Obama's foreign policy voice, speechwriter Ben Rhodes

Obama's foreign policy voice, speechwriter Ben Rhodes By: Carol E. Lee May 18, 2009 04:30 AM EDT

For Ben Rhodes, the road to Cairo begins in the Oval Office, with a legal pad on his lap, watching the president’s mind work and trying to capture his ideas and his voice. If past speeches are any guide, Rhodes’ journey could end in a speeding van, crouched over a laptop as he puts the final touches on the most anticipated foreign policy speech of Barack Obama’s presidency. The three weeks in between will involve trips to a secret office behind a door with four locks and at least three rounds of edits by Obama that typically start with, “This is well-written but ...” Rhodes, 31, is Obama’s only foreign policy speechwriter and the one charged with writing his long-promised address to the Muslim world, scheduled to be delivered in Egypt on June 4. He also was the sole White House speechwriter who traveled with the president on his first foreign trip to Europe. It turned out to be a nerve-racking jaunt full of twists that Rhodes would have welcomed a few years back, when he was an aspiring fiction writer working on a novel called “The Oasis of Love.” North Korea fired a missile hours before Obama was set to deliver a nuclear nonproliferation speech that Rhodes had been working on for a month. There was Obama, on Air Force One, tweaking his address to the Turkish Parliament while en route to Ankara. And on the flight to Strasbourg, France, the president was still tinkering with the speech he would give at a town hall as soon as he landed. See Also Republicans fear Latino flight Obama makes quiet play for GOP aid GOP keeps the heat on Pelosi over CIA “He was making changes up to the last minute, which is not unusual, and so I literally had to do those in the back of the motorcade to this site and then find a zip drive that could plug into the teleprompter,” Rhodes recalled in an interview. “He likes to work on things until the end because he likes to get them just the way he wants them. So sometimes that’s easy, sometimes it’s you in the back of a van with a laptop on your knee hoping your battery doesn’t die.” Said senior adviser David Axelrod: “Everybody here sort of lives with the reality that the president is the best speechwriter in the group.” Not long ago, Rhodes was one of the obscure guys who wrote Obama’s campaign speeches in Starbucks and played video games into the early morning hours. Now he attends national security meetings and takes writer’s refuge in a secret office on the third floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Rhodes is still largely unknown compared to Jon Favreau, Obama’s 27-year-old chief speechwriter and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. But he has come a long way in a few years — from mulling over that novel, about a megachurch in Houston, a dog track and a failed romance, to writing a closely watched president’s most significant speeches. Consider the addresses he has had a hand in since Obama took office: the unveiling of the United States’ new strategy in Afghanistan, the outline of a plan for troop withdrawal from Iraq, a Nowruz message to Iran, just about every prepared word Obama said in Europe and Latin America and now a major speech to the Muslim world. “That’ll be the biggest speech yet from the foreign policy side,” said Rhodes, whose official title is deputy director of speechwriting at the White House. The process for the Cairo address will begin this week in the same way it has for other foreign policy speeches Rhodes has written since the Inauguration: Obama will summon Axelrod; Rhodes; Denis McDonough, a deputy national security adviser; and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to the Oval Office. The president will talk off the cuff for a half-hour or so about what he wants to say in the speech. Rhodes calls it the “download.” Obama will go back to the speech, almost always by hand, three or four times before he’s satisfied. “His criticism is more, ‘No, what I really wanted to say is this, and you didn’t quite capture that here,’” Rhodes said. “Generally, if he’s not happy with it, he knows why he’s not, so he gives you a pretty clear sense the first time he talks to you.” The one thing that gets Obama annoyed, Rhodes said, is “wishy-washy language.” After nearly two years that involved uploading the audio of Obama’s every campaign event onto his computer, listening to recordings and poring over transcripts of interviews to get a sense of how he speaks offhand, Rhodes knows the president’s voice. He continues to study him, weaving ad lib answers Obama gives in news conferences into his later remarks. But better than that, Rhodes knows Obama’s foreign policy positions as well as any of his top advisers do. He is the only member of Obama’s six-person speechwriting team who has doubled as policy adviser, a role he dabbled in during the campaign. He has an open invitation to attend national security meetings, where he often pipes up as a voice for the president to say, “Hey, I know he’s going to want to talk about this.” “A lot of times, Ben will just run up to the Oval for meetings about foreign policy stuff,” said Favreau, who hired Rhodes in July 2007. “And the president will go around and ask his advice.” Part of his job, Rhodes said, is “making sure that we’re just running that Obama thread through everything that he says on foreign policy.” That thread is usually some version of the themes Obama has touched on since the campaign: listening to other countries, renewing American leadership abroad, talking to adversaries. “Watching him and the president work,” McDonough said of Rhodes, “it’s obvious that there’s a lot of shared world view.” In that sense, Rhodes has produced the chief sources of fodder for Obama’s critics. Some Republicans said the president’s Europe speeches showed he was there on an “apology tour.” And the GOP has made Obama’s foreign policy its top target, pointing to lines in his addresses as anti-American. Parsing those more delicate turns of phrases, such as saying the United States “has shown arrogance,” is something the president handles, Rhodes said. Rhodes fits in well with the Obama team. On the flight home from Europe, Obama led his staff in giving him a round of applause. And when The Economist published the speech Obama delivered in Prague, the president told his personal assistant to make sure Rhodes got an autographed copy of the magazine. “He really understands the president’s voice,” said Axelrod. “They’ve got a great mind-meld on these issues.” Part of the reason for that is in a framed photograph Rhodes keeps in his office: There’s Rhodes, McDonough, Obama and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, one of the Democratic Party’s top foreign policy figures, in August 2007. Rhodes had just earned a master’s degree in fiction writing from New York University when he was offered a job as a writer for Hamilton in 2002. A Manhattan native, Rhodes went on to write the Iraq Study Group Report and help draft policy recommendations for the 9/11 Commission, which Hamilton co-chaired. Rhodes keeps in regular contact with Hamilton, who said Obama has thanked him “for making Ben available.” Rhodes said Hamilton still reviews Obama’s major foreign policy addresses. “We run most of the big foreign policy speeches by him,” he said. “Just kind of like, ‘What do you think of this?’” So far Obama’s Iraq speech has been the most meaningful for Rhodes. Aides credit him with the part where Obama spoke directly to the Iraqi people. Rhodes is also behind Obama’s telling the story of two Marines who died trying to stop a suicide bomber from entering an American military compound in Iraq. During “the download” Obama had told Rhodes he wanted to end on the troops. “I literally just spent a lot of time Googling,” Rhodes said. Despite his new stature, Rhodes still enjoys glimmers of the days of working on an upstart campaign in Chicago. The West Wing office suite he shares with Favreau has the feel of a finished basement, with its dropped ceilings and dim lighting. “We’re like an old couple or something down here,” Rhodes explained after Favreau had walked into his office unannounced. As Rhodes prepares to write his most significant speech perhaps of his whole career, his early ties to Obama give him a head start. The address will advance overtures Obama has made to the Muslim world since he first promised he would give the speech in 2007. “That speech will be important in moving to the next phase of this engagement,” Rhodes said, “defining in somewhat concrete terms what a more positive relationship and dialogue will look like in practice over time.” He’s got just three weeks to pull it off.

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