by Ben Rhodes
“was blind, but now I see.”
An organ was playing, people were giving praise in the audience, and in that instant I was reminded that there were people, good people, kind people out there in the world who were more important than any of the petty controversies that enveloped us every day, people who understood who Obama was and what he had been trying to do, people whose support could allow him to stand there, in the middle of his seventh year as president, and be totally open in a way that I had almost never seen him be in public before. It was always hard to explain what it was that I most admired about this complicated man. Watching him, I felt that I would never have to explain it to anyone again.
He then started reciting the list, punctuated by organ chords, of the names of every one of the victims, a stratagem that managed to do something I had never seen before, as the entire life of each person was celebrated, vindicated, and elevated by the short, declarative words that he spoke:
Clementa Pinckney found that grace.
Cynthia Hurd found that grace.
Susie Jackson found that grace.
Ethel Lance found that grace.
DePayne Middleton-Doctor found that grace.
Tywanza Sanders found that grace.
Daniel L. Simmons, Senior, found that grace.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton found that grace.
Myra Thompson found that grace.
Then it was over, this moment that had opened up a window into something—into Obama; into a better America than the one I lived in every day, into a purer sense of what we were all doing, as people who worked for him, what we were a part of, what kept me coming back to work all these years. I sat at my desk, the White House feed on my television now an empty blue screen, and for the first time in many years, I sobbed.
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS AFTER the Charleston speech, I went up to the Oval Office. It was the last meeting of the day, and Obama wanted to talk to me, Denis, and Anita Decker Breckenridge, now his deputy chief of staff, about the potential rollout of an Iran deal. When the three of us walked in, instead of getting up and walking over to his chair as he normally would, Obama sat at his desk, lingering over a letter. He didn’t offer his customary “Have a seat” or acknowledge our presence, so the three of us stood over the couches awkwardly—people who saw Obama as much as anyone, but still deferential to the protocols of his office.
“ ‘Dear Mr. President,’ ” he began to read aloud. “ ‘I used to not like you because of the color of your skin. My whole life I have hated people because of the color of their skin. I have thought about things since those nine people were killed and I realize I was wrong. I want to thank you for everything you are trying to do to help people.’ ”
He finished, and put the letter down. None of us knew what to say. It felt as if the whole presidency was for the purpose of receiving this single letter.
He looked at the letter on his desk, as though it were another person in the room. “Grace,” he said. Then he got up and walked over to his chair. “It’s a shame,” he said, sitting down, “that those nine people had to die for that to happen.”
CHAPTER 26
THE ANTIWAR ROOM
Barack Obama took office after Iran had the scientific knowledge and infrastructure necessary to build a nuclear weapon. By the time we reached the interim agreement in 2013, they were less than a year from producing enough of the raw materials for the purpose if they chose to break out and pursue it. Therefore, the negotiations became an extended effort to solve a pressing scientific problem: How can we impose enough restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program to prevent them from approaching that tipping point? Given the nature of the challenge, in addition to John Kerry, an increasingly important member of our negotiating team was Ernie Moniz—the nuclear physicist who served as our secretary of energy, a brilliant, unusually plainspoken scientist with unkempt gray hair combed back in a style that made him resemble one of America’s Founding Fathers.
As the negotiations intensified into the spring of 2016, we inched closer to a deal. That is when my role became more pronounced. Because I was responsible for leading the effort to secure the congressional support necessary for an agreement to survive, I became a kind of barometer. In meetings or videoconferences with Kerry and the negotiating team, Obama would glance at me as they reported the latest progress or backsliding, looking to see if I cringed or lit up at the latest report. I was familiar with the attacks that would come our way, in part because I was already hearing them.
Obama had to balance security, science, and politics. For example, we had consistently opposed Iran having any centrifuges at Fordow, a site buried deep underground, and therefore a harder military target. The Iranians wanted to keep some centrifuges there, but disconnected, with electronic seals in place to make sure they were off. In exchange, they’d make additional concessions on other issues.
“Ernie, what do you think?” Obama asked.
“Substantively, it makes no difference,” he replied, adding that he’d rather have other Iranian commitments on their stockpile and ability to build new reactors.
Satisfied, Obama would ask me if we could make that shift. As long as we can say there’s no enrichment at Fordow, I said.
Kerry and Moniz flew to Vienna in late June to see if they could close the deal. Obama told Kerry that he had to be willing to walk away. “John,” he said, referring to the victories on healthcare and same-sex marriage, “I’ve already got my legacy. I don’t need this.” Kerry said he understood, but he was also after his own legacy—he’d spent hundreds of hours in negotiations with the Iranians, and built a close relationship with the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif. Moniz had also developed a close relationship with his Iranian counterpart, who had attended MIT while Moniz was teaching there, before the Iranian Revolution opened up the chasm between our two countries. These were the two relationships that were going to have to get us over the finish line.
Kerry and Moniz ended up spending seventeen days in Vienna, capping off years of work—there is simply no way the Iran deal would have gotten done without both of them. Most of the final questions had to do with how long the different restrictions on Iran would last. It was a complicated process—with some restrictions lasting eight years, some ten, some fifteen, some forever. Every day, Obama was updated. Multiple times a day, I’d check in via videoconference with the team in Vienna, who had barely slept for weeks. We were holding out in Washington for things that often made little substantive difference but could help us defend the deal against the barrage of criticism that was coming.
Complicating matters was the fact that Congress had passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which required a congressional vote on a final deal within thirty days of its being submitted to Congress. We initially resisted this, but Democrats had grown weary of blocking Iran sanctions bills and thought it would be awkward to block an effort to call a vote. Here is what this meant in practice: Republicans needed a majority in the House, and sixty votes in the Senate, to formally reject the Iran deal. If we had enough votes to sustain a presidential veto in either the House or Senate, then they wouldn’t be able to kill the deal. If we could secure forty-one votes in the Senate, then Congress wouldn’t even be able to reject it at all. Everyone knew that the review period would offer a forum for Republicans, the Israeli government, and AIPAC to attack the deal.
Given the protracted negotiations, we missed a July 9 deadline that Congress had set in the legislation, which meant that the review period before a vote would be sixty days instead of thirty. This would make it harder to secure congressional support, as the review period would now run through the August congressional recess, making it possible for critics of the deal to run advertisements in districts and states to pressure members of Congress. The Iranians thought we would cave on the remaining issues to avoid the longer congres
sional period, but Obama wanted to show that we were willing to live without a deal.
Day after day, on little to no sleep, Kerry and Moniz haggled over the remaining issues. On July 12, the pieces started coming together. On the thirteenth, Susan and I went into the Oval Office for Obama’s final call with Kerry. The deal was basically done, but Obama needed to give his approval. We watched as Obama listened on the phone. “John, you should be very proud,” he said. With that, he hung up the phone and smiled. “Looks like we have a deal.”
“That took eight years,” I said.
“We should call that YouTube guy,” he said, referring to the 2007 debate question about engaging adversaries.
Obama turned to the statement he’d give the next morning. “Make sure we frame this as a nuclear issue,” he told me. Ever since Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, critics had been using Iran’s nonnuclear behavior—its support for terrorism, its belligerence in the Middle East—to delegitimize the deal. “We don’t want to let the critics muddy the nuclear issue with the other issues.”
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS BEFORE the deal was finalized, I sat at my desk reading a story in my press clips. “This is insane,” I said.
Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who had recently become the NSC spokesperson sitting right outside my office, came in and asked what I was talking about. “Check out this Breitbart story,” I said. Ned read the beginning of the story over my shoulder: “Deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes—who lacks any prior qualifications for the post—has explained to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Monday that the administration believes that a bad Iran deal is worth doing because political reform inside the Iranian regime is more likely with the deal than without. Or, to use Rhodes’s own words: ‘We believe that the kiss of the nuke deal will turn the Iranian frog into a handsome prince.’ ”
“That’s insane,” Ned said.
Unlike my doctored Benghazi email, this didn’t sound anything like something that I—or any human being—would say. We checked the transcript. As it turned out, this is what I had actually said: “We believe that an agreement is necessary and has to be good enough to be worth doing even if Iran doesn’t change. If ten or fifteen years from now Iran is the same as it is today, in terms of its government, the deal has to be good enough that it can exist on those merits.” This was central to our whole argument: We needed a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon precisely because it was a bad actor; that, of course, is why critics were trying to turn the argument inside out.
I reached out to Goldberg, who publicly disputed the story. But fact checks weren’t going to reach the readers of Breitbart, which had already published more than one story, spawning an unknowable number of follow-on Internet stories, talk radio segments, and tweets. We believe that the kiss of the nuke deal will turn the Iranian frog into a handsome prince. Millions of people would consume this information in a matter of hours, far more than the readership of The New York Times. It was fake news, and there was no way to dissuade people who chose to believe things that validated their established convictions.
Breitbart had already run a story about an NSC staffer on Iran named Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, because she was Iranian American and once interned for an organization that advocated for diplomacy with Iran. Sahar was a career civil servant for a decade, starting out in George W. Bush’s Pentagon. The stories made her out to be a Manchurian candidate, advocating for Iran’s interests within the Obama White House. Afterward, Obama invited her into the Oval Office. “Don’t let them get you down,” he said, posing for a picture with her in front of his desk. She kept a huge smile frozen on her face, fighting off tears.
Later, in my office, I gave her my own pep talk. “We just can’t let them win.” It was the type of thing I had been telling myself for years, and I knew it was cold comfort—enough to motivate you through the day but not to make the nature of our opposition any less disconcerting.
Dozens of people—diplomats, lawyers, sanctions experts, nuclear scientists, intelligence analysts—had worked on Wendy Sherman’s team for years to get the Iran deal done. I felt as though they had handed off a baton to me and my team, and we had sixty days to make sure Congress wouldn’t undo their work. There was no doubt we’d confront a well-financed and relentless effort to undermine the deal. The last time we raised concerns before an actual vote on a piece of Iran sanctions legislation—a 2011 sanctions bill strongly supported by AIPAC—it ended up passing 100–0 in the Senate.
I sat at the table in my apartment, reviewing different pieces of a plan of congressional briefings and public outreach that would carry us through the next two months. “I’ve never been this stressed before,” I said to Ann, who was in the kitchen.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I feel like this is all on me.”
“That’s crazy,” she said. “There are lots of people in this.” She started ticking off the State Department’s leadership: “Kerry, Wendy, Tony…”
“It’s not the same,” I said.
“Why?” she asked. “This is what John Kerry has worked for his whole life.”
“It just isn’t the same,” I said. I took a deep breath and stared at the computer screen. “I can’t explain.” Kerry, at least, was also able to focus on diplomacy; I was about to spend two months down in the muck, doing the part of my job that I enjoyed the least, and it felt like the most important thing I was ever going to do.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, I pitched Denis McDonough on my concept: I wanted to take the Iran team I’d already built and turn it into a standing working group of people who would focus entirely on securing congressional support for the deal. “You still have a job,” he said. “You’ll need someone else to run the war room.”
I turned to a guy named Chad Kreikemeier, an amiable Nebraskan and former Hill staffer who worked on legislative affairs at the White House. Together, we’d put together a collection of combative personalities and eccentric experts who would cover policy, communications, digital outreach, engagement with the Jewish community, liaison with progressive organizations, and—above all—constant communication with members of Congress and their offices. I made the offer and Chad said he’d think about it; unspoken was the fact that whoever took on a prominent role defending the Iran deal was going to put a target on his own back. Less than an hour after leaving my office, he came back. “Okay,” he said. “There’s no way I’m not doing this.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “I think. You just took command of the war room.”
We ended up calling it the Antiwar Room. Obama charged us with making sure we mobilized the constellation of progressive groups who had joined together during the Bush administration to oppose the Iraq War. “Democrats are going to be feeling a lot of pressure from the AIPAC folks,” he said. “We need to make sure they hear from folks on the other side, especially over August recess.”
Our case was straightforward: The deal prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Iranians had to remove two-thirds of their centrifuges, couldn’t use their more advanced centrifuges, and had to get rid of 98 percent of their stockpile. They had to convert a heavy water reactor so it couldn’t produce plutonium. Inspectors would have 24/7 access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the ability to access Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain—from uranium mines and mills to centrifuge manufacturing and storage facilities. To cheat, Iran wouldn’t just need a nuclear facility like Natanz or Fordow—they’d have to run an entirely secret supply chain. If they cheated, sanctions would snap back into place.
Then there were the consequences of not having the deal. Without it, Iran could quickly advance its nuclear program to the point of having enough material for a bomb. That would leave us with a choice between bombing their facilities and acquiescing to a nuclear-a
rmed Iran. Holding out for a better deal was not going to work. It was diplomacy or war.
The press reported that AIPAC and other opposition groups were planning to spend up to $40 million on advertisements and other efforts to kill the deal, which would intimidate members of Congress, several of whom called me to express concerns that we had no similar resources to spend. They sent out long anti–Iran deal documents that would shape the arguments we’d hear made back at us from deal opponents on the Hill or in the media. Every morning, we’d convene the twenty or so people who comprised our Antiwar Room to map out what arguments needed to be countered, what Hill meetings needed to be scheduled, what briefings had to take place—of scientists, experts, journalists, or advocates. Matt Nosanchuk, the permanently smiling man in charge of our Jewish outreach, asked what his objective should be. “I want you to talk to every Jewish person in America,” I said.
“Every Jew in America,” he repeated. “Okay.”
Chad set up an office in a closet-sized room in the basement of the West Wing where he listed every Democratic senator on a whiteboard to track where they were on the issue and what needed to be done to win their vote. Every question that was raised about the deal would be fact-checked, both publicly and in materials sent to Congress. To make sure that people would see our fact checks in real time, we set up a Twitter account, @theIranDeal.
If the opposition’s advantage was the fact that the Israeli government and AIPAC were focused on lawmakers who dreaded taking a position against them, our advantage was the fact that we needed only Democratic votes. When Scott Walker, a Republican presidential candidate, said he might take military action against Iran on the first day of his presidency, we made sure that got around to Democratic offices. When Scooter Libby, an intellectual architect of the Iraq War, wrote an op-ed attacking the deal, we pointed out that the same people who got us into Iraq wanted to take us to war in Iran. “Wrong then, wrong now” became our mantra.
