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Barack Obama smoked 9 cigarettes a day in the White House and only quit when Malia caught him, reveals memoir

In his memoir, the former POTUS gets candid about his struggles with smoking and the toll his first term in office took on his relationship with Michelle
PUBLISHED NOV 15, 2020
Malia and Barack Obama (Getty Images)
Malia and Barack Obama (Getty Images)

Former US President Barack Obama's soon to be out memoir digs deep into his politics and experience as a president, but throughout its 768-page length, there are also little personal details sprinkled that might grab the eye. For instance, the fact that Obama used to smoke nine cigarettes a day when he was in the White House. It has been long since Obama quit smoking, but the first ever check into that step came when his daughter Malia, much younger at the time, had caught him.

The admission comes in the 59-year-old's upcoming memoir titled 'A Promised Land' which chronicles his early life as a politician, his career and life through the first term in the White House. Along with the official bits, Obama also gets personal about the struggles of the presidency - the first term specifically and the impact it had on his relationship with his wife and former FLOTUS, Michelle Obama. According to CNN, Obama admitted that it was the job that made it particularly difficult for him to quit smoking even though he was at sometimes eight, nine, or ten cigarettes a day.

Being on the job also made him often look for a "discreet location to grab an evening smoke." He writes in the memoir that it was Malia, now 22, who got him to quit after she "frowned" at him "smelling a cigarette on my breath." Obama also details his tryst with nicotine gums, admitting to "ceaselessly" chewing them to help kick the habit he had picked up as a teen. Speaking of his struggle to quit smoking, he said during a 2009 press conference "As a former smoker, I constantly struggle with it. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes. Am I a daily smoker, a constant smoker? No. I don't do it in front of my kids. I don't do it in front of my family - and you know, I would say that I am 95% cured, but there are times where I mess up."

Obama also gets personal about the toll being the First Lady took on Michelle. "Despite Michelle's success and popularity, I continued to sense an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant, like the faint thrum of a hidden machine," Obama writes in the memoir, adding: "It was as if, confined as we were within the walls of the White House, all her previous sources of frustration became more concentrated, more vivid, whether it was my round the clock absorption with work, or the way politics exposed our family to scrutiny and attacks, or the tendency of even friends and family members to treat her role as secondary in importance." Occasionally reminiscing "those days when everything between us felt lighter when her smile was more constant and our love less encumbered," Obama also writes he would worry that "those days might not return."

The memoir also addresses the current American political climate, saying that Donald Trump rose to presidency, specifically because of the Republican party's changed stance after the first Black president was elected into office. "It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted," Obama wrote. "Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety."

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