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Obama then left for Camp David, while Rhodes and McDonough crafted a version. Typically, Obama will respond to a first draft with a charitable “This is in the ballpark.” Not this time. Obama was annoyed by the draft’s tepidity. It had no mention of Iraq nor of September 11—hot-button issues in the Muslim world. The Holocaust had been referenced, but not Holocaust denial. Obama wanted to confront these head-on. And seeing that the writers had bundled the matters of women, religious freedom, and democracy into an amorphous passage about human rights, the president said, “No, let’s draw these out—they are different ideas.” He reminded the writers, “I’m not going to Cairo to not say certain things.” The speech would “say in public what people say in private. Israelis say, ‘Look, there needs to be a Palestinian state.’ The Muslims say, ‘Israel is not going away.’ So let’s start saying those things in public.”

Obama could tell that Rhodes was downcast. “Look,” said the president to his speechwriter, “there’s a David in there. It’s a rock, and you’ve gotta keep working at it.”

Rhodes produced a second draft. Then a third, then a fourth—the latter of which Obama marked up substantially in Riyadh after midnight, the night before the speech. He also added a crucial paragraph about democracy: “So no matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who would hold power.… Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.”

This last-minute revising meant that Obama would deliver the speech unrehearsed—and to a foreign audience deliberately consisting of not only democracy activists but also clerics and the Muslim Brotherhood. Would they heckle in Arabic? Would some walk out? When Obama greeted the Cairo University crowd with “Assalaamu alaykum,” an ear-splitting cheer went up and the speechwriters breathed a sigh of relief. And as the crowd continued to respond—aided by Arabic subtitles on the JumboTron, a lesson learned from the campaign speech in Berlin—Obama fed off of them as an athlete would, “totally leaning into it, [as if] he doesn’t want the speech to end,” recalls Rhodes.

After it was over, Rhodes and Valerie Jarrett were exulting backstage when the president sidled up.

“Ben did such a great job,” he said.

Abashedly, the speechwriter replied, “Well, actually, you did a lot of it.”

“Well, it’s a collaborative process,” said the president.

*****

obama does his writing late at night, upstairs in the residence of the White House. His days are cut up into fifteen- or thirty-minute meetings; his West Wing office is invaded at all hours by harried aides. There in the residence, after he’s read to the girls, it’s quiet. He owes the publisher another book. But there’s no deadline this time. No subject specified. The publisher and the audience await him. And this time, there’ll be no long years of anonymous struggle, no anticipation of those first steps inside the bookstore, where rows of chairs are half full and bent into a modest arc: Tell me your name. And what you do.

robert draper is a gq correspondent.

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