Ben Rhodes — All We Say
Former Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes and journalist Susan Page discuss American identity through fifteen historic speeches — and what they reveal about democratic values under pressure.
Why we picked this
Rhodes helped write major foreign policy addresses for Obama and has spent the years since reckoning honestly with what American power actually does — his reading of these speeches is shaped by someone who has worked inside the machinery they describe.
Ben Rhodes’s All We Say takes fifteen landmark American speeches — from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural to Obama’s Cairo address — and reads them not as monuments to be venerated but as arguments about who America is and wants to be. Rhodes, who served as Deputy National Security Advisor under Obama and helped draft many of the foreign policy speeches of that era, brings an insider’s understanding of how public language shapes and constrains policy.
In conversation with Susan Page, Washington bureau chief of USA Today and author of a major biography of Nancy Pelosi, Rhodes discusses what these speeches reveal about the recurring tensions in American democratic identity: between idealism and power, openness and exclusion, stated values and actual conduct. The book is also, implicitly, a reckoning with the distance between democratic rhetoric and democratic reality.
For readers who want to understand how American political language works — what it can do, what it conceals, and why it matters — this is an evening with genuine analytical depth. Rhodes is a fluent explainer who has also been inside the rooms where these decisions are made, which makes for a different kind of conversation than most political book talks.