The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

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  AS WE STRUGGLED TO keep a lid on the various crises boiling over across the Middle East—where autocracy, tribalism, and sectarianism seemed more powerful than any external force, even the United States of America—I looked for other regions and issues to devote my time to, places where we could do something affirmative in the world.

  That November, we were scheduled to go to Asia. A few weeks before we left, Jake Sullivan, Kurt Campbell, and Danny Russel asked to meet me at the White House. Jake was Hillary’s deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning. In reality, he did a little bit of everything, and did it better than anyone else. He was my age, a Minnesotan with straight, parted sandy brown hair who had followed the kind of career arc that leads to the top of America’s foreign policy establishment: impeccable academic credentials, Supreme Court clerk, top aide on Hillary’s presidential campaign. Kurt was the assistant secretary of state; a large man with a larger personality, he was equally passionate about grand strategy and a quixotic personal quest to find the remains of Amelia Earhart. Danny was more understated, a Foreign Service officer who had spent decades immersed in the intricacies of Asian politics and had been elevated to the job of top Asia staffer at the White House by a president who shared his personal affinity for the region.

  They pitched me an idea: The time was right to pursue an opening with Burma. For nearly fifty years, it had been ruled by a reclusive military junta. Like many Americans, my awareness of Burma was through the story of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning daughter of Burma’s independence hero who had been imprisoned—largely in her own home—for most of two decades after she swept to victory in a 1990 election. By the fall of 2011, there were signs that things were changing. The military had adopted a new constitution that transitioned to a civilian-led government. Suu Kyi had been released from house arrest and was reentering politics. They suggested that Obama should use his Asia trip to announce that we would reengage the Burmese government and that Hillary would visit the country. I agreed to do what I could to get this done.

  For the last two years, we had worked to elevate the importance of the Asia Pacific region. Many of the issues that motivated Obama—growing the American economy, combating climate change, forging new rules to govern trade and commerce among nations—depended upon cooperation in Asia. While the Middle East represented the past—its religious wars, American-backed autocrats, Iranian revolutionaries, terrorist threats—Asia seemed to represent the future. It helped that the people and governments in Asia wanted to deepen relations with the United States, in part because of their concerns about the largest emerging power in their neighborhood: China. Our November trip would be pivotal, shaping our Asia policy for the rest of the administration.

  We started in Hawaii, where the United States would be hosting APEC, a summit of Pacific countries. We spent two days there, signaling a tougher stance on China and a more assertive posture in Asia. With a nod from Obama, we took the ongoing negotiations over a trade agreement with a large bloc of Pacific nations—the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP—and played it up as the centerpiece of our broader regional strategy, one in which the United States, and not China, would write the rules of international trade. We were preparing to announce a deployment of Marines to a new base in Australia. And we finalized plans for Obama to call Aung San Suu Kyi and make his announcement that we were opening up relations with Burma.

  On our last night there, Tom Donilon, Jay Carney, and I got a message that Obama wanted to have a drink. That was unusual; Obama usually passed his nights playing cards or doing work. We went up to his suite, which had a huge deck overlooking the Pacific, and settled in while Obama explained that he wanted us to see the view. He switched from mindless banter to contemplative conversation while a valet brought us drinks and bowls of snacks. “You know,” he said, “everything is just better in Hawaii.”

  “It helps that there are no snakes,” I said, a piece of trivia I had learned.

  “We have a lot of mongoose for that purpose,” he said, once again fulfilling his role as the guy with an answer for everything. Then he started talking about Asia more broadly—the mix of cultures, religions, and races he found so familiar. “Hawaii has a lot in common with Jakarta,” he said. “There’s a certain communal spirit. Americans are more individualistic.” He sipped his drink and looked out at the endless ocean. “When you spend time growing up in Jakarta like I did, and see the masses of humanity in a place like that, it makes it harder for you to think purely of yourself.”

  We sat there in a moment of pregnant silence, and I tried to imagine what it was like to grow up on crowded Indonesian streets in the 1960s. Then Obama started to complain that people in Washington liked to say that he was aloof. “Few things irritate me more,” he said, mimicking the line of criticism. “ ‘He’s aloof, he doesn’t have friends.’ That could not be more wrong. I’m almost always around people. I just have a different group of friends than people who’ve been running for office since they were twenty-two.”

  Donilon pointed out that people like Clinton and Bush had been coming to Washington long before they ran for president, but Obama didn’t want to dwell on other presidents. “The thing is,” he said, “I was a fully formed person before I went into politics. And I didn’t have any money until my book started to sell after the [2004] convention. It took me twelve years to sell fourteen thousand books.”

  Obama recalled how he’d finished Dreams from My Father in Bali, writing in longhand because it helped him think. I looked around at this terrace, with its endless view of the Pacific, and it occurred to me how far away this suite was from some backpacking destination in Bali. This part of the world, which had shaped Obama, was going to be more important to the future than the familiar battlefields of the Middle East, but it was distant from the debates that dominated in Washington. “This really is a great view,” he said.

  Obama got up to go to bed, and I walked down a flight of stairs to my room. It was my thirty-fifth birthday.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER A STOP in Australia, we flew to Bali for the East Asia summit, the first time that the United States attended this forum for Asian nations, a signal of our increased focus on the region. On the flight, Obama called Aung San Suu Kyi. With her agreement, he would announce that we’d be opening engagement with the Burmese government and sending Hillary Clinton to visit. I sat opposite him, listening in as they talked.

  They discussed the trends in Burma, with Suu Kyi running through a list of issues—the democratic reform process, the release of political prisoners, the process of reconciling with over a dozen ethnic armed groups in the country. She spoke more as a politician than an icon of democracy, referencing her outreach to the military that imprisoned her all those years. We want them to understand that we will work with them if they work with us, she said. The United States should be very clear in talking to them about rewards, not punishments. We don’t need to be talking about punishments—they know all about punishments.

  Obama told her that he was going to announce the visit from Hillary. Suu Kyi agreed, and then spoke about the need to reconcile the warring ethnic groups in the country. I hope you can come to Burma yourself before too long, she said. We have many admirers of you here. Many NLD wear T-shirts with you on them, she said, referring to her political party.

  In Bali, we stayed at a hotel with balconies that looked out on a pond full of giant lizards. We met up with Hillary, who was joining us for the summit. Our press was always eager to get access to her, and she agreed to do a series of interviews, but lamented the fact that they would likely focus more on her own political future than the issues she’d been working on. “How many questions do you think I’ll get on Asia?” she said. “Maybe one?”

  So far, the trip had gone exactly as planned. We’d signaled a pivot to the Asia Pacific nations—with large commercial sales and TPP representing our ec
onomic strategy; the deployment of Marines to Australia representing a deepening security commitment; and the opening to Burma representing a commitment to promote democracy and expand relations in Southeast Asia. It was widely and rightly interpreted as a challenge to China.

  The last night of the trip was the gala dinner for the East Asia summit. We sat in a cavernous convention center.

  There were three hours of entertainment—a Filipino girl band singing pop standards such as “Fly Me to the Moon”; a large video screen showed statistics about Southeast Asian countries on a loop—their GDP, their population growth—then the MC improbably invited Quincy Jones to the stage. He lumbered up from some corner of the room, talked about being asked to do this the night before, and mentioned having just come from Morocco, where he’d produced an album called Voices of the Arab Spring for the king. Like us, Quincy was making his own pivot to Asia. Then he announced that he was going to sing “We Are the World” and invited “my President Obama and Premier Wen” to come up on stage to sing with him, hands clasped. I stopped chewing ice. Jay Carney and I began to launch from our chairs, prepared to use physical violence if necessary to stop this photo op from taking place heading into an election year. But before we had to do anything, Obama was waving Quincy down from his seat. Wen sat frozen in his chair. A large group of children joined Quincy on stage instead. There comes a time when we heed a certain call. Advance staff asked us to load the motorcade, since the dinner was ending and the U.S. president leaves first, which led to the unfortunate visual of the entire U.S. delegation walking out to “We Are the World.”

  Back at the hotel, Obama called me to the villa where he was staying. Standing there in the giant batik shirt that leaders had been made to wear, he complained about getting jammed with another China meeting the next day. “How many times do I need to tell you that I’m getting overscheduled on these trips?”

  “At least you didn’t have to sing with the guy,” I said.

  Obama laughed. “SBY definitely paid Quincy to be there,” he said, referring to the president of Indonesia.

  “Not as much as the king of Morocco,” I said.

  “All right, that’s good. Get out of here,” he said.

  That night I sat staring at the lizards off my balcony. I thought about Obama. He was like a subject I’d studied for years—reading his books, analyzing his comments, internalizing his speech edits, channeling his worldview into written words and policy. But still I wrestled with the constant concern that I was losing myself inside the experience, transformed into a cipher for the needs of this other person who, after all, was a politician, playing the role of U.S. president.

  There is always something sad about the last night of these trips. They consume you for weeks, they move you around—without sleep—for days. You stay in beautiful places, see strange things, meet famous people, and develop an intense camaraderie with the people you are with. But I felt like it was impossible to explain these things to people back home—my wife, my parents, my old friends. It was like you inhabited two parallel lives—one that made you who you were, and the other that was consuming that person, and transforming you into someone else.

  CHAPTER 14

  LIFE, DEATH, AND BENGHAZI

  The days pass, passing trips, passing crises, passing ceremonies, meetings that bleed into one another, windowless rooms, lunch from the carryout window on the ground floor of the West Wing guarded by dozens of Secret Service officers at a variety of outposts, snipers watching from on top of the White House, looking out at the perimeter gates ringing the complex and the tourists, D.C. residents, the occasional protester or crazy person who wants to stand as close as they can to this nerve center for the application of power in the world, all of it running on an endless loop. There is, always, a relentless flow of information: intelligence reports, casualty reports, notifications of natural disasters, and economic data finding their way to the right people in the right offices—reports that offer bits of information about billions of individual lives, about the manner in which things might or might not be changing.

  The days are long, the weeks are long, the months are long, but the years are short—one day you look up and realize you’re on the precipice of the final year of a presidential term. You see the world in a different way, as if you could open a window and catch a glimpse of anything that is touched by the reach of the United States government. You can be a part of actions that shape these events—your voice in a meeting, your intervention on a budget line item, your role in crafting the words that a president speaks. You are also a bystander to crises that elude intervention, buffeted by the constant and contradictory demands made on an American president—by other American politicians; by the media; by advocacy organizations; by people around the world. You never know what is the one meeting, the one decision, the one word or phrase that will matter.

  On December 18, 2011, one large piece of business was finally completed as the last convoy of U.S. troops left Iraq. Ironically, the timing had been determined by an agreement between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government, reached shortly before Obama took office. For many months, Obama considered leaving a small presence of troops there, and even signed off on a force of ten thousand that would continue to train Iraqi Security Forces. But this was predicated on the Iraqi government’s agreeing to give American troops immunity from criminal prosecution, something America demands for our troops around the world and that seemed particularly necessary in the unpredictable currents of Iraqi politics. The Iraqi government, conscious of its sovereignty, refused. So on October 21, Obama held a videoconference with the prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki. The two leaders determined that the removal of U.S. troops would be completed on schedule.

  Ending a war in which there is no clear victory is an anticlimactic thing. The flag-draped coffins and funerals were over, as was the $10 billion a month price tag. But by the time we finished pulling out, the focus on Iraq had faded—it was a marker of a different era, the defining event of a different presidency. The only thing that wouldn’t fade was the effort to shape the perception of what had happened there. For years to come, the war’s supporters would blame the further tragedies that would take place in Iraq on the fact that we didn’t keep those ten thousand troops there, rather than on the decision to invade the country in the first place.

  What does it mean to invade a country, topple its leader, face a raging insurgency, open a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict across a region, spend trillions of dollars, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and permanently alter hundreds of thousands of American lives? Something in the character of post-9/11 America seemed unable, or unwilling, to process the scale of the catastrophic decision, and the spillover effects it had—an emboldened Iran, embattled Gulf states, a Syrian dictator who didn’t want to be next, a Russian strongman who resented American dominance, a terrorist organization that would turn itself into an Islamic State, and all the individual human beings caught in between.

  * * *

  —

  I WENT TO CALIFORNIA for Christmas. My father-in-law, Roger Norris, had recently been diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer, a private tragedy amid the global ones that consumed most of my days. It was unlikely, the doctors said, that he would live more than a year.

  Roger was a quiet man. Born in Ohio, raised in Michigan, he made his way to California and worked his whole life as an engineer—first for Douglas Aircraft, which then became part of McDonnell Douglas, which then became part of Boeing. He helped to build the airplanes and spacecraft that became the ballast of America’s postwar power. He raised seven kids and settled in Huntington Beach, with its wide beaches, two-car garages, and good public schools.

  On my first trips to Huntington Beach, I’d felt out of place—a New Yorker wandering the few sidewalks, searching in vain for a New York Times. The household was always bustling, but it could be a raucous place. Roger was an isla
nd of calm, tinkering at some project outside in the garage, reading the L.A. Times, lending money to his children when they needed it. He allowed himself few indulgences. On one of his visits, I took him to a baseball game, and as we ordered a third beer he told me he hadn’t had a few beers at the ballpark in decades.

  After his diagnosis, we began a project of checking things off his bucket list. His interests seemed frozen in the 1950s, like the photographs on the walls of the Waldorf. We saw Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and ate New Year’s dinner at Lawry’s, a classic Beverly Hills prime rib joint. We went to New York and saw Jersey Boys on Broadway. Ann, the family organizer, planned additional trips to Santa Barbara and Hawaii. She idolized her father, who had been the one who took her to book fairs and talked politics against the backdrop of Huntington Beach’s surfing culture.

  With a death approaching, I watched as the wider world shrinks to a family circle, and ultimately becomes inconsequential. Yet my time was limited, the pull of pressing events never farther away than my BlackBerry. My own experience was improbable and exciting to the people around me—people like my father, the son of an engineer from Baytown, Texas, or Roger Norris, an engineer from Michigan who had gotten in his car and driven west. At the same time, the things my job offered seemed symbolically important but impersonal. Prominently displayed in the Norris household was a picture of Barack Obama with Ann at a state dinner, with the president’s inscription, TO ROGER, THANKS FOR DOING SUCH A GREAT JOB WITH ANN. I represented how far Ann had come from Roger’s simple Michigan roots, but it was always hard for me to explain what I did—something more easily captured in that framed photograph.

  For big chunks of 2012, I’d be alone in D.C. while Ann took leaves of absence to be with her family out in California. At the White House, the world continued to spin on its axis, even as the reelection campaign started to envelop all that we did. You had to do the things that were in front of you without knowing whether you would be around to see where the story would go.