The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

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  THAT NIGHT, OBAMA LOOKED relieved to be over the hump of the speech as he joined the staff in a local restaurant for drinks with the traveling press. He ordered a martini and seemed at ease amid a cluster of people all straining to hear the casual conversation he was making at one end of the table. I was seated next to Maureen Dowd, a columnist from The New York Times whom I’d read for years. I was excited, a little nervous. “Who are you?” she asked. “The speechwriter,” I said. She gave me a level stare and then complained that she wasn’t seated next to someone more important.

  Even as the coverage of the trip was glowing, there was a trickle of columns that were somewhat critical of the Berlin speech, lamenting that it didn’t lay out a clear enough foreign policy vision, that it was a missed opportunity. I got some emails suggesting that the main reason for this was that I hadn’t shared the speech with enough people. “People are never going to say anything nice about a speech that they didn’t work on,” one person said to me. It foreshadowed a problem we’d confront going forward—we were winning without the people who were the arbiters of opinion in Washington, people who were going to withhold a measure of praise so long as they weren’t occupying the constellation of positions around Obama.

  In an insurgent campaign, you go through every day with a chip on your shoulder. As we reached new heights, I only seemed to find reasons for the chip on my shoulder to grow—nursing small slights and remembering who opposed us; navigating new surroundings and craving acceptance from people who were more established, even as I was the one drawing closer to a future president. We had defeated Clinton, were about to defeat McCain, but we had done so by challenging the assumptions of the same establishment that we were about to join—the media that would cover us, the Congress that would have to pass laws, the commentators who would sit in judgment of us after the voters.

  On the flight home, Obama loosened his tie and came and put his arm around each of us, a look of satisfied exhaustion on his face. “We got that done,” he said. “Now we can go win an election.” A few days later, the McCain campaign put out an ad showing Obama waving to the throngs in Berlin, a picture of Paris Hilton popping up on the screen, and a voice saying, “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?” It seemed childish and a little insulting to compare a man who had been a U.S. senator, a constitutional law professor, and the first African American to lead the Harvard Law Review to a vapid celebrity. But it turned what we accomplished on the trip inside out. Whereas I had envisioned Obama in the continuum with Kennedy and Reagan, the ad used his very success abroad to delegitimize him. It was impossible to imagine a similar ad being run against a white senator from Illinois.

  The effort to delegitimize Obama would get its first messenger when Sarah Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate a few weeks later. I learned of the announcement when I woke up the morning after Obama delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Who is that? I thought, staring at the television screen. But as much as she became a punch line, Palin’s ascendance broke a seal on a Pandora’s box: The innuendo and conspiracy theories that existed in forwarded emails and fringe right-wing websites now had a mainstream voice, and for the next eight years the trend would only grow. We had shown that Obama could fill the role of leader of the free world, and his success had only made a whole slice of the country that much angrier.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE PRESIDENT IS ON BOARD THE AIRCRAFT

  On September 15, 2008, the lofty promise that characterized much of Obama’s campaign was met by a harsh reality that both ensured Obama’s victory in the election and imposed limits on his upcoming presidency. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, triggering fears of a catastrophic recession, and John McCain uttered one of those phrases from which presidential candidates never recover: “The fundamentals of the economy,” he said, “are strong.”

  That night, I joined a conference call with Obama and a group of his advisors, sitting in an office with my BlackBerry on speakerphone, typing up what was said in case it would be useful for remarks the next day. Things had changed a lot since March, when I’d written a speech that attacked the deregulation that took place under Bill Clinton. Now one of the architects of that policy—Larry Summers—was speaking at length about what we needed to say to calm the markets. At the end of the call, Obama asked me to take the policies from the March speech and drop them into a new speech that he would give the following day in Colorado. “Make it the final verdict on a certain approach,” he said, referring to the mix of trickle-down economics and deregulation that had dominated American political discourse since Reagan. “But make sure you run the language by these guys first.”

  It was a good time to start smoking again. I had quit for most of my twenties, but as the pressure of the campaign built, I found myself standing in the plaza outside our office building in an ever-growing circle of people falling back on bad habits. That night, I was down there every hour or so. A group of economic advisors who had picked up food for the night passed by on their way back to work. Brian Deese, a brilliant young guy with the beard of an indie rock lead singer, who would end up helping to design the plan that saved the American auto industry, stopped to talk. “The Japanese markets are opening,” he said, “so pretty soon we’ll know whether or not the entire global economy is going to fall into a great depression.”

  “What are the odds of that?” I asked, hanging on to my cigarette.

  “I’d say a little less than fifty percent,” he said.

  I finished the speech at home, sending a few paragraphs at a time to a team of economic advisors who did shifts through the night to vet my language for accuracy and market anxieties. “Jobs have disappeared, and people’s life savings have been put at risk. Millions of families face foreclosure, and millions more have seen their home values plummet,” I wrote, addressing topics far afield from my foreign policy background. “So let’s be clear: What we’ve seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed.” Here I was, in my tiny studio, sitting on a mattress pushed against the wall, laptop open on my knees, wondering what kind of world we would be taking leadership of after November. I was already going into debt because of the two rents I was paying, and now the value of my mutual fund was about to be cut in half. I had thought the Iraq War would be the inheritance that shaped an Obama presidency. I was wrong.

  Meanwhile, a group of us were asked to fill out the forms necessary to get an interim security clearance so that we could access classified information as soon as the election was over. On page after page, I had to list every place I had lived, who I had worked for, everyone I had lived with, every drug I’d taken, every foreign contact I’d had, everything of potential suspicion that I’d done for ten years—a process that is not easy for a thirty-year-old closer to a life of part-time work, shared apartments, and partying than my middle-aged counterparts, decades into respectability.

  The night before Election Day, as people were making plans for the parties they’d be attending, I got a call from Cassandra Butts, an old friend of Obama’s who was helping to run the transition. She told me my interim clearance had been denied because of past marijuana use. I could still get a clearance, she assured me—the FBI would just have to do a full investigation of my background first.

  This uncertainty hung over me on Election Day, the first time in eighteen months that I had nothing to do. As soon as the polls closed, Obama was declared the victor, and a group of staff was herded into vans that would take us the short drive to Grant Park. It was our first entry into an eight-year bubble. Tens of thousands of people filled the park, but we were in an area up front, near the stage, guarded by Secret Service and police, where they’d set up tents for different clusters of VIP politicians, celebrities, campaign donors, and staff. I found myself hugging people I barely k
new, being introduced to people who’d barely been involved in the campaign, posing for pictures with Democratic senators, and gravitating toward the core of young staffers who’d been together since before Iowa. And then there they were: Barack, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama, striding onto a stage in front of many thousands, our first black First Family—instantly recognizable, but seemingly further removed by their own new status.

  When the speech was over, the Obamas made the rounds to each of the tents, surrounded by Secret Service, offering versions of the same thank-you message. Obama passed by me in one crowded tent, leaning forward to take a picture. “Now it’s time to get to work,” he said in my ear before moving on to the next tent.

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  AFTER THE HIGH OF the election, my lack of a clearance shadowed me like an asterisk. Every day, I’d go to work in the transition office—a government building in downtown D.C. where the lobby was thronged with people I’d never seen before, seeking jobs—and I’d be reminded of my diminished status because of documents I couldn’t read, meetings I couldn’t attend, rooms I couldn’t enter. I took a job as deputy director of White House speechwriting; if I was kept out of national security, I could write more speeches about financial regulation. Finally, a few weeks later, Butts called me up to her office. The background investigation was completed, and I would get my clearance. She smiled, a soft-spoken, genial African American woman with close-cropped hair. “You’re not the only one who had a problem,” she said, “but you’re the first fish who has made it upstream.” Late in our administration, Cassandra Butts died two years after she was nominated to serve as ambassador to the Bahamas, her nomination held up by a Republican senator, Tom Cotton, because she was friends with Barack Obama.

  Our administration was filled with many of the people who we had run against. Larry Summers would be Obama’s top economic advisor. Bob Gates, the secretary of defense through Bush’s surge, was asked to stay on at the Pentagon. Hillary Clinton was named secretary of state. For each hire, I could see the rationale—in a time of crisis, bring in the most experienced people; in a potential second Great Depression, have continuity in national security; in a city where you’re an outsider, keep your political adversaries close. But cumulatively, it felt like a punch in the gut. To those of us who worked on the campaign, it made us feel as if our searing criticisms of the establishment may have been just politics after all.

  I soon found myself in the awkward position of being Obama’s representative to the team preparing Hillary Clinton for her confirmation hearings. I wrote her a memo summarizing our foreign policy, some of which had been framed as an argument against her. The first time we met, I was told to come to Whitehaven—the shorthand name for her house in Washington, which was the name of the street where she lived. When I arrived, she was flanked by many of the people who had been senior aides on her campaign. But she was unfailingly polite, complimenting my memo, putting me at ease, and earnestly soliciting my views throughout a session in which she prepared for her congressional hearing. “What would the president-elect think about this, Ben?” she would ask me. Still, I had the sense that the real meeting would take place after I left.

  Our speechwriting team spent those days working on the inaugural address, occasionally recapturing the camaraderie of the campaign in group writing sessions that went on for hours. But we also had the strange experience of watching Jon Favreau become a celebrity. Newspapers reported on who he was dating or the apartment he bought. I was uncertain about my place. I knew the president personally and had a job and now a clearance. But I was below the cutoff line of senior staff and celebrity that had picked up people like Gibbs, McDonough, and Favreau like a sudden gust of wind. Did I need to choose between national security and speechwriting? Who was going to tell me what to do? How long was I going to do this, anyway? I missed the campaign.

  Inauguration Day only deepened my unease. My parents came down from New York and were more excited than I was. My father had grown up in the segregated South and attended Robert E. Lee High School in Baytown, Texas—a refinery town where his own father spent a lifetime working for Exxon. There, he liked to say, he was taught Texas history, Southern history, American history, and world history, in that order. His vote for Obama marked the first time during my life that he had supported a Democrat for president. He had gone door to door, with bad knees, in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Texas, trying to explain to people like himself why they should vote for a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. He poured himself into the campaign as if it was a form of personal redemption, an unspoken acknowledgment that he’d been an unwitting beneficiary of an unjust system. The only two times I cried during the campaign were when I called him—the day Obama was nominated, and the day before he was elected.

  To my parents, Obama brought together the twin threads of the civil rights movement and the Kennedy brothers that formed the heroic narrative of their youth. They met in Washington in the 1960s—my father was a young, tall, blond, conservative attorney who worked in Lyndon Johnson’s Department of Justice; my mother was a young, dark-haired, liberal staffer at the newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development. She had been friends with people who were close to Andrew Goodman, a civil rights worker who was killed in Mississippi. Even though my father was a Republican, he and my mother spoke about “Jack” and “Bobby” as if they were departed family. When they came to Washington for Obama’s inauguration, they revisited the Georgetown neighborhood where they’d fallen in love, going to bars where John F. Kennedy had taken Jackie. My father would call me to keep me abreast of their movements, speaking excitedly about the opportunity to see “Barack” get sworn in as the forty-fourth president.

  I had six tickets—two for my parents, two for me and Ann, and two for Ann’s sister and her boyfriend. They were for the “purple zone”—a standing room area one ring out from the good seats. It was bitterly cold. As the hours passed, we never moved forward to a place where we could even be close to seeing the ceremony. There were frightening moments when bodies surged forward and pressed together. My parents asked if there was another way through, but I had no answers. When people passed out, it got worse because the ambulances that inched through the crowd only packed us in tighter. As I stood there, helpless, I felt a profound embarrassment as I saw a creeping disappointment on the faces of my family.

  We ended up backing out of the scrum and going to Ann’s office to watch the speech. Senator Barbara Boxer gave my parents their one sense of special access when she briefly appeared on her way to the inauguration platform. “Welcome, welcome,” she said. “We have cookies and coffee. We are so proud of Ann and Ben!”

  We stood there clutching paper coffee cups, still bundled against the cold, and watched on a small television set in the office. I sensed a conspiracy among my guests to conceal their disappointment at missing the historic moment that they had traveled to see. My father awkwardly patted me on the back a couple of times, saying, “He looks great.” My mother insisted, over and over, that it was better to watch inside, where it was warm.

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  THE NEXT DAY, I reported for the first of 2,920 days of work at the White House. I had two formal jobs—one as the deputy director of White House speechwriting, and one as the senior director for speechwriting for the National Security Council. Because the bureaucracy that processed my employment is not accustomed to this, I also got two offices. One was in the cavernous Eisenhower Executive Office Building, with a door that was opened by a code that you spun out on a dial like an old-fashioned safe. The EEOB, as it was called, is located across from the White House and houses the vast majority of the White House staff in a grand setting with wood-paneled offices, winding staircases, and frescoed ceilings. My other office was in the West Wing of the White House on the ground floor, just down the hallway from the Situation Room. That first day, as I walked in, I couldn’t quite
believe that I was allowed to be there.

  To get to my office, I had to walk through Favreau’s. It seemed strange to see him in a suit—on the campaign, we wore T-shirts to work. He told me, excitedly, that you could call the White House mess and order a coffee to go, and they’d give it to you in a cup with the presidential seal. I walked into my office and took in the quiet of the place. It had the feel of an underground bunker. The ceiling was dropped down low. (I would later learn that that was because it was underneath the Oval Office, and the wires that provided the encryption for the president’s communications needed extra space.) An old wooden desk had two computers on it—one for unclassified information, and one marked Top Secret. I hung my coat on a hanger in the small closet, feeling, in some new way, grown up.

  My blue White House staff badge gave me access to the entire complex. I kept expecting to get stopped by one of the uniformed Secret Service agents or Marines who stand or sit at a series of different checkpoints, but instead, I was allowed to wander. I walked down the colonnade next to the Rose Garden, where I’d seen old photographs of Jack and Bobby Kennedy huddled, arms crossed. I lingered on the ground floor of the White House itself, my movements followed by the eyes of official portraits of former First Ladies. I went into rooms that were featured in movies depicting the lives of fictional presidents: the Map Room, with old military maps that showed the movements of our troops into Europe during World War II; the China Room, where I stared at Mary Lincoln’s selection of plates. I walked by the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and the Roosevelt Room, the three places where a president spends most of his days. The overwhelming impression I got was of the smallness of the place. There are a few dozen people who work in the West Wing. You realize quickly that there are no other people who occupy some position of higher authority. It’s just you.