The World As It Is (2018)
Ben Rhodes (1977)
450 pages
Ben Rhodes worked for Barack Obama for ten years, joining his presidential campaign staff in 2007, and then staying on through the eight years of his administration. Initially brought in as a foreign policy advisor, Rhodes eventually became deputy national security advisor; in addition, he worked on the communications team to coordinate talking points for the administration, and as a lead speech writer for the president. This last activity --- crafting speeches that reflected Obama’s values and goals --- brought him into profound and on-going contact with the president.
In his memoir The World As It Is, Rhodes explores his experiences working for and with Obama. Over the course of the book it becomes clear that Rhodes’ time in the White House working on foreign policy issues had significant and enduring impacts on his thinking about the role of American influence in the world, and especially its limits. In an administration buffeted by an escalating series of foreign crises, Rhodes repeatedly confronted the complexity a president faces in deciding when and where and how to exert American influence. Perhaps most importantly, given the reality of our current moment, he was treated to an up-close look at the damaging consequences of the increasingly acrimonious partisan divide in the U.S. on the government’s ability to exercise American influence in addressing even critical issues and potentially existential threats.To anyone who has even casually followed the news of the past decade, the broad events that Rhodes covers will all ring familiar: the recession the Obama administration inherited; Obama’s speech in Cairo and his being awarded the Nobel Prize; the on-going conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the death of Bin Laden; the Arab Spring and resulting regime changes in Libya and Egypt, including the deaths of the consulate members in Benghazi and the political circus that followed; the civil war in Syria; nuclear treaty negotiations with Iran; and the opening to Cuba. For all of these events and others, Rhodes takes us behind the scenes to provide a fascinating glimpse into the struggles Obama, the administration and Rhodes himself faced in attempting to balance the competing and often conflicting interests of what they wanted to achieve, and the political realities both in the US and globally.
The inside look at Obama and his time in office represents the obvious draw of the book --- a point not lost on whoever chose the subtitle: A Memoir of the Obama White House. As interesting as the up-close view of Obama is, however, the ultimately more engaging and illuminating aspect of the book is looking-in as Rhodes himself grapples with the various crises the administration faced, and the potential responses to them. The complexity of these particular, concrete situations forced him to deeply examine, and at times to reconsider, the beliefs he brought with him to the job.
Of course, Rhodes dealt with these complexities from his position on Obama’s staff, and so not carrying the weight of owning the decision. He was nonetheless acutely aware that what he said --- or chose not to say --- could have direct impact on the decisions Obama would make, and so, at some level, on the course of history. Through his experiences the challenges faced by a conscientious member of an administration become evident; they must perform the difficult balancing act of presenting a president with opinions based on their personal convictions and beliefs, while recognizing the constraints of the politically possible and also adapting to the president’s general directions and policies. And, for someone in a speechwriting role as Rhodes was, understanding these distinctions, and working within them, was particularly relevant. (As it is, more broadly, for those now serving in the administration of Obama’s successor.)
Perhaps not surprisingly, the strain of his years working in the administration, and the challenges it posed to his thinking about what is achievable, is evident in the before and after pictures we see among the photos he includes with the book. Rhodes clearly ages as much as we have become accustomed to seeing a president age in office.
And, in fact, the book represents a kind of autobiographical coming of age story. Rhodes was in New York City on 9/11, and found his ideological reluctance regarding U.S. military engagement abroad tested as he watched:
the second plane hit, stared at the plumes of smoke ballooning into the sky, and then watched the first tower crumble to the ground. … The moment Colin Powell made his case for war [in Iraq] to the United Nations, I was on board. (7-8)His support for the Iraq war came to be tested a few years later, however, when he was invited to join the Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton. What he learned during that work, which included trips to Iraq to see first-hand the consequences of the decision to go to war, led him to conclude that his support for the war had been a mistake, and to re-embrace his fundamental position as “a liberal, skeptical of military adventurism in our history.” (7) He came to decide that he, and many others, had been fooled and misled into going along with the drumbeat for war.
Rhodes entered the White House, then, with his left-of-center views strengthened, and his broad ideological alignment with Obama served him well in his speech-writing role. Helpful too, he found, was his degree in fiction writing. This aspect of any politician’s job, the need to be able to tell a convincing story of what they believe and how they plan to achieve it, was highlighted by Obama to Rhodes late in the administration, at a moment when Rhodes’ education as fiction writer was being used as a knock against him. He recalls the implication being spread in the press as having been that he was writing more fiction than truth into Obama’s speeches.
As this unfolded, Obama happened to be reading Yuval Noah Harari’s engaging and powerful book Sapiens, in which Harari describes how the ability to tell stories became the critical differentiating factor catapulting Homo Sapiens over other human species. (My review of it linked to at right.) Aware of the attacks Rhodes was experiencing, Obama mentioned Harari’s book to him, and noted that, indeed, “storytelling … that’s our job.” (372) Certainly Rhodes seems to have been highly effective at helping craft the points Obama wanted to get across, the stories he wanted and needed to tell.
(For whatever reason, Rhodes does not point out that this kind of fiction, or “storytelling”, was used effectively, including on Rhodes himself, in the run up to the Iraq War that he described earlier in the book and I referred to above in the quote regarding Colin Powell’s presentation at the UN. It would hardly be surprising to discover that those who accused Rhodes of telling fictional stories in the Obama administration were perfectly comfortable with the fictions the Bush administration told regarding Iraq. One person’s fiction is another person’s effective storytelling…)
More problematic for Rhodes, particularly early in the administration, was finding the courage to push forward his opinions in meetings that often contained senior, more highly-placed staff members. As he describes it:
[I entered as] a thirty-year-old closer to a life of part-time work, shared apartments, and partying than my middle-aged counterparts [in the administration who were] decades into respectability. (33)Initially his hesitation was due largely to his relative youth among a group of older and more experienced advisors. Later, however, even as he grew more confident of his place and found his voice, he confronted a more difficult impediment --- a deepening realization of the complexity of converting his ideological beliefs into reality. As he watched Obama wrestle with foreign policy challenges in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Iran, Cuba, Syria and elsewhere, Rhodes came to recognize the tricky combination of US and global political realities, as well as local and regional tensions, which seem to conspire to tie a president’s hands at every turn.
Entering office with intentions of expanding and strengthening U.S. relations around the world, Obama often found himself forced to react to international events and crises, with generally few if any good options. And given an up-close view of these realities, Rhodes gradually found his own ideological certainties embattled. The resulting internal conflicts he had to work through deepened his appreciation for Obama’s ability to navigate these minefields, but also left him questioning the certainty of his own opinions.
Rhodes’ descriptions of Obama’s reactions to and handling of these foreign crises offer little in the way of new information about these events, but we are treated to Rhodes’ insider view of the political maneuvering that surrounded them. Recalling the unending Republican investigations into the tragedy in Benghazi for example, Rhodes presents the mundane reality behind statements made by Obama and his staff in the wake of those events, and his view of the hysteria and hyperbole these statements led to during the seemingly unending series of congressional hearings that followed.
More generally, the administration became increasingly buffeted by the political maneuverings and attacks that characterized the deepening polarization in the U.S., and, along with Obama and the rest of the staff, Rhodes suffered the consequences. He includes among the photos in the book a screenshot of a disgusting piece of hate-mail he received; viewing such personal attacks in the context of the fractured and fractions political divisiveness that plays out daily in public and private life, it is little wonder that his experience in the administration has left him lamenting the breakdown in civil discourse in the U.S., the ability to find any points of compromise.
It seem seems evident that Rhodes wrote the book in part as a chance to set the record straight about events for which he was attacked directly, and, more broadly, for which his colleagues or Obama came under what he found to be unreasonable attack. Of course, there is little chance that his book will change anyone’s fundamental beliefs about Obama, his administration or its policies --- the divisions are too deep at this point. Nonetheless, The World As It Is provides a fascinating glimpse into the workings of our government, and into Obama the man as opposed to the public figure we saw during his presidency.
Most especially, however, we witness the challenging reality of a presidential staff member attempting to put their ideological beliefs into practice while faced with the need to make concrete decisions having powerful ramifications and often uncertain consequences. We walk away with a healthy respect for the difficulties these staff members face, and for their willingness to take up the challenge.
Other reviews / information:
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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