exactly a self-help book, by not exactly a guru, but something in that direction, especially for the young, the well educated, the dutiful seeking duty.
At the core of the American experience are a set of ideals that continue to stir our collective conscience; a common set of values that bind us together despite our differences; a running thread of hope that makes our improbable experiment in democracy work. These values and ideals find expression not just in the marble slabs of monuments or in the recitation of history books. They remain alive in the hearts and minds of most Americans—and can inspire us to pride, duty, and sacrifice.
As soon as she graduated college, in 2007, she applied for a job on Obama’s campaign staff. She eventually landed an interview with Pete Rouse.
She had no idea who he was. “I’m embarrassed by the approach I took. I didn’t understand how important he was to Obama. If I’d been more savvy, I would have worked a little harder at seeming smarter or more informed. But I think he must have had so many conversations with folks like me that I like to imagine he doesn’t remember how ridiculous I was.”
(He doesn’t.) He hired her, sent her to New Hampshire to knock on doors.
In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi’s campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.
Fiona had the audiobook on a continuous loop on her iTunes. Obama in his own voice, day after day through her earphones. “Of course there’s this beautiful cadence, and I would say it to myself again and again while walking down these driveways,” she told me. “So he’d say things like ‘I ask you to believe in this campaign; I ask you to believe in yourself; I ask you to believe again in the dream that we call America.’
“That middle part about believing in yourself—we all felt that that was the message we were conveying to voters. We didn’t realize—folks involved in his campaign and later working in his administration—he was giving that to us.
“It was that idea of courage by necessity being a real gift that he instilled.”
She was in Manchester for the 2008 primary, working from the basement in the home of a family who had opened their spare rooms to the team. Obama had won the Iowa caucuses less than a week earlier, and in an ensuing debate, Hillary Clinton had tried to turn his soaring rhetorical skills into a liability. “Making change is not about what you believe; it’s not about a speech you make,” she had said. “We don’t need to be raising false hopes.”
“The truth is actually words do inspire,” Obama shot back. “Words do help people get involved….Don’t discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can’t be done, then it doesn’t. I’m running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can.”
By the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Obama was surging in the state’s polls, up by as many as thirteen points. “And it was this feeling of ‘The biggest day of my life is tomorrow,’ ” Fiona told me. “All my high-school girlfriends had come up. None of them were comfortable knocking on doors, but they did a shift. Some of my parents’ friends came. My mom reached out and said her friend had told her that my skin wasn’t looking well and I needed to take better care of myself. Yeah, thanks, Mom. But you felt like you had been away from friends and family working on this thing that you knew was important, and then really briefly, on election day, you become the center.”
Fiona was alone in the Manchester home, cleaning up the kitchen, when the results started coming in. She had the radio on. What she would remember most was the guy on the radio saying how interesting it would be to hear a speaker as powerful as Obama give a speech after a loss.
He lost.
“Yes, we can,” Obama said, that night, turning those words into a campaign slogan as he accepted defeat in New Hampshire.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes,
we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.
People like Fiona—crowds of already-devoted pollsters and organizers standing out in the cold—listened to those words, felt them in their toes; his words supercharged them. They would commit to working even harder. They would give the next ten months of their lives over to him, and when he was elected president, they moved to Washington, many of them without jobs but knowing they were part of a movement.
“And I remember feeling maybe the landlord wouldn’t put me on the lease because there was no proof that I was going to stay,” Fiona told me. “The city was so dense with people who worked on the Obama campaign. There were a lot of hang sessions around town.”
That was when Fiona met Mike Kelleher, who interviewed her for a job in the fledgling correspondence office. It was not a great interview. She didn’t make eye contact. She was painfully shy. She didn’t look happy. But Mike saw something. Perhaps it was whatever Pete saw when he hired her to knock on doors. A combination of earnestness, some apparent well of empathy, and the unflappable dedication to the president and his message that so many young Obama devotees had. Courage by necessity. He taught them to believe in themselves.
Cascading emotional chaos—that’s how people would remember those early days in OPC. Fiona’s first job was as an “analyst,” which meant she sat in a cubicle reading constituent mail with a team of other former Obama organizers. They were as overwhelmed by the volume—boxes of mail lining the hallways, millions of emails in the inbox—as they were by the content. People telling their stories. Intimate, sad stories. People needing healthcare, people losing businesses, people bankrupted because they couldn’t pay student loans, people saying “Help!” Here was the new guy who said he could fix things. It was the getting-to-know-you phase. People told him their problems. They told him to quit smoking. They told him, wow, a black guy in the White House. They told him to get bin Laden. They told him to create jobs. “Let’s see if you’re as smart as we hope you are.” There were threats to the president and first family—about a hundred a day of those alone. In OPC they had to assign one person full-time to deal with nothing but threats. Tea Party protesters flooded the mailroom with tea bags. People sent their credit card bills, showing jumps in interest rates. People sent mortgage foreclosure statements. “HELP!” “DO SOMETHING!” “YOU PROMISED!”
The campaign workers had believed themselves responsible for opening a conduit between the vulnerable and the influential—the powerless and the most powerful man in the world—and now, in the mailroom, they were expected to make good on it.
* * *
—
Youth was the main thing that Annmarie Emmet, a volunteer and a retiree, told me she noticed about the new crop of people coming in to work in OPC under Obama. She had been reading mail, three days a week, since 2001, through most of Bush’s two terms in office, and would go on to keep reading through all of Obama’s. “I’ve never been ashamed to say I worked for either administration,” she told me.
“When this new group came in, they were maybe twenty years younger than Bush’s,” she said. “They were very devoted. They were single-minded in making Obama look good.”
The tone of the incoming mail was dramatically different, she said. “It was cozier, maybe because of the younger children, watching these girls grow up. With Bush they appreciated the family, but they didn’t know it much.”
The closeness, she figured, accounted for the personal nature of the letters people wrote to the new president. “With Bush it would be more like ‘Why aren’t you helping these people as a group or doing more for that group?’ as opposed to personal struggles. I would say they felt a more personal connection with the Obamas. Kind of like: ‘I’m like you were; I need your help.’
“And then from the beginning the LGBTQ people flocked to him. You never saw that in the Bush administration.”
January 2009
Dear Mr. President,
(Because the person I love can be dishonorably discharged for loving me back, even though he is honorably serving his country right now in Iraq, I have to send this letter anonymously. It pains me to have to do so.)
My partner is currently serving in Iraq, and is in a situation where he is under fire on a daily basis. He’s a good soldier, and our country needs him to continue doing the excellent job that he has been recognized for.
The day he deployed, I dropped him off far from his base’s main gate, and he walked alone in the dark and the rain to report for duty. Where the rest of his buddies were surrounded by spouses and children at mobilization ceremonies, he stood by himself.
The phone trees don’t have my name on them, and base support services don’t apply—even though we’ve been together for 16 years and are raising a beautiful child together. Our communication is self-censored, and we are cruelly unable to nurture each other at the exact moment we both need it the most.
If something were to happen to him, no one from his unit will call me. If, like so many good soldiers before him, he gives that last full measure of devotion, no one will come knock on my door. No one will present me with a flag. It is, and would be, as if the most important thing in his life—his family—never existed.
I am not sure if I can adequately convey the mixture of fear, pride, heartache and hope I feel, all jumbled together, on a daily basis.
Fiona began her career reading letters like that—scanning, coding, sampling—and she gradually took on more responsibility. Mike Kelleher moved on from OPC in 2010, passing the directorship over to Elizabeth Olson, whom both Mike and Fiona would regard as essential in maintaining the stability of the operation, a noble shepherd. Fiona was next, taking the role of director of OPC in 2013. The shy young woman who had interviewed terribly, who could not make eye contact, was now a force.
* * *
—
“It’s a funny channel,” Fiona told me that day in her office when she sat on the couch surrounded by letters and worked on figuring out which ten she should give to the president. “Sometimes I think of it as a tray passing under a door.”
Curating the 10LADs was a job she regarded as sacrosanct. It was her daily conversation with the president, each package an array of voices she believed most accurately rendered America’s mood: Here’s what America is feeling, Mr. President.
“Well, this one is lovely,” she said, holding one letter with her fingertips. “He’s a welder. He really paints the scene. A log cabin. A faithful dog. His wife volunteering. ‘If you ever need something welded…’ ” She smiled, read it again, considering. “It’s largely a support letter, so that’s why I’m not sure it will make it.” The president needed to hear from more than just supporters, and she was mindful of the mix.
“This one is definitely staying,” she said, reaching for another letter. It had pages stapled to it. “She encloses a letter her dad once sent to Roosevelt. I think the president really eats up that historical perspective.
“Oh, and then this one just slays me,” she said about another, declining further comment and laying it on her “yes” pile on the couch.
“Then this person is alleging that the Small Business Administration was very present in the disaster recovery immediately in the wake of a flood, but then when the cameras pulled out, so did the resources. I think that’s an interesting voice to put before the president, because it’s hard for that kind of information to reach him.”
Getting a couple hundred letters down to twenty was one kind of challenge, but the real work was getting from twenty to ten. She had to be ruthless. A linear system like subject folders might seem the simplest method: Sort them all by topic, and then give the president one letter about energy, one about healthcare, one about immigration, and so on. “But then letters in each folder would be sort of in competition with each other instead of with the broad group,” she said.
I suppose
the point was obvious, but it took me a moment to compute the implications. It had to do with fairness and an underlying assumption that the letters represented people, not problems.
“Anyway, a disorderly pile is more honest,” she said.
When she had the day’s pile down to fifteen, she read through them again, one then the next. Her fingers were long, and her nails were painted shiny red, and she held the pages gently, laying each one down slowly, as if she didn’t want to hurt it. “Well, this one has to make it….And then this one—it’s hard to follow, but I think even the fact that it’s hard to follow is part of the story….And then this. We’re getting so many of these long-term legacy reflections. I don’t know….” She looked for stories. Not pro-this or anti-that, not screeds, not opinions about what someone heard on NPR. The president needed to hear the stories—that’s what he couldn’t get himself. “He can’t walk down a street and see what it normally looks like,” she said. She thought of the letters as a periscope looking outside the bubble, as a way for him to see as he used to see, before Secret Service protection and armored vehicles and a press pool and the world watching.
I asked her if she had a soft spot, a kind of letter or a subject that she might more readily want to put through.
“Inmate mail,” she said without hesitation. “Ever since the beginning. It’s one of the most extraordinary relationships in letter writing, I suppose because letter writing is more a part of prison culture than the rest of society.”
She told me about one of the earliest inmate letters she got. A guy had written in from a prison out west, and he made mosaics. “From candy wrappers,” she said. “And he had done a portrait of the president. It was on thick watercolor stock.” He had glued tiny pieces of candy wrappers in varying colors to make a convincing likeness. “It was just beautiful,” she said, and from the way she averted her eyes, I could tell this story was not going to end well. She said this was back in the early days, when she had just started at OPC. “It was just a support letter explaining that he was excited about this presidency and he wanted to offer this. I remember he also included this detail that for part of his work, he would’ve liked to have Twix wrappers to capture the color that he was going for. But that there had been an inventory change in the vending machines in his prison, so he had used Rolo wrappers, which he felt didn’t convey quite the stroke that he was going for, but it was the best he could do.”
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