“Chap­ter 24: Whose Bid Is It?” Pete Souza and I sat oppo­site Mar­vin and Reg­gie at the Air Force One con­fer­ence room table, all of us a bit bleary-eyed as we sort­ed through our cards. We were on our way to Mumbai—the first leg of a nine-day trip to Asia that would include not only my first vis­it to India but also a stop in Jakar­ta, a G20 meet­ing in Seoul, and an Asia-Pacif­ic Eco­nom­ic Coop­er­a­tion (APEC) meet­ing in Yoko­hama, Japan. The plane had been hum­ming with activ­i­ty ear­li­er in the flight, with staffers work­ing on lap­tops and pol­i­cy advi­sors hud­dling over the sched­ule. After ten hours in the air, with a refu­el­ing stop at Ram­stein Air Base in Ger­many, almost every­body on board (includ­ing Michelle, in the for­ward cab­in; Valerie, on the couch out­side the con­fer­ence room; and sev­er­al senior staffers stretched out at odd angles on the floor) had gone to sleep. Unable to wind down, I’d enlist­ed our reg­u­lar four­some for a game of Spades, and I was try­ing to read through my brief­ing book and sign­ing a stack of cor­re­spon­dence between plays. My divid­ed attention—along with Reggie’s sec­ond gin and tonic—may have account­ed for the fact that Mar­vin and Pete were up six games to two on us, at ten dol­lars a pop.

“It’s your bid, sir,” Mar­vin said.

“What you got, Reg?” I asked.

“Maybe one,” Reg­gie said.

“We’ll go board,” I said.

“We’re going eight,” Pete said.

Reg­gie shook his head in dis­gust. “We’re switch­ing decks after the next hand,” he mut­tered, tak­ing anoth­er sip of his drink. “These cards are cursed.”

ONLY THREE DAYS had passed since the midterm elec­tions, and I was grate­ful for the chance to get out of Wash­ing­ton. The results had left Democ­rats shell-shocked and Repub­li­cans exu­ber­ant, and I’d wok­en up the next morn­ing with a mix of weari­ness, hurt, anger, and shame, the way a box­er must feel after com­ing out on the wrong end of a heavy­weight bout. The dom­i­nant sto­ry line in the post­elec­tion cov­er­age sug­gest­ed that the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom had been right all along: that I’d attempt­ed to do too much and hadn’t stayed focused on the econ­o­my; that Oba­macare was a fatal error; that I’d tried to res­ur­rect the kind of big-spend­ing, big-gov­ern­ment lib­er­al­ism that even Bill Clin­ton had pro­nounced dead years ago. The fact that in my press con­fer­ence the day after the elec­tion I refused to admit as much, that I seemed to cling to the idea that my admin­is­tra­tion had pur­sued the right policies—even if we clear­ly hadn’t man­aged to sell them effectively—struck pun­dits as arro­gant and delu­sion­al, the sign of a sin­ner who wasn’t con­trite.

The truth was, I didn’t regret paving the way for twen­ty mil­lion peo­ple to get health insur­ance. Nor did I regret the Recov­ery Act—the hard evi­dence showed that aus­ter­i­ty in response to a reces­sion would have been dis­as­trous. I didn’t regret how we’d han­dled the finan­cial cri­sis, giv­en the choic­es we’d faced (although I did regret not hav­ing come up with a bet­ter plan to help stem the tide of fore­clo­sures). And I sure as hell wasn’t sor­ry I’d pro­posed a cli­mate change bill and pushed for immi­gra­tion reform. I was just mad that I hadn’t yet got­ten either item through Congress—mainly because, on my very first day in office, I hadn’t had the fore­sight to tell Har­ry Reid and the rest of the Sen­ate Democ­rats to revise the cham­ber rules and get rid of the fil­i­buster once and for all.

As far as I was con­cerned, the elec­tion didn’t prove that our agen­da had been wrong. It just proved that—whether for lack of tal­ent, cun­ning, charm, or good fortune—I’d failed to ral­ly the nation, as FDR had once done, behind what I knew to be right. Which to me was just as damn­ing.

Much to the relief of Gibbs and my press shop, I’d end­ed the press con­fer­ence before bar­ing my stub­born, tor­tured soul. I real­ized that jus­ti­fy­ing the past mat­tered less than plan­ning what to do next.

I was going to have to find a way to recon­nect with the Amer­i­can people—not just to strength­en my hand in nego­ti­a­tions with Repub­li­cans but to get reelect­ed. A bet­ter econ­o­my would help, but even that was hard­ly assured. I need­ed to get out of the White House bub­ble, to engage more fre­quent­ly with vot­ers. Mean­while, Axe offered his own assess­ment of what had gone wrong, say­ing that in the rush to get things done, we’d neglect­ed our promise to change Washington—by sidelin­ing spe­cial inter­ests, and increas­ing trans­paren­cy and fis­cal respon­si­bil­i­ty across the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. If we want­ed to win back the vot­ers who’d left us, he argued, we had to reclaim those themes.

But was that right? I wasn’t so sure. Yes, we’d been hurt by the sausage-mak­ing around the ACA, and fair­ly or not, we’d been tar­nished by the bank bailouts. On the oth­er hand, I could point to scores of “good gov­ern­ment” ini­tia­tives we’d intro­duced, whether it was plac­ing lim­its on the hir­ing of for­mer lob­by­ists, or giv­ing the pub­lic access to data from fed­er­al agen­cies, or scour­ing agency bud­gets to elim­i­nate waste. All these actions were wor­thy on their mer­its, and I was glad we’d tak­en them; it was one of the rea­sons we hadn’t had a whiff of scan­dal around my admin­is­tra­tion.

Polit­i­cal­ly, though, no one seemed to care about our work to clean up the government—any more than they cred­it­ed us for hav­ing bent over back­ward to solic­it Repub­li­can ideas on every sin­gle one of our leg­isla­tive ini­tia­tives. One of our biggest promis­es had been to end par­ti­san bick­er­ing and focus on prac­ti­cal efforts to address cit­i­zen demands. Our prob­lem, as Mitch McConnell had cal­cu­lat­ed from the start, was that so long as Repub­li­cans uni­form­ly resist­ed our over­tures and raised hell over even the most mod­er­ate of pro­pos­als, any­thing we did could be por­trayed as par­ti­san, con­tro­ver­sial, radical—even ille­git­i­mate. In fact, many of our pro­gres­sive allies believed that we hadn’t been par­ti­san enough. In their view, we’d com­pro­mised too much, and by con­tin­u­al­ly chas­ing the false promise of bipar­ti­san­ship, we’d not only empow­ered McConnell and squan­dered big Demo­c­ra­t­ic majori­ties; we’d thrown a giant wet blan­ket over our base—as evi­denced by the deci­sion of so many Democ­rats to not both­er to vote in the midterms.

Along with hav­ing to fig­ure out a mes­sage and pol­i­cy reboot, I was now fac­ing sig­nif­i­cant turnover in White House per­son­nel. On the for­eign pol­i­cy team, Jim Jones—who, despite his many strengths, had nev­er felt ful­ly com­fort­able in a staff role after years of command—had resigned in Octo­ber. Luck­i­ly, Tom Donilon was prov­ing to be a real work­horse and had ably assumed the nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor role, with Denis McDo­nough mov­ing up to deputy nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor and Ben Rhodes assum­ing many of Denis’s old duties. On eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, Peter Orszag and Christy Romer had returned to the pri­vate sec­tor, replaced by Jack Lew, a sea­soned bud­get expert who’d man­aged OMB under Bill Clin­ton, and Aus­tan Gools­bee, who’d been work­ing with us on the recov­ery. Then there was Lar­ry Sum­mers, who had stopped by the Oval one day in Sep­tem­ber to tell me that with the finan­cial cri­sis behind us, it was time for him to exit. He’d be leav­ing at year’s end.

“What am I going to do with­out you around to explain why I’m wrong?” I asked, only half-jok­ing. Lar­ry smiled.

“Mr. Pres­i­dent,” he said, “you were actu­al­ly less wrong than most.”

I’d grown gen­uine­ly fond of those who were leav­ing. Not only had they served me well, but despite their var­i­ous idio­syn­crasies, they’d each brought a seri­ous­ness of purpose—a com­mit­ment to pol­i­cy mak­ing based on rea­son and evidence—that was born of a desire to do right by the Amer­i­can peo­ple. It was, how­ev­er, the impend­ing loss of my two clos­est polit­i­cal advi­sors, as well as the need to find a new chief of staff, that unset­tled me most.

Axe had always planned to leave after the midterms. Hav­ing lived apart from his fam­i­ly for two years, he bad­ly need­ed a break before join­ing my reelec­tion cam­paign. Gibbs, who’d been in the fox­hole with me con­tin­u­ous­ly since I’d won my Sen­ate pri­ma­ry race, was just as worn down. Although he remained as well pre­pared and fear­less a press sec­re­tary as ever, the strain of stand­ing at a podi­um day after day, tak­ing all the hits that had been com­ing our way, had made his rela­tion­ship with the White House press corps com­bat­ive enough that the rest of the team wor­ried that it was neg­a­tive­ly affect­ing our cov­er­age.

I was still get­ting used to the prospect of fight­ing the polit­i­cal bat­tles ahead with­out Axe and Gibbs at my side, though I took heart in the con­ti­nu­ity pro­vid­ed by our young and skill­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor, Dan Pfeif­fer, who had worked close­ly with them on mes­sag­ing since the start of our 2007 cam­paign. As for Rahm, I con­sid­ered it a minor mir­a­cle that he’d last­ed as long as he had with­out either killing some­body or drop­ping dead from a stroke. We’d made a habit of con­duct­ing our end-of-day meet­ings out­side when the weath­er allowed, strolling two or three times around the dri­ve­way that encir­cled the South Lawn as we tried to fig­ure out what to do about the lat­est cri­sis or con­tro­ver­sy. More than once we’d asked our­selves why we’d cho­sen such stress­ful lives.

“After we’re fin­ished, we should try some­thing sim­pler,” I said to him one day. “We could move our fam­i­lies to Hawaii and open a smooth­ie stand on the beach.”

“Smooth­ies are too com­pli­cat­ed,” Rahm said. “We’ll sell T‑shirts. But just white T‑shirts. In medi­um. That’s it—no oth­er col­ors or pat­terns or sizes. We don’t want to have to make any deci­sions. If cus­tomers want some­thing dif­fer­ent, they can go some­place else.”

I had rec­og­nized the signs that Rahm was close to burnout, but I’d assumed he’d wait for the new year to leave. Instead, he’d used one of our evening walks in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber to tell me that long­time Chica­go may­or Richard M. Daley had just announced that he wouldn’t be seek­ing a sev­enth con­sec­u­tive term. Rahm want­ed to run—it was a job he’d dreamed of since enter­ing politics—and with the elec­tion hap­pen­ing in Feb­ru­ary, he need­ed to leave the White House by the first of Octo­ber if he hoped to have a go at it.

He looked gen­uine­ly dis­traught. “I know I’m putting you in a bind,” he said, “but with only five and a half months to run a race—”

I stopped him before he could fin­ish and said he’d have my full sup­port.

A week or so lat­er, at a pri­vate farewell cer­e­mo­ny in the res­i­dence, I pre­sent­ed him with a framed copy of a to-do list that I’d hand­writ­ten on a legal pad and passed to him dur­ing my first week in office. Almost every item had been checked off, I told the assem­bled staff, a mea­sure of how effec­tive he’d been. Rahm teared up—a blem­ish on his tough-guy image for which he lat­er cursed me.

None of this turnover was unusu­al for an admin­is­tra­tion, and I saw the poten­tial ben­e­fits to shak­ing things up. More than once we’d been accused of being too insu­lar and tight­ly con­trolled, in need of fresh per­spec­tives. Rahm’s skill set would be less rel­e­vant with­out a Demo­c­ra­t­ic House to help advance leg­is­la­tion. With Pete Rouse serv­ing as inter­im chief of staff, I was lean­ing toward hir­ing Bill Daley, who’d been com­merce sec­re­tary in the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion and was the broth­er of Chicago’s out­go­ing may­or, to replace Rahm. Bald­ing and about a decade old­er than me, with a dis­tinc­tive South Side accent that evoked his Irish work­ing-class roots, Bill had a rep­u­ta­tion as an effec­tive, prag­mat­ic deal­mak­er with strong rela­tion­ships with both labor and the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty; and while I didn’t know him the way I knew Rahm, I thought his affa­ble, non­ide­o­log­i­cal style might be well suit­ed for what I expect­ed to be a less fran­tic phase of my admin­is­tra­tion. And along with some new faces, I was thrilled that I’d be get­ting one back start­ing in Jan­u­ary when David Plouffe, fresh from a two-year sab­bat­i­cal with his fam­i­ly, would return as a senior advi­sor and pro­vide our White House oper­a­tion with the same strate­gic think­ing, intense focus, and lack of ego that had ben­e­fit­ed us so much dur­ing the cam­paign.

Still, I couldn’t help feel­ing a lit­tle melan­choly over the changes the new year would bring: I’d be sur­round­ed by even few­er peo­ple who’d known me before I was pres­i­dent, and by few­er col­leagues who were also friends, who’d seen me tired, con­fused, angry, or defeat­ed and yet had nev­er stopped hav­ing my back. It was a lone­ly thought at a lone­ly time. Which prob­a­bly explains why I was still play­ing cards with Mar­vin, Reg­gie, and Pete when I had a full day of meet­ings and appear­ances sched­uled to start in less than sev­en hours.

“Did you guys just win again?” I asked Pete after we fin­ished the hand.

Pete nod­ded, prompt­ing Reg­gie to gath­er up all the cards, rise from his chair, and toss them into the trash bin.

“Hey, Reg, that’s still a good deck!” Pete said, not both­er­ing to dis­guise his plea­sure at the beat­down he and Mar­vin had just admin­is­tered. “Every­body los­es some­times.”

Reg­gie flashed a hard look at Pete. “Show me some­one who’s okay with los­ing,” he said, “and I’ll show you a los­er.”

I’D NEVER BEEN to India before, but the coun­try had always held a spe­cial place in my imag­i­na­tion. Maybe it was its sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, an esti­mat­ed two thou­sand dis­tinct eth­nic groups, and more than sev­en hun­dred lan­guages spo­ken. Maybe it was because I’d spent a part of my child­hood in Indone­sia lis­ten­ing to the epic Hin­du tales of the Ramayana and the Mahāb­hāra­ta, or because of my inter­est in East­ern reli­gions, or because of a group of Pak­istani and Indi­an col­lege friends who’d taught me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bol­ly­wood movies.

More than any­thing, though, my fas­ci­na­tion with India had to do with Mahat­ma Gand­hi. Along with Lin­coln, King, and Man­dela, Gand­hi had pro­found­ly influ­enced my think­ing. As a young man, I’d stud­ied his writ­ings and found him giv­ing voice to some of my deep­est instincts. His notion of satya­gra­ha, or devo­tion to truth, and the pow­er of non­vi­o­lent resis­tance to stir the con­science; his insis­tence on our com­mon human­i­ty and the essen­tial one­ness of all reli­gions; and his belief in every society’s oblig­a­tion, through its polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and social arrange­ments, to rec­og­nize the equal worth and dig­ni­ty of all people—each of these ideas res­onat­ed with me.

Gandhi’s actions had stirred me even more than his words; he’d put his beliefs to the test by risk­ing his life, going to prison, and throw­ing him­self ful­ly into the strug­gles of his peo­ple. His non­vi­o­lent cam­paign for Indi­an inde­pen­dence from Britain, which began in 1915 and con­tin­ued for more than thir­ty years, hadn’t just helped over­come an empire and lib­er­ate much of the sub­con­ti­nent, it had set off a moral charge that pulsed around the globe. It became a bea­con for oth­er dis­pos­sessed, mar­gin­al­ized groups—including Black Amer­i­cans in the Jim Crow South—intent on secur­ing their free­dom.

Michelle and I had a chance ear­ly in the trip to vis­it Mani Bha­van, the mod­est two-sto­ry build­ing tucked into a qui­et Mum­bai neigh­bor­hood that had been Gandhi’s home base for many years. Before the start of our tour, our guide, a gra­cious woman in a blue sari, showed us the guest­book Dr. King had signed in 1959, when he’d trav­eled to India to draw inter­na­tion­al atten­tion to the strug­gle for racial jus­tice in the Unit­ed States and pay homage to the man whose teach­ings had inspired him.

The guide then invit­ed us upstairs to see Gandhi’s pri­vate quar­ters. Tak­ing off our shoes, we entered a sim­ple room with a floor of smooth, pat­terned tile, its ter­race doors open to admit a slight breeze and a pale, hazy light. I stared at the spar­tan floor bed and pil­low, the col­lec­tion of spin­ning wheels, the old-fash­ioned phone and low wood­en writ­ing desk, try­ing to imag­ine Gand­hi present in the room, a slight, brown-skinned man in a plain cot­ton dhoti, his legs fold­ed under him, com­pos­ing a let­ter to the British viceroy or chart­ing the next phase of the Salt March. And in that moment, I had the strongest wish to sit beside him and talk. To ask him where he’d found the strength and imag­i­na­tion to do so much with so very lit­tle. To ask how he’d recov­ered from dis­ap­point­ment.

He’d had more than his share. For all his extra­or­di­nary gifts, Gand­hi hadn’t been able to heal the subcontinent’s deep reli­gious schisms or pre­vent its par­ti­tion­ing into a pre­dom­i­nant­ly Hin­du India and an over­whelm­ing­ly Mus­lim Pak­istan, a seis­mic event in which untold num­bers died in sec­tar­i­an vio­lence and mil­lions of fam­i­lies were forced to pack up what they could car­ry and migrate across new­ly estab­lished bor­ders. Despite his labors, he hadn’t undone India’s sti­fling caste sys­tem. Some­how, though, he’d marched, fast­ed, and preached well into his seventies—until that final day in 1948, when on his way to prayer, he was shot at point-blank range by a young Hin­du extrem­ist who viewed his ecu­menism as a betray­al of the faith.

IN MANY RESPECTS, mod­ern-day India count­ed as a suc­cess sto­ry, hav­ing sur­vived repeat­ed changeovers in gov­ern­ment, bit­ter feuds with­in polit­i­cal par­ties, var­i­ous armed sep­a­ratist move­ments, and all man­ner of cor­rup­tion scan­dals. The tran­si­tion to a more mar­ket-based econ­o­my in the 1990s had unleashed the extra­or­di­nary entre­pre­neur­ial tal­ents of the Indi­an people—leading to soar­ing growth rates, a thriv­ing high-tech sec­tor, and a steadi­ly expand­ing mid­dle class.

As a chief archi­tect of India’s eco­nom­ic trans­for­ma­tion, Prime Min­is­ter Man­mo­han Singh seemed like a fit­ting emblem of this progress: a mem­ber of the tiny, often per­se­cut­ed Sikh reli­gious minor­i­ty who’d risen to the high­est office in the land, and a self-effac­ing tech­no­crat who’d won people’s trust not by appeal­ing to their pas­sions but by bring­ing about high­er liv­ing stan­dards and main­tain­ing a well-earned rep­u­ta­tion for not being cor­rupt. Singh and I had devel­oped a warm and pro­duc­tive rela­tion­ship. While he could be cau­tious in for­eign pol­i­cy, unwill­ing to get out too far ahead of an Indi­an bureau­cra­cy that was his­tor­i­cal­ly sus­pi­cious of U.S. inten­tions, our time togeth­er con­firmed my ini­tial impres­sion of him as a man of uncom­mon wis­dom and decen­cy; and dur­ing my vis­it to the cap­i­tal city of New Del­hi, we reached agree­ments to strength­en U.S. coop­er­a­tion on coun­tert­er­ror­ism, glob­al health, nuclear secu­ri­ty, and trade.

What I couldn’t tell was whether Singh’s rise to pow­er rep­re­sent­ed the future of India’s democ­ra­cy or mere­ly an aber­ra­tion. Our first evening in Del­hi, he and his wife, Gur­sha­ran Kaur, host­ed a din­ner par­ty for me and Michelle at their res­i­dence, and before join­ing the oth­er guests in a can­dlelit court­yard, Singh and I had a few min­utes to chat alone. With­out the usu­al flock of min­ders and note­tak­ers hov­er­ing over our shoul­ders, the prime min­is­ter spoke more open­ly about the clouds he saw on the hori­zon. The econ­o­my wor­ried him, he said. Although India had fared bet­ter than many oth­er coun­tries in the wake of the finan­cial cri­sis, the glob­al slow­down would inevitably make it hard­er to gen­er­ate jobs for India’s young and rapid­ly grow­ing pop­u­la­tion.

Then there was the prob­lem of Pak­istan: Its con­tin­u­ing fail­ure to work with India to inves­ti­gate the 2008 ter­ror­ist attacks on hotels and oth­er sites in Mum­bai had sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased ten­sions between the two coun­tries, in part because Lashkar-e-Tayy­i­ba, the ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion respon­si­ble, was believed to have links to Pakistan’s intel­li­gence ser­vice. Singh had resist­ed calls to retal­i­ate against Pak­istan after the attacks, but his restraint had cost him polit­i­cal­ly. He feared that ris­ing anti-Mus­lim sen­ti­ment had strength­ened the influ­ence of India’s main oppo­si­tion par­ty, the Hin­du nation­al­ist Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP).

“In uncer­tain times, Mr. Pres­i­dent,” the prime min­is­ter said, “the call of reli­gious and eth­nic sol­i­dar­i­ty can be intox­i­cat­ing. And it’s not so hard for politi­cians to exploit that, in India or any­where else.”

I nod­ded, recall­ing the con­ver­sa­tion I’d had with Václav Hav­el dur­ing my vis­it to Prague and his warn­ing about the ris­ing tide of illib­er­al­ism in Europe. If glob­al­iza­tion and a his­toric eco­nom­ic cri­sis were fuel­ing these trends in rel­a­tive­ly wealthy nations—if I was see­ing it even in the Unit­ed States with the Tea Party—how could India be immune?

For the truth was that despite the resilience of its democ­ra­cy and its impres­sive recent eco­nom­ic per­for­mance, India still bore lit­tle resem­blance to the egal­i­tar­i­an, peace­ful, and sus­tain­able soci­ety Gand­hi had envi­sioned. Across the coun­try, mil­lions con­tin­ued to live in squalor, trapped in sun­baked vil­lages or labyrinthine slums, even as the titans of Indi­an indus­try enjoyed lifestyles that the rajas and moguls of old would have envied. Vio­lence, both pub­lic and pri­vate, remained an all-too-per­va­sive part of Indi­an life. Express­ing hos­til­i­ty toward Pak­istan was still the quick­est route to nation­al uni­ty, with many Indi­ans tak­ing great pride in the knowl­edge that their coun­try had devel­oped a nuclear weapons pro­gram to match Pakistan’s, untrou­bled by the fact that a sin­gle mis­cal­cu­la­tion by either side could risk region­al anni­hi­la­tion.

Most of all, India’s pol­i­tics still revolved around reli­gion, clan, and caste. In that sense, Singh’s ele­va­tion as prime min­is­ter, some­times her­ald­ed as a hall­mark of the country’s progress in over­com­ing sec­tar­i­an divides, was some­what deceiv­ing. He hadn’t orig­i­nal­ly become prime min­is­ter as a result of his own pop­u­lar­i­ty. In fact, he owed his posi­tion to Sonia Gandhi—the Ital­ian-born wid­ow of for­mer prime min­is­ter Rajiv Gand­hi and the head of the Con­gress Par­ty, who’d declined to take the job her­self after lead­ing her par­ty coali­tion to vic­to­ry and had instead anoint­ed Singh.

More than one polit­i­cal observ­er believed that she’d cho­sen Singh pre­cise­ly because as an elder­ly Sikh with no nation­al polit­i­cal base, he posed no threat to her forty-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was groom­ing to take over the Con­gress Par­ty.

Both Sonia and Rahul Gand­hi sat at our din­ner table that night. She was a strik­ing woman in her six­ties, dressed in a tra­di­tion­al sari, with dark, prob­ing eyes and a qui­et, regal pres­ence. That she—a for­mer stay-at-home moth­er of Euro­pean descent—had emerged from her grief after her hus­band was killed by a Sri Lankan separatist’s sui­cide bomb in 1991 to become a lead­ing nation­al politi­cian tes­ti­fied to the endur­ing pow­er of the fam­i­ly dynasty. Rajiv was the grand­son of Jawa­har­lal Nehru, India’s first prime min­is­ter and an icon in the inde­pen­dence move­ment. His moth­er, Nehru’s daugh­ter, Indi­ra Gand­hi, had spent a total of six­teen years as prime min­is­ter her­self, rely­ing on a more ruth­less brand of pol­i­tics than her father had prac­ticed, until 1984 when she, too, was assas­si­nat­ed.

At din­ner that night, Sonia Gand­hi lis­tened more than she spoke, care­ful to defer to Singh when pol­i­cy mat­ters came up, and often steered the con­ver­sa­tion toward her son. It became clear to me, though, that her pow­er was attrib­ut­able to a shrewd and force­ful intel­li­gence. As for Rahul, he seemed smart and earnest, his good looks resem­bling his mother’s. He offered up his thoughts on the future of pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics, occa­sion­al­ly paus­ing to probe me on the details of my 2008 cam­paign. But there was a ner­vous, unformed qual­i­ty about him, as if he were a stu­dent who’d done the course­work and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the apti­tude or the pas­sion to mas­ter the sub­ject.

As it was get­ting late, I noticed Singh fight­ing off sleep, lift­ing his glass every so often to wake him­self up with a sip of water. I sig­naled to Michelle that it was time to say our good­byes. The prime min­is­ter and his wife walked us to our car. In the dim light, he looked frail, old­er than his sev­en­ty-eight years, and as we drove off I won­dered what would hap­pen when he left office. Would the baton be suc­cess­ful­ly passed to Rahul, ful­fill­ing the des­tiny laid out by his moth­er and pre­serv­ing the Con­gress Party’s dom­i­nance over the divi­sive nation­al­ism tout­ed by the BJP?

Some­how, I was doubt­ful. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part, fol­low­ing the play­book of lib­er­al democ­ra­cies across the post–Cold War world: uphold­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al order; attend­ing to the quo­tid­i­an, often tech­ni­cal work of boost­ing the GDP; and expand­ing the social safe­ty net. Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democ­ra­cy, espe­cial­ly in big, mul­ti­eth­nic, mul­tire­li­gious soci­eties like India and the Unit­ed States. Not rev­o­lu­tion­ary leaps or major cul­tur­al over­hauls; not a fix for every social pathol­o­gy or last­ing answers for those in search of pur­pose and mean­ing in their lives. Just the obser­vance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tol­er­ate our dif­fer­ences, and gov­ern­ment poli­cies that raised liv­ing stan­dards and improved edu­ca­tion enough to tem­per humanity’s baser impuls­es.

Except now I found myself ask­ing whether those impulses—of vio­lence, greed, cor­rup­tion, nation­al­ism, racism, and reli­gious intol­er­ance, the all-too-human desire to beat back our own uncer­tain­ty and mor­tal­i­ty and sense of insignif­i­cance by sub­or­di­nat­ing others—were too strong for any democ­ra­cy to per­ma­nent­ly con­tain. For they seemed to lie in wait every­where, ready to resur­face when­ev­er growth rates stalled or demo­graph­ics changed or a charis­mat­ic leader chose to ride the wave of people’s fears and resent­ments. And as much as I might have wished oth­er­wise, there was no Mahat­ma Gand­hi around to tell me what I might do to hold such impuls­es back.

HISTORICALLY, CONGRESSIONAL ambi­tions tend to be low dur­ing the six- or sev­en-week stretch between Elec­tion Day and the Christ­mas recess, espe­cial­ly with a shift in par­ty con­trol about to hap­pen. The dispir­it­ed losers just want to go home; the win­ners want to run out the clock until the new Con­gress gets sworn in. On Jan­u­ary 5, 2011, we’d be seat­ing the most Repub­li­can House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives since 1947, which meant I’d be unable to get any leg­is­la­tion called for a vote, much less passed, with­out the assent of the incom­ing Speak­er of the House, John Boehn­er. And if there was any ques­tion about his agen­da, Boehn­er had already announced that the first bill he’d be call­ing to a vote was a total repeal of the ACA.

We did, how­ev­er, have a win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty dur­ing the com­ing lame-duck ses­sion. Hav­ing returned from my vis­it to Asia, I was intent on get­ting sev­er­al key ini­tia­tives across the fin­ish line before Con­gress adjourned for the hol­i­days: rat­i­fi­ca­tion of the New START on nuclear non­pro­lif­er­a­tion that we’d nego­ti­at­ed with the Rus­sians; repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the law that barred gays, les­bians, and bisex­u­als from open­ly serv­ing in the mil­i­tary; and pas­sage of the DREAM Act, which would estab­lish a path to cit­i­zen­ship for a large swath of chil­dren of undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants.

Pete Rouse and Phil Schiliro, who between them had near­ly sev­en­ty years of Capi­tol Hill expe­ri­ence, looked dubi­ous when I ran through my lame-duck to-do list. Axe actu­al­ly chor­tled.

“Is that it?” he asked sar­cas­ti­cal­ly.

Actu­al­ly, it wasn’t. I’d for­got­ten to men­tion that we need­ed to pass a child nutri­tion bill that Michelle had made a cen­tral plank in her fight against child­hood obe­si­ty. “It’s good pol­i­cy,” I said, “and Michelle’s team’s done a great job lin­ing up sup­port from children’s health advo­cates. Plus, if we don’t get it passed, I won’t be able to go home.”

I under­stood some of my staff’s skep­ti­cism about try­ing to move such an ambi­tious agen­da. Even if we could muster the six­ty votes need­ed for each of those con­tro­ver­sial bills, it wasn’t clear that Har­ry Reid could get enough coop­er­a­tion from Mitch McConnell to sched­ule so many votes in such a short time. Still, I didn’t think I was being entire­ly delu­sion­al. Almost every item on my list already had some leg­isla­tive trac­tion and had either cleared or seemed like­ly to clear the House. And while we hadn’t had much luck over­com­ing GOP-led Sen­ate fil­i­busters pre­vi­ous­ly, I knew that McConnell had a big-tick­et item of his own that he des­per­ate­ly want­ed to get done: pass­ing a law to extend the so-called Bush tax cuts, which would oth­er­wise auto­mat­i­cal­ly expire at the end of the year.

This gave us lever­age.

I’d long opposed my predecessor’s sig­na­ture domes­tic leg­is­la­tion, laws passed in 2001 and 2003 that changed the U.S. tax code in ways that dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly ben­e­fit­ed high-net-worth indi­vid­u­als while accel­er­at­ing the trend of wealth and income inequal­i­ty. War­ren Buf­fett liked to point out that the law enabled him to pay tax­es at a sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er rate—proportionate to his income, which came almost entire­ly from cap­i­tal gains and dividends—than his sec­re­tary did on her salary. The laws’ changes to the estate tax alone had reduced the tax bur­den for the top 2 per­cent of America’s rich­est fam­i­lies by more than $130 bil­lion. Not only that, but by tak­ing rough­ly $1.3 tril­lion in pro­ject­ed rev­enue out of the U.S. Trea­sury, the laws had helped turn a fed­er­al bud­get sur­plus under Bill Clin­ton into a bur­geon­ing deficit—a deficit that many Repub­li­cans were now using to jus­ti­fy their calls for cuts to Social Secu­ri­ty, Medicare, Med­ic­aid, and the rest of America’s social safe­ty net.

The Bush tax cuts might have been bad pol­i­cy, but they had also mod­est­ly low­ered the tax bill of most Amer­i­cans, which made rolling them back polit­i­cal­ly tricky. Polls con­sis­tent­ly showed a strong major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans favor­ing high­er tax­es on the rich. But even well-to-do lawyers and doc­tors didn’t con­sid­er them­selves rich, espe­cial­ly if they lived in high-cost areas; and after a decade in which the bot­tom 90 per­cent of earn­ers had seen stag­nant wages, very few peo­ple thought their own tax­es should go up.

Dur­ing the cam­paign, my team and I had set­tled on what we con­sid­ered a pol­i­cy sweet spot, propos­ing that the Bush tax cuts be repealed selec­tive­ly, affect­ing only those fam­i­lies with income greater than $250,000 a year (or indi­vid­u­als earn­ing more than $200,000). This approach had almost uni­ver­sal sup­port from con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats, would affect only the rich­est 2 per­cent of Amer­i­cans, and would still yield rough­ly $680 bil­lion over the next decade, funds we could use to expand child­care, health­care, job train­ing, and edu­ca­tion pro­grams for the less well-off.

I hadn’t changed my mind on any of this—getting the rich to pay more in tax­es was not only a mat­ter of fair­ness but also the only way to fund new ini­tia­tives. But as had been true with so many of my cam­paign pro­pos­als, the finan­cial cri­sis had forced me to rethink when we should try to do it. Ear­ly in my term, when it looked like the coun­try might careen into a depres­sion, my eco­nom­ic team had per­sua­sive­ly argued that any increase in taxes—even those tar­get­ing rich peo­ple and For­tune 500 companies—would be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive, since it would take mon­ey out of the econ­o­my pre­cise­ly at a time when we want­ed indi­vid­u­als and busi­ness­es to get out there and spend. With the econ­o­my bare­ly on the mend, the prospect of tax hikes still made the team ner­vous.

And as it was, Mitch McConnell had threat­ened to block any­thing less than a full exten­sion of the Bush tax cuts. Which meant that our only option for get­ting rid of them right away—an option many pro­gres­sive com­men­ta­tors urged us to take—involved doing noth­ing and sim­ply let­ting everybody’s tax rates auto­mat­i­cal­ly revert to high­er, Clin­ton-era lev­els on the first of Jan­u­ary. Democ­rats could then return in the new year and pro­pose replace­ment leg­is­la­tion that would reduce tax rates for Amer­i­cans mak­ing less than $250,000 a year, essen­tial­ly dar­ing Repub­li­cans to vote no.

It was a strat­e­gy we strong­ly con­sid­ered. But Joe Biden and our leg­isla­tive team wor­ried that giv­en how bad­ly we’d lost in the midterms, cen­trist Democ­rats might break ranks on the issue and then Repub­li­cans would use those defec­tions to mar­shal a vote that made the tax cuts per­ma­nent. Pol­i­tics aside, the prob­lem with play­ing chick­en with the GOP, I decid­ed, was the imme­di­ate impact it would have on a still-frag­ile econ­o­my. Even if we could hold our Democ­rats in line and Repub­li­cans ulti­mate­ly buck­led under the pres­sure, it still could take months to get any tax leg­is­la­tion through a divid­ed Con­gress. In the mean­time, mid­dle- and work­ing-class Amer­i­cans would have small­er pay­checks, busi­ness­es would rein in their invest­ments even fur­ther, the stock mar­ket would tank again, and the econ­o­my would almost cer­tain­ly end up back in a reces­sion.

After gam­ing out var­i­ous sce­nar­ios, I sent Joe up to Capi­tol Hill to nego­ti­ate with McConnell. We would sup­port a two-year exten­sion of all the Bush tax cuts—but only if Repub­li­cans agreed to extend emer­gency unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits, the Recov­ery Act’s low­er- to mid­dle-class tax cred­it (Mak­ing Work Pay), and anoth­er pack­age of refund­able tax cred­its ben­e­fit­ing the work­ing poor for an equiv­a­lent peri­od.

McConnell imme­di­ate­ly balked. Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly declared that “the sin­gle most impor­tant thing we want to achieve is for Pres­i­dent Oba­ma to be a one-term pres­i­dent,” he was appar­ent­ly loath to let me claim that I’d cut tax­es for the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans with­out Repub­li­cans hav­ing forced me to do it. I couldn’t say I was sur­prised; one of the rea­sons I’d cho­sen Joe to act as an intermediary—in addi­tion to his Sen­ate expe­ri­ence and leg­isla­tive acumen—was my aware­ness that in McConnell’s mind, nego­ti­a­tions with the vice pres­i­dent didn’t inflame the Repub­li­can base in quite the same way that any appear­ance of coop­er­at­ing with (Black, Mus­lim social­ist) Oba­ma was bound to do.

After a lot of back-and-forth, and after we’d agreed to swap the Mak­ing Work Pay tax cred­it for a pay­roll tax cut, McConnell final­ly relent­ed and, on Decem­ber 6, 2010, I was able to announce that a com­pre­hen­sive agree­ment had been reached.

From a pol­i­cy per­spec­tive, we were pleased with the out­come. While it was painful to keep the tax cuts for the wealthy in place for anoth­er two years, we’d man­aged to extend tax relief for mid­dle-class fam­i­lies while lever­ag­ing an addi­tion­al $212 bil­lion worth of eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed at those Amer­i­cans most in need—the kind of pack­age we’d have no chance of pass­ing through a Repub­li­can-con­trolled House as a stand-alone bill.

As for the pol­i­tics behind the deal, I explained to Valerie that the two-year time frame rep­re­sent­ed a high-stakes wager between the Repub­li­cans and me. I was bet­ting that in Novem­ber 2012, I’d be com­ing off a suc­cess­ful reelec­tion cam­paign, allow­ing me to end the tax cuts for the wealthy from a posi­tion of strength. They were bet­ting that they’d beat me—and that a new Repub­li­can pres­i­dent would help them make the Bush tax cuts per­ma­nent.

The fact that the deal left so much rid­ing on the next pres­i­den­tial elec­tion might explain why it imme­di­ate­ly pro­voked out­rage from left-lean­ing com­men­ta­tors. They accused me of cav­ing to McConnell and Boehn­er and of being com­pro­mised by my bud­dies on Wall Street and advi­sors like Lar­ry and Tim. They warned that the pay­roll tax cut would weak­en the Social Secu­ri­ty Trust Funds; that the refund­able tax cred­its ben­e­fit­ing the work­ing poor would prove ephemer­al; and that in two years’ time, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would be made per­ma­nent, just like the Repub­li­cans had always want­ed.

In oth­er words, they, too, expect­ed me to lose.

As it so hap­pened, the same mid-Decem­ber week we announced the deal with McConnell, Bill Clin­ton joined me in the Oval Office din­ing room for a vis­it. What­ev­er ten­sions had exist­ed between us dur­ing the cam­paign had large­ly dis­si­pat­ed by then, and I found it use­ful to hear the lessons he’d learned after suf­fer­ing a sim­i­lar midterm shel­lack­ing at the hands of Newt Gin­grich in 1994. At some point, we got into the nit­ty-grit­ty of the tax agree­ment I’d just made, and Clin­ton couldn’t have been more enthu­si­as­tic.

“You need to tell that to some of our friends,” I said, not­ing the blow­back we were get­ting from cer­tain Demo­c­ra­t­ic cir­cles.

“If I have the chance, I will,” Clin­ton said.

That gave me an idea. “How about you get the chance right now?” Before he could answer, I walked over to Katie’s desk and asked her to have the press team rus­tle up any cor­re­spon­dents who were in the build­ing. Fif­teen min­utes lat­er, Bill Clin­ton and I stepped into the White House brief­ing room.

Explain­ing to the star­tled reporters that they might like to get some per­spec­tive on our tax deal from the per­son who’d over­seen just about the best U.S. econ­o­my we’d expe­ri­enced in recent his­to­ry, I turned the podi­um over to Clin­ton. It didn’t take long for the for­mer pres­i­dent to own the room, mus­ter­ing all of his raspy-voiced, lip-bit­ing Arkansas charm to make the case for our deal with McConnell.

In fact, short­ly after the impromp­tu press con­fer­ence began, I real­ized I had anoth­er com­mit­ment to get to, but Clin­ton was clear­ly enjoy­ing him­self so much that I didn’t want to cut him off. Instead, I leaned into the micro­phone to say that I had to leave but that Pres­i­dent Clin­ton could stick around.

Lat­er, I asked Gibbs how the whole thing had played.

“The cov­er­age was great,” Gibbs said. “Though a few of the talk­ing heads said that you dimin­ished your­self by giv­ing Clin­ton the plat­form.”

I wasn’t too wor­ried about that. I knew that Clinton’s poll num­bers were a whole lot high­er than mine at the time, part­ly because the con­ser­v­a­tive press that had once vil­i­fied him now found it use­ful to offer him up as a con­trast to me, the kind of rea­son­able, cen­trist Demo­c­rat, they said, that Repub­li­cans could work with. His endorse­ment would help us sell the deal to the broad­er pub­lic and tamp down any poten­tial rebel­lion among con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats.

It was an irony that I—like many mod­ern leaders—eventually learned to live with: You nev­er looked as smart as the ex-pres­i­dent did on the side­lines.

Our tem­po­rary détente with McConnell on tax­es allowed us to focus on the rest of my lame-duck to-do list. Michelle’s child nutri­tion bill had already received enough Repub­li­can sup­port to pass in ear­ly Decem­ber with rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle fuss, despite accu­sa­tions from Sarah Palin (now a Fox News com­men­ta­tor) that Michelle was intent on tak­ing away the free­dom of Amer­i­can par­ents to feed their chil­dren as they saw fit. Mean­while, the House was work­ing through the details of a food safe­ty bill that would pass lat­er in the month.

Rat­i­fy­ing New START in the Sen­ate proved more challenging—not only because, as a treaty, it required 67 rather than 60 votes but because domes­ti­cal­ly there was no strong con­stituen­cy clam­or­ing to get it done. I had to nag Har­ry Reid to pri­or­i­tize the issue dur­ing the lame-duck ses­sions, explain­ing that U.S. credibility—not to men­tion my own stand­ing with oth­er world leaders—was at stake, and that a fail­ure to rat­i­fy the treaty would under­mine our efforts to enforce sanc­tions against Iran and get oth­er coun­tries to tight­en up their own nuclear secu­ri­ty.

Once I got Harry’s grudg­ing com­mit­ment to bring the treaty up for a vote (“I don’t know how I’ll find the floor time, Mr. Pres­i­dent,” he grum­bled over the phone, “but if you tell me it’s impor­tant I’ll do my best, okay?”), we went to work lin­ing up Repub­li­can votes. The Joint Chiefs’ endorse­ment of the treaty helped; so did strong sup­port from my old friend Dick Lugar, who remained the rank­ing Repub­li­can on the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee and right­ly viewed New START as an exten­sion of his ear­li­er work on nuclear non­pro­lif­er­a­tion.

Even so, clos­ing the deal required me to com­mit to a mul­ti­year, multi­bil­lion-dol­lar mod­ern­iza­tion of the infra­struc­ture around the Unit­ed States’ nuclear stock­pile, at the insis­tence of con­ser­v­a­tive Ari­zona sen­a­tor Jon Kyl. Giv­en my long-term goal of elim­i­nat­ing nuclear weapons, not to men­tion all the bet­ter ways I could think of to use bil­lions of fed­er­al dol­lars, this con­ces­sion felt like a devil’s bar­gain, though our in-house experts, many of whom were ded­i­cat­ed to nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment, assured me that our aging nuclear weapons sys­tems did need upgrades in order to reduce the risk of a cat­a­stroph­ic mis­cal­cu­la­tion or acci­dent.

And when New START final­ly cleared the Sen­ate by a 71–26 vote, I breathed a big sigh of relief.

THE WHITE HOUSE nev­er looked more beau­ti­ful than dur­ing the hol­i­day sea­son. Huge pine wreaths with red vel­vet bows lined the walls along the colon­nade and the main cor­ri­dor of the East Wing, and the oaks and mag­no­lias in the Rose Gar­den were strewn with lights. The offi­cial White House Christ­mas tree, a majes­tic fir deliv­ered by horse-drawn car­riage, occu­pied most of the Blue Room, but trees almost as spec­tac­u­lar filled near­ly every pub­lic space in the res­i­dence. Over the course of three days, an army of vol­un­teers orga­nized by the Social Office dec­o­rat­ed the trees, halls, and Grand Foy­er with a daz­zling array of orna­ments, while the White House pas­try chefs pre­pared an elab­o­rate gin­ger­bread repli­ca of the res­i­dence, com­plete with fur­ni­ture, cur­tains, and—during my presidency—a minia­ture ver­sion of Bo.

The hol­i­day sea­son also meant we host­ed par­ties prac­ti­cal­ly every after­noon and evening for three and a half weeks straight. These were big, fes­tive affairs, with three to four hun­dred guests at a time, laugh­ing and chomp­ing on lamb chops and crab cakes and drink­ing eggnog and wine while mem­bers of the Unit­ed States Marine Band, spiffy in their red coats, played all the hol­i­day stan­dards. For me and Michelle, the after­noon par­ties were easy—we just dropped by for a few min­utes to wish every­one well from behind a rope line. But the evening events called for us to posi­tion our­selves in the Diplo­mat­ic Recep­tion Room for two hours or more, pos­ing for pho­tos with near­ly every guest.

Michelle didn’t mind doing this at the par­ties we host­ed for the fam­i­lies of Secret Ser­vice per­son­nel and the res­i­dence staff, despite what stand­ing in heels for that long did to her feet. Her hol­i­day spir­its dimmed, how­ev­er, when it came to fet­ing mem­bers of Con­gress and the polit­i­cal media. Maybe it was because they demand­ed more atten­tion (“Stop mak­ing so much small talk!” she’d whis­per to me dur­ing momen­tary breaks in the action); or because some of the same peo­ple who reg­u­lar­ly appeared on TV call­ing for her husband’s head on a spike some­how had the nerve to put their arms around her and smile for the cam­era as if they were her best high school chums.

Back in the West Wing, much of my team’s ener­gy in the weeks before Christ­mas went toward push­ing through the two most con­tro­ver­sial bills left on my dock­et: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) and the DREAM Act. Along­side abor­tion, guns, and just about any­thing to do with race, the issues of LGBTQ rights and immi­gra­tion had occu­pied cen­ter stage in America’s cul­ture wars for decades, in part because they raised the most basic ques­tion in our democracy—namely, who do we con­sid­er a true mem­ber of the Amer­i­can fam­i­ly, deserv­ing of the same rights, respect, and con­cern that we expect for our­selves?

I believed in defin­ing that fam­i­ly broadly—it includ­ed gay peo­ple as well as straight, and it includ­ed immi­grant fam­i­lies that had put down roots and raised kids here, even if they hadn’t come through the front door. How could I believe oth­er­wise, when some of the same argu­ments for their exclu­sion had so often been used to exclude those who looked like me?

That’s not to say that I dis­missed those with dif­fer­ent views on LGBTQ and immi­gra­tion rights as heart­less big­ots. For one thing, I had enough self-awareness—or at least a good enough memory—to know that my own atti­tudes toward gays, les­bians, and trans­gen­der peo­ple hadn’t always been par­tic­u­lar­ly enlight­ened. I grew up in the 1970s, a time when LGBTQ life was far less vis­i­ble to those out­side the com­mu­ni­ty, so that Toot’s sis­ter (and one of my favorite rel­a­tives), Aunt Arlene, felt oblig­ed to intro­duce her part­ner of twen­ty years as “my close friend Marge” when­ev­er she vis­it­ed us in Hawaii.

And like many teenage boys in those years, my friends and I some­times threw around words like “fag” or “gay” at each oth­er as casu­al put-downs—callow attempts to for­ti­fy our mas­culin­i­ty and hide our inse­cu­ri­ties. Once I got to col­lege and became friends with fel­low stu­dents and pro­fes­sors who were open­ly gay, though, I real­ized the overt dis­crim­i­na­tion and hate they were sub­ject to, as well as the lone­li­ness and self-doubt that the dom­i­nant cul­ture imposed on them. I felt ashamed of my past behavior—and learned to do bet­ter.

As for immi­gra­tion, dur­ing my youth I’d giv­en the issue lit­tle thought beyond the vague mythol­o­gy of Ellis Island and the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty trans­mit­ted through pop­u­lar cul­ture. The pro­gres­sion of my think­ing came lat­er, when my orga­niz­ing work in Chica­go intro­duced me to the pre­dom­i­nant­ly Mex­i­can com­mu­ni­ties of Pilsen and Lit­tle Village—neighborhoods where the usu­al cat­e­gories of native-born Amer­i­cans, nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zens, green-card hold­ers, and undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants all but dis­solved, since many, if not most, fam­i­lies includ­ed all four.

Over time, peo­ple shared with me what it was like to have to hide your back­ground, always afraid that the life you’d worked so hard to build might be upend­ed in an instant. They talked about the sheer exhaus­tion and expense of deal­ing with an often heart­less or arbi­trary immi­gra­tion sys­tem, the sense of help­less­ness that came with hav­ing to work for employ­ers who took advan­tage of your immi­gra­tion sta­tus to pay you sub­min­i­mum wages. The friend­ships I made and the sto­ries I heard in those Chica­go neigh­bor­hoods, and from LGBTQ peo­ple dur­ing col­lege and my ear­ly career, had opened my heart to the human dimen­sions of issues that I’d once thought of in main­ly abstract terms.

For me, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” sit­u­a­tion was straight­for­ward: I con­sid­ered a pol­i­cy that pre­vent­ed LGBTQ per­sons from open­ly serv­ing in our mil­i­tary to be both offen­sive to Amer­i­can ideals and cor­ro­sive to the armed forces. DADT was the result of a flawed com­pro­mise between Bill Clinton—who’d cam­paigned on the idea of end­ing the out­right ban on LGBTQ peo­ple serv­ing in the military—and his Joint Chiefs, who’d insist­ed that such a change would dam­age morale and reten­tion.

Since going into effect in 1994, DADT had done lit­tle to pro­tect or dig­ni­fy any­one and, in fact, had led to the dis­charge of more than thir­teen thou­sand ser­vice mem­bers sole­ly due to their sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion. Those who remained had to hide who they were and who they loved, unable to safe­ly put up fam­i­ly pic­tures in their work spaces or attend social func­tions on base with their part­ners.

As the first African Amer­i­can com­man­der in chief, I felt a spe­cial respon­si­bil­i­ty to end the pol­i­cy, mind­ful that Blacks in the mil­i­tary had tra­di­tion­al­ly faced insti­tu­tion­al prej­u­dice and been barred from lead­er­ship roles and for decades had been forced to serve in seg­re­gat­ed units—a pol­i­cy Har­ry Tru­man had final­ly end­ed with an exec­u­tive order in 1948.

The ques­tion was how best to accom­plish the change. From the out­set, LGBTQ advo­cates urged me to fol­low Truman’s exam­ple and sim­ply issue an order to reverse the policy—particularly since I’d already used exec­u­tive orders and mem­o­ran­da to address oth­er reg­u­la­tions adverse­ly affect­ing LGBTQ peo­ple, includ­ing the grant­i­ng of hos­pi­tal vis­i­ta­tion rights and the exten­sion of ben­e­fits to domes­tic part­ners of fed­er­al employ­ees. But in short-cir­cuit­ing the con­sen­sus-build­ing involved in pass­ing leg­is­la­tion, an exec­u­tive order increased the like­li­hood of resis­tance to the new pol­i­cy inside the mil­i­tary, and foot-drag­ging in its imple­men­ta­tion. And, of course, a future pres­i­dent could always reverse an exec­u­tive order with the mere stroke of a pen.

I’d con­clud­ed that the opti­mal solu­tion was to get Con­gress to act. To do that, I need­ed the military’s top lead­ers as active and will­ing partners—which, in the mid­dle of two wars, I knew wouldn’t be easy. Pre­vi­ous Joint Chiefs had opposed repeal­ing DADT, rea­son­ing that the inte­gra­tion of open­ly gay ser­vice mem­bers might adverse­ly impact unit cohe­sion and dis­ci­pline. (Con­gres­sion­al oppo­nents of repeal, includ­ing John McCain, claimed that intro­duc­ing such a dis­rup­tive new pol­i­cy dur­ing wartime amount­ed to a betray­al of our troops.)

To their cred­it, though, Bob Gates and Mike Mullen didn’t flinch when I told them, ear­ly in my term, that I intend­ed to reverse DADT. Gates said that he’d already asked his staff to qui­et­ly begin inter­nal plan­ning on the issue, less out of any per­son­al enthu­si­asm for the pol­i­cy change than out of a prac­ti­cal con­cern that fed­er­al courts might ulti­mate­ly find DADT uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and force a change on the mil­i­tary overnight. Rather than try to talk me out of my posi­tion, he and Mullen asked that I let them set up a task force to eval­u­ate the impli­ca­tions of the pro­posed change on mil­i­tary operations—which would ulti­mate­ly con­duct a com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey of troops’ atti­tudes toward hav­ing open­ly gay mem­bers in their ranks. The objec­tive, Gates said, was to min­i­mize dis­rup­tion and divi­sion.

“If you’re going to do this, Mr. Pres­i­dent,” Gates added, “we should at least be able to tell you how to do it right.”

I warned Gates and Mullen that I didn’t con­sid­er dis­crim­i­na­tion against LGBTQ peo­ple to be an issue sub­ject to plebiscite. Nev­er­the­less, I agreed to their request, part­ly because I trust­ed them to set up an hon­est eval­u­a­tion process but main­ly because I sus­pect­ed that the sur­vey would show our troops—most of whom were decades younger than the high-rank­ing generals—to be more open-mind­ed toward gays and les­bians than peo­ple expect­ed.

Appear­ing before the Sen­ate Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee on Feb­ru­ary 2, 2010, Gates fur­ther val­i­dat­ed my trust when he said, “I ful­ly sup­port the president’s deci­sion” to reex­am­ine DADT. But it was Mike Mullen’s tes­ti­mo­ny before the com­mit­tee that same day that real­ly made news, as he became the first sit­ting senior U.S. mil­i­tary leader in his­to­ry to pub­licly argue that LGBTQ per­sons should be allowed to open­ly serve:

“Mr. Chair­man, speak­ing for myself and myself only, it is my per­son­al belief that allow­ing gays and les­bians to serve open­ly would be the right thing to do. No mat­ter how I look at this issue, I can­not escape being trou­bled by the fact that we have in place a pol­i­cy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fel­low cit­i­zens. For me per­son­al­ly, it comes down to integri­ty, theirs as indi­vid­u­als and ours as an insti­tu­tion.”

Nobody in the White House had coor­di­nat­ed with Mullen on the state­ment; I’m not even sure that Gates had known ahead of time what Mullen planned to say. But his unequiv­o­cal state­ment imme­di­ate­ly shift­ed the pub­lic debate and cre­at­ed impor­tant polit­i­cal cov­er for fence-sit­ting sen­a­tors, who could then feel jus­ti­fied in embrac­ing the repeal.

Mullen’s tes­ti­mo­ny came months before the eval­u­a­tion process he and Gates had request­ed was com­plet­ed, which caused some polit­i­cal headaches. Pro­po­nents of repeal start­ed com­ing hard at us, both pri­vate­ly and in the press, unable to under­stand why I wouldn’t sim­ply issue an exec­u­tive order when the chair­man of the Joint Chiefs sup­port­ed a pol­i­cy change—especially because, while we took our sweet time with a sur­vey, LGBTQ ser­vice mem­bers were still being dis­charged.

Valerie and her team bore the brunt of the friend­ly fire, par­tic­u­lar­ly Bri­an Bond, a high­ly regard­ed gay activist who served as our prin­ci­pal liai­son to the com­mu­ni­ty. For months, Bri­an had to defend my deci­sion-mak­ing, as skep­ti­cal friends, for­mer col­leagues, and mem­bers of the press sug­gest­ed that he’d been co-opt­ed, ques­tion­ing his com­mit­ment to the cause. I can only imag­ine the toll this took on him per­son­al­ly.

The crit­i­cism grew loud­er in Sep­tem­ber 2010 when, as Gates had pre­dict­ed, a fed­er­al dis­trict court in Cal­i­for­nia ruled that DADT was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. I asked Gates to for­mal­ly sus­pend all dis­charges while the case was appealed. But no mat­ter how hard I pressed, he repeat­ed­ly refused my request, argu­ing that as long as DADT was in place, he was oblig­at­ed to enforce it; and I knew that order­ing him to do some­thing he con­sid­ered inap­pro­pri­ate might force me to have to find a new defense sec­re­tary.

It was per­haps the only time I came close to yelling at Gates, and not just because I con­sid­ered his legal analy­sis faulty. He seemed to con­sid­er the frus­tra­tions we were hear­ing from LGBTQ advocates—not to men­tion the anguished sto­ries of gay and les­bian ser­vice mem­bers who were under his charge—as one more bit of “pol­i­tics” from which I should shield him and the Pen­ta­gon, rather than a cen­tral con­sid­er­a­tion in his own deci­sion-mak­ing.

(Ulti­mate­ly he did at least mod­i­fy DADT’s admin­is­tra­tive pro­ce­dures in such a way that near­ly all actu­al dis­charges were halt­ed while we await­ed res­o­lu­tion on the issue.)

Mer­ci­ful­ly, toward the end of that same month, the results from the troop study final­ly came in. They con­firmed what I’d sus­pect­ed: Two-thirds of those sur­veyed thought that allow­ing those gay, les­bian, and bisex­u­al col­leagues to serve open­ly would have lit­tle or no impact on—or might actu­al­ly improve—the military’s abil­i­ty to exe­cute its mis­sions. In fact, most troops believed that they were either already work­ing or had worked with LGBTQ ser­vice mem­bers and had expe­ri­enced no dif­fer­ence in their abil­i­ty to per­form their duties.

Get exposed to oth­er people’s truths, I thought, and atti­tudes change.

With the sur­vey in hand, Gates and Mullen offi­cial­ly endorsed the repeal of DADT. Meet­ing with me in the Oval Office, the oth­er Joint Chiefs pledged to imple­ment the pol­i­cy with­out undue delay. In fact, Gen­er­al James Amos, the Marine com­man­dant and a firm oppo­nent of repeal, drew smiles when he said, “I can promise you, Mr. Pres­i­dent, that none of these oth­er branch­es are going to do it faster or bet­ter than the U.S. Marine Corps.”

And on Decem­ber 18, the Sen­ate passed the bill 65–31, with eight Repub­li­can votes.

A few days lat­er, for­mer and cur­rent LGBTQ ser­vice mem­bers filled an audi­to­ri­um at the Depart­ment of the Inte­ri­or as I signed the bill. Many were in dress uni­form, their faces express­ing a med­ley of joy, pride, relief, and tears. As I addressed the crowd, I saw a num­ber of the advo­cates who’d been some of our fiercest crit­ics just a few weeks ear­li­er now smil­ing in appre­ci­a­tion.

Spot­ting Bri­an Bond, I gave him a nod. But the biggest applause that day was reserved for Mike Mullen—a long, heart­felt stand­ing ova­tion. As I watched the admi­ral stand­ing on the stage, vis­i­bly moved despite the awk­ward grin on his face, I couldn’t have been hap­pi­er for him. It wasn’t often, I thought, that a true act of con­science is rec­og­nized that way.

WHEN IT CAME to immi­gra­tion, every­one agreed that the sys­tem was bro­ken. The process of immi­grat­ing legal­ly to the Unit­ed States could take a decade or longer, often depend­ing on what coun­try you were com­ing from and how much mon­ey you had. Mean­while, the eco­nom­ic gulf between us and our south­ern neigh­bors drove hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple to ille­gal­ly cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico bor­der each year, search­ing for work and a bet­ter life.

Con­gress had spent bil­lions to hard­en the bor­der, with fenc­ing, cam­eras, drones, and an expand­ed and increas­ing­ly mil­i­ta­rized bor­der patrol. But rather than stop the flow of immi­grants, these steps had spurred an indus­try of smugglers—coyotes—who made big mon­ey trans­port­ing human car­go in bar­bar­ic and some­times dead­ly fash­ion. And although bor­der cross­ings by poor Mex­i­can and Cen­tral Amer­i­can migrants received most of the atten­tion from politi­cians and the press, about 40 per­cent of America’s unau­tho­rized immi­grants arrived through air­ports or oth­er legal ports of entry and then over­stayed their visas.

By 2010, an esti­mat­ed eleven mil­lion undoc­u­ment­ed per­sons were liv­ing in the Unit­ed States, in large part thor­ough­ly woven into the fab­ric of Amer­i­can life. Many were long­time res­i­dents, with chil­dren who either were U.S. cit­i­zens by virtue of hav­ing been born on Amer­i­can soil or had been brought to the Unit­ed States at such an ear­ly age that they were Amer­i­can in every respect except for a piece of paper.

Entire sec­tors of the U.S. econ­o­my relied on their labor, as undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants were often will­ing to do the tough­est, dirt­i­est work for mea­ger pay—picking the fruits and veg­eta­bles that stocked our gro­cery stores, mop­ping the floors of offices, wash­ing dish­es at restau­rants, and pro­vid­ing care to the elder­ly. But although Amer­i­can con­sumers ben­e­fit­ed from this invis­i­ble work­force, many feared that immi­grants were tak­ing jobs from cit­i­zens, bur­den­ing social ser­vices pro­grams, and chang­ing the nation’s racial and cul­tur­al make­up, which led to demands for the gov­ern­ment to crack down on ille­gal immi­gra­tion.

This sen­ti­ment was strongest among Repub­li­can con­stituen­cies, egged on by an increas­ing­ly nativist right-wing press. How­ev­er, the pol­i­tics didn’t fall neat­ly along par­ti­san lines: The tra­di­tion­al­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic trade union rank and file, for exam­ple, saw the grow­ing pres­ence of undoc­u­ment­ed work­ers on con­struc­tion sites as threat­en­ing their liveli­hoods, while Repub­li­can-lean­ing busi­ness groups inter­est­ed in main­tain­ing a steady sup­ply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Sil­i­con Val­ley, for­eign-born com­put­er pro­gram­mers and engi­neers) often took pro-immi­gra­tion posi­tions.

Back in 2007, the mav­er­ick ver­sion of John McCain, along with his side­kick Lind­sey Gra­ham, had actu­al­ly joined Ted Kennedy to put togeth­er a com­pre­hen­sive reform bill that offered cit­i­zen­ship to mil­lions of undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants while more tight­ly secur­ing our bor­ders. Despite strong sup­port from Pres­i­dent Bush, it had failed to clear the Sen­ate. The bill did, how­ev­er, receive twelve Repub­li­can votes, indi­cat­ing the real pos­si­bil­i­ty of a future bipar­ti­san accord.

I’d pledged dur­ing the cam­paign to res­ur­rect sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion once elect­ed, and I’d appoint­ed for­mer Ari­zona gov­er­nor Janet Napoli­tano as head of the Depart­ment of Home­land Security—the agency that over­saw U.S. Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE) and U.S. Cus­toms and Bor­der Protection—partly because of her knowl­edge of bor­der issues and her rep­u­ta­tion for hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly man­aged immi­gra­tion in a way that was both com­pas­sion­ate and tough.

My hopes for a bill had thus far been dashed. With the econ­o­my in cri­sis and Amer­i­cans los­ing jobs, few in Con­gress had any appetite to take on a hot-but­ton issue like immi­gra­tion. Kennedy was gone. McCain, hav­ing been crit­i­cized by the right flank for his rel­a­tive­ly mod­er­ate immi­gra­tion stance, showed lit­tle inter­est in tak­ing up the ban­ner again. Worse yet, my admin­is­tra­tion was deport­ing undoc­u­ment­ed work­ers at an accel­er­at­ing rate.

This wasn’t a result of any direc­tive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 con­gres­sion­al man­date that both expand­ed ICE’s bud­get and increased col­lab­o­ra­tion between ICE and local law enforce­ment depart­ments in an effort to deport more undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants with crim­i­nal records. My team and I had made a strate­gic choice not to imme­di­ate­ly try to reverse the poli­cies we’d inher­it­ed in large part because we didn’t want to pro­vide ammu­ni­tion to crit­ics who claimed that Democ­rats weren’t will­ing to enforce exist­ing immi­gra­tion laws—a per­cep­tion that we thought could tor­pe­do our chances of pass­ing a future reform bill.

But by 2010, immi­grant-rights and Lati­no advo­ca­cy groups were crit­i­ciz­ing our lack of progress, much the same way LGBTQ activists had gone after us on DADT. And although I con­tin­ued to urge Con­gress to pass immi­gra­tion reform, I had no real­is­tic path for deliv­er­ing a new com­pre­hen­sive law before the midterms.

Enter the DREAM Act. The idea that young, undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants who’d been brought to the Unit­ed States as chil­dren could be giv­en some sort of relief had been float­ing around for years, and at least ten ver­sions of the DREAM Act had been intro­duced in Con­gress since 2001, each time fail­ing to gar­ner the need­ed votes. Advo­cates often pre­sent­ed it as a par­tial but mean­ing­ful step on the road to wider reform.

The act would grant “Dreamers”—as these young peo­ple had come to be called—temporary legal res­i­dence and a path­way to cit­i­zen­ship, so long as they met cer­tain cri­te­ria. Accord­ing to the most recent bill, they had to have entered the Unit­ed States before the age of six­teen, lived here for five con­tin­u­ous years, grad­u­at­ed from high school or obtained a GED, and attend­ed col­lege for two years or joined the military—and they could have no seri­ous crim­i­nal record. Indi­vid­ual states could make Dream­ers legal­ly eli­gi­ble for reduced tuition rates at pub­lic col­leges and universities—the only real­is­tic way many of them could afford high­er edu­ca­tion.

Dream­ers had grown up going to Amer­i­can schools, play­ing Amer­i­can sports, watch­ing Amer­i­can TV, and hang­ing out at Amer­i­can malls. In some cas­es, their par­ents had nev­er even told them they weren’t cit­i­zens; they learned of their undoc­u­ment­ed sta­tus only when they tried to get a driver’s license or sub­mit­ted an appli­ca­tion for col­lege finan­cial aid.

I’d had a chance to meet many Dream­ers, both before and after I entered the White House. They were smart, poised, and resilient—as full of poten­tial as my own daugh­ters. If any­thing, I found the Dream­ers to be less cyn­i­cal about Amer­i­ca than many of their native-born contemporaries—precisely because their cir­cum­stances had taught them not to take life in this coun­try for grant­ed.

The case for allow­ing such young peo­ple to stay in the Unit­ed States, the only coun­try many of them had ever known, was so moral­ly com­pelling that Kennedy and McCain had incor­po­rat­ed the DREAM Act into their 2007 immi­gra­tion bill. And with­out the prospect of pass­ing a more com­pre­hen­sive rewrite of U.S. immi­gra­tion laws in the imme­di­ate future, Har­ry Reid—who, in the months lead­ing up to the midterms, had been locked in a tight reelec­tion con­test in his home state of Neva­da and need­ed a strong His­pan­ic turnout to put him over the top—had promised to call the DREAM Act for a vote dur­ing the lame-duck ses­sion.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Har­ry made this last-minute announce­ment on the cam­paign trail with­out giv­ing us, his Sen­ate col­leagues, or immi­gra­tion reform groups any notice. Though not thrilled with Harry’s lack of coor­di­na­tion with her (“You’d think he could have picked up the phone”), Nan­cy Pelosi did her part, quick­ly push­ing the leg­is­la­tion through the House.

But in the Sen­ate, McCain and Gra­ham denounced Harry’s deci­sion as a cam­paign stunt and said they wouldn’t vote for the DREAM Act as a stand-alone bill since it was no longer linked to increased enforce­ment. The five Repub­li­can sen­a­tors who’d vot­ed for the 2007 McCain-Kennedy bill and were still in office were less declar­a­tive about their inten­tions, but all sound­ed wob­bly.

And since we couldn’t count on every Demo­c­rat to sup­port the bill—especially after the dis­as­trous midterms—all of us in the White House found our­selves scram­bling to drum up the six­ty votes need­ed to over­come a fil­i­buster dur­ing the wan­ing days before the Sen­ate wrapped up busi­ness for the year.

Cecil­ia Muñoz, the White House direc­tor of inter­gov­ern­men­tal affairs, was our point per­son on the effort. When I was a sen­a­tor, she’d been the senior vice pres­i­dent of pol­i­cy and leg­isla­tive affairs at the Nation­al Coun­cil of La Raza, the nation’s largest Lati­no advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion, and ever since she’d advised me on immi­gra­tion and oth­er issues.

Born and raised in Michi­gan and the daugh­ter of Boli­vian immi­grants, Cecil­ia was mea­sured, mod­est, and—as I used to joke with her—“just plain nice,” bring­ing to mind everyone’s favorite young ele­men­tary or mid­dle school teacher. She was also tough and tena­cious (and a fanat­i­cal Michi­gan foot­ball fan).

With­in a mat­ter of weeks, she and her team had launched an all-out media blitz in sup­port of the DREAM Act, pitch­ing sto­ries, mar­shal­ing sta­tis­tics, and enlist­ing prac­ti­cal­ly every cab­i­net mem­ber and agency (includ­ing the Defense Depart­ment) to host some kind of event. Most impor­tant, Cecil­ia helped bring togeth­er a crew of young Dream­ers who were will­ing to dis­close their undoc­u­ment­ed sta­tus in order to share their per­son­al sto­ries with unde­cid­ed sen­a­tors and media out­lets.

Sev­er­al times, Cecil­ia and I talked about the courage of these young peo­ple, agree­ing that at their age we could nev­er have man­aged such pres­sure.

“I just want to win so bad for them,” she told me.

And yet, despite the count­less hours we spent in meet­ings and on the phone, the like­li­hood of get­ting six­ty votes for the DREAM Act began to look increas­ing­ly bleak.

One of our best prospects was Claire McCaskill, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tor from Mis­souri. Claire was one of my ear­ly sup­port­ers and best friends in the Sen­ate, a gift­ed politi­cian with a razor-sharp wit, a big heart, and not an ounce of hypocrisy or pre­ten­sion. But she also came from a con­ser­v­a­tive, Repub­li­can-lean­ing state and was a juicy tar­get for the GOP in its effort to wrest back con­trol of the Sen­ate.

“You know I want to help those kids, Mr. Pres­i­dent,” Claire said when I reached her by phone, “but the polling in Mis­souri is just ter­ri­ble on any­thing relat­ed to immi­gra­tion. If I vote for this, there’s a good chance I lose my seat.”

I knew she wasn’t wrong. And if she lost, we might lose the Sen­ate, along with any pos­si­bil­i­ty of ever get­ting the DREAM Act or com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform or any­thing else passed.

How was I to weigh that risk against the urgent fates of the young peo­ple I’d met—the uncer­tain­ty and fear they were forced to live with every sin­gle day, the pos­si­bil­i­ty that with no notice any one of them might be round­ed up in an ICE raid, detained in a cell, and shipped off to a land that was as for­eign to them as it would be to me?

Before hang­ing up, Claire and I made a deal to help square the cir­cle.

“If your vote’s the one that gets us to six­ty,” I said, “then those kids are going to need you, Claire. But