by Ben Rhodes
It was approaching two in the morning, and the party next door raged on. I reached up and banged on the wall. Muffled voices quieted. After a few minutes, I heard a door close as people left.
I could imagine the staff for Johnson and Nixon, people who worked in the same offices that I spent my day in back in Washington. People just like me, with the same titles and similar pressures. One of the reasons we had bombed Laos was to preserve our credibility, to show that even if America was defeated in neighboring Vietnam, we would make the victory a costly one for our adversaries. In our post-9/11 chapter, I knew there would be no victory in Afghanistan or Iraq, or in any other new war that we might start in that part of the world. I thought of how Obama chafed at the argument that he needed to bomb Syria to preserve his own credibility. “That’s the worst reason to go to war,” he’d say.
As I drifted to sleep, the quiet in the next room was interrupted as the couple remaining began to make love. Sleep was going to be hard to come by.
* * *
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A FEW WEEKS LATER, Obama slid into the backseat of the Beast after finishing a press conference at the conclusion of the G20 in Turkey. It was only a few days after a horrifying terrorist attack in Paris, which killed more than a hundred people and sent waves of panic around the world. “Can you believe that?” he said. “Every one of them asked the same question.”
“One hundred and twenty-nine people were killed in Paris on Friday night. ISIL claimed responsibility for that massacre, sending the message that they could now target civilians all over the world. The equation has clearly changed. Isn’t it time for your strategy to change?”
“A more than year-long bombing campaign in Iraq and in Syria has failed to contain the ambition and the ability of ISIL to launch attacks in the West. Have you underestimated their abilities?”
“In the days and weeks before the Paris attacks, did you receive warning in your daily intelligence briefing that an attack was imminent? If not, does that not call into question the current assessment that there is no immediate, specific, credible threat to the United States?”
“I think a lot of Americans have this frustration that they see that the United States has the greatest military in the world, it has the backing of nearly every other country in the world when it comes to taking on ISIS. I guess the question is—and if you’ll forgive the language—is why can’t we take out these bastards?”
Obama popped a piece of Nicorette into his mouth and took out his iPad. “Why don’t you get the bastards?” he said, laughing ruefully. He looked at Susan. “Susan, why don’t you get the bastards?”
“I still think we should just put them in the terror dome,” I said. For a few weeks, we’d fantasized about creating a kind of Hunger Games with ISIL, al Qaeda, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Russian special forces in eastern Ukraine; we’d just gather up all of the world’s most nihilistic forces and put them under one dome.
“Put ’em in the terror dome,” Obama said. He noticed that I was reading some of the initial coverage of the press conference on my BlackBerry. “What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, knowing it would bother him.
“No, what is it?”
“Some people think you were most passionate in talking about refugees,” I said.
In his last answer, Obama had attacked some of the refugee proposals being made in the Republican primary, including one from Jeb Bush to admit only Christians fleeing persecution. “When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted,” Obama had said, “that’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.” That statement was being held up as a sign that he was out of touch.
“So?” he asked.
“They’re saying you were angrier at the Republicans than at ISIL.”
“What do I have to do to convince these people that I hate ISIL?” he asked. “I’ve called them a death cult. I’ve promised to destroy them. We’re bombing them. We’re arming people fighting them.” His voice trailed off. It was silent for a few moments. “You know why I do that?” he said, returning to the criticism he’d leveled against Republicans. “Because it’s my job to calm folks down, not to scare them. I expect it from Trump. But someone like Jeb Bush should know better. He does know better. And I’ve got Angela taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees. I’ve got to have her back. I can’t leave her hanging.” He looked down at his iPad, scanning the coverage. “Why don’t you get the bastards?” he said again, shaking his head.
On the flight to our next stop, Manila, Obama called Paul Ryan, who had just become Speaker of the House. There were proposals in Congress to ban refugees from coming to the United States, and Obama wanted to slow them down. He argued that we could put in place stricter vetting for people coming from certain countries, and that it’d be harder to get other countries to take in refugees if the United States didn’t. I watched as he listened to Ryan’s response, his face betraying growing annoyance. “Paul,” he said. “Paul, I understand the problems you have in your caucus, but you’re Speaker now. This isn’t something to play politics with. This is about who we are as a country.”
A few moments later he hung up and looked at us. “I’m going to miss Boehner,” he said, and walked out of the room.
* * *
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ELIZABETH PHU WAS THE NSC staffer traveling with us, responsible for Southeast Asia. She was also a refugee. Her Vietnamese father had worked for the U.S. Army during the war. After America pulled out of South Vietnam, Phu was sent to a reeducation camp for several months. She was three years old. Her grandparents sold all of their possessions to get them out and put Phu and her parents on a small boat with more than 250 people on it. When the boat’s engines died, pirates seized it, demanding any possessions of value. Phu’s father made a deal: In exchange for the wedding rings of those on board, the pirates would tow the boat to a nearby Malaysian island. Once ashore, Phu and her family waited in a refugee processing center.
The last stop of our trip was Malaysia, and we were going to visit the Dignity for Children Foundation, where refugees similarly await permanent resettlement in other countries, including the United States. That morning, I invited Phu to ride with us in the Beast, and she told Obama about her journey—from being one of the “boat people,” to an upbringing in California, to working for the U.S. government. It made me proud to be American. When we pulled up at the refugee center, she sat next to Obama and had her picture taken.
Inside, there was a group of small children seated at low, round tables in a classroom. Each of them had fled their own pocket of the world’s wars, famine, and suffering—Rohingya and South Sudanese, Kachins and Pakistanis. Just as Phu had made it out of Vietnam, and hundreds of thousands of refugees had escaped Laos at the end of that war, some of these kids were making the journey to America.
For the last few days, each time Obama had a media availability, there was a mini-intervention beforehand as people tried to help him find the right tone on ISIL. Show more anger. Speak to people’s fears. “As a mother,” Susan Rice told him in one of these sessions, “I can see why people are afraid. You have to meet them where they are.”
“I get that. But more people die slipping in the bathtub than from terrorist attacks,” Obama said.
“But folks back home think that ISIL is going to come behead them,” Susan said.
“That’s because there’s a bunch of folks on television telling them that,” Obama shot back. “I’m trying not to do that.”
Obama made his way around the room, asking the children what they wanted to be when they grew up. An engineer, one said. An artist, said another. He knelt for some time next to a Rohingya girl with a white headscarf. She was painting something, smiling shyly while av
erting her eyes. I stood against the wall, looking at the different kids, most of whom had been rescued from human traffickers.
When we were done, Obama took a few pictures with the kids, and then made his way to an adjacent room. “That’s who we need to keep out of the country,” he said to me, mimicking his Republican critics with a sharp edge in his voice. “That little girl with the headscarf.”
* * *
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WE FLEW TO PARIS a couple of weeks after the terrorist attack to join the world in pursuing a global accord to combat climate change. Republicans disparaged the effort; reporters asked us what we thought was the bigger threat, ISIL or climate change. It was a trap. Of course climate change is a bigger threat. Now that I had a young daughter, I shuddered to think of a world—ravaged by conflict and disruption—that awaited her if we failed to take the threat half as seriously as terrorism, which we’d spent trillions of dollars fighting. But if we said that out loud, we’d only fuel another controversy—one more thing for Donald Trump to attack—a couple more days of oxygen for cable news debates.
“Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled.
“Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France.
“No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room.
For six years, Obama had been working to build what would become the Paris agreement, piece by piece. Because Congress wouldn’t act, he had to promote clean energy, and regulate fuel efficiency and emissions through executive action. With dozens of other nations, he made climate change an issue in our bilateral relationship, helping design their commitments. At international conferences, U.S. diplomats filled in the details of a framework. Since the breakthrough with China, and throughout 2015, things had been falling into place. When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India.
We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult. Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power. One guy from our climate team came over to me. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” he whispered. “These guys are impossible.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s an argument about science. He loves this.”
Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out.
For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing.
“Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.”
Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained.
“I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.
CHAPTER 28
HAVANA
As we headed into the final year of the Obama presidency, we inhabited two distinct worlds. In one, we’d achieved a global climate change agreement, the Iran deal was being implemented, the economy was growing, twenty million people had signed up for healthcare, and Obama’s approval rating was rising. In another, Republican presidential candidates were painting a picture of a dystopian nightmare of crime, rampant immigration, ISIL terrorism, and wage stagnation in America. Because the two realities were so far removed from each other, and because Obama wasn’t running, it was hard to do anything but put our heads down and focus on what we could get done.
My issue of focus continued to be Cuba and, increasingly, the trip Obama would make to Havana in 2016—the first for a U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge. Over the last year, I’d learned that my work in Cuba was far from done. We wanted to push as far as we could to open a door for American travel and business and promote reform in Cuba. The Cubans wanted to make as much progress as possible to build a bilateral relationship during the last two years Obama was in office. I assured them that any Democrat who succeeded Obama would continue our approach, but I couldn’t say the same about a Republican. The Cubans understood this.
Each time I’d go, I stayed at a guesthouse that seemed transported from the 1970s, with white floors, modernist furniture that went out of style so long ago that it’d be trendy in Brooklyn, and long balconies from which I could see security guys dressed in guayaberas. Fidel, I was told, had convened an all-night meeting at the building next door, where he had made a pivotal decision about a military operation in Africa. Cuba, it seemed to me, was a layered society—an inner core that grasped onto its revolutionary legitimacy, the old stories of Fidel; and a broader outer ring comprising millions of people, whose opportunities were embalmed by politics—a government focused on sustaining its own power, U.S. policies that walled them off from the wider world. We were trying to breathe new life into Cuba by opening things up.
My first night in Havana, we piled into a van to tour the city. We stopped to get out in Old Havana. A small enclave of Europe in the Americas, nineteenth-century facades and cobblestoned squares, a place frozen in time by the absence of American engagement, like a ruin preserved deep underground. We passed the national assembly, a smaller replica of the U.S. Capitol. Old American cars filled the streets. We were shown a spot where Batista’s troops surrendered to Che Guevara’s unit during the revolution. Nearby, Ricardo mentioned to me under his breath, was a spot where firing squads had purged political opponents.
We stopped at a statue of Christ, something sponsored—I was told—by Batista’s wife in the final days before the revolution. I stood at the base of it until I noticed what appeared to be a few tourists nearby. Not unlike the people who had photographed Ricardo and me in the lobby of a hotel in Toronto, they approached us conspicuously. They spoke accented English at first, and then switched to Russian, speaking loud enough to ensure we could hear. None of us acknowledged it. I thought, again, about what kind of message the Russians were trying to send. In 2017, months after leaving government, I learned that some Americans at our embassy were harmed in mysterious attacks—from a sonic weapon or some kind of toxin. I knew that the Cuban government had never done something that brazen, even at the height of conflict with the United States. Whoever harmed those Americans clearly wanted to sabotage the opening between our countries, and I wondered whether the Russians who took such an apparent interest in my effo
rts had played a role.
Late that night, we arrived at an enormous parade ground. On the large concrete building in front of me, there was a huge illuminated image of Che over the slogan HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE, the same image that adorns the walls of thousands of college dorm rooms across America. We stood at the base of a soaring statue of José Martí, the independence hero of Cuba, who is claimed by both Cubans and Cuban Americans. This, I was told, is where Fidel gave his speeches. I looked out at the vast, empty expanse in front of me; if you closed your eyes, you could see the crowds that would stand there for hours and hours, extras in an endless duel between the Cuban state and its massive neighbor to the north, chanting slogans. The entire night seemed to be, inadvertently, a demonstration of how the United States and Cuba have been locked in an embrace, like two exhausted boxers who become tangled up in each other’s arms, at odds with each other yet needing each other as foils.
“This is where heads of state lay wreaths,” Alejandro said. Before I could respond, someone appeared at my side holding a wreath. It was now after midnight. I would be photographed by the Cuban government laying a wreath here, in the middle of Cuba’s revolutionary square. It was not an image that would go down well in Florida, or parts of Capitol Hill. To reject it, though, would have been playing the part of the ugly American, pressed into an insult of Cuban dignity. I took the wreath and looked up at Martí, the one figure in Cuba’s history revered on both sides of the Florida Straits. “To the memory of José Martí,” I said, “who is beloved in both the United States and Cuba.”
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