Page 10 of 107 Days
The first stop on the day’s calendar had been planned months earlier. At a meeting in the Oval Office discussing her work uplifting Black executives and entrepreneurs, Dr. Stacie NC Grant had invited me to address the annual gathering—the Grand Boulé—of her sorority, Zeta Phi Beta.
Throughout my career I’ve maintained that people in positions of power must be required to ask of themselves: Who am I not hearing from?
Then make it their business to seek those folks out.
I came to the White House knowing that the people in that building needed to hear from a wider range of voices.
As vice president I’d been given several roles by Joe Biden.
But one role I created for myself was building up the diverse coalition that our party encompassed.
I made it my business to get out there and make sure that no community was overlooked, especially those that had been taken for granted in the past. Black women, the Democrats’ staunchest, most reliable voting bloc, was one such community.
The boulé in Indianapolis was one of a dozen Divine Nine gatherings I’d addressed since taking office.
On this day there was a new energy in the room as I walked onto the stage.
A Black woman was slated to be the Democratic nominee for president.
It was us. And everyone there understood what it meant: that this would be a journey of both joy and pain.
I was in a room full of people with whom, because of our shared experience, certain words did not need to be said.
There is an emotion that comes from being in a place where people see you, support you, know you.
The kindness and the love in that room penetrated the armor I usually wore, armor I’d need to put back on as soon as I left that room.
The biggest applause came when I started to say what I would do to restore the rights of Roe v. Wade .
“When I am president—”
A roar erupted that drowned out the rest of that sentence.
That roar told me they could see it. Clearly, for the first time. This could be, and it should be. It was not because of gender or because of race, but despite it.
I thought, as I often did, of Shirley Chisholm, and I know they did, too. The first Black woman elected to the US Congress and the first woman to run for our party’s nomination. She had blazed the path, and now I was standing on it.
From Indianapolis we flew on to Houston to meet with emergency management staff and get a briefing on recovery efforts after the devastation of Hurricane Beryl.
The Category 1 hurricane’s eyewall had slammed Houston, bringing down power lines and leaving vulnerable people without air-conditioning or water during triple-digit heat indexes.
At least twenty souls had died. The economic damage—in the billions—was still being reckoned.
These kinds of briefings are sadly familiar to me.
As DA, I’d witnessed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
As senator, I’d been to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and I’d toured the communities in my home state that had been ravaged by wildfires.
It was heartbreaking to see the scale of these losses and the exhausted faces of individuals standing in the ruins of a lifetime’s work, a lifetime’s dreams. It was infuriating to see how predators swarmed like cockroaches, price gouging, spreading misinformation.
But it was also inspiring to talk to the first responders who ran toward danger, sometimes helping strangers even as their own homes were at risk.
And then there were the regular people who stepped up to help in whatever way they could: collecting toiletries, making sandwiches, organizing clothing drives.
In my life I’ve seen over and over that it is often the people with the least who give the most.
As I shook hands and thanked the police and emergency workers one by one, in each I saw a hero.
The kind of person who answered a calling with a sense of duty to the well-being of people they’ve never met.
A reporter in the press pool shouted a question about Biden’s upcoming speech.
It was just after five p.m. in Houston, and the president would be addressing the nation from the Oval Office later that evening.
I watched it at the hotel that night. It was a good speech, drawing on the history of the presidency to locate his own place within it. But as my staff later pointed out, it was almost nine minutes into the eleven-minute address before he mentioned me.
“I want to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and leader for our country.”
And that was it.
I am a loyal person.
During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.
He was, by some measures, the most consistently underestimated man in Washington. He’d been right about his tactics for pushing his agenda through a resistant Congress.
It was just possible he was right about this, too.
And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out.
I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run.
He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win .
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized.
Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.
The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition.
It should have been more than a personal decision.
I was well aware of my delicate status. Lore has it that every outgoing chief of staff always tells the incoming president’s chief of staff Rule Number One: Watch the VP .
Because I’d gone after him over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into the White House with what we lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption.” I had to prove my loyalty, time and time again.
When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my twenties, or claimed I was a “DEI hire,” the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected DA, top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans.
Lorraine, my chief of staff, constantly had to advocate for my role at events: “She’s not going to stand there like a potted plant. Give her two minutes of remarks. Have her introduce the president.”
They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.
An example: In 2021, I was dispatched to the élysée Palace to help reset our tattered relationship with France after we signed the Australia-UK-US security pact.
Australia had agreed to buy submarines from France but scrapped that contract when we and the UK agreed to supply Australia with nuclear subs under the new AUKUS agreement instead. This had caused tremendous friction.
In our meeting, Emmanuel Macron and I warmed the chill by focusing on our many areas of cooperation, such as space exploration, climate change, transatlantic security, cybersecurity, the Sahel, and the Indo-Pacific.
On that trip, I was invited to visit the renowned Pasteur Institute, where my mother had worked on mRNA research related to breast cancer.
I was speaking informally with the scientists there about how I wished politicians would more closely follow the scientific method: testing a hypothesis and adjusting according to results, rather than coming in with the Plan, as if they had all the answers up front.
I said “the Plan” with exaggerated emphasis and air quotes.
Fox News, the New York Post , and Newsmax went wild, claiming I’d faked a French accent.
This was total nonsense, but the White House seemed glad to let reporting about my “gaffe” overwhelm the significant thaw in foreign relations I’d achieved.
Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprung up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a “chaotic” office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.
The plain fact is many people who come to work with a new administration in the White House haven’t done it before.
It’s a job unlike any other, and not every person, no matter how talented in their former position, can step up into such a high-stress, round-the-clock role.
Others find they just don’t want a job that doesn’t pay particularly well, takes a massive toll on family, and rules out anything resembling a normal life.
I’m not going to keep people on who can’t thrive in their jobs—it’s not fair to them and it’s not good for the country.
So the first year in any White House sees staff churn. Working for the first woman vice president, my staff had the additional challenge of confronting gendered stereotypes, a constant battle that could prove exhausting.
I was the first vice president to have a dedicated press pool tracking my every public move.
Before me, vice presidents had what’s called a “supplemental pool,” as the First Lady does, covering important events.
Because of this constant attention, things that had never been especially newsworthy about the vice president were suddenly reported and scrutinized.