OVAL TEAM The 44th president and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin share a West Wing tête-à-tête. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Barack Obama and Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Ultimate Exit Interview
As
his two-term presidency draws to a close, Barack Obama is looking
back—at the legacies of his predecessors, as well as his own—and
forward, to the freedom of life after the White House. In a wide-ranging
conversation with one of the nation’s foremost presidential historians,
he talks about his ambitions, frustrations, and the decisions that
still haunt him.
His presidency is winding
down. A contentious election—fought largely over his record and legacy—is about to
be decided. With that in mind, Barack Obama recently invited the presidential
historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to the White House for a long, personal,
open-ended conversation. The meeting, arranged by Vanity Fair, took place in
the president’s private dining room, just off the Oval Office.
By Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Presidential Library.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin is no
stranger to these precincts. She has been in and out of the West Wing ever
since 1967, when, as a 24-year-old White House Fellow, she worked closely with
Lyndon Johnson during the last year of his presidency (and then afterward as he
wrote his memoirs). She has earned a raft of literary prizes, including a
Pulitzer, for books about J.F.K., L.B.J., Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore
Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and, most notably, Abraham Lincoln—the subject
of her landmark history, Team of Rivals, whose title gave America’s political
language a new and permanent catchphrase. (Steven Spielberg would use Goodwin’s
book as the basis for his film Lincoln, and when Daniel Day-Lewis won the 2012 best-actor
Oscar for his portrayal of the president, he entered the Vanity Fair
after-party with the author in tow.)
Goodwin
likes to tell the story of the day in the spring of 2007, when a young Illinois
senator phoned her, out of the blue, requesting that they meet because he’d
just finished reading Team of Rivals. That call would begin a friendship. Since
taking office, Obama has occasionally invited Goodwin, along with a small
cohort of presidential historians, to come to the White House to discuss past
presidents, their legacies—and his. And over the years she has had the
president’s ear and provided historical context and, on occasion, counsel.
In
their conversation, the president and Goodwin exhibit an easy camaraderie,
sometimes completing each other’s sentences. They touch on everything from
comedy Web sites to bodysurfing in Hawaii. But the central focus is on history,
and on enduring questions. What is presidential temperament? How does a leader
maintain perspective? When does the job of president feel the heaviest? What is
good and bad about ambition?
Obama
and Goodwin spent more than an hour over coffee, water, and scones (“I won’t be
eating those,” said the president), followed by a brief chat in the Oval
Office. Obama, in shirtsleeves, sat in a straight-backed chair, his long frame
relaxed, legs crossed, as he responded or parried—always thoughtfully,
sometimes intensely. V.F.’s Annie Leibovitz photographed at the start of the
session and then re-entered, periodically, but mainly let them be.
The
walls of the private dining room and the hallway nearby are lined with telling
mementos: images of Martin Luther King Jr.; a photo of the president with
Nelson Mandela; and a Life-magazine cover showing the 1965 march on Selma,
signed by civil-rights leader John Lewis (who, inside the House chamber the
next morning, would lead a sit-in against gun violence). Tables in the room
hold framed family photos, a bust of J.F.K., and a pair of Muhammad Ali’s
boxing gloves.
Looming
over everything is The Peacemakers, an oil painting of Lincoln and his war
council. And in its way the picture, by George P. A. Healy, with its
none-too-subtle rainbow shining above Lincoln’s shoulder, seemed to visually
reinforce the discussion at hand. Obama, for his part, noted at one point that
even in the nation’s darkest moments he gains strength—and perspective—by
tapping into an abiding sense of optimism. It is a heartening notion in an era
of blaring headlines, instant analysis, and perishable sound bites.
The
conversation between Obama and Goodwin, above all else, is a conversation between
two writers, each steeped in history.
GOODWIN: Preparing for this conversation today, I realized that it was nine years ago that you first called me on my cell phone: “Hello, this is Barack Obama. I’ve just read Team of Rivals and we have to talk about Lincoln.” Soon afterward, I came to see you in your Senate office. So what was it about him? What made you give your announcement speech in the shadow of the Old State Capitol? What spoke to you about Lincoln to make you say, “I love this guy”?
GOODWIN: Preparing for this conversation today, I realized that it was nine years ago that you first called me on my cell phone: “Hello, this is Barack Obama. I’ve just read Team of Rivals and we have to talk about Lincoln.” Soon afterward, I came to see you in your Senate office. So what was it about him? What made you give your announcement speech in the shadow of the Old State Capitol? What spoke to you about Lincoln to make you say, “I love this guy”?
OBAMA:
Well, look, I’m from Illinois, and I spent eight years down in Springfield. So
the location and the announcement, to some degree, made sense optically. My
particular passion for Lincoln, though, dates back from my earliest memories of
politics. And we’ve talked about this before—that there’s no one who I believe
has ever captured the soul of America more profoundly than Abraham Lincoln has.
Not
just his biography, of somebody who genuinely rose from nothing, self-taught,
striking out along the borders of our Great Frontier. Somebody who worked with
his hands and then worked with his mind, and somehow became one of the greatest
writers in the English language. And I think, most importantly, somebody who
was able to see humanity clearly, see the fundamental contradictions of the
American experiment clearly, and yet still remain hopeful and still remain full
of humor, and still have a basic sympathy for the human condition, even in the
midst of a terrible war and having to make terrible decisions. And having a
forgiving spirit.
I mean,
I could go on and on for hours about Lincoln. For me, Lincoln is like just a
handful of people—a Gandhi, or a Picasso, or a Martin Luther King Jr.—who is an
original and captures something essential.
GOODWIN:
When Lincoln was 23 years old, and running for office the first time, he said,
“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. I have no other so great as
that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of
their esteem.” And then, a decade later, when he was in the midst of a
depression so severe that his friends took all the knives, razors, and other
dangerous things from his room, he said he was more than willing to die but
that he had “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.”
Isn’t that incredible? So how would you describe your “peculiar ambition” that
every man has? And when did it develop?
OBAMA: It’s always dangerous to amend the words of Abraham Lincoln, but let me see if this is a friendly amendment. I actually think, when you’re young, ambitions are somewhat common—you want to prove yourself. It may grow out of different life experiences. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the admiration of the demanding father. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the love of an absent father. You may want to prove that you’re worthy of other kids or neighbors who were wealthier than you and teased you. You may want to prove that you’re worthy of high expectations. But I do think that there is a youthful ambition that very much has to do with making your mark in the world. And I think that cuts across the experiences of a lot of people who end up achieving something significant in their field. I think, as you get older, that’s when your ambitions become “peculiar” …
GOODWIN:
Oh, well said, sir. We can amend Lincoln. story.
OBAMA:
… because I think that at a certain stage those early ambitions burn away,
partly because you achieve something, you get something done, you get some
notoriety. And then the particularities of who you are and what your deepest
commitments are begin expressing themselves. You’re not just chasing the idea
of “me” being important, but you, rather, are chasing a particular passion.
So, in
my case, you could analyze me and say that my father leaving and being absent
was a motivator for early ambition, trying to prove myself to this apparition
who had vanished. You could argue that me being a mixed kid in a place where
there weren’t a lot of black kids around might have spurred on my ambitions.
You could go through a whole litany of things that sparked me wanting to do
something important.
But as
I got older, then my particular ambitions started cohering around creating a
world in which people of different races or backgrounds or faiths can recognize
each other’s humanity, or creating a world in which every kid, regardless of
their background, can strive and achieve and fulfill their potential.
And
those particular ambitions end up being rooted not just in me wanting to prove
myself, but they end up being rooted in a particular worldview, a recognition
that the world only makes sense to me given my life and my background if, in
fact, we’re not just an assortment of tribes that can never understand each
other, but that we’re, rather, one common humanity that can meet and learn and
love each other.
GOODWIN:
And at some point politics becomes the channel for that, right?
OBAMA:
Right.
GOODWIN:
For example, young F.D.R. seemed a pretty ordinary guy. At 28 he’s a clerk in a
law firm. He hasn’t done anything particularly great in college or law school.
He gets his first chance to run for the state legislature, and somehow, when
he’s out there on the campaign trail, something clicks in. William James said,
“At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, ‘This is the
real me.’ ” And
F.D.R. knew then that’s what
he wanted to be.
OBAMA:
I think F.D.R. is a great example of what I mean. If you look at his early
life, it is ambition for ambition’s sake …
GOODWIN:
Absolutely.
OBAMA:
It’s like he’s just checking off boxes. There’s no sense of what he wants to do
with power; he wants power. There’s no clarity about where he wants to take his
notoriety; he just wants to be famous. And there’s a hunger there, right?
GOODWIN:
And that’s partly because of Teddy Roosevelt …
OBAMA:
Absolutely.
GOODWIN:
Because Teddy—his distant cousin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s uncle—did this, so I’m
going to be this at 25, I’m going to be this at 30; I’m going to be president.
He says this at 28, but he doesn’t have that inner …
OBAMA:
And some of it is his mom, right? Who’s just been telling him from day one …
GOODWIN:
“You’re the best. You’re the center of the world.”
OBAMA:
“You’re the center of the world” and all that. So there are all these things
going on. And then he gets polio. And then suddenly there’s this intersection
between a personal crisis and what is beginning to happen in the country. And
that thing in him that was great but untapped suddenly is released in a way
that reflects compassion …
GOODWIN:
And empathy.
OBAMA:
… and empathy. And the innate optimism that early on might have been cockiness
now is leavened with tragedy in a way that makes that optimism that much more
profound, right?
GOODWIN:
There’s no question. Adversity in almost all the presidents I’ve studied
changes them. For Teddy Roosevelt, in 1884, losing his wife and his mother on
the same day, in the same house. He goes to the Badlands, and he’s suddenly out
among people. Both he and F.D.R. had to move beyond their privileged class.
Polio and his time at Warm Springs, Georgia [rehab facility], allowed F.D.R. to
do that. And then they created a different sense of themselves, connected to
other people—partly what you’re talking about—wanting to make other people’s
lives better. Fate had dealt them an unkind hand, like it does to many, and
they suddenly felt more deeply toward a wider range of people.
OBAMA:
Exactly. And so I think there’s a process you go through. I found during the
course of my political career on the national scene—which is relatively
compressed compared to some of these other presidents—there’s a point where the
vanity burns away and you’ve had your fill of your name in the papers, or big
adoring crowds, or the exercise of power. And for me that happened fairly
quickly. And then you are really focused on: What am I going to get done with
this strange privilege that’s been granted to me? How do I make myself worthy
of it?
And if
you don’t go through that, then you start getting into trouble, because then
you’re just [gesturing, as if climbing a ladder] clinging to prerogatives and
the power and the attention. There’s an expression that my daughters use: You
get thirsty.
GOODWIN:
And the thirst is unquenchable.
OBAMA:
And the thirst is unquenchable. And that’s what you see, I think, sometimes
with somebody like a Nixon—a brilliant person who, early on, had ambitions that
probably were not that different from an F.D.R., certainly not that different
from an L.B.J. But that thirst overwhelms everything, and you start making
decisions based solely on that.
GOODWIN:
So that brings us to the question of temperament, which is probably the greatest
separator in presidential leadership. There’s that quote when [retired Supreme
Court justice] Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who met with F.D.R. after his
inauguration, famously said Roosevelt had “a second-class intellect but a
first-class temperament.” How would you describe your temperament and why it’s
fit for this office if, in fact, you think it is?
OBAMA:
Well, whether it’s fit for this office or not is up to historians like you to
determine. I think it’s fair to say that my temperament is [pause, seemingly in
search of the right word] steady—and on the buoyant side.
GOODWIN:
Do you think of yourself as an extrovert?
OBAMA:
No. On the spectrum of successful politicians, I’m not introverted the way some
have been, but I’m not an F.D.R. or a Bill Clinton, who are just constantly …
GOODWIN:
Needing the people all the time.
OBAMA:
… in a crowd and just relishing it. I like my quiet time. There is a writer’s
sensibility in me sometimes, where I step back. But I do think that I am
generally optimistic. I see tragedy and comedy and pain and irony and all that
stuff. But in the end I think life is fascinating, and I think people are more
good than bad, and I think that the possibilities of progress are real.
GOODWIN:
I think people are born with that spirit. My father was orphaned when he was
10. My mother died when I was young. But despite these sorrows my father
remained an optimist. And that optimism was the greatest gift he gave to me—a
sense of excitement about life that has carried me through everything.
OBAMA:
Yes . . . . I think it’s up to the American people and historians, et cetera,
to decide. But I can tell you what I think served me well in this office, and
that is this basic optimism and a capacity to take the long view on things. I
don’t buy the hype when everybody is saying how wonderful things are and how
great I am, and I don’t get too down when people say, “This is a disaster and
he’s done for.”
I think
I’ve said this before. Early in my presidency, I went to Cairo to make a speech
to the Muslim world. And in the afternoon, after the speech, we took
helicopters out to the pyramids. And they had emptied the pyramids for us, and
we could just wander around for a couple hours [at] the pyramids and the
Sphinx. And the pyramids are one of those things that live up to the hype.
They’re elemental in ways that are hard to describe. And you’re going to these
tombs and looking at the hieroglyphics and imagining the civilization that
built these iconic images.
And I
still remember it—because I hadn’t been president that long at that
point—thinking to myself, There were a lot of people during the period when
these pyramids were built who thought they were really important. And there was
the equivalent of cable news and television and newspapers and Twitter and
people anguishing over their relative popularity or position at any given time.
And now it’s all just covered in dust and sand. And all that people know
[today] are the pyramids.
Sometimes
I carry with me that perspective, which tells me that my particular worries on
any given day—how I’m doing in the polls or what somebody is saying about me …
for good or for ill—isn’t particularly relevant. What is relevant is: What am I
building that lasts?
And
here in the United States, hopefully, what we’re building are not just
pyramids, are not icons to one pharaoh. What we’re building is a culture and a
way of living together that we can look back on and say, [This] was good, was
inclusive, was kind, was innovative, was able to fulfill the dreams of as many
people as possible. And that part of my temperament I think has served me well.
GOODWIN:
So when you think about the importance of that part of temperament in a
president, how do you view what’s happening with [Donald] Trump right now?
OBAMA:
Well, you know, I see Trump as a phenomenon of an expression of certain fears,
certain resentments, that have been a running thread in American history.
GOODWIN:
Yes, not unlike the turn of the 20th century, when so many of those same
anxieties and fears had developed in the wake of the Industrial
Revolution—immigration, technological change, people moving from farms to
cities.
OBAMA:
Right. And so there are always going to be figures who become symbols and expressions
of those fears and resentments. So he’s not unique in that sense. I don’t think
it’s a surprise for me to say that I don’t think his temperament is suited for
this office. But it’s not something that I have to emphasize because I think
the majority of the American people have figured that out.
GOODWIN:
And the people are looking at his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well. I’m
reminded of another moment that had to do with Team of Rivals—and you. You were
in Boca Raton late in May of 2008, and somebody asked you if you’d really be
willing to put into your inner circle one of your chief rivals, even if his or
her spouse were an occasional pain in the butt. [Laughter.] And then you
referred to Lincoln. You said, “I don’t want to jump the gun, [but] I will tell
you, though, that my goal is to have the best possible government.” And you
explained: “Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running
against him into his Cabinet because, whatever personal feelings there were,
the issue was ‘How can we get this country through this time of crisis?’ ” And then when you chose Hillary Clinton to
be secretary of state, of course, “team of
rivals” emerged as a term to characterize her
selection.
It came
full circle when I was at the Vernon Jordan party the night before your
inauguration. Hillary came up to me and said, in a teasing way, “Doris, this is
all your fault. You’re responsible for my being secretary of state.”
[Laughter.] She meant Lincoln, of course, not me. But obviously your successor
matters a great deal to you, as does the importance of carrying out the things
that you care about. It’s like a relay race, as you’ve said, so the next person
will take over. And that’s an important part of what you need to think about
now.
OBAMA:
Absolutely. I am a firm believer that you don’t do anything significant by
yourself. Again, maybe there are exceptions. There’s the Picasso or the Mozart.
GOODWIN:
Yes, Teddy Roosevelt wrote that there are certain geniuses, of which he was not
one. But Lincoln was one. Keats could write a poem that nobody else could
write.
OBAMA:
I don’t fall in that category. I marvel at those people who are true geniuses
of that sort. But what I’ve seen in my own life is that when I get something
important done it’s because of a lot of other people—some who get credit, some
who don’t.
You
look at something like health care, the Affordable Care Act. And for all the
controversy, we now have 20 million people who have health insurance who didn’t
have it. It’s actually proven to be more effective, cheaper than even advocates
like me expected. But I still view it as a starter home, in the same way that
when L.B.J. started Medicare and Medicaid, or F.D.R. started Social Security,
there were a series of refinements and incremental improvements that overall
made the system more sturdy.
GOODWIN:
L.B.J. used to say about his domestic anti-poverty programs that made up the
Great Society that it was a process, from crawling to walking to running.
OBAMA:
I think about this being a relay race in that way. I welcome the next president
saying, “This is a good start. Here are some additional things we shouldn’t or
should be doing. Here are the things that we’ve learned from the first phases
of this that could stand improvement.” That’s a good thing. To me that’s not a
failure on my part. That’s not a criticism of me. That’s the nature of how
social change comes about.
So in
that sense I don’t see myself doing this alone. But in a more granular way I
think about all the people who were involved in getting that thing passed.
There were staff people here, whose names nobody knows, who worked tirelessly
to make this happen.
GOODWIN:
They know, they know.
OBAMA:
Legislative folks, who were up on the Hill till four in the morning trying to
get a particular provision done. Teams here who were crunching the numbers to
figure out how we could pay for it. Members of Congress who voted for this
thing knowing that the politics were really tough for them, and that they might
lose their race[s].
There
were just a lot of people who ended up making enormous sacrifices—and I’m the
front man of the band. But it doesn’t work without them. And that’s why I was
always amused that people were either skeptical or surprised that I would
choose a Hillary Clinton as a secretary of state. To my mind, having somebody
smart, tough, capable with her own stature, who could travel around the world
and command the stage, was a huge asset. What I also knew—partly by virtue of
her having served as First Lady, and partly just because I knew her and had
observed her—was [that] her dedication to the country would lead her to operate
with great loyalty regardless of …
GOODWIN:
Her own ambitions.
OBAMA:
… whatever ambitions she may have had or lingering aggravations that carried
over from the campaign.
GOODWIN:
I detected a note of wistfulness in the speech you gave at Springfield last
February. You talked about what it was like in the legislature there when you
could cross party lines and share drinks and play poker, making it harder to
call your opponents fascists or idiots. It makes me want to ask: Did you
absorb, back in 2010, the full impact of what Senate minority leader Mitch
McConnell meant when he said that his party’s “most important” objective would
be to make you a “one-term president”? Did you realize how polarized it was
going to become?
OBAMA:
No. I would say that’s one of the things that surprised me, mainly because we
were in the midst of [an economic] crisis. And I was politically aware during
the Clinton presidency, so I’d watch the ways in which slash-and-burn politics
had come to be the norm nationally—some of the things that [former House
Speaker] Newt Gingrich had unleashed with his revolution. But that was during a
period of relative quiet and prosperity.
GOODWIN:
Right. So there was more freedom to play around.
OBAMA:
And so that kind of reality-TV game playing you could forgive. I expected when
we were undergoing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression that
there would be at least a span of time on the front end in which people would
rally. And the fact that that was missing probably showed my naïveté. I didn’t
anticipate that fully. But I got educated pretty quick on it.
And I
do think that there has been a degree of venom and viciousness and anger that
has been unleashed in our national politics that is qualitatively different in
at least our modern history.
GOODWIN:
And why do you think it happened?
OBAMA:
It’s a combination of things. We’ve talked about these things before. Political
gerrymandering makes the incentive for most members of Congress to play to the
extremes of their base rather than to the center. The Balkanization of the
media means that nobody is having a single conversation with a single set of
agreed-upon facts and assumptions the way you had as recently as the 90s. The
influence of not just big money, but dark money. The collapse of party
structures. The fact that most legislators now, most members of Congress, don’t
live here but travel back and forth. Yeah, all these things have contributed.
GOODWIN:
So when you get upset with this lack of discourse, what do you do? When F.D.R.
was very upset about isolationists, when he knew we had to deal with World War
II, he would actually write drafts of speeches where he would call them out by
name.
OBAMA:
Yes. [Laughter.]
GOODWIN:
And then he would do Draft Two, Draft Three, Draft Four, and one of his young
speechwriters said, “Oh, my God, you can’t say this.” And then by Draft Six,
the offending phrase was gone. Lincoln, as you know, wrote hot letters to
people. And then he’d cool down and didn’t send them. Have you ever written any
drafts of speeches or hot letters?
OBAMA:
I do it all the time.
GOODWIN:
What do you mean you do it all the time?
OBAMA:
I do it all the time. I will write a response—a full rant.
GOODWIN:
No kidding? [Laughter.]
OBAMA:
And then I’ll crumple it up. Every once in a while, my team here will hear me
go on a rant. Generally speaking, people who know me will tell you that my
public persona is not that different from my private persona. I am who I am.
You sort of get what you see with me. The two exceptions are that I curse more
than I should, and I find myself cursing more in this office than I had in my
previous life. [Laughter.] And fortunately both my chief of staff and my
national-security adviser have even bigger potty mouths than me, so it’s O.K.
And the second thing is that I can be much more sarcastic and, I think,
sometimes withering in my assessments of things than I allow to show in my
public life.
GOODWIN:
Well, we see it sometimes. [Laughter.]
OBAMA:
Yes, every once in a while you see it.
GOODWIN:
You’ve said you’d rather be alive now than any other time. But do you ever wish
you had been president in another era? Suppose you’d been around in Lincoln’s
time, when your written word would be pamphletized, when everybody would be
reading the entire speech and they’d be talking to each other about it. And
Teddy Roosevelt was right for the era when punchy language worked. F.D.R. was
perfect for conversational style on radio, J.F.K. and Reagan for the big TV
networks. And you’re governing in the age of the Internet, with its divergent voices
and sound bites.
OBAMA:
It’s an interesting question. As I said earlier, there is a big part of me that
has a writer’s sensibility. And so that’s how I think. That’s how I pursue
truth. That’s how I hope to communicate truth to people. And I know that’s not
how it is always received. Because it gets chopped up. Or if it’s too long,
then it’s dismissed as being professorial, or abstract, or long-winded.
But I
tell you what, though. [Long pause.] I’m named Barack Hussein Obama. I’m
African-American. And I’ve been elected twice to this office with the
majorities of the American people. So something is working.
GOODWIN:
And you can tell yourself that. [Laughter.]
OBAMA:
Somebody is reading some of these speeches. And it’s interesting: I just had an
exchange with a columnist who I like, but it was on the topic of using the
phrase “radical Islam,” and the criticism that’s come from some of the
Republicans. And this is a columnist who is generally sympathetic and a
thoughtful person but actually thought that I was underestimating the importance
of having this pithy phrase that includes “Islam” to accurately label the
nature of the threat. And he said, “Well, you acknowledge all these truths, but
you do it in long paragraphs, and that’s not sufficient.”
And I
took the criticism to heart. But I responded to him, saying, “I refuse to give
in to the notion that the American people can’t handle complicated
information.” Because I know the American people. I’ve met a lot of them. I’ve
met a lot more of them than any columnist has, or any talking head on TV has.
And they’re pretty sophisticated. They’re not always paying attention, and
there’s a lot of noise out there, but when they have the time, they’re not
looking to be spoken down to and there’s no requirement to dumb things down.
They get it.
You
think about the race speech that I gave in Philadelphia [in 2008] when the
Jeremiah Wright stuff broke [regarding the Obamas’ Chicago pastor]. That was a
pretty complicated piece of business, but I think people heard me. Now there
are filters, there are a lot of filters there, and so sometimes it’s hard to
get at folks. What I miss is just the fact that there’s not a single
conversation, but there is just this …
GOODWIN:
It would have been easier if there were just three television networks.
OBAMA:
Right. So I don’t need to go back to Lincoln. If I just had [the benefits of]
what Reagan had, then the concentrated power of the bully pulpit would be an
enormous advantage.
I think
part of the reason that I have been successful, though, despite maybe not
always fitting my message into the pre-packaged formulas, is there is this
whole other media ecology out there of the Internet and Instagram and memes and
talk shows and comedy, and I’m pretty good at that. I [give] maybe the
long-winded speeches that not everybody reads, but I can also do a slow jam on
Jimmy Fallon better than most. [Laughter.]
GOODWIN:
You’re proud of that, aren’t you? [Laughter.]
OBAMA:
No, no, no, I mean—
GOODWIN:
I’m teasing you.
OBAMA:
I mean, I have fun with it sometimes. But it actually serves a purpose because
I can—I think I have a pretty good take on popular culture that maybe makes up
for the fact that I’m not a sound-bite politician for the nightly news. And as
a consequence I think I’m able to reach a lot of folks, despite the fact that
the conventional news media sometimes says, “You know, this speech is too
long,” or “It’s too complicated,” or “He needs to have better sound bites,” or
what have you. Because they’re not seeing me on Between Two Ferns [laughter] trying
to sell the Affordable Care Act to young people, and the fact that we’re
getting millions of hits on something that is not on conventional TV.
GOODWIN:
So what do you regret the most that you wish you had done—or that you might
have been able to deal better with?
OBAMA:
Oh, look, the list of things I wish I had gotten done is long.
GOODWIN:
I don’t mean what you didn’t get done, but what you might have done
differently.
OBAMA:
What I might have done differently. Yes, even that list is perpetually renewing
itself because each day I say, Maybe if I had done that just a little bit
different or that a little bit better. I know there are problems that I say to
myself, If maybe I was a little more gifted I might have been able to solve.
But that’s not because I believe what I did was a mistake. It’s that maybe it
required the talents of a Lincoln.
So when
I think about the polarization that occurred in 2009 and 2010, I’ve gone back
and I’ve looked at my proposals and my speeches and the steps we took to reach
out to Congress. And the notion that we weren’t engaging Congress, or that we
were overly partisan, or we didn’t schmooze enough, or we didn’t reach out
enough to Republicans—that whole narrative just isn’t true.
GOODWIN:
But that narrative took hold, right?
OBAMA:
What I can say is maybe if I had the genius of an Abraham Lincoln, or the charm
of F.D.R. …
GOODWIN:
Or, like Lyndon Johnson, you had them over every night for dinner.
OBAMA:
Or the energy of Teddy Roosevelt, or the legislative acumen of L.B.J., or all
those things wrapped into one, maybe things would have turned out differently.
On the other hand, when I read history, I [see] what typically happens to
presidents and the other party during tumultuous times and how … people react
when the economy is collapsing and they’re losing their homes, losing their
pensions—it sort of tracks, what ended up happening, because some of that is
human nature.
So I
guess my point is that there are always things that I think I wish I could have
done better. I wish I could have persuaded the public more or my colleagues
more, here in Washington, around a particular course of action. But there
aren’t a lot of situations where I look back and I say, The decision I actually
made or the course we actually pursued was the wrong course.
GOODWIN:
That’s what F.D.R. used to say: “I think of the things that have come before me
during the day and the decisions that I have made, I say to myself—well, I have
done the best I could and turn over and go to sleep.”
OBAMA:
Exactly. Another good example of that is the situation in Syria, which haunts
me constantly. I would say of all the things that have happened during the
course of my presidency the knowledge that you have hundreds of thousands of
people who have been killed, millions who have been displaced, [makes me] ask
myself what might I have done differently along the course of the last five,
six years.
The
conventional arguments about what could have been done are wrong. The notion
that if we had provided some more modest arms to Syrian rebels—that somehow
that would have led to [Syrian president Bashar al-] Assad’s overthrow more
decisively. The notion that if I had taken a pinprick strike when the
chemical-weapons issue came out, as opposed to negotiating and getting all
those chemical weapons out—that that would have been decisive. All those things
I tend to be skeptical about.
But I
do ask myself, Was there something that we hadn’t thought of? Was there some
move that is beyond what was being presented to me that maybe a Churchill could
have seen, or an Eisenhower might have figured out? So that’s the kind of thing
that tends to occupy me when I have the time to think about it—mainly because I
think that in this job one of the things you realize is there are problems that
just end up being really hard and by definition the only problems that come to
my desk are the ones that nobody else can solve.
Usually,
I’m pretty good about sorting through the options and then making decisions
that I’m confident are the best decisions in that moment, given the information
we have. But there are times where I think I wish I could have imagined a
different level of insight.
GOODWIN:
Was there ever a time, at the beginning of your presidency, when you were
haunted? The night F.D.R. was first elected, he told his son James, “All my
life I have been afraid of only one thing—fire.... I’m just afraid that I may
not have the strength to do this job.” He was a paralyzed man, so he never
locked his door. Did you ever feel that? When confronting the explosion that
you came into, with the recession and the difficulty we were facing?
OBAMA:
[Long pause.] Honestly, no.
GOODWIN:
And that’s the only time I think F.D.R. felt it, too. And then by the next day
he was O.K.
OBAMA:
Anybody who gets into bed and turns out the lights the first night in the White
House probably feels a little bit of a start, where you say, “Goodness … ”
GOODWIN:
“This is me, and I’m here.”
OBAMA:
Right. “And I’ve got to make a bunch of decisions.” And so there’s a little bit
of a jolt that you feel.
There
wasn’t a time where I felt fearful that I couldn’t make the best decisions
possible. The times where I had been anguished almost exclusively had to do
with deploying our men and women overseas. The first Afghan decision to surge
additional troops there because the situation was deteriorating. I remember
giving a speech at West Point and seeing all those amazing young people and
knowing that some would be sent and not every one of them would come back.
Weighing that—those never get easy.
But
that’s a feeling different than fear. It’s a feeling of the weight of the
decision. And a different feeling, but related, is the decisions I’ve had to
make to launch strikes. I don’t want ever to be a president who is comfortable
and at ease with killing people. I don’t want my generals or my defense
secretary or my national-security team to ever feel deploying weapons to kill
people as routine or abstract, even if the targets are bad people. And that
weighs on me.
GOODWIN:
So what is it going to be like when this weight is lifted? What are you going
to be able to do that you haven’t been able to do for eight years?
OBAMA:
Well, I’m hoping I can take a walk. [Laughter.] And …
GOODWIN:
Somewhere else, not just with …
OBAMA:
Yes, not just around and around the South Lawn with my chief of staff and my
team and my dogs. [Laughter.]
GOODWIN:
What else? You drove around in a car in that comedy video with Jerry Seinfeld,
right? You hadn’t done it for a while.
OBAMA:
I’m looking to negotiate to see maybe if I can take a drive somewhere at least
on some open road.
GOODWIN:
You mean before the end of your term?
OBAMA:
Yeah.
GOODWIN:
You know, the other guys could. Franklin Roosevelt drove Churchill almost to
the edge of a cliff, in Hyde Park—and Churchill was so afraid. L.B.J. had his
amphibious car when he was president. He tricked me and took me in his car one
day, and the Secret Service collaborated with him. L.B.J., behind the wheel,
warned me, “Be careful, we’re going toward a lake. The brakes aren’t working.”
Well, we go into the lake: the car became a boat. Then he got so mad at me
because I didn’t get scared. I’d figured, He’s not going to die. And he said,
“Don’t you Harvard people have enough sense to be scared?” So these earlier
presidents could do things like that. It seems like things have tightened.
OBAMA:
Oh, absolutely. I think since the systematic emergence of terrorism and the
assassination attempts, everything has tightened. My hope is that it loosens
back up once I leave.
There
are a couple of particular bodysurfing beaches that I’ve not been to in Hawaii
for a long time that I want to go back to. [Laughter.] And there are places I
want to visit where if I’m wearing a baseball cap and some sunglasses I think I
can get away with and mingle in a crowd.
But,
you know, when I leave I’ll be 55, and I’ll have an entirely new chapter of my
life—the work I want to do with a presidential-center library, creating a
platform for the next generation of young leaders across disciplines to work
together … [and other] things that in some ways I suspect I’m able to do better
out of this office.
GOODWIN:
You mean, having had this office.
OBAMA:
Having had this office has given me this incredible perch from which to see how
the world works. The power of the office is unique and it is a humbling
privilege. With that power, however, also comes a whole host of institutional constraints.
There are things I cannot say. There are things that …
GOODWIN:
You mean now, but you will later.
OBAMA:
… that I cannot say, not out of any political concerns, but out of prudential
concerns of the office. There are institutional obligations I have to carry out
that are important for a president of the United States to carry out, but may
not always align with what I think would move the ball down the field on the
issues that I care most deeply about.
GOODWIN:
It must be so freeing, I think—because you now have this foundation to do the
stuff you want to do, but also you’re going to become more of a human being
without this.
OBAMA:
That’s the hope. And, look, I have no doubt that there will be moments as the
next inauguration approaches where I’ll feel melancholy or nostalgic.
GOODWIN:
And leaving all these people.
OBAMA:
And the team that you build here, the family that you build here, is powerful.
But there is a reason why George Washington is always one of the top three
presidents, and it’s not because of his prowess as a military leader; it’s not
because of the incredible innovations in policy that he introduced. It’s
because he knew when it was time to go. And he understood that part of the
experiment we were setting up was this idea that you serve the nation and then
it’s over, and then you’re a citizen again. And that “office of citizen” remains
important, but your ability to let go is part of the duty that you have.
GOODWIN:
It’s as important as taking hold of the office. That’s part of our democracy.
OBAMA:
As important as taking hold of the office is letting go of the office. And
they’re of a piece—it is an expression of our fidelity to the ideals upon which
this nation was founded.
GOODWIN:
I agree. There will be perks that you’ll miss, I’m sure.
OBAMA:
I will miss Air Force One. I will miss Marine One.
GOODWIN:
I think I told you the story about Eisenhower, that he had not personally
dialed a phone call for so long that when he finally was out of the presidency
he picked up the phone and he hears this buzz, and he said, “What’s this buzz?”
It’s the dial tone, Mr. President. [Laughter.]
OBAMA:
I will say that, having a couple of teenage daughters, I’m a little more
plugged into [laughter] technology than maybe Ike was.
My conclusion is: The United States government does not work for the American people anymore, they work for the 80 wealthiest people who rule this world. They select the President, not the people! The layout in Washington DC is all Occultic. If you don't know what this mean, well - I can't help you.
ReplyDeleteSince Clinton reigned in the White House, the wealth of America has been transferred to China and other countries. This enabled the 80 riches people to acquired more wealth that have business in those countries.
The 80 wealthiest people on this earth donate their pocket change to places like, Clinton Foundation, Rockafella Foundation, Carnagie Foundation....And these foundations would fund NGOs in those places. So Theary Seng is propably receiving funds for her work from one of these foundations,- Kennedy Foundation?
I had a dream when president Obama was elected. I dreamed that I congradulated him for fulling the role of the man of sin. And this he has done for America and the world through the UN mandates of same sex marriage. Now its transgender bathroom friendly legalization. This is far worse than Forced Marriage during Pol Pot Era.
United States of America was found upon a Republic Constitution. Later it was changed to Democratic. So instead of rule by Constitution of law it has now become: Democratic government of United States of America - government of the people, by the corrupt, for the elite. Elite being the 80 wealthiest people who sit on the top of the pyramid which is the icon on the dollar bill.