by Ben Rhodes
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.
CHAPTER 2
TALK TO IRAN, GET BIN LADEN
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 a
s 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.”
Hamilton and Obama chatted about Hamilton’s latest project—a commission focused on the war powers of the president of the United States. “It’s way too easy for any president to take us to war,” Hamilton told Obama. Then we all took a picture together and Hamilton called me “a fine young man.” I felt as if I was being sent off to summer camp.
* * *
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A FEW DAYS LATER, I moved to Chicago. Until I could find a place to live, I slept on a cot in the guest room of a friend who lived out near Evanston, almost an hour by train.
My girlfriend, Ann, was not happy about the move. Ann and I had been dating for a few years and had recently moved in together. We were an unlikely pair. She was a tall, striking redhead from a big Catholic family in Huntington Beach—the heart of Orange County, California. She worked her way to Washington—from Orange Coast Community College, to UCLA, to the office of her local congresswoman, Loretta Sanchez, who talked her into giving D.C. a try. One of my best friends from high school, David Zetlin-Jones, worked for Loretta in Orange County and set us up. “What’s he like?” Ann asked, open to the idea of a blind date because she knew no one in Washington. “He’s a tall snowboarder,” my friend replied, describing the kind of guys Ann dated.
I’m five foot seven and have never snowboarded in my life. When I asked him about this, he said, “I got you in the door. The rest is up to you.”
Neither of us loved Washington, but we’d built something of a life there. By the time I went to work for Obama, she was a senior foreign policy advisor to the California senator Barbara Boxer. “At least you’ll be back by February fifth,” she said when I told her I was going to take the job in Chicago. That was the date when everyone expected Hillary to clinch the nomination. Ann wanted Obama to win, she just couldn’t see America electing a black man named Barack Obama; he definitely wasn’t going to carry Orange County.
Some of my friends warned me that I was making a mistake—“Richard Holbrooke’s keeping a list of everyone who goes to work for Obama,” one of them said, referring to Clinton’s senior foreign policy advisor, who was presumed to be her lead candidate for secretary of state. Vernon Jordan, who had served on the Iraq Study Group, was slightly more generous. Over lunch at the Metropolitan Club, he said he was glad I was working for Obama. “Barack needs good staff,” he said. “Still, we’re going to whoop his ass.”
Obama’s opponents had pounced on our big terrorism speech. The bin Laden pledge was cast as a call to “invade Pakistan,” and he was pilloried again for being naïve in wanting to talk to Iran. A couple of days later, Obama was asked if he would use nuclear weapons to take out terrorist camps in Pakistan, and he said no. The same people who attacked Obama for saying he’d take out bin Laden in Pakistan now said he was naïve for saying he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons to do it. It all seemed like a stupid game in which sticking to a preapproved script was more important than being right; worse, the script hadn’t changed because of Iraq.
* * *
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MY FIRST NIGHT IN Chicago, I woke up around five in the morning and found several emails related to news that had broken overnight: Musharraf had condemned Obama’s threat to get bin Laden, making headlines. I’d created an international incident. The first email was from Dan Pfeiffer, a generally unflappable strategist who was the campaign’s deputy director of communications, forwarding a news story on Musharraf’s comments to a group that included the senior leadership of the campaign and me, saying, “This may be the worst thing that’s happened to us yet.” I was alone in a city where I barely knew anyone, going into debt because of the pay cut I’d taken, and I thought I’d tanked the campaign. A knot formed in the pit of my stomach and tingled out into my arms, a sense of stress that stayed with me for the next decade. I rode to work that morning certain that I’d be ostracized. When I got to the square black office building where I would spend the next sixteen months, I sat on a bench outside for almost twenty minutes wondering what I was doing with my life. Then I got an email from Favreau asking me where I was.
When I got upstairs, I was promptly put to work drafting an op-ed about Pakistan in Obama’s name—not for The Washington Post, but for the Mason City Globe Gazette. Iowa was what mattered, not Washington. A few days later, whatever doubts I had about our foreign policy fights went away when Obama did what I would see him do hundreds of times—turn defense into offense. Standing on a debate stage at Chicago’s Soldier Field, he brushed off the repeated attacks by saying—in reference to the Iraq War—“I’m not going to be lectured by people who voted for the biggest foreign policy mistake of my generation.”
Like me, Samantha felt a sense of destiny about her work for Obama. She’d volunteered as a fellow in his Senate office, and she continued advising the campaign from Boston while she finished her second book. I would stay at the office late, because I had nowhere else to go, pacing in circles, talking to her. When he was being criticized for his positions on Pakistan and Iran, we wrote a memo that was released to reporters celebrating Obama’s willingness to buck the “conventional thinking” that got us into war in Iraq—a routine campaign document that felt, to us, like a manifesto for a new epoch in American foreign policy. She never lost this enthusiasm—years later, before a meeting with Obama about whether the United States would join the global treaty banning the use of land mines, she sat in her office listening to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” on repeat to get ready. After a conversation with Samantha, I’d go home to my tiny studio apartment, in the kind of building populated by graduate students and service industry workers, thinking that I was part of a movement that would remake the world order.
Still, the campaign was grounded in those summer days by a series of bad narratives: Clinton would win because she was inevitable. Obama would lose because young people never turn out to vote. Clinton was racking up endorsements from the party elite. Obama wouldn’t get black votes because he wasn’t black enough (“I’m black enough when I try to get a cab,” he told us). Clinton passed the commander in chief test. Obama was untested and, well, different.
