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

by Ben Rhodes

His father came of age during Kenya’s liberation from British imperialism and was educated at some of America’s finest universities; when he returned to Nairobi, he ended up marginalized as a member of the minority Luo tribe, a technocrat whose Western ideas clashed with a culture of corruption and patronage—ultimately broken, unemployed, and alcoholic, he died in a car crash.

Obama believed in a competent, stabilizing force: the necessity of taking military action against certain terrorist networks, the benefits of globalization in lifting people out of poverty, the indispensability of the United States to international order.

Obama wanted to say that the 240 Muslim detainees in Gitmo had spent years “in a legal black hole”—a relatively noncontroversial statement, since no one at Gitmo had been convicted of a crime; the intelligence community wanted to delete that sentence as well, offering instead this justification: “The detainees at Guantanamo have more legal representation and have been afforded more process than any enemy combatants in the history of the world.”

Jakarta was the safer choice, far from the wars, conflicts, and autocrats of the Middle East. And that’s precisely why Obama chose Cairo.

people who spent their days thinking about how to engage Muslims around the world seemed relieved at the chance to have their ideas heard at the White House.

Sometimes Obama has a way of talking that feels as though he’s trying out ideas—testing whether they sound right spoken out loud, wanting people to argue with him. Other times he has a clear sense of what he wants to say, formulated in his mind

“We should acknowledge that not everything we see is positive—there’s a mindless violence, a crude sexuality, a lack of reverence for life, a glorification of materialism.”

When he was done, we talked through a few issues. One was democracy. I pointed out that the challenge wasn’t just the sensitivity of addressing the issue in a repressive country; it was the fact that if there was ever a real election in Egypt, the Islamist party—the Muslim Brotherhood—would probably win.

this established a pattern—a post facto criticism of Obama for not being sufficiently pro-Israel, which ignored the fact that he wasn’t doing anything tangible for the Palestinians and which absolved Israel’s own government for its failure to take any meaningful steps toward peace.

He paused. “You know, Bush’s second inaugural is a great speech, but you can’t just promise to ‘end tyranny’ in the world.”

She said she’d never forgotten the Cairo speech, which she connected to the initial protests of the Arab Spring. I said that that was assigning too much responsibility to a speech. “It wasn’t the speech,” she said. “It was him. The young people saw him, a black man as president of America, someone who looked like them. And they thought, why not me?”

It struck me as a prime example of how Washington looked at something as morally consequential as a war and turned it into a political drama.

To Obama, the failure of the Iraq War was the decision to invade in the first place.

Texas A&M University, home to the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, which had been significantly funded by wealthy Saudis and Kuwaitis grateful for America’s help during the Gulf War.

On the wars, she often sided with the military—throughout 2009, she rarely took a position in an internal discussion about Iraq or Afghanistan that differed from Gates’s.

The only senior official who consistently opposed sending more troops to Afghanistan was Joe Biden.

I was formally promoted to deputy national security advisor for strategic communications and speechwriting—an absurdly long title that I would hold until the end of the Obama presidency.

I talked to Gibbs, who described how he liked to be prepared for his briefing while checking his fantasy football team on the computer in front of him, concluding with “This will be fun.”

Obama told me, in passing, “I want you in the room more,” something he’d tell me more and more over the years until I was in the room all the time.

The only other time he had written a speech from scratch was during the campaign, when he delivered his address on race.

I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed of the lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”

Standing there, I realized everyone in the White House supported the totality of his agenda—not just our pieces.

a stinging repudiation of a two-year period in which Obama saved the global economy, passed a $1 trillion stimulus, reformed financial regulations, and passed healthcare legislation.

I’d learned that Obama got mad only at the people closest to him—with everyone else, he was unfailingly polite.

We had learned that a White House on its back foot can still accomplish more than just about any other institution in the world.

Privately, Obama was telling people that his sympathies were with the people. If it were up to him, he told McFaul, he’d prefer that “the Google guy” run Egypt, referring to Wael Ghonim, a prominent activist who was helping to lead the protest movement. He didn’t mean it literally; he was indicating solidarity with the younger protesters trying to bring about change. But his senior team was in a different place.

Obama ended up using the draft I’d written, largely intact.

that our policy should aim to revert to the status quo. This approach was being pushed hard by the Gulf States, chiefly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who feared this kind of unrest coming to their capitals.

“I want you to speak up,” he said. “Don’t hold back just because it’s the principals. You know where I’m coming from. And we’re younger.” I took that as license to raise my voice.

I was inspired by the moment; I was also making enemies.

When the speech was over, Obama spoke. “That’s not going to cut it,” he said. “Those people are not going to go home.” He effectively ended the debate by saying that he was going to call Mubarak and tell him that it was his judgment that he needed to step down.

Gates and Clinton insisting that we at least take out “it must begin now.” As Obama was about to walk out to deliver his remarks, I asked him what he wanted to do. “Leave it in,” he said.

It was the beginning of a multiyear effort by those two countries to restore a dictatorship in Egypt, and it would ultimately succeed.

“Who are these guys?” Gibbs said. “I don’t know,” I said to Obama, “but they’re not going to be paying for your presidential library.”

My father loved Reagan, so to me he could do no wrong.

Benghazi, a city of more than six hundred thousand and the center of anti-Gaddafi resistance for decades.

he’d call Cameron and Sarkozy himself and make clear to them that we’d lead the effort to take out Gaddafi’s air defenses and ground forces at the beginning of the operation, but we’d expect the Europeans to move into the lead after a period of days.

I hadn’t just failed to shave; I’d deviated from his ethos of unflappability.

I was sitting on the couch watching Jon Stewart, the ubiquitous comic voice of authority for my demographic.

churn and I turned the television off. My own worldview had been shaped, in part, by reading books like Samantha’s and watching liberals go on shows like Stewart’s to promote movies like Hotel Rwanda.

“I just wish I had some more bandwidth,” he said as the limousine turned in to the south driveway of the White House.

Like anyone who grew up in 1980s New York City, I knew Trump as a tabloid punch line, more famous for his mistresses than his politics.

they’d deflect any responsibility to fact-check everything Trump said—after all, who would take him seriously?

The Arab Spring was upending a rotted, corrupt, authoritarian order in the Middle East, and yet the debate about these seismic events in Washington was an extension of our own partisan, diminished discourse.

my entire life narrowed to this one thing, this secret, which I could not talk about with anyone else.

When he asked me what I thought, I simply said, “You always said you were going to do this.” Because I’d lived through the debate on the campaign, I knew he had meant what he said about going into Pakistan.

This, I thought, is what we were supposed to do after 9/11.

After months of dealing with Trump’s invidious “birther” innuendo, Obama took the unprecedented step—just a few days earlier—of publicly releasing his long-form birth certificate. He was not happy.

it was funny, but in a way, Obama was letting the largely white elite laugh about their failure to contain the birtherism in our politics. Some of their networks, after all, had given Trump a platform to peddle racist lies, and few Republicans condemned it.

We still didn’t know if bin Laden was at the compound and already it seemed that the worst-case scenario was playing out. People avoided making eye contact.