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

Book Preface

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 same—how 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 Columbia’s 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 day’s 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 pattern—stripes running from left shoulder to right waist—in alternating shades of black, white, and gray. All were neatly pressed. He gripped a white foam cup embossed with a gold presidential seal. He’d 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. He’d 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 didn’t hesitate to deploy them in private. “Chicago never shut down for a little snow!”
“That’s because we’re awesome, sir,” I replied, affirming our shared Windy City bona fides from a red velvet armchair against the wall.
I’d 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 president’s 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 work—how 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 president’s 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 Brian’s 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 morning’s 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 you’ll be ready for it; after all, it’s the one room in the West Wing that movies and television dramas take pains to get right. But you’re 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, everyone’s watching you, and everything that’s 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.
It’s the best home-court advantage in the world, and Obama pressed that advantage. He kept the temperature a little too warm—pleasant 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, you’d 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 didn’t want to be called on.
By my seventh year in the Obama White House, though—and my third year as his chief speechwriter—the Oval Office and I had an understanding. I’d set my laptop on the infinity-edged mica coffee table—called out by the New York Times as “extremely contemporary”—and 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, I’d 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, I’d fluff two of the couch’s overstuffed throw pillows and stack them behind me so that I could sit comfortably, like a normal human. Being in the room didn’t intimidate me anymore.
I couldn’t, however, say the same about my job. To be a speechwriter for Barack Obama is fucking terrifying.
“Okay, show me what you’ve 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 I’ve got a lot of time today.”
I smiled back—not 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. I’d take all the help I could get to avoid faceplanting on a big speech—especially one that would tread the thorny subject of race in America.
On March 7, 1965, a group of protesters—mostly young, mostly Black—set out to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery with a simple demand: the right to vote.
They were led by Hosea Williams, a close advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and John Lewis, just twenty-five years old but by that point an old hand in the civil rights movement. Just two years earlier, Lewis had been the youngest, most incendiary speaker at the March on Washington. He was also one of the most fearless practitioners of nonviolence in the movement, someone who had bet his life again and again on Freedom Rides and voter-registration drives across the South.
The murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old who’d been shot by police after a peaceful march a couple of weeks earlier while trying to protect his mother from a state trooper’s billy club, imbued the protesters with additional resolve. But the march was rigged from the start: Alabama governor George Wallace had tarred the protesters as illegitimate, calling them socialists and outside agitators, even if, like Lewis, they were children of Alabama; he warned that their very presence would incite violence, even as he ordered his troopers to be violent.
Lewis knew the game and had schooled his unarmed, neatly dressed flock in the tactics of nonviolence before leading them out of Brown Chapel AME Church for the fifty-mile march. They didn’t make it one mile before state police met them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, choking them with tear gas, breaking their bones with batons, and cracking Lewis’s skull so badly he feared he might die.
The governor and the troopers thought they’d won, confident they’d scared the young Americans not only back over the bridge but away from the political process entirely. They were wrong. The photographs of bloodied, unconscious young men and women, Black and white alike, victims of state-sponsored violence in their own land, bounced across news services and ricocheted around the world. They shocked the conscience of the country, and more Americans began to realize such cruelty wasn’t a one-time event but a daily reality for Black Americans who’d been disenfranchised, denied their civil rights, and otherwise subjugated over a century of Jim Crow.
John Lewis, with his head still bandaged, returned to the chapel and told the press that more Americans would join the marchers. He was right: They did, including Dr. King himself. The troopers parted. The marchers reached Montgomery. Their sacrifice shifted public opinion. And their words reached President Lyndon Johnson, who sampled them just weeks later in an address to a joint session of Congress, pledging “We shall overcome” and soon afterward delivering the Voting Rights Act of 1965, building on the Civil Rights Act of 1964—two laws that pulled America closer to fulfilling its founding ideals.
Fifty years later, any president of the United States would travel to Selma to commemorate what had happened there. This president of the United States happened to be Black. As John Lewis, by 2015 a U.S. representative of nearly thirty years, would say, “If someone had told me when we were crossing this bridge that one day, I would be back here introducing the first African American president, I would have said you’re crazy. You’re out of your mind.”
One might think, then, that a speechwriter’s task would be easy: Let the symbolism do the talking. But to be a speechwriter for Barack Obama was never easy. He never let a captive audience go to waste. I knew he’d demand something more than words just praising Selma as a consequential moment in America’s history. To meet his expectations demanded using Selma as a lens to examine and explain that history.