Former President Barack Obama boasts of skirting scandal in the first installment of his two-part, post-White House memoir.
“Without exception, we avoided scandal,” Obama writes. “I’d made clear at the start of my administration that I’d have zero-tolerance for ethical lapses, and people who had a problem with that didn’t join us in the first place.”
In A Promised Land, covering his childhood to the deadly 2011 Osama bin Laden raid, Obama talks about the White House workplace culture he tried to create, dishing on some of the tensions that arose in his administration’s second year.
He mentions hearing “more consternation” over then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s “occasional outbursts during early-morning staff meetings,” National Economic Council Director Larry Summers “[cutting] people out of certain economic policy discussions,” and Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs Director Valerie Jarrett taking advantage “of her personal relationship” with him and former first lady Michelle Obama.
“The cumulative effects of exhaustion — along with an increasingly angry public, an unsympathetic press, disenchanted allies, and an opposition party with both the means and the intent to turn everything we did into an interminable slog — had a way of fraying nerves and shortening tempers,” he says.
He also addresses complaints regarding the “Obama bro” environment. After Jarrett raised the issue with him during his first year in office, he recounts hosting a dinner with a dozen women on his team. There, they relayed to him their experiences of being “shouted or cursed over, interrupted, or repeated” by “many” of his male staff.
“When I spoke to Rahm and the other senior men about how their female colleagues were feeling, they were surprised, chastened, and vowed to do better,” he writes.
But overall, Obama recalls being proud of his White House’s behavior.
“With few exceptions, we avoided the open hostilities and constant leaks that had characterized some previous administrations,” he says.
Obama’s presidency wasn’t scandal-free. His then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, for instance, were heavily criticized for their handling of the 2012 assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya.
A Promised Land was released Tuesday. Penguin Random House reportedly paid the Obamas a $65 million advance for their memoirs.
