Pod Save the World - Obama's legacy after Trump

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

Tommy talks with Ben Rhodes, author of the new book "The World as It Is", which documents Ben's eight years working in the White House. They talk about Ben's criticisms of Obama, leading talks with Cuba and going to dinner with Raul Castro, becoming a target of right-wing attacks and more.

Welcome back to POTSave the World. My guest today needs no introduction, Ben Rhodes, who you all know as the former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications for Barack Obama. And now he is the author of the book, The World as it is, a memoir of the Obama White House. Ben, welcome back to the show. Good to be with you, Tommy, as always. So my first impression of this book is that it's, well, first, it's really good. Like, you're, but it's not just good because it's good. writing and it's not good because it's about Obama and I like Obama. It's good because it's brutally honest. You know, this is not a hagiography. This is, you are honest about his faults. You are honest about your own mistakes and faults. I feel like reading this that you went through an evolution from defending his foreign policy to just explaining it. And it is the best explanation of the things he did and why he did them and the headwinds and things we face at the time that

I've read literally anywhere. So did it take you some time and space to get to a place where you could even write this thing because it certainly took me a while to realize that like I was no longer a spokesman. I didn't need to respond to everything on Twitter and I could actually step back and be a little analytical. Yeah. It's a really good point. I think there are two things that helped me. One is the dynamic I was going for when I sat down to write this was to try to explain to people, you know, because there are a lot of White House memoirs or administration memoirs and not a lot of them, you know, or that memorable, they tend to just kind of defend positions that people took in meetings, and that's kind of it. What I realized was a little different about my story is that I was

29 years old when I moved out to Chicago to work on the campaign in 2007 and, you know, I met you, Tommy. Yeah. I was like totally anonymous, you know, I was a normal person, you know, unlike, you know, Hillary Clinton or John Kerry or Leon Panetta. So a reader, I wanted to explain to a reader, what's it like to be like a normal guy who finds himself, suddenly on a campaign and then in the White House and then in this Deputy National Security Advisor role. So pull back the curtain on the personal dynamic. What did this do to my personal life? What does it like to find yourself suddenly in that kind of pressure cooker, in that kind of limelight? And that gave me an entry point, I think, to speak more honestly about like my own doubts

and self-doubts and flaws. Right. I mean, you open this thing like in a long-distance relationship you hope will last, sleeping on a mattress on the floor in Chicago to marry. with two kids by the end, right? I mean, like, that's a massive life change. Exactly. And this is all playing out, you know, your life, as you know, doesn't stop when you go into these jobs. But it looks like it does to the outside world. But, you know, yeah, I moved out to Chicago. I was, you know, living with my girlfriend and had to do a long-distance relationship, see if that works. Is this job going to work out? You know, I could have told you then that I'd end up being the deputy national state advisor. And so that gave me kind of a voice and a way to talk about things that was more

personal and less like a recounting of events. But you make a great point. I mean, you know, the instinct that you have is to be a spokesperson for Obama and to defend him and defend his legacy. And it did take, you know, some doing to just kind of get that mindset to the side because I realized, you know, overall I obviously, you know, would want to defend our policy. Do think highly of President Obama. But you know what? Like that's going to be more credible. If you're all, honest about what you did wrong or what you don't know you did right or wrong or the warts and all on his character and my character and all of us and you know honesty is ultimately more credible right and i had a weird experience when i was with you also when we did a pod say at the

world event with samantha in l. i remember some guy in the audience asked me like why did we didn't recognize the armenian genocide and i remember saying well that was a mistake we should have done that and it was the first time i think i'd ever done that in public just been like yeah something we did is a total mistake. And it was liberating to be like, I don't have to just say, well, we were weighing these security concerns. It's a small thing, but it does allow for, I think, a better understanding for people of what it was like to go through this. Yeah, and it turns discussions about these issues into conversations and not arguments, and that is just such a nice place to get to. I just want to go into one specific criticism and then step back more. You talk about during the

Arab Spring, you felt like after those initial days of pushing the envelope on universal rights, human rights and support for the protesters, that the government and Obama as well sort of fell back into a traditional posture of supporting the military and those in power. And when you pushed Obama on this, you said, quote, at times he seemed to be, using his powerful mind to find justifications for more modest ambitions. And essentially that our response during the Arab Spring didn't meet the magnitude of the change that was happening across the region. Do you think that his ambitions were moderated by cautious advisors, like, you?

like Bob Gates, or was it political concerns or a growing recognition of our inability maybe to influence events or some combination of all of that? It's a fascinating question. And I think there are two issues here. There's Egypt in particular. Yeah. And there, I do think that the advisors and the instincts of the U.S. government ended up pulling him back.

And I think I find a lot wrong with what we did on Egypt. You know, I supported breaking with Mubarak, not just. because it was the right thing to do, because frankly, I didn't think Mubarak was going to be able to withstand those protests. That was a minority position in the government, certainly not the position of Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton and our agencies, national security agencies. And what happened, Tommy, after that, and you were there, you may remember this, the government never adjusted to Obama's position. You know, their default was we work with the military, we work with the intelligence services. And as soon as Mubarak was out of power, there was kind of this

rush to just embrace the military that was in the interim role as leading the country. And a lot of mistakes were made by the, you know, the military kind of set up a dynamic in Egypt where the Egyptian military, where it was kind of them or the Muslim Brotherhood binary. And they kind of sidelined secular parties that might have offered a third alternative. And ultimately, the Muslim Brotherhood won the election, in part, I believe, because of how the military set that dynamic up. And then ultimately, the Egyptian military had a coup, which we didn't even call a coup. which I also think was a mistake. And so I feel like we, I don't know that Egypt, you know, you can never go back and say everything

would have turned out differently, but I do feel like we never saw through to a logical unpoint a policy that had democracy in Egypt as its goal. That we basically, you know, took this dramatic action in breaking Mubarak, but the government didn't change its general orientation of being deferential to the Egyptian military. in the aftermath of that shift. I think separately on the questions of military intervention in Libya and then ultimately Syria, there I think Obama on his own was very cautious. And frankly, after he did intervene in Libya, was even more reluctant to do so in Syria.

There I actually, the book I described kind of going through this evolution of coming to believe that he was right and looking at these countries, you know, realizing our ability to use. use our military to shape events inside of Syria or Libya was ultimately going to be very limited. So, you know, I think historians will be debating this for decades. But I do think, you know, we have to acknowledge that we kind of charged up the hill at the beginning of the Arab Spring. But we never went all in in support of it. And ultimately, Obama's more cautious instincts kind of came together with the dysfunction in the Middle East to lead to a much more, you know, moderated, deliberate type of approach.

Yeah, I mean, just to plug the book again per second, I mean, it really brought me back to those 16, 17 crazy days when the protests were just roiling in Egypt. I mean, there was that final phone call where Obama told Mubarak that it was time to go. And I remember standing outside the Oval Office, I think you were in it, and hearing not just Obama shouting into the phone, but you could hear Mubarak screaming back in English and an Arabic on speakerphone. It was just, they felt like the world was moving so fast and there was absolutely nothing we could do to keep up with it. Another great little anecdote just before I move on.

Just talking about the, you know, the president can make a decision, but the government doesn't always follow. My favorite little note in that is when you were talking about writing a Guantanamo speech, you said, you sent the intelligence community in edit calling Gitmo a legal black hole. And you got back a note that chainted to detainees at Guantano of more legal representation have been afforded more process than any enemy combatants in the history of the world. So, yeah, a little inertia there at times. Well, just real quick on that one, I mean, I was like 31 years old, right? Right. And I'm writing a speech. Yeah, and on the campaign, you know, we've been saying, we're going to close Gitmo, and it's a black hole because nobody there has been prosecuted.

And then again, in government, I write a speech like that, and you have to clear it to the intelligence community. And I get that back. And I'm like, what do I do with this, you know? Black is white. Yeah, exactly. It was definitely a situation where you realize that unlike a presidential campaign, the U.S. government, it's not a deep state, but it's, It does have its own antibodies. Yeah.

I'm jumping around a bit, but I want to go to just the period that you open with in the book, that post-selection period, which is publicly Obama is the guy bucking up the whole White House. He's graciously welcoming Donald Trump to the Oval Office. He's putting on a brave face with foreign leaders. But privately, he is starting to question what happened and whether that means his entire worldview and approach was wrong, and whether he may be backed people into a corner and led them to revert to tribalism. Maureen Dowd wrote a kind of shitty column asserting that that anecdote, that chapter you wrote about Means Obama thought he was too good for us.

I thought that was a misread. But you were there. What was he thinking? What was he saying? And what were those weeks and months like? Yeah. You know, the notion that that was arrogance, you know, that was a surprising take for me because actually is the opposite. He was second guessing, you know, himself in profound ways and self-examining in profound ways.

what happened essentially, and I tell the story, like, you know, at first he was bucking us all up in the White House, you know, and then as time began to pass, you know, he started to question things like we all did, like, well, you know, was it the Comey letter? Was it the Russians? Was it the Hillary campaign? Like, well, how did this happen? But then what was really interesting is we went on this foreign trip, and the consequences abroad felt even more stark than at home in this strange way, because at home you at least have to have in the media that he said, she said. and they're both sides abroad. It was uniform horror at what had happened. You know, in Greece and then Germany, Anglomerical was, you know, I described she had a tear in her eye the last time she saw Obama. We get to the summit, Lima. Everybody's kind of asking him, well, what's going to happen now? We had this meeting with Justin Trudeau where he tries to kind of urge him to speak up for liberal values going forward. And, you know, I think what he's referring to there is not.

were we wrong about the campaign or about Hillary or he's referring to the pace of change in the United States and in really the West I'd say you know the the the movement of people trade that globalization in a way had gotten out ahead of where people were and that people whether it's the Brexit vote or the Trump election it showed that people were clinging to their you know more traditional identities whether it's make you know Russia great again or make America great again that essentially his brand of inclusive politics was not, well, was rejected by voters who wanted to be tribal and didn't want to embrace a future that is more inclusive and diverse and

tolerant and globalist, to use a word that has come under assault. And that's what he was really wrestling with is like, how do we balance, you know, as progressives, our view that the world continues to move in a certain direction with the kind of reality. actionary forces that want to push back against that and that the balance, you know, that we had to take seriously the fact that, you know, this was a pretty dramatic correction with Brexit and Trump winning elections and with Putin kind of asserting himself that, you know, should lead all of us to at least, you know, question, well, how do we, if we're going to promote these values, these progressive values, how do we make sure that they don't, we don't do so in a way

that loses, you know, you're not going to want everybody over, but, you know, that loses contact with people who also don't want to feel like their traditional identities are under assault. Yeah. You got called up to the Oval Office right after Obama's meeting with Trump, right? Yeah. So the readout in the book sounds like in person, face to face, Trump was a bit of a, he was friendly, he was open to preserving the Iran deal, talking about Obamacare. You know, it sounded like there was not a lot of the bravado and bluster that you see in public. Was that your sense talking to Obama? Yeah, no, there was none of it.

And, you know, he was kind of bemused. He didn't really know what to make of it because Trump was very, had been very ingratiating and said nice things about how they both drew huge crowds and, you know, we can draw big crowds, but Hillary can't. And, you know, Obama's trying to walk him through health care and immigration and the Iran deal. And, you know, Trump's not particularly engaging on that, but saying, oh, yeah, I'll take a look at that. And so he was kind of struggling to know. what to do with that, you know. In a way, it'd be easier if Trump came in and was like, let's debate

health care, you know, but that's not what happened. And I think on the one hand, sure that made the meeting go better, it also made him think, well, like, what's actually going to happen here? Yeah, yeah. And during the same time period, meanwhile, the U.S. government, the intelligence community, they are slowly coming to terms with just the amount of Russian interference into the election and all the stunning linkages to the Trump campaign. You write about how initially you weren't right into those discussions for reasons I'll let you explain. But then, when you were brought in, you guys got briefed more and more, like, probably daily. What was it like slowly coming to grips and getting presented a full picture of that

amount of interference when the rest of the world has no idea yet? Yeah, it was kind of like, you know, having the first edit of a horror movie and watching it unfold. I mean, first to your point, and I wasn't, you know, wasn't sour grape, so I wasn't in meetings. The point I was making is essentially we saw Russia, develop a certain capability to wage information warfare in Ukraine, that after the toppling of the Yanukovych government, Ukraine, Putin kind of went all in, obviously, in annexing Crimea, but also in creating these capabilities, these thousands of bots who could spread social

media disinformation, capacity to lie, a desire to push information into Western publics, using RT, their other platform. So we kind of got, or even intercepting phone calls, and I talk about one where they intercept the phone call of the U.S. diplomat and released it publicly, which you know, had never been done while I was in government that I could remember. And what happened in the election is the Russia question was treated like a cyber issue. So over that summer of 2016, there were all these secret meetings. And it reminded me, Tommy, of like the bin Laden meetings when you and I were there where there are these people who are really important meeting in situation room and you're not invited. Right. And you kind of know better than to act. And you kind of know better

than to ask, like, hey, what's that unmarked meeting? And they literally turn off the cameras that let people's assistants see who's in a meeting if it's breaking up, et cetera. That's exactly right. They don't put the topic of the meeting on the door and stuff, which they normally do. So I kind of figured out over time that that might have something to do with Russia. And finally, in September, Susan Rice sat me down and said, hey, we've had this process going with respect to Russia.

We're going to do a statement from the intelligence community that is, you know, calling out their interference, and she kind of caught me up to speed on it. Now, the problem, I think, in retrospect, is that there were no communications people in those meetings because this was viewed as kind of a cybersecurity issue, right? So, let's, you know, who can defend the election systems and who can figure out what the hack was and we'll bring the communications people in at the end, which is how sometimes people thought about, you know, a lot of things. But it's not just me like, you know, Jen Saki, for instance, our communications director,

she had been the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. They had spent years disparaging her because she would criticize them on Ukraine when she was a State Department's spokesperson. We had some experience about this fake news issue and this kind of information warfare issue that wasn't really at that table. And so when the statement did come out from the intelligence community in October saying that Russia was meddling the election, it talked about the hacking. It didn't say anything about the fake news. And so it was kind of like the missing piece of our warning and how we talked about these things. Now, I also was sympathetic to Obama. He's like, look, because I went to him and I said that to him.

And he said, well, look, I mean, we can't, if I tell people that this is fake news, Trump's going to say the elections rigged, the people consuming that news aren't going to listen to me. You know, we can debate forever whether he should have said more. That was the basic, you know, fact of it. Now, what did happen to me, and I describe, is right after the election, there was a meeting where he ordered the intelligence community to this review of, you know, what happened with Russian meddling. And right away, you know, I start to hear John Brennan and Jim Clapper lay this out, and it's much worse than I had any idea of, even as someone who consumed intelligence and had

ultimately been brought into this. And then over the course of the transition, it was like every piece of information that started to be put together pointed to the worst case scenarios, you know, in terms of the scale of what Russia did, and then ultimately the possibility that they had colluded with the Trump people. You know, that process of doing that review, you know, you reach down to the U.S. government, you pull up a lot of information, you start to connect a lot of dots, and the picture got uglier and uglier until I was sitting in the Oval Office when Comey and Clapper and Brennan briefed Obama and a group of us on this review and our jaws dropped, you know, and it was just worse than we ever knew. Frankly, we also had no idea that the FBI had been investigating

the Trump campaign. They don't brief that to us. And so I describe in the transition just getting this sense. I'm sitting the West Wing. I know I'm going to, you know, on the way out, right, I'm not going to be able to deal with this. I'm not going to be able to act on this. I'm not going to be able to respond to this. And that the people who are the ones who might have been involved in colluding with the Russians. So it was this kind of surreal experience. And I, yeah, I knew kind of when I walked out the door, like, man, this stuff is going to have a long tail. I mean, and what was even stranger is in the months after I left government, I continued to learn from the press. Each detail was worse.

I mean, if you told me in November of 2016 that like Don Jr. was having meetings with Russian agents and Trump Tower, I'd be like, oh, come on, it's not that crazy. Let's all calm down here. Right. So the story just got worse and worse. In happier times, you ended up leading these historic negotiations with Cuba. The process seems to be, it starts with you telling Obama that you are sick of fighting with reporters and you wanted to do more proactive policy development in the second term. And it ends with Obama flying to Havana to push to normalize relations with Cuba to the greatest extent possible. And you later attending Fidel Castro's funeral and going to this boozy dinner at Raul Castro's house in the middle where secret trips to Canada meet with Raul's son, trips in the Vatican to get the Pope's by.

and basically the coolest diplomacy possible. Can you just walk us through the story? Like, what was it like being there and negotiating with, like, people, these were not sort of some flunky from their Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Raoul Castro's son was your interlocutor. Yeah, this is, I was excited to tell the story

because I've never told it before. And I said to Obama on Air Force One after the election, his reelection, he's like, what do you want to do his second term? I'd really like you're seeing your job. And I'm like, look, I don't want to just defend. your drone policy for another four years. Like, I want to do a project and something affirmative, and that led to Cuba. So we sent the Cubans this message proposing a high-level, you know,

kind of back channel from the White House to the Cubans. We didn't know who they were going to come back with. And we knew that who they came back with was going to signal whether they were serious about doing something or not. And they come back with Alejandro Castro, who's son and a hugely powerful guy in their system, and we're like, okay, these guys mean business. And, you know, I remember flying up to Canada for the first of these secret meetings and we go off to literally a cabin in the woods. The Canadians were really discreet. And Alejandro Castro's son walks in. And that first meeting was just, you know, a lot of history in the Bay of Pigs and how many times did the CIA try to kill Fidel?

And we weren't getting anywhere. But over the course of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine meetings, you know, we built some trust. We did some confidence building. And ultimately, you know, we had just been negotiating a prisoner exchange to get an American Alan Gross out of prison in Cuba and they wanted some Cubans out of prison. But, you know, I said to them, let's push us as far as we can. Let's go as big as we can. And that's what ultimately led to, you know, us being at the Vatican and making these

agreements there to reestablish diplomatic relations and to they released 53 political prisoners in addition to the exchange and to open a. up travel and commerce between the United States and Cuba. And it really was like the most satisfying moment I had in government because we were doing something that just felt wholly affirmative, positive, like writing an historical wrong and offering a better future for Cubans in Cuba and for our relationship. Now it also comes with a lot of good stories because as I kept negotiating with the Cubans even after the opening to have Obama's trip down there. And I met Rao Castro a couple times. I had this bizarre experience at Vidal Castro's funeral where

I was only American on stage except for like Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte. And like all the Latin American left is there. But the last trip I took to Cuba was a few days before the end of the administration. And I had this long dinner with Raul Castro and we're drinking rum and talking about history. And towards the end, I started kind of urging him, well, don't give up on this. like Trump, maybe you make a deal, Trump, and he could tell I was kind of really upset that maybe Trump would put the brakes on this. And he says to me, look, and for those of the viewers or listeners who don't, no, you know, Raul was the minister of defense during the Cuban missile crisis under his brother Fidel. And he says to me, look, Ben, once there was a general from

Ossetia, which is a former Soviet province, he's like, there was a general from Ossetia who had the authority to launch nuclear missiles from Cuba without telling me, even though I was the Cuban Minister of Defense. So I've dealt with harder things than Trump. I literally wrote down that quote and was going to read it back to you because I love it so much. He's like, fuck off, kid, I got this. Yeah, I've been around the block a few times. Like, you may be sad about your election. I've dealt with the Cuban missile crisis. It's so good. One other historic diplomatic breakthrough that you go through in great detail is the Iran deal. Now, President Trump recently tore it up.

And like, reading this again, I just was thinking about how deeply personal this must have been for you, for Kerry, for everybody who worked on this, because the groundwork for this deal was laid during the campaign when Obama said he would meet with leaders he didn't agree with. And it took years of painstaking sanctions and negotiations. And then you led the team to help ensure that it didn't get rejected by Congress. And along the way, you were just personally pilloried and attacked. you were called anti-Israel. You were criticized for participating in a New York Times magazine profile that talked about

the work you guys did to try to get the deal to Congress. You became, as you called one chapter in the book, a right-wing villain. Can you talk about what happened and what that was like for you personally, like going through that? Yeah, well, first of all, it was, I wanted to be honest. It was just terrible, right? And, you know, you put on a brave face when you're there. But, you know, this is something that we worked on for years, and it was pretty taxed. at first, right? Like, how do we pursue sanctions and then how do we get into negotiations? But

the closer we got to a deal, the more kind of strident, unhinged, virulent the opposition got. And, you know, one of the things I describe is that, like, they bided by no standards. I remember, you know, one day, you know, I'm seeing a Breitbart story that has taken off about me in which they have whole quotes of things that I had said. I mean, one was so crazy. It was like Ben Rhodes said that the kiss. of the nuke deal will turn the Iranian frog into a prince. And they're that in quotation marks. And then that had been picked up in right-wing media. And then they're all, you know, Ben Rhodes is such an idiot. You know, I never even said anything remotely like that. It wasn't even like they took it out of, you know, like, changed one word. And I had this sense of just, I mean, the irony for all the heat I took on echo chamber

is that there was just massive echo chamber that hated the Iran deal, but thought that the way to discredit it was to savage people like me who were spokespeople for it personally. And then I kind of walked into this trap of that New York Times story, which had that objective. And it was a really difficult because, you know, you want to, you know, when you're there, you kind of shrug it off and you're like, oh, you know, we have the right enemies and, you know, we're going to, we actually won the debate, which was a hard fought win to secure it in Congress. but at the same time, like, you know, it takes a toll on you when, when you realize that there are like millions of people out there consuming this cartoon of you, you know.

Yeah. For me, it was like he's a liar. He had a fiction master's degree and he lies and he's an anti-Semite. And I talk about what that was like, even though my mother's Jewish. And, you know, it kind of grounded me down. And it also kind of made me probably more angry than I. should have been. In other words, like, I got a chip on my shoulder. You know, I probably sunk into the muck a little bit, you know, cared too much about what my critics were saying.

And so I do have to say that having gone through that experience, which, by the way, followed me out of the administration all the way to Israeli spies for Black Cube, you know, digging up dirt on me and my family, to have gone through all that and then have him kill the Iran deal was, like, pretty terrible. You know, they owned me. You know, they owned the libs on that one. Because unlike on Cuba or even Paris, like the Iranians kind of all, you're either doing it or you're not.

You know, like a future president come back into Paris. Cuba, they haven't really rolled back. But that's kind of a binary thing. And to have spent all those years on it and taken all those hits on it to just see him tear it up,

like I have to say, that's a pretty rotten feeling. Yeah, I mean, I raised it because it speaks to the strange isolation of the job. Like, We had the coolest jobs in the world.

No one should feel bad for us. That's not my point. But I was reminded of how isolating and alone it can feel in that place because you're like one of the only people read into classified information. One example was both of us were interviewed for a leak investigation about news reports about a computer virus called Stuxnet that targeted Iran's nuclear program. We would have to go disappear for hours at a time to talk to lawyers that we paid for out of our own pocket. Luckily, I got mine pro bono.

Or talk to the FBI facing like real. legal jeopardy, despite having done nothing wrong. And we sat in the same office, and you and I literally couldn't talk about it with each other. It was just like crazy. Well, and I write in there the absurdity of that situation was, you know, first of all, like, we're in the investigation because if you talked to that reporter, you're going to be investigated. So it doesn't matter if you're guilty or not. It's just like our job was to talk to reporters about Iran. Talk to David Sanger 10 times a week.

That was who wrote the book. And so we're both getting hauled in. We're good friends. and but we can't even talk about it. But then the other thing that drove me nuts, Tommy, is like, we're also getting all this incoming from angry reporters who are like, why is the Obama administration so eager to do leak investigations? And there's this huge left-wing criticism that, like, we,

and I'm like, nobody hates leak investigations more than me and Tommy because they're really fucking us up, you know? And so that used to drive me insane, but it was also like, you're right. Like, hey, I would, it comes to the territory, your public figure stuff is going to come your way. But it is isolating because like you, when you go to work on the Obama campaign in Iowa, the last thing you expect is five years later to be in a, you know, sterile FBI conference room with Rod Rosenstein asking you questions, you know, and lawyers all around you. Yeah. Oh, God. Those were not fun times. Those are genuinely scary stuff. One other thing the book, it just brought

me back to that time was the foreign trips and how exciting they were and remarkable but also frustrating at the same time. And I guess what I mean is the response to Obama visiting a country or a cultural stop was always, it was overwhelming. I mean, some of that is the power of the office, the power of the country. But seeing a young kid in Ghana or Brazil respond to Obama's mere presence was inspiring because of what it said about how America had changed and what that changed meant for that kid. But that feeling and that inspiration rarely translated back home. And you tell a story about a particularly frustrating trip when Obama delivered a U.S. for Nelson Mandela. Can you talk us through that story? Yeah. So, and you're right, it was weird to be

foreign policy speech because he gave a speech in a foreign country and be like the biggest thing that was going to happen in that country for years, you know, they're going to talk about that speech for years and it barely registered home. But the Mandela one really graded, and that's why I spent a lot of time on it. You know, here it is Nelson Mandela dies. I had to go in and tell Barack Obama that Nelson Mandela was dead. And I remember feeling totally inadequate to that moment. Yeah. God. You know, first African American president, his hero. Nelson Mandela is dead. And then we had to write this eulogy. And what I describe is over the course of writing it, I was in this awkward position as this kind of young white guy. And I worried that I was

playing the role of like the white liberal who wants to hear Barack Obama, you know, talk about how great Nelson Mandela was. You know, I felt a little out of place. But the point I was making to him was, you know, really personalized this. Like tell what in Mandela mean to you personally. And he rewrote the whole eulogy, which is why it's a really good speech by hand on the plane to South Africa. I'm going back and forth with him on it. And he ended up with some really kind of beautiful tribute to Mandela, but then some pretty visceral personal language where he said, you know, how Nelson Mandela made him want to be a better man and what he meant to him and Michelle and really talked in personal terms that he didn't usually do.

And by the way, part of the context for that time is that, you know, our press would always say, you know, Obama's aloof and stuff. And here he is on this huge stage, you know, where the rest of the world is all paying tribute to Nelson Mandela. And he gets up there and he gives this, I think, very visceral, personal and beautiful speech about Nelson Mandela. And then we get on the plane to come home. And all of the coverage back home is about, well, some of it's about he shook Raal Ocaster's hand. And yes, that was important. It was the first time he had done that. But much more so, like the Danish prime minister was like an attractive blonde woman.

And she took a selfie with Obama and David Cameron. And literally this was the story back home. And it was like dominating cable news and the tabloid headlines and social media memes and everything. And I remember Obama saying to me, like, I've never been this aggravated by the U.S. press, which, as you know, saying something. Yep, yep. But the point I make is racism wasn't saying we had to talk about a lot because it was kind of obvious.

And what he was saying to me is, like, well, of course there's a racial element to the fact that, like, why is it newsworthy that he's taking a selfie with a blonde woman? Because he's black, you know? And the fact that they would, that people would, in the United States who were seizing on this, would miss the. the horrific irony that they are, that's the story they're taking out of him eulogizing Nelson Mandela, his hero. You know, when he wouldn't even be president if Nelson Mandela hadn't done what he'd been

part of the legacy with Martin Luther King and nonviolent resistance, you know, it was always a little frustrating that the dynamic you described abroad didn't translate home. But that one, sometimes things would happen to make you say, like, there's something kind of not right in our society. if somehow the biggest news of the first African-American president flying around the world, eulogizing Nelson Mandel in the Starkley personal terms, that the biggest takeaway from that is a blonde lady took a selfie with him. I use that as kind of the stand-in for all of the frustration with kind of the trivialization and twinge with a little race that I think he had to deal with. Yeah, that showed a Donald Trump, junior level of lack of self-awareness from the press corps. I wrote down just the word Benghazi.

I couldn't even get myself to write a question. As I was reading through the chapter of Benghazi, I paused and sent Susan Rice an apology note for her having to have gone through that all over again just because she was like the person who stepped up and did Sunday shows for us. But I guess what I never totally realized and understood was how much worse it got for you after I left.

Because you and I were there together on the day of Benghazi and trying to deal with not just the sort of roiling protests all across the Muslim world because of the innocence of Muslims video, but also the sort of cynical attacks from Romney and the cut and thrust that led us through the election. But then the investigations kicked up to a degree that just got so vicious and personal that I don't know that I never really knew how many times that you were dragged in front of Trey Gowdy or name your cynical member of Congress and just pilloried by this.

these guys. I mean, have you gotten over that yet? Well, what happened, what was interesting to relive, I actually found this to be one of the most interesting things to write about, because first of all, what would happen, because in writing about this, I understood Donald Trump and how he got elected better, because what would happen is there be a flare-up, you know, there'd be some new piece of information about Benghazi that would cause the Republicans go crazy and it was almost always either false or completely misrepresented. And then it would kind of go underneath the radar a little bit, But what was interesting is each time it went underneath the radar, it got worse because it was just going into the kind of right-wing conspiracy factory to be replenished. And I remember having this surreal experience, which I describe of like every now and then on my Twitter feed, which I didn't use that much in the White House, suddenly like hundreds of people would be tweeting at me some outrageous, you know, just unhinged hatred, right?

Because some segment had just run about Benghazi where they had some conspiracy theory. So I could feel it building underneath the surface in this kind of netherworld of Breitbart and Talk Radio and wherever. And then when it would explode again, it would be that much worse. Yeah. And, you know, I've had everything from like the Republicans giving John Carl a completely made up email of mine that caused a uproar to Fox News chasing me into my house with, you know, cameras yelling. What about the Benghazi talking points? You know, I'm carrying my dry cleaning to having, yeah, to go. hauled in front of Trey Gowdy and having him, you know, what I didn't put Tomi is my favorite is

they were so relentless in trying to prove some theory that I remember they had some email from you about like Benghazi talking points and you put like explanation marks on it. And they're like, why did Mr. Vitor put exclamation marks on his email, you know? And I'm like, this is really where we are. I'm like, it's not uncommon for Mr. Vitor to use exclamation marks. Oh my God. electronic communications, you know. But so number one, what it showed to me is that there was an industry on the right that was the media and the, and the Congress. Like, they didn't care about facts. They didn't care about anything except for hanging this on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And so far as I was a supporting character with Susan Rice, I was part of that. And that's what led to Trump, right? Like, this kind of fact-free, outrage machine, social media. Like, I realized in writing the book, that that thread was very connected to what led to Trump, including, by the way, it was the select command on Benghazi that found, you know, the Hillary Clinton private email server, which had nothing to do with Benghazi.

Right. And then on the personal side, you know, yeah, I realized that I didn't handle it well. Like, I thought at the time I was handling it well. But, you know, I write about there pretty honestly, like I started drinking too much. I wasn't sleeping well. That's more irritable. my wife had the tragic loss of her father and I was like probably not as fully there for her

because I was like too hung up on the stuff I was taking so I don't think I handled particularly well because in retrospect you know I was a pretty young guy I was like in my mid-30s I wasn't quite ready to be targeted like that yeah like you said jobs and honor but it felt like this went beyond the normal you know right of passage especially because I as I I really, like, we didn't do anything wrong. And one of my favorite anecdotes about a bomb in the book is during one of these spikes

and tension, he called me into his office. And it's like two years after Benghazi, but I'm taking all this grief. And he says, like, I know you've been kind of down. And I'm like, oh, don't worry about it. And he's like, well, did you do anything wrong? And I was like, no. And he said, well, then what are you worried about? And that was kind of his mentality of like, all you can control is whether you did

something right or wrong. But for me, what ended up happening is they connected. all this stuff with me, right? So first I was a leaker and then it was Benghazi and then the Iran stuff came in and it was all this kind of ball of negativity about how essentially, you know, I was a liar and a fiction writer and they would just take the latest thing and slot it into that narrative. Yeah, and just attack. So by the time I walked out of the White House, like, you know, they had done some real, you know, damage in terms of at least their own people believing that, like, you know, the worst possible things about me.

Yeah. I mean, there's a reason people troll people, right, is because over time it does wear you down and it works. It does. And it was our job to live in the weeds and live in that morass. But it was funny to remember that because we had a president that, like, I don't know, woke up and talked to his family and read the PDV and, like, did real work. He didn't watch cable news all day. So he never knew how crazy the Fox News, Benghazi conspiracies were to the point where in debate prep, you had to very clearly remind him several times about what he'd said on that day.

And frankly, that saved him at the debate with Mitt Romney, right? Yeah, yeah. This was a hilarious Obama story because he didn't read all this crap, and he certainly didn't watch Fox News. And I remember having to go through the theories he might be asked about, there's stand-down order. And he's like, this is some real tin hat stuff. And I'm like, I'm telling you it's on Fox. And then, you know, he had stood in the Rose Garden after the Benghazi attacks and condemned it and called it an act of terror.

And so one of the charges was that we hadn't called it terrorism. And so the answer that he was giving, he was saying, well, I stood in the Rose Garden, I called it an act of terrorism. And I kept correcting him, I'm saying, like, you know, you got to call an act of terror. And Fav was there, too, and did the same thing. And he thought that that made no sense. And this is, frankly, one of the things that Hillary said that ended up getting – he's like, what's the difference between terror and terrorism, you know?

And I'm like, in this environment, a lot. You know, like you just have to, and Romney just walked right into it in the debate and said, no, you never called it an act of terror because Obama gave that answer. And what scared me about that, because they go back and forth, back and forth. And first, it's a great moment. And Candy Crowley, the moderator of the debate comes in and says, actually, he did call it an act of terror. And that was it. Like, Romney had lost that debate that turned a lot of the momentum around, frankly, after the terrible first debate.

But then I thought about it after. And I was writing about this. Romney seemed to believe that he had never called an act of terror on stage and believed all this stuff. And like Romney is not a, he's not a dumb guy.

And he's not even like a Trump guy. Like there's something that happened in the Republican mindset in part because maybe they are all consuming Fox News where you could have Mitt Romney as the major party candidate and literally he didn't believe

that Obama had said something that like a transcript showed Obama had said. Yeah, the right wing fever dream became their reality whether they liked it or not at some point. And it is scary. You were dealing with, like, I remember you were getting the craziest questions.

I was like Obama, the way Obama was to me, I kind of was, you'd come in and be like, I just, so-and-so from Fox News called me, it asked me, and what you tell me, I couldn't believe the stuff you were getting at the time. It would be like, did Obama watch Chris Stevens get overrun via a drone feed in the situation room?

Yeah, I was reported. I mean, just crazy stuff. Yeah, it's horrible. There are many, many, many more questions I want to ask you about this book. And I believe you're going to be out in L.A. soon. So we're going to harass you on POTS of America. But while I have you for my final question on the foreign policy show, when you wrote the book and you look back at eight years of all the things that he's accomplished and maybe some of the

things that have been unwound, what do you think Obama's legacy is on foreign policy at this point? Like what will be enduring that you and I will be talking about over a scotch in 30 years? Well, you know, like I think there are a few things that are individual that will continue to stand out. Like, I think that, well, first of all, he whacked bin Laden and Trump can't bring bin Laden back to life. True. That's something. He really did, you know, we had 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan when we took office.

And we had like 15,000 when he left. That's a huge shift that he didn't get enough credit for. Frankly, part of his saving the global economy was getting the world to come along. And then there are some of the individual pieces that look bad now will look better. Like Paris, I think it's going to be a huge legacy because I think the next president will just come back into the Paris Agreement. And then the Paris Agreement will be how the world deals with climate change. I think Cuba, same thing. Like Trump has rolled some of his back.

But I think inexorably we're going to open up to Cuba and he will be the guy who initiated that. So things like that will stand out. I think more broadly, though, this is kind of the note I end the book on. I thought a lot about presidents. And, you know, you actually don't remember. member that many policies that presidents undertake. I thought about like John, if, John F. Kennedy was probably my hero, right, as a president. And I, you know, when he became my hero, when I was like in high school college, I probably couldn't name five foreign policies

of John F. Kennedy, you know, maybe the Peace Corps, you know, he handled the Cuban Missile Crisis pretty well. Like, that's, that's it. It's the feeling he gave, you know. It's the speeches he gave. It's the inspiration that he offered to people. And it actually connects back to the point you made about all those foreign trips. Like, I believe, and again, people will accuse me of, you know, Kool-Aid drinking here, but I think history bears out that, like, there are certain American presidents who make an impression on Americans and people around the world that sticks. and I think that Barack Obama meant a lot to a lot of people in the United States, but even more so like billions of people around the world who saw him as a moral leader, who saw him as an indication of what minorities can accomplish inside of countries. And what are those people going to do? Like what is the inspiration that he gave them? What is that going to lead to? You know, what, how is a generation of people that kind of came of age and felt inspired by Obama going to end up changing the world? And so I feel like, as much as I hope that a lot of these policies look good, when you and I are having a drink in 30 years, it's going to be more like, yeah, Barack Obama is one of those kind of handful of American presidents who, you know, changed the way people around the world thought about themselves.

And frankly, I think that even if Trump won this election, the world is going to, you know, I hope, move more in the direction that Obama was charting, a more progressive, inclusive. world where nations work together to solve problems, where people of different, you know, races accept each other for who they are. And so there's an intangible to his legacy that I think will be more apparent as time goes on. And just like, you know, we like to look back, you know, 50 years to the Kennedys, you know, I think people are going to look back to Obama with a similar sense that he inspired people to do things and to make change. And that ultimately is probably me bigger than the Paris Agreement or certainly, you know, even if the Iran deal had survived, it wouldn't have been nearly as important as that, is that dynamic.

You know, Tanya Somanator, who runs all content here, Cricket Media, and worked with you on the Arondial stuff, told me her one piece of advice was ended on a hopeful note. And that's about as good as it gets, I think. That's as good as I can offer, I think. That's pretty damn good. The book is the world as it is. It is a truly fantastic book. If you want to learn about foreign policy in the last decade, about Barack Obama, about

what it's like to work in that place as a relatively young person and all the ways it changes you for good, for bad, for permanent. Buy the book, read the book. It's really great. You did a hell of a job in. Awesome. Really appreciate it, Tommy. Thanks a lot.