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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Rhodes
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August 7, 2023 - January 7, 2024
This was something different; sure, a speech I wrote, but a speech that only Obama could give. I’ve never gotten more positive feedback on one of his speeches, but it also ended up provoking a rebuke from Fidel Castro, and pushback from opponents of the rapprochement in both countries.
It wasn’t hard to navigate, as there was nothing for them to discover, no hidden truth that could justify the time, expense, and outrage that they had dedicated to this charade.
The Republicans loved, especially, to point out that I’d received a master’s degree in fiction when I was twenty-four years old, as if—like the subject line of an email—that fact confirmed I was a liar, an inventor of stories.
But that would have been pointless. In that room, at that moment, I wasn’t a human being, I was a character in a political drama, one in which truth was meaningless. I looked at Gowdy with an empty expression; he’d already fulfilled his mission long before I showed up in this conference room. I gave a much shorter answer: “I was,” I said, “dealing with both those things.”
The media was sensitive to charges that it’d become more trivial, because that was true.
The pile-on was worse than anything I’d experienced. At one point, I went to the Washington Post homepage and there were seven pieces about me, all negative.
Articles were written about the shallowness of the books on the shelves of my office, which Samuels had described.
Samuels wrote me long emails expressing surprise at how things were spiraling, even offering to have me come up to Brooklyn to stay with him. But one of the strangest things, in the eye of the storm, is that I wasn’t angry at him. He probably believed the things he wrote about Iran, even the ones I knew to be untrue. I was angry at myself. He had caught me at a moment when I was too high on myself, coming off the successes of 2015, and too embittered at the nature of the political and media world that I’d been at the center of for seven years. When I dropped my daughter off at daycare, and
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All the dots in their drawing of me had been connected—fiction writer, leaker, liar, Benghazi, Iran deal. People tell you those things pass, but they don’t. You live your life knowing that the story out there about who you are is different from the person you think you are, and want to be.
He described how all civilization, religion, nations were rooted in stories, which could be harnessed for good or bad. Obama’s tendency to take the long view was getting even more pronounced in his last year in office. But in his own way, he was also telling me that everything was okay, that this was now just one more subject in our endless conversation about everything.
Sitting in this tiny room with colleagues who’d become close friends, sipping broth, beer, and noodles, thousands of miles from home, I felt a sense of peace. It was an apt metaphor for my experience of the presidency itself—just offstage, eating the same things, hearing the words but not the principal participant.