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

by Ben Rhodes

I was confident in the speech I’d written, but couldn’t bear to watch it delivered.

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.”

“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.

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.