![]() In the front office, his assistant, Rumana Ahmed, and his deputy, Ned Price, are squeezed behind desks, which face a large television screen, from which CNN blares nonstop. He heads downstairs to his windowless basement office, which is divided into two parts. The Boy Wonder of the Obama White House is now 38. He is holding a phone to his ear, repeating his mantra: “I’m not important. Unnoticed by the reporters, Ben Rhodes walks through the room, a half-beat behind a woman in leopard-print heels. The National Park Service replanted the grass outside the White House, but the journalists weren’t allowed back on the lawn. 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. “I used to have a 9:30 hit on CNN,” Martin reminisces. Their repartee thus concluded, they move on to the mutually fascinating subject of Washington traffic jams. “Well, you can call,” shoots back his former colleague Roland Martin. “You don’t write, you don’t call,” Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchorman, parries. A small figure in a long navy cashmere overcoat turns around, in mock surprise. It was titled “The Goldfish Smiles, You Smile Back.” The story still haunts him, he says, because “it foreshadowed my entire life.” 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. “In retrospect, I had no idea what that meant.” His mother’s closest friend growing up ran the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which then published Foreign Policy. ![]() “I immediately developed this idea that, you know, maybe I want to try to write about international affairs,” he explained. “Because I think he knew more than we did about what was going to happen.” Writing Frederick Barthelme knockoffs suddenly seemed like a waste of time. “That image has always stayed with me,” he says. He saw an Arab guy sobbing on the subway. He saw the first tower go down, and after that he walked around for a while, until he ran into someone he knew, and they went back to her shared Williamsburg apartment and tried to find a television that worked, and when he came back outside, everyone was taking pictures of the towers in flames. program at N.Y.U., writing short stories about losers in garden apartments and imagining that soon he would be published in literary magazines, acquire an agent and produce a novel by the time he turned 26. But the way it changed Ben Rhodes’s life is still unique, and perhaps not strictly believable, even as fiction. He saw the planes hit the towers, an unforgettable moment of sheer disbelief followed by panic and shock and lasting horror, a scene that eerily reminded him, in the aftermath, of the cover of the Don DeLillo novel “Underworld.”Įverything changed that day. 11, 2001, which was Election Day in New York City. Picture him as a young man, standing on the waterfront in North Williamsburg, at a polling site, on Sept.
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