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

by Ben Rhodes

Clapper never put spin on the ball; he told you what he knew and what he didn’t know. I respected him as much as anyone in government.

This was followed by a letter from the Speaker of the House, John Boehner. “Even as the United States grapples with the alarming scale of the human suffering,” it read, “we are immediately confronted with contemplating the potential scenarios our response might trigger or accelerate. These considerations include the Assad regime potentially losing command and control of its stock of chemical weapons or terrorist organizations—especially those tied to al Qaeda—gaining greater control of and maintaining territory.” He listed fourteen detailed questions about various scenarios that could take place in Syria and demanded responses to each of those questions. Boehner also focused on the need for congressional authorization: “It is essential you address on what basis any use of force would be legally justified and how the justification comports with the exclusive authority of congressional authorization under Article I of the Constitution.” After deriding Obama’s response to Syria as weak, Republicans were now making the same warnings about action that we had used to publicly defend our inaction in the past. In doing so, they were signaling that Obama would be held accountable if these scenarios were realized, while seeking impossible guarantees that they wouldn’t be.

“Maybe we never would have done Rwanda,” Obama said. The comment was jarring. Obama had written about how we should have intervened in Rwanda, and people like me had been deeply influenced by that inaction. But he also frequently pointed out that the people urging intervention in Syria had been silent when millions of people were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “There’s no way there would have been any appetite for that in Congress.” “You could have done things short of war,” I said. “Like what?” “Like jamming the radio signals they were using to incite people.” He waved his hand at me dismissively. “That’s wishful thinking. You can’t stop people from killing each other like that.” He let the thought hang in the air. “I’m just saying, maybe there’s never a time when the American people are going to support this kind of thing. In Libya, everything went right—we saved thousands of lives, we didn’t have a single casualty, and we took out a dictator who killed hundreds of Americans. And at home, it was a negative.”

Over the course of 2012, I also saw my name pop up with increasing frequency in right-wing media, cast as Obama’s political hack on the NSC. Early in the administration, I’d become a target for occasional right-wing ridicule for a few reasons: (1) I worked for Barack Obama; (2) I wrote the Cairo speech; (3) I received a master’s degree in fiction writing from New York University when I was twenty-four years old. The MFA alone was enough to make me a minor villain: “Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Failed Fiction Writer…” One time, in 2009, I was surprised to find a colleague of mine—a kind, soft-spoken young woman named Cindy Chang—sobbing at her desk because she was so upset by one of these pieces. “How can they say these things about you?” she cried. I told her not to worry, I was proud of my enemies. Then I went into my office, closed the door, and felt a fluttering in my stomach—reading the piece, unsettled by how unhinged it was, by how much the person who wrote it seemed to hate me.

If I was going to be turned into a cartoon villain, then at least I was going to get something done.

A few hours after his initial statement, Obama called me back into the Oval Office to talk about the speech he would give on our return trip to South Africa for Mandela’s memorial. “We should remind people that he wasn’t a saint,” he said. “He was a man. You can’t appreciate what he did without that.”

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. It was there when Obama said that it was stupid for a black professor to be arrested in his own home and got criticized for days while the white police officer was turned into a victim. It was there when a white Southern member of Congress yelled “You lie!” at Obama while he addressed a joint session of Congress. It was there when a New York reality show star built an entire political brand on the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, an idea that was covered as national news for months and is still believed by a majority of Republicans. It was there in the way Obama was talked about in the right-wing media, which spent eight years insisting that he hated America, disparaging his every move, inventing scandals where there were none, attacking him for any time that he took off from work. It was there in the social media messages I got that called him a Kenyan monkey, a boy, a Muslim. And it was there in the refusal of Republicans in Congress to work with him for eight full years, something that Obama was also blamed for no matter what he did. One time, Obama invited congressional Republicans to attend a screening of Lincoln in the White House movie theater—a Steven Spielberg film about how Abraham Lincoln worked with Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Not one of them came.

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. What do you think it will take for these protests to stop? “Cops need to stop shooting unarmed black folks.” Why do you think you have failed to bring the country together? “Because my being president appears to have literally driven some white people insane.” Do you think some of the opposition you face is about race? “Yes! Of course! Next question.” But he was guarded in public. When he was asked if racism informed the strident opposition to his presidency, he’d carefully ascribe it to other factors.

I was one of those well-meaning white people looking forward to seeing Barack Obama eulogize Nelson Mandela so that I could feel better about the world, only I was the person tasked with writing the eulogy. After putting it off for a few days, I came in early one Saturday morning and wrote a first draft in one sitting. By the time we got on the plane for South Africa, I still had no idea what Obama thought of it. He called me up to his office in the front of Air Force One, which was carrying a delegation that included George W. and Laura Bush, and told me that he liked what I’d written, that it was a “safety net” because he could deliver it if nothing else came to him on the flight over. “Are you happy with it?” he asked me. “I am,” I said. “I’m sure you can make it much better.” A few hours later, Obama came back and gave me several handwritten pages on a yellow legal pad. It was an entirely new draft. “See what you can do with this,” he said. He had made it into a study of Mandela the leader.

I asked him about his interaction with Castro. “It’s funny,” he said. “He seemed taken aback that I actually shook his hand.” “It’s getting a ton of attention in our press,” I said. Already, there were vigorous debates about whether it was right to shake Raúl’s hand. “What am I supposed to do? Snub the guy at a funeral?” His voice was rising a bit. I had taken him out of the moment he’d been in, honoring Mandela, and put him back into the reality of American politics.

Obama leaned forward in agreement. “After I was reelected,” he said, “I pulled together a group of presidential historians that I have in from time to time.” People like Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, Douglas Brinkley. “It’s interesting: They made the point that the most important thing a president can do on foreign policy is avoid a costly error.” He ticked through the list of presidents who had seen their tenures defined by such mistakes: Johnson in Vietnam, Carter with Desert One, Bush in Iraq. The lesson? “Don’t do stupid shit,” he told us, tapping on the table in front of him.

“What’s the Obama doctrine?” he asked aloud. The silence was charged, as we’d always avoided that label. He answered his own question: “Don’t do stupid shit.” There were some chuckles. Then, to be sure that he got his point across, he asked the press to repeat after him: “Don’t do stupid shit.”

That Friday afternoon, my deputy at the time, Caitlin Hayden, asked me to come to a meeting in the Executive Office Building. It was actually a surprise party. I walked in to find a room full of people who’d worked alongside me for years. We drank Scotch at a large oval table and talked ruefully about the controversy. At some point, everyone went around the room and told their own story about how much I meant to them. It was perhaps the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me—that sense of a family closing in around you, protecting you, no matter how bad it was outside. Each person spoke about something I’d done to boost their career, or a time when I’d done something funny or foolish; a younger guy said he decided to go into communications because of me; a former staffer sent a photo of her baby daughter wearing a shirt that read TEAM BEN. In a perfect snapshot of how incapable I was of handling what was happening to me, I had so much to drink that I don’t remember most of these tributes.

A few days later, I got a call that Obama wanted to see me. I made the familiar walk down the hallway and up the stairs, a walk I’d made thousands of times, but this time I was filled with dread. I had a feeling this was about Benghazi. I walked into the Oval, where he was standing behind his desk. “I hear you’ve been a little upset about everything that’s going on,” he said, “this whole thing.” He gestured with his hand, not even saying the word “Benghazi.” “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know it’s a fraction of what you put up with on a daily basis. It’s just an out-of-body experience, watching yourself be convicted publicly of a crime you didn’t commit.” “Did you do anything wrong?” he asked. It was, I realized, the first time anyone had ever bothered to ask me that question. “No,” I said. “Then don’t worry about it,” he said. “All you have is your integrity. And you have as much integrity as anyone I know.”

Driving out to Obama’s rental to staff phone calls, give him updates, or draft statements. He tried to cluster his work in the morning so that he could play golf or relax in the afternoon, and when I showed up, he always seemed a little annoyed—as if I were the stand-in for a world that was ruining his vacation. Nights, I drove to a cheap Chinese takeout place and returned to my room. There I’d sit on the couch, eating lo mein out of a plastic container and watching cable news split-screen the unraveling of two of the loftier aspirations of the 2008 campaign—an end to the permanent war, and a bridging of the racial divide.

The Obamas went into an adjacent room to eat dinner with a small group of friends, and I went into an office where there were a couple of laptops and a printer. It was the kind of house where the sound system played in every room at the same volume. I sat there mustering every ounce of outrage to write a statement that would channel our national disgust toward ISIL, learning as much as I could about Jim Foley so I could compose a tribute to his life. I was sitting in a home that someone else had rented, listening to R&B that was playing for people in other rooms. I felt I could step out of myself and see myself sitting there—the effort it took to inhabit an awful moment like this, the absurdity of the setting, the question in my head that Ann would ask: Why does it always have to be you?

As if to rediscover some part of myself from an earlier time, when I read novels and wanted to write one, I was reading a new book by Haruki Murakami. The main character was exactly my age—thirty-six. In the book, he finds himself paralyzed in his own life and looking to his past for answers. I thought about this short trip I was on: the setting was familiar, the New York streets, trying to make plans with old friends, sleeping in my old bedroom. But everything else was different—the things that I was thinking about, the world coming to me through my BlackBerry, the fact that my father was in a rehab center talking about aging. I could see myself in the present circumstance of the narrator, but not in any rediscovery of the past that I didn’t know how to find. I was in the middle of a different story, and if I left my job, I wouldn’t see it through to the end.

Yes for Murakami

We went in search of the perfect, simple Italian meal. We walked for blocks and blocks, looking at restaurants and dismissing them as not quite perfect enough. Finally, we found a place near the river, with a table in the back, where we had buffalo mozzarella, prosciutto, artichokes drenched in olive oil, pasta with ragout, and a bottle of Chianti. For once, Ricardo didn’t have his spiral notebook out. “For someone like me,” he said, “this is as good as it gets.” Sitting there, I felt a thousand years removed from the anxieties that awaited me back in Washington. We had done something big and right for its own reasons. I had never felt so at home so far away from where I lived.

Obama made a comment a few days after the election that would end up becoming our mantra for the next two years: “My presidency is entering the fourth quarter; interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter.” Yes, it was a cheesy sports metaphor, but Denis—who has something of the Midwestern high school football coach in him—embraced it. He had stickers made with Obama’s mantra on them and started handing them out. This elicited some eye rolling, but also a sense that perhaps we were going to spend the last two years of the presidency doing big things, unencumbered by the caution and exhaustion that had crept in at points over the last few years.

“They’re saying that’s us calling Jews warmongers.” “Oh, come on,” he said. “John Bolton wants to bomb Iran, right?” “Yes,” I said. Bolton had written an op-ed for The New York Times entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” “Is he Jewish?” “No.” “Dick Cheney?” “No.” “I’m black,” he said. “I think I know when folks are using dog whistles. I hear them all the time.” His voice was raised a bit, which almost never happened. “Come on.” He paused, returning to his even temperament. “This is aggravating.”

I’d been vaguely familiar with the story of Laos. Hillary had visited in 2012, and I remembered that we cobbled together some money for UXO clearance—a few numbers on a budget sheet. But the Bourdain episode that showed human beings on a television screen in the middle of the night, struggling in a place that was still a war zone, forty years after a war that I’d never learned about in school, woke my interest. I added two items to the bucket list for my final year in the job: Get more money for Laos, and get Obama to tape an episode of Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.

Obama was more muted. A few days after the story, he called me back to his private dining area, behind the Oval Office. “Why were you so eager to talk about how the sausage gets made?” he asked, with a note of irritation. “You’ve got to be more careful. We’ve still got nine more months.”

For a moment, we all just stared out the window at the crowds. “I’m reading a good book now,” Obama said. “It reminds you, the ability to tell stories about who we are is what makes us different from animals. We’re just chimps without it.” He described how all civilization, religion, nations were rooted in stories, which could be harnessed for good or bad. Obama’s tendency to take the long view was getting even more pronounced in his last year in office. But in his own way, he was also telling me that everything was okay, that this was now just one more subject in our endless conversation about everything. “What’s the book?” I asked, looking for something to grab on to. “It’s called Sapiens. You should check it out.” Perhaps sensing that this was sensitive terrain, he changed the subject. “Now, what’s with this thing I’m doing tonight with Anthony Bourdain?”

That night, we’d arranged for Obama to have dinner with Bourdain at a small local restaurant that wasn’t getting advance notice, so it would be filled with whoever showed up there on a random weeknight. “He’s the guy who wrote that book, right?” he asked. “Yeah, Kitchen Confidential.” I explained to Obama about how much I’d come to like Bourdain’s shows. “His philosophy isn’t that different from yours. If people would just sit down and eat together, and understand something about each other, maybe they could figure things out.” “So we’re doing this for you?” He laughed. At the restaurant that night, I sat with a small number of staff and Secret Service in a room adjacent to where Obama and Bourdain ate bowls of bun cha and spring rolls. I had headphones that allowed me to listen to their conversation. Sitting in this tiny room with colleagues who’d become close friends, sipping broth, beer, and noodles, thousands of miles from home, I felt a sense of peace. It was an apt metaphor for my experience of the presidency itself—just offstage, eating the same things, hearing the words but not the principal participant.

He looked out the window. Malia was about to graduate from high school. As we made our descent to the tarmac next to Air Force One, 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.”

One afternoon, I was sitting on the Marine One flight back to the White House after a campaign swing to Florida. It was just a few days before the election. We got an email from Obama’s political director with the last requests for Obama’s time from the Clinton campaign: 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.”

When I got home, Ann and I talked a bit. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say,” she said. “After all the work you guys did…” She let her thought trail off. She was seven months pregnant with our second child, who would be born in an America that I couldn’t yet reconcile. “I know,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I know.” I slept for three or four hours. When I woke, I had a sensation that I’d known only a few times in my life—the feeling that you don’t want the knowledge you’d gone to sleep with to be true. When someone has died. When something like 9/11 has happened. It was a sense of profound anxiety, a shortness of breath, a constriction in the chest; it was all those things at once—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.

“Ben sent me a note last night,” he said. “We have to remember—history doesn’t move in a straight line, it zigs and zags.” With that, the group filed out of the Oval Office so that we could resume the normal rhythm of the day, the daily briefing. Walking over to my seat, I saw the words stitched into the ring around the carpet on the floor, the quote from Martin Luther King, whose bust watched silently from a table along the wall: THE ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE IS LONG, BUT IT BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE.