The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  Clinton and Gates recommended that Obama publicly embrace all four positions, and so did I. It would lay down a marker for whenever an actual peace process resumed, and it would align our public positions with our private ones. It might also forestall the Palestinian push for recognition at the UN, which was certain to isolate the United States and Israel. But taking a public position, particularly on Jerusalem, would have been politically explosive at home, drawing fierce opposition from AIPAC and others who opposed recognition of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. I saw Obama labor over the issue, not wanting to risk a fight with Israel when it was unlikely to lead to a peace agreement. With the speech approaching, a compromise option had been floated by Tom Donilon and Dennis Ross, the lead staffer on the Middle East: Obama could take public positions on two of the issues, borders and security, and leave Jerusalem and refugees for later.

  “If this doesn’t work,” Obama told me, “then I can always take positions on all four issues at the UN in September.” But it felt as if we were caught in between—doing enough to have a fight with Netanyahu, but not enough to make any real difference.

  And that’s exactly what happened. The day after Obama’s speech, Netanyahu sat in the Oval Office and lectured Obama in front of the press while lying about the position that Obama had taken. “Israel cannot go back to the 1967 lines,” he said, even though Obama had not called for that. “These lines are indefensible….Remember that before 1967, Israel was all of nine miles wide. It was half the width of the Washington Beltway. And these were not the boundaries of peace; they were the boundaries of repeated wars because the attack on Israel was so attractive.”

  It was the perfect way to mobilize opposition to Obama among the leadership of the American Jewish community, which had internalized the vision of Israel constantly under attack. I was familiar with the emotions. As secular Jews in postwar New York City, my mother’s family maintained its sense of Jewishness in part through support for Israel. Some of this was rooted in guilt—they’d emigrated to Brooklyn, not Tel Aviv; and some was rooted in the heroic Israel of the 1960s and ’70s, Jews building a nation in the desert, fighting off Arab armies, led by towering figures like Golda Meir, who seemed both indefatigable and profoundly just. But as the demographics of Israel changed throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and invading Arab armies were replaced by occasional acts of terror, the Israel that my mother’s generation idealized was increasingly eclipsed by an Israel driven by the settler movement and ultra-orthodox émigrés. That was Netanyahu’s political base, and he knew how to play in American politics on their behalf.

  Netanyahu’s smack at Obama came just as the 2012 presidential campaign cycle was cranking up, and it succeeded in igniting a firestorm of criticism. Mitt Romney said Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus.” A number of congressional Democrats distanced themselves from the speech. I was given a list of leading Jewish donors to call, to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides. It was far too painful to wade into these waters with no prospect of success. Netanyahu had mastered a certain kind of leverage: using political pressure within the United States to demoralize any meaningful push for peace, just as he used settlements as a means of demoralizing the Palestinians. The Israel that I felt love and admiration for had a government that seemed determined to make us a foil.

  This was my mindset as I walked into the White House at ten o’clock that Friday night. Obama was slated to speak in front of AIPAC that weekend, and it would be his chance to rebut Netanyahu. I didn’t draft the speech, but he wanted to give me the edits. He also wanted to vent. He sat down next to me on a bench, holding pages of handwritten notes.

  “This is as annoyed as I’ve been as president,” he said. He was tired, and I could tell by the edits he was holding that he’d been working on them for several hours.

  “It’s not on the level,” I said. This is a phrase that we used, repeatedly, to describe the dishonesty we often felt surrounded by.

  “It’s not on the level,” he repeated. “Dealing with Bibi is like dealing with the Republicans.”

  “You know,” I said, “I used to be a member of AIPAC.” I explained my family’s history, how support for Israel was a kind of secular religion. “So this is all frustrating for me on a personal level.”

  “Me, too. I came out of the Jewish community in Chicago,” he said. “I’m basically a liberal Jew.”

  With that, he walked me through the additions he’d made to the speech—a careful explanation of the positions he’d taken, coupled with concern about Israel’s growing isolation, and a blunt assessment of the demographics in Israel and the West Bank that were making it impossible for Israel to endure as both a Jewish state and a democracy if the occupation endured. But we both knew that nothing he said was going to move this ball forward. This is where we’d find ourselves throughout the administration: unable to nudge Israel in the direction of peace, and left holding up a mirror that showed the necessity of doing so.

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  A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, we left for a weeklong trip to Europe. We started in Ireland, where Obama had a distant relative in the small town of Moneygall. He was welcomed as a favorite son, traveling to a pub in his “ancestral home” and then giving a speech to tens of thousands of people in Dublin. David Plouffe had replaced David Axelrod as a senior advisor at the White House by this point, bringing the same sense of discipline and hard-edged focus that guided us through the campaign. As I watched Plouffe smiling at the sight of the Irish prime minister endorsing Obama, I had the first sense that a reelection campaign was under way. The following day, Obama had a London schedule dominated by meetings with the royal family, and I grew concerned that the trip was beginning with too little substance. When I shared this concern with Plouffe, he looked at me as if I was crazy. “Are you kidding?” he joked. “This is perfect. The queen will be a great validator for us with white people.”

  I laughed, realizing that it was true. Plouffe was able to recognize the absurdity of our politics without being dragged down by it. I was less sanguine. I was starting to feel the adrenaline that had propelled me through the last several months disappearing, and I couldn’t reconcile how much doing the right thing didn’t seem to matter. I thought it was right to break from Mubarak when he was preparing to crack down on his people, but that decision had badly divided our own government, which was falling back into the habit of deference to the Egyptian military. I thought it was right to save thousands of Libyans from Gaddafi, but we were now being second-guessed, as the averted massacre in Benghazi gave way to a lengthy air campaign. I thought it was right to pursue peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but doing so only invited political pain. Perhaps we’d be better off just visiting Irish pubs and English royals.

  The Obamas were staying at Buckingham Palace, and a group of us were invited to attend a state dinner. I had to rent a white-tie tuxedo for the event, and when we arrived we were escorted into a room with furniture that looked as if it belonged behind a velvet rope in a museum—delicate armchairs, lavishly embroidered couches—as members of the royal family circulated, making sure you were never by yourself, expertly making five minutes of conversation that put you at ease before moving on. The women wore diamond tiaras; some of the men, military uniforms. One of these ladies, after telling me about her various hobbies, looked at me quizzically—“You do know who I am, don’t you?” she said. Of course, I assured her. When she walked away, Plouffe asked me who she was and I told him I didn’t have the slightest idea.

  Obama stood next to the queen, a stoic yet kindly-looking woman adorned in jewels. Standing there, you got the sense of the impermanence of your own importance—this woman had met everyone there was to know over the last fifty years. We ate at a huge horseshoe-shaped table, a team of waiters in red coats bringing out each course in perfectly synchronized formality. Obama sat at the head of the table, chatting amicably with the q
ueen. When the dinner was over, we were moved to another room, where they served after-dinner drinks. I found myself in a conversation with David Cameron about the HBO show Entourage, which we both apparently enjoyed—in a room full of royals, the prime minister is oddly diminished, just another staffer.

  When the delegation was getting ready to leave, Obama asked Favreau and me to come back to his room to go over edits to a speech. The next day, he was being given the honor of becoming the first U.S. president to speak to the British Parliament in the historic Palace of Westminster. Obama wanted to offer a broad defense of Western values, but first he—like anyone who has just had dinner at Buckingham Palace—wanted to talk about his evening.

  “I really love the queen,” he told us. “She’s just like Toot, my grandmother. Courteous. Straightforward. All about what she thinks. She doesn’t suffer fools.”

  “She doesn’t have to,” Favreau said.

  We were sitting in a large, ornate room where there was one small table set up with a laptop computer on it. These were guest quarters, and Michelle Obama was getting ready for bed in the adjacent bedroom. At this point, a butler came in. “Mr. President, pardon me,” he said. We stopped talking and looked at him. “There’s a mouse.”

  Obama responded immediately, “Don’t tell the First Lady.”

  “We’ll try to catch it, sir.”

  “Just don’t tell the First Lady,” Obama repeated.

  After the man left, I said, “Maybe it really is a dying empire.”

  Obama laughed. “No, they’ve still got a lot going on. Did you see the bling on the queen?” He was right—her whole dress had glittered. Obama looked at us. “You guys clean up pretty well.”

  The walls were covered with giant portraits of kings and queens past, a room full of ghosts. “I’m just a few years away from being in the State Senate and living in a condo,” he said, looking around. We were almost whispering; I didn’t know whether it was out of deference to the First Lady in the next room or the surroundings. With that, he turned to the words on the page, a soaring endorsement of Western values.

  Westminster Hall resembled a cathedral, the pews filled with Members of Parliament and honored guests. The White House staff were seated on a stage opposite a group of British luminaries, the first row made up of former prime ministers—John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown—who sat with stoic, even gloomy, expressions. As we waited for Obama to come out, the only thing that felt stranger than being in such a grand setting was the fact that—more than two years into the job, with all the things that had taken place—it did not feel unusual to be there.

  When Obama came out, he was greeted with a thunderous ovation. Then the conservative Speaker of the House of Commons delivered a soaring introduction: “It is my honor, Mr. President, to welcome you as our friend and as a statesman….It has fallen to you to tackle economic turbulence at home, to protect the health of those without wealth, and to seek that precious balance between security which is too often threatened, and human rights which are too often denied.” It was striking to hear the story of the Obama presidency articulated by a conservative British politician in words that a Republican politician would never dare to use at home.

  As my mind wandered over the events of the last few months, Obama’s speech built to its climax, a ringing defense of human progress from someone whose own family had been oppressed from the seat of this empire in the past: “In a world which will only grow smaller and more interconnected,” he said, “the example of our two nations says it is possible for people to be united by their ideals instead of divided by their differences; that it’s possible for hearts to change and old hatreds to pass; that it’s possible for the sons and daughters of former colonies to sit here as members of this great Parliament, and for the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British Army to stand before you as president of the United States.”

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  THE NEXT MORNING, I had a terrible hangover. There had been a party in the queen’s honor, then Cameron’s staff invited us to a club across the street from our hotel, where our whole team stayed out way too late. When I forced myself out of bed, I’d slept less than two hours, my last recollection being Favreau teaching admiring Brits how to speak with a South Boston accent. We boarded the smaller Air Force One for the short flight across the Channel, and I willed myself to sleep as soon as we took off. A few minutes later, I woke up to find Obama standing over my seat, poking me, a huge smile on his face. He was clearly egged on by Pfeiffer, who was grinning behind him. “Can’t a guy get a little peace?” I yelled instinctively.

  When we got to the hotel, we went straight into a bilateral meeting with the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev. The room was hot and windowless. Obama and Medvedev sat side by side, and a few Russians were lined up opposite the U.S. delegation; a couple of them looked as if they’d had a night similar to mine.

  Medvedev had always gotten along well with Obama. Together, they had improved relations between the United States and Russia from the low point of 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia. We’d completed the New START treaty, reached an agreement to resupply U.S. troops in Afghanistan through Russia, and cooperated to enforce stronger sanctions on Iran. We assumed that Vladimir Putin, who was then serving as prime minister, supported this orientation, since he was widely seen as the real power in Moscow. But recently, it seemed that we had gone too far for Putin in pulling Medvedev toward an American position on the UN Security Council resolution on Libya. Russia was historically aligned with Libya and opposed to U.S.-led efforts to impose regime change on other countries, and Putin had publicly criticized Medvedev over Libya. Russia was heading into a presidential election, and it still was not clear whether Putin would run to reclaim the office that he had handed off to Medvedev.

  The impact of Putin’s criticism was apparent immediately. Medvedev began the meeting with a long complaint about our policy in Libya. He’s a short, compact man with wide-knotted ties and charismatic body language—crossing and recrossing legs, making dismissive gestures with his hands. He brushed aside the question of Gaddafi at first. I never gave him kisses like the Europeans, he said. But he went on a rant about how we’d started the war in Libya to protect civilians but were now trying to install a new regime. He was right, of course, although it was hard to see how civilians could ever be protected in Libya while Gaddafi was in power and trying to slaughter them. His rant seemed as much for the benefit of the hard-liners on his side in the room, men who were close to Putin.

  After the opening talking points had been delivered and the conversation became more casual, Medvedev surprised us when he said, Gaddafi has to go. He is messianic. It was a pattern that we’d seen—Medvedev breaking somewhat from the Russian hard line and saying what he seemed to truly believe. You got the sense that he was further out in front of Putin than we knew. Later in the meeting, when Obama explained to him that he couldn’t just demand that the WTO grant membership to Russia because he wasn’t all-powerful, Medvedev agreed and came back to Gaddafi. No one is all-powerful, he said, except the man with the little green book. It was a reference to the bizarre book of political propaganda that Gaddafi had published in 1975. Among other things, it instructed people on how to breast-feed, dress, and design sporting venues. Medvedev, it seemed, had a hard time feigning support for the more extreme thugs aligned with Russian interests.

  Toward the end of the meeting, Obama said the reset in relations between the United States and Russia had to be strong enough to outlast their personal relationship. In the back of his mind was the looming Russian election and the possibility of Putin’s returning to power. Sasha and Malia, Obama joked, could someday get elected and try to start a new Cold War. He was trying to make light of the very real sense of drift that had taken hold in the relationship—a sense that the opening of 2009 and 2010 was soon to be eclipsed by the darker forces within Russia, the cru
der nationalism that Putin represented. Medvedev joked about this himself, pointing to a particularly grim member of his delegation and suggesting, He is like Palin. This would be our final meeting with Medvedev before Putin announced his intention to run for the presidency.

  After the meeting, I went to my room. It was in the corner of the resort hotel where we were staying, and the windows overlooked the long red carpet where G8 leaders walked in to shake hands with Sarkozy. I watched as Obama and Sarkozy greeted each other and walked over to a rope line to shake hands with a group of people. Then I went into the bathroom, got on my knees, and threw up.

  At that moment, the absurdity of it all seemed to close in around me. Two days ago, I’d eaten dinner in Buckingham Palace. Now I was about a hundred feet from my boss, the president of the United States, getting sick. Sure, I’d had too much to drink and too little sleep. But more than that, it was the accumulated stress of several months of responding to constant, world-changing events. Those months had changed me. Maybe it was the huge decisions that had been made; maybe it was the harsh criticism of people on opposing sides of debates, or the warm embrace of people like the British elite; maybe it was the increasing proximity to Obama. But whatever it was, I was no longer nervous about raising my voice in meetings, speaking in front of others, or standing up on camera and briefing the press. Somehow it had become second nature to do those things—whatever anxiety I felt was no longer on the surface, but it was there, buried deeper within me, emerging in moments like this.