On the other hand, thanks to great work by my staff, I managed to get a respectable number of amendments passed. We helped provide funds for homeless veterans. We provided tax credits to gas stations for installing E85 fuel pumps. We obtained funding to help the World Health Organization monitor and respond to a potential avian flu pandemic. We got an amendment out of the Senate eliminating no-bid contracts in the post-Katrina reconstruction, so more money would actually end up in the hands of the tragedy’s victims. None of these amendments would transform the country, but I took satisfaction in knowing that each of them helped some people in a modest way or nudged the law in a direction that might prove to be more economical, more responsible, or more just.
One day in February I found myself in particularly good spirits, having just completed a hearing on legislation that Dick Lugar and I were sponsoring aimed at restricting weapons proliferation and the black-market arms trade. Because Dick was not only the Senate’s leading expert on proliferation issues but also the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, prospects for the bill seemed promising. Wanting to share the good news, I called Michelle from my D.C. office and started explaining the significance of the bill — how shoulder-to-air missiles could threaten commercial air travel if they fell into the wrong hands, how small-arms stockpiles left over from the Cold War continued to feed conflict across the globe. Michelle cut me off.
“We have ants.”
“Huh?”
“I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.”
“Okay…”
“I need you to buy some ant traps on your way home tomorrow. I’d get them myself, but I’ve got to take the girls to their doctor’s appointment after school. Can you do that for me?”
“Right. Ant traps.”
“Ant traps. Don’t forget, okay, honey? And buy more than one. Listen, I need to go into a meeting. Love you.”
I hung up the receiver, wondering if Ted Kennedy or John McCain bought ant traps on the way home from work.
MOST PEOPLE WHO meet my wife quickly conclude that she is remarkable. They are right about this — she is smart, funny, and thoroughly charming. She is also very beautiful, although not in a way that men find intimidating or women find off-putting; it is the lived-in beauty of the mother and busy professional rather than the touched-up image we see on the cover of glossy magazines. Often, after hearing her speak at some function or working with her on a project, people will approach me and say something to the effect of “You know I think the world of you, Barack, but your wife…wow!” I nod, knowing that if I ever had to run against her for public office, she would beat me without much difficulty.
Fortunately for me, Michelle would never go into politics. “I don’t have the patience,” she says to people who ask. As is always the case, she is telling the truth.
I met Michelle in the summer of 1988, while we were both working at Sidley & Austin, a large corporate law firm based in Chicago. Although she is three years younger than me, Michelle was already a practicing lawyer, having attended Harvard Law straight out of college. I had just finished my first year at law school and had been hired as a summer associate.
It was a difficult, transitional period in my life. I had enrolled in law school after three years of work as a community organizer, and although I enjoyed my studies, I still harbored doubts about my decision. Privately, I worried that it represented the abandonment of my youthful ideals, a concession to the hard realities of money and power — the world as it is rather than the world as it should be.
The idea of working at a corporate law firm, so near and yet so far removed from the poor neighborhoods where my friends were still laboring, only worsened these fears. But with student loans rapidly mounting, I was in no position to turn down the three months of salary Sidley was offering. And so, having sublet the cheapest apartment I could find, having purchased the first three suits ever to appear in my closet and a new pair of shoes that turned out to be a half size too small and would absolutely cripple me for the next nine weeks, I arrived at the firm one drizzly morning in early June and was directed to the office of the young attorney who’d been assigned to serve as my summer advisor.
I don’t remember the details of that first conversation with Michelle. I remember that she was tall — almost my height in heels — and lovely, with a friendly, professional manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse. She explained how work was assigned at the firm, the nature of the various practice groups, and how to log our billable hours. After showing me my office and giving me a tour of the library, she handed me off to one of the partners and told me that she would meet me for lunch.
Later Michelle would tell me that she had been pleasantly surprised when I walked into her office; the drugstore snapshot that I’d sent in for the firm directory made my nose look a little big (even more enormous than usual, she might say), and she had been skeptical when the secretaries who’d seen me during my interview told her I was cute: “I figured that they were just impressed with any black man with a suit and a job.” But if Michelle was impressed, she certainly didn’t tip her hand when we went to lunch. I did learn that she had grown up on the South Side, in a small bungalow just north of the neighborhoods where I had organized. Her father was a pump operator for the city; her mother had been a housewife until the kids were grown, and now worked as a secretary at a bank. She had attended Bryn Mawr Public Elementary School, gotten into Whitney Young Magnet School, and followed her brother to Princeton, where he had been a star on the basketball team. At Sidley she was part of the intellectual property group and specialized in entertainment law; at some point, she said, she might have to consider moving to Los Angeles or New York to pursue her career.
Oh, Michelle was full of plans that day, on the fast track, with no time, she told me, for distractions — especially men. But she knew how to laugh, brightly and easily, and I noticed she didn’t seem in too much of a hurry to get back to the office. And there was something else, a glimmer that danced across her round, dark eyes whenever I looked at her, the slightest hint of uncertainty, as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were, and that if she ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quickly unravel. That touched me somehow, that trace of vulnerability. I wanted to know that part of her.
For the next several weeks, we saw each other every day, in the law library or the cafeteria or at one of the many outings that law firms organize for their summer associates to convince them that their life in the law will not be endless hours of poring through documents. She took me to one or two parties, tactfully overlooking my limited wardrobe, and even tried to set me up with a couple of her friends. Still, she refused to go out on a proper date. It wasn’t appropriate, she said, since she was my advisor.
“That’s a poor excuse,” I told her. “Come on, what advice are you giving me? You’re showing me how the copy machine works. You’re telling me what restaurants to try. I don’t think the partners will consider one date a serious breach of firm policy.”
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
“Okay, I’ll quit. How’s that? You’re my advisor. Tell me who I have to talk to.”
Eventually I wore her down. After a firm picnic, she drove me back to my apartment, and I offered to buy her an ice cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins across the street. We sat on the curb and ate our cones in the sticky afternoon heat, and I told her about working at Baskin-Robbins when I was a teenager and how it was hard to look cool in a brown apron and cap. She told me that for a span of two or three years as a child, she had refused to eat anything except peanut butter and jelly. I said that I’d like to meet her family. She said that she would like that.