Obama finds peace in the late-night hours

WASHINGTON — “Are you up?”

The emails arrive late, often after 1 a.m., tapped out on a secure BlackBerry from an email address known only to a few. The weary recipients know that once again, the boss has not yet gone to bed.

The late-night interruptions from President Barack Obama might be sharply worded questions about memos he has read. Sometimes they are taunts because the recipient’s sports team just lost.

Almost every night that he is in the White House, Obama has dinner at 6:30 p.m. with his wife and daughters and then withdraws to the Treaty Room, his private office down the hall from his bedroom on the second floor of the White House residence.

There, his closest aides say, he spends four or five hours largely by himself.

He works on speeches. He reads the stack of briefing papers and 10 letters from Americans chosen each day by his staff.

The president also watches ESPN, reads novels or plays Words With Friends on his iPad.

“He is thoroughly predictable in having gone through every piece of paper that he gets,” said Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser from 201013. “You’ll come in in the morning, it will be there: questions, notes, decisions.”

To stay awake, the president does not turn to caffeine. He rarely drinks cof- fee or tea, and more often has a bottle of water next to him than a soda. His friends say his only snack at night is seven lightly salted almonds.

Obama’s longest nights — the ones that stretch well into the early morning — usually involve speeches.

In 2009, Jon Favreau gave the president a draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech the night before they were scheduled to leave for Oslo. O ba ma stayed up until 4 a.m. revising the speech.

On the plane to Norway, Obama, Favreau and two other aides pulled another near-all-nighter as they continued to work on the speech. Once Obama had delivered it, he called the exhausted Favreau at his hotel.

“He said, ‘Hey, I think that turned out OK,’” Favreau recalled. “I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Let’s never do that again.’ ”

Damon Winter / New York Times A self-proclaimed “night guy,” President Barack Obama has come to see the long, solitary hours after dark as essential to him as his time in the Oval Office.