by Ben Rhodes
On January 19, the last full day of the Obama presidency, I gathered up the items I had to return: multiple laptops that had followed me around the world; a BlackBerry from which I’d sent hundreds of thousands of messages; a diplomatic passport on which I could no longer travel. A group of us walked over to the Executive Office Building, as if it would be easier if we went together, carrying boxes of personal belongings like laid-off workers. After we were done “out-processing,” we came back to the West Wing and a few people went into Cody’s office to have a beer and watch old speeches.
Instead, I sat alone in my office—my email account would be deactivated within an hour. So I typed out some last messages. My final note was to Obama. We had this debate, over the years, about whether individuals or social movements shape history—the kind of casual, esoteric conversation that filled in downtime in cars, helicopters, airplanes, or the quiet of the Oval Office. I had been on the side of social movements, dating back to the early days of the Arab Spring. “I was wrong,” I told him in my message. “You’ve made a difference in the lives of billions of people.”
That night, the Obamas hosted a reception for the remaining staff in the White House, a skeleton group of core staff, as most people had had their last days during the previous week. The table in the State Dining Room was covered in the same snacks that I’d eaten at a hundred White House parties before; the bar in the corner served the same booze. Obama gave a toast. In the middle, he said, “Ben and I have had this debate over the years about what makes history: individuals, or movements.” He stopped and looked at me. “But I think the answer is actually that it takes a team of people.”
He invited us all up to his private residence, guiding us through the different rooms, a part of the White House I’d been in only a couple of times over the last eight years. He took me over to a frame in the corner of one room. “This is one of five original copies of the Gettysburg Address.” I leaned in and examined Lincoln’s careful handwriting, larger and more legible than Obama’s. The speech barely went onto a third page before it ended with the signature “Abraham Lincoln. November 19, 1863.”
“We could never get them this short,” I said, peering down at the writing.
He laughed. “I used to come in here sometimes in the middle of the night while I was writing. For inspiration.” I thought about him roaming these rooms in the early morning hours, going over some text I’d written, while I was off somewhere staring at a laptop.
We walked out onto the Truman Balcony, which overlooked a darkened South Lawn, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial in the distance beyond. I thought about something a Secret Service agent had said about the end of the administration—that he’d been relieved to complete two terms with Obama alive. Unspoken were the myriad threats that must have come their way, the pressure of an African American being elected president in a country with its own history of political violence, as Lincoln’s handwriting recalled. Obama, unlike Lincoln, was not going to be frozen in time as a young man taken by tragedy; he’d reached the end of the race, which made him more human in the scope of history. As he’d said about Mandela, he wasn’t a saint, he was a man.
I went back to my office and stayed until five thirty in the morning. I couldn’t seem to get to the end of the paper. I couldn’t take any of it with me; it was now the property of the National Archives, and I had to box up what I might want access to in the years ahead. There was a large, heavy metal safe in the corner where I had set aside paper over the years, documents that I might want to look at later. I sat there, in the middle of the night, looking at photographs of bin Laden’s emptied compound after the raid; early versions of what became the Iran deal; communications from the Vatican on Cuba. I put aside the things that had to be saved for posterity, stored away someplace to be found at a later date.
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ON INAUGURATION DAY, I went out to Andrews Air Force Base for the Obamas’ final flight on Air Force One. That morning, I had trouble getting past the Secret Service checkpoints that formed an outward perimeter, like an armed encampment, on Seventeenth Street and then into the White House; an agent recognized me, waved his hand at the one giving me trouble, and told the others, “He’s okay.” And with that, I walked through the White House gate one final time, eight years to the day since I walked in for the first time.
When I got inside the West Wing, all of the jumbo photographs of Obama had been taken down, the space in the walls now filled with empty frames reserved for photographs of Trump. The Oval Office had already been remodeled—yellow curtains, a new rug. This was Reagan’s design, I was told: Make America Great Again. Ferial Govashiri, my old assistant, now Obama’s, showed me his things stacked outside on the walkway that led to the colonnade. There was his couch that I’d sat on, the cushions piled up and his rug rolled up on top of it like furniture hastily prepared for a moving van on its way to some warehouse and, ultimately, a museum.
After the inauguration, the Obamas did a farewell with several hundred former staffers in a hangar at Andrews. While they shook one last set of hands along a rope line, I boarded the plane with a small staff cohort who would accompany them on their flight out to Palm Springs, California, where they’d start their vacation. George W. Bush’s team had recommended we do this to make the flight less lonely for them after eight years when they were surrounded by dozens of people. When I got on board, I noticed that the place cards that usually read AIR FORCE ONE now simply said ABOARD THE PRESIDENTIAL AIRCRAFT—it wasn’t Air Force One since the president wouldn’t be on board.
It had been drizzling, and I watched through dampened windows as the Obamas took one last walk down a long red carpet, through a military honor guard, and up the stairs to the plane. Once on board, Michelle Obama sat, as if feeling the full exhaustion of the last eight years, on the first couch down the hallway of the plane. Obama held her closely, whispering something in her ear.
The mood on the flight was subdued. The Obama girls sat with some family and friends in the staff area. They had been so young; now they were both taller than me. I stood in the hallway of the plane chatting with Obama—for the first time in eight years, I was no longer talking to the president. His face acquired a slight droop when he was tired, and the crevices in his cheeks were deeper and more pronounced than the fresh face, full of confidence, that I’d first looked at in a conference room all those years ago.
“I came to see the presidency like a game of Pac-Man,” he told me, moving his hand as if using a joystick in front of him. “Sometimes I felt like I was just outrunning people, trying to avoid getting tripped up before I got to the end of the board.” He was nestled between two presidents far less qualified than he was, yet he—the only black person to hold the office—had been held to a higher bar, and he’d cleared it.
“And here you are,” I said.
“And here I am.” He laughed. He looked profoundly relieved, though it was jarring to hear him talk about the presidency in the past tense, as a job he once had.
I told him about my first thoughts upon boarding the plane. “I always get on this plane,” I said, “put down a foldout desk, take out my laptop, and start working. But now I’ve got nothing to do. No emails to answer, no speech to write, no crisis to deal with. It’s…strange.”
“And I’ve got no briefings to read,” he said. “All the decisions have been made.”
I thought about the weight that was lifted, but also all of the information that must have filled his thoughts for eight years, now unoccupied. What must that be like, to suddenly have all of that mental space, all of that time, now open. “What are you going to do tomorrow morning, with all that extra time?” I asked.
“Sleep in,” he said, before walking back to his family.
The military aide, who would continue under Trump, the person who would sometimes carry the nuclear football that could end life on earth, wa
rned me I was about to go through “an intense physiological experience. You’ve been running on stress and adrenaline,” he said, “for years.” He wasn’t wrong. I felt a creeping tiredness coming on, a pending collapse.
When we got to Palm Springs the weather was bad and the plane flew in circles for about an hour. If it had been an urgent presidential trip, we might have just gone for it. Instead, they found a regional airport an hour or so away. They wouldn’t need a full presidential motorcade. As we landed, I gave Obama a half hug and slap on the back. “Love you, brother,” he said, heading off to get his things.
I got off the plane and walked a hundred feet or so over to an area where I could smoke. It was dark, and there were only a few cars parked on the tarmac: SUVs and a van for the personal staff that was still traveling with them. It felt eerily like all the stops we’d made to refuel Air Force One at U.S. military bases over the years—in Anchorage and Guam, in the Azores and in Germany—short breaks in the middle of long-haul trips around the globe. There was no arrival party, no red carpet. I watched as the Obamas deplaned without waving and climbed into their SUVs, heading off to begin the next chapter of their lives.
Air Force One normally bustles with activity—press, Secret Service, staff—people at the center of a traveling drama. But as we took off for the flight back to Washington, there were fewer than ten passengers on board the enormous plane—the handful of staffers who’d made the trip out with the Obamas out of some combination of sentimentality, indispensability, and moral support. The people who hadn’t left. We ate a quiet meal as the plane flew east toward home. I walked up and down the length of the plane—the seats in the back, where I’d briefed the traveling press; the four-top tables, where we’d watched movies; the conference room, where I’d watched Obama make decisions, take briefings, and play a seemingly endless game of spades; the computers, where I’d panicked over speeches that felt like the most important and urgent things imaginable.
I settled into the senior staff cabin, no longer a staffer myself, and sank into the cocoon of the white noise that always marked a long flight home. I lay down on the floor, feeling the slight, cool vibration of the carpeted floor below me. I was too tired to do anything, but there was also no way I could sleep. I looked at a framed star that the Air Force One crew had given me, a memento of having flown more than a million miles on this aircraft.
I thought of the young man I’d been who went to work in Chicago. In those days, I used to walk anonymously through the city streets, scattered skyscrapers and new construction reaching into the sky around me. I would make my way to the campaign office through a series of alleys that cut across to Michigan Avenue. Always, at the opening of a cross street or a break in the buildings, I could see out of the corner of my eye a new, wide glass tower climbing into the sky along the Chicago River. In my mind, the building came to be a symbol of what we were building in the campaign, as it worked its way to completion. It wasn’t until after we’d won the Iowa Caucus that put Obama on a path to the presidency that the letters TRUMP were affixed to the side of that building, about a third of the way up. We had no idea of the shadow that the owner of the building would cast over the historic presidency that we were about to claim.
The twenty-four-year-old I’d been, handing out flyers on a Brooklyn street on 9/11, was closer in time to the young man who went to work for the Obama campaign than I was, flying back to Washington on this plane. Trump was impossible without 9/11. The jingoism in the media; the assertion of a new, militaristic American nationalism; the creeping fear of the Other, and the way that it could be manipulated by an ideologue; the wars that sapped America’s strength, and unsteadied our place in the world; the recognition that there would be no victory, as promised by Bush, no parade or period on the end of a paragraph in history.
I closed my eyes. Somewhere out there, in the vast expanse of darkness, was the story of the last eight years, the world as it is. Markets once crippled by crisis teemed with optimistic forecasts on computer screens. Iranian centrifuges sat idle in a storage warehouse with electronic seals. Yazidi women and children who had escaped from Mount Sinjar awaited a new life in Turkish refugee camps. A team of women in Laos scoured the rough grass for unexploded bombs. Syrian prisons were filled with human beings suffering untold horror. A refugee went looking for a job in Berlin. An aging survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima went about her day in a tidy apartment. Vladimir Putin presided over a revanchist and rotting Russian regime. Angela Merkel prepared her run for another term as German chancellor. NATO patrolled the skies over Estonia. Mohamed Morsi sat in an Egyptian prison cell. American-backed forces inched closer to Raqqa. A compound once occupied by Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad was no more. American troops guarded the perimeter of Bagram Airfield. Scientists researched new methods to meet the targets set by the Paris climate accord. Colombian guerrillas planned to turn in their weapons. A Cuban shopkeeper took stock of his inventory. A young person in Kenya who had participated in a U.S. exchange program went to work building a community organization back home. The congregants of a black church in Charleston accepted God’s grace. Donald Trump watched cable news in the residence of the White House. Barack Obama finished his drive to a vacation home in Palm Springs. All the people who’d worked for him readied themselves for new lives. My own daughters lay sleeping in my small apartment, unaware of the convulsions in the world around them.
Billions of people around the globe had come to know Barack Obama, had heard his words, had watched his speeches, and, in some unknowable but irreducible way, had come to see the world as a place that could—in some incremental way—change. The arc of history. How had his presence altered the direction of these individual human beings and the larger forces they touched; the lives they would lead; the stories they would tell? I was just one human being in this expanse—altered by experience, distorted by forces beyond my control, hurtling through the American darkness on the most iconic aircraft in the world. I would land for the first time at Andrews Air Force Base without a helicopter or collection of vans waiting to escort me back to the White House. I’d touch down, in the predawn hours, another human being whose own story, whose own life, had been changed by Barack Obama. I was a man, no longer young, who—in the zigzag of history—still believed in the truth within the stories of people around the world, a truth that compels me to see the world as it is, and to believe in the world as it ought to be.
(PHOTO BY SAMANTHA POWER)
Ann and me on election night in Chicago, 2008. My OBAMA STAFF T-shirt shows through my sweater.
Obama and Reggie Love taking a private tour of the Pyramids in Giza shortly after the Cairo speech, June 4, 2009.
(PHOTO BY CODY KEENAN)
With fellow speechwriters Jon Favreau and Cody Keenan and communications director Dan Pfeiffer on the Truman Balcony after the Affordable Care Act passed Congress, March 21, 2010.
The spot in Hawaii where Obama’s mother used to come and sit when she was pregnant. He attributed his calm demeanor in part to this place.
With campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki in Iowa on the eve of Election Day 2012. Jen and I joined the Obama team at the same time in 2007.
Crowds lining our motorcade route during Obama’s first visit to Burma, November 19, 2012.
The Beast—the heavily armored presidential limousine—parked outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
(PHOTO BY ANN NORRIS)
Ann holds up six-day-old Ella, our first child, while Obama announces the Cuba opening on December 17, 2014.
Obama and Pope Francis, who had played an indispensable role in our secret negotiations with Cuba.
Obama and Anthony Bourdain during our trip to Hanoi, filming an episode of Parts Unknown.
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br /> With Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe looking on, Obama greets a survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima after his speech on May 27, 2016.
(PHOTO BY RUMANA AHMED)
Meeting with victims of unexploded U.S. ordnance in Laos, the most heavily bombed country in history—one of the toughest meetings I had in eight years.
The view from the dais at Fidel Castro’s funeral in Havana, with the image of Che hovering over us in the distance.
An example of the hate messages I received constantly on social media.
(PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA)
President Obama holds a newborn Chloe while Ella looks on.
(PHOTO BY SUZY GEORGE)
With Ricardo Zuniga and Bernadette Meehan, the two Foreign Service officers who carried me through the second term, playing instrumental roles in our dealings with Cuba and Iran.
(PHOTO BY RUMANA AHMED)
With Alejandro Castro, my negotiating counterpart, in Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana.
On the last night of his presidency, Obama showed me an original copy of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s handwriting, which was displayed in the White House residence.
