Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (52 page)

Later, the president gathered his senior advisers, urging us to remain united. “Rahm made a mistake, but the problem is Washington,” he said. “This is what I hate about this town. Small people try to stir up the intrigue and pit people against each other. I want everyone to know that I have your backs, and I hope you have mine. And I want you to stand up for one another.”

Rahm apologized to the group. “I let you down,” he said. “I didn’t mean to, but I did.”

My turn came next. I got a call from Mark Leibovich, a reporter for the
New York
Times
. I liked Mark, a smart, funny writer with an appropriately biting perspective on the nation’s capital. I enjoyed reading his pieces when they were about others. I wasn’t thrilled when he said his next story would be about me, particularly when he added, “I’m sorry.”

Leibovich was going to write the piece with or without me, so I agreed to sit down with him. I had a fresh shipment of deli food from Manny’s in Chicago stowed at the White House, and I invited Leibovich to join me in tackling it. I figured we could bond, Jew to Jew, over corned beef sandwiches and the
Flintstones
-size turkey legs that were a Manny’s specialty. It was a terrible mistake, furnishing the writer with vivid color for a story about a guy who ate too much, slept too little, and was buckling under the pressures of Washington. It didn’t help when the president walked into my office in the middle of lunch and found me with an enormous turkey leg in my hand. “What is this, King Arthur’s Court?” he quipped, providing another great line for Leibovich, who, as it turned out, was there to feast on me.

Under the headline “White House Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointed at Him,” the story’s lead set the dispiriting tone: “David Axelrod was sitting at his desk on a recent afternoon—tie crooked, eyes droopy and looking more burdened than usual. He had just been watching some genius on MSNBC insist that he and President Obama’s other top aides were failing miserably and should be replaced.” It went downhill from there, including quotes from my sister and a friend from Chicago hinting that I was near collapse.

I read the story while in Phoenix, trying to enjoy some rare days off with Susan and the kids, who suffered the fallout as I sulked away the remainder of our rare, brief vacation time together. I was accustomed to shots at my strategy, and my eating habits were well-trod ground, but the image of a guy utterly defeated irritated the hell out of me.

I wasn’t back at my desk in the White House for long before the president walked in and sat down. Casually stretching his arms and legs, he said, “So, how you doing?” I knew why he was asking and told him I was fine. “I saw that story,” he said. “It’s Washington bullshit. Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get health care done, and all this will get better.”

And little by little, the prospects of getting health care done
were
improving.

Part of that comeback had to do with two widely covered events, in which the president directly confronted his opponents, answering their questions face-to-face in front of TV cameras. The first was at a House Republican retreat in late January. Before the president appeared, we pressured the caucus to open the event to cameras, and what unfolded was a candid, unscripted, and riveting exchange of views. Obama clearly got the better of it and came back to the White House with an idea.

“Why don’t we invite everyone down here, Republicans and Democrats, who are involved in the health care issue and have a health care summit? We can televise the whole thing, get all the questions on the table, and give this thing a thorough airing?”

After ten months of closed-door negotiations and backroom deals, the seven-hour summit on February 25 at the Blair House was a welcome disinfectant; a small gesture to make good on Obama’s pledge to work through health care on C-SPAN. It wasn’t that many watched it. It was that they knew they could.

Meanwhile, Pelosi, slowly and skillfully steered her caucus to the only logical conclusion: that the Senate bill, however imperfect, was now the only path forward.

Coakley’s defeat had widely been read as the death knell for health reform. Paradoxically, it might have saved it by breaking the deadlock between House and Senate Democrats. The House would have to accept the Senate bill they hated—without a public plan or some of the more generous emoluments—or there would be no health reform law at all.

There was, of course, the inevitable last-minute drama—this over the perennially vexing issue of abortion—but after a few tense hours, a compromise was reached, and on March 21, the House gathered for a rare Sunday session to consider the Senate bill.

That night, the president, vice president, senior advisers, and all the men and women who, for over a year, had led the health care effort, gathered in the Roosevelt Room to watch the vote on TV. As the vote wound down, I left the room and went across the hall to sit alone in my own office. When I heard the cheers from next door, I began to cry—not little sniffles, but big, heaving sobs. Suddenly the political calculations and ups and downs of the previous year seemed irrelevant. I thought about Susan and Lauren and the horrific struggle we had endured to save our child and pay for her treatments. I knew that because of what had happened on this night, because of what we had done, because of the president’s determination against all odds, other families would be spared that ordeal. It was emotionally overwhelming.

Because politics was my arena, I understood, perhaps better than Obama, the steep price he had paid for this historic achievement. His standing with moderate, swing voters had taken a hit. Elected as an apostle of change in Washington, he had compromised when he had to, employed the traditional tools of the trade to achieve his goal, and jammed the law through on a straight party-line vote. In doing so, he had ignited a blazing grassroots opposition that would cost him his House majority and bedevil him for the remainder of his presidency. Yet, on this night, all of these calculations seemed beside the point. He had spent his political capital on a worthy cause, and had brought about real, substantive reform that would save and improve lives and strengthen the country for generations to come.

When I composed myself, I went and found my friend, the president, and thanked him on behalf of my family and all those who, in the future, would never have to confront the trials we had known. He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled.

“That’s why we do the work,” he said.

H
E
WAS
THE
ANTIWAR
candidate turned wartime commander in chief, the constitutional scholar struggling to balance our values and rights with our security in a new age of terrorism.
H
e would be the winner of the
N
obel
P
eace
P
rize who sent tens of thousands of additional troops into battle.

In the two years I worked at his side in the White House, I watched him carefully parry with the military to define, and confine, America’s mission in Afghanistan. I saw him confront the daily reality of terrorism and explain to a roomful of skeptical civil libertarians the limitations those threats, and practical politics, imposed on him as commander in chief. And I was in the audience in Oslo as the reluctant Nobel Prize winner reconciled his vision for a more peaceful world with his belief that there are times when evil must be met with force.

 • • • 

It is an inspiring strength of our democracy that, by a vote of the people, the unquestioned authority over the military is handed to the civilian president. At any hour of the day or night, he might be called upon to make decisions about the deployment of manpower or weaponry that almost certainly will cost someone (or many someones) their life. Sometimes those missions are covert. Often they present scenarios he couldn’t have imagined when he was crisscrossing the country auditioning for the job.

Yet what you learn when you work for the president is that while the military is scrupulously nonpartisan and will respond faithfully to the orders of the commander in chief, the Pentagon is as political a player as you’ll find in Washington. Its leaders understand how to deploy their institutional leverage to influence policy and corral presidents: the strategically placed leak, a discreet call to a friendly congressman, or less-than-supportive testimony on Capitol Hill from a general or admiral, his uniform festooned with a bedazzling array of medals and ribbons.

That concern was partly why Obama had asked Robert Gates to stay on the job as defense secretary. Gates, a fixture for four decades in the country’s national security establishment, had brought a more thoughtful sensibility to the Pentagon after the bombastic and divisive Donald Rumsfeld. Yet there was more to it. Obama was pursuing a quantum shift in policy—ending the war in Iraq and refocusing our efforts against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, banning torture as a means of interrogation, and closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. He was wary of military intervention as a first resort and eager for a surge of diplomacy. Obama understood that he would need more than a respectful salute from the military to accomplish his goals. He needed their support.

To the military, Gates represented continuity. He was an able and methodical manager, low-key and rational in his judgments. All this appealed to Obama, who shared many of the same qualities. “He’s really solid,” the president said of the defense secretary, early in his term, an assessment I would hear him repeat often. At least to me, Gates expressed equal admiration for the president. In the summer of 2010, after Gates agreed to re-up for an additional year, we chatted before a White House reception. “We really appreciate your sacrifice,” I told Gates, a short, gray-haired man with the reassuring mien of a trusted, small-town banker. Drawing closer, Gates smiled. “I love working with this president,” he said.

When Gates had agreed to continue as defense secretary, though, it was a commitment and not a contract. If he objected to the direction the president was taking, he could happily return to the bucolic splendor of his rural home in the other Washington across the country. Obama thought highly of Gates and valued his counsel, but he also
needed
Gates, as the secretary well knew. The respectful but wary tango between the commander in chief, his defense secretary, and the military leadership was a running story of my years in the White House—and much of it centered on the vexing challenge of Afghanistan.

 • • • 

Iraq was as central to Obama’s candidacy and election as any other single issue, but soon after he was sworn in, we would begin winding down our involvement there. The Bush administration had signed an agreement, partly at the insistence of the Iraqis, mandating the withdrawal of all American troops by the end of 2011. Obama would hold the United States to that agreement, which closely matched the plan he had proposed as a candidate. Soon after taking office, the president announced a precise schedule for that withdrawal, ending our combat mission by the summer of 2010. It was a compromise based on the advice of his commanders, extending the U.S. combat role a few months longer than he had proposed as a presidential candidate. The decision to lengthen the mission by a few months was publicly supported by John McCain and other hawks on the right, and openly criticized by our allies on the left. Still, all our troops would be home by the end of 2011, certainly a welcome relief for a war-weary country, for the servicemen and -women who had borne repeated tours of duty, and for their families. From my parochial perspective, it would also give Obama a huge promise kept for his reelection in 2012.

Afghanistan was a whole different story.

It began as a mission to rout Al Qaeda and bring Osama bin Laden to justice, but unraveled after the Bush administration shifted the military focus some fourteen hundred miles west, to another war in Iraq. Now, seven years later, bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s core leaders were still at large, the Taliban was resurgent, and the United States and its NATO allies were deeply mired in Afghanistan. Some six hundred Americans had already died there, and thousands more had been injured, in an effort to help prop up the government of Hamid Karzai, the country’s mercurial and corrupt, if democratically elected, leader. The allied mission, already costing more than three billion dollars every month, was adrift without an obvious strategy or endgame.

Obama was resolved to change that.

He knew that this would initially mean a greater commitment of U.S. troops to stabilize the country, train Afghan soldiers, and step up the assault on Al Qaeda. He had said so as a candidate. Yet he also was determined to define the mission and limit its duration. He felt the wars had already cost the nation dearly and had inflamed anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries and beyond. “This can’t be an open-ended commitment,” he said. “We can’t afford it and the American people won’t tolerate it.”

This triggered a months-long debate in the fall of 2009 about the size and scope of the mission, which played out in nine dramatic meetings in the cloistered White House Situation Room. The sessions revolved around a strategy proposed by General Stanley McChrystal, a newly appointed commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Before the president ever saw the plan, its details began leaking, setting the fault lines for the debate.

Before the formal review began, an agitated Joe Biden called me into his office. “Our objective in going there was to destroy Al Qaeda, so why are we plunging into COIN here?” the vice president said, predicting that the McChrystal plan for an expansive counterinsurgency, reported in the media, would become a sinkhole from which we could not escape. Biden believed that fewer troops, focused on Al Qaeda and counterterrorism efforts, was the smarter and more responsible strategy. “The president has asked me to play the bad cop on this and I am ready to do it.”

I shared Biden’s concern. We had campaigned against nation building and open-ended engagements. McChrystal’s plan might mean leaving troops in Afghanistan throughout Obama’s presidency. Still, very properly, when the meetings began, I was just a silent observer, there because I would have to help explain and defend whatever decision the president made.

Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past, the president came to the first meeting in mid-September with a raft of probing questions about the length, scope, and goals of the mission—questions he would need answered before making any decisions about additional troops. What was necessary to defeat Al Qaeda? What was achievable in Afghanistan, given the weak and corrupt government there? What was the strategy for neighboring Pakistan, more than a passive player and increasingly a safe haven for both the Taliban and Al Qaeda?

Before he could get the answers, though, the president was treated to a lesson in the complex politics of dealing with the military.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Admiral Mike Mullen, the nation’s top military man, was asked about McChrystal’s report, which was classified and had not been released. McChrystal had yet to put a number on his request for more troops, Mullen told the committee. “But I do believe that, having heard his views and having great confidence in his leadership, a properly resourced counterinsurgency probably means more forces and, without question, more time and more commitment to the protection of the Afghan people and to the development of good governance.” Six days later, the classified McChrystal memo was leaked. The front page of the
Washington Post
screamed, “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’”

Whether it intended to or not, the Pentagon had jammed the commander in chief.

Even the slow-to-boil Obama was furious. He called in Gates and Mullen and, according to Rahm, was very blunt about his feelings: “McChrystal’s report is leaked and published. We meet for two and a half hours on Sunday and have a good discussion on the way to go, and then you go out and run way out in front of where you know I am? I can only conclude one of two things, Mike. Either you don’t respect me as commander in chief or you all have been very sloppy. Neither is justifiable.”

“It got very quiet, for like five seconds, which felt like an hour,” Rahm recalled. “And then Gates said, ‘We respect you, Mr. President. The mistakes are ours.’”

What was supposed to have been a secret review was now a public debate. When the president met with congressional leaders at the White House in early October, the Republicans pushed him to embrace McChrystal’s plan, including the additional forty thousand troops he was rumored to be requesting.

“You’re the commander in chief. This is your decision, and I don’t envy you,” said Obama’s vanquished general election opponent, John McCain. “I appreciate that you need a strategy, but I do think time is not on our side.”

After a few others chimed in, echoing the same point, Obama had heard enough.

“John was right that this is
my
decision,” he said, with unmistakable edge. “And I assure you, John, we will not make it in a leisurely manner. But it’s important to get it right. If we’re going to debate on spending and deficits, there are consequences to the decisions we make. And the allies have to buy in to what we might be expecting them to do, and they will be looking for a plausible story for how this ends.”

In meeting after meeting with his war cabinet, the president pressed for a sharper definition of the mission. “The goals need to be realistic and narrowly tailored to serve our national interest, and they need to be achievable,” the president told them. Yet, even as he elicited agreement on scaled-down objectives, Gates and his commanders clung to the McChrystal plan and troop request. Obama was frustrated: “If we can’t describe closure, if we can’t describe the end point, it’s an open-ended commitment,” he complained. “No one can describe closure here.”

I had no doubt that Gates, Mullen, and the commanders were earnest in their recommendations and more attuned than anyone in the room to the wages of war. Even so, presidents have to weigh their decisions against a broader array of considerations. It is the tension between the civilian and military roles—a tension that occasionally boiled over.

After a meeting on October 26, from which many of us were excluded, Rahm told me that he had confronted Gates. “I said, ‘Bob, you’re boxing the president in. You know that forty thousand is just the beginning and in ten months or a year you’ll be asking for more. There’s no end to it.’ And he just stared at me. ‘Well, then you guys better think of something.’ I said, ‘Us guys, Bob?’ I’ve never seen such a campaign waged against the president of the United States.”

Three days later, the president made an unannounced midnight trip to Dover Air Force Base to greet a military plane carrying the remains of fifteen servicemen and three Drug Enforcement Agency agents killed in Afghanistan. He stood at attention and saluted as their flag-draped coffins filed by, then spent hours consoling their families. It was almost dawn when he returned to the White House. I asked Gibbs, who had accompanied him, what the president had said on the way home. “Nothing,” Robert told me. “He just looked out the window and said nothing.”

Obama knew that a surge of troops in Afghanistan would ensure that there would be many more flag-draped coffins and heartbroken families before he could bring the troops home. “It was very, very sobering,” he said. “It reminds you that there are real, grave, human consequences to these decisions. It’s not just about moving pieces around the board.”

In the midst of the deliberations, I got a call from Colin Powell, who spoke with the wisdom of a man who had been on both sides of such debates, as a military commander and civilian authority.

“Just remember that he’s the commander in chief and they ain’t,” he said. “They want more troops. They’ll
always
want more troops. History has shown that this is not always the right answer. My advice is that you take your time.”

On November 11, Veterans Day, the war council went through the force options, including a new Gates variation, which called for thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand additional troops, down from the forty thousand McChrystal had requested. The president, however, was focused on not just the size of the force but also the timing of its deployment. Obama had been shown a graph of the proposed troop buildup and its projected drawdown. The chart assumed a process that would last some six to eight years and cost fifty billion per year, far lengthier and costlier than he believed wise or doable. Even if it made sense and he agreed, there was no guarantee he could bring Congress along for such a plan. “I don’t know how I am going to describe this as a surge,” he said, “if in five years from now, we’re only where we are now in terms of troop levels. I want to look at an option that is not open-ended, and puts troops in for eighteen to twenty-four months and then begins thinning them out.” Holding up the chart, he said, “Why can’t we move the bell curve to the left, get the troops in and out sooner?”