The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House - Hardcover

Rhodes, Ben

 
9780525509356: The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525509356 ISBN 13: 9780525509356
Verlag: Random House, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From one of Barack Obama’s most trusted aides comes a revelatory behind-the-scenes account of his presidency—and how idealism can confront harsh reality and still survive.

“The closest view of Obama we’re likely to get until he publishes his own memoir.”—George Packer, The New Yorker  

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN

For nearly ten years, Ben Rhodes saw almost everything that happened at the center of the Obama administration—first as a speechwriter, then as deputy national security advisor, and finally as a multipurpose aide and close collaborator. He started every morning in the Oval Office with the President’s Daily Briefing, traveled the world with Obama, and was at the center of some of the most consequential and controversial moments of the presidency. Now he tells the full story of his partnership—and, ultimately, friendship—with a man who also happened to be a historic president of the United States.
 
Rhodes was not your typical presidential confidant, and this is not your typical White House memoir. Rendered in vivid, novelistic detail by someone who was a writer before he was a staffer, this is a rare look inside the most poignant, tense, and consequential moments of the Obama presidency—waiting out the bin Laden raid in the Situation Room, responding to the Arab Spring, reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran, leading secret negotiations with the Cuban government to normalize relations, and confronting the resurgence of nationalism and nativism that culminated in the election of Donald Trump.

In The World as It Is, Rhodes shows what it was like to be there—from the early days of the Obama campaign to the final hours of the presidency. It is a story populated by such characters as Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, and—above all—Barack Obama, who comes to life on the page in moments of great urgency and disarming intimacy. This is the most vivid portrayal yet of Obama’s worldview and presidency, a chronicle of a political education by a writer of enormous talent, and an essential record of the forces that shaped the last decade.

Praise for The World as It Is

“A book that reflects the president [Rhodes] served—intelligent, amiable, compelling and principled . . . a classic coming-of-age story, about the journey from idealism to realism, told with candor and immediacy . . . His achievement is rare for a political memoir: He has written a humane and honorable book.”—Joe Klein, The New York Times Book Review

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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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Chapter 1
 
IN THE BEGINNING
 
The first time I met Barack Obama, I didn’t want to say a word. It was a sleepy 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 crashed 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 military 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 military intervention, the reflexive distrust of Bush. I visited an Army recruiter under the Queensboro Bridge. After...

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Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525509356
ISBN 13 
9780525509356
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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