just behind Oprah Winfrey. (Ridiculous as it is, this ranking is hardly the most ridiculous aspect of my life.) “Reminding Americans how much they love you reminds them they love the president,” Hank told me. “You’ll be taking one for the team, and all you have to do is show up and pretend you have an ego like the rest of us.”
Charlie glances at his schedule, then pulls mine from beneath it. “You’re not traveling today, are you?”
I shake my head. “The breast-cancer panel is in Arlington.”
“A titty summit, huh?” Charlie grins. “Need any help performing a self-exam?”
“Get dressed.” I push him away and turn to make our bed, a habit I’ve been told the maids find hilarious, but one I can’t suppress. Prior to our arrival over six years ago, the sheets in the residence were changed daily, but I requested, so as not to waste water, that they be changed no more than once a week, even for Charlie and me.
He reappears a few minutes later in a white oxford shirt, a charcoal suit, and a red tie marked with tiny yellow dots. “You look nice,” I say.
“You excited to be the belle of the ball tonight?”
Dryly, I say, “I’m beside myself.”
“You’re not dreading it, are you? Lindy, you deserve to be recognized. People have no idea how much you’ve done not just for the administration but for the country.”
This is a way of talking I don’t care for, talking as you’d hope others might talk about you, believing your press, or what you wish were your press. Though in public, I try to graciously accept both compliments and criticism, in the privacy of my head, I avoid giving myself credit for vague achievements tied to my position—for being a role model, for showing leadership—and at the same time, I don’t blame myself for the broad general failures for which I am held responsible by my detractors. To others, I am a symbol; to myself, I have only ever been me.
I set my hands on Charlie’s shoulders, and we lean in and give each other a minty, toothpastey kiss. “Ella gets in around four, and I have to give a tour to a third-grade choir after that, but otherwise, I hope she and I will get to relax,” I say. (That our daughter is coming home for tonight’s gala is, in my opinion, its main benefit; though I try not to crowd her, I adore when she visits.) “If you want us to come and say hi, if you have a spare minute, have Michael call up.”
“Wyatt’s not coming with her?” Wyatt is Ella’s boyfriend of a year and a half. They both work as investment analysts at Goldman Sachs in Manhattan, and Charlie likes to play tennis with Wyatt because Wyatt is good enough to be challenging but not so good that Charlie can’t have the pleasure of beating a man half his age.
I say, “Well, Ella leaves again tomorrow, so it’s such a short visit. Will you have a good day today and be careful?” I say this to Charlie every morning. You would think—I would have thought—there would be an entirely different vocabulary that a president and a first lady would use, one that encompassed the constant possibility of national or international disaster, the weight of a country. And there’s White House jargon—FLOTUS and pool spray and “the football”—but it turns out that for the most part, we make do with the same words we’ve always used.
“I love you, Lindy,” Charlie says. It is six-twenty, and from here, he will go for breakfast in the Family Dining Room, where Hank and Debbie Bell, a senior adviser, will be waiting for him; they meet daily and call themselves the Oatmealers. From the dining room, Charlie will move on to the Oval Office for his briefings and then go directly to the South Lawn for the short ride on
to Andrews Air Force Base and the longer plane flight to Columbus. (Punctuality has been a major point of pride with Charlie during both his administrations.)
He always reminds me in this early-morning moment of an actor going onstage, an insurance salesman, or perhaps the owner of the hardware store who landed the starring role in the community-theater production of
Oh, how I want to protect him! Oh, the outlandishness of our lives, familiar now and routine, but still so deeply strange. “I love you, too,” I say.
____
THIS IS THE
part everyone already knows: that in the year 2000, Charlie won the presidential election by a narrower margin than any other candidate in U.S. history, that in fact his opponent received more popular votes while Charlie received more electoral ones; that the final decision was made by the Supreme Court, who voted 5–4 in Charlie’s favor; that at his inauguration in January 2001, he made a pledge to work in an inclusive, bipartisan fashion, a pledge I believe he intended to keep; that eight months later, terrorist attacks occurred in New York and Washington, D.C., killing close to three thousand Americans; that, first in October 2001 and again in March 2003, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of force against countries thought to be harboring terrorist leaders and weapons of mass destruction; that Charlie’s advisers and Charlie himself told the American people the war would be swift, that even as soon as six weeks after the March 2003 invasion, they assumed major combat operations were complete, as Charlie famously declared in a speech aboard a navy supercarrier, but that now, four years in, it is more bloody and chaotic than ever. Over three thousand American troops have died, the same number killed in the terrorist attacks, and close to twenty-five thousand have been wounded. As for foreign civilians, estimates range from seventy thousand deaths to ten times that. Every day, there are car bombs and suicide bombs, gun-men shooting police officers, mortar strikes on homes and schools, sniper fire outside mosques, decapitations at checkpoints. These days, Charlie and his defenders speak of freedom, of reshaping a region and shifting an ideology, of finishing what they started instead of cutting and running; his critics speak of quagmires and civil war. Some of those who were once his defenders have become his critics.
When we went to sleep at four
A.M.
on November 8, 2000, I didn’t think Charlie had won the election, and I was both sorry for him and relieved for us, for our family. I hadn’t wanted him to run for governor of Wisconsin in 1994, and I hadn’t wanted him to run for president. What we’d mostly lost already—the option of shopping at the grocery store, quietly eating dinner at a restaurant, going for a walk alone or with a friend, or just spending a Saturday reading and cleaning the house, without obligations—I knew we’d lose completely if Charlie became president. I did not want the exposure, the forfeiture of our privacy and our last ties to ordinary life.
When the election wasn’t decided for over a month, we laid low in the governor’s mansion in Madison; I read, went to friends’ houses for lunch, and attended a few gatherings for groups I’d become involved with as first lady of
