plan for this transition. Doing anything ahead of time would have been viewed as
presumptuous. For a planner like me, it had been hard to sit back. So now we
went into overdrive. My top priority was looking out for Sasha and Malia. I
wanted to get them settled as quickly and comfortably as possible, which meant
nailing down the details of our move and finding them a new school in
Washington, a place where they’d be happy.
Six days after the election, I flew to D.C., having set up meetings with
administrators at a couple of different schools. Under normal circumstances, I’d
have focused solely on the academics and culture of each place, but we were far
past the possibility of normal now. There were all sorts of cumbersome new
factors to be considered and discussed—Secret Service protocols, emergency
evacuation setups, strategies for protecting our kids’ privacy now that they had
the eyes of a nation upon them. The variables had become exponentially more
complex. More people were involved; more conversations needed to be had
before even a small decision could be made.
Thankfully, I was able to keep my key campaign staffers—Melissa, Katie,
and Kristen—working with me during the transition. We immediately set about
figuring out the logistics of our family’s move while also beginning to hire staff—
schedulers, policy experts, communications pros—for my future East Wing
offices, as well as interviewing people for jobs in the family residence. One of my
first hires was Jocelyn Frye, an old friend from law school who had a fantastic
analytic mind and agreed to come on as my policy director, helping to oversee
the initiatives I planned to launch.
Barack, meanwhile, was working on filling positions for his cabinet and
huddling with various experts on ways to rescue the economy. By now, more
than ten million Americans were unemployed, and the auto industry was in a
perilous free fall. I could tell by the hard set of my husband’s jaw following these
sessions that the situation was worse than most Americans even understood. He
was also receiving daily written intelligence briefings, suddenly privy to the
nation’s heavier secrets—the classified threats, quiet alliances, and covert
operations about which the public remained largely unaware.
Now that the Secret Service would be protecting us for years to come, the
agency selected official code names for us. Barack was “Renegade,” and I was
“Renaissance.” The girls were allowed to choose their own names from a
preapproved list of alliterative options. Malia became “Radiance,” and Sasha
picked “Rosebud.” (My mother would later get her own informal code name,