I actually didnt do that great in high school because I was drinking and smoking pot and hanging out in Central Park.. National Security, Report: Begun Is Half Done: Prospects for US-North Korea Nuclear Diplomacy, Report: President Trump Should Rethink NATO Missile Defense. Ben is the son of a Jewish mother and an Episcopalian father. The handwriting is perfect. And thats what its like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.. He reflects and he shapes at the same time., As Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodess war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. National Security Advisor, Homeland Security, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Dep.

Obamas particular revulsion against a certain kind of global power politics is a product, Rhodes suggests, of his having been raised in Southeast Asia. The representation of what happened in the meetings immaculate, like a mirrors reflection after it has been scrubbed clean. Look, with Iran, in a weird way, these are state-to-state issues. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the regions future wars a lot less likely. He is, according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself. We are an indie, 'small' store, yet our website selection is almost endless. Here was the new American self rational, moral, not self-indulgent. He is a local of NYC, NY, in the United States of America. I am silent in these meetings, taking notes. On the largest and smallest questions alike, the voice in which America speaks to the world is that of Ben Rhodes. He had the pen. If a couple has created a wedding website through The Knot, you can find it by using our Couple

He arrives here every morning between 8 and 9 from a modest two-bedroom apartment in a grad-student-type building in an unpretentious Washington neighborhood around the corner from his favorite post-collegiate bar. Anyone can read what you share. Hamilton nodded. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the content they provide to their readers. It was surreal, he says, looking off into the middle distance. Ben Rhodes. Rhodes during a video conference in the White House Situation Room. WEDDINGS/CELEBRATIONS; Anne Rhodes, Benjamin Huneke, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/style/weddings-celebrations-anne-rhodes-benjamin-huneke.html. [7] In 2002, James Gibney, editor of Foreign Policy, introduced Rhodes to Lee Hamilton, former member of the House of Representatives and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who was looking for a speechwriter. No, Panetta answers. Charles Dharapak / AP. Get premium, high resolution news photos at No longer one thing but multiple overlapping spheres or circles. His days at the White House start with the presidents daily briefing, which usually includes the vice president, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Adviser Avril Haines and Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco. Jon Favreau, then the campaigns lead speechwriter, felt as if he could use a foreign-affairs expert who could write. All Rights Reserved. We spent three, four, five hours together in Washington talking things through before the meetings. In March 2013, a full three months before the elections that elevated Hassan Rouhani to the office of president, Sullivan and Burns finalized their proposal for an interim agreement, which became the basis for the J.C.P.O.A. Furthermore, his wife also was a staff member to former U.S. When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy, its like a Risk game, or its all about us, or the human beings disappear from the decisions. Here Comes the Bride. Getting Rhodes to speak directly about the man whose gestalt he channels is a bit like asking someone to look into a mirror while describing someone elses face. Rhodes served as Hamiltons staff member on the 9/11 Commission, where he met Denis McDonough, another Hamilton protg, who had gone on to work for Tom Daschle in the Senate. Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administrations well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from senior White House officials and spokespeople. I watch the message bounce from Rhodess brain to Prices keyboard to the three big briefing podiums the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. Rhodess windowless back office, which doesnt have a TV screen, is an oasis of late-night calm in a building devoted to the performance of power. Moreover, Ben is active on Instagram under the handle @ben.j.rhodes with followers as of January 2023. Ben Rhodes (White House staffer) has been married once. Ann Norris is the former foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama. [19], In 2015-16, Rhodes defended U.S. political and military backing of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. Iraq is his one-word answer to any and all criticism. And you know my view, talking with the president, was: If brought to the point where we had evidence that theyre developing an atomic weapon, I think the president is serious that he is not going to allow that to happen.. Year. prior to joining Obamas administration, Ben was working for Lee Hamilton at the Wilson Center as a special assistant. Furthermore, Ben Rhodes is married to Ann Norris, senior foreign and defense advisor to Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California). He is the son of an Episcopal father from Texas and a Jewish mother from New York. Theyre agreements between governments. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people had just been killed. By Matthew Norris and Laura Logan 47 weeks ago "I am so happy for the both of you. [13], Rhodes wrote Obama's 2009 Cairo speech "A New Beginning. He said Obama should have recognized the American genocide and that Obamas administration was too worried about offending Turkey. I immediately developed this idea that, you know, maybe I want to try to write about international affairs, he explained. I went to work to write speeches for Barack Obama! The editor at Foreign Policy who read Goldfish, which Rhodes attached with his query letter, said that the young M.F.A. Select this result to view Gregg D Rhodes's phone number, address, and more. And were going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences were dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress. By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet. Furthermore, he is also a holder of an MFA in creative writing from New York University where he graduated in 2002.

You have to have skin in the game to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Furthermore, Ben has a YouTube channel, Ben Rhodes. Contact Ben & Theary via e-mail or via phone at 503-724-1076. The goldfish idea, Im told, had been Ms. Wellbergs.Why? I ask. He got a weird look in his eye.. When I later visited Obamas former campaign mastermind David Axelrod in Chicago, I brought up the soft Orwellian vibe of an information space where old media structures and hierarchies have been erased by Silicon Valley billionaires who convinced the suckers that information was free and everyone with access to Google was now a reporter. Hello friends and family, We are honored you will share in our special day. One might with some He is currently working as a political contributor to NBC News, MSNBC, and Crooked Media. The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obamas Foreign-Policy Guru, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html. He hears arguments like, We should be punching Iran in the nose on its shipments of arms, and do it publicly, or We should sanction the crap out of them for their ballistic-missile test and tell them that if they do it again were going to do this or were going to do that, and he hears Dick Cheney in those arguments.. She is married to Ben Rhodes, who served as President Obamas Deputy National Security Adviser. He regards everyone on the other side at this point as being a bunch of bloodthirsty know-nothings from a different era who play by the old book. So I wonder: How did he get from there to here? We talk for a while about being American and at the same time being from somewhere else, and the split-screen experience of reality that experience allows. Additionally, the writer was the adviser who counseled Obama to withdraw support from Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak becoming a key adviser during the 2011 Arab Spring. Part of what accounts for Rhodess influence is his mind meld with the president. Greetings! For Rhodes, who wrote much of the I.S.G. When his wife takes the car, he rides the bus, which offers him a touch of the anonymity he craves. Senator Barbara Boxer. In his longhand notes, Obama relocated the speechs tension in the fact that he was accepting a peace prize a week after ordering 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Foreign-policy advisers kept changing all the language that made Obama sound like he wasnt part of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, he remembers. But would you make that same assessment now? I ask him. A native New Yorker, mostly-suffering Mets, Knicks and Jets fan, Mr. Rhodes has a B.A. I am thinking specifically about Syria, I add, where more than 450,000 people have been slaughtered. report, the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons. Prior to joining the Obama Administration, he was a Senior Speechwriter and foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign. from Rice University and an M.F.A from New York University. Additionally, in the podcast, both Ben and Tommy break down the latest developments and also bring their listeners behind the scenes with the people who were present. In a controversial profile in The New York Times Magazine, the writer was quoted deriding the D.C. press corps and boasting of how he created an echo chamber to market the administrations foreign policy, including the international nuclear agreement with Iran. Therefore, Ben is a man of above-average stature. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East. We pretended to my shame at times in the Obama administration that he was interested in that. As secretary of defense, he tells me, one of his most important jobs was keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, from launching a pre-emptive attack on Irans nuclear facilities. He sent her a letter and included what would wind up being his only piece of published fiction, a short story that appeared in The Beloit Fiction Journal.

He has a brother, David is a former President of CBS News. Furthermore, in the 2012 Israel-Gaza conflict, he supported Israel. What the hell does a guy who wanted to write fiction come to me for? But he had always found writers useful, and Rhodess writing sample was the best in the pile. WebRhodes was born on November 14, 1977, in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan. It was titled The Goldfish Smiles, You Smile Back. The story still haunts him, he says, because it foreshadowed my entire life.. I dont know how you feel about Don DeLillo., Yeah, Rhodes answers. It took me 45 minutes. The CBS News anchor Scott Pelley tells a story about how members of the press destroyed the lawn during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and were told that they would be allowed back once the grass was replanted. Ben Rhodes (White House staffer) is married to Ann Norris. Yeah, I admit very much to that reality, he says. The New Yorker says that the Israeli plan, code named Black Cube, was deliberately targeting people who had been proponents of the Iran nuclear deal. People construct their own sense of source and credibility now, she said. [23][24] Rhodes was featured in the HBO documentary The Final Year, along with John Kerry, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. I dont think theres ever been an American president who had an experience like that at a young age of what power is.. He led the secret negotiations with the Cuban government which resulted in the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, and served as an advisor on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. This is somewhere else. it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the moderate camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Irans supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He doesnt think for the president, but he knows what the president is thinking, which is a source of tremendous power. The Iran experience was the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that Ben is really at the intersection of all three, Malley says. He started working with Obama as a speechwriter in 2007 during the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. [4][10] Rhodes supported Israel in the 2012 IsraelGaza conflict. The couple is relatively private about their lives, and do not publicize their family. Their oldest is a girl, Ella, who was born in 2015. I was going to show you something, he says, removing a sheaf of yellow legal paper covered in longhand. But thats impossible.. Valerie Jarrett has been called the presidents work wife and is the only member of the West Wing staff who knew Obama before he began contemplating a run for the presidency.

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