Wisconsin, while Charlie and Hank Ucker and various advisers and lawyers and relatives held urgent, secretive meetings and avoided the media. When, on December 12, after recounts and lawsuits, Charlie was declared president, I thought,
There would be risks, but we’d ride out the presidency as we’d ride out a tornado watch: Keep your head down, cross your arms over the crown of your skull. Not literally, of course—literally, what I’d do would be to comply with all that was public and obligatory, to show up when I was expected to show up—but that was how I’d think of it. For at least four years and likely for eight, I’d hold my breath, waiting for it to pass, and eventually, it would. A tornado is disruptive, but it never lasts.
But I hadn’t considered—how could I not have?—the circumstances under which Charlie and I had gotten engaged. In the middle of a storm, he had left his apartment and climbed into his car and driven through the lightning and hail, he had swooped down the basement steps of the house I lived in and proposed marriage. He’d defied the tornado that day, not run from it. And look—it had worked. Here we were, still happily married all these years later.
What I had projected onto Charlie at the beginning of his presidency was my own wish not to cause a stir, not to attract undue attention or assert myself, when Charlie
asserting himself. I know there are those who suggest he, or some shadow entity of his administration, planned the terrorist attacks, and I consider such an idea ludicrous, unworthy of discussion. But it is indisputable that he responded; he took on the challenge. Did he conflate the terrorist attacks with the separate and lesser threats coming from the country we invaded in March 2003, when the attacks and the threats were then unconnected, and did he encourage the public to conflate them as well? Was the invasion only for oil, Charlie’s vows to spread democracy mere lip service? Was he quicker to enter a war than he would have been if he’d had military experience himself instead of having spent the late sixties and early seventies working as a ski instructor? These are accusations his opponents level at him, and while they are fair questions, what I dislike most about the political conversation is its pretense that a correct answer exists for anything, that it’s not all murkiness and subjectivity. I didn’t know in the days leading up to the March 2003 invasion whether I thought invading was right or wrong, I didn’t know if I agreed with the hawks or the protestors holding candlelight vigils. As in college, when I had neither supported nor condemned the Vietnam War, my inactivity stemmed from uncertainty rather than indifference. But not knowing what I thought, I did not try to influence my husband. There were plenty of people advising him, men and women (though mostly men) who’d spent decades as foreign policy experts, who in earlier times had traveled to this very country, met with this very dictator.
Now over four years have passed since the invasion. That a war once supported by 70 percent of Americans has become divisive and unpopular has served only to make Charlie more resolute; in the circular fashion of such things, it is about being resolute that he is most resolute of all. The average American doesn’t have access to the intelligence Charlie does, he points out; the average American has become coddled and forgetful, unaccustomed to bloodshed or sacrifice. Think of the Revolutionary War, Charlie says, think of the Civil War, think of World War II. There is a price we must pay for democracy, and it has always been so. Nine months ago, in September 2006, Charlie said at a press conference, “To withdraw right now would be to surrender, and I wouldn’t surrender even if Alice and Snowflake were the only ones left supporting me.” (Snowflake is, of course, our cat; he was also my “co- author” on
an indignity either increased or lessened, I’ve never been sure which, by the fact that though we shared credit and all proceeds went to a national literacy program, I wrote no more of the book than Snowflake did.)
Since Charlie’s inauguration, I have made endless calculations: We are 10 percent finished with his time in office. We have 394 weeks left. We have five and a half years. From the beginning, I assumed his reelection not because I wanted it but the opposite. It is what we most desire that we’re afraid to count on; it’s always so much easier to believe in an eventuality you’d rather avoid.
The speeches Charlie gives, and my own as well, the fund-raisers and the funerals, the state visits and the balls, the ribbon cuttings and the receiving lines and the hundreds of letters that I write and receive every week—I am always checking them off a great list, counting down. It’s not that I don’t enjoy any of the responsibilities I bear as first lady. I do, and I feel grateful. I’ve met legends of art and literature, kings and queens and chieftains and an emperor, I’ve visited sixty-four countries, sampled beluga blinis on a ship on the Neva River, ridden a camel at the pyramids of Giza, waded in the waters of Pangkor Laut (I didn’t swim, because I didn’t wish to appear in a bathing suit before the cameras). At the airport in Asmara, Eritrea, where I had traveled without Charlie, local women threw popcorn at me as a welcoming gesture; at an orphanage in Bangalore, I donned a sari and read
to the children, accompanied by a Kannada translator; and in Helsinki, after a marvelous evening of conversation and a feast of crayfish, reindeer meat, and cloudberry layer cake, I committed a faux pas I could blame only on jet lag by saying, in a public toast to Finland’s president, that I would always remember the kindness of the Swedish people. I have had the surreal experience of holding the Bible upon which my husband was sworn in as president (I was very moved, and at the same time, inappropriately, the line from the old folk song “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” which Ella had learned as a child, kept replaying in my head: “Without my Uncle Rat’s consent, I wouldn’t marry the president . . . ”), and I have had the equally surreal experience of returning to Theodora Liess Elementary School, where I’d worked in Madison, for the school’s rededication as the Alice Blackwell School. (I hoped that Theodora, the nineteenth-century daughter of a director of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad and herself an outspoken advocate of educating Ojibwe girls, would forgive me; to decline the school’s honor seemed impolite.)
I have often felt a pang at not being able to share the more colorful of my experiences with my grandmother; what a hoot she would find my life, how she’d relish the gossipy details. But Charlie and I have included many of our relatives and longtime friends in the pleasures of our unexpected circumstances: For the eightieth birthday of my Madison friend Rita Alwin, I flew her to Washington and had her stay in the Lincoln Bedroom (on the plane out, she wore my mother’s garnet brooch, which touched me). One Christmas Day, Charlie, Ella, my mother, Jadey, Arthur, their two grown children, and I spent a delightfully raucous afternoon in the White House bowling alley (we don’t travel for the actual holiday to Wisconsin because we don’t want our Secret Service agents to be away from their families). And, among other political appointees, Charlie made our friend Cliff Hicken—a steadfast campaign fund- raiser—ambassador of France, so I’ve ended up having several wonderful visits in Paris with Kathleen, the two of us jaunting around to restaurants and museums and fashionable shops.
If the life Charlie and I share is prescribed and demanding, it is also privileged and fascinating. We are now and will always be members of a tiny club. And really, my own pleasure in or aversion to our status is irrelevant; it exists and cannot be unmade. We are famous, and when Charlie leaves office, we’ll be famous emeritus.
Today will, no doubt, be a day of drama and obligations, but it will be a day like any other; all our days now are days of drama and obligations. Three miles away, Edgar Franklin waits—futilely, I fear—to talk to Charlie; also
