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Can We Go Home Now?

I made my first trip to the Oval Office on March 10^th, 2009, when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon paid a courtesy call to President Obama.

I assumed that I would have little difficulty finding the Oval. After all, in my new universe, it was the sun around which all planets rotated. And by then, I had taken many short walks from my office in the EEOB to the ground floor of the West Wing for Situation Room meetings.

Unfortunately, as soon as I entered the White House, I realized I had no idea where to go. I rushed back to my office in the EEOB and googled “Oval Office West Wing map.” I ended up printing out a small map from the Washington Post website that showed a floor plan. But the image, which was not drawn to scale, gave me a false sense of security. I wandered up to the second floor, while the Oval—which was tough to miss—was on the first.

By the time I found my way into the “pre-brief” with the President, the other participants were already seated, and National Security Advisor Jones was speaking. I sat down awkwardly, maneuvering my seven months’ pregnant body onto the couch between my colleagues, trying to catch my breath before the President called on me.

Since my fainting episodes, I had carried a well-worn Poland Springs water bottle everywhere, and I thought nothing of setting it down on the elegant wooden coffee table next to Obama’s large bowl of fresh apples. As soon as I did so, however, a butler promptly removed the unsightly item from view. Susan, who was sitting next to Jones, tried to give me an encouraging smile, but her face bore the trace of a grimace.

President Obama greeted me warmly. “How are you, Power?” he said. “Let me give you a minute to get your bearings.” I tried to slow my breathing.

After he motioned for me to offer my thoughts, I told him that his meeting with the secretary-general was happening at a critical juncture. The previous week, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir had been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and genocide perpetrated by his forces in Darfur. In retaliation, he had just expelled thirteen international aid groups from his country, thereby crippling vital food deliveries that Darfuri displaced people needed to survive.

More nervous than I had ever been in Obama’s presence, I told him that Darfur stood at a “strategic moment.” I emphasized the peril faced by more than a million Darfuris, and I urged him to use his remarks to the press alongside the secretary-general to publicly condemn President Bashir’s actions.

“This will be the first time your voice will be heard saying that the expulsion of humanitarians is unacceptable,” I said.

“But if I say that,” Obama asked, “what leverage do we have to follow through?”

The man who sat before me in the President’s chair looked and sounded just like the man I had worked for in the Senate and on the campaign. However, even two months into his new job, he was different.

“Nobody is going to go in and arrest Bashir, and his own guys are not going to dislodge him,” Obama continued. The NSC Senior Director for Africa attempted to respond, but the President cut her off as well.

“What do we have to make Bashir cooperate? Are the Arabs with us?”

I shook my head.

“The Africans?”

“Some,” I said.

“China?”

I looked down.

The Chinese government, which was emerging as a major force in world affairs, argued that a sovereign state had the right to do whatever it wanted within its borders. This position was rooted in its own self-interest: China didn’t want outsiders scrutinizing its domestic human rights abuses. And even though many African leaders had declared their intention never to allow “another Rwanda,” they were not looking to confront the oil-rich government of Sudan.

“So what leverage do we have?” Obama asked again.

Susan jumped in, outlining the range of economic sanctions we could impose on Sudanese government officials, and mentioning the no-fly zone Obama had floated during the campaign. But Obama was elected President promising to wind down wars. Grounding Sudan’s air force by militarily imposing a no-fly zone could entail beginning a new one.

“I’m not trying to be difficult here,” the President said. “But we simply don’t have that many tools to play with, and the Sudanese must know that.”

With the pre-meeting winding down, I made one last effort to convince him that, even though no panacea existed, he should still speak out.

“The Sudanese government has a long history of making threats and then walking them back under public pressure,” I said. “They are very eager to develop a working relationship with your administration, and your voice can make a difference.”

Obama was not satisfied, but he clapped his hands together, signaling it was time to welcome the secretary-general.

In “A Problem from Hell,” I had highlighted the work of Albert Hirschman, the Princeton economist who published the landmark book The Rhetoric of Reaction in 1991. Hirschman’s thesis was that those who didn’t want to pursue a particular course of action tended to argue that a given policy would be futile (“futility”), that it would likely make matters worse (“perversity”), or that it would imperil some other goal (“jeopardy”).

Senator Obama and I had talked about Hirschman’s work, and I had admired Obama’s ability both to identify the constraints the United States faced and to think creatively about ways we could transcend those barriers. Now, though, endowed with powers he had never had before, he seemed less inclined to believe the United States could get its way. The President was keenly alert to the risks, as he often put it, of “overpromising and underdelivering”—a version of Hirschman’s futility concern.

Ban Ki-moon was escorted into the Oval, and he began telling Obama how much he looked forward to working with the members of his team: “Susan Rice, General Jones, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Jones . . .” Even though I had met the secretary-general several times before I entered government, I wasn’t surprised that he mangled my name. What did give me a jolt was that he identified me as the fictional, sex-addicted businesswoman played by Kim Cattrall on HBO’s Sex and the City. Three of Ban’s advisers immediately leaned over to him, whispering “Power, Power.”

The meeting proceeded uneventfully. Afterward, to my pleasant surprise, Obama used his joint media appearance with the secretary-general to forcefully condemn the Sudanese government’s actions. Khartoum did not agree to re-admit the thirteen NGOs, but it would allow other aid groups to make up most of the lost humanitarian capacity.

After the UN delegation left the Oval, Obama approached me and asked when I was due. “I think Barack would make a great name,” he joked.

I was so eager to talk about substantive foreign policy issues with him that I blurted out a few sentences about what I was working on. As soon as I did, I saw his shoulders stiffen, and he said he had to get to another meeting.

Initially stung, I thought about it later and understood his reaction. “Everyone on planet Earth wants something from him,” I told Cass. “He probably just wanted one simple conversation about baby names.”

In the Senate and during the campaign, my conversations with Obama could glide between the personal and the political. But now that he was President, he had the power to order officials in the government to take action on almost any issue in the world. This meant that when I raised a foreign policy topic with him, I wasn’t launching an interesting discussion. Rather, I was making an implicit demand.

WHEN I HAD FIRST FLASHED my badge to gain entry to the Situation Room, I heard a kind of internal “intruder alert” go off inside my head. Given my background as a journalist, I wondered whether people would be reluctant to speak during meetings I attended.

“Will people think I’m just a reporter masquerading as a bureaucrat?” I asked Cass. He answered with typically astute behavioral wisdom. “People tend to think about themselves,” he told me. “It is highly unlikely your colleagues are thinking about you at all.”

But he was not entirely correct. Early in the administration, John Prendergast orchestrated the placement of a brilliant half-page advertisement in the Washington Post and Politico that caused a stir within the White House. In addition to being my close friend, John remained a leading advocate on Darfur, and his shockingly well-informed ad took personal aim at specific Deputies, the typically faceless and nameless senior officials who were making key decisions about how our administration would handle the crisis there. The ad ran the same day that they were meeting to discuss what the United States should do next, and it included their pictures and first names—“Erica, Tom, Jim, Stuart, Michèle.”^* In addition to publicizing the precise timing of this private meeting, John knew the content of the policy divisions among the Deputies. Many in the administration assumed, wrongly, that I was his source.

John had been best man at my wedding. He was Declan’s godfather, and he had cared for me during some of my most difficult moments. But when I started in government, we had made a pact to never discuss internal deliberations. I wanted to continue to hear about what he learned on his travels to Africa and his recommendations for what we should do on various issues. But having served in the Clinton White House, John understood that our work-related conversations could go in only one direction.

With John’s ad and in other instances, I never knew how to address rumors of my culpability. If I marched into the offices of my higher-ups to discuss a suspected leak, I feared it would suggest guilt. But if I waited for the accusations to be leveled in person, I would be waiting a long time. Government, I discovered, was a lot like high school: people tended to dish on their peers behind their backs rather than to their faces.

Obama once pulled me aside and warned me that, because of my ties to journalists and NGOs, some in the White House suspected I was talking to the press out of school. I responded firmly and honestly, “It will never, ever be me.” I kept that promise and never leaked—but since those who did were never identified, the cloud of suspicion remained.

IN MY WRITING LIFE before government, I had come to believe that the only way to understand a place was to hop on a plane and spend months digging in to what was happening. Hearing in person from the people who were affected by US foreign policy decisions seemed essential. Yet once I gained actual responsibility for helping develop these policies, I found it almost impossible to travel. Multiple NSC officials needed to approve my trips, and my early requests were almost always denied. When I asked to join a State Department delegation in a dialogue with the Burmese government, for example, I was told I couldn’t go because the presence of someone seen as close to President Obama might inflate expectations of a breakthrough.

After a proposed trip to the UN offices in Geneva was deemed “nonessential” and declined on budgetary grounds, I offered to pay my own way. The NSC administrative official looked at me incredulously.

“If you are representing the United States government,” she said, “the government must support the trip.”

“Yes,” I said, cluelessly, “but you are saying the government won’t cover my trip, and I still want to go. It’s worth it for me to use my own money.” I did not go to Geneva.

I chafed at being cooped up in an office. “I’m like a plant in need of light,” I complained to Cass. And if I was this insulated, I thought, how must President Obama feel?

On the campaign trail, I often heard Obama lament his relative seclusion. Indeed, on the rare occasions he broke free of his fixed schedule and made a spontaneous visit somewhere, campaign staff would send around an email saying, “The bear is loose.”

I couldn’t imagine how “the bear” was now dealing with life inside the sturdiest, most regimented bubble in the world. He had a convoy of thirty vehicles wherever he went. He could do almost nothing on a whim. Days or even weeks before he went somewhere, large advance teams would secure his intended destination and even meet with the people greeting him. Everything must have felt rehearsed.

Seeing how cloistered he was, I gained a whole new respect for the importance of the relatively obscure Office of Presidential Correspondence. Some fifty staff members and three hundred volunteers helped decide which ten letters and email messages written to the President (out of the ten thousand that arrived each day) would go in the briefing book Obama took home at night. This sampling of correspondence—the “letter underground” as the staff called it—gave the President perhaps his most authentic glimpse into the real world.

Obama had played basketball all his life, but once he became president, he seemed to prefer golf. “Eighteen holes is what passes for freedom in this job,” he once explained to me. For someone pent up by rope lines and armored cars, barricades and security details, an afternoon round under an open sky must have meant much more than golf.

MY HUSBAND WAS HAVING his own issues adjusting to our new world. Unlike me, Cass needed to be confirmed by the US Senate before he could take up his dream job of running OIRA. As a former University of Chicago professor invested in ensuring that regulatory benefits exceeded costs (an approach also championed by Republicans), he was seen as too conservative for the post by some progressives. But it was right-wing pundits and politicians who waged a full-throated campaign against his confirmation.

Cass had published well over four hundred articles (most long and academic), and nearly forty books. He had never written cautiously, weighing in on contentious topics such as abortion, pornography, and animal rights. If you had tracked only Fox News, which distorted Cass’s writing, you would have thought President Obama had nominated a radical, Marxist, animal-rights activist who would use his perch at OIRA to ban hunting and prohibit meat consumption.

By coincidence, Cass had just published a book called Rumors, about how easily lies were spread and reputations were soiled in the internet age. Suddenly, the author of Rumors found himself subjected to the wildest falsehoods imaginable. The Center for Consumer Freedom wrote that Cass’s appointment “could spell the end of animal agriculture, retail sales of meat and dairy foods, hunting and fishing, biomedical research, pet ownership, zoos and aquariums, traveling circuses, and countless other things Americans take for granted.” On the floor of the Senate, Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning warned, “According to Mr. Sunstein’s logic, your dog could sue you for putting its collar on a little too tight.”

Fox News’s Glenn Beck developed an obsession with Cass, labeling him “evil” and calling him “The Most Dangerous Man in America” on air over a hundred times. To his nightly audience of three million viewers, Beck ranted about Cass’s coauthored book Nudge, which discussed modest steps governments could take to improve citizen welfare. But as Beck saw it, Cass’s true ambitions were much more ominous: “First it’s nudge. Then it’s shove. Then it becomes shoot.”

I was frightened at how far Cass’s critics seemed prepared to go. He got emails that ran the gamut from obnoxious (“I believe animals have rights, the right to be tasty”) to menacing and confused (“Go back to Israel, you Nazi”). The US Sportsmen’s Alliance called on its followers to “take up their arms” in order to prevent Cass from assuming the job.

He began receiving death threats at our unlisted home address. One, which I brought to the head of security at the NSC, read:

If I were you, I would resign immediately. A well-paid individual, who is armed, knows where you live.

I alternated between reassuring myself that these warnings were just meant to intimidate and being unable to sleep for entire nights as I stared at Cass and imagined someone actually harming him. No matter how much therapy I had done to try to heal the wounds left by my father’s death, I still worried that the deep love and peace Cass had brought me could not last.

BOTH OF US MISSED controlling how we spent our time. And early on, we didn’t feel that we were accomplishing what we wanted. As we walked to the car at night, we would assess how we had fared during the workday with the shorthand of whether we were “respected” or “not respected,” and whether we were “effective” or “not effective.”

I would typically tell Cass that I had landed, yet again, in the lower left-hand quadrant: “not respected, not effective.”

My focus became intensely bureaucratic. In the distant past, I had felt my blood boil confronting Bosnian Serb militiamen for the crimes they were committing. But now, holed up in a fully secure office with the blinds perpetually drawn, my universe shrank. Exclusion from a meeting was enough to cause me to fume to Cass that I should just pack up and move back to Boston. After meetings, an NSC colleague would send around what was called the Summary of Conclusions (SOC) to all those who attended, memorializing what had been agreed upon. If the SOC omitted, for example, my nonconcurrence on whether we should recognize a flawed election somewhere, I was almost as enraged as if I had personally witnessed a soldier rough up an election monitor.

Because we were expecting a child, we had started to receive gifts, and one of the children’s books, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, stood out. We were each so unaccustomed to dreariness in our work lives that we felt like Alexander, mired in cycles of complaint that were becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Cass never put personal sentiments in emails, but many days he would send me an SOS in code: “CWGHN?” (Can We Go Home Now?).

It felt surreal and embarrassingly self-centered to be unhappy working in the White House. I thought about my Irish cousins and aunts and uncles who were so amazed by my place of employment that they were planning to fly a very long way to get personal tours. I was learning vast amounts about how foreign policy was made. I was being schooled by top experts on parts of the world I had not previously known much about. After soliciting the views of people across the government, I had made recommendations to the President that resulted in the United States rejoining a number of UN agencies from which President Bush had walked away. And I had successfully pushed for Obama to raise his voice against the wartime atrocities being carried out in countries such as Sri Lanka and Sudan.

But I knew I did not yet have the relationships, the clout, or the mastery of bureaucratic processes I needed to maximize my impact.