So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(15)

1 Years later, the White House planned a trip to Asia that swung through Japan. Though I was rusty on the language, I began brushing up beforehand so I could impress everyone—particularly the younger employees, many of whom were from the Midwest—with my skills. The night we arrived, I decided to take everyone out for sushi and show off. My display began at the concierge, whom I asked for a recommendation in what I thought was good, if not perfect, Japanese. We’d flown overnight and were super tired—I wasn’t worried about messing up, which usually helps you not mess up.

We were all having a great time at the restaurant, ordering rounds of yakis and toris. Then, about halfway through the meal—I don’t know how I missed it before—I realized that, despite my competent Japanese, which I’d believed signaled me as a nuanced traveler and not some basic tourist, the concierge had sent us to Nobu. Wind, meet sails.

The next morning, I got a knock on my door at around 6:00 AM. “Boss,” Reggie Love, Obama’s body man, said. “Boss wants to see you.” POTUS couldn’t sleep and wanted to convene a meeting of senior staff; in my sweats, I followed David Axelrod, fully decked out in Chicago sports paraphernalia pj’s, down the hallway.

As we were all drinking coffee in POTUS’s suite, I inserted a non sequitur. I know no one likes dream stories, but the one I’d just had was particularly vivid, and I felt I needed to tell someone about it. We were all friends, and I had shared much dumber dream stories than this one. “Guys, I had this dream where I fell off a cliff,” I said. “It really felt like I was falling, too!”

I saw the people around the room make polite Oh, that’s interesting faces to indicate they were not interested. But then Robert Gibbs chimed in. “Huh. I had a dream where I fell off something, too.”

Finally, Secret Service explained that there had been a 4.7 earthquake in the middle of the night. We’d all been so tired that we slept through it.

2 A major international incident occurred in 1992, when, at a state dinner in Japan weeks before the New Hampshire primary, President George H. W. Bush vomited in the lap of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa and then passed out. The term “Bushu-suru” was subsequently coined, to mean “to do the Bush thing.”





Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (And Be Spied on by Foreign Governments)



For a while, there was a joke going around social media that Donald Trump was afraid of stairs. (The word for this fear, FYI, is “bathmophobia.”) In the weeks after he was inaugurated, photos and videos surfaced of him conspicuously avoiding inclines and steps. He grabbed Theresa May’s hand as the pair walked down a ramp at the White House, beaming the entire time like a baby who’s just discovered his reflection, as if that were not really weird. An anonymous source in a Washington Post article said he wouldn’t go to Kellyanne Conway’s office because it was on the second floor. Jezebel reasoned that his fear of stairs was proven by the fact that he can often be seen gripping handrails on his way up and down despite his public fear of germs. A CNN reporter even talked about it on New Day. While I do not want to associate myself with Trump through any other quality, I have to admit I don’t begrudge him this particular alleged phobia. I hate going down stairs, too.

I have vertigo—yes, in addition to IBS; kind of a mess over here—which means I’ve almost fallen down the stairs in many countries. It’s better now, but when I worked in the White House it was particularly bad. Traveling with the president meant I was often in countries with no obligation to be ADA-compliant, staring down a flight of stairs that I was not confident I could conquer without concussing myself and showing dignitaries my Hanes Her Way. I usually coped by clinging to the railings like a woman who got her hands on the last 60 percent off Vera Wang dress at the annual Kleinfeld’s Bridal sale and was not letting go despite it being two sizes too small.

The first time I ever noticed my vertigo was when I was working for John Kerry and he was interviewing vice presidential candidates. In order to maintain some dignity in the process and not let the names leak, we went to great pains to keep the interviewees sequestered away. Kerry was meeting with Bill Richardson—then the governor of New Mexico, before that the secretary of energy and the ambassador to the UN—in Phoenix. The interview was a few flights from the ground floor, and Richardson asked me for coffee in a cup with a saucer. (Why? Who knows.) The kitchen was on a higher floor, so I went to get it. But once I had the coffee (with the saucer), I had to walk down about three flights of stairs. I remember thinking that this was how I was going to die—or at the very least trip, fall forward, and knock out my front teeth. I was ultimately glad Richardson had requested that saucer—it was a lot easier not to spill hot coffee on myself while I was slowly creeping down the stairs.

After that I tried to only wear flats, which helps a bit. But sometimes the situation was more complicated. The staircase at the Kremlin is, like, thirty feet wide, with a red carpet down the middle, and there was no way I could politely walk down the side of it without looking like a little kid playing the “Don’t step in the lava!” game. Traveling with President Obama, I was always hyperaware of my position as a representative of the US government, and I felt like everyone was watching my every move, waiting for me to slip up so they had an excuse to blame the United States for something. (Often, they actually were, but I’ll get to that in a second.) At the Kremlin, trembling at the top of the steps as the rest of the delegation proceeded down like debutantes, I had to get Ben Rhodes to come back and hold my hand so that I wouldn’t have to live on the second floor of the Kremlin forever. This also happened at the Great Wall (a nightmare of stairs) and the Colosseum. I didn’t go up into the pyramids because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back down. (They have small pyramids, too, which I did visit. The smaller ones are for the ladies, obviously.)