The World As It Is; A Memoir of the Obama White House

xx, 450, [10] pages. Frontispiece. Illustrations. Index. DJ has minor wear and soiling. Benjamin J. Rhodes (born November 14, 1977) is an American writer, political commentator and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting under President Barack Obama. With Jake Sullivan, he is the co-chair of National Security Action, a political NGO. He contributes to NBC News and MSNBC regularly as a political commentator. He is also a Crooked Media contributor, and co-host of the foreign policy podcast Pod Save the World. In 2007, Rhodes began working as a speechwriter for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Rhodes wrote Obama's 2009 Cairo speech "A New Beginning." Rhodes was the adviser who counseled Obama to withdraw support from Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, becoming a key adviser during the 2011 Arab Spring. Rhodes supported Israel in the 2012 Israel-Gaza conflict. Rhodes was instrumental in the conversations that led to Obama reestablishing the United States' diplomatic relations with Cuba, which had been cut off since 1961. The New York Times reported that Rhodes spent "more than a year sneaking off to secret negotiations in Canada and finally at the Vatican" in advance of the official announcement in December 2014. After leaving the Obama administration, Rhodes began working as a commentator. He began contributing to Crooked Media, NBC News and MSNBC. In 2018, he co-founded National Security Action. In 2015, Rhodes was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. 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.…