Senior presidential staffer reveals her excruciating drama ahead of big meeting
THE meeting between President Obama and Pope Francis appeared to go off without a hitch. A senior presidential aide has a very different story.
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EVERYONE thinks that travelling with the president has got to be a sweet gig — lush service, pampering, the nicest meals.
It is not. Stops in each location usually last for a day, two days, something like that — it’s not exactly a vacation plus a couple of casual appointments with world leaders thrown in.
Everyone is working, trying to co-ordinate diplomacy, and thinking about what they have to do next. You’re so busy that it’s not always clear when you’ll get to eat — sometimes you’ll go the entire day without a meal.
One of the last trips I went on with POTUS was when we went to Europe in 2014. We were gone for about a week, and we visited the Netherlands, The Hague, Belgium, and Italy, where we were making a quick detour to meet Pope Francis at the Vatican before a lunch with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in Rome.
A photo of me asleep on a couch at the EU in Brussels sums up how we felt at the time: sometimes you crush the trip, and sometimes the trip crushes you.
The morning of the meeting with the pope, the most exciting part of the trip, I went downstairs to the hotel restaurant to get coffee. I hadn’t planned on getting food, but in a moment of weakness, I ordered some eggs, too — I figured I wouldn’t get the chance to eat again until dinner.
Eating eggs is unfortunately not a benign act for me — I have IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). It mostly flares up when I’m anxious or stressed, and travelling with POTUS, I had to learn to manage the constant possibility of almost shitting my pants in high-stakes situations. In a foreign country, you always want to eat the local food — the sickest I ever got was at the Raffles in Singapore because I ordered their take on chicken Cordon Bleu. But I am also just not good at handling eggs.
Why did I get them? I don’t know. It was a rash decision.
I was coming up on my last month as deputy chief, and I was letting my guard down. My stomach started making noises while Ferial Govashiri — also known as Pho; she was Obama’s personal aide and my former roommate — was pinning a mantilla on Susan Rice (National Security Advisor).
“Alyssa,” Ferial asked, “did you eat something for breakfast?”
Ferial was very familiar with my digestion issues. I told her I’d had eggs and coffee. She looked really disappointed in me.
When we got to the Vatican, I started to sweat. If you’ve never been to the Vatican before, you’ll think it’s lame when I say that it feels like you’re in The Da Vinci Code, but that’s the best non-religious reference I have for the grandness of it all. The paintings, the architecture — you don’t have to be Catholic to think it’s incredible. It’s an overwhelming place to have an IBS attack.
President Obama was scheduled to have a private audience with Pope Francis, and senior staff were set for a semiprivate audience.
We walked through a series of ceremonial anterooms and then lined up in precedent order (John Kerry (Secretary of State); Susan Rice; me; and Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s senior adviser for strategy and communications and one of my best friends) in an ornate hallway to wait for our turn.
This was the moment when I had to do some reckoning.
What are my priorities? Am I going to tell someone I’m about to have diarrhoea at the Vatican in hopes of getting help? Or am I going to keep quiet and potentially shit myself? Which is the least worst option?
I didn’t know how long Obama was going to be in there, and I didn’t want to miss my chance to go in — you can’t just walk into the pope’s chambers late. I tried praying to the patron saint of digestion — there are actually a few who specialise against stomach pains — but I felt no relief.
I told someone. By this point in my career at the White House, most of the senior staff knew about my IBS; I once had to have Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, watch the bathroom door for me at Hamid Karzai’s palace while two Afghan guards played cards and smoked on the other side of it.
This kind of thing really breaks down barriers with people. When you tell someone, “Here’s the thing: I might have to shit on this helicopter,” and they don’t shun you afterwards, you have a friend for life.
The team sprang into action, but they couldn’t find a bathroom in the building. I freaked; POTUS was due in soon.
Finally, a junior staff member came back with some good news and bad news from the doctor.
The good news: They had president-strength diarrhoea medicine.
The bad news: There was no water anywhere.
At this point, I was vaguely aware that a sense of urgency had spread through much of the travelling staff, including most of the people who reported to me: They were all engaged in the mission to find me a glass of water so I could take the emergency medicine for my impending diarrhoea.
I concentrated on not shitting my pants on holy ground. After what felt like 12 or 13 hours, someone came in with a glass of water.
“Where did this glass of water come from?” I asked.
No one would say. All I know is that it was a glass of water in the Vatican, and I drank it.
You meet a lot of famous, important people while working at the White House, but meeting the pope was the first time that I really felt moved. The meeting was nothing elaborate — you walk up; shake his hand; say, “Your Holiness, it’s an honour”; and then you move on — and I’m not religious.
But some of my family and many of my friends are Catholics, and I was struck by the sense that meeting this person would mean so much to so many people. I felt lucky.
After that, I had to go lie down in the car. Like all our drivers, the driver was a member of the military, and I always felt very embarrassed when I had to expose my digestive weaknesses to them. (My pants were also unbuttoned.)
He asked me if I was OK and if he should get the doctor; I told him no. As I flung myself over the back seat, I felt something poke me in the leg. While POTUS was meeting with the Vatican’s secretary of state, I had taken, like, five packs of the blessed rosary bead souvenirs they give to people at the exit, and they were all in my pockets.
This is an extract from Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? by Alyssa Mastromonaco published by Hachette Australia, available now.
Originally published as Senior presidential staffer reveals her excruciating drama ahead of big meeting