by Ben Rhodes
One night that week, as I walked out of work, I saw a candlelight vigil taking place in front of the White House. I recognized a few of the people—Libyan Americans I’d met with at the White House when we intervened to save Benghazi. They were honoring the memory of Chris Stevens. A small circle formed around me. One of them had tears in his eyes, thanking me for the role I’d played in supporting President Obama’s intervention in Libya and saying that he feared for the future of the people there.
“Do you think this means the United States will have to leave Benghazi?” he asked.
“I hope not,” I said, but I knew that it did.
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ON FRIDAY, EVERY TIME I walked into my office and saw the television playing another video of protest, I felt a sense of chaos, as though something was unraveling that could never be reassembled. A steady stream of reports was delivered to my office detailing how American diplomats in different places were being told to shelter in place. Ten thousand people protesting in Khartoum. In Lebanon, young men set fire to American fast food restaurants. In Tunis, four people were killed at the U.S. embassy when an angry mob climbed the walls and raised a black flag. In Cairo, hundreds were arrested in Tahrir Square. In Afghanistan, the Taliban launched an attack that killed two Marines. Meanwhile, the caskets of the four Americans killed in Benghazi were returned to Andrews Air Force Base. I felt I was watching the Arab Spring turn dark in real time.
That afternoon, I got called up to the press secretary’s office. Jen Palmieri, the White House communications director, was sitting with a handful of staff. They looked at me a little sheepishly. “We need someone out on the shows,” Jen said. All five Sunday shows were asking.
“Really?” I asked. She knew I thought those shows were a Washington ritual that accomplished little for us other than ruining people’s weekends. None of our national security principals liked to do them, but she made a credible argument.
“The world is on fire,” she said, gesturing up at the images on television. She thought we needed someone to convey that we were on top of it. Also: Netanyahu was going to be on, and he was surely going to take shots at Obama; it’d be useful to have someone ready with a response. “Do you mind reaching out to Hillary?” she asked.
I emailed Philippe Reines, Clinton’s communications advisor, and asked if she’d be up for doing the shows. I got no response. Next, I asked Tom Donilon. He looked at me as if I were crazy. The only person left was Susan Rice. She was a diplomat. She could pay tribute to the people lost and in danger, talk about our approach in the Middle East, and respond to whatever Netanyahu said about our Iran policy. I had an initial conversation in which Susan told me she was planning to go away that weekend with her kids, but said she’d be willing to do it if Clinton could not. I called back later, when I still hadn’t heard from Clinton.
“People think we need someone out there,” I said.
There was a pause. “What about Hillary?”
“She doesn’t want to do it,” I said.
She laughed. “So I’m it?”
“Looks that way.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it, if you do my prep.”
I sat at my desk and put together a document to help her prepare. It took only a few minutes—I merged the different Q&As that our press team already prepared for Jay Carney’s daily briefings, since she’d be getting the same questions, and I listed some objectives up top to make the document feel like more than a repurposed set of press guidance. One of the questions we’d been getting was whether the protests across the Middle East showed that our foreign policy was a failure, so one of the objectives I listed was to show that the protests were rooted in the Internet video, not a failure of U.S. policy. I never could have guessed how these few hurried minutes at my desk would become one crucial link in the chain of a massive conspiracy theory.
I went home. Ann, still reeling from the death of her father, was frustrated with me for being absent. She was taking things out of cabinets and cleaning them, the kind of thing she did when she wanted to distract her mind and keep me at a distance. I stared at my BlackBerry, catching up on things I’d missed in the crush of events. There was an email chain about what talking points people should be using to describe what happened in the Benghazi attack. There was a Deputies Committee meeting the next morning, as there had been every morning that week, about how to deal with the various issues—embassy security, the Internet video, the collapsing world. We’d also have to give Susan updated points for her to use on the Sunday shows. I wrote back and said that we could just deal with this at the meeting. I was standing in the closet so Ann wouldn’t snap at me for being on my BlackBerry. This was the last thing I wanted to be doing.
At the Deputies meeting, we spent most of our time on updates to our security posture at embassies, one country after another. Mike Morell was on via videoconference from CIA headquarters. When the issue of the talking points on the Benghazi attacks came up, he cut off the discussion, saying that he would rework them and send them around for use. I was grateful—one less thing to do. A little while later, we got an email from Morell with the revised points. I made one edit, changing a reference to our “consulate” in Benghazi, since it was not a consulate.
After the meeting, I left to do some errands with Ann, who was now barely speaking to me because of my long hours. We got the car washed and then went to the Calvert-Woodley liquor store on Connecticut Avenue. While she was inside, I sat in the car and joined a phone call to prep Susan for her Sunday show appearances. At first, the campaign staff was dialed in, but I kicked them off the call before Susan could dial in—we couldn’t have them brief a national security cabinet official. I walked Susan through the likely criticisms from Netanyahu that she’d have to respond to, mostly demands that we be tougher on Iran, tougher on the Palestinians. We went through all the security measures that we were taking at our diplomatic facilities, and then went through the various criticisms of our foreign policy that she’d be asked about. On the question of what happened in Benghazi, I told her we were lucky—the CIA had prepared points for this purpose, and I’d send them to her to use. Later, after I got home, I forwarded the points to her press aide to pass on. That was that.
Sunday morning, I had to go back in to work for more meetings. Protests had spread to places as far-flung as Paris and Sydney. The crisis prompted by this Internet video was going to be with us for a while. Susan taped her Sunday shows, but I was in the Situation Room at the time. I never did see a single one of those appearances, though I read the transcripts that were sent around by our media monitor on my BlackBerry and thought that—all things considered—she’d done a good job. I left work early that afternoon, hoping to have a few quiet hours.
CHAPTER 15
A SECOND TERM
Debate preparation took place at a resort in Henderson, Nevada. As the motorcade made its way farther out from Las Vegas, past where people actually lived, we went by a strip mall that sat empty like a twenty-first-century ghost town, a relic of the financial crisis. Even though this first debate was on domestic issues, I was the national security staffer assigned to the trip. I passed up the opportunity to sit in on the prep sessions, choosing instead to go on long runs on the surrounding golf courses, emptying my head while jogging down fairways baked brown by the desert sun. The hotel where we were staying had a Middle Eastern theme, with an “Arabesque” lounge, Moroccan patterns, and a signature cocktail called “the Casablanca.” I’d sit in the air-conditioned, empty lobby, sedated by this American creation of an idealized Arab world.
Each night, Jon Favreau would emerge from the debate prep sessions more and more nervous. Obama was flat, irritable, and long-winded. Favreau was notoriously anxious in campaign seasons—riding what he called a “poller-coaster” of emotions, checking the daily tracking polls, always anticipating the worst. But he also knew Obama in a way that on
ly a handful of us did, and it turned out he was right. After three days in Nevada, we flew to Denver, where Obama was thoroughly beaten in a debate with Mitt Romney. A group of us watched backstage on a television screen as Obama came across as somehow diminished and annoyed by criticisms that he found unfair. He had been cruising to reelection, so the debate offered a turn in the media narrative: Suddenly, Obama was on the ropes.
In the days that followed, Obama had small groups of us into the Oval Office. “That one was entirely on me,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
To buck up Obama’s spirits, I made a list of ten other times that things looked terrible over the last six years: when we were down by 20 points to Hillary; Reverend Wright; Palin’s high point; Scott Brown’s election; the 2010 midterms; the debt ceiling. He loved this, and called me up to the Oval to go over it.
“I wasn’t really that stressed about Palin,” he said. “I don’t remember that. Maybe she got to you.”
“That hockey mom thing worked for a little while,” I said. “What was the worst?”
“The debt ceiling,” he said, and looked momentarily pained by the memory. “Because that one wasn’t just about me. A lot of people could have been hurt.”
The second debate would be a “town hall” format, in which selected audience members ask screened questions after they’re called on by a moderator. An exact replica of the debate stage was built at a golf resort in Williamsburg, Virginia, right down to the color scheme: red carpet, star-spangled flourishes along the curved exterior. For three days, we sat in the audience seating that circled the debate stage, pretending to be real people asking questions of Obama and John Kerry, who was playing Mitt Romney. Obama would practice an answer, and then we’d critique his performance.
“Get into it faster.”
“Look at the person who asked the question.”
“Don’t forget your home base.”
At some point, Obama, who liked to name the absurdities of politics, snapped. “I get it,” he said. “So this isn’t really a debate at all, it’s just a performance.” He asked that we just write up the best answers he could give on key questions, drawing on the best answers he gave in debate prep.
One of the questions was on Benghazi. In practicing an answer, we had to tell him about all the conspiracy theories gaining traction on the right. Obama had been on a news blackout, so he didn’t believe it.
“Do people really think this?” he asked.
“It’s all over Fox,” I said.
“This is some real tin hat stuff.” One of the theories was that we’d refused to call what happened in Benghazi “terrorism” and had invented the connection to the Internet video to make his record on terrorism look better.
“I’m telling you, it’s all over Fox,” I said. I explained how he’d called it an act of terror the day after the attack, then Susan Rice had said the attack developed out of protests over the video, then the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center had testified that it was carried out by al Qaeda–affiliated extremists. Susan’s reference to protests, which had been a part of the intelligence community’s talking points, had been seized on by the right.
“How exactly is it a cover-up if we’re the ones who told people that it was terrorism?” he asked. “Just explain that to me. And what were we covering up?” It was something he did, acting as if you believed the crazy things that you were telling him.
“Don’t think too much about it. It will make your head hurt.”
He practiced his answer on Benghazi, and kept saying, “I stood in the Rose Garden the next day and called it terrorism.” When he finished, I spoke first. “No,” I said, “remember, you called it an act of terror.”
“What’s the difference?” he asked, annoyed.
“Trust me,” I said.
“Act of terror,” Favreau repeated.
He got better as practice went on, more comfortable in approaching the debate as a performance. We flew up to Hofstra and did one more practice run at a pair of lecterns in the lobby of a hotel where we had a few hours to kill. “I stood in the Rose Garden and called it an act of terror,” he said, looking at me and Favreau, overenunciating the word “terror” to make the point that he got it and thought it was ridiculous, this distinction between terror and terrorism. Then he went up to his room to eat dinner and I went to the bar and drank bourbon. We were nervous. A good debate, and he’d be on a path to victory; a repeat of Denver, and he’d be in trouble.
As the debate got under way, Obama was clearly stronger. About halfway through, the Benghazi question came, and Obama launched into a version of the answer he’d practiced. Romney pounced: “I think it’s interesting the president just said something which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.”
“That’s what I said,” Obama responded.
Romney looked surprised, even shocked, at his good fortune. “You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?”
Obama was now the one who looked pleased. “Please proceed, Governor,” Obama said.
“I want to make sure we get that for the record,” Romney said, “because it took the president fourteen days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”
“Get the transcript,” Obama said.
“What an idiot,” Favreau said, as we watched this unfold on a television backstage. Candy Crowley, the moderator, confirmed that Obama was right. Romney looked indignant, then deflated—he just knew that Obama had not called it an act of terror. Sitting there, half-drunk and delighted, it nonetheless unsettled me a bit that Romney—an intelligent man—really did seem to believe something that wasn’t true. You could almost see how his debate prep had gone, a group of aides who’d been feeding on a steady diet of Fox News preparing him to pounce on Obama for refusing to call it terrorism, for inventing a story about an Internet video. I assumed they were just cynical; what if they actually believed this stuff?
* * *
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ON ELECTION DAY, A small group of us were invited to the Obama suite at the Hyatt as it became clear that he would win: me, Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, and Cody Keenan, who was slated to take over as chief speechwriter after Favreau left. We clustered a tactful distance across the room from where the Obamas were gathered with a group of family and close friends, watching the results on television.
Because the election was called earlier than anticipated, the room had the feeling of a low-key party. There was a spread of appetizers, wine and beer, thirty or forty people scattered about. Obama made the rounds, talking to the different clusters of guests like the groom at a wedding. Michelle Obama presided over the family area, offering hugs to all who approached her. When Obama came over to us, he looked more relaxed than I’d seen him in a long time. “In some ways this one is sweeter than 2008,” he said.
“Two thousand eight was pretty good,” Pfeiffer responded.
“This one feels better,” he said. “Folks know you pretty well after four years.”
As I looked over at Malia and Sasha, now grown into teenagers, it occurred to me that the anxiety any president feels about being rejected by voters must have been magnified for Obama because he was the first African American president; you don’t want to be the first and be deemed a failure. I wondered how much some of the occasional irritability that had flared up over the last few months was tied to this. As the night dragged on, Romney refused to call and concede, even though it was obvious that he had lost badly. Finally, as it was getting closer to midnight, Obama stepped out of the room to take the call. When he came back in, he had a look of both amusement and surprise. “He kept talking about how many urban voters turned out,” he told us. “Urban voters.”
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FROM THE WINDOW OF Air Force One, Burma unfolded below, a mysterious expanse of river, rice paddies, and unspoiled green dotted with the occasional small village. It was less than two weeks after the election, and Obama was about to become the first American president to set foot in this distant country.
We landed at a small, dilapidated airport in Yangon. Air Force One felt too large for the surroundings. As the motorcade turned onto the airport access roads, we were greeted by row after row of schoolchildren waving flags. At first, the sight of these smiling young faces was reassuring, but as their identical uniforms stretched on, the authoritarian choreography felt a little chilling. Where were we? Then we reached the main road, and the crowds swelled into the tens of thousands, most in T-shirts or wrapped in Buddhist robes, mothers and fathers with their children, people as far as you could see. The crowds pressed in against the motorcade whenever it slowed, people smiling, cheering, staring in wonder at something they never believed they would see. A few years before, people weren’t allowed to gather like this in public. It felt as if the place we were visiting was changing in some intangible way just through the fact of these crowds, isolation ended, an expression of hope.
We drove to Aung San Suu Kyi’s home, a white house nestled against a lake where she’d been imprisoned for nearly two decades. We parked the limousine in a driveway adjacent to her front veranda, where she stood waiting for us. She showed us into a small room filled with trinkets that she’d received over the years. A picture of Gandhi rested on the shelves alongside well-worn paperbacks. She had a striking face with deep, dark eyes, and black hair with streaks of gray and a flower in it. I sat in a chair along the wall, while Obama, Hillary, and Suu Kyi sat around a round table, each of them still icons in their own way.