Sarada Peri Oral History

This is the Sarada—Sa-rada, right?—Peri—like my name, Perry—interview for the Barack Obama Presidential Oral History Project at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. With that, we really do want to talk to you about your amazing life and accomplishments and successes. Where does it begin? Where do you come from? Where were you born? What did your parents do?

So I was born in New Jersey, the great state of. Very exciting.

The great state, like our director, [William J.] Bill Antholis. [laughter]

Yes, yes, exactly. Actually, there are lots of both of our people in New Jersey. There’s a huge Greek population and huge Indian population. Anyway, my parents are immigrants from India. My father came in 1968. He is a doctor, like many Indian immigrants. This was after the 1965 Immigration Act, which opened the borders to people who were non-Europeans. What this meant and the reason why so many doctors of a certain age are Indian is because they permitted, suddenly, an influx of physicians and other people from other countries. So my father was part of that wave. He came in 1968, right after he finished medical school in southern India, where our family is from. He was the only boy in his family. I will not bore you with all these details, but basically, he was the person who was going to become a doctor and take care of his family.

He was the golden child.

He’s the eldest of all of his cousins, et cetera. So there was a lot put into his education. He got recruited, and a bunch of his medical school classmates did, too, to come to America. He initially, I believe, started a residency at Queens Hospital in New York and was here for a few years. He is a pediatric hematologist oncologist, so he did his residency in hematology oncology, and then he ended up later doing his pediatric residency at Buffalo Children’s Hospital, so he was in Buffalo [New York], and then eventually, they came to New Jersey.

In 1973, that summer, it was time for him to get married. He had a three-week break from his residency. He went back to India. At the time, and certainly for many families now, you engage in—it’s not a fully arranged marriage, insofar as you have the ability to say no, but you are introduced to different people.

Sort of like coming out used to be here. The debutantes would come out in society—high society, we should say—and then go to debutante balls and be meeting lots of men, eligible men.

Potential suitors.

Exactly.

Exactly, exactly.

So it was like that.

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That’s fascinating. Was it a Hindu family, or—?

[nods yes]

And was that an important part of your upbringing as well?

That’s a good question. Yes. My parents aren’t—I grew up in a town that—sorry, I’m all over the place. It’s hard to explain. So yes. Hinduism in the way that my family practices it is very ingrained in the culture. So the holidays are religious, and the stories you’re told are religious, but my parents weren’t these outwardly very devoted people who went to temple all the time or taught us to be particularly religious. In fact, I would say my mother, early on, was pretty opposed to organized religion.

My dad’s faith manifests in a pretty quiet way. He worked at a hospital in Newark, New Jersey, which was about 40 minutes away from us, and he would wake up very early and get to work early. Every morning, I knew that he was doing a puja and doing his ablutions, but it wasn’t this big public thing. There were other people in our family who are far more religious than my parents, but I would say certainly being Hindu, raised Hindu in some inchoate sense, was there.

First of all, could we back up to the—you mentioned in passing the 1965 Immigration Act. Could you just say—not that you’ve necessary delved into that carefully, but could you just say a word for the record for people who might be reading this down the road in history who don’t even know about that? I know about it from having studied Edward Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and how they were so impactful on the Hill [U.S. Congress] in getting that through. As I recall, Lyndon Johnson signed that bill into law by the Statue of Liberty, with the Statue of Liberty in the background.

So what does that mean? We are now in 2024, and just have had an election this very week in which Donald Trump is going into a second term, by and large, in addition to the economy, also related to immigration, on an anti-immigrant platform. What does all that mean to your family and to you?

It’s fair to say that America has always struggled with immigration. As much as we are a country of immigrants, it’s not as though these waves of acceptance and rejection are necessarily new. In fact, I’m thinking of a speech that I worked on with President Obama in 2015, where he—presidents frequently preside over naturalization ceremonies. This was a naturalization ceremony that happened at the National Archives, and it was shortly after Donald Trump announced his first bid for the presidency, saying that he was going to ban Muslims, and “Mexicans are rapists,” et cetera. So we turned this speech into a love letter to America, but the story of immigration and its complexity.

The history of it is, yes, prior to 1965, immigration in America operated essentially on national quotas, which were a proxy for race. Northern European countries were given preference, and it was very hard to come to America if you were from Asia, Africa, and other regions. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act set a precedent for race-based immigration restrictions, and it was signed by one of my personal favorite presidents, Chester A. Arthur.

[laughter] We must delve into that.

Yes, for the record.

But that was a reaction at the time to Chinese immigrants coming particularly in the West and supposedly taking people’s jobs—and, of course, racism. So there was this long period of time where it was very difficult to get in. In 1965—people try tie this to the civil rights era and while that’s part of it, I think the story is more complicated.

Yes, there was pressure to end such obviously discriminatory quotas, especially as the U.S. was promoting itself as a leader of the free world during the Cold War. But there were also economic motivations, given the need for skilled workers and the fact that the race-based quota system wasn't serving the economy well. And frankly, I don't think lawmakers fully anticipated how the family reunification provisions would reshape American immigration. It wasn't purely about equality or civil rights idealism—it was a mix of factors.

What this act did was, it essentially created a new preference system that prioritized family reunification alongside skills-based immigration. In other words, if you could come here based on education or skills that would allow you to make an economic contribution to the country, you could get in. But family reunification was the primary pathway. My father was here on a visa provided by the hospital that offered him his medical residency. That was enough for him to later bring his wife, my mother, over. Once they became citizens, they could sponsor their siblings and their families. They brought over many of my relations. We had, at one point, 20 people living in our house, as my aunts and uncles came over with their families, got on their feet, and then moved on to establish themselves.

My cousins now, who all live all over the country, are software engineers, doctors, teachers. They’re all over. And they’re American, and their children are American, but that’s how it happened. It created what Trump and others derisively call “chain migration,” but the point is that it completely reoriented the system in a different direction. Subsequently, there are a bunch of reasons why our immigration system ended up being broken and where we are now. But that kind of ebb and flow is not new.

It’s cyclical.

It’s cyclical. And what you’re seeing now is yet another cycle that’s been—this particular cycle has been broader in some way, and has gone deeper, and is maybe more complex, in part because it is the result of a system that was put together in a hodgepodge manner, not unlike health care, with all these holes. It has been broken for so long, and Congress has refused to take comprehensive action, and so the center will not hold.

I thought the next thing I would bring up per your dad was health care because your description of his specialty—one of my best friends in high school, her dad was a hematologist in Louisville, Kentucky, and specialized in not just, I think, pediatric cancers but all oncology across the age spectrum. This was in the 1970s that I knew him and knew my friend, his daughter. Sadly, he took his life in the late 1970s.

His daughter explained to me that at that point, they had very little to be able to offer particularly childhood leukemia patients. They hadn’t gotten to the point where they can now save, as I understand, at least 95 percent of those children with childhood leukemia, and that he just couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear losing his patients. And she said he worried that the chemotherapy that he was giving them, that he might—that was still not an exact science, as you well know, and he was worried that he would kill a patient with the wrong kind or the wrong level of chemotherapy.

So first of all, how did your dad deal with the specialty that he was in, knowing that he couldn’t save every patient, but also what did you hear growing up about access to health care and what he was experiencing with patients?

I think my father was made for this field. It fits who he is perfectly. He’s now retired, but he treated, as you said, pediatric cancer, blood disorders. That included things like sickle cell anemia, the AIDS crisis that hit children in particular, especially hemophiliacs, in the 1980s. He is just somebody who is incredibly optimistic, almost to a fault, and has “the sun will always come out tomorrow” mindset. Maybe it’s his faith. Maybe it’s where he comes from, a country that experiences a grinding poverty that most Americans just really can’t understand, that he sees hope in everything.

He’ll say now—and it’s really interesting—that you’re correct, that at the time, there are certain cancers where the survival rate was 10 percent, and today the survival rate is 90 percent. For him, he lived through that progress, and he, I think, derives great satisfaction from that. He sees it as an upward trajectory of this remarkable work of science.

And his hope came to pass.

Totally. That’s not to say there isn’t enormous tragedy in what he saw. It’s funny. People have always said, “How can your dad do that? Children with cancer?” But you ask him, and he will tell you it was just the greatest thing in his life, that he just feels so fortunate. And it is a remarkable thing. Whenever one of my little kids is sick or something, he’ll always say, “Give them Advil, and you’ll see. In 20 minutes, they’re playing with their Legos.” It’s so true. I think what he loves about working with kids is that as soon as they’re feeling better, they’re back at it. Then the fever goes back up and they’re miserable again, As soon as they feel better, they are back to playing. Anyway, this is extensive. That was one piece of it.

One element of this is that both he and actually my mom, both of them had younger sisters who died of blood disorders, and they might have survived if they had been in America. I think that having seen that, coming from large families that did not have a lot of money, where babies did die, and women died in childbirth, that’s just the way it was. I do think that there is an element of appreciating how much America had to offer by way of care and the ability, the resources, to do something. My late father-in-law was Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1943 and was exiled from his home in 1948. His family ended up in Lebanon. He ultimately became a heart surgeon at the Boston VA [Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts], with all these resources at his disposal. Can you imagine what he saw growing up, and then being able to have access to extraordinary care? To provide it himself? It’s not enough, but it’s something.

The second piece of your question is interesting because I think it ties into my parents’ politics and my own political understanding.

That was going to one of our next questions about your parents’ politics.

Like I said, my father worked in Newark, New Jersey. He was part of this clinic called the Valerie Fund out of Newark Beth Israel [Medical Center], which today is part of the [RWJ] Barnabas [Health] System in New Jersey—a large inner-city hospital. He was the head of this department. Many of his patients were on Medicaid. The Valerie Fund raised money in order to provide care for families that did not have the funds.

So it would be like St. Jude [Children’s Research] Hospital.

Exactly. My parents just, by dint of who they are, are incredibly liberal. My mother became a citizen and immediately registered as a Democrat. This was in the early 1980s. My mother frequently vocalized her distaste for Ronald Reagan.

They are people who believe in social justice, who believe in equality, who I think also—my mother would probably be the first to say this—came of age in an India that was postindependence, she learned about socialism. They shared a notion of community and shared responsibility and prosperity. She comes to America, and they’re big [Jimmy] Carter fans, and then suddenly here’s Ronald Reagan with his trickle-down [economics] and demonizing the poor, engaging in thinly veiled racism, and she just couldn’t take it. Then I think also my father seeing the poverty that he saw every day and the frustration of, “I came from a poor country, how is the richest country on earth allowing people to go without health care?” was something that we absorbed.

I have friends, and especially Indian friends, whose parents were very conservative in part because they were doing well economically in this country and naturally aligned with conservatism. Also, they had more conservative traditional ideals culturally too. My parents are very culturally progressive as Indian immigrants of their generation.

Is that to do with their temperaments—

I think so.

—rather than anything to do with caste or any—

I think caste has nothing to do with it. I mean, we’re Brahmin, which is the most obnoxious caste, [laughter] and deeply problematic.

I just find it so fascinating how that Indian background informs, as you mentioned, the social justice element of particularly your mother’s thinking.

The caste question is an interesting one. I’d have to dig into it more.

That could probably be a whole other oral history.

I’m personally entirely contemptuous of the caste system, and I think my parents pretty much are too. There’s a superiority complex that naturally stems from that kind of stratification—which is one of the many, many problems with it. But I think that for my parents, my mom, her father—her parents didn’t have a lot of money, but her father was also relatively progressive.

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It sounds like your parents had children quite quickly. You said your brother—

No, they actually didn’t.

Oh. But you have your brother and yourself. Do you have other siblings?

It’s just the two of us.

Then was your mother a homemaker?

Yes.

Did she work outside the home?

No.

Oh, interesting.

Yes, yes. She didn’t.

So they didn’t have children right away when they came.

No. My mom came—they got married in ’73, and my brother was born in 1977, and I was born in ’79.

Right. Did she ever talk to you about being a homemaker, and of course her background of not even wanting to be married? Why do you think that in the throes of the women’s movement in this country that she chose to be a homemaker?

After my brother and I were born, in 19—I guess, ’80—when we were in New Jersey, my dad’s parents came over and lived with us until they both died. Then more and more relatives started coming over. Suddenly, my mother’s job was—

Oh, and so homemaking was more than—

—was running a household, teaching people how to drive, teaching them English, getting them all the paperwork they needed. It was raising multiple children in the house, getting adults—

Running a bed and breakfast, basically, and all the cultural education.

Yes. Then there was a point—and then her parents came over, so now we’ve got three elderly people living with us. At this point, my paternal grandfather had already died. So when we say she was a homemaker, she was basically the CEO [chief executive officer] and COO [chief operating officer] of a pretty bustling enterprise. And nothing my father did for our family was possible without my mom. But there’s no doubt that she faced the complex dynamics of being a woman born in a certain era with a range of cultural and personal constraints that shaped her life.

From a very early age, I was a pretty strong feminist—earlier than my peers. Some of this came from my mom, some of this came from watching the cultural dynamics of the women in my family, literally, in the kitchen cooking and the men sitting elsewhere waiting. Seeing my grandmother serving my grandfather every single day, which at some point I just put an end to and was like, “This is no longer OK.” I finally told my grandfather, respectfully but firmly, “Go to the kitchen and get your own coffee.” My grandmother never ever would have said such a thing. For her, feeding him was part of her job. But at this point, they were both elderly, and it was crazy to me that this man who was in great shape couldn’t walk down the stairs and get his own coffee. To his credit, he did start doing more for himself and became quite self-sufficient. But the daily, almost mundane sexism of traditional gender norms was just so visible in a way that for a lot of other American kids, it isn’t. It just seemed so patently unfair.

The other thing is that my mom did tell me from a very early age, “You must be financially independent.” That just lodged in my brain. I got an after-school job when I was 15 and never stopped working. I think that she understood the limitations of her life pretty clearly and didn’t want me to be similarly constrained.

Tell us about your education.

As we’ve discussed, I grew up in New Jersey. One interesting piece about New Jersey is—and I’m sure Bill has lots to say about this too—but it’s a fascinating state because it is small but it is incredibly densely populated, and there are enormous immigrant communities from everywhere. In my town, at the time, it was very Asian-dominated, East Asian and South Asian. We had a large Eastern European contingent, so I had a bunch of friends who were from Russia, who were from Belarus. Today—I left when I was 17 to go to college and never moved back, and I don’t go as frequently because my parents now live near me in Maryland. But now, the town is dominated by Indians. As I was graduating high school and seeing this dynamic, I knew that that’s not what I wanted. Not that I didn’t want to be around Indians, but I didn’t want to be in a monolithic place.

You went to public school then for primary school and secondary, all the way through?

I went to public school all the way through, yes. When I graduated from high school I went to Tufts University outside of Boston.

How did you choose Tufts?

Well, actually, I wasn’t going to go to Tufts because I was waitlisted. I was going to go to GW [George Washington University]. Then in the late spring or early summer, I got off the waitlist at Tufts. My father and one of my cousins and I went up to Tufts to visit. I remember it was raining. It was a gloomy New England day. I don’t know how familiar you are with New England.

Yes, we are.

I walked around this campus, and it was not pretty, in the sense of, it wasn’t this gorgeous—

It’s in Somerville [Massachusetts], right outside of Boston.

Yes. The campus is beautiful, but the day was not. It was just a gloomy day. But for some reason, I just had this feeling, I think I’m supposed to be here. So I went to Tufts.

What were you hoping to study, and what did you think you wanted to be?

I knew I cared a lot about politics. What’s interesting is that coming out of my experience with my parents and my politics and all of that, health care wasn’t the thing that necessarily jumped out at me. I would say maybe poverty more than anything. These were the [William J.] Clinton years I was a political junkie. I was a voracious reader and very interested in literature, so I thought, Maybe I’ll become an academic. My dad was always saying, “You’re going to become a literature professor.” That did not happen.

He was not pushing medicine.

No, no, not at all. Nobody was pushing medicine. Not at all. That’s another thing about my parents. I think a lot of my Indian friends were pushed into science, engineering, medicine, et cetera, and my parents never did that. They just saw that my brother and I were both musicians, we were both humanities people, and they very much encouraged that.

Before you get to Tufts, were you—in high school, did you Model UN [United Nations] or debate?

I did Model UN.

We love Model UN.

So tell us about that. And then did you work in any campaigns or do anything political in high school?

Sure, sure. I just was always talking about women’s rights and gender equality in every single class. I remember in sixth grade, we had to make a poster about “Who I Am.” I decorated my poster with pictures of musical instruments and books, and then a picture of Gloria Steinem, and I wrote “women’s lib” [liberation], which was the term of art back then. That was always my lens. But yes, I did Model UN. It was a very academically rigorous public school system. I was always a reader. And then I spent a lot of time playing music. I played the upright bass, so I played in the orchestra and the jazz band, and then I sang in the choir.

The upright bass, the big bass fiddle?

Yes, yes.

Oh, my gosh. That would be taller than you.

I still play it. Yes, I play in a jazz workshop every Sunday. [laughter]

Besides from—you mentioned Gloria Steinem there. Were there other feminist icons that you looked up to at the time, or were there things that you were reading that particularly fired you up at that point?

Yes. I remember reading, probably before I should have, reading The Second Sex, and being really—

That’s quite dense.

Yes, and just being really struck. That must have been maybe early high school. I read Betty Friedan. Betty Friedan was probably the first text I read, and I found it so eye-opening, and I felt like I was looking at my mother. Of course, my mother was not an American housewife, but I could just see it in the early 1990s, looking at my mother. The Beauty Myth was really, weirdly, influential.

Any Germaine Greer?

I actually didn’t read Germaine Greer until college. Then, of course, this was also a time when I was listening to a lot of Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos, as a teenager in the 1990s does, Fiona Apple. I was just absorbing all of it.

It’s a whole comprehensive political-cultural landscape, it sounds like, that you were consuming that informed that.

I guess so, yes. It was all just self-directed. I could feel as though my interest in this was not necessarily the mainstream, so it’s not as though my, for example, my equally smart and engaged girlfriends disagreed with me, but they weren’t necessarily going down the same intellectual path. Then yes, I did Model UN. My older brother did it, too, so I did that.

What countries did you represent?

Who can remember? I do remember once representing Panama, which was very funny.

Especially in the 1990s.

Yes, exactly. Then in college, actually, I continued volunteering for one of the—for the national high school Model UN, so I would help run them. There was a big one in New York. So yes, I was all over the place. Like I said, I was a big reader. Got to college, and I knew—

So tell us about Tufts culture. What are you studying there? What is your major? What are you reading for classes? Any professors you remember being influenced by particularly?

Yes, yes. I knew that I would probably end up majoring in political science and English, and that’s what I did, just because those were the classes I gravitated towards. College is such a strange thing because my birthday is in December, so I started when I was still 17. I didn’t turn 18 until the end of that year, 1997. You’re so young, and you don’t know what you’re doing. I just knew that my parents had taken a second mortgage out on our house in order to send me to this place, and I should just do everything correctly. [laughter] You just don’t know what to do, right? I took classes that I thought were interesting, and I did my homework, and I was one of those—I had great friends and I enjoyed myself. I was one of those people who did not drink in college. It seemed like the thing that everybody else was doing, and I’m a contrarian in that way.

So, classes. I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about this. I took all the usual classes. Tufts is known for its international relations program. Tons of people major in it. I just always gravitated towards domestic, even though it seemed like I should do international, but I just gravitated towards the domestic.

Oh, I should mention one thing. I will say that the Rwandan genocide had a somewhat profound effect on me that I’ve only started to realize recently. Growing up, we subscribed to The Star-Ledger, the Newark Star-Ledger, which is the big New Jersey paper. I think my parents felt financially comfortable adding The New York Times, maybe when I was in middle school. I remember opening the page, and you would see these stories about the genocide unfolding, but they’d be on [page] A8, A9, in the middle of the A section, these little stories, and being stunned by it. It just went on and on for months. Then it’s moving closer to the front of the page, closer to the front of the page. I just remember that and feeling like, What are we doing? Why aren’t we doing something?

I was about 14 when it happened. And it stayed with me. It also removed any remaining illusions about how the world would act in the face of such atrocities. So I was interested in human rights generally. Many college freshmen come to a campus like Tufts and think they’re revolutionaries. But I quickly realized I didn’t share a lot of the super-leftist politics that I saw on campus necessarily. I always had a pragmatic streak.

Anyway, I gravitated towards domestic politics. My advisor was a guy named Jeffrey Berry, who is an expert on the presidency, lovely man. He retired a couple years ago. Then in my English classes, I was somewhat of a dilettante, but there were a few classes that really stuck out to me or that introduced me to things that I wouldn’t have otherwise known. I took an introductory American literature, twentieth-century American literature class with a guy named Jonathan Wilson, and he introduced me to writers like Ray Carver, who I came to just adore, and Grace Paley, whom I had never read. We read Maus in that—I had never read Maus or any graphic novel. So exploring new kinds of literature. Then one of my favorite professors at Tufts is a man named Kevin Dunn. He’s a Shakespearean scholar. I took his two Shakespeare classes, and I just loved them, and I loved him.

I think he was at university with me. We were in the same class. Did he do his PhD at Yale?

Where did you go? I think so. Where did you go?

Oh, my gosh. So I’m from Louisville, Kentucky, and went to the University of Louisville, stayed at home, was too scared to go away at 18, and moreover, thought about going to Georgetown [University], but we couldn’t afford it. They didn’t give me enough in the way of scholarship. I could have then done work study, but I said to my parents, “No, I just want to study. I don’t want to do any work outside of the classroom.” So he and I graduated at the top of the arts and sciences. This isn’t my oral history, but I’ll tell you more at lunch. We both ended up at Oxford, because—

I think this is right, yes.

Yes. Because the University of Louisville had a two-year scholarship for postgrads, like a Rhodes but just for University of Louisville students, to go to Oxford for two years. He went the year ahead of me, and then I waited a year and got it, and then went after him. But he was brilliant.

Oh, how funny. He’s brilliant.

Oh, my gosh. This is so exciting. [laughs]

Yes. I love him. I just loved his classes. Every class he taught, I took. I loved him. One thing that turned out to be useful in my life was that I took a class called the “History of Jazz,” because I was always a big jazz fan. It’s college. You can take whatever you want. You can do whatever you want. I sang in the chamber singers. It was just fun.

Anyway, I go through college not quite knowing what I’m going to do with my life. Over the summers, I interned at various places. My junior year I did the Washington semester program. So I went to DC my first semester of junior year. It’s at AU [American University], so it brings together kids from all different colleges. I interned at the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] that semester.

What was that like?

It was right across from the Supreme Court, which, to a political junkie, was the most exciting thing ever.

And you went to oral arguments?

And it was amazing. The work itself was just clips. At the time, we actually had clips online now, so you’d print them out and put them in the book. But it was interesting. Then I interned at a law firm one summer. I very quickly started realizing that I didn’t think I wanted to be a lawyer. I still was thinking, Do I want to go into academia? I couldn’t really decide between politics and English, but I was leaning toward politics. I still had no idea what I wanted to do.

The summer before my senior year, I did a program through Tufts that sent us to Hong Kong. It brought together students from University of Hong Kong, Beijing University, and Tufts, and we worked together all summer. We had these internships. That was really fantastic and a great experience. I had all these great experiences, but they weren’t necessarily adding up to anything. I just didn’t know what to do.

I also knew that some people were getting internships in Washington, but it was a different time. It’s not like people had tons of internships. I waited tables also. We still had normal jobs back then. I think kids now are expected to do all kinds of lofty jobs.

Career preparation.

Exactly. But we weren’t really doing that. We were still waiting tables.

My senior year, the only thing that suddenly jumped out at me that I thought, This looks interesting—two things. One was the Peace Corps, and one was Teach For America. I just felt like—I’d only ever lived in the Northeast. I went from one cosseted existence to another. I couldn’t get out of New Jersey and my home fast enough. Not that my parents aren’t lovely people, but I felt so closed in. Then you go to another place full of rich northeasterners, mostly white people. I think I just wanted to see my country. I wanted to see more and do more, do something. The idea of pushing paper the way I had been in internships seemed soul-sucking. So my best friend and I went to an informational meeting about Teach For America.

Which was pretty new at the time?

Relatively. I think it must have been 10 years old at the time.

Because the Clinton administration started that, right?

Maybe it was 10 years old at that point. It was still early, earlyish. We applied. We both applied. He’s also from New Jersey. And we got in. Back then, you had to go to get your mail. It would be an envelope, so you’d go to the mailroom and get your envelope. I got it, and I remember, I put as my first choice, my first two choices, New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Bay Area [California], because I wanted to go as far away as possible. My third choice, I think, was the Navajo Reservation. I just wanted to go see something new. I got New Orleans. I got my first pick.

That was that. My best friend chose Newark. After graduation, we went to London [United Kingdom] for a week with our paltry savings, staying in hostels. We came back, and I shipped off a week later with my suitcase and my electric bass to New Orleans. I was there just for a few days, and then we went to Houston [Texas] for the summer to get trained. I got put into secondary English, so that’s [grades] 7 through 12. After that summer of training, we would then be enrolled in a yearlong fast-track certification where we would take classes and be observed during our first year of teaching. So after the summer, I went back to New Orleans and I got placed in the biggest high school in New Orleans and taught English there for two years.

Teach For America still exists?

Yes.

Yes. So tell people what that is and why it was established. And then where did you live in New Orleans, and where is the biggest high school in New Orleans located, or at least where was it located?

It’s not there anymore. Teach For America was started by a Princeton [University] graduate named Wendy Kopp. She did her college thesis on this issue of education and the lack of excellent teachers. Her argument was that if we could just get excellent teachers into underserved schools, we would be able to move the needle on student achievement, that we were failing generations of kids who were growing up low-income communities with schools that were not serving them well. So she started this program where she would recruit these incredibly smart, recent college grads, quickly train them, and then put them into school systems. It was a deal with the school system. So you weren’t employed by Teach For America. You were a regular—I was a union teacher in New Orleans Public Schools.

It was very controversial at the time because what this did was completely bypass the system of education schools, meaning you have to go get a master’s [degree] in education. Just completely jumped over that. Union teachers and traditional teachers were resentful of this. Who do you think you are, 21-year-old white kid from Harvard, that you think you can come in here and teach? There are mixed results. There are many controversies that surround it. I’m not here to give some grand theory of whether Teach For America is good or bad. The idea is that you do this for two years, and then either you stay in education in some capacity—maybe you stay in the classroom, maybe you start a school—or whatever it is that you do next, you take those two years of experience of understanding the achievement gap, and then ideally that will influence whatever you do next.

There was somebody in my cohort who became a doctor. There’s no doubt that what she experienced as a teacher in an incredibly poor community changed how she practices medicine. So that’s the general idea. I have friends who went on to start schools. Some stayed in education, some didn’t, et cetera. For me, it was the formative experience of my—I wouldn’t trade it for the world. People say this often about the Peace Corps and really about anything, “My kids taught me more than I taught them.” That is definitely true. [laughter]

We got trained in Houston. At the time, there were only two places where you’d get trained. And training was, we taught summer school, because we had to have some kind of teaching experience. Actually, first you have to observe. So I actually went home to my hometown and observed my own 6th grade and 10th grade English teachers. Then we got trained, so I taught summer school. I taught eighth graders.

In your training, do they teach you pedagogy?

Yes. You’ve got this fast-track pedagogy. You’re put into cohorts of other people who are doing secondary education. Of course, all these people are going to go to different states with different requirements. But they give you some kind of pedagogical education to at least get started – how to plan lessons, how to think about scope and sequencing content according to standards, how to manage your classroom, etc. Is it complete? No. But what the research shows is that pedagogical teaching that you get at schools of education are not necessarily what make excellent teachers, and that certainly at the secondary level in math and science, what you really need is content knowledge. It’s why No Child Left Behind [Act of 2001] made the requirement that you must be a major of that subject in order to teach that subject.

Again, this is right around the time NCLB [No Child Left Behind] passes. There would be new requirements for districts, schools, and teachers. There’s a lot going on at this time period. This is 2001. Now we’re in the [George W.] Bush administration, and things have changed. Education has changed, and there’s a lot of tension between your traditional union Democrat education stalwarts and this new wave of people who are pushing things like charter schools and vouchers—not to put them in the same category, because I don’t. This will actually affect my work later on working for Senator [Mary] Landrieu, who shared those more moderate tendencies, and frankly, so did Barack Obama.

So I start teaching in a high school that’s in New Orleans East. It’s called Marion Abramson High School. It was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina subsequently, and then reopened as a charter school.

What was day one like?

I think I’ve blocked it out. It was overwhelming. I was what was called a “floater teacher.” I didn’t have my own classroom. The week before, I went for teacher in-service, and we did a whole community service project, cleaning up the grounds. So I got a sense of the school. I went to a big high school myself, so it wasn’t totally unfamiliar, but I was only 21 and in a school full of teenagers who are—my seniors were bigger than I was, I’m a little person.

You’re just trying to get the lay of the land on the first day. We had been taught, you know, Classroom management is the most important thing. Don’t let them see you smile. Be tough. I think that pedagogy has changed and classroom management has changed, and there were some race-related stereotypes that fed into how classroom management was taught. But I tried to be somewhat stoic and tough. They walk in. I gave them a diagnostic of very hard questions, and things like that.

But I did have to move around. So my first-period class was actually in another TFA [Teach For America] teacher’s class, then second-period off, and then—so I had to go to different classrooms.

What was the racial makeup of the school?

It was almost entirely black. There was a small Vietnamese community. In New Orleans East—New Orleans East is known for having a sizable Vietnamese community that came over as refugees during the Vietnam War, and so they’re still there, and we had a decent number of them in that part of the city.

It was a Title I school. The idea of TFA is to go to underserved communities.

What did you see in the diagnostic test that you handed out the first day?

It was rather remarkable. Oh, gosh, I haven’t thought about this in 20 years. There were children who clearly—I mostly taught 10th grade, and then I had one class of kids who had failed senior English. In New Orleans at the time, in Louisiana, you were allowed to come back and keep taking it until you passed it, I think until you were maybe 23 or 24, if you had an IEP [individualized education program], which is a special education designation. One of the young women in that class was the mother of one of Lil Wayne’s [rap star] children.

Anyway, my 10th graders, for example, there was one boy—so sweet, Antonio—who clearly was illiterate, clearly could not read or write. He could write all his letters, but they came together in nonsense. But he was so well behaved that he kept getting passed along. And then I would say the probably highest grade level of writing was something like a seventh-grade level, and then there were a couple kids who were outstanding. There was an honors track in our school, so they could be put on that.

When I saw this, I was just—based on test scores and school-level data, I went into the classroom knowing this was the case. But when I actually experienced it, I was so mad. There was no difference between me and my students—except that I happened to be born into a zip code with an excellent public school system. It was insane to me that we had let this go on, that just by virtue of being born with families who had a lower income and by having black skin, we were just systematically screwing over generations of kids. It was both infuriating and overwhelming. Like, How am I going to solve this? It’s one thing if you get them in kindergarten, although I had friends who were teaching kindergarten, and they thought, This is so unjust. How can one child know so many words and another one doesn’t?

They’re living in circumstances that just make it incredibly challenging to ever get on an even playing field. The injustice just filled me with rage. Who can prepare you for that? How can you possibly teach in a way that will actually help these students? How do I get all these kids even remotely close to being ready for life?

I think they were just—they didn’t know what to make of me. They had had TFA teachers, and some of them kind of knew that there were these random outsiders, mostly white, who would come in. There was one other Indian teacher in this school who was a TFA teacher who was one year ahead of me. He was the chemistry teacher. So they knew—they had seen an Indian person before. But I got a lot of, “What are you, Ms. Peri? What are you?” Actually, on the maybe third day of school, we had to do a, “What is Indian?” I just made a list of all the things they thought “Indian” meant.

Also, there is an entire Indigenous history in Louisiana. What is very interesting is that I would hear my kids call certain kids “red,” and what that meant was a light-skinned black person who may or may not have other Indigenous or Creole ancestry. There’s a whole lexicon and language around that that I was unfamiliar with. It’s incredibly complicated now that I look back, but in the moment, I just needed us to get past this for them to overcome their—me being a figure of intrigue so I could just become their English teacher. That was my way of doing it. Then English class began. This was late August, and then 9/11 [September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks] happened.

Oh, right.

That was, I think, really complicated in retrospect. We were so far away from home. I have people who—I’m from New Jersey, so that morning, I didn’t even—I was teaching my class when it happened, because New Orleans is an hour behind. The teacher whose classroom it was, she came in and she said, “You need to go check the news.” I remember she said, “A plane hit the World Trade Center [in New York City].” And the first thing I said was, “Is it bad?” I couldn’t comprehend what that meant. “Is it bad?” My next period was off, and so I just was trying to call people, but I couldn’t get through to anyone. Everybody’s phones—

Did you know people in the World Trade Center?

My cousin was supposed to—she worked there. She was on her way. I knew people who were on their way there. Nobody I personally knew died, but my closest friend at the time from home, he worked on Wall Street, and he just walked the Brooklyn Bridge back home. It was chaos. But we were so far away from it, it was surreal.

I presume your students would want to talk about that.

Yes, we did talk about it.

How did you talk about it with them?

We did talk about it. I don’t remember the particulars, but I tried to explain—they had a lot of questions about, Who are these people? What is terrorism? Is everybody who looks like you a terrorist? [laughs] We talked a little bit about that. I talked a little bit about the history, just to give them context for, What is this place?

I mean, I definitely had my—it was not always easy. But I think I came in tough. There were definitely kids who I just could not get to and moments that were just overwhelming, which anybody who’s a parent knows just sometimes happens. It’s teenagers with all their roiling hormones and all the complications. My second class of the day, it was a huge class my first year. It was 40 kids, and there was only one girl in it. It was all boys. A class of 40 teenage boys is something.

That was sophomore English.

They were sophomores, yes, right. But I think that my approach was—I was tough, and I gave them work. I just held them to some kind of standard, and not everybody always met it, but we were going to do work. I had a system. It was structured. That was one of the things we learned in TFA. Kids need structure, no matter what age they are. It’s what I still do as a parent. Every day, you walk in. I need to see your ID [identification]. Your shirt is tucked in. They had to wear a uniform. You sit down. You get your journal. There’s a writing assignment. It was a 90-minute class. We had a block schedule. So you sit down. I would always have a journal prompt, and you would start writing in your journal. If your feelings meant that you didn’t want to write today, you can draw a picture, but you’ve got to be doing something that’s reflective. I had a routine, and I told them. Every day, I would write the schedule. You know where the schedule is. You know what’s happening.

It was interesting because after school, I had detention, and detention was, you had to write letters to my parents telling them why you were wasting my time and keeping me off—I held it Friday afternoons. Friday afternoons, which is when teenagers are dying to get out of school, and you had to write letters. I found that this order—it was just so orderly, kids would come after school and just hang out in my classroom. I was at school all the time because I worked all the time. It was orderly. I always had snacks. I’d go to Sam’s Club and just buy tons of food because I knew kids were hungry. I just tried to make it a place that I was—

What were their favorite things that they wanted?

Oh, I never gave them their favorite stuff. I had, like, granola bars and things about, but if you’re hungry, then you’re going to eat it. I was not a great teacher. I’m sure I did nothing for them. But my thought was, I’m just going to create a predictable environment because outside is just chaos, because New Orleans was chaos. Some of their lives were chaos.

I just tried to do that. So even when they thought I was being mean or tough or they wanted to act out, they just knew that I was really there for them. They would ask me, “Do you have a baby? Don’t you have kids?” And I would say, “No, you guys are my kids. You’re my life.” And it was so true. They were just totally my life. I think they sensed that. And then also, I just really loved them, and I think they got that too.

Was there a set curriculum from the state?

There was. There were standards, and then the—

That was my next question, state standards and curriculum.

—district, and then the curriculum coordinators would come up with the curriculum. We had textbooks and everything. But in my mind, I was just looking at these textbooks and thinking, This is irrelevant to these kids. So all the other teachers would definitely stick with the textbooks, but I just kind of—I tried to, but then I also tried to supplement, because I thought, This is not interesting to them. So I would bring in—

Also, was it just the standard sophomore English anthology?

Yes, exactly. The same textbooks—

Poems, short stories.

Exactly, exactly. Then we also got supplementary books. I remember I got a whole stack of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. I just tried to come up with ways of getting my kids to read. I brought in magazines. The New York Times had free newspaper subscriptions for teachers. I got that. Then I just had stuff lying around, Sports Illustrated, Ebony, whatever, music magazines, always something to look at and read.

Could you see that that was drawing most of them in, all of them, some?

No, I have no idea. Some, maybe. I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t know how you measure that. Then the other thing I did was—

But they, on their own, would want to come into your class and read something, or come—?

Come and sit and listen. I always had NPR [National Public Radio] on because it was All Things Considered at 4:00 p.m., after school. They would just be, like, “Oh, Ms. Peri, put on better music.” But I just wouldn’t.

“Oh, it’s the news again. It’s news again.”

I just tried everything and tried to see what stuck. And then my second year, I was actually on the committee that—so now NCLB is in place, so we started getting more Title I resources for things like helping kids after school to improve their test scores. I was one of the teachers who did that, so I would work with small groups of students after school. We had these books that they sent us that we would really drill down on specific skills and things like that.

Workbooks.

Yes. That kicked in the second year, and I started working a little bit more on curriculum. Then I just learned more because one of things we had to do was get certified along the way. It was a fast-track certification, and the way we did that was, we had to create a portfolio and get observed and all that, but then Teach For America put us in small cohorts with a master teacher, and we would meet once a week and he would teach us different things. Again, not your traditional colleges of education.

This was around a time when there were other programs like this. There was something called Teach First that pulled people had been professionals, midcareers, brought them in to become teachers. There was more of an interest in trying to get new energy into the classroom and improve teacher quality, and some of this was tied up with NCLB.

This is all completely fascinating because it sounds like this was a catalyst in so many ways for developing your own political thinking that you’ve already spoken about, poverty and about these kids’ lives. You make it sound like a vocation as well, right? But I was just wondering what your life was like outside of the classroom and outside of school at the time, and if your political thinking was evolving, if there was any organizing or anything outside that that was relevant that you were getting involved in at the time.

You know, I did not have a life outside of my classroom. I really didn’t. I lived with two of my friends. We each taught different grades. I was a high school English teacher. One taught middle school, and the other taught special education in an elementary school in a rural parish about 45 minutes outside of New Orleans called St. John’s [St. John the Baptist] Paris. So we all had different lives, but we worked all the time. I don’t remember ever—I would come home at whatever, 7:00 or something. One of us would make dinner. We would watch Sex and the City and go to bed. Then I would wake up all over again at 6:00 in the morning and do it again.

Saturday morning, I would let myself maybe take some time off, hang out with my boyfriend. Then Sunday morning, I would be at the coffee shop grading papers all day and planning all day. You felt like you could never get ahead of it.

Politically, this is this Bush administration. The War in Afghanistan starts, and we saw the drumbeat towards Iraq. There are absolutely protests going on, and there are people who I knew in Teach For America who are somewhat involved in that. I had friends outside, from college or whatever else who, wherever they were living, were getting involved in the protest movement. Demonstrations in Jackson Square [New Orleans] and all the rest. For sure, there was something in the air.

I felt a little bit removed from it, I have to say. I was following it. But I was not expressing strong views one way or the other. I had always been interested in Afghanistan, just because of, I think—I had gotten interested in the Taliban and the extremism against women when I was in college. I had read a few books on it, so I was interested in that. But I wasn’t one of these people who was going to protest against the Iraq War. I was just watching what was happening.

There were a few teachers in my school who were in the National Guard and deployed, so that was a thing, and then a bunch of kids who did ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps], because it was a lifeline.

I did my two years, and then I decided not to stay on. I just knew I wanted to be doing more on maybe education policy. I wasn’t quite sure, but I knew I wasn’t going to stay in New Orleans. I didn’t love New Orleans. I mean, I love it. I have a love-hate relationship with New Orleans. It’s a complicated place. It’s hard to live in. I found the race factor, the black-white divide, the tony, extremely wealthy, white part of New Orleans, where then just a block away is a project. The white people went to these really nice fancy private schools. It felt like plantation life. As a Northerner—and we have our own brand of racism—it was foreign to me and uncomfortable. I felt like I needed to move on. I was a restless 24-year-old.

So then I moved to Washington [D.C.]. I drove. I drove myself up to Washington. Broke up with my boyfriend and got in the car. Then I ended up in Washington.

Did you already have a job lined up in Washington before you moved, or did you—

No.

Oh, OK. So you went off on a big adventure to D.C.?

Kind of. I think in the back of my mind, I always knew I would end up in D.C. You’re a political junkie. You’re going to probably end up in D.C. I wasn’t quite sure what to do. That best friend from college was now in law school at GW, so I knew that I could see him, and another friend of ours was in D.C., too. I was starting to apply for jobs, thinking about what to do. That summer, before I left, I went back to Houston to train the next cohort of TFAs, so I worked there. I was thinking all summer about what to do, and then I ended up in D.C., obviously.

I applied for Hill jobs and various other political and policy jobs, and I ended up at a small nonprofit—again, I was so clueless—but a small nonprofit that worked with state legislators. At the time, it was attempting to be a counter to ALEC, which is the American Legislative Exchange Council. What they are is this right-wing outfit that provides proactive, extremely conservative, reactionary legislation to state legislators all across the country. So it’s, You want an abortion ban? Great. Here’s model legislation that you can introduce. You want school vouchers? Great. Here’s legislation.

They were very powerful. They were huge—they still are—and had seeded themselves in states across the country, and were part of the powerful right-wing movement that had been building for, up to that point, 40 years, of the conservative movement of the 1960s and early 1970s realizing that it needed to build a ground game, getting onto college campuses, getting into school boards, getting into state legislatures, just slowly, slowly, slowly building up. I think that what they really had at their disposal that Democrats still don’t have is funders who understood that strategy and were willing to invest in it. We still don’t have that. They really did. And so ALEC was one of those outfits that then became quite powerful.

At the time, if you guys remember, back in the early 2000s, states were passing some pretty remarkable conservative legislation on a whole host of issues. Plus Bush was in office. So my organization was trying to counter that. They never really got the funding or had the muscle to do that, but it was an attempt, so I was working there for a couple of years.

It was public policy.

It was public policy, exactly, and something to try out, something to test out. It was also interesting because I had left New Orleans and left Teach For America with views that probably put me to the right of most mainstream Democrats on education specifically. In other words, I wasn’t one of those people who thought No Child Left Behind was the worst thing that had ever happened because I had been in a place where I felt like, actually, we do need to raise the standards, and actually, it is unfair that we are allowing subpar union teachers to stay in their jobs because they’re unionized.

I believe in unions, and I believe in teacher unions, but teachers unions’ interests don’t align perfectly with student interests. By definition. The students don’t have a union. I thought we did need to think carefully about teacher performance and quality and not just reflexively hate NCLB because it was signed by a Republican president.

And there is some bipartisanship, as you well know, in No Child Left Behind, particularly again with people like [Edward M.] Ted Kennedy, who is certainly not, at that time, a moderate, but he’s willing to do what he needs to do to try to, in this case, improve education.

Could I just pause a moment and go back to your reference to conservatism in the 1960s, because I’m hearing people, particularly this week because of this election and its outcome, and you particularly, I think, reading in your Slate article about linkages. Where is this conservatism coming from?

Which Slate piece was this? Was it about [Nikki] Haley or about [Jon] Meacham?

Meacham, because of his conservatism, and his working with the Bushes. I think you were commenting that, does he not see that there is a direct thread from, certainly, Ronald Reagan forward, but I’ve been working this out this week particularly, because that really resonated with me. It seems that a lot of Americans don’t see that. So could we go back to the 1960s just briefly to say, do you tie it to Barry Goldwater and that movement of 1964 that clearly crashed and burned in the ’64 landslide of LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson] and the landslide of taking Congress over, continuing to have a big majority there? Do you draw the line starting with that, coming forward?

Sure. You can go back even earlier than that, right?

Certainly, the isolationism of Robert Taft in the 1950s, and the—

You can even go back earlier, right? You can go back to—

And the 1920s.

Exactly. You can go back to [Calvin] Coolidge and [Herbert] Hoover, to the tension of what FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] was trying to do and what somewhat like Calvin Coolidge was trying to do. The movements around them may have been separate at the time—the corporate business interests, the deregulation interests, on one hand, and social conservative ideas. But those strains persist through the Great Depression and beyond.

Yes, they don’t go away.

They don’t go away. Then the isolationism that once again comes up around World War II, not all of it just—

Not all conservative, by any means.

Not all conservative, by any means, and not all just [Charles] Lindbergh and Naziism, right? Then you have World War II itself, which undermines isolationism as a political position, but those underlying conservative impulses don’t disappear—they evolve and transform. The business conservatism of the 1920s fuses with anticommunism, with emerging Christian libertarianism. The skepticism toward federal power persists and takes on new forms into the postwar period. By the 1960s, Goldwater is able to pick up the John Birch-y conservatism. We can say that movement crashed and burned, but then a phoenix really was born out of that. In some ways, being completely obliterated and humiliated in some fashion, as they were, just had them regenerate into something—

A galvanizing force.

Yes—something stronger. Not only did it not go away, but the Kevin Phillipses of the world understand you can’t just focus on the presidency. They were so strategic in how they went deeper, seeding and building a conservative movement. Not to go on a tangent, but I think one of the most ignored figures of the past century is Phyllis Schlafly.

Yes, I agree with you on this.

Right? I am so interested in pursuing a project on Phyllis Schlafly because all the credit that we give to Ronald Reagan and all those guys, I’m sorry, so much of it needs to go to her. She managed to actually bring together these elements of conservatism and motivate huge numbers of women. Her interest in foreign policy and building up the U.S. as a nuclear power, and her religious conservatism and her traditionalism, which of course completely goes against her actual work and the fact that she was working all the time despite she had—whatever, a hundred children. Anyway, she embodies so many complex, clashing forces.

She was part of that—maybe one of the most powerful figures of that movement. They saw it as a movement, and they were playing the long game. They were like the Chinese government. They weren’t thinking in four-year cycles. They were thinking in hundred-year cycles. And Democrats just never did that. Now we’re going down this rabbit hole.

No, this is really, really helpful.

Yes.

This planting of that seed that started so early, it never died. It didn’t. It got stronger. It brought in new voices. It made connections between movements that you would have thought were disparate. By the time you get to Reagan, and he is this embodiment of everything that Goldwater dreamed of and couldn’t realize, and has this—

That he had spoken for in 1964 on television.

Yes, way more powerfully than Goldwater ever had, way more persuasively, and in a way—

And seemingly safer, less virulent.

Yes. A far more palatable, attractive version of what Goldwater was offering. Suddenly, he is—I don’t know why every cycle we say, “Oh, Democrats are losing the white working class.” No, we lost them [laughs] 40 years ago. He was able to do that, pulling together all these disparate movements, selling it as something palatable and desirable. The conservative ideology that seemed to lose catastrophically in 1964 turned out to be something Americans were actually willing to embrace when it was presented with optimism and charm. The movements never went away; they just needed the right moment and the right messenger.

Sorry, I can stop ranting about this. But the Democrat donor class does not understand this. They do not know how to give effectively. Donald Trump wins, and everybody is throwing money at the ACLU. God love the ACLU, but you are missing the real levers of change, which happen—and you’re seeing it just by the fact that school board races became really important. Anyway, I think that that dynamic is so frequently ignored, and I don’t know what it will take to make people see it and to draw that really obvious line.

And follow those lessons.

Yes.

And I’m also thinking even in ’64, the other thing that Goldwater does is eliminate the Nelson Rockefeller wing, the Northeast wing of the Republican Party.

Just sent them out to pasture.

Right, again, on the way to Reaganism and then Trumpism.

Yes, yes.

Wow. It’s 11:00. Should we take a little break?

Sure. Oh my gosh, it’s 11:10 and we haven’t even started talking about Barack Obama. [laughter]

But this is what we love about these. You just don’t know how—

But it’s all about my life.

But it all feeds in.

Whole life—people think, Oh, why are you interested in me and my biography? I’m not famous.

Like it’s not relevant.

But it so is because of all the ties your life has—in this instance, and in most of these people’s instances—to politics and history that then get you, eventually, to the White House.

And then another thing to keep in mind, as well, is that students read these. High school students read these, and middle school students may read these.

I read all of these doing my master’s thesis, as I will always say.

Oh, there you are. So in addition to the academic, the scholar that you are, that helps, but it also, you have to realize, it will help students know how to negotiate their careers and what they want to do. And it’s really helpful to hear, as I remember doing this in senior year, having no idea what you want to do—knowing, going into college, Oh, I love politics, I’ll go into political science. And the frightening part of knowing every August, every September, for your whole life after that point, where you will be, and suddenly thinking, I don’t know where I want to be. I found it one of the most stressful years of my life. And so for a student to read that and know, it’s OK. It’s OK to feel that way—at whatever time you’re feeling that way in your student career.

I want every student to have the privilege of getting in a car and driving with no destination, [laughs] and just the liberation of that.

I feel like kids don’t feel like they can do that now, but I don’t know. I was listening to one of your talks, something that you had done that was on YouTube where you had said that you learned speechwriting on the job and that you just had to kind of do it. I think that’s so true for so many things in life. People are obviously terrified of doing that, and realizing, that’s OK. That’s how you learn.

[BREAK]

So, you’re at the Center for Policy Alternatives from ’03, when you finish in New Orleans, to ’05?

That’s right.

Just maybe quickly, or not—then Katrina happens. What are you thinking about the people you had worked with in New Orleans and the Bush 43 [George W. Bush] approach to that?

I was, like you said, at CPA [Center for Policy Alternatives] until 2005. I realized that I was just feeling stuck and not sure what to do, so I did the thing that one should not do, which is spend an enormous amount of time and money going to graduate school. [laughter]

We’ve all done it.

Exactly. What was I thinking? [laughter]

But still, if you do, you picked a good one.

I did, I did. It was the right place to go. I was debating between a few options, but I’m so glad I went to the Kennedy School [John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University]. It was not the most academic experience, but that’s not really what it’s about. I was just exposed to so many interesting people and sharpened my thinking in a lot of ways. In August, I moved back to Boston to start my master’s program at the Kennedy School. That’s when Katrina happened.

Right. So that’s August of ’05.

I got there and Katrina happened. My cell phone actually wouldn’t work, because I still had my New Orleans number. I guess something happened where the numbers wouldn’t work for whatever reason, even though I was far away from it.

There were people there who were from the area and who were affected. And trying to find my friend Cheryl, who was still living there—she had had to evacuate. She didn’t get back in until a couple of months later, and her house was destroyed. Her fridge [refrigerator] was neon colors because of all the rotting food and mold. The stories you heard were unbelievable. Trying to follow my students, where they were, what was going on. Facebook [social media platform] was helpful from that perspective. But it was really just a remarkable time.

Had any of your students evacuated to Houston?

Many. Many.

Were any of them in the Superdome?

Some were in the Superdome. A bunch of my students actually still live in Houston to this day. Houston, Dallas [Texas], a couple of people. One of them was originally from Shreveport [Louisiana]. And then some folks ended up back in New Orleans. I’m Facebook friends with some of them, and so I can see generally what’s going on. Yes, it was really a devasting thing.

What was so interesting as I remember at the time, we would have—The Times-Picayune, the [news]paper in New Orleans, frequently had—not frequently, but during hurricane season, there would be these editorials about how New Orleans is a “cereal bowl” [low-lying], and some geology professor or climate professor at Tulane [University] who would publish an op-ed, New Orleans is a cereal bowl, and the big one is coming, and we’re really not prepared for it. Everybody kind of knew that this was a possibility—and it just was obviously so devastating when it happened.

But probably—I don’t know. Did they talk about the levees breaking, or were they just talking about dumps of water, which would be bad enough, from rainfall?

That’s a good question. I can’t recall specifically what they would have been talking about.

That’s why there are levees, because that forms the sides of the cereal bowl.

That was the point. That was the point, right. We would get hurricane warnings, and we would just sit in our bathtub and eat Chinese takeout and wait for it to pass. No one was going to—it’s what we were talking about with Charlottesville [Virginia]. There’s one road out of New Orleans, I-10 [U.S. Interstate 10 highway]. You’re not going to get on the road if there’s no storm coming and just be stuck in traffic for hours.

And lose the gas. There’s no gas to fill up.

Exactly. And we were teachers making $20,000 a year. We’re not going to do any of that, so we never evacuated.

Could I just back up one year, and that is, any interest in the John Kerry campaign, before?

Yes. I would say yes. I was not doing any campaign work. I think in part I never really knew how to enter the campaign world. I have found Democrat politics, at least from my vantage point, to always have been somewhat opaque. If you didn’t know someone on a campaign, or—I didn’t really have an entry point.

It’s interesting because when I finally got to the Obama White House many years later, so many of the assistants and the young people there, their parents were donors. There were a lot of people who would get into these political positions, more than I had realized, because of who their parents were. That’s not to say they weren’t hardworking and smart, but they had a point of entry.

They know the infrastructure.

Exactly. They know the infrastructure. I knew nothing about this world. If I were going to be a doctor, then maybe I would have had some line of sight into how things work. But this was so foreign to my family and my background, so I was just navigating blindly.

I didn’t do any campaign work. I was working at CPA at the time. But I remember feeling some amount of hope, and then—I’m pretty superstitious, and towards the end, it was so clear to me that Bush was going to win, [laughs] and it was so depressing. It did feel like we were in the wilderness, and I think that contributed to my sense of, What am I doing? What are we going to do?

By the time I got to college, so towards the end of Clinton’s term, I really hated him. I think it had something, maybe everything, to do with Monica Lewinsky, who was just a little bit older than I was. I was just so disgusted with him. I had such general disgust for the end of the Clinton years and a feeling of regret that he had squandered such a huge, enormous, important opportunity at this moment in history, global history, where the world was making this pivot into the technological age, and we did not have a plan.

And democracy after the Cold War.

And democracy, exactly. He didn’t develop a plan, and then he just squandered the opportunity, once he had some ideas, to actually shepherd them through and then pass them onto the floor. I was pretty disillusioned, I would say, by the end of the Clinton years.

And you’ve spoken about your feminism pretty ardently as well.

Yes.

In terms of a feminist response to that?

It was enraging. It was enraging. My dad actually remembers me calling him from college. I don’t even remember this conversation, but recently he mentioned it because I was just commenting on what a garbage human Bill Clinton is, as I will say to anyone who will listen. And he said, “I remember when you called me from school, and you were just so upset at how Lewinsky was being treated, and how the press could not see that she was just a kid, and this man had completely exploited his power and was now throwing her under the bus.” I don’t think I was the only woman to feel that way at the time, but we didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about this. We really didn’t back then.

No #MeToo [movement] at this point.

No.

Yes, and the tension around his position as a very liberal figure and people not necessarily calling that out at the time.

Because he was our only option. It felt like he was our only option.

And Hillary [Rodham Clinton]—

And she did not take that opportunity to say anything. Again, it’s because you feel like you’re trapped. You have no other option. He’s our only choice. Anyway, separately from that. But yes, I think I was disaffected during the Bush years and unclear as to what ought to be done.

I am also somebody who never was a protester, meaning I have strongly held political views, obviously. I very much respect activism and understand its place. It is just not how I work. It’s not where my brain goes. I think I was not going to be somebody who was just—I mean, I was at the protests when I needed to be at protests, certainly in 2017, but that’s not my—my theory of change is that that’s part of it. It’s not all of it, and it’s not where I am most effective.

Even though you said you were a revolutionary in classes.

And by that, I meant that I would just say the thing that needed to be said and the boys would snicker. [laughter] That’s really what it was. Looking back, it’s astonishing that whatever I was saying was so simple and noncontroversial about female equality, but they would purposely egg me on because they enjoyed that back-and-forth. The girls were quiet, but when I would call out whatever behavior was happening or when I would say something in favor of women’s equality—I mean, of course it was obvious, and yet it wasn’t, and it was something to be laughed at.

I was not teased or bullied or anything. I got along with everybody. I think that actually that intellectual strain of mine took greater hold among my friends in our class by the time I was a senior, when my classmates and friends were getting older, learning more, thinking about new ideas, but I do think that—I say “revolutionary” in a tongue-in-cheek sense. I wasn’t. I wasn’t burning my bra or anything.

More important, you were speaking up.

My ideas were just—I was speaking up against something that, for whatever reason, other kids were not speaking up about. It struck a chord with me in a way that I didn’t see around me. Had I gone to maybe an all-girls school or something like that, maybe it would have been different, but that’s not where I was.

What are you hoping to accomplish and learn at Harvard Kennedy School?

I have no idea. No idea.

What did you learn at Kennedy School?

My word to the wise is, don’t just go to graduate school because you don’t know what else to do. It’s a very expensive way to dither. [laughter]

As soon as I walked on campus, though, I will say this. Just on the first day, I remember bumping into somebody who is now one of my best friends, and we just immediately connected. He had just come back from Peace Corps—lots of Peace Corps, TFA types there. He was passionate about climate, and to this day, he works in energy access. Another friend of mine, hilariously and still is, passionate about transportation. You meet someone else who is really interested in counterterrorism. You meet someone else who is really interested in analytics, and to this day is a pollster. Everybody has their own interest, but everybody is equally passionate and committed.

And they come there with those passions.

Because of that, yes.

Presumably because they’ve already done some work in that area, and they want the credential—

Exactly, yes.

—and the connections and the network.

And the exposure and all the rest of it, and to see, What else can I do now? It felt like I was with my tribe. And to this day, that group of people, they are my community, even in D.C. It was really kindred spirits. It was very cool. I don’t think I fully accepted my first semester that school doesn’t matter all that much. The grade you get in econ [economics] class—I didn’t know how to not be a nerdy, studying student. But every week, there was someone new on campus. Every week, there was something new happening.

The Harvard Institute of Politics has, obviously, people coming all the time.

Constantly.

I was going to say, was there anyone in particular that came to speak that stuck in your mind?

Who didn’t? [laughter]

Everyone—you’ll have to go back to the archive for the roster of speakers.

Truly, because everybody was there. What was so funny is that our cafeteria was in the middle of the forum, and so you’re just sitting there drinking your coffee, eating lunch with a friend, and some head of state walks by. It really is an extraordinary thing.

The forums were always so fascinating, but more than that, there were great professors and interesting classes. I took [Ashton] Ash Carter’s class, and Juliette Kayyem’s class, and Steve Jarding, and Elaine Kamarck. Just really interesting, thoughtful people, but also interesting, thoughtful classmates. So many international students, which was so wonderful. People studying different modalities of thinking.

And then I was exposed to new ideas. I actually really like statistics. I had never taken a stats class, and you had to take one. I ended up taking a couple of more, because I just thought, Gosh, data analysis, this is really interesting and useful. It just gave me a slightly different angle. Am I an econometrician? No. But was it helpful to be able to read a study or a poll? Yes.

I also started writing again. I hadn’t really been writing for a long time. I’ve been a writer since I was a little kid. My mother has the stories that I wrote as a little kid. I did not write for my college paper, in part because I did not want to be a reporter, so I would contribute opinion pieces.

I started writing opinion pieces for our Kennedy School paper—not The [Harvard] Crimson, but the Kennedy School paper. The editor was a guy who was a year ahead of me who was conservative, so we’d both—each of us would have a piece in the paper. I did that for the next two years. The next year, I became the editor. Cody Keenan actually wrote pieces for me a couple of times because he was a year behind me. I started exercising this muscle of, every week I have to write an op-ed. I had never really done that, and it was the thing that, in looking back, was maybe the most important first step to moving towards a career in speechwriting. That was just great practice.

The summer between the two years, I went to India and did some work with a nonprofit. Another Kennedy School grad had set that up. The previous summer before grad school, 2005, I had gone to India. I hadn’t been there since 1998. I went by myself for the first time and spent time with family, traveled by myself. It was a really great experience, just reconnected with a bunch of family. I wanted to go back again, and so this was the chance to do that.

Once again, like college, toward the end of graduate school, I still don’t know what I’m doing. And now there’s going to be a bill to pay because I’m going to have to start paying my student loans pretty soon, so I need a job. I graduated, and I still didn’t have a job, which is not ideal. I was applying for jobs, but I didn’t quite know what kind of job I wanted, which is problematic. I was thinking about the Hill, but I wasn’t sure how I’d get—you don’t know how to get these jobs. It’s really hard.

So I took a road trip that summer with my then-boyfriend, who was a year behind me at the Kennedy School. He’s now my husband. He had never been down South. He’s from Massachusetts. So we drove from Boston to New Orleans and made a bunch of pit stops on the way.

We spent about a week in New Orleans. While there, I revisited with some of my Teach For America friends. Again, this is now after Katrina, two years after Katrina. One of them said, “Hey, Senator Mary Landrieu is looking for a legislative assistant to focus on education, and she wants somebody who’s taught in New Orleans Public Schools,” because now we were starting the process of rebuilding the school system. This was somebody who was in the TFA office. I said, “OK, I guess I’ll apply for this job,” so they sent my resumé in.

Then I went back to Boston, where I was still living. And actually was this—no, this had to have been after graduation. I wouldn’t have taken a road trip otherwise. I ended up—I interviewed and met with Senator Landrieu. I flew down and met with her and the chief of staff. I went back to Boston, and I waited, and I got the call. They offered me the job, so I became a legislative assistant for her.

I remember that they called me and they offered me the job—Jason [Matthews], the chief of staff, offered me the job, and he said the salary. I just sort of said, “Sure,” and I hung up the phone. I didn’t know what else to do.

Naseem [Khuri], my husband—well, at the time, boyfriend—he actually works in negotiations and conflict management. That was his track at the Kennedy School. He works in conflict. He said, “You didn’t negotiate. You need to call back.” He showed me a seminal study about how women don’t negotiate their salaries and men end up negotiating and getting more. And he said, “You’re going to call back, and you’re going to ask for more money.” I said, “What if they say no?” And he said, “What if they say no?” He said, “They’re not going to rescind the job offer. Just ask.” I did, and I got $5,000 more. [laughs]

If I might ask, again, for people who have to make these decisions about where to go, and what to invest in graduate school, and what kind of jobs you get coming out, do you remember what your student debt was as you came out of the Kennedy School?

$100,000.

And what did they offer you initially from Senator Landrieu’s office?

$50,000.

And you got them up to $55,000?

Yes.

Do you remember what you were paying a month toward your student loan?

Yes. So because I had—I think I had a government job that—so I had two different student loans. I had the federally backed student loan, the federal-backed one, which is at a lower interest rate, and then I had my Citibank loan. So altogether, I was probably paying about $500 or $600 a month. I would, every once in a while, try to put in a little bit more, so I would just up my monthly payment here and there. We just tried to pay as little rent as possible. I lived with a roommate. I didn’t have a life because I worked on the Hill, so all my money went to that.

But yes, you have to pay some kind of rent to live in Washington or the suburbs.

Student debt was real. It was real.

But you made it through.

Yes, somehow. I was paying it for a very long time.

And it’s Naseem?

Naseem.

How do you spell that?

N-A-S-E-E-M. His last name is Khuri, K-H-U-R-I.

Thank you. That will help the transcriber. And you said he is Palestinian American.

Yes.

You meet at the Kennedy School.

Yes. I was his TA [teacher’s assistant] for economics.

Oh, interesting. Tell us about the integration of cultures and backgrounds.

I don’t know, ask our kids. [laughter] It’s funny. Our families are actually, in some ways, similar in that—actually, his parents and my mom came to America the same year, or maybe his came in ’72, but around the same time. Again, his father was a doctor, came over for the same reasons. So he came over, and immediately—he was a heart surgeon, so he went to the Mayo Clinic. Then he went to [Johns] Hopkins [University], and then he went to the Brigham [and Women’s Hospital of] Harvard in Boston. He ended up at the Boston VA, the Veterans Affairs hospital, and he was there for the rest of his career. But yes, similar in a lot of ways. The immigrant sensibility is really understandable.

Our parents met—I was not serious about Naseem when I met him. I mean, I was leaving Boston. I had no interest in dating one person, no interest in marriage and kids and the rest, so I wasn’t planning on staying with him. But our parents met earlier than they otherwise would have because his father had a brain tumor. Almost as soon as we met, his father was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had the same one that Ted Kennedy had. And so a year after we met—typically, people with that glioblastoma live for about 16 months, so about a year into it, it was very clear that he wasn’t going to survive this.

His last trip to New York—he went for a surgical conference. He was in the middle of getting treatment, and he was immunocompromised. Naseem said, “We’re in New York, and your parents are in New Jersey. I really think they should meet.” I was like, “I really don’t think they should meet, because”—and in my head, I’m like, This is not going to last. But he said, “Let’s just make them meet.” So we arranged a dinner. We went to a Thai restaurant where we were the only people there because my late father-in-law couldn’t be around large groups of people because he was immunocompromised.

I was very nervous. His family is Palestinian Christian. When they moved to Massachusetts, it’s interesting because their community in some ways became their church community, and as a result, they’re more westernized than my parents are. They are sort of more assimilated in some ways than my parents are.

Anyway, they met, and they instantly hit it off. Our dads had a lot in common. That immigrant experience is so similar. Then, of course, they’re both doctors. Then over the years, yes, there is a—that similarity carries—and it’s funny for me and Naseem. We’re different people and have different stories, of course, and our families are different, but I do think that our “immigrant kid” sensibility is kind of shared. Things that we think are funny, the way we make fun of the quirks of our immigrant families, you know? There’s an immigrant kid mentality and humor that we share. Even just how we raise our kids, and our focus on academic rigor, respecting your elders, working hard, we intrinsically share those values and it certainly manifests in our parenting.

And his politics—how did he come up with interest in politics?

He would say that his dad was a moderate Republican, although in the end—he died in late September of 2008, so he didn’t get to vote for Obama, but he was going to vote for Obama. My mother-in-law has become increasingly liberal over the years, actually since my father-in-law passed. I do think that she just followed his politics, and then she was a fan of Obama, and then of course Trump has horrified her, although the Gaza situation has left her thoroughly disenchanted with Biden, whom she used to admire.

Naseem was always pretty liberal. In fact, one of the reasons I almost did not marry him is because he voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. [laughter] Thankfully, he was in Maine, and his vote didn’t matter, but I was, like, Really, dude? When I learned this, I was so horrified. He was actually planning to be a doctor. He was premed [pre-medicine] at Bowdoin [College] and senior year, right before taking the MCATs [Medical College Admission Test], he woke up and was like, Actually, I’m spending all my time learning about Israel-Palestine, I don’t want to be a doctor, and then pivoted.

That’s how he got into negotiation.

That’s how he got into negotiation. He started working at—what was it then—Conflict Management Group (CMG), which was a nonprofit that came out of Roger Fisher’s work, meant to apply his approach to negotiation to the public sector. Because he was in Boston, he was surrounded by people doing this work and got his foot in the door through the Harvard Project on Negotiation and ended up in that field, which he has continued, he still is in.

Yes. Because it still is obviously so in the news, Naseem and his father, their views on how to negotiate and solve the conundrum of Israel and Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank—whether you want to speak about that before October 7, 2023, and then what it is now. Is it, for example, as simple as saying “two-state solution,” though not simple to get to? What was your father-in-law’s view and Naseem’s view, and how has that had an impact on your thoughts about the region?

I think it’s hard to say what my father-in-law, Shukri, would say because he died so long ago and so much has changed since then. But to him the conflict was simple: People need to live with freedom and dignity. All people. Palestinians of course, but also Israelis. He often said that if you left it up to him and his close colleague, a pro-Israel Jewish surgeon, they would have solved the conflict in two minutes.

Just by way of background, he was born in Jerusalem in 1943. My mother-in-law was born in Haifa [Palestine, now Israel] in 1944. Then in ’48, both of their families, like so many Palestinians, were driven from their homes during the Nakba. Shukri’s mom feared for their lives when bullets hit the ceiling above the bedroom he and his brother were sleeping in. So they fled to Damascus [Syria]. My mother-in-law’s family went to Lebanon. Eventually, Naseem’s father ended up in Lebanon, and met his mother, Randa at the American University of Beirut [Lebanon].

In fact, my eldest sister-in-law was born there before the family moved to the States. We have a lot of family who then grew up in Lebanon, were born in Lebanon, because they were the children of the Nakba. Then during the Lebanese Civil War, some people stayed, some people left, some people left and came back, et cetera, so there are lots of complicated Lebanon politics at play, as well.

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So it’s never going to happen.

. Who knows, but I think nothing will change without a deeper understanding of each other, without reckoning with generational trauma on both sides, and without new leadership—and so there’s a lot of work being done on that right now. Naseem is trying to do that work.

Between Israelis and Palestinians.

Yes, yes. They truly, fundamentally, just don’t understand each other. I’m not an expert on the region. But I do think Naseem’s family’s experience and his understanding of it have influenced me, for sure. It’s hard not to. I’m on the family WhatsApp, and our cousins have been bombed out of Beirut. They had to flee to Dubai [United Arab Emirates]. It’s just part of our lives.

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Another lunch topic to delve into. In addition to that very important—another power lesson that you’re learning, what else are you learning about education policy from the Hill’s perspective, from an LA’s [legislative assistant’s] perspective, from a senator’s office perspective, knowing that you were hired because you heard that Senator Landrieu wanted to have someone perhaps from Teach For America and obviously was still interested in No Child Left Behind. What are you seeing happening on the Hill in the aftermath of No Child Left Behind?

Even in our interview, she told me that she wanted somebody who had taught.

Oh, and then the rebuilding of the schools in New Orleans.

Yes, exactly. My portfolio was education, health care, and child welfare. The health care piece I did not really think much about. I had to handle it, and I had to manage the votes on those issues and stuff, but I didn’t think much about it in 2007. And child welfare because Mary, Senator Landrieu, is very interested and committed to adoption and foster care and reforming the child welfare system. Her own husband was adopted. Both of her children are adopted. She’s a really passionate advocate for adoption and foster care. So she was chair of the Adoption Caucus and very interested in the issue. It was, as a result, a pretty important part of my portfolio and dovetailed a little bit with education.

So on education, it was interesting because—so Senator Landrieu was a moderate Democrat from the South. I am a Northeast liberal, pretty classic. A lot of people in the office were from Louisiana, or Arkansas, or southern offices—all Democrats, of course, but just came with a more moderate bent. Already, my politics and the senator’s politics were not always aligned on everything—certainly on something like oil and gas, which is hugely important.

But working in a moderate senator’s office, and understanding our constituents, and seeing what the economy in Louisiana was like, for example, and what it was built on, it didn’t moderate my policy views necessarily, but it certainly widened my lens and made me far more sympathetic to the concerns of moderate Democrats and their constituents, frankly—our constituents. And so I would get really frustrated when I would hear my more liberal friends denigrate the southern senators and the moderates, because they didn’t understand what they were up against and also what their constituents—what their lives are like and what they care about. You have to listen to people. You can’t just shove your ideas down their throat. That dismissive attitude always bothered me.

These were more liberal people—

Outside of the Hill or outside of my office.

Your friends, but also other staffers on the Hill, perhaps?

You definitely heard that from some folks.

For more liberal senators?

Yes, yes. Again, everybody has different constituents. Everybody has different concerns. It was interesting to see that.

I also, at the time—now again, remember, this is pre–President Obama, so we’re in 2007. Democrats are not happy with No Child Left Behind, but more than that, we are rebuilding the school system. You guys may recall, maybe not, that a lot of what was happening was that, for a bunch of reasons, the mayor and the state had taken over New Orleans Public Schools and essentially eliminated the traditional public school system. They were going to start from scratch. In this scenario, the unions no longer had a ton of power because charter schools were empowered to reopen schools and start again. The teachers in charter schools don’t have to be unionized.

Cannot be or don’t have to be?

Don’t have to be. You can start a union if you want to, but you don’t have to. Or you can try to get a union started, but they’re not required to be. And they’re still considered public school teachers, so therein lies the clash right there—the traditional Democratic constituency and then what charter schools are trying to do.

Senator Landrieu was one of these Democrats who was very in favor of charter schools and actually had been—she was an appropriator. She was on the Appropriations Committee and, before my time on the Hill, had chaired the subcommittee for D.C. for a while and was part of the deal in D.C. to start a small voucher program. The way she brokered it was, the same amount of money would go to the voucher program, to charter schools, and to traditional public schools. She had brokered this deal. She was always someone who was open to that. But at the time, this was anathema in the Democratic Party.

A couple of interesting things happened. It was just the moderate Democrats who were in favor of that kind of focus on teacher accountability, on testing, on standards. Again, not to say that other Democrats weren’t, but there was still a very traditional pro-union bent that focused on just getting more resources into the classroom, paying teachers more—all really important—but less on student performance, less on teacher performance and accountability. Because NCLB was very focused on accountability for the adults, it set up this natural clash and attention within the party.

Then you have a couple of things happen. One is that Barack Obama wins. Interestingly, for whatever reason, President Obama is more open to things like charter schools and accountability. I think Arne Duncan actually has a lot to do with that. I can’t wait to read Arne’s story. But there is now a growing movement that says, Enough is enough. We actually really do need to focus on performance and accountability and standards.

Then you’ve got some new senators, and I’m particularly thinking of Michael Bennet of Colorado, who had been superintendent of Denver [Colorado] Public Schools, former business guy, consultant, I think—brilliant guy. Really smart on education, and very interested in charter schools, and accountability, and performance, and changing how we professionalize teaching—giving teachers, for example, career mobility, so that you’re attracting the best who feel like they have somewhere to go.

So now you’ve got more Democrats who are open to this. Then President Obama comes in. That sets the stage for—we can get to this later, but once he wins and once we’re doing the Recovery Act [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009], that’s when you’ve got—oh, my gosh, how am I forgetting the name? The innovation fund. What’s it called? Wow, I blocked it out as a traumatic experience. [laughter] Basically, the federal government set up a fund, a competition almost, between states.

Oh, um, Race to the Top [initiative].

Race to the Top. Oh, my gosh. How many times did I write RTTT?

You knew the acronym.

Exactly. But something like Race to the Top would not have happened, I think, without obviously President Obama and Arne Duncan, but also an openness on the part of Democrats to pursue something like that. I don’t know if something like that would have happened previously. There was a shift on education.

We haven’t talked about the leadership of the party and the majority within House and Senate, and particularly obviously in the Senate. You do have—with the ’08 elections, then you have, at least momentarily, that supermajority in the Senate. So do you then, are you also—first of all, what are your thoughts about the Senate leadership in the party?

I don’t know if I was thinking all that hard about it. From my vantage point, I was just a cog in the wheel for my boss. A lot of my life was related to appropriations because she was an appropriator.

Who was the chair?

The chair was [Robert C.] Byrd.

Oh, my gosh. Robert Byrd from West Virginia.

Robert Byrd.

What an icon.

An icon. What is so funny is, I just remember him—Senator Byrd at this point was very old and at this point being wheeled around. Just a fascinating character. You would always—a lot of appropriations happens at the subcommittee level. Senator Landrieu was on the, we called it Labor–HHS, so LHHS, but labor, health care, education, that subcommittee, so I spent a lot of time on that. She was on a couple of other subcommittees too. Finally, in the end of it all, you have to meet as the full committee, so you’re in one of the larger committee rooms.

I remember one year, everybody is seated. Everybody is waiting. Byrd’s not there yet. Then finally, his staff wheels him in, and he just says—he’s being wheeled in and the cameras are on him, and he theatrically raises an arm as he’s gliding in and says, “Make way for liberty.” [laughter] What a throwback that man was. What a relic.

I was going to say, did you feel like you were in the Advise and Consent movie from 1962?

Honestly, it was so—these guys. They’re just fascinating. But so at the end, right before the election, is TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program], because the financial crisis is happening. We’re in the middle of all that stuff, right?

Oh, yes, let’s not forget that.

I didn’t have direct—tangentially, everybody ends up getting a piece of it and having to do some part of it, but this is all going on. It’s a really big deal. Then, obviously, the election happens. So it’s just a funny time where there’s a lot of overlap of old and new, the Bush administration handing off the financial crisis to the Obama administration.

Then after inauguration, we’re on to the stimulus [program], and pretty early on—I don’t know what I thought of leadership. I guess I was thinking about the leadership that I had to interact with more directly. So for me, it was the chair of my subcommittee on approps [appropriations], which was [Thomas] Harkin, Senator Harkin of Iowa. I’m always dealing with the Harkin staff. I don’t know if I was thinking all that hard about broader leadership.

I do remember feeling like—a couple of things. One, I felt—this is actually a useful time to note that I was not a Barack Obama fangirl.

Oh, so that was going to be—I was going to go back to ’08. We think we know how you felt about Hillary, but tell us about the 2008 nomination fight.

I voted for Hillary Clinton.

Oh, interesting.

No, I liked Hillary.

Was this informed by your feminist background or just on a policy basis?

That’s a great question. Certainly from policy perspective, I thought that Hillary would be fine, and on issues I cared about, specifically related to gender, of course, I knew she would be fine. It just seemed like, Yes, let’s do this.

Experience, certainly. Way more experience than Barack Obama.

And way more experience. And then who’s this guy coming out of nowhere?

What’s so funny is that I think one of the things that turned me off was that he was rising during 2006, 2007, when I was in graduate school, and it was the culture of people who liked him that turned me off. It was all dudes, just these “bros,” these liberal bros. To be clear, these were good people, and many were my friends and they became my colleagues, but at the time, I just looked at all these mostly white “dude bros” fawning all over Obama and evangelizing about him and I thought, This is not interesting. And who is this guy? He gave a nice speech, and now he thinks that he should be president?

Were you hearing about him on the Hill once he becomes senator?

Oh, yes. Oh, for sure. People were so excited about him. Yes.

Did you not feel wrapped up in that excitement?

Not at all. And actually, honestly, I think it goes back to my own temperament. I’m just kind of a contrarian. So if everybody is going to go this way [points to her right], I’m going to go this way [points to her left]. I just was uninterested. I couldn’t get swept up in it. I voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary. But of course as soon as Obama won the primary, I was all in for him.

But anyway, Obama is inaugurated, and it just seemed like the White House team was perhaps out of their depth when it came to managing the Hill. And I was surprised because Rahm [Emanuel] was chief [of staff]. You’d think he would know how to work with Congress. In their defense, Republicans had no interest in playing ball, from day one. That was obvious to us on the Hill. But the White House wanted to try to work with them. But it looked naïve from where I sat.

So that’s in terms of staffing choices, you think, personnel?

Maybe that was part of it. I don’t have a good line of sight into what was going on over there, and candidly, I have not read all of these first-term Obama biographies or whatever because that just seems tedious. [laughter] I lived it, and I don’t need to go back to it.

Phil Schiliro was congressional liaison, director of legislative affairs?

Yes, he was congressional liaison.

Right.

From my vantage point—and I give everybody credit because it was truly a crazy time—but even as a Senate staffer, I thought they should have just let Nancy Pelosi do everything, which is, I think, my view in life. Just put her in charge.

But I felt like there was a fair amount of arbitrary decision-making during the stimulus debate, for example, saying it couldn’t exceed $1 billion. Maybe they were right, but they didn’t even fight for the counterfactual.

But that’s just my limited perspective. I didn’t know what was going on at the White House. But it did very much feel—it’s funny because you look back, and people who were in the White House at the time, they feel like all the action was there. This really comes up in health care. And I just felt like, What is the White House doing? We’re doing everything. I’m sure they felt the same way.

As I understand it, knowing that history and then going back to the Clinton efforts led by Hillary—

Yes, by design.

By design, that they decided to let the Hill—and not make the mistake that, in retrospect, people thought the White House made in the 1990s.

Absolutely. That’s definitely the case.

And it was true. You were doing—

It was true. It was true. It did feel like these negotiations were really happening between the different wings of our party. That’s really what it came down to in a lot of ways. Then, of course, the fear of—the constant belief, “Charlie Brown holding the football,” that Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe, and all these folks are going to come around and be on our side. I think it was just a misunderstanding of the politics of what was going on.

In retrospect, now you look back and see that they stated their goal, explicitly. Mitch McConnell said that their goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term President.” They had no interest in legislating. They had no interest in actually getting something done. And pretending—what a fiction it was that this was going to be some kind of bipartisan, “kumbaya” moment for Congress. It’s just absurd on its face. Anybody who understands power and who knows the Republican Party and has ever been—

Led by Mitch McConnell in the Senate.

Led by Mitch McConnell—would think that that’s what was going to happen. It was just foolishness. I think what was frustrating from the Hill perspective—at least from my perspective, where I sat, working for a moderate Democrat, spending a lot of time with the rest of our Republican delegation, so I knew these guys—that the White House was still operating as though Republicans would play ball was silly. I understand that they had to do this for a bunch of reasons but it was just frustrating.

Another dynamic was that it would be easy to make the boss’s life difficult with votes on more progressive provisions that would have been political toxic in moderate districts. As it was, we were being literally shouted down in town halls in our state by our constituents about Obamacare. The Tea Party was out in full force fighting the bill, spreading misinformation, and things were very ugly.

I have all the respect in the world for Harry Reid. He had a hard job.

Any work with Nancy-Ann DeParle down at the White House?

I think she came to our office once during health care, maybe twice. I only had to be in a meeting with her maybe once. It’s not like they were calling us every single day or really working Mary. I remember towards the end when I was working her, meaning I was just really working hard to make sure we voted for this bill. I did not feel like I had a ton of—and maybe the White House thought it was better to stay away from the moderate Democrats, that getting close to her wasn’t helpful, and I think that was probably right. On the Hill, it was Reid and Pelosi who were running the show.

What did you think about the ultimate bill that became law, the ACA [Affordable Care Act]?

Oh, I have so many thoughts about that.

Oh, please share.

No, it would take us all day. We should do a separate session on the ACA.

We can.

In what sense, what do I think about it?

Well, given that this was in your portfolio, health care; and given that we even went all the way back to your family and your dad and his thoughts about health care; and given that, as you say, there were compromises that were being made, mistakenly to bring some moderate Republicans on, but also to keep safe your boss and other moderate Democrats, if you could have waved your magic wand and said, “Here are the things that didn’t get in that I would have”—public option, I’ll just throw out on the table. But given that you had an expertise in this area and personal background, what would you have liked to have seen in it that didn’t get in it?

Well, one thought is, when I was thinking about giving away the Republicans or negotiating with them—actually, even before health care, I was actually thinking about the stimulus. That’s where it started for me.

It’s funny. I didn’t really care all that much about health care before I was forced to. I was not somebody who was passionate about health care, or knew a lot about it, or was psyched that it was in my portfolio.

Education was your passion.

Education was my thing. I learned way more than I ever will need to know about Medicare reimbursement because I worked it, but I did not go into it thinking, This is a thing that we ought to be doing, that this was the hill the president should die on necessarily? And more frustratingly—and this would connect to later why, in some ways, I was moved toward speechwriting and communications, was that—the way that we told the story of why we were doing this to the American people. Did anybody know why we were doing it or what we were doing? I’m certainly not the first person to note that this was a missed opportunity.

But in retrospect, the House bill was the bill I would have preferred. Pelosi had put together the right bill. This idea of having a national exchange made more sense to me because then the risk pool is broader. There’s a uniformity to having a national exchange that doesn’t allow more regressive states to get away with whatever they were going to get away with, and then the Medicaid problem goes away, which became problematic later on when the Supreme Court invalidated the part that required the states to expand Medicaid. It just seemed like that was a cleaner way to go.

On the public option front, the fundamental problem is that health care in America is—we don’t have to go down the history of health care in America. I’m sure others—you probably have already interviewed Nancy-Ann and everybody else.

Yes, just so you’ll know, in April a year ago, we did an ACA group oral history.

OK, great. So they told you all the things, so you don’t need this.

So we’ll have those details. We also interviewed Phil Schiliro.

You know all the things, so I don’t need to go down that road. What I will say is that it is a system that was cobbled together over time. Right? It’s just a Jenga game. It was not a deliberately designed, beautiful New York City grid. It’s a mess like the Boston grid, right? I love the idea of a public option as an alternative because we can’t have a single-payer system, which, of course, is the most rational and humane thing to do. But then you introduce a public option, and I don’t know what it would look like.

If I think back to—let’s just say we had put that in place. How would it have worked, how would we have paid for it, what would have been the insurance industry’s next move, how would people react when their plans disappeared, and given where we are now with Trump in office, what would have come of it? I don’t know what would have come of it. But I just, single-payer aside, think that for many reasons that you probably went over in the oral history, the House version made more sense.

We were just in the position where we completely abdicated the Massachusetts seat in what should have been—that was the canary in the coal mine of Democrats not understanding how to build political power and, frankly, President Obama not doing enough to build the party apparatus.

And build on it.

And build on it. We just abdicated that seat, and so that was the beginning of the end there. As a result, we just didn’t have a choice. One of the things that I remember that maybe you didn’t get in your oral history—maybe you did, depending on who was there. The December of 2009, right around the winter holidays, we had to just—Harry Reid had to broker something between the moderates and the liberals. He basically tasked [Chuck] Schumer with pulling together all of our bosses. It was Blanche Lincoln from Arkansas, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, everybody who ended up losing their seats, Kay Hagan, and then Sherrod Brown and the Left, and brought them all together. Reid basically tasked Schumer with cobbling—with getting everybody to agree on a bunch of provisions.

I remember that was a week in the Capitol where every day, the health care staffers would go with our bosses and sit down and hash it out until whatever hour, and then at 7:00 p.m., Blanche Lincoln would look at her watch and say, “My boys need to eat. I need to order them a pizza.” She would run out and [laughter] order a pizza for her kids, and come back. Then we would continue. That’s how we got to a place where the Senate could even pass that bill.

That’s the sausage-making that people talk about.

That was the sausage-making. Reid was really a savvy boxer. He knew what he was doing, and it was smart of him to have Schumer manage those negotiations, and Schumer, I think, handled it really well, in retrospect. But I remember sitting in the Capitol, looking out at the snow, and just thinking that I was sitting in the middle of something really kind of extraordinary within the Democratic Party. So having been through that sausage in that week, I understood that you can’t get everything you want. When all my liberal friends were complaining about not having single-payer, I just wanted to say, “You have no idea what it took to get to this point, and you have no idea what we are facing at home in Louisiana.”

Over the summer, that summer, I would have to go to town halls with Senator Landrieu. The unbelievable vitriol. The protests, the phone calls, the letters, the names I got called over the phone, the threats that people—that our front office was sending to Capitol Police. I don’t know how they got my direct line—I know how they got my direct line. The right wing was giving out the direct line of all the health care staffers to their lunatics. It was a really challenging time. The refrain was everywhere, Kill the bill, kill the bill.

Can I pause there and say, what do you, either at that time or now in retrospect, look back and attribute that to? Directly, you attribute it to the right wing upsetting the grassroots people, but many of those people, I think we could agree, would benefit from this bill. So what was it among those people who would come to the town halls? Was it race? Was it, “He’s a Muslim”? The woman who would stand up and say to John McCain, “He’s an Arab.” Again, I have to think that many of those people would benefit, and probably did benefit, and probably had their children on their insurance until they were 26. What do you see roiling then that we know is still roiling?

People far smarter than I will have more thought-out answers to this. I think it’s all of the above. There’s undoubtedly an element of race baked into anything that President Obama did. This notion that he was going to be forcing you off to switch doctors and—

Death panels.

—death panels and the rest. That was really fomented by right-wing media and disinformation that you are now seeing at a whole other exponential, AI-powered level, but was certainly present then.

It tapped into people’s real fear that they were losing something, not just health care and their doctor but their livelihoods. Many of them had lost their homes. Right? We’re still in the middle of the financial crisis. You’re doing health care, not housing. Why aren’t you doing housing? So there’s that element of it. There’s a growing distrust of institutions. And I really think people—we minimize the national trauma that 9/11, the Iraq War, and the financial crisis caused, the seismic shift that it will take decades to understand. All of that is baked into how people perceived the ACA. And there’s a small-c conservatism that something is culturally changing and this man is doing it.

Also that the people I was mentioning who might have benefited from ACA were also tending to send their sons and daughters into these endless wars, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think they were being told by the right-wing media ecosystem that this bill would not help them. They were being told that it was actually going to hurt them and that it was going to help other people who don’t look like you. All of these things. I’m oversimplifying it because it’s a really complicated question that we don’t have time to fully unpack, but I think all of these forces together created a scenario where they just didn’t trust anything we said.

And for our part, I do not think the White House and the Hill did a good job of explaining what it was trying to do and why, and how it fit into a broader vision of what he hoped to do. It’s almost like that—the story, the overarching narrative that they had during the campaign collapsed a bit once they started governing because they started handing out a menu of policy options and proposals without tying it together into a larger narrative about what President Obama was trying to accomplish. I think the storytelling part of it is important. I don’t want to overstate the importance of that, because I do think Democrats have a tendency to say, “If we just communicated it better”—it’s a little more complicated than that. But there’s an element of truth to the criticisms that the ACA was poorly communicated.

And that will take us to your speechwriting—

Yes, totally.

—directly, and your theories of speechwriting.

There was a day that I was working on Obamacare. And 2009 was a really brutal year. It was a brutal year of 14- to 20-hour days every day. I remember there was a day I was working on some obscure provision related to Medicare quality, and I thought, I don’t even know why we’re doing this. That’s not a great place to be. Again, of course, I did know why we were doing it from a policy perspective, but I didn’t really understand the president’s bigger picture. I couldn’t put it into a broader—I didn’t know how to tell other people why we were doing this.

I was going to say, did you have discussions with coworkers about the fact that you felt that way?

Oh, for sure. I remember at our retreat that summer—we had a staff retreat where all the offices around the state, around Louisiana, would come to Annapolis [Maryland]. We’d all get together. Our chief of staff said, “Sarada, you have to give a presentation explaining Obamacare to—explaining the ACA to”—well, we didn’t have that name for it—but explaining the bill to them “because they don’t understand what we’re doing.” I had to do a presentation. So my legislative correspondent [who served as my junior policy aide] and I worked really hard on our presentation. I explained the most important provisions in the simplest way I could, like why we needed a mandate and how we wanted to improve Medicare and what insurance even is. And at the end of that, I remember thinking, I am good at this part of it. I actually had that thought because multiple staffers came up to me and said, “We had no idea what this was about until you explained it.”

That sounds like a pretty formative experience, having to do that one presentation then, right?

Yes. In fact, I’ve never said that out loud, but I’m thinking back to it now, and I’m thinking, Wow, actually, that was—

Joining all those dots backwards.

Yes, because I explained it well, and I thought, Oh, this is easy. Sorry, one more thing about the ACA—I realize I’m all over the place. It’s really interesting because we kept talking about health care reform. What we were really talking about was health insurance reform, and that was not clear. That was not communicated.

People don’t understand insurance. Just fundamentally, they do not understand insurance, whether it’s home insurance or flood insurance or health insurance. Insurance can be a complicated subject, and we were not communicating that. We were basically saying, “We’re going to fix health care.” Well, health care is a lot of things. It’s the long lines at the doctor’s office. It’s the fact that Americans pay insane amounts of money for drugs. It’s the fact that we might pay different prices for different procedures. It’s that the procedure at this hospital here [points left] might go well, and here [points right] it might not. What is health care? That, I think, was a—nobody ever talks about this, but I think that was a profound miscalculation.

Well, and given that Elizabeth is British—Welsh and British—

Gosh, this must all seem appalling and barbaric to you.

Oh, completely—I mean, frankly, yes. Right? I come from a country where it really does blow my mind, and I just find it fascinating that these discussions are even such a thing because in the U.K., it’s pretty—that is its own thing in turmoil, but it’s taken for granted, This is a right, and there is a safety net, and you take care of folks, and that everyone has a right to—it’s like a fundamental right of safety. But I find it fascinating how that has to be hashed out, and again, how it’s just so—it’s like political dynamite.

It’s almost a third rail, and to the point where, because—that very point you’re making about labeling health care versus health insurance. I think most people in this country, certainly people who were upset about this happening, say, “Oh, you’re going to make it like the U.K. You’re going to make it like national health insurance or national health care, and we understand that’s really bad.”

Rationing. “It’s rationing.”

“It’s rationing, and you have to wait months and months for your hip to be replaced.”

Part of that is true, as well. I do—

Yes, exactly. It’s not wrong.

On the one hand, I do think it’s pretty appalling that not everyone has access to it. On the other hand, you do get treated. In the U.K., you would have these huge delays. The NHS [National Health Service] is a financial sinkhole, which has caused us to tear a lot of our country apart politically in the last couple years. Anyway, that’s a whole other story.

Right. Health care everywhere is really complicated. The only other thing I would add about this, because what you mentioned about the U.K. is really interesting, is that there is a cultural component. There’s something very American about our struggle with this, this notion that we have never created a genuinely strong safety net. I think it’s in part because Americans maybe bristle at it. Even those who quote-unquote “need” the help do not like the idea that the government would be setting anything—

It’s slightly too collectivist.

Yes.

Socialist, they’d say. It’s socialism.

Yes, and it’s that really hard edge of that individualism: Yes, you will pull yourself up, and you’ll succeed. But also, by the same token, you have to take care of yourself, and that is the bottom line for that.

Yes. I think that there’s a real tension there. Even internally in communities and in ourselves, people are fundamentally uncomfortable with it. And there’s also something kind of Puritan about it. [laughter] It is culturally unique, despite the fact that, I think, health care across—you would be hard pressed to find a system anywhere, including in northern Europe, where it’s working wonderfully.

And Americans really are holding the bag for drug development for the rest of the world, and no one’s solved that problem. There’s a reason why we pay these costs and no one else does, because we’re paying for R&D [research and development] for everybody. No one’s solved that. I’ve talked to the pharma [pharmaceutical industry] lobbyists. There’s no—what’s the solution to that? Anyway, that’s a whole other conversation.

Well, we are getting close to our lunch break. Maybe this is a good place to stop.

[BREAK]

All right, here we are. We were finishing up before lunch with our ACA conversation. Anything more to say on that before we move you to the White House—oh, first, the West Wing Writers, right, before you get to the White House—so into speechwriting.

That’s right.

But anything else to add from your time on the Hill as an LA, topics, et cetera? And the fact that you didn’t vote for Obama in the primaries in ’08, and as you put it, you were not an Obama girl fan.

Yes. No, I thought he was great, and of course, as soon as he won the primary, I was on board. But I wasn’t somebody—there were so many young people who were so enthusiastic about him.

Did it occur to you possibly to go work in that campaign, now that you at least had a foot in the door of the Hill and politics and the party in that way?

No. No, I guess not, because I was already on the Hill. I had my job, so it’s not like I was going to be leaving the Hill to go work for his campaign.

Probably unpaid.

Yes, exactly, being in all that student debt that we discussed. And my boss was up for reelection, too. She had an ’08 race. So no, it didn’t even occur to me.

Anything else that we should talk about or you want to talk about before we get you into speechwriting?

I guess that is the transition. So I think that almost as soon as I got—the trajectory is, I studied political science in college, got interested in policy through Teach For America, worked in policy after Teach For America, got my master’s in public policy, got a job on Capitol Hill doing public policy in one of the most plum jobs a recent, newly minted public policy graduate could get.

Almost as soon as I got my job, I woke up and said, I’m not sure I want to work in policy. I think it was, in some ways, the nature of the Hill, the nature of my job. I just didn’t love the actual work. I still cared about the issues, and I really loved my office, but the actual work of negotiating with powerful committee staff to push your boss’s agenda through whatever loophole they had, and all of that beg, borrowing, and stealing, that work wasn’t compelling to me. I wasn’t a lawyer, and a lot of my colleagues were. On the Hill, there’s a whole Office of Legislative Council that writes your legislation when you give them the idea. But the legislative work just wasn’t where I felt most at home—and I missed writing.

Sometime in 2007 or 2008, I was at a party in Washington, and I was complaining about my job to a friend, as one does at a party in Washington. This friend of mine, who was from graduate school and was a pollster, she said, “You know, I know a guy who’s speechwriter. You should really talk to him.” I ended up having a phone call with this guy. His name is Jeff Nussbaum. At the time, he was a partner at West Wing Writers. He had been a very, very young Al Gore speechwriter towards the tail end of the Clinton administration. When Gore lost, he ended going to the Hill. He wrote for Tom Daschle for years. Really funny guy.

We talked, and he said, “Do you have any writing samples? Can you send them to me?” Again, I was still on the Hill. I certainly wasn’t going to send him my Hill writing. But I had those columns I had written in graduate school, so I sent those to him. He invited me to come in to West Wing Writers and meet the partners. This was during a congressional recess, so I went over there. I sat around with the partners, who were all former Clinton speechwriters, who have probably done their own oral histories here, and it was just the most fun 45 professional minutes I’d had in a really long time. It felt like people who were kindred spirits intellectually, and curious, and peripatetic thinkers, and our conversation ran the gamut, history to movies to books to music. It was just fun. I left that place thinking, Gosh, maybe this is the right fit. I had never even considered speechwriting as a—I didn’t know it was a real job. I knew that aside from The West Wing [TV show], people were speechwriters, but it didn’t seem real.

That is The West Wing show.

The show, the show. Of course, I was still on the Hill, but I was certainly eager to potentially move in that direction. I took a writing test for them, which was the first speech I had ever written, was a writing test for them. Then they went radio silent.

What was the prompt?

The prompt was write—it was an environmental speech for Leonardo DiCaprio to deliver, because he’s an environmental activist. They just went a little bit radio silent and were cagey, and it turned out the financial crisis had changed everybody’s circumstances, and they just weren’t hiring. At the same time, now my boss is up for reelection anyway. So the seed was planted, but nothing happened. Then Barack Obama won, my boss won, and we were off to the races with Obamacare anyway, so I was consumed with that.

Once again, at some point in, I think, 2009, they reached out to me out of nowhere and asked me to take a second writing test, which I did. Again, I heard nothing from them.

What was that prompt?

I don’t remember. Then I just left it. Now we’re in the beginning of 2010. I knew Obamacare was going to pass, and I was exhausted. I was just done with the whole thing, and exhausted from the process, and just really wanted to get off the Hill. There was an organization, an education nonprofit, that frequently lobbied us and that I knew well. They were recruiting me to come and work for them. They knew I wanted to be doing more communications, more writing, less policy, so they created this hybrid role for me.

So I leave the Hill, and towards the middle or end of February of 2010, I head to this organization—the Education Trust, they’re called. On my third day, I got a call from one of the partners at West Wing Writers, Paul Orzulak, and he says, “Hey, Sarada, would you like to come work at West Wing Writers?” I said—I think I actually said—“Are you fucking kidding me? You couldn’t have called, I don’t know, three days ago?” I was so mad. I’m sorry. I just cursed on the oral history. Wait till they see my emails. [laughter]

I didn’t know what to do. I just started this new job. So I went home, and I met up with a friend for a drink. He said, “You know, do you think this is something you could do? Do you think this is something you want to do that you could see yourself doing?” I just thought about it, and I imagined myself in the job.

What it comes down to is that when you’re young, especially young ambitious people in places like government and politics and the rest, you imagine, I want to be at the State Department, I want to have a job at the White House or on the Hill, but you’re not really thinking about what the work is, what you’re actually going to be doing for 8 to 18 hours a day. What does that look like? Will you enjoy—is it about being with people? Are you writing? Are you researching? You have to really think about that. Up until that point, I don’t know if I had ever actually done that.

I tried to actually imagine what the work would be like, which is largely staring at a blank [Microsoft] Word document. I thought about it, and I thought, Actually, yes, I think this fits me. I think this fits the way I think, especially having met these people who just felt like kindred spirits. It just feels like the right thing. So the next day, I went back to work, and I quit my job, which—you know, anathema in D.C. You do not do that.

What did they say?

My direct boss was actually very understanding. Actually, they generally were, and they just said, “If this is your dream, you’ve got to go follow it,” which I really appreciated. So I quit, and a couple weeks later, I started at West Wing Writers. What’s—maybe this is true for other people, but the only speech I had ever written was my writing tests. Here I was, 30 years old, which is pretty old to start as a speechwriter in this world, and I was starting out in a totally new career.

Did they bring in you in in a junior position, or because of your experience, were you midlevel for them?

It was so small at the time—I think there were only seven or eight of us—so I was just one of the associates. It was partners and associates.

What were they paying in those days?

I definitely took a pay cut. By this point, I was senior enough in my job on the Hill that I was—I think I was making maybe $70,000 or $75,000 at that point. This was—I think I was back to my $55,000.

But another good thing to raise, to let people know that sometimes you do. You’ll go ahead and take a cut to get what you want at that time and then move up.

Absolutely. It just seemed so obvious to me that doing what I wanted to do, what I actually enjoy doing, what felt like the right thing, was 100 percent the right call, even if it meant taking a pay cut and eating more ramen, or whatever. It just seemed like the right thing.

Do you know when the West Wing Writers were founded?

Yes. They were founded in 2001, after the Clinton administration. They basically took their shop from the White House and started their own thing.

Were most of your colleagues of that ilk, or had other people come from other political backgrounds?

All the partners were all Clinton speechwriters. The associates were varied. They were too young to have been Clinton speechwriters. There weren’t that many of us, but all varied. One of them was actually a friend of mine from graduate school, and he got his foot in the door first, and is still a speechwriter but in the corporate world.

Without naming names, because you probably can’t, but clients, clientele. What kinds of people or organizations come to West Wing Writers?

It’s a fair amount of corporate work, so corporations—your big, huge ones; your smaller ones; nonprofits; philanthropies. There’s definitely a fair amount of philanthropic work. Individuals, your occasional celebrity who has to give a commencement speech, that sort of thing. It was a pretty wide variety.

But not politicians as much?

And politicians, too.

Some politicians?

Sure. Typically—you know, the thing about the business model that’s odd is, politics doesn’t actually pay that much. If you’re running a company, as they were, you have to be able to make enough, earn enough, to feed all these mouths of your employees.

And a CEO or a big corporation can certainly do that.

Exactly. The economics of that just work out better. But certainly politicians would come, and especially around things like humor dinners. Jeff would spearhead that humor work, and people would come through and ask for help with their Gridiron [Club Dinner] or their Al Smith [Dinner] or whatever it might be, so that would come through, too. It was a mix.

What’s day one like? Oh, sorry, you were going to say?

No, no, no, we can get to that. Day one. Day one was—well, I started.

Where are they located?

On Connecticut Avenue, not too far from the White House. If I’m correct, 1150 Connecticut Avenue [Northwest]. Is that address still imprinted in my mind? Day one was getting your sea legs under you. You know what was strange about it was, I had been on the Hill, which is so fast-paced, for enough time that this felt strangely—not corporate, but just quiet in its own way.

Slower?

A different pace, yes. There were times when it was very fast, but just in terms of the environment, it was not people running around to committee hearings and meetings and floor votes, so it was just a different pace and speed. But intimidating, because I had never done this before. I was so scared, the first speech I wrote. I remember the speech. It was for Stephanie Schriock, who at the time was the relatively new head of EMILYs List, taking over for Ellen Malcolm, who had been this long figurehead, really important figure in EMILYs List. I was working with Jeff on a speech for her. It was my first one.

I just remember being so scared to even hit “send” on the first draft. And when I did finally hit send to Jeff, a few minutes later, he comes into my office. It was the first time I had an office, by the way. He says, “Sarada, read the first paragraph out loud to me.” I read it out loud to him, and I immediately knew what the problem was, which was that I had written for the eye and not for the ear. It was the first really important instructive lesson.

It was just an extraordinary education, working with these folks who are beautiful writers and great editors, and would sit down and really walk you through how to write a speech that is compelling. I learned so much from them.

What’s the difference between writing for the eye and writing for the ear, the difference between a person’s eyeballs reading versus their ears hearing?

When you read, you can take in a lengthy, complex sentence, and if you didn’t take it in, you can go back and reread it. When someone is listening, you need to signpost a little bit more. There needs to be a clear kind of rhythm to it, which of course exists in writing for the eye but has to be more pronounced in speeches. You’re going to do things that you wouldn’t normally do in “good” writing. You’ll break the rules your English teacher taught you. You’re going to include fragments. Good writing always includes varied sentence structure, but now it becomes even more important because after a while, something—if everything is at the same register, it can just sound like this [moves hand in a straight line], like a buzz.

It’s Charlie Brown’s teacher, “Wah wah wah wah wah.”

It’s Charlie Brown’s teacher. So you have to add a kind of dynamism to it. Repetition becomes really important because I can’t go back and reread the thing that I just read. And so if there is some kind of refrain, repetition becomes important. Tricks like litany become important. There has to be an internal rhythm to it, which I think, again, is true for writing for the eye, too. But it is interesting, whenever I work with junior speechwriters, folks who are new to it, they really are trying to—you have to reorient your brain a little bit. That’s why I always encourage people to read their writing out loud if it’s going to be a speech, because you have to hear it. You have to hear it.

This ties into that musical background that you have, as well, that we were discussing briefly, the way you find rhythm in a sentence. I wonder if organizing a speech is a similar—the transferrable skills from understanding music notation, in a way.

I had never really thought about it consciously, but there’s probably some element of being a musical person that feeds into—seeps into how I do this work, maybe. I’m a lot more comfortable with silence and space.

Is that actually something that has to be—not necessarily getting onto delivery of speeches as a different thing—but managed silence in speeches where you’re trying to emphasize a point? If you think about President Obama speaking, there are so many moments where there is silence, where the point is being absorbed. Getting onto—I know delivery of speech is probably a different thing, but how much do you write for that, as well, as a speechwriter, not just the message that you’re getting across, but how can we make this something that delivers well to the ear?

Oh, it’s hugely important. Again, otherwise you’re just writing an op-ed. [laughter] Which we can do. That’s fine too. But if it is going to be a speech, then again, people can only listen for so long and in so many ways, and our brains can only process so much information in a sitting. That’s why songs are so powerful and memorable. It’s why stories are so powerful and memorable. You do have to think about, When is it time to give the audience a moment to process what I just said, or to be uncomfortable, or whatever it might be. President Obama talks about this. Cody talks about it in his book, how President Obama told him to listen to Miles Davis for the spaces when he’s not playing.

It is true that that is a Miles Davis trademark, hallmark. You listen to his solos, especially on Kind of Blue and albums from that period, where there is a certain amount of space. He will start two and a half beats into a measure with an idea and then stop, and then come back again, giving you a lot more space. In some ways, he pulled the plug on an old way and reinvented jazz. He wasn’t the only one, but he popularized modal jazz, which allow for space: This entire song is going to be one or two modes. That’s it. No rapid chord changes. And we’re going to solo over this more open landscape, with room to breathe. Sorry, now we’re going down a jazz tangent.

But space and silence have to be done well, and it can’t seem contrived. This is the art of it, and this is why having a collaboration with a speaker who really understands this is important. Of course, speechmaking is performative. There is a theater to it. At the same time, any kind of artifice is so transparent to audiences, especially today.

Maybe we’ll get to this, but I think the way that people consume information today, especially young people, they are craving a kind of authenticity that you see on this, ironically enough, unfiltered TikToks [short videos] and other social media, where you feel closer to somebody because the informality of it suggests authenticity, like they’re really being themselves—whether or not they actually are. That kind of performance is a little bit of what you want to provide in a speech. But necessarily, there is a theatrical element to speeches. There has to be. It has to be distinct from—it both has to be conversational and elevated. It has to be conversational and theatrical. A speaker’s job is to strike a balance that will give them and their message credibility.

And getting harder now, as you say, because of the way people are—it makes me think of when you watch movies, for example, of the 1930s or ’40s, where I can watch an actor or actress and say, “I bet that person started on the stage.” It doesn’t mean that they don’t make the transition to film or they make it poorly, but there’s a different—because you have to be larger than life on the stage, as opposed to the intimacy of film.

This makes me think, then, when you begin to write, you don’t know most of the people you’re writing for, and I presume you don’t know their personalities or how they—if they do deliver speeches fairly frequently. So how do you do that, then, before you get to the White House and you’re writing for President Obama—and then you fairly quickly learn about him, and you also have been listening to him—these other people are fairly anonymous to you and to most other people, for that matter. Is that as important, not knowing who they are or what their style is, as just getting the message down? If they’re a good deliverer, will it be good no matter what kind of delivery they have, what style they have?

You could write a generic speech for anyone, but that wasn’t our job. The first thing we would do if we were working with someone was have a conversation with them. Typically we would then record and transcribe that conversation to have their raw words on paper so that we would start to get a sense of them. Then before you start a project, especially if it’s with a new client, you are asking their staff for everything they’ve ever said, everything they’ve ever written. You are really trying to absorb them.

People often ask speechwriters, “How do you find someone’s voice?” For me, finding someone’s voice is not about how they speak. It’s about how they think. You want to understand how they see the world. You want to understand their worldview, and how they solve problems. There are any number of ways that you can do that, but of course talking to them and spending time with them is the best way. Then the second-best way is to at least absorb what they’ve put out into the world.

To me, that’s the work. You can always figure out, Oh, they like this turn of phrase. Oh, they stumble on that kind of word. That’s too flowery for them, or Yes, they prefer poetry. But all that stuff you can figure out. It’s getting into their minds that I think is the more interesting and challenging part. Figuring out, do they like to make analogies to science? Or are they a sports person? Are they optimistic by nature? What motivates them? The way to get that—

I think about the questions I ask people when I’m working with them. They might seem completely disconnected to the work, but they’re actually really important. What book is on your nightstand? What’s your favorite holiday? Are you a Sour Patch Kid kind of person or are you an M&M kind of person? Really, you’re trying to understand what makes them tick. Those sorts of tools are really important and available regardless of who you’re writing for. But sure, sometimes it goes better than other times. Some people are more built for set-piece speeches, and other people are built for town halls. I actually think it’s really more important for leaders to lean into their strengths than try to be something they’re not, but of course, all this stuff is teachable and learnable if people are open to it.

At West Wing, I was picking up all these things, just learning. In 2012—I started there in 2010. In 2012, Jeff Nussbaum was tasked for the second time, because he had done this in 2008. He was tasked with running the speechwriting room at the Democratic [National] Convention. So for Barack Obama’s reelection, he asked me to do it with him. This was only two years into me being a speechwriter. So I was part of that team.

That was certainly an honor—

Oh, totally.

—and certainly sent the message to you that you were learning very quickly, as this profession goes.

I think so, yes. I would not say that I felt that confidence in the moment. You know what I mean?

But now looking back, you can see that.

Looking back, I can see that. But I think I suffer from what many women suffer from, and did even then, which was a lack of confidence about my abilities, in part because this was a brave new world for me and it was dominated by “pale male Yale.” [laughter] And they were all so young, a bunch of 25-year-old Yale grads who knew all the jokes and knew how this all went.

Right. The associates at West Wing—were you the only woman?

When I started—no, there was one other young woman. Really wonderful, beautiful writer, Julia Lam. I actually just had her on my team at the convention this year. Harvard grad. [laughs] Yes, so there were two of us. She was very young. She had been an intern at West Wing and then immediately after graduation got her job there. So I’m 10 years older than all these people, and it’s my first speechwriting experience. But anyway—

So to the Democratic convention. I didn’t know there was a speechwriting room at conventions.

There is.

I guess I must have thought that everyone who speaks of any stature would have their own speechwriter or a staff, especially if it’s a politician. I did think that the people who start out, let’s say, at the seven o’clock hour—I’ll just use the example from this Democratic convention, Jason Carter and Jack Schlossberg. I pay attention to them as young people coming up in the party, but I thought, I don’t think those were their speeches. I felt sort of sorry, particularly for Jack Schlossberg, and if you wrote it, that’s OK. I just didn’t think it sounded like Jack Schlossberg.

Jack—that was a lot of Jack, for sure.

Well, then, I didn’t think he delivered it very well.

I didn’t watch that.

Anyway, would that be true to say that the lower-level people are handed a speech and that other people bring in their own speech? How does that work?

The way it works is that—the prime-time folks, you are correct that in 2012—let’s use 2012 as an example. Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, the prime-time people, [Joseph R.] Biden then, they have their own speeches, and no one is going to tell them what to say.

But in 2012, David Axelrod, who was the campaign message guru, was absolutely directing the rest of it. Also, he knew what the principals would say in prime time. The pre–prime time—at that point, we had something like 150 speeches pre–prime time, and it’s everybody from Caroline Kennedy to a regular person who’s going to benefit from the Affordable Care Act who’s never been on a stage this big in Charlotte, North Carolina. There are a hundred speeches that need to be written, and someone needs to write them.

But it’s not just the writing of the speeches. For example, Cecile Richards, who spoke that year, had a speechwriter. She could come with a draft. But the point is that Axe [David Axelrod] had come up with a message strategy. Everybody was invited and put into a particular time slot on a particular day for a particular reason to carry a particular message. Our job—and Jeff and three other managers running the room, their job was to stitch all of this together and make sure that every speech was doing what it was supposed to do. Somebody had to write those speeches. If we weren’t actually writing them, because they did have a speechwriter, then we had to manage them through the process.

Process is always important in speechwriting and especially in this setting. Our process was the writer either works with the speaker and their team to write a draft or gets a first draft from them. You make sure the draft is the right draft. You work with the speaker, you work with our staff, double-check it with the message gurus. We fact-check it. Then we have to rehearse it, so we also have a rehearsal room. Then maybe there are changes made in the rehearsal room, and then there’s timing. Somebody has to manage his entire operation and all those speeches, and it turns out to be 15-ish unkempt speechwriters who are locked in the referee’s locker room of whatever stadium we have the convention in. It’s very glamorous, let me assure you. But that’s how it goes.

I was on that team, and worked with Jeff, and worked on a bunch of speeches. It was a great experience. It was a great experience because it’s like speechwriting camp, a speechwriting war room. In fact, two of the people who I met there—Andy Barr, who was a long-time speechwriter for Al Franken, and he’s written for every Democratic politician; and Stephen Krupin, who went on to write for [John] Kerry, and had written for Harry Reid in the Senate, and who was my colleague in the White House, is now at SKDK—the two of them became two of my dearest friends, but also the three of us ran the speechwriting room this year.

You forge a kind of bond with these writers, and I had never experienced anything like that. It’s solitary work, speechwriting, so to do it in a room with people where you could just hand your laptop to someone and have them edit a speech was really gratifying, and intense but so fun, and maybe not as existentially scary because it was for Obama’s reelection, although we were worried. He crashed the second debate, or first debate, as you all know.

What was interesting about that was—well, there were a bunch of things that were interesting. For example, the reason you need speechwriters is, for the fourth day, which was the last day of the convention when President Obama was actually going to speak, a couple things happened. First, they were originally going to be doing it outside. They decided to move it inside, which meant a smaller audience could attend and there were all kinds of logistics to work out. Then every day, the program went over time, which happens every year. It goes over. We got to the last day, and the networks said, “We’re going to cut from the President if you go over time. You’ve got to cut down this program. We’re not going to be going way over prime time.”

So Jeff was given the order that we had to cut the program, which meant we had to cut every single speech in half. It’s calling the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, and saying, “Sorry, sir. We’re going to cut your speech in half.” And it’s calling Scarlet Johansson and telling her that we’re going to cut her speech in half, at which point Harvey Weinstein calls Jeff and says, “I hear you write speeches.” And he says, “Yes.” He says, “Well, now you’re going to hear one,” and lights into him, unsurprising to all. We suddenly—the entire speechwriting team, we’re sitting in our referees’ locker room with disgusting takeout containers, cutting each other’s speeches in half. It’s a really intense experience.

While I was there, towards the end—I was on the ground for 10 days or something like that. I had no responsibilities in my life. While I was there, Cody came down. At this point, Cody is on the president’s speechwriting team. He is not yet chief. He, I think, knew that he would become chief when Jon Favreau left, as he was planning to do after the reelect.

Cody and I knew each other from graduate school, which I think I mentioned earlier. He was a year behind me. He was actually in Naseem’s class. We were friendly, and he wrote occasionally for my opinion section in the paper. We were friendly and had seen each other here and there. I don’t even think he knew I was a speechwriter because last we talked, I had probably still been on the Hill. Anyway, we were in the room together for a couple of days, and he saw my work there. He clearly knew I was a speechwriter at a certain level who had ascended pretty quickly. That was that, and we all went our separate ways.

President Obama wins his reelection, and then my friend Steve actually went to the State Department and asked me to come to the State Department sometime in 2013. I thought really long and hard about it, and I decided I didn’t want to do that. Then Jeff told me that Cody had asked him about me at some point. That may have been later, so I’ll back up.

Again, at some point in 2013, maybe a year after the conversation or something, Cody and I had lunch, just casually, just to catch up since we hadn’t seen each other since the convention. We had lunch at P. J. Clarke’s in Washington, which is right near the White House. It was between both of our offices. We sit down. We order lunch. He starts telling me about the president’s commencement speech at Barnard [College], which he is very proud of, Barnard being the women’s college associated with Columbia University. He thinks it’s so great. I’ll say anything, as you guys have learned today, so I said, “I actually thought that speech kind of sucked.” He was taken aback, and to Cody’s credit, he said, “Oh, tell me more.”

I said, “I think the president has a problem when he talks about women,” and he’s not the only politician who’s got a problem, but here’s how it goes. First of all, he spoke to them like they were aliens, like, “I have women friends,” kind of thing. It was stilted and silly.

“My best friends are women.”

Yes, exactly.

“My wife is a woman.”

Right. “You go, girl.” It was just patronizing and kind of retro, like the 50-something dad he was, right? But more problematic, every time many politicians—women do this too—speak about an issue that was related to or disproportionately affected women, he would say something like, “And we should care about this because they’re our daughters and our sisters and our wives.” This relational trope just drives me batty.

The notion that “we”—whoever the “we” is—should only care about an issue that disproportionately affects women insofar as women are related to men, that a woman only gets these rights or deserves this equality because she is related to a man, strikes me as deeply problematic. It’s potentially part of a persuasive argument, especially to demographics that might not naturally be inclined to support or feel comfortable with whatever policy you’re talking about, but as the ballgame, as the thing you’re leading with, it struck me as weak.

Somehow I ended up on this tangent, and Cody’s just listening to my rant. At the end of it, he says, “Huh. Wow. OK. We never thought about it like that.” And I thought, Yes, because you’re all a bunch of dude bros. Why would you have thought about it? He said, “You’re right, but you’ve given me something to think about.” When he hired me later on, he said, “Actually, one of the reasons I’m hiring you is because you yelled at me at lunch that day,” which I give him a ton of credit for. But he said, “We haven’t had different perspectives,” and the first term was dominated by brilliant writers, great people, but mostly guys, who were young and didn’t necessarily have a ton of experience, and had zero female perspective. Anyway, that was interesting.

In 2014, kind of out of nowhere—I remember it was Memorial Day weekend, and Cody calls me. He says, “Hey, do you want to come write speeches for the president?” Just out of nowhere, really. I said, “What?”

He said, “Yes, do you want come be on my team?”

And I said—what do you say to that? I don’t even remember what I said. But I said, “Do I need to apply for this job?”

He said, “No. I know your writing. I’ve seen your writing. I know you.”

I said, “Do I need to interview with anyone?”

He said, “Just me. You don’t need to.” And it was just, really—he said, “I want—I think you’re the right person for this team at this moment. You’re a great writer, and I just think we need you.”

And so I took that job. I was at West Wing at the time, so I—

Just moved down the street a little bit.

Down the street, yes.

I love how there’s this feminist throughline of your whole story, talking about that in your youth, and then this one speech that you give feedback on is directly related to how we view women. I think that’s really—

Yes, as well as the feeling that you grew up with, that you honed in school, of speaking your mind and telling it like it is, but that your mother, you would say, was always a little bit worried about how she was coming across, or was her English good enough when it was perfect. Then that little bit where you will say, “Oh, this is an amazing honor,” and that you continued to move so quickly, and then you will be honest and say, “But I didn’t have confidence.” But you had confidence to speak your own voice, right?

Yes. I wouldn’t have attributed it to confidence so much as I was unaffected by—

There was not a restraint. You felt no restraints from anyone or anything.

It wasn’t like a job interview, as well, right?

Exactly.

You were just having lunch with a friend of yours.

I’m pretty sure—it may even have been a liquid lunch. I’m confident he ordered a beer. We just were—it was like talking to a friend. And it’s not as though I thought, Barack Obama is going to bring me into the White House, so I’d better mind my p’s and q’s. That was a preposterous notion. So I just felt comfortable saying whatever I wanted.

But you also did in school, you were saying.

Yes. I’m sure there were times when I kind of calibrated carefully. And I think this is actually interesting. We were talking about this a little bit at lunch. Generationally, there’s a difference too.

Now when I talk to young women, or even in my later time in the White House, but much more recently, the number of times I’m in a meeting or I’m talking to young people and somebody will say, “As a woman of color,” as a this or as a that—I remember—that is so new. We never—I’m not saying that we’re of the same generation, either, but we never did that. When I started in the workplace, of course I frequently was the only woman—certainly the only woman of color—but it’s not like I was trying to draw attention to that. I walk in a room and I can’t hide that fact, obviously. There’s nothing I can do about it. If anything, you’re trying to make yourself as similar to everybody else as possible to fit in. It was never something that you’d lead with. It was not helpful.

Later on, when young people ask me in forums or whatever, “What was it like to be a woman or woman of color in politics or presidential speechwriting?” I can’t even put words to that because we did not have the vocabulary for that, as we were talking about earlier. It was not something I ever thought about. It was only later. I give credit to these young people. It might be causing a bit of a backlash now, but I give credit to the young women who pushed me to say, No, you should—it’s not OK to be sexually harassed at the workplace, or whatever it might be.

In workplaces, especially as I advanced in my career, you do have to be careful about what you raise because you also increase the risk that if you keep complaining or raising flags, at some point they’re not going to take you seriously anymore. I do feel a responsibility to be careful about what I raise. We’ve gone on a tangent, but in that particular instance, I felt pretty comfortable saying what I wanted to say.

Of course, once you’re in the White House, then you’re just terrified every minute. You walk through those northwest gates, and every day in the White House, I just imagined, at some point, big men with guns are going to come to my office and say, “Ma’am, we’ve made a terrible mistake,” and escort me off the campus. It feels like, What am I doing here? This is wild. How did I get into this building? This is crazy. That’s what it felt like every day.

Do you remember what your first day felt like going in?

Yes. Again, I was kind of shell-shocked, so Susannah Jacob, who was Cody’s assistant and our assistant speechwriter—an absolutely brilliant, hilarious young woman who is currently getting her PhD in history at Yale—met me in the front. We get through security in the northwest gate, and then she walks me to the OEOB [Old Executive Office Building], now known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, because in Washington, we name everything after Republican presidents.

I’m escorted in. Where my office is—the OEOB, there’s a basement level, and then there’s the first floor. I was on the first floor, and I had the most amazing office. It was on the corner looking out onto Pennsylvania Avenue facing Blair House. It was a huge office that clearly should have belonged to someone more important than me. It was the end of the speechwriting suite. It was me, and then at the time when I first started—it was different speechwriters then later—but the President’s speechwriters, and then Mrs. Obama’s two speechwriters, Sarah Hurwitz and, at the time, Tyler Lechtenberg.

So they were with you in speechwriting—

We were all in the suite.

—rather than being in the East Wing with the rest of her staff.

Exactly. Speechwriting was one office. Hurwitz had started out—she had been a Hillary Clinton campaign speechwriter, jumped over to the Obama campaign, wrote for the president for the first year, and then Mrs. Obama got her. She is a genius and one of the best speechwriters, and their partnership is one for the ages.

We would love to speak with her. We’ll reach out.

Oh, my gosh, yes. You should reach out to Sarah Hurwitz. It’s wild to me that that hasn’t happened yet.

I think I’ve already sent an invitation, but I haven’t heard.

She’s writing her second book.

Oh, that’s probably part of the reason.

But she’s remarkable. Anyway, I walked into this office, and I was—this is the biggest office I’ve ever seen, and I’m a relatively not important White House staffer, but OK. But my office, as a result, became kind of the center of gravity. So if you’re having a bad day, you’re going to go lie on the couch in my office. Whenever we had meetings, or sometimes we would invite outside speakers. One of my colleagues in particular, David Litt, who would go on to write a few books, he is very funny and was very precocious, and invited David Sedaris to come and talk to us. Whenever we had anything like that, it would happen usually in my office. So my office became the center of gravity in that way.

But the first day was a little bit crazy. I knew some people who worked in the White House already. Two of my closest friends from graduate school were there. One of them was national security staff. So I had people who I knew in the building, but it was still crazy. I’m a history junkie and somebody who just really appreciates that historical element of the White House, and so just to walk around was something else.

What was great was—I think I started in the middle of the week. Was it? I forget. It must have been the middle of the week, or maybe it was Monday. That Friday, Cody said, “Hey, I’m going to just walk you around the West Wing, give you a tour of the West Wing.” Cody was freer that day. The West Wing was a little quieter because the president was going on a trip. He was going to Europe. So he walks me around. The first place we go is Denis McDonough’s office, and I meet the chief of staff. He just shows me everything, shows me his office. I had already met Terry [Szuplat]. We had had a speechwriters’ meeting earlier that week.

So he’s showing me around the West Wing, introducing me to different people, and suddenly I realize that he has walked me to the outer Oval Office. I’m sure you’ve got the whole geography of the place, so I don’t have to tell you, but we get to the outer Oval, and Brian Mosteller, who’s the director of Oval Office operations, and Ferial Govashiri, who is the president’s assistant at the time, are there. I meet them. They’re very lovely. Then Cody just takes me into the Oval Office. I had never been inside the Oval Office before, obviously, and I was just—I mean, there really is a quieting effect of the place, to walk into this institution. It’s the Oval Office! I’m enough of a history nerd to know details of the creation of this space in the building and the rest of it. But my gosh, I was really stunned. Cody just walks right up and takes an apple from the bowl, and like he owns the place, puts his feet up.

Then he’s just showing me around a little bit, pointing out what’s on the walls and in the bookshelf. Suddenly he says, “Look out there.” I look out to the South Lawn, and the president is walking to Marine One [presidential helicopter]. We watch Marine One take off. It was the coolest first week of a job I’d ever had. It was so kind of him to do that, to let me get that insider glimpse. It was really cool.

Did that feeling of—many people have spoken about this, right? That feeling of awe is probably the best way of describing it, of being in the Oval. I don’t know if you ever had any kind of encounters where you had to go in and speak to the president. How did that feeling of being the office affect you when you did have to go and present ideas or speak with him? Did it feel overwhelming at points, or did it become more normal for you, working there?

It didn’t for me, and it affected me more than I wanted it to or than I—I intellectually understood that it should not, that I was not walking through some force field when I entered this office and I had a job to do, and yet it still affected me. I am humble enough to say that it still affected me more than I wanted it to. I can’t quite identify why.

Now, I suspect that if I were the kind of staffer who saw him more frequently—so, I guess in the landscape of staff, the pantheon of staff, the vast majority of staff never see him. Most people who work in the OEOB don’t have the blue badge that lets you walk into the West Wing whenever you want, but speechwriters did. So I could come and go as I pleased, whereas somebody who was even maybe more senior than I was technically, at OMB [Office of Management and Budget] or something, couldn’t just walk in and out that way. So I already had a level of freedom and a kind of status that exceeded my real job title, I would think. I don’t know. Maybe that’s wrong. It was actually interesting reading the pieces about speechwriting in here because it’s instructive to put our era of speechwriting in the context of these others.

So I saw him more frequently than your average staffer. Most people never saw him, never met him, whatever. But not as much as Ben Rhodes, and Cody, and Susan [Rice], and Denis, and people who are taking walks with him every day. Just being in that in-between made that force field still pretty palpable, and powerful, and disquieting, frankly. [laughter] So yes. It’s not like I was going in there to—I wasn’t going in there telling President Obama how the world should be, but I would definitely be more nervous than I would want to be. Now when I see him, it’s a little bit different. I do some work for the museum, so it’s a little bit different. But no, there’s something about that room. There’s something about that space.

And I think—also, there’s this picture of me and him at the Resolute desk. He’s sitting at the desk and I’m sitting next to him. He’s going over edits. There’s the smallish picture of [Abraham] Lincoln in the background. It really is astonishing, a scene that Lincoln never could have imagined: a black president sitting with his woman speechwriter at the Resolute desk—not that he had the Resolute desk or the Oval. Every time I walked in there, I did think, I have zero business being here, not just because of identity reasons but just because who gets to be here? This is crazy.

However, I will say this. At some point—and I think it was helpful that I was a grown-up when I got this job—it is a job. If you let yourself get cowed by it, and silenced, and in your head, then you’re not going to do your job. He doesn’t have time for everybody to be starstruck around him. He really doesn’t. What he needs is for everybody to do their job. As speechwriters, our job, especially for someone like President Obama, who could very easily write his own speeches better than we could, our job is to save him time because he doesn’t have time. You very quickly have to move past the awe and do your job.

It’s a little bit like being a speechwriter or a reporter or anybody who works on deadlines. There are the people who think, I want to be a writer. I want to sit in a coffeeshop and wait for inspiration to hit me, and then I will write something. That’s just not how our jobs work.

The great novel, right.

Yes. We don’t have that luxury. It’s more like Stephen King, who wakes up at 5:00 in the morning and writes until noon, and then goes for a swim. It is a discipline. You have to be disciplined enough to just put on your big girl pants and do your job. I think it’s balancing discipline and creativity.

What was the first thing you wrote on this job?

What was the first thing I wrote? The first thing I wrote was actually for that Friday.

And you started in midweek, you said.

I started Monday or Tuesday. It wasn’t even really a big thing. I was thinking about, actually, this first question. “Discuss your first meeting with President Barack Obama.”

Oh, feel free to—do you want to start with that?

No, no, I can do this one first because he was just giving—

Because you hadn’t met him. You had never met him, had you?

I had never met him, no.

You just saw him in person walk out to Marine One.

Yes.

Had you been to the White House before?

Yes.

But not in the Oval.

Not in the Oval.

You didn’t have the behind-the-scenes tour.

Right. I did not have the behind-the-scenes tour. I had done the East Wing tour, and I had been to a press Christmas party during the George W. Bush administration, because a friend of mine was a reporter, but I had never actually met him or done that.

The first set of remarks I did were just talking points for—it was a staff, executive service picnic or something that was going on. Just a party, basically, on the South Lawn, and it was just talking points. And it wasn’t even talking points he would actually read. I think that this was Cody just getting me a little bit comfortable.

Then there were two things that happened the next week that then became my first real speeches. On Fridays, he would tape his videos. We had the weekly address that would go up on the web and then any other videos that he had to do for events he couldn’t make it to or whatever else it might be. One of the videos was a PSA [public service announcement] kind of thing for this campaign the White House launched against campus sexual assault called “It’s On Us.” I worked on that.

Then the following week was the launch of the campaign. It was actually a rare situation where the president and vice president spoke together in the East Room, because this initiative really came out of—the VP [vice president] was a big part of it. Vinay Reddy, who is currently President Biden’s chief speechwriter, was his chief speechwriter when he was VP. Vinay was with the teleprompter as Biden spoke, and then I was with the teleprompter when President Obama spoke. That was my first speech.

But I met him because, for that It’s On Us situation—it must have been the following Friday, and I will go back and check my dates. But Cody said, “You really should meet the president.” I said, “Do I really have to meet the president? I think it’s fine.”

What was your reluctance?

I’m just an under-the-radar sort of girl in those situations, and it didn’t seem necessary. But I appreciated—of course, I was kind of joking. Of course I had to meet him at some point. He had to know who I was. The president was taping the weekly address and a couple of videos, including this one, in the State Dining Room, which, again, you all are familiar with the geography of the place. What they had done was, they had to set up three different stations, so he would do his weekly address, then he’d move to the next station, and then he’d move, because one of them was standing, et cetera.

I walk in with Cody. He’s doing his taping, and he does a double take when he sees me because clearly he has no idea who I am. He doesn’t recognize this random woman who’s walked into his taping. But it’s a big enough room that it wasn’t cramped. After it’s done, he saunters over to us, and Cody says, “Mr. President, this is your newest speechwriter, Sarada Peri.” He said, “Hello, nice to meet you.” Cody had said, “She comes from West Wing Writers.” He says, “Nice to meet you. West Wing Writers. Isn’t that us?” [laughter] I was just laughing. I forget what he asked me, maybe just small talk. He was very nice.

What’s really funny is—and you can see it in this—Chuck [Kennedy] or Lawrence [Jackson] or someone took a picture of us. I am 5′ [foot] 2″ [inches], and President Obama is 6′3″, and it’s really funny. I am looking up at him like this [looks up at the ceiling].

I’ll sound like a psychiatrist. How did that make you feel? In addition to meeting this man for the first time, and just physically, he has an imposing stature by his physicality.

He does, yes.

How did that feel?

I don’t know if that struck me in particular, in part because it’s a little bit like being a woman. I’m always this small woman. I walk around the world and everybody is taller than I am, so it’s not—I’m pretty used to that, so that didn’t feel—and Cody is a lot bigger than me. So I’m always around people who are just—

You’re always looking up.

I’m always looking up. My husband is a foot taller than I am. I am very used to it, so it’s not a big deal. That didn’t strike me, but I do think he has a presence. He has an imposing presence, and he’s got this swagger, and he’s very comfortable. Year 6, he was very comfortable being president, so I think there was something about that. But again, I do think in the back of my head I thought, He is meeting a new staffer. I am his employee. I work for him, and my job is to do the best possible job. So I probably was more serious around him than I actually am in real life, in part because you want him to know that I’m not “fangirling” over him.

That’s a distinction between speechwriters and everybody else, not that everybody else isn’t professional about it, but we really have to just rein it in a little bit and put on our professional face, and get really ready to absorb everything he’s saying, and absorb his presence and who he is. It’s almost a different—I don’t know if other speechwriters talk about this, but I really think it’s a different kind of mind shift. I’m just trying to inhabit him, in a creepy way.

It’s overused, but mind meld?

A little, yes. I would never have a mind meld with him the way that Rhodes or Cody or Favreau does, and I wasn’t going to try. But I think I was just trying to absorb him a little bit and get myself to inhabit him.

Correct me if I’m wrong on this. It’s not like I’m an actor, but you hear actors—certainly method acting—talking about reading a character, reading a script, and then trying to inhabit that character. Is it a bit like that?

It is like that. I was thinking about that with the convention this summer when we had all of our writers in one room, and people would be working on speeches. I would hear them read each other’s speeches, really thinking about, Could this person say this? Would they say it this way? How is it going to come out of their bodies?

What was great is that this year, we also controlled or ran the speaker prep side of things, the rehearsal space. We had speaker coaches that were working with all of our speakers. Our speechwriters and our speaker coaches were all working together to help the speaker sound like the best version of themselves, which is our job. But it was thinking about, How is it going to come out of this person’s body and mouth? You have to think about that; otherwise, it sounds so inauthentic. Yes, I think there was an element of that.

So it seems really smart for Cody to have you meet the president up front early on in your tenure. You were only in there two or three days, so you hadn’t yet written the piece for It’s On Us. You hadn’t written that, but you were starting it, or—

I think I may have been in the middle of writing it. Honestly, I can’t remember. I may have been in the middle of it. In a weird way, writing for him—I know Peggy Noonan has written about this. I think she never met Reagan or met him once at the end or something. In a way, when you write for someone who is so prolific and so out there, you can do the work of absorbing them in some ways without being with them, but it is very helpful to do that. But for speeches like that or on a subject on which he has spoken so frequently, we didn’t need to talk to him ahead of time. I could have not met him. I’d spent the months just absorbing everything about him anyway, reading everything, knowing how he would say something.

My job is to do my level best to get there. Cody and Terry would get us even closer with their edits. Then we would get it to him, and then he would make his edits. But our job is to get it as close as possible, and then we’ll go back and forth.

I suppose, also, it’s almost—with so many public figures, they exist on these dual levels of who they are in the broad picture, political figure—and obviously for Obama, he was so infused with meaning for so many people as a public figure—and then Obama the person, the separation of that almost. And I suppose not necessarily having met him but having read everything and observed everything, you were able to write to that, as opposed to necessarily having to spend that much time with him. Do you see what I’m—?

Yes, that’s right. Enough of him was out there. What’s interesting about someone like Obama is that—I don’t know about this being true for other presidents because I don’t know them. Not that I know him, but in some ways, what you see is what you get. He really is even-keeled. He’ll talk this up to “island mentality,” having grown up on an island. He’s never too high or too low. He really is that cool as a cucumber. And that emotional range is very accessible to me. I can hang there.

More than that, I think that he is somebody who has a rich interior life. That actually does manifest even in his public presentation to the masses. It may manifest at a slightly less sophisticated level or in a more broadly accessible presentation, but he’s always there. That richness, the depth, the intellect, it’s always right there. So even if you’re not spending a ton of time with him, I think you can get that from his writing, from how he answers questions. You just have to look for it. Then that gives you enough of a scaffolding to start to build something, and then everybody else who knows him better can help you fill that out, and then he can do his edits.

And then each time he edits, you have to learn from that. Editing is—I think, again, young writers often feel like red on the page is an indictment of your character. [laughter] And it’s not. It’s feedback. You have to learn from that feedback. Trying to understand his edits and then improve is also part of it.

But it’s not like I was writing States of the Union. That nightmarish process was all Cody’s problem.

Do you want to talk a little bit more about the process once you are really into writing more for him? Oh, I did have one question. Back to the dual appearance of the president and the vice president for It’s On Us. And you said the vice president, of course, had his own speechwriter. On this rare occasion when they would appear together, do the two lead speechwriters for each man have to look at those to make sure that one is not—the president speaks and then the vice president, or the vice president and the president, that they’re not overlapping or repeating?

Yes. I forget who looked at whose. One of us looked at the other’s. Everybody knows that the vice president’s speech could change at the last minute and whatever, so we don’t know exactly—

Because he would—

Yes.

—ad-lib.

Correct. They had a different process. Our process was a machine. There was no changing things at the last minute. Theirs was not, and the way Biden reads off the teleprompter and how he delivers his speeches, he will, in the moment, jump around. It was very stressful watching Vinay working with the teleprompter operator. “Oh, go down there. Oh, go back up. Now we’re back down. Go back up.”

So he would have to sit with the teleprompter operator.

Yes. We both were standing by the operator, but I didn’t have to do anything when it came to me. I was often by the prompter, but I never had to do anything except chat with the prompter operator.

Am I correct that even if the president ad-libbed, he wouldn’t jump around from one part of the speech to another?

Correct.

But Biden would.

Yes. It’s just a different process.

Before we leave Biden, anything that you’re hearing about him or how people view him? Are they viewing him positively as a wonderful partner in this whole process of being the Obama presidency?

Biden?

Yes.

It always seemed to me like they had a good partnership. I did not hear anything negative. I was reading whatever everybody else was reading. The places where they disagreed or where Biden was disagreeing with the president, and I think the president has written about it in his own biography—

Yes, sure, particularly on marriage equality. That’s the famous one where he was out in front a little bit of the president.

Right, and I think there was something about the surge [of troops in Afghanistan].

Yes, there were issues related to the wars.

Right. But I never got the sense that—if there was animosity between the offices or between the men, I did not get that sense. I do remember when Beau [Biden] was sick and then when Beau died, I know that that was—the president was very struck by that. I think their connection was real. But like any president and vice president, the relationships—you are scholars of this. You know better than anyone, they’re just so complicated. They are really different men and had really different processes. The speech process is a great example of how different they are.

So let’s go to your machinelike process.

Sure. I don’t know if you’ve already talked to Jon and Cody.

We haven’t. We really started more junior and are working our way up, mostly because we haven’t had a lot of contacts. Other people will say, “Oh, yes, I will tell So-and-so.” We just haven’t had a lot of contacts with the people who are the leads, for example. And like Cody, we knew, had done this book, and so we didn’t really think that we were going to get him. Any of these people, by the way, if you want to say, “Oh, I had such a good time,” or you can even—they can do it online.

They would totally do it. I don’t know about Jon, but Cody would totally do it. They just had a baby, but—

Oh, good. Oh, good. We even thought—because the Miller Center, long before I came, did a group oral history with speechwriters from different administrations. They just put a big seminar table here and then brought them in from all these different presidencies. We were thinking of doing one with just the Obama speechwriting team.

I talked to Kyle O’Connor, and the only thing is, I talked to him last spring, and he said most people had gotten together in Chicago for the reunion. He was very honest with me. I said, “One of the ways that we know these group oral histories work is like with Nancy-Ann DeParle saying”—she said, “I’ve already done my single interview for Columbia [University],” but Russell [Riley] said, “Would you like to do a group?” And she said, “Oh, that would be great. It would be like a reunion, and we’ll all get together in Charlottesville in April.” When you have somebody, maybe like yourself, who would say, “Yes, this is a great idea. Let’s all get together,” that really helps push things along too.

When I said to Kyle—first, again, he said, “I just don’t know if in the next few months that would be the time to do it,” since everybody just had gotten together. Second, he said, “You just have to understand, I was not at that level.” He was very clear about it and didn’t try to put on airs or anything. He’s here in town, so we thought that would be another good reason. But he said, “I just don’t feel like I’m the person who be calling up the top people to say, ‘I think you should get together.’”

Kyle could call Jon. And Kyle writes for President Obama now. Any of us could ask Cody. It’s the first-term guys that I just don’t know, so I have no idea.

I know obviously Jon Favreau left, but was there much turnover from other writers on the staff between the terms?

Yes, there was. The early speechwriters—Hurwitz, Sarah, she went over to Mrs. Obama. She was there all eight years. Then Jon [Favreau] left, Jon Lovett left. Kyle left at some point. There was a guy named Aneesh Raman. He was only there for maybe a year. He was gone. Then Adam Frankel, who was essential, was gone, although he has been writing for [Kamala] Harris. All those guys left in the first term.

Was there a reason for that, or was it just that other things came along?

I think they’d been on the campaign. It’s exhausting. I’m sure they just wanted to move on with their lives and do something different. Favs [Favreau] had been with him since he was a senator. It’s just a long time to be with one person. Honestly, what happens in these jobs—I see it now. The people who stayed with him for all eight years, the ones who stayed on after, you just get stuck as being a staffer to this one person forever. I think it’s unhealthy, even to work for people who are as wonderful as the Obamas. That’s not a good place to be. At some point your whole identity becomes having been so-and-so’s aide, and people can struggle to separate themselves and carve out their own space away from that person and moment in their lives. I wouldn’t want to be there, so I could imagine. I think it’s actually hard to break the chain, and then once you can bring yourself to do it, you’ve really got to do a full, clean break.

Is it harder to get positions after that if you’ve stayed with—are you too identified with someone by the outside world?

That’s a good question. I think it probably depends on what you did. I don’t know anything besides speechwriting, so I’m not sure.

Right, right. But of course, Ben Rhodes was there doing speeches in the foreign policy realm and was there from the time in the Senate to the campaign and then all eight years in the White House.

Yes, but then he was done after that. He consults here and there.

He moved on. So back to process.

Yes. So the process was—and I wish Cody were here, because he would correct me for all the—I forget if he outlines it in his book.

He does, but it’s better—we want to hear how you work in the system.

By the time I got there, it was a well-oiled machine. Year 6, they know what they’re doing. What would happen is, Cody was a member of the senior staff. He would go to those 7:30 a.m. meetings every day. Then we would have speech team meetings maybe a couple times a week, which was just, we would go over to his office in the West Wing—the cave, the “speech cave,” we called it—and sit around, and he would assign speeches. My understanding is that that did not happen the first term, but I don’t actually know how it all went. I think it was just a different time and a different setup.

So Cody would get the assignments. He would have a general sense of the schedule. Something like a commencement speech that’s months away, they actually get put on the books pretty early because universities know when they’re happening. For the president it’s, he’s going to give a commencement at an HBCU [historically black colleges and universities]. He’s going to give one at one of the military academies. It’s all very—there’s a formula to it. He knows.

Every year, that pattern is the same.

Exactly. You get those, and he knows pretty early, so something like that is always on the books ahead of time. But sometimes it’s just, Oh, in two weeks, he’s got to give a speech at this event. Or he has a foreign trip. Terry’s got a list of speeches he’s got to work on. So it just depends. If he got assignments, we would have a meeting, and he would divide them up based on people’s time, capacity, interest, whatever it might be.

Then you would get to work. What that meant was—let’s just say I got assigned a—what would it be? Let’s say an economics speech. I would go back to my desk and pull up any speeches that the president had already delivered on that subject. I would set up a meeting with whichever policy people were involved in that. Cody would know, because he had been in the senior staff meeting. He would say, “Oh, this is actually a labor rule. Call this person.” Whatever it was. This is all internal to the White House. I was not calling agencies. That’s not a thing, which is also interesting to read that in here.

Then I would talk to the policy people, get a sense of what they wanted to say. Sometimes you were giving a speech because you were announcing a new something, or there was an event in front of a trade association of whatever. Maybe you were making an announcement. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was a statement of policy.

What’s interesting about speechwriting is that sometimes an idea isn’t clarified until someone says, “Let’s give a speech about this.” Then the idea in some ways gets adjudicated and clarified on your page. But it’s an interesting thing to decide, We need one message. What is that message going to be? And parsing through all that policy with people who are very focused on policy to try to push them toward deciding on an actual narrative, a persuasive message. What does this all add up to and why does it matter? Why should anyone care? Who is our audience? Who are we trying to persuade?

So I would talk to those people, work on a draft. In my early weeks, I would maybe send Cody an outline. That stopped relatively quickly, but I just felt like I needed some training wheels. Write a draft. Send it to Cody or Terry. Terry was our deputy, so whichever one of them was editing a given speech, usually Cody. They would make edits.

Typically the day before a speech, around 10:00 a.m., after Cody got his back edits to me, I would then send it to this Listserv [electronic mailing list]—speeches @, whatever it was, I forget the actual thing—and I would say, “Here’s a draft of the president’s remarks for tomorrow. Please send me your edits by 3:00 p.m.”

Everybody was on the list. I shouldn’t say everybody, but a lot of people were on this list. It was a hundred people or something. It was everybody from the chief of staff and the national security advisor, the lawyers, the fact-checkers, key policy people, so the heads of OMB, DPC [Domestic Policy Council], NEC [National Economic Council], whatever. Then I might copy relevant individual staffers who were not a permanent member of that group, but they were involved in this particular speech.

And they would have been people you had already spoken to based on the very beginning, getting the assignment from Cody and saying, “Talk to these policy people.”

Yes. If they were a more junior person, maybe I’d also add their boss, whatever it was. So I’d say, “OK, please send me your edits by 3:00 p.m.” At 5:00 p.m., the edits start rolling in. You all know how this goes because you all have written and managed edits-by-committee under deadlines. So now you’ve got edits coming from all corners of the White House. Some of them are your fact-checkers, and usually fact-checkers—they had to fact-check so many things besides speeches. They were researching and vetting for a variety of offices in the White House. So you often wouldn’t get their flags until maybe sometime in the night, later in the evening, and you’d deal with them later. But the lawyers might have some issues. Maybe the policy people wanted to clarify something. More often than not, they wanted to add more details to whatever you were saying.

But then sometimes—I will never forget this. I was writing a speech for—wait. Let me finish the process, and then I’ll tell you a story. Sometimes you get edits from people who have nothing to do with anything but just feel like they know more and would like to—

They want to weigh in.

They want to wordsmith you. So you start getting these edits. When I first did this, not being as wise as I was a week later, I would get, for example, from within the NEC, National Economic Council, multiple people within the directorate sending me their edits, and their edits didn’t even necessarily—they were conflicting with each other. At that point, I called the assistant for that office and said, “You need to get all these people to collate their edits internally and send me one document with all their edits.”

So I would get their edits. I’m a hundred years old and need to see things on paper, so I would print all these edits out and then just check them off as I went through them. And if I saw an edit that felt maybe not articulated well or in the President’s voice but was important, I made sure that I talked to that person. Or if it was the lawyers who sent me edits that were in legal gobbledygook, but I knew that we were all going to go to jail if I didn’t follow it, I would call them up and say, “Hey, what’s the interest behind this edit? Can we work together to make sure that it sounds like human English that Barack Obama would say?” So you go through this whole process which is 75 percent about managing and negotiating with people and 25 percent writing.

Then later on in the evening, once I’ve done all this, maybe Cody reads it again, maybe he doesn’t. Then I would send it now to the president’s book. So that list includes all those original people on the Listserv plus the assistants who put together the President’s book, which was his big book of homework that President Obama took home every night. I believe there was a New York Times article about this, but he’s a bit of a night owl. He would have his big book of memos, schedules, briefings, whatever, speeches. He would take that overnight. The next morning, you would get a call from Ferial. She would say, “He’s got edits. Come pick up the folder.” Go to the outer Oval, pick up the folder. If he had substantial edits, then he might want to talk to you, so then you go in the Oval, and he’ll go over his edits with you. There might be some back and forth.

Then he’s delivering the speech that day?

Usually, if it was—

So I just have a really basic question about the process. Why get it so close to the day before he’s delivering the speech to get the edits? Even just another 24 hours would have made things easier for you and the other speechwriters.

I disagree with that, actually. I wouldn’t want to give anybody more time to mess with our stuff.

Oh, more time to think about it.

Oh, God, no. No.

OK, got it. All right. That makes perfect sense.

No, no, no. You want to close off that miserable spigot as quickly as possible. Actually, no. I, in retrospect, think this was really wise. If it was a really early morning speech or something more complex, a Selma [Alabama] or whatever it’s going to be, commencements, then you would do it earlier.

I gotcha. OK. This was already in place. This, Wait, don’t give people a lot of time, but give people a chance, 24 hours—fewer than 24 hours.

I don’t know the origin of that, and I don’t know why it came down to a day before.

But you did not implement that.

I had nothing to do with any of this, no. This was the system. I just plugged myself in like the cog in the machine I was.

Then you realized, though, that this does work better than if—

For me, yes, I did. Plus, honestly, is it worth it to get the president’s attention on something when he’s very busy with other things? He’s not going to practice it, so do we really need to do that? It just depended. But this is generally how it worked.

Yes, OK. That makes perfect sense.

Yes. So then that morning, you make the edits, and then you send it final, which is to all those people, plus Ferial and the book people, plus the teleprompter operators if there’s a teleprompter, plus the body person who is going to print it out on big font and put it in the binder in case the prompter breaks. If it’s not prompter, then slightly different process. Some speeches are not prompter. So that’s basically the process.

What’s nice about it is that we really were the last people—the speechwriter was the last person who said yea or nay. I never had a situation where Denis, my chief of staff, or Cecilia [Muñoz] at DPC, anybody of the many people who were more important than I was, at the last minute said, “You need to insert this.” And if they did need me to add or change something, they were always incredibly kind and deferential about the best way to do it and always apologetic for a last-minute change. The most senior people really respected the process.

Presumably that’s because you had given them, all of these people, the opportunity to hold forth.

I actually think it was a cultural thing. I’m sure that in other offices maybe they give them the opportunity, but you give them an inch and they take a mile, and they feel like they are authorized. They have the authority to do that, to keep pushing, that they can override whatever the speechwriter says or does.

Who set that culture?

Probably President Obama, and it might be because of the relationship that he had with Jon and Ben early on in the campaign. Maybe it’s because he’s such a gifted orator, such a gifted speaker, very thoughtful about his words. I don’t know. But we’re not—it was an orderly White House, from that perspective. You hear a lot about, for example, the Clinton White House, which is full of brilliant people and beautiful writers, but there was a little bit more of a chaotic element to that White House, as you all well know, having done the oral history.

My sense of it—and again, I have such a limited window into it, having come towards the end and not knowing the campaign, so you all would know better. But my sense of it is that President Obama’s discipline lent itself to a disciplined White House. You stayed in your lane, which is why it was always so surprising when somebody stepped out of their lane and tried to wordsmith your stuff. You always thought, Huh? That’s not what we do here. But in any event, I do feel like people respected the process.

As a speechwriter—this is outside of the White House—I think process is probably the most important element of what I do. Process is so important in speechwriting. You need to establish parameters. You need to be really clear about expectations, about who is doing what, if for no other reason than basic problems like version control, which in a situation like the White House or a convention room, can go out of control very quickly. Somebody has to be responsible and accountable for what shows up on the teleprompter.

Early on, for whatever reason—and I would be interested to hear what others who were there for longer would say—but they just instituted a culture where we were the last people who saw it. Of course, the president could make changes, and sometimes would, but in my experience, he was really disciplined about it, and I think he trusted us to do our level best for him. And he had seen the speech, so he generally trusted us.

So then that also did not lead to errors or missteps. Your process was working, so the president never had to say, “Well, this isn’t working,” or Denis McDonough say, “Why did you have him say that?” Everything was working smoothly in this well-oiled machine.

Yes, I think so in general. The first time I “traveled” with the president, which was internally, that I went with him to a speech, it was in D.C. It was that October of my first year to the Congressional Black Caucus gala that they have every year. Every president speaks there. The president was speaking there.

I will not tell the whole lengthy story, but that was a speech that was happening on a Saturday evening, which is tricky for our whole process. We had circulated it on Friday morning, done all the things we were supposed to do. It had gone to his book Friday night, but Saturday morning, there were no edits. Cody said, “I’m confident he has not read the speech.” So I just hung out in the office all day Saturday waiting for something to happen, waiting for his edits, but it was a beautiful fall day, and he was playing golf. Cody said, “That means he doesn’t have edits. He’s not really going to look at it. I don’t think he’s going to look at it before. But just hang around your office.”

So I’m waiting in my office all day. Cody is in his office working. I don’t get any edits. Now we’re getting very close to “go time,” which, if you’re a staffer, you have to get to the motorcade significantly before the president does, because as soon as the president gets in the car, you go. I go over. I’ve never been in the motorcade. I don’t know how anything works.

For some reason, I take a copy of the speech. I take my personal phone, my BlackBerry [work smartphone]—my wallet? I don’t know why I took my wallet. Did I need money? I don’t know what I was thinking. I had just never done this.

[laughs] Always take your wallet.

I had no idea what I was doing. I walk over across West Exec [West Executive Avenue], across the colonnade. I go into the East Wing through the Diplomatic Reception Room, which is where the exit to—where the driveway is where the motorcade is meeting. I go in. They point me to one of the staff cars that’s towards the back, a staff van. I get in. I’m chatting with the people in the van. There’s always a nurse who travels with the president. I’m chatting with her.

Suddenly the door opens, and a guy says—who I now know to be Joe Paulsen, the president’s body man, but at the time I didn’t know him. Joe says, “Are you the speechwriter?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Great. Here’s the president’s edits.” Hands me a folder with the edits. The door closes. Two seconds later, we start moving.

We’re going to the D.C. Convention Center, which, under normal circumstances on a Saturday night in D.C., would take 20 minutes from the White House, but they’ve cleared the streets, so it takes 5. I’m going through these edits. At first, maybe my blood pressure has risen a little bit. But I go through and I start seeing—at first, I saw an arrow. I thought, Oh, my gosh, we’re really in trouble here.

He’s changing the order.

And then I realized, OK, no, actually, this is all reasonable. This is all doable. I just need to get to the teleprompter. I’m a professional. I’ve done this many times. I can do this.

Because you can—I’ve never used any—have no connection with the teleprompter. Can you be right there at the teleprompter station inputting changes?

I can. I can. Typically—

Because you didn’t bring your laptop or anything.

The staff is always going to be backstage. For the president, the president’s teleprompter is operated by military personnel because it’s considered secure communications. It’s not like any random dude can operate the teleprompter—unless you’re Trump. I’m pretty sure he does whatever he wants.

Anyway, we arrive at the convention center. Whenever you travel with the president, the entrance is never glamorous. You’re always going through the back door, the garage, past the dumpsters. [laughter] In this case, Mrs. Obama was with him. She wasn’t speaking, but she was just going to make an appearance. I’m racing up from the back of the staff vans, but I get to the garage to go through the entrance, and the president has come out of the limo [limousine], and he’s opened the door for Mrs. Obama. She gets out. She’s all glamorous and tall in her beautiful white dress. They walk in—again, we’re in a back entrance—and immediately, they’re mobbed by the staff or whoever is there to welcome them, and we’re moving like molasses.

When is he to give the speech?

So this is the thing.

Before dinner?

I had been told that there was going to be a rope line, and so I thought, OK, then that means I’ve got a few minutes, but I’m not sure. I just don’t know, and we’re already running late. This guy Luke sees me. He’s the travel coordinator that day. He sees me, and he sees the panic in my eyes. [laughter] He’s a really big dude and can see over everybody’s heads, so he just grabs me, and he says, “Come with me.” He just somehow manages to inch me past this mob of people who are surrounding the president and the first lady and takes me to the teleprompter operator.

So I go over to the teleprompter operator and I say, “Hi, are you the operator?” He’s a very young, nerdy military guy. “[in a nasal voice] Yes, I’m the teleprompter operator.” He’s very official. I said, “Great. I’m the speechwriter. I need you to move, my darling.” He just moves out of the way, and I sit down. I’m working my way through the edits. You’ve got to do it really methodically because you can’t screw it up.

So, OK. So I make my edits. That’s done. He reloads.

But there’s more because then you have to take all of the pages out of the hard-copy version that he has in case the prompter breaks down. That’s in a binder like this [touches binder on table] with plastic page protectors. So you take all of the pages out. Now we’re reprinting it on the big font. I have to fix—because I fixed it in the prompter, but I have to fix it on the regular Word version, too. Luke has a laptop. You have to print it because the prompter—

So there’s always somebody traveling with a laptop, and you know there’s a printer there.

Yes. I don’t know how there was a printer there. I’m not worried. There’s a printer there. It’s backstage.

Because you’ve got to get that hard copy and put that on the podium.

Exactly.

You didn’t have to run back through the crowd and hand it to him.

No, no, no, no. At this point, they’re doing the rope line, I think. But it’s the tedious process of taking all the pages of this, and then reprinting it, putting it back in, because you can’t print from this prompter. Prompter formatting looks crazy if you just were to read it. So this is all happening, and I’m just—you know. Finally, we do it. Phew, we’re done. OK. Hand the binder back to whoever was going to go put it on the podium.

I stand up. OK. So now I am holding the old version of the speech, which was in big print, so it is a lot of pages. I am holding my personal phone, my BlackBerry, my wallet—you recall? Why am I holding my wallet? I’m holding all these things, and I stand up, and I notice that it seems like the rope line is done, and the president is just chatting with some staff. I just, for whatever reason, drop everything. Drop everything. Everything falls out of my hands. I’m holding too many things. The papers go flying. Now here we are, backstage at the CBC [Congressional Black Caucus], all these glamorous people, and the dorky staffer has dropped all of her stuff.

And scattered the president’s speech all in front of her.

Papers everywhere. Everywhere. This is the old version of the speech, right? It’s just kind of a mess. So I get on the ground, chastened and humiliated, and I start picking up all the papers. I’m picking up all the papers. I feel a shadow coming towards me. [laughter] President Obama just—

A tall shadow.

A tall shadow. He just comes up, and I’m literally on the floor, on the carpet, just like this. He looks at me, and he looks at the papers, looks back at me, and he says, “Is that my speech?” I’m like, “Yes, sir. This is your speech.” And he says, “So what, so I’m just going to stand up there and say, ‘In conclusion’?” Then he laughs at me, just laughs at me, and saunters away. I’m like, Oh, my God, this is the most humiliating moment of my life. I finish picking up all these papers, vow never to take my wallet anywhere.

Then a few minutes later, he comes back over, and he says, “Come with me.” I’m, like, Oh, God, what humiliation am I about to endure now? [laughter] He takes me to this cordoned off area. Mrs. Obama is sitting there on a stool. He says, “Michelle, I’d like you to meet my newest speechwriter.” I am just—I have nothing to say. I don’t think I said anything. I don’t know what I said.

He didn’t say, “I just found her on the floor.” [laughter]

And that’s how I met Mrs. Obama, the one and only time.

Wow. That was the only time you met her?

Yes.

Oh, my gosh. Do you remember if she said anything to you?

What?

Did she say anything to you?

I can’t remember. I’ve blocked it out entirely. You know those moments when you meet certain people and you black out? That’s what happened.

I actually had that with Barbara Bush one time because I said, “Oh, we did your husband’s oral history.” This was just before he passed and before she had passed, but she was in a scooter down at that library. I thought, Well, this is my opportunity. First of all, I said, “My name is Barbara,” and I thought that might—oh, she had steely blue-gray eyes. Then I said, “And we did your husband’s oral history. You know, behind every great president is a great woman and a great first lady.” She just trained those eyes on me, and she said, “Baloney.” I came back and I told Russell, “Somehow, I ended up back in the green room before going onstage to do a panel where my piece was to talk about her. I thought, I’m just going to tell that story because there are 300 people in the audience and they all know who she is. They just roared.”

They ate it up? [laughs]

They roared. But I said, “Russell, I don’t know how I got back to the green room. I just blacked out.”

You just black out.

These first ladies, they just do that to you.

I know. And she was so sweet. She was so sweet. She shook my hand. I just don’t remember anything else.

Now, let me ask you this. If the worst had happened and you couldn’t get this on the teleprompter, and there was no printer, and you couldn’t get this re—could he—I’m assuming the answer to this is yes. He could have delivered that speech even from the corrections that had come in to you, the edits.

Yes. I mean, I wouldn’t have given him—no. See, we wouldn’t have given him that edited version, I don’t think. I think if we hadn’t been able to make the changes, I think he would have just gone up and given the speech as it was, and then learned that next time, he shouldn’t play golf, he should do his homework. [laughter]

Yes, it was his fault, now that you mention it.

Yes, it was totally his fault. But I think in that scenario, the edits were not so significant. They were somewhat cosmetic, and he probably could have ad-libbed some of the ideas.

I was going to say, right. So he could have read what you had given him as the final—

I think so.

—and ad-libbed his edits.

Exactly. It would have been fine. Because if we had given him—the Word version—this is so, sorry, speechwriter-y and tedious. The Word version would have had his handwritten edits, but it was on font this big [small letters]. And I mean, I couldn’t have done it without my glasses.

And he was wearing readers by then?

I don’t actually know.

I don’t remember seeing him in readers.

I never saw him with readers. No, I’ve never seen him with readers.

But you did typically do big font.

Yes. It was 24 point when there was a prompter, 26 point when there was not a prompter, and bold.

Maybe when you’re president, everything comes in giant font so you don’t ever have to wear readers.

You know, I do this with everyone, honestly. This was his—this was a style that was given to me when I came into the—this is just what they did. But with whomever I’m working with, I—

Big fonts.

Maybe it’s a little bit smaller than that, but always. And appropriate page breaks, no orphaned words, no orphaned sentences. All that stuff is actually really important for delivery.

Numbering properly.

Yes. I actually leave space so that the bottom is blank, so that they’re not looking at the top of your head if you’re looking down. All these little tricks that you do as a speechwriter.

I would have never have thought of that. This is a question, back to Elizabeth’s point before lunch, about delivery. How are we doing on time? How about a little—

We’re fine. I’m just getting some ChapStick.

Are you sure? Well, if you’re doing that, I’ll do that.

Am I allowed to do that?

You may do whatever you wish. Back to delivery and style. This just may be moi, but I have a thing about teleprompters. I think the teleprompters don’t have the same ability to impact when people are reading from them because they’re rather artificially going from left to right. It also could just be because I love John Kennedy, I love Ted Sorensen. I just love that, and I don’t think teleprompters existed. I think Lyndon Johnson was probably the first president to use them. Or Martin Luther King and his “I Have a Dream” speech.

They are looking at this [touches paper on table]. They can also ad-lib or add as they’re going along. But they’re typically looking out at the audience, even when they go down a little bit, but when they come up, they’re at the audience. It always seems artificial to me as people look artificially left and artificially right because that’s where the text is.

So how do you get people—first of all, especially you have to do this at a convention—how do you get them so that they who, like me, have never used a teleprompter can figure out how to do that? What is that like?

But then for the president, who has to do that all the time—and I certainly think that Barack Obama was really, really good at it. And I also thought that Kamala Harris was good at it because I thought she worked more at trying to look out to the audience, whatever her audience was, to the center.

Yes, she’s good at that.

But do you have a feeling about that?

Mrs. Obama’s really good at that, too. Mrs. Obama had a teleprompter in her office to practice from because she knew how important it is to connect.

And she probably hadn’t used it much, if at all.

I have lots of questions about your thoughts on teleprompters. I think part of it is—and I’d be curious if you agree—but it depends on how good the person is at using them.

Yes.

So that’s part of it. And I think that the age of Kennedy is different for a lot of reasons, but one is, I wonder if to some extent, because so frequently they’re speaking to the camera too—there’s always a camera—it is difficult to teach people to read appropriately from notes and be able to have the visual of it, which I think has just changed since Kennedy’s time. But I totally hear what you’re saying. I get that.

There is a performative element to the prompter. I think done well, it can actually be the reverse effect, which is, it allows people to really be looking out and connecting. The other element of it is that, certainly at a place like a convention, it’s not actually just here [gestures to the sides]. There’s a screen back there [points straight ahead]. There’s one in the center.

OK. I had wondered if that was the case because I thought, Well, how is the person looking to the center and still being able to speak? OK.

In a really big—yes.

That makes sense.

I mean, prompter reading is a skill. You really have to learn it and practice it. It’s not something that you can just do on your first try. You have to practice.

That helps.

I have a question, which is, I guess, technical in a different sense, not related to teleprompters at all. In terms of speechwriting and rhetoric, were there particular speeches that you looked to as inspiration or rhetorical devices that you personally favor? I’m just wondering how you think about the craft of rhetoric and how that informed—how much that came into play when you were writing your speeches versus balancing it with the messaging and getting the core of the message across.

I don’t know if I ever thought about it.

That’s fascinating because so many people will read them and think that.

I thought this article, “Strategic Maneuvering in the Political Rhetoric of Barack Obama,” was the funniest thing I’d ever read. I was, like, What even is he talking about? I have no idea.

That’s fascinating because even as a literature scholar yourself, right?

I mean, I’m certainly not a scholar. I just like reading. But good Lord, what is he even talking about? “Exploring the possibilities of contemporary political rhetoric of being both successful on the one hand and rational according to normative standards of argumentative discourse on the other.” What on God’s earth is he talking about?

That’s scholarship for you.

I have no—I got through, and at some point there’s an equation. An actual math equation in this paper about the President’s rhetoric. I have no idea what on earth he’s talking about. No. No. And it’s really interesting because I spoke at a speechwriters’ conference put on by the U.K. Speechwriters’ Guild, your people, in Cambridge [United Kingdom] earlier this year. Wonderful, wonderful European speechwriters from all over Europe. So many of them asked questions about rhetoric, and we just don’t do that.

I wonder if that’s—the way I’m coming at this is that I was a classics junkie at school, and I did Latin, so I read Cicero. The whole point of that was dissecting this for rhetorical devices. I also did English literature as well, along the way. I wonder if that’s partially our cultural background that informs that. But that’s fascinating to me that doesn’t come into play.

Yes. I thought this was hilarious. I literally was laughing, and then I texted a picture of it to Terry, who goes on ad nauseum about this stuff. It drives him nuts. He has a book out. It’s called Say It Well, and it’s about public speaking for mere mortals.

All to say—I’m being a bit facetious. I think that there are rhetorical devices that we all know intuitively, and to me, those are the ones that matter. So repetition, and litany, metaphor, alliteration—things that make sense because we speak with them normally. What, unfortunately, Aaron Sorkin has done is make everybody feel like every speech needs to be at a certain kind of self-righteous register that is here [gestures up high], and that’s not how people operate or speak even what they think is real. There’s an artifice to that kind of performative speech. It actually ultimately doesn’t move people, I think. To me, the best speeches are clear, and straightforward, and compelling because they are clear and straightforward, and have a clear message, and can connect with people the way that we do in conversation.

President Obama—actually, for all the talk of him being this beautiful orator, which he is—I actually think that so much of what he does well is say things pretty simply, in a relatively straightforward manner. I think he’s good at making connections. The way he talks about—in the race speech, in the 2008 “More Perfect Union” speech after the Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright controversy, or at the height of it—the way he explains the complexity of race in America using his grandmother, for example. All it is is, it’s telling a story in a pretty plainspoken way, in the Lincoln sense, the plainspoken Lincoln sense of storytelling, not actually Sorensen rhetoric.

Or Sorkin.

Or Sorkin. Exactly. Exactly. All of that—there is a place and a time for some of that too, if it sounds real, but I always say, even that beautiful rhetoric—like, “Ask not what your country can do,” that is not just a line. It is the culmination of an argument that Kennedy had been making through the entire campaign. And one that reflected two changing dynamics in America. He was saying it is time to turn the page from a season of war and strife into something where we are taking on an active citizenship, where we are all part of building something. It was the whole campaign. Yes, it was a pretty line, but there was something more substantive behind it. Even that line is, in some ways, very straightforward, even though it uses the reversible raincoat device.

So that’s your point that we were talking about at lunch, so we’ll put it on the record, of the theme. You have to have a theory of the case. You have to have the theme. More is the better if you have a memorable line, and more is the better, and probably best, if you have an anecdote, especially one—could I ask this question? I so remember the grandmother line from the race speech from Obama, then–candidate and Senator Obama. But I grow weary of many examples of anecdotes. Typically a candidate will say, or sometimes even a president, “On the campaign trail, I met So-and-so from Such-and-such, and boy, she has had this terrible problem in her family.” Those begin to sound artificial to me.

I use the example of Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, which I think by all accounts is viewed as the number one political, certainly American, speech in all of American history. Think how much poorer it would have been if Lincoln had begun to pick people out of the audience and say, “And here is Joe from Pennsylvania who lost a leg. I’m sorry Joe can’t stand up to wave to the crowd, but I just want to acknowledge Joe. Joe, wave your hand.”

You’re so right.

I go back to then Reagan and the State of the Union in which he pointed out Lenny Skutnik. Now that is the thing about State of the Union addresses, but it’s also seeped into a lot of certainly campaign speeches. When you said anecdotes, telling the story, did you have a preference between that more personal type of “my grandmother” versus an unknown person I met on the campaign trail, and did you use those examples to get a compelling story but sprinkle them like seasoning, just a little bit at a time when appropriate in a speech to make a case?

What’s important about the grandmother line is that it wasn’t even a story. He just said, “I could no more reject these Americans than I could reject my grandmother, who”—and even that was five more words. It was evocative. It wasn’t a story. It was enough context for people to immediately understand what he meant by that and clarify something that is often muddled, and also, I think, impute a moral sensibility and basically deflate the righteousness that so many people bring on the race issue in either direction. And he understood the nuance of that.

He understood that if his white grandmother had seen him as an unknown black man walk down the street, she would have locked her doors of her car.

Right. Right. Again, by saying it the way he said it, he just deflated that righteousness and deflated the lack of empathy in any direction. It wasn’t even a story.

No, no. Reference.

Reference. It was a reference, but a really clean, neat, purposeful one. With storytelling, I think you’re right. It often sounds like, “And I met this,” or the number of people who now feel like they need to tell us about their hardship childhood, even though they grew up in suburban Pennsylvania or whatever. It’s very silly, and it comes off as artificial.

And yet stories do matter, and storytelling is really important. It’s funny. At the convention, the best speeches are the ones given by normal people telling their story. It’s not when the politicians tell their story, it’s when they tell their story.

Did you find that with the women on reproductive—I thought that was so powerful.

Oh, yes. We just got an unbelievable response to that, of course, when they tell their own stories. In the White House, I think more often than not, the stories we would use were actually from the Office of Presidential Correspondence, the letters that would come in. That’s where we got our stories. And also because the president did—we had 10 letters, 10 letters a day. He would read 10 letters every single day. Some of those were people who he ended up corresponding with, who he would actually write back to. There was some kind of connection. So to the extent that we used stories, we did it that way. I agree with you, though. I think it’s delicate. It’s difficult. And like anything, it can be overused, so you have to find the right way to do it.

I also think—we haven’t talked about this at all, but in some ways, we’re talking about speechwriting in a very traditional, dated sense. By the time—President Obama’s time in office really coincided with the rise of social media. So suddenly, everything changed in terms of communications. The digital comms [communications] office became very, very important. Dan Pfeiffer, who was our communications director at the time, really understood—he gets digital better than everybody and really understood its importance and was prescient on that point.

Certainly by the time I got there and towards the end, we were really working together with the digital office to think about what would resonate with people. So it wasn’t always a big set-piece speech. Maybe it was a quick Instagram video. Maybe it was a Snap story. I’m getting all the terminology wrong.

Snapchat, right.

Maybe it was him going on Buzzfeed with the selfie stick. There were all these other ways that you wanted to reach audiences that break so far beyond the traditional set-piece speech.

I’m just thinking even that sounds old, a selfie stick. But remember when that was all the rage?

That was the rage, and it was a big deal. And just trying to find people where they are, which is even more important now. All to say, I think, yes, that kind of tradition—if you do it incorrectly, it is inauthentic, and inauthenticity is death in politics and in leadership. It’s about making it real. A story is important when it works well. It works when it’s good, and that’s hard to get right.

So again for people who read this, Dan Pfeiffer’s book on his time in the White House and his following that growth of social media is really good, I think, for people to understand, and then to understand how Trump ended up using it to win in 2016.

One thing that is so important that we haven’t talked about in the president’s edits is, what edits is he giving you? What kinds of things does it come back from him to you?

Probably different if you would talk to Cody, who was working with him more on bigger speeches, and he talks about the Charleston [South Carolina] speech in his book. He’s been interviewed before about the Selma speech. That kind of back-and-forth where it’s very different from what I would necessarily be experiencing. The edits were certainly some line edits, but then often sometimes it was expanding on an idea, or moving things around, moving the order, or rephrasing something.

I remember, for example, one of the speeches I worked on was when the Pope [Francis] came, the Pope arrival ceremony. Because the Vatican is a country, it was a state arrival. It was an early morning speech, so we had to do it two days ahead of time. Cody was actually out of the office that day, so Terry was managing me through it. I sent a draft a few days ahead, and it was a big deal. I got the rare email from—no, I passed Ben in the hallway, and he said, “That was really good.” No, he emailed me. He emailed me, and he said, “That was really good. This is a really good speech.” I thought, Oh, my gosh, praise from Ben Rhodes. He doesn’t talk very much. Oh, my gosh. I didn’t know Ben very well. I think he’s a beautiful writer, so I remember thinking, Oh, interesting.

Then I got edits back from the President the next day, but it was one word crossed out, and that’s it. I thought, Something’s wrong. Sure enough, I get a phone call from Ferial, who says, “Oh, he wasn’t done. Can you come up to the Oval?” I sit with him. What he said was he really liked Pope Francis, and he really wanted to hone in on Pope Francis’s focus on the least of these. He said, “I know this is supposed to be a really short speech.” He really was only supposed to speak for five minutes. But he said, “I really want to expand on this.” So he wrote a little bit. I had to go back in a couple more times that day to—

Excuse me. The five minutes had been because this is an arrival of a head of state, and it’s just going to be that brief welcome to the White House.

Exactly. There’s a whole ceremony. He speaks, the Pope speaks. It’s out on the South Lawn. There’s the band and the flags and whatever. It’s at the butt crack of dawn. So yes, it’s not supposed to be—it’s not lengthy.

But he wanted more than that, and he’s the president, so he gets to do that.

Yes. He specifically wanted it to be that part of it, that focus. He saw that and he said, “I want to say more about that,” and then he expanded that.

So the least of these. He’s thinking—

Meaning caring for the vulnerable, caring for—

And this is Matthew 25.

Yes.

He’s thinking, I guess, about his Jesuit background and care for the poor, and the fact that the Pope won’t live in the Vatican Palace. He lives in this monastery or convent, I think. I just remember when he came in, it was so different.

It was so different. I think that’s what—

That really appealed to the president.

I don’t think that’s what he was thinking about in the moment, though. I actually think in the moment, he was thinking about Syria and the world’s obligation to care for refugees. That was my guess of where he was going. But I think he was leaning into that message, this important message that Pope Francis was always trying to teach.

And that would resonate with Pope Francis’s—

I don’t know if he was thinking about resonating with Pope Francis so much as resonating with all of us, that he wanted to highlight what he felt was so critical about the Pope’s leadership, is my sense, and then marrying it to what was relevant to Americans, too, at that moment, that this was an issue that was coming up, and lots of conflict internally about refugees.

Did he have words that he immediately wanted to add, the president did, or did he say, “I’d really like to take this theme and run with it. Can you go back and—”

No, no, he wrote it out. He was writing when I walked into the office. He said, “Come on in. I’m not done yet.” I just sat there in silence. Speechwriters spend a lot of time in silence with our people, so I sat in silence with Barack Obama for a bit of time. I just waited, and then he finished. He showed me what he did. He has very neat handwriting, so it’s not like I couldn’t read it, but he explained to me what he wanted to do. Then he said, “OK, can you put this in and then send it back to me, and then if I have more edits, I’ll let you know.” I did that.

Later on, I got a call. I sent it pretty quickly, and then around 1:00 or something, I got called up again. At this point, he was in his private dining room. He had just finished lunch. I had never been back there, so I walked and tried to memorize everything on the walls from the short walk over there. I sat down, and he had a little plate of carrots. “Come on in.”

He was eating a little plate of carrots?

I think the steward had already taken away his lunch, and he just had a little plate of—

[laughs] I was going to say, no wonder he’s so thin.

Very disciplined. But anyway, he just had a few more edits, and I honestly can’t remember what they were. I’m sure I have the original draft, the original copy.

By the way, you can add that, anything like that you like.

Am I even allowed to do that? I have no idea. I wasn’t even sure if I was allowed to make copies at the time. Oh, well.

Well, we can check on that. But we always say to people, if the refer to some kind of document that, yes, isn’t top secret or doesn’t go into the archives, or whatever it is—

I’m pretty sure all bets are off now that Donald Trump has done everything illegal.

Like someone’s going to come after the Miller Center.

If they would? Come after me.

Yes. But what we say is, if there is something like that that you want to add, you can always add that to your transcript, and then that can become part of what—but anyway, we can check on that as well.

So anyway, yes, he made more edits. At the end, he said, “I have to go pick up the Pope at five.” He was going to [Joint Base] Andrews [Maryland] to greet him. He said, “But can you just run this by Denis to make sure it’s OK?” Because Denis, our chief of staff, was also a— [pause to investigate an external sound] Should we carry on?

Perry: Yes, I think that was just a squirrel outside the window.

He just said, “Check it with Denis”—Denis is a devout Catholic—which I did. Then it was fine.

But no, his edits varied. Oftentimes it was just wordsmithing, line edits. Sometimes it was additions, moving things around. I don’t know if there was one—it’s not like there was one thing. He was not blowing things up unless he really disagreed with the direction of something. If he did, he would just cross it out and then take out his yellow legal pad and start writing. They were always really thoughtful. He’s one of the few people I’ve ever worked with whose edits made things better, not worse.

That’s interesting. We should bear down on that just a little bit. That doesn’t surprise us that you would say that about him, but what is it about other people who, when they come back with edits, it doesn’t improve what you’ve—

I’m exaggerating a bit, but I always think the second draft of something is better than the final draft, often because people—people just lose sight of what they’re trying to do. If you’re going to give a speech or put out any message in the world, you need to ask yourself, Why am I doing this? If somebody asks me to help them with a commencement speech, I always say, “Why did you say yes? Why did you agree to do this?” Because that will start to give you a sense of, What is the purpose of this? People lose sight of that or they never spend the time up front to figure out their purpose. Then the more they review a draft, the more they think, I need to add more. Right? It’s time for me to add more things to this.

So they keep telling you.

They keep adding. That expands, and I always say that a speech about everything is a speech about nothing. You lose discipline over time if your goal is to keep adding.

Now, for those who are interesting in tightening, it gets better. But if you let people sit with—they often, if they’re not really thinking with their communications hats on, then they are not disciplined.

Speaking of communications—you mentioned Dan Pfeiffer. I think I have two questions along those lines. One is, talking about conventions and messaging. Obviously, a White House has messaging that it is wanting to get out, and you are part of the process in various ways of statements being made or speeches. What was your connection or the speechwriters’ team connection with communications and press secretary, if any?

The other is, I think it was in Cody’s book, that he talked about sometimes people entering in from the political side—a Valerie Jarrett, for example—having an issue about a political element of a speech, and then the policy people, as well, wanting to be more involved or wanting something different. How did you—

The first one is, again, just working with communications to get the overarching messages out, and what role did they play, other than just presumably being on the Listserv when you sent things out? And then did you ever directly have any issues with people from these other bailiwicks of the White House pushing you on a speech you were doing, or did you hear about this within the team?

We were ostensibly part of the communications team. Even though Cody was also an assistant to the president and senior staff, and the communications director was too, we were all part of the same team. If there was a really big comms meeting going on, we would all be in it. Oftentimes, if there was a speech happening, we might go and talk to Jen Palmieri, or then it was Dan, or Jen Psaki, and get their take on something. But I never felt like they were really intrusive on our side of things unless we asked them for something.

Sometimes we would then connect with a team that was doing the rollout, so understanding, OK, well, he’s going to be giving this speech, and then this fact sheet is going to go out, and then this media is going to be here, so we might be coordinating with them, plus the digital folks who are going to be putting up the Facebook post, and whatever else is going on. There was some amount of coordination. And, so it was—it’s hard to say. I think that probably evolved over time. But we were all in touch and connected, and I think Cody probably had more interaction with those folks. But we were all on the same team.

Oh, I think what I’m remembering, too, is maybe Valerie on the Charleston speech.

Right. That’s also different because that was a race speech. Valerie is going to have some important thoughts and is going to understand what the president may or may not want to say or what might be appropriate, et cetera. Also, she ran the Office of Public Engagement, so she’s thinking about the constituents. Sure. So Valerie sometimes had things to say about speeches, or Tina [Tchen]. I remember a particular back-and-forth with Tina on a speech. I love Tina, so I’m just going to put that out there, but I remember—

We do, too.

Yes, adore Tina. But I remember finding her edits incredibly frustrating. She wrote back and she said, “This doesn’t have enough heart.” What I call the “men without pens” edits, people who are [makes air quotes] “consultants” and giving you feedback that is too generic and general to be useful. She was doing a little bit of that. She’s so smart, so I know whatever she was saying was probably correct. It was just very hard to implement. I remember that kind of thing happening. It took some time for me to feel comfortable enough to go back and say, Can you help me put down on paper what you have in mind?

Sometimes people would say, “Oh, this constituency is going to get mad if you do this,” if they saw a speech. But I never felt like people were pushy, at least not with me and with us. I think there was a lot of deference given to the speechwriting office in the Obama White House. Again, I would be curious what others would say. I also tried to just maintain a really open demeanor with folks so that they knew they could come to me if they needed to. But yes, people definitely had input.

Part of it also goes back to knowing when you can push back and when you can’t, and also not coming at it from a posture of, Any edits are going to be problematic, and I am going to stand here like a wall and reject all of them. That’s not productive. You’re just setting yourself up for frustration. I’m not saying I was always great at that or particularly good at it, but I do think that was a helpful mindset to have in some of these instances, especially knowing that other folks had known him for a lot longer than I had and understood the politics of things that maybe I wasn’t seeing. But sure, I had disagreements with people and wouldn’t always implement everything they wanted, and I would push back if I had to, or maybe go to Cody and say, “I’m not going to do this,” and he would say, “OK, don’t do it.”

But sometimes edits would come back and they’d be—they’d be crazy. This would often happen on the foreign policy side. I didn’t write many foreign policy speeches, but the first time I had to write anything remotely related to foreign policy, the edits I got back from various NSC [National Security Council] directorates were just crazy. I’m sure that they were reasonable, maybe, from a substantive perspective in terms of being accurate, but they were not anything that you would ever put in a speech. You might put them in a fact sheet. And they’re not anything that sounded like human English.

Like the lawyers.

I had so much respect for Terry and Ben after this. I put all their edits in my draft because I was nervous when people were saying, “You’re going to upend a trade agreement if you don’t include detail Z from this fact sheet in your speech.”

Terry looked at it and said, “What happened to our speech?”

I said, “I just got completely cowed by all these people. I didn’t know. I panicked and I put in all their edits.”

And Terry said, “Sarada, we are all on the same team. We all work for President Obama and the American people. We all are trying to get his agenda across the finish line. However, we”—however many speechwriters there were, seven of us—“are the only people in this building whose only job it is to protect and advance President Obama’s voice and his narrative. And it’s OK to stand up to people and say, ‘He would not say this,’ because we know he wouldn’t. You’re allowed to do that, and you’re not going to destroy NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] if you do.”

That was very helpful. It was a helpful reminder that we had a really specific job to do.

Does anyone need a break?

[BREAK]

We’ve made some references to the speeches about Selma, of course, but also Charleston. Could I take this opportunity to ask about the process when a crisis, an unanticipated crisis, occurs, a tragedy, a eulogy that’s required, an immediate statement by the president that is required at a crisis time? How did you all deal with that?

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I will say that if it was something like—I think there was a cadence to these shootings that’s grotesque, honestly, insofar—and not because of what we did, but because of the reality, which was that—

I remember I had to write a speech about a bunch of executive actions the president was going to be issuing on gun safety legislation, gun safety measures, because Congress wasn’t acting. I remember just copying and pasting the paragraph listing all of these mass shootings, which I know Cody would have to do every single time there was one. It was so—

So sadly, there was a pattern and a practice of these happening, and therefore, you had a routine and content set up.

Yes. He knew exactly what to do, and he would just copy and paste. It’s grotesque.

In terms of anything that happened last minute, I can give you an example of a last-minute one. And sometimes with the tragedies—sorry, I’m jumping around, but just one more note on the tragedy thing. Something like a shooting, there’s the immediate, here’s what happened, We need to get a statement out really quickly. That would involve senior staff communing, so Cody would be working with Jen or whoever the comms director was, plus Josh Earnest, the press secretary, because he’d be managing the press aspect of it, and the president might be going out in front of the press. Josh would be managing that.

Typically, unless the president was in Japan and it was in the middle of the night, did the president typically, if he was available, go out and make those statements?

It depended on what the situation was, but you guys remember, he did make a fair number of them. And he would express his frustration, “This is the nth time I’m out here, and nothing is changing.” So I think yes. But there had to be some kind of coordination around that, too, because often there was also maybe an ongoing investigation. Maybe there was an active shooter situation. And so they’re also coordinating with Lisa Monaco, who is the homeland security advisor. They need to work with the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] to figure out, OK, what can they say, what can’t they say? The lawyers. There’s a fair number of external actors or other components that go beyond just issuing a statement. All of that coordination would be happening. I’m sure that Denis’s office was involved.

My one experience with a last-minute statement—well, I had a few, but one memorable one is that if you recall—why would you, but Antonin Scalia died on a Saturday.

Oh, I recall, [laughter] because I also study the [Supreme] Court.

This Saturday also happened to be a Saturday when the president was in California for G20 [Group of 20 meeting] or whatever. Cody was in the mountains of Virginia with his then, maybe fiancée, I don’t know, now wife, Kristen [Bartoloni], who also was our researcher in the White House, by the way, so this becomes a problem.

She was the fact-checker?

Yes. She was the deputy research director. Our assistant speechwriter, who was also our speechwriting researcher, Susannah, was in Scotland visiting her sister. David Litt had left the White House, so we were short-staffed. And Tyler, my other colleague on the team, had gone to the grocery store and left his BlackBerry at home for the first time since he started working on the Obama campaign back in 2006.

So it’s a Saturday afternoon, and I’m at home. Apparently—we get a somewhat panicked email forward from Cody, who had not had cell service all morning and was missing all these emails among senior staff about how Antonin Scalia had died. He forwarded the emails from—

Oh, so you already knew this during the daytime because it was in the evening when it finally broke, I think.

Is that right?

I think so, yes.

This was definitely—it was daylight when this happened.

And it was February, so it was not daylight saving time. So I suspect maybe you got a heads-up.

Maybe. I don’t even know. But he forwarded—no, I think—I don’t even remember.

Well, maybe it did go out earlier and I just didn’t—

I’m not sure. But at any event, hours had gone by when this conversation was happening and we finally get this. He said, “I finally got reception and I see all these emails. Who can take this speech? The president’s got to make a statement.” He forwarded it, and I waited a beat because normally somebody would jump, just in case, and then I just said, “I got it.” Five minutes later, Tyler texted me and said, “I went to the grocery store and forgot my BlackBerry. Sorry.”

I’m suddenly on an email chain with senior staff. It’s Denis, it’s Jen, it’s Josh, it’s the lawyers, White House counsel.

Which would have been Neil Eggleston by that time?

Yes, but I think Bos, Michael Bosworth, was probably—I forget. Neil was probably on the email, but I feel like one of the deputies was interacting more closely. OK, so now I’m on this email. Denis says, “OK, Sarada. You’ve got to write a statement. Can you get us a draft ASAP?” I had basically 45 minutes to write a draft.

It was a Saturday afternoon. I was in our apartment. My husband and I were actually just about to go around the corner to a friend’s house. I said, “OK, well, you go ahead. I’m going to stay here.” Actually, I used him for an extra 10 minutes. I made him get on his laptop and do some research for me because I didn’t have my researchers at my disposal. Then I kicked him out. So I just—you know, what do you say?

I was going to say, and where do you begin?

Where do you begin? I wasn’t getting a ton of assistance from senior staff. They were giving me some ideas. The lawyers were saying—talk a little bit about his career. Somebody had a suggestion about— [coughs] Sorry, I think I’ve been talking too much. [pause for sip of water]

While you’re resting a moment, your voice, I’m thinking obviously newspapers prepare obituaries in advance. For those of us who write columns, we’ll hear from somebody we’ve written columns for. Starting years ago, I was getting, “Could you write a column on Jimmy Carter? He’s not got long to live.” Then when he went into hospice, “Let’s write another one.” I don’t know how many I’ve written.

Yes. So my question is, then—we’ll go back to Justice Scalia—but do you have statements bankrolled for if a former president dies? Do you look ahead to Supreme Court and say, “This is the eldest person. We should probably have something ready,” or do you not have time to be doing that?

We didn’t. Honestly, we didn’t. There were some where it’s going to happen. You know it’s going to happen, so you start working on it. There’s the perpetual Jimmy Carter obituary. There was a—

So seriously, you were—

Seriously. Not in the White House, though, after. Post-Obama speechwriters, or Kyle, for example, working on the Queen Elizabeth [II] statement before—you know what’s coming, right? Also, for someone like President Obama, his office is made aware when very important people are close to their passing.

President Bush 41 is nearing, and Barbara Bush is nearing.

Exactly, or the queen, for example. That’s the kind of thing where they get notified, and then—

Before the general public, OK.

And also before it happens, even. OK, this is going to happen. Be prepared.

Soon, right.

What’s interesting, actually—a side note—is that a friend of mine used to write for Biden when he was vice president, and Biden had a binder of obituaries for all kinds of people because he had been in the Senate so long, and these aging senators—inevitably, he was going to—

Senator [Robert] Byrd could not go on forever.

Exactly. He was going to be delivering those eulogies, and so they actually did take their free time to prepare those obituaries, which is fascinating. But we didn’t. And in this case, who thought Scalia was going to die?

So I am just sitting there, and I honestly don’t know what to do. At this point, I have 20 minutes in which to do it, so I need to get something down quickly. This says something, actually, a little bit about my process, which is different from someone like a Cody. We’re just different writers in this way. I do a brain dump. I believe in getting a bad first draft done as quickly as possible.

Just put something on paper?

Yes, something to work with.

Get something on paper, because I don’t want to polish a turd, to use a term of art. Right? If it’s completely off base, why am I going to sit here wordsmithing to death something that’s just wrong? I’d rather put something on paper, even if it’s really bad, get a steer, and then I can spend more time revising, right? That was my theory here.

What were the first things you put down about him?

Honestly, it was a book report. It was—I went to Wikipedia, and it was a book report because I was thinking, We all can’t stand this guy. This person has invented individual gun rights using “originalism,” which is basically however he interprets history—all these things he did that I strongly disagreed with. I wasn’t sure, honestly, what the President would want to say. I knew he’d want to be respectful of his intellect. I knew I was going to throw in something about his relationship with Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg. But I did not have a clear vision. So honestly, it read like a book report.

I sent this around to this small internal team, and Denis said, in his incredibly Midwest-nice Denis way—I could hear his tone over email—“Sarada, could we make this a little more, you know, personal?” [laughter] I thought, Yes, OK. I’m sorry. I’ll throw in the opera stuff. I go back. So round two was better. And at this point, Bos or whoever was from counsel did offer a little bit more of a reflection on—

His jurisprudence.

—on his jurisprudence, which was helpful to add in. And what President Obama might respect about—

As a constitutional law scholar himself.

—about Scalia’s completely inconsistent, invented, quote, unquote, “originalism,” when it’s convenient for my ideological leanings, jurisprudence. But sure, let’s call it something with an academic name and give him some gravitas—unearned gravitas, as far as I’m concerned. But whatever, putting aside his hypocrisy. So I put this together, and the second draft is a little bit better. We’ve got to go.

And once again—I’m sorry, this is a theme—but President Obama is in California, and he’s playing golf. Anita, his deputy chief of staff at this point—

Is this Anita Dunn?

No, Anita Breckenridge, Anita Decker Breckenridge. She is with the president, and so I’m saying, “Is he going to see it? Is he going to look at it before”—because he’s going to get off the golf course, and they’re going to take him back to the hotel, and he’s going to go on TV and do this. It didn’t sound like he was still on the 10th hole or whatever. He’s not going to read this thing. I’m in this “hurry up and wait” scenario.

In the meantime, Alex [Alexandra Platkin], the director of research that Kristen worked with, she’s fact-checking. I have something like, you know, “And his beautiful family, and his 27 grandchildren.” At this point, I’ve already sent it. They said, “Just send it to the book because we’ve got to print it. It’s got to be ready to go.” I don’t even think there was a teleprompter. I think they quickly set up a podium in his hotel. I had already sent it to the book. Alex says, “I can’t verify how many grandchildren he has.” [sighs] And I—

One could have been born after he passed.

Exactly. She said, “Can we just say ‘many grandchildren’?” I said, “Oh, my gosh.” Now I have to go back, fix the “many grandchildren.” They’ve got to, I don’t know, reprint it or whatever it is.

But that was a hurry up and wait kind of—you’ve got to get the draft out quickly, but then it still has to go through the vetting process. There are probably some statements where it’s a true emergency. President Bush on 9/11 with his megaphone, these moments like that. But something like this is a little bit different. You really do have to still go through the process as quickly as possible. The process doesn’t disappear.

That is a perfect example, I should say.

Another question that I had is about—did I read correctly or see something that you had written or mentioned that you were the only woman—we talked about one of two women in West Wing Writers, but were you the only woman in the speechwriters shop?

One of the partners is a woman, a former Clinton speechwriter, Vinca LaFleur.

Right, but in the White House?

Oh, in the White House?

Other women in the speechwriting office.

Yes, OK. Sarah Hurwitz had been first term, first year, then jumped over to Mrs. Obama, although we were still all in the same suite. But she was the only woman for a long time. Right before me, a year before me, Cody—it must have been 2013, so right after the reelect—he hired Megan Rooney, who had actually also been at West Wing Writers before me, and then worked for Secretary Clinton when she was secretary of state, and then Cody hired her. She was there for about a year. And then we overlapped a little bit, and then she left to go work on the Clinton campaign. But she was there right before me, then she left. Then I was the only woman.

That left you as the only woman.

Yes, plus Susannah, who was our research assistant.

Yes, but not a speechwriter, as such.

Yes. I mean, she did write speeches, but she mostly was considered, I guess, a researcher, and Cody’s assistant too.

So the question that I have is that I did, a couple years ago for the Obama conference at Hofstra [University], a paper on gender, particularly women, and the Obama administration for foreign policy and domestic policy. One of the things that I discovered that I don’t remember reading at the time, and I think it was in The Washington Post, but it was about some grumblings among women in the White House about the typical thing that we all have experienced and seen and heard about at meetings.

There were, let’s face it, a lot of really strong, particularly male, personalities. You mentioned Rahm at one point, obviously, and then he went on. Larry Summers. Just lots of strong males, and the issue of, a woman says something, no one picks it up, and then the male person says it, and it gets picked up, and everyone explains how great it is.

One of the things that I remember specifically that the women said that they were doing and that it was—

Amplifying?

Pardon me?

Amplifying.

Yes, exactly. And that some people were, I guess, giving this information to Valerie and that she then asked the president if he would have a dinner. This might have been before you arrived.

Way before me. It was the first term, yes.

Right. How does that strike you with your being there, being the only woman in speechwriting? But also, are you hearing anything that, “Oh, it used to be this way, but it’s much better now,” or, “It’s still kind of bad,” or, “We wish it would be better”? Or your point about President Obama’s speaking about women in a way that didn’t sound particularly authentic. What are your thoughts about the administration and women’s issues and women in the workplace there?

Yes, I certainly have heard and read about Christy Romer’s experience with Larry Summers and all these women trying to be heard around these giant personalities. I think that is real and strikes me as genuine and problematic. And you can see it. The first term, the speechwriting office alone really was just a mostly white male kind of place.

Like a fraternity?

A little bit, a little bit, but a liberal fraternity. Again, these are not bad guys. Not that fraternity boys are bad, but they’re not bad people. That’s just the culture. It was a very—I think there is a “bro” element of Barack Obama. He is a bro and is comfortable in that space, lots of competitive sports jiving.

Basketball, and—

Yes. Of course, not that there aren’t plenty of women sports fans, but the ethos, the culture, did feel like a kind of male place. I think that was particularly true in the first term. In the second term, he really prided himself on the fact that—I think he had maybe 13 senior advisors, assistants to the president, and I think half of them were women. Obviously on his national—Susan Rice, and Lisa Monaco, and Avril Haines, really powerful women. He always had extraordinary women on his team. But I do think that culture still stood.

I would hear from other people, especially some women who worked on the economic side, just feeling a bit silenced. I heard this in particular from a black woman and it was so frustrating to hear her experience. Again, I don’t think that was anybody’s intention, but just the consequence of staffing the place with many entitled men. From my perspective, again, coming from a different time, I always expected every room to be like that. I don’t know. I just do, and I’m always pleasantly surprised when it’s not. I was told that the second term was different.

I think Cody really made an effort, and I felt comfortable mostly speaking up when I felt like maybe somebody was not paying attention in the right way or that gender was a problem. But I think the culture overall—there was a bro mentality and an energy.

Can you describe that? Being older, I know it exists, and I hear it a lot, and I’m not sure I know what it means exactly.

I think it’s hard to define. It’s like this sense that—I’m not going to define it correctly, but—they’re progressive men, but they still feel like they’re in charge. And there are more of them. Many of them were educated in the same places. They are very used to hearing the sound of their own voice, and they enjoy it.

I feel like that is a key part, because the world of podcasting is so linked to this, which, obviously, all of these guys—

They went on and did that.

—then went on to do, right? The dominance of their voices in public discourse, but also seemingly in the White House, seems to be a really key element of this.

I think so. And I think some of this is tied to the president, who—look, he was the most famous person on the planet, and he couldn’t even walk into a bookstore freely anymore. The way he would relax when he was traveling, for example, was to sit in his hotel room and play cards with his body guy, and Marvin [Nicholson], and Pete [Souza], the photographer. He was comfortable with those guys.

And then, as you said, golf.

He’s super competitive.

The golf and the basketball playing, those are all—

Yes, yes. Again, it’s not like women can’t do those things, but he’s just this really competitive person, intensely competitive, almost—about petty things. And that does generate a momentum of its own in the White House.

And he’s cool. He’s very cool.

He is a cool guy.

And he’s very cool, he’s very tall. He’s really cool. I don’t think that he is uncomfortable with women, and he certainly had many female senior advisors. He’s very close to Susan and very close, of course, to Valerie, or whatever. But I don’t know. I always felt like there was a little bit of a barrier that he couldn’t ever quite get comfortable enough with me. Now, of course, I was also a latecomer, and it’s not like I was spending all this time with him like Cody. It’s funny, because I still see him now, and he’s nothing but wonderful to me. But I still think there is a bit of a I’m not quite sure what to do with you barrier.

I don’t want to overstate it, so that’s why I’m being careful here because it’s really hard to pin down. I think actually what’s insidious about this sort of culture because nobody intends for it to be this way. All these men think they’re so progressive. By the way, many of them were men who were around my age and had very young children and yet were working all the time. That meant that somebody was at home doing all of that.

That inequity, the assumption—and I don’t want to presume what was going on in people’s lives, but knowing some of what their wives’ jobs were and still seeing that all of that work was obviously falling to those women—the assumption that women would still be responsible for their home lives, that their careers were more important than anybody else’s, that you see play out and I see play out in my demographic. I think it’s all tied together. I am progressive because I believe in all these policies, and I’m pro-choice, and I believe—but am I actually living my progressive values? I don’t know. I don’t know if those men were.

The way they manage their personal lives connects to all of this, and just a sense that the world is still theirs, a kind of entitlement. And, by the way, I don’t think it’s disconnected from the fact that a lot of these guys were educated in similar—these tony institutions, and come from privilege, and all the rest of it. Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. But if you’re not from that, if you don’t speak that language, it is hard to break through in a way where you’re able to retain your power, where you’re not coming in from a, Hey, guys, I’m here now. Uh, how do I fit in here? You’re not coming in at the same level.

I maybe escaped some of the insecurity that comes from that, if only because I was a grown-up when I got there. I was, what, 34 or something like that? Just more settled in my life, had been in Washington for a long time. I wasn’t some green little girl. I probably carried myself a little bit differently than I would had it been 10 years earlier. I was good at my job. I had a job with a certain amount of inherent authority and power. I was nice to everybody. I never felt disrespected. But there was just a sense of discomfort, I think. And I don’t think he meant to create that kind of culture, but there was something inevitable about it.

I’ve struggled on this gender piece, and I’ve talked to other women about it. I think we all walked away a bit puzzled. But for me, and for other women at my level, there is an element of it that just comes down to him. But I would take him any day over, you know, Bill Clinton so—I also think that he evolved, in part probably because of the girls, because those girls got older. I cannot imagine his teenage daughters were not pushing back at him. Now they are young women.

I think by the end, the speeches we were writing—I wrote a speech for him to deliver at the United State of Women, which was this big conference that we had in 2016. He got up there and said, “This is what a feminist looks like.” I had him call out all these sexual double standards and things that no sitting U.S. president had ever said before. And he did it passionately and like he believed it. So I do think that—not that he hadn’t believed those things before, but I think there was an evolution of him personally. I’m making some assumptions. But you have to imagine that he changed as he got older, and as his kids got older, and he saw the world through their eyes. How would you not?

But I think this is real. The gender question is real. However, at the same time, maybe we’re holding him to a different standard because it’s a different time from those previous presidents.

Yes. I know what puzzled me in doing that research was that he is so progressive, and he’s a black man for civil rights. I can’t even believe this would be happening, my naivety. [laughs] But I’m also just so gratified to know that you wrote that speech for the United States of Women because that—we included that, my colleague and I, in our paper and chapter, and made the comment that that was the first time that a president had used the term “feminist,” but we didn’t know who wrote it.

Oh, yes. Actually, a funny thing about an edit. So anybody who is a person of a certain age knows that phrase, “This is what a feminist looks like.” Right? It’s a famous Feminist Majority [Foundation] phrase. I circulated that speech, and I get this email from—I think it was the NEC, or maybe it was CEA [Council of Economic Advisers]. Maybe it was CEA. One of the economic directorates.

The assistant for that office had compiled edits, and she said, “Hey, one of our analysts here had a couple of edits.” She forwarded the email from that guy, and it was two things. One, making a comment about how I should talk more about Hillary Clinton, and two, “This phrase, ‘This is what a feminist looks like,’ it’s kind of awkward. Consider changing.” And I thought, Who is this child who is “mansplaining” this to me, who is definitely not a speechwriter? And of course, immediately I Google [searched for] him. Of course, he’s some little snot from Yale who’s like 24 years old. And I thought, Oh, my gosh, this is the best, richest example of mansplaining I’ve ever experienced.

Might call it “boysplaining” in his case.

Honestly. Honestly. I was like, Who is this child? I actually called this poor assistant, and I said, “Who is this kid? I need to know who he is.” And she was, like, “He’s very smart.” And I said, “I don’t give a shit how smart he is. What is this? Bite me. He’s too young to even know what this phrase is.” I was so mad, and of course I ignored it. And of course, that phrase, the whole place went nuts. He [Obama] brought the house down because everybody in the room knew what it meant. Anyway.

As I remember, doesn’t he come on the stage, and then it’s Oprah [Winfrey] and Michelle?

There was a conversation between them. Yes, he had a comment about that.

Between the two of them, and he says something about how—

“I know you’re all here for Michelle.”

Yes, which was probably true.

Yes, yes.

Not that people didn’t want to see him. This is so exciting to hear that background on that. OK. Let me look to see—

One thing we haven’t spoken about is the gay marriage speech.

Yes, and Pride speech, right?

Cody talks about that in his book, right? He probably says it all. He has a better memory than I do.

Are there any—I had listened to you talking in a video online, and obviously, you’ve told us today that you’re a music junkie, and you had mentioned that occasionally you got fun little remarks to do when people came. Was there anyone in particular that came to the White House for the Obamas that you wrote remarks for the president for that stuck out or was particularly fun?

There was never one person. What the White House does—and this was started before him. I’m sure you guys have talked to others who were involved with these, but PBS would have these live in the White House concerts [In Performance at the White House]. The Obamas were obviously very passionate about the arts. What I love about their take on the arts is that they really see it as central to American democracy, that the art that we create here, whether it’s music or visual art or whatever it is, is so woven into the fabric of American character and therefore our democracy.

No event was ever a throwaway, This is just going to be a fun party, thing. Every speech, even if we were welcoming—this is true of everything—even if we were welcoming the Chicago Cubs [baseball team] for winning the World Series or whatever, we always were trying to tie it to the bigger project of America that the president was trying to help us realize, right? Everything was an opportunity, so even these speeches were always an opportunity to do that. Cody would always assign them to me, for obvious reasons we just discussed. Nobody was ever going to give me the Cubs speech, obviously. I don’t speak sports.

Anyway, these concerts would happen, and each had a different focus. I think the first one the Obamas did was actually maybe one for country music, and then they did the spoken word one, which is where Lin-Manuel Miranda first played the opening to Hamilton. That was a whole thing. The first one I did when I got there was the one for honoring gospel music. I just loved—it was just so fun to write, in part because the stakes were so low. Nobody cares about this speech about music, about this concert, but I do, so I’m going to just give it my level best. You can take a creative swing because there are no interests involved who are going to push back with their silly edits, and if they are, it doesn’t matter.

Right. But you know the president will be very interested.

Yes, but I know that I can write something that he’ll like. You know what I mean? I can just do my thing, and I know it will be OK, or at least I can try, and then Cody will tell me if he thinks that it’s going to be off base and the president won’t like it.

So how did you approach the history of gospel?

Well, I learned a little bit about the history of gospel. When you’re in the White House, you can call anyone, so I called a scholar of gospel, and I just did a bunch of research. I went to the White House Library. The librarian helped me dig into a little bit more to learn more about its origins in the music of slaves, et cetera—enslaved persons. I’m sorry. My terminology is dated. And so I leaned into that and pulled together these remarks.

They’re very brief remarks that he gives at the opening before the concert starts, but they were just so—I just loved doing them. I did a good job on that one, so then after that, Cody would always assign me the music ones, and tell everybody, “Speak now or forever hold your peace,” but people would always let me do them. So I did that one, and then we had one for the blues. That was really fun. My favorite was probably the jazz one because, as you may have picked up, I’m a big jazz fan. We had the International Jazz [Day] Festival at the White House, which was really fun. I just loved that you could take a big, creative swing.

Broderick Johnson, who was the Cabinet secretary. His office was actually next to mine, a mild-mannered, very lovely man. After the jazz one, he emailed me and he said, “You nailed jazz,” because he’s a big jazz fan. [laughter] I thought, Oh, that’s so great. I don’t think anybody else cared, but Broderick and I cared, so that was cool.

What were your feelings when you—obviously, we know that you were there at the Black Caucus dinner when the president gave that now, we will say, “famous” speech from its background. I presume you went out to the South Lawn to see him welcome the Pope? Is that correct?

No. I was in my office for that one. It was so early in the morning.

Would you listen?

Oh, I was watching it on the internal feed. I would always watch his speeches. I always got the [National] Prayer Breakfast speeches. I think that people were hazing me because they’re a nightmare—

Why so?

—and I would watch them. They’re a no-win situation, in my view. The history of the prayer breakfasts, I’m sure you all know, and I’m sure others have spoken about, but they started out as this bipartisan, breaking bread, coming together over faith, over our faith and common humanity. Over time, the people who run it—it got taken over by right-wing kooks who actively can’t stand President Obama. And so he was still forced to go and attend these breakfasts in front of an audience of rabid Obama haters, many of whom were probably racists. It was really—

And birthers, no doubt.

Yes, and birthers and the rest. So it was really frustrating to have to write these speeches. And then of course, let’s let the Hindu on the staff write these speeches. [laughter] I actually love writing those speeches, I actually love writing faith-based speeches. There’s so much opportunity. They’re so rich. There’s so much language you can dig into with scripture of any faith. I think it’s such a rich area. I also—Melissa Rogers, who was the head of the Office of [Advisory Council on] Faith-Based [and Neighborhood] Partnerships when I was there, just the loveliest woman and always such a pleasure to work with.

So anyway, I got assigned that, my first prayer breakfast speech, and that was a real landmine because he wanted to talk about how—this was around the time when ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] was gaining strength, and at the same time, there was an anti-Muslim resurgence in the U.S. Fox News was having a field day with all of this. He wanted to talk about how violent religious extremism wasn’t invented by Muslims and that Islam does not have a hold on it or a monopoly on it. Every religion has all kinds of extremism and always has. He hearkened back to the Crusades, and Hindus killing Muslims in India, and what’s going on in Myanmar. Every faith has this.

Was that—

All him. All him.

That was his theme that he said, “I want to talk about this because of ISIS.” This is in summer of ’14?

Yes. I think so, something like that.

Yes, when they take over Mosul [Iraq].

I had sent a draft, and I don’t even think that’s what I talked about, but then that’s what he wanted to do. And Ben was in the speech meeting when he called us up to go talk about it. I’m just typing away as the president is talking and, in pretty sharp terms, calling out the hypocrisy of people who suggest that only Muslims are ever terrorists. He’s like, “And the Hindus killing the Muslims,” and the this and that, and “the Crusades.”

Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.

Catholics and Protestants. We leave the office and Ben’s like, “You can tone some of that down.” [laughter]

And did you?

I did. I tried to tone it down a little bit.

And did he accept it?

Yes, for the most part. It was all fine. I mean, no, it wasn’t fine, because then—OK. So then he goes and gives his speech. It’s so early in the morning. Also, President Obama, not a morning person, so already this is—he’s not, I’m sure, happy to go be giving this speech. I was like, I don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole. I am not going to this one.

So I’m watching from my office, drinking my coffee at 8:00 in the morning, 7:30, maybe? He’s down at the “Hinckley Hilton” [after would-be assassin of President Ronald Reagan] where they had these—sorry, what is it, the Washington Hilton, it’s officially called? So he’s at the Hinckley Hilton giving the speech, and I’m watching it on TV on our feed—maybe it was C-SPAN. He does his whole thing. There was a NASCAR [National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing] driver, I think, who was the keynote speaker, so the president opened with some NASCAR jokes or something like that, does his thing.

By the way, did you have to write the NASCAR jokes?

Yes, yes. I do all of them. We do everything. Full-service speechwriters here. [laughter] At the time, we did not have access to Twitter [social media] on our computers. Only the comms office folks, the people who collect clips, they had access to Twitter. So they would collect tweets and then email them out to everybody. I’m watching the speech, and the press office is sending us tweets.

I start panicking because it’s Fox News saying, “President Obama compares Christians to ISIS,” and somebody tweeting, “The Crusades weren’t that bad,” kind of thing. Just getting ridiculous, totally deliberately misinterpreting the president. And I’m thinking, Fox News is having a field day. One of the network’s personalities tweeted something incendiary about how the president was un-American for saying this and “going after Christians once again,” demonizing Christians. And I’m thinking, Oh, my gosh, I’m going to get fired.

I go down to Terry’s office. Terry’s office is inside of Cody’s office. It’s a little bit like Lesotho inside of South Africa. I go over there. Cody’s not in his office, and I go to Terry. I said, “Terry, I’m going to get fired.” And he said, “Why?” I said, “Because Fox News is—the right-wing ecosystem is going nuts about this Prayer Breakfast speech. They’re saying that the president is comparing Christians to ISIS and all this.” He said, “Do you really think we’d fire you because Fox News is stupid? I mean, really?” That was that.

Did he [Obama] ever speak to you around—now that we know that you wrote all of the prayer breakfast speeches—about his own faith and his views of faith?

No. He would speak to us about faith (a) calling out the hypocrisy of these people, and then (b) I think the way he speaks about faith publicly is certainly how I would hear it in these exchanges, which is the value of faith to connect us through our common humanity. I think that’s why Pope Francis really resonated with him, not this performative religiosity.

I can’t speak to president Obama’s faith and whether he is a person of faith deep down. I have no idea. Who can speak to someone else’s inner life? I’m not. And I think the possibility of what faith is and the ability to have faith in anything unseen is resonant with him. I think he understands its power so is able to access it and tap into it. But is he George W. Bush? No.

So tell me, is it back to that interior intellectualism and vibrancy that you spoke earlier about, that he thinks about those kinds of things deeply?

Maybe, yes. Again, I’m not going to psychologize him, but yes, that sounds fair. There’s a reason that someone like Dr. King resonates with him so deeply. I think he is moved by what people of genuine faith are able to do with that strength. And then I think he’s also clear-eyed about its destructive power.

Certainly. I’m just looking to see. We’re obviously getting toward the end of our time. What about 20—so you come in before the 2014 midterms.

Yes, the shellacking.

Yes. He first took his first shellacking in 2010 with those midterms, and then another one in 2014. What are you thinking as that’s happening, given your time on the Hill, but also what that means for writing speeches about policy? And you’re coming now to what will be the final two years of his presidency. Do you see things speeding up in an attempt to get—as George W. Bush would say, “sprinting to the finish line”?

I certainly don’t want to say that things slowed down in the sense that people were giving up, but how was all of that resonating? The last two years, the shellacking of ’14? And then we’ll come back to Scalia dying in 2016 and Mitch McConnell going out that very night to say, “We won’t even give this person a hearing. We won’t give a nominee from Barack Obama a hearing too close to the 2016 presidential election.” How were you dealing with all that?

I think anybody who studies presidential history understands the kind of timelines of activities in a presidency. They’re particularly interesting and instructive in a two-term presidency in the modern era. It would be interesting to put it on a graph against someone like Clinton or even [George W.] Bush, who was far less popular. Bush’s unpopularity is hard to square with this picture.

But in any event, I don’t think the midterms were unexpected. We all expected that that would happen. My former boss, Senator Landrieu, lost her seat that year. It would be the last—we’re not going to get a Democratic senator from Louisiana anytime soon. And a large reason why she lost her seat was Obamacare, it’s fair to say. She just couldn’t overcome that being tied to Obama. I was not surprised by that. I don’t think anybody in Washington who was watching the polls was surprised by that. But, you know, it’s a sobering moment.

At the same time, I don’t think anybody thought legislation was necessarily going to happen in those second two years. There’s just a pendulum swing. You’re always going to lose the midterms. The party in power is going to lose the midterms. So I don’t think that was surprising.

But “the phone and the pen,” as he would say.

So then the phone and the pen happened.

The executive orders—

Exactly. The phone and the pen happened. Denis, our chief of staff, took that really up. He had these cards made that we had “phone and pen.” It was a whole thing. [laughter]

I didn’t know that.

I probably have mine somewhere. It was a whole thing. Denis was really serious about it.

By this point—I forget when I got—oh, when David left. No. When David left? Yes. David left, and then I got his SAP [special assistant to the president] spot, his special—when I got hired, I was just a senior speechwriter. I became a special assistant to the president—that’s being a commissioned officer—when David left. David Litt left, and I got his commission. That made me not by any means senior staff, but what it meant is that I would start going to meetings every morning in the Roosevelt Room that Denis held for a certain level of staff, midlevel of senior staff. In those meetings, Denis was really—that didn’t happen for a year later—but this momentum that he wanted of running through the tape was very real, and they were very committed to doing the kinds of executive actions that they hadn’t done previously.

You could see something like DAPA [Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents] as one of those. DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] was, too, but DAPA was maybe a step further than they would have gone otherwise. We’ve had all these gun safety executive actions, some around equal pay. They did a—I don’t even know if this was an executive action or just a rule, but they added parental leave for White House staff. Parental leave doesn’t even exist for feds [federal employees]. It’s gross.

Anyway, there was this sense that we’re just going to do everything we can. Convenings, bully pulpit, whatever it is. And Denis—if you know Denis, he’s a man of action, so “we’re going to run through the tape” was the mantra. Yes, I think there was a sense that—you never got the sense that he was going to stop or slow down necessarily.

As for the [Justice] Ginsburg situation, it was infuriating, I have to say. I’d always found Mitch McConnell to be an appalling human being, but it did start—that was the moment when it felt like, We have lost something. You always knew that the way that someone like a Joe Biden calls back to Senate culture and the comity that once existed, all of that is—there’s a nostalgic gloss placed on some bygone era. There also wasn’t a bathroom for women senators, literally. So say what you will about how great it was. But I do think that McConnell opened the door to just kind of trampling on norms that paved the way for someone like Trump to do it even more. You just open that door a little bit, and suddenly, nothing matters.

It was very frustrating, and I personally was frustrated by the fact that we weren’t going harder on it. The nomination of Merrick Garland was so stunningly dumb because you could never build a public—from a Congress perspective, it’s just blatantly obvious that that was a bad choice because you can’t build a constituency around it. They were thinking—it was still that old 2009 Recovery Act fantasy.

And ACA. “If we get them”—

Exactly right. If we just seem reasonable, how can anyone possibly disagree with us? Because you are bringing a knife to a machine gun party. That’s why. And that’s not how this works. You need to find somebody who you can build a constituency around and then make a loud-ass national campaign. And that just didn’t happen.

And when you said “dumb,” you meant the choice of Merrick Garland—

Yes.

—because of his perceived and, I guess, genuine moderation?

Yes. He’s just a sort of milquetoast guy. I’m sure he’s a great judge, but I’m sorry, wrong guy for the wrong moment.

Right. And you were having this feeling then, and then what happened after Ginsburg passed in September of ’16, right? Were those of you in the speechwriting office saying, “This is happening. Why don’t our folks in comms understand this?”

I think we were talking about it with each other a little bit. But we didn’t have that kind of power to—who’s going to listen to us? And also, Barack Obama is going to nominate whoever he wants.

Yes. But where was that—was that coming from the president, or Denis McDonough? Where did that start, that we didn’t learn our lesson [laughs] from ACA?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

OK. I wonder.

Maybe that’s who the president genuinely wanted? I have no idea.

Yes, that is true. Well, we’ll keep asking. [laughter]

I don’t mean to denigrate anybody who, at the time—it just seems like there are some times when we are just not bold as a party. I just wrote in Politico about this yesterday. I think it’s just time to—sometimes you just have to break the damn glass, you know?

And particularly if it wasn’t going to go through anyway, then why not just put someone—

Exactly. Exactly.

Yes, OK. I got that.

He just profoundly misjudged McConnell. We were always profoundly misjudging McConnell. At what point do you stop misjudging that man?

Yes. The new biography, The Price of Power, which I say should have been subtitled, “Selling My Soul and the Country’s.”

Yes, yes, because he doesn’t really believe in anything.

Power.

Power. Just power.

Norms. We are talking about norms. I’m thinking of the heckler who showed up at the White House and that the president was being interrupted by a heckler.

Oh, at the immigration speech.

Yes.

No, it was Hispanic Heritage Month. I wrote that speech.

Was it Hispanic Heritage?

It was a transgender immigrant who was heckling him for not being—

That’s it, in the East Room.

Yes, that was Hispanic Heritage Month.

And heckling the president, and he made the statement about drinking my—

Yes. “Eating my food, drinking my drinks.”

“Eating my food.” I made my note about hecklers, norms beginning to deteriorate. But we’re actually starting with that in part back, for Washington’s sake, at the Hill in 2009—

Joe Wilson.

Yes, and then ACA. Yes, and Joe Wilson.

“You lie.”

And, by the way, birtherism in the 2008—OK. I think this will also be a way to bring us to an end today and say where we are now, some of the things we talked about at lunch, but it might be really helpful to get your thoughts on record for history.

So thoughts about that at the time? You’ve already said about Merrick Garland, about ACA, what you were seeing on the Hill. But then the heckler showing up at the White House. What were you thinking was happening to our political culture, and maybe our society as a whole?

In some ways, I think the catalyst was Sarah Palin. So you start with a vice-presidential candidate who is really fueling some nasty hate, just openly, and not really being called out for it by her party. That seeded something that then grew into a movement. I think it begins there. Probably before then, but certainly there. And again, coupled with the financial crisis, even earlier national traumas like 9/11 and the Iraq War. They have a compounding effect that make people lose faith in institutions that no longer work for them.

By 2016, it does feel like the wheels have come off. The heckler at the White House feels different. That was a form of internal left-wing protest that just always happens. That actually feels different from Mitch McConnell breaking norms and even race-baiting on the outside. That felt—

Always happens in that leftist or rightist, but in this case, a leftist activist wanted to speak up. But was it a norm in the White House that someone would do that?

I don’t know. It struck me as obnoxious but not as a particularly big deal. It’s weird that that person made it through security, but they weren’t violent, and they were heckling—the irony of the whole situation. But that didn’t strike me at all.

I was actually more worried that, I can’t believe that got through. How did OPE [Office of Public Engagement] not vet every single person who was in this audience? And am I in trouble? Because I think I wrote that speech. But no, I did not at all put that in the same category. Maybe that’s my mistake and my failure of imagination there, but I did not.

That’s helpful.

I think that the Palin and Mitch McConnell, that seems to be in a framework of institutional norms as well. It’s a different thing.

I guess I was thinking of the institutional norm of respect for the president and the presidency in the White House.

Public discourse and civility. Yes.

But I see that you could draw a distinction there.

Yes, and I also think that that person was relatively young. I just chalk everything that somebody under the age of 26 does to being dumb and young. At least I hope that’s how my mistakes are seen from that time period.

Our brains were not fully developed until our midtwenties, especially for me.

Exactly. I don’t know if they were really thinking about it from this perspective. You know what I mean?

Again, we’re coming towards our end here. Is there anything—I’m used to this now from journalists. They always say, “Is there anything I haven’t asked that you wanted to talk about?” But seriously, was there any topic, any issue, anything that you want to get on the record with us right now? Elizabeth, anything? I’m just going to quickly look through. Oh, I know. The day after election day in the White House, 2016.

Whew, brutal.

And then another date, the last day, the 20th of January, 2017.

Yes, hearing about that would be good.

Yes. That whole time period was so strange. Cody and I were the commissioned officers on our team, which meant we were the only ones who could write political speeches. In other words, who could write the president’s campaign speeches—

For him to speak for Hillary.

—for him to speak, just as a sort of—

Or a senator, or—

Yes, exactly. So anything campaign-related, only Cody and I could do. There’s a legal distinction, which, again, all this seems so quaint.

In fact, on Halloween of that year, October 31st, I was traveling with the president for some campaign speech. In the OEOB, there’s a trick-or-treating thing where people can—staff can bring their kids to come and trick-or-treat around the OEOB, and so everybody decorates their doors. I was gone all day because I was traveling with the president, but I knew that in the morning, our excellent intern had come up with a great cover for my door, the speechwriting suite. It said, “Don’t boo. Vote,” because that was the president’s line on the trail. Anytime he was speaking and he would mention Trump or whatever, and the audience would say, “Boo,” he would say, “Don’t boo. Vote.” So clever to add that for Halloween. And he made a ghost and whatever. So clever, right?

I come back to my office that evening, and Steve Krupin, one of my colleagues, said, “You’ll never believe this. White House counsel made us take it down.” And I said, “What?” He said, “Yes. It violates the Hatch Act. We can’t say”—and I said, “(A), All we’re saying is ‘Vote,’ but also, this is decoration for a children’s Halloween party. This is insane.” When you think about what we elected shortly thereafter, the notion that this was violating the Hatch Act is just—it is, again, the knife fight to the machine gun party thing. It’s so insanely out of touch and completely missing the moment that I still think back to that as so emblematic of how out of our depth we have been because of a level of cautiousness and risk aversion that no longer matches our circumstances.

I was going to say, it seems to be so symptomatic of where it was at that point, right?

Yes, yes.

The one question I have is, does the White House counsel’s office walk around and look at the Halloween decorations to see if there are any Hatch Act violations?

You know what happened is, I think somebody posted it on Instagram. I don’t even know. I don’t even know how they saw it.

Or they could have brought their child.

I don’t even know how they saw it. Like I said, I was gone all day. I will say, it was a funny time because we were—I had done the convention, the 2016 convention, once again. This is my now second convention. I was on the speechwriting team there. You have to take the week off. You have to volunteer. So I took the week off from my White House job in August, went down, did the convention, came back. Then we were campaigning, so I was going a few places. Interestingly, I was actually secretly in my first trimester of my pregnancy.

For your first?

For my first. The Zika virus was going on at the time, and we were scheduled to go to Miami [Florida]. Zika was there, and my doctor had said, “Don’t go to Miami.” So even before I hit 12 weeks, I went to Cody and said, “I’m scheduled to go to Miami, but I can’t go. I’m pregnant.” I was like, “Don’t fire me.” He was very excited. He’s friends with my husband.

So this was a very strange time. I once again had this feeling that she was just not going to win. I just felt like, You’re not going to give a Democrat a third term. Trump is more popular than you realize, and something is off. We are missing the moment here. Something is off. It just felt wrong.

On election night, we were all gathered. The speechwriters were gathered in my office, where everybody was always gathered, watching. I forget if it was when they—it was, like, the margins in Florida. Florida hasn’t been a swing state in a long time. But it was Florida, and then maybe was it Virginia next that happened? The numbers across these states were trending in a direction that made it very clear that she was going to lose. It was maybe 9:45 or something, and I am unhappy, pregnant, and therefore unable to drink my feelings, and so I went home. I remember leaving Sarah Hurwitz and Dave Cavell, Mrs. Obama’s speechwriters, and everybody else maybe still was there in my office.

I crawled into bed. It was 10:00. I remember my husband was away for work. I crawl into bed, and I reopened Harry Potter book 1. I was, like, I’m just going to—this is how I’m going to get through this. [laughs] So I started re-reading Harry Potter book 1. The next morning, we all show up to work, and everybody is just shattered.

Because most of these people thought for sure she would win?

I think so.

Yes.

I think so. And also just the reality of what was about to happen.

But it’s interesting to me that you didn’t—Susan Rice, in her memoir, says that she was in Alaska, I think, with the president and the top people just before the election and was saying—she said, “I was the only one who said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think so.’”

Yes. I remember feeling like I was the, what’s the expression, the “skunk at the garden party” every time this came up because I felt like I was being negative about it, but it just seemed so obvious to me.

Isn’t it interesting the two of you had that view?

Yes. I just thought, There’s no way they’re going to give this woman the keys to the kingdom. There’s just no way.

Mostly gender, or—

All of it.

The Clintons?

The Clintons, her, the animosity that she generated, not necessarily her fault, but she just evoked very strong feelings from people. The emphasis that the campaign was putting on her record-breaking nature of her candidacy, it just all seemed off. I thought, as much as people love President Obama, in general—again, historically, it’s hard for one party to hold onto power for so long. [George] H. W. [Bush] was able to do it, but then again he lost his reelect. It’s hard. It’s a hard position to be in. I just didn’t have a good feeling about it. I’m also really superstitious, so no matter what, until the end, I would have held out and said, “No, there’s no way she’s going to win,” but it just didn’t feel good.

Anyway, the next day we go in, and everybody is very shattered. Everybody’s an emotional wreck. This is, again, where I very much understand President Obama. I don’t operate at that level. Not that I’m not somebody who has “emotions,” but I can be pretty cerebral about this stuff, and I really stay in a—life is 49–51. It’s always—

So it’s “No Drama Sarada.”

Yes, a little bit. As you can see, I can be dramatic, [waves hands] and it’s not like I’m—I’m not cool as a cucumber the way the president is. But when it comes to reaction to events, I just don’t have an emotional reaction to it that way. Like even this most recent one, I don’t have a—

So anyway, Susannah’s coming to me, and very upset. Cody calls us all over. Speechwriters are talking. Then actually Psaki, who at this point was our communications director, Jen Psaki, has the whole comms team come over to her West Wing office. We’re all just there, and she says something. I don’t remember what anybody said. Josh said something. Cody said something. People are crying. It’s bleak.

Then Ferial comes down and says, “The president wants all of you to go into the Oval Office.” I don’t know why he chose—this is sort of a random sampling of White House staffers. But the comms team is the one who’s responsible for the White House’s public face, so maybe that’s why. I think Cody had been up there helping him prepare his statement and probably said, “There’s a bunch of really broken 28-year-olds. Can you talk to them?”—I don’t know.

Anyway, we all go up there. Most of these people had never met him, certainly never been in the Oval. It’s just a collection of staffers. Maybe some had. We walk in, and we’re all standing in that circle. I think there’s a photograph of it. He just gives us a little bit of a pep talk. President Biden—Vice President Biden, at the time—said a few words, just about, losses happen and we can’t let this stop us. A little bit of what he said yesterday or today.

But President Obama’s parting message was very clear, which was, “You guys are the face of this White House and of this transition, and there will be no mischief. You are going to do everything by the book. We are going to be as helpful as possible. We’re going to do everything we need to do. I don’t want to hear anybody say anything negative to the press, to anyone. That’s not how we roll.”

Discipline again.

Discipline again. “We are no drama. We are not going to give anyone any fodder. And we’re going to be respectful of this transition and the office of the presidency. That’s how this is going to go, and I don’t want to hear anything else”—which was, I think, important, just to remind us of the import of the office. It is not about a person. It is about the office. That was helpful. Of course, we all know what happened next. It was a pretty difficult—it was a really—I think everybody was really broken.

Then, gosh. So my last day was—they stagger the people leaving so that not everybody’s last day is January 20th. It would be too much going on. So my last day was January 17th.

How had the setting changed? Were there boxes being packed and breaking down of offices?

Yes, lots of boxes. Lots of boxes and breaking down of offices. Actually, strangely enough, CNN was doing a documentary called The End about the end of the Obama presidency. They had taken a liking to the speechwriting office, so they were around. They had filmed us postelection. This all started, I think, postelection. But they filmed us talking about the—coming up with jokes for the Thanksgiving turkey pardon, which was—

Between the election and the inauguration.

Between the election and—right, just a couple weeks after the election. They actually have this scene in the documentary where we tell jokes, and then there’s a kind of anticlimactic, “Oof.” Then somehow we all start laughing again. But you can see the camaraderie of our team.

Then there’s this scene where they—so my husband plays in a band, so the whole speechwriting team went to go see the show. Before the show, we all got a drink, and the CNN crew is filming us. We’re just chatting and stuff, and then they take us to—then we go to the show. It’s interesting because they start this somewhat downer of a song called “Cavalry” that Naseem’s band is playing. They’re called Kingsley Flood. They start from showing the live show, but then they continue the song, and they take us back to the White House, where people are packing up their boxes. You see Valerie and Tina putting stuff away into the boxes. It’s all very sad. [laughter]

But on the 17th, it was my last day. I walked out. Then a couple days later, we all come back to Andrews to say goodbye. I obviously did not watch the inauguration. Actually, Naseem and I both went to Andrews. I’m standing with all my friends, my speechwriting friends.

So you didn’t go to Chicago for—

Oh, I did go to Chicago for the farewell address. I’m sorry. When was the farewell address?

Not too long before inauguration, as I recall.

No. It was right around the same time. I did go to Chicago for inauguration.

Maybe the last week?

Yes. I did go to Chicago for the farewell address. That was awful.

Who wrote that?

Cody. All these big speeches, it was Cody, which is why you should talk to Cody. Yes. That was brutal. It was brutal.

Tearful, even though you are even-keeled? But did you feel tearful?

Yes. I mean, I felt emotional about it. I can’t remember if I actually let out a tear. Maybe I did. I don’t remember.

And you were pregnant. It’s OK.

I was pregnant. I was pregnant.

You have an excuse. [laughter]

Again, I could not drink my feelings. I can’t remember. Maybe. But it was emotional. It was also a bit of a reunion. People could come back from—

From the first term.

Exactly. There were a lot of people there. So many people who had worked on the campaign. It was a big thing. Then we went back and—

So you had that, and then you had—

—and then Andrews.

—going back to Andrews to say farewell on inauguration day.

Yes. Yes. That was, I mean, that was just a hard—it was just hard, not because they were going to go. They were always going to go. But just this notion of what we were leaving. What was to come? Who knew how awful it would be? Apparently, America has forgotten, but there are parents who will never see their children again because of this man. You know?

Because of immigration and—

Yes. It’s just wild. It’s just wild.

—policy. Anything more to say about your time with Obama or the Obamas, or anything you want to say now that we are headed towards a second and nonconsecutive term of—

What else is there to say about that?

The 45th president will become the 47th.

I will say, about a year and a half later, Cody asked me to help the museum. Obama has a museum—the Obama library, museum, whatever you want to call it, was being built. He wanted one of us to help develop the narrative around it. So I started doing that project in the fall of 2018, I think. It is a project I’m still working on. But ultimately, I am the person who was the lead scriptwriter, which means all the stuff you’ll see on the walls.

Oh, how exciting and interesting that must be.

So that’s one of my projects, yes. That’s how I’ve stayed connected to the whole project.

And you now have your own business.

Yes.

Do you consider it a speechwriting shop?

I do speeches. I do comms strategy.

Comms strategies. PR [public relations]?

I don’t do PR.

No PR.

No. Writing of any kind, but also just helping people and organizations figure out how to tell their story.

Right. For the same kinds of clientele as West Wing?

I’m way pickier, so fewer annoying corporate folks.

Good for you.

It’s just me, so I can do that.

You became pregnant with your first child just toward the end. When you were talking about the men who worked all these hours and were clearly not involved in childcare until maybe they got home late, late at night, or on the weekends or something, it must have been easier—you were married, obviously. But it must have been easier at that point not to have children, would you say, particularly as a woman working in the White House?

Yes. I will say that I have a far more equitable partnership than almost anyone I know, and I didn’t even agree to have children until we had figured out that this was how—I was with Naseem for 10 years before we had kids. I was very clear how this was going to go. So even if I had had children in the White House, I know that it would have been very different because I just have a different partnership. So, for any of the young people listening, choose wisely. Now, I have a demanding job, and Naseem has a demanding job, and we are equitable.

But yes, I think I didn’t appreciate the extent to which it was crazy until afterward, once my daughter was born in May. I took off three months, and then Naseem took off three months. We both work for ourselves, so we just gave ourselves those three months. It was at that point that Naseem was actually the one who said—we had friends who were in the administration and who had children at the time, and he looked back, and he said, “This is crazy. How could they do this? They were never around.”

And you had learned your lesson watching your grandmother serve your grandfather.

Totally, and I just knew that I was never going to do that. I was never going to put up with that, because then why did my parents even come here? It was the whole point. I remember giving them an Oval Office tour. It was just kind of—

Oh, yes. We didn’t get to ask what your parents thought about all of this.

Oh, they were very quiet about it, but yes, they were thrilled.

And you took them to the Oval Office?

Well, I gave them the West Wing tour, as I gave many people West Wing tours. I love giving tours. That was one of my favorite parts about working in the White House, because I so love history. All the books on my nightstand are biographies of dead white men, as my husband always says, and so I just—you know, this thrills me.

What was great is that Susannah, who now is getting her PhD in history, is also a history buff, and so she would do things like arrange tours for the speechwriting team with the White House curator. We got a special East Wing tour, and they really walked us through the artwork and the rooms because, you know, it does come up in speeches that we would write for the president. That was really great. So I gave really good tours.

So I gave my parents a West Wing tour, of course. Then once I was a commissioned officer, I had them come down—they were still living in New Jersey at the time and come to the—I could take people to lunch at the mess, the White House Mess. There was a week when Vikram Sunderam, who is the head chef at Rasika, which is this James Beard–award winning Indian restaurant in D.C.—he was the guest chef that week, and so I had my parents come that week, which was really cool.

But no, it was actually pretty—it sounds so silly and sentimental, but it was actually very special to see my parents standing, looking inside the Oval Office. That’s not something that they ever—and we left, and my dad said, “I really never in my wildest dreams imagined anything like this happening.”

That he would even see it, much less than you would be working there.

That he would even see it. Yes, yes. What was really nice is that when we left the White House, you know the president takes pictures with everybody and their families. And so my parents and Naseem came, and they got to meet him, which was cool.

Well, therefore, we have come full circle from the opening of our conversation this morning.

That’s true, yes, yes.

We always say, we don’t necessarily exhaust all the questions. We might exhaust the interviewee, and we’re sorry if we’ve done that.

No, no, and I feel bad that we didn’t talk about Trump, but what else is there to say?

Right. I think you said it all about the first term and what will come, what we believe will be worse than the first term.

The other thing we always do is thank you, not only for your service to our country, but we consider this service to country, continuing, because you have left such an amazing conversation and such detail, rich detail, and telling compelling stories.

I hope so. I hope this is useful.

You have given a masterclass in telling compelling stories, which I’m sure will help budding speechwriters and others who read this, so thank you so much for doing it.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me. It’s really a privilege. I feel very honored to be a part of this project, so thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]