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

by Ben Rhodes

In late January, Speaker Boehner put out a press release announcing that Netanyahu would be traveling to the United States at his invitation to address a joint session of Congress. We received no advance notice of this visit from either Boehner or the Israeli government. This type of interference in American foreign policy—a foreign leader invited to lobby the U.S. Congress against the policy of a sitting president—would have been unthinkable in 2009. But by 2015, Netanyahu had become almost a de facto member of the Republican caucus, and Republicans had abandoned any norms about working with a foreign government to undermine the policies of a sitting president.

Usually, I was on permanent defense, responding to various lines of criticism circulating on the Hill. After Netanyahu’s speech was announced, the dynamic shifted; suddenly, the Democrats were more annoyed at Netanyahu for interfering in our politics than at anything we were doing. I’d have these meetings in the Capitol, often right before or after the Israeli ambassador, Ron Dermer—a close Netanyahu confidant—was meeting with the same group. It felt as if we were sparring, getting ready for a bigger fight to come.

On June 16, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency. I watched as he rode down an escalator in the gold-plated lobby at Trump Tower, waving to an assembled crowd. He launched into a rambling, semicoherent rant that sounded like a greatest-hits version of Fox News opposition to Obama, and called Mexicans rapists.

We didn’t take it all that seriously. Trump was just a cruder expression of what we’d heard from Republicans for years, and it seemed he had little chance of becoming president.

I started to feel everything at once—the hurt and anger at the murder of those nine people, another thing that I’d kept pressed down in the constant compartmentation of emotions that allowed me to do my job; the stress that came from doing a job that had steadily swallowed who I thought I was over the last eight years; the more pure motivations, to do something that felt right, buried deep within me; the sense that maybe we were all going to be okay even if the world wasn’t.

It was always hard to explain what it was that I most admired about this complicated man. Watching him, I felt that I would never have to explain it to anyone again.

“ ‘Dear Mr. President,’ ” he began to read aloud. “ ‘I used to not like you because of the color of your skin. My whole life I have hated people because of the color of their skin. I have thought about things since those nine people were killed and I realize I was wrong. I want to thank you for everything you are trying to do to help people.’ ” He finished, and put the letter down. None of us knew what to say. It felt as if the whole presidency was for the purpose of receiving this single letter. He looked at the letter on his desk, as though it were another person in the room. “Grace,” he said. Then he got up and walked over to his chair. “It’s a shame,” he said, sitting down, “that those nine people had to die for that to happen.”

Kerry and Moniz flew to Vienna in late June to see if they could close the deal. Obama told Kerry that he had to be willing to walk away. “John,” he said, referring to the victories on healthcare and same-sex marriage, “I’ve already got my legacy. I don’t need this.” Kerry said he understood, but he was also after his own legacy—he’d spent hundreds of hours in negotiations with the Iranians, and built a close relationship with the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif. Moniz had also developed a close relationship with his Iranian counterpart, who had attended MIT while Moniz was teaching there, before the Iranian Revolution opened up the chasm between our two countries. These were the two relationships that were going to have to get us over the finish line.

Day after day, on little to no sleep, Kerry and Moniz haggled over the remaining issues. On July 12, the pieces started coming together. On the thirteenth, Susan and I went into the Oval Office for Obama’s final call with Kerry. The deal was basically done, but Obama needed to give his approval. We watched as Obama listened on the phone. “John, you should be very proud,” he said. With that, he hung up the phone and smiled. “Looks like we have a deal.” “That took eight years,” I said. “We should call that YouTube guy,” he said, referring to the 2007 debate question about engaging adversaries.

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.”

But fact checks weren’t going to reach the readers of Breitbart, which had already published more than one story, spawning an unknowable number of follow-on Internet stories, talk radio segments, and tweets. We believe that the kiss of the nuke deal will turn the Iranian frog into a handsome prince. Millions of people would consume this information in a matter of hours, far more than the readership of The New York Times. It was fake news, and there was no way to dissuade people who chose to believe things that validated their established convictions.

The last time we raised concerns before an actual vote on a piece of Iran sanctions legislation—a 2011 sanctions bill strongly supported by AIPAC—it ended up passing 100–0 in the Senate.

If the opposition’s advantage was the fact that the Israeli government and AIPAC were focused on lawmakers who dreaded taking a position against them, our advantage was the fact that we needed only Democratic votes. When Scott Walker, a Republican presidential candidate, said he might take military action against Iran on the first day of his presidency, we made sure that got around to Democratic offices. When Scooter Libby, an intellectual architect of the Iraq War, wrote an op-ed attacking the deal, we pointed out that the same people who got us into Iraq wanted to take us to war in Iran. “Wrong then, wrong now” became our mantra.

These were anodyne and accurate statements. Yet some deal opponents started to make a new charge: that Obama and his team were anti-Semites, conjuring up stereotypes of moneyed Jewish interests propelling us into a war. This put us into an impossible position. Even to acknowledge the fact that AIPAC was spending tens of millions to defeat the Iran deal was anti-Semitic. To observe that the same people who supported the war in Iraq also opposed the Iran deal was similarly off limits. It was an offensive way for people to avoid accountability for their own positions.

Obama wasn’t going to be intimidated. In a short meeting with a group of us before he spoke to American Jewish community leaders in early August, I explained that people were accusing him of using anti-Semitic dog whistles. “Dog whistles?” he asked. “How, exactly?” “By saying that the same people who got us into the war in Iraq want to take us to war with Iran.” “How is that a dog whistle?” He was incredulous, and—as was often the case when I was the messenger for this type of thing—he talked to me as if I was the one making the criticism. “They’re saying that’s us calling Jews warmongers.” “Oh, come on,” he said. “John Bolton wants to bomb Iran, right?” “Yes,” I said. Bolton had written an op-ed for The New York Times entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” “Is he Jewish?” “No.” “Dick Cheney?” “No.” “I’m black,” he said. “I think I know when folks are using dog whistles. I hear them all the time.” His voice was raised a bit, which almost never happened. “Come on.” He paused, returning to his even temperament. “This is aggravating.” “I know,” I said. “I’m the self-hating Jew. Or half self-hating.” He laughed, then turned more serious. “This isn’t about anti-Semitism,” he said. “They’re trying to take away our best argument, that it’s this or war.”

Before going on his own August vacation, he gave a speech at American University. In it he made a case for the deal that he wanted Democrats to take home with them over recess. “I know it’s easy to play on people’s fears, to magnify threats, to compare any attempt at diplomacy to Munich, but none of these arguments hold up,” he said. “They didn’t back in 2002, in 2003, they shouldn’t now. That same mindset, in many cases offered by the same people, who seem to have no compunction about being repeatedly wrong, led to a war that did more to strengthen Iran, more to isolate the United States, than anything we have done in the decades before or since.”

The reaction was fierce. In one of the harsher responses, an editorial in Tablet magazine lamented, “The use of anti-Jewish incitement as a political tool is a sickening new development in American political discourse, and we have heard too much of it lately—some coming, ominously, from our own White House and its representatives.” I cringed when I read these things. Support for Israel had been central to my own sense of identity as I was coming of age, a way for a child of mixed religious background to find an anchor in culture and history. Now that kind of attachment was being cynically manipulated to discredit a profoundly unbiased president, destroy a diplomatic agreement, and once again avoid any reckoning with the actual legacy of Iraq.

Everyone seemed a bit on edge, as if I represented their best shot at securing an infusion of funding. There was no mention of the fact that I represented the government that had dropped hundreds of millions of cluster munitions on this country for no reason that could possibly be rationalized.

It was hard to square the extent to which we admirably valued every American life with the bombs that we’d dropped.

The briefing team stood waiting for me to say something. “Every morning,” I had said, “I meet with President Obama. We want to do everything that we can to help. When I get home, I will tell him about the work that you are doing here.” Tears welled up in the eyes of one of the men, even though he was much more hardened by life than I am.

An embassy staffer next to me asked how the UXO demonstration had gone. “It was a much bigger explosion than I expected,” I said. “Yeah,” he said. “None of the kids even looked up.”

We were in our fifteenth year of war in Afghanistan, and it was hard to see what positive difference we were making. A rounding error of the money we spent each year in Afghanistan could alter the trajectory of a country like Laos—feeding children, sending them to school, cleaning up the bombs that they stumbled upon.

As usual, Obama’s case depended upon a much longer view of history. Ultimately, he argued, the bill would come due for Putin’s interventions—the money spent on wars abroad, the impact of sanctions on his economy, the rot of a corrupt system in which Putin and his cronies ran Russia as a cartel. But in the reality of politics in 2015, Putin was better than Obama at putting himself at the center of events that captured attention. We ended up looking as if we were reacting to Putin, and not the other way around.

It was far easier for me to see how the war in Syria was in part an unintended consequence of other American wars, no matter how well-meaning they might have been. The toppling of Saddam Hussein had strengthened Iran, provoked Putin, opened up a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict that now raged in Iraq and Syria, and led to an insurgency that had given birth to ISIL. The toppling of Muammar Gaddafi had made plain to dictators that you either cling to power or end up dead in a sewer. Syria looked more and more like a moral morass—a place where our inaction was a tragedy, and our intervention would only compound the tragedy. Obama kept probing for options that could make a positive difference, finding none.

One of the reasons we had bombed Laos was to preserve our credibility, to show that even if America was defeated in neighboring Vietnam, we would make the victory a costly one for our adversaries. In our post-9/11 chapter, I knew there would be no victory in Afghanistan or Iraq, or in any other new war that we might start in that part of the world. I thought of how Obama chafed at the argument that he needed to bomb Syria to preserve his own credibility. “That’s the worst reason to go to war,” he’d say.

Obama popped a piece of Nicorette into his mouth and took out his iPad. “Why don’t you get the bastards?” he said, laughing ruefully. He looked at Susan. “Susan, why don’t you get the bastards?” “I still think we should just put them in the terror dome,” I said. For a few weeks, we’d fantasized about creating a kind of Hunger Games with ISIL, al Qaeda, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Russian special forces in eastern Ukraine; we’d just gather up all of the world’s most nihilistic forces and put them under one dome.

“They’re saying you were angrier at the Republicans than at ISIL.” “What do I have to do to convince these people that I hate ISIL?” he asked. “I’ve called them a death cult. I’ve promised to destroy them. We’re bombing them. We’re arming people fighting them.”

For the last few days, each time Obama had a media availability, there was a mini-intervention beforehand as people tried to help him find the right tone on ISIL. Show more anger. Speak to people’s fears. “As a mother,” Susan Rice told him in one of these sessions, “I can see why people are afraid. You have to meet them where they are.” “I get that. But more people die slipping in the bathtub than from terrorist attacks,” Obama said. “But folks back home think that ISIL is going to come behead them,” Susan said. “That’s because there’s a bunch of folks on television telling them that,” Obama shot back. “I’m trying not to do that.”

Obama made his way around the room, asking the children what they wanted to be when they grew up. An engineer, one said. An artist, said another. He knelt for some time next to a Rohingya girl with a white headscarf. She was painting something, smiling shyly while averting her eyes. I stood against the wall, looking at the different kids, most of whom had been rescued from human traffickers. When we were done, Obama took a few pictures with the kids, and then made his way to an adjacent room. “That’s who we need to keep out of the country,” he said to me, mimicking his Republican critics with a sharp edge in his voice. “That little girl with the headscarf.”

“Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled. “Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France. “No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room.

Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out.

Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.

As we headed into the final year of the Obama presidency, we inhabited two distinct worlds. In one, we’d achieved a global climate change agreement, the Iran deal was being implemented, the economy was growing, twenty million people had signed up for healthcare, and Obama’s approval rating was rising. In another, Republican presidential candidates were painting a picture of a dystopian nightmare of crime, rampant immigration, ISIL terrorism, and wage stagnation in America. Because the two realities were so far removed from each other, and because Obama wasn’t running, it was hard to do anything but put our heads down and focus on what we could get done.

In 2017, months after leaving government, I learned that some Americans at our embassy were harmed in mysterious attacks—from a sonic weapon or some kind of toxin. I knew that the Cuban government had never done something that brazen, even at the height of conflict with the United States. Whoever harmed those Americans clearly wanted to sabotage the opening between our countries, and I wondered whether the Russians who took such an apparent interest in my efforts had played a role.

The entire night seemed to be, inadvertently, a demonstration of how the United States and Cuba have been locked in an embrace, like two exhausted boxers who become tangled up in each other’s arms, at odds with each other yet needing each other as foils.

I would be photographed by the Cuban government laying a wreath here, in the middle of Cuba’s revolutionary square. It was not an image that would go down well in Florida, or parts of Capitol Hill. To reject it, though, would have been playing the part of the ugly American, pressed into an insult of Cuban dignity. I took the wreath and looked up at Martí, the one figure in Cuba’s history revered on both sides of the Florida Straits. “To the memory of José Martí,” I said, “who is beloved in both the United States and Cuba.”

Each year, the United States gives Cuba a check for a few thousand dollars to pay for the facility; the Cubans never cash it. “I just want to be clear here,” I said. “You are offering to take all of the prisoners?” There were, at that time, nearly a hundred. “Cuba is very good at holding people securely,” he said.

For the rest of my time in government, there wasn’t a meeting when he didn’t revisit this idea. Even as I knew it was unlikely to happen, I came to like the idea, and I told Obama so. We could have some negotiated transition period, where the United States and Cuba jointly administered the facility. In meeting after meeting on Gitmo, I’d hold up my hand and say, “I’m the only one with a Plan B.” Obama dismissed it as a bridge too far, even for the fourth quarter. But I couldn’t help but see the unintentional genius in the idea—righting two historical wrongs, ending two chapters at once.

He pointed to a tiny speck of land south of Cuba. “There, I have allowed an Italian businessman to park a houseboat with five beds where he feeds sharks all day.” I nodded, not sure what to make of this anecdote.

“You know,” Raúl said to me, “a thought has occurred to me that I have never shared. The Americans like to give people candy.” He looked around the room, finding nodding agreement on his side. “They like to give people candy for doing whatever they want in Latin America. But Cuba is not interested in candy.”

I went through some of the remaining issues for our trip, including Obama’s planned meeting with dissidents. “Obama is welcome to meet whoever he wants in Cuba,” he said, waving his hand in front of him. “Obama is welcome in Cuba.”

As we neared the three-hour mark, we wound down the meeting. “It is hard for us,” he said, “being your closest neighbor.” I corrected him. The Mexicans were our closest neighbor, and they liked to say of themselves, “So close to America, so far from God.” He laughed, but in turn corrected me. “Look,” he said, pointing down at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the map in front of us. “We are your closest neighbor.”

As the outskirts of Havana came into view—thatched houses and corrugated shacks—Obama said, “That doesn’t look like a threat to our national security to me.”

It spoke to the raw feelings of some Cuban exiles that when I exited my commercial flight, I had a sizable police escort waiting for me that followed me throughout the day. In Miami, history was a present thing, and there were people who saw any rapprochement with the Castro government as an act of betrayal.

The children and grandchildren of exiles didn’t carry the same baggage, didn’t see the future of Cuba as a competition between Castros and exiles. Some of the old hard-liners were changing, too. Carlos Gutierrez, who had been George W. Bush’s commerce secretary, had been transformed from a hard-liner into an enthusiastic proponent of engagement. “I just got tired of using the same talking points,” he told me.

More than any other diaspora community I’d engaged with, Cuban Americans saw themselves as a people in exile.

Cuba also seemed to attract a unique assortment of personalities that represented powerful threads from America’s own story. Ernest Hemingway had lived there for more than twenty years, and his grandsons reached out to me before our trip. José Andrés, the prominent Spanish American chef, came with us, as he had supported Cuba’s self-employed cooks. Jimmy Buffett made plans to play a concert. Jackie Robinson had played baseball in Havana, and we were joined on Air Force One by his daughter and ninety-three-year-old widow, Rachel. It felt as if we were traveling to Havana with a cast of American underdogs and overachievers: Cuban exiles and the offspring of cultural icons; baseball players and singers; civil rights heroes; and, of course, an African American First Family. The delegation itself spoke for America.

The imperative back home was to push the Cubans on human rights, but that could backfire. We got fifty-three political prisoners out through quiet talks, not through denunciations. Pushing them publicly was not always the best way to get results.

Castro shook hands with Obama and then tried to raise their hands together in triumph. Obama, not wanting to have that image plastered on front pages all over the world, let his hand dangle limply in Castro’s. It seemed an apt metaphor for our approach—engaging without embracing.

It was too much for me. I slipped out a back door to a side street, smoking, staring at dilapidated facades and old cars, the empty street frozen in time outside a theater where history was happening.