Michelle Obama and the White House have aggressively pushed back against a recent book by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor detailing the role of the first lady in her husband’s administration. Released last month, “The Obamas” has skyrocketed up the New York Times’ best sellers list and has generated national controversy for its portrayal of the first lady and her relationship with her husband and staff.
Kantor did not interview either the President or the first lady for the book, instead basing it on interviews with 33 White House staffers and close friends of the couple. Kantor wrote a piece on the Obamas’ marriage for the New York Times Magazine in October 2009.
Depictions in the book include testy exchanges between the first lady and both former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
Michelle Obama said in an interview with Gayle King of CBS that she had not read the book, though she denied accounts of tension between herself and her husband’s staff. She attributed the book’s portrait of her as conforming to a stereotype.
“I guess it’s just more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here,” she said. “That’s been an image people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced, that I’m some kind of angry black woman.”
At Princeton, Obama was active in African-American life on campus and wrote her senior thesis about racial animosity she encountered at the University. She wrote in her thesis that at Princeton she was “far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before.”
Kantor describes the prejudice Obama faced at Princeton in her book. Kantor specifically recalls Obama’s roommate’s decision to switch rooms rather than live in close quarters with an African-American.
The White House has reacted sharply to the characterization of the first lady and the administration, calling Kantor’s book “an overdramatization of old news.”
“These secondhand accounts are staples of every administration in modern political history and often exaggerated,” White House spokesperson Eric Schultz said.
The response from Pennsylvania Avenue to Kantor’s book has been so critical and aggressive that some political commentators have speculated that the reaction may have been overkill.
Princeton U. politics professor Paul Frymer said that these sort of unauthorized biographies of people in the White House often trigger controversies and significant pushback.
“It is true that unauthorized books about presidents and their family and staff come out all the time, and anything that comes out as in any way unflattering is going to be criticized by the Administration,” Frymer said. “They have a big group of hired staff that spends all their time on public relations, so they are going to respond by countering anything negative.”
The book depicts Michelle Obama as slightly ambivalent, or even reluctant, to move away from the normal life her family knew in Chicago to take on her role in the White House. She even considered delaying her own move to the White House and staying temporarily in Chicago with their daughters until they completed the school year, the book says.
The lack of first-hand interviews with the Obamas has raised concerns about the accuracy of the book’s portrayal of the first lady. However, in many cases, first-hand access to a biography’s subject is not always possible, and their absence from the text does not necessarily damage its accuracy, according to Princeton politics professor Jennifer Widner.
“With a contemporary figure, we generally do want to see that the author has interviewed the person or people profiled, but there are plenty of biographies written about people who are long gone, and the writer must use many forms of evidence to produce an accurate story,” Widner said.