been planned meticulously in advance by our scheduling teams and the Secret
Service, meant as always to maximize efficiency and security.
Barack (with the help of Sam Kass) had chosen a restaurant near Washington
Square Park that he knew I’d love for its emphasis on locally grown foods, a
small, tucked-away eatery called Blue Hill. As we motorcaded the last stretch of
the journey from the helipad in lower Manhattan to Greenwich Village, I noted
the lights of the cop cars being used to barricade the cross streets, feeling a twinge
of guilt at how our mere presence in the city was mucking up the Saturday
evening flow. New York always awakened a sense of awe in me, big and busy
enough to dwarf anyone’s ego. I remembered how wide-eyed I’d been on my
first trip there decades earlier with Czerny, my mentor from Princeton. Barack, I
knew, felt something even deeper. The wild energy and diversity of the city had
proven the perfect hatching place for his intellect and imagination years back
when he was a student at Columbia.
At the restaurant, we were shown to a table in a discreet corner of the room
as around us people tried not to gawk. But there was no hiding our arrival.
Anyone who came in after we did would have to get swept with a magnetometer
wand by a Secret Service team, a process that was usually quick but still an
inconvenience. For this, I felt another twinge.
We ordered martinis. Our conversation stayed light. Four months into our
lives as POTUS and FLOTUS, we were still retrofitting—figuring out how one
identity worked with the other and what this meant inside our marriage. These
days, there was almost no part of Barack’s complicated life that didn’t in some
way impact mine, which meant there was plenty of shared business we could
have discussed—his team’s decision to schedule a foreign trip during the girls’
summer vacation, for example, or whether my chief of staff was being listened to
at morning staff meetings in the West Wing—but I tried in general to avoid it,
not just this night, but every night. If I had an issue with something going on in
the West Wing, I usually relied on my staff to convey it to Barack’s, doing what I
could to keep White House business out of our personal time.
Sometimes Barack wanted to talk about work, though more often than not
he avoided it. So much of his job was just plain grueling, the challenges huge and
often seemingly intractable. General Motors was days away from filing for
bankruptcy. North Korea had just conducted a nuclear test, and Barack was soon
to leave for Egypt to deliver a major address meant to extend an open hand to
Muslims around the world. The ground around him never seemed to stop