I know what it’s like to make big decisions in small rooms, separated from the rest of the world, alone with the weight of your choices.
It seems, in fact, that such acts defined my government career. For six years, I was an official in the Obama administration, advising secretaries of state and ambassadors, spending my days in secure rooms at the State Department, the White House, and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
I frequented gilded conference rooms behind key-carded hallways where men—it was so often me and a room full of men—considered the direction of U.S. foreign policy. I’d glance at the portraits of former Secretaries—Marshall, Kissinger, Albright, Powell—and feel the privilege and responsibility of my presence. There among the dark suits in stiff chairs. Bright lights shining above. Heavy doors that locked with a click and left you to answer: Will aid prevent a humanitarian crisis? Is our counterterrorism policy working? How can America lead?
I spent hours alone in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs, the rooms where you go to read classified intelligence. The briefings always warned of potential crises, and my job was to help keep not-yet-disasters from becoming full-blown conflagrations.
By myself at a plain table, I’d open coded folders concealing stories from distant places: infectious diseases ravaging populations, ethnic tensions simmering, and protests that might birth democracies or ignite civil wars. Every day the reading was different, but, in a way, the messages were all the same: plain type, small print, huge consequences.
When the stakes were highest, I would, on occasion, be invited to the Situation Room, which looks in real life like it does on TV, digital clocks lined up on the wall, one always displaying the local time of the President. I’d check my electronics at the door, see the expansive mahogany table, and then stop to catch my breath, understanding that America has the power to start wars or forge peace, to ignore suffering or to end it, to live our values or to breach them.
The rooms I inhabit now are more ordinary and unassuming, living as I do in a two-bedroom apartment, sheltering in place with my wife and young child in the age of COVID-19.
There’s my bedroom, where the light peeks through the shutters in the morning, and for a brief moment before I rise, I can almost forget that things are not normal. The laundry is piled in the corner undone, and my business suits hang in the closet unworn. There’s a stack of serious books on my nightstand, but I reach most often for my phone which alerts! (of a market crash), and alerts! (of school closings) and alerts! (of death tolls, rising, rising).
There’s my daughter’s room, with its soft pastel colors and shelves lined with books; they tell stories of dragons and monsters, but not an invisible virus more powerful than any imagined villain. From the toddler bed, she looks up at me with plaintive eyes and asks, “Is tomorrow going to be a school day?” From the doorway, I stand and answer, “Not tomorrow, baby, but maybe soon.”
There’s our living room—our everything room—where we cook, and eat, and build a fort, and chase the toddler, and Zoom with grandparents, and collapse at the end of the day, bleary-eyed and exhausted, but grateful that we are healthy and safe when so many others are not.
When I was in government, I would try to keep my personal life out of the rooms I inhabited. But sometimes it snuck in.
That day when I went to the SCIF, heavy with labor, rushing to read the intel before I went to the hospital, needing to provide advice just one more time.
That day when the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, and my eyes filled with tears outside my boss’s office, knowing that my upcoming marriage would be recognized under U.S. law.
