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

by Ben Rhodes

Putin was a white man standing up for a politics rooted in patriarchy, tribe, and religion, the antiglobalist.

He saw the necessity of drones, but he spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to impose restrictions on when they could be used, setting standards for whom we could target and how to avoid civilian casualties.

truly existential threats such as climate change, which is almost never discussed in debates about American national security.

It was the most politically motivated rollout imaginable, all founded on a theory that we had been the ones to politicize the deaths of four Americans.

Obama wanted to extricate the United States from the permanent war that had begun on 9/11.

I told Ann, but despite all the sacrifices she’d made, she surprised me by encouraging me to stay. “If you leave,” she said, “you’ll regret it.”

Speaking in paragraphs, he tied together Putin, the emergence of right-wing political parties in Europe, and ISIL.

Obama—who had spent six years methodically investing in clean energy, changing fuel efficiency standards and enhancing environmental protections without congressional support—took note of China’s ability to make a snap decision that could transform their economy. “They can send a signal and remake their energy sector,” he said. “We can’t even build an airport.”

“I’ve got a song stuck in my head,” he said, and started playing it at top volume—something I’d never seen him do in hundreds of these limo rides. “Thrift Shop,” by Macklemore. He and Susan started dancing in their seats, bobbing and weaving from side to side—“I’m gonna pop some tags, only got twenty dollars in my pocket”

“You know,” he said, “I can see how the Iraq War happened.” “What do you mean?” “People are so scared right now,” he said. “It’d be easy for me as president to get on that wave and do whatever I want.”

“Hey,” he said, sitting behind his desk. “I didn’t realize that we were being so politically correct in talking about Islamic extremism. I thought it was just some Fox News bullshit.”

Ted Cruz, gearing up for a presidential run, denounced Obama—who had waged war as commander in chief every day of his presidency—as “an apologist for radical Islamic terrorists.”

this moment that had opened up a window into something—into Obama; into a better America than the one I lived in every day, into a purer sense of what we were all doing, as people who worked for him, what we were a part of, what kept me coming back to work all these years.

To make sure that people would see our fact checks in real time, we set up a Twitter account, @theIranDeal.

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.”

There were 580,000 bombing missions, which averages out to one every eight minutes for nine years.

More than fifty thousand people have been killed or injured in UXO accidents; over the last decade, nearly half of those casualties have been children.

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

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.

“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.”

“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.”

sure, a speech I wrote, but a speech that only Obama could give.

Obama more directly conveyed how much he’d begun thinking about the end of his time in office. “I’m not certain of many things,” he said, “but I am certain of one. On my deathbed, I won’t be thinking about a bill I passed or an election I won or a speech I gave. I’ll be thinking about my daughters, and moments involving them.”

U.S. government broadcasting has a legal firewall against editorial direction from the White House.

“Some said,” Johnson wrote, “it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.” “Really?” Obama said. “The black guy doesn’t like the British?”

This was her greatest strength and her greatest challenge. Here we were, fifteen minutes after perhaps the high point of her political career, and she wanted to discuss the intricacies of Burma policy. She was kind, curious, and ready to be president, but she had less instinct for the mechanics of how to get there.

The Clinton campaign was already fingering the Russians, but when the White House and NSC press shops would ask what we could say about it publicly, we’d be given little running room by the intelligence community.

McConnell’s refusal was staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic in its disregard for a foreign adversary undermining our democracy.

Not all of the leaders of the intelligence community wanted to be named, particularly Comey, which struck us as ironic, considering how talkative he’d been about the Clinton email investigation.

I felt incredulous. You guys are aiming your fire at Obama when we are a few weeks away from an election in which someone who is a clear and present danger to American values and international order could win.

In an October meeting with Obama, the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, raised the issue of Russian meddling. They are, he said, doing the same thing in Italy as they are doing to you here.

Our government had responded to the Russian meddling as a cybersecurity issue. The people who’d been in meetings were largely intelligence and cyber experts; not one person had a communications background,

we had no idea—Obama had no idea—at the time that there was an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia; that information was walled off from the White House,

The day before the election, could he go to Michigan and Pennsylvania? “Michigan?” Obama said, eyes wide. It was a state he’d won by 10 points in 2012. “That’s not good.”

the brand of racist, mean-spirited, truthless politics that had shadowed us since 2008. Everything was suddenly eclipsed; I felt enveloped in a darkness.

“Do you want to offer any reassurance to the rest of the world?” “What do you have in mind?” he asked. “Something for our allies, for NATO. That the United States will continue to be there for them.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that I’m the one to tell them that.”

an event that would challenge my assumptions about America and alter the course of the world as well as my own life. After all the work we’d done, it was going to end like this.

He was the only one standing. It was both admirable and heartbreaking watching him take everything in stride, working—still—to lift people’s spirits. When he was done, I spoke first. “It says a lot about you,” I said, “that you’ve spent the whole day trying to buck the rest of us up.” People applauded. Obama looked down.

I thought about all the made-up stories about Hillary—her ill health, her corruption, her crimes. It seemed impossible to know where they all began; which ones came from the American right wing and which ones came from Russians;

I told him that I worried about the scale of the fake news effort, the disinformation that went beyond hacking. “And do you think,” he asked me, “that the type of people reading that stuff were going to listen to me?”

Our NSC had prepared volumes of briefing papers on every possible subject—from Syria to Ukraine, from China to Cuba, but it was never clear to us who, if anyone, was reading them.

Flynn liked to attribute his firing to some ideological dispute with Obama over “radical Islam”; in reality, Obama had no role in it.

they painted a stark picture of a methodical and relentless campaign waged by Putin on behalf of Trump. Once again, it went well beyond anything that any of us, including Obama, had heard before.

Our time was done, and our government was about to be led by the very people Putin had spent so much effort trying to put there. Sometimes there are no words to say.

For the next several hours, the global left was heard from in speech after speech. The message was tired, out of date.

“I was wrong,” I told him in my message. “You’ve made a difference in the lives of billions of people.”

I thought about something a Secret Service agent had said about the end of the administration—that he’d been relieved to complete two terms with Obama alive.

He was nestled between two presidents far less qualified than he was, yet he—the only black person to hold the office—had been held to a higher bar, and he’d cleared it.

another human being whose own story, whose own life, had been changed by Barack Obama. I was a man, no longer young, who—in the zigzag of history—still believed in the truth within the stories of people around the world, a truth that compels me to see the world as it is, and to believe in the world as it ought to be.

Barack Obama made this entire story possible, taught me more than I could ever put into words, and continues to give me faith in the world as it ought to be.

#ThanksObama