Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  Mubarak, once an appealing, energetic leader, was now eighty-one and showing his age. Our visit was his first major event since the devastating loss, a few weeks earlier, of his twelve-year-old grandson. Whether it was grief or the burdens of almost three decades in power, Mubarak seemed weary and unfocused as he listened to Obama’s appeal to their shared interests. “Help us find progress in this peace process and we will reduce the influence of Iran in this part of the world,” Obama told him.

  How many American presidents and their envoys have made similar appeals over the years? I wondered. The old man leaned closer and, in a gravelly voice, offered observations about the region he knew so well. It felt like a scene from The Godfather, an aging don sharing the weary wisdom accumulated over a lifetime of turf wars.

  “Netanyahu says he would accept two states in the end,” Mubarak said of the Israeli prime minister. “‘We want to live in peace,’ he says. I told him that he has to be flexible. I told him, ‘We have peace, but the Palestinians don’t trust you. Do something big!’”

  “We will work for this,” Mubarak told Obama. “But the Middle East is so complicated.”

  After a symbolic visit to one of Cairo’s historic mosques, we made our way through empty streets to Cairo University. Cairo was a ghost town, shut down for Obama’s speech, which was broadcast live on state television and monitored closely throughout the Middle East. As I took a seat among the Egyptian dignitaries near the front of a gold-ceilinged reception hall, there was a palpable sense of anticipation. It would have been a major event if any American president had spoken there. That it was this president at this moment raised hopes that there might be greater understanding, possibly even genuine friendship someday, between America and the Islamic world.

  When Obama punctuated his opening salutation with the traditional Muslim greeting, Assalamu alaykum—“Peace be upon you”—the Egyptians around me burst into smiles and applause.

  “I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect . . . ,” he told them. “But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors.”

  He then delivered on that pledge by acknowledging U.S. government actions that had inflamed the Islamic world: the war in Iraq, our use of torture as a tool of interrogation, and the open-ended detention, without trial, of some at Guantánamo Bay. He also pushed back against the defamation of America that had become the mantra of Islamic extremists.

  “Now, much has been made of the fact that an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama could be elected president,” he said, a point that was lost on no one there. “But my personal story is not so unique. The dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone in America, but its promise exists for all who come to our shores—and that includes nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today . . .”

  The audience repeatedly interrupted Obama’s speech with enthusiastic applause. The clerics relished his every invocation of the words of the Koran. Veiled women in the audience heartily applauded the president’s plea for women’s rights, a sensitive issue in the Middle East. The audience warmly received the president’s call for a Palestinian state, and heartily cheered when he denounced Israel’s development of Jewish settlements in occupied territories as a barrier to peace. Yet the hall was conspicuously quiet when the president made a passionate case for Israel’s right to exist.

  For the speech to be honest and credible, we felt it was essential both to stress our unbreakable bond with Israel and to include a statement condemning new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Opposition to new settlements had been U.S. policy for decades, but the president’s blunt restatement of that position in Cairo and his determined outreach to the Islamic community was seized upon by some critics to cast doubt on Obama’s commitment to Israel’s security and, ultimately, its survival. It was a canard, belied by the unprecedented military aid and unwavering support in international forums the president would give to Israel. And he viewed his persistent call for a resolution to the longstanding siege between the Israelis and Palestinians as a boon to both.

  Obama also gave voice to the democratic aspirations of people across the Middle East, who had found inspiration in his election. “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election,” he said only a few hours after we had sat down with the despotic Mubarak. “But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere . . .”

  Many of the Egyptian officials around me shifted uncomfortably as the president implicitly challenged their domestic politics, where opposition parties were marginalized or banned, the rule of law was administered at the discretion of the rulers, and speech was anything but free. Yet his remarks prompted a rousing response from the auditorium’s balcony, where the university’s students were seated. “Barack Obama, we love you!” one of them shouted.

  Looking back, I am sure the student who shouted in approval was also in Tahrir Square two years later, when the Arab Spring swept Mubarak from power. Perhaps he was even the young man I saw on television proudly hoisting the handmade sign reading, “Yes We Can Too.” Yet that inspiring moment faded into the harsh reality that, as Obama noted presciently in Cairo, elections alone don’t ensure democracy. The democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood proceeded to subdue civil institutions, trample minority rights, and impose its theocratic agenda on the country, while Egypt’s problems continued to grow. Soon, a counterrevolution brought to power a new strongman in the Mubarak tradition, with whom America would necessarily have to deal. Across the region, the hopeful Arab Spring unleashed darker forces, as the impulse for democracy warred with ancient ethnic rivalries.

  As Mubarak said, “The Middle East is a complicated place.”

  After Cairo, the president stopped in Germany, where he would pay his respects to victims of the Holocaust with a visit to Buchenwald, the site of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps.

  We were joined there by Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize–winning author and human rights activist. As a teenager, he had been a prisoner at Buchenwald and witnessed his father die there. His unforgettable memoir, Night, was my most searing vantage point on the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, as it had been for generations since it was first published in the 1950s. “I’ve been back there only once for fifteen minutes, years ago,” Wiesel told us, his eyes brimming with tears. “It’s difficult.”

  While we were together, Rahm asked Wiesel whether it bothered him to share a stage with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, as he would at Buchenwald later that day. “No,” he said, without hesitation. “The children of murderers are not murderers. We cannot carry the sins of the parents forward.”

  Millions had died in the death camps. Others survived with souls forever scarred. Yet this kindly, thoughtful scholar emerged from the nightmare and years of reflection with a kind of spiritual wisdom that, combined with his gift for narrative, had made him the conscience of the world. Having nearly lost his life at Buchenwald, the wispy-haired, sad-eyed Wiesel had spent much of the rest of his life shining an unsparing light on acts of inhumanity.

  “You don’t know this, but you changed my life,” the president told Wiesel, who was sitting beside him in the limousine on our way to the ceremony. “You came to Occidental College in Los Angeles when I was a student there. I still remember the lecture. You brought some much-nee
ded sobriety to my life. You made me realize that it was time to think about something more than myself.”

  I was surprised at how fluent Obama was in Holocaust literature. He engaged Wiesel most deeply on the works of Primo Levi, an Italian scientist turned resistance fighter who wound up a prisoner in Auschwitz. Levi recounted his experiences in a series of books and poems before taking his own life in 1987.

  “I spoke to Primo a few days before he died,” Wiesel told us. “I begged him to let me come spend time with him. I told him I would clear my schedule. He said, ‘It’s too late.’ And I knew he was gone. Primo died at Auschwitz. He lived for another forty years, but he died at Auschwitz.”

  We transferred from the car to Marine One, the president’s helicopter, for the rest of the trip. Wiesel looked out the window as we glided above the heavily wooded German countryside, its lush beauty so incongruous with the death camp the Nazis had built there.

  “I think of how you arrived here the first time, piled into a boxcar,” I said. “Now you’re returning by helicopter with the first African American president of the United States. Maybe history has a sense of justice.”

  Wiesel smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know if history has a sense of justice. But it certainly has a sense of humor.”

  Of all the people I had the honor to meet during my years in the White House, none moved or impressed me more than Wiesel, who would become a loving friend and mentor. Somehow, when I am with him, I feel closer to God.

  • • •

  Having come of age at a time when the prospect of nuclear annihilation was a day-to-day reality, I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the United States and Russia. The showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev over Soviet missiles in Cuba was one of the defining memories of my childhood.

  Obama was only a year old when that scary drama took place, and was living in Hawaii, as remote from the action as you could be and still be in America. Dmitry Medvedev, who became president of the Russian Federation in 2008, was born three years after the Cuban missile crisis. Both were young men when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved. Their political sensibilities and careers had been shaped in a post–Cold War world.

  Yet when Obama took office, relations between the United States and Russia were as chilly as at any time since the Cold War. At the beginning of his first term, President George W. Bush claimed to have looked into the eyes of then President Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB officer who has led Russia since 1999, and got “a sense of his soul.” Bush liked what he saw. Relations between Bush and Putin soured over time, however, reaching their nadir when Russia invaded the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in the summer of 2008. Now Obama hoped to find in Putin’s successor a partner with whom he could deal.

  The United States needed Russia’s help to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and to contain North Korea’s penchant for belligerence. Also, a range of other issues—from the battle with Islamic extremism to the integrity of supply lines for U.S. troops in Afghanistan—required cooperation between the two countries. Moreover, almost a half century after the Cuban missile crisis took the world to the brink, the question of what to do with American and Russian nuclear arsenals was still unresolved.

  As a senator, Obama had focused on the mortal threat that “loose nukes” posed in the age of terrorism. Yet any serious effort to curb nuclear weapons had to begin with the countries that held 95 percent of them, the United States and Russia. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, a nonproliferation treaty between the two nations, had gone into effect at the end of 1994 and was about to expire. At a time when Obama hoped to rally the world around sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, he felt it behooved the United States and Russia to set a good example.

  Obama and Medvedev met for the first time in early 2009 at a G20 summit in London. I was struck then by how young and boyish the forty-three-year-old Medvedev appeared. Yet it was his height—even wearing substantial shoes, he was only five foot four—that made the biggest impression on me. I wondered if his diminutive stature was one of the virtues the vain and vertically challenged Putin, just five seven himself, saw in his handpicked successor and placeholder.

  Appearances aside, the new Russian and American presidents had much in common. Both were cool, pragmatic lawyers largely unburdened by the passions of the Cold War era, and they quickly developed a comfortable working relationship. Medvedev couldn’t ignore Putin, who wielded more power than his new title of prime minister suggested, but at this first meeting, the Russian president still had enough leeway to agree to pursue a nuclear treaty slashing offensive weapons. He also opened the door to cooperation on Iran and other fronts. “You were right about Iran’s capacities and we were wrong,” Medvedev conceded, establishing the candor that would come to characterize their relationship. After the seventy-minute meeting, both men spoke hopefully about a fresh start and a reset in relations.

  A few days later, in Prague, we were reminded of the urgent need for global action to curb the development and spread of nuclear weapons.

  While we were there, I woke up with a start when the phone rang in the middle of the night. “Sir,” the official-sounding voice on the other end began, “this is the Situation Room. I’m calling to let you know that the event we had been anticipating has happened. You might want to get to the skiff.”

  I gathered my wits about me and quickly processed the message. North Korea had fired a missile, in contravention of warnings from the United States and the global community. Our intelligence had been closely monitoring the situation and for weeks had been predicting the inevitability of this latest act of belligerency. I threw on a T-shirt and sweatpants and headed for the hotel room designated as the Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF (the “skiff” my caller mentioned), a secure location—in this case tents specially designed to thwart outside surveillance—where classified communications and discussions could be held. Gibbs was assigned to roust the president. I had left my room so hastily that my hair was standing straight up in the air. When Obama arrived, perfectly groomed, and saw me, he also saw his perfect, unwitting foil. “Axe, I see you decided to dress up as Kim Jong-Il for the occasion,” he said, a reference to the North Korean leader with the famously bizarre hairstyle.

  Even as I unwittingly provided this moment of levity, the scene was intense. And it gave added meaning to evoking the dream of a world without nuclear weapons, and pledging the U.S. to concrete steps toward that goal, including a New START treaty with Russia.

  Three months later, when we arrived in Moscow to advance those talks, the rapport between Obama and Medvedev was apparent. During a nearly four-hour meeting in an ornate, gold-trimmed Kremlin hall, good-natured jousting punctuated their talks. When the subject turned to Moscow’s selective barriers against the importation of American pork in response to the H1N1 virus, Obama said, “I appreciate that you have loosened the restrictions on some states—including my own state of Illinois,” he said. “I’m sure it was a coincidence!” Medvedev grinned broadly. After the meeting, the two men signed a preliminary agreement sketching the outlines of the “New START,” as it would be called, that would yield deeper cuts in the nuclear arsenals of both countries to levels not seen since the early part of the Cold War.

  The morning after signing the preliminary arms agreement Obama met with Putin. Their meeting ran long, and it was a sobering harbinger of a turbulent future. The first hour, the president reported, was devoted almost entirely to Putin’s energetic litany of complaints about the indignities he felt the West had heaped upon Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union. If Medvedev was looking past the Cold War, Putin seemed consumed by it. “You are a highly educated man,” Putin told the president edgily. “I come from the security sector.” Later, I asked the president for his assessment of Putin. “He’s smart, tough, clear about his interests, and without a trace of sentimentality.”

 
• • •

  In the fall of 2009, we traveled to Asia, with Obama’s first visit to China as the centerpiece of the trip. Given Asia’s meteoric growth, Obama sought to make our engagement in that region a key element of his foreign policy. And in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century, no global relationship was more important or complex than the one with this rising superpower. China is a fierce, sophisticated, and sometimes unscrupulous competitor, but with more than a billion people, it is also a huge and growing market for American goods. A notorious currency manipulator, gaming the system to favor Chinese exports, it is also the largest holder of American debt among foreign nations, which makes confrontations over currency and other economic issues tricky. China has cast a troubling shadow over our allies in the region and has expanded its presence to every corner of the world. It seeks the international community’s embrace while routinely violating human rights. Yet it is a necessary ally in forging global responses to challenges such as the ones posed by North Korea and Iran. For the United States, China is a very complicated piece of business.

  On our way there, we were reminded that China is a police state and that we shouldn’t consider our communications secure. There would be hidden surveillance cameras in our hotel rooms, including the bathrooms. I felt nothing but pity for the poor security officer whose job it would be to monitor me showering. While we were there, police swarmed the floors of our hotel. Gary Locke, the secretary of commerce who would later become ambassador to China, returned to his hotel room to find two men rifling through his things.