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

by Ben Rhodes

Here I was, able to plan and execute a trip for the president of the United States, and yet I couldn’t trust myself to catch a train.

When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed I was with people from work.

Looking back, while the focus has always been on whether we should have taken military action, I am haunted by the question of whether some more assertive diplomatic initiative could have avoided some of the violence to come, even if it didn’t require Assad’s immediate ouster.

He was, I think, turning over in his head the point he’d posed to me in the limo ride back from his speech on Libya: whether we had enough bandwidth to shape the Arab Spring. Later, I would come to see he was also debating something else: whether it was shapable at all.

Sitting in Battery Park, I started getting emails from young staffers at the NSC and State—people who knew which social media accounts to follow. This is how the White House learned that Tripoli was about to fall: on Twitter.

There was a sense that those of us who had gone through the campaign together were family and, implicitly, had one another’s backs.

Susan painted a grim picture on Middle East peace. We were working to secure a majority of votes on the Security Council against recognizing the Palestinians—that way, they would be less likely to force the issue to a vote.

After the meeting, Obama called me up to his suite to go over the speech he would give to the UNGA the next morning. We went through edits, and then he paused on the Middle East section, in which we were fully embracing Israel’s position. “I hate it when Erdogan has arguments to make,” he said. “The Sudan one was pretty good,” I said. “The thing is,” Obama said, “I really don’t think the Palestinians should go to the UN. I just can’t make Bibi want peace.” “Have you seen Jerry Maguire?” I asked. “Of course,” he answered. “Dealing with Netanyahu is like that,” I said. “Help me help you.”

Obama signaled for me to come in and eat dinner with him: his usual plate of salmon, brown rice, and steamed broccoli. The simplicity of his meals always said something about his discipline—food was something that sustained his health and energy in this job, not something to be enjoyed.

“You know,” he said, “everything is just better in Hawaii.” “It helps that there are no snakes,” I said, a piece of trivia I had learned. “We have a lot of mongoose for that purpose,” he said, once again fulfilling his role as the guy with an answer for everything.

Advance staff asked us to load the motorcade, since the dinner was ending and the U.S. president leaves first, which led to the unfortunate visual of the entire U.S. delegation walking out to “We Are the World.”

The days are long, the weeks are long, the months are long, but the years are short—one day you look up and realize you’re on the precipice of the final year of a presidential term.

Ending a war in which there is no clear victory is an anticlimactic thing. The flag-draped coffins and funerals were over, as was the $10 billion a month price tag. But by the time we finished pulling out, the focus on Iraq had faded—it was a marker of a different era, the defining event of a different presidency. The only thing that wouldn’t fade was the effort to shape the perception of what had happened there. For years to come, the war’s supporters would blame the further tragedies that would take place in Iraq on the fact that we didn’t keep those ten thousand troops there, rather than on the decision to invade the country in the first place.

What does it mean to invade a country, topple its leader, face a raging insurgency, open a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict across a region, spend trillions of dollars, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and permanently alter hundreds of thousands of American lives? Something in the character of post-9/11 America seemed unable, or unwilling, to process the scale of the catastrophic decision, and the spillover effects it had—an emboldened Iran, embattled Gulf states, a Syrian dictator who didn’t want to be next, a Russian strongman who resented American dominance, a terrorist organization that would turn itself into an Islamic State, and all the individual human beings caught in between.

With a death approaching, I watched as the wider world shrinks to a family circle, and ultimately becomes inconsequential.

You had to do the things that were in front of you without knowing whether you would be around to see where the story would go.

I worried that we were becoming so conservative that we were losing touch with what we had set out to do.

Burdened by a reelection campaign, buffeted by the stridency of his opposition at home, divisions among his own team, and a sense that he lacked good partners abroad, Obama seemed at times to be using his powerful mind to find justifications for more modest ambitions.

Another time, at a meeting on what he was aiming to accomplish in his first term, I pointed to the potential for a democratic opening in Burma. “Ben,” he said, “no one cares about Burma in Ohio.”

How do you establish your own voice when your entire reputation is founded on someone else’s?

a flattering piece about the young group of Obama White House aides trying to find a different way to communicate with the Muslim world.

Suddenly we were faced with this terrible news, the thing you fear the most, the death of Americans overseas.

It is a reality of twenty-first-century communications that you have to address totally different audiences at the same time, because anything you say will be consumed by the entire world.

I stayed at work until there was nothing left to do. Around nine or ten, I walked home, feeling a mix of sadness and anger. Egypt and Libya—the two places that, a year ago, had represented so much hope, were now roiling with protests by people who had nothing to offer except hate. Two Americans were dead.

They would say anything if it could cast Obama as somehow anti-American. It wasn’t just politics, it was sickening in its cynicism.

The rest of the week, protests over the offensive video continued to grow in dozens of cities around the world—from Islamabad to Sana’a to Tunis. The overwhelming fear was that Friday would be a bloodbath, Fridays being the biggest protest days in Muslim communities, as it’s the weekend and people attend Friday prayers, where imams can stir up a crowd and extremists can take advantage of the chaos.

One of the questions we’d been getting was whether the protests across the Middle East showed that our foreign policy was a failure, so one of the objectives I listed was to show that the protests were rooted in the Internet video, not a failure of U.S. policy.

Finally, as it was getting closer to midnight, Obama stepped out of the room to take the call. When he came back in, he had a look of both amusement and surprise. “He kept talking about how many urban voters turned out,” he told us. “Urban voters.”

While offering support to the democratic opening, he asked her about the troubling situation facing the Rohingya people in Rakhine State, an ethnic minority that was confined in part to displaced persons camps. This will be very difficult, she said, referring to efforts to improve conditions there. Of course we believe the human rights of all people in Burma must be respected.

Back when I worked for Lee Hamilton, one of his longtime staffers had warned me always to remember: In Washington, when you work for someone, you’re staff, no matter how close you get to your boss. I had begun to drift asleep when a hand shook me awake—Obama had spoken to Morsi again and I’d have to brief the press at the back of the plane. Even friends, after all, are staff.

It spoke to the schizophrenia in American foreign policy that we were simultaneously debating whether to designate the Syrian opposition as terrorists and whether to provide military support to the Syrian opposition. And it spoke to the hubris in American foreign policy to think that we could engineer the Syrian opposition whom we barely knew—and who were fighting for their lives—through terrorist designations and some modest military support.

“Maybe that’s right,” he said, “but we can’t fool ourselves into thinking that we can fix the Middle East.” He paused, chewing. “I love that you care this much. But what’s the line from Lawrence of Arabia?” he said. It was a movie we frequently quoted to each other. “ ‘Young men make wars….Then old men make the peace.’

After a long meeting with Abbas, Obama met with a group of young Palestinians in a small classroom. Each took turns speaking and had a wrenching story of occupation. I noticed one boy, about eighteen, who looked the most agitated throughout the meeting, staring at his hands while the others spoke. He was last to speak, and when his turn came he told similar stories of friends imprisoned, freedom of movement restricted. Finally, he built up to a line that he had clearly practiced. “Mr. President, we are treated the same way the black people were treated in your country. Here, in this century.” He paused, and let a pregnant silence hang over the table. “Funded by your government, Mr. President.” Obama looked drained. He had no good answer for the kid, so he didn’t bother faking it. He talked about how much promise they had, how he hoped young Palestinians could get a higher profile in the United States. He defended Israel, saying that the Jewish people had a right to be concerned about their security. He ended on the most optimistic note he could find—how young people gave him hope, how they reminded him of his own daughters, how Israeli mothers should be able to see them and hear their stories because they would understand. Often, when Obama was frustrated by governments, he’d talk about their people.

His comments were met with rolling applause, and when he dived back into the prepared text it occurred to me that this tribute—this imploring of Israelis to see Palestinians as human beings no different from themselves—might be the most he would be able to do to keep a promise to those Palestinian kids.

She recounted the story of how her family had hid throughout the Holocaust, the pride they felt upon reaching Israel, the imperative of bringing the nearly dead language of Hebrew back to life. It evoked in me a sense of pride at what Israelis had accomplished over the last seventy years, but it was also hard to reconcile that sense of history, generosity, and justice with those Palestinian kids. Obama’s vision—so readily accepted by young people everywhere, including the young Israelis in the convention center—seemed to clash with the harder edges of politics, the world in which one side needs to win and another needs to lose.

“Probably,” he said. “Everyone knows that there’s only one end to the story, but no one knows how to get there.”

“But only if they don’t identify themselves as Rohingya,” Derek interjected. The Burmese denied that the Rohingya were a distinct ethnic group, referring to them as Bengalis—illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. For the next three and a half years, we’d have to constantly press the government, often working with other countries, to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control.

Every time I returned to different issues, she kept turning the conversation back to the election and the constitution. “Of course we care about human rights,” she said, “for all our people. But we cannot have human rights without democracy.” She’d spent decades imprisoned and could now envision actually becoming president of the nation her father had founded before he was assassinated. I’m so close, her body language seemed to suggest.

Rakhine Buddhists were unabashed in their bigotry, speaking of the “Bengalis” as illegal immigrants who needed to be deported.

Derek told me about the government cronies who still control huge chunks of the economy. One of them offered a several-thousand-dollar bottle of wine at a dinner in his house, which is near a street where people beg for food. The people who were sanctioned by the United States seemed to be doing just fine; it was the rest of the country that was suffering.

Pacing back and forth in an empty parking lot, I started to plan a public campaign to ramp up to a military intervention.

Sitting in a crowded restaurant among my in-laws, I felt the loneliness of knowing that I’d have to do what the president of the United States was asking me to do, and that on the scale of what was going wrong in the world, my own inconvenience—however dramatic in the context of my family—was not going to be anyone else’s concern.

He listened, but I knew he was skeptical that we could contain military action once we’d begun.

It was as if Obama was finally forcing me to let go of a part of who I was—the person who looked at Syria and felt that we had to do something, who had spent two years searching for hope amid the chaos engulfing the Arab world and the political dysfunction at home.

Obama had not put forward more than one option—it was clear that his mind was made up. Still, as always, he went around the room.

about America, our willingness to take on another war, a war whose primary justification would be humanitarian, a war likely to end badly. “People always say never again,” he said. “But they never want to do anything.”

During my first year in the job, I was hanging out in my friend Alyssa Mastromonaco’s office when Pete Rouse walked in—a senior advisor to Obama who had been such an institution on Capitol Hill that he was referred to as the 101st senator. He asked us if we had federal liability insurance. I didn’t even know what that was or why I’d need it. “Look it up,” he said. “This is not optional.” I did what I was told and ended up spending a couple hundred dollars a year to cover legal expenses that might come from investigations. This ended up saving me around $100,000.

Early in the administration, I’d become a target for occasional right-wing ridicule for a few reasons: (1) I worked for Barack Obama; (2) I wrote the Cairo speech; (3) I received a master’s degree in fiction writing from New York University when I was twenty-four years old. The MFA alone was enough to make me a minor villain: “Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Failed Fiction Writer…”

One day I was part of a global Jewish conspiracy, working with my brother to fix the news. The next I was a virulent anti-Semite, covering for the Muslim Brotherhood.

I had strange thought patterns while lying awake at night or in breaks during the day. I wished, for instance, that I was being attacked over something I had actually done wrong. No matter how many investigations found no wrongdoing, there would be another one. No matter how clearly mainstream reporters saw it was a sham, they’d cover it anyway—it was a story, and I was one of the characters.