by Ben Rhodes
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
I remembered the conversation, the vigorous agreement we’d had over the effect of closing bureaus. I sounded mean, arrogant, and dismissive. I was twenty-nine when I went to work on the Obama campaign. Many of the journalists who I had become friends with were around twenty-seven when they went to work covering the campaign. I assumed it would be the worst thing in the story. But then came the section on Iran.
The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented—that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country—was largely manufactured for the purpose of selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012.
This was far worse than anything I feared, and it was patently untrue. First, because we’d never concealed our interest in an Iran deal; it was the defining fight of the 2008 primary. Second, because we never had serious negotiations with Iran before the election of Rouhani. And third, because we hadn’t sold the deal as dependent upon a “new political reality in Iran”—we’d sold it on how the deal prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. I remembered Obama’s first instructions to me after the deal was reached—“We don’t want to let the critics muddy the nuclear issue with the other issues.” That’s exactly what Samuels was doing, the trap I’d walked into.
By eliminating the fuss about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.
I felt that I was seeing stated more clearly what the deal’s critics thought about our motives. But it was Samuels’s view, his narrative, his story of the Iran deal. We were trying to avoid a war and a nuclear-armed Iran. Samuels had turned the deal into a massive realignment of American foreign policy, one that positioned the United States in some kind of partnership with Iran.
“We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
It sounded diabolical, but all I was describing was the most routine aspect of communications work. Briefing people. Disseminating fact sheets. Hoping that others who share your view will make the same arguments as you in public. This was no different from what any White House communications official does to support the rollout of a new policy.
Sitting there on my couch, I read the story over two or three times. It was a clever and, in places, intelligent piece of writing. It made me sound smart, powerful, and ahead of my time. It also made me sound dishonest, bitter, and cynical. It took multiple readings to see how Samuels had used my criticism of the media to set up what he’d written about Iran, suggesting a connection that I’d never drawn—that a media that knows nothing can be fooled into supporting the Iran deal. It also alluded to my own background as a fiction writer, suggesting that someone who told stories was primed for this dirty work.
I went to the White House nervous, embarrassed to face my colleagues. I felt as if I had a new target affixed to me, a laser dot on my forehead. But on first read, most of the people I heard from thought that the article was great for me, and so I allowed myself to think that for most of the day. Then the backlash started to build.
The rest of that week was a blur. I had, with my own words, managed to pick fights with some of the most powerful interests in Washington: the media, the foreign policy establishment, the organized Jewish community, opponents of Iran. It was a combustible mix, and it seemed to explode, releasing some pent-up anger about things that ran far deeper than my words in a profile piece. The media was sensitive to charges that it’d become more trivial, because that was true. The foreign policy establishment was tired of being blamed for Iraq. Opponents of the Iran deal who’d lost the 2015 fight saw an opportunity to win in a rematch framed on their terms. I’d made myself an easy mark.
The pile-on was worse than anything I’d experienced. At one point, I went to the Washington Post homepage and there were seven pieces about me, all negative. I scrolled through Twitter, and almost everyone in my feed was trashing me. Articles were written about the shallowness of the books on the shelves of my office, which Samuels had described. A line of attack emerged that I must have invented an anecdote I’d told Samuels, about seeing an Arab man in tears on the subway on the day of 9/11. I heard a podcast in which a New York Times reporter dismissed my negotiations with Cuba as just a few meetings in Canada. I had now been fully erased and replaced with a different person—a liar, an egoist, an asshole.
Samuels wrote me long emails expressing surprise at how things were spiraling, even offering to have me come up to Brooklyn to stay with him. But one of the strangest things, in the eye of the storm, is that I wasn’t angry at him. He probably believed the things he wrote about Iran, even the ones I knew to be untrue. I was angry at myself. He had caught me at a moment when I was too high on myself, coming off the successes of 2015, and too embittered at the nature of the political and media world that I’d been at the center of for seven years. When I dropped my daughter off at daycare, and made small talk with the other parents, I wondered if they now saw me as some shady character.
I scrambled to cling to pieces of a life that I felt drifting away from me. I wrote lengthy apologies to the groups of people with whom I’d had the most meaningful collaborations over the last year—the Jewish Democrats in the House; the outside groups who’d helped us advocate for the Iran deal; the Cuban American community in Miami, who proved to be the most supportive. People at work rallied around me, as they had before. I heard from dozens of people I’d worked with over the years, which made me feel as if I was dying—if not dead. Susan hosted a surprise party for me, the second such gathering in a year.
Obama was more muted. A few days after the story, he called me back to his private dining area, behind the Oval Office. “Why were you so eager to talk about how the sausage gets made?” he asked, with a note of irritation. “You’ve got to be more careful. We’ve still got nine more months.”
Most people told me it would pass, but that wasn’t true. My involvement with one of the things I was proudest of, the Iran deal, was now permanently tainted. A label would forever be attached to me: “Ben Rhodes, who boasted of creating an echo chamber to sell the Iran deal…” The right-wing critics now had fresh meat for the balance of the Obama years and beyond. All the dots in their drawing of me had been connected—fiction writer, leaker, liar, Benghazi, Iran deal. People tell you those things pass, but they don’t. You live your life knowing that the story out there about who you are is different from the person you think you are, and want to be.
CHAPTER 30
THE STORIES WE TELL
“You know what that New York Times story got wrong?”
Obama was sitting opposite me in the Beast, staring down at his iPad. Three weeks had passed but the fire was still not out. We were in Vietnam, yet another trip, yet another piece of our effort to extend American infl
uence in Asia and turn the page on the past. The motorcade was winding through the streets of Hanoi, and enormous crowds lined the streets, a powerful sight in a country where millions of people had been killed only two generations ago, something that lent a little perspective to my own predicament.
“That Iran section?” I said. It made me nervous that he was bringing up the story at all. Susan shot a protective look my way.
“No, forget about that,” Obama said. “That’s just a pimple on the ass of progress.” He flipped the cover of his iPad closed. “The notion that there’s something wrong with storytelling—I mean, that’s our job. To tell a really good story about who we are.”
For a moment, we all just stared out the window at the crowds. “I’m reading a good book now,” Obama said. “It reminds you, the ability to tell stories about who we are is what makes us different from animals. We’re just chimps without it.” He described how all civilization, religion, nations were rooted in stories, which could be harnessed for good or bad. Obama’s tendency to take the long view was getting even more pronounced in his last year in office. But in his own way, he was also telling me that everything was okay, that this was now just one more subject in our endless conversation about everything.
“What’s the book?” I asked, looking for something to grab on to.
“It’s called Sapiens. You should check it out.” Perhaps sensing that this was sensitive terrain, he changed the subject. “Now, what’s with this thing I’m doing tonight with Anthony Bourdain?”
That night, we’d arranged for Obama to have dinner with Bourdain at a small local restaurant that wasn’t getting advance notice, so it would be filled with whoever showed up there on a random weeknight. “He’s the guy who wrote that book, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, Kitchen Confidential.” I explained to Obama about how much I’d come to like Bourdain’s shows. “His philosophy isn’t that different from yours. If people would just sit down and eat together, and understand something about each other, maybe they could figure things out.”
“So we’re doing this for you?” He laughed.
At the restaurant that night, I sat with a small number of staff and Secret Service in a room adjacent to where Obama and Bourdain ate bowls of bun cha and spring rolls. I had headphones that allowed me to listen to their conversation. Sitting in this tiny room with colleagues who’d become close friends, sipping broth, beer, and noodles, thousands of miles from home, I felt a sense of peace. It was an apt metaphor for my experience of the presidency itself—just offstage, eating the same things, hearing the words but not the principal participant.
When the meal was done, I met Bourdain. He looked a little shell-shocked, as if still trying to understand how his own life had led him to interview the president of the United States in this small noodle shop. I rushed through the story of my own experience with Laos, beginning with his show. “You should know,” I said to him, “that later this year we’re going to Laos, and I think we’re going to be able to get a hundred million dollars to clean up UXO.” He looked at me as if I was crazy, a bemused grin on his face.
* * *
—
THE HELICOPTER TOOK OFF for Hiroshima, the final stop on our trip. I was sitting next to Caroline Kennedy, our ambassador to Japan, who had politely but persistently insisted that we make this visit in calls, emails, and visits to the White House for many months. When Obama took office, no U.S. ambassador had even traveled to Hiroshima for the annual commemoration of the bomb dropping. Obama was going to break an enormous taboo in our relationship with Japan and our own history; he was going to become the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima.
It would be a short stop where Obama would give a speech that he and I had been working on over the course of the trip, something that grappled with the enormity of dropping the atomic bomb. He had rewritten my first draft entirely in his small, careful handwriting. Reflecting each of our strange moods in his last year in office, the speech had turned into a meditation on the meaning of war and whether it can be stopped.
As we left behind a military hangar filled with U.S. troops, Obama returned to talking about the book he’d been reading, and I could tell that it was his way of indirectly addressing the discomfort of flying in a United States military helicopter to a city that the United States had once destroyed. “It’s interesting,” he said, “that individual human beings didn’t benefit much from the agricultural revolution. Life was actually better for hunters and gatherers.”
Some of the people in the helicopter looked a little confused, but I knew that he’d rewritten the speech to pose questions about whether the march of technology would inexorably lead to the destruction of humankind. His tangent made a certain kind of sense. “Why?” I asked, knowing I had to keep this conversation going. “Because of feudalism?”
“No,” he said. “That was part of it, but it was also because for most of the early agricultural revolution, people focused on grain. Grain is not as nutritious and balanced as eating a diet with proteins, fruits, and nuts. Hunters and gatherers lived in small units—ten to twelve people—and agriculture required people to have more children, which led to disease and infant mortality. Life actually got worse.” He looked out the window at the blue water below. It was a gorgeous, sunny afternoon. “It’s interesting, most of human history is unrecorded. We were around for millions of years and don’t know much about how people lived. Recorded history didn’t begin until eight or nine thousand years ago.” Then he went on to talk about the Neanderthals, and how they were more developed than was commonly believed relative to Homo sapiens. “Humans,” he said, “just developed a slight advantage in terms of language and socialization. That allowed them to develop the capacity to overrun the Neanderthals, who lived in relatively small groups.”
“Like the opening scene in 2001,” I said. Everyone laughed. I looked at Caroline, whose father was president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the time we came the closest to nuclear destruction, and wondered what she was thinking.
It was quiet for a moment. Then Obama said, “It’s kind of eerie, flying into Hiroshima.” Down below, fishermen worked with nets in the water. “What are they doing down there, Caroline?”
“Oysters,” she said. She then described the process of harvesting pearls. From up above, it looked like a peaceful way to make a living.
“Why did we pick Hiroshima?” Obama asked.
“This came up in my research for the speech,” I said. “We decided fairly early to preserve Hiroshima from other bombing runs so that we could demonstrate the impact of the bomb on a city that was intact.”
“We wanted to show the Japanese what we could do,” Caroline added.
“People were so accustomed to the air raid sirens that they didn’t go into the shelters when they heard them,” I said. “Especially because there weren’t many planes.”
“They gave an all-clear,” Caroline said.
“I don’t know if I’d second-guess Truman’s decision to drop the bomb,” Obama said, the only person in the helicopter who could put himself in Truman’s shoes. “But there’s something about the way we did it.”
The helicopter landed and I got into one of the support vans in the motorcade. As we turned out of the airport, there was an enormous mass of people, smiling and waving. It was an awesome sight. As the cars rolled by, I tried to make out individuals in the crowds. I fixed on one small boy holding a sign that said WELCOME TO HIROSHIMA and in that moment I felt the flash of responsibility, the fact that we’d killed thousands of boys just like him, even if the brutality of the Japanese Empire compelled it. Going from Hanoi to Saigon to Hiroshima on a single trip was something that I couldn’t entirely get my mind around, as was the fact that in these places, we’d been greeted by some of the largest crowds of Obama’s presidency.
The whole scene put the unpleasantness of the last few weeks into some
perspective, but it also fed a sense of anger at the story I was caught up in back in Washington. The notion that there is no room for complexity: Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, not a nationalist. We could not have dropped the atomic bomb on something other than a large city. There are no Iranian moderates. It was as if simply recognizing complexities and context was tantamount to pulling a thread that could cause some American narrative to unravel. The faces of the people lining these streets told a different story. Surely what made America great to them was not the fact that we’d dropped the bomb; it was the ideal associated with who we were, the fact that we had a president who was willing to acknowledge difficult histories and show respect for different people. Our constant struggle to improve ourselves and our country while seeking guidance from the story of our founding values—that is what makes America great.
When we got to the center of the city, thousands of people stretched back from the Peace Park, the site of Obama’s speech, right near Ground Zero. My seat was directly in front of the podium, only a few feet from where Obama would be speaking. A young Japanese girl handed Obama a wreath, which he laid at the base of the memorial. Then he stepped up to the lectern to deliver his speech. I’ve never heard such a large crowd so quiet as he began.
Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.
