Ben Rhodes Oral History, interview 1

Hello, Ben. Hi. Thank you so much.

Sorry, I had emergency childcare duties this morning, so—

Oh, everybody OK?

Oh, yes. Well, my wife actually wasn’t feeling good, so I had to take my kids somewhere, but I can go till 12:30 p.m. my time [Pacific], if you want, and then we can always do another session.

Oh, music to our ears. Well, thank you so much, and we hope everybody’s safe. I’m Barbara [A.] Perry, and I’m the co-chair of presidential oral history here at the Miller Center. And my colleagues [Robert] Bob Strong, from Washington and Lee [University], political scientist and former provost there—has just retired—and Spencer Bakich, my colleague. Both are fellows at the Miller Center, and Spencer is a full professor at VMI [Virginia Military Institute]. Because they have such expertise in the area that you worked in in the [Barack] Obama White House, I’m going to give them the lion’s share of the time and questions. We ask if you have any questions before we start?

No, that’s pretty straightforward.

OK, great. So I want to turn things over to—first of all, we loved your memoir, and we have all delved into it. It is so detailed, and given that you are a speechwriter, it is so beautifully written. It’s just a pleasure to go through it, but also very informative.

Knowing that you don’t have days and days of time to devote to us for whole-life questions and most of those have been answered, one thing we sometimes like to start with is the question for those who have written complete memoirs: What was left on the cutting room floor, either in the interest of space or time? Or what you didn’t want to put in at the time you wrote it but that you would like to talk about now? We’ll start with that open-ended question, and then Spencer has a question related to that on a specific topic. We’ll let you go ahead first.

Oh, that’s an interesting question. I was, I think, pretty candid for a White House memoir. I think the stuff that I was probably the most cautious about, and not even trying to be super withholding but just because everything was so raw, was actually the end. In the Russia stuff, it wasn’t clear what was classified, and what—I remember being very confused about how much I could say about the Russia stuff because there were so many investigations. I was being investigated by the Republicans for leaking, even though I didn’t. I think I was probably pretty cautious about the last year, and [Donald J.] Trump, and Russia, and all that.

By the way, there’s not a ton I have to add to that story, but it’s just something that came to mind. I think as a general matter, I ended up hitting a lot of the Cuba, Iran, Arab Spring, Afghanistan. The big issues crowded out, probably, a lot of important other things, so in a strange way, it’s hard for me to pick one out. But I think I ended up writing, as you saw, chapters that were pretty thematic to some of the bigger issues. I probably didn’t get into drones, and at that time, I was a little more uncertain about classification, so I remember thinking that I didn’t do a lot on drones and counterterrorism type issues.

OK.

The last thing I’d say is that I’m always a bit of a hybrid because I was principally in national security, but I was also a political advisor and political staffer, and a speechwriter who helped out with non-foreign policy stuff. It definitely centers on the national security side of my identity, but everything, from both campaigns to I was usually in the room for whatever political crisis was going on—I don’t know if that’s of interest, but that part I felt I didn’t bring in too much.

That is super helpful. We’ll circle back to these, I know, but I’ll turn things over to Spencer, who had a very specific question about an item.

Yes, and this oral history is going to be, I suspect—by the way, hi, I’m Spencer Bakich. It’s a pleasure to meet you. As Barbara said, I love your memoir. It was fantastic, and of the many, many memoirs that I’ve read, I got a sense from yours that you—well, I’ll use your term: You had the “mind meld,” right? You had the opportunity to spend time with the president, in public and in private, and work with a person, a thinker, who dreams, probably, in full paragraphs. And you engaged him over a period of eight years at that level, which, I think, is a unique position for anyone to be in, and especially for a full two terms. I really think that the focus of what we’re going to talk about with you today is going to hone in on that.

My specific question, though, is a bit wonkier. I was reading in the timeline that, with respect to the national security strategy, you were the principal author. You were holding the pen. Is that correct?

On the first one, yes.

Yes, the first one.

Not the second.

Yes, good, first one. Notice that it wasn’t in the index. I don’t recall you writing on it. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.

I didn’t, you’re right. I don’t think I mentioned that in my book. I don’t think so.

OK, cool. Then—

It’s so wonky, I thought it’s a small number of people that were desperate for the backstory of the national—

You came to the Miller Center, sir. [laughter] That’s where we’re going.

That’s what we’re here for.

That’s what we’re here for, exactly. Would you mind giving us a description on how that process began under the Obama White House? Who was involved? How long it took, the trials and the tribulations, these types of things, if you wouldn’t mind.

Yes, and—this is probably a good thing—I have a strangely good memory about things. [laughs] In terms of the arc of the story, dates are sometimes hard, but if you want the full story, I’ll do it as quick as I can. When Obama wins and we come in, the first thing we did is something called the National Security Priorities Review. I don’t know if you found that document, NSPR. That was the first crack at kind of communicating to the government, the bureaucracy, what Obama’s priorities were.

I was part of this triumvirate, basically, with Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, who are like the three people who had worked the closest with Obama on the campaign and back into the Senate. In terms of Lippert and McDonough, I am still realizing how much that bothered people. [laughs] Who are these young campaign aides? But so Lippert and McDonough asked me to take the lead because I’d written all these speeches and gotten to know Obama well. I think I had the pen on that with Lippert.

That was an interesting process because we did do consultations too. We would meet with people from State [Department], and USAID [United States Agency for International Development], and OMB [Office of Management and Budget] because it was meant to drive some budgeting. What I was basically doing is translating all the things Obama had said in the campaign, and because that was a two-year campaign, we ended up putting a lot of detailed policy. I don’t remember tremendously the substance of that document other than it felt like I was trying to distill everything that he had said and we had put out in the campaign, and kind of translate that into a government document.

That was a first round at that. Concurrently, State and DoD [Department of Defense] were churning up their own processes for the national security strategy because they were very interested in that. At State it was Anne-Marie Slaughter policy-planning. She was beginning to write materials that were intended to feed into that process. At DoD it was Rosa Brooks and some guy who thought he’d written a version of the “Long Telegram,” I remember. [laughter]

It was emblematic—and you’ll find I try to be pretty blunt in these—of some of the awkwardness of those early Obama months that [James L.] Jim Jones is national security advisor, and he never really clicked with Obama. He brought a woman named Mary Yates over to be the NSC [National Security Council] senior director, who would be coordinating the policy planning shops. She was a lovely person and an experienced Foreign Service officer, but she, too, had no relationship with Obama.

I think, at first, the idea was—because I wasn’t looking for more to do. I was very busy that first year because he gave so many speeches. But I think over the course of that year, Mary was coordinating these agency components that included pretty big personalities—Anne-Marie Slaughter and Rosa Brooks, they’re not shrinking violets—and it was kind of messy because it was kind of competitive. At a certain point, and I couldn’t even tell you exactly when, I had started to sit in on these meetings as this person who might be able to help write the thing and who knew Obama the best of everybody. At a certain point, it just evolved into, I’m writing this thing. And I think—I think [laughs]—Mary was OK with that. Everybody’s always nice to you at the time, right?

The funny thing is I didn’t see it as some big—I wasn’t happy to be doing it. It wasn’t like, Oh, here’s my dream, to write a national security strategy. I felt like Rosa in particular—Anne-Marie, probably, to a lesser extent—thought I was making this big power play, and I really wasn’t. I was just like, Someone’s got to just write this thing. So I had that at a national security priorities review. I had done all the speeches, obviously, and so I was trying to communicate—I was trying to infuse what was going to be, inevitably, a fairly bureaucratic document with more vision of Obama’s priorities, and what he wanted to focus on, and the kind of story he wanted to tell.

I remember feeling like I was pretty aligned in that with Anne-Marie. The things that she was pushing were kind of the same things, like emerging powers and broadening the agenda to include other issues, like climate. I honestly don’t remember the debate points too much. I remember Rosa feeling dissatisfied. I don’t even remember why, other than I think that they were very committed to the document they produced and it didn’t become the basis for the thing.

Right.

But then, at some point it entered into an IPC [interagency policy committee]—we had a deputies committee meeting on it, I remember. Again, I don’t remember it being particularly acrimonious beyond just, as every national security strategy goes, people start insisting you include everything, [laughter] and you include everything, and it becomes a less valuable document. I think if I had done it later in my time in government, I would have been better at controlling that and keeping it tighter.

It was also a strange time because the global economy was so overwhelmingly the focus of the administration. And I remember we didn’t want any document that didn’t have the global economy featuring pretty prominently. It was almost seen as a political problem if that was the case, so that was a little difficult to figure out how much you bring economic issues into the national security strategy. I remember we did a deputies committee. It went reasonably well. Again, I don’t remember there being big arguments. It went to Obama, and so he actually read it, and then he actually edited—I think there was a foreword to it or something. That’s what he paid the most attention to, the framing.

I don’t remember him getting too much in the weeds, but yes, my main recollection is what we were trying to do was pivot off the war on terror. Like everything else, it was like we had come through eight years of having focused on the war on terror, and we wanted to recenter around a different concept of national security that brought in the global economy, that brought in climate change, that brought in transnational issues, and deprioritized the war on terror but still has its role. And then, regionally, a bit of the beginning of that shifting of focus to Asia, and then having a focus on emerging powers. I think at that time, and I think it continued to be a feature of the Obama presidency—Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, all places he went, by the way, in the first year or two; India, again, another place—there was a big focus in those early years of trying to lift up those relationships with the middle powers.

Then it rolled out, and I think it was received reasonably well, but it didn’t— I remember being in [Washington] D.C. when the first [George W.] Bush one came out, and it was like a nuclear bomb. The only other thing I’d say is that, from the beginning, we got the question, What’s the “Obama doctrine”? And I always hated that, in part because I’d worked at a think tank when the Bush doctrine came out, and the Bush doctrine was, We will go to war preemptively against countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction. It sounds good on a piece of paper, but they went to war in Iraq, and they didn’t go to war in North Korea and Iran. Sure, it was a doctrine, but it didn’t mean anything really.

We would say, No, there’s not an Obama doctrine, which I think was the intellectually honest thing to do, but probably then everybody just starts projecting onto you what your doctrine is. I honestly, as a national security practitioner, find that doctrine conversation to be the most exhausting one because I cannot point to a doctrine since James Monroe [laughter] that the U.S. government has actually followed through on. I never quite understood why there was always this hyperfocus on it in the foreign policy community.

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, and I want to get this right: It sounds to me like—the name “national security strategy” notwithstanding—you and your team didn’t necessarily approach it as an exercise in, We are going to craft this as an explicit strategy. It was more of a statement of priorities, principles that kind of crystallized, perhaps, Obama’s worldview and what the administration aspired to do. But it wasn’t necessarily a means-ways-ends kind of knitting together what the government plans to do over the course of the next three years, five years, whatever.

Yes, that’s fair. And for good and bad, I’d acknowledge, in the sense that—we had this conversation at the time about means, ways, ends, and how much to make it this or that. I think Obama’s own view—because we did talk to him about this a little bit—was he gave a lot of speeches, more than I think most presidents. Particularly in that first year, he gave a lot of foreign policy speeches or national security speeches that covered big chunks: National Archives, on national security and legal matters; Cairo [Egypt], on the Middle East; multiple Afghanistan and Iraq speeches on that; Africa; Ghana; Tokyo [Japan]. So he’s like, I’m telling the story. This was not like—sometimes a national security strategy has to communicate a message, and I think some of the sense was, We’re doing that. He’s doing that in all these public comments.

So yes, I think you summarized it fairly, that it was about sending a signal about priorities, about the shifts, Where do we want to be signaling? Like a reallocation of prioritization and resourcing and attention. The strategy was really about where the presidency was at the time, which was digging out of a hole and putting the United States in a stronger position to do all these things. I get that that’s not, as someone who has looked at grand strategy—but I just think we didn’t think this particular document was the venue, frankly, where he was going to do that.

We could have done it differently. Again, this is not a criticism of Mary, but she wasn’t the person to do that. I was drinking from the firehose, and Anne-Marie and Rosa didn’t know Obama. So there’s an alternative history where you actually do use that document to be a very clear articulation of a strategy, but I’ve actually never really read a national security strategy that did that. [laughs] Again, weirdly, the Bush one came the closest, the first Bush one.

I agree.

The [William J.] Clinton ones were like ours. If anything, they were more exhaustive than ours. [Joseph R.] Biden’s, same thing. So I think it was pretty conventional national security strategy.

Last question on this, and then I’ll turn it over to Bob. Was there any coordination between your strategy writing and the QDR [Quadrennial Defense Review], the QDDR [Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review] that Rosa and Anne-Marie were doing, or did those documents evolve independently of one another?

I remember this a little bit. There’s obviously some overlapping in coordination just because some of the same people were involved in the different processes. Literally people who worked into the Interagency Policy Committee and the Deputies Committee on National Security Strategy are also plugging into the QDR and the QDDR. I think if I were to make a critique of the way the U.S. government does this generally, though, it’s all these things are happening concurrently. The only way to do it, otherwise, would be to come in and do just your national security strategy first and then do everything after, and yet those other documents have urgent uses.

I remember, for instance, I got involved in the NPR, the Nuclear Posture Review. That was a really important document because Obama had prioritized these issues, and so I remember spending more time on the Nuclear Posture Review than the national security strategy. [laughs] It’s a function of how the U.S. government works. So yes, there was some overlap, but I think the honest answer is probably these were parallel processes.

OK, great. Really enlightening, thank you.

Bob.

Thank you. I have a whole bunch of questions I want to raise as a scholar who has visited presidential libraries and is very attracted to speechwriter files. They tend to open earlier than other files. They tend to have fewer classified documents in them, so you get more of a full picture. And they have all this stuff in them that’s well written and worth looking at. Let me start with this question: When the library opens, when there’s access to the speechwriting files, is there a speech that’s underrated? Is there a speech that’s misunderstood, that scholars should start looking at, in addition to the famous ones that we regularly identify with Obama?

Oh, I love that question because I’m still a speechwriter at heart. First of all, one thing you’ll see—because I think we were good at preserving these—is his edits on every single speech, which could be quite exhaustive, and actually, sometimes, his handwritten first drafts of speeches. Watching the evolution, just him as an orator, will be interesting. But in terms of individual speeches, I—I’ll just pull from memory.

The Nobel Prize speech, which is one of the ones that gets paid attention to, but—I’m fascinated by that as someone who now actually is writing a book about the history of speeches. That is the most accurate portrayal of every decision he made, after it, than any document. What I mean by that: The circumstance he outlined for when he would use force applies to Libya and not Syria. We had all these debates, these kind of intellectual debates, in working on that speech about these questions. Samantha Power wanted him to endorse the “responsibility to protect” in that speech, and he didn’t. We wanted to define what were just interventions and what were ones that we probably aren’t going to get involved in.

Again, the way in which Obama ended up using force as president is deeply embedded in that speech. I could even argue that the way he made decisions about what language to use and not use in that speech foreshadowed the way he made decisions about Libya and Syria. In some ways, I think that speech is underrated, or underappreciated, just as a guide to what Obama would do.

Then, it’s hard for a speechwriter to choose among his—

“Children.”

“Children,” exactly. I always loved the Hiroshima [Japan] speech because it’s the worldview of Barack Obama at the end, not the beginning, so it’s a bit hardened by experience. It’s kind of this statement of—it’s very much of that moment in 2016 where things didn’t feel good out there, but he’s trying to offer the alternative path to what is building everywhere. I always thought that was an interesting one to look at, but that’s still probably more conceptual.

I do think the regional speeches, the speech he gave in Ghana in 2009 and Cape Town [South Africa] in 2013, that’s the whole Africa policy there. And those speeches, what I’ve been struck by—the Ghana one, in particular, has long tail in Africa. It entered into African politics. It’s something that gets quoted back to me whenever I’m there. Sometimes we undervalue how impactful, particularly with Obama, these speeches he gave in these other countries were. People went into politics because of them, and started organizations, or there was backlash from some repressive government or something.

In Asia, too, the speech he gave in Tokyo in the first year and the Australian parliament. That’s the same thing. In the Australian parliament speech, I remember, he basically described what is currently the Biden policy. It’s this thickening of alliances, and networking our allies with each other, and basically the containment strategy for China. I didn’t write that one, actually, but a totally obscure foreign policy speech that I think, actually, this was where the U.S. was going at that time and ended up being where the U.S. went. I always think those were important speeches.

I don’t know. Then the other—I tend to value, again, those global ones. I’m trying to think what else. Were there any that you had in mind?

Well, there was another question related to that. Would there be files of speeches that started and were never given? Ideas that Obama wanted to explore but, in the end, decided not to give?

Well, first of all, just your reference to files reminds me that some of the most interesting speeches, probably, for researchers are going to be speeches where there was actually a process, so anything related to counterterrorism. So the [National] Archives speech in 2009, the speech at the National Defense University on the drone reforms, the speech on the post-[Edward] Snowden revelations.

Speeches like that, Obama would turn them into these unusual—and pretty rich, I think, for historians. They were kind of intellectual exercises, as well as policy processes, because he would usually at the beginning have some principle. I want to get to an outcome where I can say, near certainty of no civilian casualties for civilians. What does that mean? Being transparent about the use of drones going forward. Well, what does that mean? He would give these almost objectives and then the processes would feed in.

I’d say that those three that I mentioned—and particularly the National Defense University one in 2013, I think, is an underappreciated speech. In 2009 at the Archives was about, Here’s what I’m doing with all these things I inherited that are currently a mess and being challenged in courts and things like that. But by 2013, that’s Obama’s statement of how he wants the war on terrorism to end. How do we get this into a durable legal structure? How do we make this more transparent? But also, he called for things that still haven’t happened like, We need a new Authorization for Use of Military Force. So I thought that 2013 one was quite interesting as well.

What else would I say? I want to make sure I answered your question right.

Well, you have identified one of the reasons those files are so attractive. A draft of a speech goes out; memos come back from the Pentagon, We don’t like this; State Department, You have to change that. And again, things come back in the president’s own handwriting. It puts together a deliberation in a way that you can’t get, or can’t get quickly, from the notes taken in National Security Council meetings or other venues. That’s why the speechwriting files can often be very rich.

I think—

The other thing that—

Can I add something?

Sure.

Just because you triggered a thought that I think would be useful to people. When I look back on it, I’m very struck—and I felt this at the time—that at times the speeches, the things he wanted to say, were in tension with what the government was comfortable with him saying and, sometimes, that would even become a policy. Things I worked on tend to be in that category. Cuba, we got way, way out ahead of the government. Iran, he was always pushing rhetorically for diplomacy with Iran, and sometimes the government was like, Oh, I don’t know what to say about this. Anything related to war on terrorism authorities, things like that, and even just the kind of message he had on foreign policy, talking about past misdeeds by the United States, the U.S. government would say, Oh, we shouldn’t do that.

I think you’ll see, but also it’s important to understand, that dynamic that Obama had as president. I think he was—because Trump had it too. Obama was a less conventional foreign policy president, and so I think there’s some tension that you could probably exhume in those documents.

Oh, yes. Again, that’s why they’re often worth looking at. Presidents are trying to communicate to their own government—

Yes, we thought about that.

—not just to the public at large. That’s why there would be fights about lines in the State of the Union. If I can get my line in the State of the Union, I’m that much closer to getting my policy preference. They are important for that, although I think you’re right: Obama may be unusual in the degree to which he’s using speeches as those policy-framing devices.

Yes, he knew that. Because an Obama speech also got more attention, I think, than most presidential speeches, we were self-conscious about using the speeches as direction to the government, always, but particularly in that first year. Every speech, we were like, OK, audience number one is the U.S. State Department. It’s actually an efficient way to reach the whole bureaucracy. And also, I think unusual for presidents, he wanted to use speeches that way, so he would say, “I would like to talk about the end of the war on terror.” He’d have something he wanted to say, and he wanted to do it in a speech.

There were even times, like during the Arab Spring, at the beginning, those statements on Egypt were literally for the government to know what the policy was, and there wasn’t enough time to do a policy process. Actually, those would be some of the most interesting to look at, the statements on Egypt in January and February of 2011 because—I actually wrote about this in the memoir. I remember Mike Mullen crossed out every single thing in the speech except one paragraph [laughs] about stability. That was a policy difference in the speechwriting process.

That happened to every one of those, and so there’s amazing, probably, drafts. I’d love to know what they said about the speech after because they’re usually not happy about it. Sometimes you’re doing that in real time too. Because Obama had such a big megaphone, again, what he said on Egypt on camera at the height of those protests was, I think, magnified way beyond a normal president because he had this kind of global position as well.

One more question along these same lines. Those regional speeches, or the important ones he’s giving on foreign travel, is there a tension between writing a speech that’s going to be effective for the host audience and the people overseas and the care you have to take about how it’s going to be read and talked about back in the United States? Is that a balancing act?

Yes. First of all, in 2009, he had this series of, I think, pretty incredibly effective public diplomacy trips. Kind of resetting the narrative in the post-Bush years. The first trip to London [United Kingdom] and Strasbourg [France] and Turkey and Iraq and Prague [Czech Republic], he gave a speech at every stop—and the Cairo speech, the Accra speech in Ghana.

But by the end of 2009, we had the “apology tour” thing hung around our necks by Republicans. They made it known that everything he said abroad, they were going to look at, particularly because if their effort was to define Obama as somehow foreign and “other,” it was useful for them to take anything he said on foreign soil that sounded disparaging of America and make hay of it, right? That was one through line, which was knowing the scrutiny these things were going to be put under. I think the record shows that that did not really constrain us that much, but we were aware of it.

The other thing was always being cautious about—particularly because Obama was popular abroad, there’s the optic of him being cheered by huge crowds in other countries. Americans would think about the economy. [laughs] We did go out of our way, usually, to have something in the speech about why it was important for America to care about this, or American jobs are supported by Asian markets. And sometimes I felt like we were bending pretty far to at least have some articulation of not just a relevance to American interests but a relevance to the American economic interest. But that’s part of the drill.

The last and most interesting ones were the speeches—Obama went out of his way to visit these places that were on the fault lines of American history, so Hiroshima; Argentina, where we had supported the military government; Chile, so we’re going to talk about [Augusto] Pinochet; El Salvador, he went to the grave of Óscar Romero, killed by U.S.-backed death squads. There were a lot of places he went—Laos, he talked about unexploded ordnance. It’s actually not a small number of times that Obama went to a place where there had been something ugly in American history.

Again, I think, because it was Obama—if Joe Biden went to those places, there probably wouldn’t be the same hyperfocus. Because Obama showed himself willing to openly name and wrestle with these issues—our theory was that that actually was in America’s interest because you kind of cleared the air a little bit. If you want to have a better relationship with an Argentina or a Chile or an El Salvador, it’s important to name the history. And then, obviously, when you get a place like Cuba or Laos, you can’t avoid it.

Those were always interesting because the domestic political people were like, The last thing we need is some debate on cable television about whether Obama apologized in such-and-such country. There was often a tension between the huge upside benefit in these countries of being frank and, if not remorseful, at least acknowledging the importance of difficult history—there was huge benefit in those countries, and there was almost uniformly downside risk in terms of American politics.

One more question. It follows up on something you’ve already said, and maybe there isn’t much to add to it. But in addition to the important issues where you were writing speeches or the important issues where you took a lead—Iran, Cuba, and others that you cover extensively in the memoir—you would have been a witness to lots of other policymaking, foreign policymaking in particular, in the Obama years.

Are there things that, again, scholars, historians should pay more attention to among those things you saw? You already mentioned how Russia was dealt with at the very end. You already mentioned drones and the counterterrorism issues that are being talked about all during his presidency. But are there other things that you would, again, tell us scholars, Go look at that?

I guess a couple things would come to mind. I mean, all the decision-making around Arab Spring pivot points—Egypt, Libya, Syria—was quite dramatic. Something happens, there’s a flurry of paper. There’s a bunch of debates. There are real differences about what to do. There are no good options. Those, I think, will all live up to the hype. [laughs] But then, I think beyond that, a couple things.

I think climate change is an interesting thing because I’ve never seen an accurate description of how we got to the Paris Agreement. Sometimes people shorthand it to the U.S. and China made this bilateral deal, and then that opened things up and we got the Paris Agreement. My book kind of tells that version of the story. But what I found very interesting about the Paris story is—and this is something that the U.S. government has not done since, and I know some people in the Biden world who wanted this to happen, but it didn’t for a variety of reasons. Between 2013 and the Paris Agreement, all the sudden climate change becomes a very central issue in every bilateral relationship that matters at a presidential level.

Just to get to that China deal, there were huge processes in the U.S. government, letters back and forth between Obama and Xi Jinping, phone calls, negotiations. Well, that was also happening with India, with Brazil, with European capitals. All of a sudden it was the mainstreaming of climate change versus just having an envoy at the State Department who’s doing that. And again, it’s not as hot-button as the use-of-force stuff, but given how important I think climate change is going to be going forward, the bilateral stories of how you got to an international climate agreement are just definitely in the underrated category because I’ve never really heard someone explain it.

The U.S.–China relationship, generally. I think Obama was very involved in everything. A lot of stuff came to him for decision, and so I think there’s a story about—at that time, when China was kind of changing—him trying to figure out what the right mix of approaches was. It’s probably not understood as well as it could be.

Yes, Iran, Cuba, those being the cases where Obama was really pushing the U.S. government to do something that it wasn’t built to do, so those are interesting.

I guess the last one—and I mentioned this in the book, too—the first-term version of the climate story is like the management of the post-financial crisis. In particular, there are all these pretty dramatic interventions between Obama and Europeans in 2010 and 2011, when the Eurozone was in crisis, and he’s literally designing European Central Bank bailout packages on the phone with Angela Merkel. [laughs] And why? Because his reelection was going to be—if the Eurozone had tanked and pulled the world back into a financial crisis, that was existential for his presidency too. So a hyperdetailed focus on global economic issues as foreign policy issues, as the number one issue in our relationship with France, Germany.

Those ones—climate, Eurozone, China—really important things that I have not seen people understand how they worked.

Let me just do one more and then give others a turn. Obama, in his memoir, says part of his close bond with you was that you both had a “writer’s sensibility.” What did he mean by that?

I think that the way that is most relevant is—so, when you have a writer’s sensibility, you have a bit of detachment. You can kind of stand outside of what you’re experiencing and just look at it and be like, Huh, why is this happening? Or, That person is emblematic of something that’s happening in the world, right? I think Obama and I, throughout the presidency, when we traveled together or would be in the hotel late at night after working on a speech, we’d kind of comment about what we were doing as outsiders.

Actually—I think I tell this story in the book, but it just popped in my head as an example—when we met with [Toomas Hendrik] Ilves, the president of Estonia, it was after Russia invaded. And he was totally hyperbolic about what was going on, the threat from Russia. All Obama would talk about after was like, It’s so interesting. You could apply the way he described the radicalization that [Vladimir] Putin is undertaking in Russia, and how does that compare to the radicalization that we’re seeing with ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] versus the radicalization in the American right? And Obama’s head is going to—again, a writer’s sensibility is trying to contextualize things a bit more and having an appreciation for that anecdotal moment that opens up some understanding.

Obama just liked interesting characters, so you would meet the occasional world leader that’s got some eccentricity. And I think that’s important to how he would look at the world. I always felt he looked at it—because you can get really locked in your bubble, right, when you’re in the White House. And I always felt like he had two sets of eyes on things: the person in the room, but then something floating above, like a camera that’s just kind of watching him. Because he would also comment on being the only black person in a room or looking around the table and thinking how many of the foreign leaders were racist. [laughs] He had things like that on the brain.

Were you able to detect Obama bonding with other foreign leaders based on this character trait?

Yes, I think there were—I think he and Merkel, in a different way, she also had this skill of—because sometimes that would enter into almost how you solve a problem. The example I give is that we went to Cannes [France] in the midst of the Eurozone crisis. It was G20 [Group of 20] amidst the Eurozone crisis. He and Merkel were sitting there and literally looking at plans of bailouts, very down in the weeds, and then they’re both like, You know what? None of this works if [Silvio] Berlusconi is still the prime minister of Italy because he’s not going along with any of this. And Merkel’s like, Well, we’ve got to get rid of Berlusconi somehow. [laughter] And literally then the whole focus of that G20 became how can, basically, the world just muscle this guy aside.

And it worked. It’s just kind of interesting. Yes, there’s the stuff you’re doing on paper, but what’s the story? What’s the piece of the story that we’re missing here?

Merkel and he had a lot of conversations, also, late in his presidency. He started to give more and more of these speeches about European identity, in Estonia and Brussels [Belgium]. She was like, “I’m glad you’re doing this because someone has to tell the story of Europe and get people refocused on why we need a Europe.” And then he’d say, “Well, why don’t you do that?” And she’s like, “The German chancellor shouldn’t be the one to do that because of history and—” So they were having these conversations that were about, Where are we in this historical arc?

Interestingly, the other guy was Xi Jinping. Hu Jintao had been this heavily scripted guy, who was, in almost every way, easier to deal with because it was very predictable. And he was not pushing outside the lines of what was normal in the U.S.–China relationship. But Xi Jinping liked to have these long, one-on-one dinners with Obama, for two or three hours at a time, and had these historical debates.

It’s more like what reminds me of when you hear about the old U.S.–Soviet summits. They would sit there and they would debate societies based on individual rights and opportunities versus societies based on the collective. And Xi Jinping would give his whole spiel about why the Chinese people are about the collective, and Obama would usually be pretty energized by those. He’d get on the plane the next morning and tell us all about it. So I think Xi Jinping, interestingly, was another guy that was like that. Then there were just some leaders that had history, that had seen a scope of history.

But yes, because some foreign leaders you would interact with, all they’re focused on is the pre-scripted agenda, the ones who are interesting are the ones who kind of step back and actually talk about things. Putin would try to do it, but it was like a machine spitting out the most predictable—it was like an AI [artificial intelligence] of Putin [laughter] giving a list of grievances and accusing us of overthrowing the Ukrainian government. In a way, that was no different than being on talking points because you knew what he was going to say, even if he was trying to take this grand sweep-of-history view.

You didn’t get the sense that Xi was working from his own constructed or Central Committee [of the Communist Party of China]–constructed talking points? It was more of a willingness to engage a fellow leader on these points?

Yes, I think it’s actually quite important. You could go back and when you read about the [John F.] Kennedy–[Nikita] Khrushchev debates or something, this was really a guy [Xi] that had a fleshed-out view that went beyond the Communist Party’s. It was rooted in something else.

It was rooted in some view of Chinese history. Because he had been in the U.S., he understood. He’d be like, “Here’s why I know it wouldn’t work there, but—” What he was trying to get across was, You don’t understand us because you’re trained to think about the individual as the basis of society. It was kind of ideological, fundamentally, in terms of the kind of discussions they’d have. And actually, Obama said to him, “Look, because I lived in Jakarta [Indonesia], I actually know what you’re talking about. I remember what it’s like to feel like the individual’s not as central to politics.” They were getting on personal levels, too, whereas with Putin—

So I actually take Xi seriously, as someone who has a lot of views I don’t like and a lot of views that are anchored in the interest of the Communist Party. But I think he actually does have a worldview that is important to understand, that he shared with Obama and I’m sure shares with other visitors.

From a negative standpoint, Mohammed bin Salman showed that too, and I tell that story of him standing up and lecturing Obama on [laughs] the Saudi justice system. But that was a useful moment because you’re like, Oh, wait a second, this is a different leader. The Saudi king is usually the leader of some collective family decision-making. This guy has his own views. So you look for those times when a leader stepped beyond the predictable.

Who were racist, Ben? You said the president would come out of meetings saying, “Boy, that person is racist.”

Well, Putin. Obama definitely thought there was a racialized tension in their relationship. But then—well, [laughs] I don’t know. I’ll say it—I won’t ascribe this to Obama. I’ll suggest [Benjamin] Netanyahu. And then there was this kind of Tea Party, global Right, where I’m not saying that people were racist but on the spectrum of conventional—Mitch McConnell—to flirting with racist elements of the Tea Party. When you would have a Tony Abbott in Australia, for instance.

There were a few of those types of leaders, who I’m not suggesting were—but it was kind of, Where would they be if they were in the American Republican Party? was the conversation we’d have. Is this a [John] Boehner Republican, or is this a Paul Ryan Republican, or is this a crazy Jim Jordan? We’d talk about—that was useful to kind of figuring out David Cameron is all the way at the other end of the spectrum. David Cameron would be a Democratic moderate senator in the United States. But Tony Abbott, he was one of those leaders that Obama was like, I think he’d be pretty comfortable in the Tea Party Caucus. And actually, that bore out. He ended up this pretty far-right Tory guy in the U.K. now. So it was kind of along those lines.

Could we talk, Ben, I think leading from this conversation about the president’s persona, certainly highly charismatic. But your mentioning of Kennedy and Khrushchev did make me think about my interests and scholarship on President Kennedy. One of the things I think that so frustrated him about that 1961 summit in Vienna [Austria] with Khrushchev was that he couldn’t charm him.

Certainly Kennedy is known for both charisma and charm, and I would think of President Obama that way, but would you? And in this category, maybe we can also pivot a little bit to domestic politics. I would say, for example, McConnell was not charmed [laughs] by the president, and I’m sure vice versa. But that part of the president’s persona—the charisma, the charm, the winning smile, the winning people over, the attraction, the magnetism.

But also you mention a lot in your memoir his frustration, oftentimes his frustration across the board, whether it would be in traveling and meeting with foreign leaders or in the crises. And because on the outside, both at the time and since, there’s still this concept of “no drama Obama,” I just wondered if you could speak to those elements. Is the “no drama” part that he didn’t throw food against the wall but he’s human and he could be frustrated or angry over people or crises or politics and what was happening in the world and the country? So both sort of the positive and maybe the negative parts.

OK, so there’s a lot there. I guess I’d say, first of all, with his charm—and I love President Kennedy, so I read a ton—Obama’s charm was most potent directed outward to a large audience. His charisma shone the most with a crowd in front of him or even a smaller crowd around him.

Yes, he would be the most noticeable guy in the room. But I think in terms of foreign leaders and members of Congress, the bond he would try to make would be intellectual—for better and worse, by the way. He wasn’t there to become best friends with someone or to make the person think he loved them. He wanted to see, Can I make a connection —and again, Merkel was the perfect partner for him because that’s how Angela Merkel was. They did have a bond that was more than just working. It was about, We’re solving problems together, and we want to understand each other and how we think about problems. That’s who Obama would be the best with. So it was less him—and Putin—sometimes it helped Obama.

I guess here’s where charm did come into it. Sometimes Obama is just so popular that that was charming. [laughs] The European leaders really, really wanted Obama to like them, in part because if that became evident, it would help them politically. And so I actually do think, insofar as that’s charm, that would help sometimes. When people who didn’t want to do Russia sanctions at the end the last couple years, Obama gets on the phone, “I really need you to do this,” and so it was a strange kind of charm in the sense of leveraging his popularity.

Sometimes that was evident in the room, like, leaders just wanted to be—when you go to Africa or Southeast Asia, people wanted to be in the kind of reflected glow of Obama. That was a form of charm, like, Yes, sure, I’ll come and drape my arm around you and we’ll go for a walk in front of the cameras, but I need this from you. That’s how I think he best leveraged his charm. And I would say his ability to charm large audiences in other countries was intangibly important.

I think back home, another common thread is there weren’t that many leaders at home and abroad who just—we had the rise of nationalism, and those were leaders out of step with Obama. We had just some leaders that, honestly, I think weren’t—like [François] Hollande was not exactly a big French president. It wasn’t like dealing with [François] Mitterrand or somebody of that—even [Emmanuel] Macron, as he’s been. We didn’t have a lot of leaders of big stature. So globally, he didn’t have that many peers who were like-minded. Domestically, he did have, I think, the most important relationships, like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. He got along great with them, but we didn’t ever find that one Republican to work with.

Ironically, the Republican that Obama got along with the best is Boehner. I think in a less toxic political era, they would have had a really successful partnership because Obama would always say to me, “This guy’s the exact same as Republican legislators that I hung out with in Springfield [Illinois].” And you forget Obama was there longer than he was in Washington. John Boehner’s the kind of guy I would have been playing poker with, and he’d be smoking, and we’d be good friends, and we’d hash out a deal over the poker table or something. So Boehner was definitely the guy that he—that was a very good personal relationship, actually. And I think, again, in another era it could have been like a [Ronald] Reagan–Tip O’Neill kind of thing.

But because Boehner had no—and they wanted to do big things. They wanted to do the grand bargain on the budget. They wanted to do immigration. It’s probably where I think Obama’s a little—because he gets a lot of crap for not having these. No, I think actually he and Boehner had that kind of relationship, and when those talks got derailed at the end in 2011, it was like, Oh, man. Even though Boehner wanted to get there, he couldn’t bring his people there. That was the thing that obviously kept happening all the way through the immigration stuff and that resulted, eventually, in Boehner just saying, Screw this.

If I could, perhaps, dovetail—Barbara, did you have something you wanted to—

Go ahead.

OK. At the top of our discussion you mentioned several people who, I think, your quote, didn’t “get” Obama, and now we’re talking about how Obama did bond with certain people. I’m wondering if we could perhaps maybe take this and move it into a decision-making process realm, maybe at the beginning. Two of the big names, obviously, in the Cabinet: [Robert M.] Gates, [Hillary Rodham] Clinton. How did Obama work with these two? Did he “get” them? Did they “get” him?

I think so, actually. Gates and Obama had a fairly similar temperament, which sounds bizarre because their public personas are different. But again, Obama appreciated Gates’s methodical, technocratic style. Because Obama liked the Bob Gates-style, I think they both “got” each other, and they kind of knew what the nature of their agreement was, which was, We probably don’t see the world exactly the same way. But Gates is going to help Obama figure out, How far can I move the Pentagon? And on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” [official policy on nonheterosexual service members], it was really important.

We really invested in that relationship because Gates was going to be the one who was going to have to get us across the goal line of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I think that was a deal, in a way: I know I’m going to have to do this for you, but I’m going to push back on your Gitmo [Guantanamo Bay detention camp] policy a little bit. Gates was like, I’m carrying a lot of your water over in this building. And so what was good for us on that is that Gates could deliver Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal. Gates accepted, even though he probably didn’t love it, the time-bound nature of the Afghan surge. But by not having a Democrat who was ideologically aligned with Obama, things like Gitmo were harder, I think.

Hillary, they got each other kind of as politicians. It was a lot of looking at things through a political realm, understanding a foreign leader through the prism of their domestic politics. The strength of that partnership was that they both understood what it was like to be prominent political figures. They were good at sizing up foreign leaders and figuring out where they had space to maneuver.

I think the downside, again, is just that they were different, and they did see the world a little differently. Joe Biden has [Antony] Tony Blinken. Everybody knows that Tony Blinken doesn’t have a thought that’s different than Joe Biden’s, [laughs] and what he’s saying reflects what Biden thinks. I’m not sure that was the case with Hillary because, if you’re a foreign leader, are you talking to Hillary, the representative of Obama, or just talking to Hillary? And then that permeates down through the State Department: Does the State Department work for Hillary or do they work for Obama? You always felt that a little bit.

I should say, I did not feel that with [John] Kerry. I think Kerry was much better at not running a machine of all the John Kerry people, but wanting to be Barack Obama’s empowered secretary of state. I think he [Obama] worked a little better with Kerry, and that allowed us to take some shots—Iran deal—because Kerry wanted his ambition to be channeled to getting done the things that Barack Obama was interested in getting done: Paris Agreement, Iran.

Right. Two others then. How about Jim Jones at the start?

Yes, I liked Jim Jones personally, but they just did not understand—Jim, just generationally, temperamentally, stylistically, they just—I’ve read a lot about national security advisors, and some fit and some don’t. It wasn’t any ill feeling, and I think that sometimes got misinterpreted. Obama liked Jim Jones, he’s a likable guy, but they just never had any kind of—they almost talked past each other in meetings, and that was kind of apparent.

But what I think Jim Jones did then that was smart, and Obama too, was Jim Jones kind of became an envoy. He’s negotiating the New START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] deal with the Russians, and he traveled a lot for a national security advisor—and he was good at that. Meanwhile, Tom Donilon, who Obama did have a good connection to as deputy, was a very strong deputy. He was running the policymaking process, and Jim Jones was almost floating above it. He [Jones] could deliver a message, or he could help on the Hill, and he had his own views, and those obviously entered into the policy process. But he wasn’t coordinating the interagency in the way that a Jake Sullivan or Tom Donilon did as national security advisor.

Right.

Ben, looking back, whom should the president have chosen initially for that post? Should it have been Tom Donilon?

Yes, I think it would have been a much more cohesive process out of the gate in ways that might have been helpful on things like the Afghan review [Afghanistan and Pakistan Annual Review]. He also could have chosen Susan Rice, who stepped in, and I thought she did an exceptional job. She had a certain public stature that Tom didn’t have at that time.

Again, I think a lesson: I think he [Obama] was a little too cautious in putting his own people in these national security positions at the beginning. I don’t say that out of any disregard for the people who were in the positions, but it did create this—I don’t necessarily think the “team of rivals” is the best approach because in national security you have to make pretty fast decisions. I liked the second-term team better because it was just clear that we were all pushing in the same direction, whereas there were times in those first four years, on Afghanistan, on the Arab Spring, where it felt like there were these different plays being run at the same time.

Can we hover over those two first? Especially the Afghanistan review. Lots has been written. We’ve spoken to several folks, obviously. In your estimation, how did that process not work as well as it should have?

I think it was basically the beginning, right? It was kind of polluted from the beginning by how it came about, in the sense that [Stanley] McChrystal basically did his own review, and we found out about it in the press. [laughs] By the time it’s known that this young new commander-in-chief, that the heroic generals—and I think what people forget is how high [David] Petraeus’s stature was at that time. It was peak post-9/11 general worship going on. And so Petraeus, and then by extension McChrystal, there was a massive amount of leverage created.

They may not have intended that, too, by the way—I really like McChrystal—they may have just thought they were doing a review. But the net effect was the whole thing had the appearance of these popular generals, who most people thought got it right in the Iraq surge, challenging the young commander-in-chief to be man enough [laughs] to give them 80,000 troops in Afghanistan. So when Obama’s like, “Pause, we need to do a review,” whatever happened after that was going to be a bit problematic because of how it came about.

The review itself I thought was really interesting and contributed, obviously, to a lot of what became our foreign policy, like the hyperfocus on al-Qaeda, the effort by Obama to lower expectations in Afghanistan. But when I look back on it, the absurdity of the review was we spent all these countless hours refining the objectives, narrowing the scope of what we were trying to achieve in Afghanistan, building out this counterterrorism piece for al-Qaeda, but the troop request never changed. [laughs] It kind of made you wonder, Are all these pieces connected to each other?

The outcome, I think, did set up what was the Obama Afghanistan policy, which was try to make as big a push as you can against al-Qaeda as the focus for the surge. Then try to build up enough in Afghanistan so we can begin to get out of there and not think we’re going to do a nationwide counterinsurgency campaign. That would take not only even more troops than McChrystal was asking but would probably take going into Pakistan to go after the Taliban. Again, that was a real thing that if you actually wanted to, quote, “win that war,” you would have to do.

By narrowing the scope of what we were trying to achieve, I think that ended up, in the long run, being what we did. But the troop levels, it felt, got kind of tied to this surge. In that way, I think it was—again, it’s like the national security strategy question. Well, normally you would have done your review before McChrystal did his review, and it was kind of backwards. It was like a resource request that led to a review, and that’s the fundamental tension in it.

Two questions on that. The first one: Do you attribute that out-of-sync process to Jones’s supervision of the NSC process, or was that just unfortunate timing?

I do think ultimately it’s Jones’s responsibility because—here’s how I’d put it: We actually tried to do this different. We had the Bruce Riedel review. Everybody forgets. Everything was out of joint because we had a decision to make about the Bush administration–era request for troops. We launched the Bruce Riedel review. We’re being told that the Bush administration request is so urgent, you have to approve it before the Bruce Riedel review is concluded. That irks Obama, but Jones is not really effectively translating all this to him in ways that I would have understood a couple years later.

Then the Riedel review happens, and there’s already been one troop request granted. It kind of comes out at the same time that Gates, then, wants to replace the commander with McChrystal. So then the Riedel report is not at all informed by McChrystal, and all the sequencing got out of joint.

I think a strong national security advisor would have figured this out pretty fast because they would have come in. On their desks they would have had the troop requests for the Bush era, and then the plan to do the Riedel thing, and then the question of who’s going to be the commander in Afghanistan.

I do think from having seen eight years of this, a smart national security advisor would have said, “Let’s pause all this, do our review, and everything flows out of that.” Instead, it just felt like all these planes were taking off at the same time, and Jim Jones was not being the air traffic controller, and Tom Donilon was just not a strong enough figure in the bureaucracy at that time to do that.

Right. It sounds to me like—correct me if I’m wrong—the slow, deliberative process that Obama eventually does adopt, it took a lot of meetings, and a lot of time, and I think it upset Washington, writ large, that it took so long. It sounds to me like perhaps that was a way of Obama imposing order on this? Or was this just a way that if Obama wanted to make the decision, he would have done it anyway?

No, I think you’re right, and I think this is a really important point. So Obama comes in. He’s dealing principally with the financial crisis. He’s making national security decisions, but some of them are pretty expected—it’s like approving the Iraq drawdown timeline. But he’s hyperfocused on the economy and the global economy, right? Even his foreign relationships, he’s calling Gordon Brown, he’s calling Angela Merkel, he’s calling Hu Jintao. But it’s about the global economy.

Meanwhile, as he’s doing that, there’s this kind of messiness in the national security process. That comes to a head in the summer when this starts leaking out, and Obama’s like, What the hell is going on? I don’t even know that Obama knew that McChrystal was going to have some troop request. And so the Afghan review, which he hyperdesigned, was him saying, Stop, this is how I want the government to run on national security. That actually became the beginning of what was our process for the next seven and a quarter years.

That was how Obama made decisions from then on, which was, I want to be involved at the beginning. I want to know what the process is, even if I’m not involved in it. And then it’s going to come back to me at this time, and it was very deliberative. I feel like the Afghan review was him almost taking on the role of national security advisor to design a process that suited him.

It’s really interesting because inevitably, administrations, in their first year, there is going to be a foreign policy flub in some way. The first [George H. W.] Bush administration had it. They course-corrected and they implemented a more deliberative process. But it’s almost as if those early mistakes are absolutely formative and influential because they kind of force the president to make a decision about how decision-making should be done.

Yes. Biden, on Afghanistan—

Exactly, exactly.

I could totally see from the outside, Oh, this is because they did not have a good process. There were issues that were obvious that should have been raised that weren’t. I do think the huge trade-off question is—the more you break from continuity, the more stuff opens up. In other words, to get the process that works for the president, you’re going to have to change the existing process. So the question is, is it better to be disruptive in changing that process right away versus building it as you go?

I think the lesson is probably make much better use of the transition and come in with your own process from the get-go as a way to mitigate Bay of Pigs [invasion], Afghan review, collapse of Afghanistan, whatever the thing is.

I think, too, it would have also presupposed that personnel decisions were better made at the beginning. The process and the personalities go hand in hand, I would think.

Yes, I would announce your national security advisor the week after your election and get those people to go to work in building the process, yes.

My second question on the review is—and I really appreciate you mentioning the fact that a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy would have been regional, and it would have required gobs more troops. What we got was really close to, I think, what Vice President Biden was talking about with the “counterterrorism plus” idea. Can you shed some light on their relationship, specifically, at this early point in the administration?

Obama and Biden?

Obama and Biden, absolutely, yes. How did they work together? Was it an intentional process where Biden would—I don’t want to be glib about it—annoy a lot of people simply to give the president a lot of space?

Yes. It was interesting because it was kind of two things at once. It was Biden with his own history, and I don’t know what his grievance was with the military but it was clear that he was a bit more inherently distrustful or mistrustful. But also it was—particularly because Gates and Clinton, it was very obvious that they were going to be with the military, and they had these hawkish similarities. Particularly because Hillary was a pretty hawkish secretary of state, it was very useful to have Biden really pushing the envelope in the other direction.

I think Obama was never surprised when Biden, in some of those meetings, would literally go off in the other direction. Stylistically, that’s not how their relationship tended to work, though, going forward, so it may be because they didn’t know each other that well. That was almost like a transaction, OK, go off and do your thing, but it’s actually helpful. But I don’t remember that being some normal component of the Biden role, though I wasn’t in as many domestic—I don’t know how that worked on the domestic side as well, but in foreign policy.

All right, good. [To Perry and Strong] I would be happy to transition to the Arab Spring, unless you guys have something that you want to bring up or talk about at this point.

We’ll check Bob.

Well, at some point I think we want to come back and ask you some more about Obama. Is he really as calm as everyone says, or is some of that the way he’s presenting himself to the outside world and less of his core? What are the things that shaped him, or what are the occasions that you saw that gave you real insight into who he is? But we can maybe do that after.

Actually, you’ve teed up the questions, Bob.

I think that’s great, and it does follow up to my “no drama Obama”—

Yes.

—and Ben’s writing about him when he was, if not being dramatic, just genuinely frustrated or angry.

It is, 100 percent—and I’ve definitely spent more time with Obama than any person in national security, in foreign policy, in the last 15 years. I’m pretty close to the top on just general people, staffers. I literally never saw the guy lose his temper. I’ve never seen a human being as—you were almost aware of this intense self-discipline to be just at ease. And, by the way, that went the other direction. I rarely saw him—he wasn’t jumping up and down, high-fiving people. He almost moved with a posture of—

Smoothness?

Yes, yes, just this smooth glide into a room. I have the anecdote in the memoir about telling me about his mom sitting on a bench in Hawaii when she was pregnant.

But I think the bigger point is if I were to do the psychology of it, which I think I’m actually relatively qualified to do—I also helped him write his memoir—one, it’s growing up in Hawaii. I don’t know if any of you guys have spent any time there. [laughs] People are calm in Hawaii, and it’s obvious why. But I think that’s important to understand because Hawaii is part of America, and most Americans don’t—it’s an island culture. It’s infused with Buddhism and all—so that’s part of it.

It’s probably the most diverse state in America.

It is. It’s so diverse, and you have no idea where these people are from because it’s all manner of Asian Americans. It’s much easier to understand Obama if you just think about it through the prism of where he grew up, in Hawaii, and Jakarta. I’ve met a lot of kids who had to grow up in extremely foreign environments, and actually being calm—you learn to deal with the stress of being surrounded by people who are speaking a different language, as a young child. You have to have some kind of inner core that can deal with that.

Then I think being a black person—well, one, going into the black South Side Chicago [Illinois] world as an outsider. That must have been a bit of an intimidating experience in the sense of he’s got to know that people are going to look at him as, Wait a second, you’re half-white, you’re from Hawaii. He comes in, an outsider as a person entering the heart of black America, right? And then he’s a black politician in a white man’s world, you know? [laughs] So, everywhere, he’s this outsider.

And I would say a black politician has a higher margin of error in terms of personal conduct. Obama was very deliberatively scandal-free. I think that adds up to his personality type. He said to me, Every politician’s strength is also their weakness, and that’s been the best prism for me to think about politicians generally. With Obama, his calm was his strength—he never got rattled, he rarely overreacted to things—but it could be a weakness, right? You should be madder about this. [laughs] Sometimes I wanted to be like, You should be more pissed off about this.

In terms of when he did get angry, even if he didn’t lose his temper and stuff, it was always when he felt he’d been misled by information. So ISIS, I remember when Mosul [Iraq] collapsed. He’d had however many years of briefings about how great the Iraqi Security Forces were because the DoD briefings are usually about how great everybody is, and so he felt misled. He was angry about that. There were occasionally instances like that.

He was remarkably forgiving of bad things happening on someone’s watch or even if it’s kind of like an honest mistake is made. What would make him angry is if he felt like—and I think the same thing was true with Congress, by the way, if he thought he had a deal with somebody and they broke it. He started to get angry with Boehner because Boehner kept making agreements and then coming back and reopening the negotiation, right? The thing that would trigger Obama’s anger was, weirdly, less all the I’m angry because people are saying I wasn’t born in this country. The times I saw him actually be angry were when he felt misled on things. I think that temperament, in terms of the toxicity directed at him, I’ve often wondered if it might have been better if sometimes he got more—

The birther [movement] thing in 2011 he saw mainly as a distraction, not as a sign of a racialized movement in politics that is dangerous because if this many people believe a conspiracy theory that is so evidently race-based, what does that mean for the health of the project? [laughs] I believe personally—and I’m not some super woke [social justice advocate] person, but I do believe personally—if you look back at the Obama years, there’s going to be some stuff you’re like, Wow, that’s pretty racist. [laughs] That was not the discussion at the time, in part because he wasn’t saying it, so we kind of all pretended that the Tea Party was all about deficits and that birtherism was just some weird thing that Donald Trump was doing.

There were a lot of these things happening at once, and it wasn’t like saying, “Well, wait a second. There’s something that needs to be named and talked about here.” A lot of the conversation about race didn’t happen until Trump got elected. I got asked more in the month after Trump was elected about race than I did in eight years under Obama. It was this kind of weird thing where being a little more—you don’t want to be the stereotypical “angry black man,” but maybe being more triggered by that—

But I’ve talked to him about that kind of thing over the years, and what he’ll say is, “Well, black people, we’re not surprised by it, so I didn’t get exercised because I kind of anticipated some of that.” As a white person, I always found interesting, Why am I more angry about this than Obama? [laughs] This birther thing or something. And the answer from him is, “Well, because we’ve all been living with this our whole lives. You guys are just seeing it when it comes above the surface.”

Did he also, Ben, feel that he had not put it to rest for the country or racists, but he said what he needed to say during the campaign, after the Jeremiah Wright controversy, with his speech?

Yes.

Really?

Yes. I think he thought, Look, I’ve talked about this at length. But then the “put it to rest” made me think of something funny: It is a very Obama thing to think that you’re going to release your long-form birth certificate and then that will put it to rest. Here’s the information! I’ve given you the information! Meanwhile, more people, I think, believed he was born outside the United States at the end of the Obama presidency than the beginning.

So, yes, sometimes I think he did—because he’s such a rationalist, he would think he’d addressed something or “Didn’t they hear what I actually said?” which is, again, why he’d get more angry. I talk about being misled. He didn’t like it when he was misrepresented, when somebody said he’d said something he didn’t or somebody ascribed a motive to him that he didn’t have. Those are the kinds of things that would trigger him more.

We live in a period of time where lies have more power and where people who underestimate them do so at some peril. I want to connect that to a theme you developed at the end of the book, really very nicely: Storytelling is important. How you frame things, how you present things. Those involve simplifications, or those involve not really distortions but choices about how you’re going to tell, how you’re going to explain. Election denialism isn’t a narrative, it’s just a plain lie. We’ve always had plain lies, right? But the power and influence they have looks to be larger or looks to be different.

You encounter some of that, talk about it in your book, in terms of the Benghazi [2012 attack] investigation. Of course Congress does hard-hitting investigation. Of course people aren’t trying to be showmen and get some attention for the question or issue they raise. But that gets to a bizarre level of fabrication, fantasy, that doesn’t look like normal politics, even in a nasty Washington.

Yes, two things about this because I think this is hugely important, and frankly, I think it’s going to be really important for historians to unpack what happened. I mean, I have my theories, but I think it’s going to take time.

One small point and then one much bigger point. The small point is just on Benghazi [Libya]. What became so bizarre about Benghazi—and again, I think historians are going to have to unpack this. My belief about what happened in Benghazi never changed. In other words, there was a video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad that did—

And there were riots.

—lead to riots in Cairo that were seen on television by people in Benghazi, who then decided to go down to the American facility. Some of those people were protestors. Some of those people were heavily armed militia members. And a terrible, chaotic thing happened.

What became so weird is that the hard-hitting congressional investigation wasn’t about the truth. If I were to say in public, “Hey, I actually still believe that this video caused this thing,” even though that was the truth, they would have invented an alternate truth. I didn’t even understand what it was about, and that’s that moment I wrote about. I’m looking at Trey Gowdy, who I know is an intelligent human being, and I’m like, “I don’t even understand what you’re—you’re not trying to extract any hidden truth from me. You’re just perpetuating something.” I actually don’t even know what Trey Gowdy thinks happened in Benghazi.

That’s what became so disorienting about it. It wasn’t like a scandal where we’re hiding something that they’re seeking to uncover. It was something different. It was like they’re just using this horrible thing that happened to do—I don’t know what they’re even doing. But I think that became the style of right-wing politics in this country after Benghazi, so I think Benghazi is a hugely important thing because I still don’t know what the scandal was.

It sounds to me like what you’re describing is a classic disinformation campaign.

Yes.

Is that what you mean?

Yes, and what it’s like is, it’s like the election: Nobody knows how it was stolen from Donald Trump, they just know it was. And so then if we can find some sketchy story about election workers, or we can make—

And so it’s the same thing. Benghazi, obviously a terrible thing happened. Is it a scandal that Susan Rice said it was tied to a video? Is the scandal that there wasn’t security there? It became like one theory that we were running guns through this facility. Then there were all these conspiracy theories that just started sprouting like limbs from a tree.

And so people are energized and angry about this, but they don’t even know what the thing is [laughs] they’re angry about. Meanwhile, the answer is actually, “No, there was this video.” That’s what’s so crazy about it is that, again, saying the truth was the most dangerous thing we could do politically because it was like, “There these guys are again inventing this video.” And it’s like, No, in an objective reality, there’s a video. You can go watch it.

Stepping back from this whole dilemma, I talked to Obama about this endlessly over the eight years because part of what was happening is, is politics changing or is media changing? On the media side, it changed in eight years. I remember doing the ’08 campaign, the nightly newscasts, the morning news shows, several newspapers. There was still a baseline story of what was happening in that campaign. Even in the first year of the administration, there was a baseline story in the media of what was happening with the financial crisis.

Now, pretty early, as media consolidation continues, and less and less people are watching traditional media, and all the right-wing energy is going to Fox [News] and that ecosystem, and then social media comes into that during the Obama presidency, there ceased to be any agreed-upon venue in the media for what was happening. There were just these different realities, and nothing we could do could change that.

Barack Obama couldn’t have been a more present—in my life, other than Reagan, I can’t think of anyone else who was narrating events more than Barack Obama, like, This is what’s happening in the world. This is how you should think about it. If some presidents are more like narrators for the country and some are more nuts-and-bolts, Obama was as big a narrator as we’ve had.

This one wasn’t on him, but something happened in—so while that’s happening in the media, politics—particularly on the Right, I have to say—gets much more conspiracy-theory minded, much more divorced from facts, much more immune to shame. I used to run these fact-checking efforts, and in 2009, if you could prove that your critic had said something wrong, that was a win. By 2014, it didn’t matter. If every fact-checker gave people “Pinocchios” [Washington Post rating of dishonesty in politicians’ comments], it made no difference. There was a tolerance for dishonesty and disinformation on the Right that made it kind of impossible for there to be a coherent conversation. Obviously that’s a partisan view, but that was my feeling.

Well, in part it seems because if you start with this premise of populism, whereby all elites are bad and wrong, and Trump says politicians lie all the time, which, in some ways, strangely immunized him against lying, I suppose—

Yes.

But if you take all of that, and then you add to it the financial collapse, of “Wall Street versus Main Street” [social inequality], where these people feel so put upon—understandably, I must say, in the sense that they feel that Wall Street and the banks and the car dealers and car manufacturers were all bailed out, and they weren’t.

One thing we haven’t talked about—and we’re coming toward the end of your time, Ben, I think for this afternoon, our time. But maybe you can say a quick word about the domestic part of ACA [Affordable Care Act]. We know the Tea Party is ginned up by the financial collapse and certainly by ACA and—talk about “dispenses disinformation,” I would just say propaganda, as well—portraying Obama as [Adolf] Hitler at these Tea Party rallies, and then the town halls when members of Congress go back home, and now it’s Obamacare. I have to say I loved his line last week that “now that it’s popular, it’s not Obamacare, it’s ACA.” [laughs]

I think that—yes.

Was that your line or the president’s?

No, that was his line.

Well, we’ve got that for history.

Yes, you’re really right to focus on it. It was an interesting situation because our communications strategy, if you go back and look at it, was very fact-based. Here’s the fact-based case for our plan, and we’re fact-checking, constantly, these different attacks, death panels and everything. We’re having this very policy-driven messaging effort, but the opposition doesn’t care if you win on debate points, you know what I mean? They’d raise some crazy thing—death panels—and we’d spend a week grinding that argument down, but then they’d just move on to the next thing that they chose to be angry about.

When you tell the history of this period, we were engaged in totally different messaging endeavors. Ours was to make a fact-based policy case for the ACA, and the opponents’ was to just unleash grievance and fear and to tie the idea of socialized medicine to the “Other.” Now, having done my own research on this, that’s common back to the ’60s. Socialized medicine is a right-wing set of grievances, but we were speaking two different languages in that debate.

I also think that we maybe underestimated how big the vacuum of leadership was in the Republican Party. I think it’s a really important point because you have the Bush years, but then in the beginning of Obama, [John] McCain had kept a lid on all that stuff in the campaign, the darker, racialized or xenophobic or nationalist—and it’s not all about race. It’s that kind of Pat Buchanan Republican Party. McCain had deliberately kept a lid on that. He was not close to the Christian right. So, once he’s removed from the picture—and he’s not at all the leader of the party because he had no interest in being leader of the party, and Bush is down on his ranch—Mitch McConnell basically became the leader of the Republican Party. But Mitch McConnell didn’t try to keep a lid on any of the ugliness in the Republican Party.

And so we may have been—because I remember we were genuinely surprised that we didn’t get a Republican vote for the stimulus. A lot of effort had been put into making that bill kind of Republican. The ACA was chosen in part because it was a model that Republicans had done. And it was like, Yes, we don’t care.

What was happening was the Republican Party was kind of regenerating. The inside game in D.C. was Mitch McConnell, but because he paid no attention to or didn’t care to stop what was a convenient energy in the country, the outside energy became that Buchanan-legacy nationalist, grievance-based populism. And so for the whole eight years of the Obama—

Yes, go ahead.

I’ll end on this. The whole eight years of the Obama administration, there was never a leader of the Republican Party. Mitt Romney never controlled the Republican Party, even when he was the nominee. What there were were people surfing all of this energy that was anti-Obama. And yes, tactically, then, McConnell would use that to negotiate or whatever, but it had the effect of turning the Republican Party into that populist energy.

Well, I was just going to add, as a Kentuckian, to the history of this that I think I’m right in saying that McConnell was up for reelection in ’08. He won, of course, his Senate seat, but the vote was closer than he anticipated. And so I think part of his moving in this direction—because you might remember he did not support Rand Paul for that Senate.

Yes.

He supported Trey Grayson, who was a moderate Republican from northern Kentucky, Harvard-educated, and Mitch saw where the Commonwealth of Kentucky was going. And sadly, that, I think, turned him even more in the direction you’re suggesting.

So with that, we’re at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time, and we’re going to stop—right, Ben, for your time?

Yes, but I’m happy to do another session.

Oh, that’s wonderful. Shall we have our scheduler in touch with your folks?

Yes, yes. It’s always interesting to revisit this stuff, so happy to do it.

Well, we’re just so grateful, and I feel like the kid in the candy store because I mentioned in my introduction letter to you that I just love it when you’re on MSNBC. First of all, for you to take time from all that you’re doing and speak to us is wonderful, but I always want more from you on MSNBC, [laughter] so to have two hours today—

I’ll balance those things, yes, yes, yes.

—it’s my proverbial candy store. Thank you so much, and we can’t wait to talk to you again. And thanks to Spence and Bob for your great questions.

Yes, thanks, all.

Thank you very much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]