There’s Lady Bird in yellow chiffon Pat Nixon looking forlorn and trapped Laura and Barbara Bush, both in somber black. Hillary Clinton’s portrait looks less like Hillary than Kate McKinnon in a pantsuit doing Hillary. Jackie Kennedy’s has a pastels-in-soft-focus aspect. Today, with no one around, I feel compelled to take another look. We were at a reception, drinks in hand, going from one to the next, when I judged Nancy Reagan’s-purely as a fashion artifact-to be my favorite. Obama’s tall, glamorous press secretary, took me on a spin past the First Lady portraits that hang in the Center Hall on the ground floor. It was during that visit two years ago that Joanna Rosholm, Mrs. “I understand you’re going to be with us for a while.” She paused as a look crossed her face, that ornery one she makes when she’s about to deliver a line: “We’re doin’ a deep dive.” Wearing a purple-and-white striped sleeveless Laura Smalls dress, she enveloped me in one of her customary hugs. Obama, I arrived around ten o’clock and had to “hold” in a reception room for ten minutes then move to a hallway to hold again then another spot, hold until at last I was ushered into the Map Room because the First Lady wanted to say hello before we went off to Howard University. There is usually so much high-stakes, highly choreographed pageantry unfolding that it’s hard to shake the feeling that if you made a move without permission you might get tackled. Obama in her motorcade and head out to an event on her schedule.
I have been here every week for a month, sometimes twice a day, to interview people on the First Lady’s staff or to join Mrs. When I arrive at the White House on a hot afternoon in late September to interview Michelle Obama, the place is so eerily quiet I worry for a second that I have come on the wrong day. On the eve of her departure from the White House, First Lady Michelle Obama has never been a more inspiring figure-America’s conscience, role model, and mother in chief. “And that’s a wonderful gift of freedom.” Atelier Versace dress. “Any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role,” says Mrs.
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