The evening before he was sworn into office, Barack Obama stepped out of Blair House, the government residence where he was staying across from the White House, and climbed into an armored limousine for the ride to a bipartisan dinner. Joining him in the back seat were John Brennan, his new counterterrorism adviser, and two foreign-policy advisers, Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert. The three men with the president-elect were out of breath, having rushed more than a mile from transition headquarters on foot after failing to find a taxi in Washington’s preinaugural madness. As the motorcade moved out, they updated Obama on gathering evidence of a major terrorist plot to attack his inauguration. After a weekend of round-the-clock analysis, the nation’s intelligence agencies were concerned that the threat was real, the men told him. A group of Somali extremists was reported to be coming across the border from Canada to detonate explosives as the new president took the oath of office. With more than a million onlookers viewing the ceremony from the National Mall and hundreds of millions more watching on television around the world, what could be a more devastating target?
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Damon Winter/The New York Times
President Obama has inherited two struggles — one with Al Qaeda, and another that divides his country over issues like torture, prosecutions, and what it means to be an American.
“All the data points suggested there was a real threat evolving quickly that had an overseas component,” Juan Carlos Zarate, President George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, told me in November. As the inauguration approached, signs of a plot “seemed to be growing in credibility and relevance.” Another senior Bush official involved in those tense events a year ago said last fall that protecting the new president was not enough. Even a failed attack would send a debilitating message to the world. “If something happens on the podium and there’s chaos,” this official told me, “that’s the first time you see the new president, and you really don’t want that.”
The threat seemed to weigh on Obama. He canceled a practice session to go over his inaugural address with aides at Blair House. David Axelrod, his senior adviser, later interpreted that as a sign that Obama was thinking about the suspected plot. “He seemed more subdued than he had been,” Axelrod told me not long ago. Obama had not yet taken office, and he was already being confronted with the threat that consumed his predecessor’s presidency. No matter how much he thought about terrorism as a senator or as a presidential candidate, it was another thing to face it as the person responsible for the nation’s security — and quite another thing again to know the threat was aimed directly at himself, his wife and their two daughters. “It’s not as if you don’t know what you’re getting into,” Axelrod said. “But when the reality comes and the baton is being passed and you’re now dealing with real terrorism threats, it’s a very sobering moment.”
There was little Obama could do but ask questions and rely on the people who had been fighting this fight for years. His advisers worked side by side with the outgoing administration. The two teams gathered in the Situation Room of the White House shortly before the inauguration to sift through what was known and to hash out what should be done about it. The final iteration of Bush’s team sat across the table from the brain trust of Obama’s administration — Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley and their colleagues on one side, Hillary Rodham Clinton, James Jones and their colleagues on the other.
Clinton immediately put her finger on the problem. According to participants, she asked, what should Obama do if he is in the middle of his inaugural address and a bomb goes off somewhere on the mall? “Is the Secret Service going to whisk him off the podium so the American people see their incoming president disappear in the middle of the inaugural address?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”
Among those in the room was Robert Gates, who served two years as Bush’s defense secretary and would remain in that post under Obama. After the meeting, everyone eventually agreed that Gates should stay away from the inauguration in a secret location. With no other member of Obama’s cabinet confirmed by the Senate, Gates — an incumbent cabinet officer who also had the imprimatur of the newly elected commander in chief — was the most logical person in the line of succession to take over the presidency should the worst happen.
At the heart of the deliberations about what to do was John Brennan, a former C.I.A. officer. A Middle East specialist known for setting up the National Counterterrorism Center for Bush, Brennan was coming back after three years out of government as the top counterterrorism official in the Obama administration. He had wanted to be C.I.A. director but found his potential appointment sunk by liberal protests over his ties to the old order, so instead he was made deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, a position that did not require Senate confirmation.
As he helped manage the inaugural threat, culling reports and coordinating between two administrations, Brennan was already becoming the most important voice in the ear of the new president as he moved to reshape the nation’s struggle with terrorists. If it is now Obama’s war, Brennan is his general. And the first battle set the tone. “It was a poignant reminder of the seriousness of the issue the president would be facing, on the eve of the inauguration,” Brennan told me in November.
Brennan suspected that the threat was a classic “poison pen,” when one group of radicals rats out another group to get Americans to take out its rivals, and he was right. In this case, officials familiar with the situation said, some Somali extremists knew that a rival group was traveling to the United States and planted false information about its intentions that got back to the Americans. In the end, what for 72 hours looked like a credible threat turned out to be a false alarm.
For a fledgling president, the incident would be a lesson in the fluid, murky nature of terrorism. The challenge of leading the struggle against violent extremists is more than just hunting down bad guys; it’s distinguishing between what’s real and what’s not, tracking down where threats begin, figuring out the right response and finding a balance between acknowledging danger and projecting confidence. The Obama administration spent its first year in office trying to find its balance.
Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first president to take office in the Age of Terrorism. He inherited two struggles — one with Al Qaeda and its ideological allies, and another that divides his own country over issues like torture, prosecutions, security and what it means to be an American. The first has proved to be complicated and daunting. The second makes the first look easy.
The attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines passenger jet on Christmas Day heightened a debate that has percolated over the last 12 months. Obama’s approach has been either a dangerous reversal of the Bush years or a consolidation of the Bush years, depending on who is talking. In fact, the new president, during his first year, has adopted the bulk of the counterterrorism strategy he found on his desk when he arrived in the Oval Office, a strategy already moderated from the earliest days after Sept. 11, 2001. He did, however, shave back some of the harsher edges of the remaining Bush policies and in the process of his recalibrations drew simultaneous fire from former Vice President Dick Cheney and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Obama, then, found himself in a place where he seems most comfortable, splitting the difference on a tough issue and presenting it as the course of reasoned judgment rather than of dogmatic ideology. Where Bush saw black and white, Obama sees gray. Where Bush favored swagger, Obama is searching for a more supple blend of force and intellect. Where Bush saw Islamic extremism as an existential threat equivalent to Nazism or Communism, Obama contends that that view warps the situation out of proportion and plays into terrorists’ hands by elevating their stature and allowing them — even without attacking again — to alter the nature of American society.
With joblessness still plaguing the economy and health care dominating his agenda, Obama has not wanted his presidency to be defined by the war on terror, as Bush’s was. He has given few public speeches on the topic and declined to discuss it for this article. Rather than seeing terrorism as the challenge of our time, Obama rejects the phrase “war on terror” altogether, hoping to recast the struggle as one of a number of vital challenges confronting America. The nation is at war with Al Qaeda, Obama says, but not with terrorism, which, as he understands it, is a tactic, not an enemy.
“There was a tendency on the part of some to view the world through that prism — you know, are you with us or against us, black and white, this global war on terror,” John Brennan told me a couple of months ago in his windowless, low-ceilinged, soundproof office in the West Wing, where mobile phones are banned. “It was almost all-consuming. It was the driving force for our foreign policies, that we were now engaged in this march on the global war on terror.” That attitude, Brennan went on to say, proved counterproductive. “This president recognizes that there’s still a very serious terrorist threat that we face from organizations like Al Qaeda,” he said. “But at the same time, what we have to do is make sure that we’re not pouring fuel on the flames by the things that we do.”
And so perhaps the biggest change Obama has made is what one former adviser calls the “mood music” — choice of language, outreach to Muslims, rhetorical fidelity to the rule of law and a shift in tone from the all-or-nothing days of the Bush administration. He is committed to taking aggressive actions to disrupt terrorist cells, aides said, but he also considers his speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in June central to his efforts to combat terrorism. “If you asked him what are the most important things he’s done to fight terrorism in his first year, he would put Cairo in the top three,” Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, told me.
The policies themselves, though, have not changed nearly as much as the political battles over closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay and trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York would suggest. “The administration came in determined to undo a lot of the policies of the prior administration,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the homeland-security committee, told me, “but in fact is finding that many of those policies were better-thought-out than they realized — or that doing away with them is a far more complex task.”
If terrorism has not been the driving force of the Obama presidency, neither has it been the catalytic issue to the American people that it was more than eight years ago, when the twin towers collapsed in a heap of steel, concrete and bodies. Yet that mood can change in a hurry, as the Christmas Day plot showed. Obama understands that, if only by the law of averages, there is a decent chance of a major attack on the United States during his presidency. And if that attack happens, any change in policy, no matter how incidental to the facts of the case, will be fodder for critics to blame him for the attack. When the aviation screening and intelligence systems that Bush built failed to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian with ties to Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, from getting on a plane bound for Detroit with explosives in his underwear last month, a number of Obama’s political opponents blamed the sitting president. If Bush’s system was broken, they asked, why didn’t Obama fix it?
But the underlying complaint seemed less about any particular policy than about Obama himself — how he reacted, how he spoke, how he led. Although he held conference calls every day with Brennan, who was back in Washington, it took Obama three days to emerge from his Hawaiian vacation to address the matter in public, and when he did, he was typically cool and cerebral, with none of Bush’s bring-it-on, dead-or-alive rhetoric. Never mind that Bush took six days to publicly address the 2001 case of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, or that Reid was charged in civilian court, not as an enemy combatant; critics like Cheney argued again that Obama did not believe America was at war. Bush felt it in his gut. Obama thinks about it in his head. If he rushed out in public to talk the minute something happened, wouldn’t that play into the hands of those trying to instill fear in the American people? Shouldn’t he prudently wait for more information? Yet with the country afraid, is it possible to overthink it?