The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  There was one final thing that could have derailed what we were doing. The communications team had been planning to set up a lectern in the Roosevelt Room—a location that would put Obama in front of a giant portrait of Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill—the moment, symbolically, when the United States initiated its de facto colonization of Cuba. We had them move it instead to the Cabinet Room.

  The next day, I went to work early. It was cold and I had barely slept in days, but the secret had held. I awoke to a clutter of messages—separate planes had taken off for Cuba to pick up Alan Gross and the intelligence asset; notification had begun for different members of Congress and our administration. All of the pieces were now in motion. I sat at my desk and made some final tweaks to the statement that Obama would give when I got word that the plane with Alan Gross on board had taken off from Cuba, a corned beef sandwich—his favorite—ready in the galley, his wife, Judy, who had endured more than five years of separation, waiting for him. News started to break and we did a press call. I’d done hundreds of these over the years, but now I was telling a story of the last year and a half of my life. When that was done, I walked back out into the cold to get some air and take a break by myself, before reentering a world that now knew my secret.

  I went back inside and watched Obama speak on the small television mounted on the wall in my office. I’d attend no celebration, no victory party; I wanted to take care of business so I could go home to my daughter, who was still not a week old. Before Obama was even finished speaking, Ann gave me the greatest gift that I could have received when she sent me a photo her sister, Teresa, took of Ann holding Ella in front of the image of Obama speaking on television, the chyron below him reading “OBAMA ANNOUNCES NEW CUBA POLICY: Obama: normalizing relations between our two countries, most sweeping change to U.S.-Cuba policy since 1961.” This was, as Ricardo had told me in Rome, as good as it gets.

  CHAPTER 25

  TAPPING THE BRAKES

  As we started the fourth quarter, Obama had the national security team that he wanted in place: Susan Rice, Lisa Monaco, and Susan’s principal deputy, Avril Haines, a smart, diligent, and eccentric woman who combined the experience of having been the NSC’s top lawyer, insisting on fidelity to the rule of law, with the operational background of having been deputy director of the CIA. Together, this team had constructed a counter-ISIL strategy and an emergency global effort that would stamp out the Ebola epidemic that had spawned fears of millions being killed around the world.

  Toward the end of 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the summary of a 6,700-page report on the Bush administration’s use of torture and rendition, detailing in stark terms the moral collapse of the United States government after 9/11. There had been a lengthy period of declassification, with our White House put in the position of mediating between a CIA reluctant to see information go public and a Senate committee that wanted as few redactions as possible.

  The day after the report was released, McDonough asked Obama if he felt the rollout of the report had gone okay. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought it went fine. What did you think?”

  “I thought it went fine, too,” McDonough said. “I just wanted to make sure you were good.”

  “You know,” Obama said, “I think it’s a chance for all of us to reflect on what fear can do to this place. We’re not so different from the people who came before us, though I think we’re right about more things.” His tone was unusually formal. “If you want to know why sometimes I tap the brakes, that’s why. We can’t make decisions based on fear.”

  “You’re goddamn right,” Biden said. “And we’re lucky to have you.” He reached out like an old pol and grabbed Obama’s wrist.

  After the ISIL beheadings, there had been a limitless demand for Obama to take military action, to obtain some measure of vengeance. Fear, bordering on hysteria, seemed to project from cable television. At one event, a businessman pulled me aside, as if in confidence, and told me he’d hired a private security detail so that he wouldn’t be beheaded on the streets of New York. At one point in the midst of it all, Obama called me up to the Oval Office, as he did sometimes when he wanted to unburden his mind. We chatted a bit about the current state of our public line on ISIL. “You know,” he said, “I can see how the Iraq War happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People are so scared right now,” he said. “It’d be easy for me as president to get on that wave and do whatever I want.”

  Instead, that fall, he had been more deliberate, commencing a limited bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria and putting small teams of U.S. advisors on the ground to help organize the Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish forces who were going to start steadily retaking territory from ISIL. He placed strict caps on the numbers of these troops, and on what they could do, prompting another series of complaints about Obama “micromanaging” the Pentagon. He didn’t care. ISIL was a serious enough threat to warrant launching thousands of airstrikes, but he cringed when he heard the threat described as “existential.” ISIL had killed four Americans, a tiny fraction of those lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t, as some of our critics roared, analogous to Nazi Germany—the same rhetoric Bush used after 9/11 when the government was authorizing torture.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE WINTER OF 2015, a principal Republican attack on Obama was that he didn’t refer to our enemy as “radical Islam.” Early in the administration, we decided to move away from the phrase “Global War on Terror,” believing that you can’t wage war against a tactic, nor could you ever defeat it. We also generally avoided using the word “Islam” in describing the enemy because terrorist groups like al Qaeda wanted to cast themselves as a religious movement. After bin Laden was killed, communications were found in his compound in which he lamented that the absence of a religious name for al Qaeda allowed the West to “claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.” ISIL—“the Islamic State”—was addressing that challenge in their name and their declaration of a caliphate.

  Since most Republicans didn’t want to call for more troops in places like Syria, their strategies often began with the assertion that they would identify the enemy as “radical Islam,” as if the clarity of this rhetoric would cause ISIL to crumble. The media constantly asked us about our refusal to do so. That February, we were hosting a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, which would bring together experts and leaders from communities (largely Muslim ones) where there was a threat of radicalization. The absence of the word “Islamic” from the conference name kicked the issue up yet again in the press, and Obama called me up to his office.

  “Hey,” he said, sitting behind his desk. “I didn’t realize that we were being so politically correct in talking about Islamic extremism. I thought it was just some Fox News bullshit.” He had just read a column by Thomas Friedman entitled “Say It Like It Is,” lambasting us for not saying we were at war with radical Islam.

  I stood there, feeling a weakness in my legs. Had we spent months defending a position that Obama didn’t care that much about? “I think it’s the phrase ‘radical Islam,’ ” I said. “That makes it sound…”

  “Like all of Islam is radical,” he said, nodding. “I get that. But I don’t have any problem saying this ideology is a problem in the Islamic world.”

  “We’ve pointed to all the times you’ve said that.” I tried to think of an alternative phrase, and then realized that that was the problem. “I think the issue that comes to Josh,” I said, referring to our press secretary’s daily press briefings, “is why we don’t say that we’re at war with radical Islam.”

  I saw Obama registering the absurdity of the debate. It was often the case that these controversies—which migrated from fringe websites, to Fox News, to the White House briefing room, and then finally to columns by people like Tom Friedman—did not reach him until later in that process than the res
t of us. “So anything we do now would be a shift in our position.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “And attract more attention.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Here and around the world.”

  We were both silent for a moment. “So it’s not on the level,” he said.

  “It’s not on the level.”

  “Okay,” he said, realizing that it was a domestic political issue, and not really a matter of national security. “I’ll talk to Josh and Denis about it.”

  We went ahead with the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, announcing a series of measures to work with communities to combat the threat from ISIL, as well as other extremist groups—such as white supremacists. We announced commonsense, technocratic things to do—build ties between law enforcement and Muslim communities targeted by ISIL; recognize that violent extremism can take different forms. But politically, that only raised the temperature. Ted Cruz, gearing up for a presidential run, denounced Obama—who had waged war as commander in chief every day of his presidency—as “an apologist for radical Islamic terrorists.”

  * * *

  —

  I FINALLY CONFIRMED TO Obama that I would stick it out through the end of the administration. I was standing in the Oval Office when he asked me, as he had two years ago after the election on Air Force One, if I wanted to take on an additional project—something like Cuba.

  “No,” I said, “but I would like some things to change.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’d like to work less,” I said, “and see my family more.” To give him a sense of what I meant, I added, “I’d like to get out of the day-to-day communications where I can. I don’t want to be coming to work in late 2016 and still answering some criticism about why you’re weak on ISIL.”

  He laughed. “Neither do I,” he said. “But I’m going to need you for Iran.”

  We were entering the homestretch of negotiations with the Iranians, and the ferocity of opposition to the agreement—which didn’t even exist—was building. In late January, Speaker Boehner put out a press release announcing that Netanyahu would be traveling to the United States at his invitation to address a joint session of Congress. We received no advance notice of this visit from either Boehner or the Israeli government. This type of interference in American foreign policy—a foreign leader invited to lobby the U.S. Congress against the policy of a sitting president—would have been unthinkable in 2009. But by 2015, Netanyahu had become almost a de facto member of the Republican caucus, and Republicans had abandoned any norms about working with a foreign government to undermine the policies of a sitting president.

  Congress was debating yet another Iran sanctions bill, a shortsighted and unnecessary piece of legislation that would have blown up the negotiations. Obama went before the Democratic caucus and gave a lengthy defense of the need to give John Kerry time and space to negotiate a nuclear deal. “This vote,” Obama said, “is not a freebie. I need you on this.” He told them, again, that he’d veto anything that put the negotiations in danger. I was meeting regularly with Democratic members of Congress to try to convince them that we were pursuing a good deal, one that would roll back the Iranian nuclear program and avert a war. This included a standing meeting with the Jewish Democrats in the House. These were occasionally raucous meetings, as we all talked over one another and debated the various intricacies of the Iranian nuclear program: how many centrifuges they’d have operating; what facilities they could use; what would happen to their heavy water reactor, which was on track to produce plutonium—hours and hours talking about a deal that hadn’t even been reached.

  Usually, I was on permanent defense, responding to various lines of criticism circulating on the Hill. After Netanyahu’s speech was announced, the dynamic shifted; suddenly, the Democrats were more annoyed at Netanyahu for interfering in our politics than at anything we were doing. I’d have these meetings in the Capitol, often right before or after the Israeli ambassador, Ron Dermer—a close Netanyahu confidant—was meeting with the same group. It felt as if we were sparring, getting ready for a bigger fight to come.

  * * *

  —

  A TEN-DAY STRETCH IN June encapsulated both the events that ensured Obama’s presidency would be a historic success and the clouds that would hover over his legacy.

  On June 16, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency. I watched as he rode down an escalator in the gold-plated lobby at Trump Tower, waving to an assembled crowd. He launched into a rambling, semicoherent rant that sounded like a greatest-hits version of Fox News opposition to Obama, and called Mexicans rapists. We didn’t take it all that seriously. Trump was just a cruder expression of what we’d heard from Republicans for years, and it seemed he had little chance of becoming president.

  The next day, June 17, a young white supremacist named Dylann Roof walked into a black church in Charleston, joined a Bible study group, and then opened fire—killing nine people in a matter of minutes. At that time, Roof had killed more Americans than ISIL and added a particularly vile act of terror to the long list of mass shootings that had taken place during the Obama presidency—shootings that we felt powerless to stop with a Congress that opposed any gun restrictions. Privately, Obama lamented that he was out of words to express outrage at another shooting. “Maybe I’ll just go and attend the memorial service,” he said, “and not say anything.”

  Then, on June 25, we filed into the Oval Office for the morning meeting. While Obama was getting briefed, he was interrupted, which was unusual, and told that “the Supreme Court upheld the ACA.” Then he held his hand over his head and closed his eyes tightly, as if to say, Give me a minute. We all applauded, stood up, shook his hand. After less than a minute, he sat down and asked us to continue the briefing. It seemed that a weight had been removed from his shoulders.

  On the twenty-sixth, more good news; the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. The White House became a celebratory place, people embracing in the hallways, gay colleagues in tears at the news. Plans were made to light the White House that night in rainbow colors. Coupled with healthcare, it felt as if the outlines of a successful presidency were coming into focus.

  Obama had been up late the night before, rewriting the speech that he was slated to give in Charleston at a memorial service for the nine people who’d been killed. Cody Keenan had done the first draft, but told me that Obama had rewritten much of it himself, choosing to anchor the speech in the concept of grace. In raw, handwritten prose, he addressed squarely the racial taboos that he often shied away from—the racism of the Confederate flag and the criminal justice system; the scourge of gun violence and the casual bias that leads people to “call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal”; the need to “examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate.” As Cody took off on Marine One, he sent me a note that Obama had said something unusual: Perhaps, if the spirit moved him, he would sing “Amazing Grace” during his speech.

  That afternoon, I was working at my desk when the speech came on the White House television channel that played whenever the president was speaking. Over the course of the speech, I stopped to watch as he delved deeper into these subjects. As was often the case in black churches, he fell into a more rhythmic style, feeding off the crowd, a man far more welcome there than he had ever been in Congress. “God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind,” Obama said. “He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency and shortsightedness and fear of each other—but we got it all the same.”

  It felt as though he was speaking directly to all of the conflicting emotions about America that I’d come to feel—the disappointment in the reality around me, but also the redemptive nature of the project that we were all a part of. As Obama neared the end
of the prepared text, he described the dignity of the victims, the grace in their lives that could heal the hate in America. “If we can tap that grace,” he said, “everything can change. Amazing grace. Amazing grace.” I froze.

  Obama stopped talking and put his head down. I stared at the television. He paused for what felt like an eternity. The African American clergy behind him sat in prayerful silence, draped in purple vestments. It felt as though he’d reached the end of one kind of speech, a particularly good one, but something was not yet fully expressed. Then something changed in his face—a face I had stared at and studied across a thousand meetings, a face I had learned to read so I could understand what he was thinking, or what he wanted me to do. I saw the faintest hint of a smile and a slight shake of the head as he looked down at the lectern, a letting go, a man who looked unburdened. He’s going to sing, I thought.

  “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…”

  The pastor behind him let out a joyful laugh. The audience began to cheer, springing to their feet, released from some more passive form of mourning.

  “that saved a wretch like me…”

  The voices of the other congregants started to rise in unison with his. One of the preachers behind him opened up into the largest smile that you could ever have at a memorial service, a wistful smile. Obama’s body relaxed into the moment, his imperfect singing voice mining the depths of the hymn.

  “I once was lost, but now I’m found…”

  I started to feel everything at once—the hurt and anger at the murder of those nine people, another thing that I’d kept pressed down in the constant compartmentation of emotions that allowed me to do my job; the stress that came from doing a job that had steadily swallowed who I thought I was over the last eight years; the more pure motivations, to do something that felt right, buried deep within me; the sense that maybe we were all going to be okay even if the world wasn’t.