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

by Ben Rhodes

I stood in my bedroom processing the words as waves of anger washed over me. For a moment, I couldn’t even understand which statement Romney meant; then I realized that he was referring to the statement that the embassy in Cairo put out earlier in the day, before anything had happened in Benghazi. I had grown accustomed to ugly Republican attacks, but this felt different. Some threshold had been crossed. They were slamming us in the crudest possible way in the middle of a crisis. They were attacking career Foreign Service people who had issued a statement while their embassy was under siege. They were ignoring the fact that the video was offensive. They were making it harder for us to say things that could help protect American lives abroad. They would say anything if it could cast Obama as somehow anti-American. It wasn’t just politics, it was sickening in its cynicism. We were now in some new, uglier reality. I could never have guessed just how ugly it would become: that for the next four years, “Benghazi” would be transformed from the name of a city in Libya where American intervention had saved tens of thousands of lives into something entirely different: a word that represented the sentiment in that statement of Romney’s, an expression of an ugly conspiracy theory to delegitimize Obama and Clinton, destroy any concern for facts that didn’t fit the theory, and dehumanize a small group of people, including me. Benghazi.