This is a book about two people making the most important decisions in the world. One is Barack Obama. The other is Ben Rhodes.
The World As It Is tells the full story of what it means to work alongside a radical leader; of how idealism can confront reality and survive; of how the White House really functions; and of what it is to have a partnership, and ultimately a friendship, with a historic president.
A young writer and Washington outsider, Ben Rhodes was plucked from obscurity aged 29. Chosen for his original perspective and gift with language, his role was to help shape the nation’s hopes and sense of itself. For nearly ten years, Rhodes was at the centre of the Obama Administration – first as a speechwriter, then a policymaker, and finally a multi-purpose aide and close collaborator.
Rhodes puts us in the room at the most tense and poignant moments in recent history: starting every morning with Obama in the Daily Briefing; waiting out the bin Laden raid in the Situation Room; reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran; leading secret negotiations with the Cuban government; confronting the resurgence of nationalism that led to the election of Donald Trump.
This is the most vivid portrayal yet of Obama’s presidency. It is an essential record of the last decade. But it also shows us what it means to hold the pen, and to write the words that change our world.
From 2009 to 2017, Ben Rhodes served as Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama overseeing the Administration’s national security communications, speechwriting, public diplomacy and global engagement programming.
Prior to joining the Obama Administration, from 2007–2008 Rhodes was a senior speech-writer and foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign. Before joining then Senator Obama’s campaign, he worked for former Congressman Lee Hamilton from 2002–2007. He was the co-author, with Tom Keen and Lee Hamilton, of Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission.
A native New Yorker, Rhodes has a B.A. from Rice University and an M.F.A. from New York University.
For my parents
“The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.”
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
FOR THE FINAL time in a foreign country as President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama eased into his seat as a Secret Service agent shut the heavy door. “Let’s go home,” he said.
Inside the presidential limousine—known as the Beast—the world outside is silent and kept at a distance by inches of bullet-proof glass and armored metal. There is an eerie familiarity to riding in a motorcade, whether you are in an empty Saudi Arabian desert or a crowded street in Hanoi. The front two seats are always occupied by Secret Service agents who never say a word; while they sit there scanning the road ahead, you learn to talk as if they are not present.
Obama glanced across at me and a light crept into his eyes. “Did you see Ben forgot his socks?” he said to Susan Rice, peeling back a wrapper and popping a piece of Nicorette into his mouth. He laughed in anticipation of his own words. “I mean, come on, man. Your socks!”
Each day that you travel abroad with the president, you place your suitcase outside your hotel room door and someone picks it up at a set time. This was part of the easy rhythm of travel that would soon disappear. I began to explain that when I’d shoved my bag outside my door at three in the morning, I thought I’d set aside a pair …
He waved a hand at me. “I get it. It was a late night. I’m glad you guys had a good time while I was reading my APEC briefing book.”
I looked out the window at one last stretch of crowds. The streets of Lima were littered with onlookers set against a backdrop of rising modern towers and older, more dilapidated buildings. They were watching, waving, and holding up smartphones—one more trickle of humanity among the millions of faces I had seen over the years through the window of a passing motorcade, straining for a glimpse of Barack Obama. Every now and then on these drives, Obama would glance out the window and offer a casual wave and I’d see someone’s face freeze in a shock of recognition. Sometimes I would hold up my phone and take pictures of the crowds taking pictures of us, the only way to feel a connection with a mass of human beings whom I would never, could never, really know.
Normally, Obama would take out his iPad and scroll through the news or rejoin an endless game of Scrabble and ask us how we thought he did in the just-concluded press conference. I sat opposite him, just as I had on trips to dozens of countries over the last eight years. But—after the laughter at my socks faded away—he sat silently, chewing his Nicorette and staring out the window. This was the final trip, and despite the familiar rhythms, nothing about it felt normal. The whole world seemed to be passing us by.
I glanced across at the presidential seal affixed to the wood paneling next to the seat that Obama occupied—a seat that would be taken by Donald J. Trump in a couple of months.
AT OUR FIRST stop, in Athens, we had planned to give a speech celebrating the resilience of democracy in its birthplace, with the Acropolis as the backdrop. As we’d sketched it out, we’d foreseen a defiant challenge to Russia and its revanchist leader, Vladimir Putin. Somehow, that setting no longer felt equal to America’s moment. It was two weeks after the election of Donald Trump. We moved the speech indoors to an auditorium that could have been anyplace.
We ended up touring the Acropolis instead, on a pristine, warm morning. From its perch up on a hill, the world was lovely and calm—in the clear blue sky and sweeping view of Athens, there was no hint of the financial crisis gripping Greece, the flow of refugees crossing its borders, or the uncertainty that those forces had unleashed in the world beyond. 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.”
At our second stop, in Berlin, Angela Merkel asked to see Obama for dinner our first night there. 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.”
The two of them sat alone at a small, simple table in the middle of a hotel conference room. They ate and talked for three hours, the longest time Obama had spent alone with a foreign leader in eight years. A few of us dined with her staff in an adjoining room. The Germans looked stricken; they spoke with unease about the new world coming, and the burdens on Merkel within it. “To the leader of the free world,” I toasted, ruefully. One aide told me that Steve Bannon’s appointment to the White House staff had been front-page news in Germany. “We know Bannon,” he said, leaning toward me as if passing on a secret in confidence. Outside the window you could see the Brandenburg Gate in a gold light, and the Reichstag building, the replacement for the one that was set on fire as Hitler took power.
Later, Obama told us that Merkel had talked to him about her looming decision on whether to seek another term, something that she now felt more obliged to do because of Brexit and Trump. 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.”
At this third and final stop, a summit of Pacific nations in Lima, Obama was pulled aside by leader after leader and asked what to expect from Donald Trump. Ever conscious of the norms of his office, Obama dutifully urged his counterparts to give the new administration a chance. “Wait and see,” he told them. 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.
For the first time in eight years, history felt out of our hands.
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. Abe confirmed his plans to visit Pearl Harbor when Obama would be in Hawaii in December—a gesture of reconciliation that mirrored Obama’s own visit to Hiroshima, and that suddenly seemed out of step with the times.
Obama met with the president of China, Xi Jinping, in a sterile hotel conference room, untouched cups of cooling tea and ice water before us. There was a long review of all the progress made over the last several years. 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.
Toward the end of the meeting, Xi asked about Trump. Again, Obama suggested that the Chinese wait and see what the new administration decided to do in office, but he noted that the president-elect had tapped into real concerns among Americans about the fairness of our economic relationship with China. 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.
On this final day, Obama held his last bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. In a back room at the convention center where the summit was held, the two sat in chairs next to each other with a few of us flanking them on either side. I avoided crossing my legs and instead kept my feet tucked under my backpack to hide my lack of socks. 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.”
Trudeau said that he felt he had to, drawing on the example of his own father, who transcended his role as leader of Canada to become a global statesman. I modeled my campaign on yours, he added, referring to a brand of politics that now felt under threat.
In person, Trudeau’s good looks tend to make him look younger than he is. Watching him, I thought about how much I had aged in my job; Trudeau looked younger than I did. I will fight them, he said, referring to the authoritarian trends in the world, with a smile on my face. That is the only way to win.
When they were done, we walked through the back passageways of the convention center, Obama clutching a Styrofoam cup of tea and waving to the maintenance staff as he made his way to a final foreign press conference. I didn’t feel like watching. Instead, I sat alone on a bench in the fading light of dusk, fumbling through my BlackBerry, ensconced within a security perimeter guarded by men in suits with earpieces who folded their hands in front of them. When the press conference was over, I joined the pack around Obama walking out of the room, passing Trudeau and his team as they moved in the other direction.
ALONG THE STREETS of Lima the crowds still waved as the president of the United States passed by.
“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.”
His comment rested heavily as Susan and I made eye contact. Over the last couple of weeks, Obama was the one who had been putting on the bravest face. The night of the election, after he reminded me that there were more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth, I’d sent him a simple note, trying to cheer him up: “Progress doesn’t move in a straight line.” In private conversations with staff and in public interviews ever since, he’d been repeating a version of it: “History doesn’t move in a straight line,” he’d say, “it zigs and zags.”
What if we were wrong?
Since I went to work for Obama in 2007, the one thing I never lost faith in was the confidence that I was a part of something that was right in some intangible way. Sure, we—the Obama White House—had gotten some things wrong. But the larger project—that was correct. The belief in America becoming a better place. The hope that if we can find strength in containing multitudes, then so can the world.
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.”
He didn’t look up. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or twenty years too early.”
The silence lingered. Over the past eight years, we’d had a thousand conversations that all felt like part of one running thread, talking about books we’d read and foreign leaders who frustrated us, about race and old movie lines, sports and theories of everything. My role in these conversations, and perhaps within his presidency, I had come to see, was to respond to what he said, to talk and fill quiet space—to test out the logic of his own ideas, or to offer a distraction—as he scrolled through his iPad or looked out the window, mind churning.
The motorcade reached the airport and pulled onto the tarmac before a waiting Air Force One. We stopped near the edge of a group of Peruvian and American “greeters” in a long, straight line to bid farewell.
As we waited for the agent to open the door, Obama leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, returning to my comment about young people. “But we’re about to find out just how resilient our institutions are, at home and around the world.”
With that, he stepped out of the Beast and began to work his way down the receiving line. I got out and walked, my bare feet sticking against the worn leather of my shoes, to a spot under the wing of the plane where clusters of people stood, journalists recording the moment for posterity, staff posed for pictures with one another. The scene was entirely familiar to me after flying well over a million miles around the world on this plane, but it was about to disappear forever.
Barack Obama shook the last hand and made his way up the stairs. He always moved with ease, like an athlete playing a basketball game at slightly less than a hundred percent, holding some energy in reserve for the key moments of the fourth quarter. A man constantly in the public eye who hid important parts of himself. Over the last two years, I’d seen him become increasingly comfortable being both himself and the president—in individual moments, singing “Amazing Grace” in a black church that had been targeted by a white supremacist in Charleston; or in policies, ending an approach to Cuba that he had long told me he opposed. This evolution had made him more effective, more interesting, and ultimately more appreciated in these waning days of his time in office. This was one possible and painful answer to the question he had raised in the Beast: We were right, but all that progress depended upon him, and now he was out of time.
For the first time in eight years, there was no trip left to plan. Obama would board the plane as a successful two-term African American president and a vessel for the aspirations of billions of people around the world. But he was about to hand power over to a man who represented every political, economic, and social force that his own identity opposed. One joke that he told in the days after the election expressed his frustration at how this would impact the rest of his life: “I feel like Michael Corleone,” he’d say. “I almost got out.”
I was twenty-nine years old when I went to work for the Obama campaign. From the tarmac in Lima, 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. I’d spent eight years pursuing it in a windowless West Wing office where I could hear rats scurrying in the ceiling above me and could walk into meetings where the fate of nations was discussed. I’d experienced highs I could never have anticipated, such as walking into the Vatican to tell a cardinal we were normalizing relations with Cuba. I’d suffered lows I couldn’t yet understand, being demonized by the same forces that led to the rise of Donald Trump. Most of all, I’d subsumed my own story into the story of Barack Obama—his campaign, his presidency, the place where he was leading us.
Standing there, I struggled to find some feeling within myself that would sum up what it felt like to watch our country represented abroad for the last time by this man—decent and determined, at times reticent, at others bolder than any politician I’d seen. But watching him make his way up the stairs of the plane, all I could conjure up was a flood of disconnected images from trips past: a sea of humanity waiting to hear him speak in Berlin; a greeting party of drummers in the middle of the night in Ghana; millions of smiling people lining all the routes of our motorcade in Vietnam; the unlikely sight of Havana from the window of Air Force One. The sense of excitement that people had, all those people in all those places, all those faces looking back with hope. That is what I’d been looking for when I moved out to Chicago ten years before. And that, I realized, would no longer greet an American president abroad, so it was hard to feel anything other than tired and sad. I could not remember what I was like when the story began, and I had no idea what I—or the world—would be like after it was over.
There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.
Obama reached the top of the stairs, and I thought he might stop for just an extra moment to take it all in, to offer himself some opportunity to mine the kind of thoughts that were racing through my head. But whatever memories were passing through his own head, however he felt about the hundreds of places he’d been as president and the millions of people he’d seen, despite the uncertainty that now awaited, he offered only a routine wave before disappearing through the doorway of the plane and into the journey home.
What if we were wrong?
THE FIRST TIME I met Barack Obama, I didn’t want to say a word.
It was a sleepy May afternoon in 2007, and I was sitting in my windowless office at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a D.C. think tank like dozens of others. I was underemployed and debating moving back home to New York when I got a call from Mark Lippert, who was Obama’s top foreign policy aide in the Senate. Lippert was a young guy, like me, and I had come to expect phone calls from him every few days with random taskings; he was working for the most exciting politician to come along in years, and he clearly enjoyed the fact that anyone would take his call at any time.
“Ben,” he said, “I was wondering if it’s not too much trouble for you to come over and do debate prep with Obama?”
I gripped the phone a little more tightly. For the last few months I’d been doing everything I could to work my way onto the Obama campaign—writing floor statements on Iraq, drafting an op-ed on Ireland (“O’Bama”), editing speeches and debate memos. I had never gotten near the man, and I was starting to wonder if my volunteer work would ever turn into anything else.
“When is it?” I asked.
“It’s right now.”
The session was at a law firm a couple of blocks away, and I walked slowly, gathering my thoughts. Like all the work I’d done for the campaign, this felt like some sort of test, only no grade was issued at the end and no one would tell me if I’d passed. When I got there, I was directed to a set of glass doors that led into a large conference room. I could see at least fifteen people around a long table strewn with binders, stacks of paper, and soda cans. Obama was seated at the head of the table with his feet up. Lippert met me at the door, pulled me outside, and told me they were debating whether Obama should vote for a spending bill in Congress that would fund the so-called surge in Iraq. “I thought, why not call the Iraq guy?” he said.
A few months earlier, I had finished working for the Iraq Study Group, a collection of former officials and foreign policy experts who had been asked to come up with a strategy for the Iraq War. My boss at the time, 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. Throughout our work, in meetings with members of the Bush administration that he’d helped put into power through his efforts on the Florida recount after the 2000 election, Baker’s understanding of the scale of the mess that had been made in Iraq seemed to morph into a kind of paternal disappointment—he’d given the keys to his kids and they’d crashed the car.
For me, the project opened a window into a war that I’d watched unfold with swelling anger. As part of our work, we’d gone to Iraq in the summer of 2006, flying into Baghdad in a cargo plane with a group of servicemembers starting their tour, sitting in silence because the roar of the engine made it too difficult to be heard. I looked closely at the faces of these men and women who would soon be threatened by car bombs and improvised explosive devices, but they betrayed no emotion at all—just blank stares. The plane dropped sharply into Baghdad International Airport, making tight corkscrew turns to avoid antiaircraft fire. We flew in helicopters to the Green Zone. Down below, I could smell burning sewage and see the faces of children looking up at us with vacant expressions.
For several days, we stayed on the embassy compound in small trailers. At night, we went to a bar—the Camel’s Back—where contractors got hammered and danced on tables. There were two beds in each trailer and a shared bathroom. A flak jacket was next to each bed in case of incoming mortar or rocket fire. I had the place to myself except for one night when I came back to find a bearded guy, perfectly fit and totally naked, standing in the bathroom. I noticed some neatly arranged Special Forces gear by his bed. We didn’t say a word to each other. When I woke at dawn, he was gone. Years later, I would become familiar with the work that people like him did as I learned about it thousands of miles away in the basement of the White House.
During our stay, we were driven in armored vehicles to lavish compounds filled with gold-plated furniture and thick curtains left behind by Saddam Hussein. We met with Iraq’s political leaders, American military officers, and a mix of diplomats, journalists, and clerics. We heard about violence between Sunni and Shia sects that was killing Iraqis just beyond the walls of the Green Zone—bodies in sewers, family members assassinated, nightmarish stories of group executions. We’d recap at night in James Baker’s trailer, where he’d drink straight vodka in a tracksuit and just shake his head at how screwed up things were. 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.”
Each night, helicopters brought wounded Americans to a temporary hospital. When we visited, Hamilton spoke to a medic who gave us an overview of the work they did. “My job,” he said, “is to keep these folks alive until we can get them up to surgery.” 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.
Just being there for a few days showed me how the most pivotal moment of my life had led to moral wreckage and strategic disaster. I moved to Washington in the spring of 2002, as the drumbeat for war in Iraq was sounding louder. I moved because I was a New Yorker and 9/11 upended everything I had been thinking about what I was going to do with my life. I had been teaching at a community college during the day, getting a master’s in fiction writing at night, and working on a city council campaign. 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 visited an Army recruiter under the Queensboro Bridge. After leaving with a pile of materials and getting a few follow-up phone calls, I decided that I couldn’t see myself in uniform. Instead, I would move to Washington to write about the events reshaping my world. I had never considered being a speechwriter, and I had never heard of Lee Hamilton, but one reference led to another and soon 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.
Now here I was, a few years later, seeing what that war had wrought. We began writing the Iraq Study Group report by committee, but after a few drafts, Baker’s staff guy called me and asked me to take the lead. 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.
Lippert and I walked into the conference room, and I took a seat near the back end of the table farthest from Obama. From the moment I saw his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, I had wanted him to run for president. He had been against the war when nearly everyone else went along with it. 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.
I was seated next to Tony Lake, who—along with Susan Rice—was leading a network of foreign policy advisors for the campaign. Lake was a soft-spoken older guy with the smart but slightly scattered demeanor of a professor at a small liberal arts college, which he’d been for many years. He’d also been Bill Clinton’s first national security advisor. Rice had also worked for Clinton, becoming the assistant secretary of state for Africa. Since then, she’d been a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy—unabashedly ambitious, well-spoken, and prolific—who risked her relationship with the Clintons to work for Obama. Still, over the last few months, I’d come to suspect that the network led by Lake and Rice was mostly about giving people a way to feel connected to a candidate they were unlikely to ever meet. Most of the work I’d done that actually reached Obama was coordinated by Lippert and another campaign staffer, Denis McDonough. It was Lippert, after all, who had brought me into this room.
David Axelrod was the principal strategist, and as I took my seat he was giving a long description of the political dilemma—Democratic primary voters would want any vote on the Iraq War to be a no, but if Obama voted no, a future Republican general election candidate would say that Obama failed to fund our troops in battle. The ghosts of the 2004 election, when Republicans painted John Kerry as soft on terrorism, lingered in the room. “I’m sure they’re having the same discussion in the Clinton campaign,” Axelrod said.
“Hillary will vote however I vote,” Obama said. I was struck by his confidence; it could have seemed like arrogance, except he was so casual in his tone.
The conversation meandered around the room. Most everyone was neutral—describing the dilemma, as Axelrod did, but offering no clear recommendation. It felt as if the political advisors leaned no but didn’t want to say so. When it got to Susan, she made the case for voting yes. Compact, permanently composed, and the only African American in the room other than Obama, she spoke in sharp, declarative language. “This is about the bullets that go in the weapons that defend our troops,” she said. “This is a commander in chief moment.”
As she spoke, I felt panic welling up inside me. I didn’t want to be called on. At the time, I had a profound fear of public speaking. If a group was familiar to me, I didn’t have a problem. But here, I wouldn’t be able to conceal my nerves. I imagined myself staring blankly, then choking on my words. There, at the head of the table, was Barack Obama. What would he think if I couldn’t get through a paragraph of advice?
To avoid having to speak in front of the group, I figured I’d give Lake my views. I leaned over and began to tell him why I thought Obama should vote no. 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. “Tony,” he called out from the other end of the table. “You have a view you want to share?”
“Why don’t we ask Ben?” Tony said.
“Who’s Ben?” Obama asked.
“He helped write the Iraq Study Group report,” Lippert said.
“Well, what do you think?” Obama looked at me. Nerves in my stomach became tightness in my chest, dryness in my throat. There was no way I could speak in paragraphs. So I had to do something different that would break up my speaking.
“Well,” I said. “You oppose the surge, right?”
“Sure,” Obama said. I took a deep breath.
“And you’ve introduced legislation to draw down our troops in Iraq and impose more conditions on the Iraqis to reconcile, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Obama said.
“And this legislation funds the surge and rejects your plan, right?”
“Yes.”
Obama seemed to be getting irritated, so I got to the point. “Well, why would you vote to fund a policy that you oppose, that you don’t think will resolve the situation in Iraq, and that contradicts the legislation that you’ve introduced? You should vote no.”
The room was quiet for a moment. Obama leaned forward and tapped the table with his hand. “Okay, I think we’ve talked about this enough,” he said. “I’ll make a decision when I go up to the Hill.”
When the meeting ended, people started to break into groups, and Obama got up to leave. After he reached the door, he stopped, turned around, and waded through a few people to come over to me. He extended a hand.
“Hey, I’m Barack,” he said. “Glad you’re with us.”
I muttered something like “Thanks” as he turned away. Lippert asked me to walk with him to the Metro and told me something that he hadn’t shared widely—as a Navy Reservist, he’d been called up to serve in Iraq. He’d be leaving in a little over a month, instead of going to Chicago to work in the campaign office as planned, and he was going to recommend they hire me. “No one out there knows anything about foreign policy,” he said as he descended the escalator.
I stood at the entrance to a Metro station that I’d come in and out of for the last five years. Something had changed in my life, but I had no way of knowing the scale of that change. A couple of hours later, Obama—who valued, more than I knew, advice that draws on common sense to reject convention—walked onto the floor of the Senate. He voted no.
THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN needed more than foreign policy help—they needed a speechwriter, too, and asked me to move out to Chicago at the beginning of August to join a three-person speechwriting team while also being, essentially, the guy who knew something about foreign policy in the Chicago office. After I’d spent the last five years in the buttoned-up world of a D.C. think tank, where people lingered over lunch to talk about postconflict reconstruction, the communications department of an insurgent Democratic primary campaign was a revelation.
I reported to three people. The omnipresent strategist who weighed in on every issue was David Axelrod, a brilliant and disheveled former Chicago journalist known universally as Axe, who would call at all hours of the day to test out ideas—he saw, for instance, an article about how the Bush administration failed to take a shot at an al Qaeda leadership meeting in Pakistan in 2005 and wanted me to use that in an upcoming speech. The communications director was Robert Gibbs, a win-at-all-costs operative from Alabama who, shortly after my move, gave us all a football coach lecture about how the only time we were allowed to take off until the Iowa caucus was Sunday morning to go to church. The chief speechwriter was a charismatic twenty-five-year-old named Jon Favreau, the handsome leader of the under-thirty set on the campaign, who was known only as Favs. (Obama called him Fav, but no one ever corrected him.) When Favreau emailed me in July to tell me that I was going to have to write a “big terrorism speech,” the subject line of the email was “Terror. It’s Not Just for Terrorists Anymore.”
I was hired at a time when foreign policy was increasingly important in the campaign. 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.” Clinton disagreed, and—sensing an opening—later called Obama’s position “irresponsible, and frankly naïve.”
There usually aren’t many differences on policy in a primary, and this one played into the narratives of both campaigns. Obama’s message was that Clinton was too close to Bush because she voted for the Iraq War and couldn’t be trusted to bring change; Clinton’s message was that Obama wasn’t experienced enough to be president. So this question about whether to pursue diplomacy with adversaries was about something bigger—about which criticism was right, and how the United States should conduct foreign policy after the Iraq War. I found myself in the middle of that debate, and I’d stay there for the next decade.
After I was offered the job, I gnawed on one question: How do you write a speech for someone you don’t know? To capture Obama’s voice, I studied his speeches, interview transcripts, and books, which I would end up rereading a dozen times. His first memoir, Dreams from My Father, is a kind of Rosetta Stone to Obama’s life and worldview, and it offered up many eloquent turns of phrase that I would reuse again and again over the next ten years.
The goal for the “big terrorism speech” was to have Obama sound like someone who could be commander in chief, someone who could be a strident critic of the Iraq War and still be able to wage war against the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. This premise had the benefit of being true. One of the things that had drawn me to Obama was a speech he’d given at an antiwar rally in 2002, before the war in Iraq, when the people who knew better were saying it was bad politics and bad policy to oppose the war. “I know,” he said, “that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”
The speech I was writing would bring that argument up to date. Obama would lay out his drawdown plan for Iraq while calling for two additional combat brigades in Afghanistan and a renewed focus on al Qaeda. Beyond that, he would propose a counterterrorism strategy of strengthening other countries to go after terrorists; closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and ending torture; and expanding diplomacy and foreign assistance. It ended up being a remarkably accurate blueprint for what Obama did as president, especially on the two most controversial items: a renewed pledge to pursue diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program, and a promise to go after Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
The staffer who coordinated foreign policy for the campaign was Denis McDonough, an earnest Minnesotan whose extreme politeness concealed a steely ambition that would lead him to consolidate national security decision making on the campaign and on the National Security Council and ultimately become White House chief of staff. That July, bin Laden was back in the news because a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate declared that al Qaeda had regenerated in Pakistan. Like Axe, Denis and I both thought that Obama’s position should include a commitment to go after bin Laden in Pakistan.
Obama’s external foreign policy advisors were wary. Several had already been uncomfortable with the call for diplomacy with Iran without preconditions. The day after the debate, the campaign couldn’t find experts willing to go out and defend Obama’s stance. The consensus in the foreign policy establishment was that Obama had made a blunder, and that was mirrored by a political class in Washington who felt that anything other than reflexive “toughness” on Iran was a losing proposition. Diplomacy, apparently, is “weak”; refusing to engage in diplomacy, by the inverse property, is “tough.” Never mind that Iran was steadily advancing its nuclear program.
While the main office was in Chicago, the Obama campaign also had a small walk-up suite of rooms on Massachusetts Avenue near the Capitol. It was a place for Obama to have meetings and make fundraising calls, and for staff who happened to be in D.C. to get on a laptop. A few days before the speech, a group of policy advisors met there with Obama around a small conference table. As the speechwriter who had been hired by the campaign, I felt I had a new standing as I took my place at the small table with a few of the bigger foreign policy names on the campaign, including Susan Rice, Denis McDonough, Jeh Johnson—a lawyer from New York—and Richard Clarke.
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. “Senator,” Clarke said to Obama, “you have to get the tribes in the FATA to work with you”—referring to the tribal region of Pakistan along the Afghan border.
Others worried about blowback from President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, an American ally. After the external advisors left, Obama walked into another room, where Robert Gibbs was scanning press stories on a laptop screen. No one asked me to leave, so I followed Obama into the other room with Denis, hoping to get more insight into the person I was working for.
“Here’s the man that won the straw poll,” Gibbs said to me. The first speech I’d written for the campaign was for a Planned Parenthood conference, and Obama had won a straw poll of the attendees. “Congratulations, brother.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or making fun of me, a foreign policy guy now writing constituency speeches.
Obama strolled over to read the screen over Gibbs’s shoulder. The two of them had an easy familiarity that came from traveling together for years. “Senator,” I asked, “how do you want to handle bin Laden in the speech?”
“I want to say we’d take him out,” he replied.
“Do you want me to talk about Musharraf?” I asked.
He looked over his shoulder at me. “I don’t care how we say it. I want to make clear that we’ll get bin Laden.”
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?” This, I thought, was someone new, someone different.
Over the next few days I got a flurry of notes on each draft of the speech from a dozen policy advisors. Afraid of bucking people who were more experienced, I’d include their edits, only to get rebuked by Axe, Favreau, and ultimately Obama. Finally, I just started telling people no, Obama wanted to keep it the way it was. It’s something I would keep doing for years.
On August 1, Obama was set to deliver the speech at the Wilson Center. A few minutes before, this forty-five-year-old black man I was going to work for met with me and Lee Hamilton, the seventy-six-year-old white man who’d been my boss for more than five years. Later in the campaign, I’d spend a couple of days driving across southern Indiana with Hamilton as he campaigned for Obama—something he did for no favors, as he ended up turning down an offer to run the CIA. Southern Indiana once had a high concentration of KKK membership, and every audience was old and white. In diners adjacent to town squares, small college meeting rooms, and senior centers, Hamilton would plead for votes to skeptical groups of ten, twenty, and thirty, his voice raised an octave, his accent more folksy. “I know what you’re thinking,” he’d say. “He’s different. He’s young. He’s black.” Then he’d pause. “Well, I’m telling you, this guy is the future. And it’s time for a change.”