The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  None of that mattered to us. The office was filled with young people who spent all day staring at their laptops, communicating by Instant Messenger even when we were sitting next to each other. We spent our days acting as though we were in on a secret that nobody else knew—we were going to win the election, and the more people said we wouldn’t, the more certain we were that we would. The campaign leadership sat in glass offices with open doors. The leader among equals was unmistakably David Plouffe, a short, intense forty-year-old man who spoke in staccato phrases and never showed any nerves. While the rest of us were looking at polls, he’d call all-staff meetings, with all the state offices dialing in by phone, and rattle off the number of caucusgoers that the campaign had reached in Iowa: the phone calls made, the number of doors knocked. In Iowa, he said, “we’re going to drive a stake through the heart of the Clinton campaign.”

  Every few weekends, we were required to drive to Iowa and knock on doors. Most nights we’d go out to bars where no one knew who we were and no one but us talked about politics. We had all made this bet to work for the underdog campaign, so there was something essential that we shared, the belief that we were doing something both historic and right. It was unspoken that if you ever needed anything—a place for a visiting friend to stay, help with what you were working on, a person to talk to about something bothering you—someone would be there for you. We were down by 20 points in national polls. It was the happiest time of my professional life.

  CHAPTER 3

  A COMMUNITY OF FATE

  A couple of hours before Barack Obama was set to address a crowd of two hundred thousand people in Berlin, I learned that our speech was going to echo Adolf Hitler.

  The core contrasts with Clinton that we’d drawn in the summer of 2007 had been folded into a broader story—change you can believe in—that propelled us through a bruising primary campaign. Obama, the argument went, was different from the establishment that Clinton represented, and could therefore be trusted to bring change. The campaign had built like a wave, picking up people who aren’t normally involved in politics, or who’d stopped believing that politics mattered. Now, at the onset of a general election campaign against John McCain, we were going to take that message around the world.

  The Berlin speech was the heart of an audacious trip for a presidential candidate—a trip that would take Obama to Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Usually, the goal of any foreign policy effort on a general election campaign is to do no harm and check certain boxes—appealing to ethnic constituencies in key states; reassuring military base communities and veterans; and showing voters that you are, in some intangible way, tough enough to be commander in chief.

  But the ethos of the Obama campaign was to do more than simply clear a bar, an ethos shaped by an African American candidate who lived the Jackie Robinson reality that black people had to do things better than white people to reach new heights. That’s how we clinched the nomination—building a coalition of African Americans and young people, weathering a scandal about the inflammatory comments of Obama’s pastor by having Obama give a starkly personal speech about race, and outmaneuvering the Clinton campaign by competing in every part of the country. Now, we set out to prove that Obama could handle visits to two war zones, negotiate the minefields of Middle East peace, and be welcomed in the capitals of Europe. The itinerary encapsulated our campaign’s foreign policy message: After eight years of George W. Bush, we had to wind down the wars, reinvigorate diplomacy, and restore America’s standing around the world. But we also clung to our share of defensiveness; a mistake abroad would be devastating in a campaign in which the only advantage for John McCain was experience, and we had internalized a siege mentality in the face of rumors that Obama was a Muslim, a Kenyan, a terrorist sympathizer, or all of the above.

  I would be responsible for the words he spoke in public, and the Berlin speech was the center of my existence for a couple of weeks. As a thirty-year-old who had never written a speech delivered outside the United States, this was like being asked to ride your first race as a jockey on the favorite horse at the Kentucky Derby. It was, after all, Berlin. Kennedy: Ich bin ein Berliner! Reagan: Tear down this wall! The two most iconic speeches delivered by American presidents abroad both took place in Berlin. I read each of them dozens of times. I’d listen to recordings of them in my apartment late at night. I wanted, more than anything else, to help put Barack Obama in that continuum, to write words that someone like me might someday read. And to the campaign staff, this was precisely the objective—to put Obama visually in that continuum.

  The one person who didn’t seem enthusiastic about giving a speech in Berlin was Obama. When Favreau and I talked to him about it, he didn’t offer much beyond suggesting we use Berlin’s story to talk about what we were proposing in our own foreign policy. Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected a request from the campaign for the speech to take place at the Brandenburg Gate, where Reagan had called on Gorbachev to tear down the wall, saying that the venue should be reserved for an actual president. When he learned about this, Obama was embarrassed and annoyed. “I never said I wanted to give a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate,” he snapped. It spoke to a larger dynamic in the campaign: While Obama was often blamed for the cult of personality growing up around him—arty posters, celebrity anthems, and lavish settings for his events—he was rarely responsible for it, and worried that we were raising expectations too high in a world that has a way of resisting change.

  Before he left for Afghanistan, he read a draft of the speech and told us he was satisfied with it—“You could put this speech on the teleprompter and I’d be fine,” he said—but I was hoping for more than that. I was hoping for edits that would elevate the speech and make it more than a summation of our worldview. The shift to a foreign audience hadn’t been hard, as Obama’s message about working across races and religions, his preference for diplomacy over war, his embrace of the science of climate change, and his recognition that the world needed to confront issues beyond terrorism were going to be well received in Germany. I kept looking for the phrase or two that might elevate that message, summarizing it in a way that could convey the same sense of common mission that Kennedy and Reagan had evoked.

  On the flight from Israel to Berlin, the morning that he would give the speech, I told him that the venue we’d settled on—in front of the Victory Column at the end of a long boulevard—would allow him to speak to tens of thousands of people. “What if nobody shows up?” he asked, not kidding. When we landed in Berlin, it was clear that this was not going to be a problem. Crowds greeted our motorcade. Hundreds of people pressed against the barricades outside our hotel—cheering, holding signs, taking pictures, straining for a glimpse of Obama.

  I had taken a step onto a much bigger canvas than a Chicago campaign office, one that had the immediacy of history. Here I was, thirty years old, traveling with a presidential candidate from Israel to Germany. My mother’s family was Jewish, with roots in Poland and Germany. Those who didn’t emigrate to the United States were killed in the Holocaust. They didn’t leave, my mother always said, because they thought they were more German than Jewish. That decision always haunted me, in part because I understood it: I was raised outside the Jewish faith—in my father’s casual churchgoing Episcopalianism—but aware of my Jewish identity, which was most acutely present through the family that I didn’t have.

  I first traveled to Germany when I was twenty years old on a train from Paris, where I was studying abroad. I still had the memory of falling asleep on the train in France and waking up to the sound of the German language being spoken over the loudspeaker, a conductor calling out the names of the next stops. Hearing these incomprehensible sounds evoked the secular New York Jewish education that I had received from my mother: The Holocaust was the central event of the twentieth century; you had family that was killed in the Holocaust; t
he Germans, the most civilized of people, did this. Still, on this trip, and on all the trips to come in the years ahead, there was little space for personal reflection. Instead, my energy—emotional and mental—would be channeled into the work I had to do.

  I walked into my hotel room feeling a strange mix of adrenaline and crushing responsibility. Outside my window, I could see huge crowds massing. My room was full of antique furniture, and Secret Service agents guarded the floor. On my laptop was a Microsoft Word document that held the words that everyone was waiting to hear. There were still a few more hours until the speech. I opened my computer and stared at the text on the screen, which had become so familiar to me that the words seemed drained of meaning. The heart of the speech, an echo of Reagan with a twist of Obama, was the one part I was confident about, so I read it over and over aloud—a ringing affirmation of globalism over crude nationalism: “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

  Favreau had been reading a book about the “candy bombers”—American pilots who, during the Berlin airlift, helped win the hearts and minds of Berliners by air-dropping food, including candy for the children of the city. We used that story to frame the speech, as it seemed like the right anecdote to pay homage to history while conveying an idea central to Obama’s worldview: that American leadership depended on our military but was rooted not just in our strength but also in our goodness. One anecdote from the book stood out: A German woman described it at the time, saying, “We are a community of fate!”

  As a speechwriter, you are always looking for a new way to say something you’ve said before. This phrase echoed our campaign’s message: Yes we can. Our destiny is not written for us, it is written by us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. But now—community of fate. This phrase said it just as well. Favreau and I wrote a big ending, building up to this line—“We are a community of fate!” It was the one thing in the speech that Obama loved the first time he read it. It offered a transition to conclude the speech by saying, in echoes of Kennedy, how that spirit had connected American pilots and a German woman in the street, and connected us still today; that we are all “citizens of Berlin.” It worked so well that we included the single German word that translates to “community of fate” in the text of Obama’s remarks: Schicksalsgemeinschaft.

  Schicksalsgemeinschaft.

  I stared at it on my screen. We would need a phonetic pronunciation, I thought. But something made me uneasy. Could a single word really mean “community of fate”? I Googled it. Paging through the results, I understood nothing except the Google translation, which confirmed the meaning. There were, embedded in dozens of links, a few Nazi references. It was German, after all. I emailed our lead Germany advisor and asked if there was anything to worry about in using that word. He checked with a couple of people and wrote back—all clear. I called Marc Levitt, our advance staffer, who was with the German man translating the speech so it could be posted online. I asked him if he would check about this one word—is there anything I should be worried about? There was a pause on the other end of the line: “He’s relieved you asked,” Marc said. “He says it’s been bothering him all day.”

  He handed the phone to the man, who told me, “This is the title of one of Hitler’s first speeches to the Reichstag.”

  I looked at the word on my screen and then out the window where the new Reichstag stood, a glass monument to transparency and the new German republic. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I didn’t see that on the Internet.”

  “Yes, yes. Maybe not the title, but the Germans will know this.”

  I told Marc I would get back to them with a revised draft. I felt that tightness in my chest—how had I gotten so close to such a huge mistake? Was I not up to this job? I stared at the ending and tried to think of something that could replace it, but I couldn’t. I emailed Reggie Love, Obama’s all-purpose aide, to see if I could come see Obama. He told me they had just finished a workout and I should come by his suite. Not Obama’s—Reggie’s.

  I went up a flight of stairs, showing my Secret Service pin to the agents who guarded the staircase, and found the door to Reggie’s room. Reggie was six feet four and had been a basketball and football player at Duke; he exuded a casual charisma, as though no situation that he found himself in was surprising or could lead him to alter his behavior in any way. He had become a mini-celebrity in his own right, an effect that would extend to other Obama staffers, often with as much baggage as benefits. Obama, wearing a gray shirt and black workout pants, was sitting at a small desk reviewing the speech on a laptop, smoking a Marlboro Red. Reggie was lying on the bed staring at his BlackBerry. The curtains were drawn to shield the room from any external audience. For a moment, I wondered how he could get away with smoking in a hotel room, then it occurred to me: He was a few months away from possibly being president of the United States, he could do whatever he wanted to do.

  “I have some news,” I said. “That line at the end—‘community of fate.’ ” Obama looked up from the screen and nodded at me. “I spoke to the German guy translating the speech. He says that line was in one of Hitler’s first speeches to the Reichstag.”

  There was a pause while I saw Obama process this new information about the key line that was currently on the computer screen in front of him, which was two hours away from being on the teleprompter as he spoke to hundreds of thousands of people. He held up one hand, signaling that he was about to say something important.

  “Reggie,” he said, “we have our employee of the month!” With this he leaned forward in what seemed like a cathartic full-body laugh. “Hitler? Really? ‘Obama echoes Hitler in Berlin speech,’ ” he said, imagining the headline.

  “Not what you’re going for,” Reggie said, without looking up from his BlackBerry.

  “It’s problematic,” I said, volunteering myself as straight man.

  “You think?” Obama said. Instead of being angry, the absurdity of the situation seemed to put him more at ease. “The Reichstag.”

  He reworked the ending himself while I stood there watching over his shoulder. For all my anxiety about this speech, it was only one piece of the much bigger and more surreal experience that he was going through. But my experience of this strange moment, like thousands of others that would accumulate in the years to come, drew me closer to a man who bore a responsibility that I could never fully imagine, but that I was a part of—as a witness and a participant, the guy who sent the speech to the teleprompter, not the guy who delivered it.

  I went downstairs and loaded into a black SUV with Obama, Axe, and Gibbs to make the trip to the speech site. The motorcade snaked through enormous crowds shouting and waving and covering their faces in shock at seeing this person riding in the seat opposite me. “Why are there so many people here?” Obama asked.

  We sat there not knowing what to say. We could tell that Obama was nervous—there was a jerkiness to his usually smooth movements as he intermittently waved or sat back in his seat. How do you put someone at ease who is about to speak to two hundred thousand Germans? They were cheering and pressing against barricades as we drew closer to the stage. Then Axe, who is Jewish, broke the silence. “Boy, the Germans are a lot nicer than my grandparents made them out to be.”

  The car let us out backstage where Obama was briefed by a young advance staffer on what, exactly, he would do. Stand on this piece of masking tape. Wait for this signal. Walk up this flight of stairs. Turn and walk this number of paces. The crowd will be in front of you. Wave. Walk up to the lectern. Prompter screens to the right and left. I went around to get a look at the crowd—an ocean of humanity that went on as far as you could see.

  By the time he jogged up the stairs
, the nervous man I’d seen in the car was gone, replaced by a charismatic leader who moved with ease, smiling, waving casually to the crowd as if it was the most normal place in the world for him to be, standing there in front of people who were ready to love whatever he said. I stood off to the side watching him. As he started into his speech, I realized that the words he spoke would not be as powerful as the image of him, an African American, standing on these stages. This was the gift and the struggle of working for Obama.

  I walked behind the large structure that had been set up to hold the journalists covering the speech so that I wouldn’t have to watch. I was confident in the speech I’d written, but couldn’t bear to watch it delivered. Any extended silence would make me think the audience didn’t like it. Any wind-up to an important point would feel too long. Over the next eight years, I almost never saw a speech that I wrote being delivered to a crowd; instead, I would choose the detached experience of pacing backstage, occasionally glancing at my BlackBerry and reading the initial reactions to the speech as it was being given.

  When you are a speechwriter and the speech that you have written is finished, you go from being the most indispensable member of the staff to being temporarily irrelevant. Afterward, I lingered at the site, and then followed the trail of humanity back to the hotel, people clutching signs and cameras as if they had been to a rock concert. Returning to my room was like going back in time. Everything was still in the same place—the open laptop; cups of coffee; a half-drunk glass of wine; printed-out copies of an almost finished draft—but the anxiety and adrenaline were gone. Taking in this scene, I realized that I was developing an addiction to this life—the moments I craved were not the grand crowd scenes when speeches are delivered, but rather the accumulating pressure that leads up to them; the moments when everyone is waiting to hear the words there on your laptop, as if you know a secret that has yet to be whispered to the world.