It was a crystal-clear September morning, comfortably warm but not hot or humid—as beautiful as the day Ian and I were married almost exactly nine years earlier. I was looking forward to celebrating our anniversary the next day. Driving into the office with the top down and radio turned up in my red Honda S2000 (my “premature midlife crisis,” as I called it), the sunny skies and balmy warmth gave me one more reason to feel grateful for the latest developments in our lives.
Nine months earlier, on January 20, 2001, after eight years at the White House and State Department under President Clinton, I had left government, exhausted and ready to downshift. My son, Jake, was three and a half and had only known a mother who commuted to Africa with excessive frequency. Within a week after I left government, Jake said to me, “Mommy, I hated that job. I’m really glad it’s over.” Taken aback by his brutal honesty and self-awareness, I was also deeply grateful that he had the sensitivity to wait until after I left government to tell me how he really felt. One week earlier and I would have crumpled in tears.
It had taken me some time to reenter the real world. I had some immediate priorities: buy a cell phone for the first time; get my first personal email address; familiarize myself with using the internet, then a relatively new tool that I had ignored while in government; get a trainer and exercise regularly. Above all, I wanted to spend time with my son and try to have a second child. I knew I didn’t want to go back to work right away. I wanted to sleep, travel, and reflect.
For much of 2001, I managed to decompress and tend to the home front. We moved from our compact townhome in D.C.’s hip Adams Morgan neighborhood in the thick of city life—where we would wake occasionally to find a knife, errant passport, or a homeless person in our front yard—to the leafy, spacious area called Kent, in the far western corner of the city. We bought and decorated our current house, a property with plenty of space and a backyard pool, large deck, and grassy play area.
It was then, shortly after this move, on an otherwise exquisite morning in September as I drove to Georgetown, where I briefly consulted part-time at a start-up, that our world was shaken to the core.
Without warning or premonition, NPR’s breaking news caused me to accelerate inadvertently as my heart skipped a beat. At about 9:15 a.m., Bob Edwards interrupted the regularly scheduled Morning Edition programming and reported that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had each been struck by an aircraft. Flashing back to the near simultaneous bombings of our African embassies in August 1998, I knew immediately it must be Al Qaeda. It was an attack on the heart of New York City and a far deadlier do-over of the same target the Blind Sheikh had hit in 1993 eight years earlier.
Shortly before 10 a.m., after I arrived at the office, the first of the towers began to collapse, followed some thirty minutes later by the second. Already, the Pentagon had been struck. The State Department, White House, and Capitol were being evacuated for fear of yet another plane incoming to Washington. My mind immediately turned to my four-year-old son, Jake, who I was relieved to recall was safely at home with our nanny, Adela, since he only attended preschool in the afternoon. Ian was at the ABC News Bureau in Washington, and I realized he would probably be gone overnight as the networks would have to provide 24/7 coverage. I worried next about colleagues in the Pentagon and friends who were career employees at the White House and State, with whom I had worked intensively until just months ago. They all could be in the bull’s-eye.
Like every American, I was shocked, horrified, and furious but not entirely surprised. Al Qaeda was a formidable and committed adversary, as I had learned firsthand. What I, like many others, did not fully anticipate was the extent of their capacity to strike on American soil.
For weeks, planes stopped flying in and out of Washington. The border with Canada was shut. Bilateral trade, our shared lifeblood, ground to a halt. No one traveled. Muslims became targets of intensive, irrational ire. And we went to war in Afghanistan.
This first foreign attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor stoked outsize fear and unfounded suspicions. Still, I never anticipated it would touch me so directly. Until the Washington blame game began.
To deflect responsibility from the new Bush administration, its surrogates sought to blame Clinton administration officials and its holdovers who remained in government, notably my first boss at the NSC and counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, whom they falsely accused of failing to warn them adequately about the Al Qaeda threat. It got quite ugly, as Bush officials were blamed for ignoring intelligence warnings, Clinton officials were accused of missing opportunities to capture or kill bin Laden, and Congress established a joint investigative committee. Later, the independent 9/11 Commission was formed.
In December, a British freelance writer, David Rose, published an explosive article in the January 2002 edition of Vanity Fair entitled “The Osama Files.” He falsely accused me, as well as Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, of essentially being responsible for the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks. When I first saw the article, my blood boiled and skin crawled. I found it an outrageously deceitful and irresponsible excuse for investigative reporting and couldn’t believe Vanity Fair would publish such a hit job. The article began:
September 11 might have been prevented if the U.S. had accepted Sudan’s offers to share its intelligence files on Osama bin Laden and the growing al-Qaeda threat. Recently unearthed documents reveal that the Clinton administration repeatedly rejected the help of a country it unwisely perceived as an enemy.
Specifically, Rose alleged that I, with Berger’s and Albright’s assent, refused repeated offers by the government of Sudan to provide the U.S. government with Sudanese intelligence files that, had we only accepted, would have provided invaluable information about Al Qaeda operatives and their network. Thus, we would have been able to take down the terrorist organization. The accusation was basically that I refused the purported Sudanese offers or ordered others to refuse them, because of my irrational and implacable hatred of the Sudanese regime.
It was a wholly baseless and dishonest allegation, put forward by two self-avowed opponents of U.S. policy and of me personally, which benefitted the extremist government of Sudan. Nonetheless, given the breathtaking nature of the charge—that I was responsible for the deaths of over three thousand Americans in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil—it gained attention on CNN and elsewhere.
Albright, Berger, former undersecretary of state Tom Pickering, and I published a detailed rebuttal, the contents of which I also summarized on television shortly after the article was published. We wrote in the March 2002 edition of Vanity Fair:
The fact is members of the Clinton administration met repeatedly with Sudanese-government officials to seek their full cooperation on counterterrorism issues, both prior to the suspension of our full-time embassy operations in Khartoum in February 1996 and in the years thereafter.
U.S.-government representatives met with Sudanese officials on terrorism issues on multiple occasions from 1996 to 2001 in venues ranging from Addis Ababa and Khartoum to Virginia, Washington, D.C., and New York. In none of those meetings, despite repeated U.S. requests for detailed information on bin Laden’s network, finances, and operatives and on other terrorist organizations, did the government of Sudan [G.O.S] hand over its alleged files or provide detailed information deemed of significant operational value by U.S.-government counterterrorism, law-enforcement, or C.I.A. officials. …
Since May 2000, the U.S. has had a full-time counterterrorism team in Khartoum for the precise purpose of obtaining detailed information from Sudan on terrorism. That Khartoum also apparently failed to share these alleged documents at any time prior to September 11, including with the Bush administration for more than eight months, suggests that Khartoum had no intention of sharing this information with the U.S. It seemingly did so only after September 11, fearing U.S. retaliation.
As false and outlandish as the claims against me were, it was still hard to fathom them. Former U.S. ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, who could never conceal his dislike for me and my Clinton administration colleagues, was a key, on-the-record accuser. Carney seemed to me to be seeking revenge for what he believed to be my role in closing his embassy in Khartoum in 1996 and for our disagreements over Sudan policy.
His sidekick was a Pakistani American businessman, Mansoor Ijaz, who had oil interests in Sudan. A generous donor to the Clinton presidential campaigns, he was apparently frustrated that he had failed to parlay his money into policy influence. Ijaz attempted to carry messages between the Sudanese leadership and the White House, and after the White House refused to utilize him as a private channel, I believe he became embittered enough to try to blame me and other Clinton officials for 9/11. Carney and Ijaz were joined in their defamatory allegations by a paid lobbyist for Sudan and senior Sudanese government officials. Sudan no doubt feared that President Bush might attack it again after 9/11 and therefore sought to absolve itself of any responsibility for harboring bin Laden by trying to shift culpability for their lack of counterterrorism cooperation to former U.S. officials.
In May 2002, almost six months after the Vanity Fair article, a reporter for Elle magazine, Ruth Shalit, published an investigative report “J’Accuse!” in which she interviewed me and several of my accusers. The article exposed the biases of Carney, Ijaz, and even Rose (whom I’ve never met) through their own on-the-record quotes, which revealed their desire to take me down personally. David Rose told Shalit that I was “a lying toad.” Ijaz told her:
She had dreams of becoming the first African-American Secretary of State. To build her career, she was willing to ignore every single indication that the Sudan might be willing to come forward and become a member of the family of nations again. She used her blackness, if I may put it that way, to climb a ladder that ultimately ran out of rungs. Never again! Never again should we allow a U.S. government official to allow her personal views on a country to enter into the policy-making realm.
Similarly, Carney said to Shalit, “You’ve got people saying September 11 wouldn’t have happened.… She [Rice] was seen as someone of enormous potential, but she’s seriously damaged her prospects as a result of being so completely wrong on the Sudan question. There’s no doubt about it.” Shalit also revealed that former CIA operative Milton Bearden, a key unnamed source for Rose and a registered lobbyist for Sudan, was paid $1.35 million by another American, Anis Haggar, an honorary consul for Sudan. Carney was also shown to be close to Haggar and to have taken money from him for travel and expenses for trips to Africa.
Perhaps frustrated that “The Osama Files” had lost traction, Ijaz and Carney wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in June 2002 that provided new fodder for right-wing attacks on Bill Clinton. In the Post, they again targeted me and others, recycling the “Osama Files” claims and falsely alleging that, in 1996, Sudan had offered to hand over bin Laden to the U.S., implying that Berger and others had failed to take up the offer.
Together, these men leveled an audacious and sustained assault on me and my superiors. Their attacks ultimately failed to rehabilitate Khartoum or to sink my career, but not before causing considerable pain. This was my first time in the barrel—my maiden national hazing—in which I faced a public assault on my integrity and competence. It was both shocking and painful to be the subject of vicious lies, and particularly to be blamed for such a horrific and deadly event. The depth of the hate reflected in the attacks on me left me reeling at first. Being publicly vilified was a new and bracing experience. Once I absorbed the blow, my pain turned to anger, as it often has since childhood, and then to resolve—to fight for the truth and press on. In the process, I began developing the emotional body armor I didn’t know I would need in the future.
Fortunately, facts are facts (or they used to be). The 9/11 Commission examined the allegation that Sudan had offered to turn over bin Laden to the U.S. and concluded that it was unfounded. The Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 specifically examined the Vanity Fair allegations that I and other Clinton Administration officials had refused Sudan’s offer of intelligence files on Al Qaeda. According to a principal staffer on the Inquiry, Daniel Byman, “after many interviews and the review of numerous documents, the Joint Inquiry established that many of the claims in the article had little merit, including the allegation that Dr. Rice and other senior Administration officials refused an offer of serious cooperation. The Joint Inquiry’s review also found no evidence that this supposed offer of help from Sudan in the late 1990s would have prevented the 9/11 attacks.”
Carney and crew’s smears lost steam for almost a decade, until my dedicated detractors seized a subsequent opportunity to try to block my ascent.
While in the Clinton administration, I poured the last dirt on the grave of my youthful political ambitions. I discovered that as an assistant secretary (of state or most agencies), one typically has more policy influence and decision-making authority than all but the most senior senators. With direct, line responsibility for distinct areas of policy, plus a budget and staff who carry out those policies, you have much greater ability to determine outcomes than through the cumbersome and uncertain legislative process, or even by exercising oversight responsibility. For a lot less pain, and far more gain, I could make policy without running for office, raising money, or compromising my principles.
At age thirty-six, I had already had significant experience in national security policymaking; but, down the road, I hoped to serve at more senior ranks—eventually at the cabinet level. To do that, I had to broaden my knowledge and expertise beyond Africa and be accepted as someone who could contribute on foreign policy globally. Making this transition would not be easy. Most former regional assistant secretaries of state continue to work primarily in their original area of expertise after they leave government—whether in the private sector, academia, or think tanks—seemingly content to stick with the region they know best.
I needed to forge a different path.
After a recuperative period of low-intensity consulting and speaking, in the fall of 2002 I decided to join the Brookings Institution, an esteemed, nonpartisan think tank, as a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program. From the time I left government, my mother had been pressing me to pursue the think tank life, arguing that it would grant me personal and intellectual freedom, good colleagues, a distinguished affiliation, a public platform, and a solid salary. She was right.
More importantly, Brookings enabled me to conduct scholarly research, write, and opine on a broad range of subjects, including but not limited to Africa. Long experienced with the menace of Al Qaeda, I was one of the very few scholars at Brookings to openly oppose the Iraq War. From the start, I viewed that war of choice as a dangerous diversion from the main objective of defeating Al Qaeda globally and in Afghanistan, one that would open a Pandora’s box in the Middle East.
While at Brookings, I traveled to Asia and the Middle East, expanding my understanding of the policy challenges and opportunities these regions posed. My friend and former colleague in the Clinton administration Kurt Campbell, who had served in the Defense Department as the senior Asia policy advisor, invited me to travel with groups of experts to China, Australia, and Singapore. He also opened the door to my joining the Aspen Strategy Group, an annual bipartisan gathering of current and former senior officials who spend several August days delving deeply into complex policy issues.
Through Brookings, I joined working groups focused on Europe and the Persian Gulf. I wrote articles, policy briefs, and op-eds, and gave speeches, interviews, and congressional testimony on a wide range of subjects. My in-depth research focused on measuring state weakness as well as the nexus between fragile states, global poverty, and transnational threats to U.S. national security. This work drew on my experience working on Africa but applied it to global challenges. My years at Brookings enabled me to broaden my expertise, while allowing me flexibility to travel, serve on numerous nonprofit boards—including the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, the Beauvoir School (following in my mother’s footsteps), and the National Democratic Institute—and, best of all, to grow my family.
To Ian and me, it felt that over the first five years of our marriage, circumstances continually conspired to separate the two of us. After moving from Toronto to Washington in 1993, when I joined the Clinton administration, Ian was able to work in the CBC’s Washington Bureau; but by 1995 he had been called back to Toronto for a promotion as senior producer of The National. Most weekends, Ian made the trip to Washington and, occasionally, I returned the visit to Canada. Long-distance marriage was tedious but not unfamiliar to us after years of living apart. We didn’t plan to tolerate a commuter marriage forever, but there seemed no obvious end in sight, as we both were doing professionally what we wished. Ian still liked the CBC, and despite several efforts had not been able to secure a comparable job at an American television network. Moving back to Canada was not an option I seriously considered so long as I had the opportunity to work at the White House. So, we resolved to endure the distance for the time being.
Then, in 1997, the Almighty, it seemed, intervened yet again. He sent Jake to save us from ourselves. Jake’s welcome arrival accelerated our return to living under one roof. Just prior to Jake’s birth, Ian moved back to D.C., making the first of many professional sacrifices and fulfilling another of his parents’ fears about our marriage. The next year, Ian transitioned from the CBC to ABC News’s Washington Bureau, where he worked as a producer for World News Tonight; yet it took several years to regain the seniority that he had given up at the CBC. Ian knew that for my career to reach its potential, I had to be in Washington. He also knew that his own career could thrive in the U.S. once he made the move to an American network. In effect, Ian generously made a long-term bet on me.
If marrying Ian is the best decision I ever made, Jake jump-starting our family is our greatest blessing. God has a sense of irony and humor, and Jake is proof. From birth when he had a reparable but delicate condition that required three surgeries and tricky postoperative care, to college where he became known for his outspoken leadership as a conservative, Jake has challenged us every step of the way.
Born jaundiced and skinny with gorilla-length arms, Jake developed unevenly as a child. He was plainly very smart, with a powerful memory and strong verbal skills. To this day, whatever he is fascinated by becomes an all-consuming passion. He absorbs everything there is to know about his passions—beginning when he was pre-verbal and pointed insistently with his middle finger at every ceiling fan in sight, to his serial obsessions with the Teletubbies, Thomas the Tank Engine, dinosaurs, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, every living mammal, the U.S. presidents (which he could recite in order, forwards and backwards), polls and election results in almost every congressional district from 2008 to the present, world geography, and now finance, birdwatching, and the intricacies of various policy issues, foreign and domestic.
Jake’s interest in world affairs began early, and I took advantage of my post at Brookings to expose him to events and people of interest. There was no one I was more keen to introduce him to than former South African president Nelson Mandela. When in 2005 a slower moving, yet still-sharp Mandela came to Brookings, Jake and I sat very near the front of the audience. In the middle of his discussion with Strobe Talbott, Brookings’s president, Mandela suddenly paused and, for no apparent reason, interrupted himself. He looked directly at Jake (wearing his little coat and tie) and said in his distinctive South African brogue, “Young man, are you the president of this country?”
Taken aback but not knocked off his game, Jake replied, “No sir, not yet.”
Mandela seemed amused by Jake’s answer, which I too thought was cute at the time, but his ready retorts seem less so these days, given how my son’s political views have evolved. After the event, Jake was thrilled to shake Mandela’s hand before giving his first press interview at age nine to the French news service Agence France-Press about his reaction to meeting the great Madiba, which he likened to meeting Martin Luther King Jr.
We applied Jake to three top D.C.-area private schools for prekindergarten. At four, his first visit was to the Georgetown Day School, a progressive coed school with an excellent reputation, and he distinguished himself. Jake walked into the school for the “play group” interview and marched straight up to the director of admissions. No sooner had I introduced him than he blurted out with intensity, “I hate this school!” He spent the next half hour in the play group refusing to talk to anyone, totally disengaged. At that stage, the director of admissions gently suggested that perhaps we would prefer to come back another day.
I was livid. When we got outside the school, I gave Jake the harshest talking-to that he received from me until he reached maturity: “You don’t have to like a place, but you are not allowed to be rude. If you pull that trick the next time at Sidwell Friends or Beauvoir, you will be in bigger trouble than you have ever been.” Steaming, I marched him to the car and drove home furiously. As I calmed down, I recalled with some amusement that retribution is fair play: Jake had tormented me (with a little more spice) just as I had my mother when at the same age I refused to speak until the last seconds of my interview at Beauvoir. Jake pulled it together for his subsequent interviews, and now we both laugh at this episode.
In his early elementary years, Jake initially had difficulty with catching, throwing, and other gross motor skills. During youth soccer, Jake was easily distracted by birds and never much took to the game. Tennis finally caught Jake’s interest around age ten, an attraction perhaps spurred more by the views of his libertarian coach than by any deep passion for the family sport.
In second grade, Jake’s teachers at the Beauvoir School were puzzled and concerned by the gap they observed between his evident capacity in the classroom and his abysmal results on every standardized test. He had also been slow to read until a savvy teacher found some history books that grabbed him. The school recommended we get Jake tested professionally, and the results revealed that Jake had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) in addition to certain executive function and sensory processing challenges, the latter of which had affected his gross motor coordination.
In the context of this testing, Jake’s pediatrician Dr. Amy Pullman decided out of an abundance of caution to require a cardiological exam before she prescribed any ADD medication, which is a stimulant. She worried, in part, that Jake (and possibly Ian), both tall and slender with long arms and legs, might have Marfan syndrome (aka Abe Lincoln disease), a genetic disorder that is characterized by their tall, lean body type and can cause the aorta, heart valve, and eyes to degenerate dangerously. The exams ruled out Marfan for both Jake and Ian but revealed by chance that Jake had another rare condition: Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome, in which the heart is wired with an extra electrical pathway that causes it to beat rapidly. In its most severe form, WPW can kill unexpectedly (often during the late teens or twenties), when the heart is stressed by physical exertion or stimulated by drugs like cocaine or ADD meds. Jake needed cardiac ablation, an invasive heart procedure to determine the severity of the WPW and to “zap” the extra electrical pathway in order to return the heart to normal function.
Bewildered and scared, I took Jake up to Boston Children’s Hospital shortly after he finished second grade to be treated by one of the country’s leading pediatric cardiologists. As it happened, Jake’s doctors determined during the ablation that he had the worst form of WPW, placing him at high risk of death. To our enormous relief, they readily fixed Jake’s heart, and he now has a normal life expectancy due to the hyper-vigilance of his extraordinary pediatrician.
After the heart scare, Jake’s medical issues abated. With tutoring, physical therapy, medication, and extreme determination, Jake steadily overcame his challenges, blossoming as a high schooler at the Maret School into a top student, a leader among his peers, and a member of the varsity tennis team.
Maris was born on a snowy day in early December 2002. Jake’s insistence on the previously unheard-of name “Maris” prevailed over our dithering indecision, after our OB-GYN, Dr. Sharon Malone, blew up our planned girl’s name by casually mentioning that she had delivered three “Sophia’s” in just one day the week prior. The day Maris arrived, I was scheduled to meet with the prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, along with Gayle Smith and Tony Lake. Meles was visiting Washington to meet with President Bush, and we had planned an informal visit, one of our first since the end of the Ethiopian-Eritrean War, two years prior, when most of our discussions were all business. When I had to cancel, the prime minister, Gayle, and Tony decided to drive through the snow to visit me at Sibley Hospital just two hours after Maris had emerged robust, ample, and charming from the start.
Five-year-old Jake, ever protective if sometimes smothering of his baby sister, objected when during Meles’s visit the nurse came around to announce she was taking his sister away for a changing. He protested loudly, “Please don’t CHANGE the baby!”
By Christmas, three weeks later, Maris had firmly established herself as a force within our family. Even as an infant, she exuded a wisdom and cool confidence that prompted my mom to predict that Maris would prove payback to me for my strong-willed challenges to her over the years. (Turns out, she was wrong about Maris but right about payback—belatedly, from Jake). Several friends, who first met Maris before she could even utter a word, observed that she gave the uncanny impression of “having been here before.” Her facial expressions and body language spoke volumes before she could, revealing even her presidential preferences. When, at eighteen months in the summer of 2004, I said the words “George Bush,” Maris would grimace and frown in mock anger. When I said “John Kerry,” she would smile broadly, raise her arms, and clap in approval. I swear I didn’t teach her that, but I can’t pretend that I didn’t encourage this display once I discovered her talent.
As a baby, Maris ate readily, slept through the night at an early age (unlike Jake), and rarely cried without reason. At her first medical examination at one week old, our pediatrician touched her hairline and matter-of-factly observed, “She’s going to be blond.”
Stunned, I blurted uncontrollably: “Get the fuck out of here!”
Dr. Pullman looked at me impassively, glanced over at Ian knowingly, and replied, “You should have thought of that when you married him.”
Stung and ashamed by my stereotypical expectations, I let the discussion of hair drop. When Maris’s hair started growing in earnest, to our surprise it was no-kidding red before changing to blond. I admit to hoping and assuming that I would have children who looked a bit more like me. Ian’s genes skunked mine, twice over.
At Brookings, I had ample freedom not to travel and was able to breast-feed Maris much longer than Jake. When she was fourteen months old, I took my first extended trip away from her to a conference in Italy. While abroad, I continued pumping (this time I brought a backup, just in case) and returned home five or six days later, eager to resume feedings. When I greeted Maris that afternoon, she was a little standoffish, but I didn’t make much of it. After a short period of reacclimation, I lay her down on my lap to breast-feed. She bit me so forcefully and unexpectedly that I screamed in pain. My scream caused her to cry, and we both were hot messes.
Rattled, I left it alone for several hours. That night, as usual, I took Maris upstairs to her room, and with the lights dimmed I held her closely on my lap in the rocking chair. After she relaxed, I offered her a bedtime feeding. After a few seconds of fussiness, Maris sat up erect on my lap, pulled down my shirt emphatically, pointed to her crib indicating that it was bedtime, and declared: “All Done!” To my surprise (and admiration), she was serious. Having so decreed, it was the end of breast-feeding.
Not since that hard bite has Maris caused me much pain. On the contrary, I can think of very few others with whom I enjoy spending time as much. Smart, sincere, self-assured, Maris gets along well with almost everyone unless you mess with her.
As younger children, Jake and Maris generally engaged nicely, despite their five-and-a-half-year age gap and their very different personalities and temperaments. As a mother, I learned early on that, with kids, like with birthday cake at a little friend’s party, you “get what you get and don’t get upset.” In other words, I believe that kids come into this world precooked to a substantial extent, with the capacity to be molded and shaped, but with much of their nature established. That humbling conclusion came hard and powerfully to me, as someone who is a roll up your sleeves and take-charge kind of leader. Without question, parents, extended family, school, and other external influences play a critical role in shaping a child. That’s why I have been a fairly hands-on parent. I have also seen how the same two parents in the same household can produce very different characters. To me, that’s part of the great joy of parenting; it keeps you on your toes, and it’s never boring. It’s also forced me to develop more patience than I would have otherwise, though still not enough.
Since Jake was born, I have viewed being a mother as my most important and rewarding job. Motherhood, I believe, has also made me a better policymaker. It has given me a sense of priority about what matters most. It has invested me more deeply in the future and in the long-term consequences of policy choices. An issue like climate change is one that concerns me deeply in any case. Still, it becomes personal when I consider the impact of our action or inaction on my children and grandchildren.
Motherhood also gave me relief from the stress of work. Nothing offered a better sense of perspective than holding my child, reading him a bedtime story, cheering her at a soccer game, or worrying about his academic challenges. The kids have always provided me both comfort and opportunities to have direct and meaningful influence on things large and small, when the problems of the world seem intractable. Moreover, nothing puts a work or policy challenge into its proper dimensions like a child’s health crisis or a very sick parent.
Ian and I have tried our best to raise healthy, self-respecting, curious children who care about others. Parenting any child is challenging but there can be additional challenges when raising self-aware, mixed-race children who must find their unique identities as white-looking black kids in privileged white environs within a majority-black city. I have wrestled with how best to imbue our kids with a sense of their history and responsibilities, when they have grown up mostly free from burden and another generation removed from the struggles of their ancestors. There are limits to what family history, book learning, travel, and service can teach. Without knowing the hurt of being serially doubted or discounted, without feeling what it’s like to be judged reflexively on the basis of their appearance, there is a potent aspect of the African American experience that I cannot adequately impart to my children. This recognition leaves me feeling that I have fallen short in an important part of parenting that is peculiarly my domain.
In tackling these and all the other challenges of child-rearing, I am blessed to have an exceptional partner in Ian, who is an actively engaged, fully committed parent beloved by our kids. We share the same values and dreams for our kids, and we are mostly a good team, even though we differ in style. I am the more strict parent, less flexible and forgiving, quicker to discipline. When Jake attempts to hijack a family vacation by compelling us all to go birding in some distant, obscure location, or Maris begs to spend nearly a month (yet again) at summer camp in the middle of her high school years when working or traveling might be better preparation for college, I am the parent who is the heavy hand and readily says “No.” Ian is gentler, more patient, and prefers to get to “yes,” but even he has limits. The kids have learned not to push him too far, because when rarely their dad gets truly angry, it is a sight to behold. Together, Ian and I produced two smart, loving kids who know their minds and are unabashed in expressing their views. Still, they remain works in progress; our jobs are far from done.
Brookings was the ideal place for me to focus on family while also expanding my foreign policy horizons and developing a more global perspective. While there, I could also engage in political activity on the side and take leaves of absence as needed. In 2004, I assisted Governor Howard Dean’s primary campaign as a very part-time outside advisor, because he was the only leading Democratic candidate to oppose the Iraq War. When he flamed out following his infamous shrieking speech after the Iowa caucuses, I sat out the rest of the primary season.
Still chastened by the crushing Dukakis loss, in the summer of 2004 I chose nonetheless to take a leave of absence from Brookings and accept a job on the Kerry campaign, because I was committed to defeating George W. Bush, particularly after his disastrous decision to invade Iraq. John Kerry was then, in my mind, a strong if imperfect candidate. His Iraq War stance was unsatisfying, mainly insofar as he claimed to be “for it before I was against it,” while his understandable focus on Vietnam seemed dated and largely irrelevant to me.
Tall, lean, and carefully coiffed with thick gray hair and angular features, Kerry not only looked the traditional part of president but he was also deeply experienced, energetic, and eager to do battle. Working with my old friend Randy Beers, I contributed to crafting Kerry’s policy positions, supported debate preparation, and co-managed our small foreign policy team. I also served as a television surrogate on foreign policy matters and liaised with our senior outside advisors. It was a far more significant role than I played on the 1988 Dukakis campaign and one that helped hone my political experience. At this stage, though I had no personal interest in running for office, I recognized that, as a political appointee, my best path back into a policy role was likely through a winning campaign.
On election evening 2004, like many campaign staffers, I flew from our headquarters in Washington up to Boston for the election night party. Unlike sixteen years before, the race this time was tight down to the wire, and the early exit polls looked good for Kerry. The Bush team, seeing the same exit polls, was reportedly downcast as they returned to Washington on Air Force One, and our side was buoyant—until about 9 p.m., when it started to seem the exit polls might be wrong. By midnight, Ohio hung in the balance and, without a come-from-behind-win there, Kerry looked cooked. In the light of morning, it was clear we had lost, and Kerry conceded.
Kerry’s defeat was even more devastating than Dukakis’s had been. This, my second outing on the team of a Massachusetts Democrat, was a far more successful campaign than my first, but it seemed to suffer from some of the same ills. These ranged from a failure to energize African American voters, a misplaced assumption that logic and integrity were sufficient for victory, and the lack of a consistent, strong counterpunch—whether on Iraq, the swift boat veterans who smeared Kerry unfairly, or charges that Kerry was a “flip-flopper.”
Notwithstanding the loss, I didn’t feel that my service on the Kerry campaign had been a waste of time or effort. It was a noble and necessary battle, fought ably on behalf of a laudable candidate, by good people. And, of course, it was during the 2004 contest that I came to meet the man, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate from the state of Illinois, who would enable me finally to say that I worked on a winning presidential bid.
After the Kerry campaign, I returned to Brookings to pursue my policy research and writing, especially on weak states and the impact of state fragility on U.S. national security, and I continued to deepen my understanding of other regions. When Senator Obama asked me in early 2007 to join his campaign and co-lead his outside foreign policy team, I had said “I am all-in,” but didn’t immediately envision how deep my involvement would become. Through 2007, I was able to balance my home life and my work at Brookings with my involvement on the campaign, which included fundraising, recruiting experts, and advising Obama on speeches, debate prep, and foreign policy matters. When the primary season began in 2008, I had to take unpaid leave from Brookings in order to serve additionally as a public surrogate and travel as requested by the campaign.
From the outset, advising Obama came easily to me. Our minds worked in similar ways (although, I hate to admit, his is keener than mine and that of any of our colleagues). Our policy instincts and values meshed almost completely; we respected each other’s intellect and could communicate plainly without pretense or polish. We both were hands-on, detail-oriented thinkers who demanded high-quality analysis and output. As I grew to know him well, it seemed I could predict with almost uncanny accuracy what he was thinking about a particular issue and even how he was likely to say it. Keeping this odd intuition to myself, I puzzled at how natural it felt to me. Eventually, I realized that this was not prescience but the fact that, more often than not, what Obama would say was very much what I was thinking and would have said myself, sometimes almost verbatim. This instinct made serving as a surrogate on his behalf a whole lot easier.
To the task of building a bench of foreign policy experts, I brought my own prior experience in government and a network of seasoned colleagues—contacts who were not readily available to a junior senator running as an upstart candidate. Like all of the early Obama supporters, these recruits joined the team for the right reasons—not because they were angling for their next job, but because they believed in the message of the candidate and the type of change he intended to bring. This kind of camaraderie and selfless devotion to mission buoyed us through the rough pre-primary season throughout 2007, when Obama consistently lagged Clinton in national polls and took some punches in early debates. Clinton had tried to portray Obama as green, unprepared for the weight of the office, and unable to unite the party.
After coming in third place to Obama in Iowa, Clinton felt she needed to go on the offensive, personally and through surrogates. And for the Obama team, losing a heartbreaker in New Hampshire meant it was time to hunker down for a grueling battle, understanding that it wasn’t going to be short or pretty.
Indeed, it got quite ugly very quickly. Clinton surrogates, including but not limited to BET founder Bob Johnson and former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, used racially tinged language to denigrate Obama. They and others variously implied that he may have dealt drugs; attended an Islamist madrassa; was Muslim and/or a foreigner; had only gotten as far as he had because he was black; and could be assassinated if elected. Former president Bill Clinton dismissed Obama’s candidacy (or, as he later insisted, Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War) as “a fairy tale,” which offended many African Americans. Following the South Carolina primary, Bill Clinton discounted Obama’s twenty-nine-point drubbing of Hillary as the result of the black vote and suggested his victory would be as fleeting as Jesse Jackson’s, saying: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”
After South Carolina, the contest became even more combative on both sides. Among other attacks, Senator Clinton and her surrogates regularly questioned whether Obama could garner the support of “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans.” The race-baiting was shocking and very dispiriting to me, as one who had been (and remains) proud to have served President Clinton and had long viewed the Clintons as supportive of African Americans. It took me some while to get over my sore feelings; but, with time and in victory, I did.
Also challenging was politics within the Democratic Party, particularly the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Many CBC members initially strongly supported Hillary, out of years of loyalty to the Clintons. Some also viewed Obama as an upstart who had failed to wait his turn, a young Turk prematurely challenging the hierarchical black political establishment. The Clinton campaign’s racial overtones prompted some misgivings, notably from Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, but, like most CBC members, all of whom were also coveted super-delegates, he refrained from endorsing Obama until it was clear Hillary would not win the nomination.
I got firsthand insight into this dynamic when Eric Holder, then a former deputy attorney general, and I went to meet privately with New Jersey congressman Donald Payne in the spring of 2008 to seek his endorsement of Obama. Congressman Payne had long been a good friend and ally of mine, a close collaborator on African issues, and a respected senior member of the CBC. Eric and I labored for over an hour to convince Payne that Obama was the real deal, right on the issues, and likely to win the nomination. Payne, we argued, shouldn’t miss the opportunity to be a relatively early supporter of this remarkable young leader we were convinced could become the first African American president. But Payne stonewalled us, returning variously to his commitment to the Clintons, his doubts about Obama’s bona fides, and his deep resentment of these young, know-it-all, come-from-nowhere, elite, Ivy League–educated politicians like Obama and then–Newark mayor Cory Booker, who haven’t paid their dues. It was several more months before Payne finally (and perhaps reluctantly) got on the Obama bandwagon. Our failure to win over Payne did not hurt my relationship with him, but it was an abject reminder of the complex racial politics that imbued the 2008 Democratic primary contest.
My parents were also interesting barometers for me to read.
In early 2007, when I told Dad that I was backing Obama, he balked. Concerned that a black man could not be elected president, he tried to dissuade me from leaving the Clinton camp. I told him I could see a path for Obama to victory, but mostly, “He represents what I care about.” I also felt it was too soon for another Clinton and argued that political dynasties, as with the Bushes, were getting tired. Plus, I wasn’t nearly as sure as he was that a black man couldn’t win the presidency.
This kind of robust but friendly argument epitomized my adult relationship with my father. Ever since childhood, the fundamentals between Dad and me were never shaken. We shared a strong intellectual connection, a fascination with the world and public policy, an unsparing sense of humor, a passion for tennis, and a readiness to stand up for what we believe without fear of others.
Our strengths and weaknesses closely aligned. We both were often accused of intimidating others, even when (mostly) that was not our intent. Dad appeared overly serious, walking around with what looked to be a frown on his face when really he was just driving himself intensely. Similarly, when not familiar with me personally, people frequently misread anger in my face when I am not smiling.
Despite his dedication to me and those he loved most, dealing with Dad was not always easy. He never shed his quick temper, inherent impatience, and fierce independence. Getting along with him required accepting the good with the difficult, though sometimes it was necessary just to fight it out and move on. Dad had an indomitable spirit.
I was deeply disappointed when, in 1997, shortly after Jake was born, Dad decided to move across the country. His timing couldn’t have been worse. He was seventy-eight, and I wanted him close—especially now that his grandson had arrived. Yet, ever since his graduate school days at Berkeley, Dad had dreamt of returning to the West Coast. He was also sick of Washington after forty years and eager to escape the Mid-Atlantic, particularly its tedious winters with occasional treacherous ice storms and excessive summer humidity. Over several years, Dad had toured the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to Northern California, looking for the perfect spot. California, he concluded, was too expensive. He searched for a good view, nearby salmon fishing, reasonable cost of living, and proximity to a major airport.
Finally, he found his place: a comfortable house with an exceptional view of the Columbia River and Mount Hood framed spectacularly by his living room and kitchen picture windows. Camas, Washington, is just across the river from Portland, Oregon, and twenty minutes from its airport. Washington State has no state income tax, and Oregon has no sales tax. It was perfect for my frugal economist father. Initially, I agonized that he was heading to a strange part of the country as a single man, where he knew no one and would be lonely and vulnerable if he had a health crisis.
I was wrong to worry. Dad quickly immersed himself in Camas, making scores of new friends, including eligible women, through a group of active seniors called “The Ospreys.” The group met most mornings for an hour-long walk in the woods and then coffee and breakfast at a nearby café. To my relief, he also found an excellent network of doctors. Whenever I visited him in Camas, he was happy, relaxed, and appreciative of his newfound life out west.
Thankfully, Dad came back east a few times a year for extended visits and always for the holidays. He also made regular trips to South Carolina to spend time with and care for his older sister Pansy, until 2007 when she died. In D.C., Dad enjoyed hanging out with his friends and resuming rituals like taking me and Ian to the annual Christmas ball for the Washington-area Boulé, a fraternity of accomplished African American professionals.
Dad loved to laugh, relished a loud party, and could boogie with the best until his final days. I will never lose the image of my dad at eighty-nine, rocking with Democratic strategist and television commentator Donna Brazile at my house just after President Obama’s first inauguration. As his favorite dance song, Tom Browne’s “Funkin’ for Jamaica” blared and they circled each other on the floor, the party crowd chanted, “Go, Donna. Go, Donna.” To this day, in our household, any subsequent true throwdown has been nicknamed a “Go, Donna.”
Even from a distance, Dad remained active and present in our lives. When we were apart, Dad and I spoke frequently by phone. He would call to talk current events or comment on my television appearances. If I hadn’t heard from him, I would call almost daily to check in, as I worried increasingly about him living alone far across country. Eventually, we installed a system where we could remotely monitor motion, his comings and goings, and detect anything unusual, but Dad resisted all forms of visiting nursing care. He barked and scared off all the caregivers that the local services sent over at our request.
Then, one morning, they cracked the code. Dad was home alone when the doorbell rang. When he opened it, there stood an exceptionally attractive, young African American nurse named Ticey Westbrooks. Without knowing why she was there, he opened the door wider and said, “Come on IN!” When she explained that she had been sent by the caregiver agency, he still didn’t put her out. They clicked, and Dad finally had a visiting nurse he liked and we trusted.
On one of his return trips to D.C. in March 2007, I convinced Dad to give Obama a chance. Dad came to a fundraiser I co-hosted for the then still long-shot candidate. Finally, my father saw what I saw. From then on, Dad supported Obama sincerely, if skeptically, given my father’s experience of race in America.
My mother was a different story. Like Dad, she attended the fundraiser and became a committed donor. Unlike Dad, she never questioned my decision to join Obama’s campaign. She grasped immediately what animated my enthusiasm for him and would spend the rest of her life fretting and fawning over her favorite president.
By then, my relationship with Mom had evolved greatly.
Mom mellowed with age, and I matured becoming less impatient and more appreciative of my mom’s many gifts. By my late twenties, we had become what she always said she wanted us to be: “best friends.” It was Mom who lured me to the Brookings Institution in 2002, where she had been a Guest Scholar since the early 1990s after leaving the Control Data Corporation out of frustration that she was unfairly compensated relative to her male peers. At Brookings, Mom worked on education policy, higher education finance, and workforce diversity issues. She also found a new love and reconnected with friends from whom she had grown distant as she cared for Alfred while he battled cancer. She took great joy in spending summers at her lovely house on Penobscot Bay near Camden, Maine. Overall, her stress level came down considerably, which enabled her to leverage her many talents and temper her most evident flaws.
Johnny and I both benefited from the changes we saw in Mom. Like mine, his relationship with her improved with age and independence. After Yale, Johnny worked at AT&T before attending Harvard Business School (finally giving Mom a Harvard grad) and thereafter at Disney and the NBA in Latin America and Japan. While at Harvard, Johnny conceived of a nonprofit called Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), which ten years later he turned into reality.
Management Leadership for Tomorrow prepares minority college students, largely from lower-income backgrounds, for coveted postcollege jobs and graduate schools that can help deliver true economic mobility for their families. Utilizing one-on-one coaching, mentorship, and connections, MLT supports over a thousand students and professionals annually to become senior leaders who can transform their organizations and communities.
Mom was a founding board member and avid fundraiser, viewing MLT as a much-needed addendum to her life’s work of expanding access for minorities and low-income students to higher education. Both Mom and Johnny understood that, for the less privileged who grow up without the “social capital” that elites enjoy, merely graduating from college does not ensure full access to the American Dream. These students also need the targeted training, support, and relationships that will help them secure the best jobs and continue to rise.
Like Mom, Dad was proud that his son had chosen to carry on our families’ tradition of service through education, which dates back to his grandfather’s founding of the Bordentown School. Through MLT, Johnny has taken to scale my parents’ commitment to helping others by partnering with over 150 corporations and universities to prepare more than seven thousand African American, Latino, and Native American “Rising Leaders” to excel in top companies and social sector organizations.
By contrast, Mom was slower to support Johnny’s personal choices, particularly in women. After expressing some hesitation about most of Johnny’s prior relationships, Mom finally embraced Andrea Williams, the woman he ultimately married. Having only half jokingly admonished Johnny while in college to “never bring home a white girl,” Mom toasted the couple at their wedding rehearsal dinner by bestowing on the bride (a black woman) her highest possible compliment, “Most of all, Andrea reminds me of me.”
Like Ian is to me, Andrea is exactly what Johnny needs—a calm, patient, devoted, and accomplished partner who balances Johnny’s energy, intensity, and silliness. Andrea played varsity tennis at Yale and continues to compete formidably, rising to the number one ranked woman in America in the 50+ age group. After graduating from Stanford Business School at the height of the tech boom, Andrea worked for top investment banks as a highly regarded equity analyst of Silicon Valley companies. She has since devoted herself to various entrepreneurial ventures, along with their two children, tennis, and nonprofit work. Since Johnny and Andrea moved back to the Washington area from California in 2007, our families could not be closer.
Becoming a grandmother turned out to be Mom’s greatest joy and also did more than anything to smooth out our edges and elevate our relationship to the high point we sustained over the balance of her life. She was there in the delivery room with Jake and almost every day thereafter, spending quality time with him and Maris throughout their lives.
Our friendship grew ever stronger over the years. From helping me improve my wardrobe to tutoring me in the fine points of preparing a worthy Thanksgiving dinner, Mom and I were able to cooperate and support each other with rare acrimony. As she battled cancer and other health challenges, from 2006 to her passing in 2017, Mom was deeply appreciative of the attention Johnny and I gave to her care. Her struggles brought us closer, underscoring just how much we loved and needed each other.
As I returned to the public spotlight, Mom remained fiercely protective of me, bristling at every criticism and bursting with pride at my success. Not at all tech-savvy, Mom could barely use a simple cell phone and had no phone alerts or internet access to track my activities. Instead, she watched CNN incessantly and cultivated a network among my staffers who would call to alert her to watch me on television. Following my public appearances, she would phone me to provide her unvarnished critique of how I looked and what I said.
By early 2008, Mom had lots of feedback to offer. At this point, in addition to my role as policy advisor and coordinating the outside experts, I had been tapped increasingly by the Obama campaign as a television spokesperson. A full-time volunteer, but not a paid staffer, I kept my base in Washington and visited headquarters in Chicago occasionally. Since Obama’s time was spent mostly on the campaign trail, I had only intermittent contact with him and engaged mostly with the policy staff. At debate prep, debates, or meetings with the candidate, I also interacted with the political team, including David Plouffe, the wiry, puckish, and super-analytical campaign manager, and David Axelrod, the warm, jovial senior political guru. On and off the campaign trail, I also came to know well senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, one of the Obamas’ closest friends and trusted aides. Valerie always offered me kind support and candid insights from inside headquarters.
The campaign regularly sent me out on cable television to represent Obama’s positions on key foreign policy issues and sometimes to debate Clinton representatives or Republican opponents. In a hard-fought, sometimes bitter primary, I was confident on the air, a happy warrior unafraid to throw a punch as needed. Yet, as I discovered during the 2008 campaign, it is not hard to make the kind of mistake on television that gives your opponent an opening they can exploit, even if what you say is not technically inaccurate.
In early March 2008, I appeared on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show, and the conversation went like this:
I continued:
My comments were seized upon by opponents as a confession by a senior Obama spokesperson that Obama was not prepared to be president. It made for an unhelpful and distracting story for several days. My main point was valid—that no one has had the true experience of taking a crisis call until they occupy the presidency, and what matters in a candidate is good judgment. Still, if I could reformulate my answer, I would not have used the word “ready” and said simply “neither has ever taken a 3 a.m. call.” Obama never mentioned this mistake to me, but thereafter without ever being told so by anyone on the campaign, I was tacitly benched for a few weeks and given only safer opportunities by the campaign to appear publicly, until the furor died down.
My transgression, however, was rapidly eclipsed by fellow Obama advisor Samantha Power, who called Hillary Clinton “a monster.” While Samantha had asked that her words be treated as off-the-record in an otherwise on-the-record interview, the U.K.’s The Scotsman published her comment anyway. The Clinton campaign took great offense, whether real or feigned, demanding Samantha’s sacking. The Obama team acknowledged that the comment had gone a bit too far, and Samantha felt compelled to resign as an advisor to the campaign and apologize publicly to Senator Clinton.
Thereafter, I rarely, if ever, ran afoul of the Obama campaign’s sensibilities and continued my active role as a media and in-person surrogate through the end of the general election. As our attention shifted from Clinton to Senator John McCain, the nominees’ relative national security credentials became a persistent theme. The McCain camp portrayed Obama as soft and inexperienced, while we questioned McCain’s policy judgment and temperament. In my press appearances, I criticized Senator McCain’s tendency to “shoot first and ask questions later,” arguing: “… it’s dangerous, and we can’t afford four more years of this reckless policy.” I also noted that, “On critical, factual questions that are fundamental to understanding what is going on in Iraq and the region, Senator McCain has gotten it wrong and not just once but repeatedly.” McCain, I said, “shot from the hip,” and was “very aggressive, belligerent.”
These jabs, it seems, got under McCain’s skin. Whether it was the substance of my critique or the messenger, I am not sure. John Kerry, General Wesley Clark, and other surrogates had made similar arguments but, in subsequent years, many journalists speculated that McCain’s outsize hostility to me derived in substantial part from my criticisms during the 2008 campaign. Perhaps the comment that most rankled McCain related to Senator Obama’s upcoming trip to Iraq in the summer of 2008 (where McCain had visited earlier). Speaking of Obama, I said: “I think he wants to get out and do as much as he can. I don’t think he will be strolling around the market in a flak jacket,” an allusion to McCain’s much touted, heavily guarded, brief walk in a Baghdad market in which he aimed to show how much security had improved. While I make no apology for my critiques of McCain’s policy judgments, I do regret the “flak jacket” comment, since it was flippant and mocking, and it ran counter to my deep respect for McCain’s service to our country and all he endured as a POW.
Following the highly successful overseas trip that Obama had taken to the Middle East and Europe to demonstrate his competence on the world stage, the last months of the general election were dominated by the convention, debate preparation, and transition planning. Against the backdrop of the crashing economy and McCain’s missteps in the economic policy realm, Obama’s star continued to rise. Foreign policy receded somewhat as a dominant campaign theme. During the last weeks of the campaign, the balance of my effort shifted to preparing for the transition, including establishing teams to coordinate with the outgoing Bush administration at the National Security Council and each of the national security agencies.
On election evening, I had chosen not to go to Chicago to be with the campaign team and the Obamas. For me, it was a moment that required the proximity of family. Win or lose, I needed to be with my mother and the kids to watch the election returns. Ian had to work from New York, and my dad stayed out west, but we all were in frequent telephone communication throughout the night.
Our first stop was to join Tony Lake and Julie Katzman at their home for a small (hopefully celebratory) gathering. It was a fitting coda to a journey that began with Tony four years earlier, when he first asked me to talk to then-Senate candidate Obama about foreign policy. Mindful of how wrong exit polls can be, and still somewhat skeptical that America could actually bring itself to elect a black man, I was taking nothing for granted. As the results began to come in with the Obama-Biden ticket winning several of the most contested states—Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, even Indiana, North Carolina, and Colorado—it seemed that an election evening might finally go our way. After Tony’s, we sped to a party at my brother’s house and arrived shortly before the victor was declared.
As we awaited the results, Mom and I sat on the couches in Johnny’s family room, glued to the big screen TV. I tried to concentrate on the television but found myself frequently gazing at my kids, five-year-old Maris and eleven-year-old Jake, and my nephew and niece, Mateo and Kiki. This historic evening seemed more about them and their generation’s future than anything else.
The older kids and Johnny’s guests milled around in muted anticipation. Then the announcement blasted across the airwaves: Barack Obama was the forty-fourth president of the United States! The campaign’s signature song, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” blared like a triumphal anthem for the faithful as we all waited for Obama. When at last he took the stage, with his beautiful wife and two adorable daughters, along with Vice President–elect Biden and his massive family, it seemed real for the first time.
With my mom sitting very close to me and Maris crashed in my lap, I refrained from loud cheers and just cried copious tears of joy and relief. It had actually happened. An incredible, historic, impossible dream come true. America had proved my dad and so many others wrong. Deep down, I too had doubted whether this moment would come in my lifetime. When it did, I couldn’t stop crying—that night and all the next day.
For all the wisdom we had received from our parents, all their encouragement to reach for the pinnacle of possibility—as a family and as a nation—the aftermath of the election did not allow time to reflect on how we got there, thankful as we were for all that had brought us this far. Following the deluge of my tears, which lasted through Wednesday, it was time for me to look forward, to prepare for where we were all headed next. By Thursday, I had pulled myself together and showed up to work at Transition Headquarters.