Granny power
Michelle's mama keeps it real for the First Family
Last night, Michelle Obama flew into Stansted on a visit to Europe, while her husband stayed in Washington. Eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed that her arrival at one of London’s least glamorous airports was not entirely solitary. The First Lady was accompanied by her daughters, Malia, 16, and Sasha, 13 – and her mother.
Marian Robinson has no official job title, but in Washington she is referred to as Grandmother-in-Chief, or First Grandmother of the United States (FGOTUS, pronounced fuh-GOH-tus – a riff on POTUS, which is shorthand for her son-inlaw’s position as President of the United States). They may be jocular, but these nicknames hint at Mrs Robinson’s influence within the First Family. She is not just along for the ride; she is very much a key part of the Obama entourage.
“Michelle calls Marian Robinson her ‘rock’. She is steady, she is strong,” says Peter Slevin, whose biography Michelle Obama: A Life, came out two months ago. “She has opinions, but she is very grounded in the real world,” he told the Telegraph yesterday.
A sign of her importance is where she lives. Namely, one floor above Barack and Michelle Obama. While the President and his immediate family live on the second floor of the Residency of the White House, his mother-in-law lives on the third.
The idea of holding down the most important job in the world while having your mother-in-law living above the shop has been a gift to satirists and Obama’s critics. But it is not unprecedented: Harry Truman’s mother-in-law moved in, despite her dislike for Truman, while Woodrow Wilson’s second wife had her mother installed.
If anything, Marian Robinson’s presence at the White House reflects the increasing youth of today’s world leaders. Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were grandparents while they were in power. But this sudden lurch youthwards – Tony Blair and David Cameron both had children while in Downing Street – means that many world leaders are now the classic sandwich generation: bringing up children, while caring for their elderly parents. And, in many cases, not that elderly. Cameron’s mother-in-law, Viscountess Astor, is only 66 and still runs her own furniture business.
Mrs Robinson is older at 77, but very fit and active. Indeed, back in 1997 she won the gold medal in both the 50 and 100 metres at the Illinois Senior Olympics. She abandoned the sport after an injury that made her less competitive. “If I can’t do it fast, I’m not doing it,” she said in Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, O. “You don’t run just to be running – you run to win.” You can see where her daughter gets her drive from.
After a lifetime spent in Chicago, Mrs Robinson had to be persuaded to join the First Family in Washington when Obama won his first election in 2008. Although her husband, Fraser, had died in 1991, she was reluctant to leave her modest bungalow, siblings and friends. But she had already become a vital part of the Obama support network, having given up her job as a secretary at a bank so she could help out with child care during the presidential campaign.
After the election, she agreed to visit for three months to help Michelle, and particularly the First Daughters, settle down. “They’re dragging me with them, and I’m not comfortable with that,” she told CBS at the time. “But I’m doing exactly what you do. You do what needs to be done.”
Mrs Obama added: “She wasn’t completely kicking and screaming, but it was clear that her preference would be to remain in her old life.”
Six and a half years later, she is very much at home in Washington. Not only has she made new friends – notably Betty Currie, the former private secretary to Bill Clinton – but created her own life. Being able to slip out from the White House without Secret Service protection means she can regularly attend performances at the Washington Center, for instance.
“It’s important to remember the White House is such a bizarre place. The Obamas have 24-hour security, hot and cold running staff, they are under a microscope,” says Slevin. “I think Mrs Robinson acts as a calming presence. Barack Obama talks about how much he enjoys having her in the White House. He also says because she can slip out, she comes back to the White House with stories of real life. She is a humanising presence.”
Now that the girls are growing up, and her regular duties of picking them up from school and reading bedtime stories are coming to an end, her role has changed into something even more important: chaperoning the girls on global trips.
Before her son-in-law entered the White House, Mrs Robinson had never been abroad. Now, accompanying her granddaughters, she has visited Senegal, Tanzania, China and Italy, where she met the Pope; this will be her first time in Britain. That is some journey, considering that she was born, one of seven children, in 1937 in segregated Chicago. She did not go to college, and married Fraser C Robinson III, a former boxer and soldier, who spent his working life tending boilers at the city’s water plant. They brought up their children, Michelle and Craig, in a modest home in the working-class, south side area of the city.
Until the children left the nest, she was a stay-at-home mother, obsessed with them getting in to the best colleges. Both went to Princeton.
In a rare interview, given to CBS, Mrs Robinson denied she had some magic dust that meant her daughter ended up in the White House, and her son was a successful college basketball coach. “I don’t think it was magic dust, as a matter of fact. I believe there were lots of families who did exactly the same thing. But that was just the norm – you raised your children to stress education. We wanted them to have the feeling they could try anything. The saying was: ‘If it can be done, you can do it.’ It was a matter of choice.”
This week, in London, along with having tea with Prince Harry, Michelle will hope to rekindle the spark she lit in the capital back in 2009, when she visited an all-girls school in Islington, north London. Back then – making her first speech on foreign soil – she told the girls that she was “counting on every single one of you to be the best that you can be”, urging them to follow her example and use their education to do great things, regardless of their background. It was a visit that went down a storm, and some of the girls in the audience went on to Oxbridge.
The venue this time is Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets, east London, as part of Mrs Obama’s Let Girls Learn initiative. Ofsted ranks the school outstanding, and nearly all the children come from a Bangladeshi heritage.
“It’s very clear that her mother’s values, the lessons she taught Michelle growing up on the south side of Chicago, are an essential part of who Michelle is,” says Slevin. “If you think about what Michelle is emphasising, especially on this London trip – education, education, education – this was a message that was very powerful in Michelle’s life, and indeed very common with many African-Americans growing up.”
As Obama’s presidency starts to wind down, it is unclear how history will view his two terms in office. The conclusions are likely to be mixed. The First Lady, however, has scored some notable hits, not just with her anti-obesity and pro-education drives. More than anything, she has held her family together with a semblance of normality in the goldfish bowl of the White House.
And much of that success is thanks to the Grandmother-in-Chief.