Review
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“Ben Rhodes, who served Barack Obama as a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter from beginning to end,
has written a book that reflects the president he served—intelligent, amiable, compelling and principled. And there is
something more: The World as It Is is a classic coming-of-age story, about the journey from idealism to realism, told
with candor and immediacy. It is not a heavy policy book. There are anecdotes galore, but they illuminate rather than
scandalize. Even Donald Trump—a politician who seems the omega to Obama’s alpha—is treated with horrified amazement
rather than vitriol. . . . Ben Rhodes is a charming and humble guide through an unprecedented presidency. . . . He never
quite loses his idealism; in a crass political era, he impressively avoids becoming a cynic. . . . His achievement is
rare for a political memoir: He has written a humane and honorable book.”—Joe Klein, The New York Times Book Review
“In The World as It Is, Rhodes shows no trace of the disillusionment that gave George Stephanopoulos’s tale of Bill
Clinton its bitter, gossipy flavor, or of the light irony that came to inflect Peggy Noonan’s adoration of Ronald
Reagan. More than any other White House memoirist, Rhodes is a creature of the man he served. . . . This is the closest
view of Obama we’re likely to get until he publishes his own memoir.”—George Packer, The New Yorker
“The World as It Is offers a peek into Mr. Obama’s tightly sealed inner sanctum from the perspective of one of the few
people who saw him up close through all eight years of his presidency. Few moments shook Mr. Obama more than the
decision by voters to replace him with a candidate who had questioned his very birth.”—Peter Baker, The New York Times
“The World As It Is opens and closes with Obama’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump. In between, it recounts
world events in a newsy, chronology.”—Karl Vick, Time
“For in on that Obama playbook, it makes sense to consult Ben Rhodes’s fine new memoir of the Obama years. . . .
Rhodes was ‘in the room’ for almost every foreign policy decision of significance that Obama made during his eight years
in office and in a privileged position to chronicle how the idealism of the early Obama administration faded as it
confronted the realities of an often-Hobbesian world.”—Peter Bergen, CNN
“Ben Rhodes is one of the most brilliant minds and powerful storytellers I’ve ever known. In The World as It Is, he
doesn’t just bring you inside the room for the key moments of Obama’s presidency, he captivates you with the journey of
an idealistic young staffer who becomes the president’s close friend and advisor—a journey that both cynics and
believers will find riveting and hopeful.”—Jon Favreau
“The World as It Is is a page-turning, unfiltered, altogether human look at Barack Obama’s presidency. Ben Rhodes—one
of Obama’s closest and most important advisors—opens up the defining issues of the presidency, from the role of race and
the rise of conspiracy theories to the hunt for bin Laden, the Syria ‘red line’ debate, and the secret negotiations Ben
himself led to normalize ties with Cuba. Inful, funny, and moving, this is a beautifully observed, essential record
of what it was like to be there.”—Samantha Power
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About the Author
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From 2009 to 2017, Ben Rhodes served as deputy national security advisor to President Barack Obama,
overseeing the administration’s national security communications, speechwriting, public diplomacy, and global engagement
programming. Prior to joining the Obama administration, from 2007 to 2008 Rhodes was a senior speechwriter and foreign
policy advisor to the Obama campaign. Before joining then–Senator Obama’s campaign, he worked for former congressman Lee
Hamilton from 2002 to 2007. He was the co-author, with Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, of Without Precedent: The Inside
Story of the 9/11 Commission. A native New Yorker, Rhodes has a BA from Rice University and an MFA from New York
University.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Chapter 1
IN THE BEGINNING
The first time I met Barack Obama, I didn’t want to say a word. It was a y May afternoon in 2007, and I was sitting
in my windowless office at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a D.C. think tank like dozens of
others. I was underemployed and debating moving back home to New York when I got a call from Mark Lippert, who was
Obama’s top foreign policy aide in the Senate. Lippert was a young guy, like me, and I had come to expect phone calls
from him every few days with random taskings; he was working for the most exciting politician to come along in years,
and he clearly enjoyed the fact that anyone would take his call at any time.
“Ben,” he said, “I was wondering if it’s not too much trouble for you to come over and do debate prep with Obama?”
I gripped the phone a little more tightly. For the last few months I’d been doing everything I could to work my way
onto the Obama campaign—writing floor statements on Iraq, drafting an op-ed on Ireland (“O’Bama”), editing speeches and
debate memos. I had never gotten near the man, and I was starting to wonder if my volunteer work would ever turn into
anything else.
“When is it?” I asked. “It’s right now.”
The session was at a law firm a couple of blocks away, and I walked slowly, gathering my thoughts. Like all the work I’d
done for the campaign, this felt like some sort of test, only no grade was issued at the end and no one would tell me if
I’d passed. When I got there, I was directed to a set of glass doors that led into a large conference room. I could see
at least fifteen people around a long table strewn with binders, stacks of paper, and soda cans. Obama was seated at the
head of the table with his feet up. Lippert met me at the door, pulled me outside, and told me they were debating
whether Obama should vote for a spending bill in Congress that would fund the so-called surge in Iraq. “I thought, why
not call the Iraq guy?” he said.
A few months earlier, I had finished working for the Iraq Study Group, a collection of former officials and foreign
policy experts who had been asked to come up with a strategy for the Iraq War. My boss at the time, Lee Hamilton, was
cochair, along with James Baker. Hamilton was a throwback—a crew-cut Democrat from southern Indiana who had served
thirty-four years in Congress. He wasn’t just a moderate—he was a pragmatist who approached government without a trace
of ideology. Baker was what the Re- publican Party used to be—a business-friendly operator who took governing as
seriously as making money. Throughout our work, in meetings with members of the Bush administration that he’d helped put
into power through his efforts on the Florida recount after the 2000 election, Baker’s understanding of the scale of the
mess that had been made in Iraq seemed to morph into a kind of paternal disappointment—he’d given the keys to his kids
and they’d ced the car.
For me, the project opened a window into a war that I’d watched unfold with swelling anger. As part of our work, we’d
gone to Iraq in the summer of 2006, flying into Baghdad in a cargo plane with a group of servicemembers starting their
tour, sitting in silence be- cause the roar of the engine made it too difficult to be heard. I looked closely at the
faces of these men and women who would soon be threatened by car bombs and improvised explosive devices, but they
betrayed no emotion at all—just blank stares. The plane dropped sharply into Baghdad International Airport, making tight
corkscrew turns to avoid antiaircraft fire. We flew in helicopters to the Green Zone. Down below, I could smell burning
sewage and see the faces of children looking up at us with vacant expressions.
For several days, we stayed on the embassy compound in small trailers. At night, we went to a bar—the Camel’s Back—where
con- tractors got hammered and danced on tables. There were two beds in each trailer and a shared bathroom. A flak
jacket was next to each bed in case of incoming mortar or rocket fire. I had the place to myself except for one night
when I came back to find a bearded guy, perfectly fit and totally naked, standing in the bathroom. I noticed some neatly
arranged Special Forces gear by his bed. We didn’t say a word to each other. When I woke at dawn, he was gone. Years
later, I would become familiar with the work that people like him did as I learned about it thousands of miles away in
the basement of the White House.
During our stay, we were driven in armored vehicles to lavish compounds filled with gold-plated furniture and thick
curtains left behind by Saddam Hussein. We met with Iraq’s political leaders, American officers, and a mix of
diplomats, journalists, and clerics. We heard about violence between Sunni and Shia sects that was killing Iraqis just
beyond the walls of the Green Zone—bodies in sewers, family members assassinated, nightmarish stories of group
executions. We’d recap at night in James Baker’s trailer, where he’d drink straight vodka in a tracksuit and just shake
his head at how screwed up things were. The United States had nearly 150,000 troops supporting the Iraqi Security
Forces, but everyone spoke of a series of militias as the main drivers of politics. One American general told us that
unless the different sects reconciled, “all the troops in the world could not bring security to Iraq.”
Each night, helicopters brought wounded Americans to a temporary hospital. When we visited, Hamilton spoke to a medic
who gave us an overview of the work they did. “My job,” he said, “is to keep these folks alive until we can get them up
to surgery.” He explained that our troops wear armor that covers your upper body well; what it does not cover is the
lower extremities, nor does it guard against the force of the blasts that can cause trauma to the brain. Were it not for
this armor, he said, the American dead in Iraq would be closer to the number of those killed in Vietnam; but for those
who survive those wounds, life can become a permanent and painful struggle.
Just being there for a few days showed me how the most pivotal moment of my life had led to moral wreckage and
strategic disaster. I moved to Washington in the spring of 2002, as the drumbeat for war in Iraq was sounding louder. I
moved because I was a New Yorker and 9/11 upended everything I had been thinking about what I was going to do with my
life. I had been teaching at a com- munity college during the day, getting a master’s in fiction writing at night, and
working on a city council campaign. On September 11, 2001, I was handing out flyers at a polling site on a north
Brooklyn street when I saw the second plane hit, stared at plumes of black smoke billowing in the sky, and then watched
the first tower crumple to the ground. Mobile phone service was down and I didn’t know if lower Manhattan had
been destroyed. A man with some kind of European accent grabbed my arm and said, over and over, “This is sabotage.” For
days after, the air had the acrid smell of seared metal, melted wires, and death.
I wanted to be a part of what happened next, and I was repelled by the reflexive liberalism of my New York University
surroundings—the professor who suggested that we sing “God Bless Afghanistan” to the tune of “God Bless America,” the
preemptive protests against American intervention, the reflexive distrust of Bush. I visited an Army recruiter
under the Queensboro Bridge. After leaving with a pile of materials and get- ting a few follow-up phone calls, I decided
that I couldn’t see myself in uniform. Instead, I would move to Washington to write about the events reshaping my world.
I had never considered being a speechwriter, and I had never heard of Lee Hamilton, but one ref- erence led to another
and soon I found myself at the Wilson Center, one small cog in the vast machinery of people who think, talk, and write
about American foreign policy. I was a liberal, skeptical of adventurism in our history, and something seemed
off about toppling Saddam Hussein because of something done by Osama bin Laden. But when you’re putting on a tie and
riding the D.C. metro with a bunch of other twenty-five-year-olds to a think tank a few blocks from the White House,
angry about 9/11 and determined to be taken seriously, you listen to what the older, more experienced people say. The
moment Colin Powell made his case for war to the United Nations, I was on board.
Now here I was, a few years later, seeing what that war had wrought. We began writing the Iraq Study Group report by
committee, but after a few drafts, Baker’s staff guy called me and asked me to take the lead. I’d stay up all night
agonizing over sentence structure and whether the group was going far enough in calling for an end to the war. The first
sentence of the report said “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” and the report called for a phased
withdrawal of U.S. troops. Instead, Bush put more troops into the country. To me, the experience clarified two things:
First, the people who were supposed to know better had gotten us into a moral and strategic disaster; second, you can’t
change things unless you change the people making the decisions. I had a decent policy job, but I wanted to get into
politics. And I wanted to work for Barack Obama.
Lippert and I walked into the conference room, and I took a seat near the back end of the table farthest from Obama.
From the moment I saw his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, I had wanted him to run for president. He had
been against the war when nearly everyone else went along with it. He used language that sounded authentic and moral at
a time when our politics was any- thing but. There was also something else, something intangible. The events of my
twenties felt historic, but the people involved did not. I wanted a hero—someone who could make sense of what was
happening around me and in some way redeem it.
I was seated next to Tony Lake, who—along with Susan Rice—was leading a network of foreign policy advisors for the
campaign. Lake was a soft-spoken older guy with the smart but slightly scattered demeanor of a professor at a small
liberal arts college, which he’d been for many years. He’d also been Bill Clinton’s first national security advisor.
Rice had also worked for Clinton, becoming the assistant secretary of state for Africa. Since then, she’d been a leading
Democratic voice on foreign policy—unabashedly ambitious, well-spoken, and prolific—who risked her relationship with the
Clintons to work for Obama. Still, over the last few months, I’d come to suspect that the network led by Lake and Rice
was mostly about giving people a way to feel connected to a candidate they were unlikely to ever meet. Most of the work
I’d done that actually reached Obama was coordinated by Lippert and another campaign staffer, Denis McDonough. It was
Lippert, after all, who had brought me into this room.
David Axelrod was the principal strategist, and as I took my seat he was giving a long description of the political
dilemma— Democratic primary voters would want any vote on the Iraq War to be a no, but if Obama voted no, a future
Republican general election candidate would say that Obama failed to fund our troops in battle. The ghosts of the 2004
election, when Republicans painted John Kerry as soft on terrorism, lingered in the room. “I’m sure they’re having the
same discussion in the Clinton campaign,” Axelrod said. “Hillary will vote however I vote,” Obama said. I was struck by
his confidence; it could have seemed like arrogance, except he was
so casual in his tone.
The conversation meandered around the room. Most everyone was neutral—describing the dilemma, as Axelrod did, but
offering no clear recommendation. It felt as if the political advisors leaned no but didn’t want to say so. When it got
to Susan, she made the case for voting yes. Compact, permanently composed, and the only African American in the room
other than Obama, she spoke in sharp, declarative language. “This is about the bullets that go in the weapons that
defend our troops,” she said. “This is a commander in chief moment.”
As she spoke, I felt panic welling up inside me. I didn’t want to be called on. At the time, I had a profound fear of
public speaking. If a group was familiar to me, I didn’t have a problem. But here, I wouldn’t be able to conceal my
nerves. I imagined myself staring blankly, then choking on my words. There, at the head of the table, was Barack Obama.
What would he think if I couldn’t get through a paragraph of advice?
To avoid having to speak in front of the group, I figured I’d give Lake my views. I leaned over and began to tell him
why I thought Obama should vote no. Obama, a former law professor, has a trait that I would witness thousands of times
in the years to come. He likes to call on just about everyone in a room. And he doesn’t like it when people have side
conversations.“Tony,” he called out from the other end of the table. “You have a view you want to share?”
“Why don’t we ask Ben?” Tony said.
“Who’s Ben?” Obama asked.
“He helped write the Iraq Study Group report,” Lippert said. “Well, what do you think?” Obama looked at me. Nerves in
my stomach became tightness in my chest, dryness in my throat. There was no way I could speak in paragraphs. So I had to
do something different that would break up my speaking.
“Well,” I said. “You se the surge, right?” “Sure,” Obama said. I took a deep breath.
“And you’ve introduced legislation to draw down our troops in Iraq and impose more conditions on the Iraqis to
reconcile, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Obama said.
“And this legislation funds the surge and rejects your plan, right?”
“Yes.”
Obama seemed to be getting irritated, so I got to the point. “Well, why would you vote to fund a policy that you
se, that you don’t think will resolve the situation in Iraq, and that contra- dicts the legislation that you’ve
introduced? You should vote no.”
The room was quiet for a moment. Obama leaned forward and tapped the table with his hand. “Okay, I think we’ve talked
about this enough,” he said. “I’ll make a decision when I go up to the Hill.” When the meeting ended, people started to
break into groups, and Obama got up to leave. After he reached the door, he stopped, turned around, and waded through a
few people to come over to me. He extended a hand.
“Hey, I’m Barack,” he said. “Glad you’re with us.”
I muttered something like “Thanks” as he turned away. Lippert asked me to walk with him to the Metro and told me
something that he hadn’t shared widely—as a Navy Reservist, he’d been called up to serve in Iraq. He’d be leaving in a
little over a month, instead of going to Chicago to work in the campaign office as planned, and he was going to
recommend they hire me.“No one out there knows anything about foreign policy,” he said as he descended the escalator.
I stood at the entrance to a Metro station that I’d come in and out of for the last five years. Something had changed
in my life, but I had no way of knowing the scale of that change. A couple of hours later, Obama—who valued, more than I
knew, advice that draws on common sense to reject convention—walked onto the floor of the Senate. He voted no.
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