“Blitzer!” a man calls out. A small figure in a long navy cashmere overcoat turns around, in mock surprise.
“You don’t write, you don’t call,” Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchorman, parries.
“Well, you
can call,” shoots back his former colleague Roland Martin. Their
repartee thus concluded, they move on to the mutually fascinating
subject of Washington traffic jams. “I used to have a 9:30 hit on CNN,”
Martin reminisces. “The office was 8.2 miles from my home. It took me 45
minutes.” The CBS News anchor Scott Pelley tells a story about how
members of the press destroyed the lawn during the Monica Lewinsky
scandal and were told that they would be allowed back once the grass was
replanted. The National Park Service replanted the grass outside the
White House, but the journalists weren’t allowed back on the lawn.
Unnoticed
by the reporters, Ben Rhodes walks through the room, a half-beat behind
a woman in leopard-print heels. He is holding a phone to his ear,
repeating his mantra: “I’m not important. You’re important.”
The
Boy Wonder of the Obama White House is now 38. He heads downstairs to
his windowless basement office, which is divided into two parts. In the
front office, his assistant, Rumana Ahmed, and his deputy, Ned Price,
are squeezed behind desks, which face a large television screen, from
which CNN blares nonstop. Large pictures of Obama adorn the walls. Here
is the president adjusting Rhodes’s tie; presenting his darling baby
daughter, Ella, with a flower; and smiling wide while playing with Ella
on a giant rug that says “E Pluribus Unum.”
For
much of the past five weeks, Rhodes has been channeling the president’s
consciousness into what was imagined as an optimistic, forward-looking
final State of the Union. Now, from the flat screens, a challenge to
that narrative arises: Iran has seized two small boats containing 10 American sailors.
Rhodes found out about the Iranian action earlier that morning but was
trying to keep it out of the news until after the president’s speech.
“They can’t keep a secret for two hours,” Rhodes says, with a tone of
mild exasperation at the break in message discipline.
As
the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications,
Rhodes writes the president’s speeches, plans his trips abroad and runs
communications strategy across the White House, tasks that, taken
individually, give little sense of the importance of his role. He is,
according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White
House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping
American foreign policy aside from Potus himself. The president and
Rhodes communicate “regularly, several times a day,” according to Denis
McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, who is known for captaining a tight
ship. “I see it throughout the day in person,” he says, adding that he
is sure that in addition to the two to three hours that Rhodes might
spend with Obama daily, the two men communicate remotely throughout the
day via email and phone calls. Rhodes strategized and ran the successful
Iran-deal messaging campaign, helped negotiate the opening of American
relations with Cuba after a hiatus of more than 50 years and has been a
co-writer of all of Obama’s major foreign-policy speeches. “Every day he
does 12 jobs, and he does them better than the other people who have
those jobs,” Terry Szuplat, the longest-tenured member of the National
Security Council speechwriting corps, told me. On the largest and
smallest questions alike, the voice in which America speaks to the world
is that of Ben Rhodes.
Like
Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an
agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is
adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains,
their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully
chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior
officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s
foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social
media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His
ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more
effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number
of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional
real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility
for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a
master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative
writing — is still startling.
Part
of what accounts for Rhodes’s influence is his “mind meld” with the
president. Nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase “mind
meld” verbatim, some with casual assurance and others in the hushed
tones that are usually reserved for special insights. He doesn’t think
for the president, but he knows what the president is thinking, which is
a source of tremendous power. One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting
in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, “I
don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”
Standing
in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does
the political math on the breaking Iran story. “Now they’ll show scary
pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,” he predicts, looking
at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to
stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. “We’re resolving this, because
we have relationships,” he says.
Price
turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s
well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and
newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at
critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior
White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce
from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing
podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and
across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of
insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for
mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news
microclimate — a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of
nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.
Rhodes
logs into his computer. “It’s the middle of the [expletive] night in
Iran,” he grumbles. Price looks up from his keyboard to provide a
messaging update: “Considering that they have 10 of our guys in custody,
we’re doing O.K.”
With
three hours to go until the president’s address to Congress, Rhodes
grabs a big Gatorade and starts combing through the text of the State of
the Union address. I peek over his shoulder, to get a sense of the
meta-narrative that will shape dozens of thumb-suckers in the days and
weeks to follow. One sentence reads: “But as we focus on destroying
ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into
their hands.” He retypes a word, then changes it back, before continuing
with his edit. “Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks,
twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages — they pose an enormous
danger to civilians; they have to be stopped. But they do not threaten
our national existence.”
Watching
Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is
using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative
and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page
imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials,
the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and
ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking
points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision about who
Americans are and where we are going that Rhodes and the president have
been formulating together over the past seven years. When I asked Jon
Favreau, Obama’s lead speechwriter in the 2008 campaign, and a close
friend of Rhodes’s, whether he or Rhodes or the president had ever
thought of their individual speeches and bits of policy making as part
of some larger restructuring of the American narrative, he replied, “We
saw that as our entire job.”
Having
recently spent time working in Hollywood, I realize during our
conversations that the role Rhodes plays in the White House bears less
resemblance to any specific character on Beltway-insider TV shows like
“The West Wing” or “House of Cards” than it does to the people who
create those shows. And like most TV writers, Rhodes clearly prefers to
imagine himself in the company of novelists.
“What novel is this that you are living in now and will exit from in eight months and be like, ‘Oh, my God’?” I ask him.
“Who would be the author of this novel?” he asks.
“The one you are a character in now?”
“Don DeLillo, I think,” Rhodes answers. “I don’t know how you feel about Don DeLillo.”
“I love Don DeLillo,” I answer.
“Yeah,”
Rhodes answers. “That’s the only person I can think of who has
confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds
himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific
kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to
work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.”
It has been rare
to find Ben Rhodes’s name in news stories about the large events of the
past seven years, unless you are looking for the quotation from an
unnamed senior official in Paragraph 9. He is invisible because he is
not an egotist, and because he is devoted to the president. But once you
are attuned to the distinctive qualities of Rhodes’s voice — which is
often laced with aggressive contempt for anyone or anything that stands
in the president’s way — you can hear him everywhere.
Rhodes’s
mother and father are not interested in talking about Rhodes. Neither
is his older brother, David, who is president of CBS News, an
organization that recently revived the effort to declassify the contents
of the redacted 28 pages of the Sept. 11 report on the eve of Obama’s
visit to Saudi Arabia, on which Rhodes, as usual, accompanied the
president. The brothers are close, but they often go months without
seeing each other. “He was like the kid who carried the briefcase to
school,” Ben says of his brother, who worked at Fox News and Bloomberg
before moving to CBS. “I actually didn’t do that great in high school
because I was drinking and smoking pot and hanging out in Central Park.”
Rhodes’s
impassioned yet depressive vibe, which I feel in his stray remarks and
in the strangeness of his decision to allow me to roam around the White
House, stems in part from feeling overloaded; he wishes he had more time
to think and write. His mother is Jewish from the Upper East Side, and
worships John Updike, and reads The New Yorker. His father is a Texan
lawyer who took his sons to St. Thomas Episcopal Church once a month,
where Rhodes felt like the Jewish kid in church, the same way he felt
like a “Jewish Christian” at Passover Seders. His New York City
prep-school-kid combination of vulnerability, brattiness and passionate
hatred for phonies suggests an only slightly updated version of what
Holden Caulfield might have been like if he grew up to work in the West
Wing.
Rhodes’s
windowless back office, which doesn’t have a TV screen, is an oasis of
late-night calm in a building devoted to the performance of power. The
walls are painted a soft creamy color, which gives it the feel of an
upscale hotel room with the drapes closed. He arrives here every morning
between 8 and 9 from a modest two-bedroom apartment in a
grad-student-type building in an unpretentious Washington neighborhood
around the corner from his favorite post-collegiate bar. Before coming
to work, he walks his 1-year-old daughter to day care. Then he drives to
work in his Beamer, which appears to be the one grown-up luxury he and
his wife, Ann Norris, who works in the State Department and longs to
return to her childhood home of California, can afford. When his wife
takes the car, he rides the bus, which offers him a touch of the
anonymity he craves. His days at the White House start with the
president’s daily briefing, which usually includes the vice president,
National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Adviser
Avril Haines and Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco.
The
books on his shelves are a mix of DeLillo novels, history books,
recondite tomes on Cuba and Burma and adventure-wonk stuff like Mark
Mazzetti’s “The Way of the Knife.” C. S. Lewis makes an appearance here,
alongside a volume of Lincoln speeches (Obama tells all his
speechwriters to read Lincoln) and George Orwell’s “All Art Is
Propaganda.” I have seen the same books on the shelves of plenty of
Brooklyn apartments. Yet some large part of the recent history of
America and its role in the world turns on the fact that the entirely
familiar person sitting at the desk in front of me, who seems not unlike
other weed-smokers I know who write Frederick Barthelme-type short
stories, has achieved a “mind meld” with President Obama and used his
skills to help execute a radical shift in American foreign policy.
So I wonder: How did he get from there to here?
The story that Rhodes published in The Beloit Fiction Journal is a good place to start.
The goldfish idea, I’m told, had been Ms. Wellberg’s.
“Why?” I ask. She is dyed blond, slim, petite, attractive.
“You take meticulous notes,” she slurs.
The
editor at Foreign Policy who read “Goldfish,” which Rhodes attached
with his query letter, said that the young M.F.A. would be bored with
fact-checking. Instead, he suggested that he apply for a job with Lee
Hamilton, the onetime congressman from Indiana, who was looking for a
speechwriter.
“I
was surprised,” Hamilton remembered. “What the hell does a guy who
wanted to write fiction come to me for?” But he had always found writers
useful, and Rhodes’s writing sample was the best in the pile. So he
hired him on at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank. Though
Rhodes never said a word in meetings, Hamilton says, he had a keen
understanding of what was going on and a talent for putting the
positions of distinguished participants down on paper. “I immediately
understood that it’s a very important quality for a staffer,” Hamilton
explained, “that he could come into a meeting and decide what was
decided.” I suggested that the phrase “decide what was decided” is
suggestive of the enormous power that might accrue to someone with
Rhodes’s gifts. Hamilton nodded. “Absolutely,” he said.
The notes go on and on. They have ideas with subsets of ideas and reactions to ideas indented beneath the original ideas. The handwriting is perfect. The representation of what happened in the meetings immaculate, like a mirror’s reflection after it has been scrubbed clean. I have a reputation for my notes.
Rhodes
served as Hamilton’s staff member on the 9/11 Commission, where he met
Denis McDonough, another Hamilton protégé, who had gone on to work for
Tom Daschle in the Senate. Rhodes then became the chief note-taker for
the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission that excoriated George
Bush’s war in Iraq. He accompanied Hamilton and his Republican
counterpart on the group, former secretary of state and Bush family
intimate James Baker, to their meetings with Colin Powell, Condoleezza
Rice, Stephen Hadley, David Petraeus and many others (Vice President
Dick Cheney met with the group but didn’t say a word). According to both
Hamilton and Edward Djerejian, Baker’s second on the I.S.G., Rhodes’s
opinions were helpful in shaping the group’s conclusions — a scathing
indictment of the policy makers responsible for invading Iraq. For
Rhodes, who wrote much of the I.S.G. report, the Iraq war was proof, in
black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the
many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that
the decision-makers were morons.
One
result of this experience was that when Rhodes joined the Obama
campaign in 2007, he arguably knew more about the Iraq war than the
candidate himself, or any of his advisers. He had also developed a
healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment,
including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington
Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war
and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of
neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown
fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the
American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes,
the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war
promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse
of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.
Boost thinks very highly of me. My notes are so impressive that they have taken on the form of ideas, he feels. I capture other people’s words in a manner that not only organizes them, but inserts a clarity and purpose that was not present in the original idea. Connections are made between two opposing ideas that were not apparent in the meeting. I have gotten at not only the representation of things, but the way that the mind actually works.
Jon
Favreau, then the campaign’s lead speechwriter, felt as if he could use
a foreign-affairs expert who could write. “Foreign-policy advisers kept
changing all the language that made Obama sound like he wasn’t part of
the Democratic foreign-policy establishment,” he remembers. “The idea of
someone with a masters in fiction who had also co-authored the Iraq
Study Group and 9/11 Commission reports seemed perfect for a candidate
who put so much emphasis on storytelling.” The two young speechwriters
quickly found themselves to be in sync. “He truly gives zero [expletive]
about what most people in Washington think,” Favreau says admiringly of
Rhodes. “I think he’s always seen his time there as temporary and won’t
care if he’s never again invited to a cocktail party, or asked to
appear on ‘Morning Joe,’ or inducted into the Council on Foreign
Relations hall of fame or whatever the hell they do there.”
I sit next to Boost in the meetings. The ideas fly like radio waves. I am silent in these meetings, taking notes.
“He
was easily underestimatable,” Samantha Power recalls, of Rhodes’s
arrival on the Obama campaign in 2007. Herself a writer, whose history
of America’s responses to genocide, “A Problem From Hell,” won the
Pulitzer Prize, Power went to work in Obama’s Senate office in 2005.
Power is now the American ambassador to the United Nations. Her attire
suggests a disingenuous ambivalence about her role in government that
appears to be common among her cohort in the Obama administration, with a
cardigan made of thick, expensive-looking cashmere worn over a simple
frock, along with silver spray-painted rock ’n’ roll sneakers. See, I’m
sympatico, the sneakers proclaim.
Early
on, what struck her about Rhodes was how strategic he was. “He was
leading quietly, initially, and mainly just through track changes, like
what to accept and reject,” she says. When I ask her where Rhodes’s
control over drafts of the candidate’s speeches came from, she
immediately answers, “Obama,” but then qualifies her answer. “But it was
Hobbesian,” she adds. “He had the pen. And he understood intuitively
that having the pen gave him that control.” His judgment was superior to
that of his rivals, and he refused to ever back down. “He was just
defiant,” she recalls. “He was like: ‘No, I’m not. That’s bad. Obama
wouldn’t want that.’ ”
Obama
relies on Rhodes for “an unvarnished take,” in part, she says, because
“Ben just has no poker face,” and so it’s easy to see when he is feeling
uncomfortable. “The president will be like, ‘Ben, something on your
mind?’ And then Ben will have this incredibly precise lay-down of why
the previous half-hour has been an utter waste of time, because there’s a
structural flaw to the entire direction of the conversation.”
The
literary character that Rhodes most closely resembles, Power
volunteers, is Holden Caulfield. “He hates the idea of being phony, and
he’s impetuous, and he has very strong views.”
In Afghanistan the Taliban dynamites enormous statues of Buddha, the ancient material imploding and crumbling to the ground, small specks of men can be seen watching in the foreground. This is somewhere else. Far away.
On his first day
in the West Wing, Rhodes remembers thinking how remarkably small the
space was, and noticing that the same few dozen people he worked with at
campaign headquarters in Chicago were now wearing suits instead of
jeans. The enormousness of the endeavor sank in on that first day, and
he realized that for all the prep work, there was no manual for how to
be on the staff of the person who is running the country, particularly
at a time when the global economy was in free fall and 180,000 Americans
were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He became aware of two things at
once: the weight of the issues that the president was confronted with,
and the intense global interest in even the most mundane presidential
communications.
The
job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United
States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant
ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in
Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard
for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business
— 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs
over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news
they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in
the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the
“content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the
game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on
its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which
words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out
a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a
hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have
foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to
them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are
reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk
to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of
being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally
know nothing.”
In
this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many
people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how
it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he
explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own
dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force
multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out
to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them — ”
“I
can name them,” I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington
reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House
messaging.
Price
laughed. “I’ll say, ‘Hey, look, some people are spinning this narrative
that this is a sign of American weakness,’ ” he continued, “but — ”
“In fact it’s a sign of strength!” I said, chuckling.
“And
I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I
know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have
huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on
their own.”
This
is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an
art best practiced in person. In a world where experienced reporters
competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a
cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder
to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time. Now the most
effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always
carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to
necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.
When
I later visited Obama’s former campaign mastermind David Axelrod in
Chicago, I brought up the soft Orwellian vibe of an information space
where old media structures and hierarchies have been erased by Silicon
Valley billionaires who convinced the suckers that information was
“free” and everyone with access to Google was now a reporter. Axelrod, a
former newspaperman, sighed. “It’s not as easy as standing in front of a
press conference and speaking to 70 million people like past presidents
have been able to do,” he said. The bully pulpit by and large doesn’t
exist anymore, he explained. “So more and more, over the last couple of
years, there’s been an investment in alternative means of communication:
using digital more effectively, going to nontraditional sources,
understanding where on each issue your constituencies are going to be
found,” he said. “I think they’ve approached these major foreign-policy
challenges as campaign challenges, and they’ve run campaigns, and those
campaigns have been very sophisticated.”
Rhodes’s innovative campaign
to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future
administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The
way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal
presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with
Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political
reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought
moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the
purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story
are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to
take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. Obama’s
closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with
Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his
presidency. “It’s the center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to me two
days after the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action, was implemented. He then checked off the ways in which the
administration’s foreign-policy aims and priorities converged on Iran.
“We don’t have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other
ways to resolve these issues,” he said. “We can do things that challenge
the conventional thinking that, you know, ‘AIPAC doesn’t like this,’ or
‘the Israeli government doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the gulf countries
don’t like it.’ It’s the possibility of improved relations with
adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the
president’s been spinning — and I mean that not in the press sense — for
almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.”
In
the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in
2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan
Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to
pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to
negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The
president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the
nuclear deal on July 14, 2015: “Today, after two years of negotiations,
the United States, together with our international partners, has
achieved something that decades of animosity has not.” While the
president’s statement was technically accurate — there had in fact been
two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the
J.C.P.O.A. — it was also actively misleading, because the most
meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012,
many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an
election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran
was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad
public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in
the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to
moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their
neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have
otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy
choices that his administration was making. By eliminating the fuss
about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a
source of structural tension between the two countries, which would
create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established
system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and
Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin
the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.
The
nerve center for the selling of the Iran deal to Congress, which took
place in a concentrated three-month period between July and September of
last year, was located inside the White House, and is referred to by
its former denizens as “the war room.” Chad Kreikemeier, a Nebraskan who
had worked in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, helped run
the team, which included three to six people from each of several
agencies, he says, which were the State Department, Treasury, the
American delegation to the United Nations (i.e., Samantha Power), “at
times D.O.D.” (the Department of Defense) and also the Department of
Energy and the National Security Council. Rhodes “was kind of like the
quarterback,” running the daily video conferences and coming up with
lines of attack and parry. “He was extremely good about immediately
getting to a phrase or a way of getting the message out that just made
more sense,” Kreikemeier remembers. Framing the deal as a choice between
peace and war was Rhodes’s go-to move — and proved to be a winning
argument.
The
person whom Kreikemeier credits with running the digital side of the
campaign was Tanya Somanader, 31, the director of digital response for
the White House Office of Digital Strategy, who became known in the war
room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal. Early on, Rhodes asked her to
create a rapid-response account that fact-checked everything related to
the Iran deal. “So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is
literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,”
Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the
different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts,
the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking
tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was
able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for
them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no
potential negative comment passed without a tweet.
As
she explained how the process worked, I was struck by how naïve the
assumption of a “state of nature” must seem in an information
environment that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and
reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write
about. “People construct their own sense of source and credibility now,”
she said. “They elect who they’re going to believe.” For those in need
of more traditional-seeming forms of validation, handpicked Beltway
insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of
Al-Monitor helped retail the administration’s narrative. “Laura Rozen
was my RSS feed,” Somanader offered. “She would just find everything and
retweet it.”
Rhodes’s
messaging campaign was so effective not simply because it was a
perfectly planned and executed example of digital strategy, but also
because he was personally involved in guiding the deal itself. In July
2012, Jake Sullivan, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, traveled to
Muscat, Oman, for the first meeting with the Iranians, taking a message
from the White House. “It was, ‘We’re prepared to open a direct channel
to resolve the nuclear agreement if you are prepared to do the same
thing and authorize it at the highest levels and engage in a serious
discussion on these issues,’ ” Sullivan remembers. “Once that was agreed
to, it was quickly decided that we resolve the nuclear agreement in two
steps, the interim agreement and the final agreement.” Subsequent
meetings with the Iranians followed, during which he was joined by
Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns. “Bill and I had a huge amount of
license to explore what the terms would look like, within the
negotiating parameters,” Sullivan says. “What the precise trade-offs
would be, between forms of sanctions relief and forms of restraints on
their programs, that was left to us to feel out.”
The
fact that the president largely let his surrogates do the talking and
the selling of the Iran deal — and even now, rarely talks about it in
public — does not reflect his level of direct engagement. Sullivan and
Burns spent hours before and after every session in Oman with the
president and his closest advisers in the White House. When the
president wasn’t present, Rhodes always was. “Ben and I, in particular,
the two of us, spent a lot of time thinking through all the angles,”
Sullivan says. “We spent three, four, five hours together in Washington
talking things through before the meetings.” In March 2013, a full three
months before the elections that elevated Hassan Rouhani to the office
of president, Sullivan and Burns finalized their proposal for an interim
agreement, which became the basis for the J.C.P.O.A.
The
White House point person during the later stage of the negotiations was
Rob Malley, a favored troubleshooter who is currently running
negotiations that could keep the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in
power. During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always
kept in close contact with Rhodes. “I would often just call him and say,
‘Give me a reality check,’ ” Malley explained. “He could say, ‘Here is
where I think the president is, and here is where I think he will be.’ ”
He continued, “Ben would try to anticipate: Does it make sense
policywise? But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to
Congress? How do we sell it to the public? What is it going to do to our
narrative?”
Malley
is a particularly keen observer of the changing art of political
communication; his father, Simon Malley, who was born in Cairo, edited
the politics magazine Afrique Asie and proudly provided a platform for
Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat, in the days when the leaders’ words might
take weeks to travel from Cuba or Cairo to Paris. “The Iran experience
was the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and messaging
all had to be brought together, and I think that Ben is really at the
intersection of all three,” Malley says. “He reflects and he shapes at
the same time.”
As
Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy
Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal
negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that
had already been agreed upon, Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol
Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of
arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social
media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless
reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him
to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the
deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to
say.”
When
I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed
from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes
nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse
the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who
was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use
outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So
we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the
Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.
Yet
Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been anything deceptive
about the way that the agreement itself was sold. “Look, with Iran, in a
weird way, these are state-to-state issues. They’re agreements between
governments. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that Rouhani and
Zarif” — Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister — “are real
reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction
that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in
some respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on that.”
In
fact, Rhodes’s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the
technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular
optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those
are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it
derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting
American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of
American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely. When
I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin
campaign being run by a different administration is something that
scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober,
reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take
a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”
Getting Rhodes to
speak directly about the man whose gestalt he channels is a bit like
asking someone to look into a mirror while describing someone else’s
face. The Obama he talks about in public is, in part, a character that
he has helped to create — based on a real person, of course — and is
embedded in story lines that he personally constructs and manages. At
the same time, he believes very deeply in Obama, the man and the
president, and in the policies that he has helped to structure and sell
on his behalf.
Obama’s
particular revulsion against a certain kind of global power politics is
a product, Rhodes suggests, of his having been raised in Southeast
Asia. “Indonesia was a place where your interaction at that time with
power was very intimate, right?” Rhodes asks. “Tens or hundreds of
thousands of people had just been killed. Power was not some abstract
thing,” he muses. “When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy,
it’s like a Risk game, or it’s all about us, or the human beings
disappear from the decisions. But he lived in a place where he was
surrounded by people who had either perpetrated those acts — and by the
way, may not have felt great about that — or else knew someone who was a
victim. I don’t think there’s ever been an American president who had
an experience like that at a young age of what power is.”
The
parts of Obama’s foreign policy that disturb some of his friends on the
left, like drone strikes, Rhodes says, are a result of Obama’s
particular kind of globalism, which understands the hard and at times
absolute necessity of killing. Yet, at the same time, they are also ways
of avoiding more deadly uses of force — a kind of low-body-count spin
move.
He
leans back and opens a drawer in the file cabinet behind his desk, and
removes a folder. “I was going to show you something,” he says, removing
a sheaf of yellow legal paper covered in longhand. “Just to confirm for
you that he really is a writer.” He shows me the president’s copy of
his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, a revision of an original draft
by Favreau and Rhodes whose defining tension was accepting a prize
awarded before he had actually accomplished anything. In his longhand
notes, Obama relocated the speech’s tension in the fact that he was
accepting a peace prize a week after ordering 30,000 more troops to
Afghanistan. King and Gandhi were the author’s heroes, yet he couldn’t
act as they did, because he runs a state. The reason that the author had
to exercise power was because not everyone in the world is rational.
We
sit for a while, and I examine the president’s thoughts unfolding on
the page, and the lawyerly, abstract nature of his writing process.
“Moral imagination, spheres of identity, but also move beyond cheap lazy
pronouncements,” one note reads. Here was the new American self —
rational, moral, not self-indulgent. No longer one thing but multiple
overlapping spheres or circles. Who is described here? As usual, the
author is describing himself.
Valerie
Jarrett has been called the president’s work wife and is the only
member of the West Wing staff who knew Obama before he began
contemplating a run for the presidency. What I want to understand
better, I tell her, are the swirls of the president’s emotional
fingerprint, which I saw in the longhand draft of his Nobel speech. We
talk for a while about being American and at the same time being from
somewhere else, and the split-screen experience of reality that
experience allows. Jarrett was born in Iran and spent her early
childhood there.
“Was
it a point of connection between you and the president that you had
each spent some substantial part of your childhoods living in another
country?” I ask. Her face lights up.
“Absolutely,”
she answers. The question is important to her. “The first conversation
we had over dinner, when we first met, was about what it was like for
both of us to live in countries that were predominantly Muslim countries
at formative parts of our childhood and the perspective it gave us
about the United States and how uniquely excellent it is,” she says. “We
talked about what it was like to be children, and how we played with
children who had totally different backgrounds than our own but you
would find something in common.” She recalls her very first dinner
together with the new fiancé of her protégée Michelle Robinson. “I
remember him asking me questions that I felt like no one else has ever
asked me before,” she says, “and he asked me from a perspective of
someone who knew the same experience that I had. So it felt really good.
I was like, ‘Oh, finally someone who gets it.’ ”
Barack Obama is not
a standard-issue liberal Democrat. He openly shares Rhodes’s contempt
for the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its
hangers-on in the press. Yet one problem with the new script that Obama
and Rhodes have written is that the Blob may have finally caught on.
“He
is a brilliant guy, but he has a real problem with what I call the
assignment of bad faith,” one former senior official told me of the
president. “He regards everyone on the other side at this point as being
a bunch of bloodthirsty know-nothings from a different era who play by
the old book. He hears arguments like, ‘We should be punching Iran in
the nose on its shipments of arms, and do it publicly,’ or ‘We should
sanction the crap out of them for their ballistic-missile test and tell
them that if they do it again we’re going to do this or we’re going to
do that,’ and he hears Dick Cheney in those arguments.”
Another
official I spoke to put the same point more succinctly: “Clearly the
world has disappointed him.” When I asked whether he believed that the
Oval Office debate over Syria policy in 2012 — resulting in a decision
not to support the uprising against Assad in any meaningful way — had
been an honest and open one, he said that he had believed that it was,
but has since changed his mind. “Instead of adjusting his policies to
the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing
realities on the ground, the conclusions he draws are exactly the same,
no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests,” he says.
“In an odd way, he reminds me of Bush.” The comparison is a startling
one — and yet, questions of tone aside, it is uncomfortably easy to see
the similarities between the two men, American presidents who projected
their own ideas of the good onto an indifferent world.
One
of the few charter members of the Blob willing to speak on the record
is Leon Panetta, who was Obama’s head of the C.I.A. and secretary of
defense and also enough of a product of a different culture to give
honest answers to what he understands to be questions of consequence. At
his institute at the old Fort Ord in Seaside, Calif., where, in the
days before he wore Mr. Rogers sweaters, he served as a young Army
intelligence officer, I ask him about a crucial component of the
administration’s public narrative on Iran: whether it was ever a salient
feature of the C.I.A.’s analysis when he ran the agency that the
Iranian regime was meaningfully divided between “hard-line” and
“moderate” camps.
“No,”
Panetta answers. “There was not much question that the Quds Force and
the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm, and there was not
much question that this kind of opposing view could somehow gain any
traction.”
I
ask Panetta whether, as head of the C.I.A., or later on, as secretary
of defense, he ever saw the letters that Obama covertly sent to
Khamenei, in 2009 and in 2012, which were only reported on by the press
weeks later.
“No,”
he answers, before saying he would “like to believe” that Tom Donilon,
national security adviser since 2010, and Hillary Clinton, then
secretary of state, had a chance to work on the offer they presented.
As
secretary of defense, he tells me, one of his most important jobs was
keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his defense
minister, Ehud Barak, from launching a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s
nuclear facilities. “They were both interested in the answer to the
question, ‘Is the president serious?’ ” Panetta recalls. “And you know
my view, talking with the president, was: If brought to the point where
we had evidence that they’re developing an atomic weapon, I think the
president is serious that he is not going to allow that to happen.”
Panetta stops.
“But would you make that same assessment now?” I ask him.
“Would I make that same assessment now?” he asks. “Probably not.”
He
understands the president’s pivot toward Iran as the logical result of a
deeply held premise about the negative effects of use of American
military force on a scale much larger than drone strikes or Special
Forces raids. “I think the whole legacy that he was working on was, ‘I’m
the guy who’s going to bring these wars to an end, and the last goddamn
thing I need is to start another war,’ ” he explains of Obama. “If you
ratchet up sanctions, it could cause a war. If you start opposing their
interest in Syria, well, that could start a war, too.”
In
Panetta’s telling, his own experience at the Pentagon under Obama
sometimes resembled being installed in the driver’s seat of a car and
finding that the steering wheel and brakes had been disconnected from
the engine. Obama and his aides used political elders like him, Robert
Gates and Hillary Clinton as cover to end the Iraq war, and then decided
to steer their own course, he suggests. While Panetta pointedly never
mentions Rhodes’s name, it is clear whom he is talking about.
“There
were staff people who put themselves in a position where they kind of
assumed where the president’s head was on a particular issue, and they
thought their job was not to go through this open process of having
people present all these different options, but to try to force the
process to where they thought the president wanted to be,” he says.
“They’d say, ‘Well, this is where we want you to come out.’ And I’d say
‘[expletive], that’s not the way it works. We’ll present a plan, and
then the president can make a decision.’ I mean, Jesus Christ, it is the
president of the United States, you’re making some big decisions here,
he ought to be entitled to hear all of those viewpoints and not to be
driven down a certain path.”
But
that can’t be true, I tell Panetta, because the aides he is talking
about had no independent power aside from the authority that the
president himself gave them.
“Well,
that’s a good question,” Panetta allows. “He’s a smart guy, he’s not
dumb.” It’s all part of the Washington blame game. Just as Panetta can
blame young aides in order to avoid blaming the president for his actual
choices, the president used his aides to tell Panetta to take a hike.
Perhaps the president and his aides were continually unable to predict
the consequences of their actions in Syria, and made mistake after
mistake, while imagining that it was going to come out right the next
time. “Another read, which isn’t necessarily opposed to that,” I
continue, “is that their actual picture is entirely coherent. But if
they put it in blunt, unnuanced terms — ”
Panetta
completes my sentence: “ — they’d get the [expletive] kicked out of
them.” He looks at me curiously. “Let me ask you something,” he says.
“Did you present this theory to Ben Rhodes?”
“Oh, God,” Rhodes
says. “The reason the president has bucked a lot of establishment
thinking is because he does not agree with establishment thinking. Not
because I or Denis McDonough are sitting here.” He pushes back in his
chair. “The complete lack of governance in huge swaths of the Middle
East, that is the project of the American establishment,” he declares.
“That as much as Iraq is what angered me.”
There
is something dangerously naïve about this kind of talk, in which words
like “balance,” “stakeholders” and “interests” are endlessly reshuffled
like word tiles in a magnetic-poetry set, with little regard for the
immutable contingencies that shaped America’s role in the world. But
that’s hardly fair. Ben Rhodes wanted to do right, and maybe, when the
arc of history lands, it will turn out that he did. At least, he tried.
Something scared him, and made him feel as if the grown-ups in
Washington didn’t know what they were talking about, and it’s hard to
argue that he was wrong.
What
has interested me most about watching him and his cohort in the White
House over the past seven years, I tell him, is the evolution of their
ability to get comfortable with tragedy. I am thinking specifically
about Syria, I add, where more than 450,000 people have been
slaughtered.
“Yeah,
I admit very much to that reality,” he says. “There’s a numbing element
to Syria in particular. But I will tell you this,” he continues. “I
profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things
better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of
what happens when we’re there — nearly a decade in Iraq.”
Iraq
is his one-word answer to any and all criticism. I was against the Iraq
war from the beginning, I tell Rhodes, so I understand why he
perpetually returns to it. I also understand why Obama pulled the plug
on America’s engagement with the Middle East, I say, but it was also
true as a result that more people are dying there on his watch than died
during the Bush presidency, even if very few of them are Americans.
What I don’t understand is why, if America is getting out of the Middle
East, we are apparently spending so much time and energy trying to
strong-arm Syrian rebels into surrendering to the dictator who murdered
their families, or why it is so important for Iran to maintain its
supply lines to Hezbollah. He mutters something about John Kerry, and
then goes off the record, to suggest, in effect, that the world of the
Sunni Arabs that the American establishment built has collapsed. The
buck stops with the establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean
up their mess.
It
is clearly time for me to go. Rhodes walks me out into the sunlight of
the West Wing parking lot, where we are treated to the sight of the aged
Henry Kissinger, who has come to pay a visit. I ask Rhodes if he has
ever met the famous diplomat before, and he tells me about the time they
were seated together at a state dinner for the president of China. It
was an interesting encounter to imagine, between Kissinger, who made
peace with Mao’s China while bombing Laos to bits, and Rhodes, who
helped effect a similar diplomatic volte-face with Iran but kept the
United States out of a civil war in Syria, which has caused more than
four million people to become refugees. I ask Rhodes how it felt being
seated next to the embodiment of American realpolitik. “It was surreal,”
he says, looking off into the middle distance. “I told him I was going
to Laos,” he continues. “He got a weird look in his eye.”
There
is nothing snarky about his delivery. Rhodes just was bothered by
seeing legless kids and unexploded cluster bombs in the jungle. He is
not Henry Kissinger, or so his logic runs, even as the underlying
realist suspicion — or contempt — for the idea of America as a moral
actor is eerily similar. He is torn. As the president himself once
asked, how are we supposed to weigh the tens of thousands who have died
in Syria against the tens of thousands who have died in Congo? What
power means is that the choice is yours, no matter who is telling the
story.
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