Crammed into a tiny cubicle just outside the door of the Oval Office sat Reggie Love, a 6ft 5in, 18-stone, shaven-headed, muscle-packed, former American football player.
Though the man is fast, athletic and tough - he can bench press 350lb and played both basketball and American football at Varsity level - he is not one of the new President’s official bodyguards.
Yet Reggie, a charismatic and immaculately dressed 26-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, spends more time with Mr Obama than anyone else - even the First Lady, Michelle Obama. For he is the President’s ‘bodyman’.
The bodyman is a curiously American political appointment, dating back to the first U.S. president George Washington, who paid his assistant Tobias Lear £250 a year to act as valet, secretary, bodyguard and general factotum. The personal protection role has long been assumed by the highly-trained bodyguards of the Secret Service but, ever since Washington, every President has employed a trusted personal aide who caters for his every whim.
The role remained a little-known political tradition until the inner workings of the White House were dramatised in the TV drama The West Wing, where the handsome and dapper bodyman Charlie Young, played by Dulé Hill, was always at the right hand of fictional President Josiah Bartlet.
Like Young, Love is expected to shadow the President at all times, rarely straying more than a body length away from him during his waking hours. It is Reggie who holds Mr Obama’s BlackBerry, dials the numbers on his mobile phone, briefs the White House chef on what the President would like for lunch and what he would like to drink.
Every time Mr Obama leaves for a meeting, Reggie hands him his suit jacket and dabs any spots on his tie with a stain removal pen. Until Reggie Love, bodymen tended to be regarded as glorified butlers, hired for their self-effacing manners and efficiency at managing their employers’ schedules.
Their most public job was handing out souvenir cufflinks engraved with the Presidential seal to White House visitors. But Mr Obama promises to be a different kind of President - with a different kind of bodyman.
Though the man is fast, athletic and tough - he can bench press 350lb and played both basketball and American football at Varsity level - he is not one of the new President’s official bodyguards.
Reggie Love, President Obama's bodyman, lugs bags to a car and, right, on the campaign trail
And though he has a degree in political science from one of America’s finest institutions, the blue chip Duke University, he is not a policy adviser. 
Yet Reggie, a charismatic and immaculately dressed 26-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, spends more time with Mr Obama than anyone else - even the First Lady, Michelle Obama. For he is the President’s ‘bodyman’.
The bodyman is a curiously American political appointment, dating back to the first U.S. president George Washington, who paid his assistant Tobias Lear £250 a year to act as valet, secretary, bodyguard and general factotum. The personal protection role has long been assumed by the highly-trained bodyguards of the Secret Service but, ever since Washington, every President has employed a trusted personal aide who caters for his every whim.
The role remained a little-known political tradition until the inner workings of the White House were dramatised in the TV drama The West Wing, where the handsome and dapper bodyman Charlie Young, played by Dulé Hill, was always at the right hand of fictional President Josiah Bartlet.
Obama and Reggie with another aide in the campaign aircraft.
Like Young, Love is expected to shadow the President at all times, rarely straying more than a body length away from him during his waking hours. It is Reggie who holds Mr Obama’s BlackBerry, dials the numbers on his mobile phone, briefs the White House chef on what the President would like for lunch and what he would like to drink.
Every time Mr Obama leaves for a meeting, Reggie hands him his suit jacket and dabs any spots on his tie with a stain removal pen. Until Reggie Love, bodymen tended to be regarded as glorified butlers, hired for their self-effacing manners and efficiency at managing their employers’ schedules.
Their most public job was handing out souvenir cufflinks engraved with the Presidential seal to White House visitors. But Mr Obama promises to be a different kind of President - with a different kind of bodyman.
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