These days, Rhodes lives in Southern California, and cohosts the tellingly titled podcast Pod Save the World, part of a successful media company founded in 2017 by a trio of fellow Obama speechwriters and “strategic communications” cadres. Though he was formally a strategic communications adviser, Rhodes enjoyed a much wider political brief in practice, which included leading the administration’s negotiations with Cuba. Rhodes then spent eight years in the White House as Obama’s deputy national security advisor, a period chronicled in his 2018 memoir, The World as It Is (memorably nominated by Perry Anderson as an archetypal “spin-doctorate of the equerry”). Soon after, he became speechwriter for the vice chair of the 9/11 commission, and later found his way onto Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Review of After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, by Ben Rhodes (Penguin Random House, 2021).īen Rhodes graduated from New York University in 2002 with a master’s degree in creative writing, before moving to Washington, DC, “to be part of the nation’s response” to 9/11.
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