by Brian Abrams
JONATHAN FINER
Not having engaged a massive nation-building effort, we probably erred too far on the other side and did not do enough to help Libya get back on its feet after taking the very justifiable step of protecting those civilians in Benghazi, which ultimately led to Gaddafi’s ouster.
ROB ANDREWS
My criticism was less about the administration and its decision-making than the box we put ourselves in. The constitutional power for the Congress to declare war had been diluted to almost meaningless status.
BARBARA LEE
I opposed the first authorization to use force in 2001.98 I knew it was going to set the stage for perpetual war.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
I thought it was a huge mistake, because what were the contingencies? Here was a tyrant who gave up any nuclear ambitions and sat down and negotiated with the West, and I didn’t know what we were going to replace him with.
BILL DALEY
It was ironic, you know. The people who ended up defending Gaddafi were the same people who loved it when Reagan tried to kill him and a couple of his kids after the Pan Am flight thing.99 Some people said, Oh we shouldn’t have gone after him because—whatever reason. The reality was, he was nuts. That whole place was unraveling, and by the time we were faced with a decision of doing military action, Gaddafi’s days were limited. The place was torn apart. It was divided, and the president ended up reacting to Do you allow a slaughter in Benghazi of two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand—sort of an Assad situation? Because Gaddafi was going to do that.
PETE HOEKSTRA
The French and the Brits hated Gaddafi, and I understood that. That’s horrific, to find a plane with body parts all over your countryside. But Obama bought into the European NATO strategy to overthrow Gaddafi, from my perspective, with little evidence.
ROB ANDREWS
My concern about Libya and Syria was less about the specific policy choices that President Obama made, but its role in the continuing undermining of the separation-of-powers argument. And not to be “I told you so,” but many of us would say, Well, there may well come a day when someone will occupy the Oval Office in whom we don’t have a lot of confidence. A permanent state of war against an adjective—I mean, it’s strange.
DR. HAROLD KOH
The Obama administration worked hard to say there was no “war on terror.” We fought against particular terrorist networks that attacked the United States and had a continuing desire to do that. So al-Qaeda attacked the United States and killed three thousand people. That’s different from attacking anyone anywhere who terrorizes someone. I didn’t think I ever cleared a single document, of the thousands of documents I cleared, that used the term “war on terror.” That’s not a view. You couldn’t battle “terror,” but you could battle people who attacked us—but then, when you did that, you’d have to establish that those people were connected to the people that actually attacked us. They’re not just “other people who hate America,” because if you end up fighting against everyone who hated America, you’d be fighting for the rest of your life.
PETE HOEKSTRA
The problem was, in Libya and Egypt, Obama fundamentally changed our approach to the Muslim world by deciding that he would engage the radical jihadists of the Muslim Brotherhood. I’m talking about a whole series of speeches and actions that he took. The [2009] speech in Cairo was a part of it, but what he talked about with Mubarak and political change in Egypt. Then ultimately the political change took place in Libya . . . Gaddafi was an awful guy, but he had turned over his nuclear-weapons program. He had paid reparations to the families of Pan Am 103, and he was also cooperating with us in fighting radical jihadism. And the thank-you that Gaddafi got for doing that: five years later the Americans basically put out a death warrant.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
Republican colleagues of mine have said to me that they didn’t understand how someone as stupid and dumb as Obama could ever be elected president. They actually believe he’s stupid, and they actually saw themselves as smart in relation to him. Now, they wouldn’t say he’s stupid because he’s black. They would not say that to me, but here’s what I understood: “He’s black and he’s stupid.” That was, for me, part of the difficulty in always challenging him, because I saw those forces at work, and I didn’t want to contribute to those forces.
BEN LABOLT
That’s what the birth-certificate stuff was about, too.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
It was all about lies and delegitimizing him. I had colleagues talk to me in the gym. We’d be talking, shaving, hanging out, and they’d be like, “Damn, Gutiérrez, that guy’s so dumb. How do you do it?” They would never grant him who he was, whereas I believed most people in America, when they heard Obama speak? They heard a cultured, educated, worldly, sophisticated, complex man. The attempt to delegitimize him came with the birth certificate and everything he did and everything he said. Whether he was born in America or he was a Muslim or he wasn’t a man of Christian faith, and did he really go to Harvard? And did he really get those grades?
CODY KEENAN
I know this sounds strange, but we didn’t really think about it that often. We always knew it was there. How do I explain this? We never really acknowledged the birtherism as serious,100 even when the polls would show that 60 percent of the Republican Party would believe it. Well, that’s their problem.
BARBARA LEE
They’re totally complicit. He kept on, he fought hard, and he didn’t let that deter him.
MICHAEL STRAUTMANIS
This navigation of race was something that, as an African American, I’d done all my life. And I guess I’d say that the trying to decide when to respond to the disgusting and insulting push that was the birth-certificate issue? Navigating that was something that I was used to. And so it was disheartening, in one respect, to see him have to deal with that, but in another sense, it was, you know, par for the course in a very sad way. And so just finding a way to deal with that, being able to swallow it and move on and to be able to push the agenda and really make an impact on the things that were really important, that’s something African Americans had been doing in this country for a long time.
CODY KEENAN
We never sat around thinking about what we would write into a speech, like Does this make him sound black? Does this make him sound Kenyan? It wasn’t something that crossed our minds. When it would bubble up, it would just make us angry. But it was never anything we talked about. Now, obviously, there were times where it became part of a speech, whether it’s something as innocuous and positive as speaking at an HBCU commencement or when you get into community-policing stuff. Like, there you knew it’s going to be closely viewed through a prism of race.
MICHAEL STRAUTMANIS
The thing that I remember most was not actually the day that he revealed his birth certificate. I just remember the constant drumbeat about it moving in the months leading up to that. I really had to bury my anger. I always felt like I had eyes on me, whether it was young staffers or interns who knew my relationship with the president. In some ways I was the closest thing they would ever get to him. Whether I had a message to deliver and focus on about a particular issue internally or externally, that anger I had to just bury deep to do my job.
ROB O’DONNELL
Press Assistant, Office of Public Affairs, US Department of Justice (2011)
Director of Broadcast Media, White House (2015–2017)
Birtherism was Donald Trump’s calling card. He got famous in the Republican Party because of his attacks on President Obama, and the president had always been able to take that in stride.
DAVID PLOUFFE
There was strategy. Lifting up Trump as the identity of the Republican Party was super helpful to us. The president went out in the briefing room to present his long-form birth certificate,101 [but] really to continue the dance with Trump. Our view was lifting Trump up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, you kn
ow, as kind of the example of the Obama opposition. There was a strategy behind the material and the amount of time we spent on Trump. Let’s really lean into Trump here. That’ll be good for us.
CODY KEENAN
No, I didn’t think it was deliberate to link him with Republicans. The way that came down was we would get a list of everyone who would be at the dinner, whether it’s celebrities or reporters or whatnot, and we’d go through that list to see who was worth making fun of. And when we got the list, as soon as we saw Donald Trump we were like, Oh my God. This is perfect. But no, there was no real political strategy to it. We just decided to tee off on him for a little while, because, you know, it had been insulting on so many levels, what he was doing. Not just to our president but to our democracy and the people who were following this. The president of the United States having to take time out of his day to go out and show people proof that he was born in America was insane.
BILL DALEY
He was the brunt of the jokes in ’11. Some people thought it was so over the top, the president’s attack on him, and hilarious, that that’s what motivated Trump to double down. It was too late for him to run in ’12, but no question he was motivated after that to continue to be engaged on the birther thing and much more aggressively anti-Obama and probably fed into his ’16 run.
JON FAVREAU
I don’t know what goes on in that addled mind of Donald Trump’s. I heard the same thing. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times said, she had sources that said that that’s what prodded him toward it for sure, but I don’t know. When you’re thinking about it anyway, there probably would have been some triggering event if not the dinner.
DAVID PLOUFFE
Well, who knows? There may be something to that. Trump had obviously played around with running for president previously, as he did in ’12, but Trump had a deep motivation to prove himself, and I was sure he was mortified.
JON FAVREAU
I was sitting at the table right behind him, and he did not look happy. That’s for sure. I could see the back of his head, mostly, but a couple times he turned and I could see he was not very pleased, which was funny.
DAVID PLOUFFE
I was in the room. The president was funny and good-natured and calm, and, as close as an advisor as I was to him, he was particularly careful to keep me out of any of the bin Laden stuff. Because having your chief political advisor being aware of that was just not going to be a smart move. And so I didn’t know that night, at the Correspondents’ Dinner, that the raid was happening.
LEON PANETTA
It was August of the year before that we’d been able to find the compound and began to conduct surveillance. We did it for all the way through until December-January, and we were piecing together bits of intelligence. We didn’t have 100 percent information that bin Laden was there, but the president felt that, because this had gone on as long as it had, that he was becoming nervous that information might leak out and we might lose that opportunity. So that’s when we took the next step, which was to develop the operations to go after bin Laden.
BILL DALEY
The first day I got there, Panetta was in the PDB.102 And I thought, This is nice of Leon, to come on my first day. And he went through the possibility of bin Laden in this compound in Abbottabad. And they wanted to take it to the next level of putting on more resources, but I think I was the only non–national security White House person involved in every meeting.
LEON PANETTA
I think that’s right. We were explaining to the president and to the National Security Council the first intelligence reports that indicated that we had located this compound in Abbottabad, what the nature of it was, and why it raised a very strong indication that it could be a hiding place. So that was a real breakthrough for the president, for the CIA, and for our whole effort to go after bin Laden.
FERIAL GOVASHIRI
Senior Advisor to the Deputy National Security Advisor, White House (2009–2014)
Personal Aide to the President of the United States, White House (2014–2017)
Do you know the setup of the National Security Council? I’ll explain it from a physical perspective. You’d have all these agencies—the Department of Agriculture, State, CIA, whatever—and the heads of all these agencies make up an NSC meeting. One of the heads of these meetings was the national security advisor, who’s based in the West Wing. Another person on the scene was the director of [the National] Counterterrorism [Center], and they’d meet in the Situation Room. Not all of [the cabinet members] were part of National Security Council meetings. If the president were hosting a meeting, that means he’d chair. But then, if the national security advisor was heading the meeting, it’d be called a “principals meeting.”
BILL DALEY
We were having a lot of meetings with a lot of senior people. It got to a point where it was pretty hard. When the president went into the Situation Room, it’s obvious he’s in there. There was always a fear that at some point you’d have a call coming. “Oh, what’s going on? He’s there all the time” or “We hear that . . .” It was amazing that the government was able to keep quiet.
NICK SHAPIRO
I was at the intersection of press politics and policy for six years, and nothing was kept that secretive. Even the really secretive stuff, a lot more people knew about. It’s amazing how many people outside of the White House did know about the stuff. It was kept in the White House so small, a handful or maybe two handfuls of people. Yet, at the same time, there were a lot of the people at the CIA, rightfully, because they were the ones looking for him. Everyone talked about how closely guarded the secret was, and it surely was, but the CIA had a good amount of folks who knew about it. They kept quiet, and that’s a testament to the CIA.
LEON PANETTA
I briefed [Admiral] Bill McRaven of Special Operations on what we had found, and, to his credit, he came up with several approaches to deal with the compound. We discussed each of those, went over them with the White House and the NSC, and agreed, ultimately, to a commando raid. That became the principal operations discussion, as to how that would be conducted and how we would accomplish that.
BILL DALEY
McRaven came into the Situation Room with a total mock-up of the compound, and you had the most senior people meeting fairly regularly over those last couple weeks. As I said, to the point where we were getting a little nervous that the president was down in the Situation Room so much that that, in and of itself, was gonna raise some tremendous number of eyebrows.
LEON PANETTA
Even when we presented that final recommendation to the NSC, the president went around the room and people worried that it was very risky and did not think that it was something we should do. I told the president that, based on my own history in the Congress when they had a tough decision, I always pretended I was asking an ordinary citizen in my district, If you knew what I knew, what would you do? And I said, “If an ordinary citizen knew that we had the best evidence and location of bin Laden since Tora Bora,103 I think that citizen would say that we have to conduct this operation.”
CAROLYN MALONEY
Joe Biden told me that in the Situation Room, they talked about all the evidence that they had on the expected home of Osama bin Laden. They had circumstantial evidence, not concrete evidence that he was in that house. They didn’t know for sure, and the president went around the table and asked people if they would go in. Panetta said yes, but every other person at that table said no. Joe Biden told me that he said no, that we didn’t have enough evidence. And we knew what happened with Jimmy Carter when he went in to free hostages and it didn’t work out. It cost Jimmy Carter his reelection. Then the president said, “Well, let me think about it.”
LEON PANETTA
He didn’t make a decision, but the next morning he did. And we proceeded to implement the operation.
DAVID PLOUFFE
[On May 1] I got a call around noon from either Tom Donilon or Denis McDon
ough to come into the building. And the president then came into my office and said, “Hey, I couldn’t tell you before, but here’s what’s going down.”
PETE SOUZA
It was May 2 in Pakistan for the time change, but for us on the East Coast it was still May 1. It’s certainly probably my most “famous” photo, but it’s not my “favorite” photo of my career. There’s not much action going on, but people were drawn to that photo because they can imagine what it must have been like—the tension, the anxiety, that must have been going on with everybody in that room.
Seated, from left: Vice President Biden; President Obama; Lt. General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley; National Security Advisor to the Vice President Tony Blinken; Director for Counterterrorism Audrey Tomason; Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Pete Souza, White House
PETE SOUZA
I mean, look, the decision had already been made. Right? It’s not like anybody in that room could do anything about what was happening.
LEON PANETTA
It’s a lot of emotions. But when you’re close to it, when you’re working with people and developing the planning on it, you had a certain comfort about the competence of the people that you’re working with. [It] didn’t give you the sense that you’re simply rolling dice and you didn’t know what may or may not happen. You had a higher confidence level that these were people that knew what the hell they’re doing. You had trust in their ability to get the job done. I felt that way. Not to say I didn’t say a hell of a lot of Hail Marys, but at the same time, I also felt that this was a job that was being done by the best people on earth to do it. I just, deep down, felt that this was going to work.
