- Welcome to Amherst College, and the final event of this year's LitFest. It's wonderful to see you all here and it's wonderful to be here with our guests, Ben Rhodes and Andy Ward. My name is Cullen Murphy. I'm from the class of '74 of Amherst and I'm an editor at The Atlantic magazine and before we begin, I wanted to say a word about Dick Todd. You'll see in your places, I guess they would have been called pews, wouldn't they at one point? That there is a handout with a bio of Dick. Dick was in the class of 1962. He was one of the premier editors of his generation. He was also an extraordinary human being. He was wise and shrewd. He was gentle and trenchant. When he asked questions as an editor, they came across like questions, but you realized that they were more important than just mere questions. That he knew more than you. It was a privilege to have him as a friend and it seemed that it would be fitting this year to devote this session to a conversation between an editor and a writer, which is the kind of conversation that Dick Todd had all his life. Dick never knew it, because I never admitted it, but he really was my mentor. He never actively took that role, but from the moment when I was here at Amherst and became aware of who he was and what his role was, at The Atlantic, and at Houghton Mifflin. He served as kind of a model of how to behave and the standards to uphold. So I hope that in the future, that this session at LitFest, this final session, will be devoted to conversations between an editor and a writer. You know, editors and editors talk about writers all the time. Do they ever? And writer and writers talk about editors but it is rare to have an editor and a writer talk about one another in public. Thank you for that, and members of Dick's family are here. Susan, his wife. Emily, Nell, and Maisy. Welcome to you all, and now to our guests. Andy Ward is, just been given a purple mantle of promotion. You're the executive vice president and publisher of Random House. At this point after a long stint as editor of chief of Random House which is one of the. Andy is one of the great presences in that field, and Ben Rhodes was Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama and author of the bestselling The World As It Is. He appears frequently as a commentator. He's also a contributor to The Atlantic. So welcome to both of you. Let me start with the book itself. A book in some ways represents an arranged marriage, and there are different perspectives depending on whether you're the writer who wants to do something, or the editor who wants to acquire and work on something. When it comes to making this book happen. Ben, let me start with you. What propelled you to write this particular kind of book and then Andy follow up right away, what did you see, and then what did you not see, that you wanted to see? Ben.
- It's great to be here. Beautiful setting. I actually didn't plan to write a memoir. In part, because I don't like the genre of political memoir that much. It's usually a list of meetings that people were in and arguments about why they were right in those meetings, and so that had not been in the back of my head throughout the administration, but then after the election, after Donald Trump won the election, I started to think well maybe actually this would be more relevant because of the context and that period of time between the election and the inauguration I was totally shell shocked. Felt unword. Had a sense of trepidation about what was coming, but had no capacity to digest the experience because I was still doing my job, and so it was this surreal period where you're still running the government and yet, there's this kind of looming shadow that is growing, and I had a particular feeling on the last foreign trip that Obama took which was after the election, where we met a series of foreign leaders who were similarly shell shocked. Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau, Xi Jinping of China. You could feel the world adjusting itself, to the reality that America had elected Donald Trump and it was a fairly intense experience to be still in charge but have them adjusting to what's coming, and Obama and I were having a series of conversations throughout this trip about what had happened in the election and what was gonna happen next, and I remember in the last car ride, limousine ride from a Summit to Air Force One, he got much more introspective, and he essentially said, what if we were wrong, and essentially the presumption that America had been moving in a more progressive direction, and I'm spit out after inauguration day. Totally exhausted, and I remember Obama set me up in an office kind of down the hall from him. I'm in this big empty office with no idea really what I'm doing, and I was just sitting there one afternoon the first week after the administration, I just wrote what became the prologues of my book which was just essentially a step by step recounting of this trip, and then realized I want to write a book that explains the last eight years, and I didn't know how to do that. I had no idea how one does that, and so I went through the motions where you get an agent and you write a little bit more, but I still didn't have a fully formed idea and so I did the thing you do which is you go up to New York and my agent set up a whole bunch of meetings. I had one and then I had this lunch with Andy and Andy immediately said, what you can write is totally different than a normal political memoir because number one you were there all eight years, which is unusual, so you can tell the whole story, beginning to end, and you were also, I was 29 when I went to work for Obama, and I was 39 when I left the administration, so he started saying, you can write essentially a coming of age story, and as someone who grew up wanting to be a writer I'd say well this guy is, this makes sense. Suddenly I could see, how this could be, a worthwhile book, both to make sense of my own experience but also to write something that could be of value. I remember walking out of there, we still have a bunch of meetings scheduled and I said to my agent, we're doing these people. She's like, you're not. Don't ever tell them that. We had to sell the book, but I could tell immediately that Andy was thinking about this not as, he didn't say to me, what are the 10 juiciest anecdotes you have or tell us what you're gonna do that's gonna be in the first New York Times story about your book. He wanted me to write the best book possible, and that's when I knew he was right.
- Andy, why don't you take it from there, and here's one thing to bear in mind as you're carrying Ben's story forward. People often don't have a clear sense of what an editor like yourself does. There's so many kinds of editing. There's pencil editing and copy editing and so on but in the world of magazine assignments and in book publishing, editing is something that begins at a much earlier stage and it doesn't involve pencils at all. It involves something more important which is precisely what you, I think, brought to this project. Could you talk about that?
- Yeah, I think a lot of this job is, I think of as more conceptual than anything else. I think there is a point in every one of these projects where it does get down to what's on the page and we're not editors, we're not copy editors, but we're still engaging with the language sentence by sentence, line by line. There's a really intimate process that happens there but so much of what goes into editing before you get to that point is long conversations with Ben about how to tell the story, and I think for me, even more important, what is essential to this story? What do we need to include, and what can we leave out? You're talking about, not just eight years of someone's life but eight unbelievably consequential and intense years, that are so packed full of events and emotional highs and lows that it's almost not really possible for somebody who hasn't been in it to fathom it. I think working with Ben, and we can talk more about this. I think a lot of the process for us was figuring out what we really needed to include to make this story everything it could be, but just to back up for a second, to come back to why I wanted to do this book, because as a book editor, especially these days, you're besieged with political book ideas, and I don't do that many of them. I think I was A, a huge huge fan of President Obama. I knew very well who Ben was, and I knew that he was a writer. He's an actual writer, and a lot of his books are not written by writers. They're written by political figures who worked with writers, and there's nothing wrong with that kind of book. I just don't do many of them. So the idea of, what would happen if you could work with a guy who was as close to a transformative president and the most powerful person in the world who was as close as you could possibly be to him for not just eight years, but really nine years, nine plus years. What would happen if that story was being told by somebody who had a writer sensibility? Ben has an MFA, which the right wing hammers, beats him about the head with all the time.
- [Ben] I paid a big price for that MFA.
- Mock him for it, but it's actually I think what makes this book, what was so fun for me about this book is that I was working with somebody who could execute it in all the ways that I sort of dreamed about, and I think that first meeting that we had. I don't remember what month it was. It was May or June?
- It was March.
- March. Ben had been out of the White House for two months, and he was I think a little traumatized, and it was I think hard to get altitude on what he had just lived through in some ways. It was like. He was in a car crash essentially that lasted eight years, but it's like imagine if you were in a car crash and somebody said to you, okay now, write the story of that crash.
- After the 18 wheeler Donald Trump ran you over at the end of the car crash.
- It's like you're trying to imagine how do I even begin to, like what happened, and it's all moving so fast, and how do I begin to actually get my head around that story, and so I think there was a sense of Ben wanting to do that, but not having the perspective on it yet. So a lot of what I was trying to do was help him gain perspective on it, and he did. I think on what you accomplished in a very short time. This is the really first big book about the administration that came out to account for the full scope of it. It's really remarkable. I think the book lasts, and I think you will be able to read this book in 10 years and it will serve as a record of what happened but also a really moving human story as well. This guy is a unicorn. He's a unicorn.
- I would just echo that last point of Andy's. Those of you who have not read this book, there's a warmth and a humanity in the book that is atypical in a Washington political book. Maybe even absent. This is a different creature. Ben, I'd like to come back to you just as a writer, but a particular kind of writer. A speech writer, which was one of the things. Your portfolio at the White House was enormous and varied, but I believe you started out as a speech writer for Obama and you were telling us a few minutes ago how you had a stack of papers this high of Obama's writing that you had edited that you had to give to the National Archives, rather than the Frost Library and the question I have is what is it like to edit the president? We know he's a fine writer. Everyone can use some help. The relationship is sort of unequal, and but I'd just love to know what the experience is like.
- I think, what's interesting about that is that most of the time he was the editor in that he couldn't write the first draft of most of his speeches, and so usually what he would do is he would, if it was a big speech he would kind of give you almost an hour of his time to walk through what he wanted to say and the outline of what he wanted to say and the argument he wanted to make and then my job is to write that into a speech, work it through the whole process of different advisors, get it to him, and then he's editing it, and I'm inserting his edits. I think the process has changed a little bit in this administration, but the example I'd give you is the Nobel Peace Prize speech. He was very conflicted about receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, and it's a good window into how White Houses work because I think people probably assume, oh, they probably worked on the Nobel Peace Prize speech for months but we didn't because he had to give a speech about Afghanistan and address the nation two weeks before he received the Nobel Peace Prize, and I had written a draft of the Nobel Peace Prize speech, that wrestled with the complexity of him getting the award so early in his presidency, and I gave it to him, and I kept waiting for it to come back with his edits and it never did, and then the morning that we were meant to leave for Oslo that night, he calls me into his office, and he had stayed up almost the whole night, and he had written by hand an entire draft of a totally new speech, on yellow legal pad. 10 pages of hand written text and he said, I've redone this whole speech. What you did is interesting, except I think the real tension is that I'm getting this award at a time that I just sent troops to Afghanistan and I was like that is a much better premise for the speech and so I remember I had this feeling of both euphoria and terror. The euphoria is that every time Obama really engaged in speech he made it much better, and partly because it was more personal and part because he's a writer, but I also knew that we had to get on a helicopter in seven hours to go to a plane to fly to Oslo and I had just these handwritten notes and I pray that they were really good, and I started reading it and it was totally extraordinary. It was a man wrestling with the nature of his office, the responsibility of sending people to die, sending people to kill other people, but it was very raw, and again, this doesn't happen I think under Trump, but he had many quotes in the speech. He had quotes from Kennedy. He had quotes from King that he'd use to guide himself through the arguments he wanted to make, and I saw that I had a brilliant document but it was completely unworkable as a speech that a president could give and so I had to rewrite this in a way that he could deliver it, and so I rewrote it, and he was very aware of what I had taken out and he kind of fought with me to put stuff back in and I said, and we literally flew overnight to Oslo. He stayed up the whole night on the flight, giving me pages as I'm editing, and I'm arguing with him and my job was to essentially preserve the core of what he was trying to say that was interesting, but turn it into a piece of rhetoric a president could deliver. I think one other example I give which I mentioned in the book about this relationship is, it was really uncomfortable for me but he had to eulogize Nelson Mandela. Who was his hero, and I knew that this was a hugely consequential moment. The first African American president eulogizing the most important African in the last century and he wrote a really. I wrote a draft and he edited, but there was something missing. Something personal, and I remember going through various edits of this and realizing there's something missing here. I felt very uncomfortable raising with him as a white person, which was essentially something personal about how he had modeled himself on Mandela. Something that could allow him to connect to that audience and I actually remember asking Susan Rice and she agreed with that and she said absolutely. There's something missing here, and so I brought her with me, and I went to see him and I said, this is, why aren't you doing? And I made similar points, but I said look, you really need to connect with this audience and he shot me a pretty nasty look and he said, I don't want to put myself on his level, and I realized that's why he had not been doing it, and Susan said it's important to those people that you do. Not that you put yourself on his level but you try to draw a personal connection, and I said to him, I was like look, you're this, this is the eulogy, that people are going to look for at this event and you need to connect with these people and that's just not here in the speech, and he was really annoyed and kicked me out of the room but then he walked back with about a page of written text. It was what became three of the last paragraphs. It was totally extraordinary and very personal and was basically about how Nelson Mandela made him want to be a better man, because Nelson Mandela was imperfect, because Nelson Mandela was not a saint, because Nelson Mandela was a flawed person just like he was, but he demonstrated what a flawed person could do if he tried to make himself better, and so it was uncomfortable and awkward at times, but I think we had enough, he respected the writing process enough to know that whether I was a writer or an editor on what he was working on, I was trying to help him get where he wanted to go. He used to describe speeches like being a sculpture that there's a block of stone and we just are chipping away at it and if we do our jobs right, and we get the full human figure out of that block of stone, and so that sounds very high level but it's Barack Obama. That's what we're trying to do.
- Thank you for that explanation. I want to switch gears a little bit and I would like to ask about Cuba and Andy, I want to follow up after Ben talks about Cuba, with the role that you needed to play with respect to his account.
- Sounds good. I'm just glad I don't have to follow that answer.
- Too often Andy's the person who has to lop an arm off that beautiful sculpture. You were involved in, centrally in many of the core endeavors of the administration. The Iran deal and the opening to Cuba, and the opening to Cuba, I found particularly fascinating for two reasons. One was that you managed to keep it secret for a year which is unheard of in Washington and second, it involved having to deal with the Vatican, which has got to rival the worst of anything in Washington when it comes to ordinary diplomatic dealings and yet must be fascinating at the same time. So I'd just love to hear about the Cuba story with reference in particular to working with the Vatican and keeping everything under a lid.
- I'll focus mainly on the Vatican. Basically for over a year, we were in these secret negotiations with the Cubans. It was just me and my negotiating partner on the American side, a wonderful foreign service officer named Ricardo Zuniga. He was like the foremost Cuba expert and the idea of our team was that I was someone who was very close to Obama. He was someone who was our best Cuba expert and on the Cuban side was Alejandro Castro who is Raul Castro's son, and he had a team of people, and we did it in this incredibly low key manner. The Canadians agreed to host us. We never told them the purpose of the negotiations, just that we wanted a venue to talk to the Cubans which by the way, is the value of allies. They didn't ask questions. They said we'll set up a house for you that is out of the way. About an hour's drive outside of Ottawa on the lake, and we'll put up a table and we won't ask why you're there, and I would fly up from Dallas Airport, hope that I wouldn't run into people who'd ask weird questions about why I was going to Canada, and I went up there about 10 times. We also went to Trinidad and Mexico at times too, just when we thought the Canadians might be getting antsy about it. I won't go through the whole Cuba side, foreshadowing something Andy's gonna say, but suffice to say it took a lot of sessions to work through the underbrush of all the history between the United States and Cuba. The first session, I think I got, an eight hour lecture about, efforts to Assassinate Fidel Castro, the long history, and my approach to that was to say look, I wasn't even born when a lot of that happened and I'm here because Obama wants to move forward, wants to move past that. Interestingly, the secrecy was punctured at one time. We were in an airport hotel in Toronto to negotiate and two very conspicuous people tattooed people were sitting in the lobby as we walked in. They saw us. As I'm checking into the hotel, they walked about as far away from me as you are, held up a camera and just took a picture of me. They were Russian. It was secret but not entirely, but to skip ahead to the Vatican, we needed a third party that could guarantee that each side would keep its commitments. You're dealing with two countries that don't full trust each other, so we want to commit to the a third party that we're going to do the things that we say and we also knew that the Vatican was a respected institution in both countries and therefore could be a validation of what we were trying to do, and we also knew that Pope Francis was a figure that had transcended some of the complexities of the Catholic church and Cuba because he was from Latin America. He was on the left. He was for social justice, so the Cubans found Pope Francis personally appealing, and so when we went to the Vatican in March of 2014, President Obama talked to Pope Francis about what we were trying to do and he was very enthusiastic and basically offered them as a venue, as a supporter, and so we set up a situation where we would go to the Vatican after we reached, we internally, with the Cubans, after we'd reached all of our agreements. So we go to the Vatican in the Fall of 2014, and what was interesting was that the Vatican had no idea that we'd actually finished the negotiation because they don't do any business over email, which in retrospect is a really good idea, and so we're ushered into the Vatican. It was like walking into the heart of an institution that you don't normally see. We go through one courtyard after another. They point at a simple door and they say, well that's Pope Francis' apartment and we're going past that and we come into this grand room full of tapestries and actually a huge portrait of the still living Pope Benedict and we had to meet separately with the Cardinal who is the number two guy at the Vatican. Cardinal Parolin who is the Secretary of State, and when I went in second after the Cubans he looked stunned and he said, are you really gonna normalize relations with Cuba and I said yes, and he said, you're gonna open embassies, and I said yes, and he ticked through all the things we'd agreed to, and at the end he said, who are you? I was like, I'm Ben Rhodes, and he's like does John Kerry know about this, and I said yes, I promise you. I'm here for President Obama, and what was so amazing about that is that then we'd go into the other grand room and each side had to real aloud all the commitments we were making to the other. That's the very formal way in which the Vatican does business and it was incredibly emotional to read aloud these words about establishing embassies and agreeing to address differences through dialogue and not through conflict, and the Cubans were gonna release a lot of political prisoners and establish internet access and we were going to open up space for commerce and travel and at the end the Cardinal got up and made a speech in which he got quite emotional and he said, this will give people hope around the world. Not just Americans and Cubans, but that people can reconcile, that a time of conflict, if you guys can work out your differences, maybe that can be an example, and there were other Vatican officials, all priests around the table who had worked in Cuba, and there were tears in their eyes, and I remember just feeling this incredible weight of what we were doing, and then walking out of the Vatican after it was done and being disappearing into the anonymous crowd of Rome and thinking I know something that 10 people in the world know just happened and government, as I wrestled with in the book, most of what you do is a 51/49 call. You're not sure it's right, or you think it's the best of bad options, but this felt 100% right and having that kind of almost spiritual blessing. I'm not a Catholic, did imbue it with more meaning.
- That's a remarkable account, and Andy, now Ben's original account of all of this was what, a million words?
- As you can see, it's a really interesting story, and listening to Ben talk about it is like, yeah, I want more of that. That's one meeting in a year's long process that people didn't know about, and that in itself could be a book, but that's not the book that we were working on together. We were telling a story in which this was one beat along a path and I was talking before about the need to get perspective on that period of Ben's life, was in some ways his nose was still really close to the page, and all of these things, when you sit down to write them, Cuba was one example for sure, because Ben was like at the center of that whole deal but the Iran Nuclear Deal was another example. There may have been debt ceiling negotiations or something.
- [Ben] Afghanistan.
- Afghanistan, where it's all interesting, but the scale of it gets really out of whack and so Ben's first full draft of the book was probably 210,000 words, which if you guys don't know word counts, it's like more than 600 pages as a book and there were 40,000 words on Cuba, and so part of what my job was, was to point out to him that, this is all interesting, but a lot of it is not necessary and yes, you lived through it, and yes, it happened, but that doesn't mean we have to account for all of it, and I think Cuba was probably like, I think at one point I called it a goiter on the book. It felt like this.
- [Ben] It was a book within a book.
- Yeah, it was a book within a book, and you could excise a lot of that and still the book was not worse off because of it. It meant a lot of extra work for Ben and I think just the need to record that is totally understandable, but that wasn't so much the mission of the book, but the stories are incredible.
- The thing you point out that was right is that I was thinking about I need to create a historical record of these negotiations minute by minute, but it was over weighted relative to the rest of the Obama presidency, which is the real story.
- The historical record of those events will emerge. People will write those stories. In 20 years that story will be written in great detail. That's not what this book was about so much. At least, not the book that we arrived at ultimately. If that makes sense.
- Yes, and you'll notice that Andy used a key editorial technical term here, goiter. There are many others like that. Not always as gentile. There's something that I wanted to mention to the two of you that is in the Amherst College Archives which will be of interest to both of you probably for the same but also for different reasons and it's the text of a speech that John F. Kennedy gave here in 1963, when Frost Library was being opened and the speech had been written by Arthur Schlesinger and on the plane up Kennedy did the editing on it and it's a wonderful thing to look at because you realize both what a good editor Kennedy was and what a good writer Kennedy was and so the first Andy, one of the things you'll notice in this document is that he has taken Schlesinger's draft and he has put these big X's and I just wonder, do you use the X approach on your manuscript?
- I do. I do a box with a strike through. Which is maybe a little bit nicer than the X but yeah. It's basically an X.
- There are places where Kennedy actually goes like this.
- I don't do that. That's aggressive.
- Never come back.
- When you're president, you can do that.
- Actually, Obama does the same thing you do. Gentle.
- It's not as aggressive.
- Gentle but don't push back. And then there's Kennedy's own writing or rewriting. Here's a phrase that was in Schlesinger's draft. When power narrows the area of man's concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. Fine. Kennedy crosses that out, and writes in, when power corrupts, poetry cleanses. It's just remarkable, done on a plane probably over Chicopee and I wonder Ben, do you recall, any edits along those lines?
- Yeah, actually, and yeah you previewed that. I had no idea that that was yet, but one thing that pops in my head is the remarks that Obama had to give the night that Osama Bin Laden was killed. I had been asked to prepare a draft for different contingencies. If Obama had to announce that Osama bin Laden was killed, if Osama bin Laden wasn't there at this compound, if things went horribly wrong, but I had written all the negative remarks but I couldn't write the positive ones, because I was afraid of jinxing it. So what that meant is I had an hour to write this address to the nation that he was going to give. It was going to be watched by like a billion people around the world, and so I write this draft, and I couldn't quite get the ending and what I wanted to write at the ending was something and Obama gave me a little direction that at the ending I should talk about how long this had been but that we'd stuck at it as a country and we'd gotten this measure of justice for 9/11 even amidst the tragedies of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd written something along those lines that said, basically said that. It's been a hard decade, but we've stuck at this, and lots of language. I can't remember exactly my draft, and he edited it and he basically took this paragraph that said, what I just kind of alluded to, and he made it, and I'm not gonna get this exactly right, so when you check your, but he basically made it, that this reminds us that America can still do big things. That was the phrase. America can still do big things, and what I realized was so interesting about that is that a president is telling one or Obama used to do this. I don't know that every president does this but Obama used to like to think that he was telling one story throughout his whole presidency, and that line was essential to that story. America can still do big things, and it's actually a very Kennedy line. Like we can go to the moon, and I just remember that that was a simple formulation, in a way that anybody could understand and I probably written something more flowery like Schlesinger was trying to do. What a good politician can do is distill a lot of language into something that ordinary people can understand but also what a good politician does is recognize that everything that they're saying is telling one story. Every speech is a chapter in one story that they're telling to the country as president about what they're trying to do, and that line, America can do big things, appeared in his next State of the Union. It appeared in his reelection campaign and what I always say to people is if you want to know Barack Obama's skill as a politician it's that his 2004 convention speech that launched him on to the national scene. His farewell address as president is the exact same message as that first speech. How many politicians can you say have that kind of through line, and so that one edit to me, is emblematic of this broader skill he had to kind of root everything in a kind of story he was telling about America that could be understood by anybody.
- In a moment I want to come back to both of you and your backgrounds, and the trajectory by which you got to where you are, but for the audience I wanted to mention that you'll see in front of you that there's some cards, where you have the opportunity of writing questions if you wish and the event staff will be coming around and picking up those cards and giving them to us, so it'd be a good opportunity to ask something, in particular if something comes to mind, and we'll do that in just a few moments but this is a good time to write those out. Andy and Ben, and let's start with you Andy, in part because, I'm mindful of the fact that Amherst College is a writing college. I would bet that 40 graduates every year go into the general field that you and I, and Ben more recently, are in, and it's not a field that has a, there's not a conveyor belt into the job. It's entrepreneurial in some way. You gotta feel your way towards it. There are many different access points, and I wonder, I'd like to hear from you first about this, but also Ben from you, on the same question, because where you ended up is also not, I mean most MFA's don't result in what you did for a living. When you think back, what are the skills, the influences, that kind of bore you up, as you tried to get into this, the field of magazines, books, and so on?
- I think that's a good question. I think I always loved to read. I was a reader. I always thought of myself as a reader and actually grew up, my father was a speech writer like Ben, for a United States Senator for many years, and I grew up seeing him upstairs in his office, in his bathrobe with his cup of coffee, typing, on his IBM's electric in all caps, his speeches for Lloyd Benson was the Senator, and it's a different kind of writing. He wasn't a novelist. He wasn't a journalist, and there was a lot about his job that I think he didn't love as a speech writer but I grew up seeing that, and I grew up being intrigued by it and being impressed by what my dad could do with language and I came here and I think this fell sort of naturally into the English Department and American Studies Department and continued to pursue my passions. I failed on multiple fronts here though. I don't know why, but I didn't do any. I didn't work for the school paper. I didn't edit for a literary magazine. I should have, but I didn't, and when I graduated however, I really didn't know. I didn't have any skills obviously but I thought I just wanted to get into the world of books, and I'll do this quickly, but I took a job at a book publisher in New York and lasted two years there before leaving it. I hated it. I really did not think that books were gonna be for me because the place that I landed, was not particularly friendly to junior editors and it was not a place where you were ever gonna advance and I just felt like I wanted to be doing. I was ambitious and probably annoying, probably wanted to do things, that were not gonna be available to me for quite some time in the book world so I ended up in magazines. Took a freelance job at Esquire Magazine and ended up almost the next 15 years as a magazine editor, and really learning how to edit, and how to generate ideas, and how to care about every sentence, in a way that I think, I may not have learned as well in the world of books, where the scale of a book is so different and sometimes I think editors in the book world are just not able or trained to focus as intensely on the language on the page. After almost 15 years of magazines, the problem for me with magazines was that I worked at Esquire Magazine and then GQ Magazine, which were the magazines where you could do these long stories and work with great writers, and had the resources to do things that I really cared about. What I didn't care about was the mission of the magazine. I didn't care about men's magazines. I didn't care about the conversation, the larger conversation that these magazines were engaged in, so I kind of reached an end point on that and realized that what I really wanted to do was go back to the world of books, and I did 10 years ago. I came back into the world of books at Random House, and it was, I had sort of built up editorial skills that I had acquired in magazines, but yet again, didn't really know what the world of books was about. I had to learn it, and learn it at a more advanced age, and it's been like, I have not regretted that decision since I made it, and it's in some ways, I consider myself a generalist as an editor. I'm interested in a lot of things. I'm not an expert in any of them, but what this job has allowed me to do is just pursue again, ideas that are interesting to me. Writers that I've always wanted to work with, and it's, for me it's been the dream job.
- Before turning back to Ben, what are like five projects on your desk right now?
- Speaking of John F. Kennedy I have volume one of a two volume biography by Fred Logevall who is a professor at Harvard whose last book about the Vietnam War won a Pulitzer Prize. I have a book by a psychiatrist slash neuroscientist at Stanford about the origin of human feelings. I have a novel by Imbolo Mbue. It's her second novel. Her first novel was a huge success and an Oprah book pick, and this novel is actually something that she started 17 years ago way before her first book came out and was a big complicated personal story. She's from Cameroon. It takes place in an unnamed African country but is essentially Cameroon and it's a much more complex enterprise narratively and it took her 17 years to do it and it's coming out in June and that's on my desk right now. I have a history, A Cultural History of Blackness in America by Wesley Morris whose a cultural critic at the New York Times. It's essentially, it starts with, and goes Sidney Poitier as sort of act two and then it's gonna end with Kanye. So I have a followup. A second book by reporter named Michael Moss who did a book called Salt, Sugar, Fat, about seven or eight years ago, about the processed food industry. This book is about addiction and food. It's a crazy range of things, and that's what makes the job so fun every day.
- Sounds like the Amherst Course Catalog.
- No really, it's like every day bring something new and every writer is different and every process is different. If you're interested in a broad array of subjects, it's really a great job.
- Ben, what are the qualities and skills that carried you into the world that you found yourself in, probably not totally expectedly?
- Yeah, and I mean I'll do this quickly, but essentially what I always say to people is, particularly the younger people who are here, if I had set out to have a plan to become the Deputy National Security Advisor in the White House, I never would have become the Deputy National Security Advisor at the White House. I think sometimes people think, you go to graduate school, and you get this Master's degree and then you do this internship and that path would have not led me where I went. What happened for me is, I was getting this MFA, and working on local political campaigns in New York during the day because I always had interest in politics, teaching, and I witnessed 9/11 happen right in front of me and so after that experience I knew that I wanted my life to be connected to whatever was going to happen next, and so the first point was, I wanted to connect my own personal story to the bigger story that was happening around me in the world. I knew I wanted to be engaged and then what I applied for jobs. I knew my skill was writing, so I applied for jobs in journalism, and I had an editor of the magazine say to me, you don't want to come to work here. You'll just fact check, and maybe we'll throw you a side bar every now and then. If you want to learn about foreign policy in the world and you want to write, you should be speech writer for somebody, and I got a job as a speech writer for a guy named Lee Hamilton and what I'd say is that I always did a job that involved me working for somebody that I admired, and could learn from and doing something that I loved to do, whether it was writing, or some aspect of foreign policy, and the reason that was so important for me is that you're much much better at your job if you like it. This seems like an obvious point to make, but if you're forcing yourself to do something, because it's a credential, that you don't really like to do, you're not gonna be as good at it, as if you're doing something that you're passionate about, or if you go to work on a campaign for somebody let's say there's a billionaire running for president, because that person is going to pay you a lot of money. You're not gonna be that good of a campaign staffer, if it's just for that check. If you're passionate about the person you're working for, and you're doing the thing you like to do, you're gonna be good at what you're doing. Granted, I had some luck. I went to work for Barack Obama when I was 29 years old and we were all just a bunch of kids but even that we believed, we convinced ourselves because he told us that we had agency to change the world, and so for me, I didn't even think about and nor did any of the other people. I went to work in a tiny office with so many, John Favro and a couple other guys. We weren't thinking about what jobs we were gonna have. We just wanted to elect this guy president and that made us much better at what we were doing, and so those are my core lessons, was I didn't stick to a plan. I didn't force myself into a plan. I gave myself the luxury and with the full acknowledgement sitting here by the way, that I had the privilege to do that. I was a privileged person. I have the privilege of getting a good education. I had the privilege of not having to worry so much about money because I didn't have parents to take. I think we all have to have some humility here that I could only be in the position I'm describing because of that privilege, but if you're at Amherst, you probably have a dose of that too and the point is that, being passionate and putting that into a skill that you care about and a person you care about or a cause you care about is going to make you go places faster than if you feel like you're painting by numbers to get to a job. The last thing I'd say to get Andy, Andy's an understated guy. I mean literally, someone who can both edit educated and genres. This is a unicorn editor. I know what I don't know. I didn't know how to write a book. You need some humility, no matter what field you're going into, and so when I leave the White House and want to write, I knew I had to write a book. I had to allow myself to be guided by someone who knew more than me. Someone who knew how to do what I wanted to do better than I did. So then that's the other thing because if I had just gone to a publisher, give me some money and said, come back in a year with a book with some good anecdotes that can sell in the first week the book wouldn't have been good which means I wouldn't have had a chance to maybe write a second book and so you also have to allow yourself to be mentored and guided by people who know something more than you do because there's always somebody that knows something more than you do in life.
- Let me just follow that up and then I'm going to turn to the questions from the audience. I loved hearing what you were saying about what it's like to suddenly come into the orbit of an editor, who was able to become a partner in many ways in what you're doing, and I'd like to hear that from your perspective too Andy. Both of us are editors. It's a surprisingly intimate occupation sometimes, and yet at the same time very rewarding and it changes from writer to writer, but can you tell us something? Just a little bit about what appeals to you about the nature of that social interaction between what you're doing and you're a writer?
- Yeah, I think ultimately what appeals to me about it is just the act of being part the privilege to be part of this act of creation. I think it's really important for editors to always understand that they're just editors. We're not, the writer is the writer, and we're the editor, and our job is to help that writer make the best book they possibly can without making ourselves the story and I just like that. I like that part of the job. Maybe it's because I don't want my own ass on the line with a book out there in the world with my name on it. I can kind of just do my thing and it's Ben's book, and I don't have to go on MSNBC and talk to people, but I don't know. I just find. I get to work with a lot of really interesting brilliant people and I get to, you develop these relationships, you learn from them. You often end up over the course of, some of these books take, Ben is, what he did in like 12 months, is not normal, and I work on books that again, I was talking about Imbolo's book. That's 17 years she's been working on that. I work on lots of books that take more than five years and they can be really. These can be difficult and frustrating and painful processes, but ultimately, I think more often than not, you end up with something that you're really proud of and that's never not thrilling to me and the people that I get to work with I'm always impressed by them, and I think there's this assumption that writer editor relationships are frought and I've really made it my mission to not have that be part of my life. It shouldn't be frought. If you're doing your job right, you're doing everything you can to help that writer make the best book possible. Not to force your own world view on their work. That's that way I tend. Did I answer your question?
- Yes, you did.
- I'm rambling here, but yeah, it's really, the relationships you make as an editor. Most of my close friends are the writers that I work with and it's one more thing on this, it's really an incredibly brave act to write, and so editors have to always remember that. To have somebody send you a manuscript that they've written is like, it's somebody essentially taking their clothes off in front of you, and you're just like they're revealing themselves in a way that can be, they're very vulnerable, and that is like you have to really honor that as an editor I think and realize that the act of doing that is a brave thing, and that your role is to help them turn what they've given you into something that you can both be proud of.
- Thank you. Now we've got some questions from members of the audience, and we've got about 13 versions of this one. Knowing what you do now, what would you have done differently during your time in the White House?
- There's a lot of dimensions to that because I can tick through different world events or policies that we worked on, but obviously what I can't ignore is the orange elephant in the room, to be followed by Trump, but not just Trump but by this rising nationalism authoritarianism around the world and I often go back and think about what I could have done differently to prevent that obviously and it's a very hard thing to wrestle with and I say in the beginning of this book when Obama's having this conversation with me where he says, what if we're wrong? What if we push too far? I mean the irony is, I think now there's a sense on the left that he didn't push far enough but I think what Obama was wrestling with is did I push too far? Was there a backlash to me? Which is a very complicated question because frankly, if you really get down to it the backlash wasn't to anything he did. It was the fact that he was black, which is not something you can control and so then I think about, what could we have done differently to kind of deal with the illiberalism of the Republican party that was rising the whole time we were there and part of what's so interesting about that is some of our failure to deal with that effectively was rooted actually in the fact that Obama is somebody who abided by norms, who didn't play dirty. Even the 2016 Russian interference in our election, he was very studiously non partisan in how he approached it, rather than trying to drive home a message to the American people about what was happening. Just as it's complicated to think about how he could have managed the fact of the backlash to an African American being president, it's also hard to recognize that what we were doing is playing by the rule book at a time when our political opponents threw out the rule book, and what enabled them to accumulate power in many ways was not playing by the rules. Not seating Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court and I could go down a long list. It's a very complicated thing that I wrestle with, because frankly, what you might have done differently is been much more aggressive and hard nosed in your politics and here's what I would say for instance. If I were the president, and I couldn't have done these things. So I'm thinking I'm speaking for the whole Obama presidency. When we add two years with the huge majorities at the beginning of the Obama presidency which we never had again. Why didn't we do voting rights? Why didn't we do immigration reform? Why didn't we do? Why didn't we appoint judges faster? Again, I didn't have agency over those things but when Republicans acquire power the first thing they try to do is things that make it less possible for the other side to ever get power back and so I guess if I were to step back what's interesting is the only window we had to do that was the first two years because when you lose Congress you can't do these things as easily. So I do think that, I do think that actually the window to do a lot of the things that might have made a difference in preventing the direction of American politics, over the next decade, were actually at a time, when we were dealing with the financial crisis and two wars and weren't thinking about that the Supreme Court might overturn the Voting Rights Act and allow people to be purged from voter rolls and which would then allow a guy like Donald Trump to be elected president in 2016. We just weren't thinking like that, but I do think there's a lesson for whoever becomes president next, if it's a Democrat, that you need to be mindful of these aspects of the intersection of politics and power. Again, that's not me personally. I could go through a bunch of things that I might have done personally different but I think the questions are probably more about the Obama administration generally. That, all of that said, I still believe, one of the things that you realize is that the arc of history is very long and that precisely, Obama used to say a politician's strength is often his weakness. His strength was his dignity and his integrity. In a bizarre way, it was also his weakness, because he didn't do some of the things I was talking about in terms of hard ball and in the long run I think you're making a bet that history and people will recognize that and return to it. I get asked a lot about legacy. How's it feel to have all these things you worked on now done? I always say, my political hero was John F. Kennedy and I couldn't sit here and name you five pieces of legislation that John F. Kennedy sponsored. It was the feeling he gave people. It was those speeches like the one you quoted. It was inspiration. It was all the things that people who were inspired by John F. Kennedy did. That's his legacy. I went into politics in part, because I was inspired by John F. Kennedy. In a way everything I did in politics is part of his legacy and I actually think Obama's legacy is going to be that. It's going to be less an Iran Nuclear agreement. It's gonna be what are all the people who listened to all the speeches he gave, what are they going to do? I know many of them personally who run for office. Someone just got elected to Congress. What are they going to do in their careers and so it may be that while, there's a short term setback obviously, and a pretty grave one, and one that could get much worse if Trump is reelected, that, ultimately that example, what he was doing, pays off in a much longer run.
- That arc of history line of Obama's is one that always comes to mind and at The Atlantic I remember a number of conversations over the question of the rest of it is, bends towards justice but whether it does or doesn't, how long that arc is. To switch subject matter, another question here has a question for you Andy, and as you answer it, remember that some of your teachers may be in this room. What's something that sticks with you from an Amherst class?
- Wow. You mean beyond, don't call on me? I think it's probably, maybe the least surprising answer, but I think it's the freshman English 11. The first paper that you have to write in that class and we were, the first text that we read was Paradise Lost, which I really had trouble understanding I think, and the paper that we had to write was probably the first week of class, realizing how little I really knew about how unsophisticated I was really as a writer and a reader, and how much I struggled with that, and then over the course of that year, just in that class, but also in my other classes here, how much I learned from my professors and also from the people that I was in the class with. That leap, that freshman year leap in terms of writing and thinking is something I think about a lot and how utterly unprepared I felt in some ways to be doing that when I first got here.
- So many people mention English 11 as the oh my God moment.
- Yeah, it feels like stepping into the batter's box against a major league pitcher after having played Babe Ruth League ball for a long time.
- And thinking you were good.
- Yeah, exactly.
- A question for you Ben is, are you still in touch with president Obama and let me extend that question slightly. The relationship between you and Obama is marbled throughout your book. You are changing in the course of the book. He is changing in the course of the book. Your relationship is changing in the course of the book. So I just throw those out as additional topics to think about as you talk about being in touch with Obama now.
- Yeah, I'm in touch with him, just about every day. When you're no longer president, you can text people, and I actually was in Washington this week and spent several hours with him a couple days and I still work for him a bit in his various projects. His foundation, some of the other ventures he has, and I guess the way to connect it to your other question is over time it was interesting to go to work for him. I try to show the relationship that developed and this conversation we had over many years. The quick arc of it I'd give that was interesting was I went to work for him. People forget when Obama ran for president, he'd only been a U.S. Senator for a couple years when he decided to run. So he didn't have some big of Washington people around him. He was four years removed from being a state Senator with student debt when he got elected president. I think he did always, and then suddenly he's surrounded by Washington advisors. I do think he always wanted to have people around him who knew him before he was president, who didn't just want a job from him or a role with him but I think dispositionally for whatever reason we clicked and got along, and I noticed something unusual about halfway through and I tell this story in the book after the first term, he's reelected, everybody starts to look for, okay what's my job gonna be in the second term, and I watched all these friends of mine. Samantha Power go from the White House to the U.N. Ambassador, and someone would go from the White House to be U.S. trade representative. People are moving to Cabinet positions and things like that. Ambassador positions, and he called me up to the front of a plane on a flight home from a foreign trip and said you're gonna stay at the White House in the same job, and part of me was kind of like oh boy, and he said, he's like, you're not just an advisor, you're a friend, and I want you around. That's basically what he said, and I remember feeling this tremendous weight. What a strange thing. I wouldn't have told him he was my friend. I would have felt that would be very presumptuous but then I realized that this guy has very few familiar faces around him. That there's turnover constantly around him in his life and there's like maybe two or three of us who he kept in the White House for eight years. Maybe a little more than that, and these positions, and I realized that was part of my purpose and as I describe in the book, to talk to him in between the decisions. To talk to him in the car rides, and talk to him in the plane, and to have these conversations about the books he was reading, and about theories of everything and not influencing policy which I think is what some people thought. No, this is just someone who wanted to be able to unwind with people that he was comfortable with. Now what's interesting in that anecdote is after I get this whole thing, of what a good friend you are, and I go to the back of Air Force One, I order a drink and someone pats me on the shoulder and is like it's time to go brief the press in the back of the plane. I'm like I'm a staffer as well as that, and you never stop being a staffer and you have to have that mindset too. I think now what's interesting is he's a man who finds himself at the age of 55, spit out from his experience as president of the United States, you have to remember he's a person. He's like I'm gonna be alive for a few decades hopefully, and what am I gonna do? I'm the most. I remember we went on a trip after he was president and throngs of people outside the hotel and how strange he thought, that would stop, and it didn't, so figuring out how do you have a productive life? How do you have as broad an impact as you can while just living your life? That's something, it's interesting to watch him navigate a position that there's not a lot of precedent for, but hopefully what he's trying to do is how can he have the broadest possible impact on what I was talking about before, the people who are gonna carry forward this legacy beyond him, and I think he's been writing his book, so that's been consuming a lot of attention but that's part of what I'm helping him think through, is how can I not necessarily get into Twitter fights every day with Donald Trump but rather strategically use my influence and connections and role in the world to have a lasting impact on that arc that we talked about.
- I'm mindful of the fact that we want to have time to be able to sign books, and there are a lot of people here, probably a lot of you have books, and Ben is gonna be needing to get back to Los Angeles, so let me close with one question and then we can turn it over to you and your books and the table will be brought up here and there will be a line where you can form. As a last question, as you know Andy, Scott Turow is a graduate of Amherst, and I remember, I remember him saying on one occasion something that has always stuck in my mind. I found myself turning to it time and again just because it's interesting to turn over in your head, and it was this. I don't have the words exactly right but it's every person on their way to true maturity needs an important adult in their lives who isn't a parent and isn't a spouse and as I say that sentiment has always stuck with me and Andy I wonder is there such a person, as you think about what you've done in your life where you've come, the preoccupations that you have, and the creative energies that you have. Is there a person who comes across like that for you?
- Yeah, for sure. I think there are really two people. The first was my boss at Esquire magazine who really taught me how to edit and took me under his wing and gave me opportunity. The person though that I think like when we talk about maturity, I was.
- I'm assuming maturity.
- Well I was 25 at Esquire when I was learning this stuff and all I was really focused on was how do I do this? How can I do more of it? How can I begin assigning stories and having a role at the magazine and how can I advance this stuff? I think my boss at Esquire, at Random House who hired me 10 years ago, was a woman named Susan Camel, who was the publisher at Random House, and she passed away last summer. I now have her job, and Susan was an incredible presence. Ben met her. She was, book publishing can be, it's a hard job in some ways, because even though I'm sitting here telling you how delightful it is to work with these writers and to produce these books, and how meaningful it is, a lot of what you produce, doesn't succeed in the world, and there's a lot of disappointment that goes along with it, and Susan was in the business for more than 40 years, and she was not beaten down by it at all and that's really why I wanted to work with her when I met her was that she still had this hope in every book and belief in every book and love for the writers she worked with and the books that she published. To me, I always try to remember that when I'm in this job now, which is we have a department with 10 editors and we publish 90 books a year just in the Random House imprint alone and there's a lot of disappointment that goes along with those 90 books and so you have to constantly remind people that there's value even in the books that don't work and that we have to believe in this stuff because it's meaningful, and she really like exemplified that to me, better than anybody I'd met, and she had this ability too that I think, I don't know that I can replicate it, but it's something to aspire to, which is that every conversation that she would have with somebody I think of it since she died, I think of it as like the transference of belief. You would come in doubting yourself in some way or having some question or crisis and you would leave her office believing in yourself more which is a really hard thing to pull off and you can, a lot of people I think, think they're doing it and they're probably not. She was actually doing it. I think about that a lot too and how important that is for writers in particular because the whole thing is, if you really think too hard about what you're doing it's a scary proposition. A lot of the job of the editor is to constantly infuse that person with the belief that they can do it and that you're with them and that it's gonna work out. I think Susan was truly remarkable.
- Thanks for that remembrance Andy, and Ben, for you?
- First of all, I want to say about Susan, she did bring this kind of joy to everything. I remember that first meeting we talked at was a lunch and Susan shows up with a bottle of wine and it's like this is gonna be fun and the energy it wasn't like we want to publish your book. It's like we want you to be part of our community and enjoy this together. I remember when the book came out, I'm super nervous. We had a book party and Susan comes, and my parents are there. They've never been to a book party in their life and Susan goes right to my mother who is a big reader and talking for her animatedly for like 30 minutes about books and my mother comes over to me and she's like that woman is wonderful. I'm like Mom, that's the publisher of Random House. Do you know who you were just talking to? I was embarrassed, but she didn't tell her that. That's such a Susan thing, but anyway. Two people and I'll be quick here because I know we're gonna wrap, but the Lee Hamilton was my first boss in Washington. He was a Congressman for 34 years. He's from Southern Indiana. Kind of a centrist Democrat pragmatist, and what he taught me is, it was the Bush years, and I was always agitating, and we had the 9/11 commission and something called the Iraq Study Group that I worked on him for, and what I learned from him, he was always like we're gonna do the work. The work is going to make the point we want to make more than me rushing on television yelling it on cable news. The quality of the work we do is ultimately going to inform the impact we have, which sounds again, obvious, but is completely absent in Washington today. The concept that you make your point through the work you do. Obama's obvious one for me. I just pointed to two anecdotes that I thought about as Andy was talking. One is, both late in the administration but they kind of are emblematic of the impact he had on me personally. One is I became kind of a, let's just say I'm not the favorite person of the right wing of American politics, and so I was constantly getting in the barrel in the second term. Benghazi and Iran and all kinds of things. Scandals and conspiracy theories, and FOX news camera crews outside my house and it really rattled me. Death threats, doxxed on Twitter. I could go on. I remember in one of the particularly grueling weeks around Benghazi, which I could never understand. I didn't understand what I had done. I really didn't. It still makes no sense to me. We'd invented a video, and the video actually existed. None of it made any sense to me, but it was awful. It was the tenth time I went through it and each time it was worse, and he called me up to his office and he said, I understand you're coming down and I'm embarrassed that he's taking time out of his day to talk to us. It's nothing compared to what they say about you. I'll be fine, and he looked at me and he said, did you do anything wrong, and I realized when he asked me that question that nobody had ever asked me that, in the two years of the Benghazi scandal. Nobody has said, did you do anything wrong? It was all about the, what do we say to this, and how do we answer this argument, but nobody had gone back to the original core of the thing and I said, no. I was just doing my job. I thought what I said was right at the time. He said, then what are you worried about? It was so simple, and it's kind of a serenity prayer kind of thing, but it was like okay, I can go back to work now. He's right. I can't control what these people say. The other thing was similar. Another time when I was once again in the barrel and they were focused on the fiction writer thing and he's talking to me. He's like you know what they get wrong about you, this whole thing about being a fiction writer. I was like oh God, where's this going? He said, our entire job here is to tell a story. Just a story about what America is. Ties back to what I was saying before. We just have to tell a really good story and that's not just the speeches. It's what we do. What our policy priorities are. Who we care about. How we interact with people, and what we say, has to be a story, about what we believe in, and again, also simple, but I actually think it's a good piece of advice about life. I actually tend to think about my life now, as a story are all the things I'm doing, from my family and my kids to my work to how I act in the world, is that a part of a story I'm trying to tell, who I want to be and what I believe in? He was good at anchoring you back in these core questions that can get obscured in the day to day.
- Andy and Ben, it's a privilege to have you here at Amherst. Thank you for spending some time with us.
- Thank you. Thank you.