by Ben Rhodes
The staff was put up at a hotel in Waikiki, and I had a balcony that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. There was a soothing rhythm to the days—waking up at five to put together a memo for Obama on what was happening around the world; reading books not related to work; driving to the northern shore of Oahu, taking in the surfers, shrimp trucks, and small bungalows and coming to understand why someone could find his own little piece of the world here and never go back. But there was a lonesome tinge to the experience. Ann was with her family in California before flying out to Hawaii for the second half of the trip. So on Christmas Day, I walked through groups of people on the beach, away from friends and family for the first time in my life.
That night, one of the advance staffers put together a small party in one of the basement conference rooms of the hotel. I went for a little bit, mingling with an odd assortment of staffers, and then left to sit up on my balcony. Another hotel, one of hundreds. I had gained a new life that brought me to this beautiful place with a president, but I’d lost my old one as well. I called Ann, and then my parents, and could hear the background noise of more familiar holiday experiences that were now distant. As the sun set into the Pacific, I listened to the voices of strangers wafting up to the balcony and thought about my family and friends. I’d become somebody they watched from afar—whose quotes they might read in the newspaper more often than they spoke to me—someone whose experiences were unknowable to them.
A few days later, Obama invited a few of us to go snorkeling at Hanauma Bay. I drove there with Ann in a rental car, parked, and then we walked over a hill. Down below lay a curving, pristine beach that opens out onto the bay, a reef glistening in the sun. Normally thousands of people might pass through here on a given day, but one day a week it’s closed, and they let the Obamas use it. The Secret Service had shut down a perimeter surrounding the beach, and casually dressed agents stood on the tops of the tall rock formations that overlooked us. The beach was dotted with only the Obama family, their friends, and a handful of staff. I’d never snorkeled before, and after I got over the awkwardness of it, I allowed myself to forget the world beyond whatever was in the water beneath me. When I walked back up onto the beach I saw Obama headed toward me, looking even thinner than usual without a shirt on. He stood next to me and we looked out at the water. “This doesn’t suck,” I said.
He pointed up to a place at the top of the hill that looked over the scene. “You see that spot up there?” he said. “My mom used to come here every day and sit there looking out at the bay when she was pregnant with me.” I could hear waves lapping at the shore. “I’ve always thought that’s one of the reasons why I have a certain calm.” For a moment, the entire world seemed to quiet.
This calm belied a gathering storm. Just a few days earlier, a small story had popped up on my BlackBerry, one of millions of stories that happen every day, most of which lead to nothing beyond the confines of their community. A fruit cart vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, had grown frustrated by the harassment he faced from corrupt officials and set himself on fire, initiating protests in the small North African nation on the other side of the world.
CHAPTER 9
EGYPT
The Transition Must Begin Now
After we got back from Hawaii, Obama had a call with Hosni Mubarak. Over the previous three weeks, the protests in Tunisia had spread like a brushfire. On January 11, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator who had ruled Tunisia for decades, fled power. People in Cairo had begun to mimic Bouazizi, setting themselves on fire to protest corruption, repression, and Mubarak. Despite these tremors, the intelligence community did not initially think that the protests were likely to topple other governments. Men like Mubarak and Bashar al-Assad of Syria were too entrenched, able to count on the loyalty of security services and the backing of foreign powers. In the case of Egypt, that power was the United States, which had provided decades of military assistance following the Camp David Accords and forged deep relationships between the Egyptian state and our own national security establishment.
I was part of a cohort of younger staffers in the government who shared a distaste for the corrupt way in which the Middle East was ruled. Most of the Foreign Service officers had served there and had friends there who felt no connection to their own governments—the mix of monarchies and autocracies whose legitimacy rested on a family’s claim to a piece of land, or militaries who insisted upon a tight-fisted rule to keep an enemy at bay—Islamists, terrorists, Iran. These younger staffers were much more certain of spreading unrest than the more senior people. Meanwhile, a patchwork of aides was pressing for more support for the protesters across the region: Gayle Smith, the NSC’s senior director for democracy, a flamboyant, white-haired former journalist who had served as an Africa expert under Clinton. Mike McFaul, the NSC’s senior director for Russia, who had spent most of his life thinking and writing about democratic movements. And, of course, Samantha Power. Egypt is next, they’d say, and will be a test of whether we’d stand on the side of the people in the streets or the autocrats trying to put them down.
Obama’s call with Mubarak was focused on Middle East peace, but he used it to discuss the protests in Tunisia. “We think it is best if Ben Ali does not return to Tunisia,” Obama said. “We hope the Tunisian government will hold free and fair elections in the future.”
I think he will not be able to return again, Mubarak responded with confidence. You will not succeed unless the people are very fair and want you. I told the same thing to Gaddafi.
In the days that followed, every television in the West Wing showed silent images of protest—young men running in the streets; masses gathering in Tahrir Square; people the same age as me chanting together and then being dispersed by the same security forces who had guarded our motorcade route in Cairo. Meanwhile, Hillary had insisted the Egyptian government was stable. Biden said in an interview that no, Mubarak wasn’t a dictator. We issued mild calls for the government to show restraint in suppressing the protests. We were, it seemed, a step and a half behind the people in the streets, implicitly siding with a dictator in the country where Obama had talked about how democracy was compatible with Islam and the Arab world.
Privately, Obama was telling people that his sympathies were with the people. If it were up to him, he told McFaul, he’d prefer that “the Google guy” run Egypt, referring to Wael Ghonim, a prominent activist who was helping to lead the protest movement. He didn’t mean it literally; he was indicating solidarity with the younger protesters trying to bring about change. But his senior team was in a different place. Gates and our military favored stability in Egypt, and they felt that stability came with Mubarak. The Clintons had a long-standing relationship with Mubarak, dating back to the Middle East peace process of the Clinton years. The intelligence community was wary of extremists taking advantage of the unrest.
The main driver of opinion seemed to be generational, with the younger staff pressing for change. Mubarak no longer represented stability, we’d say—his dictatorship was the source of instability. This was a once-in-a-generation chance to achieve meaningful reform in the Arab world. We had a moral responsibility to be on the right side of history. It would be a betrayal of what Obama stood for, of what his own election represented, if we weren’t.
This divide was starkly illustrated for me when Obama gave his first statement on Egypt on the twenty-eighth. The protests were now boiling over, and Egypt seemed poised on the precipice between a brutal crackdown and some kind of radical change. The statement I drafted spoke about the universal rights of the protesters and called on the government to respect those rights, refrain from violence, and pursue “a path of political change.” Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough asked me to give a copy to each of the principals. The edits that came back took out almost all of this language. One draft illustrated the resistance to change so starkly that I saved it and kept it in my desk for the next six years: Every word
about human rights and the grievances of the protesters was removed—all that remained were the calls on the protesters to be peaceful, and expressions of support for the Egyptian government. Written in the margins was, simply, the word “balance.” Obama ended up using the draft I’d written, largely intact.
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THE RHYTHM OF THOSE days was unlike anything I’d experienced before. Ann was traveling, so I’d go home every night around ten, eat on the couch while drinking something stiff, watching cable news, and falling asleep to the scene of crowds swelling. I’d wake and go to work, get my briefing—dominated by stories of unrest in Egypt and surrounding countries—and then attend a standing eight-thirty Deputies meeting to review what was happening. Before every briefing, Gibbs would complain that we weren’t embracing the protests, arguing that our calls on the government to show restraint risked looking ridiculous. One day, as I sat in Gibbs’s office, the large, mounted television screen showed government-associated goons on horseback with machetes trying to clear Tahrir Square. “How the fuck am I supposed to call that restraint?” he said.
Every meeting seemed consequential; every statement felt pivotal. People would forward me reports that had been sent to them by their friends who had taken up living in Tahrir Square, quoting verbatim from things that Obama had said, lamenting that he wasn’t taking their side; on the other hand, our military and diplomats were getting calls from Egyptian officials expressing anger that Obama was abandoning them. The only thing they had in common is that they seemed to care, deeply, about what we were saying. And to me, it seemed, there were clear-cut choices—between right and wrong, boldness and caution, the past and the future.
To those of us who were pushing for change, it was clear that the cabinet-level principals were not. Time and again, Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Mike Mullen would put forward the Egyptian government’s view—that the protests would die down; that things could be channeled into a “national dialogue”; that our policy should aim to revert to the status quo. This approach was being pushed hard by the Gulf States, chiefly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who feared this kind of unrest coming to their capitals.
On January 29, Obama got a call from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who complained that our statements were too forward-leaning. In a sign of how closely our words were being watched, he took exception to statements Gibbs had made in his briefings supporting the protesters. He dismissed the people in the street as nothing more than the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbollah, al Qaeda, and Hamas. This was their view of who was protesting in Egypt: terrorists. But that is not what the rest of us could see with our own eyes. The protesters weren’t just Islamists, they were secular activists, young people, Coptic Christians.
Obama sensed this, too. He called me up to the Oval Office. I stood in front of his desk and we discussed the administration’s current public line on Egypt. “You’re in all of these meetings, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, realizing he had little idea how I spent my days when I wasn’t with him.
“I want you to speak up,” he said. “Don’t hold back just because it’s the principals. You know where I’m coming from. And we’re younger.”
I took that as license to raise my voice. Gone were the days of the Afghan review when I’d hold back my views for fear of overstepping some boundary. In one meeting, where there was broad agreement at a senior level that we should invite the leaders of key Arab countries to Washington as soon as possible to reassure them of our support, I couldn’t contain myself. “Maybe if we’re going to have all the corrupt autocrats over, we could think about actually inviting some of these young people, too…for balance.” The people at the table sat there grimly; the young people on the back bench loved it. I was inspired by the moment; I was also making enemies.
Things came to a head in the Situation Room on February 1, in a meeting where the principals were debating whether we should counsel Mubarak to step aside. Obama took the unusual step of coming down to join a meeting he wasn’t scheduled to attend. We’d gone around and around, with Clinton, Gates, and others recommending that we stand by Mubarak, and the more junior people urging that we press him harder.
Shortly after Obama came downstairs, Mubarak went on television to address the Egyptian people. We stopped the meeting and turned on the televisions that lined the walls. We all sat there in silence watching Mubarak standing at a lectern, an Egyptian flag beside him, a man who had held office since 1981—just four years after I was born. Occasionally I looked at Obama, but he betrayed no emotion. Mubarak announced that he would not seek another term as president. But he was combative in pledging to serve out his existing term, warning of a choice between “chaos and stability” and pledging to die on Egyptian soil.
When the speech was over, Obama spoke. “That’s not going to cut it,” he said. “Those people are not going to go home.” He effectively ended the debate by saying that he was going to call Mubarak and tell him that it was his judgment that he needed to step down. The call was set up for an hour later. Staff left to go draft Obama’s talking points. I went to my office to draft a statement that he would give afterward. Then I ran up to the Oval Office for the call.
“I want to share my honest assessment about what I think will accomplish your goals,” Obama told Mubarak. A few of us stood there, scattered across the office, farther away from the desk than normal, as if we didn’t want to crowd him. Obama cradled the phone against his ear while a speaker played for the benefit of the others in the room. A translator turned Obama’s words into Arabic, creating pregnant pauses and giving Mubarak extra time to digest the words, since he spoke English quite well. “I say this with the greatest respect,” Obama continued. “I’m extraordinarily proud of my friendship with you. It is my belief that if the transition process drags out for several months and you continue in your office, that the protests will continue. It will make [the situation] harder to control, and I think your role and the role of the Army will be made much more difficult. I think now is the time to present Egypt to its next government. I think now it is time for you to move in a timely fashion in not allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to take advantage of the situation.”
You don’t understand the culture of the Egyptian people, Mubarak shot back. He had stopped waiting for translation at certain points. Egypt is not Tunisia, he said. These protests will be over soon.
The conversation went on like that, back and forth, for another ten minutes. I stood next to Donilon and McDonough, who leaned over and asked when was the last time that an American president had had a conversation like this with a foreign leader. “Marcos, I think,” Donilon offered, speaking of Reagan’s break with our ally in the Philippines.
Obama began to wrap up the conversation, speaking off the cuff, no longer even glancing at the talking points. “Mr. President,” he said, leaning forward, elbow on his desk, “I always respect my elders. You’ve been in politics for a very long time. There are moments in history—just because things have been the same way in the past doesn’t mean they will be the same way in the future.” When he hung up, Obama looked at us and shrugged, as if to signal that he didn’t think he’d gotten through. It was the last time they spoke.
During the call, there had been some churn about the statement. The key line read, “It is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.” After the draft was circulated, calls and emails were lobbed in to Donilon and McDonough to take out the line altogether, with Gates and Clinton insisting that we at least take out “it must begin now.” As Obama was about to walk out to deliver his remarks, I asked him what he wanted to do. “Leave it in,” he said. The following day, when Gibbs was asked what Obama had meant by “now,” he replied: “Now started yesterday.”
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ON FEBRUARY 5, OBAMA got a call from David Cameron,
the prime minister of the United Kingdom, who was worried that we weren’t being aggressive enough in pressing Mubarak to step down. Cameron said he was confused by what Frank Wisner had said that day.
“Wisner?” Obama replied. “I have not seen that.”
Frank Wisner came from one of the families that defined America’s role in the world after World War II. His father had been one of the top people at the CIA. Wisner had had a long career at the State Department, serving as ambassador four times, including five years in Egypt at the end of the Cold War. As the protests picked up, Obama accepted a recommendation from Hillary to send Wisner to Cairo as a special envoy. He was someone whom Mubarak trusted, a reminder of a better time when our countries were in lockstep during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Wisner’s difficult task was to counsel Mubarak to initiate a transition in Egypt. The last words I heard Obama say to him as he set out on his mission were straightforward: “Be bold.”
Wisner succeeded in securing Mubarak’s promise not to seek another term as president, but that wasn’t enough for the people in the streets, or for Obama. A few days after Obama’s statement calling for a transition, unbeknownst to any of us in the White House, Wisner videoconferenced into an international security conference in Munich. Because he had just completed a stint as a presidential envoy, people assumed he was speaking for the administration when he said, “You need to get a national consensus around the preconditions of the next step forward, and the president must stay in office in order to steer those changes through.” This was the remark that had caught Cameron’s attention. Clinton, who also attended the conference, had made comments that seemed to reinforce Wisner’s.