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

by Ben Rhodes

The destruction of any objective truth over those previous nineteen months was one of the strangest aspects of my experience. Toward the end of 2013, a reporter who was deeply sourced in Libya reached out to me. He was writing a long reconstruction of the events in Benghazi, including documenting the ebb and flow of the crowd, the way in which a large, angry mob ultimately turned into a smaller group of heavily armed men waging a military-style assault. People he’d spoken to—people who had been there in Benghazi that night—said that some people had gone to the American facility out of anger over the video. To protest, to loot, to kill—it depended upon whom you asked. “You’re not in Washington,” I said. “If I went out and said that it was actually because of the video, they’d burn me in effigy.”