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

by Ben Rhodes

if an immature leader throws the world into chaos, then the world will know whom to blame.

The events of my twenties felt historic, but the people involved did not. I wanted a hero—someone who could make sense of what was happening around me and in some way redeem it.

Yes we can. Our destiny is not written for us, it is written by us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

progressive view of American history; the capacity for self-correction is what makes us exceptional.

liberation without mature institutions is its own form of oppression, as corruption and tribalism can overwhelm the individual.

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.”

the Israel that my mother’s generation idealized was increasingly eclipsed by an Israel driven by the settler movement and ultra-orthodox émigrés.

“I really love the queen,” he told us. “She’s just like Toot, my grandmother. Courteous. Straightforward. All about what she thinks. She doesn’t suffer fools.”

“the example of our two nations says it is possible for people to be united by their ideals instead of divided by their differences; that it’s possible for hearts to change and old hatreds to pass; that it’s possible for the sons and daughters of former colonies to sit here as members of this great Parliament, and for the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British Army to stand before you as president of the United States.”

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.

“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Obama’s next call was to Angela Merkel. There was no foreign leader he admired more. Like him, she was a pragmatist, driven by facts, dedicated to international order, deliberate in her decision making.

It felt as if I was trapped within a system fueled by hypocrisy and opportunism.

“Maybe they just want to oppose you,”

It. Is. Not. A. Reward. To. Talk. To. Folks.

He told us about a guard who once smuggled an eight-month-old baby into the arms of Mandela so he could be reminded of what it felt like to hold a child.

The fact that he was a black president wasn’t going to bring life back to an unarmed black kid who was shot, or alter structural inequities in housing, education, and incarceration in our states and cities. It wasn’t going to change the investment of powerful interests in a system that sought to deny voting rights, or to cast people on food stamps working minimum wage jobs as “takers,” incapable of making it on their own.

The last person who ever thought that Barack Obama’s election was going to bring racial reconciliation and some “end of race” in America was Barack Obama.

Hillary. 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. I felt I was living in an alternate reality that was in some way insane, unable to recognize hypocrisy or to separate facts from politics. The world around me seemed to have come unmoored. The truth had become irrelevant.

This, I thought, is a guy who is out of fucks.

I sat on a couch with a plastic cover as one of the best-looking men I’ve ever seen came in to give Ann an epidural.

I had TWO stunningly gorgeous anesthesiologists when I had my baby 🤣

by 2015, Netanyahu had become almost a de facto member of the Republican caucus,

“Because it’s my job to calm folks down, not to scare them. I expect it from Trump.

This offensive video—probably fueled by the crass Islamophobia that characterized the right wing’s nativist response to the 9/11 attacks and Obama’s election—lit a spark in the Middle East.

You have relentlessly politicized the terrible loss of four Americans and constructed your own pyramid of conspiracy theories to further pollute American discourse and polarize the American people, a dynamic that has led to Donald Trump’s being the front-runner for the nomination of your party.

we had a president who was willing to acknowledge difficult histories and show respect for different people. Our constant struggle to improve ourselves and our country while seeking guidance from the story of our founding values—that is what makes America great.

The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.

Because we had to be fact-based, because we had to be mindful of sensitive intelligence, we were slower than the Russians,

After all the work we’d done, it was going to end like this.

Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, 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.

The irrelevance of facts.

“He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,”

Sometimes there are no words to say.