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

by Ben Rhodes

I trailed Obama as he wandered through the collection of ancient pillars and scaffolding and tributes to the gods, a monument to the origins of democracy and the ruins left behind by lost empires and expired beliefs. When I saw him afterward, he repeated a maxim that he’d shared with me in the early morning hours after the election of Trump, a refrain that sought out perspective: “There are more stars in the sky,” he said, “than grains of sand on the earth.”

Merkel has a kind of reverse charisma—stoic, self-possessed, with a slight smile that draws you in, a woman at ease in power and her own skin—and she greeted him with a hand on each arm. She was his closest partner in a world that offered few friends, and she had risked her political future by welcoming a million Syrian refugees to Germany.

Obama admired her pragmatism, her unflappability, and her stubborn streak. Over the previous year, he had battled his own bureaucracy to increase the number of refugees that America would welcome, telling us again and again, “We can’t leave Angela hanging.”

At the end of our time in Germany, when Obama bade her farewell at the door of the Beast, a single tear appeared in her eye—something that none of us had ever seen before. “Angela,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s all alone.”

The leaders of eleven other countries who had painstakingly negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement met with Obama on the first day. If they were angry at having taken tough political decisions to bind their economic futures to the United States only to see the new president-elect commit to pulling out, they concealed it. Instead, they were almost apologetic in their suggestion that they’d probably just move forward with some form of the agreement without the United States.

The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, apologized for having breached protocol by meeting with Trump at Trump Tower without telling Obama beforehand. The Japanese felt they had no choice but to strike up a relationship with a man who had threatened to charge Japan for the troops that we stationed there.

Xi assured Obama, unprompted, that he would implement the Paris climate agreement even if Trump decided to pull out. “That’s very wise of you,” Obama replied. “I think you’ll continue to see an investment in Paris in the United States, at least from states, cities, and the private sector.” We were only two years removed from the time when Obama had flown to Beijing and secured an agreement to act in concert with China to combat climate change, the step that made the Paris agreement possible in the first place. Now China would lead that effort going forward.

Xi is a big man who moves slowly and deliberately, as if he wants people to notice his every motion. Sitting across the table from Obama, he pushed aside the binder of talking points that usually shape the words of a Chinese leader. We prefer to have a good relationship with the United States, he said, folding his hands in front of him. That is good for the world. But every action will have a reaction. And if an immature leader throws the world into chaos, then the world will know whom to blame.

Obama—not usually an outwardly sentimental man—attempted to pass a torch of sorts. “Justin, your voice is going to be needed more,” he said, leaning forward and putting his elbows on his knees. “You’re going to have to speak out when certain values are threatened.”

“What if we were wrong?” Obama said, sitting opposite me in the Beast. “Wrong about what?” I asked. For days, we had been trying to deconstruct what had happened in the recent election. Obama had complained he couldn’t believe that the election was lost, rattling off the indicators—“Five percent unemployment. Twenty million covered. Gas at two bucks a gallon. We had it all teed up!” Now he told me about a piece he had read in The New York Times, a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity is to people, that we had embraced a message indistinguishable from John Lennon’s “Imagine”—touting an empty, cosmopolitan globalism that could no longer reach people. Imagine all the people, sharing all the world. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

Something stung a bit in Obama’s words, the suggestion that what he represented was, in the current moment, a lost cause. “But you would have won if you could have run,” I said. Grasping for a different argument, I talked about the young people he had spoken to in a town hall meeting just the day before in Lima, as he had done in so many countries around the world. “They get it,” I said. “They’re more tolerant. They have more in common with young people in the United States than Trump does. Young people didn’t vote for Trump, just like young people in the UK didn’t vote for Brexit.”

“Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or twenty years too early.”

“But we’re about to find out just how resilient our institutions are, at home and around the world.”

I could no longer recognize the person who had moved out to Chicago to write speeches and live in a studio apartment with a few scattered Ikea items and a mattress on the floor. The catastrophes of 9/11 and the Iraq War had propelled me there, in search of a better story about America, and myself.

Lee Hamilton, was cochair, along with James Baker. Hamilton was a throwback—a crew-cut Democrat from southern Indiana who had served thirty-four years in Congress. He wasn’t just a moderate—he was a pragmatist who approached government without a trace of ideology. Baker was what the Republican Party used to be—a business-friendly operator who took governing as seriously as making money.

The United States had nearly 150,000 troops supporting the Iraqi Security Forces, but everyone spoke of a series of militias as the main drivers of politics. One American general told us that unless the different sects reconciled, “all the troops in the world could not bring security to Iraq.”

He explained that our troops wear armor that covers your upper body well; what it does not cover is the lower extremities, nor does it guard against the force of the blasts that can cause trauma to the brain. 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.

On September 11, 2001, I was handing out flyers at a polling site on a north Brooklyn street when I saw the second plane hit, stared at plumes of black smoke billowing in the sky, and then watched the first tower crumple to the ground. Mobile phone service was down and I didn’t know if lower Manhattan had been destroyed. A man with some kind of European accent grabbed my arm and said, over and over, “This is sabotage.” For days after, the air had the acrid smell of seared metal, melted wires, and death.

I wanted to be a part of what happened next, and I was repelled by the reflexive liberalism of my New York University surroundings—the professor who suggested that we sing “God Bless Afghanistan” to the tune of “God Bless America,” the preemptive protests against American military intervention, the reflexive distrust of Bush.

I found myself at the Wilson Center, one small cog in the vast machinery of people who think, talk, and write about American foreign policy. I was a liberal, skeptical of military adventurism in our history, and something seemed off about toppling Saddam Hussein because of something done by Osama bin Laden. But when you’re putting on a tie and riding the D.C. metro with a bunch of other twenty-five-year-olds to a think tank a few blocks from the White House, angry about 9/11 and determined to be taken seriously, you listen to what the older, more experienced people say. The moment Colin Powell made his case for war to the United Nations, I was on board.

I’d stay up all night agonizing over sentence structure and whether the group was going far enough in calling for an end to the war. The first sentence of the report said “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” and the report called for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops. Instead, Bush put more troops into the country. To me, the experience clarified two things: First, the people who were supposed to know better had gotten us into a moral and strategic disaster; second, you can’t change things unless you change the people making the decisions. I had a decent policy job, but I wanted to get into politics. And I wanted to work for Barack Obama.

He used language that sounded authentic and moral at a time when our politics was anything but. There was also something else, something intangible. 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.

Obama, a former law professor, has a trait that I would witness thousands of times in the years to come. He likes to call on just about everyone in a room. And he doesn’t like it when people have side conversations.

During a Democratic debate in July, Obama had been asked by a YouTube questioner if he’d be willing to meet, without preconditions, with a number of U.S. adversaries, including Iran and Cuba. “I would,” Obama answered. “And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is somehow punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration, is ridiculous.”

Clarke was a former Bush administration counterterrorism official who had made a name for himself by blasting the Bush administration’s failure to take the threat from al Qaeda seriously before 9/11. I remembered sitting in a charged Senate hearing room watching him testify before Hamilton and the other 9/11 commissioners, surprising the audience by apologizing to the 9/11 families present for failing to prevent the attacks. Now I listened as he voiced caution against a call to go after bin Laden in Pakistan.

Gibbs started reading aloud from the story they were looking at, in which Madeleine Albright was criticizing Obama for saying he’d talk to Iran. “What are these people talking about?” Obama said. “Didn’t she go to North Korea?” Denis asked. Obama turned and laughed in a way that he does, leaning far forward and putting his whole body into it. “Right!” he said. “It. Is. Not. A. Reward. To. Talk. To. Folks.” He pounded his open palm on the table as he spoke. “How is that working out with Iran? I want to double down on this. Put it in the speech. Robert, I want to do an interview. Can we get someone over here now?”

Obama was asked if he would use nuclear weapons to take out terrorist camps in Pakistan, and he said no. The same people who attacked Obama for saying he’d take out bin Laden in Pakistan now said he was naïve for saying he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons to do it. It all seemed like a stupid game in which sticking to a preapproved script was more important than being right; worse, the script hadn’t changed because of Iraq.

If you had asked me who I wanted to become when I moved down to Washington, I probably would have said Samantha. She’d been a journalist in the Balkans and won a Pulitzer Prize in her early thirties for a book about America’s failure to prevent genocide. To my generation of liberals, she offered an alternative to the neoconservative views that dominated the debate after 9/11: She supported an interventionist America that promoted human rights and prevented atrocities, yet she’d opposed the war in Iraq, standing apart from many liberal interventionists who were co-opted by the Bush crowd.

Still, the campaign was grounded in those summer days by a series of bad narratives: Clinton would win because she was inevitable. Obama would lose because young people never turn out to vote. Clinton was racking up endorsements from the party elite. Obama wouldn’t get black votes because he wasn’t black enough (“I’m black enough when I try to get a cab,” he told us). Clinton passed the commander in chief test. Obama was untested and, well, different. None of that mattered to us. The office was filled with young people who spent all day staring at their laptops, communicating by Instant Messenger even when we were sitting next to each other.

We had all made this bet to work for the underdog campaign, so there was something essential that we shared, the belief that we were doing something both historic and right. It was unspoken that if you ever needed anything—a place for a visiting friend to stay, help with what you were working on, a person to talk to about something bothering you—someone would be there for you. We were down by 20 points in national polls. It was the happiest time of my professional life.

The itinerary encapsulated our campaign’s foreign policy message: After eight years of George W. Bush, we had to wind down the wars, reinvigorate diplomacy, and restore America’s standing around the world. But we also clung to our share of defensiveness; a mistake abroad would be devastating in a campaign in which the only advantage for John McCain was experience, and we had internalized a siege mentality in the face of rumors that Obama was a Muslim, a Kenyan, a terrorist sympathizer, or all of the above.

It spoke to a larger dynamic in the campaign: While Obama was often blamed for the cult of personality growing up around him—arty posters, celebrity anthems, and lavish settings for his events—he was rarely responsible for it, and worried that we were raising expectations too high in a world that has a way of resisting change.

I was hoping for edits that would elevate the speech and make it more than a summation of our worldview. The shift to a foreign audience hadn’t been hard, as Obama’s message about working across races and religions, his preference for diplomacy over war, his embrace of the science of climate change, and his recognition that the world needed to confront issues beyond terrorism were going to be well received in Germany.

My mother’s family was Jewish, with roots in Poland and Germany. Those who didn’t emigrate to the United States were killed in the Holocaust. They didn’t leave, my mother always said, because they thought they were more German than Jewish. That decision always haunted me, in part because I understood it: I was raised outside the Jewish faith—in my father’s casual churchgoing Episcopalianism—but aware of my Jewish identity, which was most acutely present through the family that I didn’t have.

I was confident in the speech I’d written, but couldn’t bear to watch it delivered. Any extended silence would make me think the audience didn’t like it. Any wind-up to an important point would feel too long. Over the next eight years, I almost never saw a speech that I wrote being delivered to a crowd; instead, I would choose the detached experience of pacing backstage, occasionally glancing at my BlackBerry and reading the initial reactions to the speech as it was being given.

When you are a speechwriter and the speech that you have written is finished, you go from being the most indispensable member of the staff to being temporarily irrelevant. Afterward, I lingered at the site, and then followed the trail of humanity back to the hotel, people clutching signs and cameras as if they had been to a rock concert. Returning to my room was like going back in time. Everything was still in the same place—the open laptop; cups of coffee; a half-drunk glass of wine; printed-out copies of an almost finished draft—but the anxiety and adrenaline were gone. Taking in this scene, I realized that I was developing an addiction to this life—the moments I craved were not the grand crowd scenes when speeches are delivered, but rather the accumulating pressure that leads up to them; the moments when everyone is waiting to hear the words there on your laptop, as if you know a secret that has yet to be whispered to the world.

A few days later, the McCain campaign put out an ad showing Obama waving to the throngs in Berlin, a picture of Paris Hilton popping up on the screen, and a voice saying, “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?” It seemed childish and a little insulting to compare a man who had been a U.S. senator, a constitutional law professor, and the first African American to lead the Harvard Law Review to a vapid celebrity. But it turned what we accomplished on the trip inside out. Whereas I had envisioned Obama in the continuum with Kennedy and Reagan, the ad used his very success abroad to delegitimize him. It was impossible to imagine a similar ad being run against a white senator from Illinois.

But as much as she became a punch line, Palin’s ascendance broke a seal on a Pandora’s box: The innuendo and conspiracy theories that existed in forwarded emails and fringe right-wing websites now had a mainstream voice, and for the next eight years the trend would only grow. We had shown that Obama could fill the role of leader of the free world, and his success had only made a whole slice of the country that much angrier.

“Jobs have disappeared, and people’s life savings have been put at risk. Millions of families face foreclosure, and millions more have seen their home values plummet,” I wrote, addressing topics far afield from my foreign policy background. “So let’s be clear: What we’ve seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed.”

I had thought the Iraq War would be the inheritance that shaped an Obama presidency. I was wrong.

Our administration was filled with many of the people who we had run against. Larry Summers would be Obama’s top economic advisor. Bob Gates, the secretary of defense through Bush’s surge, was asked to stay on at the Pentagon. Hillary Clinton was named secretary of state. For each hire, I could see the rationale—in a time of crisis, bring in the most experienced people; in a potential second Great Depression, have continuity in national security; in a city where you’re an outsider, keep your political adversaries close. But cumulatively, it felt like a punch in the gut. To those of us who worked on the campaign, it made us feel as if our searing criticisms of the establishment may have been just politics after all.

That first day, as I walked in, I couldn’t quite believe that I was allowed to be there.

I walked into my office and took in the quiet of the place. It had the feel of an underground bunker. The ceiling was dropped down low. (I would later learn that that was because it was underneath the Oval Office, and the wires that provided the encryption for the president’s communications needed extra space.) An old wooden desk had two computers on it—one for unclassified information, and one marked Top Secret. I hung my coat on a hanger in the small closet, feeling, in some new way, grown up.

The overwhelming impression I got was of the smallness of the place. There are a few dozen people who work in the West Wing. You realize quickly that there are no other people who occupy some position of higher authority. It’s just you.

Past the conference room, there is a larger staff cabin with a couple of four-tops and a workspace where two enormous old computers are bolted to a table. When I turned one on for the first time, it coughed and moaned and took a while to boot; when it finally did come to, the emergency remarks that George W. Bush delivered when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 were still on the desktop—a reminder that we are all temporary employees and have to respond to whatever cards the world deals us.

Our first stop was in London for the G20—a gathering of the leaders of the world’s largest economies—who were meeting to coordinate a response to the financial crisis. The awkward fact for us is that we were asking other countries to spend money to stimulate the global economy in order to fix a crisis that the United States created.

Obama knew that he had leaned hard on other countries to follow our lead, so he expressed some humility in his closing press conference when he was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism. “I believe,” he said, “in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” It was a quote that would be used for the next eight years to cast Obama as less than sufficiently adamant in his belief in America’s primacy among nations.

It seemed that we were squandering his popularity to address the circumstances we’d inherited instead of being able to invest it in the new initiatives we envisioned. Obama echoed this frustration when I saw him the first night in France. “I’m spending all of my political capital,” he said, “just to keep things going.”

I walked back to my seat and typed up some language that set up the point Obama wanted to make, running through a list of areas where Turkey needed to improve its human rights record and ending with “I say this as the president of a country that not very long ago made it hard for somebody who looks like me to vote, much less be president of the United States. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries.” The references to America’s own historical sins—to people like Obama and me—reflected a positive, patriotic, and progressive view of American history; the capacity for self-correction is what makes us exceptional.

In addition to working to stabilize the global economy, increase commitments to the Afghan war, and put forward an agenda to roll back the threat of nuclear weapons, Obama had told a different story about what America was and how we would engage other nations and peoples. But on-the-fly decisions we had made about the words Obama spoke inflamed the spreading attacks and innuendo, from Fox News to the halls of Congress: Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, he’s not patriotic, he’s not like Us, he might even be Muslim. I had become the coauthor of “Obama’s Apology Tour.”