Just Like Anyone Else's Kids. [View all]

[sheshe2]

Sandy Hook

Valerie JarrettSenior advisor to the president and director of the office of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, 2009-2017

I was in the Oval Office when the president found out that 20 children and six adults had died. And I remember asking, Could you repeat the number? Because I couldn't absorb 20 children. Then I found out they were 6 and 7 years of age. It was almost as if I couldn't take it in.



Valerie Jarrett

Just two days later, the president went to Newtown. It was a rainy day so he couldn’t take a helicopter. We had to drive for an hour and 10 minutes. I remember that like it was yesterday. In the car, he looked at his remarks and he turned them over and he said, “That’s not what I want to say,” and he pulled out a yellow pad of paper and he started to write.

Barack ObamaPresident of the United States, 2009-2017

I knew one thing I needed to do was to name the children, to acknowledge them and make sure that people understood that this wasn’t an abstraction, that these were [kids] just like Malia or Sasha or anybody else’s kids that would hug you and be tucked in at night and read stories to. The notion that we as a society couldn’t protect them, not from a natural disaster but from something like this…

Joshua DuBois

I remember the sheer number of people affected. You had all of those students and teachers who were lost, but each one of them had multiple family members who were directly impacted. Three, four, five, some of them had 10 or 15 people there...And every single one, the president greeted. He would bring them in for a big hug. He’d put his hands on their shoulder and look 'em in their eyes. Some of the younger siblings who were just too young to understand what was going on, he’d try to get them to laugh a little bit or hand them a box of White House M&Ms from his pocket. [The president] just gave whatever he could in that time.



My President





http://www.history.com/the-obama-years/newtown.html