On the eve of her departure from the White House, First Lady Michelle Obama has never been a more inspiring figure—America’s conscience, role model, and mother in chief.
When I arrive at the White House on a hot afternoon in late September to interview Michelle Obama, the place is so eerily quiet I worry for a second that I have come on the wrong day. I have been here every week for a month, sometimes twice a day, to interview people on the First Lady’s staff or to join Mrs. Obama in her motorcade and head out to an event on her schedule. There is usually so much high-stakes, highly choreographed pageantry unfolding that it’s hard to shake the feeling that if you made a move without permission you might get tackled. Indeed, the day I started following Mrs. Obama, I arrived around ten o’clock and had to “hold” in a reception room for ten minutes; then move to a hallway to hold again; then another spot, hold; until at last I was ushered into the Map Room because the First Lady wanted to say hello before we went off to Howard University. Wearing a purple-and-white striped sleeveless Laura Smalls dress, she enveloped me in one of her customary hugs. “I understand you’re going to be with us for a while.” She paused as a look crossed her face, that ornery one she makes when she’s about to deliver a line: “We’re doin’ a deep dive.”
But on this day, a month later: no tours or press conferences, no state dinners or medal ceremonies. Just an enormous, well-appointed mansion, the low fall sun slicing through the cleanest windows in America. Indeed, but for the guards stationed here and there, the place feels entirely empty. Which means that I am (sort of) free to wander around. In the Cross Hall that connects the East Room and the State Dining Room, the mother of all red carpets is rolled up and just sitting there, like it’s about to be hauled away. I bump into Angella Reid, the first (black) woman to serve as chief usher, whom I’d met a couple of years ago when I was here on another assignment. After some inevitable wistfulness about the end of an era, we peek into the Old Family Dining Room, which Mrs. Obama recently redecorated and opened to the public, mostly to catch a glimpse of the mid-sixties painting by Alma Thomas, the first piece of art by a black woman ever displayed in the White House.
It was during that visit two years ago that Joanna Rosholm, Mrs. Obama’s tall, glamorous press secretary, took me on a spin past the First Lady portraits that hang in the Center Hall on the ground floor. We were at a reception, drinks in hand, going from one to the next, when I judged Nancy Reagan’s—purely as a fashion artifact—to be my favorite. Today, with no one around, I feel compelled to take another look. Jackie Kennedy’s has a pastels-in-soft-focus aspect. Hillary Clinton’s portrait looks less like Hillary than Kate McKinnon in a pantsuit doing Hillary. There’s Lady Bird in yellow chiffon; Pat Nixon looking forlorn and trapped; Laura and Barbara Bush, both in somber black. But it is Eleanor Roosevelt’s that really raises an eyebrow. At the bottom of her portrait, her disembodied hands engage in various tasks: knitting, holding a pair of reading glasses, and, inexplicably, fidgeting with her wedding ring, as if she were about to take it off to wash a sinkful of dishes. It is a reminder of just how peculiar the role of First Lady is in American public life. She has a job with no salary, a platform with no power, an East Wing filled with staff but no budget. And it is, as Mrs. Obama will point out to me later, a role that is surprisingly malleable, shaped by the personality, style, and interests (or lack thereof) of the person occupying it. “Everything we do is by choice,” she will tell me. “I could have spent eight years doing anything, and at some level, it would have been fine. I could have focused on flowers. I could have focused on decor. I could have focused on entertainment. Because any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role. There’s no legislative authority; you’re not elected. And that’s a wonderful gift of freedom.”
