New Oral History looks back at Obama, his time and the compromises he made
WASHINGTON — In a day of great drama at an international conference on climate change early in his administration, President Barack Obama confronted a senior Chinese official who made what the US delegation considered a weak commitment. Mr. Obama rejected the offer. Not good enough.
The Chinese official exploded. What do you mean that’s not good enough? Why isn’t that good enough?” he demanded. He was referring to an earlier conversation with John Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. “I talked to Senator Kerry and Senator Kerry said that was good enough.”
Mr. Obama looked at him evenly. “Well,” he replied, “Senator Kerry is not President of the United States.”
That moment of sharp relief, a clash with an implacable foreign apparatus by a young American president who has his way, comes to life in a new oral history project on the Obama administration release Wednesday. Six years after Obama left office, the project from Incite, a social sciences research institute at Columbia University, has amassed perhaps the most comprehensive collection of interviews from that era to date.
Researchers interviewed 470 veterans of the Obama administration, critics, activists and others caught in the midst of major events at the time, including Mr. Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, and collected a total of 1,100 hours of recordings. Transcripts of the interviews will be released in batches over the next three years, starting with an initial series of 17 to be made public on Wednesday, focusing on climate change, a central issue still shaping national debate at the time.
“Hundreds of new insights will emerge from this study, many of which will change our understanding of the Obama presidency and the period from 2008 to 2016 more broadly,” said Peter Bearman, founder and director of Incite and principal investigator of the Obama oral history project.
What sets Obama’s presidency apart is the way it resonated around the world in the “Obama moment,” as Evan McCormick, who led the foreign policy arm of the project, put it. “One thing that becomes clear from our interviews is that the moment of great hope and anticipation was ushered in by the election of the world’s first black president,” he said.
Oral histories from previous presidencies have become valuable resources for historians and researchers in recent decades. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has carried out such projects dating back to Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The Columbia Project was organized with support from the Obama Foundation.
The first tranche of interviews to be made available will not include those of the former president, first lady or other major recognizable figures of the Obama era. Instead, it focuses heavily on one issue that the researchers deemed vital to his presidency, a feast of policy discussion rather than a broader view of Mr. Obama himself or his total eight years in power.
Yet even in these limited initial interviews, some taste of his behind-the-scenes management emerges. While sucking in his favorite Fiji water, Mr. Obama teased scientists and engineers. “I stayed away from all of you at school,” he would say. “I’m a lawyer. I don’t like math. I don’t do math.” And when Steven Chu, his Nobel Prize-winning physicist-turned-energy secretary, showed up with 30 slides when five would have been enough, an exasperated president said, “Steve, we got it. We got it. We don’t have to look at that anymore.”
The focus on climate change in the first set of interviews also highlighted the greater compromises Mr. Obama made between competing priorities. For example, the transcripts reveal how, early in his term in office in 2009, he delayed major health care legislative action on climate change, perhaps a doomsday scenario for the drastic measure he would eventually advocate.
At one point, when he was expending all his influence to pass the Affordable Care Act, he ruefully explained his priorities to Mr. Chu. “Look, I know I said energy and healthcare, but next year,” he said. “Energy is next.”
“With Obama, I was just so absolutely hopeful,” recalls Carol M. Browner, his White House Coordinator for Energy and Climate Change Policy. “I just felt like we’re finally here on climate change. And we were. Then the Senate would never consider the bill.”
Mr. Chu, who viewed Mr. Obama as “an extraordinary president” for putting aside personal politics, nevertheless expressed the disappointment of many of his allies that he did not try harder to pressure Congress. In his oral history interview, Mr. Chu compared Mr. Obama to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was known for empowering lawmakers in passing landmark civil rights bills and the Great Society anti-poverty program.
“He was less connected to Congress than I had hoped,” Mr. Chu said. At some point in 2012, he recalled asking Obama if he had seen Steven Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln,” which recounted the moral compromises made to pass the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery. “Now I’m not asking President Obama to do immoral things,” said Mr. Chu. “But to shake off and use the power of the presidency to really garner votes was something I wish he had done more of. He was too much of a gentleman, too distant about it.
After his re-election in 2012, Obama again pledged to save the planet from ecological destruction. “Obama clearly came into the second term ready to rock and roll on climate change,” said Todd Stern, his special envoy for climate change at the State Department, speaking to Columbia interviewers about the rocky road to climate change. Paris Climate Agreement signed in 2015. “Obama come in like gangbusters.”
Obama’s successor, President Donald J. Trump, subsequently pulled the United States out of the Paris accord, but President Biden has rejoined the accord.
Oral history organizers also interviewed those who were dissatisfied with Mr. Obama, such as Bill McKibben, a longtime environmentalist and writer who helped found 350.org, a grassroots global organization.
“My impatience with Mr. Obama and many others on this front is that I think they tended to group it,” by which they mean climate change, “with other issues that they faced and thought about in the same way they think about other things thought, like an item on a checklist,” he said.
“No matter how much I loved him,” Mr. McKibben added, “it was very clear that on a deep level he couldn’t care less about all these things and wasn’t willing to sacrifice – suffer political pain to the problem.”
But his advisers insisted Mr. Obama did care and said he regretted his early failures. Just before going to the East Room of the White House in 2015 to announce his Clean Power Plan, which placed limits on carbon emissions from power plants, he told Gina McCarthy, his chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and later the United States’ climate adviser. Mr Biden that he was determined to take action in the interests of his two daughters.
“I promised to do something about the climate,” he told her. “I didn’t get it delivered in my first term. And this is so meaningful.”