The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

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  SHORTLY AFTER THE ELECTION, Obama convened a National Security Council meeting on Russia. He opened by saying that he wanted the intelligence community to do a comprehensive review of Russia’s meddling in the election that could be presented to him, and to Congress, before he left office. “We need to learn the lessons about what they did, because they’re going to do it again,” he said. Unspoken was the fact that Trump would never convene such a review. One after the other, the leadership of the intelligence community walked us through what they knew. It was worse than I’d previously known, more expansive, more clearly designed to aid Trump.

  In the weeks to come, nearly everything I learned reinforced this dreadful reckoning. In Germany, Merkel’s spokesperson told me about how fake news impacted their politics. He gave an example. At the height of Merkel’s political vulnerability over the refugee issue, there would be stories about crimes committed by Syrian refugees. A rape, for instance, caused a huge outcry in a community. For days, there were protests, political fallout.

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then we investigate this story and learn that it never happened,” he said. “And we trace the story, and it started with a social media user with a German-sounding name, but something is not exactly right. The name is a little off. And the server, it is not German.”

  “It’s probably in eastern Ukraine or Moldova,” I said.

  “Yes, this is right,” he answered. “Russians.”

  I thought about all the made-up stories about Hillary—her ill health, her corruption, her crimes. It seemed impossible to know where they all began; which ones came from the American right wing and which ones came from Russians; how they spread; whether this flood of content was coincident or coordinated with the Trump campaign.

  I’d run into different staffers who worked on Russia in the government, and they all had the same message: It’s even worse than you think. Always, the suggestion was that there was more to the story. Trump, one told me, is exactly the kind of person that the Russians like to invest in for years. Invest in how? I asked. The Russians build relationships—finances, personal ties, associates, compromising information. What those relationships are for, or how they are activated, or whether the Americans involved are witting or not, can be an open question.

  I walked around the West Wing feeling a kind of hollowness inside. I pulled Jen Psaki into Josh Earnest’s office. “I think this Russia thing is a lot worse than we knew,” I said, and went through all the different things I was learning. Josh looked at me with the same frozen smile he used on reporters who asked uncomfortable things in the briefing room.

  “Have you talked to POTUS about this?” he asked.

  I went to see Obama and told him that I thought we had a problem with Russia. “You think?” he said, sarcastically.

  “I mean us. We have a problem. There’s going to be a narrative,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “that we didn’t do enough. It’s already building.”

  “What were we supposed to do?” he asked. “We warned people.”

  “But people will say, why didn’t we do more, why didn’t you speak about it more.”

  “When?” he asked. “In the fall? Trump was already saying that the election was rigged.”

  I told him that I worried about the scale of the fake news effort, the disinformation that went beyond hacking. “And do you think,” he asked me, “that the type of people reading that stuff were going to listen to me?”

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  THE LEADERSHIP OF THE Trump transition team was fired shortly after the election. There would be two or three iterations of it before the inauguration. I never met any of them. Our NSC had prepared volumes of briefing papers on every possible subject—from Syria to Ukraine, from China to Cuba, but it was never clear to us who, if anyone, was reading them. Nobody on the Trump transition team wanted to talk to me or interact with me in any way, even though I’d spent eight years in the White House. “You’re kind of PNG,” our transition director told me. I heard they were collecting lists of people who had worked with me, suggesting that career people could pay a price for having served on my staff. It felt less like a peaceful transition of power than a vindictive extension of the right-wing campaign against Obama and people like me.

  During our transition, in 2008, we’d all worked out of a government office space in downtown Washington, using government email accounts. The transition I was watching on television was taking place at Trump Tower, and foreign governments told us they’d chase down Trump officials—and Trump himself—on personal email and cellphones; a clever and capable foreign adversary would have no trouble puncturing that bubble. The Saudis and Emiratis were boasting around town about the access they had to Trump’s family, which had much to gain financially from the kind of casual wealth that emanated from the Gulf.

  You’re never as high as you are after winning an election—everyone is asking for a job, telling you how great you are. You imagine that the political moment will be frozen in time—your congressional majorities, your media coverage, your fawning treatment from foreign governments and domestic constituencies. Almost immediately after assuming real responsibility, however, all of that capital starts to drain. These guys, I thought, are acting as though the rules don’t apply to them.

  In mid-November, Mike Flynn was named national security advisor. Flynn was an impetuous, angry former three-star general who had fulminated against Obama ever since he’d been fired by Jim Clapper in 2014 as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn liked to attribute his firing to some ideological dispute with Obama over “radical Islam”; in reality, Obama had no role in it. Clapper had gotten rid of him because he was destroying morale at the agency. In 2015, he’d been photographed next to Putin at a dinner for RT, the principal propaganda organ for the Kremlin, which had led the pro-Trump charge. He took a couple of weeks after his appointment to accept Susan Rice’s invitation to meet. His own transition team volunteered to us that he’d met with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, before meeting with the American official he was replacing.

  Meanwhile, we were still running the government. Around Christmas, we finalized a package of measures against Russia to retaliate for their attack on our democracy; we’d delayed this until after the election, assessing that anything before could have led them to hack the election itself. The State Department was worried about retaliation against Americans serving in Russia, but Susan made clear that we needed to pursue the toughest option. We’d impose sanctions. We’d close two Russian estates that were used for intelligence gathering and expel thirty-five Russian agents from the country.

  “What about Putin?” I asked, in the final Situation Room meeting on the topic.

  “What about him?” Susan asked.

  “People are going to ask why we aren’t sanctioning Putin.”

  There was a brief debate. I argued that if we were naming him as responsible for the interference, he should be included. It was decided that that would be a bridge too far—we rarely sanctioned heads of governments, and usually only where we favor regime change.

  I did a press call to announce the measures. I chafed at the Russian denials. “There are facts,” I said, “and then there are things that Russia says.” In the back of my head, I wondered what I could say that might trigger the Russians to mount a disinformation campaign against me. I dismissed those worries, but the fact that the thought even crossed my mind sent a chill through my body: If I’m thinking this, I thought, every public official in a Western democracy is going to think twice before criticizing Russia.

  On January 5, the leadership of the intelligence community filed into the Oval Office to brief Obama on the report on Russian meddling. Jim Clapper, James Comey, John Brennan, and Mike Rogers took seats on the couches. I sat in my usual seat facing Obama. One after
the other, they painted a stark picture of a methodical and relentless campaign waged by Putin on behalf of Trump. Once again, it went well beyond anything that any of us, including Obama, had heard before. The act of pulling up all the information in the government had clearly connected some dots, corroborated some things, filled in a more disturbing picture. The same report, they told us, would be briefed to Trump the next day. A classified version would then be sent to Congress. A short, unclassified summary would be released to the public.

  Obama sat silent and stoic, occasionally asking questions for clarification. Biden was animated, incapable of hiding his incredulity. We sat there looking at one another. The inauguration was in two weeks. We’d already announced our countermeasures. This review was now a body of evidence that would have to be reckoned with by our intelligence community, the FBI, Congress, and the White House. Our time was done, and our government was about to be led by the very people Putin had spent so much effort trying to put there. Sometimes there are no words to say.

  Obama’s response to Russian meddling had scrupulously adhered to the norms and responsibilities of his office. Establish the facts. Have the intelligence community do the public warning in its own, carefully chosen words. Protect the election infrastructure. Order a review of everything that happened. Stay in the lane of the rule of law and good governance; be impartial; don’t stray for a moment into the dirtier political space occupied by everybody else: the Russians, the Trump campaign, Wikileaks. This set limits on what he, or any of us, could do before the election—limits that, in hindsight, did not extend far enough to encompass the scale of the assault on our democracy. Yet that disposition also ensured the painstaking review that established the facts about what happened and raised additional questions about what the Trump campaign had done, which would endure long after we were gone. If Obama’s faith in norms and institutions is validated, then the truth will all come out, and consequences will flow from that.

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  THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTION, in a Skype session with the Cubans from the Situation Room, I apologized for my confidence that Clinton would win, which I had predicted would lead inexorably to the lifting of the embargo. Alejandro Castro showed no irritation. “You are the first person from your country who approached us with a sense of mutual respect and equality,” he said. I looked down the table at Bernadette, who was in tears. Alejandro then expressed some hope for the Trump team: As recently as that summer, representatives from the Trump organization had traveled to Cuba to scout hotel opportunities.

  I’d planned to fly to Havana one more time along with Caroline Kennedy: another symbolic end to the Cold War. It was another one of those victory laps that would never be run. Just after Thanksgiving, the day before we were set to go, Fidel Castro died. I was invited to attend his funeral as the sole representative of the U.S. government. I’d never met Fidel, and he’d criticized the opening between our countries. Many of the Cuban Americans I was friends with despised him. But given the precarious state of U.S.-Cuba relations after the election, I decided to go.

  For the first time, I flew down to Havana by myself. That evening, a black car dropped me off behind the statue of Martí as the sun was setting. I was told to find my own space in rows of chairs that flanked the dais. When I came around the statue, there were hundreds of thousands of people in front of me, filling the square in the way I had imagined it during my first midnight visit. I walked up and down the dais, looking at the names printed out on white sheets of paper, antagonists of America for the last forty years: Robert Mugabe, Daniel Ortega, Nicolás Maduro. Gerhard Schroeder, the former chancellor of Germany, wandered the rows, with the red face of hard living, searching for his name. I found a protocol officer who led me to my seat, next to the French representative and one row in front of Hugo Chávez’s daughter.

  For the next several hours, the global left was heard from in speech after speech. The message was tired, out of date. Africans talking about the struggle to shake off colonialism. Latin Americans honoring the Cuban people and their resistance to the “empire” to the north. Middle Eastern royals offering tributes that seemed rooted in hotel interests. Russians and Chinese mouthing words of proletarian revolution. I sat on the dais, dozens of international television cameras pointed in my direction from a platform nearby, with a frown frozen on my face—mindful of my critics back home, not wanting to be criticized for smiling. I stared out into the crowd, the occasional Cuban flag waving. Che’s face loomed over the square, young in death, the face of ideology not curdled by the passage of decades, or the corruption of power. Up front, a few hundred people clapped and chanted “Viva Fidel!” and other slogans. But the mass of humanity behind them was quiet, only occasionally stirred to life. Who knows why they were there—devotion to Fidel or shock at his finally passing; coercion or curiosity. I was out of place on that dais, just as I was now out of place in Washington. As I sat there, thirty-nine years old, the one American official who could somehow be on the dais at Fidel Castro’s funeral, my belief was not in revolutions or the administration preparing to take power back home: I believed in the people standing in the back of the crowd.

  I made one last trip to Cuba the week of the inauguration to conclude the last in a flurry of agreements meant to lock in as much of our progress as possible before Trump took over: agreements that overhauled U.S. immigration policy toward Cuba, established deeper business ties, and initiated law enforcement cooperation. The Cubans arranged for me to tour the house that Hemingway lived in for more than two decades. My hero growing up—they’d done their homework. I wandered through the house, browsing his bookshelves. There, in the bathroom, was line after line of tiny, barely legible black ink handwriting on the wall—Hemingway recording his weight day to day, month to month, year to year. People are people.

  Raúl hosted me for a long dinner—just him, me, Alejandro, and Juana, sitting in the same room where Obama had attended a meeting earlier that year. We drank rum and talked about hurricanes and weather modeling, liberation struggles in Angola and Namibia, the period after the Soviet Union fell and Cuba’s economy, me making my normal pitches for change. Deep into the dinner, and the rum, I asked Raúl whether Cuba would have made itself America’s enemy—and the Soviet Union’s partner—if America had responded differently to the revolution. “We would not,” he said. “We just wanted to survive. It was your choice!”

  Before it was over, I tried to reassure Raúl that he should seek a deal with Trump, that the forces in the United States still pointed—inevitably—toward engagement between our countries. As I talked, I thought about how he was into his eighties, that this change he had initiated with the United States might not fully take hold during his lifetime after all. He smiled, driving his eyes to squint. “Ben,” he said. “There was once a general from Ossetia who had the authority to launch nuclear missiles from my territory without telling me, even though I was defense minister. I’ve dealt with harder things than Trump.”

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  ON JANUARY 3, our second daughter, Chloe, was born. She came quickly, as if she was in a hurry. Chloe wouldn’t have the Internet fame that Ella had, the pictures of her wearing her elephant Halloween costume in the Oval Office with Obama. But she also wouldn’t have the absences of the first two years, the early morning daycare drop-offs and late-afternoon pickups. She had a life to begin, and I did too. Ann and I took some small measure of satisfaction in the fact that she wasn’t born while Trump was president.

  There was the matter of the rest of our lives. If Hillary had won, Ann would have stayed on in her State Department job for at least a few months. Now she’d be gone with me on January 20. I knew I was going to keep working for Obama. I thought I might write a book. That’s about all I knew. I was out of touch with every person and aspect of my life other than the next thing that had to get done. After bringing my new family of four home from the hospital, I
went back to the White House to complete the last two weeks of eight years of work.

  My days shrank to completing a few final pieces of business, packing up my office, and attending one goodbye party after another, fighting off a sense of desolation at who was taking our places. Outside the White House, the inauguration platform was steadily constructed, day by day, like a coffin for your own funeral. The enormity of what I was saying goodbye to was impossible to measure. The people who’d surrounded me, some for ten years; people who’d been in the middle of the most important events we’d ever experienced, perhaps the most important things we would ever experience. This group of people would never be together again. Some were staying in government, seeking posts overseas. Some were headed out to California to ride the wave of technology that had helped bring Obama and then Trump into office. Some, like me, were going to wake up on January 21 without knowing what they were going to do the next day.

  And there was the place. In my first days on the job, I’d marveled at the Oval Office and the fancy rooms; now I roamed the White House complex like a ghost to my own experience. Here was the staircase that led to the Usher’s Office in the residence, where I’d meet Obama after hours to get his speech edits, the words he’d speak in Cairo or announcing our opening to Cuba. Here was the bench out behind the kitchen area, where they’d assemble the flowers for an event or cook the meat on grills for a dinner, where I disappeared sometimes to think because no one could find me there. Here was the milk crate I sat on, down a metal staircase in the inner courtyard of the EEOB, one of the few places you could smoke, where I’d turned over in my head the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote for Obama.