Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (55 page)

As Mubarak said, “The Middle East is a complicated place.”

After Cairo, the president stopped in Germany, where he would pay his respects to victims of the Holocaust with a visit to Buchenwald, the site of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps.

We were joined there by Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize–winning author and human rights activist. As a teenager, he had been a prisoner at Buchenwald and witnessed his father die there. His unforgettable memoir,
Night
, was my most searing vantage point on the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, as it had been for generations since it was first published in the 1950s. “I’ve been back there only once for fifteen minutes, years ago,” Wiesel told us, his eyes brimming with tears. “It’s difficult.”

While we were together, Rahm asked Wiesel whether it bothered him to share a stage with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, as he would at Buchenwald later that day. “No,” he said, without hesitation. “The children of murderers are not murderers. We cannot carry the sins of the parents forward.”

Millions had died in the death camps. Others survived with souls forever scarred. Yet this kindly, thoughtful scholar emerged from the nightmare and years of reflection with a kind of spiritual wisdom that, combined with his gift for narrative, had made him the conscience of the world. Having nearly lost his life at Buchenwald, the wispy-haired, sad-eyed Wiesel had spent much of the rest of his life shining an unsparing light on acts of inhumanity.

“You don’t know this, but you changed my life,” the president told Wiesel, who was sitting beside him in the limousine on our way to the ceremony. “You came to Occidental College in Los Angeles when I was a student there. I still remember the lecture. You brought some much-needed sobriety to my life. You made me realize that it was time to think about something more than myself.”

I was surprised at how fluent Obama was in Holocaust literature. He engaged Wiesel most deeply on the works of Primo Levi, an Italian scientist turned resistance fighter who wound up a prisoner in Auschwitz. Levi recounted his experiences in a series of books and poems before taking his own life in 1987.

“I spoke to Primo a few days before he died,” Wiesel told us. “I begged him to let me come spend time with him. I told him I would clear my schedule. He said, ‘It’s too late.’ And I knew he was gone. Primo died at Auschwitz. He lived for another forty years, but he died at Auschwitz.”

We transferred from the car to Marine One, the president’s helicopter, for the rest of the trip. Wiesel looked out the window as we glided above the heavily wooded German countryside, its lush beauty so incongruous with the death camp the Nazis had built there.

“I think of how you arrived here the first time, piled into a boxcar,” I said. “Now you’re returning by helicopter with the first African American president of the United States. Maybe history has a sense of justice.”

Wiesel smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know if history has a sense of justice. But it certainly has a sense of humor.”

Of all the people I had the honor to meet during my years in the White House, none moved or impressed me more than Wiesel, who would become a loving friend and mentor. Somehow, when I am with him, I feel closer to God.

 • • • 

Having come of age at a time when the prospect of nuclear annihilation was a day-to-day reality, I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the United States and Russia. The showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev over Soviet missiles in Cuba was one of the defining memories of my childhood.

Obama was only a year old when that scary drama took place, and was living in Hawaii, as remote from the action as you could be and still be in America. Dmitry Medvedev, who became president of the Russian Federation in 2008, was born three years
after
the Cuban missile crisis. Both were young men when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved. Their political sensibilities and careers had been shaped in a post–Cold War world.

Yet when Obama took office, relations between the United States and Russia were as chilly as at any time since the Cold War. At the beginning of his first term, President George W. Bush claimed to have looked into the eyes of then President Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB officer who has led Russia since 1999, and got “a sense of his soul.” Bush liked what he saw. Relations between Bush and Putin soured over time, however, reaching their nadir when Russia invaded the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in the summer of 2008. Now Obama hoped to find in Putin’s successor a partner with whom he could deal.

The United States needed Russia’s help to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and to contain North Korea’s penchant for belligerence. Also, a range of other issues—from the battle with Islamic extremism to the integrity of supply lines for U.S. troops in Afghanistan—required cooperation between the two countries. Moreover, almost a half century after the Cuban missile crisis took the world to the brink, the question of what to do with American and Russian nuclear arsenals was still unresolved.

As a senator, Obama had focused on the mortal threat that “loose nukes” posed in the age of terrorism. Yet any serious effort to curb nuclear weapons had to begin with the countries that held 95 percent of them, the United States and Russia. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, a nonproliferation treaty between the two nations, had gone into effect at the end of 1994 and was about to expire. At a time when Obama hoped to rally the world around sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, he felt it behooved the United States and Russia to set a good example.

Obama and Medvedev met for the first time in early 2009 at a G20 summit in London. I was struck then by how young and boyish the forty-three-year-old Medvedev appeared. Yet it was his height—even wearing substantial shoes, he was only five foot four—that made the biggest impression on me. I wondered if his diminutive stature was one of the virtues the vain and vertically challenged Putin, just five seven himself, saw in his handpicked successor and placeholder.

Appearances aside, the new Russian and American presidents had much in common. Both were cool, pragmatic lawyers largely unburdened by the passions of the Cold War era, and they quickly developed a comfortable working relationship. Medvedev couldn’t ignore Putin, who wielded more power than his new title of prime minister suggested, but at this first meeting, the Russian president still had enough leeway to agree to pursue a nuclear treaty slashing offensive weapons. He also opened the door to cooperation on Iran and other fronts. “You were right about Iran’s capacities and we were wrong,” Medvedev conceded, establishing the candor that would come to characterize their relationship. After the seventy-minute meeting, both men spoke hopefully about a fresh start and a reset in relations.

A few days later, in Prague, we were reminded of the urgent need for global action to curb the development and spread of nuclear weapons.

While we were there, I woke up with a start when the phone rang in the middle of the night. “Sir,” the official-sounding voice on the other end began, “this is the Situation Room. I’m calling to let you know that the event we had been anticipating has happened. You might want to get to the skiff.”

I gathered my wits about me and quickly processed the message. North Korea had fired a missile, in contravention of warnings from the United States and the global community. Our intelligence had been closely monitoring the situation and for weeks had been predicting the inevitability of this latest act of belligerency. I threw on a T-shirt and sweatpants and headed for the hotel room designated as the Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF (the “skiff” my caller mentioned), a secure location—in this case tents specially designed to thwart outside surveillance—where classified communications and discussions could be held. Gibbs was assigned to roust the president. I had left my room so hastily that my hair was standing straight up in the air. When Obama arrived, perfectly groomed, and saw me, he also saw his perfect, unwitting foil. “Axe, I see you decided to dress up as Kim Jong-Il for the occasion,” he said, a reference to the North Korean leader with the famously bizarre hairstyle.

Even as I unwittingly provided this moment of levity, the scene was intense. And it gave added meaning to evoking the dream of a world without nuclear weapons, and pledging the U.S. to concrete steps toward that goal, including a New START treaty with Russia.

Three months later, when we arrived in Moscow to advance those talks, the rapport between Obama and Medvedev was apparent. During a nearly four-hour meeting in an ornate, gold-trimmed Kremlin hall, good-natured jousting punctuated their talks. When the subject turned to Moscow’s selective barriers against the importation of American pork in response to the H1N1 virus, Obama said, “I appreciate that you have loosened the restrictions on some states—including my own state of Illinois,” he said. “I’m sure it was a coincidence!” Medvedev grinned broadly. After the meeting, the two men signed a preliminary agreement sketching the outlines of the “New START,” as it would be called, that would yield deeper cuts in the nuclear arsenals of both countries to levels not seen since the early part of the Cold War.

The morning after signing the preliminary arms agreement Obama met with Putin. Their meeting ran long, and it was a sobering harbinger of a turbulent future. The first hour, the president reported, was devoted almost entirely to Putin’s energetic litany of complaints about the indignities he felt the West had heaped upon Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union. If Medvedev was looking past the Cold War, Putin seemed consumed by it. “You are a highly educated man,” Putin told the president edgily. “I come from the security sector.” Later, I asked the president for his assessment of Putin. “He’s smart, tough, clear about his interests, and without a trace of sentimentality.”

 • • • 

In the fall of 2009, we traveled to Asia, with Obama’s first visit to China as the centerpiece of the trip. Given Asia’s meteoric growth, Obama sought to make our engagement in that region a key element of his foreign policy. And in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century, no global relationship was more important or complex than the one with this rising superpower. China is a fierce, sophisticated, and sometimes unscrupulous competitor, but with more than a billion people, it is also a huge and growing market for American goods. A notorious currency manipulator, gaming the system to favor Chinese exports, it is also the largest holder of American debt among foreign nations, which makes confrontations over currency and other economic issues tricky. China has cast a troubling shadow over our allies in the region and has expanded its presence to every corner of the world. It seeks the international community’s embrace while routinely violating human rights. Yet it is a necessary ally in forging global responses to challenges such as the ones posed by North Korea and Iran. For the United States, China is a very complicated piece of business.

On our way there, we were reminded that China is a police state and that we shouldn’t consider our communications secure. There would be hidden surveillance cameras in our hotel rooms, including the bathrooms. I felt nothing but pity for the poor security officer whose job it would be to monitor me showering. While we were there, police swarmed the floors of our hotel. Gary Locke, the secretary of commerce who would later become ambassador to China, returned to his hotel room to find two men rifling through his things.

Our first stop was Shanghai, where Obama was to hold a town hall meeting with students. Chinese authorities were unenthusiastic about such an unbridled exchange and made organizing the event as difficult as possible. Ben Rhodes, who was assigned to oversee the session for the national security team had engaged in heated negotiations over the ground rules. By the time Obama and our delegation arrived, Rhodes discovered that his BlackBerry was unusable; it remained jammed by forces unknown for the duration of our stay.

In Beijing, the president and our delegation held a bilateral meeting with Chinese president Hu Jintao. “Bilats” with the Chinese, I learned, are less freewheeling exchanges than exercises in responsive reading. The leaders come prepared with written answers to anticipated questions and rarely stray from the script.

The meeting took place in the Great Hall of the People, a massive and elaborate edifice. Obama decided to lighten the mood with a little icebreaker. “I’m told this magnificent hall was built in just ten months,” he said. “You’ll have to give me the name of your contractor. It sometimes takes that long to get a kitchen done in our country.” Our side of the table chuckled, but Obama’s quip apparently didn’t translate. Hu and his team stared at him, a great, impassive wall of Chinese. After that, we engaged in what was a generally productive, if stilted, meeting.

At the end of our visit, we were treated to the Chinese version of a state dinner. I was seated next to a minister of science and technology who regaled me with tales of the high-speed rail in which China was investing aggressively. China had already built many such lines between major cities. We had been trying, through the Recovery Act, to encourage high-speed rail between ours, but as with so many worthy endeavors, it was running into political resistance over spending.

The highlight of the evening was a musical revue that included the soulful stylings of the People’s Liberation Army Military Band, playing, in honor of America’s first black president, Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” We also heard from happy Uighurs, joyous Tibetan snow queens, and festive Mongolian folk singers, a cross section of China’s oppressed minorities. In China, all minorities are valued and respected, the master of ceremonies assured us.

Across the table, a jet-lagged Larry Summers was sound asleep and almost falling off his chair as one of China’s leading opera singers was reaching his crescendo. Favreau shot me an e-mail: “It looks like SOMEONE’S in need of a second stimulus.” I burst into laughter, which quickly turned into heaving snorts as I tried to contain myself. My outburst drew about the same stony reaction from our Chinese hosts as the president had with his contractor joke. Though nothing was said, they clearly disapproved and wondered what I could possibly have found so hilarious in this stirring aria.