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

by Ben Rhodes

“What do you want to say about Mandela?” I asked. He looked up at me. “What about him?” “You haven’t seen?” I said. I suddenly felt unequal to the task of telling him this news. “He’s passed. Zuma is making a statement.” The fact of reporting that Jacob Zuma, the South African president, was making a statement seemed insignificant, the type of detail that would occur to a White House communications official already calculating how long Obama’s statement would come after Zuma’s, how soon his words would appear in the obituaries—the quotable line, the voice for the rest of us. Behind me, a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., sat on a pedestal; in the adjacent room, a large framed photograph showed Mandela seated on a chaise, hand reaching up to greet a younger Barack Obama, who sat before me as the first black president of the United States of America, a nation that—like South Africa—had suffered under an apartheid system and its aftermath.