From the Corner of the Oval

by Beck Dorey-Stein

D.C. is the girl who never swears and always wears a full face of makeup; the guy who makes a weekend “brunch rezzie” for him and his ten closest bros and thinks tipping 15 percent is totally solid.

“Too cool for school?” he asks, and I turn around. “Me?” I ask, and not in a flirty, eyelash-batting kind of way. I ask because I need clarification, because too many times in my life I’ve waved back at someone who was waving to the person standing behind me.

Secret Service agents manning the door watch with disdain as we squeeze into the room and feast our eyes on the leaders like eager piglets piling onto a beleaguered sow at lunchtime.

But just a few seconds later, POTUS is thinking aloud. “Twenty-eight, twenty-eight…I was just starting law school in the fall,” he says, “which means it was this summer that I met Michelle.” He nods to himself. “It might have been this week, or even today, that we met for the first time twenty-four years ago.” He looks at me, and I feel compelled to say something. “Twenty-four years ago! We should have champagne!” I venture my first glance around after having sat down. It’s a very nice helicopter, but it’s small. There’s no cart service, that’s for certain. “Well, you sure got comfortable quick,” POTUS teases, his eyes glimmering with mischief. “You sit down all nervous and now you’re already trying to drink champagne on Marine One!”

“EVEN THE POPE likes to hear he’s lost weight,” Cole says over iced coffees from Swing’s, the Thursday before Labor Day weekend. We’ve been talking about the day before, when Cole complimented the president’s new suit and the president was clearly pleased that someone had noticed; he’d been feeling self-conscious because it was a narrower cut.

Teddy leans against the door, sensing my disappointment that he didn’t say something funny or even hello. “His world is so strange,” Teddy reminds me. “We all know so much about him, down to his every movement of every day, and he barely knows our names.”

POTUS even tried to speak in Hindi—always a crowd pleaser. So yes, the Indians are satisfied, but only because of the president. He knows this, but he’s throwing us a bone anyway. Humility is a privilege of the great. POTUS starts to walk back up to the front of the plane when he pivots back with a mischievous smirk. He clacks away on his Nicorette, feeling out the tempo for his joke as if he’s hopping between two jump ropes. “You know,” he begins, “it’s not every day you can make a billion people happy!” He gives us that toothy grin you see in photos, the one where his whole face is a huge smile. The joke isn’t even that funny, not even really a joke, and yet he’s so pleased with his line, like a proud dad. In these moments, it’s easy to see his younger, lighter self.

Traveling back in time makes everyone a little loopy. So do the drinks. A senator who’s flying with us can barely keep his eyes open or his words coherent as he throws his arms around young staffers he’s ignored the whole trip.

Senior staffers I’ve never formally met raise their hands like fifth graders when I ask who’d like a set. Everyone takes out their drug of choice—Sonata or Xanax or Ambien—and in that place between awake and unconscious, the forced, awkward intimacy with colleagues is suddenly just funny and bizarre. I mean, you’re having a sleepover with your boss, your boss’s boss, and a ton of other people you can’t fathom seeing in their pajamas, even as they stand before you in their pajamas asking you to pass them a pillow. POTUS passes through wearing all black, and it’s like being in third grade and seeing your teacher in the grocery store.

And so the fact is, the true hero of that historic U.S.-Cuba bilat at the Summit of the Americas was not the president or Ricardo Zuniga or Ben Rhodes or any of their Cuban counterparts—it was a tech guy named Steve who figured out how to stream the Masters in the president’s hold while he waited for the first plenary session to wrap. Getting to watch golf with Marvin, Teddy, and Noah for half an hour before the briefing on the Cuba bilat allowed the boss to reset. Consequently—and unsurprisingly—POTUS crushed the meeting with Raúl Castro and made it memorable for all the right reasons.

“What’s been most striking to you?” a journalist asks. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes that I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” POTUS says. “That’s what strikes me. ‘There but for the grace of God.’

I’m not sticky with secrets. Mark Twain said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”