Cody Keenan - Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America

For Kristen

And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

JAMES BALDWIN

Contents

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO SNOW TWO DAYS BEFORE THE SPEECH. I stumbled out of bed and pulled aside the window shade, hoping the city would be covered in a fresh blanket of white.

Nothing. Damn it. I let the shade fall closed and grabbed my phone, swiping for that one email that would define the day, wondering how many other people across the city were doing the samehow many working parents were praying schools would stay open, how many young staffers were hoping offices would close.

I was in a strange hybrid position: I wanted to get the day off and to go to work.

I got my wish: The federal government had declared March 5, 2015, a snow day. Not for a dome of polar chill that often pierced my lungs growing up in Chicago, not for the three-footers of heavy stuff I trudged through to grad school in Cambridge, not for the squalls of ice particles that sandblasted my face while canvassing for votes in Iowa. Just a solid four to seven late-winter inches on the way. Just enough for snow-phobic authorities to preemptively keep a couple hundred thousand employees off the District of Columbias roads.

It offered the opening I was hoping for: unfettered access to the president of the United States.

I showered, dressed, and followed a lumbering salt truck down a quiet 14th Street to my office for the past six years: the White House.

Barack Obama stepped from the Colonnade into the West Wing, dusting a few of the days first flakes from his single-breasted, two-button charcoal suit crafted by his favorite Chicago tailor. His white shirt bore vertical gray stripes; his tie was a British regimental patternstripes running from left shoulder to right waistin alternating shades of black, white, and gray. All were neatly pressed. He gripped a white foam cup embossed with a gold presidential seal. Hed worn no overcoat for the short commute from the Residence; to walk the length of the Rose Garden took about fifteen seconds. More snowflakes snuck in past him, a few spoiling his freshly polished Johnston & Murphys, black with a modern toe. Hed shaved within the hour.

Can you believe this shit? His expression mirrored his tone. For someone who chided his speechwriters when he found a rhetorical question in his speeches, Barack Obama didnt hesitate to deploy them in private. Chicago never shut down for a little snow!

Thats because were awesome, sir, I replied, affirming our shared Windy City bona fides from a red velvet armchair against the wall.

Id been waiting with his two assistants, who were already at their desks in what we called the outer Oval Office, a small room tucked between the West Wing hallway and the Oval Office that functioned as a control tower of sorts, where, with the presidents complete trust, they managed his meetings and his arrivals and departures to and from every event on his schedule.

Brian Mosteller, the director of Oval Office operations, was a man equally as fastidious as his boss in his professional appearance, and even more so in his professional demeanor; if he was at his station, he was a touch taciturn, even if he liked you. His passion was the work behind the workhow an event was staged, how a president knew where to go and when, how a speech got from words on a screen to printed pages on a lectern. From his desk, he could see the president at his. Brian was the only person who could boast that, even though he never would.

Ferial Govashiri, born in Tehran, raised in Orange County, California, and barely past thirty years old, acted as the presidents private switchboard and managed the intersection of his personal and professional lives. She sat closer to the door of the Oval Office and balanced out Brians reticence with her perpetual cheer and perfectly timed eye rolls.

Obama handed some files to Brian and strode past me. Come on, Cody.

I stood up and frowned at my own shoes, the same dull, scarred, brown leather monk straps I wore every day, making a mental note to buy a replacement pair now that a squishy sock betrayed a brand-new hole in the right sole. Sneaking a glance in the gold-framed mirror hung over a console topped with fresh flowers and the mornings arrangement of newspapers, I scanned my shapeless navy suit, rumpled blue shirt, and fraying black tie. It was my favorite outfit.

I smiled at Ferial, who gave me a wink as I trailed the president of the United States into the Oval Office.

The first time you walk into the Oval, your mouth goes dry. It happens to everybody. You think youll be ready for it; after all, its the one room in the West Wing that movies and television dramas take pains to get right. But youre not ready for it. The gravitas of it squeezes the air from your lungs like pressure at the sea floor. The quality of the light is different, sharper somehow, like you just walked onto live television, everyones watching you, and everything thats about to happen carries more weight than it would anywhere else. If your self-importance swells while ascending the White House driveway for a meeting with the president, the Oval Office punctures it right away.

Its the best home-court advantage in the world, and Obama pressed that advantage. He kept the temperature a little too warmpleasant for someone who had spent his first eighteen years between the 22nd Parallels, maybe, but enough to make everyone else fidget. He chose furniture that forced guests to sit awkwardly: If he beckoned you to the antique chair by the Resolute Desk, youd sit two inches too low and at an angle that made you crane your neck to face him, like a dancer frozen midleap; if he motioned you to the caramel couches, plush and deep and maligned by critics as reminiscent of basement hand-me-downs, you could either perch on the edge, back straight, like the class goody two-shoes, or slouch like a child who didnt want to be called on.

By my seventh year in the Obama White House, thoughand my third year as his chief speechwriterthe Oval Office and I had an understanding. Id set my laptop on the infinity-edged mica coffee tablecalled out by the New York Times as extremely contemporaryand grab a Honeycrisp apple from the one-of-a-kind, hand-turned wooden bowl, then wait to see where he wanted to sit. If he stayed behind his desk, Id walk over and remain standing in front of him, ignoring the short, rigid chair. If he walked toward his high-backed chair by the fireplace, Id fluff two of the couchs overstuffed throw pillows and stack them behind me so that I could sit comfortably, like a normal human. Being in the room didnt intimidate me anymore.

I couldnt, however, say the same about my job. To be a speechwriter for Barack Obama is fucking terrifying.

Okay, show me what youve got, the president said as he settled behind the thirteen-hundred-pound, oak-timbered Resolute Desk. He took a sip of his Lipton with honey and lemon and let out an exaggerated Ahhhhhhh. He raised his eyebrows and offered an ironic smile. Apparently Ive got a lot of time today.

I smiled backnot at him, but to myself. His cleared schedule was why I had come to work rather than climb back into bed. The snow day was my scheme to heist as much of his time on the front end of a big speech as I could, and maybe even coax a little more collaboration from him than usual. Id take all the help I could get to avoid faceplanting on a big speechespecially one that would tread the thorny subject of race in America.

On March 7, 1965, a group of protestersmostly young, mostly Blackset out to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery with a simple demand: the right to vote.