chartered flight from Chicago. As was protocol for the president-elect, we’d been invited by President and Mrs. Bush to drop by for a visit to the White House and had scheduled it to coincide with my trip to look at schools. I stood waiting at the private terminal as Barack’s plane touched down. Next to me was Cornelius Southall, one of the agents heading my security detail.
Cornelius was a square-shouldered former college football player who’d previously worked as a part of President Bush’s security team. Like all of my detail leaders, he was smart, trained to be hyperaware at every moment, a human sensor. Even then, as the two of us watched Barack’s plane taxi and come to a stop maybe twenty yards away on the tarmac, he was picking up on something before I did.
“Ma’am,” he said as some new piece of information arrived via his earpiece, “your life is about to change forever.”
When I looked at him quizzically, he added, “Just wait.”
He then pointed to the right, and I turned to look. Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts. The presidential motorcade. It was at least twenty vehicles long, moving in orchestrated formation, car after car after car, before finally the whole fleet rolled to a quiet halt, and the limos stopped directly in front of Barack’s parked plane.
I turned to Cornelius. “Is there a clown car?” I said. “Seriously, this is what he’s going to travel with now?”
He smiled. “Every day for his entire presidency, yes,” he said. “It’s going to look like this all the time.”
I took in the spectacle: thousands and thousands of pounds of metal, a squad of commandos, bulletproof everything. I had yet to grasp that Barack’s protection was still only half-visible. I didn’t know that he’d also, at all times, have a nearby helicopter ready to evacuate him, that sharpshooters would position themselves on rooftops along the routes he traveled, that a personal physician would always be with him in case of a medical problem, or that the vehicle he rode in contained a store of blood of the appropriate type in case he ever needed a transfusion. In a matter of weeks, just ahead of Barack’s inauguration, the presidential limo would be upgraded to a newer model—aptly named the Beast—a seven-ton tank disguised as a luxury vehicle, tricked out with hidden tear-gas cannons, rupture-proof tires, and a sealed ventilation system meant to get him through a biological or chemical attack.
I was now married to one of the most heavily guarded human beings on earth. It was simultaneously relieving and distressing.
I looked to Cornelius, who waved me forward in the direction of the limo.
“You can head over now, ma’am,” he said.
* * *
I’d been inside the White House just once before, a couple of years earlier. Through Barack’s office at the Senate, I’d signed myself and Malia and Sasha up for a special tour being offered during one of our visits to Washington, figuring it’d be a fun thing to do. White House tours are generally self-guided, but this one involved being taken around by a White House curator, who walked a small group of us through its grand hallways and various public rooms.
We stared at the cut-glass chandeliers that dangled from the high ceiling of the East Room, where opulent balls and receptions were historically held, and inspected George Washington’s red cheeks and sober expression in the massive, gilt-framed portrait that hung on one wall. We learned, courtesy of our guide, that in the late eighteenth century First Lady Abigail Adams had used the giant space to hang her laundry and that decades later, during the Civil War, Union troops had temporarily been quartered there. A number of First Daughters’ weddings had taken place in the East Room. Abraham Lincoln’s and John F. Kennedy’s caskets had also lain there for viewing.
I could feel my mind sifting through all the various presidents that day, trying to match what I remembered from history classes with visions of the families who’d walked these actual halls. Malia, who was