Both Rhodes and Kahl reacted on Twitter as well. “Well, that’s a good question,” Panetta allows. Hamilton nodded. The company compiled detailed background profiles on Rhodes and Kahl and tried to find out whether they had worked with Iran lobbyists or somehow made money on the deal. When I ask her where Rhodes’s control over drafts of the candidate’s speeches came from, she immediately answers, “Obama,” but then qualifies her answer. If you start opposing their interest in Syria, well, that could start a war, too.”. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. “I don’t know how you feel about Don DeLillo.”, “Yeah,” Rhodes answers. At first, they talked broadly about Iran policy, but then the conversation devolved into specific questions about Rhodes and Kahl. How do we sell it to the public? To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Carolyn Kaster / AP file Also targeted was Ben Rhodes, a deputy … He saw the first tower go down, and after that he walked around for a while, until he ran into someone he knew, and they went back to her shared Williamsburg apartment and tried to find a television that worked, and when he came back outside, everyone was taking pictures of the towers in flames. But they do not threaten our national existence.”, Watching Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”. The handwriting is perfect. Rhodes found out about the Iranian action earlier that morning but was trying to keep it out of the news until after the president’s speech. Rhodes during a video conference in the White House Situation Room. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo. “Another read, which isn’t necessarily opposed to that,” I continue, “is that their actual picture is entirely coherent. “He was just defiant,” she recalls. That’s bad. The reason that the author had to exercise power was because not everyone in the world is rational. See, I’m sympatico, the sneakers proclaim. Anne Norris admitted to beating Marcel Reardon to death with a hammer before attempting to hide his body. Luckily, the reporters on the couch in the West Wing waiting room don’t know it yet. “He was extremely good about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the message out that just made more sense,” Kreikemeier remembers. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war was Rhodes’s go-to move — and proved to be a winning argument. CONFIRMED: The Israeli intel firm Black Cube used to go after Harvey Weinstein’s accusers also targeted me & @brhodes (& our families). A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”, Operatives were told to contract prominent Iranian Americans and journalists who favored the Iran deal, including, according to the Guardian, reporters for the New York Times, MSNBC, the Atlantic, Haaretz, and Vox. By eliminating the fuss about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. “There was not much question that the Quds Force and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm, and there was not much question that this kind of opposing view could somehow gain any traction.”. We talk for a while about being American and at the same time being from somewhere else, and the split-screen experience of reality that experience allows. “He is a brilliant guy, but he has a real problem with what I call the assignment of bad faith,” one former senior official told me of the president. But once you are attuned to the distinctive qualities of Rhodes’s voice — which is often laced with aggressive contempt for anyone or anything that stands in the president’s way — you can hear him everywhere. “Who would be the author of this novel?” he asks. He is not Henry Kissinger, or so his logic runs, even as the underlying realist suspicion — or contempt — for the idea of America as a moral actor is eerily similar. Something scared him, and made him feel as if the grown-ups in Washington didn’t know what they were talking about, and it’s hard to argue that he was wrong. “It’s the center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to me two days after the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was implemented. Likely the brain behind this operation. Per the Observer: Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an art best practiced in person. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. Having recently spent time working in Hollywood, I realize during our conversations that the role Rhodes plays in the White House bears less resemblance to any specific character on Beltway-insider TV shows like “The West Wing” or “House of Cards” than it does to the people who create those shows. “What the hell does a guy who wanted to write fiction come to me for?” But he had always found writers useful, and Rhodes’s writing sample was the best in the pile. There is nothing snarky about his delivery. “He was like: ‘No, I’m not. He is invisible because he is not an egotist, and because he is devoted to the president. Rhodes’s mother and father are not interested in talking about Rhodes. “Absolutely,” she answers. newsletter, Please consider making a contribution to Vox today from as little as $3, Iran nuclear deal: Trump withdraws the US from the agreement, Don’t expect Biden to reenter the Iran nuclear deal right away, Netanyahu went on Fox & Friends to lobby Trump on the Iran deal, Spend June with the delicious vacation read Leave the World Behind, How Native Hawaiians fought the US Navy, and won, Democrats barely passed a bill to increase security at the US Capitol, Master of None season 3 is an artfully filmed disappointment, Biden’s negotiations with Republicans are making some Democrats anxious. At least, he tried. “That image has always stayed with me,” he says. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. The enormousness of the endeavor sank in on that first day, and he realized that for all the prep work, there was no manual for how to be on the staff of the person who is running the country, particularly at a time when the global economy was in free fall and 180,000 Americans were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. -Wife Ann Norris is PDAS for legislative affairs in the State Dept. At the same time, he believes very deeply in Obama, the man and the president, and in the policies that he has helped to structure and sell on his behalf. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. He contributes to NBC News and … The New Yorker reported that one source said the effort to get information on Rhodes and Kahl was part of Black Cube’s work for a “private sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran.”. When his wife takes the car, he rides the bus, which offers him a touch of the anonymity he craves. Senator Barbara Boxer. And he understood intuitively that having the pen gave him that control.” His judgment was superior to that of his rivals, and he refused to ever back down. It’s nonproliferation. Obama wouldn’t want that.’ ”, Obama relies on Rhodes for “an unvarnished take,” in part, she says, because “Ben just has no poker face,” and so it’s easy to see when he is feeling uncomfortable. But if they put it in blunt, unnuanced terms — ”, Panetta completes my sentence: “ — they’d get the [expletive] kicked out of them.” He looks at me curiously. The aura that Gates built over the past two decades may be permanently shattered. https://t.co/T2ERbnYSMu Was this authorized by the Trump White House? “Don DeLillo, I think,” Rhodes answers. Everything changed that day. For Rhodes, who wrote much of the I.S.G. With Jake Sullivan, he is the co-chair of National Security Action, a political NGO. Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, in his office.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times, Picture him as a young man, standing on the waterfront in North Williamsburg, at a polling site, on Sept. 11, 2001, which was Election Day in New York City. The story that Rhodes published in The Beloit Fiction Journal is a good place to start. Similar contact was made with Ann Norris, a former State Department official, who is also the wife of Ben Rhodes, in June 2017, according to The New Yorker. Rhodes told the Observer he was not aware of the campaign against him but was not surprised. This is somewhere else. Power is now the American ambassador to the United Nations. They’re agreements between governments. A small figure in a long navy cashmere overcoat turns around, in mock surprise. But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to Congress? “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,” Somanader offered. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that Rouhani and Zarif” — Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister — “are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in some respects, pro-American. His father is a Texan lawyer who took his sons to St. Thomas Episcopal Church once a month, where Rhodes felt like the Jewish kid in church, the same way he felt like a “Jewish Christian” at Passover Seders. What happened to the $45 billion in rent relief? It was titled “The Goldfish Smiles, You Smile Back.” The story still haunts him, he says, because “it foreshadowed my entire life.”. “The idea of someone with a masters in fiction who had also co-authored the Iraq Study Group and 9/11 Commission reports seemed perfect for a candidate who put so much emphasis on storytelling.” The two young speechwriters quickly found themselves to be in sync. Rhodes is married to Ann Norris, [former] chief foreign policy adviser to Senator Barbara Boxer [who is now the Senior Advisor at the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues at the U.S. Department of State.] The parts of Obama’s foreign policy that disturb some of his friends on the left, like drone strikes, Rhodes says, are a result of Obama’s particular kind of globalism, which understands the hard and at times absolute necessity of killing. So it felt really good. “Bill and I had a huge amount of license to explore what the terms would look like, within the negotiating parameters,” Sullivan says. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we’re there — nearly a decade in Iraq.”. Expand Your Search. As she explained how the process worked, I was struck by how naïve the assumption of a “state of nature” must seem in an information environment that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write about. Yet, at the same time, they are also ways of avoiding more deadly uses of force — a kind of low-body-count spin move. According to both Hamilton and Edward Djerejian, Baker’s second on the I.S.G., Rhodes’s opinions were helpful in shaping the group’s conclusions — a scathing indictment of the policy makers responsible for invading Iraq. The fact that the president largely let his surrogates do the talking and the selling of the Iran deal — and even now, rarely talks about it in public — does not reflect his level of direct engagement. “I used to have a 9:30 hit on CNN,” Martin reminisces. Furthermore, Ben Rhodes is married to Ann Norris, senior foreign and defense advisor to Senator Barbara Boxer(D-California). No longer one thing but multiple overlapping spheres or circles. “We can do things that challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, ‘AIPAC doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the Israeli government doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the gulf countries don’t like it.’ It’s the possibility of improved relations with adversaries. Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency. “Yeah, I admit very much to that reality,” he says. The ideas fly like radio waves. She blamed her actions on bad mental health. ), Kahl’s wife, Rebecca Kahl, got an email from a woman who insisted she needed to talk to her about the school her daughter attended. In July 2012, Jake Sullivan, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, traveled to Muscat, Oman, for the first meeting with the Iranians, taking a message from the White House. In the e-mail, a woman who introduced herself as Eva Novak and claimed to work for a London-based film company called Shell Productions asked Norris to … “So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “The first conversation we had over dinner, when we first met, was about what it was like for both of us to live in countries that were predominantly Muslim countries at formative parts of our childhood and the perspective it gave us about the United States and how uniquely excellent it is,” she says. As the Biden administration ramps up, sign up for our essential weekly policy newsletter, An Israeli spy firm was reportedly hired to dig up dirt on ex-Obama aides involved in the Iran deal, A no-beef diet is great — but only if you don’t replace it with chicken. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. Jarrett was born in Iran and spent her early childhood there. Though Rhodes never said a word in meetings, Hamilton says, he had a keen understanding of what was going on and a talent for putting the positions of distinguished participants down on paper. “And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”. He is also a Crooked Media contributor, and co-host of the foreign policy podcast Pod Save the World.. Rhodes served as Hamilton’s staff member on the 9/11 Commission, where he met Denis McDonough, another Hamilton protégé, who had gone on to work for Tom Daschle in the Senate. The New Yorker’s report landed a day after the Observer reported that aides to President Trump had hired Black Cube to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign on Rhodes and Kahl. “That as much as Iraq is what angered me.”. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”, Rhodes’s messaging campaign was so effective not simply because it was a perfectly planned and executed example of digital strategy, but also because he was personally involved in guiding the deal itself. Another official I spoke to put the same point more succinctly: “Clearly the world has disappointed him.” When I asked whether he believed that the Oval Office debate over Syria policy in 2012 — resulting in a decision not to support the uprising against Assad in any meaningful way — had been an honest and open one, he said that he had believed that it was, but has since changed his mind. “In fact it’s a sign of strength!” I said, chuckling. The buck stops with the establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean up their mess. “There’s a numbing element to Syria in particular. His days at the White House start with the president’s daily briefing, which usually includes the vice president, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Adviser Avril Haines and Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco. Rhodes (center) and Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, listening as President Obama spoke to reporters during an off-the-record discussion. So I wonder: How did he get from there to here? He arrives here every morning between 8 and 9 from a modest two-bedroom apartment in a grad-student-type building in an unpretentious Washington neighborhood around the corner from his favorite post-collegiate bar. Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why. Rhodes’s impassioned yet depressive vibe, which I feel in his stray remarks and in the strangeness of his decision to allow me to roam around the White House, stems in part from feeling overloaded; he wishes he had more time to think and write. Rhodes wurde in New York geboren und wuchs auf der Upper East Side in Manhattan auf. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East. Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use, which became effective December 20, 2019. Here is the president adjusting Rhodes’s tie; presenting his darling baby daughter, Ella, with a flower; and smiling wide while playing with Ella on a giant rug that says “E Pluribus Unum.”. Rhodes is married to Ann Norris, who was chief foreign policy adviser to former U.S. Price looks up from his keyboard to provide a messaging update: “Considering that they have 10 of our guys in custody, we’re doing O.K.”, With three hours to go until the president’s address to Congress, Rhodes grabs a big Gatorade and starts combing through the text of the State of the Union address. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely. “Instead of adjusting his policies to the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing realities on the ground, the conclusions he draws are exactly the same, no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests,” he says. It took me 45 minutes.” The CBS News anchor Scott Pelley tells a story about how members of the press destroyed the lawn during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and were told that they would be allowed back once the grass was replanted. Nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase “mind meld” verbatim, some with casual assurance and others in the hushed tones that are usually reserved for special insights. One sentence reads: “But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands.” He retypes a word, then changes it back, before continuing with his edit. I am silent in these meetings, taking notes. He is holding a phone to his ear, repeating his mantra: “I’m not important. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. Yet some large part of the recent history of America and its role in the world turns on the fact that the entirely familiar person sitting at the desk in front of me, who seems not unlike other weed-smokers I know who write Frederick Barthelme-type short stories, has achieved a “mind meld” with President Obama and used his skills to help execute a radical shift in American foreign policy. He leans back and opens a drawer in the file cabinet behind his desk, and removes a folder. The books on his shelves are a mix of DeLillo novels, history books, recondite tomes on Cuba and Burma and adventure-wonk stuff like Mark Mazzetti’s “The Way of the Knife.” C. S. Lewis makes an appearance here, alongside a volume of Lincoln speeches (Obama tells all his speechwriters to read Lincoln) and George Orwell’s “All Art Is Propaganda.” I have seen the same books on the shelves of plenty of Brooklyn apartments. The goldfish idea, I’m told, had been Ms. Wellberg’s.“Why?” I ask. Sullivan and Burns spent hours before and after every session in Oman with the president and his closest advisers in the White House. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East. But the way it changed Ben Rhodes’s life is still unique, and perhaps not strictly believable, even as fiction. Similar contact was made with Ann Norris, a former State Department official, who is also the wife of Ben Rhodes, in June 2017, according to The New Yorker. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today from as little as $3. What I want to understand better, I tell her, are the swirls of the president’s emotional fingerprint, which I saw in the longhand draft of his Nobel speech. But that’s hardly fair. The death of Ronald Greene in Louisiana police custody, explained. Rhodes at a nuclear-security summit meeting in March, where President Obama met with President Xi Jinping of China. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision about who Americans are and where we are going that Rhodes and the president have been formulating together over the past seven years. Norris is married to Ben Rhodes, a former foreign-policy adviser to President Barack Obama and a prominent advocate of the Iran nuclear deal. One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”. The cream of the crop are here this early p.m. for a private, off-the-record lunch with the president, who will preview his annual remarks to Congress over a meal that is reported to be among the best in the White House chef’s repertoire. Benjamin J. Rhodes (born November 14, 1977) is a writer and political commentator. “I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. Select from premium Ben Rhodes Obama of the highest quality. In the front office, his assistant, Rumana Ahmed, and his deputy, Ned Price, are squeezed behind desks, which face a large television screen, from which CNN blares nonstop. I also understand why Obama pulled the plug on America’s engagement with the Middle East, I say, but it was also true as a result that more people are dying there on his watch than died during the Bush presidency, even if very few of them are Americans. “When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy, it’s like a Risk game, or it’s all about us, or the human beings disappear from the decisions. “We don’t have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues,” he said. report, the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons. “Once that was agreed to, it was quickly decided that we resolve the nuclear agreement in two steps, the interim agreement and the final agreement.” Subsequent meetings with the Iranians followed, during which he was joined by Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns. During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact with Rhodes. But I will tell you this,” he continues. We’ll present a plan, and then the president can make a decision.’ I mean, Jesus Christ, it is the president of the United States, you’re making some big decisions here, he ought to be entitled to hear all of those viewpoints and not to be driven down a certain path.”. Those are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. “Just to confirm for you that he really is a writer.” He shows me the president’s copy of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, a revision of an original draft by Favreau and Rhodes whose defining tension was accepting a prize awarded before he had actually accomplished anything.

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