Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Barack Obama wanted to escape. It was an uncharacteristically sunny day in London, warm and not a cloud in the sky, and all afternoon the president had been cooped up with foreign leaders inside a stuffy ballroom at Winfield House, a grand mansion that is home to the U.S. ambassador. The property has one of the largest and most beautiful private gardens in London. Its lawn, green and lush, is the length of several football fields, framed by shady magnolia trees that were just beginning to bloom.

For security and privacy, the Secret Service had covered the windows facing the lawn. But whenever a door leading to a back credenza opened, Obama was able to catch a glimpse of the outdoors. After he said goodbye to his last guest, Chinese President Hu Jintao, Obama walked to the back door and peered out. "Come on," he called to two of his closest aides, senior adviser David Axelrod and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. "Let's go take a walk."
The Secret Service agents on duty "freaked," in the words of one senior Obama aide who recounted the story (and who, like others quoted in this story, asked for anonymity for the usual reasons). They raced ahead of the president, fanning out to make sure Obama was safe.

His regular team of agents—as they often remind Obama, much to his chagrin—do not enjoy moments of spontaneity like this. On the roof, snipers stood at the ready as the president and his aides slowly circled the lawn again and again. "We did that for about 45 minutes," Gibbs recalled. "Just looping around." They talked a bit about business—there was drama between the Chinese and French that put the looming G20 talks at risk—but mostly Obama kept quiet, taking in the view and keeping his thoughts to himself.

It was a rare moment of semi-freedom for a president who has struggled to maintain a sense of normalcy in the White House. Just two days later, at a town-hall meeting in France, Obama talked about the drawbacks of being president: "You know, it's very frustrating now. It used to be when I came to Europe that I could just wander down to a café, and sit and have some wine and watch people go by, and go into a little shop, and watch the sun go down. Now I'm in hotel rooms all the time and I have security around me all the time. And so just, you know, losing that ability to just take a walk, that is something that is frustrating."

Obama is hardly the first president to complain about life in the White House bubble. "I never dreamed such loneliness and desolation of heart possible," wrote Woodrow Wilson. William Howard Taft called it "the loneliest place in the world." Harry Truman spoke of "the great white jail known as the White House," a phrase echoed by Bill Clinton, who called it "the crown jewel of the federal penal system."

Yet Obama seems to have had a tougher time adjusting than Clinton, or even George W. Bush, in part because he can still remember what it was like to be a normal person. Before becoming president, he spent just four years in the U.S. Senate; though he was hardly a stranger to the public, Obama still had a life. If he wanted to take a walk around Capitol Hill, he could—and often did. But Obama's temperament has also made the adjustment difficult. Though outgoing in public, Obama was an only child and spent a lot of time alone (he's described himself as being hermitlike during his days at Columbia University). That hasn't changed. "He likes solitude, where he can just take a moment and collect his thoughts and breathe," says a close Obama friend. "And in this job, there is none of that."