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

by Ben Rhodes

Were it not for this armor, he said, the American dead in Iraq would be closer to the number of those killed in Vietnam; but for those who survive those wounds, life can become a permanent and painful struggle.

side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

“I’m spending all of my political capital,” he said, “just to keep things going.”

the capacity for self-correction is what makes us exceptional.

The embassy in New Delhi tries to help U.S. businesses get into the Indian market. The USAID mission in Nairobi meets with the Kenyan Ministry of Health to help the fight against HIV/AIDS. A scholarship student from Indonesia boards a plane bound for an American university. The U.S. military conducts a joint exercise with the South Koreans to deter North Korea. Our intelligence community shares information about a terrorist plot with Europeans. A Special Operator leaves a Baghdad trailer at dawn to capture or kill a terrorist. A taxpayer-funded F-16 fighter aircraft is delivered to the Egyptian military.

“We’re telling a story,” he told me early that first year, “about who we are.” Over

His grandfather served in Europe during World War II, and his great-uncle helped liberate the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

individual. 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. To some on the left,

“Any world order that elevates one group of people over another will fail.”

He told a story about how his mother once worked in Pakistan. She was riding on an elevator. Her hair was uncovered and her ankles were showing. Yet even though she was older, “this guy in the elevator with her couldn’t stand to be in that type of space with a woman who was uncovered. By the time the door opened he was sweating.” He paused for effect. “When men are that repressed, they do some crazy shit.”

This was a formal position that the United States had not yet taken, as it would be a signal that millions of Palestinian refugees will not have the right to return to Israel as part of a peace agreement. I sat there and took his request on board, assuring him that we were breaking no new ground in our support for the Palestinians. The Israelis were by far the stronger party in the conflict, but we were acting as if it was the reverse.

“I had to stay up all night writing this,” he said, handing us seven pages torn from a yellow legal pad, each filled with his tiny, neat handwriting. The only other time he had written a speech from scratch was during the campaign, when he delivered his address on race.

“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.”

“the world as it is” and our effort to strive for “the world that ought to be.”

“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

which had been central to our message in Cairo (“the United States is not—and never will be—at war with Islam”).

You could almost see how his debate prep had gone, a group of aides who’d been feeding on a steady diet of Fox News preparing him to pounce on Obama for refusing to call it terrorism, for inventing a story about an Internet video. I assumed they were just cynical; what if they actually believed this stuff?

Toward the end of 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the summary of a 6,700-page report on the Bush administration’s use of torture and rendition, detailing in stark terms the moral collapse of the United States government after 9/11.

“You know,” Obama said, “I think it’s a chance for all of us to reflect on what fear can do to this place.

We chatted a bit about the current state of our public line on ISIL. “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.”

“I get that. But more people die slipping in the bathtub than from terrorist attacks,” Obama said. “But folks back home think that ISIL is going to come behead them,” Susan said. “That’s because there’s a bunch of folks on television telling them that,” Obama shot back. “I’m trying not to do that.”

out. For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.

OBAMA’S TRIP TO HAVANA would be in March, because he wanted it to coincide with Sasha and Malia’s spring break. Every

And then Obama said what he believed: that people should be equal under the law; that citizens should be free to criticize their government and protest peacefully; that voters should have the freedom to choose their government in open elections. “I believe those human rights are universal,” Obama said. “I believe they are the rights of the American people, the Cuban people, and people around the world.” The Americans in the audience applauded. Raúl Castro sat in his seat with a thin smile. We were pushing, I knew, too far, too fast. But we were saying what we believed, and sometimes that is all that you can do.

“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.”

“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?”

“Civilization,” he liked to tell us, “is just a thin veneer.” We like to think that we, as Americans,

The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family—that is the story that we all must tell.

“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.”

When protests toppled the Ukrainian government, Putin interpreted that as the United States coming into Russia, akin to an act of war; when he launched his counterattack—annexing

“America is already great. America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump.”

Why didn’t you tell us earlier? Is Russia trying to help Trump win? What are you going to do in response?

If I scanned the Internet or Twitter, slogging through the cascade of attacks on Hillary, it was impossible to know where the stories came from. Breitbart? InfoWars? An American? Or a Russian? The content was the same. I’d raise this with Obama. “I know,” he’d say. “They’ve found the soft spot in our democracy.”

“Michigan?” Obama said, eyes wide. It was a state he’d won by 10 points in 2012. “That’s not good.”

“So, that happened,” he said.

we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to bring change. Change we can believe in. How

THE ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE IS LONG, BUT IT BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE.

“He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,” I said. “You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.”

It was worse than I’d previously known, more expansive, more clearly designed to aid Trump. In the weeks to come, nearly everything I learned reinforced this dreadful reckoning. In Germany, Merkel’s spokesperson told me about how fake news impacted their politics. He gave an example. At the height of Merkel’s political vulnerability over the refugee issue, there would be stories about crimes committed by Syrian refugees. A rape, for instance, caused a huge outcry in a community. For days, there were protests, political fallout. “And then?” I asked. “And then we investigate this story and learn that it never happened,” he said. “And we trace the story, and it started with a social media user with a German-sounding name, but something is not exactly right. The name is a little off. And the server, it is not German.” “It’s probably in eastern Ukraine or Moldova,” I said. “Yes, this is right,” he answered. “Russians.” 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; how they spread; whether this flood of content was coincident or coordinated with the Trump campaign. I’d run into different staffers who worked on Russia in the government, and they all had the same message: It’s even worse than you think. Always, the suggestion was that there was more to the story. Trump, one told me, is exactly the kin...

“Ben,” he said. “There was once a general from Ossetia who had the authority to launch nuclear missiles from my territory without telling me, even though I was defense minister. I’ve dealt with harder things than Trump.”

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.

When I asked Obama what he intended to do the next morning, now that he was no longer president, he said, “Sleep in.”