The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  I went back inside just as Obama was making the case for engagement. “This is not just a policy of normalizing relations with the Cuban government,” he said. “The United States of America is normalizing relations with the Cuban people.” And then came the careful balancing act. An extended tribute to Cuban small business owners, something that Cubans never heard from their own government. A call to end the embargo, which drew thunderous applause. But then the onus was put on the Cubans: “But even if we lifted the embargo tomorrow, Cubans would not realize their potential without continued change here in Cuba.”

  I had set up the language about democracy by acknowledging the past. “Before 1959,” Obama said, “some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption. And since 1959, we’ve been shadow boxers in this battle of geopolitics and personalities. I know the history, but I refuse to be trapped by it.” It was the same thing I had said to Alejandro in our very first meeting.

  And then Obama said what he believed: that people should be equal under the law; that citizens should be free to criticize their government and protest peacefully; that voters should have the freedom to choose their government in open elections. “I believe those human rights are universal,” Obama said. “I believe they are the rights of the American people, the Cuban people, and people around the world.” The Americans in the audience applauded. Raúl Castro sat in his seat with a thin smile. We were pushing, I knew, too far, too fast. But we were saying what we believed, and sometimes that is all that you can do.

  The speech ended on Obama’s note about reconciliation between Cubans and Cuban Americans, drawing on stories I’d been told over the last few weeks—a woman meeting her sister for the first time in sixty years; another woman who went back to her family’s old home and was recognized by a neighbor she hadn’t seen in decades. “We can make this journey,” Obama concluded, “as friends, and as neighbors, and as family—together. Si se puede.”

  The speech had said everything I believed and had stirred a pot. Every Cuban would hear it a different way. I had tried to paint a picture of a future in which there was a place for everyone’s story—for the story of the revolution and the dignity of a Cuba that stood up to the United States; for the story of the dissidents who protested that government and the entrepreneurs building a new Cuban economy; for the story of the exiles who’d fled or been forced to flee to the United States; for the story of the nameless Cubans who didn’t have a voice in the conflict between our countries but simply wanted a better life. But that’s what touched a nerve among hard-liners. A sympathetic speech about the Cuban Revolution would have been easy to dismiss as an apology for tyranny in Miami. A boorish speech about democracy would have been easy to dismiss as imperialism in Havana. This was something different; sure, a speech I wrote, but a speech that only Obama could give. I’ve never gotten more positive feedback on one of his speeches, but it also ended up provoking a rebuke from Fidel Castro, and pushback from opponents of the rapprochement in both countries.

  Our final stop was the baseball game. I walked out into the sunshine of a baseball stadium with tens of thousands of cheering fans. I was seated next to Alejandro, who passed me his young daughter, just a year or two older than Ella. A few seats away from me, Obama was introducing Rachel Robinson to Raúl Castro while Derek Jeter looked on. And then the game began, my favorite sport, the one I’d played as a child in Central Park with my father, finding my own confidence in the ability to catch a ball and throw it back to him. For a few moments, politics disappeared; there was just a game on a sun-splashed field, and it was easy to feel that the future didn’t belong to missile crises or ISIL attacks, ideological disputes or geopolitical competition, demagogues in Cuba, America, or anyplace else. I was just one person in a large crowd watching a game on a perfect afternoon, comforted by the sound of so many human beings responding to the direction of the ball in front of us, feeling that finally I could just relax in the midst of something that was real, that was true.

  CHAPTER 29

  THE STORIES PEOPLE TELL ABOUT YOU

  Early one afternoon in February, I walked out of the entrance of the West Wing, climbed into the backseat of a black car, and was driven a single block to the underground parking garage of the New Executive Office Building, a characterless government building across Lafayette Park, to appear before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

  Every aspect of my and Susan Rice’s appearance had been subject to a months-long negotiation. No White House likes to allow staff to appear before Congress, because it wants to avoid setting a precedent by which staff who give advice to the president can be summarily hauled up to Capitol Hill. I just wanted to get the whole thing over with, but I was caught in the middle of powerful interests: Republicans who wanted to perpetuate their Benghazi show; a presidential campaign that had been shaped in part by the Select Committee’s discovery that Hillary Clinton had used a private email server as secretary of state; and a White House protecting the institution of the presidency. My own story, what had actually happened during the few days around the Benghazi attacks, seemed to have become irrelevant.

  To avoid the spectacle of Susan’s and my going to the Hill amid a cluster of reporters, the White House counsel agreed to this alternative venue. Susan appeared in the morning, and I passed her in the parking garage as she left, making eye contact and saying very little. It was now forty months since the Benghazi attacks. Ever since, we’d both been living as figures of controversy, convicted of a charge that neither of us understood. How had we hatched some kind of cover-up? And what exactly were we alleged to have covered up? At Susan’s fiftieth birthday party, I’d kept my eyes on her aging mother, who had taken the villainizing of her daughter particularly hard, as she stared at a slide show of Susan’s life that was playing on a loop, her eyes filled with tears that never seemed to fall.

  The meeting took place around a large table in a conference room, with a handful of members of Congress and staff on one side. I sat flanked by White House lawyers and my own personal attorney. For the first few minutes, there were conversations back and forth about the agreed-upon process and parameters. I sat there silently, feeling more like a prop than a human being. The day before, I’d had a stomach flu, and I had two large Gatorades to sustain me.

  I spent the next four hours being questioned about the minutiae of my experience on the day of the attacks, and the week after. Emails I had little memory of writing or receiving were placed in front of me. I had to be mindful that anything I said could be taken out of context and used to suggest a meaning I didn’t intend. The questioning was split between staffers who seemed to have only a slight understanding of how government works, and congressional representatives who enjoyed playing the role of prosecutor. It wasn’t hard to navigate, as there was nothing for them to discover, no hidden truth that could justify the time, expense, and outrage that they had dedicated to this charade. The chief antagonist on the Republican side was the committee chairman, Trey Gowdy, a former assistant U.S. attorney whose small, beady eyes opened wide when he feigned incredulity, and whose stiff shock of gray hair looked like a Tyrolean hat.

  The absurdity of the exercise hit home for me about halfway through, when Gowdy grilled me about a printed-out email chain that was handed to me. “What is that subject line?” he asked.

  I read it aloud. “The U.S. public response to events in Libya and Egypt.” On the list of recipients were many of the various people who worked on national security communications in September 2012.

  “In Libya and Egypt,” he said, as if circling some essential truth. “And the very first item discussed are [sic] talking points on what?”

  I stared at the email, which included talking points about the Internet video, the stock language we’d circulated so that people could condemn it while stressing that it didn’t justify violence. The email chain was the kind of basic communications channel we always
established so that we could share public talking points and draft Q&As. “Mr. Chairman,” I said, “the subject line was originated on September 12 in reference to statements that the U.S. government was going to make in response to events in Libya and Egypt. The contents with respect to the movie were in an email I wrote the following day.”

  “Mr. Rhodes, I’m asking you who told you the movie was the catalyst for the attacks in Benghazi. Who told you that?”

  I looked at the email, trying to understand what he was getting at; I hadn’t even written the subject line. “Again,” I said, “I’m not suggesting that the movie is the catalyst for the attacks in Benghazi.”

  “Well, can you see how a reader might think that maybe you were? Since the—since the first country mentioned in the subject line is Libya?”

  “But the subject line was created the day before I wrote the content of my email, regarding a different set of circumstances,” I said, and that’s when the cynicism of what he was doing hit home. We had started the email chain after the violence in Libya and Egypt and used it for days because the right people were on the distribution list, including people at the State Department who had to find the right words to answer questions and try to put out the fires burning across the region because of this offensive video. Gowdy was using the subject line to turn everything that followed into a conspiracy theory. To believe we’d done something wrong, you’d have to believe that we were all pretending to be concerned about the video all week, or that we were using something as innocuous as a subject line—“The U.S. public response to events in Libya and Egypt”—to signal some grand conspiracy theory to people working across the government.

  Gowdy isn’t dumb. He had to know that wasn’t the case. He was simply using whatever shred of language he could to keep his conspiracy theory alive, just as the Republican Party had been doing for the last forty months. He stared at me evenly, as though I wasn’t a real person whose own life and reputation had already been ravaged by this farce. The Republicans loved, especially, to point out that I’d received a master’s degree in fiction when I was twenty-four years old, as if—like the subject line of an email—that fact confirmed I was a liar, an inventor of stories. “So you never intended anyone to believe that the video was in any way connected with the attacks in Benghazi? Is that what you are testifying to?”

  I stared at him across the table, suppressing an urge to shout. Instead, I just said calmly, “I intended at every juncture to provide the best information I had from the intelligence community about what took place in Benghazi. I also had to try to mitigate the fallout from this video.”

  “Those are two separate things,” he said.

  I could have said: No, Mr. Chairman, they weren’t two separate things! This offensive video—probably fueled by the crass Islamophobia that characterized the right wing’s nativist response to the 9/11 attacks and Obama’s election—lit a spark in the Middle East. It led people to attack our embassy in Cairo. People in Benghazi saw that happening and went to our facility—to protest, to loot, to attack, to commit acts of terror—and four Americans were tragically killed. Violent protests burned for days in dozens of places. What we said all week, what Susan Rice said on those stupid Sunday shows, was what we believed at the time, what the intelligence community told us we could say, and was far closer to the truth of what actually happened than anything you, Trey Gowdy, and the Republican Party and Fox News and Breitbart and thousands of talk radio segments and Donald Trump have alleged in an effort to destroy people’s careers and delegitimize Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Your entire theory rests upon knowing the motivations of every individual who showed up at our facility in Benghazi that night, on knowing that they weren’t motivated by a video that coincidentally motivated other people to attack other U.S. facilities in other Muslim-majority countries at the same time, and on knowing that all of us in the White House and the State Department and the intelligence community decided to pretend to care about that video—which we were also being asked about all week, because it was the dominant news story in the world—to cover up…something. You have relentlessly politicized the terrible loss of four Americans and constructed your own pyramid of conspiracy theories to further pollute American discourse and polarize the American people, a dynamic that has led to Donald Trump’s being the front-runner for the nomination of your party.

  But that would have been pointless. In that room, at that moment, I wasn’t a human being, I was a character in a political drama, one in which truth was meaningless. I looked at Gowdy with an empty expression; he’d already fulfilled his mission long before I showed up in this conference room. I gave a much shorter answer: “I was,” I said, “dealing with both those things.”

  * * *

  —

  AT THE SAME TIME that we were negotiating the terms of my Benghazi appearance, a writer named David Samuels sent me an email. He wanted to write a profile of me for The New York Times Magazine and wanted to know if I would agree to some interviews and let him follow me around for a few days. I’d never dealt with Samuels before; he wasn’t someone on the White House beat. A cursory Google search showed that he’d written for the type of magazines I liked to read—The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s. Underneath all that, there surely was a mix of vanity and approval seeking as well. I’d spent seven years in a basement office. I was proud of what I’d done over the last year, with the Cuba opening and the Iran deal. I was frustrated at being transformed into a one-dimensional right-wing villain. Maybe this could be different. I said yes.

  Over the holidays, I traveled to Hawaii with Obama. While I was there, I started to hear from people whom Samuels was interviewing about me. Samantha Power reached out to say she was slightly disturbed by her conversation. “He seems to really like you,” she said, “but I’d be a little careful. I can’t tell what his angle is.”

  When I finally sat down with Samuels in January, I had no idea what to expect. He was an intense guy, wide-eyed, probing, with glasses and slightly unkempt brown hair. We spent an hour or two talking about my life without even reaching the point at which I went to work for Obama. He asked questions about my parents, my religious background, my 9/11 experience, what authors I liked to read. He was eccentric, and there was a cynical edge to some of his questions. But if anything, the conversation seemed to confirm my hopes: This guy was going to have a different perspective; he seemed actually interested in who I was.

  Over the next few weeks, I did a few more interviews and let him follow me around to some meetings and appearances. One afternoon in my office, we had a long conversation about the decline of the news media. I lamented the fact that so many news organizations had been forced to close their foreign bureaus, leaving it to young political reporters to cover foreign policy, which caused complex issues to be covered through the distorted prism of Washington’s political reality show. I complained about a foreign policy establishment that couldn’t shake the groupthink around military intervention in the Middle East that had gotten us into Iraq. As I spoke, he urged me on, often in vigorous agreement. I was enjoying the back-and-forth, letting myself get worked up, dispensing with the Washington tradition of distinguishing between being on the record and off the record as we went along, a practice that always felt a bit slippery, to me anyway.

  I never could figure out his angle. He interviewed Favreau about speechwriting, Ricardo about Cuba; he asked to speak to some of the people I’d worked with on Burma and Iran. Each time, I heard similar things from the people he talked to: Be careful, he’s an unusual guy, not sure what he’s getting at. Favreau forwarded me a several-thousand-word email that Samuels had sent him in the middle of the night, filled with questions about narrative, storytelling, and the practice of political rhetoric. Something wasn’t right. Then one day, I heard from a journalist I knew. “You’re doing a profile with David Samuels?” he asked, as if I had lost my mind. Samuels had opposed the Iran deal, h
e said. His wife was the editor of Tablet magazine, the publication that had accused us of the worst kind of anti-Semitism at the height of the Iran debate the previous summer.

  It was now February. My interviews with Samuels were done, and he was writing the piece. It would be almost three months before the article came out. I spent that whole time with a knot in my stomach, sensing that I’d had a terrible lapse in judgment, that this wasn’t going to turn out well. I just didn’t know how bad it would be.

  One morning in early May, I woke up to find that the story had been posted online. Before Ann was awake, I slipped out to the couch and began reading it on my iPhone.

  Picture him as a young man, standing on the waterfront in North Williamsburg, at a polling site, on Sept. 11, 2001, which was Election Day in New York City.

  There I was, on the day that had changed everything for me, and I could remember the person I had once been, before everything began.

  He interspersed personal observations with glimpses of me at work, where he cast me as much better at my job than I actually was. At a time when I felt I had little control of how our foreign policy was portrayed, he described me as a master of communications, deftly navigating a balkanized media and taking on the president’s critics.

  He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

  I remembered using the phrase “the Blob” with Samuels, trying to capture that sense of groupthink that always seemed to lead inexorably to more military intervention in the Middle East, to “bomb something.” I didn’t know that I’d affixed the label to Clinton. She was going to be the Democratic nominee for president, so I immediately braced for angry calls I’d get from her advisors, friends of mine like Jake Sullivan. Then I reached the part about the media: