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

by Ben Rhodes

The embassy in New Delhi tries to help U.S. businesses get into the Indian market. The USAID mission in Nairobi meets with the Kenyan Ministry of Health to help the fight against HIV/AIDS. A scholarship student from Indonesia boards a plane bound for an American university. The U.S. military conducts a joint exercise with the South Koreans to deter North Korea. Our intelligence community shares information about a terrorist plot with Europeans. A Special Operator leaves a Baghdad trailer at dawn to capture or kill a terrorist. A taxpayer-funded F-16 fighter aircraft is delivered to the Egyptian military. These actions take place on their own momentum—rooted in a vast complex of deployments, alliances, international agreements, and budget decisions that could have been made a month, a year, or decades ago. This reality contributes to occasional schizophrenia, because our foreign policy represents a particular view of U.S. interests at the time that particular decisions were made.

And so our Treasury Department enforces an embargo on trade with Cuba that was established in the 1960s even as USAID tries to deliver phones and printers to dissidents there that would be more readily available without an embargo. Our troops fight a war on terrorism in Afghanistan in the early 2000s against jihadists who in the 1980s were armed by the United States and praised as frontline fighters in the war on Communism. Our diplomats try to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement while our foreign assistance finances the Israeli military that enforces the occupation of an increasing amount of Palestinian land.

Barack Obama came to office with a different worldview from those of his predecessors and the type of (largely white male) people who serve in elevated national security positions—one that encompasses the complexities of U.S. foreign policy. He was born in Hawaii, a former U.S. colony that hosts America’s Pacific fleet, nurtures a diverse citizenry, and serves as a bridge between the Americanized Pacific and East Asia. His grandfather served in Europe during World War II, and his great-uncle helped liberate the concentration camp at Buchenwald. He lived in Indonesia as a child, just years after a U.S.-supported coup initiated bloodletting that killed hundreds of thousands of people—the kind of event that barely registers in the United States but shapes the psyche of a foreign country.

And, of course, Obama became centered in his own identity as an African American, joining a continuum of those who had suffered oppression but managed to achieve change through nonviolent mobilization. So just about every aspect of American power and its role in people’s lives since World War II lurks somewhere in Obama’s background—our capacity to keep the peace abroad and to disrupt it; our capacity to transform individual lives through both our generosity and our callousness; the allure of our democratic values and our imperfection in realizing them.

But the experience of Obama’s own family showed that liberation without mature institutions is its own form of oppression, as corruption and tribalism can overwhelm the individual. Yes, Obama believes in the liberation of peoples, but he is at his core an institutionalist, someone who believes progress is more sustainable if it is husbanded by laws, institutions, and—if need be—force.

As I was working on this speech, it became clear to me how agencies form their own antibodies against a president’s desire to move in a particular direction. A practice of having the intelligence community review speech drafts had been put in place after George W. Bush overhyped Saddam Hussein’s efforts to acquire nuclear material in his 2003 State of the Union address. Now Obama wanted to assert that tactics like waterboarding amounted to torture; the intelligence community struck that formulation, preferring the more antiseptic “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Obama wanted to call Gitmo a danger to American national security; the intelligence community wanted to strike that. Obama wanted to say that the 240 Muslim detainees in Gitmo had spent years “in a legal black hole”—a relatively noncontroversial statement, since no one at Gitmo had been convicted of a crime; the intelligence community wanted to delete that sentence as well, offering instead this justification: “The detainees at Guantanamo have more legal representation and have been afforded more process than any enemy combatants in the history of the world.”

Sitting in my windowless office and reading those comments, I felt the gap between working on a campaign and working in the White House. The person I was working for was president of the United States, and a figure uniquely revered by people around the world; but his views did not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.

After the inauguration, there was some debate about whether the speech should be given at all—there was enough to do without having Obama fly somewhere to speak to a global faith community that most Americans viewed with suspicion. But the anticipation around the speech, from Muslims and the media, raised the cost of walking away from the idea, and we ended up presenting Obama with two choices for where he could deliver the speech: Jakarta, the place where he had lived as a boy, which offered a venue for him to talk about a more tolerant brand of Islam; or Cairo, which was the center of a region that had been the source of so much extremism and instability in recent decades. Jakarta was the safer choice, far from the wars, conflicts, and autocrats of the Middle East. And that’s precisely why Obama chose Cairo. “Let’s be honest,” he told a group of us. “The problems are in the Arab world, not Indonesia.”

Within the government, even as bureaucracies can be rigid, there are deep reservoirs of talent, and the people who spent their days thinking about how to engage Muslims around the world seemed relieved at the chance to have their ideas heard at the White House.

The “Global War on Terrorism” had made many Muslims think that all we cared about was terrorism, and that we viewed them all as potential terrorists. As one Muslim colleague said to me, the phrase “radical Islam” is heard by many Muslims as a characterization of Islam itself and not of a faction within it. Meanwhile, the polling that had been done showed that what most Muslims actually cared about was poverty, corruption, and unemployment. If you asked them what they wanted to work with America on, the answers were education and entrepreneurship, science and technology. If you asked them what U.S. policy was focused on, they said oil, Israel, and weakening the Muslim world.

He stopped walking when he landed on some language that he wanted to use in the speech: “Any world order that elevates one group of people over another will fail.” He sat down in the chair facing us. “Then I want to talk about how I benefited from experience in both worlds.” “Some of the language about how you’ve had Muslims in your family and learned to appreciate Islam in Indonesia?” I asked. “Some of that,” he said. “I’d say I appreciate the differences, but I’ve also learned that there are things that all people aspire to. More opportunity for their children. Family. Faith. These things we share.”

“We can’t ignore the basis for tensions; those are genuine. We won’t ignore them or brush them under the rug. We need to face them squarely.”

He said we had to find a way to reach Muslims who “didn’t think it was such a great thing to have a McDonald’s down the street and American pop culture on their television.” All people, he said, want to maintain their identity in the modern world. “We should acknowledge that not everything we see is positive—there’s a mindless violence, a crude sexuality, a lack of reverence for life, a glorification of materialism.” That said, he wanted to make several statements of belief in human progress—that countries succeed when they are tolerant of different religious beliefs; that governments that give voice to their people and respect the rule of law are more stable and satisfying; and that countries where women are empowered are more successful.

“When I was a kid in Indonesia,” he said, “I remember seeing girls swimming outside all the time. No one covered their hair. That was before the Saudis started building madrassas.” This was a theme he’d come back to again and again. He told a story about how his mother once worked in Pakistan. She was riding on an elevator. Her hair was uncovered and her ankles were showing. Yet even though she was older, “this guy in the elevator with her couldn’t stand to be in that type of space with a woman who was uncovered. By the time the door opened he was sweating.” He paused for effect. “When men are that repressed, they do some crazy shit.”

Obama paused on this, then offered a formulation: The United States should welcome the legitimacy of all political movements, even those we disagree with, but we will also judge any political movement by whether they choose to act and govern in a way that is consistent with democratic principles. Little did we know how that position would be tested at the height of the Arab Spring.

Touring the Pyramids that day, though, I knew that it wasn’t the kind of speech that could be measured against the state of the world at any one particular moment. It expressed what Obama believed and where he wanted to go, the world that should be. In writing the speech, and over the course of the trip, we’d seen the forces aligned against that outcome: the contradictions of American foreign policy; the corruption of Saudi Arabia; the repression in Egypt; the extremist forces lurking just out of sight; the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Years later, after Obama left office, I ran into a Palestinian-born woman whom I knew casually. She said she’d never forgotten the Cairo speech, which she connected to the initial protests of the Arab Spring. I said that that was assigning too much responsibility to a speech. “It wasn’t the speech,” she said. “It was him. The young people saw him, a black man as president of America, someone who looked like them. And they thought, why not me?”

In painstaking detail, he worked to establish a few baselines: al Qaeda and the Taliban were allied but distinct—the former a terrorist group trying to attack the United States, the latter a domestic political actor inside Afghanistan; the Taliban could not be defeated so long as it had political support in Afghanistan and a safe haven in Pakistan; Pakistan would not abandon its support for groups like the Taliban so long as their primary concern was having proxies against neighboring India. It was clear he wanted to focus on defeating al Qaeda, not on remaking Afghanistan. That, in turn, would mean fewer troops for a shorter period of time.

Brennan was a career CIA guy who appeared to do nothing but work. He once had a hip replacement and came to the office the next day. His experience in the Middle East made him skeptical that the United States could shape events inside the countries there, even as he was adamant about the need to take out terrorist networks. He spoke sparingly, but with a precision and gravitas that made you stop and listen closely. He used to complain when people used the word “fulsome” as a synonym for “robust,” because it actually is a synonym for “noxious”—he’d look at me whenever the word was used incorrectly in a meeting, an eyebrow slightly raised.

“Why is this whole thing being framed around whether I have any balls?” Obama asked a small group of us in the Oval. He had begun to call us up there every now and then to recap what had gone on in the meetings downstairs. “I think it’s clear I care about Afghanistan, because I’m spending all this time trying to get it right.” We nodded in agreement.

“This is going to cost a lot of money and a lot of lives,” Obama said, kicking off one of the final Situation Room meetings. “Am I going to see kids who had their legs blown off at Walter Reed and Bethesda in eight years?” The room was quiet. He held up the chart showing the forty thousand troops sent into Afghanistan and staying there, a line that hit a plateau, a line that represented lives forever changed. “You keep giving me the same option,” he said. “I can’t sell this. It will be six years until we’re essentially back to where we are now.” Speaking as the only one who had to think about everything the U.S. government has to do around the world, he said, “A six-to-eight-year war at over fifty billion dollars a year is not in the national interest. The Petraeus surge [in Iraq] was much quicker than that. This has to be a surge like that.”

Brennan gave the best summary of what we ended up doing. He noted that we’d have to sustain our ability to go after al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and train Afghan Security Forces, all of which required more troops for some time. But he noted that it would take “at least a generation” to transform Afghanistan, and that we needed to stick to more modest goals.

“The American people are idealists,” he said, “but their leaders have to be realistic and hard-headed.” At the beginning and end of the speech, he wanted to draw upon American idealism—Roosevelt’s belief that we “carry special burdens” in the world. In between, he wanted to acknowledge that in disorderly places there is a limit to what we can achieve.

The American public was exhausted by nearly a decade of war. In a way, we’d failed him by making him spend so much time on this review. He’d reshaped what had come to him and turned it into something that he felt was necessary, something worthy of sacrifice, something with limits. But I could still sense his unease at sending young people to die.

He gave the speech on December 1 at West Point. I stood backstage with him as rows and rows of uniformed soldiers awaited his words. Some of them would end up dying as a result of the decision Obama was announcing. Before going out, Obama fidgeted a bit backstage, waiting as a large clock ticked down to the moment when he would stride out onto the stage to deliver the address. “They’re so young,” he said.

A WEEK AFTER ESCALATING the war in Afghanistan, Obama flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. To help him prepare the remarks he’d give at the ceremony, Obama had asked Jon Favreau and me to give him a selection of speeches and essays about war—John F. Kennedy speaking about the nature of peace and calling for a nuclear test ban treaty; Churchill, Roosevelt, and Lincoln at war; Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Obama had turned the entire speech into an effort to deal with the tension of getting the award right after he had decided to send thirty thousand troops to fight in a war. Samantha’s memo, together with the Afghan review, had stirred something inside him. I started to circulate the draft, which was dotted with quotes from Niebuhr; meditations on the meaning of war; and personal language reconciling his current position with his political heritage: “As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed of the lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”

While Obama met with Karzai, I smoked and made small talk with some of the guys who formed McChrystal’s inner circle. Like so many of the troops I met in government, they represented the ethos of a post-9/11 generation that had been asked to bear so many more responsibilities than the rest of the American people, while being given complex missions in challenging places. They were smart, tough, and mission-oriented, without the luxury of questioning the mission.

I’d wake up between six and seven. Each morning, an appointed White House “media monitor” would send a list of news stories to a large group of staff, anything having to do with Obama or, to a smaller list, national security. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the wires (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, AFP), then Politico, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the congressional dailies (The Hill, Roll Call), an assortment of right-wing media (Fox News, the New York Post, The Daily Caller, Breitbart), transcripts from the various television morning shows, longer magazine pieces, and—in later years—notable tweets. This is how I got my news for ten years—by scrolling through my BlackBerry, reading different versions of the same story, looking for a shift in the narrative about Obama or our foreign policy, for what might raise an international issue that was escaping attention, for what lines of attack Republican critics were repeating in ways that might signal a new, coordinated effort—to keep Gitmo open, to bomb somebody, to portray Obama as un-American. I could tell they were getting traction if I also got emails from reporters, cutting and pasting a quote from a Republican critic and asking if I had a response. This was Washington presenting a constant choice: Ignore something and let it stand, or feed it oxygen by hitting back.

I’d shower and shave listening to NPR, the calmest minutes of my day, and head out the door around eight, walking to the bus stop on Connecticut Avenue. I’d stand on the bus for the ten-minute ride, scanning the last of the clips on my BlackBerry and seeing what emails from my colleagues might set the tone for the day. I’d get off the bus at Seventeenth and I, where armies of lawyers and lobbyists made their way to soulless eight-story office buildings, and walk south among a dwindling group of people making their way to the White House.

Entering the West Wing, I’d grab a coffee from the White House Mess carryout window and be trailed back to my office by a “briefer,” someone from the intelligence community who would sit across my desk and walk me through the President’s Daily Briefing (PDB). In those days before we switched to iPads, the PDB was a mahogany leather binder with the seal of the president on it. The first few items—referred to as “articles”—were one- or two-page summaries of key topics or developments that would also go to Obama. Usually, they dealt with whatever bad thing around the world merited his attention: terrorism, a worrisome trend in the Middle East, a new development with China or Russia. I was always struck by the exclusion of large global trends—climate, governance, food, health—in favor of an intricate level of detail about terrorist plots. After 9/11, the intelligence community was going to let any president know anything it knew about a potential plot, even if there was little he could do about it.

The briefer watched me as I read the material while offering additional color. These people had been up all night. They would meet in the early morning hours with the analysts who drafted the PDB articles to get additional context so they’d be ready for queries from people like me. I always felt compelled to ask questions, even when I didn’t have any, because they worked so hard to be prepared. In addition to the PDB articles, they’d include a packet of intelligence reports—a tiny sample of the enormous volume of information collected by the U.S. government—that were relevant to topics that were a focus for the White House. They called this “traffic.”

Foreign trips were my favorite part of the job. You got to immerse yourself in a different place for a period of time—its politics, how it fit into U.S. foreign policy, what its people cared about. Strange things happened—in Russia, I came back to my room from the staff office to find a cleaning woman standing next to the bed and three men in suits going through my things; they put everything down and walked out without a word. You saw the impact Obama had on certain audiences—in Ghana, it seemed every television channel was playing a documentary about his life, and the radio was filled with people singing his name—“Barack Obama, you are our Obama.” Speeches that he gave abroad got little attention at home but would be carefully consumed in the places where he gave them for years.

THAT NOVEMBER, AS WE WERE preparing to go to Asia, an enormous electoral wave gave the Republican Party control of the House of Representatives—a stinging repudiation of a two-year period in which Obama saved the global economy, passed a $1 trillion stimulus, reformed financial regulations, and passed healthcare legislation. We expected to lose, but not as badly as we did; our people had stayed home, and Palin’s had turned out. In the days after the election, I had come into the Oval Office and caught the tail end of conversations in which Obama was calling a member of Congress who’d lost the election because of their healthcare vote, thanking them for making a difference.

I felt the same frustration he did at the venal politics at home. But I was also upset at him. I’d spent months planning a trip that would appeal to each of these countries—India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan—countries that accounted for a billion and a half people, with distinctive governments, interests, and populations. India, the home of his hero, Gandhi; Indonesia, his home as a boy. Often, I felt as though I cared more about the global progressive icon Barack Obama than Barack Obama did.

As soon as Air Force One took off, I felt a sense of relief. We’d been through two years of the campaign, then two years in the White House. We’d proved to ourselves that we belonged, suffered a drubbing in the midterms, and then bounced back—ramming the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the ratification of the New START treaty through Congress. Gay people could now serve openly in the military, and the United States and Russia would be pointing fewer nuclear weapons at each other. We had learned that a White House on its back foot can still accomplish more than just about any other institution in the world.

In the days that followed, every television in the West Wing showed silent images of protest—young men running in the streets; masses gathering in Tahrir Square; people the same age as me chanting together and then being dispersed by the same security forces who had guarded our motorcade route in Cairo. Meanwhile, Hillary had insisted the Egyptian government was stable. Biden said in an interview that no, Mubarak wasn’t a dictator. We issued mild calls for the government to show restraint in suppressing the protests. We were, it seemed, a step and a half behind the people in the streets, implicitly siding with a dictator in the country where Obama had talked about how democracy was compatible with Islam and the Arab world.

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.

To those of us who were pushing for change, it was clear that the cabinet-level principals were not. Time and again, Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Mike Mullen would put forward the Egyptian government’s view—that the protests would die down; that things could be channeled into a “national dialogue”; that our policy should aim to revert to the status quo. This approach was being pushed hard by the Gulf States, chiefly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who feared this kind of unrest coming to their capitals.

On January 29, Obama got a call from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who complained that our statements were too forward-leaning. In a sign of how closely our words were being watched, he took exception to statements Gibbs had made in his briefings supporting the protesters. He dismissed the people in the street as nothing more than the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbollah, al Qaeda, and Hamas. This was their view of who was protesting in Egypt: terrorists. But that is not what the rest of us could see with our own eyes. The protesters weren’t just Islamists, they were secular activists, young people, Coptic Christians.

In one meeting, where there was broad agreement at a senior level that we should invite the leaders of key Arab countries to Washington as soon as possible to reassure them of our support, I couldn’t contain myself. “Maybe if we’re going to have all the corrupt autocrats over, we could think about actually inviting some of these young people, too…for balance.” The people at the table sat there grimly; the young people on the back bench loved it. I was inspired by the moment; I was also making enemies.

Mubarak announced that he would not seek another term as president. But he was combative in pledging to serve out his existing term, warning of a choice between “chaos and stability” and pledging to die on Egyptian soil. When the speech was over, Obama spoke. “That’s not going to cut it,” he said. “Those people are not going to go home.” He effectively ended the debate by saying that he was going to call Mubarak and tell him that it was his judgment that he needed to step down. The call was set up for an hour later.

“I want to share my honest assessment about what I think will accomplish your goals,” Obama told Mubarak. A few of us stood there, scattered across the office, farther away from the desk than normal, as if we didn’t want to crowd him. Obama cradled the phone against his ear while a speaker played for the benefit of the others in the room. A translator turned Obama’s words into Arabic, creating pregnant pauses and giving Mubarak extra time to digest the words, since he spoke English quite well. “I say this with the greatest respect,” Obama continued. “I’m extraordinarily proud of my friendship with you. It is my belief that if the transition process drags out for several months and you continue in your office, that the protests will continue. It will make [the situation] harder to control, and I think your role and the role of the Army will be made much more difficult. I think now is the time to present Egypt to its next government. I think now it is time for you to move in a timely fashion in not allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to take advantage of the situation.”

“Mr. President,” he said, leaning forward, elbow on his desk, “I always respect my elders. You’ve been in politics for a very long time. There are moments in history—just because things have been the same way in the past doesn’t mean they will be the same way in the future.” When he hung up, Obama looked at us and shrugged, as if to signal that he didn’t think he’d gotten through. It was the last time they spoke.

During the call, there had been some churn about the statement. The key line read, “It is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.” After the draft was circulated, calls and emails were lobbed in to Donilon and McDonough to take out the line altogether, with Gates and Clinton insisting that we at least take out “it must begin now.” As Obama was about to walk out to deliver his remarks, I asked him what he wanted to do. “Leave it in,” he said. The following day, when Gibbs was asked what Obama had meant by “now,” he replied: “Now started yesterday.”

There were other voices of caution. Brennan had spent much of his career working on issues related to the Middle East. Unlike some of the other principals, he knew Mubarak couldn’t weather the storm. But he warned that Egypt wasn’t ready for democracy, that the population had no experience of a politics that wasn’t zero-sum. The same Saturday, as I was working to clarify Wisner’s statement in the press, Brennan gave me a note: “It is a truism to say that there is a far greater unity among the masses in Egypt on what and who they want to see gone than there is on what and who they want in its/their place.”

I was increasingly frustrated. The president I worked for had taken a bold step to embrace a social movement that was demanding change, and yet the ambivalence within his administration was going to ensure that he was seen as behind the curve. Meanwhile, I heard that the ambassadors from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two of the most powerful envoys in Washington, were telling people in the press and the foreign policy establishment that Obama had been badly advised by younger people like me who were more interested in preserving Obama’s brand than listening to the wise hands who understood that democracy couldn’t work in the Middle East. It was the beginning of a multiyear effort by those two countries to restore a dictatorship in Egypt, and it would ultimately succeed.

“You know,” he said, “one of the things that made it easier for me is that I didn’t really know Mubarak.” He mentioned that George H. W. Bush had called Mubarak at the height of the protests to express his support. “But it’s not just Bush. The Clintons, Gates, Biden—they’ve known Mubarak for decades.” I thought of Biden’s perennial line: All foreign policy is an extension of personal relationships. “If it had been King Abdullah,” Obama said, referring to the young Jordanian monarch with whom he’d struck up a friendship, “I don’t know if I could have done the same thing.”

Most people in government didn’t want to do anything. The military made it clear that Libya wasn’t a priority—they had two wars to deal with and little desire for a third. A no-fly zone wasn’t just a talking point, it was a complex undertaking that involved eliminating all of Gaddafi’s air defenses and patrolling the skies over Libya indefinitely. Others in the White House wondered why, with the economy foremost on the minds of Americans, the Arab Spring consumed so much of Obama’s time. No one had voted for Obama so that he’d do something about Libya. When the U.S. government wants to avoid doing something, it avoids producing the options to do something. And so as the days went by, no option for a no-fly zone made its way to Obama, even though it was being debated across Washington and other capitals around the world.

Samantha—who lived with the permanent tagline “Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of ‘A Problem from Hell’: America in the Age of Genocide”—passed me a note saying that this was going to be the first mass atrocity that took place on our watch. I looked at the names of towns and cities written on the map in front of me, most of which I was unfamiliar with just a few weeks ago. And here we were, debating whether the people in those places would live or die. I looked at Obama, leaning back in his chair and holding the piece of paper, eyeing the same map, the same places.