President Obama’s national security adviser Ben Rhodes, who edited the administration’s Benghazi talking points, is a former fiction writer who penned a short story about a supernaturally gifted professional note-taker who rises through the corporate world by taking notes that make other people’s statements sound better.
Rhodes, it was recently revealed, sent a 2012 email after the Benghazi terrorist attack instructing then U.N. ambassador Susan Rice and other administration officials “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”
Rhodes, who has worked for Obama since the president was a U.S. senator, holds a Masters degree in Fiction from New York University. His one known published short story, “The Goldfish Smiles, You Smile Back,” was published in Beloit Fiction Journal in the spring 2002 issue. The story was about a man with an incredible gift for note-taking.
“My notes are so impressive that they have taken on the form of ideas…I capture other people’s words in a manner that not only organizes them, but inserts a clarity and purpose that was not present in the original idea,” states the protagonist of Rhodes’ short story.
Obama’s little sensitive artist is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes, whose network prevented investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson from digging too deep into the Benghazi scandal and finding out who edited the administration’s talking points.