By Jon Meacham:

On a lovely early autumn day in her final October in the White House, Michelle Obama stepped out onto a sunny South Lawn and, in a way, bid farewell. The setting was her celebrated organic kitchen garden, but the subtext seemed to go far beyond any single initiative. “I have to tell you that being here with all of you, overlooking this beautiful garden — and it is beautiful — it’s kind of an emotional moment,” Mrs. Obama said at a ceremony to unveil a bigger, fortified version of the garden. “We’re having a lot of these emotional moments because everything is the last. But this is particularly my baby, because this garden is where it all started. So we’re really coming full circle back to the very beginning.” She recalled conversations in 2008 about the role she might play in an Obama presidency — and noted, tellingly, that the garden emerged after “Barack actually won,” to which she added: “He won twice.” The gathered guests happily applauded.

Image Jon Meacham Credit... Gasper Tringale

There, in a way, was the essential Michelle Obama, or at least the essential observable version of herself: speaking of broad public good (the garden, which was part of her campaign against childhood obesity) while revealing an arch sense of competitiveness. My husband won; he won twice. As their history-making time in the White House comes to an end, it’s worth pondering the lessons of the Age of Obama. My own view is that both the president and the first lady have conducted themselves splendidly in the White House, managing the most difficult of tasks with apparent ease: projecting a grace that masked the ambition and the drive that took them, at early ages, to the pinnacle of American life.

In this they have kept faith with a tradition that, in our country, is as old as George Washington, who embodied the classical ideal of Cincinnatus, the reluctant leader summoned from his plow to lead the nation. President Obama gets much of the public credit for handling his eight years coolly, but the first lady has been a critical element of his success. She has chosen her shots carefully — not least in choosing to make the case against Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2016 — and is leaving the country with a warm impression of an excellent mother, a steady spouse and a sensible, devoted American.

Not everyone agrees, of course; not everyone ever does. The Obama skeptics and the Obama haters have from time to time questioned her patriotism, but this is the same country that managed, in some quarters, to hold Eleanor Roosevelt in contempt. The important thing is that Mrs. Obama, a clear-eyed lawyer, found a way to withstand the scrutiny of the spotlight. In point of fact, she did more than withstand it. To borrow a phrase from William Faulkner, she not only endured it; she prevailed over it.

How? By finding, or appearing to find, that most elusive of things in the modern world: balance. She was not Mrs. Roosevelt or Mrs. Carter or Mrs. Reagan or Mrs. Clinton, playing roles in affairs of state. Instead she did what the first African-American first lady arguably had to do to play a successful public role. In Voltaire’s terms, she cultivated her own garden, never threatening and never intimidating her neighbors. Much more doubtless unfolded beneath the surface or behind closed doors; history will sort that out. For now, it is enough to say that she is leaving the White House a strong and popular figure with a lifetime of good will and great reservoirs of capital on which to draw as she and her husband write their next chapters.

Back in 2008, musing on the life she was about to enter, Mrs. Obama recalled doubts about her garden — a bit of projection, one suspects, for doubts about the entire presidential enterprise. “What if we planted this garden and nothing grew?” Mrs. Obama asked. “We didn’t know about the soil, or the sunlight. And it’s like, oh, my God, what if nothing grows? … It was like afterwards I remember telling Sam [Kass, the former White House senior advisor for nutrition], ‘This better work, buddy. This better work.’” And so it did.