On a Thursday morning in April, I met with Vice President Kamala Harris at Number One Observatory Circle, the Victorian mansion that, for the past two and a half years, she and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, have called home. She can be a striking presence when she walks into a room, with a long stride and an implacable posture that make her seem taller than she is (about 5 foot 2). By the time I saw Harris at the residence, I had already traveled with her to Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, and Reno, Nevada, as well as to Africa, trips on which she had carried herself with ease and confidence.

Ease and confidence have not been the prevailing themes of Harris’s vice presidency. Her first year on the job was defined by rhetorical blunders, staff turnover, political missteps, and a poor sense among even her allies of what, exactly, constituted her portfolio. Within months of taking office, President Joe Biden was forced to confront a public perception that Harris didn’t measure up; ultimately, the White House issued a statement insisting that Biden did, in fact, rely on his vice president as a governing partner. But Harris’s reputation has never quite recovered.

Harris is intensely private, so I was somewhat surprised to be invited to her home. The residence had been redecorated, and in keeping with past practice the work was done without fanfare. There have been no photo spreads, and the designer, Sheila Bridges, signed a nondisclosure agreement. But Harris seemed to enjoy showing me around. In the turret room, she pointed to the banquette seating built along the curve. (“I just love circles,” she said.) She gestured at some of the art she’d brought in, on loan from various galleries and collections, describing each piece in terms of the artist’s background rather than its aesthetic qualities—Indian American woman, African American gay man, Japanese American. “So you get the idea,” she said. We moved into the library, with its collection of books devoted to the vice presidency. (Who knew there were so many?) The green-striped wallpaper pattern that the Bidens had favored when they lived here was gone. Now there was bright, punch-colored wallpaper—chosen, Harris explained, in order to “redefine what power looks like.”

She said this with a laugh, but it was a studied phrase. Redefining what power looks like has been the theme of every chapter of Kamala Harris’s political career. She is the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants—her mother a cancer researcher from India, her father an economist from Jamaica. As Biden’s running mate, she became the first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American to be elected vice president. Before that, she was the first South Asian American and only the second Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Before that, she was the first woman, Black American, and South Asian American to serve as attorney general of her native California. Before that, she was the first Black woman in California to be elected as a district attorney.

[Jemele Hill: Kamala Harris makes history]

When Biden underwent a colonoscopy in November 2021, Harris served as acting president, becoming the first woman (and first South Asian American) to officially wield presidential authority. If vice presidents have historically been tormented by the question of legacy—compelled to wonder not how they will be remembered but whether they will be remembered at all—Harris was assured of a mandatory nod in the history books the moment she was sworn in.

But after nearly three years in office, the symbolic fact of Harris’s position has proved more resonant than anything she has actually done with it. From almost the beginning, Harris’s vice presidency has unfolded in a series of brutal headlines: “Exasperation and Dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris’ Frustrating Start as Vice President” (CNN, November 2021). “A Kamala Harris Staff Exodus Reignites Questions About Her Leadership Style—And Her Future Ambitions” (The Washington Post, December 2021). “New Book Says Biden Called Harris a ‘Work in Progress’ ” (Politico, December 2022). “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting” (The New York Times, February 2023).

The hazy nature of Harris’s responsibilities has made for easy satire—“White House Urges Kamala Harris to Sit at Computer All Day in Case Emails Come Through,” read an early Onion headline. Clips of Harris sound bites gone wrong have ricocheted across social media, and not just right-wing sites. A Daily Show feature in October 2022 paired clips from various Harris speeches (“When we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community …”) with clips from the fictional vice president Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, on Veep (“Well, we are the United States of America because we are united … and we are states”).

In June 2023, an NBC News poll put Harris’s approval rating at 32 percent. While Biden’s own approval numbers, in the low 40s, are hardly inspiring, the percentage of those who disapprove of Harris’s performance is higher than for any other vice president in the history of the poll.

Ordinarily, as people around Harris like to remind reporters, a vice president’s approval rating does not warrant notice. But if Biden—already the country’s oldest president—wins reelection, he would begin a second term at age 82. And although Democrats recoil at any mention of Biden’s mortality, it’s hardly a coincidence that, as the 2024 campaign gathers pace, people have begun to contemplate the possibility that Harris could become president. In the campaign’s announcement video and at events across the country for the past few months, Harris has been enlisted more prominently as a spokesperson for the administration’s accomplishments—more visible, often, than the president himself. But unlike Biden, Harris does not simply need Americans to agree that she deserves four more years in her current job. She needs them to trust that she is ready, should the moment require it, to step into his.

Republicans may offer a mandatory “God forbid” when raising the prospect of some presidential health crisis, but they are already pushing the idea that “a vote for President Biden is a vote for President Harris.” They are doing so in large part because they see her as a more inviting target than the president himself: a woman of color whose word-salad locutions turn themselves into campaign ads, and whose outspoken advocacy on social issues makes her easier to paint as an ideologue lying in wait.

Harris and I talked at the residence for an hour. Toward the end of the conversation, she patted the cushion between us. “No reporter has sat here ever,” she said. It was a small moment, but it seemed to represent a recognition that something had to change—if not about the way Harris actually does her job, then about the way she presents herself, and her role, in public.

Even today, people who have worked for Harris make a point of telling you where they were during the Lester Holt interview. Usually, it is because they want to make clear that they were not involved.

In June 2021, at the end of a two-day trip to Guatemala, the vice president sat down with the NBC anchor to discuss Biden’s immigration agenda. Harris had recently become the administration’s lead on the so-called root-causes element of border policy, working with Central American countries to alleviate the violent and impoverished conditions that lead many migrants to flee north to the U.S. in the first place. The questions should have been easily anticipated—such as whether Harris had any plans to visit the border itself, where crossings had surged. Yet when Holt did ask that question, Harris threw up her hands in evident frustration. “At some point, you know, I—we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole, this whole—this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.” Holt corrected her: “You haven’t been to the border.” Harris became defensive. “And I haven’t been to Europe,” she snapped. “I don’t understand the point you’re making.”

The exchange became the subject of headlines and late-night monologues. (“Well, that escalated quickly,” Jimmy Fallon said on his show the same night.) Afterward, Harris shied away from the camera for months.

For many Americans, the Holt interview was the first real exposure to Harris as vice president. She had spent the better part of her career as a “smart on crime” prosecutor who won her first election—district attorney of San Francisco, in 2003—by positioning herself as a pragmatic reformer. As California’s attorney general, she targeted transnational gangs and cartels and won billions in extra relief from big banks at the center of the foreclosure crisis. She had been the state’s junior senator for just over two years when she launched a bid for the presidency, in 2019, buoyed by the brief but bright flashes of stardom she’d earned from her tough, courtroom-style questioning of Trump-administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions (“I’m not able to be rushed this fast; it makes me nervous,” Sessions complained to her at one point), and of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. And although she was an early favorite for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, raising millions in donations as she promised to “prosecute the case against Donald Trump,” her campaign fell apart before the Iowa caucus, beset by uneven messaging, disorganization, and low morale.

Throughout her time in national politics, Harris has repeated some advice imparted to her by her mother: “You don’t let people tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.” Yet a consistent theme of Harris’s career has been her struggle to tell her own story—to define herself and her political vision for voters in clear, memorable terms. The result, in Harris’s first months as vice president, was that high-profile mistakes assumed the devastating weight of first impressions. Verbal fumbles (“It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day”) became memes and were anthologized online. Shortly after the Holt interview, White House aides began leaking to various news outlets about top-to-bottom dysfunction in Harris’s office and Biden’s apparent concern about her performance. In her first year and a half as vice president, Harris saw the departure of her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, national security adviser, and other aides. Her current chief of staff, Lorraine Voles—formerly Al Gore’s communications director, who has expertise in crisis management—was brought on initially to help with, as Voles put it, “organizational” issues with the team still in place.

[Read: The woman who led Kamala Harris to this moment]

Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, told me that after her initial missteps, Harris became highly risk-averse: “She’s always nervous that if she does something that doesn’t go well, she’s setting us back.” David Axelrod, a former senior strategist for President Barack Obama, noticed the same trait. “I think it’s one of the things that plagued her in the presidential race,” he told me. “It looked as if she didn’t know where to plant her feet. That she wasn’t sort of grounded, that she didn’t know exactly who she was.” He went on: “People can read that. When you’re playing at that level, people can read that.”

Those closest to Harris have tried to make sense of why the vice president’s positive qualities—her intelligence, her diligence, her integrity—have failed to register with Americans. It is impossible, of course, to talk about perceptions of Harris without laying some of the blame on racism and sexism. The briefest glance at the toxic comments about Harris on social media reveals the bigotry that motivates some of her most fervent detractors. But the vice president’s allies also acknowledge that she has struggled to make an affirmative case for herself. Judging from what has gone viral online, she is better known for her passion for Venn diagrams than for any nugget of biography; right-wing personalities enjoy mocking this predilection almost as much as they enjoy mocking the way she laughs.

Harris may understand intellectually the imperative to seem “relatable” to a broad audience—to condense her background to a set of compelling SparkNotes to be recited on cue—but she hasn’t made a habit of doing so. In smaller settings, she can be funny at her own expense. When I asked her what advice she would give to a successor, she referred back to some of those social-media reviews: “Don’t read the comments.” In our conversation at the residence, she touched briefly on how her “first woman” status shapes even the most workaday elements of the job: “I’m not going to tell you who said to me—it’s a previous president of the United States. He said, ‘Wow, women—I get up, I go work out, I jump in the shower, and I’m out the door. You guys …’ ” (I suspect she was quoting Obama, a friend of hers who has spoken about his efficient morning routine.) Harris told me that she has to let the Secret Service know a day in advance if she is going to be wearing a dress instead of a pantsuit, because agents have to pick her up in a different kind of car.

But she prefers a discreet distance from topics like these. A friend of Harris’s advised me before our first interview to avoid “small talk” or “diving immediately into personal matters.” The friend explained: “She appreciates the respect in that way.” Minyon Moore, a Democratic strategist with long-standing ties to Harris, made a related point: “She’s not a person—which I kind of like, but it doesn’t do her any good—she’s not a person that’s going to brag on herself. In fact, she’s very uncomfortable, say, beating her own chest. She just wasn’t raised that way.” Lateefah Simon, a former MacArthur fellow and now a candidate for Congress, was in her mid-20s when Harris hired her to run a program for young people convicted of nonviolent felonies, mostly involving drugs. Simon remembers Harris telling her she could either stand outside with a bullhorn or come push for change from the inside. “If you know Kamala Harris, she’s stern—she was a stern 38-year-old,” Simon recalled. But she could also be more than that: Harris gave Simon her first suit after she showed up on day one in Puma sweats.

Harris in 1997, when she was a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, California (Mary F. Calvert / MediaNews Group / The Mercury News / Getty)

Nearly three years after Harris’s swearing-in, her current and former staff still seem to be unearthing pertinent elements of her life story. Twice while I was reporting this article, aides highlighted an experience in Harris’s adolescence—one that had informed her decision to become a prosecutor—that they’d learned about only after joining her team. In high school, a friend confided in Harris that she was being molested by a family member, so Harris insisted that the friend move in with her own family (and she did). The outrage Harris felt in that moment would help define her path to the Alameda County district attorney’s office, where much of her work as a deputy involved prosecuting sex crimes against children.

I understood why her aides wanted me to hear that story, which is not widely known. I wondered why—when I’d asked about her decision to become a prosecutor—Harris hadn’t mentioned it herself. When we spoke at the residence, she did acknowledge the “request, sometimes the demand,” for personal revelation. “I guess it’s a bit outside of my comfort level,” Harris said, “because for me, it really is about the work. You know, I am who I am. I am who I am. And I think I’m a pretty open book, but I am who I am.” She went on a little longer, making clear that she understands that people want to know more. And then, in a softer tone, she said: “And I just, you know, yeah. I don’t know what to say about that.”

But what is “the work”? For the first time in her career, Harris holds a job devoid of any clear benchmarks of success. She was a transformational figure by the mere fact of her election, but the office to which she was elected doesn’t lend itself to transformational leadership.

After settling into Observatory Circle, Harris made a point of gathering historians for dinners—to discuss not just American democracy but also the history of the vice presidency itself. “You’re not supposed to be visible,” Heather Cox Richardson, who attended one dinner, told me, referring to the nature of the vice president’s job. “So there’s that really fine tightrope you walk, between how do you make people understand that you’re qualified without looking like you’re unqualified because you don’t understand your role.”

Neither Biden nor Harris arrived in Washington with a particular vision for Harris’s vice presidency. Harris had issues in which she was interested—racial justice, climate change, gun violence, maternal mortality—and as vice president she has explored these and others. But America imposed its own urgent agenda: Getting the pandemic under control absorbed much of everyone’s attention. With a 50–50 partisan split in the Senate, Harris was also compelled to spend much of her time in her old place of work, exercising the vice president’s constitutional duty to cast the deciding vote in the case of a tie. “We couldn’t make plans for me to be outside of D.C. for at least four days of the workweek,” she recalled.

More fundamentally, Biden and Harris came into office with few instructive models for their partnership, despite Biden having once held the job himself. For nearly half a century, with occasional exceptions, the vice president has been a creature of the capital. The president, in contrast, has been a relative outsider. Walter Mondale, the archetype of the modern American vice president, had 12 years in the Senate under his belt when he was sworn in. He became Jimmy Carter’s anchor to Washington. George H. W. Bush did the same for Ronald Reagan, as did Al Gore for Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney for George W. Bush, Joe Biden for Barack Obama, and Mike Pence for Donald Trump. But Harris and Biden flipped the script: a comparative newcomer serving as vice president to a man who’d launched his Senate career before she reached her tenth birthday.

[Read: The long arc of Joe Biden]

In our interviews, Harris spoke of her relationship with Biden largely in generalities. When I asked how she and the president complement each other, she said, “Well, first of all, let me just tell you, we really like each other,” and then went on to talk about shared values and principles. When I asked Harris what aspects of her skill set Biden depends on, she was more direct: “You’ll have to ask him.” (When I did, a spokesperson for Biden sent this statement: “Kamala Harris is an outstanding vice president because she’s an outstanding partner. She asks the hard questions, thinks creatively, stays laser-focused on what we’re fighting for, and works her heart out for the American people. She inspires Americans and people around the world who see her doing her job with skill and passion and dream bigger for themselves about what’s possible. I trust her, depend on her, admire her. And I’m proud and grateful to have her by my side.”)

Current and former aides to both say Harris and Biden have a good friendship. The president made the relationship a priority early on, setting up weekly lunches with Harris, like the ones he himself had valued with Obama. She still has lunch with him, she says, “when he’s not traveling, when I’m not traveling.” Given that Harris loves to cook—and regularly has friends and family over for meals—I asked whether she and her husband had hosted the Bidens for dinner. She said that they hadn’t, and seemed momentarily stuck in a feedback loop: “We have a plan to do it, but we have to get a date. But he and I have a plan, we have a plan to do it. And yeah, no, we actually have a plan to do it.”

As vice president, Harris has been unfailingly loyal to Biden. For West Wing staff, especially at the beginning, this was no small thing. During Harris’s vetting for the job, some of those close to Biden—reportedly including his wife, Jill—struggled with the memory of her sharp attacks on him during the presidential primary. In a televised debate, Harris had brought up the subject of Biden’s past opposition to busing, leading to one of the most withering exchanges of the race. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris told Biden. “And that little girl was me.”

Perhaps in recognition of this history, Harris has been an unswerving advocate of Biden and his policy priorities. Ultimately, she told me, that is what she sees as the core of her mandate as vice president. Building out the rest of the mandate has proved more complicated.

The path to the Lester Holt interview began with tension over Harris’s policy portfolio. During one of the administration’s early multiagency meetings about the surge of unlawful crossings at the Mexican border, Biden was impressed as Harris outlined ideas for engaging the Central American countries that many of the migrants were coming from. According to Ron Klain, the president turned to Harris and said, “Well, why don’t you do that?”—meaning, become the point person on the morass of root-cause elements. Harris approached the chief of staff after the meeting. “And she said,” as Klain recalled, “ ‘Well, I wasn’t really looking for that assignment—my idea was, this is what we should do, and someone else should do it.’ ” Klain told Harris he understood but, as vice president, Biden had worked on this aspect of immigration policy for Obama, and they needed her to take it on as well.

It wasn’t that Harris lacked relevant experience; as attorney general of California, she had worked extensively with law enforcement in Mexico on drug and human trafficking. But the politics of the issue were radioactive. Harris knew this, and so did Klain. “It was obviously a controversial assignment,” he acknowledged to me. “It wasn’t necessarily anyone’s idea of a glory assignment.” (Asked about this, the vice president’s office responded that Harris had “plunged into the issue with vigor.”) Harris broke the news of the task to her staff on a mordant note, opening a meeting with the announcement that she was “going to oversee the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to a person who was in the room, then dialing back to the slightly less grim reality.

As Klain saw it, Biden intended the appointment—to the same role he had once held—as a show of respect. But it also suggested obliviousness to Harris’s need, early in her term, for a measure of stability and success. Of course, as the Holt interview showed, Harris could make the task harder all on her own. Republican lawmakers and Fox News personalities relished the prospect of pinning the border crisis on Harris. She may have been responsible for just one sliver of U.S. policy, but they used her proximity to border issues to fuel the image of Harris as Biden’s “border czar.”

[Read: Conflict between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is inevitable]

In the first year of his presidency, Biden did little to present Harris as essential to the administration; neither did the Democratic Party more broadly. Indeed, there was a sense that Harris might be a liability more than anything else. Less than two weeks into office, Harris appeared on a West Virginia news station to pitch the Biden administration’s coronavirus stimulus package—which Joe Manchin, the state’s conservative Democratic senator, was not yet sold on. In an interview on the same station the next day, Manchin said he was shocked that Harris had given him no notice of the appearance. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “That’s not a way of working together.” Later that year, as my colleague Franklin Foer has reported, Biden invited Manchin to the Oval Office to discuss the stimulus package; Harris was there initially, but after pleasantries was sent on her way. Biden had once said that Harris’s would be “the last voice in the room” during important conversations. Not this time.

Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, as they arrived in Accra, Ghana, in March 2023 (Ernest Ankomah / Getty)

In June 2021, Biden asked Harris to take the lead on voting rights for the administration. The House had recently passed the For the People Act—a massive overhaul of election law that addressed voter access, gerrymandering, campaign finance, and other matters—and Democratic leaders were eager to see movement in the Senate. That was unlikely. Mitch McConnell, the Senate GOP leader, promised that no Republican would support the bill; not all Democrats were on board either. The legislation would likely die by filibuster—a procedure that Biden, despite calls from many in his party, was almost certainly not going to try to undermine.

Harris’s allies would later characterize voting rights as one of those impossible issues—intractable is the word they often use—that the president had saddled her with. Yet it was Harris herself who had lobbied for the assignment. Her personal background made her a natural spokesperson, and as attorney general of California, she had signed on to an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold the protections against discrimination in the Voting Rights Act—the protections eventually struck down in Shelby County v. Holder. But the bill’s death by filibuster was virtually inevitable. And Harris didn’t do much to stave it off.

Harris’s aides once described her to reporters as potentially a key emissary for the administration in Congress—helping corral votes by way of “quiet Hill diplomacy.” But she lacked the deep relationships needed to exert real influence. Congressional officials told me that Harris rarely engaged the more persuadable holdouts on either side of the aisle. At a key moment in the negotiations, Biden went to talk with the two resistant Democrats, Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema. Harris did not go with him. A White House official declined to get into details and said only that Harris was “interested and engaged” in conversations with Democratic lawmakers during this period. Harris shifted the terms of the discussion when I asked how her Senate background had proved useful in the administration’s push for legislation: “I mean, I think the work we have to do is really more in getting folks to speak loudly with their feet through the election cycle”—an unusual image, though the point was clear enough: Electing more Democrats might be more effective than trying to twist more arms.

For now, Senate Democrats are not fighting for time with Harris when she’s on the Hill. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a Democratic office that actually engages with her or her team on a regular basis,” one Democratic senator’s chief of staff told me. Traditionally, this person said, officials from the executive branch who visit the Capitol are cornered by lawmakers hoping to get their priorities before the president. But few people are “scrambling to make alliances” with Harris—not because of any dislike, as this person and other congressional officials told me, but simply because of uncertainty about the nature of her role. “In her case,” the chief of staff said, “it’s kind of like, ‘Hey, good to see you.’ And that’s kind of the end of it.”

This past spring, I traveled with Harris to Los Angeles, where she was scheduled to appear on Jennifer Hudson’s daytime talk show. When Hudson asked Harris what she missed most about her old life, before the White House, the vice president replied, “Have you watched The Godfather ?” I was in the greenroom with her staff as they looked apprehensively at the screen, wondering where their boss was going with this. Harris went on to describe the scene in which Michael Corleone is out for a quiet walk in Sicily with his fiancée, “and then the shot pans out, and the whole village is on the walk with them.”

There’s no escaping the reality that her every move is probed and dissected. During our conversation at the residence, Harris pointed to the veranda. “Sometimes in the summer, I’ll come and sit out with my binders and a cup of tea, and it’s just really nice and quiet,” she said. It wasn’t until later, when I listened again to the tape of the conversation, that I remembered what she’d said next: “You almost forget that there are 5,000 people around here.”

Having worked in politics and government for the better part of her life, Harris is accustomed to a certain amount of scrutiny. But in her past jobs—as a prosecutor, as attorney general—people were looking at her actual accomplishments. That was how it seemed to her, at least. A friend of Harris’s told me that her professional yardstick was “outcome driven.” Campaigning for district attorney of San Francisco, Harris criticized the incumbent’s low conviction rate for felonies; running later for reelection, she talked about how she had improved it by 15 percentage points. Communication wasn’t a matter of rhetoric. It was just laying out the facts.

This is still, in some ways, how Harris tends to perceive her job. She is always asking aides to get to the point: Show me the data; show me the metrics. And for some things, this works. But success in national politics involves gauzier, more emotional elements. It’s not an accident that the single utterance by Harris that most people can call to mind—“That little girl was me”—drew on searing personal experience.

Go to enough of Harris’s events and you’ll notice a pattern. Many of them—conversations with community leaders at, say, a college campus or a civic center—begin shakily. The moderator opens by asking Harris a sweeping question about the state of the country, or the administration’s approach to some major issue—the sort of question that a seasoned politician should be able to spin her way through on autopilot. And yet Harris often sounds like she’s hearing the question for the first time.

During a discussion at Georgia Tech focused on climate change, I listened as Harris was asked to speak about the administration’s progress over the past two years in addressing the crisis. Her baroque response began: “The way I think about this moment is that I do believe it to be a transformational moment. But in order for us to truly achieve that capacity, it’s going to require all to be involved … and I will say, on behalf of the administration, a whole-of-government approach to understanding the excitement that we should all feel about the opportunity of this moment, and then also thinking of it in a way that we understand the intersection between so many movements that have been about a fight for justice and how we should see that intersection, then, in the context of this moment … And so I’m very excited about this moment.”

This is not Churchill. It’s not even Al Gore. Only when Harris assumed the role of interrogator herself did she seem to find her rhythm, pressing the moderators on the stage—two scientists—to discuss their personal journey toward an interest in climate issues. She then leveraged one moderator’s story to explain the administration’s plan to replace lead pipes across the country—using $15 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure deal, one of the Biden administration’s marquee victories. The communities that have been suffering from contamination “have been fighting for years and years and years,” Harris noted. “It didn’t take a science degree for them to know what was happening to their children.” The audience responded as if at a church service, with murmurs of affirmation.

Hillary Clinton told me that she has met with Harris at the White House and the vice president’s residence, and has talked with her numerous times by phone. “I’ve tried to be as helpful and available to her as possible,” Clinton said, adding, “It’s a tough role.” She noted that Harris isn’t a “performance” politician, a comment she intended not as a criticism but as an acknowledgment that Harris’s skills mainly lie elsewhere. (Clinton isn’t a performance politician either.) Harris doesn’t dispute the point: “My career was not measured by giving lovely speeches,” she told me.

Harris communicates most effectively when she can shift the focus away from herself. The first two conversations I had with the vice president, both while traveling with her, felt stilted and strained, as if I were tiptoeing around glass. But at the residence, alone, Harris was warm, inviting, at times even maternal. “You’re newly married,” she said. (“Yes,” I responded, though it wasn’t a question.) “Pay attention to your marriage,” she counseled. “Friendships, marriage require that you pay attention. Because life has a way of sweeping you up.”

Harris has configured many of her public events to resemble a back-and-forth conversation rather than a standard Q&A: She likes talking with people. The grassroots settings that Harris enjoys represent a mode of retail politics that rarely grabs national attention. But such events have given her a good read on what voters care about. They have also allowed her to inhabit her own space. As Klain observed, in Washington, you’re “just the vice president.” In the rest of the country, you’re “the vice president.”

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the abortion protections embodied in Roe v. Wade, Harris had a strong sense of American public opinion on the issue. Amid a crush of headlines predicting a so-called red wave in the upcoming midterm elections—with the economy as the central issue—Harris was steadfast in her view that abortion rights would shape the contest. She spent much of 2022 on the road, hosting conversations on reproductive rights in red and blue states alike. Women, she told me, “won’t necessarily talk loudly” about an issue like abortion. “But they will vote on it.” In this respect, Harris understood the mood of the country, and the potential impact at the ballot box, better than most people in Washington. In the midterms, the Democrats did far better than expected, even winning a majority in the Senate; there was no red wave. Harris has continued to travel and talk about abortion rights ever since. It is a central issue for the Democratic base and one that Biden—a devout Catholic who, in his own words, isn’t “big on” abortion—has been reluctant to press himself.

Harris marking the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade at an event in Tallahassee, Florida, in January 2023 (Aileen Perilla / Redux)

Fighting Dobbs will be a long battle. But it’s the kind Harris may be suited for. In one of our conversations, she spoke about “the significance of the passage of time”—a line that featured in one of her more unwieldy speeches as vice president. I remember steadying myself when the phrase surfaced. But what followed was a revealing commentary about the diligence and patience that are required to produce real change. Harris told me about a commencement speech she had given at the law school of UC Berkeley. She spoke to the new graduates about Brown v. Board of Education—about how, after the ruling, integration largely took place on a creeping, county-by-county basis, and only in response to continual pressure. Exerting that pressure meant building a legal foundation, erecting a structure brick by brick, and laboring over the details, all in return for progress that was often measured in inches. This is a truth, Harris noted, that Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston and Constance Baker Motley all knew. “And I just got up there and I was like, ‘You want to be a lawyer?’ ” she recalled. If you do, she told them, then you must learn to “embrace the mundane.”

She laughed at the memory of that line. “And the parents are like, Ooh, this is good,” she recalled. “And the kids are like, Oh, fuck.”

Harris’s engagement with abortion rights has broken through to voters more than anything else in her vice presidency, according to the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. But Harris has been effective in another arena—diplomacy—that to the public is hardly visible at all.

During his two terms as vice president, Joe Biden traveled to 57 countries—and before that, as a senator, he had decades to acquire experience abroad. In the past two years, Harris has traveled to 19 countries, including France, Germany, Poland, Guatemala, Mexico, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, and Indonesia. She has met with 100 or so foreign leaders. They have tended to appreciate, as more than one White House official told me, how fact-based and direct she is. She has “very little patience,” one of them said, for the euphemisms and platitudes of routine diplomacy. Harris’s risk aversion appears to stop at the water’s edge.

Her first major diplomatic test came during a five-day trip to France in November 2021. For some time, Harris had been considering an invitation to attend the Paris Peace Forum, whose purpose was to discuss global inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. But in the weeks before the event, relations between Washington and Paris had been pitched into tumult after the announcement of a lucrative joint U.S.-British submarine deal with Australia that nullified France’s own submarine deal with Australia. French President Emmanuel Macron was furious, recalling his ambassador from Washington; Biden soon admitted that his handling had been “clumsy.” For Harris, the trip to Paris went from optional to crucial.

In front of the cameras, Harris and Macron both said what they were expected to say about a positive long-term bilateral future. The atmosphere was one of chilly civility. But behind the scenes, Harris was helping lay the groundwork for cooperation on the looming crisis in Ukraine. She used her nearly two-hour meeting with Macron at the Élysée Palace to present an array of U.S. intelligence. Harris urged the French president to take seriously the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Three months later, Biden asked Harris to represent the administration at the high-visibility Munich Security Conference. It was a sign of Biden’s confidence—on a personal level (Biden had attended the conference many times) and also because of the timing. The U.S. now knew that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent, and Harris was tasked with helping press allies and partners to develop a coordinated response. Five days before the invasion, Harris met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to share U.S. intelligence and plans for military support. Publicly, Zelensky still seemed uncertain about Russia’s intentions and the scale of the threat. “The vice president directly and very clearly conveyed to Zelensky and his team that this was going to happen,” an official on the trip told me, “and they should really be planning on that basis and not waste any time.”

Harris returned to the Munich Security Conference this past February. Speaking for the administration, she formally declared the U.S. view that Russia had committed “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.

A month later, I joined Harris on a multicountry tour of Africa. China’s deepening presence on the continent provided the geopolitical backdrop. But Harris was bringing with her more than $7 billion in commitments, largely from the private sector, to promote climate-resilience initiatives, money she had raised herself through months of tree-shaking phone calls to companies and individuals. The trip was a seven-day sprint, and logistically taxing. On one occasion, the American advance team had to upgrade an entire road from dirt to gravel; the vice president’s Secret Service code name may be “Pioneer,” but there are limits to what her motorcade can handle.

In Cape Coast, Ghana, Harris walked through the Door of No Return, where enslaved people had taken their final steps in Africa before being forced onto ships. She discarded her prepared remarks—something she had almost never done before—and spoke powerfully about the legacy of the diaspora in the Americas. In Lusaka, Zambia, she was driven to the rural outskirts of the capital to visit Panuka Farm, powered entirely by renewable energy. The vice president had spent time on a farm as a child; wearing jeans and Timberlands, she seemed at home inside the netted enclosures of sweet peppers and iceberg lettuce. Washington felt very far away.

Harris’s allies touted the Africa trip as a historic effort to deepen ties with the fast-growing continent. But it hardly registered back home. Terrance Woodbury is a Democratic pollster who focuses on young and minority voters; he saw the Africa trip as a “pivot” in terms of Harris’s self-presentation. Yet when I asked whether the trip had made any difference politically, he said, simply, “No.”

The trip also offered a reminder of Harris’s ongoing struggle when it comes to telling her own story—and of the Veep comparison. The vice president’s visit to Zambia had been billed as a kind of homecoming. As a young girl, Harris spent time in Lusaka with her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, who had been dispatched there in the 1960s from India to advise Zambia’s first independent government on refugee resettlement. Now, decades later, she was returning to Zambia as one of the most prominent public figures in the world. Harris’s scheduled stop at her grandfather’s old home in the capital, where she was expected to speak about his work and how his career as a civil servant had shaped her own ambitions, promised to be a special moment.

Instead, dozens of reporters and others looked on as Harris laughed somewhat awkwardly in front of a concrete-and-stucco office building. Greeting her near the doorway was a U.S.-embassy official, who explained that, after a year of combing through public records, researchers had managed to locate the plot of land on which Gopalan’s house had stood. The house itself, however, had been replaced by the headquarters of a Zambian financial-services group. Seeming not to know what else to do, Harris accepted an offer to tour the building. Reporters and cameramen, who had been anticipating a press conference at the end of the event, were ushered away. When I asked why the press conference had been scrapped, an aide said, “She needed a private moment.” Life has a way of sweeping you up.

My conversation with Harris at the residence came three weeks after our return from Africa. She took me through her herb garden, just off the driveway, crouching to examine the state of her oregano, dill, rosemary, thyme, and sage. Washington’s springtime pollen was at its worst, and my eyes were red-rimmed and watery as we made our way inside. After finding a box of tissues, Harris sympathized, referring to D.C. as “a toxic swamp of pollen.” People from outside the area, she went on, “are not acclimated to this mix.” It was a botanical comment, but it reminded me of something one of Harris’s old friends had told me about the vice president’s seeming discomfort in the capital, and how much happier she appeared when traveling to other parts of the country.

Perceptions of Harris appear to be frozen in 2021. A recent op‑ed in The Hill, largely sympathetic to the vice president, urged the Biden campaign to get her “off the sidelines”—this during a week when she traveled to Indianapolis; Jacksonville, Florida; and Chicago. (Many weeks, she is on the road at least three days out of seven.) At one point during my conversation with David Axelrod, he wondered why Harris hadn’t become more of a champion for the administration’s most significant achievements, such as the infrastructure package. But much of her cross-country travel is focused exactly on that.

Of course, Harris is not alone in having trouble breaking through. “I mean, why do only a third of voters know what the president has done?” Celinda Lake, the pollster, asked when we spoke. “My God, they spent millions of dollars on it. They’ve got ads up now.” If voters don’t know what the president has done, Lake said, “they sure as heck aren’t going to know what the vice president has done.”

This summer, I asked Jeff Zients, the current White House chief of staff, if he could recall a moment when Biden had noticeably leaned on Harris for guidance, or when her input had meaningfully changed the administration’s approach to an issue. He had mentioned earlier in our interview that Harris had been instrumental in putting “equity” at the forefront of the administration’s COVID response—ensuring that public-health efforts reach the underserved. Other examples? “Let me think of a specific anecdote, and I’ll have somebody follow up,” he said. His spokesperson texted after the call to confirm that the office would get back to me. Despite my follow-ups, that was the last I heard.

Vice presidents are chosen mainly for political reasons—as Harris was—and not actuarial ones. In most of the presidential elections during the past half century, the possibility that the candidate at the top of the ticket might die in office was not a significant issue. (It was an issue for John McCain, in 2008, with his history of multiple melanomas, which was one more reason McCain’s selection of the erratic Sarah Palin as his running mate had such negative resonance.) This time around, given Biden’s age, the words heartbeat away connote a real possibility.

[Read: Why Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris]

When I asked Zients what he’s observed in Harris that makes him confident about her abilities as a potential chief executive, he at first started chuckling in what seemed to be discomfort at the subtext of the question. (“Well, I want to, you know, make sure we’re not talking about anything—but, you know, she’s prepared.”) But after that he went on thoughtfully: “You know, the first thing I go to is when you’re president, there are so many issues, and understanding what’s most important to the American people, what’s most important to America’s position in the world—it takes experience, which she has, and it takes a certain intuition as to what matters most, and she’s very good at quickly boiling it down to what matters most, and focusing on those issues, and then within those issues or opportunities, understanding what’s most important, and holding the team accountable.”

That’s a sharp assessment of what a vice president can bring to the table, and not a bad way to make important observations about Harris that seem matter-of-fact and not tied to the prospect of a sudden transition.

So I was surprised when another White House official, who knows both Harris and Biden well, treated the topic of readiness as if it were somehow illegitimate—a ploy by desperate Republican candidates. “People who are polling near the bottom do things and say things to try and be relevant and get oxygen.” Was it ridiculous to ask about Harris’s constitutional closeness to the presidency? “She is the closest to the presidency, as all of her predecessors have been.”

Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, and Ron DeSantis, all of them presidential candidates, have explicitly raised the specter of a “President Harris.” So have other Republicans. The probable GOP nominee, Donald Trump, who habitually belittles women, will likely do so too. He has referred to Harris as “this monster” and has questioned her citizenship. On one occasion, he made fun of her name—“Kamala, Kamala, Kamala,” repeating it slowly with various pronunciations. Harris called him childish for that, but has largely declined to take the bait. Perhaps not surprisingly for a former prosecutor, she has become more publicly outspoken than anyone else in the White House about the indictments that Trump faces and the need to hold lawbreakers accountable.

The Biden administration has every incentive to embrace Harris. Why does addressing preparedness seem so difficult? Harris has affirmed that she is ready, if need be, but there’s a limit to what she herself can say. It’s not unusual for a president, any president, to take pains to demonstrate his vice president’s readiness for the top job, if only by regularly referencing their closeness—the notion that the person is briefed on everything and has an opportunity to weigh in on major decisions, even if the fingerprints aren’t always visible. And no president comes to the Oval Office with every necessary skill. Harris is an uncomfortable fit in the vice president’s role, whatever that is, and she cannot speak or act independently; the job makes every occupant a cipher. But she has been a successful public servant for more than three decades. She ran the second-largest justice system in America, in a state that is the world’s fifth-largest economy. By virtue of her position, she is among those who represent the future of her party, and she represents its mainstream, not its fringe. Of course Kamala Harris is ready for the presidency, to the extent that anyone can be ready. This should not be hard for her own colleagues to talk about. Not talking about it leaves the subject open for political exploitation—by opponents whose own likely candidate makes the idea of readiness absurd.

And yet the topic is treated as a trip wire. In a brief conversation after an abortion-rights rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the first anniversary of the Dobbs decision, I asked Harris herself: Had she and Biden discussed how to address questions about her readiness to step in as president, should circumstances ever require it? “No,” she said. And that was the end of the conversation.

This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Her?”

Abortion foes thought Roe v. Wade’s reversal would usher in a more pro-life America by finally clearing the legal obstacles to the eventual abolition of abortion.  But in the 16 months since Roe fell,  everywhere abortion has been on the ballot—including red states such as Kansas, Ohio, Montana, and Kentucky—voters have instead supported measures that protect abortion rights. Even some Republican presidential candidates, who in previous cycles might have pressed for sweeping abortion restrictions, are instead advocating for a 15-week limit, a policy that would protect the vast majority of abortions. Donald Trump, the front-runner for the nomination, and a man who has called himself “the most pro-life president” in American history, labeled Florida’s de facto abortion ban a “terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”

The conservative calls for moderation should sober pro-life activists. Now more than half a century old, their movement seems trapped by internal tensions. Its bold demand for a new society that rests on rights for all humans—born and unborn—has been its singular strength, inspiring a level of devotion matched by few other causes. Having spent countless hours interviewing and observing its activists, I know at least one thing with certainty: They sincerely consider themselves human-rights crusaders. Supporters of abortion rights who don’t see this are underestimating what they’re up against.

[Read: It’s abortion, stupid]

The ideals of the pro-life movement have also buoyed anti-abortion sympathies in the broader public amid the fast-rising tides of social liberalization. Although surveys show that the United States is much more supportive of gay rights and gender equality than it was 50 years ago, support for abortion rights has not had a similar increase.

But the movement’s ultimate ambition—the abolition of abortion—is also a call for social revolution that scares Americans, especially now that Roe’s reversal has brought that revolution to their doorsteps. Just as center-left Democrats turned against police abolitionists in droves, so too have many Republicans rejected the dream of abortion abolitionists in their ranks. For Americans across the political spectrum, calling their local police or Planned Parenthood is sometimes an unfortunate necessity, however ambivalent they might feel about those institutions.

Laws that protected abortion rights were certainly revolutionary way back in the 1960s, but now they are our tradition, deeply embedded in our way of life. Americans from all walks of life have come to rely on these protections. This is no less true of Republicans than Democrats, especially as the GOP’s base has become more working-class. Research shows that women without a college degree are more likely to get an abortion than women with more education.

Even so, it still might be possible for pro-lifers to nudge the nation in their direction by pushing for something well short of abolition, such as a strict national limits on abortion access after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a policy for which Republican presidential candidates Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Tim Scott have all voiced support.

But to pursue any such settlement, right-to-life advocates must accept an America remade by 50 years of abortion rights. That is hard. How does any movement set aside the very ambition that drives it? That is the pro-life movement’s dilemma: It can’t easily push for a durable settlement to the abortion conflict without vitiating the ideals that have held it together.

The liberalism of the pro-life movement has been the unacknowledged secret to its success. While socially conservative causes have lost considerable ground since Roe was decided, abortion opinion has been remarkably stable. One explanation is that the core claims of right-to-lifers continue to resonate in a culture committed to the proposition that all human beings are created equally, entitled to life, liberty, and happiness.

That means pro-life and pro-choice activists are fellow children of the Declaration of Independence, fighting over its meaning. Both movements are trying to expand the frontiers of human freedom and equality. The abortion fight is often cast as a culture war that divides Americans into competing worldviews, one liberal , the other theocratic. But it is in fact a fight over what liberalism means.

     From the beginning, many right-to-life activists have been inspired by the ideals of freedom and equality, rather than the sexism they are often accused of. Even back in the 1970s, many of the most radical pro-life leaders were hardly Archie Bunker conservatives. Centered in the anti-war, Catholic left, many early radicals saw their activism as part of a broader ethic of nonviolence. One leader, John O’Keefe, was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and aimed to prove his commitment to feminism by adding  his wife’s last name to his in 1976, changing it to Cavanaugh-O’Keefe. Unlike O’Keefe, Francis Schaeffer—an early Protestant leader who inspired legions of evangelicals to join the anti-abortion cause—was no lefty, but he still wanted nothing to do with Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign to fight the Equal Rights Amendment. As different as they were, leaders such as O’Keefe and Schaeffer were mostly consumed with, as they put it, “saving babies,” not some retrograde desire to keep women in their place.

Their ranks became more conservative in the ’80s when Protestant fundamentalists enlisted, diminishing what one history of the movement called its early “sixties leftist feel.” Many were openly anti-feminist. Randall Terry, the leader of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, even excluded women from leadership positions.

But if views on gender roles were what animated the movement, then the dramatic rise in gender egalitarianism since the ’80s should have depressed pro-life sentiments and activism. Surveys show, however, that gender traditionalism declined markedly without depressing pro-life opinion. As a consequence, today the gap between the gender ideologies of pro-life and pro-choice citizens is much smaller than it was in the ’80s. Other survey-based research on pro-life activists themselves finds that, compared with other Americans, their views on gender roles are only slightly more conservative.

The vitality of the pro-life movement is partly why the Supreme Court overturned Roe. That the public seemed no less divided over Roe than it had in 1973 gave the Court’s conservative justices room to reconsider it. Had the pro-life movement and the sentiments that power it waned significantly over time, the Court might well have left Roe alone. It would have been just another social issue the Court was a little ahead of, like same-sex marriage. But Roe was never legitimated by the forward march of social attitudes.

Yet as soon as it was overturned, voters turned against the pro-life cause everywhere they could. Of course, citizens often fear the sudden disruption of the status quo, and some research on voting behavior suggests that people are particularly susceptible to such concerns when asked to vote on ballot measures. And naturally, a preference for normality may be especially strong among conservative voters.

That raises an interesting possibility: Although the pro-life movement hasn’t generally been propelled by conservative values, it may be ultimately defeated by them.

Perhaps the best evidence of pro-choice conservatism comes from the purple state of Michigan. In 1972, voters rejected a law that would have made abortion legal in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy. Fifty years later, in 2022, voters approved a nearly identical ballot measure. The shift can’t be easily explained by dramatic changes in abortion attitudes, which, as I’ve noted, have been remarkably stable since the ’70s.

But while abortion attitudes haven’t changed all that much, nearly everything else has. When the citizens of Michigan rejected abortion rights in 1972, they were affirming the world they knew. They were voting against social revolution. When the state’s citizens took to the polls in 2022, their vote to sustain a long legacy of abortion rights expressed the same essential conservatism. Michigan voters didn’t change. The context did.

For years, pro-choice Boomers have lamented younger generations’ distance from a pre-Roe America. They supposed that Gen Xers and Millennials would be more committed to abortion rights if only they had witnessed the horrors of “back alley” abortions. But America’s emerging pro-choice consensus suggests that the opposite is more true: Our collective distance from a world without Roe makes us reluctant to resurrect it.

Although a reflexive bias toward the status quo is sometimes irrational, that isn’t true in this case. Even those of us—myself included—who have genuine sympathy for the philosophical case against abortion should be uneasy about reimposing broad abortion prohibitions in an America remade by the sexual revolution.

In the era prior to Roe, unplanned pregnancies tended to impose heavy burdens on men, not just women. Men were generally expected to commit to lifelong marriage when their girlfriend got pregnant. Until the 1970s, shotgun marriages were still the norm.

After Roe, though, the sexual revolution unraveled the social expectations that had once distributed the burden of unplanned children more equally. More and more, women were left to go it alone in cases of unplanned pregnancy. Roe itself accelerated this revolution, but it also reduced its costs by giving women something closer to the same freedom from parenthood that men enjoyed. Hence, Roe didn’t simply reject an old conservative social order; ironically, it did some of the work of the old order by attempting to re-create a semblance of equality between the sexes.

That means if abortion were prohibited in this age of sexual freedom, a troubling social experiment would result: compulsory motherhood without demanding anything from men in return.  Pro-lifers should accept reality. Absent any agreement on the moral status of the embryo, Americans will never support a radical social revolution on its behalf. They don’t want to live in a nation without abortion any more than they want one without police.

[Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion]

Movement leaders probably can’t afford to surrender that dream and still maintain the dedication of their activists, but they can recognize that their dream won’t be coming true anytime soon. Pro-lifers should also see that flirting with strong-arm tactics—like impeaching a newly elected pro-choice judge in Wisconsin—to achieve what they could not at the polls might backfire by further alienating voters.

Doing so might also undermine a real opportunity to attain durable and meaningful limits on abortion. A 15-week limit is a good one from the point of view of right-to-life advocates. It would move us well past the extremism of Roe, which, with its companion decision (Doe v. Bolton), established one of the most radical abortion policies in the world. Yes, Roe and Doe technically permitted third-trimester bans, but they also neutralized them by subjecting such bans to an exception that allowed physicians to perform abortions for any reason they deemed relevant to the health of their patients, including “emotional, psychological, [and] familial” concerns.   

     

One model that might attract bipartisan support is France’s abortion policy: It provides funding for poor women who seek abortion and allows for late-term procedures in rare cases (e.g. severe fetal abnormalities and serious maternal health risks), but also limits abortion to 14 weeks.  France’s policy is close to the norm throughout other Western democracies, perhaps because it is consistent with common moral intuitions that predispose us to feel more protective of embryos once they begin to resemble newborns, roughly after the first trimester.  Though more restrictive than many pro-choice advocates would prefer, it would still protect the vast majority of abortions, even as it would prevent many thousands of later-term ones that pro-life advocates find most troubling.

Alternatively, pro-lifers could seek more restrictive abortion policies by trying to subvert the will of a pro-choice majority, as they recently attempted to do in Ohio and are contemplating in Wisconsin. Not only does that strategy risk alienating the American public; it also represents a troubling about-face: After decades of rightly insisting that citizens should not be effectively disenfranchised by Roe, pro-lifers are now seeking their marginalization.

It is easy enough for me to say what pro-life activists should do. But as abortion foes weigh their options, they should remember what our post-Roe politics has revealed: When given a choice between prohibition and expansive abortion rights, Americans seem to prefer the latter—and they have good conservative reasons for doing so.

Nestled among the Rocky Mountains, in a yawning stretch of sagebrush, granite rocks, and flowing hills near Gunnison, Colorado, is the Hartman Rocks Recreation Area, one of the first spots to clear of snow in spring. Which means that it is one of the first spots to give cooped-up humans a place to stretch their legs and fill their lungs—to ride their bikes.

Unfortunately for the Gunnison sage grouse, the seasonal rhythms that send cyclists outside coincide with the rhythms that make the birds start fanning and strutting like little brown peacocks, in a bid to reproduce. Back in the early 2000s, they were stuck flaunting their strange mating dance amid Hartman Rocks’ ever-more-popular trail system. The birds did not love loud noises and two-legged creatures zooming by on wheels. Stress made them mate less and abandon their leks, one more straw on a dwindling population’s back.

And so the Bureau of Land Management decided to limit spring disturbances such as motor and mountain biking. To balance the needs of bikers and birds, the agency posted signs telling riders to stay out of one portion of the trails—at least from March 15 to May 15.

As far as human activities go, outdoor recreation has seemed relatively benign in its impacts compared with building a subdivision, oil-and-gas field, or shopping center. But researchers are beginning to understand that it’s causing distress to wildlife all over the country. The signs ordering bikers to stay out of Hartman Rocks were an early example of an uncomfortable realization: Our fun and the future of wildlife do not always align.

Today, in the West alone, where some of the fastest-growing states contain some of the largest tracts of federal public land, bighorn sheep burn calories avoiding backcountry skiers, elk have a harder time raising their calves around cyclists and hikers, and grizzly bears appear to miss important meals because of lookie-loos. These problems exist precisely because the ways we connect with the planet—hiking, biking, trail running, skiing, climbing—put us in such close proximity to other animals, in some of the few spaces they now have left to roam.

Being outside benefits us and benefits the outdoors: Love the mountains, and you’re more likely to support biodiversity conservation and other pro-environmental efforts. But the wildlife we’ve pushed into nature’s corners is starting to bear the brunt of all that love. Recreation-without-consequences is coming apart at the seams.

“If we can really be smart about it, I think we can continue to enjoy the wildlife that we do,” says David Wiens, the executive director of the International Mountain Bicycling Association, which has worked on hundreds of trail-building projects across the globe. Being smart, he told me, requires restricting ourselves in certain places during certain parts of the year, where and when the well-being of wildlife depends on it. That would mean accepting new norms for even the lightest uses of this country’s more wild spaces—and at the same time recognizing just how many places we can still visit.

I’ve spent more than a decade as a journalist encouraging, cajoling, and even demanding that people just go outside. I follow my own advice: Someone asked me after a recent backpacking trip how many nights my young daughter has slept in a tent. I realized the answer was roughly a year, or about a seventh of her life. Camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, and otherwise existing outside of cities and towns can be sources of solace, peace, and connection to our place on Earth. We want her to be able to identify an elk track as easily as she can identify Frozen’s Elsa, because elk are a part of her world, one we want her to understand, to love, to eventually protect.

This idea is fundamental to the conception of natural spaces in the United States. More than a century ago, after settlers had run roughshod over the nation’s forests, grasslands, and prairies, environmentalists began arguing that the country needed a constituency for the outdoors. After national leaders began carving spaces for wildlife, nature’s new constituents flocked outside, and by using these places learned to love and protect them. Over time, the tracts of land managed by federal agencies became massive playgrounds, used all the more during the coronavirus pandemic. BLM land clocked 81 million visits in 2022—a jump of 10 million from just three years before, and a 40 percent increase over 2012. Visits to national forests and wilderness areas, too, increased by 18 million from 2019 to 2020.

Not every glimpse of an elk or grizzly bear in every location is disrupting the creature’s natural rhythms. Take lynx. Studies in some of the most ski-heavy areas of Colorado show that as long as skiers stay on predictable trails in relatively open areas, they don’t bother the wild cats all that much, John Squires, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Montana, told me.

Contrast that with grizzly bears who scarf ants as readily as they take down elk calves. Some bears in Wyoming and Montana flock to high talus slopes to munch on high-calorie moths in the summer. The moths can provide up to a third of the calories a bear needs to build fat for winter. But if people hike up near those sites, as quiet as they may be, bears often leave, Frank van Manen, the leader of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, told me. He doesn’t yet know the toll those moves take, but every day spent avoiding humans is another day not preparing for winter.

Most of these brushes, of people spooking bighorn sheep, elk, or deer, fall into the grizzly-bear category: Almost 60 percent of wildlife interactions with outdoor recreation are negative, according to a 2016 review of 274 scientific papers. Although the review authors acknowledged the research is limited, that finding would mean that after more than half of species-recreationist interactions, animals become more vigilant, move somewhere else, or stop eating, which over time can result in fewer babies, lower fat reserves, and even death.

But knowing we have an impact doesn’t mean we know its extent, or the solutions for varied species over an even more varied landscape, Kathy Zeller, a researcher with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, told me. She and Mark Ditmer, a fellow biologist at the research station, are studying the effect of biking and hiking sounds on wildlife. They know the sounds change how deer, bears, moose, and other wildlife behave, but not if those animals can tolerate those changes and still survive and reproduce.  

Belief in America’s boundless plenty has caught up with this country before. Back when tens of millions of bison roamed its expanses, along with millions of bighorn sheep, elk, pronghorn, deer, and countless other species, wild animals seemed endless. Until they weren’t. By the early 1900s, those species numbers were dwindling, some with populations in the tens of thousands as a result of market hunting, meat hunting, railroad expansion, and environmental warfare against Native Americans.

The answer wasn’t to stop hunting forever. Hunters began backing license fees supporting state agencies that managed wildlife, and seasons regulating how many animals were killed in what places. The answer was limitations. Hunters became crucial advocates for maintaining some of America’s wildlife.

Unlike hunting, other outdoor recreation doesn’t rely on wildlife. Still, seeing a moose or bighorn sheep while hiking, or a fox or bald eagle while mountain biking, is part of what separates the experience from biking in a city or spinning on a Peloton. It helps transform these spaces that we use into spaces that we love.

The answer, again, could be limitations targeted to each species and area. Some trails in high-use places such as national parks and rafting trips down rivers already rely on permitting to manage use; more sites could start. Restrictions could last for full seasons—or only for certain hours of the day. By mid-morning, some animals such as sage grouse are often already done mating.

Getting used to the idea of limitations can take time. In Colorado, at first, those edicts to keep mountain-biking pressure off the sage grouse went largely unheeded. But Wiens found that when mountain bikers understood why they were supposed to keep out, eventually they did.

He understands the need to ride: He’s in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, and his wife, Susan DeMattei, won an Olympic bronze medal for mountain biking. In 2006, he formed a local organization called Gunnison Trails to provide order and funding to often-haphazardly-built trails. He then realized that the new association could rally its own to follow the rules.

“It took a while for some of the late adopters to finally join in,” he told me. But in the past decade or so, during breeding season he’s seen almost no sign of bikers using the closed trails.  

Rules require adjustments, sure. We want to just go for a hike and let our dogs run. We want to camp and play and not worry if we’re harming a bird we might never see. But we’re sharing those spaces with humans and wildlife alike.

There will always be places we can ride, too. The other 75 percent of the Hartman Rocks Trails aren’t closed in the spring. Better understanding how we’re affecting other creatures also means that we better know which areas host animals that are less sensitive to human presence, or which times of year or even times of day we’re least disruptive. We can advocate for conservation and still go hiking, skiing, and biking. We can also put our dogs on leashes and heed signs erected by land managers. Because if we want wildlife to be there, too, we might need to accept that the outdoors can’t be open everywhere, all the time.

When I first heard that Israeli civilians were being massacred on the country’s Gaza border, I thought of my friend Amir Tibon. Amir is an exceptionally talented journalist who is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and has devoted his life and skills to humanistic coverage of what can often be a dehumanizing region. His writing includes award-winning reporting on efforts to achieve a two-state solution and a biography of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

On Sunday, I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead.

That’s because Tibon lives in Nahal Oz, a small community bordering Gaza that has no Iron Dome missile defense to protect it. On Saturday, it came under mortar fire from above and was invaded on the ground by Hamas terrorists. During their incursion into Israel, they murdered more than 900 Israelis, while brutalizing and kidnapping many others, most of them civilians. The death toll is continuing to rise.

Tibon and his family survived the indiscriminate slaughter, but only after enduring a horrifying ordeal. Just before he put his two young daughters to bed tonight, we spoke about what happened, how he was saved, why he thinks Israel arrived at this point, and what he would like to see from the international community in the days ahead. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Yair Rosenberg: What does your life look like right now?

Amir Tibon: I’m happy to be alive. I’m happy my family is alive. I’m staying with my extended family. I’m worried sick about friends and neighbors who were injured or kidnapped into Gaza. And I’m worried about my country.

Rosenberg: As a religiously observant Jew, I don’t use electronics or access the internet on Jewish holidays or the Sabbath, so by the time I logged on after two days offline, you had posted that you were safe and shared the harrowing story about what you and your family experienced. Can you talk about what you endured?

Tibon: I’m happy that you missed the events as they were happening, because it was a dark day, really the worst day in the history of the state of Israel. It’s Saturday, October 7. We’re in bed, sleeping. I live with my wife and two young daughters in Kibbutz Nahal Oz. It’s a small community, 500 people, located directly on Israel’s border with Gaza. A beautiful place, very resilient, very courageous people, with a very strong sense of community and togetherness. But it’s Saturday, six in the morning, and we hear a very familiar sound: the sound of a mortar about to explode. It’s like a whistle.

My wife, Miri, immediately pushes me. We run from our bedroom to what we call the safe room. In every house in our community and other communities along the border with Gaza, there is a room that is built of very strong concrete that can withstand a direct hit from a mortar or a rocket. And in most families, that’s where they put the kids to sleep every night. So we run to the safe room where our two daughters are: Galia is three and a half years old; Carmel is one and a half years old.

They don’t know that anything is happening. We shut the door and we wait. I mean, this is something we’re accustomed to. When you live on the border with Gaza, attacks like this happen from time to time. You wait sometimes an hour, you pack your bags meanwhile, and when there is a break of a few minutes, you just shove the kids in the car and you go away from the border toward a more secure place.

But this time as we were packing, I heard the most chilling noise I’ve heard in my life. Automatic gunfire in the distance. First I’m hearing this gunfire from the fields. But then I hear it from the road, then I hear it from the neighborhood, and then I hear it outside my window. I’m in the room with my wife and I hear the gunfire directly outside my window, as well as shouting. I understand Arabic. I understood exactly what was happening: that Hamas has infiltrated our kibbutz, that there are terrorists outside my window, and that I’m locked in my house and inside my safe room with two young girls and I don’t know if anyone is going to come to save us.

That’s how it started.

Rosenberg: One thing for people to understand: Nahal Oz is very, very close to the Gaza border. And that’s why you guys don’t have something like Iron Dome and why you are in the safe room in the first place.

Tibon: Yeah, we’re so close that Iron Dome, which is an amazing invention that protects large parts of Israel from rocket fire, is not relevant in our area.

But I’ll tell you something. In a way, the fact that they shot the mortars at our community before they broke through the border saved a lot of people’s lives, because it caused people to run into the safe room. And this safe room, if you lock it properly, is very hard to open from the outside. A lot of people were barricaded in those safe rooms for hours and sometimes an entire day. In a lot of cases, the terrorists tried to break in and they couldn’t.

What happened in our case was that we were sitting there in the dark. A few minutes after we got in and we heard this gunfire, the electricity stopped. We had no food. We did have some water. And we’re telling our daughters: “You have to be quiet now. You have to be absolutely quiet. Not a word. You can’t cry. Can’t talk. It’s dangerous.” And my girls were absolute heroes. They waited silently in the dark for 10 hours and they did not cry. They understood. Maybe that’s not the right word, but they felt that we were dead serious about this. So we’re with them in the dark, and they’re completely silent.

In the beginning, we still had cell reception. A short time later, there was no cell reception either. I texted my parents: “There are terrorists outside.” We actually thought they were inside the house, because they were firing live ammunition into our house and we heard it as if it’s inside. And we’re looking at our group text with our neighbors and everybody’s saying there are terrorists outside my house or inside my house.

I called a colleague and friend, Amos Harel, the veteran military-affairs correspondent for Haaretz. I told him, “Amos, there are terrorists outside my house, maybe even inside.” And what Amos told me in reply was the scariest thing I heard. He said, “Yes, I know, but it’s not only in your kibbutz; it’s not only in Nahal Oz. It’s all over southern Israel. It’s all over. It’s in cities and in towns and in kibbutzim and in villages. Thousands of armed Hamas fighters have infiltrated the country. They have taken over military bases.” That was scary because I realized that if that’s the situation, it will take a very long time for the military to come and confront these terrorists and save us.

Rosenberg: Could you talk to you about how we got to this point?

Tibon: Yes, I want to say something about this failure of the military and of the government. Miri and I moved to this community in 2014, immediately after the war that took place that summer between Israel and Hamas, the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. We were living at the time in Tel Aviv, a young couple with no children. And the communities on the Gaza border during that war suffered from Hamas’s use of attack tunnels into Israel. They basically dug tunnels under the border. The fighters would emerge from underground on the other side, and they killed and kidnapped soldiers. The scariest thing back then were the tunnels. We came originally to support the community, and we fell in love with the place and decided to stay there.

But successive Israeli governments, all of them led by Benjamin Netanyahu, invested billions of dollars—I think some of them actually from U.S. support—in constructing an underground wall to prevent Hamas from using those tunnels again. This was a major infrastructure project for the state of Israel. And that project allowed us to sleep at night, because you can deal with rockets falling over your head if you have a safe room in your house, but if terrorists are infiltrating underground and they can walk into your community, that’s a game changer. And so the reason we could live there, and that’s true for everyone, is because of this underground wall that Israel constructed. And in the morning hours of Saturday, October 7, when we heard the gunfire outside our window, we realized that this project is an utter and complete failure.

Israel invested so much in it, and what did the Hamas people do? They took a few tractors and SUVs, and they ran over the border fence. We prepared everything to make it impossible for them to come from underground, and they just walked through the border. That is a major, major failure. And so bringing myself back to the conversation with Amos Harel, when I realized that this is the situation all over, that’s when I thought: Okay, we’re going to die here. Nobody’s going to be able to come in time. And if they manage to break into the house, they will then try to break into the safe room. And if they manage to do that, we will be dead or kidnapped.

Rosenberg: How did you ultimately get out?

Tibon: I called Amos, but I also called my father. My father is a retired general. He’s 62 years old. He lives in Tel Aviv. And my parents told me: “We’re coming. It’s an hour-and-20-minute drive.” Now, this goes against all logic. But I told myself, Okay, right now I’m asking my two young daughters to put complete faith in me and my wife, in their parents, to do what we’re telling them in order to save their lives, which is to be very, very quiet and understand that we cannot get out of the room, we cannot go get food, we cannot go to the bathroom, we cannot go out to play, and I’m asking them to put their faith in me completely.

And I told myself: I have to do the same thing right now. I have to trust my father, who is a trustworthy man, that if he said he will come here and save us, he will do it. Only many hours later, when my father arrived, did I learn what had happened that day to my parents, which is an incredible story by itself.

My parents started driving from Tel Aviv. They arrived in the town of Sderot, which is the largest town in the border area. When they get there, they see people walking barefoot on the road. These are survivors from a music festival nearby, where the Hamas people came early in the morning and massacred more than 200 people, people who came to a music festival. My parents put the survivors in their car and took them farther away from the border. They’d already gotten to the border area, but they’re seeing people who need help, so they take them away. And then they turn around and they continue driving toward our area.

They stop in a nearby community that is close to the border, but not as close as we are. And my father convinces a soldier who is standing there and looking for a way to help to come with him to Nahal Oz, to my kibbutz, in order to kill terrorists and save families. They drive toward the kibbutz, but along the way they see a military force being ambushed by Hamas fighters. They get out of the car. My father is retired; he doesn’t have military-grade weapons. In Israel, unlike in America, citizens cannot buy AR-15s, and I’m glad for that. But my father has a pistol with him, and he and this other soldier join the soldiers who are fighting the Hamas cell, they help kill them, and now they’re very close to my kibbutz. They’re five minutes from the entrance to my kibbutz, but two of the soldiers are wounded. And again, my father has to turn around. He puts the wounded soldiers in his car with the help of that other soldier who joined him, and they go back to where my mother is.

My mom takes the wounded soldiers with her in their car to a hospital. My father sees another retired former general, Israel Ziv, who’s closer to 70 than 60. But Israel put on his uniform and came like a regular soldier down south to try to help. My father tells him, “Israel, I don’t have a car. My wife is taking the wounded soldiers to the hospital to save them. I need to get to Nahal Oz, where my family is barricaded. My granddaughters are there. Take me to Nahal Oz.”

These two guys over the age of 60 are driving in a regular car. It’s not even a Jeep or something. It’s not an armored vehicle. It’s just a car, like people take on the New Jersey Turnpike on their way to work in the morning. They’re driving now on the road where half an hour earlier there was a deadly ambush of soldiers. They both have weapons. My father took weapons from the wounded soldiers, who gave them to him because he told them, “I’m going back in.”

They reached the entrance to the kibbutz. And when they get there, they meet a group of soldiers from special forces who are about to begin the very dangerous process of going from house to house in our community to try to engage the terrorists and release the people who are barricaded. By that point, I have no idea that all of this is happening. We are in the safe room. The terrorists are still outside. And we have no cell reception. We have no phone battery. We’re just waiting in the dark.

But we start hearing gunfire again—and this time, it’s two kinds of guns. And we realize there is a battle. We realize that there is an exchange of fire. And I tell my wife: “He’s coming. My father is coming. They’re fighting. He’s with these soldiers.” They didn’t come immediately to our house. They went from house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, inside our community. I don’t remember how long it took.

We were just hearing the gunfire getting closer and closer. The girls had fallen asleep, but now they woke up. I think it’s 2 p.m. They haven’t had anything to eat since last night. There’s no light and we don’t have cellphones anymore, so we can’t even show them our faces, and there’s one sentence that is keeping them from falling apart and starting to cry—I’m telling them: “Grandfather is coming.”

I tell them, “If we stay quiet, your grandfather will come and get us out of here.” And at 4 p.m., after 10 hours like this, we hear a large bang on the window and we hear the voice of my father. Galia, my oldest daughter, says, “Saba higea.” Grandfather is here. And that’s when we all just start crying. And that’s when we knew that we were safe.

Rosenberg: I want to move from the personal to the political a little bit. You work for a Tel Aviv–based liberal newspaper. Most people assume you live in Tel Aviv, but you don’t. You moved to Nahal Oz, and you told me you were inspired to go there after you first visited it as a journalist, following another clash with Gaza, during which the community had been rocketed again and again. And yet, you met people there who were Israeli patriots still committed to the place and to peace and who wanted to find something better, even though they perhaps had more reason than anyone to distrust the future. I know you share that faith, but I’m wondering how it feels right now. Is that faith ever shaken?

Tibon: The politics of our area, of the Gaza-border area, is very interesting, and it’s a microcosm of politics in Israel. The kibbutz communities, like mine, are very left-leaning. And the large town in the area, Sderot, which also went through a terrible, terrible disaster, is actually much more right-wing and religious and supportive of Netanyahu. So there’s this split. But we’re in this together. It’s true that there is this divide, but we are both suffering from these same conditions right now. And I think a lot of people are going to reexamine everything once it’s over.

I love my community. I love my neighbors. I’m proud of them for their resilience on this horrible day. What we went through is not a unique story. This is the story of an entire region in Israel.

I’m ashamed of my government. We had a contract with the state that communities like ours protect the border. This is why people live there. We protect the border with our presence there. This is a fundamental strategy of the state of Israel since the earliest days of the country, that a border that does not have civilian communities and civilian life along it will not be properly protected.

We kept our part of the contract. We lived on the border. We went through difficult situations sometimes, with mortars and with the use of incendiary devices to set fires in the fields. If you live in a place like Nahal Oz, you wake up every morning and you know there are people on the other side of the border who want to kill you and your children. And so the contract was: We protect the border and the state protects us.

And this government, which is the worst government in the history of the state of Israel, led by a corrupt, dysfunctional, and egoistic man who sees only himself—Benjamin Netanyahu—failed us. There were warning signs that this will happen. The military and the intelligence agencies warned that Israel’s neighbors were seeing the internal divide in the country over the government’s disastrous plan to eliminate the powers of the judiciary. There are reports coming out as we speak that Egyptian intelligence warned Netanyahu a few days ago that Hamas was planning something massive on the border.

The way that the events of the day unfolded is the worst failure in the history of the state of Israel. I mean, people like my father, like Israel Ziv and other retired officers, had to come down to save citizens, to try to save their own families and others. Meanwhile, the military is falling apart, and all the civilian infrastructure that is supposed to support the military and society in such an event is also not functioning.

Listen, right now we have to win this war. We have to destroy Hamas. We have to make it impossible for them to ever, ever again conduct anything that is even close to what happened on Saturday. No country in the world can allow something like this to happen to its citizens and just go back to business as usual. I feel very bad for the people of Gaza. I’m heartbroken. But this was our 9/11.

After we win the war and we eradicate Hamas, there will be time also to throw into the dustbin of history any politician, starting with the prime minister, who had anything to do with this failure. But that’s a conversation for tomorrow. Today it’s about saving our citizens and destroying the enemy’s ability to do something like this ever again.

Rosenberg: Tomorrow, what happens to Netanyahu?

Tibon: First of all, we have to win the war. This is the most important thing. After the war, I believe the people who went down to fight and to rescue their families, and the people who have loved ones kidnapped inside Gaza, and the people who lost their homes—these people will not allow this government to stay one more day. The protests that Israel saw in the last year are going to be a children’s game compared to the anger of the public after this. But right now, it’s about winning the war.

Rosenberg: This is not over. This is ongoing. There are people held hostage. What do you expect now from the U.S. and the world?

Tibon: First of all, I was relieved to see the very, very strong commitment of President Biden, verbally but also in action, in sending U.S. military forces to the region and making clear that if any other actor in the region is confused, the United States will support Israel if someone is trying to use this moment of crisis in the wrong way.

There is the issue of the Israelis who are kidnapped, some of whom are dual citizens of other countries. And on this, as someone who covers diplomacy, I think the language really matters. You can say “Hamas is responsible for their fate.” That’s, you know, the usual diplo-speak. But the sentence I hope to hear from countries, including the United States but also others, is: “We expect their immediate release.”

These are citizens, okay? The majority of them are not soldiers. There are many women there. There are children, there are elderly people. And I think the international position should be that they must be immediately released. This is what I hope to hear.