by Ben Rhodes
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A WEEK AFTER THE McChrystal report was leaked to the Washington Post, I was formally promoted to deputy national security advisor for strategic communications and speechwriting—an absurdly long title that I would hold until the end of the Obama presidency.
Up to that point, the leadership of the NSC had been split among four people. At the top of the pyramid was Jim Jones, a four-star general and former commandant of the Marine Corps who looked like a tall, square-jawed, handsome actor playing the role of a four-star general and former commandant of the Marine Corps. Jones never quite took to the role of staffer. He tended to float above the NSC like a monarch—serving as an effective envoy with foreign governments and offering advice on issues that interested him. He had a strange habit of giving this advice to Obama while looking at someone else in the room, which sometimes put me in the awkward position of holding eye contact with him while he spoke to the president. He had no problem letting others around him brief Obama, which allowed the deputy national security advisor, Tom Donilon, to carve out an influential role.
Donilon was the kind of guy widely known inside Washington and nearly anonymous outside it. As a young man, he’d been a sharp-elbowed political operative working for Jimmy Carter in the White House. While his brother, Mike, never left the role of political consigliere for Joe Biden, Tom worked hard to make a turn from politics to foreign policy. He spent the Clinton years in State Department roles, and the early 2000s credentialing himself through the types of establishment organizations that function as a farm system for future national security officials: the Aspen Strategy Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council. His closeness to Rahm—together with Jones’s hands-off style—allowed him to take control of the levers of national security decision making: the coordination of different agencies that prepare options and recommendations that go up to the president.
Then there was a bottleneck. After the election, both Mark Lippert and Denis McDonough wanted to come to the White House to be—essentially—Obama’s guy on the NSC. Lippert had served in Iraq until the summer of 2008, and during that time Denis had taken his place as Obama’s lead national security staffer. The two of them were friends—former Hill staffers in their thirties. They shared an office meant for one person, and each kept changes of clothes there to account for endless hours. They were both capable of performing the role of multipurpose aide and gatekeeper—being the decision maker on issues related to Obama’s schedule; controlling the paper flow; working with the White House on communications strategy; helping staff the government; making sure Obama’s personal priorities were addressed. But they both couldn’t keep doing the same job. Ultimately, Lippert would be the one to leave. I liked Lippert, and always thought he missed the days of being Obama’s Senate aide, without all the politics of working in the White House. He had loved serving in the military, and that summer he arranged to have himself redeployed overseas.
As this played out, Denis told me that he was going to take the job of NSC chief of staff, and he wanted to know if I would take his position as deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. I’d have a standing invitation to Deputies Committee and cabinet-level Principals Committee meetings, he said, and NSC meetings with Obama. I would be in charge of communications on national security—preparing Obama for his press conferences and interviews and Robert Gibbs for his press briefings, running a staff of about ten people at the NSC, and coordinating the spokespeople for State, Defense, and other agencies. I would also be in charge of the sprawling ways that the United States reaches foreign publics—from exchange programs to information operations.
I said I needed some time to think it over. I couldn’t imagine saying no, but something made me uneasy. I liked the idea of having more of a voice on policy and more stature in the White House. I didn’t like dealing with the press that much, but was assured (falsely) that that could be delegated. My one demand was to keep writing the major national security speeches. I was also able to hire another national security speechwriter, Terry Szuplat, who proved to be a rock of intelligence and stability for the next seven years.
The source of my unease didn’t become clear to me until I delayed telling Ann about this new opportunity as we were driving back to D.C. from a weekend in New York, shortly before our wedding. I mentioned that Denis had floated the prospect of this job. She went quiet and looked out at the road. “So that’s a deputy national security advisor position?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Her response was neither negative nor enthusiastic. “We’re going to be in Washington for a while, aren’t we?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. But in that moment, I knew what had been churning inside me since Denis first broached the job. I’d made a choice, back in 2007, to go work for Obama to see if I could help get him elected. Since then, I had never really thought about what my job would be other than writing speeches. Now I was being offered the kind of position that carries more responsibility than writing another man’s words; that puts you in charge of other people; that begins to define you to the wider world; and yes, that keeps you in Washington for a while.
“You know we will,” Ann said. “But it’s an unbelievable opportunity.”
I looked out at the passing darkness of southern New Jersey, the exits getting farther apart as we approached Delaware. I’d made the drive to and from New York dozens of times since I’d moved down to D.C. as a twenty-four-year-old who figured I’d be there for a few years and do some interesting things before moving back to fulfill my true calling writing for a magazine or churning out books. My best friends, who I almost never had any time to speak to anymore, all lived there. My brother had just recently welcomed his second son.
Ann and I were about to get married, and this promotion was going to ensure that I wasn’t going to move to New York or anywhere else for the foreseeable future. I wasn’t going to go to happy hours after work, or watch live music, or keep in touch with old friends, or go to movies and read books as they came out, or see a lot of my parents before they got older, or see my nephews grow up. Instead, I was going to be a deputy national security advisor.
Here is how I was officially elevated to this position: I talked to Gibbs, who described how he liked to be prepared for his briefing while checking his fantasy football team on the computer in front of him, concluding with “This will be fun.” Then Axe came down to my office and closed the door. He worried aloud about whether I had the stomach for the day-to-day grind of dealing with the press—“I can see you doing well with the thoughtful people like David Ignatius,” he said, citing the Washington Post columnist, managing in his own unique way to praise and put me down at the same time, but that was it. There were, as far as I could tell, no other candidates, and no one considered that I might say no. Obama told me, in passing, “I want you in the room more,” something he’d tell me more and more over the years until I was in the room all the time.
A few weeks before the change became official, Ann and I were married. We held the ceremony in Los Angeles. Orange County was out of the question for a New Yorker; New York was too expensive and out of the question for a Californian; Washington didn’t feel like home to either of us—it felt like a place where we worked. So we chose a venue in a Los Angeles park, behind the striking Art Deco public library—Southern California enough for Ann and her family, urban enough for me and mine. It was a spectacular spot—the skyscrapers surrounding us, the weather just right. To me, it also suggested that we were people—at that moment—who weren’t really from anywhere; we didn’t live at home, but we also weren’t ready to go back home, wherever that was.
The biggest contingent at our wedding were Obama people—the late twenties and early thirties set, people who’d bonded on the campaign and become something of a family. For one night, we set aside the stress of our jobs and had a party. The deejay p
layed a hip-hop playlist. A conga line danced on the walls of a fountain. I sang George Michael’s “Freedom 90” into the deejay’s microphone standing on a wall. It felt like the period on a stretch of time when we all hadn’t quite been promoted to positions of higher responsibility—before people took over departments of government, joined the cabinet, had kids, got divorced, succeeded in (or failed out of) government, or went off to make money. At the end of the night, Samantha Power was carried dramatically out of the wedding party by her husband. Denis McDonough and his wife flew back to Washington on a red-eye. Favreau stayed up most of the night to draft a speech that Obama would give to a joint session of Congress urging that they pass healthcare reform.
We took only a couple of days off after getting married. Instead, Ann and I delayed our honeymoon by over a year because I had to get back to Washington to prepare for the United Nations General Assembly and the looming Afghan review. After I moved into my new job, the U.S. government installed a communications system in our small two-bedroom apartment. Ann called it the Command Center. It took up a chunk of our living room and occasionally made strange noises during the night as a system of fans turned on to cool the devices. Sometimes it was so loud that it woke us up. When I complained about this to people at work, I learned that these noises were not uncommon—I was just the only person with one of these installations who lived in a small apartment, a place where it could not be stored in a more distant room, out of earshot. I still lived in a young person’s home.
CHAPTER 7
WAR AND A PEACE PRIZE
The Afghan review was one of those dramas that Washington loves while it is happening and then moves on from as soon as it’s over.
The meetings usually ran two to three hours. Obama sat at the head of table, flanked by officials in descending rank order, with others joining by Secure Video Conference, including McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador in Afghanistan. In the early meetings, Obama said he didn’t even want to discuss the “resource request” before we established what was achievable. But it was always the unspoken presence in the room.
Obama wanted to show his government how he went about making decisions, so we needed to understand what was happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan, define our interests, test what resources were necessary, weigh those needs against all of our other priorities at home and around the world, and then make a decision.
Obama wasn’t against sending in more troops, but he wanted to make sure we didn’t define their mission in overly broad terms. He would sit there taking his own notes while different principals talked. Then he would offer his own summation at the end of the meeting. In painstaking detail, he worked to establish a few baselines: al Qaeda and the Taliban were allied but distinct—the former a terrorist group trying to attack the United States, the latter a domestic political actor inside Afghanistan; the Taliban could not be defeated so long as it had political support in Afghanistan and a safe haven in Pakistan; Pakistan would not abandon its support for groups like the Taliban so long as their primary concern was having proxies against neighboring India. It was clear he wanted to focus on defeating al Qaeda, not on remaking Afghanistan. That, in turn, would mean fewer troops for a shorter period of time.
For me, it was a time of transition into a new job where I’d be involved in the closed-door meetings and be responsible for shaping the public view of what was taking place in them. I felt a small thrill at being with such well-known people, sitting in a row of chairs along the back bench of the Situation Room, taking notes. But I rarely spoke, unsure of when to weigh in, deferential to more experienced people who largely saw my role as putting out generic statements that did more to obfuscate our deliberations than illuminate them (“Today, the president and his national security team met to discuss the situation in Afghanistan…”). Meanwhile, people steadily leaked information that all pointed toward Obama’s sending in forty thousand troops, and it felt as though I had little ability to control anything other than the inevitable speech that Obama would give when the three-month review was over.
Early in the process, we made an effort to steer the public debate. Gibbs had me invite a couple of New York Times reporters to the White House to speak to John Brennan, who was Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor. This is the kind of thing you do when you want to signal that you’re communicating something important: arrange for an interview with someone who rarely grants them, tell the reporters that you want to offer a sense of our thinking. Brennan was a career CIA guy who appeared to do nothing but work. He once had a hip replacement and came to the office the next day. His experience in the Middle East made him skeptical that the United States could shape events inside the countries there, even as he was adamant about the need to take out terrorist networks. He spoke sparingly, but with a precision and gravitas that made you stop and listen closely. He used to complain when people used the word “fulsome” as a synonym for “robust,” because it actually is a synonym for “noxious”—he’d look at me whenever the word was used incorrectly in a meeting, an eyebrow slightly raised.
Sitting down with the reporters, Brennan made the case that the Taliban and al Qaeda had to be viewed separately, arguing that “when the two are aligned, it’s mainly on the tactical front.” He stressed that we needed to destroy al Qaeda but that it wasn’t necessary to destroy the Taliban to accomplish this goal. The Taliban had to be pushed back to give us the capacity to go after al Qaeda, but we couldn’t destroy a movement indigenous to Afghanistan’s tribes with local agendas that did not include launching attacks against the United States beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
When the session was over, I felt we were finally beginning to get our message out, laying a predicate for a less ambitious commitment in Afghanistan. But when the story came out, with the headline AFGHAN WAR DEBATE NOW LEANS TO FOCUS ON AL QAEDA, I felt I was playing out of my league. Going to the press, especially the Times, was a blunt instrument, and the story could have come only from the White House, given the view it reflected. The Pentagon was a large building, staffed with thousands of people, so leaks could be blamed on an anonymous multitude. The White House was small, and the number of people who knew what was going on in the Afghan review numbered fewer than twenty. I knew people were unlikely to blame Obama, or even more senior aides like Brennan. It’s always easier to blame the younger guy.
I got a chilly phone call from Gates’s press secretary, counseling me that people in his building were upset with the story. Gates met privately with Obama to say that he was furious—this was no way to conduct a review. Obama expressed no concern to me about the story, but he wanted to keep Gates happy, so in the next meeting he made a point of saying that he didn’t want to read any more about the deliberations in the newspaper. To me, the hypocrisy was stinging. The whole review had been shaped by leaks from the military designed to box Obama into sending more troops into Afghanistan. I kept reading anecdotes in the press about how much Gates hated leaks, when nearly all of them emanated from his department. I knew that Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Petraeus shared an independent communications advisor who seemed to spend much of the day in casual conversations, meals, and drinks with reporters—something that I didn’t have the time to do. I thought about Axe’s comment—maybe I wasn’t up for this kind of thing.
In meeting after meeting, the principals seemed to calibrate their arguments to align with Obama’s views without changing their position on troops. Gates argued that he wasn’t for a CT strategy or a full COIN strategy—he was for something in between, something that promoted a strong, effective government that delivers services to the people. When the shortcomings of the Afghan government were pointed out, Gates said that we should not give “one dollar or soldier” for a corrupt government—even though that’s exactly what we were doing. Petraeus said our goal was not to defeat the Taliban but to deny them population centers. Mullen talked about the psychologi
cal piece—the need to create the impression that the Taliban will lose. For the same reason, Clinton said that putting in troops wouldn’t work but you still need to put in troops. It seemed to sum things up perfectly: We had created political pressure on ourselves to send in troops based on a theory of COIN; the review was determining that COIN couldn’t succeed; but all of the arguments still pointed to sending in the same number of troops. We are not going to defeat the Taliban, Obama kept saying. We need to knock them back to give us space to go after al Qaeda.
As the review ground on, the public pressure on Obama shifted from making the case for more troops to something more primal, a criticism that would persist for seven years: He was, Washington concluded, dithering. Nothing bothered Obama more than one column by David Brooks in The New York Times. Brooks, a temperamentally moderate guy, announced that he had spoken to the nation’s “smartest military experts,” people “who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan.” These people, according to Brooks, “are not worried about his policy choices. Their first concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.” As if that wasn’t clear enough: “Their concerns are about Obama the man.” Brooks gave the assurance that “most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable”—though he didn’t describe what winning looked like. He concluded that for Obama, “the most important meeting isn’t with the Joint Chiefs and cabinet secretaries. It’s the one with the mirror.”
