Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  “We need to make sure you can deliver a proper salute.”

  Denis himself had never served in the military, although there was an order to his movements, a deliberateness and focus, that made some people assume he had. Tall and angular, with a jutting jaw, deep-set eyes, and graying hair that made him appear older than his thirty-nine years, he’d grown up in the small town of Stillwater, Minnesota, one of eleven children in a working-class Irish Catholic family. After graduating from college, he’d traveled through Latin America and taught high school in Belize, gone back to get his master’s degree in international affairs, and worked for Tom Daschle, then the Democratic leader in the Senate. In 2007, we’d recruited Denis to serve as a foreign policy staffer in my Senate office, and over the course of the campaign Denis had assumed more and more responsibility—helping me prepare for debates, putting together briefing books, organizing every aspect of my preconvention foreign tour, and endlessly jousting with the traveling press corps.

  Even in a team full of type A personalities, Denis stood out. He sweated the details; volunteered for the most difficult, thankless tasks; and could not be outworked: During the Iowa campaign, he spent what little spare time he had canvassing door-to-door, famously shoveling snow for folks after a particularly bad storm, hoping to win their commitment to caucus for me. The same disregard for his own physical well-being that had helped him make his college football team as an undersized strong safety could lead to problems—in the White House, I once had to order him to go home after learning that he’d worked twelve straight hours with a bout of the flu. I came to suspect a religious aspect to this intensity, and though an iconoclastic streak (as well as an adoration of his wife, Kari) led him to steer clear of the collar, he approached his work both as a form of service and as self-abnegation.

  Now, as part of his good works here on earth, Denis had taken it upon himself to get me ready for my first day as commander in chief. On the eve of my inauguration, he invited two military guys—including Matt Flavin, a young navy veteran who would serve as my White House veterans affairs staffer—to the transition office to put me through my paces. They started by showing me a bunch of photos of previous presidential salutes that did not make the grade—weak wrists, curled fingers, George W. Bush trying to salute while carrying his dog under his arm. They then evaluated my own form, which was apparently not stellar.

  “Elbow a little farther out, sir,” said one.

  “Fingers tighter, sir,” said the other. “The tips should be right at your eyebrow.”

  After twenty minutes or so, though, my tutors seemed satisfied. Once they’d left, I turned to Denis.

  “Anything else you’re nervous about?” I teased.

  Denis shook his head unconvincingly. “Not nervous, Mr. President-Elect. Just want us to be prepared.”

  “For what?”

  Denis smiled. “For everything.”

  * * *

  —

  IT’S A TRUISM that a president’s single most important job is to keep the American people safe. Depending on your political predispositions and electoral mandate, you may have a burning desire to fix public education or restore prayer in schools, raise the minimum wage or break the power of public sector unions. But whether Republican or Democrat, the one thing every president must obsess over, the source of chronic, unrelenting tension that burrows deep inside you from the moment you’re elected, is the awareness that everybody is depending on you to protect them.

  How you approach the task depends on how you define the threats that the country faces. What do we fear most? Is it the possibility of a Russian nuclear attack, or that a bureaucratic miscalculation or glitch in the software launches one of our warheads by mistake? Is it some fanatic blowing himself up on a subway, or the government, under the guise of protecting you from fanatics, tapping into your email account? Is it a gas shortage caused by disruptions to foreign oil supplies, or the oceans rising and the planet frying? Is it an immigrant family sneaking across a river in search of a better life, or a pandemic disease, incubated by poverty and a lack of public services in a poor country overseas, drifting invisibly into our homes?

  For most of the twentieth century, for most Americans, the what and why of our national defense seemed pretty straightforward. We lived with the possibility of being attacked by another great power, or being drawn into a conflict between great powers, or having America’s vital interests—as defined by the wise men in Washington—threatened by some foreign actor. After World War II, there were the Soviets and the Communist Chinese and their (real or perceived) proxies, ostensibly intent on world domination and threatening our way of life. And then came terrorist attacks emanating from the Middle East, at first on the periphery of our vision, scary but manageable, until just months into a brand-new century, the sight of the Twin Towers crumbling to dust made our worst fears manifest.

  I grew up with many of these fears imprinted on me. In Hawaii, I knew families who’d lost loved ones at Pearl Harbor. My grandfather, his brother, and my grandmother’s brother had all fought in World War II. I was raised believing that nuclear war was a very real possibility. In grade school, I watched coverage of Olympic athletes being slaughtered by masked men in Munich; in college, I listened to Ted Koppel marking the number of days Americans were being held hostage in Iran. Too young to have known the anguish of Vietnam firsthand, I had witnessed only the honor and restraint of our service members during the Gulf War, and like most Americans I viewed our military operations in Afghanistan after 9/11 as both necessary and just.

  But another set of stories had also been etched into me—different though not contradictory—about what America meant to those living in the world beyond it, the symbolic power of a country built upon the ideals of freedom. I remember being seven or eight years old and sitting on the cool floor tiles of our house on the outskirts of Jakarta, proudly showing my friends a picture book of Honolulu with its high-rises and city lights and wide, paved roads. I would never forget the wonder in their faces as I answered their questions about life in America, explaining how everybody got to go to a school with plenty of books, and there were no beggars because most everyone had a job and enough to eat. Later, as a young man, I witnessed my mother’s impact as a contractor with organizations like USAID, helping women in remote Asian villages get access to credit, and the lasting gratitude those women felt that Americans an ocean away actually cared about their plight. When I first visited Kenya, I sat with newfound relatives who told me how much they admired American democracy and rule of law—a contrast, they said, to the tribalism and corruption that plagued their country.

  Such moments taught me to see my country through the eyes of others. I was reminded of how lucky I was to be an American, to take none of those blessings for granted. I saw firsthand the power our example exerted on the hearts and minds of people around the world. But with that came a corollary lesson: an awareness of what we risked when our actions failed to live up to our image and our ideals, the anger and resentment this could breed, the damage that was done. When I heard Indonesians talk about the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in a coup—widely believed to have CIA backing—that had brought a military dictatorship to power in 1967, or listened to Latin American environmental activists detailing how U.S. companies were befouling their countryside, or commiserated with Indian American or Pakistani American friends as they chronicled the countless times that they’d been pulled aside for “random” searches at airports since 9/11, I felt America’s defenses weakening, saw chinks in the armor that I was sure over time made our country less safe.

  That dual vision, as much as my skin color, distinguished me from previous presidents. For my supporters, it was a defining foreign policy strength, enabling me to amplify America’s influence around the world and anticipate problems that might arise from ill-considered policies. For my detractors, it was evidence of weakness, raising the possibility that I
might hesitate to advance American interests because of a lack of conviction, or even divided loyalties. For some of my fellow citizens, it was far worse than that. Having the son of a black African with a Muslim name and socialist ideas ensconced in the White House with the full force of the U.S. government under his command was precisely the thing they wanted to be defended against.

  * * *

  —

  AS FOR THE senior ranks of my national security team, they all considered themselves internationalists to one degree or another: They believed that American leadership was necessary to keep the world moving in a better direction, and that our influence came in many forms. Even the more liberal members of my team, like Denis, had no qualms about the use of “hard power” to go after terrorists and were scornful of leftist critics who made a living blaming the United States for every problem around the globe. Meanwhile, the most hawkish members of my team understood the importance of public diplomacy and considered the exercise of so-called soft power, like foreign aid and student exchange programs, to be essential ingredients in an effective U.S. foreign policy.

  The question was one of emphasis. How much concern did we have for the people beyond our borders, and how much should we simply worry about our own citizens? How much was our fate actually tied to the fate of people abroad? To what extent should America bind itself to multilateral institutions like the United Nations, and to what extent should we go it alone in pursuit of our own interests? Should we align ourselves with authoritarian governments that help keep a lid on possible chaos—or was the smarter long-term play to champion the forces of democratic reform?

  How members of my administration lined up on these issues wasn’t always predictable. But in our internal debates, I could detect a certain generational divide. With the exception of Susan Rice, my youthful U.N. ambassador, all of my national security principals—Secretaries Gates and Clinton, CIA director Leon Panetta, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as my national security advisor, Jim Jones, and my director of national intelligence, Denny Blair—had come of age during the height of the Cold War and had spent decades as part of Washington’s national security establishment: a dense, interlocking network of current and former White House policy makers, congressional staffers, academics, heads of think tanks, Pentagon brass, newspaper columnists, military contractors, and lobbyists. For them, a responsible foreign policy meant continuity, predictability, and an unwillingness to stray too far from conventional wisdom. It was this impulse that had led most of them to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and if the resulting disaster had forced them to reconsider that particular decision, they were still not inclined to ask whether the bipartisan rush into Iraq indicated the need for a fundamental overhaul of America’s national security framework.

  The younger members of my national security team, including most of the NSC staff, had different ideas. No less patriotic than their bosses, seared by both the horrors of 9/11 and the images of Iraqi prisoners abused by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib, many of them had gravitated to my campaign precisely because I was willing to challenge the assumptions of what we often referred to as “the Washington playbook,” whether it was on Middle East policy, our posture on Cuba, our unwillingness to engage adversaries diplomatically, the importance of restoring legal guardrails in the fight against terror, or the elevation of human rights, international development, and climate change from acts of altruism to central aspects of our national security. None of these younger staffers were firebrands, and they respected the institutional knowledge of those with deep foreign policy experience. But they made no apologies for wanting to break from some of the constraints of the past in pursuit of something better.

  At times, friction between the new and the old guard inside my foreign policy team would spill into the open. When it did, the media tended to attribute it to a youthful impertinence among my staff and a lack of basic understanding about how Washington worked. That wasn’t the case. In fact, it was precisely because staffers like Denis did know how Washington worked—because they’d witnessed how the foreign policy bureaucracy could slow-walk, misinterpret, bury, badly execute, or otherwise resist new directions from a president—that they would often end up butting heads with the Pentagon, State Department, and CIA.

  And in that sense, the tensions that emerged within our foreign policy team were a product of my own design, a way for me to work through the tensions in my own head. I imagined myself on the bridge of an aircraft carrier, certain that America needed to steer a new course but entirely dependent on a more seasoned and sometimes skeptical crew to execute that change, mindful that there were limits to what the vessel could do and that too sharp a turn could lead to disaster. With the stakes as high as they were, I was coming to realize that leadership, particularly in the national security arena, was about more than executing well-reasoned policy. Awareness of custom and ritual mattered. Symbols and protocol mattered. Body language mattered.

  I worked on my salute.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE START of each day of my presidency, I would find a leather binder waiting for me at the breakfast table. Michelle called it “The Death, Destruction, and Horrible Things Book,” though officially it was known as the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB. Top secret, usually about ten to fifteen pages in length, and prepared overnight by the CIA in concert with the other intelligence agencies, the PDB was intended to provide the president a summary of world events and intelligence analysis, particularly anything that was likely to affect America’s national security. On a given day, I might read about terrorist cells in Somalia or unrest in Iraq or the fact that the Chinese or Russians were developing new weapons systems. Nearly always, there was mention of potential terrorist plots, no matter how vague, thinly sourced, or unactionable—a form of due diligence on the part of the intelligence community, meant to avoid the kind of second-guessing that had transpired after 9/11. Much of the time, what I read in the PDB required no immediate response. The goal was to have a continuously up-to-date sense of all that was roiling in the world, the large, small, and sometimes barely perceptible shifts that threatened to upset whatever equilibrium we were trying to maintain.

  After reading the PDB, I’d head down to the Oval for a live version of the briefing with members of the NSC and national intelligence staffs, where we’d go over any items considered urgent. The men running those briefings—Jim Jones and Denny Blair—were former four-star officers I’d first met while serving in the Senate (Jones had been Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, while Blair had recently retired from his role as navy admiral in charge of Pacific Command). They looked the part—tall and fit, with close-cropped graying hair and ramrod straight bearings—and although I had originally consulted with them on military matters, both prided themselves on having an expansive view of what constituted national security priorities. Jones, for example, cared deeply about Africa and the Middle East, and following his military retirement he had been involved in security efforts in the West Bank and Gaza. Blair had written extensively on the role of economic and cultural diplomacy in managing a rising China. As a result, the two of them would occasionally arrange for analysts and experts to attend morning PDB sessions and brief me on big-picture, long-term topics: the implications of economic growth in sustaining democratization in sub-Saharan Africa, say, or the possible effects of climate change on future regional conflicts.

  More often, though, our morning discussions focused on current or potential mayhem: coups, nuclear weapons, violent protests, border conflicts, and, most of all, war.

  The war in Afghanistan, soon to be the longest in American history.

  The war in Iraq, where nearly 150,000 American troops were still deployed.

  The war against al-Qaeda, which was actively recruiting converts, building a network of affiliates, and plotting attacks inspired by the ideology of Osama bin Laden.

  The cumulat
ive costs of what both the Bush administration and the media described as a single, comprehensive “war against terrorism” had been staggering: almost a trillion dollars spent, more than three thousand U.S. troops killed, as many as ten times that number wounded. The toll on Iraqi and Afghan civilians was even higher. The Iraq campaign in particular had divided the country and strained alliances. Meanwhile, the use of extraordinary renditions, black sites, waterboarding, indefinite detention without trial at Guantánamo, and expanded domestic surveillance in the broader fight against terrorism had led people inside and outside the United States to question our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

  I’d put forward what I considered to be clear positions on all these issues during the campaign. But that had been from the cheap seats, before I had hundreds of thousands of troops and a sprawling national security infrastructure under my command. Any terrorist attack would now happen on my watch. Any American lives lost or compromised, at home or abroad, would weigh uniquely on my conscience. These were my wars now.

  My immediate goal was to review each aspect of our military strategy so that we could take a thoughtful approach to what came next. Thanks to the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki had signed about a month before my inauguration, the broad outlines of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq had largely been settled. American combat forces needed to be out of Iraqi cities and villages by the end of June 2009, and all U.S. forces would leave the country by the end of 2011. The only question remaining was whether we could or should move faster than that. During the campaign, I had committed to withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq within sixteen months of taking office, but after the election I had told Bob Gates that I’d be willing to show flexibility on the pace of withdrawal so long as we stayed within the SOFA parameters—an acknowledgment that ending a war was an imprecise business, that commanders who were knee-deep in the fighting deserved some deference when it came to tactical decisions, and that new presidents couldn’t simply tear up agreements reached by their predecessors.