First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (51 page)
Read First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies Online
Authors: Kate Andersen Brower
From left to right:
Rosalynn Carter, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Nancy Reagan attend Betty Ford’s 2011 funeral. After President Ford’s death in 2006, Betty told her children, “I just want to go be with my boyfriend.”
Michelle Obama is counting down the days until she can leave the confines of the White House. In 2011, she took a rare trip to a suburban Target department store in Alexandria, Virginia, where an Associated Press photographer shot photos of her. Michelle’s first chief of staff, Jackie Norris, says, “I think there were a lot of people saying no to her in the beginning. . . . That’s pretty hard when you first come into an environment and have so many restrictions put on you and such high scrutiny.”
Michelle Obama grew up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and she’s most comfortable talking to young boys and girls with backgrounds like her own. “Don’t ever scale back your dreams,” she told students graduating in 2010 from Anacostia High School, considered one of the worst schools in Washington, D.C. And she’s known for her hugs. Here she bear-hugs a young girl at an event in the White House’s East Room on April 22, 2015.
Michelle Obama came into the White House describing herself as “mom-in-chief,” and her devotion to the Obamas’ two young daughters has remained her top priority. When their father’s term ends, Sasha will be a sophomore in high school and Malia will be in college. The Obamas sit for a family portrait in 2009 in the Green Room of the White House. Sasha has her arm around her father, and Malia has her arms around her mother.
The Obamas in 2015 in the Rose Garden. Malia is on the left, and Sasha is on the right, posing with their Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Bo.
In 2013, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Bush, and Rosalynn Carter gathered for the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. These remarkable women, who are sometimes political rivals, will always be united as part of the uniquely American sisterhood of first ladies.
KATE ANDERSEN BROWER
is the author of the number one
New York Times
bestseller
The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House
. She spent four years covering the Obama White House for Bloomberg News and is a former CBS News staffer and Fox News producer. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and their two young children. She can be followed on Twitter: @katebrower.
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The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photographs: © Patricia De La Rosa/Getty Images (woman); © STUDIO BOX/Getty Images (buttons); © Michael Kraus/Shutterstock (pin)
FIRST WOMEN
. Copyright © 2016 by Kate Andersen Brower. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-0-06-243965-9
EPub Edition April 2016 ISBN 9780062439673
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