The first stop on the day’s calendar had been planned months earlier. At a meeting in the Oval Office discussing her work uplifting Black executives and entrepreneurs, Dr. Stacie NC Grant had invited me to address the annual gathering—the Grand Boulé—of her sorority, Zeta Phi Beta.

Now I was in Indianapolis, looking out over a convention center packed with 6,000 powerful women in dark-blue dresses and white jackets.

I’m a member of a different sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Black women’s Greek-letter organization, founded at Howard University in 1908. But these women are my sisters, too. We’re all part of the Divine Nine, the Greek organizations founded when segregation was law in the South and standard practice in the North. W. E. B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall were early members of the first Black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, founded at Cornell University in 1906. The Divine Nine has been an engine of uplift for generations of Black college men and women, instilling a love and celebration of excellence, philanthropy, and service to all mankind. My Divine Nine family would show up for me throughout the campaign. That day I was so pleased to see the young president of Phi Beta Sigma, Chris V. Rey, and the esteemed president of Delta Sigma Theta, Elsie Cooke-Holmes.

Throughout my career I’ve maintained that people in positions of power must be required to ask of themselves: Who am I not hearing from? Then make it their business to seek those folks out. I came to the White House knowing that the people in that building needed to hear from a wider range of voices.

This article has been excerpted from Kamala Harris’s new book, 107 Days.

As vice president I’d been given several roles by Joe Biden. But one role I created for myself was building up the diverse coalition that our party encompassed. I made it my business to get out there and make sure that no community was overlooked, especially those that had been taken for granted in the past. Black women, the Democrats’ staunchest, most reliable voting bloc, was one such community. The boulé in Indianapolis was one of a dozen Divine Nine gatherings I’d addressed since taking office.

On this day there was a new energy in the room as I walked onto the stage. A Black woman was slated to be the Democratic nominee for president. It was us. And everyone there understood what it meant: that this would be a journey of both joy and pain. I was in a room full of people with whom, because of our shared experience, certain words did not need to be said. There is an emotion that comes from being in a place where people see you, support you, know you. The kindness and the love in that room penetrated the armor I usually wore, armor I’d need to put back on as soon as I left that room.

The biggest applause came when I started to say what I would do to restore the rights of Roe v. Wade.

“When I am president—”

A roar erupted that drowned out the rest of that sentence.

That roar told me they could see it. Clearly, for the first time. This could be, and it should be. It was not because of gender or because of race, but despite those things.

Kamala Harris speaks at the Grand Boulé. (Erin Schaff / The New York Times / Redux)

I thought, as I often did, of Shirley Chisholm, and I know they did, too. The first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress and the first woman to run for our party’s nomination. She had blazed the path, and now I was standing on it.

From Indianapolis we flew on to Houston to meet with emergency-management staff and get a briefing on recovery efforts after the devastation of Hurricane Beryl. The Category 1 hurricane’s eyewall had slammed Houston, bringing down power lines and leaving vulnerable people without air-conditioning or water during triple-digit heat indexes. At least 20 souls had died. The economic damage—in the billions—was still being reckoned.

These kinds of briefings are sadly familiar to me. As district attorney, I’d witnessed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As senator, I’d been to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and I’d toured the communities in my home state that had been ravaged by wildfires. It was heartbreaking to see the scale of these losses and the exhausted faces of individuals standing in the ruins of a lifetime’s work, a lifetime’s dreams. It was infuriating to see how predators swarmed like cockroaches, price gouging, spreading misinformation. But it was also inspiring to talk to the first responders who ran toward danger, sometimes helping strangers even as their own homes were at risk. And then there were the regular people who stepped up to help in whatever way they could: collecting toiletries, making sandwiches, organizing clothing drives.

In my life I’ve seen over and over that it is often the people with the least who give the most.

As I shook hands and thanked the police and emergency workers one by one, in each I saw a hero. The kind of person who answered a calling with a sense of duty to the well-being of people they’ve never met. A reporter in the press pool shouted a question about Biden’s upcoming speech. It was just after 5 p.m. in Houston, and the president would be addressing the nation from the Oval Office later that evening.

I watched it at the hotel that night. It was a good speech, drawing on the history of the presidency to locate his own place within it. But as my staff later pointed out, it was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address before he mentioned me.

“I want to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris. She is experienced, she’s tough, she’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and leader for our country.”

And that was it.

I am a loyal person.

During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.

He was, by some measures, the most consistently underestimated man in Washington. He’d been right about his tactics for pushing his agenda through a resistant Congress.

It was just possible he was right about this, too.

And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.

“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.

Many people want to spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity. Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.

I was well aware of my delicate status. Lore has it that every outgoing chief of staff always tells the incoming president’s chief of staff Rule No. 1: Watch the VP. Because I’d gone after him over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into the White House with what we lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption.” I had to prove my loyalty, time and time again.

When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a “DEI hire,” the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans.

Lorraine Voles, my chief of staff, constantly had to advocate for my role at events: “She’s not going to stand there like a potted plant. Give her two minutes of remarks. Have her introduce the president.”

They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.

An example: In 2021, I was dispatched to the Élysée Palace to help reset our tattered relationship with France after we signed the Australia-U.K.-U.S. security pact. Australia had agreed to buy submarines from France but scrapped that contract when we and the U.K. agreed to supply Australia with nuclear subs under the new AUKUS agreement instead. This had caused tremendous friction.

In our meeting, Emmanuel Macron and I warmed the chill by focusing on our many areas of cooperation, such as space exploration, climate change, transatlantic security, cybersecurity, the Sahel, and the Indo-Pacific.

On that trip, I was invited to visit the renowned Pasteur Institute, where my mother had worked on mRNA research related to breast cancer. I was speaking informally with the scientists there about how I wished politicians would more closely follow the scientific method: testing a hypothesis and adjusting according to results, rather than coming in with the Plan, as if they had all the answers up front.

I said “the Plan” with exaggerated emphasis and air quotes. Fox News, the New York Post, and Newsmax went wild, claiming I’d faked a French accent. This was total nonsense, but the White House seemed glad to let reporting about my “gaffe” overwhelm the significant thaw in foreign relations I’d achieved.

Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a “chaotic” office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year.

The plain fact is many people who come to work with a new administration in the White House haven’t done it before. It’s a job unlike any other, and not every person, no matter how talented in their former position, can step up into such a high-stress, round-the-clock role. Others find they just don’t want a job that doesn’t pay particularly well, takes a massive toll on family, and rules out anything resembling a normal life. I’m not going to keep people on who can’t thrive in their jobs—it’s not fair to them and it’s not good for the country.

Harris arrives for a Medal of Freedom ceremony in the White House. (Tierney L. Cross / Bloomberg / Getty)

So the first year in any White House sees staff churn. Working for the first woman vice president, my staff had the additional challenge of confronting gendered stereotypes, a constant battle that could prove exhausting.

I was the first vice president to have a dedicated press pool tracking my every public move. Before me, vice presidents had what’s called a “supplemental pool,” as the first lady does, covering important events. Because of this constant attention, things that had never been especially newsworthy about the vice president were suddenly reported and scrutinized.

And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.

“The VP should take on irregular migration.”

From March 2021, my assignment was to attack the root causes of the misery that was driving people from their homes and villages in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Because I’d prosecuted cartels and human traffickers from the Northern Triangle, I was up to speed on the region and its problems, and had ideas about the kinds of investments and other interventions that over time would reduce irregular migration, help to bring stability, and offer people a safer future in their own community.

Most people don’t want to leave home. They don’t want to leave their grandmother, their church, their friends, their language. And when they do, it is usually for one of two reasons: they fear for their lives, or they can’t make a living. Much of that region is rural, and farmers are increasingly hit by climate events such as floods and droughts. If you can no longer grow food where you are, and if there’s no other livelihood, you will leave, because there’s simply no choice. Corruption and gangs thrive when there are limited resources.

When Republicans mischaracterized my role as “border czar,” no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved. I won commitments of $5.2 billion in new investments by private companies for the region. I had already seen almost a billion dollars of that money deployed, thanks to enthusiastic partners such as Mastercard, Microsoft, and Nespresso.

I held numerous bilateral meetings with leaders throughout the region, especially with President Alejandro Giammattei in Guatemala, and later his successor, President Bernardo Arévalo. I had multiple calls with Giammattei, warning him that I expected free and fair elections; I sent my national security adviser Phil Gordon to reinforce the message in person; and I publicly supported Arévalo once the election was called.

I met with activist groups fighting against corruption and for human rights in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Cabinet members pitched in: Tom Vilsack at the Department of Agriculture accessed resources to train farmers in the latest methods to increase yields.

I worked closely with Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and later his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, on our mutual border concerns. The investment I was bringing was a bargaining chip with regional governments to crack down on corrosive levels of corruption. These American companies, I told them, would not invest unless real steps were taken. The investments I encouraged have connected communities to the internet and brought people into the formal financial system, creating jobs and opportunity.

In the locations where I was able to bring new enterprises and greater stability, data showed it was working. Our investments had created 70,000 new jobs, reached more than a million people with training programs, and connected 2.5 million previously unbanked people with banking services and access to credit. These people were staying put. I wanted to get that good news out. But White House staff stalled. “Not yet. We need more data.” The story remained untold.

Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Even the breathtaking cruelty of Trump’s family-separation policy hadn’t deterred the desperate. It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time.

No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with.

Then the Dobbs decision came down.

Here was a huge issue on which the president was not seeking to lead. Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment. He ceded that leadership to me. I initiated a national tour and rallied the outrage in red states and blue states alike. As well as big public events, I convened roundtables, starting out with 10 or 12 state legislators whom I would connect with resources in the Justice Department or Health and Human Services. Soon, advocates started attending, then health-care providers, then families affected by restrictive laws. There would be hundreds of people at these meetings, building a national coalition. All this work upended the narrative that we were doomed to a shellacking in the midterms. We defied historical precedent because of our efforts on this issue. (Since 1934, the president’s party has lost an average of 28 House seats and four Senate seats in midterm elections. We lost just nine seats in the House and retained control of the Senate.)

Joe was already polling badly on the age issue, with roughly 75 percent of voters saying he was too old to be an effective president. Then he started taking on water for his perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza.

When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging.

In Selma, Alabama, at the commemoration of Bloody Sunday, when civil-rights marchers were attacked and beaten once they’d crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I gave a strong speech on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Desperate people had been shot when they swarmed a food truck, and I spoke of families reduced to eating leaves or animal feed, women prematurely giving birth with little or no medical care, and children dying from malnutrition and dehydration. I reiterated my strong support for Israel’s security and called on Hamas to release the hostages and accept the cease-fire agreement then on the table. I also called on Israel for greater access to aid. It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the National Security Council. It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased. I was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well.

Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him.

His team didn’t get it.

This article has been excerpted from Kamala Harris’s new book, 107 Days.

107 DaysBy Kamala HarrisBuy Book

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About the AuthorKamala HarrisKamala Harris is a former Vice President of the United States.Explore More TopicsJoe Biden, Kamala Harris, Washington, D.C., White House