by Ben Rhodes
The weather was clear and it was approaching the same time of year that we’d dropped the bomb, putting an end to a horrific war and cementing our status as a superpower. I looked at the buildings all around us; every one of them had been built since that day.
Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors, having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood, used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind.
He was, I knew, grasping for the largest possible context in which to make sense of not just this historical event, but of a world that he’d interacted with as its most powerful inhabitant for nearly eight years. The stubborn duality of humanity’s capacity for ingenuity and its capacity to do harm. I had a hard time looking at Obama as he spoke. Normally I’d be pacing somewhere backstage, watching the lines scroll on a teleprompter. My eyes kept being drawn toward the eternal flame and dome in the distance. I thought about his own constant struggle to constrain our own warmaking, his fear—at the height of the ISIL fever—at how he could have ridden that wave to even greater destruction. “Civilization,” he liked to tell us, “is just a thin veneer.” We like to think that we, as Americans, are different. But we’re just human beings.
Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different. The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.
I thought of Obama’s line about storytelling: “That’s our job,” he’d said. Back home, in our campaign, Trump was telling a story that dehumanized others, those who are different. The stakes of that campaign, of any campaign that concludes in giving a human being the power to destroy whole cities, seemed entirely divorced from its conduct.
My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family—that is the story that we all must tell.
These were words he’d written. For nearly eight years, Obama had been telling this story. Were people at home listening? I stared down at the concrete in front of me and closed my eyes tightly for a brief moment.
Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.
These were words I’d written. For nearly eight years, I had seen how ordinary people often seemed to understand Obama better than the people who had the largest platforms to render judgment on him. That was the thing that gave me hope.
When he was done, Obama went over and greeted the atomic bomb survivors. An elderly man with discolored skin and an enormous smile wept and Obama pulled him into a half embrace, patting his back. It was silent except for the clicks of hundreds of camera shutters being released at once, sounding like the striking of typewriter keys.
We got back into the Beast for the drive back to the helicopter. “You should send a link of that speech to Assad and ISIL and Putin,” he told me.
“And Xi,” I said.
“No,” Obama replied, “the Chinese have not generally been about expansion, they’ve been focused on consolidating control. And they’re fragile.” Then he returned to ancient history. The expansionists, he said, were not the Chinese but the Mongols. “Genghis Khan is a reminder of what people can do to each other,” he said. “He came from nothing and conquered half the world. His people would get to the edge of a town and give two choices: Surrender and you’ll be killed immediately. Don’t surrender, and you’ll be boiled alive in oil, your daughters will be raped in front of you. He only had to do that in a few places.”
“The word got around,” I said.
It was, again, his way of talking about Hiroshima. “They had an edge,” he said. “In their case it wasn’t an atomic bomb, it was good horsemanship.”
On the helicopter ride, the weight of the moment had lifted a bit, and we talked about random things—the upcoming schedule, the next markers we had to hit with the time remaining. “I’m going to miss UNGA this year,” Susan said. “I’m going to fly with my son out to Stanford, where he’s starting in September.”
“That’s exactly where you should be,” Obama said. “We’re going to miss them a lot.” He looked out the window. Malia was about to graduate from high school. As we made our descent to the tarmac next to Air Force One, Obama more directly conveyed how much he’d begun thinking about the end of his time in office. “I’m not certain of many things,” he said, “but I am certain of one. On my deathbed, I won’t be thinking about a bill I passed or an election I won or a speech I gave. I’ll be thinking about my daughters, and moments involving them.”
CHAPTER 31
INFORMATION WARS
On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. The plane had been flying over territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists, armed by Russia, where Russian advisors were present.
A few days later, the Russian Foreign Ministry held a press conference in Moscow and put forward several different, and contradictory, theories for how the plane was shot down. A Ukrainian combat aircraft did it. Ukrainian surface-to-air missiles were in the area. The missile that shot down the plane was actually in territory controlled by the Ukrainian government. These theories were repeated by Russia’s major state-run news outlets—RT and Sputnik—and flooded social media feeds in Russia and Europe. It didn’t matter much that the shifting Russian explanations could be debunked. The investigation was going to take years; with their media capabilities and willingness to lie, the Russians could fill that space with all manner of false narratives.
Since the protests had ousted Russia’s client leader in Ukraine in 2014, we’d grown accustomed to Russian disinformation. Sometimes it could be thuggishly personal. Jen Psaki, who was then our State Department spokeswoman, was a target. Russian media outlets—amplified by Russian bots—invented quotes from her to discredit our policies. In social media campaigns, her head was superimposed on the body of a model in a provocative pose to suggest that she was a crude, unserious person. Then there were the lies about policy: There are no Russian advisors in Ukraine. There is no Russian military equipment crossing into Ukraine. Russia had no responsibility for the shoot-down of MH-17.
Those of us who had to fight it out in the information space with the Russians on a daily basis started pressing our government to move faster in debunking Russian narratives and building our capabilities to counter disinformation. A little over a week after MH-17, we got the intelligence community to declassify overhead imagery that showed Russian military equipment pouring over the Ukrainian border, but it was still framed by objective international media outlets as a “he said, she said” story, and Russia just issued more denials in response. We were like traditional newspapers trying to keep up with the Internet. Because we had to be fact-based, because we had to be mindful of sensitive intelligence, we were slower than the Russians, and couldn’t be as definitive in our statements or as far-reaching in our social media presence.
I felt this asymmetry acutely. Whoever did my job in Russia was sitting on top of billion-dollar investments in television stations, marshaled an army of Internet trolls who populated social media, and was empowered to lie with impunity. I had five people working in the NSC press office and my own official Twitter feed. U.S. government broadcasting has a legal firewall against editorial direction from the White House. It took lengthy meetings and email chains to declassify information to debunk Russian narratives.
Obama occasionally asked me to think about how we could revamp our international broadcasting to make it more relevant, more responsive, to find ways to compete with the Russian juggernaut. In a 2014 meeting, we showed him what, hypothetically, it would take to replicate something like RT—hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of people, and greater White House supervision. He laughed. “I’m sure the Republicans are going to sign off on giving me a billion-dollar propaganda channel.” The idea was quickly abandoned. Instead we worked for more incremental advances. We launched a new Russian-language broadcasting channel and prioritized media markets in Eastern Europe and Russia’s periphery. But this was a drop in the ocean compared to the Russian effort.
At the same time that we confronted the danger of Russian disinformation in 2014 and 2015, we had a parallel effort to combat ISIL’s social media campaign to recruit and radicalize Americans. A team of outside experts from the technology sector recommended changes that led to the creation of a new unit at the State Department—the Global Engagement Center (GEC)—which could serve as a hub to coordinate efforts across the U.S. government, mapping and spotlighting ISIL propaganda, lifting up credible voices against ISIL, and producing content that pushed back on ISIL messaging. Recognizing that Russia now posed a bigger challenge, we added the mission of countering Russian disinformation to the GEC, and formally stood it up in April 2016. The budget was in the low tens of millions of dollars.
To understand what ended up happening in the 2016 presidential election, you have to understand this: When protests toppled the Ukrainian government, Putin interpreted that as the United States coming into Russia, akin to an act of war; when he launched his counterattack—annexing Crimea, creeping into eastern Ukraine—he weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie, using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus. Eventually, the Russians would come into America, as they believed we’d gone into Ukraine. They took advantage of the fact that we were worn down by decades of political polarization and the balkanization of our media. America’s antibodies to the sickness of Russian disinformation were weak, if they were there at all.
* * *
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IN APRIL 2016, WE landed in London for a hastily arranged trip to help David Cameron fight off a Brexit referendum. Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, had emailed me a couple of months earlier urging the visit; they were barely ahead in the polls and fearful, and Obama polled at more than 70 percent in the United Kingdom. A strong expression of support from him might be enough to inch them over the finish line. On the flight over, I emailed back and forth with Cameron’s staff about an op-ed that Obama was publishing in The Daily Telegraph making the case for Britain to stay in the European Union. It was unusual to coordinate so closely with a foreign government, but the Brits were different, and Brexit would be calamitous, a crucial piece of the post–World War II order drifting off into the sea.
After we landed, I showed Obama a dueling op-ed that had been written by Boris Johnson, the bombastic mayor of London and a chief proponent of Brexit. To counterprogram our trip and appeal to nationalist sentiment in the UK, the whole lead-in was an indictment of Obama for swapping out a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office. “Some said,” Johnson wrote, “it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.”
“Really?” Obama said. “The black guy doesn’t like the British?” We were standing in the U.S. ambassador’s house in London, a stately mansion with a lawn so big, with grass so carefully cut that it resembled a football field without lines.
“They’re more subtle back home,” I said.
“Not really,” he said. “Boris is their Trump.”
“With better hair.”
Obama chuckled. “Talk to Cameron’s folks,” he said. “Get me the best arguments for and against Brexit.”
I talked to Llewellyn and got a thick briefing packet with the key arguments on both sides. The problem, for those who wanted to stay in the EU, was that many of the arguments for Brexit were built on lies: about how much the UK paid into the European Union; about how Brexit wouldn’t hurt the British economy. Another problem was that the Brexit campaign was tapping into the same sense of nationalism and nostalgia that the Trump campaign was promoting back home: the days of Churchill, the absence of immigrants and intrusive international institutions. The arguments for staying in the EU were grounded in facts, not emotion: The EU was Britain’s largest market. The EU offered Britain a stronger voice in global affairs. Even the name of the campaign—Remain—sounded like a concession that life wasn’t going to be all that you hoped it would be.
We had a long, friendly meeting with Cameron at 10 Downing Street. Cameron explained to Obama that one of the claims from the Brexit crowd was that the UK could quickly negotiate a trade deal with the United States if they left.
“What? There’s no way that could happen. Isn’t that right, Froman?” he called out to our trade advisor.
The Brits laughed. “We’d be at the back of the queue,” one of them said.
It’d be great, Cameron said, if you could make that point publicly.
At the press conference, Obama and Cameron spoke in front of clusters of flags. “My understanding,” Obama said, “is that some of the folks on the other side have been ascribing to the United States certain actions we’ll take if the UK does leave the EU.” He repeated the formulation that the UK would be “at the back of the queue” for a trade agreement. And he went out of his way to talk about his admiration for Churchill: “I don’t know if people are aware of this, but in the residence, on the second floor, my office, my private office is called the Treaty Room. And right outside the door of the Treaty Room, so that I see it every day, including on weekends, when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game, the primary image I see is a bust of Winston Churchill. It’s there voluntarily, because I can do anything on the second floor. I love Winston Churchill.” The British press laughed.
Then he turned the knife into Johnson. “Now, when I was elected as president of the United States, my predecessor had kept a Churchill bust in the Oval Office. There are only so many tables where you can put busts—otherwise it starts looking a little cluttered. And I thought it was appropriate, and I suspect most people here in the United Kingdom might agree, that as the first African American president, it might be appropriate to have a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King in my office to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who would somehow allow me to have the privilege of holding this office.” I looked over at Cameron’s people on the other side of the room, and they were congratulating one another.
That night, I went out to dinner with Cameron’s team to celebrate a visit that had accomplished everything they had asked. But Llewellyn, a man who usually had a wide, genuine smile affixed to his face, looked uneasy. “It’s going to be close, I’m afraid,” he said. “We just need people to break, in the end, for the safer choice.”
The wine flowed. We laughed at seven years of stories: Cameron and Obama playing Ping-Pong, and losing to some kids; Cameron flying out to Dayton, Ohio, to watch a basketball game with Obama in 2012 and having no idea what the rules of the game were. In a world that led to different outcomes, the dinner would have been a memorable valedicto
ry, a group of people satisfied that they had done their best with the time they had occupying places of leadership in the free world. But this was an uncertain moment. “How are you feeling about Trump?” Llewellyn asked, toward the end of dinner.
“He’s probably the Republican that Hillary has the best chance to beat,” I said.
“You’re not worried that he can win? Putin would like nothing more. Some of our people,” he said, referring to conservatives who support Brexit, “say that he’s tapped into something with this immigration issue. From Central America.”
“Unaccompanied children,” I said.
“Yes, that’s right. The same way people are feeling about immigration here, a loss of control.”
“That’s true,” I said. “When I watch his rallies, I think how potent his message would be from a more skilled politician.” I took a sip of red wine, enjoying the easy chatter of voices from a Saturday night crowd at a comfortable London restaurant. “But, you know,” I said, “like you, we need people to break for the safer choice.”
* * *
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BACK HOME, AN ANTSY Obama had to wait until the end of a bitter Democratic primary before he could get out and start campaigning—like a basketball player waiting by the scorer’s table to check into a game. Bernie Sanders had come to meet him after Clinton clinched the race, and I got some inkling of the challenge she had faced: The steps of the EEOB were filled with young Obama White House staffers, craning their necks, trying to get a glimpse of their populist hero.
Our first rally with Clinton was in Charlotte, and the crowd was familiar: Obama people, thousands of them, a sea of white, black, and brown faces, waiting to erupt into applause when he walked on stage.
