Outside the ballroom, the reaction was no less enthusiastic. At the 9 A.M. meeting the next Monday, Jason Goldman, the White House digital director, delivered the news: Our Facebook clip of POTUS and Keegan’s performance had been viewed thirty-five million times. In just forty-eight hours, “Luther, the Anger Translator” had become the most popular government-produced video in Internet history.
I bring this up for two reasons, and the first is bragging. But the second is more important. On some level, every White House staffer is an alchemist. You arrive at the building full of faith in miracles, striving to craft something flawless and shiny from the leaden scraps of real-world events. Before long, however, you realize it’s never going to happen. Anything involving the real world, no matter how well executed, is bound to be impure.
Then one day, if you’re lucky, you’re going about your business when a shiny, golden nugget appears as if by magic in your lap. It’s one of the greatest gifts of public service: you get to be part of small miracles, long after you’ve stopped believing that miracles of any size occur.
Legacy items. That’s the term we used to describe these golden moments. Sometimes we even knew what it meant. Taking out bin Laden was a legacy item. So was rescuing the auto industry, bringing troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But just as often, we imagined our legacy with the starry eyes of a hobo describing the Big Rock Candy Mountain. We dreamed of a distant utopia, a sunny political paradise, where the credit flows like a waterfall and approvals stay sky-high.
We weren’t there yet. With twenty months to go until POTUS left office, our place in history was far from certain. But inside the building, something had undoubtedly changed. President Obama’s jaunty, let’s-go-for-it attitude was infectious. We no longer felt like turtles in our shells.
Our growing confidence was matched by growing competence as well. That’s not to disparage the early days: as White Houses go, Obama’s functioned fairly smoothly from the start. Still, the longer POTUS ran the institution, the more we learned from our mistakes. After the Healthcare.gov disaster, we began “red-teaming” a growing number of big decisions, assigning designated cynics to guard against undiluted hope. Confronted with its lack of diversity, Obamaworld gradually became a place where rooms full of white guys were the exception and not the rule. Baby steps, I know. But these baby steps made us a unicorn among bureaucracies—we improved over time.
Somewhat to my astonishment, so did I. At the risk of sounding boastful, I had now gone two full years without angering a sovereign nation. Even better, the White House finally felt like home. There was no one moment when the transformation happened. I didn’t burst forth from a cocoon. It was more like learning a language. You study, you practice, you embarrass yourself. And then one day someone cuts you off in traffic and you call them a motherfucker in perfect Portuguese.
Whoa, you think. I guess I’m learning.
It must be said that my newfound fluency in White House was less a matter of national politics than office politics. I now had enough friends in the First Lady’s office to sneak into East Room concerts without being unceremoniously bounced. Thanks to a growing list of policy contacts, I was winning more battles with fact-checkers. I had even mastered the dark art of adding a single, wildly indefensible claim to a draft when I knew lawyers would be reviewing. That way they could feel virtuous about cutting something while leaving the rest of my speech intact.
I even knew about a kind of top secret, commander in chief sonar: President Obama’s incessant whistling. I’m not sure exactly when POTUS picked up this habit. Maybe 2014, maybe before. All I know for certain is that once he started, he couldn’t be stopped. I’d be waiting for a photo line to finish or a taping to begin. Then, in the distance, I’d hear it, each note clear but the order random, like a child playing recorder or a bird badly botching a call. The louder the sound, the closer the president. When the whistling neared its crescendo, you knew to stand extra straight.
Like all things White House, the whistling also served an informal barometer of power. The more it annoyed you, the more time you spent with the boss. “It is really fucking irritating,” announced one Assistant to the President in a hold room, cementing his place in the inner circle. His tone suggested he was dying to say something. But what?
“Excuse me, sir. I know your judicial nominees are stalled and Yemen’s a nightmare, but could you please knock it the hell off?”
As a SAP, I wasn’t important enough to be annoyed by the president’s tics. I was, however, important enough to take outsiders to lunch at the Navy Mess. After showing us to our seats in the wood-paneled dining room, the uniformed wait staff would inquire about the signature dessert.
“Would anyone like a chocolate freedom?” At this, even people who didn’t like chocolate perked up. “Chocolate freedom?” they asked. Before the server could answer, I jumped in.
“Excellent idea! Chocolate freedom for everybody!”
Later, molten fudge oozing from their lava cakes, vanilla frozen yogurt secure in its candy shell, my guests’ faces would glow with rapture. There was no better ego trip. They were having a once-in-a-lifetime experience; I was having lunch. Drunk with power, or at least familiarity, I traipsed through the residence and self-righteously flashed my blue badge and was as cocksure as Rob Lowe in The West Wing. And then, just when I reached peak swagger, a coworker found me in my underwear in the coat closet of Air Force One.
Allow me to explain.
THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF MISFORTUNE THAT CAN BEFALL A WHITE House staffer. The first is the act of God. The van hits a pothole on the way to Andrews Air Force Base; ergo, you have coffee on your shirt.
The second is the mountaineering accident. There’s no one big mistake. Rather, there’s a series of small ones. An extra layer left at base camp. A carabineer improperly tightened. Boots a half size too small. No single oversight is worth mentioning. But add them up, throw in some bad luck, and before you know it you’re standing before your colleagues on the presidential aircraft without pants.
The events that led to my mountaineering accident began the first week of June. POTUS was scheduled to fly from D.C. to Germany on Saturday, participate in a G7 summit on Sunday, and return the following afternoon. Cody and Terry had no interest in a thirty-six-hour jet lag fiesta. They assigned me the trip.