by Brian Abrams
JONATHAN FINER
We knew we were close, because in Lausanne we had reached an understanding on most of the big outstanding issues and knew that it was a matter of whether we could get all of the details nailed down—and that that wasn’t guaranteed, but that we were closer to getting a nuclear deal than certainly we had ever been before and that many people thought was possible. The challenge was that some things had happened that threw a lot of uncertainty into the process.
RICHARD NEPHEW
There was literally one moment where I hesitated. It was in March of 2015, when a lot of really bad leaks had come out of the process. They basically exposed all of the ideas and put them to test in Tehran and Washington before we were ready to present them as a package that made sense integrated. That was the only time I even went below 50 percent likelihood confidence number, but, even then, I was still like 49 percent.
WENDY SHERMAN
You really couldn’t boil this down to one obstacle. There were many things along the way where one might have imagined we were at a dead end. I think there was unanimity among all of the P5+1 to try and get to the right outcome here, and the commitment to doing that was evident after [the] Ukraine [conflict] happened. We were sanctioning the Russians and, at the same time, they stayed focused in the room on ensuring Iran couldn’t obtain a nuclear weapon because that was also in their national-security interest. So there were all kinds of things. The Cotton letter was signed with forty-seven senators essentially saying, “Never.”170 Bibi Netanyahu’s speech in Congress,171 and, obviously, many times that the Iranians balked at what was necessary, but the president of the United States was clear that we had to cut off all the pathways to fissile material for a nuclear weapon.
RICHARD NEPHEW
The Iranians just flat out asked, “How can we make sure this remains in effect throughout this entire longevity?” You know, they were basically saying, We have to make a commitment to you that we’re going to abide by it, but we have a Supreme Leader and he’s going to be in place no matter what happens to politics. He may die. You know, he’s human. But they didn’t have the same imminence of every four years the risk of switching over. So they had been asking us from moment one, “How do we get an agreement that will survive your presidential transitions?” And “How do we get an agreement that will survive your congressional transitions?”
JEFF WEAVER
Campaign Manager, Bernie Sanders for President, 2016
President Obama was not going to be on the ballot in 2016. Hillary Clinton had announced172 and had basically cleared the field. It was really the beginning of the post-Obama era, right? Obama got the Democratic Party back on its historical trajectory as being a more inclusive party, which had been interrupted by the Reagan years and then the Clinton years and then the Bush years. A party more concerned about a working people was really a departure from the type of Democratic Party that had been built up by the Bill Clinton machine in the ’90s. And so Bernie Sanders’s candidacy was not a repudiation of Obama but, really, a continuation of the attempt to move the party back in the direction it had been moving since FDR—again, which had been interrupted by Reagan and then Bill Clinton’s presidency and the Bush years.
STUART STEVENS
I went to Middlebury College. I can remember Bernie Sanders running for mayor. I would ride my bicycle down Church Street in Burlington, and this guy’s out there yelling about rent control.
DAVID PLOUFFE
I thought Trump had started running more as a lark, more to help build the brand . . . In 2015, the night before he [announced], it’d be interesting to know what he was thinking.173 It probably was fair to assume I’ll show everybody that they’re wrong about me, but I don’t know. I think we’ll never know.
JEFF WEAVER
Bernie wanted to have a progressive candidate in the race. It appeared, by all accounts, Elizabeth Warren was not going to run, and Bernie Sanders had championed a core set of issues for his entire adult life. I thought he felt it was time for those issues to be brought on a national stage, on a presidential stage that would give them the attention that they needed and hopefully propel him into the White House so that those issues could be advanced.
TOM VILSACK
Change doesn’t happen overnight. Our recognition of change may happen overnight, but the change itself happens incrementally, and you have to manage it. If you manage it properly, you can sustain it. If you don’t manage it properly, then it’s not going to last.
JON CARSON
The president truly believed he was just one part, the biggest part, but one part of a larger movement. The best example of that was when the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land. The speech that the president gave in the Rose Garden talked about how this decision was the culmination of millions of Americans doing their parts over decades—every last member of the LGBT community who had the courage to come out to their own families, every ally who’d ever carried a sign, every city-council member that had passed a resolution barring discrimination back when most members of government weren’t doing any of that.174 Those humans that had worked over decades led to that.
BEN LABOLT
I’m not sure the court would have ruled the way that it did, had public opinion not so fully embraced marriage equality across demographics during Barack Obama’s presidency. I thought part of the reason public opinion shifted was the president and the vice president, and other leaders, came out and not only endorsed marriage equality, but worked over the course of years to advance gay rights, to say that they were human rights, and that they were in the same category and on the same trajectory of civil rights as we know them.
VANITA GUPTA
There were loud cheers from the Civil Rights Division in the hallways of Main Justice. We were really exuberant. It was a really important moment, and again, the trajectory of change, even within the department, it fell around the litigating position of the United States in the last prior couple of years that it had evolved. So to see that arc and have that outcome was historic. For the last prior couple of years, the administration had really been all-in on trying to advance and protect LGBT rights.
CODY KEENAN
As soon as he finished talking about marriage equality, we got on the helicopter to Charleston.175
HEATHER FOSTER
I just remember seeing Reverend Pinckney’s widow that day and how people in that community compared it to the death of Martin Luther King, and how her own personal grief touched me in a different way. Vice President Biden and his wife had also just gone through their own personal loss.
CODY KEENAN
[Obama] had eulogized Beau Biden two weeks before, and that might have still been in his head. “What a good man. Sometimes I think that’s the best thing to hope for when you’re eulogized, after all the words and recitations and resumes are read, to just say somebody was a good man. You don’t have to be of high station to be a good man.” All of that was ad-libbed.
HEATHER FOSTER
I was running around, but another staffer texted me. “You need to come out here and hear this speech.” I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just gotta make sure that everything’s good in the back when they’re done.” And she was like, “No, no, no. You gotta come hear this.”
CODY KEENAN
When I was writing it, I didn’t know he would sing. On the way to [Joint Base] Andrews, he mentioned on Marine One, “You know, if it feels right, I might sing it.” That had never occurred to me. I was just like, “Hey, man, you do you.” Within about thirty seconds, you saw the speech was in a black church and they’ve got someone on the organ while the president’s speaking. I was like, There is a 99.9 percent chance he sings.
HEATHER FOSTER
When he started singing “Amazing Grace,” I just bowled over. I was so tired afterwards that I just crawled into the back of another staffer’s car: “I just need you to drive me to the hotel.” When I turned my phone on, sixty-two messa
ges from every walk of my life—people talking about how they were in their offices crying, and everybody said the same thing: My president sees me. My president knows me.
VANITA GUPTA
There really was an incredible sense of community and togetherness that I think everyone needed.
CODY KEENAN
And very quickly people forgot about Charleston, because there was a two-day stretch where the ACA was upheld and marriage equality became the law of the land. As we landed, and the sun was going down, the front of the White House was lit up in the colors of the rainbow.
JENNIFER PALMIERI
Director of Communications, White House (2013–2015)
Director of Communications, Hillary for America (2015–2016)
The memorable moments from when I was there? A couple shutdowns, Ebola, Healthcare.gov, ISIS beheadings, Ukraine, Bergdahl, the stupid GSA/Vegas trip—I left in 2015 just as things started getting better. As I came back to the White House just to visit with people, right after the greatest week ever, the president’s like, “Yeah, man, you really should have stuck around.”
CODY KEENAN
The Confederate flag came down,176 and that was like the fourth-most-important thing of the week. We always joked how he passed trade-promotion-authority legislation through Congress,177 which for a lot of presidents would have been like the biggest thing to happen to them all year. It was like the fifth-biggest thing of the week. It was exhausting and it was amazing. It was probably the week that might have summed up this White House and this country more than any other.
ROB O’DONNELL
Those ten days really set the tone for the last eighteen months. I was waiting to get my security clearance to go into the White House, and for the first time in a long time, we were like, We’re back out in front again. We’re not going to be lame ducks.
CODY KEENAN
It was a ten-day stretch that began with the worst of humanity and cruelty and malice, and it unfolded in ways nobody had expected. Nobody ever thought about the Confederate flag coming down and someone like Nikki Haley setting an incredible example.178 Then, bang, the ACA was upheld again.179 Bang, marriage equality. And then the president of the United States led the country in a eulogy on unearned grace. And again, that’s where he hit things that you just couldn’t reach as a speechwriter. It’s not like I went to sit down and draft a eulogy and said, “Hey, I’m going to do a sermon on the concept of unearned grace.” I mean, that’s insane. It was his idea. He led the whole thing.
BARBARA LEE
It really was a watershed moment, not [just] for me personally but also the country and the world, when President Obama announced his vision for establishing relations with Cuba.180 Since the mid-’70s I’d been trying to end this embargo. I’d taken delegations there. It just didn’t make sense. It was a bad policy. When the president announced many of the policies that would shift towards normalizing, you know, any way I could have helped move the ball forward.
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN
I’d always raise the case of Alan Gross, my constituent who was held prisoner in Cuba for over [five] years, and a number of members of Congress also engaged in trying to change our bankrupt policy. And the president was focused on the need to change our approach, but the fact that Alan Gross was being held prisoner made it difficult to move forward. So we had to resolve the Alan Gross situation in a way that would be advantageous to the United States. That ultimately involved identifying some prisoners the Cubans were holding. Some of our intelligence assets had been discovered and imprisoned by the Cubans, and they were released. That person was released about the same time that [three] of the [remaining] Cuban Five were released.
BARBARA LEE
I was part of the work that led to Alan Gross’s release. It was just really quite dynamic. Also, I went with Secretary Kerry when he reopened the embassy, and the Marines who actually took down the flag when we left Cuba? They were there. They were in their eighties.
JONATHAN FINER
Summer of 2015, yeah, so a few things about that: One was that, just a week before we got to Vienna, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran put out a series of statements that said, The following are red lines. There were seven main ones. Each of these seemed, on its face, to contradict a fundamental aspect of the agreement that we thought we had reached in Lausanne.
RICHARD NEPHEW
I was still convinced, from the start, that the interest of both countries and the leaderships of both countries were gonna get it done.
JONATHAN FINER
Some people had said, “We’ll never get a deal. They’re going back on what they had already said.” Our sense at that point was, we will not treat that as the official Iranian position. We need to see what they say in the room with the negotiators. We need to go and test this. It’s too important for abandonment.
DENNIS ROSS
There were those who felt it was so significant to get the deal done because it made sure that the Iranians wouldn’t be able to have a nuclear weapon anytime soon, and it would create the possibility of more-enduring channels that maybe offered the prospect of moderating their behavior—because maybe you could integrate them into the international financial system in a way that would also build their states into doing less troublemaking. That was one side of the debate. There was another side that said people who were against the deal were overstating its weaknesses and the people who were for it were overstating its strengths.
JONATHAN FINER
The other thing that happened was that one month before we were supposed to get to Vienna, Secretary Kerry was riding his bike and ended up hitting a curb, falling, and fracturing his femur, which was a very serious injury. It required him to have surgery and be medevaced from [France] to recuperate for a bit. So there was some question initially as to whether, physically, he’d be up to both the intense many hours of negotiations and also even traveling back to Europe to conduct them. Because we’d always done [the negotiations] in Europe, so that no one would be able to claim some sort of unfair home-country advantage. In the end, Secretary Kerry recovered extraordinarily well but remained in a high level of pain throughout a lot of that negotiating period.
DENNIS ROSS
The natural instinct, before you close a deal, is to satisfy yourself that you couldn’t do better, that you couldn’t get more. It works in many high-stakes negotiations that way. My view was there was going to be a deal. Now, I’m sure if you’re in the middle of negotiations, you ride a roller coaster of emotions where one day you think, Okay, we got it, and then the next day you think, We’re gonna lose it. And I’m sure that’s what the mood was there. I’m sure of it.
RICHARD NEPHEW
You couldn’t sustain, year on year, 45 percent inflation. That would be unsustainable in our system and in our economic experience. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean much, because for the Iranian experience that kind of inflation was normal. So for their own psyche, it was a little bit of a different impact than it would be for the US, but this was, to me, one of the key points of the whole thing. We were in a position where we desperately didn’t want the Iranian nuclear program going any further than it was, and the Iranians desperately didn’t want the sanctions to go any further than they were. So our interests synchronized, and to me, that overcame a lot in terms of pens being thrown and all that. That’s all kind of a sideshow compared to the fact that the national interests on both sides were so strong.
JONATHAN FINER
We stayed for almost three weeks, the longest any secretary of state had ever remained in any single city outside the United States in the history of the country. At moments during that period it looked like things would fall apart. There were some intense negotiating sessions and instances of people storming out or shouting at each other, and by the end—late the evening of July 13, early in the morning of July 14—we nailed down the final substantive details such that we had an agreement. And we were able to announce that agreement in front
of the world on July 14.
DENNIS ROSS
But after 15 years, the Iranians will have a large nuclear infrastructure that is legitimate and puts them in a position where the path to Obama’s block is simply deferred for that period of time. So the challenge becomes, you couldn’t say it’s blocked all the paths. You could say you blocked fifteen years and you now have time, and you need to do something with that time to make it even less likely. And I think there was a not-insignificant part of the national-security community that looked at it that way.
WENDY SHERMAN
When people would say they didn’t like the deal, I’d ask, “What’s your alternative?” The two alternatives most people talk about were: That we should have bombed their facilities, but you cannot bomb away knowledge. They have mastered the entire nuclear fuel cycle. So you could have bombed their buildings, but within two or three years, they would have recreated them, and probably underground, in secret. The second that people talked about was that you should have continued to sanction them and tighten the noose. The only reason we got countries around the world to enforce the sanctions was because we said we would be committed to giving diplomacy a try. So if you blew up the diplomacy, you’re not going to have the cooperation of countries around the world to impose sanctions, because they all took an economic hit to enforce those sanctions.
JONATHAN FINER
I think for many of us, this stood as the foremost example of what a combination of willingness to use military force, if necessary—because the president had always said that—economic sanctions, diplomatic engagements through negotiations, what all of those tools that we had at our disposal could accomplish if used in a concerted, coordinated strategy toward the goal that we set. Which was preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and we accomplished that.
