Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  The flood of appearances and announcements had the intended effect of muting, if not fully eliminating, the bad stories in the press. But it was the results of two earlier decisions I’d made that ultimately got us through the crisis.

  The first involved making sure that BP followed through on its earlier promise to compensate third parties harmed by the spill. Typically the process for filing claims required victims to jump through a bunch of bureaucratic hoops or even hire a lawyer. Resolving those claims could take years, by which time a small tour-boat operator or restaurant owner might have already lost his or her business. We thought the victims in this case deserved more immediate relief. We also figured now was the time for maximum leverage: BP’s stock was tanking, its global image was being pummeled, the Justice Department was investigating the company for possible criminal negligence, and the federal drilling moratorium we’d imposed was creating huge uncertainty for shareholders.

  “Can I squeeze the hell out of them?” Rahm asked.

  “Please do,” I said.

  Rahm went to work, badgering, cajoling, and threatening as only he could, and by the time I sat across the table from Tony Hayward and BP’s chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, for a June 16 meeting in the Roosevelt Room, they were ready to wave the white flag. (Hayward, who said little in the meeting, would announce his departure from the company a few weeks later.) Not only did BP agree to put $20 billion into a response fund to compensate victims of the spill, but we arranged for the money to be placed in escrow and administered independently by Ken Feinberg, the same lawyer who’d managed the fund for 9/11 victims and reviewed executive-compensation plans for banks receiving TARP money. The fund didn’t solve the environmental disaster. But it fulfilled my promise that all the fishermen, shrimpers, charter companies, and others who were racking up losses due to the crisis would get their due.

  The second good decision I’d made was putting Steve Chu on the job. My energy secretary had been underwhelmed by his initial interactions with BP engineers (“They don’t know what they’re dealing with,” Chu said), and he was soon splitting his time between Houston and D.C., telling Thad Allen that BP “shouldn’t do anything unless they clear it with me.” In no time, he had recruited a team of independent geophysicists and hydrologists to work with him on the problem. He convinced BP to use gamma-ray imaging to help diagnose what had gone wrong with the blowout preventer and to install pressure gauges to get real data on what was happening at the base of the well. Chu and his team also hammered home the point that any effort to cap it should be preceded by a thorough consideration of how that work risked triggering a cascade of uncontrollable underground leaks—and an even worse catastrophe.

  Chu and the BP engineers eventually agreed that the best solution was to fit a second, smaller blowout preventer—called a capping stack—on top of the one that had failed, using a series of sequential valves to shut down the leak. But after looking over BP’s initial design—and getting government scientists and engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and elsewhere to run a series of simulations on their supercomputers—Chu determined that it was inadequate, and the group quickly went to work on crafting a modified version. Axe stopped into the Oval one day and told me he’d just run into Chu at a nearby deli, sitting with his food barely touched, drawing various models of capping stacks on his napkin.

  “He started trying to explain how the contraption worked,” Axe said, “and I told him I was having enough trouble figuring out what I should order for lunch.”

  The final capping stack weighed seventy-five tons, stood thirty feet tall, and, because of Chu’s insistence, included multiple pressure gauges that would give us crucial data revealing its efficacy. Within weeks, the stack was in place above the well and ready to be tested. On July 15, BP engineers shut down the stack’s valves. The cap held. For the first time in eighty-seven days, oil wasn’t leaking from the Macondo well.

  Consistent with the luck we’d been having, a tropical storm threatened to pass through the Macondo site the following week. Chu, Thad Allen, and BP’s managing director, Bob Dudley, had to quickly decide whether or not to reopen the valves before the vessels involved in the containment efforts and the BP staff members monitoring the integrity of the capping stack had to clear out of the storm path. If their calculations on subsurface pressure proved wrong, there was a risk that the stack wouldn’t hold and, worse, could cause the ocean floor to fracture, triggering even more problematic leaks. Loosening the valves, of course, meant we’d restart the flow of oil into the Gulf, which was something nobody wanted. After running a final set of numbers, Chu agreed that it was worth the gamble and we should keep the valves closed as the storm ripped through.

  Once again, the cap held.

  There were no celebrations in the White House when we heard the news—just enormous relief. It would take a couple more months and a series of additional procedures before BP declared the Macondo well permanently sealed, and cleanup efforts would continue through the end of the summer. The fishing ban was gradually lifted, and seafood from the Gulf was certified as safe. Beaches were reopened, and in August I took the family to Panama City Beach, Florida, for a two-day “holiday,” to boost the region’s tourism industry. A picture from that trip, taken by Pete Souza and later released by the White House, shows me and Sasha splashing in the water, a signal to Americans that it was safe to swim in the Gulf. Malia’s missing from the photo because she was away at summer camp. Michelle is missing because, as she had explained to me shortly after I was elected, “one of my main goals as First Lady is to never be photographed in a bathing suit.”

  In many ways, we had dodged the worst-case scenario, and in the months that followed even critics like James Carville would acknowledge that our response had been more effective than we’d been given credit for. The Gulf’s shorelines and beaches suffered less visible damage than expected, and just a year after the accident, the region would enjoy its biggest tourism season ever. We formed a Gulf coastline restoration project, funded by additional penalties levied against BP, allowing federal, state, and local authorities to start reversing some of the environmental degradation that had been taking place long before the explosion. With some nudging from federal courts, BP ultimately paid settlements in excess of what was in the $20 billion response fund. And although the preliminary report of the oil spill commission I had set up would rightly criticize MMS oversight of BP’s activities at the Macondo field, as well as our failure to accurately assess the enormity of the leaks immediately after the explosion, by the fall, both the press and the public had largely moved on.

  Still, I continued to be haunted by the images of those plumes of oil rushing out of a cracked earth and into the sea’s ghostly depths. Experts inside the administration told me that it would take years to understand the true extent of the environmental damage resulting from the Deepwater spill. The best estimates concluded that the Macondo well had released at least four million barrels of oil into open waters, with at least two-thirds of that amount having been captured, burned off, or otherwise dispersed. Where the rest of the oil ended up, what gruesome toll it took on wildlife, how much oil would eventually settle back onto the ocean floor, and what long-term effect that might have on the entire Gulf ecosystem—it would be years before we’d have the full picture.

  What wasn’t a mystery was the spill’s political impact. With the crisis behind us and the midterm elections now on the horizon, we felt ready to project a cautious optimism to the public—to argue that the country was finally turning a corner and to highlight all the work my administration had done in the previous sixteen months to make a concrete difference in people’s lives. But the only impression registering with voters was of yet one more calamity the government seemed powerless to solve. I asked Axe to give me his best assessment of the chances that Democrats would retain control of the House of Representatives. He looked at me like I was joking.

&nbs
p; “We’re screwed,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  FROM THE DAY I took office, we’d known that the midterms were going to be tough. Historically, the party controlling the White House almost always lost congressional seats after its first two years in power, as at least some voters found reason for disappointment. Voter turnout also dropped substantially in the midterm elections, and—thanks in part to America’s long history of voter discrimination, as well as many states’ continued use of complicated procedures that made casting a ballot more difficult than it needed to be—the falloff was most pronounced among younger, lower-income, and minority voters, demographic groups that tended to vote Democratic.

  All this would have made the midterms challenging for us, even in a time of relative peace and prosperity. Which, of course, we weren’t in. Although companies had started hiring again, the unemployment rate remained stuck around 9.5 percent through June and July, mainly because cash-strapped state and local governments were still shedding employees. At least once a week, I’d huddle with my economic team in the Roosevelt Room, trying to come up with some variation on additional stimulus plans that we might shame at least a few Senate Republicans into supporting. But beyond a grudging extension of emergency unemployment insurance benefits before Congress adjourned for the August recess, McConnell generally managed to keep his caucus in line.

  “I hate to say it,” a Republican senator told me when he came by the White House for another matter, “but the worse people feel right now, the better it is for us.”

  The economy wasn’t the only headwind we faced. Public opinion polls typically gave Republicans an edge over Democrats when it came to national security, and from the day I’d taken office, the GOP had looked to press that advantage, seizing every opportunity to paint my administration as weak on defense and soft on terrorism. For the most part, the attacks had failed: As disenchanted as voters were with my economic stewardship, they’d continued to give me solid marks on keeping them safe. Those numbers had held steady after the attack at Fort Hood and the thwarted Christmas Day bombing; they even remained largely unchanged when, in May 2010, a man named Faisal Shahzad—a naturalized American citizen raised in Pakistan and trained by the Pakistani Taliban—tried unsuccessfully to detonate a car bomb in the middle of Times Square.

  Still, the fact that 180,000 U.S. troops remained deployed in wars overseas cast a pall over the midterms. And while we were entering the final phase of withdrawal from Iraq, with the last combat brigades due home in August, the summer fighting season in Afghanistan was likely to once again bring about a distressing rise in U.S. casualties. I’d been impressed with Stan McChrystal’s leadership of coalition forces there: The additional troops I’d authorized had helped regain territory from the Taliban; the training of the Afghan army had ramped up; McChrystal had even convinced President Karzai to venture out beyond his palace and start engaging the population he claimed to represent.

  And yet each time I met with wounded soldiers at Walter Reed and Bethesda, I was reminded of the awful costs of such incremental progress. Whereas my earlier visits had taken roughly an hour, I was more often spending at least twice that time, as the hospital appeared to be filled almost to capacity. On one visit, I entered a room to find the bedridden victim of an IED blast being tended to by his mother. Thick stitches ran along the side of the young man’s partially shaved head; his right eye appeared blinded and his body partly paralyzed, with one badly injured arm encased in a soft cast. According to the doctor who briefed me before I went in, the patient had spent three months in a coma before regaining consciousness. He’d suffered permanent brain damage and had just undergone surgery to rebuild his skull.

  “Cory, the president’s here to see you,” the soldier’s mother said encouragingly. The young man couldn’t speak but registered a faint smile and nod.

  “It’s great to meet you, Cory,” I said, gently shaking his free hand.

  “Actually, you two have met before,” the mother said. “See?” She pointed to a photograph that had been taped to the wall, and I stepped closer to examine a picture of me with a group of smiling Army Rangers. It dawned on me then that the wounded soldier lying in the bed was Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg, the spirited young paratrooper I’d spoken with less than a year earlier, during the commemoration of the Allied landing at Normandy. The one who’d told me he was on his way to Afghanistan for his tenth deployment.

  “Of course…Cory,” I said, glancing over at the mother. Her eyes forgave me for not having recognized her son. “How are you feeling, man?”

  “Show him how you’re feeling, Cory,” the mother said.

  Slowly and with great effort, he raised his arm and offered me a thumbs-up. Taking pictures of the two of us, Pete looked visibly shaken.

  Maybe what had happened to Cory and so many like him didn’t sit at the forefront of voters’ minds the same way it did mine. Since the shift to an all-volunteer military in the 1970s, fewer Americans had family members, friends, or neighbors who served in combat. But at the very least, the mounting casualties left a weary nation as uncertain as ever about the direction of what increasingly seemed like an endless war. That uncertainty was only compounded in June when a lengthy Rolling Stone profile of Stan McChrystal hit the newsstands.

  The article, titled “The Runaway General,” was largely critical of the U.S. war effort, suggesting that I’d been rolled by the Pentagon into doubling down on a hopeless cause. But that wasn’t new. Instead, what grabbed Washington’s attention was the access McChrystal had granted to the reporter and the slew of caustic remarks the general and his team had leveled at allies, elected officials, and members of the administration. In one scene, the reporter describes McChrystal and an aide joking about possible responses to questions about Vice President Biden. (“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal is quoted as saying. “Who’s that?” To which the aide chimes in, “Did you say: Bite Me?”) In another, McChrystal complains about having to have dinner with a French minister in Paris (“I’d rather have my ass kicked”) and groans over an email from Hillary’s special advisor, longtime diplomat Richard Holbrooke (“I don’t even want to open it”). And while I’m largely spared the worst of the mockery, a member of McChrystal’s team notes his boss’s disappointment in our meeting right before I appointed him coalition commander, suggesting that I should have given the general more personal attention.

  Beyond the hard feelings the article was bound to generate—reopening divisions within the Afghan team that I’d hoped were behind us—it made McChrystal and his crew sound like a bunch of cocky frat boys. I could only imagine how Cory Remsburg’s parents would feel if they read the article.

  “I don’t know what the hell he was thinking,” Gates said to me, making an effort at damage control.

  “He wasn’t,” I said curtly. “He got played.”

  My team asked me how I wanted to handle it. I told them I hadn’t decided but that while I made up my mind, I wanted McChrystal on the next flight back to Washington. At first, I was inclined to let the general off with a stern reprimand—and not just because Bob Gates insisted that he remained the best man to lead the war effort. I knew that if anyone ever recorded some of the private conversations that took place between me and my senior staff, we might sound pretty obnoxious ourselves. And although McChrystal and his inner circle had shown atrocious judgment in speaking like that in front of any reporter, whether out of carelessness or vanity, every one of us in the White House had said something on tape that we shouldn’t have at one time or another. If I wouldn’t fire Hillary, Rahm, Valerie, or Ben for telling tales out of school, why should I treat McChrystal any differently?

  Over the course of twenty-four hours, I decided that this was different. As every military commander liked to remind me, America’s armed forces depended entirely on rigid discipline, clear codes of conduct, unit cohesion, and
strict chains of command. Because the stakes were always higher. Because any failure to act as part of a team, any individual mistakes, didn’t just result in embarrassment or lost profits. People could die. Any corporal or captain who publicly disparaged a bunch of superior officers in such vivid terms would pay a grave price. I saw no way to apply a different set of rules to a four-star general, no matter how gifted, courageous, or decorated he was.

  That need for accountability and discipline extended to matters of civilian control over the military—a point I’d emphasized in the Oval Office with Gates and Mullen, apparently to insufficient effect. I actually admired McChrystal’s rebel spirit, his apparent disdain for pretense and authority that, in his view, hadn’t been earned. It no doubt had made him a better leader—and accounted for the fierce loyalty he elicited from the troops under his command. But in that Rolling Stone article, I’d heard in him and his aides the same air of impunity that seemed to have taken hold among some in the military’s top ranks during the Bush years: a sense that once war began, those who fought it shouldn’t be questioned, that politicians should just give them what they ask for and get out of the way. It was a seductive view, especially coming from a man of McChrystal’s caliber. It also threatened to erode a bedrock principle of our representative democracy, and I was determined to put an end to it.