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by
Ben Rhodes
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June 25 - July 14, 2018
We prefer to have a good relationship with the United States, he said, folding his hands in front of him. That is good for the world. But every action will have a reaction. And if an immature leader throws the world into chaos, then the world will know whom to blame.
“Maybe we pushed too far,” he said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
“History doesn’t move in a straight line,” he’d say, “it zigs and zags.”
He didn’t look up. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or twenty years too early.”
“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.”
One joke that he told in the days after the election expressed his frustration at how this would impact the rest of his life: “I feel like Michael Corleone,” he’d say. “I almost got out.”
One of my best friends from high school, David Zetlin-Jones, worked for Loretta in Orange County and set us up. “What’s he like?” Ann asked, open to the idea of a blind date because she knew no one in Washington. “He’s a tall snowboarder,” my friend replied, describing the kind of guys Ann dated. I’m five foot seven and have never snowboarded in my life. When I asked him about this, he said, “I got you in the door. The rest is up to you.”
Still, the campaign was grounded in those summer days by a series of bad narratives: Clinton would win because she was inevitable. Obama would lose because young people never turn out to vote. Clinton was racking up endorsements from the party elite. Obama wouldn’t get black votes because he wasn’t black enough (“I’m black enough when I try to get a cab,” he told us).
Still, on this trip, and on all the trips to come in the years ahead, there was little space for personal reflection. Instead, my energy—emotional and mental—would be channeled into the work I had to do.
When you are a speechwriter and the speech that you have written is finished, you go from being the most indispensable member of the staff to being temporarily irrelevant. Afterward, I lingered at the site, and then followed the trail of humanity back to the hotel, people clutching signs and cameras as if they had been to a rock concert. Returning to my room was like going back in time. Everything was still in the same place—the open laptop; cups of coffee; a half-drunk glass of wine; printed-out copies of an almost finished draft—but the anxiety and adrenaline were gone. Taking in this scene,
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as much as she became a punch line, Palin’s ascendance broke a seal on a Pandora’s box: The innuendo and conspiracy theories that existed in forwarded emails and fringe right-wing websites now had a mainstream voice, and for the next eight years the trend would only grow. 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.” Here I was, in my tiny studio, sitting on a mattress pushed against the wall, laptop open on my knees, wondering what kind of world we would be taking leadership of after November. I was already going into debt because of the two rents I was paying, and now the value of my mutual fund was about to be cut in half. I had thought the Iraq War would be the inheritance that shaped an Obama presidency. I was wrong.
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.
The plane is both unlike any other you will ever be on and not as nice as you think. It’s nearly thirty years old, and the interior has the feeling of 1980s luxury: large light brown leather seats; wood paneling; beige carpeting. Bowls of fruit and M&M’s line the shelves that run along the side of the plane. The president’s office is up front, a spare room with a desk and a couch that runs along the wall; adjacent to it are a bedroom 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
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When we got back to the plane, I fell into a deep sleep, only to be awoken by Obama shaking me. For a moment I had no idea where I was, until I came to the realization that the president of the United States was standing over me. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “Ben Rhodes!” Everyone broke into a round of applause, as the speech had created the most affirmative moment of the trip. Obama rarely gave positive feedback, but—like a coach who knows how to get the most out of his players—he chose the right moments.
“I say this as the president of a country that not very long ago made it hard for somebody who looks like me to vote, much less be president of the United States. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries.” 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.
for any president, the conduct of foreign policy represents a strange mix of managing the circumstances you’ve inherited, responding to the crises that take place on your watch, and being opportunistic about where you want to launch the new initiatives that will leave an imprint on the world.
Over the years, much of my authority within the White House was tied to the perception that Obama and I had some kind of “mind meld”—that I could anticipate what he would want to say or do on a particular issue, or that he trusted me to speak for him. There were, of course, enormous differences in our backgrounds, and there was a yawning gulf in our responsibilities. But I did come to see some similarities in our personalities. We both have large groups of friends but maintain a sense of privacy that can lead people to see us as aloof. We’re both trying to prove something to our fathers and
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Yes, Obama believes in the liberation of peoples, but he is at his core an institutionalist, someone who believes progress is more sustainable if it is husbanded by laws, institutions, and—if need be—force.
“Any world order that elevates one group of people over another will fail.”
Ann and I were about to get married, and this promotion was going to ensure that I wasn’t going to move to New York or anywhere else for the foreseeable future. I wasn’t going to go to happy hours after work, or watch live music, or keep in touch with old friends, or go to movies and read books as they came out, or see a lot of my parents before they got older, or see my nephews grow up. Instead, I was going to be a deputy national security advisor.
In the coming days, he consistently took out of the speech any language that spoke of winning or victory. He would pay tribute to the troops, but not overpromise. “We should glorify their service,” he told me, “but we should not glorify war.”
“As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. 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.”
I went to meet Obama outside his suite, where he had some final edits. I summarized the debate I’d been having with Samantha, and he looked at me with exasperation. “I’m on my way to deliver the speech,” he said. “This isn’t the time to be making policy.” Jon and I made his final edits—language that spoke of the tension between “the world as it is” and our effort to strive for “the world that ought to be.”
After the announcement, Obama convened his national security team—the same personalities who had proved so hard to manage during the Afghan review. It was a brief meeting, and he raised his voice, which almost never happened. “If people can’t pull together as a team, then other people are going to go. I mean it.”
This is how I got my news for ten years—by scrolling through my BlackBerry, reading different versions of the same story, looking for a shift in the narrative about Obama or our foreign policy, for what might raise an international issue that was escaping attention, for what lines of attack Republican critics were repeating in ways that might signal a new, coordinated effort—to keep Gitmo open, to bomb somebody, to portray Obama as un-American. I could tell they were getting traction if I also got emails from reporters, cutting and pasting a quote from a Republican critic and asking if I had a
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When you show up as Barack Obama in India or Indonesia, no one there cares about the midterm results. This created a strange discordance between the somber bubble we traveled within and the enthusiasm outside it. I packed the schedule—Barack and Michelle Obama dancing with schoolchildren in Mumbai; Obama holding a town hall meeting with students; the first African American president paying tribute to Mahatma Gandhi in Delhi; Obama, the man who lived in Indonesia as a child, delighting a crowd with phrases in Indonesian. Those were always my favorite moments on trips—moments that connect a
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His G20 frustration was clearly a proxy for everything else—the midterms, the press, the sense that he’d been handed as bad an inheritance as any president since Roosevelt and no one cared. By this point, I’d learned that Obama got mad only at the people closest to him—with everyone else, he was unfailingly polite.
Another hotel, one of hundreds. I had gained a new life that brought me to this beautiful place with a president, but I’d lost my old one as well. I called Ann, and then my parents, and could hear the background noise of more familiar holiday experiences that were now distant. As the sun set into the Pacific, I listened to the voices of strangers wafting up to the balcony and thought about my family and friends. I’d become somebody they watched from afar—whose quotes they might read in the newspaper more often than they spoke to me—someone whose experiences were unknowable to them.
“I want to share my honest assessment about what I think will accomplish your goals,” Obama told Mubarak. A few of us stood there, scattered across the office, farther away from the desk than normal, as if we didn’t want to crowd him. Obama cradled the phone against his ear while a speaker played for the benefit of the others in the room. A translator turned Obama’s words into Arabic, creating pregnant pauses and giving Mubarak extra time to digest the words, since he spoke English quite well. “I say this with the greatest respect,” Obama continued. “I’m extraordinarily proud of my friendship
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The last words I heard Obama say to him as he set out on his mission were straightforward: “Be bold.”
When the U.S. government wants to avoid doing something, it avoids producing the options to do something.
And then Obama diverged from his usual script: Having heard the views of his principals, the people sitting around the table, he started to call on people who occupied the seats along the walls. He wanted, I could tell, different views. One by one, the more junior staffers argued for action, highlighting the generational chasm that had opened up over the last several weeks. When it got to Samantha, she talked in humanitarian terms, pointing out that we knew what Gaddafi had done in the past when his rule was threatened. “He massacres civilians,” she said. “He told us what he was going to do in
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The whole scene spoke to an absurdity in the office of the American presidency—Obama sat at the head table, carrying out his duties, promoting American business in a country of more than two hundred million people, while the vast machinery of the U.S. government, on Obama’s order, was preparing to rain down bombs on a country of seven million.
Somewhere along the way, I lost my razor, and our last night in San Salvador, Obama snapped at me. “What, you can’t even bother to shave?” he said. At first I thought that he was kidding. “I think my razor is somewhere in Brazil,” I said. “Pull yourself together,” he said. “We have to be professional here.” There was an edge to his voice; he wasn’t joking. I felt like exploding. I haven’t slept more than three hours in days. I’m doing three jobs out there defending this war for hours each day. Obama seemed oblivious to the work I was doing out of his sight, work that left me no time to buy a
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Because I’d lived through the debate on the campaign, I knew he had meant what he said about going into Pakistan. He asked me to prepare for four scenarios: (1) bin Laden is at the compound and it’s a success; (2) bin Laden is at the compound and it’s messy—people killed, Pakistani security services, instability; (3) bin Laden’s not there but we get in and out cleanly; (4) bin Laden’s not there and it’s a mess.
As people filed out of the room, Biden pulled Denis and me into a smaller, adjacent room and closed the door. He looked genuinely pained. “You fellas really think he should do this?” “I do,” Denis said. I agreed, and repeated my point about Obama’s always having said he would go into Pakistan to get bin Laden. “Well,” Biden said, “I’m just trying to give him a little space.” I believed that—Biden sometimes took strident positions in meetings to widen the spectrum of views and options available to Obama. He also worked hard to understand Obama’s mind. “You’ve always got his back,” McDonough
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LIKE A THIRD-TIER AWARDS SHOW, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is the kind of ritual that you complain about while desperately seeking an invitation. Washington people pretend to be glamorous in the basement of a characterless hotel, drinking bad wine, avoiding one another, and craning their necks to catch a glimpse of passing celebrities.
Obama, a man who had publicly released his own birth certificate a few days ago, told us in the Oval Office that no—there was no way that we would release the photos. “We’re not going to spike the football,” he said.
found myself in a conversation with David Cameron about the HBO show Entourage, which we both apparently enjoyed—in a room full of royals, the prime minister is oddly diminished, just another staffer.
Every time I arrive in the city, emerging from the escalators at Penn Station, I feel a release as soon as I disappear into the crowd. Some people relax in the country or on the beach; for me, it is a crowded subway car or a cramped Chinatown street.
Obama signaled for me to come in and eat dinner with him: his usual plate of salmon, brown rice, and steamed broccoli. The simplicity of his meals always said something about his discipline—food was something that sustained his health and energy in this job, not something to be enjoyed.
Then Obama started to complain that people in Washington liked to say that he was aloof. “Few things irritate me more,” he said, mimicking the line of criticism. “ ‘He’s aloof, he doesn’t have friends.’ That could not be more wrong. I’m almost always around people. I just have a different group of friends than people who’ve been running for office since they were twenty-two.”
There is always something sad about the last night of these trips. They consume you for weeks, they move you around—without sleep—for days. You stay in beautiful places, see strange things, meet famous people, and develop an intense camaraderie with the people you are with. But I felt like it was impossible to explain these things to people back home—my wife, my parents, my old friends. It was like you inhabited two parallel lives—one that made you who you were, and the other that was consuming that person, and transforming you into someone else.
The days are long, the weeks are long, the months are long, but the years are short—one day you look up and realize you’re on the precipice of the final year of a presidential term. You see the world in a different way, as if you could open a window and catch a glimpse of anything that is touched by the reach of the United States government. You can be a part of actions that shape these events—your voice in a meeting, your intervention on a budget line item, your role in crafting the words that a president speaks. You are also a bystander to crises that elude intervention, buffeted by the
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Burdened by a reelection campaign, buffeted by the stridency of his opposition at home, divisions among his own team, and a sense that he lacked good partners abroad, Obama seemed at times to be using his powerful mind to find justifications for more modest ambitions. Another time, at a meeting on what he was aiming to accomplish in his first term, I pointed to the potential for a democratic opening in Burma. “Ben,” he said, “no one cares about Burma in Ohio.” These comments stuck with me. For the first time, I felt out of step with my boss. In the quiet of my empty apartment, I began to
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A group of us watched backstage on a television screen as Obama came across as somehow diminished and annoyed by criticisms that he found unfair. He had been cruising to reelection, so the debate offered a turn in the media narrative: Suddenly, Obama was on the ropes. In the days that followed, Obama had small groups of us into the Oval Office. “That one was entirely on me,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
Often, when Obama was frustrated by governments, he’d talk about their people.
“It’s sad,” I said, “that Cuba is only ninety miles from Florida, yet so few Americans have been able to travel there.” “Jay-Z and Beyoncé just visited,” Alejandro said. “People-to-people exchange,” I joked.
To show Assad and the world that there would be consequences, Obama decided to publicize a decision to provide military support to the Syrian opposition—the latest iteration of the plan that Petraeus had first presented in 2012. It was an unsatisfying response, and there weren’t any volunteers to announce the plan publicly. Almost by default, the responsibility fell to me. Even though I had misgivings about our Syria policy, I was glad that we were doing something. I had also internalized a certain ethos: If there was an issue that no one wanted to talk about publicly, I would do it. I thought
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