by Ben Rhodes
To some on the left, there was a mirror image—an expectation that Obama would be hostile to America’s national security state. Yes, he harbored a deeper concern about overreach—how our policies affect people in places like Indonesia; the casual manner in which, from Vietnam to Iraq, we failed to consider the consequences of our actions; the dangers of unchecked executive power. But Obama believed in a competent, stabilizing force: the necessity of taking military action against certain terrorist networks, the benefits of globalization in lifting people out of poverty, the indispensability of the United States to international order. He wanted to redirect the ocean liner of American foreign policy, not sink it.
And to many in government, the president’s worldview doesn’t really matter. Every agency has its own interests, which don’t change with the presidency. The military wants more freedom of action. The State Department wants to sustain existing relationships and arrangements. The intelligence community wants more capabilities. Everyone wants more—more money, more people, more support from the White House. Usually, a president presses his agenda through the leadership of these institutions. Yet Obama took office without an established set of relationships with the type of people who take those jobs, because he had been in Washington for a total of only four years. Most of the people who filled the top positions at Obama’s State Department or Pentagon were people he had never actually met.
In Obama’s first year, I was in a smaller circle of White House aides who knew Obama, had internalized his worldview, and had no personal or institutional interest beyond helping him articulate his foreign policy. Because he was spending most of his time trying to rescue the economy, he turned to speeches as a vehicle to reorient American foreign policy, to communicate a new direction not just to the American people and audiences abroad but to his own government. And because of how much he cared about words—and trusted me—I often got an uncurtained window into his thinking, one that made me a bridge between his speeches and his actions.
This became clear to me with two speeches in May. For weeks, Obama had made a series of decisions about national security issues related to the rule of law. His plan for closing Gitmo had been complicated by congressional opposition; he decided to release the Bush administration memos justifying torture but not to prosecute those responsible; he chose not to release photos showing U.S. troops abusing prisoners abroad. But the ad hoc nature of these decisions grated on him, as he felt there was no context to these announcements we were making, no guiding vision. So there was talk of him giving a big speech laying out his approach to all of these issues. His personal assistant, Katie Johnson, called me up to the Oval Office with a simple “POTUS wants to see you.”
When I got there, he had a legal pad in front of him with what looked like a lengthy outline on it. “Here’s what I want to say,” he said.
“Do you want me to get anyone else?” I asked.
“Why don’t I just give this to you—you can fill in the others.”
With that, he proceeded to pace slowly around the Oval Office for nearly an hour, pausing every so often over the pad on his desk, dictating his outline. Within it he had embedded a series of policy decisions and how he wanted them framed—about how to categorize detainees at Gitmo, about how to balance transparency and secrecy in government. When he was finished, he told me to scrub it with the rest of the staff and get him a draft in a few days. And so I had the awkward responsibility—as, essentially, a midlevel staffer—of calling a meeting the following day with the senior White House staff so that I could tell them what the president wanted to do.
As I was working on this speech, it became clear to me how agencies form their own antibodies against a president’s desire to move in a particular direction. A practice of having the intelligence community review speech drafts had been put in place after George W. Bush overhyped Saddam Hussein’s efforts to acquire nuclear material in his 2003 State of the Union address. Now Obama wanted to assert that tactics like waterboarding amounted to torture; the intelligence community struck that formulation, preferring the more antiseptic “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Obama wanted to call Gitmo a danger to American national security; the intelligence community wanted to strike that. Obama wanted to say that the 240 Muslim detainees in Gitmo had spent years “in a legal black hole”—a relatively noncontroversial statement, since no one at Gitmo had been convicted of a crime; the intelligence community wanted to delete that sentence as well, offering instead this justification: “The detainees at Guantanamo have more legal representation and have been afforded more process than any enemy combatants in the history of the world.”
Sitting in my windowless office and reading those comments, I felt the gap between working on a campaign and working in the White House. The person I was working for was president of the United States, and a figure uniquely revered by people around the world; but his views did not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.
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ON A LATE SATURDAY morning after the speech, I was back in the Oval Office to get Obama’s initial thoughts on another speech that he was going to give two weeks later in Cairo. The fact that he was giving it at all was rooted in a relatively obscure line in the first major campaign speech I’d drafted for him almost two years ago. Sifting through a list of proposals submitted by different advisors, I’d found the idea of “addressing the Muslim world during my first hundred days in office.” In August 2007, it had seemed a distant enough idea, and one that captured Obama’s potential to change America’s image abroad. Over time, it took on a life of its own among Muslim populations, who had high expectations for an American president named Barack Hussein Obama with Muslim relatives. As we took office, it was referred to inside the White House as simply “the Muslim speech.”
After the inauguration, there was some debate about whether the speech should be given at all—there was enough to do without having Obama fly somewhere to speak to a global faith community that most Americans viewed with suspicion. But the anticipation around the speech, from Muslims and the media, raised the cost of walking away from the idea, and we ended up presenting Obama with two choices for where he could deliver the speech: Jakarta, the place where he had lived as a boy, which offered a venue for him to talk about a more tolerant brand of Islam; or Cairo, which was the center of a region that had been the source of so much extremism and instability in recent decades. Jakarta was the safer choice, far from the wars, conflicts, and autocrats of the Middle East. And that’s precisely why Obama chose Cairo. “Let’s be honest,” he told a group of us. “The problems are in the Arab world, not Indonesia.”
In the weeks leading up to our Oval Office session, I cast a wide net for what to include, reaching out to academics, religious leaders, and prominent Muslim Americans. Within the government, even as bureaucracies can be rigid, there are deep reservoirs of talent, and the people who spent their days thinking about how to engage Muslims around the world seemed relieved at the chance to have their ideas heard at the White House. Much of the advice focused on what the United States had done wrong. The “Global War on Terrorism” had made many Muslims think that all we cared about was terrorism, and that we viewed them all as potential terrorists. As one Muslim colleague said to me, the phrase “radical Islam” is heard by many Muslims as a characterization of Islam itself and not of a faction within it. Meanwhile, the polling that had been done showed that what most Muslims actually cared about was poverty, corruption, and unemployment. If you asked them what they wanted to work with America on, the answers were education and entrepreneurship, science and technology. If you asked them what U.S. policy was focused on, they said oil, Israel, and weakening the Muslim world.
“We should begin,” Obama said on that Saturday, “with the history of colonialism.” He asked me to come alone to these sessions, but this time I brought McDonough along. There was going to be a lot that Obama wanted to
say, I knew, that might be unpopular with other advisors. I wanted a witness so I wouldn’t be fighting these battles by myself. “We need to name the sources of tension.” He was walking slowly in a circle around where I was sitting on the couch, scribbling down what he was saying on my notepad. “Then go to the Cold War, and how there was a tendency to see the Middle East as peripheral to the world’s concerns, and that has to change.”
He wanted to describe a new framework for how we could cooperate with the Muslim world. “The West,” he said, “has to reeducate itself about Islam and the contributions that it has made to the world, and Islam has to recognize the contributions that the West has made to articulate certain principles that are universal.” He ticked through Islam’s contributions to art, science, and mathematics when “we were a backwater”—including himself in what would have been, at the time, Europe. Then, “we need to talk about the contributions that America has made.” The goal, he said, could be shorthanded as “We have to know each other better.” He talked about how religious absolutism ultimately fails as a means of governing, just as imperialism does. He stopped walking when he landed on some language that he wanted to use in the speech: “Any world order that elevates one group of people over another will fail.” He sat down in the chair facing us. “Then I want to talk about how I benefited from experience in both worlds.”
“Some of the language about how you’ve had Muslims in your family and learned to appreciate Islam in Indonesia?” I asked.
“Some of that,” he said. “I’d say I appreciate the differences, but I’ve also learned that there are things that all people aspire to. More opportunity for their children. Family. Faith. These things we share.” He summed up what would be the wind-up portion of the speech, and then a transition to more difficult issues. “We can’t ignore the basis for tensions; those are genuine. We won’t ignore them or brush them under the rug. We need to face them squarely.”
Sometimes Obama has a way of talking that feels as though he’s trying out ideas—testing whether they sound right spoken out loud, wanting people to argue with him. Other times he has a clear sense of what he wants to say, formulated in his mind while he sat in meetings, watched ESPN, played cards, worked out, or lay awake at night. This felt like one of those moments.
He ticked through a list of issues he wanted to address. The need to wipe out terrorist networks without compromising our values. Iraq, and our plans to draw down our troops. Israel and Palestine. The pursuit of a nuclear agreement with Iran. Then we went into the social issues—democracy, opportunity, gender equality. Each of these questions, he said, deals with “how we interact with Islamic countries, and how modernity interacts with Islam.” Occasionally my eyes would drift to the family photos behind the Oval Office desk, and beyond that—out the windows—to the playground set he’d installed for his daughters. In the Rose Garden, his mother-in-law sat on a small bench talking to a visiting friend.
He said we had to find a way to reach Muslims who “didn’t think it was such a great thing to have a McDonald’s down the street and American pop culture on their television.” All people, he said, want to maintain their identity in the modern world. “We should acknowledge that not everything we see is positive—there’s a mindless violence, a crude sexuality, a lack of reverence for life, a glorification of materialism.” That said, he wanted to make several statements of belief in human progress—that countries succeed when they are tolerant of different religious beliefs; that governments that give voice to their people and respect the rule of law are more stable and satisfying; and that countries where women are empowered are more successful. “When I was a kid in Indonesia,” he said, “I remember seeing girls swimming outside all the time. No one covered their hair. That was before the Saudis started building madrassas.” This was a theme he’d come back to again and again. He told a story about how his mother once worked in Pakistan. She was riding on an elevator. Her hair was uncovered and her ankles were showing. Yet even though she was older, “this guy in the elevator with her couldn’t stand to be in that type of space with a woman who was uncovered. By the time the door opened he was sweating.” He paused for effect. “When men are that repressed, they do some crazy shit.”
When he was done, we talked through a few issues. One was democracy. I pointed out that the challenge wasn’t just the sensitivity of addressing the issue in a repressive country; it was the fact that if there was ever a real election in Egypt, the Islamist party—the Muslim Brotherhood—would probably win. America tended to express support for the type of democratic activists who would get only a small percentage of the vote, and it made us less credible. Obama paused on this, then offered a formulation: The United States should welcome the legitimacy of all political movements, even those we disagree with, but we will also judge any political movement by whether they choose to act and govern in a way that is consistent with democratic principles. Little did we know how that position would be tested at the height of the Arab Spring.
I spent several days working on the speech, often hiding out in my second—unused—office in the EEOB where nobody could find me—sanding down harder-edged points, filling out the policy sections with inputs from the rest of the government. I worked with a devout Muslim on the White House staff, Rashad Hussain, to sprinkle in references from the Koran. To personalize it as much as I could, I ended up lifting, almost verbatim, a line from the culmination of Dreams from My Father describing Obama’s thoughts as he sought a connection with his absent father in Kenya, which spoke to a search for something universal in people no matter where they came from or what they believed: “It’s a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the heart of billions. It’s a faith in other people, and it’s what brought me here today.”
Given the high profile of the speech, we also tried to nudge forward different policies. A few weeks before the speech, Obama had written a secret letter to the Supreme Leader of Iran indicating an openness to dialogue on the nuclear program. In response, we’d received a secret letter back—a long and obstinate recitation of the perceived crimes of the United States, particularly the U.S. role in a coup that overthrew the Iranian government in the 1950s and installed the repressive shah. The letter indicated that relations between nations had to be approached with “courage, rectitude, and resolve.”
Since letters weren’t going to set a new tone, in the speech we tried to set a new tone for dialogue with Iran by acknowledging the past—thinking it necessary to name the difficult history in order to move beyond it: “In the middle of the Cold War,” Obama would say, “the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians. This history is well known. Rather than remain trapped in the past, I have made it clear to Iran’s leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward.” To send a message to those watching carefully in Iran, we inserted the Supreme Leader’s own words, turning them back at him: “It will be hard to overcome decades of mistrust, but we will proceed with courage, rectitude, and resolve.”
The most heavily scrutinized section was about Israel and the Palestinians—an issue that also drew on the varied aspects of Obama’s background. On the one hand, he had deep roots in the Chicago Jewish community, which has been historically close to Israel; on the other hand, he had empathy for the Palestinian predicament (during a campaign debate prep, he snapped at me when I suggested going easy on Israeli settlements—“If we can’t criticize settlements, then we might as well go home”). In Israel, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu had just been elected prime minister, and his government—along with its supporters in Washington—were expressing concerns that Obama would use the speech to lay out a peace plan. White House advisors like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Tom Donilon, who was deputy national security advisor, shared those concerns. T
he speech should not be seen as about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they said, because that would validate the view that all the problems in the Middle East were rooted in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.
The caricature of Rahm is that he swore all the time, and he did. But a lot of the time he seemed to do it to live up to his caricature (“the secretary of fucking agriculture”) rather than to put people down. More than being profane, he was constantly in motion: The first time he called me with edits to a speech, he was swimming. He was avowedly pro-Israel and pro-peace, and he kept a careful eye on the politics of Israel. He argued that it was going to be hard—if not impossible—for a center-left government in the United States to make peace with a center-right government in Israel. But he felt that trying was important. When he got tired of hearing me argue that Obama had to show empathy to the Palestinians, he started calling me Hamas. “Hamas over here,” he’d say, “is going to make it impossible for my kid to have his fucking bar mitzvah in Israel.”
Rather than put forward a peace plan, Obama accepted a recommendation to call for a halt to Israeli settlements that were encroaching further into the land necessary for a Palestinian state. Rahm and Axe were occasionally smeared as “self-hating Jews” for any pressure we put on Israel, but instead of pushing back on the smear, we usually responded by reciting all the ways in which we were supporting Israel. In Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other organizations friendly to Netanyahu had established themselves as the adjudicators of what was pro-Israel, and they had zero tolerance for any pressure on the Israeli government, and enormous influence with Congress. Most Americans, of course, also felt a natural affinity for Israel.
