Enter Ben Rhodes, who is now, consciously or not, attempting the same feat. One of former President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy advisors, Rhodes has now written a memoir from his eight years in the White House that is clearly intended to be a lasting contribution to history. The political events the Obama administration was obliged to confront — the Great Recession of 2008, accompanied by expanding conflict in many regions of the globe — were certainly promising as raw historical material. It’s no accident that, as president-elect, Obama spent much of his transition reading about Roosevelt, consulting historians, and hiring what he believed was his own version of FDR’s famous “brain trust.” And Rhodes is clearly in a rare position to offer a clear account of what the Obama administration was like and how things got done (and didn’t get done).

 

But Rhodes’s book ultimately reveals his shortcomings as a policymaker — shortcomings that reflect those of the broader administration and its president. It is telling that, while the memoir will enter the historical record, it does not make its author out to be a transformative figure. And, somewhat tragically, it also diminishes Obama’s own transformative status.

 

Ben Rhodes would admit he was an unlikely shaper of history. He grew up in New York, not Obama’s Chicago; he was an aspiring writer, not a policy expert; and he had little political experience. He benefited from the fact that, in the run-up to the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton drew all of the top Democratic talent to her presidential campaign. Rhodes was a young man who was skilled with words and willing to work around the clock. He was idealistic, but he had few firmly articulated positions, which made him the perfect voice for Obama.

 

Rhodes and other young idealists were motivated to enter public service by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but they were disillusioned with how establishment leaders in both parties supported a self-destructive war in Iraq and selfish economic policies that increased inequality and sunk the world economy. Rhodes channels the spirit that animated Obama’s successful campaign when he explains: “First, the people who were supposed to know better had gotten us into a moral and strategic disaster; second, you can’t change things unless you change the people making the decisions.” Millions of Americans believed the country had to change direction after President George W. Bush’s failed wars and economic policies. Obama was the antidote. “I wanted a hero,” Rhodes remembers, “someone who could make sense of what was happening around me and in some way redeem it.”

 

Rhodes decided Obama would be that hero, and his memoir paints a flattering portrait of the president and his team’s efforts to promote his heroic qualities. Like Rosenman with Roosevelt, Rhodes saw Obama up close, attending many of the most important policy meetings, traveling frequently with the president, and sharing quiet moments with him away from the press and other members of his administration. Rhodes recounts how hard Obama worked, often late at night, to address an endless series of domestic and international crises. He describes the president as a highly analytical, open-minded man, eager to acquire information about policy problems and hear different points of view. In Rhodes’s account, Obama reads extensively, he listens carefully, and he searches for good solutions to difficult problems.

 

But Rhodes has some sense that his heroic longings were not an easy match with his chosen hero’s character. Rhodes wants to measure the administration’s success by its ability to inspire the public toward idealism. At the same time, the president most often uses Rhodes to craft words that define the middle ground between extremes. When that tension reveals itself, Rhodes is apt to blame anyone but the heroic Obama — including, more often than not, himself.

 

U.S. policy in Afghanistan offers one of the most insightful examples of the Obama decision-making process, as seen by Rhodes in the key White House meetings. He describes how the president assembled the most informed experts, studied the issue, asked difficult questions, and struggled to find a route to stability in a country with corrupt leaders, countless foreign invaders, and a U.S. military presence that was simultaneously overcommitted and under-resourced.

 

Rhodes describes Obama as facing a no-win set of choices in Afghanistan, where withdrawal would look like defeat and escalation would deepen the quagmire. He argues that the president ultimately found a prudent path that improved the situation and minimized risks by increasing American forces in Afghanistan by 30,000, while demanding a focus on al Qaeda terrorists and an 18-month timetable for drawdowns to begin. Rhodes watched as the president struggled: “He’d reshaped what had come to him and turned it into something that he felt was necessary, something worthy of sacrifice, something with limits.” He then put Obama’s decision into words with the president’s speech at West Point on Dec. 1, 2009, announcing the “mini-surge” in Afghanistan.

 

Rhodes reveres Obama’s seriousness and his integrity but, unlike Rosenman, he expresses repeated dissatisfaction with the no-win options presented to the president: “we’d failed him.” Conventional wisdom about U.S. power and mobilized opposition from interest groups (including the military), foreign governments (especially Israel), and Republican politicians haunt Rhodes’s time in the White House. Time and again, the urge to pursue new policies in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and other regions was pared back, by necessity, because the president could not push against so many adversaries at once. Obama’s heroism, in Rhodes’s account, comes from his combined idealistic pursuit of reform, realistic recognition of limits, and pragmatic acumen in crafting various compromises and half-measures.