September 30, 2016 | No Comments
President Barack Obama buried another of his heroes Friday — a role model from his early life and now a role model for the future he’s slowly starting to map out.
Shimon Peres, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela: these men whom he’s now led the world’s goodbyes to were all friends — most don’t realize it, but of the three, he actually spent the most time with Peres — part of Obama’s pantheon, up there with Lincoln, Gandhi, King.
They are what Obama wants to become.
“I could somehow see myself in his story and he could see himself in mine,” Obama said, delivering the final eulogy for Peres Friday morning in Jerusalem, calling the former Israeli prime minister and president in Hebrew “dear friend,” and lingering for a moment with his hand on the coffin as he left the stage. Peres died Wednesday at the age of 93.
They were all political, but came to transcend politics. Local players who became national figures who became global icons. People from absurdly small beginnings who shaped history.
For a president who has 111 days left on the clock until he starts his own path forward and who’s told people that he wants his post-presidency to be greater the eight years in office his aides are already celebrating as transformational, they are very much on his mind.
But that is not, to Obama, because they left politics behind — after all, Thursday night at a reception in Washington, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer noted that part of his own last conversation with Peres six weeks ago in Tel Aviv was kibitzing about what was going to happen in the 2016 presidential election.
“Each of those men did not change. What happened was their circumstances changed,” said Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior adviser and longtime friend, reflecting Thursday afternoon on what that unlikely trio of Mandela, Ali and Peres represents in the president’s mind. “When President Obama is not in the middle of the 24-hour news cycle and all the inevitable scrutiny that comes with that, once he’s freed of all that, then he will be able to make an impact in a different way that’s just as productive. When you’re not in the daily scrum, it frees you up in a way that can be very liberating, and your impact can be profound.”
Obama doesn’t think of many people this way. Rep. John Lewis. Pope Francis. The Dalai Lama. A few others at most.
To the president, their arms are linked across history. His Mandela eulogy three years ago connected the South African leader to Gandhi, King and Lincoln, the official White House statement on Ali (the funeral was the same day as his older daughter’s high school graduation, and he didn’t go), clearly from the president’s own pen, “he stood with King and Mandela; stood up when it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t.”
Peres, Obama said Friday, reminded him of Mandela, of Queen Elizabeth — another unlikely soulmate of his, and the rare one who was born into privilege. Peres lived, Obama said, his favorite quote from King.
“He knew better than the cynic that if you look at the arc of history, human beings should be filled not with fear but with hope,” Obama said.
They are what Obama styles himself to be already, and wants to become more of: “leaders who’ve seen so much, whose lives span such momentous epochs that they find no need to posture or traffic in what’s popular in the moment. People who speak with depth and knowledge, not in sound bites. They find no interest in polls or fads. And like these leaders, Shimon could be true to his convictions even if they cut against the grain of current opinion.”
Obama is struck, Jarrett said, by having gotten to know these people who even 10 years ago, he was still just reading about and looking up to.
“There’s a personal chemistry there, in addition to respect,” she said. “When he encounters iconic figures who others may put on a pedestal but don’t put themselves on a pedestal, I think that enhanced their connection too.”
Obama spoke in longing about Peres’s great dream of peace, acknowledging Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in his remarks as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not, remarking at the outset of his speech that Abbas’ “presence here is a gesture and a reminder of the unfinished business of peace.”
But the failed process was captured just an hour earlier, when the funeral was abuzz with the image of Netanyahu and Abbas shaking hands for the first time in longer than anyone can remember, 23 years after Bill Clinton brought Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat to the Rose Garden for the handshake to seal the Oslo Accords.
Though they sat next to each other Friday, Netanyahu is the leader among American allies that Obama personally dislikes the most (the feeling is mutual). But at the funeral they agreed: Peres — whom the prime minister revered over their connection to his beloved older brother killed in the raid in Entebbe that Peres ordered but whom he’d himself beaten in the 1996 Israeli elections — “was a great man of the world.”
Post-presidency talk used to be forbidden in the White House. Slowly, it’s seeping in. Obama’s picked a site and an architect for his library in Chicago, and he’s been having more conversations, formally and informally, to figure out exactly what he’s going to do. At 55, he’ll be one of the youngest former presidents ever, and unlike Bill Clinton won’t be shaped by having a wife who’s running herself, unlike George W. Bush has no interest in retiring from public life or painting. Jimmy Carter was drummed out of office and spent the decades since refashioning himself around the world.
Obama’s popularity at home is climbing by the weeks as the end gets closer. He keeps promising in trips around the world that he’ll be coming back once he’s out of office, and the crowds cheer loudly every time.
Like Mandela, who remained a force in South Africa and around the world after he left the presidency, Ali kept mentoring and being an advocate for Parkinson’s and peace long after he left the ring, Peres was still at it even after finishing seven years as president in 2014, at the age of 90.
“They continued to have a passion and sense of responsibility to public service, whether they were in office or not,” Jarrett said. “The president respects that and intends to emulate it post presidency.”
Peres came to the Oval Office one last time in 2014. He met with the president’s top advisers. He met with Obama, like he’d done in the same room with every president since John F. Kennedy. He walked out afterward to answer a few questions from reporters in his famous mumble.
But the memory that resonates in the White House most is from a dinner Peres held for Obama on his 2013 trip to Israel, when he presented him with the government’s Medal of Distinction, and toasted him.
“When I visited you in Washington, I thought in my heart, America is so great and we are so small. I learned that you don’t measure us by size, but by values. Thank you,” Peres said. “When it comes to values, we are you, and you are us. On occasions when we were alone you stood with us, so we were not alone. We were alone together. We shall never forget it.”