Desirée Glapion Rogers is the descendant of a Creole voodoo priestess. The
first time I meet her, she welcomes me into her East Wing lair of the White
House and turns on just enough Southern charm to camouflage an aura of
self-assuredness typically reserved for catwalk models or first ladies.
Wearing a crisp white shirt, black patent flats and high-waisted navy slacks
that would look terrible on almost anyone else, 49-year-old Rogers talks
about her job as White House social secretary.
If there's one thing Rogers and her staff want you to know - and will keep
reminding you until you get it - it's that the President and Michelle Obama
plan to open up the White House and again make it the “people's house”. They
want to create an environment where average Americans might stop by and
catch the First Lady serving homemade huckleberry cobbler and caramel ice
cream to students, tending to the vegetable garden on the South Lawn, or
watching the romantic comedy He's Just Not That Into You with her
girlfriends. In one of the most visible roles in the Obama Administration,
Rogers is out to solidify the Obamas as one of the most memorable families
in presidential history, and the Ivy League-educated First Lady, in
particular, as the most popular mom-in-chief.
The first day I interview Rogers, I do not see the President or the First
Lady. What I do see is the First Lady's garden, green and manicured, sitting
like a postcard outside Rogers's large cheery windows. Michelle Obama's
office is down the hall. With her direct access to the Obamas and
unparalleled connections to White House staff, as well as Washington and
Chicago power-brokers, Rogers is considered by many to be the key to Brand
Obama. She stands at the centre of the careful marketing of the family and
an administration-wide effort to make the White House appear a hip and
accessible abode.
The First Lady's press team manages a media blitz, while Rogers controls the
day-to-day development and execution of the brand. Rogers, who ran an online
social-networking unit at Allstate Financial, served as president of Peoples
Gas and North Shore Gas and, at the age of 31, headed the Illinois State
Lottery, manages to speak with the confidence of a top executive and the
casualness of a woman who can't be bothered with business. Above all, Rogers
is a world-class networker - the ultimate social engineer, not just planning
White House dinner parties and her own soirées, but also connecting powerful
people in her orbit. She has immersed herself in Chicago's charity circuit
and developed a wideranging circle of friends, including the senior White
House adviser Valerie Jarrett, and Linda Johnson Rice, head of the company
that publishes Ebony and Jet magazines. She has also tapped her connections
over the years to help advance friends' political interests. Rogers held
parties at her house and called former classmates from Harvard and
longstanding friends in New Orleans during the 2008 campaign to help raise
$200,000 for Barack Obama's presidential bid.
“She's been a social engineer from the beginning,” says Shawnelle Richie, a
friend and TV executive. “It's beyond parties, it's the way she connects
with people.”
At times Rogers can sound as if she's from East Coast privilege. In fact,
she's a daughter of middle-class New Orleans - with a city councilman
father, who used to ask little Desirée to serve drinks or gumbo and help
entertain when company arrived. School nights didn't exist in the Glapion
house. “There was never any normal type of family,” says Roy A. Glapion, 47,
Rogers's only sibling, a businessman and civil engineer. Rogers, who calls
herself the “eyes and ears” of the First Lady, has known her for nearly two
decades. They met through Rogers's ex-husband, John Rogers Jr, who played
basketball at Princeton with Michelle's brother, Craig Robinson. They have
an easy way together, chatting about their daughters and smiling at each
other, the way old girlfriends do. The First Lady pops her head in Rogers's
office to chat as if still surprised that she works down the hall from her
friend. Friendships with all the right people may be one of the reasons that
Obama chose Rogers for the job of planning every social event that takes
place at the White House - from black-tie dinners to basketball games, press
conferences, movie nights and birthday parties. Rogers says that she plans
events that “promote the Obama presidency” and make sure “the White House
asset is reflective of who they [the Obamas] are. We have the best brand on
Earth: the Obama brand. Our possibilities are endless.” Like all brands, the
Obama brand has a “crown jewel,” she explains, and that crown jewel is the
White House.
Think of it like Unilever's Dove, a consumer brand Rogers says she admires.
Having started with a simple bar of soap, the utilitarian Dove brand now
boasts such grooming products as shampoo, body wash and deodorant. In 2004,
its “Campaign for Real Beauty” featuring plus-size and older models
generated a flood of publicity, boosted sales and made the brand seem
approachable and public-service-oriented. “You basically need to understand
what your customers want and need,” Rogers says.
Brand Obama is a marketer's dream, says Michael Sitrick, chairman of Sitrick
and Company, a PR firm. Rogers has an idyllic American family to work with
“straight out of a 1950s sitcom”, Sitrick says. They “really get it from a
PR perspective”.
Like most successful women, Rogers knows how to use a certain bossiness, to
which other people quickly yield. One morning Rogers, holding a white paper
cup of coffee emblazoned with the gold White House seal, greets a group of
high-powered women that includes the R&B singer Alicia Keys, the actress
Phylicia Rashad and the make-up mogul Bobbi Brown. Pacing through the
diplomatic reception room, Rogers gives them instructions for later that day
when they will be deployed to Washington public schools to talk to
high-school girls about self-confidence and the importance of attending
college. When the First Lady enters the room, Rogers gently directs her to
stand in front of the small cluster of photographers roped inside a corner
of the room.
Thomas Wilson, head of the insurance giant Allstate Corporation, aggressively
recruited Rogers in 2008. When Obama first offered Rogers the social
secretary job last November, she reached out to Wilson for advice. “She
thought she could transform the job beyond the traditional role by really
focusing on the branding,” Wilson says.
Rogers is entering uncharted territory in one aspect of this branding exercise
- dealing with a First Lady who has built an impressive career and who's
known for her forthright nature. Early in the campaign, Michelle got off to
a rocky start when she talked about her husband's dirty socks and how he was
“stinky” in the morning, images that some claimed emasculated him. Rogers is
playing a major role in the First lady's transition from controversial
campaign figure to potential American icon. Rogers doesn't advise her on
which publications to appear in or which media interviews to grant, but she
does organise events that reinforce the makeover Michelle underwent during
the campaign.
It isn't always easy. One recent afternoon in the White House kitchen the
First Lady reviews a menu of winter citrus salad and Nantucket scallops
(“The President loves scallops,” she says) with a group of culinary students
from L'Academie de Cuisine and a small group of reporters. The foods would
be served to visiting governors later that night. The next day, a headline
in the Los Angeles Times read “Is Michelle Obama Really in the Kitchen?”
While the kitchen scene may be representative of a wider mission to depict a
storyline that connotes an all-American archetype, says Sheila Weidenfeld,
former press secretary to Betty Ford, feminist writers have lamented the
“momification of Michelle Obama”. They're waiting for the Harvard-educated
attorney to adopt a more defined policy role. But Rogers doesn't agree. “All
these rules we've put in place for ourselves, we are saying, ‘Ladies, smash
them, be who you want to be'. ”
She has a powerful tool on her side. The Republican strategist Stuart Stevens,
who worked on George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, says that one of the
first things an administration does is to use the White House as a prop to
connect to “elements of society and the electorate . . . that they couldn't
connect with during the campaign”.
On the first day of spring, the White House took centre stage as the President
faced public rage over $165 million in bonuses paid to AIG executives. His
wife grabbed a shovel and, with 26 fifth-graders from Bancroft Elementary
School in Washington, dug up a grassy patch on the South Lawn to plant the
new White House Kitchen Garden - the first vegetable garden at the White
House since Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden during the Second World War.
“Let's hear it for vegetables!” the First Lady cheered, surrounded by picnic
tables and beaming children. “Let's hear it for fruits!” The following day,
a photo of her gardening appeared on the front of The New York Times (a
spokeswoman for Michelle says that the timing of the event had nothing to do
with the AIG fallout).
Unlike previous administrations, which have kept the East and West Wings
separate, Rogers and her five staff are a vital part of its political
operation, says a White House aide. Every morning at 8.15, Rogers strides
from the East to West Wing, where she attends a meeting with the President's
chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, top Obama aide David Axelrod and other senior
White House officials.
Rogers is political and, like any good politician, she knows candidates don't
get anywhere if they charm only rich people. The rich may fund elections,
but they don't win them. A typical dinner party at her Gold Coast co-op
might seat an academic next to an executive, an artist next to a labour
leader. Or, as Rogers describes it, she likes to keep “gumbo, a mixed bag”
of people around. “This ability to mix people together is something I learnt
early on,” she says. “No one should walk into a party and have a stamp that
says ‘mayor' or ‘businessman' on their head. Everyone is just there to have
a good time.”
Rogers got her sense of style from Big Mama, her maternal grandmother, Marie
Smith, who used to dress for church on Sunday in bright colours and
spectacular hats. It grew from there. By 2004, Rogers was dressing up for
$1,000-a-ticket fundraisers and posing for Vogue magazine as an example of
how “executive and chic can coexist”. In February, the White House came
under criticism for being flippant during an economic crisis after Rogers
was photographed sitting in the front row next to Anna Wintour, Vogue
editor-in-chief, at New York Fashion Week.
Even if Rogers weren't in such a visible position, at a slim 5ft 10in she's
the type of woman who would not go unnoticed. She is 50 in June, but as a
young male White House press aide points out: “Man, she doesn't look it.”
Typically, events staged by Rogers at the White House end up on a
choreographed loop in the news, such as when Rogers dyed the White House
fountain on St Patrick's Day at the request of Michelle and then went on the
Today TV show beaming about the bright-green fountain behind her. Then there
was the night that she made room for a dancefloor in the State Dining Room
so that the nation's governors could dance to Earth, Wind & Fire before
meeting with the President the next day to debate an economic stimulus
package many of them opposed. By the time Boogie Wonderland played, the
Obamas joined the governors on a packed dance floor. “Desirée has done a
phenomenal job of making events at the White House reflective of our desire
to entertain regularly, to create an environment that is conducive to
building relationships and not just conducting business,” The First Lady
says in a statement.
Rogers faces the challenge of planning White House social events in the midst
of a historic economic downturn. She says that she and the First Lady have
asked the White House kitchen to tone things down and use US wines and
locally grown produce. “We wouldn't do caviar,” she says.
In Washington, Rogers lives in a Georgetown apartment. Her only child,
Victoria, 18, is a freshman at Yale. At the White House, traces of New
Orleans are everywhere. The photo of a house, busted from hurricane winds,
hangs on her wall. “For anyone who lives here and leaves, New Orleans is
part of your soul,” says her brother. Determined to move to a place where it
snows, he says that Rogers stayed up late at night studying, got straight As
and ignored bullies who teased her for being best friends with a white girl.
She moved to Chicago where she married John Rogers. She is not someone who
lets anything distract her. In 2003, breast cancer was diagnosed but, after
several operations, she overcame the illness.
“There's no time to waste. Every day there needs to be movement on something,”
she says. At the President's request, she plans to arrange intimate dinners
with US icons this summer - from Hollywood stars to Nobel prizewinners.
“He's got to have some fun, too,” Rogers says.
To read the full Desirée Rogers story, view WSJ.magazine online at:
www.wsjmagazine.com
