The film showed him to be even glibber and more self-aggrandizing than the Times had let on a bully, too. I kept struggling to nurse a sympathy for Rhodes through the release this January of The Final Year, an HBO documentary that shadowed the deputy national-security adviser through his last months thinking up American foreign policy. And anyone who has tried to catch 40 winks at a Brookings Institution foreign-policy panel or taken up a machete to hack through the tangled prose of Foreign Affairs will think the “Blob” is not only an accurate tag but maybe too kind. Reading this one Sunday morning with the Times scattered on the floor around me, I could barely stifle a cry: Ben! My Man! What’s not to like?Rhodes’s description of the working press in Washington, particularly those bright young things who flutter around partisan politics and the White House, is perfectly accurate. “And their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old,” Rhodes said. Even better, Rhodes turned his attention to the Washington press corps, which he described as easily manipulated-by him. Rhodes, according to the author of the profile, had “a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.” Rhodes called this establishment the Blob, and among its stalwarts he named Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates. His observations scandalized professional Washingtonians, and that made me feel the warm glow of intellectual kinship. Everyone agreed that the article presented Rhodes, still in his mid-thirties, as a glib, self-aggrandizing twit, but that’s not why I wanted to like him. My struggle began in 2016, when the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of him. Or two years now I’ve been trying to persuade myself that I could at least pretend to have a soft spot in my iron-clad heart for Ben Rhodes, the Obama foreign-policy adviser whose new memoir, The World As It Is, has lately been making noise.
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