"Worldly at 35, and Shaping Obama’s Voice" (He also wrote "9/11 Report)
(Kind of a bizarre article about this guy's rise to fame and going back when he was 20 Something Writing the "9/11 Report?"
Dunno about this...but it is NYT's which is read by many the World Over. 
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Worldly at 35, and Shaping Obama’s Voice
Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Benjamin J. Rhodes, who pressed President Obama to take a more activist policy toward Egypt and Syria, advocates support of the Syrian opposition, friends and colleagues say.
By MARK LANDLER
Published: March 15, 2013
In many ways, Mr. Rhodes is an improbable choice for a job at the heart of the national security apparatus. An aspiring writer from Manhattan, he has an unfinished novel in a drawer, “Oasis of Love,” about a woman who joins a megachurch in Houston, breaking her boyfriend’s heart.
The son of a conservative-leaning Episcopalian father from Texas and a more liberal Jewish mother from New York, Mr. Rhodes grew up in a home where even sports loyalties were divided: he and his mother are ardent Mets fans; his father and his older brother, David, root for the Yankees.
“No one in that house agreed on anything,” said David Rhodes, who is now the president of CBS News.
Benjamin Rhodes, who worked briefly for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s re-election campaign in 1997, was living a writer’s life in Queens on Sept. 11, 2001, when he watched from the Brooklyn waterfront as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. The trauma of that experience, he said, led him to move to Washington in 2002.
Mr. Rhodes went to work for a Democratic foreign-policy elder, former Representative Lee Hamilton, helping draft the 9/11 Commission report as well as the Iraq Study Group report. That report was a template for the anti-Iraq war positions taken by Barack Obama, then a senator, whose campaign Mr. Rhodes joined as a speechwriter in 2008.
At the White House, Mr. Rhodes first came to prominence after he wrote Mr. Obama’s landmark address to the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009. The speech was notable for Mr. Obama’s assertion that governments should “reflect the will of the people,” prefiguring his policy in dealing with Mr. Mubarak and Colonel Qaddafi.
In writing Mr. Obama’s speech next week, Mr. Rhodes is likely to focus on America’s unshakable support for Israel. But if history is any guide, he will slip in a reference to Syria’s democratic future.
“Ben always holds on to the pen,” Mr. McFaul said. “Because of his close personal relationship with the president, Ben can always make policy through the speeches and statements made by President Obama.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/world/middleeast/benjamin-rhodes-obamas-voice-helps-shape-policy.html?hp&_r=2&pagewanted=all&
= new reply since forum marked as read
into territory that it's hard to see him qualified for, though.
Just saying from reading this. I realize NYT is the Paper of Judith Miller (disgraced and others)...but, still.. Something seems really bizarre that this guy has Obama's ear and is influencing Policy along with "writing the 9/11 Commission Report?
Well...help me out here as to how this article distorts and lies...I have open ears to listen.
The article says he has Obama's "Ear" on Foreign Policy.
That's a very different thing from being a "young speech writer and document writer for the President of USA. I still have problem with a young 20 something crafting together the "9/11 Report" though. Who was overseeing him? Why was he chosen.
Nevertheless...I thank you for the discussion. Not often here on DU that we try to understand each other's viewpoints without name calling and worse.
