Knowing that we owed more to our service members and their families than
token thank-yous, Jill and I had been collaborating with a group of staffers to
identify concrete ways to support the military community and raise its visibility.
Barack had kicked things off earlier in the year with a government-wide audit,
asking each agency to find new ways to support military families. I, meanwhile,
reached out to the country’s most powerful CEOs, generating commitments to
hire a significant number of veterans and military spouses. Jill would garner
pledges from colleges and universities to train teachers and professors to better
understand the needs of military children. We also wanted to fight the stigma
surrounding the mental health issues that followed some of our troops home, and
planned to lobby writers and producers in Hollywood to include military stories
in their movies and TV shows.
The issues I was working on weren’t simple, but still they were manageable
in ways that much of what kept my husband at his desk at night was not. As had
been the case since I first met him, nighttime was when Barack’s mind traveled
without distraction. It was during these quiet hours that he could find perspective
or inhale new information, adding data points to the vast mental map he carried
around. Ushers often came to the Treaty Room a few times over the course of an
evening to deliver more folders, containing more papers, freshly generated by
staffers who were working late in the offices downstairs. If Barack got hungry, a
valet would bring him a small dish of figs or nuts. He was no longer smoking,
thankfully, though he’d often chew a piece of nicotine gum. Most nights of the
week, he stayed at his desk until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, reading memos,
rewriting speeches, and responding to email while ESPN played low on the TV.
He always took a break to come kiss me and the girls good night.
I was used to it by now—his devotion to the never-finished task of
governing. For years, the girls and I had shared Barack with his constituents, and
now there were more than 300 million of them. Leaving him alone in the Treaty
Room at night, I wondered sometimes if they had any sense of how lucky they
were.
The last bit of work he did, usually at some hour past midnight, was to read
letters from American citizens. Since the start of his presidency, Barack had asked
his correspondence staff to include ten letters or messages from constituents inside
his briefing book, selected from the roughly fifteen thousand letters and emails
that poured in daily. He read each one carefully, jotting responses in the margins
so that a staffer could prepare a reply or forward a concern on to a cabinet
secretary. He read letters from soldiers. From prison inmates. From cancer