Guardian - 13 January 2018, 11:00 (+ 2297 days 7 hours and 30 minutes) Movies & TV
He spent 10 years as Barack Obama’s right-hand man. As a new film puts him in the spotlight, he talks high-stakes diplomacy and the chaos of Trump’s White HouseIn his final foreign speech as president, Barack Obama spoke to a crowd in Athens. “As you may have noticed,” he said, “the next American president and I could not be more different. But American democracy is bigger than any one person.” More than a year on, with that proposition tested daily, Obama’s decision to make his last trip abroad to the birthplace of western democracy looks prescient.The person Obama turned to just before taking the stage was a trim man with thin, close-cropped hair and a furrowed brow who had been at his side on almost every foreign trip he made, and who helped write this and just about every other foreign policy speech the president delivered. Ben Rhodes, the longest-serving member of Obama’s foreign policy team, at the age of 40, has been a permanent fixture in his close orbit; inside the Obama camp, Rhodes was routinely said to be so close to the president that their minds had melded. Continue reading...