Judging the ‘architect of American liberty,’ not by today’s standards but by those of his time. William Anthony Hay reviews ‘Jefferson’ by John B. Boles.
ByWilliam Anthony Hay
The satirist Finley Peter Dunne once observed, through his character Mr. Dooley, that the Supreme Court follows the election returns. In a similar way, historical scholarship tends to follow the preoccupations of its own time. Thomas Jefferson offers an illuminating example. Though far from uncritical, biographers of Jefferson in the postwar years up to, roughly, the early 1970s—scholars like Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson—treated him with sympathy and celebrated his Enlightenment ideals. In the mid-1970s, Fawn Brodie changed Jefferson’s public image by highlighting his relationship with the slave Sally Hemings. Race soon became central to Jefferson scholarship and opened up criticism on other fronts. Once lionized as a defender of liberty, Jefferson came to be depicted as a slave-owning elitist whose class interests, as a Virginia planter, trumped his egalitarian rhetoric. Indeed, neo-progressive historians began to argue that, by creating a property-owning democracy of white males, Jefferson had curbed the prospect of liberty for women, slaves and Native Americans and had codified structural inequality. From such a standpoint, Jefferson’s legacy stands in tension with his professed ideals, making him a hypocrite if not worse.
In “Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty,” John Boles, a history professor at Rice University, advances a series of arguments counter to these interpretive trends. He offers a sympathetic (though not hagiographic) view of Jefferson that emphasizes the differences between his world and ours. The constraints under which Jefferson lived—legal, financial, personal and intellectual—shaped his actions, Mr. Boles shows, limiting or guiding his choices and revealing them to be, when viewed in context and without today’s presumption of moral superiority, admirable more often than not, fully justifying the esteem in which Jefferson was once routinely held. It is better, Mr. Boles argues, to understand Jefferson’s world and his place in it than to judge him by the standards of a later day.
A 1789 bust of Jefferson by Jean-Antoine Houdon.PHOTO: LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
JEFFERSON
By John B. Boles
Basic, 626 pages, $35
Slavery offers a case in point. Although condemned as a slave owner who doubted that free blacks could live at peace among whites—as he famously wrote in “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1785)—Jefferson opposed slavery in his own state and pushed for the legislation that ended the importation of slaves to the U.S. after 1808. Debts kept him from following George Washington’s example of freeing his slaves after his wife’s death, an inaction that Mr. Boles describes, rightly, as almost ruining Jefferson’s reputation in the late 20th century. But none of the Founders, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, risked his career by pushing hard for abolition. Jefferson did what circumstances allowed, and it turned out to be more than expected of a man formed by his slave-owning milieu.
Jefferson grew up on a plantation more culturally part of the old Tidewater region on the Chesapeake than the Piedmont frontier where it stood. Studying the classics reinforced in him a stoicism common among Virginia gentlemen. Although in his own words a hard-working student at the College of William & Mary, Jefferson managed to enter Williamsburg society by drawing the notice of men like Francis Fauquier, the royal governor of Virginia. Conversation and social polish complemented Jefferson’s reading, which went far beyond preparing him to practice law.
From his early support for colonial liberties as a Virginia legislator, Jefferson became a pre-revolutionary spokesman for the American cause—which he saw as a fight for self-rule against new efforts of the British to impose control over the colonies. It is hard for us to grasp today how bold it was to assert the rights of the governed against the encroachments of imperial authority. Almost the youngest delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1775, Jefferson determined to fight rather than submit to Parliament’s insistence on imposing internal taxes and legislating for the colonies without their assent.
The next year, as Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, he would turn to a range of much earlier English writings as well as to the Virginia Declaration of Rights that George Mason had written not long before. Summarizing “years of thinking and political philosophizing,” Mr. Boles notes, Jefferson framed his thoughts in the Declaration to make an argument for America’s place among nations. Congress kept 90% of his words in the final document.
Instead of taking up arms, Jefferson became a revolutionary lawmaker first in Congress and then back in Virginia. Mr. Boles calls him a born legislator who combined deep legal knowledge with precise language, a pleasant manner and sheer diligence. He started the process of revising Virginia’s laws to promote religious freedom and to make the rules of inheritance more democratic. Far from curtailing liberty, as latter-day interpreters would have it, he worked to expand it. Mr. Boles notes that his efforts against slavery—including an effort to denounce the slave trade in the Declaration—faced too much resistance to make headway.
In the later stages of the war against Britain, Jefferson returned to Congress, where he wrote the ratification of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. His report on western lands guided the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a law that planned the sale of the lands to homesteaders, provided funds from the proceeds for public education, and excluded slavery north of the Ohio River: a democratic initiative if ever there was one. It is again important to imagine how differently this territory might have been managed if powerful, self-interested elites, preferring tenants or large estates to independent small-holders, had held sway. Jefferson’s work, by contrast, helped to extend a society of landowning farmers to territory that eventually become states on equal footing with the original 13.
Throughout his career, as Mr. Boles emphasizes, Jefferson framed institutions on broad principles of republican government and thus had a lasting effect on America’s political culture. In such a way, he was, in Mr. Boles’s words, the “architect of American liberty,” a phrase the author uses without the sneers or hedges that have become de rigueur among recent chroniclers of the founding era.
Attributes that made Jefferson an effective legislator also served him as a diplomat in France in the 1780s. Mr. Boles describes him as a remarkable conversationalist, and his scientific feats had made him a celebrity before he reached Versailles. There he became “an exemplar of the philosopher as statesman.” Touring Europe made him value the United States all the more, especially for the prosperity and liberty it gave ordinary people. He blamed monarchy in France “for the shocking discrepancy in living standards between the richest and the poorest,” as Mr. Boles writes. Jefferson did not foresee the tremendous social upheaval that the French Revolution would unleash, and he returned home before the Jacobin Reign of Terror. His unwillingness to denounce its excesses gave American opponents ammunition for years to come. Jefferson “considered the threat of governmental repression a greater danger than rebellion from below,” Mr. Boles notes, but he neither consistently defended periodic rebellion nor opposed lawful authority.
The global conflict that the French Revolution set in motion in the early 1790s heightened America’s vulnerability and made it all the more important to preserve neutrality. Jefferson was alarmed by Federalists who sympathized with Britain and who sought a strong federal government to check the possibility of plebeian unrest; he saw them as hankering after the monarchy he despised. They, in turn, saw him as a crypto-Jacobin who would bring atheism and social revolution to America. Washington sided with Jefferson (then his secretary of state) and maintained good relations with France while distancing the United States from its old ally, but relations within Washington’s cabinet broke down as rival parties emerged.
John Adams’s presidency further polarized American politics, though Jefferson and his friends did not realize that, as Mr. Boles says, “Adams was a moderating voice” among the Federalists, checking Hamilton’s larger ambitions. Tensions at home and a quasi-war with France drew Jefferson away from playing a mere passive role as vice president and into actively campaigning to succeed Adams. He consciously sought reconciliation after his victory in the 1800 election by reaching out to former opponents. But he also strove to promote the republican principles of simplicity and frugality, not least by reducing both taxes and the national debt and reversing Hamilton’s efforts at economic centralization.
Purchasing Louisiana in 1803 from France “for a song,” as Gen. Horatio Gates, the famed Revolutionary War veteran, put it, marked Jefferson’s greatest achievement as president. French control over New Orleans had meant a stranglehold over exports from the Mississippi Valley, an arrangement that, Jefferson said, would force Americans to “marry ourselves to the British fleet & nation.” Patient diplomacy and a shift in Napoleon’s strategy brought a sale on favorable terms, although by a step not allowed explicitly by the Constitution (as Jefferson’s critics like to point out).
Jefferson fared less well in his second term, mainly because the Napoleonic Wars threatened American trade. Economic warfare squeezed neutral powers like the United States, and clashes with Britain threatened war. Jefferson responded with an embargo on trade that would, he believed, pressure foreign rivals and buy time for diplomacy. Commercial strain had more effect on Britain than critics at the time realized, but economic disruption also hurt the United States and divided the country along regional lines. Jefferson’s departure from Washington in 1809 ended his public career, though he pursued an active retirement—writing, gardening, tinkering with the architecture at Monticello and the University of Virginia—until his death in 1826.
While emphasizing Jefferson’s part in framing institutions fundamental to American liberty, Mr. Boles stresses the man’s contradictions. An aristocrat by birth and manner, Jefferson was “the most thoroughgoing democrat of the Founding Fathers.” Deeply convinced of the power of words, he avoided public oratory and preferred working behind the scenes. A devoted agrarian, he was a connoisseur of cities who took a leading part in the designing of Washington, D.C. More cosmopolitan and widely traveled than other Founders, he preferred the comforts of home and family. The contradictions—almost as much as the differences between past and present—make Jefferson hard to grasp. Mr. Boles’s splendid biography shows that trying to understand him on his own terms is more than worth the effort.
—Mr. Hay is the author of a forthcoming biography of Lord Liverpool, Britain’s prime minister during the Napoleonic Wars.
Image from article, with caption: Although Trump tweeted on Thursday that he no longer watches “Morning Joe,” the timing of his rant suggests otherwise.
Excerpt:
Donald Trump promised to bring the country together, and he’s finally accomplished it. On Thursday, people from across the political spectrum were unified in their condemnation of his incredibly crass and sexist attack on Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”[JB emphasis]
In a pair of tweets he posted from the White House just before 9 a.m., Trump wrote, “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to . . . to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
The criticisms of Trump began to pour in almost immediately ...
Ramadan, the Muslim holiday of fasting, began on May 27, 2017, and ended with Eid al-Fitr, on June 24. The celebration that ends a month of fasting focused on the premise: One Nation Under God.
During this time, Muslims gather in large venues for communal prayers, listen to a Khutba, or sermon, and give away food as charity, called Zakat al-Fitr.
Eid al-Fitr Teachings in America
The Eid al-Fitr celebration was from June 24-27. Imams across the nation took this time to talk about strengthening American values as “One Nation Under God,” according to Huffington Post.
American Muslims have committed to one goal: E pluribus unum, to be one with all. When these dedicated citizens recite The Pledge of Allegiance, they are emotionally moved by the words:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
According to the Quran 49:13, Allah created the people from a couple and made nations and tribes so they would know each other. Thus, one nation under God.
Only in deeds is any one greater than another. A good deed is defined as an act that benefits someone else.
All citizens of America should proudly fly the flag. To some, it is a symbol of their hopes and dreams. To others, it represents the evolution of a nation, and even still, the American flag reminds all, the many lives lost defending the rights of the people.
It is under this premise Imams teach Muslim congregations to reach out and create a cohesive America, one community at a time. Building harmonious relationships with those around them in an effort of peace. This is Islam in its simplest form, according to Huffington Post contributor Mike Ghouse.
Muslims, different than Jihadists, do not seek to impose their values on society. Islam teaches the desire for true freedom – harmony inside and out.
History of Iftars at the White House
In 1805, President Thomas Jefferson sent formal invitations that read, “Dinner will be on the table precisely at sun-set.” This was in respect to Sidi Soliman Mellimelli and Ramadan. Muslims fast from dawn to dusk for 30 days. The Iftar had to be served after the sun set, which is the breaking of a fast.
Jefferson’s invitation to dinner at sundown was more than a show of respect for the Muslim ambassador, it was a showing of his Constitutional beliefs.
In 1786, he wrote the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, Jefferson’s self-proclaimed greatest work. In his autobiography, he explains:
Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that it should read ‘departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’ the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.
February 1996, Hillary Clinton hosted 150 people for the White House Iftar. Her daughter Chelsea had studied Islamic history and taught her mother about Ramadan tradition, according to Muslim Voices. The first lady understood that Americans needed to be educated on the tenets of Islam to build resilience and strength as a country. Clinton told guests, “The values that lie at the heart of Ramadan – faith, family, community and responsibility to the less fortunate – resonate with all the peoples of this earth.”
President George W. Bush hosted an Iftar every year he was in office, including November 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He said,
America was fighting against terrorism, not Islam. We’re a nation of many faiths.
According to Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, under President Bush, Charlotte Beers, the November dinner was a true picture of the respect America has for all religions. In an interview with the Washington Post, 15 years later, she said the administration agreed they had to reach out to Muslims acknowledging they were as concerned as every other citizen. The dinner resounded around the world – America was founded on the premise of freedoms, including freedom of religion.
Former President Barack Obama had Jefferson’s copy of the Koran on display at the 2012 White House Iftar. He said,
And that’s a reminder, along with the generations of patriotic Muslims in America, that Islam – like so many faiths – is part of our national story.
Obama told attendees about President Jefferson and the first White House Iftar, in honor of the visiting Muslim ambassador.
Each year the White House dinner had a special meaning. The overarching event has evolved, however, the basis remained: Bold inclusion and respect. Donald Trump has chosen not to continue this tradition during his administration.
Muslim/White House Tradition Discarded
This formal White House celebration continued through the decades until 2017.
Instead of hosting a White House Iftar, President Trump released a statement on June 24:
Muslims in the United States joined those around the world during the holy month of Ramadan to focus on acts of faith and charity. Now, as they commemorate Eid with family and friends, they carry on the tradition of helping neighbors and breaking bread with people from all walks of life. During this holiday, we are reminded of the importance of mercy, compassion, and goodwill. With Muslims around the world, the United States renews our commitment to honor these values. Eid Mubarak.
Reportedly, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stated in May, the Ramadan White House tradition would not continue with the Trump administration. He did send his best wishes to Muslims celebrating Eid al-Fitr.
This day offers an opportunity to reflect on our shared commitment to building peaceful and prosperous communities. Eid Mubarak.
Eid Mubarak is a Muslim greeting used specifically for the festivals of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. It means blessed celebration.
In 2015, Pew Research Center reported there were 3.3 million Muslims in America. Although the Trump administration chose to reject 200 years of tradition, it is hopeful that next year he will host a White House Iftar.
By Jeanette Smith
Sources:
Huffington Post: Eid Al-Fitr Ramadan Sermons to focus on building a Secure Cohesive America Stars and Stripes: Trump just ended a long tradition of celebrating Ramadan at the White House Time and Date: Eid al-Fitr
Vanity Fair; by BUZZ BISSINGER photographs by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ styled by JESSICA DIEHL [original article contains additional photograph & additional links] This is a love story.
It wasn’t seamless, starry eyes at first light. There was a discovery, unexpected and shocking. There were moments of really getting pissed and the standard irritation that comes when one half of the whole kept leaving the suitcase in the hallway. But there were also moments of unplanned intimacy that is the only true kind of intimacy in a love story, soft touches and laughter and absurdity, because you need absurdity in a love story, since love is slightly absurd anyway, a feeling that, like eternity, is indefinable.
With 23 grand-slam wins on the women’s pro tennis tour spanning nearly three decades—from her first, at 17 years old, in September of 1999, to her latest, at 35, in January of 2017, and the most in the open era—Serena is in the heart of every conversation concerning the best athlete of her time. “If I were a man, then it wouldn’t be any sort of question,” she told me. She may well be right, a society still conditioned to believe that men are better than women in everything except the superfluous.
Alexis, on the other hand, had never seen a tennis match until he met Serena, in May of 2015 in Rome. He knew so little about the game that the photo he excitedly posted on Instagram of her playing her first match in the Italian Open showed her foot faulting.
Serena plays a sport that requires the mental focus of instantaneously letting go of losing points and moving on because there are a lot of excruciating ones no matter how great you are, continual regrouping and re-inventing: dwell on them, you lose confidence; lose confidence and you lose. She is also superbly conditioned, given that a female tennis player may run about three miles in a match without the luxury of coming out of the game because you feel winded or lost too much money gambling with teammates the night before on the charter and would rather mope on the bench.
Alexis’s athletic history amounted to the level of a very gangly defensive tackle for Howard High School in Ellicott City, Maryland, far more interested in science fairs and programming and building Web sites. His skill at tennis is not one of potential; when Serena offered to give him a lesson, he turned it down so he could tell his friends that he once turned down a lesson with Serena Williams.
Serena has been romantically linked in the past to such rappers as Drake and Common. Once, when she and Alexis went to a movie in San Francisco, he got up from his seat to get popcorn, earning the admiration of the kid at the counter.
Reddit, Rome, and rats? Watch the video [...] for a primer on the unlikely beginning of Serena Williams’s and Alexis Ohanian’s romance.
“Yo, dude, that wasn’t Serena Williams, was it?”
“Come on. Me? Really?”
“You’re right.”
Before we get to how Serena and Alexis actually met, or a better sense of who he really is, or her reaction to the pregnancy and how she told him, it’s probably wise to spend a little time with Serena Williams to give our love story some context.
Let’s just get this out of the way right now: Serena Williams is the best tennis player in history, with an aggregate winning percentage of 85.76 percent and 72 tournaments won on the Women’s Tennis Association tour (including the 23 grand-slam victories in 29 singles finals, not to mention 14 doubles finals with sister Venus). She has earned $84,463,131 in career prize money and nearly twice that in endorsements and appearance fees.
Thirty is the point of no return for most female tennis players, but Serena has only gotten better since, with 10 grand-slam wins and almost running the four-tournament table—the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open—in 2015. She has been ranked No. 1 in the world longer than anyone other than Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova, and is the obvious favorite to win any tournament she chooses to play in.
But then an unforeseen discovery left both Serena and Alexis in shock. Which is perfect for our love story, since a love story without drama is just another story.
JANUARY 2017
It began to unfold roughly a week before the beginning of the Australian Open, in Melbourne, last January, not that anyone would have known. After playing poorly in her first match of the year, in which she felt she had missed too many backhands, she went to the practice court and for two and a half to three hours hit 2,500 of them, by her estimation. If she missed one, she started over. She did roughly the same the next practice day.
But she felt a little different physically. She had unexpectedly thrown up at one point and her breasts had enlarged. She thought it might be hormonal. But her friend Jessica Steindorff immediately suspected something else and suggested a pregnancy test. Serena thought it was ludicrous.
Jessica worked on her for two days until Serena relented, and so Jessica went to a pharmacy and bought a pregnancy kit.
“I’ll take it just because (a) to prove you wrong and (b) because it’s fun, whatever. It’s like a joke. Why not?”
GRANDSTAND “I don’t know what to do with a baby. I have nothing.... I’ve done absolutely nothing for the baby room.”
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
That Friday, as Serena was doing her hair and makeup for an event sponsored by the lingerie company Berlei, where she is a spokesperson for its line of sports bras, she took the test in the bathroom. “I put it down. I went back to finishing hair and makeup, was laughing, talking. I was getting the styling done. An hour and a half later, I went back to the bathroom and I totally forgot about it because it was impossible for me. . . . So I went back to get dressed and I went back in the bathroom and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that test.’ ”
Jessica shrieked in delight at the results. Serena, as she put it, “did a double take and my heart dropped. Like literally it dropped.
“Oh my God, this can’t be—I’ve got to play a tournament,” said Serena. “How am I going to play the Australian Open? I had planned on winning Wimbledon this year.”
But never underestimate the Serena Stubbornness, as legendary in certain circles as her first serve. Beleaguered Jessica went back to the hotel pharmacy and bought five more test kits to further convince her.
Test No. 2: Positive. Test No. 3: Positive. Test No. 4: Positive. Test No. 5: Positive. Test No. 6: Positive.
Which is an opportune time in our love story to bring in the father and rewind to the moment Serena met Alexis and Alexis met Serena.
MAY 2015
Although in his early 30s, there is something still gushingly boyish about Alexis, six feet five inches and lean, with the moppish hairstyle that college tour guides favor as they extol all the wonders of the campus, including the mail room and the six-shooter cereal dispenser. In his case the corporate offices of Reddit, in the Union Square area of San Francisco, which look oddly unfinished—as if to say, Why be bothered with such trivialities in the hip high-tech culture?—twentysomething savants engrossed by their computer screen with heads slightly hunched, the way people used to look when they were engrossed by books, searching for the next Pied Piperian breakthrough and likely finding it before lunch is served on the second floor from a line of stainless-steel buffet trays winking and nodding with nutritious options.
Alexis was born in Brooklyn and raised in the nationally known planned community of Columbia, Maryland. Reddit’s origins go back to 2004 during his junior year at the University of Virginia, when he took an L.S.A.T. prep exam for law school, got about midway through the first section, and went to the Waffle House on Route 29 in Charlottesville to have waffles. He realized he did not want to be a lawyer, just as he had also realized that his real love was programming and building Web sites. He teamed with Steve Huffman, an engineering major, whom he had met the first day of freshman year.
He left Reddit and went to Armenia, where his father’s family is originally from, to do volunteer work. He wrote a book called Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed, and traveled the United States for five months to promote it on a bus that went to 80 universities because he wanted to be on a bus that traveled around the country. He became a leading voice in stopping government intervention in the Internet. He helped invent the travel Web site Hipmunk. Several years ago, he and Huffman returned to Reddit as executive chairman and chief executive officer, respectively, the company once again independent.
Alexis and Serena met the way two people do in the best love stories: by chance. Actually, it runs a little deeper than that because, let’s face it, Alexis was initially considered by Serena and the others she was with to be an irritant they were hoping would just get the hint and go away.
The location was the Cavalieri hotel, in Rome, on May 12, 2015. That night Serena was about to play her first match in the Italian Open. She is not a morning person and usually doesn’t eat breakfast, but the buffet offering at the Cavalieri was beyond extravagant and Jessica was champing at the bit, so they went to try it along with longtime agent Jill Smoller, of William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, and Zane Haupt, who handles some business-development opportunities for Serena.
The buffet had closed down five minutes before the group got there, so their only recourse was to go to the pool area and sit at a table for four and order breakfast. Other people on Serena’s team were expected at an adjoining table.
“I knew it was coming,” she says of the proposal. “I was like, ‘Serena, you’re ready. This is what you want.’ ”
“This big guy comes and he just plops down at the table next to us, and I’m like, ‘Huh! All these tables and he’s sitting here?,’ ” Serena remembered. Alexis recalled that the pool area was “not quite so empty.”
Then came the quintessential Australian accent of Zane Haupt. “Aye, mate! There’s a rat. There’s a rat by your table. You don’t want to sit there.”
Serena started laughing.
“We were trying to get him to move and get out of there,” said Serena. “He kind of refuses and he looks at us. And he’s like, ‘Is there really a rat here?’ ” At which point Serena remembers the first words she ever said to him.
“No, we just don’t want you sitting there. We’re going to use that table.”
“I’m from Brooklyn. I see rats all the time.”
“Oh, you’re not afraid of rats?”
“No.”
Which is when Serena suggested a compromise and invited Alexis to join them.
Which is when Alexis became “98 percent sure” that the person asking about his rat tolerance was Serena Williams. He knew generally about her accomplishments on the court. But Alexis, an avid pro-football-and-basketball fan, had “never watched a match on television or in real life. It was literally the sport—even if ESPN was announcing tennis updates, I would just zone out. . . . I really had no respect for tennis.”
He did keep this to himself.
Serena asked about the tech conference and whom Alexis had come to hear speak. He later described the question as a “softball lobbed over the plate” that even he could hit out of the park.
“Actually, I’m here to speak.”
Alexis told her about Reddit. Serena knew nothing about it but acted as if she did, and said she had been on it earlier in the morning.
To which Alexis asked, “Oh, were you? What do you like about it?”
To which Serena gave a very long “Wellllll . . . ” and was saved by Jessica and Jill chiming in.
Serena Williams has long been queen of the tennis court, but her success also extends to business, fashion, and philanthropy. Watch the video below to see some of her biggest career achievements.
Serena started asking him about her Web site and if she should have an app. Alexis thought, “This is an interesting, charming, beautiful woman.” But he had just come out of a five-year relationship and was still slightly hungover and “I was not thinking beyond ‘Yeah sure, I can give you some feedback on your Web site.’ ”
Serena thought he was interested in Jessica. But she did give him her number—she later said it was only because she might have more tech-related questions. He was eminently likable, and Jill, after finding out he was a client of WME for his speaking gigs, invited him to the match that night.
Serena had an injury and did not play well but still won. Afterward she and her team got on a van to head back to the hotel. Alexis was on board as well and Serena freaked out a little bit.
“I see this super-tall guy get in our [van], and I was like, ‘Oh my God, Jill. Tell me what’s wrong. Do I have another stalker? Why is Rome sending personal security with me. . . . And she’s like, ‘No, that’s Alexis.’ I remembered his name because it was a unique name. I was like, ‘Oh, I remember.’ ”
After recognizing him, she invited Alexis to join her team for dinner that night. It didn’t work out. But something was in the air, and as our love story continues, there’s only one place to find out just what.
After Serena won the Australian Open, the next big tournament was the second leg of the grand-slam circuit, the French Open, at Roland-Garros, later that month. She texted Alexis that she was bummed that he had not seen her play well in Rome and proposed that maybe he should come to Paris. To Alexis, it was one of those classically inverse L.A.-style invites that are extended because you are sure it will never happen.
But Alexis did come to Paris for the weekend. Not that he had any particular expectations. “Even if she blows me off and we don’t even hang out, I’m still going to have an amazing time in Paris, and I’ll have an even better story for all my childhood friends when I was like, ‘Yeah, I went to Paris for a weekend. I was supposed to meet up with Serena Williams, she blew me off, but I’ve got other friends there, and we had a great time.’ ”
They just walked and roamed, Serena placing her faith in Alexis because he was a tried-and-true traveler, where all you needed was a backpack and the only rules were none. Alexis also sensed that this was not something Serena ever got to do as a worldwide celebrity, so much of her life being about regimen and glamorous scenes where acolytes circled like fireflies. For six hours they walked all over, the magic of the day multiplied by the city’s heartbreak of beauty, which only made it more beautiful.
APRIL 2016
The day of his birthday, April 24, Alexis went to the Carousel Restaurant in Little Armenia in Los Angeles with his grandparents. Serena and he FaceTimed. She was calling to say happy birthday, which might not sound like a big deal but was because she is a Jehovah’s Witness and part of the religion is not to celebrate birthdays. She was doing something she normally would not do, reaching beyond, telling him on the phone how wonderful their lives together had been.
Alexis knew then he wanted to marry her, not simply out of happiness or compatibility. She was helping him become the best version of himself because of her own work ethic and focus, with millions watching and the expectation of the public that she should win every time, what Serena herself described as carrying “three pyramids” on her shoulder. He thought he worked hard—it is part of the romance of high tech that everyone works 18 hours a day and then curls up under the desk for a few hours’ sleep with their laptop as teddy bear and pacifier—but he realized it was nothing compared with Serena.
“I felt like a door had been opened to a person who made me want to be my best self. . . . I find myself just wanting to be better by simply being around her because of the standard she holds.”
DECEMBER 2016
Alexis decided he would surprise Serena by proposing to her on December 10 in virtually the same spot he had first met her: the Cavalieri. It was an intricate and tactical plan, several months in the making. Serena was scheduled to play in an exhibition in India, so Jill Smoller talked her into making a stopover on the way back and spending the night at the Cavalieri. Then the exhibition was canceled. There was no reason for Serena to go to Italy. Plus, she was beginning training for the Australian Open, and when Serena gets close to a grand-slam event, practice becomes a personal Hacksaw Ridge—fury, broken rackets, sometimes tears. Now going to Rome?
Alexis scrambled to enlist the help of others. Serena’s executive assistant, Dakota Baynham, secretly packed her bags. Tommy Hilfiger did a major solid by scheduling a meeting at her house in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, to discuss some fashion-related items so she would be there to get picked up for the airport. Jill came to the house and told her that she had to go to Italy because Alexis wanted her there under the guise of a spontaneous trip, much like the one they had taken to Disney World a few weeks earlier.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Serena wasn’t happy. Actually, she was livid. But after she got on the plane, she realized that he was flying her out for only one reason. “I knew it was coming. I was like, ‘Serena, you’re 35, you’re ready. This is what you want.’ ”
Alexis picked the same room they had shared a year earlier, the hotel at his instruction filling it with flowers. He took her downstairs to the same table by the pool area where they had first met. No one else was there, since the hotel, also at his instruction, had cleared everyone else out. He retold the story of how he had met her for the first time at this exact spot two years earlier. On the table was a little plastic rat.
Once Serena knew she was pregnant, she called Alexis and told him he needed to come to Melbourne earlier than planned. She did not give him the reason, but Alexis thought it was likely health-related and immediately got a United flight out of San Francisco. When she saw him, not a word was said.
She handed him a paper bag with the six positive pregnancy tests.
He was as shocked as Serena. But there wasn’t time to dwell. The Australian Open was about to begin, and an immediate medical determination had to be made on what risk there might be in playing. The doctor who examined her thought she was about three or four weeks pregnant—it was almost impossibly hard to tell because the fetus was so small—and said there was no risk whatsoever. When Serena returned to the States and had a subsequent exam, it was discovered that she had actually been more advanced, about seven to eight weeks, but she said she still would have played. There were only five people who knew during the tournament: Alexis, Jessica, Jill, Venus, and the doctor. Not even Serena’s coach knew. Nor did tournament officials.
In her earlier years Serena was all about sheer aggressiveness, playing to the strength of opponents and still beating them. She has gotten more strategic, but her game still pivots on power, a first serve that often clocks in at somewhere around 120 miles an hour and is one of the best ever in tennis. The speed is lethal, but it is complemented by a perfect technique in which she tosses the ball in the air with the same trajectory every serve so her opponent has no idea where she is aiming. Assuming her opponent can even get to the first serve, it often makes for a weak return that enables Serena to finish off a point with short, three- or four-stroke rallies that conserve strength. This obviously helps her endurance and allows her, a great three-set player, to win a match.
The Australian Open presented a new challenge that Serena had never faced before in her career. Because of the pregnancy she did not have the same endurance. She could uncharacteristically feel herself getting tired between points, particularly long ones. If a match went to three sets she knew she would lose, so she was determined to make every match two sets. She also had to deal with the Melbourne heat, which can be vicious on the court in the late afternoon: despite hating playing in the morning, Serena, because she had the option of choosing the match time in the early rounds, played as many as possible at 11 A.M.
You had to win seven matches to win the tournament.
Serena won them all in straight sets.
MAY 2017
It is a typical day in Palm Beach Gardens, the temperature in the mid-80s and enough humidity to get your attention. Serena is on the back patio, curled up on a white outdoor couch trimmed with wicker. There is none of the pouty celebrity I-would-rather-be-doing-anything-other-than-this monosyllabic slouch, nor is every answer punctuated with Sorry-I-have-to-take-this-call. There are a few moments when she pauses and talks to Chip, her beloved teacup Yorkie, who is slightly bigger than her hand, and whom she calls “her son” and clearly means it.
She is now a little more than six months pregnant and showing, which is helping her face the reality that she is having a baby, because “it just doesn’t seem real. I don’t know why. Am I having a baby?
“If you would have told me last year in October or November that I would have a baby, not be pregnant but have a baby, I would have thought you were the biggest liar in the world. This is kind of how I am right now. This is happening sooner than later, and it’s going by so fast.”
If there is no giddiness, there is no panic. Says her friend Diondria Thornton, Serena “loves being pregnant.” But it’s not that simple. “I can also see competition creeping in on her. Is this over yet? I think she’s getting this itch . . . to see her intensity and her workout—‘I have to stay fit. I have to get back on the court.’ Very determined to get back on the court.”
Serena says she will return to the tennis circuit as soon as January because “I don’t think my story is over yet.”
She is slowly converting one of the guest rooms of her house into the baby’s room but as of May hadn’t made any further preparations. “I don’t know what to do with a baby. I have nothing. . . . I’ve done absolutely nothing for the baby room.” She is more than busy: the working out, about to launch her own online fashion site, recently named to the board of SurveyMonkey, an online survey platform. She won’t get to the bulk of baby paraphernalia until later in the summer, when moving around will be much harder and she will be, as she puts it, “bored to tears.”
Alexis, of course, is earnestly preparing and already has a tip jar he puts money into whenever he uses profanity so he won’t utter it around the baby. He also wants to make sure that Chip, his future stepson, is psychologically cool with a baby in the house.
Alexis and Serena still try to see each other every weekend in what will be a bi-coastal relationship until marriage. Alexis is looking forward to the marriage. Serena, with tongue floating somewhere in cheek, says, “I’m trying to enjoy the little freedom I have left.” They are largely homebodies when together, cooking with each other—although Serena is very proprietary about her tacos—playing the game Heads Up!, in which player No. 1 calls up a name on their cell-phone screen, places it on forehead, and player No. 2 gives clues to see if player No. 1 gets the right answer before time runs out. There is another version, in which the clues are in the form of impressions, and Serena tries earnestly, even though, according to Alexis, she is frankly terrible, whereas Alexis takes pride in doing some pretty good ones. Alexis is aware that when you are in tech the word “nerd” becomes a suffix next to your name. But he says that Serena is really the nerd, knowing, for example, all the words to the animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender by heart.
Marriages are impossible to predict. Fairy tales become broken tales, love stories turn into stories of love lost, initial euphoria into a wish for marital euthanasia. The trouble with love is that it comes with the guarantee of nothing.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
The nature of it is risk, happiness and hurt in the same muscle of the heart. Maybe Serena and Alexis are too different. Maybe she won’t be able to give enough when she is giving to a baby even before the marriage begins. Maybe he will feel he is making too many sacrifices in his spectacular and exciting career to accommodate Serena, since her career is even more spectacular and exciting.
Perhaps the prospect of a continued love story is as realistic as Serena’s insistence that she will return to the pro tennis circuit as soon as January because “I don’t think my story is over yet.” But if she says she will be back in January, she will be back in January. Anyone who has met Serena for more than five seconds knows that.
The marriage? How can it not thrive when the first date was six hours in Paris—with no particular destination—where no matter how crowded the streets and alleyways winding through the city, there was no one else except the two of you.
A Princeton PhD, was a U.S. diplomat for over 20 years, mostly in Central/Eastern Europe, and was promoted to the Senior Foreign Service in 1997. After leaving the State Department in 2003 to express strong reservations about the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq, he shared ideas with Georgetown University students on the tension between propaganda and public diplomacy. He has given talks on "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United" to participants in the "Open World" program. Among Brown’s many articles is his latest piece, “Janus-Faced Public Diplomacy: Creel and Lippmann During the Great War,” now online. He is the compiler (with S. Grant) of The Russian Empire and the USSR: A Guide to Manuscripts and Archival Materials in the United States (also online). In the past century, he served as an editor/translator of a joint U.S.-Soviet publication of archival materials, The United States and Russia: The Beginning of Relations,1765-1815. His approach to "scholarly" aspirations is poetically summarized by Goethe: "Gray, my friend, is every theory, but green is the tree of life."
