18 The Furies
“You’re shitting me, right?” I asked White House chief of staff Denis McDonough on an evening in late August 2013.
“No, I’m serious. I was just on my nightly walk with the president, and he thinks we should pause and first go to Congress.”
I was stunned. Denis, standing in my office doorway, repeated his news—that President Obama had suddenly decided not to strike Syria immediately, as planned, but first to get congressional approval for U.S. military action in response to Syria’s horrific use of chemical weapons. Denis said a small group of us would soon gather in the Oval Office to discuss this further with the president.
As national security advisor for less than two months, I’d already chaired several Principals Committee meetings on our response to Syria’s violation of the president’s so-called “red line” on the use of chemical weapons. Nearly two thousand people, including many children, had been killed by the Syrian regime in a sarin gas attack on the Ghouta region. We almost all believed we needed to act militarily to demonstrate to Assad that he could not violate international law with impunity by using deadly gas against civilians without paying a price.
That afternoon, at an NSC meeting, the president agreed and approved appropriate military targets. We were very close to launching. Our primary impediment was the U.N., which needed time to move their personnel out of harm’s way. We had lined up international partners to join our military operation, notably France and the U.K. But Prime Minister David Cameron decided to seek parliamentary approval for this action and, shockingly, he had lost the vote. This was a major setback, an “own goal” by Cameron, but France remained gung ho.
When we gathered that Friday evening in the Oval, President Obama laid out his thinking. He began with his description of the challenge he aimed to address. To start, he recounted, we did not have a clearly valid international legal basis for our planned action, but we could argue that the use of banned chemical weapons made our actions legitimate, if not technically legal. Domestically, we could invoke the president’s constitutional authority to use force under Article II, but that would trigger the War Powers clock—meaning, if our actions lasted longer than sixty days, the president would need to obtain congressional approval. Therefore, before we used any significant force in Syria to address its chemical weapons use, the president thought it best to invest Congress in the decision, and through them the American people.
As usual, Obama was thinking several plays down the field—to the potential need for military action against Iran, if diplomacy failed, to force Iran to give up its still nascent nuclear weapons program. Once the precedent was established that Congress should act to authorize military action in Syria, we could insist on the same kind of vote, should we need to confront Iran—a much higher-risk proposition that he would want Congress to own with us.
I admired the president’s logic but disagreed with his assumptions. As Obama polled his key aides assembled in the Oval for their individual views, all agreed with him. He called on me last, as he often did in my role as national security advisor.
The lone dissenter, I argued for proceeding with military action, as planned. We had signaled clearly and publicly (most recently that morning in a strong speech by Secretary Kerry) that we intended to hold Syria accountable through the use of force. Our military assets were in place. The U.N. was warned. Our allies were waiting. We needed to go. As Vice President Biden likes to say, “Big countries don’t bluff.” Finally, I invoked the painful history of Rwanda and predicted we could long be blamed for inaction.
Above all, I argued to the president, “Congress won’t grant you the authority.” That was my strong gut. I had come to believe from bitter experience that Republicans in Congress were so hostile to President Obama they would deny him anything of consequence he requested, even if they believed it was the right thing to do. I anticipated that congressional Democrats would splinter, as many did not want to vote for what they feared might become another war of choice in the Middle East. The president listened closely to us all and acknowledged my concerns. He concluded his argument with characteristic aplomb, predicting that we would get the votes. Neither a political strategist, the legislative affairs director, nor twice elected president, I rested my case.
The next morning, the president convened his whole national security cabinet to discuss Syria. Again, he laid out his thinking and polled the room. Everyone professed to agree with his arguments and proposed course of action, though I sensed some were not being fully forthcoming with their true opinion. When it was my turn at the end, I summarized with greater brevity the same concerns I had expressed the night before, for the other principals to hear: we would never get Congress on board; it was time to act. As the meeting ended, as anticipated, I was badly outvoted. So, figuratively, I saluted and moved out to implement the president’s decision.
President Obama later told me that he was not certain we would prevail in Congress but thought we had a fighting chance. He foresaw that a night or two of bombing might not change Assad’s calculus and that a more sustained military campaign may be needed to achieve our objectives. Given that reality, Obama felt that even if we might fall short of the needed votes, it was important to try to vest Congress in such a consequential decision to use force. After Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, Congress needed to be on board with such critical choices; it had to own them alongside us—one way or the other.
In the meantime, sensing that Russia feared that the U.S. was on the verge of major military action, President Obama pigeonholed Putin on the margins of the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg in early September 2013. Obama told Putin he was prepared to use force to punish Assad for deploying chemical weapons, though he remained open to a more permanent negotiated solution, if one could be found, to address Syria’s chemical stockpile. Intrigued, Putin agreed that Secretary Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov should discuss possible options. Obama later instructed me to alert Kerry to pursue this prospect with Lavrov.
The U.S. and Russia worked together to compel Assad to declare and relinquish his chemical weapons stockpile, subject to international verification. Russia vowed to exert the necessary pressure on Assad, and Kerry and Lavrov codified their agreement in a U.N. Security Council resolution, which threatened sanctions and, by implication, the use of force, if Syria failed to comply. The U.S. agreed to hold off bombing until we could see whether Assad would fulfill his commitments or not.
Ultimately, we would fail to garner the necessary support for a congressional authorization to use force. Republicans and Democrats had acted precisely as I predicted. Ironically, it turns out, I was right about the politics; but President Obama was right about the policy. Without the use of force, we ultimately achieved a better outcome than I had imagined. The bombing of some discrete chemical-weapons-associated targets (not actual stockpiles, for safety reasons) would have marginally set the Syrian regime back in the short term. It would have sent a message to Assad but would not have eliminated the vast bulk of his chemical weapons stockpile or changed the course of Syria’s civil war.
Some months later, Syria did declare its stockpile, joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, and shipped out under international supervision all of its declared chemical weapons stockpile—some 1,300 metric tons. Israel, which was directly threatened by Syrian gas, hailed the action and stopped distributing gas masks throughout the country. The removal of Syria’s declared stockpile could not have been accomplished through bombing. It was achieved through the credible threat of the use of force and painstaking U.S.-Russia diplomacy.
Unfortunately, this was not to be the end of the story. While we made considerable efforts to address any gaps and inconsistencies in Syria’s declaration, including by raising such issues with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), we were never fully satisfied that Syria had declared every element of their program. Ultimately, we were unable to point to anything sufficiently specific to prove this to the OPCW and, of course, Syria may have simply made new sarin gas. What we do know is that, in April 2017 and again in April 2018, Syria killed scores more in fresh chemical attacks. In both instances, President Trump dusted off the Obama-era military plans and target list and struck suspect facilities with cruise missiles and air strikes.
In my view, President Trump was right to act against Assad, who with Russian complicity had violated his agreement with the U.S. and the U.N. But his strikes were divorced from any strategy to leverage our use of force to catalyze a diplomatic solution. Senior Trump administration officials issued mixed public messages about the objective of the bombings, which further complicated matters. Ultimately, these U.S. strikes sent a message but failed to change any facts on the ground. The conflict persisted and Assad grew stronger, while continuing to kill innocents.
In both 2017 and 2018, the U.S. made clear too quickly that these were short-lived, limited packages of strikes. The Trump administration failed to keep Assad and Russia guessing, limiting their ability to again use the credible threat of force to pursue a diplomatic outcome that addressed our chemical weapons concerns or brought the conflict closer to conclusion. Syria’s chemical weapons problem remains unresolved. So too does the larger Syria policy conundrum.
For six years, the Obama administration wrestled painfully and unsuccessfully with Syria, which I believe to be the hardest policy challenge we faced. Assad, the murderous dictator, remains hell-bent on regaining full control from rebels who once occupied significant swaths of Syrian territory. He uses whatever vicious means necessary—barrel bombs, chemical weapons, targeting hospitals—to kill hundreds of thousands and cause millions to flee as refugees.
The human costs of his slaughter burned our collective conscience and directly implicated U.S. interests by driving destabilizing refugee flows into fragile neighboring states like Jordan and Lebanon, as well as Turkey, and further afield to Europe, which has not recovered politically or socially from the shock of the inflow. The active intervention of Hezbollah, Iran, and later Russia dramatically exacerbated the conflict, aiding Assad but also threatening Israel. Terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and ISIS, exploited the chaos to establish safe havens from which they planned attacks on the West. It was a complete horror show that only got worse with time.
At every stage, the dilemma for the Obama administration was how deeply to involve the U.S. in trying to topple Assad and stop the bloodshed and refugee flows. The gap between our rhetorical policy and our actions constantly bedeviled U.S. policymaking. In August 2011, several months after the start of the Syrian uprising and in the midst of the Libya operation, President Obama joined our key European partners in declaring that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” But having learned the lessons of regime change in Iraq and sobered by the complexity of sustaining even an air campaign in Libya, no principal argued for direct military intervention with U.S. ground troops to force Assad out, as President Bush had done to Saddam Hussein. The costs in blood and treasure to the U.S. were massive in Iraq, and Syria would be at least as bad, if not worse, given Iran’s strong backing. Once Russia put its forces into Syria in September 2015, any effort at regime change could have courted World War III.
But we did consider and reconsider (again and again) many significant steps short of direct war against Assad. At the same time, we imposed what U.S. and European sanctions we could; but absent U.N. Security Council authority, which Russia consistently blocked, comprehensive global sanctions were not achievable. We provided almost $6 billion in humanitarian assistance to the victims of Syria’s conflict and more to the neighboring states coping with the burden. We spent untold amounts of senior-level energy trying to negotiate with Russia, Syria, and other key players to end the conflict peacefully. At various points, we tried to exploit potential diplomatic openings, but none ever came to fruition.
After over a year of intense internal debate, President Obama decided in 2013 to join our Sunni Arab and Turkish partners in arming and later training vetted Syrian rebels who were fighting Assad. The challenge we continually faced, however, was that some of the rebels were genuine political opponents of the regime while others were members of lethal terrorist groups. Still others were in between. The terrorist groups, like the Al Qaeda–linked al-Nusra Front, were the best anti-Assad fighters, but we would never assist them. The difficulty was how to help the good guys, and those in the gray area, without inadvertently providing sophisticated weapons and training to terrorists.
We tried to walk that fine line but could never do so perfectly. The rebels were fractured and lacked a coherent, achievable political agenda. The assistance we provided was significant but not as much as the rebels wanted and arguably needed. We did not do the maximum, because we assessed that the long-term risks of passing the most dangerous weapons to rebels in a murky war zone outweighed the benefits. While the U.S.-supported rebels fought as best they could and at times did increase military pressure on Assad, they were unlikely ever truly to threaten the regime’s survival without direct U.S. military intervention.
The Principals fought over Syria longer and harder than on any issue during my tenure. John Kerry, John Brennan, and Samantha Power argued for the U.S. to do more—provide more lethal weapons to the rebels, take targeted strikes against Assad or his air force, and, perhaps, establish safe zones for civilians. Others, including me and Denis McDonough, Secretary Ash Carter, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey and later Joe Dunford, were equally tortured by the suffering in Syria but opposed deeper U.S. military involvement.
I didn’t see a feasible middle ground. If we took action that directly targeted Assad or his military, we were at war with him, Iran, and ultimately Russia. If we set up a no-fly zone or safe zones on the ground, we were buying a costly, dangerous, lengthy, and uncertain military commitment on top of Afghanistan and Iraq that put significant numbers of U.S. forces in harm’s way. Could we have protected civilians in safe zones? Yes, had we deployed thousands of U.S. troops to take and hold the ground and committed roughly a hundred planes to provide an air-cap. Would that have toppled Assad in addition to saving lives? Unlikely, before Russia intervened in September 2015, and certainly not thereafter.
I believed, and continue to believe that, as pained as we felt, as much as our values were offended, and as amoral the decision not to intervene directly in Syria’s civil war seemed, it was the right choice for the totality of U.S. interests. President Obama agonized over Syria constantly, but repeatedly reached the same conclusion. Many people I respect disagree strongly with that judgment, but in retrospect I cannot say that I would have done much differently—except perhaps to have avoided declaratory statements such as “Assad must go” or red lines as on chemical weapons that raised expectations for actions that may not have served U.S. interests. In the same vein, I question the wisdom of arming and training the Syrian rebels since the level of our support was not sufficient to create more than a temporary stalemate, before Russian intervention tilted the conflict in Assad’s favor.
My heart and my conscience will forever ache over Syria. Since Rwanda, my bias has been in favor of action in the face of mass atrocities—when the risks to U.S. interests are not excessive. In contrast to Libya, in my view there was no version of U.S. intervention in Syria that we should have conducted except very limited strikes to respond to chemical weapons use. For instance, strikes against Assad’s air force, as some advocated, would not have been one-off endeavors. To sustainably degrade his military capacity, given Assad’s external backing and robust air defenses, would have required a long-term air campaign against a far-better-equipped and more sophisticated army than Qaddafi’s. But even still, only U.S. ground forces deployed before Russia intervened could have reliably stopped Assad’s deadly ground war against the rebels. This likely would have amounted to another Iraq-scale invasion. Although I acknowledge the very high costs of limiting our actions and am neither content nor proud to admit it, I believe we were correct not to become more deeply involved militarily in Syria.
Most days, the job of national security advisor seems infinite. Its weight feels like a huge slab of concrete constantly resting on one’s torso. Fortunately, I could still breathe and function under that pressure, even as more and more bricks were piled on top of the original slab. In fact, in some strange way, the crush was both daunting and energizing. If one is doing the job of NSA thoroughly and conscientiously, there are more challenges to monitor and address, more opportunities to be pursued, than any one human being can manage, much less master. To survive and indeed thrive, I needed a first-class team alongside me: strong, capable deputies to divide and conquer the incoming challenges, plus highly motivated, exceedingly competent senior directors to seize strategic opportunities (such as pushing progress on global health security, climate policy, and cyber security) without needing my constant oversight and direction.
In my last two years as NSA, I was extremely fortunate to have the invaluable input, support, and counsel of my sisters, Avril Haines and Lisa Monaco. Avril replaced the wonderful Tony Blinken, who became deputy secretary of state in December 2014. A physicist, pilot, bookstore owner, lawyer, and former deputy White House counsel for national security and deputy director of the CIA, with years of additional work in the Senate and at the State Department, Avril is brilliant and brought deep knowledge and broad experience back to the NSC. Already well-known to the president and NSC staff, she adapted easily to her new role. Patient, wise, and calm, Avril helped soothe my sharper impulses with her uniquely disarming combination of love and reason.
Another accomplished lawyer, Lisa had served as a federal prosecutor, chief of staff to FBI director Robert Mueller, and most recently as assistant attorney general for national security when President Obama appointed her his homeland security and counterterrorism advisor in March 2013. Tough, plainspoken, with an acerbic wit and a well-buried soft streak, Lisa took no prisoners in all she did—from killing terrorists to punishing cyber criminals.
In the privacy of the Oval, President Obama dubbed his all-female senior national security team “The Furies.” Avril, Lisa, and I—though all petite in stature—commanded significant power behind the scenes and were the three women President Obama most loved to tease. Never before, I am sure, had such small packages wielded such national security punch. Together, we led and managed the predominantly white male national security cabinet and deputies.
Lisa, Avril, and I laughed at being called “The Furies,” but also feared that the Boss’s nickname for us would leak. The Furies were known as “monstrous, foul-smelling hags,” we would protest. “It’s sexist,” I insisted. “They were goddesses of vengeance and retribution who preyed on men. That is not us. We like men!”
President Obama countered that, “The Furies were not evil. They delivered justice and defended the moral and legal order, mainly by driving their victims mad. The moral and just had nothing to fear from The Furies, only the guilty and evil.” And, his Furies were charming (some of us more than others), tough, smart, and fair. “It’s perfect!” he declared. The president loved each of us individually, but especially the team.
One Saturday, we found ourselves in the Oval Office standing near the Resolute Desk. The Boss was looking at a New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast that was entitled Furies 2.0. Lisa had found the cartoon and, to underscore our private joke, edited it—to depict “Ironia” as Avril, “Sarcasta” as Lisa, and “PassivAggressa” as me, except that Lisa had aptly crossed out “Passiv.” As the three of us cracked up, our friend White House photographer Pete Souza, who was in on the secret, captured the moment in a well-known photo captioned: “A rare moment of weekend laughter with the President’s key national security aides, from left, National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice, Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco, and Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines as they joke about a cartoon in The New Yorker that resembled the three women.” It didn’t resemble us physically, of course, but we thought the personality labels were pretty spot-on.
The three of us were quite conscious of the rare gift we enjoyed of having two other strong, supportive women as our closest colleagues (plus Ben Rhodes, whom we also teased about being one of the girls, given his sensitive side). Between the three of us, there was always candor and trust. We always played straight with each other, even when we differed, as Lisa and I sometimes did over personnel and policy. Avril, ever the smooth and deft fixer, would help us forge common ground. Confident in ourselves and each other, we wouldn’t let any outsider perceive, much less exploit, our differences. Woe unto anyone, especially any male counterpart, who tried to play one of us against another.
Often, Lisa, Avril, and I had to combine our collective efforts to tame a balky bureaucracy and deliver to the president the policy outcomes he sought. That variously entailed massaging, cajoling, pressing, and, if necessary, rolling certain agencies to achieve presidential objectives, which they initially resisted. These ranged from safely and responsibly but substantially increasing refugee admissions numbers and reducing the prison population at Guantánamo, to requiring public reporting by DOD and CIA of the number of civilians accidentally killed in counterterrorism operations, and to ensuring that as we reconfigured our military presence in Afghanistan, we did not fall back into the trap of having Americans directly fighting the Taliban, except in clear cases of self-defense.
On other occasions, the three of us ran interference to ensure that the president did not receive inadequately vetted proposals that we knew he would question and likely reject. On more occasions than I care to recall, like clockwork on a Friday evening, DOD would send over (with no prior notice) a time-sensitive proposal for a high-risk military operation, known as a “con-op” (concept of operations), and demand near immediate presidential approval. After cursing DOD—because we knew that any such proposal had taken at least a week to make its way up the DOD chain of command to the secretary of defense for his approval, yet now DOD was asking the president to bless it instantly—we got to work.
President Obama appropriately expected his NSC staff to employ the established national security decision-making process to give him well-considered recommendations as to whether to approve or reject a con-op. That meant we had to convene the Deputies and Principals on short notice to review the intelligence, operational plan, diplomatic implications, and risks/rewards of the proposal—all over a weekend—and preferably get a decision memo to the president within twenty-four hours. Remarkably, we repeatedly managed these fire drills swiftly and effectively, sometimes surfacing flaws in the proposal and prompting refinements to lower the risks and increase the odds of success. As fast as we obtained a decision, it often was not before someone at DOD had leaked to the press that the anal and micromanaging NSC was slow-rolling their urgent operational plan.
We didn’t let those kinds of ploys knock us off our game or cause us to cut corners in giving the president the kind of analytical rigor and carefully considered recommendations he deserved. Together, Lisa, Avril, and I displayed fierce, loyal, and effective female leadership that was appreciated by the president and many on the NSC staff, if not all the agencies all the time. We cherished the fact that our collaborative women’s leadership style was distinctive and rare, especially in our field.
When we left the White House in 2017, Lisa, Avril, and I gave a signed copy of the Roz Chast Furies 2.0 cartoon to the Boss as a farewell gift. President Obama keeps it in his office at his foundation.
Given that we had to spend ridiculous hours together, I felt grateful to be part of a close-knit NSC leadership team that genuinely loved one another and also knew how to have fun. For starters, we decided to revolutionize the NSC Holiday Party. I led the dancing, which got funky and sweaty fast.
Ben Rhodes was a demon on the dance floor, flipping partners over his back and shoulders. Ben and I had worked closely together from the campaign through every foreign trip of my tenure, every tough press story, and every twist and turn in the Cuba and Iran negotiations. We also shared the experience of being vilified as scapegoats of the right wing, targeted by Fox, and blamed for Benghazi. Ben is funny, super-smart, and kind. Like another brother, Ben always had my back, and I will always have his.
Suzy George, the NSC chief of staff, tended to hang back and watch over the parties, making sure everyone else was having sufficient fun. I first met Suzy over twenty years before, back when she worked for Madeleine Albright at USUN and as deputy chief of staff at the State Department. Tough but sweet, funny but quietly ruthless, Suzy had been a partner at Albright Stonebridge, the highly successful firm Madeleine built after leaving government. With Madeleine’s reluctant but generous blessing, Suzy came to help me whip the NSC into fighting shape—releasing weak players, hiring the best in class, guiding the “right-sizing” effort, and driving improved processes. Suzy had the extraordinary gift of firing somebody and making that person almost think the departure was his idea. I relied on her, like Salman Ahmed, to give me the hard advice straight, correct me when I was off-course, and tell me how to do it right—always with a disarming smile and deadly efficacy. I had learned from Howard Wolpe, when I was assistant secretary, the value of surrounding yourself with colleagues who have the courage and commitment to give you tough love.
Too late in my tenure, we added Wally Adeyemo to our team, a young lawyer of Nigerian descent whom National Economic Council director Jeff Zients and I brought over from Treasury to be our deputy for international economic affairs. Brilliant, polished, smooth, and effective, Wally helped us energize and empower the international economic team, which was responsible for everything from sanctions to trade policy, climate, energy, and preparations for the G7 and G20. Miraculously, he also made the economic aspects of my job far more enjoyable for me.
There is no team I’d rather be with in the trenches or on the dance floor than the extraordinary senior staff of Obama’s second-term NSC.
“What’s the sleep strategy?”
This was a standard Obama question predictably posed as we would fly past the Washington Monument on Marine One, the presidential helicopter, for the fifteen-minute ride to Joint Base Andrews at the start of an overseas trip. It was an especially pertinent question for long trips to Asia or Africa and the Middle East. The answer depended on the number of legs to the journey, time zones, and the schedule we faced when we arrived. Weighing the best approach to ensuring adequate sleep, work time, and readiness for the day ahead, we could usually reach a consensus view.
When the helicopter landed at Andrews, President Obama would bolt off and up the steps to Air Force One, with the press corps capturing his farewell wave. The small team aboard Marine One, who followed him up the front steps to the plane after he was out of sight, usually consisted of me, another senior staffer or two, the White House doctor Ronny Jackson, the president’s lead Secret Service agent, his military aide, and the president’s personal aide Joe Paulsen or Marvin Nicholson.
Once on board, we were wheels-up within a very few minutes, since the presidential aircraft takes priority and clears the airspace around D.C. I always sat in the four-person senior staff cabin where I had a pull-down desk table by the window, an ample leather chair that swiveled but did not recline much, a pillow, and a blanket. Soon after takeoff, I hustled into one of the two forward bathrooms and changed into my comfy travel garb for the long journey ahead.
Air Force One has many cool features—a full office and comfortable bedroom with shower for the president, a conference room big enough to seat ten or more, secure airborne communications, a staff office, the ability to send and receive classified documents, a full kitchen, a doctor’s cabin that can be converted into an emergency operating room, screens with live television and movies galore, and infinite quantities of food and drink.
But the two 747s that take turns flying the president of the United States and his staff are over thirty years old. They have prehistoric, if amply sized seats, but nothing approaching a lie-flat bed for anyone other than the leader of the free world. The bathrooms are cramped with no facilities for staff or press to wash up. It’s always an honor and still a bit of an adrenaline rush to fly on Air Force One, but the glory is decidedly not in the aircraft itself.
Early in the flight, President Obama would usually saunter back from his cabin at the front of the plane on his way to the conference room, having changed into jeans or khakis, an open-collar shirt, and sometimes a cashmere sweater. He often poked his head into our cabin before walking farther back to greet the rest of the travelers, including the scheduling and advance team, NSC staff, stenographers, and any accompanying VIPs or members of Congress. Obama would then settle in at the far corner of the conference table where he spent the bulk of every trip reading briefing materials and memos, playing spades, eating his meals, and making phone calls, often to foreign leaders.
For me, the outbound journey on every trip was consumed by the need to review the briefing materials my team and I had provided to the president, prepare for every meeting he would conduct, review and edit speeches, press remarks, and talking points, and deal with whatever crisis du jour by fielding calls from the White House or cabinet colleagues. Sometimes I needed to support our frantic advance teams who were already on the ground struggling to resolve some last-minute hitch with the host government—like the Russians refusing to let Secret Service sweep the president’s villa for listening devices, or Japanese officials making some entirely unreasonable demand about the president’s schedule.
During the flight, I’d catch whatever rest I could on the only couch available to staff—in the hallway just outside our cabin. There was an unspoken hierarchy governing access to the couch. As the senior staffer on most foreign trips, it was mine. Occasionally, however, if someone who outranked me joined the trip, like the White House chief of staff, I’d tacitly relinquish the couch. I also deferred to White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett when rarely she traveled with us. I’m not sure why I honored that convention, since on these foreign trips the demands on me far exceeded those on her, except that she is slightly older and a friend. Plus, she had owned the couch since the beginning of the administration, and I was a second-term late arrival. When I had no couch, I joined the other senior staff on the floor, each of us on a two-inch-thick, firm foam mat with pillow and blanket.
Inevitably, we arrived exhausted. The toughest trips for me were to Europe, because they were too short to enable me to complete my work and get anything close to enough sleep. Worse, we would usually leave early evening D.C. time and arrive in the wee hours of the morning to face a full day of meetings and a working dinner without any opportunity to do more than shower and, if lucky, exercise before the schedule began. Longer trips to Asia were better, because we usually landed at night and could get a full night’s sleep after arrival, plus whatever we had snagged on the plane.
The trips themselves were intensely packed, as Obama would often complain, blaming me but to a far greater extent, Ben Rhodes, who planned most elements of the schedule beyond the obligatory official meetings and meals. Everywhere we went, the president would “meet and greet” U.S. embassy staff. He often sat down with private sector leaders and almost always with civil society activists to show U.S. support for democracy and human rights. Where possible, he held a town hall with selected young leaders from across the region. When time permitted, Obama liked to visit important historical or cultural sights like the Parthenon in Athens, the Panama Canal, Bob Marley’s house in Jamaica, the historic city of Luang Prabang in Laos, the impossibly tiny bones of Ethiopia’s “Lucy”—believed to be the first humanoid—or World War II cemeteries in Belgium or the Philippines.
By day three, the president was almost always irritable. You could set your watches by the onset of his grumpy mood, due to a lack of sleep, jet lag, and his relentless schedule. By the fifth or sixth day of a long trip, as we could begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the president’s mood usually lightened, and the trip home was like galloping back to the stables.
Despite the intensity, these trips had fun aspects. Ben, other senior staff, and I had a bounty of unscripted time with the president where we could joke, banter, or absorb his philosophical reflections, which he shared much more readily on long trips when we had a surplus of time in planes, helicopters, and automobiles. We enjoyed occasional drinks in his suite and regular meals prepared by his military valets, typically of salmon, chicken, or beef with broccoli and brown rice.
On the road, I was often asked to ride with President Obama in his limousine known as “the Beast.” The large, armored car had two backseats separated by a console with a secure phone and the presidential seal; these seats faced two other seats, allowing four people comfortably in the back, while two Secret Service agents manned the front. On these many car rides, I would sometimes brief him on important developments or late-breaking changes to the program, but more often we would talk about random subjects—our kids, politics, history, whatever he was reading, gossip from the staff’s escapades the night before, or reflections from our youth. Just as often, we would sit quietly looking out the window, occasionally waving to people lining the streets, and absorbing the street scenes of Ho Chi Minh City, Kuala Lumpur, Panama City, Nairobi, or Havana. Obama would often play electronic scrabble, scour articles on his iPad, and frequently check his phone, while I read intelligence or paperwork and caught up on news and emails. Neither of us felt the need to fill the void; the silence between us was just as comfortable as conversation.
Occasionally, the trips got more interesting than planned.
When Nelson Mandela passed away in December 2013, President and Mrs. Obama led the U.S. delegation to the memorial service in Johannesburg. The whole visit was something of a circus. The attendees constituted a who’s who of global leaders, plus a massive U.S. congressional delegation, which flew on its own plane to South Africa, and the official U.S. party, which included two former presidents, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, accompanied by Laura Bush and former secretary Hillary Clinton.
The Bushes, along with Hillary, flew seventeen hours with us to and from South Africa. The plane was unusually full, so most of the bigwigs shared the conference room during their waking hours. On the way down to South Africa, President George W. Bush (who turns out to be one of the funniest people I have ever met) regaled us with stories of his new passion as a painter and gave an iPad exhibition of his work, mostly colorful and commendable portraits of figures public and private. The rapport between the two Bushes and two Obamas is extremely friendly and relaxed, and with George Bush and Michelle Obama (who is also one of the funniest people I know) riffing off each other altogether unplugged, it made for a memorable flight.
Our time on the ground was less than twelve hours, just enough to get from the airport to the hotel (to shower and change) and then to the stadium, where Mandela’s interminable memorial service was held in torrential rain. This brief stop in Johannesburg was a security nightmare. Rather than a normally smooth motorcade ride with streets blocked, police escort, and fast, unimpeded movement along the highways, we crawled in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The president’s motorcade was stuck among cramped bush taxis, buses, and civilian cars. The drive into town was stressful, if ultimately uneventful for Secret Service, but it was only the beginning of a very long day.
While waiting hours at the hotel because the ceremony started late, we learned that the South African authorities had decided to let the massive crowds of citizens enter the stadium without the usual magnetic screening. In other words, Obama was going to be on stage in a football stadium with dozens of other heads of state surrounded by tens of thousands of people who could have been armed with anything, in a country known for having one of the highest crime rates in the world. Complicating matters, President Obama did not bring shirts or a suit that was sized to allow him to conceal a flak jacket underneath. The Secret Service wanted him to wear one; but having only a regularly sized suit in the clammy, humid rain, Obama demurred.
For several hours, the press focused on the sign language interpreter who mimed strangely behind Obama (and was later discovered to be a fraud), Obama’s historic handshake with Cuban president Raúl Castro, the selfie taken by Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the very attractive blond prime minister of Denmark, of herself and the president laughing, and, to a far lesser extent, on Obama’s truly moving tribute to Mandela. Meanwhile, those of us in the know worried that the president of the United States could be shot on the world’s stage at Madiba’s funeral.
Even though Africa was hardly the most dangerous place the president traveled, especially compared to Afghanistan or Iraq, it somehow accounted for a disproportionate share of our security-related stress. In July 2015, Obama visited Kenya for the first time as president. Predictably, the crowds were enormous, often pressing in on his motorcade as they densely lined the streets of Nairobi. The masses of people were uniformly friendly, but the enthusiastic crowds understandably concerned Secret Service. Once out of Kenya and on to Ethiopia, I assumed the collective blood pressure of the agents on the trip would drop precipitously.
So I was surprised to be summoned late in the evening to the Secret Service command post at the hotel just after I had returned to my room from the state dinner in Addis Ababa (still in my formal gown). I arrived to find the president’s head of detail, several senior agents, and security officials from the U.S. embassy in Ethiopia all huddled in a secure tent talking anxiously. They reported that they had credible information that Al Shabab, a dangerous East African terrorist group, which had carried out successful attacks inside Ethiopia in the past, appeared to be planning to attack President Obama before he left the capital. Ethiopian security officials, who are both skilled and ruthless, claimed to have the plotters under surveillance and assured us that they had the threat in hand. Suffice it to say, these assurances did not assuage Secret Service (nor I, though I knew better how capable they were).
We talked through the information. I called back to Lisa Monaco in Washington to ensure that we were putting every effort into chasing down this plot and its alleged perpetrators. I also swiftly enlisted my old friend Gayle Smith, who was traveling with us in her role as a senior NSC staffer. Gayle knows Ethiopia as well as any (non-Ethiopian) American, so I grabbed her to work with me and the Secret Service late into the night, review their contingency plans, and ensure we were communicating with the Ethiopians at the highest level of government.
The plot was due to be executed the next day, reportedly, as the president’s motorcade made its way from the African Union, where he was giving the final speech of his trip, to the airport. Only a very small handful of White House staff, in addition to Secret Service, knew about the plot. When the speech ended, the president was spirited into a holding room. Irritated and ready to go home, he kept asking what was delaying our departure for the airport. Anita Decker Breckenridge, his deputy chief of staff, and I explained that Secret Service was working through some security concerns related to a threat, and Gayle was trying to get the latest. The president waited, growing increasingly impatient.
I returned to Gayle, who was huddled in a closet-sized anteroom off the main hall of the new, Chinese-built African Union headquarters. With her were Ben Rhodes and Ethiopian prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn, whom we had flagged down right after the president’s speech ended. “Mr. Prime Minister, we have a problem,” I explained. “Our information indicates that the bad guy is still on the loose and is now positioned between here and the airport. Secret Service can’t move the president until this is sorted out.” Hailemariam took out his cell phone and called his chief of intelligence, Getachew Assefa. After a short conversation, he handed the phone to Gayle, who reiterated, “We have a real problem, here.”
Getachew reassured her in half Tigrinya, half English, “Gayley, it’s not a problem.”
Gayle repeated, “No, it is a problem.”
“Don’t worry. There is not a problem.”
Puzzled, Gayle explained that Secret Service can’t rely on vague assurances that “there is no problem.”
“No, it’s not a problem,” he said yet again.
Gayle said, “Do you know where he is?”
“Yes,” Getachew replied. “He is with me. He is with me.”
“Huh?” she said.
Getachew explained, “At the airport. I have him with me in the car.”
“Okay. You’ve got him? Very good. Thanks.” Gayle ended the call.
Images of a man stuffed in a trunk came to mind, but I didn’t want to dwell on the details. After a Secret Service agent at the airport verified that the suspect was in custody, the president (still unaware) was hustled into the motorcade, and we sped to the airport. On the tarmac, we thanked the Ethiopian prime minister for his hospitality and the efficiency of his security forces. We took off on the steepest and most accelerated ascent I can recall on Air Force One (or on any military plane outside of a war zone).
Once airborne, Gayle, Anita, Ben, and I explained the whole story to the president, and we all had a good, if slightly nervous, laugh. Secret Service thanked me, and especially Gayle, for her critical assistance. There was no public evidence of the drama in Addis Ababa but perhaps some extra alcohol for the long ride home.
Foreign visits tended to be easier when the president was the host and the venue was the White House. There were some exceptions, such as the Chinese paranoia over protests targeting President Xi (which were in fact audible in the Rose Garden), the entitled Saudis, provocative Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, and the prickly Pakistanis. Generally, however, most foreign visits to the White House went according to our script.
State visits were a set-piece tradition, and Obama held thirteen during his presidency. Invitations were reserved for close partners or critical players, such as India, China, and our NATO or Asian allies. They followed a standard format beginning with a morning arrival ceremony on the South Lawn (notwithstanding sweltering heat or freezing cold) with full delegations on both sides ranging from the vice president and cabinet members to the mayor of Washington. This ceremony is one of my favorites, because of its unique pageantry, complete with a review of the troops, the military’s fife and drum band in Revolutionary War costume playing “Yankee Doodle,” and a twenty-one-gun salute.
Following the arrival ceremony, the president and visiting leader introduce each delegation to the other and then settle in for their intimate meeting in the Oval Office on more sensitive topics, often followed by an expanded meeting including more cabinet members and a broader set of issues in the Cabinet Room. Then there is the joint press conference in the Rose Garden or East Room, a luncheon hosted by the secretary of state in the ceremonial Benjamin Franklin Room on the top floor of the State Department and, later that evening, the state dinner.
Other rituals were equally obligatory but less fun. In particular, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was an annual root canal for cabinet officials and senior White House staff. On one level it is an important celebration of the free press and its crucial role in holding government accountable. At the same time, it is a pretentious mass gathering of the press, celebrities, current and former administration officials, members of Congress, and ambassadors, which traditionally featured a stand-up routine by a famous comedian that too often ended badly, and a carefully scripted, comedic speech by the president, which when Obama was in office was reliably funny as hell.
Nonetheless, the Correspondents’ Dinner bequeathed me some of my least favorite memories. These included a night during which Charlie Rose, seated next to me, took every opportunity to put his hands all over my bare shoulders.
Worse, however, was at the next year’s dinner, in 2015. During a break when people were mingling and moving around, I remained seated at my table. From behind me came a large and unexpected man. He summoned me from my chair. I looked for my husband, but Ian was engrossed in conversation some distance away and was oblivious to what was happening. Once I stood up, it was too late. It was Donald Trump who was looming. He surprised me by giving me an unsolicited hug.
Even though the hug was not too close, I was taken aback, given that I had never met him before. While holding me, Trump whispered in my ear that I had been “very unfairly treated” over Benghazi and was “doing a great job for the country.” He then posed for a picture with his arm around me, in which we were both smiling too broadly, and left.
At the time, I was rattled and told White House correspondent April Ryan, who had snapped the photo of me and Trump, that I felt almost as if I had been molested. She asked if she could write that, and I said “please, no.” Her blog post the next day skirted this characterization, reporting that she watched Trump “swarm” me “in an overly gregarious manner and hold a conversation. She [Rice] seemed shocked but said their conversation was pleasant and lasted several minutes.”
I told my mother and family the story the next day, noting that I had not been this grossed out since the 2014 D-Day anniversary in Normandy when, in Obama’s absence, Vladimir Putin puckered his lips and blew me a faux kiss while telling his colleague how good I looked, especially for a national security advisor.
I thought frequently during the 2016 campaign about making Trump’s words public. He had accosted me just six weeks before he launched his presidential campaign, and I figured his praise of me would not sit well with Benghazi-crazed, Republican primary voters. Yet I resisted the urge, because I didn’t want to be even a tangential part of another campaign-related story, however briefly.
Now, I kick myself.