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Sex, lies and Obama’s White House
Former White House stenographer Beck Dorey-stein was immersed in a world of late nights and long days, culminating in an affair with a senior Obama staffer. She talks to Jane Mulkerrins about her revelatory memoir
In 2012, Beck Dorey-stein went to work as a White House stenographer. By the time she left that world of long hours, late-night drinking and jet-setting on Air Force One, she’d enlisted Barack Obama as a g ym buddy – and embarked on an ill-fated affair with a senior member of his team. She talks to Jane Mulkerrins about a memoir sure to ruffle some feathers
It was eight years between Bill Clinton’s departure from the White House in 2001 and the moment Barack Obama took up residence there. But the memory of the previous Democratic president of the United States still lingered. ‘No-drama Obama’ quickly established a reputation for calm and order, but Clinton’s years in office were known for anything but – various sex scandals swirled around ‘Slick Willy’, culminating in the Monica Lewinsky affair and, ultimately, impeachment proceedings against the president. Nothing like that took place on Obama’s watch – but that’s not to say that sex was entirely banished among the youthful, dedicated team who served him.
For legions of bright-eyed, ambitious graduates, landing a job in the White House – particularly Obama’s White House – would represent the pinnacle of professional achievement. Not so for Beck (short for Rebecca) Dorey-stein, who harboured little affection for the US capital, and no desire to work in its main industry. ‘I thought it was too buttoned-up, too obsessed with politics,’ she says of Washington, DC, with an expression of disdain. And yet in 2012, at 25 years old, she found herself at the beating heart of American politics, working for President Barack Obama. As one of six stenographers – tasked with recording and typing up his speeches, statements and official briefings, for both the press pool and the presidential archives – Dorey-stein travelled the world with Obama. She went to more than 60 countries and witnessed the making of history first-hand – including Obama’s visit to Cuba, the first by an incumbent US president in almost a century – as well as transcribing his emotional responses in the aftermath of tragedies such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and Isil’s beheading of the American journalist James Foley.
Now 32, Dorey-stein has turned her five years in the White House into a memoir, which is creating a buzz in Washington and beyond. In From the Corner of the Oval Office, she details not only her extraordinary experiences at the side of the former leader of the free world, but also the long affair she had with one of his senior staffers – a man with a ‘gigantic grin’ and ‘very blue eyes’, according to her description in the book – in snatched moments at hotels, on Air Force One and during presidential trips around the world.
We meet on a humid, drizzly morning in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. Slim, tanned and freckled after a week at her parents’ beach house on the New Jersey coast, Dorey-stein, wearing a floral dress and hi-top trainers, is upbeat and self-deprecating. It’s not hard to imagine what a breath of fresh air she must have been among the self-regarding politicos of Washington. Or why the man she calls ‘Jason’ in the book – the senior staffer with whom she fell in love, despite both of them being in other relationships – was attracted to her.
Though she had no interest in joining the ranks of the city’s pushy go-getters – the ‘DC creatures’ as she calls them – Doreystein’s ambitions were nevertheless influenced by Obama. In his 2008 commencement speech to her graduating class at Wesleyan University, the then-presidential hopeful had urged them to give back. As a result, she went into teaching instead of advertising, landing a part-time maternity-cover job at Sidwell Friends, an exclusive Quaker school whose students included the Obama daughters (Dorey-stein’s interactions with Sasha and Malia were limited to bumping into them in corridors). She was in a new relationship, with Sam, who worked in public relations.
OBut she was working five different part-time jobs and struggling to pay the rent on her shared house. Full-time roles were proving hard to come by. Until she spotted an advert on Craigslist.
Incredible though it may seem, Dorey-stein’s job as a White House stenographer was advertised on the website, more usually a go-to for second-hand sofas. The posting claimed it was for a position at a law firm, and was full-time, with benefits. Only after taking the initial tests for the recruiting agency did she discover the details. ‘My hands start to shake uncontrollably,’ she recalls in the book, of her first time in the Oval Office. ‘President Obama is sitting not even four feet away and gives me a quick nod and tight-lipped smile before beginning his remarks to reporters.’ But she quickly became adept at slipping into her spot, ‘behind the big lamp on the side table, between the president’s chair and the tan sofa – prime real estate’, she says today, with a laugh. ‘My whole job was to be invisible. The times we really interacted were on the treadmill.’
bama, whom she refers to as the ‘competitor-in-chief ’, shares her passions for running and basketball, as well as being a keen golfer. For security reasons, he would assiduously use the hotel gym when on the road. ‘I had just run seven miles, I was really proud of myself and really sweating,’ she tells me of her first solo interaction with him, early one morning in spring 2012, at a hotel in Colorado. A black-clad man in a baseball cap climbed on to the treadmill beside hers and observed, jokingly, ‘I thought you’d be faster than that.’ Dorey-stein froze. ‘I couldn’t think of anything to say,’ she laughs. ‘He was just being friendly, making a dad joke, but I couldn’t process it, so I just sprinted out of the gym.’
Within a year, though, the stenographer and POTUS – his name among White House staff, which stands for ‘president of the United States’ – were regular gym buddies. ‘It’s weird how normal it is to say hi to the president in the gym now,’ Doreystein writes. ‘Normal’ it might have become, but the book is nonetheless suffused with reverence for Obama. ‘He’s incredibly warm, and genuine and authentic,’ she enthuses today. ‘This idea that he’s aloof is just not the case at all. And he’s very funny, particularly behind closed doors.’
Hers was an all-consuming job and she had to travel continually, both across America and overseas, on diplomatic visits to France, Greece, Burma, Peru, China, Japan and Vietnam. She visited Hawaii, where the Obama family spends Christmas. In the book Dorey-stein recalls beach-volleyball tournaments, which the ever-competitive president was desperate to win, and festive barbecues with the first family. ‘I never thought I’d find myself casually chit-chatting with the president of the
The president – clad in black and wearing a baseball cap – climbed on to the treadmill beside hers and observed, jokingly, ‘I thought you’d be faster than that’
United States on the North Shore of Oahu while his daughters read in a nearby hammock and FLOTUS [Michelle Obama – First Lady of the United States] holds court with her friends, cracking jokes and sipping fun drinks through straws,’ she writes.
But constant travel, even on the presidential plane, takes its toll. ‘The people who make the president look good on these trips often look terrible and feel even worse’ – as she explains in the book – burnt out and surviving on junk food, Xanax and other pharmaceutical aids, late-night drinking and little sleep. Potentially more damaging still, however, is the loneliness that comes with spending weeks on the road, separated from friends and partners, deprived of ordinary intimacy.
Dorey-stein and Jason first talked to one another when, at a conference in Cambodia, he returned her precious voice recorder from a press briefing where she’d left it, and she spontaneously hugged him in relief. Then, after an intense trip to Jordan, the two began an affair – he gave her a lift home, confessed that his relationship with his girlfriend wasn’t going well and, after Dorey-stein played him her favourite song (Heart It Races by Dr Dog), the two kissed. Soon after, they spent their first night together in a hotel accompanying Obama on a fundraising trip to Silicon Valley.
‘We were kind of kindred spirits in a very strange environment,’ she says today. ‘At first, when travelling, I was like, “I just want my boyfriend here. There’s this beautiful pool. There’s an ocean. And I’m here with a bunch of strangers.” And then slowly, those strangers become your friends and then you delve into this dangerous territory of, like, “Oh, we are in Paris.”’ She does not specify exactly what role Jason played in Obama’s team, just that he was senior, ‘significantly’ older and enormously popular. ‘He was really kind,’ she tells me of his appeal. ‘He wasn’t drawn to the really important people, but always looked for people in the corners of rooms. That always impressed me and was part of why I liked him. From the time I met him and started to fall in love with him, I was like, “Oh, I need to keep my eyes peeled for people who are being overlooked.”’
Soon, on trips to Senegal, France and Japan, the pair would regularly end up in Dorey-stein’s bed. She gives a wry smile. ‘You’re on the other side of the world, in a really nice hotel room, at four in the morning, after not sleeping for three days, and here’s this great guy being like, “How are you holding up…?” The context kind of lends itself to it.’ She freely admits that she was ‘totally in love with’ Jason. ‘Even when all the signs were pointing in the wrong direction, I was like, “But you do love me. It’s going to happen. It’s totally going to work.”’ If colleagues suspected anything, they never let on, she says.
For all of the kindness she attributes to him today, in the book Jason comes across as a charming but selfish manipulator, aware of his appeal and systematically abusing his power. I have, I tell Dorey-stein, annotated my copy of From the Corner of the Oval Office with many four-letter words, particularly around the sections in which he sleeps with other staff members on trips, or rejects her outright only to later lure her into bed after too many drinks in the hotel bar. ‘That’s kind of you, because a lot of people have said, “You’re just so dumb,”’ she says. Dumb? I definitely don’t think so. A little naive, perhaps, but attempting valiantly to do her job in close proximity to the person making her lovesick and sad.
Her friend Hope Hall, Obama’s videographer and the only person in whom she confided about the extent of the ongoing affair, told her at one point to ‘snap out of it’. The travelling team was visiting Stonehenge with Obama. ‘Don’t let him ruin this for you,’ she ordered Dorey-stein, who gives an impressively honest account of her part in the affair. ‘I had a boyfriend, so that doesn’t reflect well on me, but it’s what happened,’ she shrugs.
Torn between her feelings for the two men, she broke up with Sam in the summer of 2013. Jason, however, stated that he wanted to make it work with his girlfriend, Brooke (not her real name). After Dorey-stein and Sam reunited that November, she confessed that she’d cheated on him with Jason, though she claimed it had been ‘just a couple of make-outs in a car’. He was ‘devastated’, she writes, but blamed himself for being too absorbed in his job. In Hawaii that Christmas, Sam came face-to -face with Jason, whom he appraised as ‘a cliché and a creep and stupid and transparent’. Brooke, Dorey-stein believes, never learnt of the affair.
She and Sam finally broke up for good in January 2015, though for reasons of distance – he moved for work – rather than as a result of her affair, which was secretly continuing. And Dorey-stein appears to have forgiven herself, for the most part. ‘I think most people have had a Jason in their life,’ she reflects. ‘It was extremely painful to have to relive it, but also helpful. It gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate. I was mad at myself for so long, but writing [the book] helped me work on forgiving myself.’
Shortly after Hillary Clinton’s shock defeat in the 2016 presidential election, Jason called Dorey-stein to tell her he had married Brooke. ‘The world is officially turning upside down,’ she writes. Washington felt funereal, all her friends had left the White House, but, as a non-political appointment, her job continued. While former colleagues bade tearful farewells to the Obamas, she was at work, ‘typing up Trump’s fire-and-brimstone inauguration speech and sobbing’, she says. By now a stenographer in the new administration, she flew on Air Force One with ‘the insane clown posse’, as she calls Donald Trump and his staff, to his Mar-a-lago resort in Florida, with Fox News blasting. In the book, she recalls how Trump got lost while giving the new First Lady, Melania, a tour of the plane, before appearing at Dorey-
They spent their first night together accompanying Obama on a trip to Silicon Valley… Jason was senior, ‘significantly’ older and enormously popular
Stein’s seat, standing too close to her. ‘It looks like he’s spent the last decade staring directly into the light of a tanning bed.’
While falling for a fellow staffer may have been naive, Doreystein had the foresight to keep copious notes and journals of her five years in the job, along with emails about her experience to friends and family – and she started writing her memoir. In February 2017, midway through transcribing a press briefing given by Trump’s then-press secretary, Sean Spicer, she got the call telling her she had a publishing deal. She walked straight out of the White House. She’s now a full-time writer.
Is Jason aware, I ask, that she’s written this book. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We have enough people in common to surmise that he knows.’ His reaction, however, she doesn’t know – they’ve had no contact since before Obama left office. But her retelling of their affair will be tricky for him to avoid, since the film rights have already been bought by the production company behind the Oscar-winning Spotlight. Her White House years in the stenography pool may be behind her, but these days Dorey-stein is tapping out her own story.
From the Corner of the Oval Office, by Beck Dorey-stein, is published by Bantam Press (£14.99). To order your copy for £12.99 plus p&p call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk