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

by Ben Rhodes

A FEW DAYS BEFORE the deal was finalized, I sat at my desk reading a story in my press clips. “This is insane,” I said. Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who had recently become the NSC spokesperson sitting right outside my office, came in and asked what I was talking about. “Check out this Breitbart story,” I said. Ned read the beginning of the story over my shoulder: “Deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes—who lacks any prior qualifications for the post—has explained to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Monday that the administration believes that a bad Iran deal is worth doing because political reform inside the Iranian regime is more likely with the deal than without. Or, to use Rhodes’s own words: ‘We believe that the kiss of the nuke deal will turn the Iranian frog into a handsome prince.’ ” “That’s insane,” Ned said. Unlike my doctored Benghazi email, this didn’t sound anything like something that I—or any human being—would say. We checked the transcript. As it turned out, this is what I had actually said: “We believe that an agreement is necessary and has to be good enough to be worth doing even if Iran doesn’t change. If ten or fifteen years from now Iran is the same as it is today, in terms of its government, the deal has to be good enough that it can exist on those merits.”