Spoken from the Heart (60 page)

But I never expected what would happen on the afternoon of October 26, when I sat down with Jason DeParle in my office in the East Wing. In a tone that was adversarial and more than a touch offensive, he began by asking, "So what's a nice woman like you doing with a guy like him?" Meaning Ken Thigpen. It was demeaning to me, and it even seemed demeaning to Ken. I thought it radiated cynicism, as if Jason did not believe in the sincerity of Ken's efforts to choose a different path for himself and his son.

In these exact words, Jason later said, "One of the people wrote, this is a
Saturday Night Live
skit,
that people--you're vulnerable to people--being a wealthy woman in the White House, vulnerable to people rolling their eyes and making fun of your ability to talk to gang members. What do you think about that? Did that--does that go through your mind?" And then I recounted yet again that I began my adult career as a twenty-one-year-old teacher working with predominantly African-American kids in inner-city schools. It was not a new interest. It had been my interest for nearly forty years, while I taught and while George was governor. But Jason kept on trying to bait me, saying, "Well, that's what so interesting about your association with Ken. You're not put off that he was a drug dealer or a pimp in his earlier life?" At that point I was incredulous. The assumption by this reporter was that he knew all there was to know about me, and that of course, I couldn't be, wouldn't be, interested in anyone who was different from me. I had already spent hours talking with ex-gang members. I was happy to meet Ken.

Jason DeParle's tenor suggested that he saw my efforts as some kind of a joke. His article after the conference was no better. It opened by smugly saying that I was "wealthy and white," while Ken was "poor and black." As it happens, Jason DeParle himself is wealthy and white, but does that disqualify him from writing about poverty and African-American welfare mothers?

There are hardworking, stellar members of the press who cover the White House. They are highly dedicated to their work under demanding and difficult conditions. Two journalists, NBC News' David Bloom and
The Atlantic
magazine's Michael Kelly, had died covering the early days of the Iraq War, David of a blood clot, and Michael in a vehicle accident.

Many regional reporters from outside Washington also did their homework and were quite fair. On the national stage, I was always happy to do interviews with the highly professional Jonathan Karl, Robin Roberts, and Diane Sawyer of ABC News; as well as Deb Riechmann of the Associated Press; Ann Curry, Matt Lauer, and David Gregory of NBC News; and Greta Van Susteren and Chris Wallace of Fox News. And in the early months and years after 9-11, the snide remarks about my looks largely evaporated. There were far bigger things to discuss. It was the press who had graciously called me the "comforter in chief."

But as in every White House, from the beginning some in the media came with preconceived notions and an adversarial point of view. Some of it was sloppiness, reporters who didn't know an issue and got basic facts wrong. But some of it was bias, where journalists, rather than being objective, could not put their own emotions and assumptions aside. Jason DeParle was a classic example of a reporter coming with his story already written.

And how some journalists saw me often had very little to do with me and very much to do with how they perceived George. What was written and said about him was far worse.

The misperceptions about George were manifested in many ways, large and small. I remember interviewing in February of 2004 with Elisabeth Bumiller, then the
New York Times'
White House correspondent. She had just written a piece about George and John Kerry both being members of the same secret society at Yale. At the end of the article, Elisabeth repeated a previously circulated story about George's dad appearing at his son's dorm room door and telling George to join his old society and "become a good man." But the story wasn't true. Gampy was a congressman at the time. He wasn't concerned about whether George joined a Yale secret society or not; he certainly didn't make a special trip to New Haven to speak to George. At the end of our interview, I asked Elisabeth about the article, and it was clear from her reply that she had never checked the story herself. But apparently the anecdote was just too good not to use. That was the problem. While the truth may not be as interesting, it is the truth.

For me, the greatest casualty of this media cynicism was what the press frequently would not cover: stories of amazing people doing extraordinary things across America. The people I met and places I visited as part of my Helping America's Youth initiative inspired me as first lady.

In April of 2005, I traveled to Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles. Founded in 1988 by Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest, Homeboy is the largest gang intervention program in the nation. Los Angeles County is home to eleven hundred gangs, with an estimated eighty-six thousand gang members. Each year Homeboy opens its doors to twelve thousand gang members from eight hundred separate gangs. If a gang intervention program has a 30 percent success rate, it is considered effective. The University of California-Los Angeles puts Homeboy's success rate at 80 percent. The program has given tens of thousands of gang members new lives.

"Father Boyle would ride his bicycle into the middle of our gang fights," one of the young women working at Homeboy told me in 2005, shaking her head in disbelief. But Father Boyle couldn't ride into the middle of every gang fight. He designed Homeboy to give ex-gang members, many of whom have criminal records and very little formal education, a fresh start. His motto, he told me, is "Jobs, jobs, jobs," and his belief is that if gang members could be taught work skills and could get good jobs, they would choose a different path. Although drug dealing may look lucrative, Father Boyle contends that many of the young men and women standing on street corners or working out of neglected buildings live with enormous anxiety. They fear being shot, being arrested, being robbed. They fear the people they buy from and the people they sell to. But they don't know anything else. Getting out is, in fact, a relief.

Homeboy Industries operates five businesses and a solar-panel installation training program, all staffed with ex-gang members. Homeboy also helps to provide job training and placement, even things as basic as how to behave on the job and how to dress. Young people in the program who are not ready for the private work world are given jobs in the Homeboy businesses, where they can learn everything from landscaping and T-shirt silk screening to baking and working in restaurants and food service. They learn how to take direction from a supervisor, how to get along with co-workers, and how to develop a work ethic. Father Boyle's program provides mental health counseling, alcohol and drug abuse treatment, anger management programs and domestic violence classes, ways to get a GED high school degree, and help for people who have recently been released from jail and need to make the transition from detention to a free life. One other major component of Homeboy is gang-tattoo removal. Sitting in his spare office with a simple desk, Father Boyle told me of one young man who came to him when Homeboy was relatively new and said, "I've got a huge tattoo on my chest that I want removed." Father Boyle thought for a moment and then replied, "Don't worry. You can wear a shirt. Tattoo removal hurts. No one will see it." The young man answered, "My son will."

Thousands of the young men in the program are covered in gang tattoos. Father Boyle has convinced twelve Los Angeles doctors to remove those tattoos for free; these twelve doctors conduct four thousand tattoo removal treatments each year.

Father Boyle was one of the people I invited to the conference at Howard University. He came and brought some of his ex-gang members. It was their first plane trip and the first time they had ever worn suits. After the conference I invited them to a reception at the White House. Over the years Father Boyle would travel to Washington with other ex-gang members, and we always made sure that they could get a White House tour. Young men who had been in gang fights and had even spent time in jail could learn that, having started down the path to change their lives, they were welcome in the most prominent home in the nation.

There were so many other remarkable programs across the nation. Dr. Gary Slutkin, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Chicago, had spent most of his career combating tuberculosis in San Francisco, cholera in Somalia, and AIDS in Uganda with the World Health Organization before he returned home to Chicago. He thought he was done with public health crises until he realized that in some Chicago neighborhoods 20 to 30 percent of children have directly witnessed violence. In other areas the numbers are even higher. In the South Side of Chicago during the 1990s, as many as one in four children at three elementary schools had witnessed a shooting; one-third had seen a stabbing. By 2002 Chicago's homicide rate was nearly three times that of New York. Slutkin's model was to treat violence as an epidemic, like AIDS in Africa. His program, CeaseFire, works to reduce violence in communities by treating the entire community.

Whereas in Uganda he had used former prostitutes to spread the message about AIDS, in Chicago he recruited reformed ex-convicts and ex-gang members. Called "violence interrupters," they return to the same neighborhoods where they once got into trouble. If they see a fight or hear of one brewing, they literally interrupt it and say, "Don't ruin your life over this petty slight," or "Don't shoot someone or pull a knife because he looked at your girlfriend or because he cut in front of you in line." Slutkin matches at-risk kids with older trained mentors in their communities, and he brings together the whole community, law enforcement, clergy, teachers, school administrators, and parents, so each of them can deliver the message that violence is not accepted here. They march in the streets to protest after shootings and put up billboards with the pictures of beautiful young children, saying, "I want to grow up." In its first year, CeaseFire cut shootings in one police beat by 68 percent. In six communities, it reduced shootings by 42 percent. By 2004 CeaseFire had been implemented in fifteen Chicago neighborhoods. Within a few years, it would be used in cities throughout Illinois.

After the Howard University conference, my staff and I held six regional conferences, to highlight more programs and reach more people; in short, to help the helpers. We searched published reports and interviewed hundreds of experts to find organizations that were turning around what might otherwise have been tragedies. Each organization had to have independent statistics measuring its success and a track record to pass our vetting process. What we found amazed us.

The human needs in parts of our society are so great that fatherhood initiatives must teach young men the most basic lessons of being a dad. One program I visited in Kansas taught fathers and their children how to hug. They started with a thirty-second embrace. For most of these children and their dads, it was the first time they had ever been wrapped in each other's arms.

I traveled again to Los Angeles to visit Will Power to Youth, a program founded by Ben Donenberg and sponsored in part by Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, which uses Shakespeare to reach at-risk kids. Instead of hanging out with gangs, teens in L.A. are paid to spend a summer producing a Shakespeare play, building scenery, acting, and learning Shakespeare. One of the young men I met was hired by Home Depot for its kitchen design department because of what he had learned designing sets for Shakespeare plays. I saw a program in Atlanta where Emory University students coach debate teams in housing projects, to teach kids to use their minds and their words to settle disputes. In upstate New York, I watched as teenagers were taken through a mock arrest and jury trial to see how evidence is presented and what their sentences would be for a potential crime. I played the Good Behavior Game with kids in Baltimore. Dr. Sheppard Kellam helped pioneer the game; his idea was that many children do not know how to be students; they have never seen a parent read, have never sat still in a chair to listen. The Good Behavior Game teaches them how to behave in school.

I also told these success stories to other audiences, speaking to the National League of Cities, the Big Brothers Big Sisters conference, and other organizations around the nation. After three years my office had helped to develop a more organized way for these innovators and pioneers to share their findings and their wisdom. We created a special website to help new organizations get started and existing ones to expand. And George signed an executive order to make the special interagency working group permanent.

There are still gangs, still teenagers going to jail, still children without fathers, but there are also more people giving their time and their lives to offer kids another path. In December of 2008, Gary Slutkin of CeaseFire wrote to me, "I believe that someday we may be able to contain violence, as we have so many other epidemic problems of history." However difficult that may be, there is no reason not to try.