by Ben Rhodes
That fall, these governments knew that an interim agreement would increase the odds of a more comprehensive long-term deal; and if there was a comprehensive long-term deal, the odds of the United States going to war with Iran would plummet. Obama’s phone calls with Netanyahu became more acrimonious, as Netanyahu’s objections to an agreement became more strident, even as Israeli technical experts were in constant contact with our negotiating team so that we could prioritize their concerns. AIPAC became more unsubtle in raising questions about the agreement before it was even reached. Criticisms of our Iran policy from unnamed “Arab diplomats” reached a fever pitch. Everybody from junior congressional staffers to political journalists to cable television pundits was an expert on nuclear physics, armed with talking points.
I knew this debate was going to be rough, and that it was a dress rehearsal for a longer, harder fight to come if we reached a comprehensive nuclear deal. I started to host regular meetings of staffers from across the government who worked on the Iran negotiations as well as public affairs and congressional relations. Our approach was to produce a steady flow of facts about what was in the potential deal, to arm supporters with the case for diplomacy, and to pre-rebut the barrage of criticism that was going to come. I threw myself into this mission, meeting with anyone who wanted to be briefed—journalists and experts, progressive groups and congressional skeptics, Quakers and arms control advocates. We had a chance to avoid a war and a nuclear-armed Iran, but diplomacy wouldn’t succeed if we couldn’t keep Congress from killing it with new sanctions legislation.
There was a final flurry of meetings in late November 2013. As Kerry negotiated in Geneva with the Iranians and the other P5+1 countries, he’d call back with different formulations on the remaining issues. One of the most contentious was an Iranian insistence that we recognize their “right to enrich uranium”—the process necessary for a civil nuclear program (and a nuclear weapons program); we didn’t want to recognize a right to enrich, and we wanted to assert that any Iranian enrichment had to be negotiated with the P5+1. We had conference call after call, arguing over the most minute language, with Susan demanding changes in wording. Kerry reached a breaking point, shouting into the phone—“Susan, this is a goddamn good deal!” I was a little worried, but Susan assured me that she was just bucking him up. “I want John to be as worried about us as the Iranians,” she said. Kerry got the final language and asked to speak to Obama. Tony Blinken, the deputy national security advisor, who had capably helped guide the negotiations, sat with me on the couches in the Oval Office as Kerry read the agreement to Obama. On all the outstanding issues, Kerry had secured what we needed. We held our thumbs up. Obama stood up from his desk, holding the phone to his ear, and congratulated Kerry.
Late that night, in the East Room of the White House, Obama made a televised statement about the deal while I watched off to the side. After six years of sanctions, diplomacy, and political fights, here we were. “As president and commander in chief,” he said, “I will do what is necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But I have a profound responsibility to try to resolve our differences peacefully.”
When he was done, I walked with him back to the residence. The familiar hallways were quiet; the discord over the deal felt a great distance from the stoic portraits that lined the walls. “You know,” I said, “right when I went to work for you we had this fight in the primary, about whether to talk to Iran.” I reminded him of the scene in that small campaign office on Massachusetts Avenue: It. Is. Not. A. Reward. To. Talk. To. Folks.
He stopped at the base of the stairs that led up to his living quarters and smiled. “We were right then,” he said, “and we’re right now.”
CHAPTER 20
RACE, MANDELA, AND CASTRO
A couple of weeks after the interim nuclear deal was announced, I walked into the Oval Office to find Obama reading alone at his desk. “What do you want to say about Mandela?” I asked.
He looked up at me. “What about him?”
“You haven’t seen?” I said. I suddenly felt unequal to the task of telling him this news. “He’s passed. Zuma is making a statement.” The fact of reporting that Jacob Zuma, the South African president, was making a statement seemed insignificant, the type of detail that would occur to a White House communications official already calculating how long Obama’s statement would come after Zuma’s, how soon his words would appear in the obituaries—the quotable line, the voice for the rest of us. Behind me, a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., sat on a pedestal; in the adjacent room, a large framed photograph showed Mandela seated on a chaise, hand reaching up to greet a younger Barack Obama, who sat before me as the first black president of the United States of America, a nation that—like South Africa—had suffered under an apartheid system and its aftermath.
“Why don’t you draft something short and simple,” he said. “I assume there’s going to have to be something longer for the memorial.”
* * *
—
WE HAD GONE TO South Africa earlier that summer, but Mandela had been too sick to receive visitors. Instead, we visited Robben Island—the piece of rock off the coast of Cape Town where he was imprisoned for decades. We flew there by helicopter, with an awe-inspiring view of the coastal city from the air—mountains ringed around a glistening harbor, birds squawking overhead.
Jay Carney and I toured the quarry where prisoners used to work, while the Obama family set off on their own tour, some thirty feet ahead of us. Our tour guide, a former prisoner, was an older man with an elegant manner and a belly protruding over his belt. He referred to himself as being from “the rank and file” of the African National Congress. He described fourteen years of work that he did in the same sunshine that beat down on us, how Mandela would set the pace for the other prisoners. Then he pointed to a small, dark cave on the other end of the quarry where they were allowed to eat lunch and occasionally use the toilet. “That,” he said, “was the best university in the world. That is where Mandela and others would debate political theory and all manner of topics. Then their discussions would filter out to the rank and file.”
Occasionally, our guide would stop talking and just stare at the Obamas, as if needing to confirm again with his own eyes that this family was the First Family of the United States, and that they were here. He told us about a guard who once smuggled an eight-month-old baby into the arms of Mandela so he could be reminded of what it felt like to hold a child. In the prison courtyard, he told us how they used to communicate by putting messages into tennis balls and hitting them over the wall to the others. Then, in the cellblock, he walked us through the ways in which the prisoners smuggled things in and out. The Obamas lingered in Mandela’s cell. When we went inside after them, I felt the smallness of the space. Our guide spoke of Mandela’s refusing a bed if the other prisoners couldn’t have one. I asked him what they could see from Robben Island. “The top of the mountain,” he replied. When he got out of prison, he told me, he climbed it.
That afternoon, I rode alone in the limousine with Obama after he made a speech at the University of Cape Town, the car winding through hills occasionally dotted with crowds. As we compared our experiences of Robben Island, Obama told me that the one time he teared up was when he asked his tour guide what had been most difficult for Mandela, and he responded, “the absence of children.” Mandela had not seen his own children for decades. “When you have kids,” Obama told me, “you’ll understand in a different way.”
I told him the story that my own tour guide had mentioned, about Mandela holding the smuggled baby. Obama just stared out the window at the passing countryside, lush green hills that resembled the coastline of northern California. I took his silence as a signal that he was done with the subject.
* * *
—
NOW, SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, Mandela was gone. A few hours after his initial statement, Obama called me back
into the Oval Office to talk about the speech he would give on our return trip to South Africa for Mandela’s memorial. “We should remind people that he wasn’t a saint,” he said. “He was a man. You can’t appreciate what he did without that.”
For the next couple of days, I didn’t work on the speech—it hung there, impossible to focus on while I was living the day-to-day reality of American politics in 2013. Instead, I read the words of the young man who had been sentenced to live the rest of his life in prison in 1964: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” I went jogging along the Potomac River listening to recordings of Mandela’s later speeches—the melodious accent, the hard-earned wisdom in the voice of an older man. Running past memorials to white men, some of them slave owners, I began to see glimpses of something more clearly—not the saint played by Morgan Freeman in the movies and celebrated in Western capitals, but the man who struggled, who turned to violence, who was labeled a terrorist by large swaths of white society, the man who was willing to die for what he believed with no idea that he would become a global icon for happy endings.
Racism was a constant presence and absence in the Obama White House. We didn’t talk about it much. We didn’t need to—it was always there, everywhere, like white noise. It was there when Obama said that it was stupid for a black professor to be arrested in his own home and got criticized for days while the white police officer was turned into a victim. It was there when a white Southern member of Congress yelled “You lie!” at Obama while he addressed a joint session of Congress. It was there when a New York reality show star built an entire political brand on the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, an idea that was covered as national news for months and is still believed by a majority of Republicans. It was there in the way Obama was talked about in the right-wing media, which spent eight years insisting that he hated America, disparaging his every move, inventing scandals where there were none, attacking him for any time that he took off from work. It was there in the social media messages I got that called him a Kenyan monkey, a boy, a Muslim. And it was there in the refusal of Republicans in Congress to work with him for eight full years, something that Obama was also blamed for no matter what he did. One time, Obama invited congressional Republicans to attend a screening of Lincoln in the White House movie theater—a Steven Spielberg film about how Abraham Lincoln worked with Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Not one of them came.
Obama didn’t talk about it much. Every now and then, he’d show flashes of dark humor in practicing the answer he could give on a particular topic. What do you think it will take for these protests to stop? “Cops need to stop shooting unarmed black folks.” Why do you think you have failed to bring the country together? “Because my being president appears to have literally driven some white people insane.” Do you think some of the opposition you face is about race? “Yes! Of course! Next question.” But he was guarded in public. When he was asked if racism informed the strident opposition to his presidency, he’d carefully ascribe it to other factors.
I came to realize that this was about more than not offering up what some of his opponents craved—the picture of the angry black man, or the lectures on race that fuel a sense of grievance among white voters. Obama also didn’t want to offer up gauzy words to make well-meaning white people feel better. The fact that he was a black president wasn’t going to bring life back to an unarmed black kid who was shot, or alter structural inequities in housing, education, and incarceration in our states and cities. It wasn’t going to change the investment of powerful interests in a system that sought to deny voting rights, or to cast people on food stamps working minimum wage jobs as “takers,” incapable of making it on their own. The last person who ever thought that Barack Obama’s election was going to bring racial reconciliation and some “end of race” in America was Barack Obama. That was a white person’s concept imposed upon his campaign. I know because I was once one of them, taking delight in writing words about American progress, concluding in the applause line “And that is why I can stand before you as president of the United States.” But he couldn’t offer up absolution for America’s racial sins, or transform American society in four or eight years.
I was one of those well-meaning white people looking forward to seeing Barack Obama eulogize Nelson Mandela so that I could feel better about the world, only I was the person tasked with writing the eulogy. After putting it off for a few days, I came in early one Saturday morning and wrote a first draft in one sitting. By the time we got on the plane for South Africa, I still had no idea what Obama thought of it. He called me up to his office in the front of Air Force One, which was carrying a delegation that included George W. and Laura Bush, and told me that he liked what I’d written, that it was a “safety net” because he could deliver it if nothing else came to him on the flight over. “Are you happy with it?” he asked me.
“I am,” I said. “I’m sure you can make it much better.”
A few hours later, Obama came back and gave me several handwritten pages on a yellow legal pad. It was an entirely new draft. “See what you can do with this,” he said. He had made it into a study of Mandela the leader.
We stopped in Senegal to refuel, and as we idled on the tarmac I got into a long conversation with George W. Bush about Texas football. I knew a bit about the subject because of my father’s Texas background—he’d been in the high school band at football games, wearing the gray uniform of Confederate soldiers for Robert E. Lee High School. Bush was pleasant, and he knew everything there is to know about Texas football, the Southwest Conference that my dad grew up with. It was hard to attach the genial man in front of me to the catastrophe of the war in Iraq. Obama stumbled upon us as he was walking back to give me his latest revisions. He mentioned that I’d gone to Rice, which was home to the Baker Institute.
“They’ll give anyone an institute these days,” Bush joked.
“Maybe they’ll give Ben one someday,” Obama replied.
“Nah,” Bush said. “He’s already got them scholarships named after him.”
As I returned to the computers to finish editing the speech, something was missing—it was fuller of wisdom than my draft, but it felt impersonal. Susan wandered back and read it over my shoulder. She agreed. “He’s not there,” she said, referring to Obama. She offered to go talk to him with me—it was going to be an awkward conversation, as Obama didn’t like to be told to be more revealing, particularly on matters that intersected with race.
We found him playing spades at the conference room table. I could tell from the look on his face that he was pleased with what he’d written. “How’re you feeling about it?” he asked.
“It’s great,” I replied. “There’s just one thing. We think it needs to be more personal.”
“I’ve already done that,” he said. “Remember that speech in Cape Town?” I did—a speech that began with a reminiscence of how Obama had first become politically active in the antiapartheid movement when he was at Occidental College. But this was different. This was Mandela’s memorial.
“Yes, it doesn’t have to be the same,” I said, “but you need to put more in here about what Mandela meant to you personally.”
He flashed a little anger, a look I’d learned to read, a narrowing of the eyes. “I don’t want to claim him or put myself in his company.”
“But they want to hear that,” I said. “People want to see you as part of that legacy, and they can do that without your comparing yourself to Mandela.”
Susan chimed in. “They do,” she said. “Folks want to hear from you on this.”
He complained again that South
Africans had heard him talk about that before, but he agreed to take another stab at it. What came back an hour later was some of the most personal writing I’d ever seen him do. In small, careful script, he had written: “We know that, like South Africa, the United States had to overcome centuries of racial subjugation. As was true here, it took sacrifice—the sacrifice of countless people, known and unknown, to see the dawn of a new day. Michelle and I are beneficiaries of that struggle….Over 30 years ago, while still a student, I learned of Nelson Mandela and the struggles taking place in this beautiful land, and it stirred something in me. It woke me up to my responsibilities to others and to myself, and it set me on an improbable journey that finds me here today. And while I will always fall short of Madiba’s example, he makes me want to be a better man.”
* * *
—
WHEN WE LANDED IN South Africa, it was raining in sheets. Shortly before Obama had to leave for the memorial, I went to check in with him. The Secret Service was explaining that he’d have to wear a bulletproof vest while speaking; the memorial service was outside in a soccer stadium, and there wasn’t going to be any partition.
“I forgot to go over one thing,” I said. “Raúl Castro is going to be up there on the dais with you.”
“So?” he asked.
“So the question is, what do you do if you see him?” Some press had started asking about this—no U.S. president had greeted a Cuban president since the revolution. Their interaction would be a matter of intense scrutiny.
