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

by Ben Rhodes

“I get it. It was a late night. I’m glad you guys had a good time while I was reading my APEC briefing book.”

“We can’t leave Angela hanging.” The two of them sat alone at a small, simple table in the middle of a hotel conference room. They ate and talked for three hours, the longest time Obama had spent alone with a foreign leader in eight years.

they were almost apologetic in their suggestion that they’d probably just move forward with some form of the agreement without the United States. For the first time in eight years, history felt out of our hands.

Trudeau said that he felt he had to, drawing on the example of his own father, who transcended his role as leader of Canada to become a global statesman. I modeled my campaign on yours, he added,

Now he told me about a piece he had read in The New York Times, a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity is to people,

My role in these conversations, and perhaps within his presidency, I had come to see, was to respond to what he said, to talk and fill quiet space—to test out the logic of his own ideas, or to offer a distraction—as he scrolled through his iPad or looked out the window, mind churning.

“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.”

all that progress depended upon him, and now he was out of time.

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

he was working for the most exciting politician to come along in years, and he clearly enjoyed the fact that anyone would take his call at any time.

Baker’s understanding of the scale of the mess that had been made in Iraq seemed to morph into a kind of paternal disappointment—he’d given the keys to his kids and they’d crashed the car.

We’d recap at night in James Baker’s trailer, where he’d drink straight vodka in a tracksuit and just shake his head at how screwed up things were.

Were it not for this armor, he said, the American dead in Iraq would be closer to the number of those killed in Vietnam;

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.

The events of my twenties felt historic, but the people involved did not. I wanted a hero—someone who could make sense of what was happening around me and in some way redeem it.

I didn’t want to be called on. At the time, I had a profound fear of public speaking. If a group was familiar to me, I didn’t have a problem. But here, I wouldn’t be able to conceal my nerves.

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.

A couple of hours later, Obama—who valued, more than I knew, advice that draws on common sense to reject convention—walked onto the floor of the Senate. He voted no.

Robert Gibbs, a win-at-all-costs operative from Alabama who, shortly after my move, gave us all a football coach lecture about how the only time we were allowed to take off until the Iowa caucus was Sunday morning to go to church.

To capture Obama’s voice, I studied his speeches, interview transcripts, and books, which I would end up rereading a dozen times.

someone who could be a strident critic of the Iraq War and still be able to wage war against the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. This premise had the benefit of being true.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

Ann wanted Obama to win, she just couldn’t see America electing a black man named Barack Obama;

The bin Laden pledge was cast as a call to “invade Pakistan,” and he was pilloried again for being naïve in wanting to talk to Iran.

I was alone in a city where I barely knew anyone, going into debt because of the pay cut I’d taken, and I thought I’d tanked the campaign. A knot formed in the pit of my stomach and tingled out into my arms, a sense of stress that stayed with me for the next decade.

he brushed off the repeated attacks by saying—in reference to the Iraq War—“I’m not going to be lectured by people who voted for the biggest foreign policy mistake of my generation.”

before a meeting with Obama about whether the United States would join the global treaty banning the use of land mines, she sat in her office listening to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” on repeat to get ready.

Samantha Power

We were down by 20 points in national polls. It was the happiest time of my professional life.

an ethos shaped by an African American candidate who lived the Jackie Robinson reality that black people had to do things better than white people to reach new heights.

the Berlin speech was the center of my existence for a couple of weeks.

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,

I told him that the venue we’d settled on—in front of the Victory Column at the end of a long boulevard—would allow him to speak to tens of thousands of people. “What if nobody shows up?” he asked, not kidding.

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.

Axe, who is Jewish, broke the silence. “Boy, the Germans are a lot nicer than my grandparents made them out to be.”

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.

“So let’s be clear: What we’ve seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed.”

She told me my interim clearance had been denied because of past marijuana use. I could still get a clearance, she assured me—the FBI would just have to do a full investigation of my background first.

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.

and a shower. A senior staff cabin holds four people in large chairs that swivel around, with a phone at each seat so that you can place calls that require you to push a button to be heard while you talk. A long hallway takes you past a conference room where Obama would spend so much of his time over the next eight years, sitting at a table playing spades with a handful of aides while ESPN played on a muted television. Past the conference room, there is a larger staff cabin with a couple of four-tops and a workspace

The awkward fact for us is that we were asking other countries to spend money to stimulate the global economy in order to fix a crisis that the United States created.

It seemed that we were squandering his popularity to address the circumstances we’d inherited instead of being able to invest it in the new initiatives we envisioned.

“I’m spending all of my political capital,” he said, “just to keep things going.”

Temporary NSC offices on the road are unpleasant places. Blue tarp is put up along the walls of a hotel room to prevent video surveillance; a constant mind-scrambling mix of pop songs plays to block efforts to eavesdrop.

I sat at my computer inserting a strongly worded warning to the North Koreans about the isolation they’d face for continued nuclear and missile tests.

Obama thought for a moment. “Let’s get into it,” he said, “by talking about how we’ve been able to overcome similar issues. It’s not like we’re without sin. I mean, what happened to the Indians? Or black folks? Let’s make the point that democracy is the way we deal with those problems, all right?”

The references to America’s own historical sins—to people like Obama and me—reflected a positive, patriotic, and progressive view of American history; the capacity for self-correction is what makes us exceptional.

Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, he’s not patriotic, he’s not like Us, he might even be Muslim. I had become the coauthor of “Obama’s Apology Tour.”

Obama was unique in that the mere fact of his own identity was going to leave an imprint on people abroad.

a reality in which I was a junior partner who worked hard to understand what my boss wanted to say and do in the world.