Oftentimes, I was happy to withdraw into the protected hush of the residence at the end of a long day. But this night felt different, as paradoxical as the country itself. After a day spent grieving in Charleston, I was looking at a giant party starting just outside my window. Hundreds of people were staring up at our house. I wanted to see it the way they did. I found myself suddenly desperate to join the celebration.
I stuck my head into the Treaty Room. “You want to go out and look at the lights?” I asked Barack. “There are tons of people out there.”
He laughed. “You know I can’t do tons of people.”
Sasha was in her room, engrossed in her iPad. “You want to go see the rainbow lights with me?” I asked.
“Nope.”
This left Malia, who surprised me a little by immediately signing on. I’d found my wing-woman. We were going on an adventure—outside, where people were gathered—and we weren’t going to ask anyone’s permission.
The normal protocol was that we checked in with the Secret Service agents posted by the elevator anytime we wanted to leave the residence, whether it was to go downstairs to watch a movie or to take the dogs out for a walk, but not tonight. Malia and I just busted past the agents on duty, neither one of us making eye contact. We bypassed the elevator, moving quickly down a cramped stairwell. I could hear dress shoes clicking down the stairs behind us, the agents trying to keep up. Malia gave me a devilish smirk. She wasn’t used to my flouting the rules.
Reaching the State Floor, we made our way toward the tall set of doors leading to the North Portico, when we heard a voice.
“Hello, ma’am! Can I help you?” It was Claire Faulkner, the usher on night duty. She was a friendly, soft-spoken brunette who I assumed had been tipped off by the agents whispering into their wrist pieces behind us.
I looked over my shoulder at her without breaking my stride. “Oh, we’re just going outside,” I said, “to see the lights.”
Claire’s eyebrows lifted. We paid her no heed. Arriving at the door, I grabbed its thick golden handle and pulled. But the door wouldn’t budge. Nine months earlier, an intruder wielding a knife had somehow managed to jump a fence and barge through this same door, running through the State Floor before being tackled by a Secret Service officer. In response, security began locking the door.
I turned to the group behind us, which had grown to include a uniformed Secret Service officer in a white shirt and a black tie. “How do you open this thing?” I said, to no one in particular. “There’s got to be a key.”
“Ma’am?” Claire said. “I’m not sure that’s the door you want. Every network news camera is aimed at the north side of the White House right now.”
She did have a point. My hair was a mess and I was in flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt. Not exactly dressed for a public appearance.
“Okay,” I said. “But can’t we get out there without being seen?”
Malia and I were now on a crusade. We weren’t going to relinquish our goal. We were going to get ourselves outside.
Someone then suggested trying one of the out-of-the-way loading doors on the ground floor, where trucks came to deliver food and office supplies. Our band began moving that way. Malia hooked her arm with mine. We were giddy now.
“We’re getting out!” I said.
“Yeah we are!” she said.
We made our way down a marble staircase and over red carpets, around the busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and past the kitchen until suddenly we were outdoors. The humid summer air hit our faces. I could see fireflies blinking on the lawn. And there it was, the hum of the public, people whooping and celebrating outside the iron gates. It had taken us ten minutes to get out of our own home, but we’d done it. We were outside, standing on a patch of lawn off to one side, out of sight of the public but with a beautiful, close-up view of the White House, lit up in pride.
Malia and I leaned into each other, happy to have found our way there.
* * *
As happens in politics, new winds were already beginning to gather and blow. By the fall of 2015, the next presidential campaign was in full swing. The Republican side was crowded, including governors like John Kasich and Chris Christie and senators like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, plus more than a dozen others. Meanwhile, Democrats were quickly narrowing themselves toward what would become a choice between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the liberal, longtime independent senator from Vermont.
Donald Trump had announced his candidacy early in the summer, standing inside Trump Tower in Manhattan and railing on Mexican immigrants—“rapists,” he called them—as well as the “losers” he said were running the country. I figured he was just grandstanding, sucking up the media’s attention because he could. Nothing in how he conducted himself suggested that he was serious about wanting to govern.
I was following the campaign, but not as intently as in years past. Instead, I’d been busy working on my fourth initiative as First Lady, called Let Girls Learn, which Barack and I had launched together back in the spring. It was an ambitious, government-wide effort focused on helping adolescent girls around the world obtain better access to education. Over the course of nearly seven years now as First Lady, I’d been struck again and again by both the promise and the vulnerability of young women in our world—from the immigrant girls I’d met at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who’d been brutally attacked by the Taliban and who came to the White House to speak with me, Barack, and Malia about her advocacy on behalf of girls’ education. I was horrified when, about six months after Malala’s visit, 276 Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram, seemingly intent on causing other Nigerian families to fear sending their daughters to school. It had prompted me, for the first and only time during the presidency, to sub for Barack during his weekly address to the nation, speaking emotionally about how we needed to work harder at protecting and encouraging girls worldwide.
I felt it all personally. Education had been the primary instrument of change in my own life, my lever upward in the world. I was appalled that many girls—more than 98 million worldwide, in fact, according to UNESCO statistics—didn’t have access to it. Some girls weren’t able to attend school because their families needed them to work. Sometimes the nearest school was far away or too expensive, or the risk of being assaulted while getting there was too great. In many cases, suffocating gender norms and economic forces combined to keep girls uneducated—effectively locking them out of future opportunities. There seemed to be an idea—astonishingly prevalent in certain parts of the world—that it was simply not worth it to put a girl in school, even as studies consistently showed that educating girls and women and allowing them to enter the workforce did nothing but boost a country’s GDP.
Barack and I were committed to changing the perceptions about what made a young woman valuable to a society. He managed to leverage hundreds of millions of dollars in resources from across his administration, through USAID and the Peace Corps, and also through the Departments of State, Labor, and Agriculture. The two of us together lobbied other countries’ governments to help fund programming for girls’ education while encouraging private companies and think tanks to commit to the cause.