* * *
My mind raced with all that needed to get done. There had been no way to 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, “Raindance.”）
When speaking to me directly, the Secret Service agents almost always called me “ma’am.” As in, “This way, ma’am. Please step back, ma’am.” And, “Ma’am, your car will be here shortly.”
Who’s “Ma’am”？ I’d wanted to ask at first. Ma’am sounded to me like an older woman with a proper purse, good posture, and sensible shoes who was maybe sitting somewhere nearby.
But I was Ma’am. Ma’am was me. It was part of this larger shift, this crazy transition we were in.
All this was on my mind the day I traveled to Washington to visit schools. After one of my meetings, I went back to Reagan National Airport to meet Barack, who was due in on a chartered flight from Chicago. As was protocol for the president-elect, we’d been invited by President and Mrs. Bush to drop by for a visit to the White House and had scheduled it to coincide with my trip to look at schools. I stood waiting at the private terminal as Barack’s plane touched down. Next to me was Cornelius Southall, one of the agents heading my security detail.
Cornelius was a square-shouldered former college football player who’d previously worked as a part of President Bush’s security team. Like all of my detail leaders, he was smart, trained to be hyperaware at every moment, a human sensor. Even then, as the two of us watched Barack’s plane taxi and come to a stop maybe twenty yards away on the tarmac, he was picking up on something before I did.
“Ma’am,” he said as some new piece of information arrived via his earpiece, “your life is about to change forever.”
When I looked at him quizzically, he added, “Just wait.”
He then pointed to the right, and I turned to look. Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts. The presidential motorcade. It was at least twenty vehicles long, moving in orchestrated formation, car after car after car, before finally the whole fleet rolled to a quiet halt, and the limos stopped directly in front of Barack’s parked plane.
I turned to Cornelius. “Is there a clown car?” I said. “Seriously, this is what he’s going to travel with now?”
He smiled. “Every day for his entire presidency, yes,” he said. “It’s going to look like this all the time.”
I took in the spectacle: thousands and thousands of pounds of metal, a squad of commandos, bulletproof everything. I had yet to grasp that Barack’s protection was still only half-visible. I didn’t know that he’d also, at all times, have a nearby helicopter ready to evacuate him, that sharpshooters would position themselves on rooftops along the routes he traveled, that a personal physician would always be with him in case of a medical problem, or that the vehicle he rode in contained a store of blood of the appropriate type in case he ever needed a transfusion. In a matter of weeks, just ahead of Barack’s inauguration, the presidential limo would be upgraded to a newer model—aptly named the Beast—a seven-ton tank disguised as a luxury vehicle, tricked out with hidden tear-gas cannons, rupture-proof tires, and a sealed ventilation system meant to get him through a biological or chemical attack.
I was now married to one of the most heavily guarded human beings on earth. It was simultaneously relieving and distressing.
I looked to Cornelius, who waved me forward in the direction of the limo.
“You can head over now, ma’am,” he said.
* * *
I’d been inside the White House just once before, a couple of years earlier. Through Barack’s office at the Senate, I’d signed myself and Malia and Sasha up for a special tour being offered during one of our visits to Washington, figuring it’d be a fun thing to do. White House tours are generally self-guided, but this one involved being taken around by a White House curator, who walked a small group of us through its grand hallways and various public rooms.
We stared at the cut-glass chandeliers that dangled from the high ceiling of the East Room, where opulent balls and receptions were historically held, and inspected George Washington’s red cheeks and sober expression in the massive, gilt-framed portrait that hung on one wall. We learned, courtesy of our guide, that in the late eighteenth century First Lady Abigail Adams had used the giant space to hang her laundry and that decades later, during the Civil War, Union troops had temporarily been quartered there. A number of First Daughters’ weddings had taken place in the East Room. Abraham Lincoln’s and John F. Kennedy’s caskets had also lain there for viewing.