Power Forward : My Presidential Education (9781476763361)

by Love, Reggie

  As punishment for my carelessness, I wasn’t allowed to dress for games “indefinitely.” The hiatus ended up being for the rest of the Duke basketball season. I couldn’t even dress for the 2002 ACC tournament played in my hometown of Charlotte. I was that much of an embarrassment to the team. The only way I could do my part for Duke in the NCAA Sweet Sixteen was to cheer from my couch.

  What I came to understand was that my photos of shame were not about me—though they certainly felt that way at the time. Because I was a basketball player on a storied team, I was always representing that history, even off campus at a friend’s nineteenth birthday party at 2 A.M. When it came to Duke basketball, there were no days off from being an example to others.

  Turns out I was lucky to receive that message early in life, during my sophomore year in college. It was the perfect tutorial for my time with the President. If there were ever a time when a man was symbolizing something larger than himself, it was as an African-American personal aide to the first African-American president. Screwing up in college had put me on alert: certain positions carry outsized responsibilities, and working for Obama meant my every move and word would be scrutinized. The choices I made about what to say, how to behave, whom to confide in, and where and with whom to spend my time would either tarnish or bolster the presidency.

  This will always be the deal. No matter what I achieve in the future, I will never not be “Reggie Love, former aide to President Barack Obama.”

  Every misstep I make will be weighed against that title, and will reflect, rightly or wrongly, on the President. I may act alone, but the consequences extend much further. This can feel a bit burdensome, but from the beginning the bigger part of me was ready to rise to the occasion. In truth, no one on this planet walks without the weight of history, even if it is just your family name.

  * * *

  Going into my junior year at Duke, I became a different guy. Not as angry. Not as immature. I was beginning to see the bigger picture. It hit me that my football coaches were under more pressure to win games than I could fathom. They had taken up permanent residence in the hot seat. They could be fired at any minute, lose the economic security for their families. I’d been naïve about the business side of college sports, the crippling politics. Once I had that insight and realized I didn’t know better than they did, I left all my self-involved nonsense behind, stopped bitching about the calls and the coaches’ decisions. Ironically, it took getting wiser to grasp how little I actually knew.

  By the time I was a senior, I’d figured out my place was working as an extension of the coaches. I knew I needed to act right to build culture. It took me a while, but I recognized that if I acted a fool, other players thought they could too. If I wanted everyone to win, I needed to fixate on myself less. So I organized players. I made sure we had continuity on and off the field. Younger teammates were looking up to me. I was a leader because I was seen as the older, more experienced guy.

  In December of 2004, I was named the captain of the Duke basketball team. Coach K announced, “This season I am naming Reggie captain because he shows up every day regardless of what’s going on off the court, personally or in his family. He walks on the court and plays the game the way it should be played. If everyone played the game like Reggie, we would win a national championship.” It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

  Getting appointed captain was the chance I’d been waiting for. It gave me an opening to rectify all the damage I’d done. To be a positive influence instead of a pariah. To show the other guys growth was possible—and necessary.

  I’d gone from not good enough to make the squad to being the first walk-on/non-recruited player to both make captain and be a starter. I’d gone from embarrassing myself and my teammates to inching my way back through hard work and humility, finally letting go of the ego that had given me such a bad attitude that sophomore year. I had arrived in Durham thinking, I got this, just give me the chance and I will excel. I wasn’t used to losing. I wasn’t used to not playing. I had to be knocked down before I could climb higher.

  There was something else that terrible year gave me. Another unexpected gift. And that was finding out what authentic friendship looks like.

  When I was persona non grata on the team, so filled with self-loathing and unchecked rage, my then roommate Chris Duhon stood by me. He had been with me the night of the birthday party, when the photos were snapped and took my pride along with them. “I should have had your back,” he said. “I let you down.”

  He didn’t. But his sentiment filled me with unexpected solace. He was still in my corner. And so were many of my other teammates and friends. Nobody bailed. The Darryl Scotts, Erik Stowes, Andrew Moores, David Callaways—they stuck with me in the muck. Soon enough, it would be my turn to do the same. Only I would be doing it on a different playing field.

  7

  * * *

  * * *

  OWN YOUR MISTAKES

  * * *

  * * *

  In the beginning, there was . . . awkwardness.

  The two of us were usually packed tight in minivans, town cars, suburbans, small airplanes, casting about for things to discuss or reading in silence in preparation for the next round of events. Most of the time the senator would ask me questions I didn’t know the answers to. About the schedule. About the briefings. I spent most of my first four months on the job saying, “Let me see if I can find out.”

  I sensed his disappointment. There were times when I wouldn’t have the information he wanted, and I’d say, “I’ll ask,” and he’d say, “I’ll just talk to them myself.”

  It wasn’t a good look for me. Complicating matters, the senator was used to taking care of his own business. He wasn’t about having help, especially help that was playing catch-up all the time. I began to have nightmares about someone saying to the candidate, “Reggie said he would get this done and he didn’t!” I had pride in my job. I just didn’t know what my job was yet.

  I did know that early on he saw me as superfluous. At times, I believe I was a source of aggravation, a gnat he couldn’t swat away. Let’s just say, Obama and I went through a long and difficult “adjustment period.”

  And then, in the spring, just as the weather and the candidate were beginning to thaw ever so slightly, I committed the biggest screwup of my bodyman career to date.

  It was April 26, 2007, three days before my twenty-fifth birthday. We were in Miami, Florida, and the campaign had just officially been assigned Secret Service.

  Interesting side note: when you receive a Secret Service detail is determined by assessed “threat levels,” aka how likely it is the candidate could get shot. Obama’s threat levels were dangerously high, a reminder that crisscrossing the country with a black candidate for president carried unique risks. (Harry Reid said, jokingly of course, that the party couldn’t afford to lose any Democratic senators given how slim its majority was.) Hence, early Secret Service detail.

  We were in Florida to do a fundraiser with Cuban-Americans, hosted by Ricky and Eddy Arriola. The event had come up suddenly, so the schedule was more hectic than usual. The senator put his bag in the back of the Secret Service Suburban. We weren’t staying overnight. Just a quick fundraiser and then an afternoon flight to South Carolina for the opening primary debate. It wasn’t until the plane was in the air headed to Columbia that I noticed the candidate’s bag was MIA. I’d never retrieved it from the vehicle.

  The second I realized I’d forgotten the bag, my gut flipped. I knew instantly it was about as big a mistake as I could possibly have made. And I’d just made it.

  It should be said that at this point in time, Obama was still very much about carrying his own belongings. He didn’t like to exit a plane not holding anything. He would say, “JFK carried his own bags.”

  Nonetheless, the plane was airborne, the bag was missing, and I proceeded to have a full-blown panic attack. Sweat began to bleed through my clothes. My heart raced like a cornered rabbit. In
my head I prayed he wouldn’t notice, that I’d have time to find the bag and by some miracle get it back to him before he realized it had vanished.

  In the meantime, I called Jessica Clark, then a finance assistant for the campaign, who in turn rang the Secret Service driver, who snagged the bag from the Suburban and drove it to Jessica, who handed it to a campaign member, who was flying to South Carolina to watch the debate. The bag was en route, at least. But we were going to beat it to the hotel by several hours.

  When we landed in Columbia, I was feeling a modicum of relief, believing maybe disaster had been averted, maybe this would all resolve without any drama, and it was precisely at that moment that the candidate turned to me and said, “Hey, Reg, where’s my bag?”

  I froze, debating in my head whether to say “It’s on the way” or “It’s unavailable right now.”

  Obama, like most people, was not a man who enjoyed going without his personal effects. Especially not the Tumi containing his keys, his wallet, his credit cards, and everything he needed for the upcoming debate.

  I went with, “It’s on the way.”

  “What do you mean ‘on the way’?” he asked, thinking I was joking.

  “It’s coming from Florida,” I said, explaining how it had been left in the Suburban, but we had it, everything was fine, he’d have it in no time.

  “You left my briefcase in Florida,” he stated, incredulous.

  And then: he said nothing. It was like I was back with Coach K, whose level of displeasure was inversely proportional to how little he spoke. The silence felt worse than being reprimanded.

  As we rode to the Columbia campaign headquarters with Kirk Wagar without another word passing between us I thought, That’s it, I’m fired. I kept hoping he would break the tension and yell at me. I was praying for that come-to-Jesus lecture; anything he could say would be better than not addressing the issue right then and there.

  Once we arrived at the campaign field office, Obama asked for an office so the two of us could talk. We sat down at a circular conference table, face-to-face, no phones or computers. He began calmly.

  “Listen, Reggie, I think you’re a great guy.”

  Here it comes. Game over, I thought.

  “But,” he said and paused. There it was. The dreaded “but.” I braced myself for the next line, and the candidate leaned forward slightly. “If you’re not up to doing this job,” he said flatly, “I can get someone else to do it.”

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I kept mum while he continued talking, his voice even and firm.

  “You have one job. And if I have to worry about all this stuff, then you’re not making it easy for me to do my job.”

  It was like I was six years old and my dad was giving me a talking-to, only this was much worse because the father figure reprimanding me was trying to become the next President of the United States and my negligence had thrown a wrench into his efforts. I’d let the candidate down, he’d told me as much, and I felt nothing so much as ashamed.

  I apologized. I told him he was right. I promised it would never happen again. There was nothing else I could do or say at that point. I couldn’t undo my mistake. He just needed to decide if he could trust me. Which, thankfully, he did, and I was given another chance.

  “Get your act together, Reggie. Help me do my job,” he said, as he rose from the table and walked out of the room. I followed behind, chastened, and ran right into Marvin Nicholson, the former bodyman for John Kerry and Obama’s trip director, as well as a man who would become one of my best friends.

  “What was that all about?” Marvin asked.

  “I lost the bag.”

  He laughed a long, hearty laugh. “Yeah, that’s happened to me before, when I worked for Kerry,” he said, then added, “Seriously though, I wouldn’t do it more than once.”

  Marvin was funny, even if he was half-Canadian. He stood six-foot-eight, and there was little he enjoyed more than giving me a hard time. Marvin took it upon himself to haze me until I was whipped into what he deemed some sort of shape.

  Part of this was because when he was candidate John Kerry’s bodyman, he was kept busy. Marvin would tell me stories about how hard he had it in the early days of email and cell phones, people still relying on fax machines and Filofax notebooks, and how his workload of responsibilities had been exponentially greater. Whenever I would whine about anything I had to do for Senator Obama, Marvin was quick to shut my complaining down.

  “You don’t know how good you have it,” he’d say, then walk away. He never helped me carry a single thing. It was a matter of principle. Once, Obama said to him, “Hey, Marvin, you going to help Reggie out?” And Marvin shook his head no.

  “Reggie needs to earn his stripes. I’ve earned mine.”

  From that day forward I never asked Marvin for assistance with anything. Even if he tried to step in, I’d be clear: “Don’t touch anything, I’ve got it.” It became a point of pride.

  Reflecting on this now, I understand Marvin’s strategy. By making it a competition, he enabled me to have self-respect about parts of the job that were less than thrilling.

  Near my twenty-eighth birthday three years later, Marvin handed me a present. It was a small wooden frame with a patch of military stripes displayed on the inside.

  “I got it off eBay,” he said with a grin. “You earned them.”

  * * *

  I’m convinced the only reason Obama kept me on after the lost bag debacle was because I took full responsibility for leaving it behind. I did not blame the chaotic schedule or the Secret Service. I said it was my mistake. Simple as that. I’d seen Coach K do as much during my tenure at Duke. You would never hear him say to anyone that the team let him down. Instead he’d tell reporters, “I didn’t have these guys ready to play. Any loss ultimately rests with me.”

  The senator was no different. He routinely accepted blame for the mistakes made by his staff. One example I recall vividly was the “D-Punjab” memo fiasco, where an interior correspondence was leaked criticizing Hillary Clinton’s financial ties to Indian-American donors. When it accidentally went public, the candidate told the New York Times it was a “dumb mistake” and described the language as “unnecessarily caustic.” He said he was ultimately responsible for the content of the document, even though he wasn’t. (He hadn’t even viewed the memo.)

  Obama’s willingness to swallow his pride and tarnish himself for the team rubbed off on me, and I didn’t want to put him in a position where he had to do that for any mistakes I committed. So I redoubled my efforts not to make additional missteps. This is not to say there weren’t other blunders. A page (or twelve) would go missing from a speech. Or the teleprompter would be busted, leaving it to the candidate to figure out how to improvise.

  This happened at a Vegas Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser after he was president. He delivered a rousing speech, came off stage, jaw tight, and asked, “Sooooo, who forgot to put the rest of the speech in the book?”

  “Excuse me, sir?” I said.

  “After page ten, there was nothing.”

  We were like, “Oh, man.” We scrambled. We had to figure out what had happened. It was like expecting your teammate to score without the ball.

  “You couldn’t tell from the performance,” I offered, hoping that would soften the blow. It did not. At least this mishap didn’t go down during the campaign, where every speech meant possible votes, and every error meant more intense negative coverage in the media. As the underdog in the race, the senator couldn’t afford to come off looking like he didn’t have his act together. He didn’t have the benefit of history behind him. Or even the benefit of the doubt. He had to prove his worthiness at every stop.

  During the 2008 campaign, the candidate worked off the stump, without formal remarks. A stump speech is basically the mainline pitch you deliver every day, to convince voters to support you. Obama would pepper the stump speech with local details. He did this effortlessly, his memory al
ways a steel trap.

  There was one morning in October when he was campaigning in Pennsylvania only a few weeks ahead of the election and the team had neglected to plan for bad weather. When I woke up, only a couple of hours before the call time of the first event, it was pouring out.

  “Reggie, what’s the rain site for this thing?” the senator asked me, eating his eggs and bacon.

  There wasn’t one. No rain site could accommodate a crowd this size, which I lamely tried to explain.

  He pressed me. “So people are just going to be standing out in the rain and the cold waiting for me?” The idea of a crowd standing in a downpour didn’t thrill him. Or me.

  “I’m afraid they’re already there, sir.”

  In fact, potential voters had been lining up in the wet for hours, like they were standing in line to get on the Ark.

  Obama released a heavy sigh. “We can’t have that.”

  “I know, sir. But it’s too late to change the venue.”

  Obama dressed in casual “Iowa attire”—slacks and a windbreaker. He decided to break the schedule and go straight to the rally site and start the event as soon as possible so that people wouldn’t be out in the rain and cold a minute longer than they needed to be. It was raining so hard that there were pools of standing water on the teleprompter screen, rendering it as useless as an inkless pen. Not only was he going to be speaking in a downpour, now he would be speaking in a downpour sans notes.

  Nonetheless, the candidate came out to greet the voters with a big smile. He thanked everybody for enduring the miserable weather. He made a few opening remarks, then said, “I’m not going to keep you folks here long. I don’t want you guys to be sick next week when I need you to get out and vote.” You could hear the roll of laughter even over the din of the storm.