by Obama Barack
My mother-in-law never complained about anything. Whenever I interacted with her, I’d remember that, no matter what kind of mess I was dealing with, no one had forced me to be the president and that I needed to just suck it up and do my job.
What a gift my mother-in-law was. For us, she became a living, breathing reminder of who we were and where we came from, a keeper of values we’d once thought ordinary but had learned were more rare than we had ever imagined.
* * *
—
WINTER SEMESTER AT Sidwell Friends School started two weeks before Inauguration Day, so after New Year’s we flew back to Chicago, scooped up whatever personal effects had not already been shipped ahead, then boarded a government plane for Washington. Blair House, the president’s official guesthouse, couldn’t accommodate us that early, so we checked into the Hay-Adams hotel, the first of three moves we’d make in the span of three weeks.
Malia and Sasha didn’t seem to mind being in a hotel. They especially didn’t mind their mom’s unusually indulgent attitude toward TV watching, bed jumping, and sampling every dessert on the room-service menu. Michelle accompanied them to their first day of school in a Secret Service vehicle. Later, she would tell me how her heart sank as she watched her precious babies—looking like miniature explorers in their brightly colored coats and backpacks—walking into their new lives surrounded by burly armed men.
At the hotel that night, though, the girls were their usual chattering, irrepressible selves, telling us what a great day they’d had, and how lunch was better than at their old school, and how they had already made a bunch of new friends. As they spoke, I could see the tension on Michelle’s face start to lift. When she informed Malia and Sasha that now that school had started, there’d be no more weeknight desserts and TV watching and that it was time to brush their teeth and get ready for bed, I figured things would turn out okay.
Meanwhile, our transition was firing on all cylinders. Initial meetings with my national security and economic teams were productive, with folks sticking to the agenda and grandstanding kept to a minimum. Crammed into nondescript government offices, we set up working groups for every agency and every imaginable topic—job training, airline safety, student loan debt, cancer research, Pentagon procurement—and I spent my days picking the brains of earnest young whiz kids, rumpled academics, business leaders, advocacy groups, and grizzled veterans of previous administrations. Some were auditioning for a job in the administration; others wanted us to adopt proposals that had gone nowhere over the previous eight years. But all seemed eager to help, excited by the prospect of a White House willing to put new ideas to the test.
There were, of course, bumps along the way. Some of my preferred choices for cabinet positions declined or didn’t pass vetting. At various points in the day Rahm might pop in to ask me how I wanted to handle some emerging policy or organizational dispute, and behind the scenes there was no shortage of the early jockeying—over titles, turf, access, parking spots—that characterizes any new administration. But overall, the mood was one of focused exhilaration, all of us convinced that with smart, deliberate work we could transform the country in the ways we had promised.
And why not? Polls showed my approval rating close to 70 percent. Each day brought a new round of positive media coverage. Younger staffers like Reggie and Favs were suddenly hot items in the D.C. gossip columns. Despite forecasts for frigid temperatures on Inauguration Day, authorities predicted record crowds, with hotels already booked for miles around. The avalanche of requests for the ticketed events—from elected officials, donors, distant cousins, high school acquaintances, and various important personages we barely knew or hadn’t even met—never slowed. Michelle and I did our best to sort through all of them without bruising too many feelings.
“It’s like our wedding,” I grumbled, “but with a bigger guest list.”
Four days before the inauguration, Michelle, the girls, and I flew to Philadelphia, where in homage to Lincoln’s whistle-stop train ride from Springfield to Washington for his 1861 inauguration we boarded a vintage railroad car and reprised the last leg of his journey, with one deviation: a stop in Wilmington, where we picked up Joe and Jill Biden. Watching the adoring crowd that had gathered to see them off, hearing Joe joke with all the Amtrak conductors he knew by name after years of commuting, I could only imagine what was going through his mind, rolling down tracks he’d first traveled not in joy but in anguish so very long ago.
I spent much of the time that day chatting with the several dozen guests we’d invited along for the ride, most of them ordinary voters we’d met here and there along the campaign trail. They joined Malia, Sasha, and me in singing “Happy Birthday” as Michelle blew out the candles on her cake (it was her forty-fifth), giving it the feeling of a close family gathering, the kind Michelle so treasured. Occasionally I’d step out onto the train’s rear platform, feeling the wind cut against my face, the syncopated rhythm of wheels against tracks somehow slowing down time, and I’d wave to the clusters of people who had gathered along the way. There were thousands of them, mile after mile, their smiles visible from a distance, some standing on flatbed trucks, others pressed up against fences, many holding homemade signs with messages like GRANDMAS 4 OBAMA or WE BELIEVE or YES WE DID or lifting up their kids and urging them to wave.
Such moments continued over the next two days. During a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I met a young Marine amputee who saluted from his bed and told me he’d voted for me despite being a Republican, and that he would be proud to call me his commander in chief. At a homeless shelter in southeast Washington, a tough-looking teenage boy wordlessly wrapped me in the tightest embrace. My father’s stepmother, Mama Sarah, had traveled all the way from her tiny rural village in northwestern Kenya for the inauguration. I smiled as I watched this elderly woman without any formal education, a woman whose home had a tin roof and neither running water nor indoor plumbing, being served dinner in Blair House on china used by prime ministers and kings.
How could my heart not be stirred? How could I resist believing there was something true in all this, something that might last?
Months later, when the magnitude of economic wreckage was fully understood and the public mood had turned dark, my team and I would ask ourselves whether—as a matter of politics and governance—we should have done more to tamp down this collective postelection high and prepare the country for the hardships to come. It’s not as if we didn’t try. When I go back and read interviews I gave right before taking office, I’m struck by how sober I was—insisting that the economy would get worse before it got better, reminding people that reforming healthcare couldn’t happen overnight and that there were no simple solutions in places like Afghanistan. The same goes for my inauguration speech: I tried to paint an honest picture of our circumstances, stripping out some of the loftier rhetoric in favor of calls for responsibility and common effort in the face of daunting challenges.
It’s all there, in black and white, a pretty accurate assessment of how the next few years would go. And yet maybe it was for the best that people couldn’t hear those cautionary notes. After all, it wasn’t hard to find reasons to feel fear and anger in early 2009, to mistrust politicians or the institutions that had failed so many people. Maybe what was needed was a burst of energy, no matter how fleeting—a happy-seeming story about who we were as Americans and who we might be, the kind of high that could provide just enough momentum to get us through the most treacherous part of the journey.
That feels like what happened. A collective, unspoken decision was made that for a few weeks at least, the country would take a much-needed break from cynicism.
* * *
—
INAUGURATION DAY ARRIVED, bright, windy, and freezing cold. Because I knew that the events had been choreographed with a military precision, and because I tend to live my life about fifteen minutes behind schedule, I
set two alarms to make sure I was up on time. A run on the treadmill, breakfast, a shower and shave, repeated tries before the tie knot was up to snuff, and by eight forty-five a.m. Michelle and I were in the car for the two-minute drive from Blair House to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where we had invited a friend of ours, Dallas pastor T. D. Jakes, to lead a private service.
For his sermon that morning, Reverend Jakes drew on the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel, describing how Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, faithful to God despite their service in the royal court, refused to kneel before King Nebuchadnezzar’s golden idol; how as a result the three men were thrown into a blazing furnace; and yet how because of their faithfulness, God protected them, helping them to emerge from the furnace unscathed.
In assuming the presidency during such turbulent times, Reverend Jakes explained, I too was being thrown into the flames. The flames of war. The flames of economic collapse. But so long as I stayed true to God and to doing what was right, I too had nothing to fear.
The pastor spoke in a majestic baritone, his broad, dark face smiling down on me from the pulpit. “God is with you,” he said, “in the furnace.”
Some in the church began to applaud, and I smiled in acknowledgment of his words. But my mind was drifting back to the previous evening, when after dinner I had excused myself from my family, walked upstairs to one of Blair House’s many rooms, and received a briefing from the director of the White House Military Office on the “football”— the small leather-jacketed suitcase that accompanies the president at all times and contains the codes needed to launch a nuclear strike. One of the military aides responsible for carrying the football explained the protocols as calmly and methodically as someone might describe how to program a DVR. The subtext was obvious.
I would soon be vested with the authority to blow up the world.
The night before, Michael Chertoff, President Bush’s secretary of homeland security, had called to inform us of credible intelligence indicating that four Somali nationals were thought to be planning a terrorist attack at the inauguration ceremony. As a result, the already massive security force around the National Mall would be beefed up. The suspects—young men who were believed to be coming over the border from Canada—were still at large. There was no question that we’d go ahead with the next day’s events, but to be safe, we ran through various contingencies with Chertoff and his team, then assigned Axe to draft evacuation instructions that I’d give the crowd if an attack took place while I was onstage.
Reverend Jakes wrapped up his sermon. The choir’s final song filled the sanctuary. No one beyond a handful of staffers knew of the terrorist threat. I hadn’t even told Michelle, not wanting to add to the day’s stress. No one had nuclear war or terrorism on their minds. No one except me. Scanning people in the pews—friends, family members, colleagues, some of whom caught my eye and smiled or waved with excitement—I realized this was now part of my job: maintaining an outward sense of normalcy, upholding for everyone the fiction that we live in a safe and orderly world, even as I stared down the dark hole of chance and prepared as best I could for the possibility that at any given moment on any given day chaos might break through.
At nine fifty-five, we arrived at the North Portico of the White House, where President and Mrs. Bush greeted us and led us inside, to where the Bidens, Vice President Cheney and his family, and congressional leaders and their spouses had gathered for a brief reception. Fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, our staffs suggested that we leave early for the Capitol in order to account for what they described as massive crowds. We loaded into the waiting cars in pairs: leaders of the House and Senate first, then Jill Biden and Mrs. Cheney, Michelle and Mrs. Bush, Joe Biden and Vice President Cheney, with President Bush and me bringing up the rear. It was like the boarding of Noah’s Ark.
It was my first time in “the Beast,” the oversized black limousine used to transport the president. Reinforced to survive a bomb blast, the thing weighs several tons, with plush black leather seats and the presidential seal stitched on a leather panel above the phone and the armrest. Once closed, the doors of the Beast seal out all sound, and as our convoy slow-rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, while I made small talk with President Bush, I looked out the bulletproof windows at the throngs of people who were still on their way to the Mall or had already taken seats along the parade route. Most appeared to be in a celebratory mood, cheering and waving as the motorcade passed. But turning the corner onto the final leg of the route, we came upon a group of protesters chanting into bullhorns and holding up signs that read INDICT BUSH and WAR CRIMINAL.
Whether the president saw them I couldn’t say—he was deep into an enthusiastic description of what it was like to clear brush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he’d be heading directly after the ceremony. But I felt quietly angry on his behalf. To protest a man in the final hour of his presidency seemed graceless and unnecessary. More generally, I was troubled by what these last-minute protests said about the divisions that were churning across the country—and the weakening of whatever boundaries of decorum had once regulated politics.
There was a trace of self-interest in my feelings, I suppose. In a few hours it would be only me riding in the backseat of the Beast. It wouldn’t take long, I figured, before bullhorns and signs were directed my way. This too would be part of the job: finding a way not to take such attacks personally, while avoiding the temptation to shut myself off—as perhaps my predecessor had too often done—from those shouting on the other side of the glass.
We had been wise to leave early; the streets were choked with people, and by the time we arrived at the Capitol we were several minutes behind schedule. Together with the Bushes, we made our way to the Speaker’s office for more handshakes, photos, and instructions before participants and guests—including the girls and the rest of our families—began lining up for the procession. Michelle and I were shown the Bible we’d borrowed from the Library of Congress for the administering of my oath, a small, thick volume covered in burgundy velvet with gilt edges, the same Bible Lincoln had used for his own swearing in. Then it was Michelle’s turn to go, leaving me, Marvin, and Reggie momentarily alone in a holding room, just like old times.
“Anything in my teeth?” I asked with an exaggerated smile.
“You’re good,” Marvin said.
“It’s cold out there,” I said. “Just like Springfield.”
“A few more people, though,” Reggie said.
A military aide stuck his head into the room and said it was time. I gave Reggie and Marvin fist bumps and followed the congressional committee down the long hallways, through the Capitol Rotunda and National Statuary Hall, past the rows of well-wishers who lined the walls, a gauntlet of honor guards saluting each step, until I finally arrived at the glass doors leading out onto the inaugural platform. The scene beyond was stunning: The crowd blanketed the Mall in an unbroken plane, reaching well past the Washington Monument and out to the Lincoln Memorial, with what must have been hundreds of thousands of handheld flags shimmering under the noonday sun like the surface of an ocean current. For a brief moment, before trumpets sounded and I was announced, I closed my eyes and summoned the prayer that had carried me here, one I would continue to repeat every night I was president.
A prayer of thanks for all I’d been given. A prayer that my sins be forgiven. A prayer that my family and the American people be kept safe from harm.
A prayer for guidance.
* * *
—
TED SORENSEN, JFK’s friend, confidant, and chief speechwriter, had been an early supporter of mine. By the time we met, he was almost eighty but still sharp, with a bracing wit. He even traveled on my behalf, a persuasive if also slightly high-maintenance campaign surrogate. (Once, while our motorcade was barreling down the highway in a driving Iowa rainstorm, he leaned forward and yelled at the agent behind the wheel, “Son, I’m half blind but
even I can see you’re too damn close to that car!”) Ted also became a favorite of my young speechwriting team, generously offering advice and occasionally commenting on drafts of their speeches. Since he had co-authored Kennedy’s inaugural address (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”), they asked him once what had been the secret to writing one of the four or five greatest speeches in American history. Simple, he said: Whenever he and Kennedy sat down to write, they told themselves, “Let’s make this good enough to be in a book of the great speeches someday.”
I don’t know if Ted was trying to inspire my team or just mess with their heads.
I do know that my own address failed to reach JFK’s lofty standards. In the days that followed, it received far less attention than did the estimates of the crowd size, the bitterness of the cold, Aretha Franklin’s hat, and the slight glitch that occurred between me and Chief Justice John Roberts during the administering of the oath, causing us to meet in the White House’s Map Room the following day for an official do-over. Some commentators thought the speech had been unnecessarily dark. Others detected inappropriate criticism of the previous administration.
Still, once I’d finished delivering it, I felt satisfied that I’d spoken honestly and with conviction. I was also relieved that the note to be used in case of a terrorist incident had stayed in my breast pocket.
With the main event behind me, I let myself relax and soak in the spectacle. I was moved by the sight of the Bushes mounting the stairs to their helicopter and turning to wave one final time. I felt pride holding Michelle’s hand as we walked a portion of the parade route. I was tickled by the parade participants: Marines, mariachi bands, astronauts, Tuskegee Airmen, and, especially, the high school bands from every state in the Union (including my alma mater Punahou’s marching band—Go Buff ’n Blue!).
