by Obama Barack
Later, as we sat having dinner at our hotel’s outdoor restaurant, we were informed that a heavy fog had settled over Corcovado and we might have to cancel the trip to see Christ the Redeemer. Malia and Sasha didn’t look all that disappointed. I watched as they questioned the waiter about the dessert menu and felt a little bruised by their lack of enthusiasm. With more of my time spent monitoring developments in Libya, I was seeing the family even less on this trip than I did at home, and it compounded my sense—already too frequent of late—that my daughters were growing up faster than I’d expected. Malia was about to be a teenager—her teeth glinting with braces, her hair in a ropy ponytail, her body stretched as if on some invisible rack, so that somehow overnight she’d become long and lean and almost as tall as her mother. At nine, Sasha at least still looked like a kid, with her sweet grin and dimpled cheeks, but I’d noticed a shift in her attitude toward me: She was less inclined to let me tickle her these days; she seemed impatient and a touch embarrassed when I tried to hold her hand in public.
I continued to marvel at how steady the two of them were, how well they’d adapted to the odd and extraordinary circumstances in which they were growing up, gliding seamlessly between audiences with the pope and trips to the mall. Mostly, they were allergic to any special treatment or undue attention, just wanting to be like the other kids at school. (When, on the first day of fourth grade, a classmate had tried to get a photo of Sasha, she had taken it upon herself to snatch the camera, warning that he’d better not try that again.) In fact, both girls vastly preferred hanging out at friends’ houses, partly because those households seemed to be less strict about the snacks they ate and the amount of TV they watched, but mainly because it was easier in those places to pretend their lives were normal, even with a Secret Service detail parked on the street outside. And all of this was fine, except for the fact that their lives were never less normal than when they were with me. I couldn’t help fearing that I might lose whatever precious time I had with them before they flew the nest….
“We’re good,” Marvin said, walking up to our table. “Fog’s lifted.”
The four of us then piled into the back of the SUV, and soon we were heading up a winding, tree-lined road in the dark, until our convoy halted abruptly in front of a wide, spotlit plaza. A massive, shining figure seemed to beckon us through the mist. As we made our way up a series of steps, our necks craning back to take in the sight, I felt Sasha grab my hand. Malia slipped an arm around my waist.
“Are we supposed to pray or something?” Sasha asked.
“Why not?” I said. We huddled together then, our heads bowed in silence, with me knowing that at least one of my prayers that night had been answered.
* * *
—
WHETHER OUR BRIEF pilgrimage to that mountaintop helped fulfill my other prayer, I can’t say for certain. I do know that the first few days of the Libya campaign went as well as possible. Gaddafi’s air defenses were quickly dismantled. European jets had moved into place as promised (with Sarkozy making certain it was a French plane that first crossed into Libyan airspace), executing a series of air strikes against the forces advancing on Benghazi. Within days, Gaddafi’s forces had retreated and our no-fly/no-drive zone had been effectively established across much of the eastern part of the country.
Still, as our Latin American tour continued, I remained on pins and needles. Each morning, I consulted with my national security team via secure videoconference and got updates from General Carter Ham, the commander overseeing the operation, as well as from military leadership at the Pentagon, before reviewing a detailed list of next steps. Beyond maintaining a clear sense of how well we were meeting our military objectives, I wanted to make sure our allies held up their end of the bargain and that the U.S. role didn’t stray beyond the narrow parameters I’d set. I was well aware that the American public’s support for what we were doing was exceedingly thin, and that any setbacks could prove devastating.
We did have one bad scare. On our first night in Santiago, Chile, Michelle and I attended a state dinner hosted by Sebastián Piñera, the gregarious, center-right billionaire who’d been elected president just a year earlier. I was sitting at the head table, listening to Piñera talk about the growing market in China for Chilean wine, when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find Tom Donilon, looking even more stressed than usual.
“What is it?” I asked.
He leaned in to whisper in my ear: “We just received a report that a U.S. fighter jet crashed over Libya.”
“Shot down?”
“Technical failure,” he said. “Two servicemen ejected before the crash, and we’ve picked up one, the pilot. He’s fine…but the weapons officer is still missing. We’ve got search-and-rescue teams near the site of the crash, and I’m in direct contact with the Pentagon, so as soon as there’s news, I’ll let you know.”
As Tom walked away, Piñera gave me a searching look.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I replied, my mind quickly running through scenarios—most of them bad.
For the next ninety minutes or so, I smiled and nodded as Piñera and his wife, Cecilia Morel Montes, told us about their children and how they first met and the best season to visit Patagonia. At some point, a Chilean folk-rock band called Los Jaivas started to perform what sounded like a Spanish version of Hair. The entire time, I waited for another tap on the shoulder. All I could think about was the young officer I had sent into war, who was now possibly injured or captured or worse. I felt as if I might burst. Not until Michelle and I were about to climb into the Beast after dinner did I finally see Tom heading toward us. He was slightly out of breath.
“We have him,” he said. “It seems he was picked up by some friendly Libyans, and he’s going to be fine.”
I wanted to kiss Tom at that moment, but I kissed Michelle instead.
When someone asks me to describe what it feels like to be the president of the United States, I often think about that stretch of time spent sitting helplessly at the state dinner in Chile, contemplating the knife’s edge between perceived success and potential catastrophe—in this case, the drift of a soldier’s parachute over a faraway desert in the middle of the night. It wasn’t simply that each decision I made was essentially a high-stakes wager; it was the fact that unlike in poker, where a player expects and can afford to lose a few big hands even on the way to a winning night, a single mishap could cost a life, and overwhelm—both in the political press and in my own heart—whatever broader objective I might have achieved.
As it was, the jet crash ended up becoming a relative blip. By the time I returned to Washington, the overwhelming superiority of the international coalition’s air forces had left Gaddafi’s loyalists with few places to hide, and opposition militias—including many high-ranking defectors from the Libyan army—began advancing westward. Twelve days into the operation, NATO took command of the mission, with several European countries assuming responsibility for repelling Gaddafi’s forces. By the time I addressed the nation on March 28, the U.S. military had begun to move into a supporting role, primarily helping with logistics, refueling aircraft, and identifying targets.
Given that a number of Republicans had been vocal advocates for intervention, we might have expected some grudging praise for the swift precision of our operation in Libya. But a funny thing had happened while I was traveling. Some of the same Republicans who had demanded that I intervene in Libya had decided that they were now against it. They criticized the mission as being too broad, or coming too late. They complained that I hadn’t consulted with Congress enough, despite the fact that I’d met with senior congressional leaders on the eve of the campaign. They cast doubt on the legal basis for my decision, suggesting that I should have sought congressional authorization under the War Powers Act, a legitimate, long-standing question about presidential power, w
ere it not coming from a party that had repeatedly given previous administrations carte blanche on the foreign policy front, particularly when it came to waging war. The Republicans seemed unembarrassed by the inconsistency. Effectively, they were putting me on notice that even issues of war and peace, life and death, were now part of a grim, unrelenting partisan game.
They weren’t the only ones playing games. Vladimir Putin had been publicly criticizing the U.N. resolution—and, by implication, Medvedev—for allowing a wide mandate for military action in Libya. It was inconceivable that Putin hadn’t signed off on Medvedev’s decision to have Russia abstain rather than veto our resolution, or that he’d failed to understand its scope at the time; and as Medvedev himself pointed out in response to Putin’s comments, coalition fighter jets were continuing to bomb Gaddafi’s forces only because the Libyan strongman showed no signs of calling them into retreat or muzzling the vicious mercenary fighters he sponsored. But clearly that was beside the point. In openly second-guessing Medvedev, Putin seemed to have decided to deliberately make his handpicked successor look bad—a sign, I had to assume, that Putin planned to formally retake the reins in Russia.
Still, March ended without a single U.S. casualty in Libya, and for an approximate cost of $550 million—not much more than what we spent per day on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—we had accomplished our objective of saving Benghazi and its neighboring cities and perhaps tens of thousands of lives. According to Samantha, it was the quickest international military intervention to prevent a mass atrocity in modern history. What would happen with regard to Libya’s government remained unclear. With Gaddafi ordering further attacks even in the face of NATO bombing operations, and with the opposition fueled by a loose coalition of rebel militias, my team and I worried about the prospect of prolonged civil war. According to the U.S. diplomat Hillary had sent to Benghazi to act as a liaison to the emerging governing council there, the opposition was at least saying all the right things about what a post-Gaddafi Libya would look like, emphasizing the importance of free and fair elections, human rights, and rule of law. But with no democratic traditions or institutions to draw on, the councillors had their work cut out for them—and with Gaddafi’s police force no longer in place, the security situation in Benghazi and other rebel areas now had a Wild West aspect.
“Who is it that we sent to Benghazi?” I asked, after hearing one of these dispatches.
“A guy named Chris Stevens,” Denis told me. “Used to be chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, a bunch of Middle East posts before that. Apparently, he and a small team slipped into Benghazi on a Greek cargo ship. Supposed to be excellent.”
“Brave guy,” I said.
* * *
—
ONE QUIET SUNDAY in April, I found myself alone in the residence—the girls were off somewhere with their buddies, Michelle was having lunch with friends—and so I decided to head downstairs to do some work. It was a cool day, in the sixties with a mix of sun and clouds, and walking along the colonnade I took time to appreciate the plush beds of tulips—yellow, red, pink—the groundskeepers had planted in the Rose Garden. I rarely worked at the Resolute desk on weekends, since there were always at least a few West Wing tours passing through, and visitors could catch a glimpse of the Oval Office from behind a red velvet rope only if I wasn’t there. Instead, I usually set up shop in the Oval’s adjoining dining room and study, a comfortable, private area filled with mementos I’d gathered over the years: a framed Life magazine cover of the Selma march, signed by John Lewis; a brick from Abraham Lincoln’s law office in Springfield; a pair of boxing gloves from Muhammad Ali; Ted Kennedy’s painting of the Cape Cod coastline, which he’d sent to me as a gift after I’d admired it in his office. But as the clouds broke and sunlight splashed across the window, I moved myself to the terraced patio just outside the dining room—a lovely, secluded space with hedges and plantings on one side and a small fountain on the other.
I’d carried down a stack of memos to read, but my mind kept drifting. I had just announced that I’d be running for reelection. It was a formality, really, a matter of filing the papers and filming a short video announcement—a stark contrast to that heady, frigid day in Springfield four years earlier when I’d declared my candidacy before a crowd of thousands, promising to deliver hope and change. It seemed like an eternity ago, a time of optimism and youthful energy and undeniable innocence. My reelection campaign would be an entirely different endeavor. Certain of my vulnerability, Republicans were already lining up for the chance to run against me. I’d noticed that my political team had begun to layer a series of early fundraisers into my schedule, anticipating an expensive, bare-knuckle contest. Part of me resented the idea of gearing up for the election so soon—for if my first campaign seemed a distant memory, my actual work as president felt as if it had only just begun. But there was no point arguing about it. I could read the polls myself.
The irony was that our labors of the previous two years were finally bearing some fruit. When I hadn’t been dealing with foreign policy issues, I’d been traveling the country, highlighting the shuttered auto factories that had just reopened, the small businesses that had been saved, the wind farms and energy-efficient vehicles that pointed the way to a clean energy future. A number of infrastructure projects funded by the Recovery Act—roads, community centers, light-rail lines—were already completed. A host of ACA provisions had already come into force. In so many different ways, we’d made the federal government better, more efficient and more responsive. But until the economy really started picking up, none of it would matter much politically. So far, we’d managed to ward off a “double-dip” second recession, in large part thanks to the billions of stimulus dollars we’d attached to the Bush tax cut extension during the lame-duck session. But just barely. And by the looks of it, the new House majority seemed intent on shifting the economy into reverse.
From the moment he’d been elected Speaker in January, John Boehner had insisted that House Republicans had every intention of following through on their campaign pledge to end what he called my “job-crushing spending binge of the last two years.” Speaking after my 2011 State of the Union address, Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chair, had predicted that as a result of such out-of-control spending, the federal debt would “soon eclipse our entire economy and grow to catastrophic levels in the years ahead.” The new crop of GOP members, many of whom had run on a Tea Party platform, were pressing Boehner hard for an immediate, drastic, and permanent reduction in the size of the federal government—a reduction that they believed would finally restore America’s constitutional order and take their country back from corrupt political and economic elites.
Purely as a matter of economics, all of us in the White House thought that enacting the House GOP’s agenda of deep federal spending cuts would result in absolute disaster. Unemployment remained at about 9 percent. The housing market had yet to recover. Americans were still trying to work off the $1.1 trillion in credit card debt and other loans they’d accumulated over the previous decade; millions of people owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth. Businesses and banks faced a similar debt hangover and remained cautious about investing in expansion or making new loans. It was true that the federal deficit had risen sharply since I’d taken office—mainly as a result of lower tax revenues and increased spending on social programs in the aftermath of what was now commonly known as the Great Recession. At my request, Tim Geithner was already mapping out plans to bring the deficit back to pre-crisis levels once the economy had fully rebounded. I’d also formed a commission, headed by former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, to come up with a sensible plan for long-term deficit and debt reduction. But for now, the best thing we could do to lower the deficit was to boost economic growth—and with aggregate demand as weak as it was, this meant more federal spending, not less.
&n
bsp; The problem was that I’d lost the argument in the midterms, at least among those who’d bothered to go to the polls. Not only could Republicans claim they were following the will of the voters in seeking to cut spending, but the election results seemed to have turned all of Washington into deficit hawks. The media was suddenly sounding the alarm about America living beyond its means. Commentators decried the legacy of debt we were foisting on future generations. Even CEOs and Wall Street types, many of whom had benefited, directly or indirectly, from the bailout of the financial system, had the temerity to jump on the anti-deficit bandwagon, insisting that it was high time politicians in Washington did the “courageous” thing by cutting “entitlement spending”—using the misleading catchall term for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social safety net programs. (Few of them expressed interest in sacrificing their own tax breaks to address this supposed crisis.)
In our first skirmish with Boehner, over funding levels for the rest of the 2011 fiscal year, we’d conceded just $38 billion in spending cuts, an amount large enough for Boehner to take back to his conservative caucus members (they had originally sought nearly twice as much) but small enough inside a $3.6 trillion budget to avoid any real economic harm—especially since a big chunk of those cuts amounted to accounting tricks and wouldn’t reduce vital services or programs. Boehner had already signaled, though, that the Republicans would soon be coming back for more, even suggesting that his caucus might withhold the votes necessary to increase the statutory debt limit if we didn’t meet future demands. None of us believed that the GOP would actually act that irresponsibly. After all, raising the debt ceiling was a routine legislative duty observed by both parties, a matter of paying for spending that Congress had already approved, and the failure to do so would result in the United States defaulting on its debt for the first time in history. Still, the fact that Boehner had even broached such a radical idea—and the fact that it had quickly gained traction among Tea Party members and conservative media outlets—offered a hint of what was in store.