The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  After the announcement, Obama convened his national security team—the same personalities who had proved so hard to manage during the Afghan review. It was a brief meeting, and he raised his voice, which almost never happened. “If people can’t pull together as a team, then other people are going to go. I mean it.” As he walked down the hallway afterward, he turned to me. “It’s too bad,” he said. “I really did like Stan.” A year later, he would announce the beginning of a drawdown of American troops from Afghanistan, on schedule.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  Here is what my life was like during the first year after I took my new job.

  Sometimes the phone would ring in the middle of the night. Two in the morning, three in the morning. I’d pick it up and hear “This is the White House Situation Room calling for Mr. Rhodes,” followed by news of some calamity—a natural disaster, an attempted coup, a car bombing in Afghanistan. I’d stare at my BlackBerry, waiting to see if any more news emerged. Ann would ask me what was going on, and I’d tell her. “What do they want you to do about it at two in the morning?” she’d say. I’d email people I knew who worked at the embassy in the affected area to make sure they were all right. If I felt we needed to release a statement, I’d email a few people to get a draft started. Then I’d lie in bed, imagining what it was like to be there—where the protest was massing or the truck bomb went off—to get the same phone call I got, only it was to tell you your wife or brother had been killed. I knew the bad news before everyone else. I’d lie awake for as long as it took for my mind to shut back down so I could drift to sleep.

  I’d wake up between six and seven. Each morning, an appointed White House “media monitor” would send a list of news stories to a large group of staff, anything having to do with Obama or, to a smaller list, national security. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the wires (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, AFP), then Politico, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the congressional dailies (The Hill, Roll Call), an assortment of right-wing media (Fox News, the New York Post, The Daily Caller, Breitbart), transcripts from the various television morning shows, longer magazine pieces, and—in later years—notable tweets. This is how I got my news for ten years—by scrolling through my BlackBerry, reading different versions of the same story, looking for a shift in the narrative about Obama or our foreign policy, for what might raise an international issue that was escaping attention, for what lines of attack Republican critics were repeating in ways that might signal a new, coordinated effort—to keep Gitmo open, to bomb somebody, to portray Obama as un-American. I could tell they were getting traction if I also got emails from reporters, cutting and pasting a quote from a Republican critic and asking if I had a response. This was Washington presenting a constant choice: Ignore something and let it stand, or feed it oxygen by hitting back.

  I’d shower and shave listening to NPR, the calmest minutes of my day, and head out the door around eight, walking to the bus stop on Connecticut Avenue. I’d stand on the bus for the ten-minute ride, scanning the last of the clips on my BlackBerry and seeing what emails from my colleagues might set the tone for the day. I’d get off the bus at Seventeenth and I, where armies of lawyers and lobbyists made their way to soulless eight-story office buildings, and walk south among a dwindling group of people making their way to the White House. I’d flash my blue White House badge at a Secret Service gate where foreign tourists sometimes argued with agents in broken English because they thought they could enter there for a White House tour.

  Entering the West Wing, I’d grab a coffee from the White House Mess carryout window and be trailed back to my office by a “briefer,” someone from the intelligence community who would sit across my desk and walk me through the President’s Daily Briefing (PDB). In those days before we switched to iPads, the PDB was a mahogany leather binder with the seal of the president on it. The first few items—referred to as “articles”—were one- or two-page summaries of key topics or developments that would also go to Obama. Usually, they dealt with whatever bad thing around the world merited his attention: terrorism, a worrisome trend in the Middle East, a new development with China or Russia. I was always struck by the exclusion of large global trends—climate, governance, food, health—in favor of an intricate level of detail about terrorist plots. After 9/11, the intelligence community was going to let any president know anything it knew about a potential plot, even if there was little he could do about it.

  The briefer watched me as I read the material while offering additional color. These people had been up all night. They would meet in the early morning hours with the analysts who drafted the PDB articles to get additional context so they’d be ready for queries from people like me. I always felt compelled to ask questions, even when I didn’t have any, because they worked so hard to be prepared. In addition to the PDB articles, they’d include a packet of intelligence reports—a tiny sample of the enormous volume of information collected by the U.S. government—that were relevant to topics that were a focus for the White House. They called this “traffic.”

  When I finished this briefing, I’d open my email and usually find Politico Playbook there, a “tipsheet” emailed to a few thousand people in media and government. I never subscribed to it, I just started getting it in my in-box one morning around the election. It attempted to distill the news into what people needed to know—what were the storylines driving political coverage and debate; what D.C. insider had a birthday (“Ari Fleischer is 57!”); who was out the previous night (spotted at Bobby Van’s!). It portrayed American politics as a game played by a few thousand insiders who mainly cared about who was up and who was down in the daily narrative, yet to fulfill my responsibilities as a national security and communications official, I had to be familiar with the contents of both the PDB and Playbook.

  This hit home for me over Christmas in 2009. We were sitting around the tree in my parents’ living room when I got a call: “This is the White House Situation Room calling for Mr. Rhodes…” A young Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to set his underwear on fire on a flight to Detroit. His underwear contained explosives. They didn’t ignite. When the plane landed, he was arrested, taken into custody, and questioned. Was anyone hurt? I asked. No. Was this part of a broader plot? No. Was there a claim of responsibility from a terrorist group? Not yet.

  Then American politics and media took over.

  A few days later, I’d open my Playbook to this headline: “Briefs bomber may disrupt plans to empty Gitmo—Test of leadership for Hawaiian White House: cerebral, or slow?—GOP plans to keep hitting Dems on terrorism—Invasion of the body scanners.” And then this analysis:

  Good Tuesday morning. The White House gets harsh reviews for its handling of the briefs-bomber aftermath, with the lead headline of The New York Times saying of the president’s remarks yesterday: “MOVES TO QUELL CRITICS.” Peter Baker’s Honolulu dispatch begins: “President Obama emerged from Hawaiian seclusion.” A Yunji de Nies piece on “GMA” showed clip after clip of the White House response being attacked on cable news (mostly by Republicans) and made a big deal of the president’s golfing and “even playing a game of tennis before his public address.”

  I spent a few days earnestly telling reporters that we didn’t want to overreact, but this approach was dismissed as cerebral. After a few days of hysteria, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack and grew in prestige because they had successfully terrorized America. Democratic support for closing Gitmo plummeted simply because Republicans were on television asserting that Obama was weak and terrorists like Abdulmutallab should be sent to a military prison. Part of me wanted to ignore this side of my job—I wanted to read intelligence reports, go to policy meetings, write speeches that I hoped the world understood. But that wasn’t an option.

  Later in the morning, I’d prepare for the
daily press briefings out of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House. We’d hold conference calls with the spokespeople at different agencies to go over the key news items of the day and what we were going to say about them. Then I’d join the several staffers in the NSC press office—most of them Foreign Service officers (FSOs) who worked for a year or two at the NSC—to walk Robert Gibbs through the questions he was likely to get in his White House press briefings. These FSOs were around my age, people who’d signed up after 9/11 and served at embassies across the Middle East and around the world. They were acutely aware of how foreign publics consumed the words that came out of the United States government, of where we could make an impact and where we couldn’t.

  When the briefings were done, I’d eat lunch at my desk and catch up on emails. The early afternoon was usually filled with a Deputies Committee meeting, in which the deputy-level officials from various agencies—State, Defense, the intelligence community, and Treasury—come together to make policy on different issues. These meetings were always in the Situation Room and usually ran a couple of hours. Each agency would present its view, the meeting evolving toward some kind of consensus that could make its way up to the cabinet-level officials and—if necessary—Obama. At first, I felt intimidated at being included in these groups. But I had a clear equity—how would these policies be received publicly at home and abroad, how would we explain them, and how should we take that into account as we made policy. I also came to see that people assumed I knew, or could anticipate, what Obama would think on an issue. In the absence of international crises throughout 2010, these meetings—and our foreign policy—focused largely on methodically advancing a few issues. Implementing the Afghanistan strategy. Withdrawing troops from Iraq. Negotiating a New START arms control treaty with Russia. Imposing sanctions on Iran. But 2010 would be the last year when foreign policy felt somewhat routine; those meetings would become far more consequential soon enough.

  In many ways, my job that year was to help keep things calm on our accounts while Obama pursued his domestic agenda, particularly healthcare. The night that the Affordable Care Act passed Congress, Obama had a small group of us up to the White House residence to celebrate. He looked as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders as he hoisted a martini glass on the Truman Balcony and told us, “This is what we all came here to do—this.” Standing there, I realized everyone in the White House supported the totality of his agenda—not just our pieces.

  In the late afternoon, between five and seven, I would usually focus on planning for whatever the next big item was on the calendar—the next speech, the next major policy rollout, the next foreign trip. This part of my job grew in the fall, when Donilon replaced Jones as national security advisor, with Denis McDonough moving up to the lead deputy national security advisor role. This left the role of NSC chief of staff vacant for several months, leaving me the responsibility of planning Obama’s schedule—what foreign countries he’d visit, who he’d meet with there—a responsibility I’d hold for the rest of the administration.

  Foreign trips were my favorite part of the job. You got to immerse yourself in a different place for a period of time—its politics, how it fit into U.S. foreign policy, what its people cared about. Strange things happened—in Russia, I came back to my room from the staff office to find a cleaning woman standing next to the bed and three men in suits going through my things; they put everything down and walked out without a word. You saw the impact Obama had on certain audiences—in Ghana, it seemed every television channel was playing a documentary about his life, and the radio was filled with people singing his name—“Barack Obama, you are our Obama.” Speeches that he gave abroad got little attention at home but would be carefully consumed in the places where he gave them for years.

  At the end of the day, between eight and nine, I’d come home and eat dinner with Ann and watch some television. Before going to sleep, I’d check a last round of emails close to midnight; there was always some loose end to be tied up, some question to answer. Then I’d drift to sleep, playing over the day in my head, thinking about what I had to do when I woke up.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NOVEMBER, AS WE WERE preparing to go to Asia, an enormous electoral wave gave the Republican Party control of the House of Representatives—a stinging repudiation of a two-year period in which Obama saved the global economy, passed a $1 trillion stimulus, reformed financial regulations, and passed healthcare legislation. We expected to lose, but not as badly as we did; our people had stayed home, and Palin’s had turned out. In the days after the election, I had come into the Oval Office and caught the tail end of conversations in which Obama was calling a member of Congress who’d lost the election because of their healthcare vote, thanking them for making a difference.

  When you show up as Barack Obama in India or Indonesia, no one there cares about the midterm results. This created a strange discordance between the somber bubble we traveled within and the enthusiasm outside it. I packed the schedule—Barack and Michelle Obama dancing with schoolchildren in Mumbai; Obama holding a town hall meeting with students; the first African American president paying tribute to Mahatma Gandhi in Delhi; Obama, the man who lived in Indonesia as a child, delighting a crowd with phrases in Indonesian. Those were always my favorite moments on trips—moments that connect a president to people in other countries, when people didn’t just see Obama but felt seen by him.

  I thought the trip was going great, but he was tired and increasingly cranky; much of our press was waiting to write that the world was souring on Obama just like the electorate back home. Things started to fall apart in Seoul on the fifth day, when we attended the G20. We missed a deadline to complete the renegotiation of a free trade agreement with South Korea, and the trip quickly turned into a story about Obama’s diminished star.

  Before a press conference, Gibbs, Jen Psaki, and I walked into a conference room to brief him. Psaki was kind, curious, and unflappable, with bright red hair, a permanent smile, and a maternal instinct for her colleagues. She had started in Chicago around the same time as I did, and over the years she became like a sister within our surrogate Obama family. Obama was sitting with his top economic advisors, and they had been complaining about the lack of credit they were getting for rescuing the global economy from a depression. Gibbs, Psaki, and I quickly became the object of blame for how the press covered foreign policy and, by extension, our politics back home. “Does anyone in the press even care that we’re responsible for every word in this communiqué?” Obama said, holding up a sheet of paper—the carefully negotiated text that the G20 would issue upon completion of the summit. In reality, the answer was no; it was hard for me to care about the communiqué. I avoided making eye contact with Psaki because I would have laughed.

  His G20 frustration was clearly a proxy for everything else—the midterms, the press, the sense that he’d been handed as bad an inheritance as any president since Roosevelt and no one cared. By this point, I’d learned that Obama got mad only at the people closest to him—with everyone else, he was unfailingly polite. By the time we got to Japan, I was the only one around when he wanted someone to complain at. He called me up to his suite, one of dozens of such rooms that I’d see him in over the years, all eerily familiar in their uncomfortable opulence. He had all the newspapers laid out on a table by the door, their headlines a Greek chorus of ridicule. He gestured at them, a scowl on his face, sarcasm in his voice: “Isn’t there something we can do about this?”

  Feeling tired myself, I snapped back, “No, not when we don’t actually reach a trade agreement.”

  He moved on to the next thing, preparing for the APEC summit, as if that very fact encapsulated the absurdity of being president and never getting a break. “Remind me why this organization even exists?”

  With that, I started to laugh, and so did he, as a group of APEC policy experts walked into the room looking confused.
I felt the same frustration he did at the venal politics at home. But I was also upset at him. I’d spent months planning a trip that would appeal to each of these countries—India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan—countries that accounted for a billion and a half people, with distinctive governments, interests, and populations. India, the home of his hero, Gandhi; Indonesia, his home as a boy. Often, I felt as though I cared more about the global progressive icon Barack Obama than Barack Obama did.

  The next and final day, we went to see a giant Japanese Buddha that Obama had visited as a child. We’d picked the site knowing that it would strike a chord in a Japanese culture that loved Obama and this type of recognition. He was quiet on the ride out as the helicopter flew over brilliant green hills and a winding coastline. The motorcade then drove for miles on twisting roads, through small fishing villages lined with people—thousands of people, smiling and waving. Even for Obama, the crowds were extraordinary. A kindly older Japanese woman then showed Obama around the twelfth-century Buddha, an austere stone monument that put midterm elections in perspective.

  When we got back to the helicopter, he looked out the window for a few minutes. Then he looked at me and said, “That was good to do.”

  “It will be the biggest story here in Japan,” I said.

  “I know. I know why you make me do all of this stuff on trips,” he said. “It matters to a lot of people.” We rode on in silence.

  * * *

  —

  THAT DECEMBER, I TRAVELED with Obama to Hawaii as the lone NSC staffer who would be there during his Christmas vacation. As soon as Air Force One took off, I felt a sense of relief. We’d been through two years of the campaign, then two years in the White House. We’d proved to ourselves that we belonged, suffered a drubbing in the midterms, and then bounced back—ramming the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the ratification of the New START treaty through Congress. Gay people could now serve openly in the military, and the United States and Russia would be pointing fewer nuclear weapons at each other. We had learned that a White House on its back foot can still accomplish more than just about any other institution in the world.