Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  I was sold. The change, when announced, was well received, with commentators drawing parallels between McChrystal and David Petraeus—battlefield innovators who could turn a war around. Senate confirmation was swift, and in mid-June, as McChrystal (now a four-star general) prepared to assume command of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Gates asked him to provide us with a fresh, top-to-bottom assessment of conditions there within sixty days, along with recommendations for any changes in strategy, organization, or resourcing of coalition efforts.

  Little did I know what this seemingly routine request would bring.

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  ONE AFTERNOON a couple of months after the Af-Pak announcement, I walked alone across the South Lawn—trailed by a military aide carrying the football and my veterans affairs staffer, Matt Flavin—to board the Marine One helicopter and make the brief flight to Maryland for the first of what would be regular visits to Bethesda Naval Hospital and Walter Reed Army Medical Center. On arrival, I was greeted by commanders of the facility, who gave me a quick overview of the number and condition of wounded warriors on-site before leading me through a maze of stairs, elevators, and corridors to the main patients’ ward.

  For the next hour, I proceeded from room to room, sanitizing my hands and donning scrubs and surgical gloves where necessary, stopping in the hallway to get some background on the recovering service member from hospital staffers before knocking softly on the door.

  Though patients at the hospitals came from every branch of the military, many who were there during my first few years in office were members of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps that patrolled the insurgent-dominated areas of Iraq and Afghanistan and had been injured by gunfire or IEDs. Almost all were male and working-class: whites from small rural towns or fading manufacturing hubs, Blacks and Hispanics from cities like Houston or Trenton, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from California. Usually they had family members sitting with them—mostly parents, grandparents, and siblings, though if the service member was older, there would be a wife and kids too—toddlers squirming in laps, five-year-olds with toy cars, teenagers playing video games. As soon as I entered the room, everyone would shift around, smiling shyly, appearing not quite sure what to do. For me, this was one of the vagaries of the job, the fact that my presence reliably caused a disruption and a bout of nervousness among those I was meeting. I tried always to lighten the mood, doing what I could to put people at ease.

  Unless fully incapacitated, the service members would usually raise their bed upright, sometimes pulling themselves to a seated position by reaching for the sturdy metal handle on the bedpost. Several insisted on hopping out of bed, often balancing on their good leg to salute and shake my hand. I’d ask them about their hometown and how long they’d been in the service. I’d ask them how they got their injury and how soon they might be starting rehab or be getting fitted for a prosthetic. We often talked sports, and some would ask me to sign a unit flag hung on the wall, and I’d give each service member a commemorative challenge coin. Then we’d all position ourselves around the bed as Pete Souza took pictures with his camera and with their phones, and Matt would give out business cards so they could call him personally at the White House if they needed anything at all.

  How those men inspired me! Their courage and determination, their insistence that they’d be back at it in no time, their general lack of fuss. It made so much of what passes for patriotism—the gaudy rituals at football games, the desultory flag waving at parades, the blather of politicians—seem empty and trite. The patients I met had nothing but praise for the hospital teams responsible for their treatment—the doctors, nurses, and orderlies, most of them service members themselves but some of them civilians, a surprising number of them foreign-born, originally from places like Nigeria, El Salvador, or the Philippines. Indeed, it was heartening to see how well these wounded warriors were cared for, beginning with the seamless, fast-moving chain that allowed a Marine injured in a dusty Afghan village to be medevaced to the closest base, stabilized, then transported to Germany and onward to Bethesda or Walter Reed for state-of-the-art surgery, all in a matter of days.

  Because of that system—a melding of advanced technology, logistical precision, and highly trained and dedicated people, the kind of thing that the U.S. military does better than any other organization on earth—many soldiers who would have died from similar wounds during the Vietnam era were now able to sit with me at their bedside, debating the merits of the Bears versus the Packers. Still, no level of precision or care could erase the brutal, life-changing nature of the injuries these men had suffered. Those who had lost a single leg, especially if the amputation was below the knee, often described themselves as being lucky. Double or even triple amputees were not uncommon, nor were severe cranial trauma, spinal injuries, disfiguring facial wounds, or the loss of eyesight, hearing, or any number of basic bodily functions. The service members I met were adamant that they had no regrets about sacrificing so much for their country and were understandably offended by anyone who viewed them with even a modicum of pity. Taking their cues from their wounded sons, the parents I met were careful to express only the certainty of their child’s recovery, along with their deep wells of pride.

  And yet each time I entered a room, each time I shook a hand, I could not ignore how incredibly young most of these service members were, many of them barely out of high school. I couldn’t help but notice the rims of anguish around the eyes of the parents, who themselves were often younger than me. I wouldn’t forget the barely suppressed anger in the voice of a father I met at one point, as he explained that his handsome son, who lay before us likely paralyzed for life, was celebrating his twenty-first birthday that day, or the vacant expression on the face of a young mother who sat with a baby cheerfully gurgling in her arms, pondering a life with a husband who was probably going to survive but would no longer be capable of conscious thought.

  Later, toward the end of my presidency, The New York Times would run an article about my visits to the military hospitals. In it, a national security official from a previous administration opined that the practice, no matter how well intentioned, was not something a commander in chief should do—that visits with the wounded inevitably clouded a president’s capacity to make clear-eyed, strategic decisions. I was tempted to call that man and explain that I was never more clear-eyed than on the flights back from Walter Reed and Bethesda. Clear about the true costs of war, and who bore those costs. Clear about war’s folly, the sorry tales we humans collectively store in our heads and pass on from generation to generation—abstractions that fan hate and justify cruelty and force even the righteous among us to participate in carnage. Clear that by virtue of my office, I could not avoid responsibility for lives lost or shattered, even if I somehow justified my decisions by what I perceived to be some larger good.

  Looking through the helicopter window at the tidy green landscape below, I thought about Lincoln during the Civil War, his habit of wandering through makeshift infirmaries not so far from where we were flying, talking softly to soldiers who lay on flimsy cots, bereft of antiseptics to stanch infections or drugs to manage pain, the stench of gangrene everywhere, the clattering and wheezing of impending death.

  I wondered how Lincoln had managed it, what prayers he said afterward. He must have known it was a necessary penance. A penance I, too, had to pay.

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  —

  AS ALL-CONSUMING AS war and the threat of terrorism were proving to be, other foreign policy issues also required my attention—including the need to manage the international fallout from the financial crisis. That was the major focus of my first extended foreign trip when I traveled to London for the Group of 20 Leaders’ Summit in April and then onward to continental Europe, Turkey, and Iraq over the course of eight days.

  Before 2008, the G20 had been nothing more than a yearly meeting of finance ministers and central
bank governors representing the world’s twenty largest economies to exchange information and tend to the routine details of globalization. U.S. presidents reserved their attendance for the more exclusive G8, an annual gathering for leaders of the world’s seven largest economies (the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Canada) plus Russia (which, for geopolitical reasons, Bill Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair had pushed to include in 1997). This changed when, after Lehman’s collapse, President Bush and Hank Paulson wisely invited the leaders of all G20 countries to an emergency meeting in Washington—a recognition that in today’s interconnected world, a major financial crisis required the broadest possible coordination.

  Beyond a vague pledge to “take whatever further actions are necessary” and an agreement to gather again in 2009, the Washington G20 summit had yielded little in the way of concrete action. But with practically every nation now poised for a recession, and global trade projected to contract by 9 percent, my assignment for the London summit was to unite the diverse set of G20 members around a swift and aggressive joint response. The economic rationale was straightforward: For years, U.S. consumer spending—turbocharged with credit card debt and home equity loans—had been the primary engine of global economic growth. Americans bought cars from Germany, electronics from South Korea, and practically everything else from China; these countries, in turn, bought raw materials from countries further down the global supply chain. Now the party was over. No matter how well the Recovery Act and the stress tests might work, American consumers and businesses were going to be digging themselves out of debt for a while. If other countries wanted to avoid a continued downward spiral, they would have to step up—by implementing stimulus packages of their own; by contributing to a $500 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) emergency pool that could be tapped as needed by economies in severe distress; and by pledging to avoid a repeat of the protectionist, beggar-thy-neighbor policies that had prolonged the Great Depression.

  It all made sense, at least on paper. Before the summit, though, Tim Geithner had warned that getting my foreign counterparts to agree to these steps might require some finesse. “The bad news is, they’re all mad at us for blowing up the global economy,” he said. “The good news is that they’re afraid of what will happen if we do nothing.”

  Michelle had decided to join me for the first half of the trip, which made me happy. She was less concerned with my performance at the summit—“You’ll be fine”—than she was with how to dress for our planned audience with Her Majesty the Queen of England.

  “You should wear one of those little hats,” I said. “And carry a little handbag.”

  She gave me a mock scowl. “That’s not helpful.”

  I had flown on Air Force One close to two dozen times by then, but it wasn’t until that first transatlantic flight that I truly appreciated the degree to which it served as a symbol of American power. The aircrafts themselves (two customized Boeing 747s share the job) were twenty-two years old, and it showed. The interiors—heavy upholstered leather chairs, walnut tables and paneling, a rust-colored carpet with a pattern of gold stars—called to mind a 1980s corporate boardroom or country club lounge. The communications system for passengers could be spotty; not until well into my second term would we get Wi-Fi on board, and even then it was often slower than what was available on most private jets.

  Still, everything on Air Force One projected solidity, competence, and a touch of grandeur—from the conveniences (a bedroom, private office, and shower for the president up front; spacious seating, a conference room, and a bay of computer terminals for my team), to the exemplary service of the air force staff (about thirty on board, willing to cheerfully accommodate the most random requests), to its high-level safety features (the world’s best pilots, armored windows, airborne refueling capacity, and an onboard medical unit that included a foldout operating table), to its four-thousand-square-foot interior spread out over three levels, capable of transporting a fourteen-person press pool as well as a number of Secret Service agents.

  Unique among world leaders, the American president travels fully equipped so as not to rely on another government’s services or security forces. This meant that an armada of Beasts, security vehicles, ambulances, tactical teams, and, when necessary, Marine One helicopters were flown in on air force C-17 transport planes in advance and pre-positioned on the tarmac for my arrival. The heavy footprint—and its contrast with the more modest arrangements required by other heads of state—occasionally prompted consternation from a host country’s officials. But the U.S. military and Secret Service offered no room for negotiation, and eventually the host country would relent, partly because its own public and press corps expected the arrival of an American president on their soil to look like a big deal.

  That it was. Wherever we landed, I’d see people pressing their faces against airport terminal windows or gathering outside the perimeter fencing. Even ground crews paused whatever they were doing to catch a glimpse of Air Force One slowly taxiing down the runway with its elegant blue undercarriage, the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA appearing crisp and understated on its fuselage, the American flag neatly centered on its tail. Exiting the plane, I’d give the obligatory wave from the top of the stairs, amid the rapid buzz of camera shutters and the eager smiles of the delegation lined up at the base of the steps to greet us, sometimes with a presentation of a bouquet by a woman or child in traditional dress, at other times a full honor guard or military band arrayed on either of side of the red carpet that led me to my vehicle. In all of this, one sensed the faint but indelible residue of ancient rituals—rituals of diplomacy, but also rituals of tribute to an empire.

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  AMERICA HAD HELD a dominant position on the world stage for the better part of the past seven decades. In the wake of World War II, with the rest of the world either impoverished or reduced to rubble, we had led the way in establishing an interlocking system of initiatives, treaties, and new institutions that effectively remade the international order and created a stable path forward: The Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Pacific alliances to serve as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and bind former enemies into an alignment with the West. Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to regulate global finance and commerce. The United Nations and related multilateral agencies to promote the peaceful resolution of conflicts and cooperation on everything from disease eradication to protection of the oceans.

  Our motivations for erecting this architecture had hardly been selfless. Beyond helping to assure our security, it pried open markets to sell our goods, kept sea-lanes available for our ships, and maintained the steady flow of oil for our factories and cars. It ensured that our banks got repaid in dollars, our multinationals’ factories weren’t seized, our tourists could cash their traveler’s checks, and our international calls would go through. At times, we bent global institutions to serve Cold War imperatives or ignored them altogether; we meddled in the affairs of other countries, sometimes with disastrous results; our actions often contradicted the ideals of democracy, self-determination, and human rights we professed to embody.

  Still, to a degree unmatched by any superpower in history, America chose to bind itself to a set of international laws, rules, and norms. More often than not, we exercised a degree of restraint in our dealings with smaller, weaker nations, relying less on threats and coercion to maintain a global pact. Over time, that willingness to act on behalf of a common good—even if imperfectly—strengthened rather than diminished our influence, contributing to the system’s overall durability, and if America was not always universally loved, we were at least respected and not merely feared.

  Whatever resistance there might have been to America’s global vision seemed to collapse with the 1991 fall of
the Soviet Union. In the dizzying span of little more than a decade, Germany and then Europe were unified; former Eastern bloc countries rushed to join NATO and the European Union; China’s capitalism took off; numerous countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracy; and apartheid in South Africa came to an end. Commentators proclaimed the ultimate triumph of liberal, pluralistic, capitalist, Western-style democracy, insisting that the remaining vestiges of tyranny, ignorance, and inefficiency would soon be swept away by the end of history, the flattening of the world. Even at the time, such exuberance was easy to mock. This much was true, though: At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States could legitimately claim that the international order we had forged and the principles we had promoted—a Pax Americana—had helped bring about a world in which billions of people were freer, more secure, and more prosperous than before.