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

by Ben Rhodes

This divide was starkly illustrated for me when Obama gave his first statement on Egypt on the twenty-eighth. The protests were now boiling over, and Egypt seemed poised on the precipice between a brutal crackdown and some kind of radical change. The statement I drafted spoke about the universal rights of the protesters and called on the government to respect those rights, refrain from violence, and pursue “a path of political change.” Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough asked me to give a copy to each of the principals. The edits that came back took out almost all of this language. One draft illustrated the resistance to change so starkly that I saved it and kept it in my desk for the next six years: Every word about human rights and the grievances of the protesters was removed—all that remained were the calls on the protesters to be peaceful, and expressions of support for the Egyptian government. Written in the margins was, simply, the word “balance.” Obama ended up using the draft I’d written, largely intact.