by Edward Klein
During a speech that Sherrod had delivered at a meeting of the NAACP, she related her experience with a white farmer who came to her for help. Andrew Breitbart, the late conservative blogger, got hold of the tape of Sherrod’s speech and, through selective editing, made it sound as though Sherrod had refused to help the farmer because he was white. In Breitbart’s telling, Sherrod was a black racist. However, when the complete tape of Sherrod’s speech was released, it became clear that she was nothing of the sort. In fact, she had worked hard to save the white farmer’s land.
By firing Sherrod without looking into the matter more carefully, Obama once again revealed himself to be politically inept. Unknowingly, he had picked a fight with the wrong black person, for not only was Shirley Sherrod falsely maligned by the White House, but it turned out that her husband, Charles Sherrod, had played a significant role in the 1960s civil rights movement. Charles Sherrod had been a Freedom Rider along with John Lewis, a prominent member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a longtime Georgia congressman.
As might be expected, the African-American political elite quickly came to the defense of the Sherrods. “I’ve known these two individuals—the husband for more than fifty years and the wife for at least thirty-five, forty—and there’s not a racist hair on their heads or anyplace else on their bodies,” Congressman Lewis said.
“I don’t think a single black person was consulted before Shirley Sherrod was fired—I mean, c’mon,” said Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, who had ditched Hillary Clinton to support Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary campaign. “The president is getting hurt real bad. He needs some black people around him.... Some people over there [in the White House] are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the representative from the District of Columbia, concurred: “The president needs some advisers or friends who have a greater sense of the pulse of the African-American community, or who at least have been around the mulberry bush.”
Never one to graciously admit his mistakes, Obama finally phoned Shirley Sherrod and spoke to her for a grudging seven minutes. Obama said he felt that the incident had been blown way out of proportion, and he refused to apologize personally for the national humiliation Sherrod had suffered. When he offered Sherrod another job in the Agriculture Department, she politely declined.
In the wake of the Sherrod incident, Maureen Dowd, usually a liberal voice on the op-ed page of the New York Times, unleashed a blistering rebuke of Obama.
“The Obama White House is too white,” wrote Dowd.
It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran. But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.... The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one.
The Sherrod Case was a turning point in relations between Obama and the black leadership. No longer were blacks willing to bite their tongues when speaking about the black president. By the summer of 2011, the Congressional Black Caucus was openly warning Obama that black voters were frustrated by his administration’s unwillingness to address black joblessness, which was more than double the national average, and which rose as high as 40 percent in urban centers like Chicago and Detroit. The message was clear: although Obama would probably still get more than 90 percent of the African-American vote in 2012, he couldn’t count on the kind of black turnout he had generated in 2008 to offset the white vote in swing states.
“I’m frustrated with the president, I’m frustrated with the Senate, I’m frustrated with the House,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, a Missouri Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “The president and his White House team [are] trying to minimize the discussion of race as it relates to job creation.”
Emanuel Cleaver’s complaint was echoed by Maxine Waters, a former chairman of the caucus. “The worry should be that are [black] people going to be enthusiastic about getting to the polls, or are they not going to be as enthusiastic.”
Obama compounded his problem with African-Americans in August 2011, when he set off on a three-day bus tour through the Midwest to talk about his push to create jobs. With his approval ratings at an all-time low of 39 percent, Obama campaigned before all-white audiences in Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. This set off a chorus of criticism from black leaders, who wanted to know why the president had avoided African-American communities.
Stung by all this criticism, Obama appeared before the Congressional Black Caucus in September 2011 and gave a no-holds-barred speech chastising his critics. He told the attendees at the gathering to “take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes” and “stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying.”
In response, Maxine Waters deftly put the president in his place. “I’ve never owned a pair of bedroom slippers,” she said.
If relations between Obama and black politicians were touchy, they were downright contentious with black businessmen. I spoke with Harry C. Alford, the president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which represents the nearly two million black businesses in the United States.
“When Obama became president, we were all happy about the symbolism—America’s first black president,” Alford told me. “We didn’t really care about his position or views on anything. We just wanted a black president no matter what. We should have been more careful, as his views on small business, especially black business, are counter to ours.
“His view of business is that it should be a few major corporations which are totally unionized and working with the government, which should also be massive and reaching every level of American society,” Alford continued. “Thus, his first Executive Order was the reinstatement of Project Labor Agreements in government contracting. PLAs give labor unions an exclusive [option] in construction jobs—all participating firms must use union labor or, at least, pay union wages and abide by union rules. This activity, in effect, discriminates against blacks, Hispanics, and women per se, as trade unions deliberately under-employ them....
“President George W. Bush eliminated PLAs from federal contracting and his main reason was ‘unions discriminate against small business, women, and minorities.’ So here we were with the first black president who deliberately discriminates against small business, women, and minorities. How ironic!”
As he headed into his fourth year in office and began to gear up for his reelection campaign, Obama was forced to face an uncomfortable fact: he was profoundly unpopular with black leaders, who found him cold and distant, an inauthentic “brother.” If he hoped to generate a large black voter turnout in 2012, something had to be done to counter this growing disenchantment. He had to rally his base.
Suddenly, I started hearing from prominent blacks, whose phone calls and emails to the White House had gone unanswered for three years.
“I wanted you to know that I finally got an invitation to the White House—I was asked to attend the White House Christmas party,” one of Obama’s severest black critics told me. Others confirmed that the White House had undertaken a full-court press to win black approval.
In January 2012, the president turned up at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, the mecca of African-American culture, where he broke into the opening of Al Green’s recording of “Let’s Stay Together.” A month later, he hosted a tribute to the blues at the White House and joined bluesmen B. B. King and Buddy Guy for the first few lines of “Sweet Home Ch
icago.”
“It makes the president more likable because it’s humanizing,” said Mark McKinnon, a Republican political strategist and a onetime Nashville songwriter. “Just the fact that he tried to sing in public was a single. That he sang well was a double. That he didn’t sing ‘America the Beautiful’ was a triple. That he sang Al Green was a home run.... Not saying that he could win American Idol, but he’s got some decent pipes. History will judge his presidency, but it’s probably not a stretch to say he may be the best crooner to occupy the Oval Office.”
PART IV
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE
The United States under Barack Obama
is less assertive, less dominant, less power-minded,
less focused on the American people’s particular
interests, and less concerned about preserving
U.S. freedom of action.
—Douglas J. Feith and Seth Cropsey, “The Obama Doctrine
Defined,” Commentary magazine, July 2011
CHAPTER 17
THE WAR ON GENERAL JONES
They’re a bunch of Chicago thugs.
—Diane Jones, wife of General James Jones, speaking about Barack Obama’s inner circle
Diane Jones had reason to be bitter.
No one in the Obama White House had a more distinguished record of service to his country than her husband, James Logan Jones Jr. The six-foot-four, plainspoken, retired four-star Marine Corps general was a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, the first Marine Corps general to serve as supreme allied commander in Europe, and a trusted military adviser to both Democratic and Republican presidents. And yet, within months of being appointed as Obama’s first national security adviser, Jones became the victim of a snarky whispering campaign by White House aides, who spread word in the media that he was so detached from his job that he bicycled home to McLean, Virginia, for lunch and left work early.
As a rule, Jones followed John Wayne’s advice in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon: “Never apologize, never explain—it’s a sign of weakness.” But things became so nasty in the West Wing that, less than four months into his tenure, he took the unusual step of defending himself in the press: “I’m here by 7 o’clock in the morning and I go home at 7, 7:30 at night; that’s a fairly reasonable day if you’re properly organized.... There is a generational thing here,” continued Jones, who at age sixty-five was some twenty years older than most of his staff. “There is a process thing here. I’m used to staffs, and I’m used to certain order. I’m used to people having certain roles. And so there’s a very natural adjustment period.... When I first went into the Oval Office, I didn’t expect six other people from the [National Security Council] to go with me.”
Asked by a New York Times reporter about the behavior of young Obama officials who prided themselves on staying at the White House until late at night, Jones snapped: “Congratulations. To me that means you’re not organized.”
The late Richard Holbrooke, the most talented diplomat of his generation and Obama’s representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, respected Jones. In response to charges that Jones delegated too much responsibility to his subordinates, Holbrooke pointed out that, as a Marine, Jones “believes in team-building” and had produced “a sophisticated, multilayer decision structure at the National Security Council that did not exist before.” Holbrooke didn’t suffer fools or amateurs gladly, and as far as he was concerned, hiring someone as mature and experienced as Jim Jones and then not using him properly displayed a lack of executive sense on the part of Obama. But Holbrooke’s defense of Jones fell on deaf ears. Holbrooke had been a Hillary Clinton loyalist during the primary campaign and, like Jones, he was treated as an outsider by the inbred claque of Obamans.
Jones’s brutal turf fights with Obama’s inner circle were chronicled in Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, for which Jones was a major source. The general complained to Woodward that the political team Obama had imported from Chicago—Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs—made it virtually impossible for him to do his job. The Chicagoans even went so far as to block his access to the president. He described them to Woodward as “water bugs,” the “Politburo,” and “the Mafia.”
A clash of personalities was only part of Jones’s problems. For all of Obama’s talk about being open-minded and willing to listen to competing ideas, he was only comfortable with people who shared his view of America as a less predominant power in a multipolar world. Though a registered Democrat, Jones was non-ideological; he was neither a hawk nor a prophet of American doom. He was a warrior-diplomat in the tradition of Generals George C. Marshall and Maxwell Taylor, and the sorry saga of his tenure in the White House said volumes about how Barack Obama conducted America’s foreign policy.
Jones hardly knew Obama when he was appointed to head the National Security Council. In fact, the two men had met only twice. The first time was in 2005, when then Senator Obama’s foreign policy aide, Mark Lippert, arranged a meeting between the two men. Obama and Jones met again in the fall of 2008, when President-elect Obama asked Jones to become his chief national security adviser. Despite his low-key manner and the deference he showed to the young, inexperienced president, Jones was never able to bond with Obama the way his predecessors in the NSC job, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, had bonded with George W. Bush.
There were signs from the beginning that Jones’s calm, systematic approach to problems did not fit the frenetic, highly politicized atmosphere in the Obama White House. That lesson was brought home to Jones when he was asked to phone Marine General Anthony Zinni, a former commander of Central Command and a friend of thirty years, and offer him a key job in the new administration.
“Jones ... asked if I would be willing to serve as ambassador to Iraq or in one of the envoy jobs, on the Middle East peace process,” Zinni recalled. “I said yes. Then [right after the inauguration], Jones called and said, ‘We talked to the secretary of state, and everybody would like to offer you the Iraq job.’ I said yes. The [vice] president called and congratulated me.”
The next thing Zinni knew he was asked to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her office at the State Department. When he showed up, Clinton introduced him to Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns. “She asked me my views on Iraq,” Zinni said. “She said to Burns and Steinberg, ‘We’ve got to move quickly. [Ambassador Ryan] Crocker is leaving [Iraq]. We’ve got to get someone in there and get the paperwork done and hearings.... Lots to do to get ready to go.’”
Zinni expected to get a call the next day, and when he didn’t, he phoned Undersecretary Bill Burns.
“To make a long story short, I kept getting blown off all week,” Zinni said. “Meantime, I was rushing to put my personal things in order.... I was beginning to set up to resign from boards and put my financial house in order, kiss my wife goodbye. And nothing happened.... Finally, nobody was telling me anything. I called Jones ... several times. I finally got through late in the evening. I asked Jones, ‘What’s going on?’ And Jones said, ‘We decided on Chris Hill.’ I said, ‘No one told me. If I hadn’t called you, I’d have read about it in the Washington Post.’ And Jones said, ‘I didn’t know.’”
Jones was mortified by the way the Obama White House had treated his old friend and fellow Marine. As things turned out, it was only the first of many humiliations he suffered while working with Barack Obama.
Despite his considerable prestige, Jones was not permitted to pick his own staff. What’s more, he was rarely allowed to see the president alone. When he went to the Oval Office, he was usually accompanied by a phalanx of aides, including three political operatives who had played key roles in Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign: Jones’s chief of staff, Mark Lippert; his deputy, Tom Donilon, who had coached Obama for his debates against John McCain; and Denis McDonough, the director of strategic communications. At times, this gr
oup was expanded to include Hillary Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and, on rare occasions, Michelle Obama. Most of the attendees were not foreign policy experts. However, that didn’t stop people like Valerie Jarrett from expressing opinions on matters about which they knew little or nothing.
Making Jones part of a large and diffuse group signaled to everyone in Washington that he didn’t have Obama’s ear on foreign policy. His influence was further diminished by the way Obama conducted meetings on foreign policy. He liked to do most of the talking. Others in the room, including Jones, were there to listen and agree, even on military matters like the deployment of aircraft carrier groups.
Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that no president had taken more personal control over foreign policy than Obama. “This is an Obama-centric decision-making operation. In other administrations, a lot of decisions were made below the presidential level. But Obama shapes most policies. He takes pen to paper and writes decision papers. Usually presidents have other things to do than sit down and write a document that takes an inordinate amount of time. But Obama makes the calls on most every subject and with a degree of personal intensity.”
Both in the Oval Office and at National Security Council meetings in the Situation Room, Obama seemed to pass quickly over Jones in favor of his deputy, Tom Donilon. Understandably enough, this annoyed Jones. He had little use for Donilon, a Democratic Party insider who had worked as an aide for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, and was a former Washington lobbyist and executive at Fannie Mae.