The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

Every now and then on these drives, Obama would glance out the window and offer a casual wave and I’d see someone’s face freeze in a shock of recognition.

We ended up touring the Acropolis instead, on a pristine, warm morning. From its perch up on a hill, the world was lovely and calm—in the clear blue sky and sweeping view of Athens, there was no hint of the financial crisis gripping Greece, the flow of refugees crossing its borders, or the uncertainty that those forces had unleashed in the world beyond.

When I saw him afterward, he repeated a maxim that he’d shared with me in the early morning hours after the election of Trump, a refrain that sought out perspective: “There are more stars in the sky,” he said, “than grains of sand on the earth.”

We prefer to have a good relationship with the United States, he said, folding his hands in front of him. That is good for the world. But every action will have a reaction. And if an immature leader throws the world into chaos, then the world will know whom to blame.

Xi jinping to obama, abt Trump

Obama—not usually an outwardly sentimental man—attempted to pass a torch of sorts. “Justin, your voice is going to be needed more,” he said, leaning forward and putting his elbows on his knees. “You’re going to have to speak out when certain values are threatened.”

“Maybe we pushed too far,” he said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

Obama on 2016 election

Since I went to work for Obama in 2007, the one thing I never lost faith in was the confidence that I was a part of something that was right in some intangible way. Sure, we—the Obama White House—had gotten some things wrong. But the larger project—that was correct. The belief in America becoming a better place. The hope that if we can find strength in containing multitudes, then so can the world.

As we waited for the agent to open the door, Obama leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, returning to my comment about young people. “But we’re about to find out just how resilient our institutions are, at home and around the world.”

One joke that he told in the days after the election expressed his frustration at how this would impact the rest of his life: “I feel like Michael Corleone,” he’d say. “I almost got out.”

The catastrophes of 9/11 and the Iraq War had propelled me there, in search of a better story about America, and myself. I’d spent eight years pursuing it in a windowless West Wing office where I could hear rats scurrying in the ceiling above me and could walk into meetings where the fate of nations was discussed.

Most of all, I’d subsumed my own story into the story of Barack Obama—his campaign, his presidency, the place where he was leading us.

The sense of excitement that people had, all those people in all those places, all those faces looking back with hope. That is what I’d been looking for when I moved out to Chicago ten years before. And that, I realized, would no longer greet an American president abroad, so it was hard to feel anything other than tired and sad.

The United States had nearly 150,000 troops supporting the Iraqi Security Forces, but everyone spoke of a series of militias as the main drivers of politics. One American general told us that unless the different sects reconciled, “all the troops in the world could not bring security to Iraq.”

I wanted to be a part of what happened next, and I was repelled by the reflexive liberalism of my New York University surroundings—the professor who suggested that we sing “God Bless Afghanistan” to the tune of “God Bless America,” the preemptive protests against American military intervention, the reflexive distrust of Bush.

I was a liberal, skeptical of military adventurism in our history, and something seemed off about toppling Saddam Hussein because of something done by Osama bin Laden. But when you’re putting on a tie and riding the D.C. metro with a bunch of other twenty-five-year-olds to a think tank a few blocks from the White House, angry about 9/11 and determined to be taken seriously, you listen to what the older, more experienced people say. The moment Colin Powell made his case for war to the United Nations, I was on board.

Circus

The first sentence of the report said “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” and the report called for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops. Instead, Bush put more troops into the country. To me, the experience clarified two things: First, the people who were supposed to know better had gotten us into a moral and strategic disaster; second, you can’t change things unless you change the people making the decisions. I had a decent policy job, but I wanted to get into politics. And I wanted to work for Barack Obama.

From the moment I saw his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, I had wanted him to run for president. He had been against the war when nearly everyone else went along with it. He used language that sounded authentic and moral at a time when our politics was anything but. There was also something else, something intangible.

I wanted a hero—someone who could make sense of what was happening around me and in some way redeem it.

“Hillary will vote however I vote,” Obama said. I was struck by his confidence; it could have seemed like arrogance, except he was so casual in his tone.

Obama, a former law professor, has a trait that I would witness thousands of times in the years to come. He likes to call on just about everyone in a room. And he doesn’t like it when people have side conversations.

The day after the debate, the campaign couldn’t find experts willing to go out and defend Obama’s stance. The consensus in the foreign policy establishment was that Obama had made a blunder, and that was mirrored by a political class in Washington who felt that anything other than reflexive “toughness” on Iran was a losing proposition. Diplomacy, apparently, is “weak”; refusing to engage in diplomacy, by the inverse property, is “tough.” Never mind that Iran was steadily advancing its nuclear program.

Ann wanted Obama to win, she just couldn’t see America electing a black man named Barack Obama; he definitely wasn’t going to carry Orange County.

It all seemed like a stupid game in which sticking to a preapproved script was more important than being right; worse, the script hadn’t changed because of Iraq.

To my generation of liberals, she offered an alternative to the neoconservative views that dominated the debate after 9/11: She supported an interventionist America that promoted human rights and prevented atrocities, yet she’d opposed the war in Iraq, standing apart from many liberal interventionists who were co-opted by the Bush crowd.

Like me, Samantha felt a sense of destiny about her work for Obama.

After a conversation with Samantha, I’d go home to my tiny studio apartment, in the kind of building populated by graduate students and service industry workers, thinking that I was part of a movement that would remake the world order.

We spent our days acting as though we were in on a secret that nobody else knew—we were going to win the election, and the more people said we wouldn’t, the more certain we were that we would.

We had all made this bet to work for the underdog campaign, so there was something essential that we shared, the belief that we were doing something both historic and right.

It was unspoken that if you ever needed anything—a place for a visiting friend to stay, help with what you were working on, a person to talk to about something bothering you—someone would be there for you. We were down by 20 points in national polls. It was the happiest time of my professional life.

we had internalized a siege mentality in the face of rumors that Obama was a Muslim, a Kenyan, a terrorist sympathizer, or all of the above.

Kennedy: Ich bin ein Berliner! Reagan: Tear down this wall! The two most iconic speeches delivered by American presidents abroad both took place in Berlin. I read each of them dozens of times. I’d listen to recordings of them in my apartment late at night. I wanted, more than anything else, to help put Barack Obama in that continuum, to write words that someone like me might someday read. And to the campaign staff, this was precisely the objective—to put Obama visually in that continuum.

While Obama was often blamed for the cult of personality growing up around him—arty posters, celebrity anthems, and lavish settings for his events—he was rarely responsible for it, and worried that we were raising expectations too high in a world that has a way of resisting change.

I was hoping for edits that would elevate the speech and make it more than a summation of our worldview.

I opened my computer and stared at the text on the screen, which had become so familiar to me that the words seemed drained of meaning.

The heart of the speech, an echo of Reagan with a twist of Obama, was the one part I was confident about, so I read it over and over aloud—a ringing affirmation of globalism over crude nationalism: “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

an idea central to Obama’s worldview: that American leadership depended on our military but was rooted not just in our strength but also in our goodness.

For a moment, I wondered how he could get away with smoking in a hotel room, then it occurred to me: He was a few months away from possibly being president of the United States, he could do whatever he wanted to do.

He held up one hand, signaling that he was about to say something important. “Reggie,” he said, “we have our employee of the month!” With this he leaned forward in what seemed like a cathartic full-body laugh. “Hitler? Really? ‘Obama echoes Hitler in Berlin speech,’ ” he said, imagining the headline.

The motorcade snaked through enormous crowds shouting and waving and covering their faces in shock at seeing this person riding in the seat opposite me. “Why are there so many people here?” Obama asked.

Berlin, campaign 08

By the time he jogged up the stairs, the nervous man I’d seen in the car was gone, replaced by a charismatic leader who moved with ease, smiling, waving casually to the crowd as if it was the most normal place in the world for him to be, standing there in front of people who were ready to love whatever he said.

As he started into his speech, I realized that the words he spoke would not be as powerful as the image of him, an African American, standing on these stages. This was the gift and the struggle of working for Obama.

Over the next eight years, I almost never saw a speech that I wrote being delivered to a crowd; instead, I would choose the detached experience of pacing backstage, occasionally glancing at my BlackBerry and reading the initial reactions to the speech as it was being given.

Taking in this scene, I realized that I was developing an addiction to this life—the moments I craved were not the grand crowd scenes when speeches are delivered, but rather the accumulating pressure that leads up to them; the moments when everyone is waiting to hear the words there on your laptop, as if you know a secret that has yet to be whispered to the world.

I was seated next to Maureen Dowd, a columnist from The New York Times whom I’d read for years. I was excited, a little nervous. “Who are you?” she asked. “The speechwriter,” I said. She gave me a level stare and then complained that she wasn’t seated next to someone more important.

“People are never going to say anything nice about a speech that they didn’t work on,” one person said to me. It foreshadowed a problem we’d confront going forward—we were winning without the people who were the arbiters of opinion in Washington, people who were going to withhold a measure of praise so long as they weren’t occupying the constellation of positions around Obama.

In an insurgent campaign, you go through every day with a chip on your shoulder.

We had shown that Obama could fill the role of leader of the free world, and his success had only made a whole slice of the country that much angrier.

Our administration was filled with many of the people who we had run against. Larry Summers would be Obama’s top economic advisor. Bob Gates, the secretary of defense through Bush’s surge, was asked to stay on at the Pentagon. Hillary Clinton was named secretary of state. For each hire, I could see the rationale—in a time of crisis, bring in the most experienced people; in a potential second Great Depression, have continuity in national security; in a city where you’re an outsider, keep your political adversaries close. But cumulatively, it felt like a punch in the gut. To those of us who worked on the campaign, it made us feel as if our searing criticisms of the establishment may have been just politics after all.

My other office was in the West Wing of the White House on the ground floor, just down the hallway from the Situation Room. That first day, as I walked in, I couldn’t quite believe that I was allowed to be there.

The overwhelming impression I got was of the smallness of the place. There are a few dozen people who work in the West Wing. You realize quickly that there are no other people who occupy some position of higher authority. It’s just you.