Obama- An Oral History
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BRANDON HURLBUT
There’s no orientation manual. On day one we had a swearing-in ceremony for seven cabinet members that were confirmed during the transition. We didn’t even know where the bathrooms were. We didn’t even have computers set up. We were just making this up as we went along.
DAN SHAPIRO
I went straight to work in the West Wing. I had to borrow somebody’s computer to write the briefing memos and call sheets for those four calls. So I did that throughout the day. Obviously, at night were the inaugural balls, and we were told to be at the Oval Office at eight thirty the next morning for these calls.
HERBIE ZISKEND
The vice president and the president had what’s called military aide-de-camps, a different person from every branch of the military, and those were the people who carried the nuclear football. You always saw the president near a military person who’s carrying a briefcase. So I was connected with the people who were Cheney’s military aide-de-camps. They’re not political appointments. They serve specific terms, and so all the people who were Cheney’s aide-de-camps became Biden’s aide-de-camps as soon as Obama took office. And I was communicating with them before he took office earlier in the day. Think about it from their perspectives: they went to the Mall with Cheney, Obama took the oath, and then they left with Biden . . . We were at the inaugural balls that night.
ALLYSON SCHWARTZ
I went to one of the inaugural balls. Inaugural balls were what they were. That was not extraordinary. What had been extraordinary [were] the moment and the feeling.
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN
That night I celebrated at a Maryland party. It was obviously a moment of high spirits, and I don’t mean alcohol only. It was only later, of course, that we read that, while we were celebrating this great victory, Republicans were plotting to bring down our next president.
TED KAUFMAN
The evening of January 20, 2009, at the Caucus Room—the restaurant in Washington—they all got together: Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, Pete Sessions, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn. And they’re having dinner together, okay? They basically decided, led by Gingrich, who kind of did this in 1995, that the only option they had—opposite extinction with the Democrats having the presidency, a majority in the Senate, and a majority in the House—was to agree, as a group, not to do anything. Anything Obama came up with, they were gonna say no to it.
PETE HOEKSTRA
R-Michigan, Second District, US House of Representatives (1993–2011)
I think people have blown this meeting into more than it was, talking about how we were going to obstruct Obama.17 At least the parts of the dinner that I was at, that’s not how I left that meeting. It was kind of like, Hey, this is a brainstorming meeting where we’re talking about, now that we’ve got a new president, what do we need to do? How do we move forward?
MARY BONO
R-California, Forty-Fourth District, US House of Representatives (1997–2003)
R-California, Forty-Fifth District, US House of Representatives (2003–2013)
Both parties are the Party of No against whoever’s in power. So, long ago, far, far away, when control of the House was so lopsided because the Democrats had such high numbers of seats, Tip O’Neill, the legend went on, decided both parties should work together because there really was no direct political threat. There used to be an unwritten rule that you would not campaign against anybody in your own state—you needed to work together on behalf of your constituents. After a certain point, maybe 104th Congress, everything was a battle.18 There was no gentleman’s agreement that you didn’t campaign against your neighbor. You actually expected to. I mean, it was a real battle.
TED KAUFMAN
In 1995, Gingrich came up with this idea of blaming everything on the Democrats. At the same time, he was throwing sand in the gears to keep everything from working. Well, nobody’s going to blame Gingrich and the Republicans when the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency. So he pitched the same thing to the [Republican] congressional leaders in 2009, and essentially said, Look, if we do this, we’ll win the House, we’ll win the Senate, and then in 2012 we’ll win the presidency.
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN
Right off the bat, you had incredible resistance from Republicans, even on something like the recovery bill.
BARNEY FRANK
I was always for the stimulus. In fact, I continued to call it “stimulus.” As you know, they convened my least favorite group, these focus groups, and to be in a focus group you have to be an airhead by definition. You can’t be in a focus group if you know anything or have any opinions. So, as a result of the focus groups, they decided they couldn’t call it “stimulus.” They had to call it “recovery.” I’ve since said that I was puzzled by that, because most of the people I know would rather be stimulated than recovered.
DAN SHAPIRO
I got [to the White House] at 8:20 [a.m.] and walked right in. The president was there—he was businesslike. Rahm Emanuel walked out, having briefed him on the schedule of his day. He looked like he was completely at home, completely just where he had always been sitting and doing his business. We went through the calls. The first was to President Mubarak, thanking him for Egypt’s role in arranging the cease-fire. Second call to Prime Minister Olmert, expressing our support for Israel’s right to self-defense and concern for its losses in the conflict. Third, the call to President Abbas, thanking him for the Palestinian security forces helping keep the West Bank quiet during the conflict, and then the president had to leave. On the way to the National Cathedral for prayer service for his first full day, he made his call to King Abdullah [II] of Jordan—just to check in and express support. Later in the day, Robert Gibbs put out a summary of the four calls. It did not specify the order.
NICK SHAPIRO
Assistant Press Secretary, White House (2009–2011)
Senior Advisor to the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, White House (2011–2013)
Deputy Chief of Staff, Central Intelligence Agency (2013–2015)
So Gibbs was the press secretary. Bill Burton and Josh Earnest were the two deputies. Jen Psaki was a deputy as well.
DAN SHAPIRO
[The call summary] listed them in alphabetical order by country. So Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Palestinian Authority—the last two were reversed from the actual sequence—and at some point later in that day the Palestinian Authority spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said the president told Abbas that this was his very first phone call on his very first day. He sort of put that out to the world’s media, which seemed to be a play for relevance . . . I don’t know if they actually thought that was true [or] if they were spinning something they knew was not true, but it got picked up by people all too ready to argue that Obama was trying to show distance from Israel.
JACKIE NORRIS
Going into the White House might have been different for me because I had worked in a White House before, when I worked for Al Gore. Also, I was on the First Lady’s side, on the East Wing side. The stakes were a little lower than, you know, war.
DAN SHAPIRO
At some point I asked my colleagues, “News people are incorrectly describing the call. Should we correct it?” And, you know, nobody ever made a hard decision, “No,” for any specific strong reason—“We need to not correct it.” Rather, it seemed kind of petty. Everybody in those early days was focused on much more important things.
BRANDON HURLBUT
I remember Rod O’Connor, who was the chief of staff at [the Department of Energy], called me and said, “Hey, we had some beryllium leak at one of our labs. Who needs to know? What’s the process here?” And I remember being like, “What’s beryllium?” He’s like, “I don’t know!” We’re, like, Googling beryllium. Those were the kinds of questions you would get.
MARGARET RICHARDSON
Counselor to the Attorney General, US Departmen
t of Justice (2009–2011)
Deputy Chief of Staff to the Attorney General, US Department of Justice (2011–2012)
Chief of Staff to the Attorney General, US Department of Justice (2012–2015)
This was true at the beginning of every administration. There’re like thirteen or so political appointees who start, and then there are people at the White House who are trying to figure out who you call and when you call and who clears things. I had a friend at the Treasury Department who forwarded me an email two or three days in that said, like, Oh, let’s reach out to Margaret Richardson to clear this regulation through the Justice Department. I was like, “I don’t know what this is, but I am not the right person to clear it.” Those kinds of things, that’s just getting your sea legs in government.
MATTHEW MILLER
Director, Office of Public Affairs, US Department of Justice (2009–2011)
A lot of the things we thought on January 20 just turned out to not be totally true. What we didn’t understand was that the Republican Party had bet the entire previous presidency on their handling of national-security issues. After 9/11 they had reoriented the party around, more than anything else, fighting terrorism. Flowing from that was Gitmo, was torture, more renditions—all sorts of issues, each [of] which had fifty tails to it. So if you had renditions, then you also had civil litigation over it. You had to use the state-secrets privilege to block some of that, which has its own thorny history.19 Same with Gitmo—you had all these habeas cases where people went before courts. You had to decide, if you had someone who you thought was dangerous and couldn’t let go, were you going to rely on evidence that might have been obtained through torture to keep them locked up? There were all these thorny questions.
DAVID OGDEN
Deputy Attorney General, US Department of Justice (2009–2010)
One piece of closing Gitmo was [figuring out] what you would replace it with. There was massive resistance to the idea of doing real trials for these folks, and there was the whole controversy over whether there would be military tribunals, which ones would we try [at Gitmo] and which ones would we try in federal court. There was a whole interagency process set up under the attorney general’s supervision to figure that out.20
SHOMIK DUTTA
Gitmo was such an enormously complicated political decision. There was a class of prisoners you could definitely release and just watch. There was a class of prisoners that you could bring to the US, and there was a class of prisoners who were too dangerous to be [brought] to the US.
MATTHEW MILLER
People didn’t know, at the gut level, that the Republican Party would go to war over every inch that we would move on those issues.
DAVID OGDEN
It was strange, of course, because McCain had supported closing Gitmo.21 There was a consensus that Gitmo was a terrible black eye for the United States. Whatever the realities on the ground were, the perception of Gitmo was [that it was] a bad thing, but it immediately changed overnight and became a point of enormous contention. The idea of moving the real bad guys to high-security federal prisons in the United States, there was panic on Capitol Hill about that.
BEN LABOLT
The president wanted to shut it down. John McCain wanted to shut it down. Bush said, toward the end of his presidency, that he wanted to shut it down. The intelligence community had heard a kind of chatter out there about Gitmo—[al-Qaeda] using it as a propaganda tool against the United States.
DR. HAROLD KOH
Legal Advisor, US Department of State (2009–2013)
Every other established democracy, when they suffered an attack, they tried them in the very place that the attack occurred. The point to be made was that, you know, You haven’t hurt us. The French, when they had an attack in Paris, they tried the terrorists in Paris. We were doing the opposite. We were effectively saying they’re so powerful and frightening, we had to keep them locked away somewhere. And that’s just playing to this paranoia.
MICHAEL FROMAN
Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, National Security Council and National Economic Council, White House (2009–2013)
US Trade Representative, White House (2013–2017)
The Bush administration had gotten so bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and had been so focused on those countries that [it] had ignored important developments elsewhere in the world. Early in the [Obama] administration, the president was focused on the importance of rebalancing [the focus] towards Asia. It was to have multiple dimensions, certainly a security dimension. There’re some important treaty allies—Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Thailand, Philippines—and it had a political dimension with the president, for example, being the first US leader to engage with the ten ASEAN countries as a unit.22
JEFFREY BLEICH
Special Counsel to the President, White House (2009)
Ambassador to Australia, US Department of State (2009–2013)
The rebalance to Asia was an obvious need, and was part of the discussion in the White House and in the State Department from the beginning. The State Department favored the term “pivot” and the White House favored the term “rebalance,” but in both cases, the concept was to focus assets in the Indo-Pacific, where we were facing strategic competition and where our future economic growth would be centered.
MARK LIPPERT
This was something that Obama walked in with in his head, on day one. There’s a lot of credit to be spread around here, but I really did feel that this was the president himself, with his Asia background, realizing what the basic strategic play was. As important as the Middle East was, Asia was far more important in terms of economic viability and its impact on the next century. It’s hard to measure things like that, but look at the first couple of months in the Oval Office. The prime minister of Japan was the first head of state of a government to visit.23 He had the prime minister of Australia in the first six months.24 Then couple that with the first state dinner with the prime minister of India.25 You could quickly see, just in schedule alone, how much emphasis there was on this, even from the earliest times.
JEFFREY BLEICH
The rebalance to Asia was crucial, and we recognized early that Australia would be critical to that for a variety of reasons—its location, its positive relations across a number of nations, its weight in Southeast Asia, and various other factors. So Australia was going to be a very important country for us. It was one that I knew well, and where I expected the ambassador role would matter.
MARK LIPPERT
There was talk that the US and China should just get together, form a G2 and divide up how which countries’ core interests would be respected in which parts of the world.26 The president rejected that approach and ultimately went with an “alliance first” strategy. Remember, too, decisions on Asia confronted him in the midst of the financial crisis.
ADAM HITCHCOCK
At that point, even if you weren’t working in [the Office of] Legislative Affairs, you found a lot of your time was spent supporting efforts focused on Capitol Hill.
JIM DOUGLAS
Governor of Vermont (R) (2003–2011)
Chair, National Governors Association (2009–2010)
I was headed to DC to speak at a health-care policy conference, and we didn’t have a lot of flights from Burlington to DC. So I said to my team, “Make a day of it. Why don’t we see if we can set up a meeting with the new Intergovernmental Affairs folks in the White House to get acquainted?” Well, the Sunday night before we were going, my assistant got a call. “Our meeting tomorrow has been upgraded. You’re meeting with the president!” I said, “Oh, okay. I hope our flight’s on time.”
TED CHIODO
The actual physical shell of the place—outside of the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the Roosevelt Room—was sort of just like a beige old government building, but the Oval Office was different. That’s the one place that was like, Oh, it’s bigger than it is on TV.
JIM DOUGLAS<
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We chatted about his new digs and stuff, and then we got ready for a brief press spray, as they called it, and we sat there, all the press came in, did their thing, and then cleared out. Well, I hadn’t noticed that the two couches had been moved back to accommodate the media. So after they left, the president went over to one end of one of the couches, and I instinctively went to the other end to help him move it back into place.
President Obama and Governor Jim Douglas in the Oval Office, February 2, 2009. Pete Souza, White House
PETE SOUZA
Chief Official White House Photographer (2009–2017)
His hands were actually not touching the couch. The president was actually moving it himself.
JIM DOUGLAS
He hadn’t been there long, twelve days or so, but the context was the Recovery Act. There was a lot of Republican pushback that this was too big. It was wasteful spending. It was more debt, but among the governors, frankly, there was a lot more bipartisan support. We’re the ones who’re facing drastic shortfalls in our state budgets and trying to figure out how to dig ourselves out of a hole, fiscally.
JASON FURMAN
The pressure we were getting from the president was to do something bold for the economy, but also something visionary and transformative that would last. If we had a problem, it’s almost as if we did too much. It was like twenty different things, any one of which would have been decided a big deal, but they all happened at the same time, and as a result, I think it became harder [for the public] to understand any of them. But the goal wasn’t to have people understand. The goal was to have it actually happen.
CAROL BROWNER
Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency (1993–2001)
Director, Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, White House (2009–2011)
It became clear that one of the important things to do in the Recovery Act was invest in clean energy. This was a nascent industry in many instances. It was struggling. It couldn’t go to Wall Street and get the kind of investment resources that more established sectors could get. So we started to build out the program with people in the industry—the environmental community, the academic community, the scientific community, and then ultimately Congress.