Cont... To the First Lady, With Love Four thank-you notes to Michelle Obama, who has spent the past eight years quietly and confidently changing the course of American history. By CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, GLORIA STEINEM, JON MEACHAM and RASHIDA JONE
By Jon Meacham:
On
a lovely early autumn day in her final October in the White House,
Michelle Obama stepped out onto a sunny South Lawn and, in a way, bid
farewell. The setting was her celebrated organic kitchen garden, but the
subtext seemed to go far beyond any single initiative. “I have to tell
you that being here with all of you, overlooking this beautiful garden —
and it is beautiful — it’s kind of an emotional moment,” Mrs. Obama
said at a ceremony to unveil a bigger, fortified version of the garden.
“We’re having a lot of these emotional moments because everything is the
last. But this is particularly my baby, because this garden is where it
all started. So we’re really coming full circle back to the very
beginning.” She recalled conversations in 2008 about the role she might
play in an Obama presidency — and noted, tellingly, that the garden
emerged after “Barack actually won,” to which she added: “He won twice.”
The gathered guests happily applauded.
There,
in a way, was the essential Michelle Obama, or at least the essential
observable version of herself: speaking of broad public good (the
garden, which was part of her campaign against childhood obesity) while
revealing an arch sense of competitiveness.
My husband won; he won
twice. As their history-making time in the White House comes to an end,
it’s worth pondering the lessons of the Age of Obama. My own view is
that both the president and the first lady have conducted themselves
splendidly in the White House, managing the most difficult of tasks with
apparent ease: projecting a grace that masked the ambition and the
drive that took them, at early ages, to the pinnacle of American life.
In
this they have kept faith with a tradition that, in our country, is as
old as George Washington, who embodied the classical ideal of
Cincinnatus, the reluctant leader summoned from his plow to lead the
nation. President Obama gets much of the public credit for handling his
eight years coolly, but the first lady has been a critical element of
his success. She has chosen her shots carefully — not least in choosing
to make the case against Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 —
and is leaving the country with a warm impression of an excellent
mother, a steady spouse and a sensible, devoted American.
Not
everyone agrees, of course; not everyone ever does. The Obama skeptics
and the Obama haters have from time to time questioned her patriotism,
but this is the same country that managed, in some quarters, to hold
Eleanor Roosevelt in contempt. The important thing is that Mrs. Obama, a
clear-eyed lawyer, found a way to withstand the scrutiny of the
spotlight. In point of fact, she did more than withstand it. To borrow a
phrase from William Faulkner, she not only endured it; she prevailed
over it.
How?
By finding, or appearing to find, that most elusive of things in the
modern world: balance. She was not Mrs. Roosevelt or Mrs. Carter or Mrs.
Reagan or Mrs. Clinton, playing roles in affairs of state. Instead she
did what the first African-American first lady arguably had to do to
play a successful public role. In Voltaire’s terms, she cultivated her
own garden, never threatening and never intimidating her neighbors. Much
more doubtless unfolded beneath the surface or behind closed doors;
history will sort that out. For now, it is enough to say that she is
leaving the White House a strong and popular figure with a lifetime of
good will and great reservoirs of capital on which to draw as she and
her husband write their next chapters.
Back
in 2008, musing on the life she was about to enter, Mrs. Obama recalled
doubts about her garden — a bit of projection, one suspects, for doubts
about the entire presidential enterprise. “What if we planted this
garden and nothing grew?” Mrs. Obama asked. “We didn’t know about the
soil, or the sunlight. And it’s like, oh, my God, what if nothing grows?
… It was like afterwards I remember telling Sam [Kass, the former White
House senior advisor for nutrition], ‘This better work, buddy. This
better work.’” And so it did.
Jon
Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, is the author, most
recently, of “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert
Walker Bush.”
By Rashida Jones:
The
first time I met Michelle Obama was at the White House as part of a
mentoring initiative, for which the first lady had brought together a
dynamic group of women to speak to urban teenage girls about their
career goals. Olympians, actresses, producers, writers, an astronaut and
an Air Force general gathered in the West Wing to greet Michelle before
we headed out to various local schools. She was warm, gracious and
charming. She thanked us for coming, hugged everybody and made us all
feel like her friends. As first lady, she has ticked all the boxes:
loving wife, protective mother, health and fitness advocate, garden
enthusiast and, yes, style icon. These accomplishments have left
traditionalists feeling satisfied.
But,
as is always the way, her reputation as the perfect hostess invited
criticism from progressives. Enter Michelle Obama, outspoken activist, a
woman who isn’t afraid to remind us she is a proud African-American
woman, which is, in itself, revolutionary.
A former lawyer who speaks
out on behalf of gay rights and gun control, she delivered an
unforgettable speech at the Democratic National Convention earlier this
year, shining a clear, bright light on our country’s shameful history.
Suddenly, the progressives were pleased and the traditionalists were
confused. The media wants to pin her down — they’ve been trying since
Barack Obama took office in 2009. But you simply can’t.
Michelle
Obama embodies the modern, American woman, and I don’t mean that in any
platitudinous or vague way. Rarely can someone express their many
identities at the same time while seeming authentic. My female friends
and I often talk about feeling like we’re “too much.” We’re complicated;
we want to be so many things. I want to be a boss and also be
vulnerable. I want to be outspoken and respected, but also sexy and
beautiful.
All
women struggle to reconcile the different people that we are at all
times, to merge our conflicting desires, to represent ourselves honestly
and feel good about the inherent contradictions. But Michelle manages
to do this with poise, regardless of the scrutiny.
That, to me, is the
best thing for feminism. Her individual choices force us to accept that
being a woman isn’t just one thing. Or two things. Or three things. The
position of first lady is, unfortunately, symbolic, and that makes it
fair game for media analysis ad nauseam. But no think piece can fully
encompass a real woman.
If
feminism’s goal is equal opportunity and choice, Michelle makes me feel
like every choice is available. You can go to Princeton and Harvard,
you can rap with Missy Elliott, you can be a mother and a lawyer and a
powerful orator.
You can champion the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,
while also caring about fashion. You can dance with Ellen and also
fearlessly remind people, on live television, of the reality of your
position: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.
And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women,
playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.” You can be your
husband’s partner and supporter, and also use your cultural and
political capital to campaign for Hillary Clinton, unflinchingly
standing up to her “locker room talk”-ing bully of an opponent with the
battle cry “enough is enough!” — eloquently putting into words what a
lot of people, myself included, had been feeling.
Michelle
Obama will have her own legacy, separate from her husband’s. And it
will be that she was the first first lady to show women that they don’t
have to choose. That it’s okay to be everything.
Rashida
Jones is a writer, actress and producer who stars in the TBS comedy
series “Angie Tribeca,” and most recently co-wrote an episode of “Black
Mirror,” premiering later this month on Netflix.
Read more...
Read more...
Source: nytime.com
No comments