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

by Ben Rhodes

McRaven reported that one of his men, someone who—at six foot four—was the same height as bin Laden, had lain down next to the corpse to confirm that the height was a match. Obama leaned forward. “You guys need to get a tape measure.”

When I told the NSC spokesman, Tommy Vietor—one of my closest friends—he said, “Fuck yes, I’ve been waiting three years to get this call.”

Republicans pounced on this, accusing us of leaking details about the raid to make Obama look good.

The high of the raid, the ability to just feel good about something, dissipated quickly. If the country’s politics couldn’t even allow us to enjoy this, then literally nothing would bring the country together.

In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama’s story was gaining a certain momentum. A hundred thousand troops had left Iraq. The economy had stabilized. Healthcare reform was law. Bin Laden was dead. Obama had largely done the most important things that he said he was going to do.

the Republican Party had embraced a strategy of virulent and brazen opposition that led healthy majorities of its own voters to believe that Obama was born in Kenya.

“It’s not on the level,” he repeated. “Dealing with Bibi is like dealing with the Republicans.”

found myself in a conversation with David Cameron about the HBO show Entourage, which we both apparently enjoyed—in

he was being given the honor of becoming the first U.S. president to speak to the British Parliament in the historic Palace of Westminster. Obama wanted to offer a broad defense of Western values,

It was striking to hear the story of the Obama presidency articulated by a conservative British politician in words that a Republican politician would never dare to use at home.

the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British Army to stand before you as president of the United States.”

Medvedev had always gotten along well with Obama. Together, they had improved relations between the United States and Russia from the low point of 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia. We’d completed the New START treaty, reached an agreement to resupply U.S. troops in Afghanistan through Russia, and cooperated to enforce stronger sanctions on Iran.

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.

This is how the White House learned that Tripoli was about to fall: on Twitter.

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.

as the reelection campaign started to envelop all that we did. 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.

it felt as if we were becoming technocratic, competent managers of things amid a world roiling with change.

something had also happened at our diplomatic compound in Benghazi. In a meeting with his secretary of defense, Obama had directed that the military do what was necessary to secure U.S. facilities in Libya and across the region.

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

After the meeting, I left to do some errands with Ann, who was now barely speaking to me because of my long hours.

After three days in Nevada, we flew to Denver, where Obama was thoroughly beaten in a debate with Mitt Romney.

One of the questions was on Benghazi. In practicing an answer, we had to tell him about all the conspiracy theories gaining traction on the right.

“I want to make sure we get that for the record,” Romney said, “because it took the president fourteen days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.” “Get the transcript,” Obama said. “What an idiot,” Favreau said, as we watched this unfold on a television backstage.

“I’m tired of just being the guy who defends drones.”

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.

Obama listened intently, asking questions as much as he offered his own opinions.

How could the United States fix a part of the world that was that broken, and that decades of U.S. foreign policy had helped to break?

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.”

Often, when Obama was frustrated by governments, he’d talk about their people.

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

I was surprised to see pamphlets that translated the Cairo speech into Burmese. I asked why the speech was of interest to people here. “The people admire Obama,” one man said. “We use this speech to teach them how to be tolerant of people from different religions.”

There were weeks of drip-drip-drip revelations about U.S. surveillance, the same tactic that would shadow the run-up to our 2016 elections, involving the same people: Russia, Wikileaks.

the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marty Dempsey, who had internalized the limits of U.S. military action in the Middle East. One time he surprised me in the hallway of the West Wing by recommending that I read Rachel Maddow’s book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.

I asked McDonough if it was possible for Obama to call so he could talk to Ann—something he occasionally did for people who have grown weary of their spouse’s work schedule.

I could write a U.S. government assessment, which they would review for accuracy and sign-off. It took me a moment to understand what he was suggesting. In all my time at the White House, I had never written that kind of assessment, and never would again. These were usually technical documents produced by teams of people in the intelligence agencies.

getting angrier and angrier. It felt as if I was trapped within a system fueled by hypocrisy and opportunism.

Thousands of tons of chemical weapons would be removed from Syria and destroyed, far more than could have been destroyed through military action. The war would continue. Barack Obama would continue to keep the United States out of it.

I received a subpoena and ended up having a couple of lengthy sessions with the FBI and the U.S. attorney from Maryland, Rod Rosenstein.

It felt like a malevolent force in America that I couldn’t comprehend, an anger attached to something bigger than Benghazi, the same blindness to reason that led people to believe that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

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.

anger at Republicans, anger at the media, anger at the realization that I had no control over what people thought of me. I sensed that some of my colleagues held similar feelings. We worked in the most powerful building in the world yet felt powerless to change the environment around us.

our guide would stop talking and just stare at the Obamas, as if needing to confirm again with his own eyes that this family was the First Family of the United States, and that they were here.

Racism was a constant presence and absence in the Obama White House. We didn’t talk about it much. We didn’t need to—it was always there, everywhere, like white noise.

Obama didn’t talk about it much. Every now and then, he’d show flashes of dark humor in practicing the answer he could give on a particular topic.

The last person who ever thought that Barack Obama’s election was going to bring racial reconciliation and some “end of race” in America was Barack Obama.

he couldn’t offer up absolution for America’s racial sins, or transform American society in four or eight years.

With his short reply, Obama had casually recognized a history that no other president before would have dared to speak aloud.

I scanned the American press. There was almost no coverage of the first African American president eulogizing the most iconic African of the last century. Instead, the lead story back home was a selfie that the Danish prime minister had taken with Obama.

Reportedly, he wanted to go to Venezuela, transiting through Havana, but I knew that if the Cubans aided Snowden, any rapprochement between our countries would prove impossible.

Our response went far beyond anything that the Bush administration had done to Russia after it invaded Georgia in 2008, but Republicans still castigated Obama as weak. Some even praised Putin as a strong leader, someone to be admired.