On the day of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, the
president grieved like any father would.
On December 14, 2012, in the quiet community of Newtown, Connecticut,
20-year-old Adam Lanza shot his mother, then drove to Sandy Hook
elementary school, where he gunned down 26 people, 20 of them 6- and
7-year-old children. Like many around the country, President Obama had
a visceral response to the massacre; the day is widely acknowledged by
the president and his inner circle as the worst of his eight years in
office.
[The morning] started like any other. It was a Friday and we got an
email from the Situation Room saying there [was] a possible school
shooting. And then cable news started to cover it and more information
came in, more rumors.
There were holiday parties going on and people over at the White House
residence area partying and having a nice time and you’re
getting this terrible information.
I was in the Oval Office when the president found out that 20 children
and six adults had died. And I remember asking, Could you repeat the
number? Because I couldn't absorb 20 children. Then I found out they
were 6 and 7 years of age. It was almost as if I couldn't take it in.
At the time, Jon Favreau [Obama’s head speech writer] and I
shared an office in the West Wing. The president had just been
reelected so he was working on the Inaugural Address. There were
fiscal cliffs and tax standoffs and all sorts of partisan stuff that
suddenly seemed really small. So we quickly banged out a statement
together and took it up to the Oval Office.
The president called me up to get the edits and when I walked into the
Oval, he didn't even look up at me because he was so upset. That was
probably the most upset I'd seen him.
He crossed out a couple of paragraphs that he said were too raw. He
had tears in his eyes. And he said, “I don't know if I'll be
able to get through this.”
A memorial service was scheduled for Sunday, December 16, and as the
day approached, the president’s speech writers struggled with
how to verbalize the unspeakable.
I found out I had about 48 hours to turn around the eulogy. And around
3 am that night I started crying because how do you eulogize 20
6-year-old children?
When the shooting in Aurora [Colorado] happened, the president and I
were in Florida for an event and he said, “You don’t have
kids yet, but there’s a saying, ‘Having kids is like walking
around with your heart outside your chest.’ ” I remembered
that moment and we used that in his Sandy Hook remarks.
Just two days later, the president went to Newtown. It was a rainy day
so he couldn’t take a helicopter. We had to drive for an hour
and 10 minutes. I remember that like it was yesterday. In the car, he
looked at his remarks and he turned them over and he said,
“That’s not what I want to say,” and he pulled out a
yellow pad of paper and he started to write.
I knew one thing I needed to do was to name the children, to
acknowledge them and make sure that people understood that this
wasn’t an abstraction, that these were [kids] just like Malia or
Sasha or anybody else’s kids that would hug you and be tucked in
at night and read stories to. The notion that we as a society
couldn’t protect them, not from a natural disaster but from
something like this…
I remember being conscious of my breathing because I didn't want to do
anything to disturb him. And he wrote solidly for an hour and 10
minutes straight. When we got out of the car he handed his remarks to
one of his aides and…delivered one of the most powerful speeches
I've heard him give.
President Obama got there and a few of us went down to brief him. He
was clearly emotional and devastated by what had happened, but he knew
that as the president of the United States it was his responsibility
to be there for people in their time of need. So we kind of walked
through the families that he would see. He just dove in and just gave
every ounce of what he could give to these people who were going
through this unimaginable loss.
He spent a couple hours meeting with all the families and a lot of
kids who were too young to fully understand what had happened other
than that their brother and sister were gone.
He spent as much time as they wanted, with him, and they showed him
photographs of their loved ones and told their stories about their
children. He was really the consoler in chief that day.
Most of the families brought their holiday card, so they could show
the president their deceased son or daughter.
I remember the sheer number of people affected. You had all of those
students and teachers who were lost, but each one of them had multiple
family members who were directly impacted. Three, four, five, some of
them had 10 or 15 people there...And every single one, the president
greeted. He would bring them in for a big hug. He’d put his
hands on their shoulder and look 'em in their eyes. Some of the
younger siblings who were just too young to understand what was going
on, he’d try to get them to laugh a little bit or hand them a
box of White House M&Ms from his pocket. [The president] just gave
whatever he could in that time.
That’s not the only time I’ve had to comfort families
who’ve lost loved ones. Unfortunately it’s happened too
often. But these were 6-year-olds and it wasn’t just the parents
but in many cases you had siblings who were 10, 8 who had learned that
their younger brother or sister had been killed. It’s the only
time I ever saw Secret Service cry at an event. It was brutal.
I was sitting next to a man during the service and he didn't have
anyone with him and he started to cry and I reached across to hold his
hand. He didn’t know me. I was a total stranger but I was
desperate to be able to provide comfort at a time when there was no
possible way to provide comfort.
That was the first time I ever saw the president cry. At the end of
the day, he’s a dad, a father. When he spoke at Newtown, he
said, very famously, “By any measure, we are failing these
children”.
I went to Sandy Hook about four or five days after the shooting to
thank some first responders. In one of the classrooms, there were
these little posters kids had put up that said,
What I Want to Accomplish this Year—I want to learn how to spell, I
want to learn how to read, I want to learn how to do math. This was the place where these kids had been gunned down. There
were tufts of carpet kind of pulled up, and I asked one of the crime
scene search officers and he said, “That’s where the
bullets hit.” And as I walked out, I was thanking the crime
scene search officers and the first responders…and these
grizzled 20, 30-year veterans were crying. And I thought, boy, this is
finally going to move this country.
Though U.S. public opinion had been fairly evenly divided for years
between those who advocated for gun control and those who favored the
rights of gun owners, after the Sandy Hook shooting, there was a
shift: A Pew Research Center poll taken a week after Newtown found
that 49 percent of Americans favored restricting gun ownership while
only 42 percent were more concerned with gun owners’ rights.
The president hadn't even been re-inaugurated, but he decided to use
his political capital right after reelection to try to do something
about guns.
He was always a strong supporter of gun control, but [Sandy Hook]
really intensified his belief that we needed to once again march up
the hill and try and do something.
We plotted our strategy, and made the determination that the vice
president and I would lead the effort along with Janet Napolitano to
try to really come up with common sense gun safety proposals.
In those first couple months, we [were] trying to do something about
guns along with the vice president and the families of Newtown who
found courage fast. One couple, Francine and David Wheeler, recorded
the Weekly Address in lieu of the president and it was just one of the
most painful things I could possibly imagine.
I think the president is generally a cool person, unflappable. But
he’s not a person without emotion and he was as affected by
Sandy Hook as I was. It was something that wore him down over time and
took off that level of calm and reserve. You could see how he was
really feeling about this issue and how sincerely he felt a need for
change.
On April 17, 2013, a bipartisan measure that would have required
expanded background checks for would-be gun owners and banned the sale
of some military-type semi-automatic weapons failed to pass the
then-Democratically-controlled Senate, in a 54 to 46 vote.
When gun control failed, that was a very personal issue for the
president. He had gotten close to many of the victims’ families.
If Washington could agree on nothing else, it seemed as if doing
something in the aftermath of Newtown, like instant background checks,
should be possible.
An overwhelming majority of Americans felt that things like background
checks…might save a few lives; that if a mad man walks into a
school intent on doing harm, fewer children might die if he
doesn’t have a semi-automatic weapon with magazines that can
just deliver a stunning amount of bullets in a short span of time. The
fact that we couldn’t even get something as basic as that
through the Senate was heartbreaking.
So why didn’t it work? The NRA is probably the most effective,
single-issue advocacy organization in the world. They were able to
convince enough Republicans that they would lose in the primaries if
they supported it.
One of his biggest disappointments…was Congress’
unwillingness to listen not just to the president but to 90 percent of
the American people who believed what we were trying to do made sense.
This isn’t a case where you could say, if only we had done X, Y,
or Z differently, we would’ve passed something. It just
wasn’t going to happen. And I don’t know what it’s
going to take because hopefully we’re not going to have another
incident as bad as what happened in Newtown.
I've seen the president genuinely angry twice. Once was when he found
out healthcare.gov wasn't working. The other was when background
checks failed in the Senate. And I mean angry, like deeply, deeply
disturbed by it. I think he used the word disgusted.
After Sandy Hook, after these 6-year-olds had been killed, these
little angels, you’d think that would certainly be something
that would move the nation. [The legislation] certainly didn’t
go as far as I thought we needed to go, but it seemed like a
reasonable first step. And to see even that get shot down, that was
extremely disheartening.
At the end of the day, the reason we didn’t make progress on gun
safety wasn’t because of substance. It was because of raw
politics and money and influence.
How much do we have to endure as a nation before we do that which we
are capable of doing?
It sounds harsh, [but] this doesn’t happen in other nations.
Other nations make public policy choices around guns, and common sense
gun control. My wife is from Australia. This doesn’t happen in
Australia, it doesn’t happen in England, it doesn’t happen
in Japan or Canada. And the fact that…we allowed this to happen,
this devastation to families and communities…and allow parents
to bury their kids, it’s devastating.
For all the president’s idealism, he’s clear eyed about
the Congress he has and the political environment he’s in. And
he pushes really hard to make progress where he can but he knows that
can only go so far.
I give us close to an F on gun control. Have we fundamentally
made the nation safer? We absolutely failed there.
It’s probably the closest I’ve come to being cynical
during the course of my presidency…when we saw that we
couldn’t get the system to move in a smarter direction. But
we’ve stayed at it.
He’ll keep fighting for gun safety and he’ll do it long
after he leaves office. But he’ll try to find other ways around
it.
Frankly, if the American people had the ability to take that tour with
me on that day, even the gun lobby would not have been able to stop
reform.
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