As it happened, this was exactly what I had hoped for. I was, by now, no stranger to Air Force One. I had taken more plane selfies than I could keep track of. I knew the best beer available was Yuengling Black & Tan. I had seen the sequels to both Anchorman and Hot Tub Time Machine on the in-flight entertainment system, and monitored at least one eBay auction from midair. But for all my time on board, my farthest trip had been California. I had never traveled overnight.
Which led to my first mistake: I didn’t think about sleepwear. By the time Luke Rosa, our trip director, reminded us to bring something to change into, it was too late. I had no time to shop. The best I could do was rifle through my dresser, where two options emerged. The first was boxers and an oversize T-shirt. The second was a purchase from my freshman year of college, pajama pants adorned with pictures of the Incredible Hulk. It was a Sophie’s choice of sleepwear. I chose Hulk.
My second mistake came just a few minutes after takeoff. We were in the staff cabin when, without warning or explanation, a member of the medical team entered and began handing out sleeping pills like candy. Foreign-trip veterans knew the drill. They immediately gobbled their meds and staked out prime nesting spots on the carpeted floor. But I stayed in my chair and abstained.
This is how I learned something: Air Force One is a surprisingly shitty place to sleep. It’s cold. It’s loud. The seats don’t recline past forty-five degrees. I understand that “Air Force One ruined my eight hours” is the epitome of a first-world problem. Still, couldn’t whoever installed the top secret communications array have made the track lighting slightly less harsh?
Apparently not. With no chemical help, sleep escaped me. When I finally drifted off, it was for an hour at most.
I awoke somewhere in French airspace, and here I made mistake number three: I ate. I wasn’t even hungry. But I remembered the flight attendant’s words of wisdom—an army marches on its stomach—and eager to be a good soldier, I gorged. Eggs. Croissants. Jam. Fruit. Coffee. Diligently plowing through my tray, I was too busy to notice the line forming along the plane’s port side. By the time my plate was clean, a dozen people stood waiting to enter the lavatory and change into business attire. It would take at least an hour before my turn came. By that time, the plane would be on the ground.
This is the point when I panicked. Waking nightmares began cartwheeling through my head. What if the plane lands, Angela Merkel is there to greet us, and I walk out onto the tarmac in my jammies? In desperation, I scanned the staff cabin for a place to change. The small room with the computer and printer was out—it had no doors. Throwing a blanket over my chair was impossible; the risk of being noticed was too great. Then, suddenly, a stroke of genius! At the front of the cabin was a shallow closet, about six feet high and two feet deep, where staffers hung their coats.
It was the perfect plan. The moment my coworkers’ heads were turned, I scooted into the closet and slid the door closed behind me. With lightning speed, I removed my shirt, socks, and pants. I reached for my trousers. I slid them off their hanger. And that’s when Luke, the trip director, decided to retrieve his coat.
How will I be remembered by those who knew me? You can’t help but ask yourself this question, especially if your work is part of something significant and grand. I liked to imagine that former colleagues, upon hearing my name many years from now, would picture someone self-assured and writerly. “He wrote those jokes I liked,” they might say. Or, “Isn’t he the one who made infrastructure finance come alive?”
Maybe some people really will remember me that way. Maybe not. But as I stood somewhere over Germany, looking from Luke’s stunned expression to the giggling faces behind him, one thing was certain. For a small but significant portion of my colleagues, I will always be startled, pasty, and half naked, a pair of balled-up Hulk pajamas at my feet.
MY LEGACY, IN OTHER WORDS, WAS COMING INTO FOCUS. BUT HOW much did my record—my modest achievements, my less-than-modest humiliations—affect that of the president himself?
According to those responsible for boosting morale, the answer was “A lot.” One day during the fourth quarter, a motivational poster appeared on the first floor of the EEOB, just outside the steps to West Exec. It was a black-and-white picture of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson. The caption underneath was printed in large, blocky letters.
* * *
MEETINGS OF CHANGE
* * *
I always thought this was cheating. A more accurate “meetings” poster would have shown a staffer browsing Amazon for Christmas presents while listening to a conference call on mute. Still, I got the point. Everything I did somehow affected the Oval. Every action bolstered, or diminished, the most powerful person on earth.
Too bad the message on the walls was belied by the one in the floor. Throughout the EEOB hallways, the black-and-white tiles were dotted liberally with fossils. These were not impressive specimens, dinosaur teeth or mastodon tusks. What we had were mollusks out the wazoo. Most were little more than leggy spirals. A few looked like roaches. Tyrannosaurs these were not.
And yet I couldn’t help but give our long-extinct friends a backstory. As far as I was concerned, the petrified little creatures beneath me had once been the White House staffers of their era. Swimming self-assuredly through prehistoric ooze, they reveled in their outsize importance. Perhaps they even thought about their legacies. Now, a few million years later, here they were, stomped on by the apex predators of a different age.
More than anything else, this cognitive dissonance—the disconnect between floor and poster—was the defining feature of White House life. There is something fundamentally ridiculous about putting humanity’s fate in the hands of mortals. I’m not saying there’s a better way to do it. I’m just saying that being a Very Important Person on one hand and a future fossil on the other takes an emotional toll. To live in such a contradiction, even for a righteous cause, is a low-grade form of agony. It pulls you apart at the seams.
Every White House staffer dealt with this inner turmoil differently. Some became short-tempered. Others took up yoga, smoking, or both. An impressive handful ran marathons. Almost everyone drank.
A few—fewer than you might think—became grandiose. These were the people whose egos ceased to exist except in relation to the Oval. They lost the ability to distinguish between themselves and the president, between petty personal jealousies and weighty national concerns. I don’t blame those who came to believe their jobs made them more than human. A demigod complex is the malaria of the D.C. swamp. Still, it was sad to see good people fall victim.