Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama arrived at the White House in 2009 with a resume built almost entirely outside politics — a Princeton and Harvard Law education, a corporate law career she left for public service, and a vice presidency at the University of Chicago Medical Center overseeing community relations. Once in the East Wing, she chose childhood health as her central project, planting a vegetable garden on the South Lawn in 2009 and launching the Let's Move! initiative the following year to address childhood obesity through better nutrition and more physical activity in schools across the country.

Let's Move! helped drive passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which tightened nutrition standards for school lunches nationwide, a change that drew praise from public health advocates and sustained criticism from parts of the food industry and some parents who objected to the new rules. In 2015 she expanded her focus internationally, launching Let Girls Learn with the Peace Corps and other federal agencies to support girls' education in countries where cultural and economic barriers kept millions of them out of school.

Her 2018 memoir, Becoming, sold more than 10 million copies within its first year, the best-selling book of any kind published in the United States that year and the best-selling memoir by any First Lady in American publishing history. It launched a companion Netflix documentary and an international arena tour, extending her public influence well beyond the causes she had championed in office.