Alter Egos by Mark Landler

Author:Mark Landler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

Nine

Red Lines

Barack Obama wanted to get out of the office. The West Wing, airless and tense at the best of times, felt like it was going to war footing. So shortly after six P.M. on the last Friday of August 2013, the president asked his chief of staff and closest aide, Denis McDonough, to join him for one of their periodic end-of-the-day strolls around the South Lawn. In his office just down the hall from the Oval Office, Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s senior adviser, was heading out to what he figured would be his last dinner date with his girlfriend for a while. He’d already canceled his Labor Day plans on the Outer Banks. Downstairs in his windowless cubbyhole, Ben Rhodes, having cut short a vacation with his wife in Oregon, was fine-tuning a communications rollout for the hectic days to come. Across West Executive Drive, in the Eisenhower building, Philip Gordon, the NSC’s coordinator for the Middle East, was hunkered down, having broken the news to his daughter that he couldn’t take her to the Nationals game and fireworks show to celebrate their shared birthday that night.

As Obama and McDonough circled the South Lawn, their path took them past symbols of the Obama presidency, public and private: the Rose Garden and the Oval Office, but also the swing set the president had installed for his daughters, now rarely used; the White House beehive, yielding honey that darkens in color throughout the summer; the vegetable patch planted by his wife, which supplied the heirloom tomatoes for the First Family’s table. The circuit takes only a few minutes to complete, so the two men did multiple laps, with Obama doing most of the talking.

The president was having second thoughts about the missile strike against Syria he had vowed to carry out if it was determined that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people. Obama told McDonough he wanted to pull back and seek congressional approval first. He ticked off his reasons: a growing sense of isolation after British prime minister David Cameron, who’d pledged to join the United States in the military operation, had suffered a stinging defeat in Parliament when he put the matter to a vote; a fear that acting without approval might undermine him if he needed congressional backing for the next military crisis in the Middle East, perhaps one involving Iran; and, not least, his own record. At an NSC meeting earlier that afternoon, the White House counsel, Kathy Ruemmler, speaking on a video screen, pointedly reminded him that as a senator, he had called for presidents to seek the buy-in of Congress for military operations.

“I’m well aware of what my position is,” Obama replied curtly.

McDonough was receptive to his boss’s doubts. More so than anyone but Obama himself, he thought that American presidents had reached too reflexively for the military lever over the last decade. From the start of the Arab uprisings, McDonough had resisted the interventionist instincts of his colleagues, whether it was

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