← The David Frum Show
The David Frum Show
The Atlantic Interview: Pete Souza
00:33:55
The White House photographer brings us up-close and personal to the Obama presidency.
Loading summary
Transcript77 lines
- [00:00]
A
Unmen official de Medicare estoyo orranto dinero y mis resetas medicas vejas de Medicare beneficio. Additional. Welcome to the Atlantic interview. I'm Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, and this week I spoke with Pete Souza. There's a chance you may not recognize his name, but you'd certainly recognize his photographs. Pete was the official White House photographer for Barack Obama, and he documented the president throughout his eight years in office. Recently, Pete came out with a book of photographs from that time entitled An Intimate Portrait. When I spent time interviewing President Obama or traveling with the president, Pete was always right there in the background, shooting away. He was everywhere. And yet also, as we discuss, kind of nowhere, he managed to make himself invisible, even while documenting the presidency in all of its manifestations. So it was really a fun thing to sit down with Pete and hear what it was like to be an intimate observer of an entire presidency. Pete Souza, welcome to the Atlantic interview.
- [01:16]
B
Thanks for having me on.
- [01:17]
A
Oh, no, it's great. I haven't seen you since President Obama was president. Remember that period in American history when President Obama was president?
- [01:25]
B
It was not that long ago.
- [01:26]
A
No. Really?
- [01:27]
B
Are you sure about that? Sometimes it feels like it was a decade ago.
- [01:31]
A
I'm not sure about that. I don't really recall it anymore. I've been eager to have you on this show for a number of reasons. In part, to just sort of talk about what it's like to have the ultimate bird's eye view, in part because I'm one of the people who's been lucky enough to be photographed by you with the president. And actually, it's my first question. This is gonna seem extreme, extraordinarily specific, but here's one of the mysteries of your career or your job in the White House. Whenever you go into the Oval Office to meet the president, or really anywhere, but particularly the Oval, within a minute, you pop out of some secret door or secret cloud. I can't figure it out, but you would always sort of pop out. And I never understood, where were you hiding? Did you just, like, were you just positioned, ready to go? Because it was sort of like, where did Pete Souza come from? How did that work?
- [02:29]
B
Well, what I tell people is the Cliff Notes version of what I do. What I did for a job was I would tag along with President Obama from the time he came down from the residence in the morning until the time he left at night. And I was either in the Oval Office or just outside the Oval Office all day long. That's basically What I did.
- [02:52]
A
Did you have like sort of a perch where you can see what's going on. You had access to the schedule, obviously, but it was really, you know, the Oval Office is quite discombobulating, in part because it is an oval and in part because you can't tell where the doors are. And I just was always. I would always turn to someone and say, where did he come from? And then you would disappear. It was a lot of people talk about a particular gift that you had, which was to make yourself invisible at key moments. Talk about that a little bit. How did you sort of become unobtrusive yet manage to photograph everything?
- [03:27]
B
I like to say I used a small footprint, meaning I used the quietest cameras that existed. Would not use a flash, would not use a motor drive, you know, rapid succession and try to move about. So I wasn't interfering with what was taking place. If President Obama was having a one on conversation like he did with you, I wouldn't necessarily stay in the whole meeting. I would just try to get my pictures and slowly disappear through one of those secret doors.
- [04:00]
A
Yeah. How many secret doors are there?
- [04:02]
B
Well, there's three, four doors into the Oval. They're not really secret.
- [04:07]
A
Well, they're secret when you're looking for the handle and you can't find it.
- [04:10]
B
Well, yeah, I mean, we've had people, you know, at the end of the meeting, reach for the wrong door handle.
- [04:16]
A
Yeah, that was me, among others. Yeah. It's exhausting though, right? I mean, one of the things. And I traveled on enough presidential trips. You have photos in this wonderful book from a trip I was on to Asia. You have a trip to Israel in the Middle East. You were always around. I don't understand your ability to sort of your endurance in that. Talk about that a little bit, because you were there from morning to night.
- [04:47]
B
Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, one thing I give myself credit for is my endurance. I took one sick day in eight years. And the only reason I took a sick day was because I had to go undergo anesthesia. But, you know, there are days that we're like, watching paint dry in that not much was going on necessarily in terms of visually. And that was the challenge is to always be ready. I mean, early on, I made the determination that if I was not in the Oval Office, I was gonna be right outside the Oval Office. Because with this particular president, you just never knew what was gonna happen. It was kind of a fluid situation all day long. Yes, he had a schedule, but, you know, he might just pop out of the office and walk down to the chief of staff's office or so I just was always hanging around.
- [05:46]
A
Was he ever annoyed by having you follow him everywhere?
- [05:51]
B
He might have been annoyed the first few months, but I think he understood the value of having somebody document visually a presidency. And I think he appreciated the way I did it in not really being a nuisance and knowing that, you know, there were days when he. I might give him a little more space because, you know, he might be in a bad mood or he might have a sinus infection and just sort of like it's more intuitive than anything else. Does that make sense?
- [06:24]
A
Yeah. Do you remember any particular bad days?
- [06:28]
B
I mean, it depends on your definition of bad. I mean, a really bad day was, of course, when he found out about the Sandy Hook shootings. But that was also, you know, historic, so that was not a problem.
- [06:45]
A
You took a very famous photograph of being of the president being briefed by.
- [06:48]
B
John Brennan, and he understood that I needed to be around for those kind of bad days. But there were bad days when. I don't know. I can't even think. Like, he. He didn't show his. His bad moods to people publicly, but I could sort of tell, and I. I can't think of anything specifically. Well, here's a funny story. This guy was notorious for being a disciplined eater.
- [07:19]
A
So in his back, the seven almonds contrast.
- [07:22]
B
Yeah. So in the. In the dining room, he had these three jars with almonds and I don't know what, three different kinds of nuts. So I had the idea on 1, April 1, I got the valets to dump out all the nuts and put in M and Ms. Because he never ate candy. And as soon as he walked into the office, I could tell he was in a really bad mood. And I quickly went back to the valet and said, we got to put the nuts back.
- [07:51]
A
He's very sensitive to the nuts. You know, I remember him getting mad when people were talking about that story where he ate nine almonds after dinner. And I remember hearing him say that sometimes it would be 10 or 12. He didn't actually count them. He was very frustrated by the telling of that story. Talk about the West Wing a little bit. You said that sometimes, and this is hard to believe in one sense, sometimes having your job was like watching paint dry. There is this quality of the West Wing that a lot of people don't understand, which is that it's very, very quiet. Talk about something that surprised you when you started to go work in the West Wing.
- [08:28]
B
Well, it's not like the West Wing TV show.
- [08:31]
A
It's the opposite.
- [08:32]
B
Yeah. It's small. I mean, if you go, you know, my office was one floor down from the Oval Office, and it was the old barbershop, and you could, you know, barely fit two people in there. It's smaller than people think. It's older than people think. It's, you know, there's no wireless. It's, you know, everything kind of centers around the Oval Office, but everybody else's office is really kind of small, except for the Chief of Staff's office.
- [09:01]
A
Right, right. Let's talk about some of the photographs in this book. The first question I ask as an editor is how you possibly culled down to this selection. It's a big book, but nevertheless, it represents a tiny fraction of the photographs you took. Talk about the process a little bit of getting to this.
- [09:23]
B
To start out, I would say that because we were the administration that used social media in a way that no other other administration had done before, just so happened that a lot of these tools became available during the Obama administration. Instagram didn't even exist until 2010. So as a result, a lot of these pictures had been made public in some capacity before. So that was the core photographs that I began with ones that we had made public in some capacity. And there were thousands. And then I was trying to choose photographs. The book is done chronologically, so you sort of see the flow of the presidency from 2009 right up until January 20th of last year. And I was trying to show pictures that told you something about his presidency or told you something about him as a human being. What was he like? And then I would also weave in some of the important historical moments, as well as trying to set the scene with some aesthetic moments of the presidency as a whole, like pictures of Air Force One of the White House. And that was challenging because there were so many pictures to choose from. The challenge was just trying to get it down to 350 pages, I think, is what we have.
- [10:59]
A
And this is a critique of the administration, the Obama administration, not you. But one of the critiques was you got all the access to photographer, but your former colleagues in the press were restricted. And it is fair to say that there's no photograph among these photos that is unflattering of the president. Have you thought about the leap that you made from being a journalist to being a chronicler of a presidency for the president?
- [11:28]
B
I met Barack Obama when he was elected to the Senate. I was working for the Chicago Tribune and spent a lot of time with them, especially in 2005 and 2006, as a member of the press, working for the Chicago Tribune. And, you know, the moment I walked into the Oval Office as the chief White House photographer, I didn't like change how I made pictures. The process is still the same. I'm still photographing in the same manner. Yes, the White House. You're not photographing for a daily newspaper, so you're not editing to fit a certain story. I was thinking more long term of making timeless photos, historical photos. But the process of me photographing isn't any different than it was as a photojournalist for the Chicago Tribune.
- [12:25]
A
Do you think that the press was kept at bay too much by the press operation, by the public relations operation at the White House?
- [12:33]
B
I mean, I think that's a legitimate complaint. It happens every administration. Ironically, the current administration, they're not getting as many complaints because the current president loves to have the entire press pool come in and so he can sign some executive order or things like that. I mean, President Obama much preferred having a solo photographer, which we did several, dozens of times, have an individual photographer sort of tag along with me for the day or do a solo interview like he did with you. He much preferred those than having the whole contingent of press come in.
- [13:17]
A
Coming back to this point, it's a minor point, but the quietness that people who were in the West Wing over the Obama administration felt, that's also a kind of a reflection of his disciplined, orderly, quiet personality. I have to think, by the way, that's probably the nicest thing you've ever said about Donald Trump, but I'm not even sure it counts as nice. Do you think it would be fun to photograph Donald Trump? Can you imagine, put aside your feelings about Donald Trump, which you've made clear. Could you imagine it being an exciting job right now to be the White House photographer?
- [13:51]
B
No.
- [13:52]
A
Why?
- [13:57]
B
Trying to be delicate?
- [13:59]
A
This is a very indelicate podcast.
- [14:03]
B
Because it doesn't appear to me that much access is given to the White House photographer.
- [14:13]
A
So just from a technical standpoint, you're not getting in there. I don't want to ask you the obvious question, which is, what is your favorite photograph you made of the president or the presidency? Let me frame it this way. Which of these photographs do you think will be remembered 100 years from now?
- [14:30]
B
Well, that's a good question. I think obviously the bin Laden photo, watching the bin Laden raid in the Situation Room. Although that picture to me is historic, and yet I wouldn't consider it one of my Favorites. It's probably my best known picture. The picture that's on the back cover of Little Jacob Philadelphia kind of touching the head of the President. That was taken actually early on. It was in May of 09.
- [15:07]
A
You knew that was a moment.
- [15:08]
B
I actually didn't know that was a moment because it happened so fast. I have one frame of that. It was so unexpected and I didn't see the picture because, you know, you can look on the back of your camera. But I'm so busy that oftentimes I don't really get to peruse my pictures until the end of the day. And that's one picture that I didn't know what I had until the end of the day. And when I saw it, I was like, oh, okay, this is special.
- [15:36]
A
Did you know it was special because you've been following Obama around for long enough that you knew his unique status as the first African American president meant so much to so many people. I mean, cause it's not, no offense, it's not your most artfully composed photograph. It was done completely on the fly. When you looked at it, what said to you, oh, wait a second, this is capturing an essential truth about this historical moment.
- [16:02]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny because a photographer always wants to have the perfect composition, framing, lighting, moment, all those things that come together and in some ways the imperfectness, if there's such a word of this composition and framing make it more special to me. I mean, the reason it works as a photograph is you can both see young Jacob's hand touching his head and you can see Jacob's eyes looking at his head. If I had been six inches in either direction, it might not have worked. But I think it resonates with a lot of people for two reasons. One, you got a young African American kid touching the head of the president United States who looks like him. That's one. And two, I think it tells you something about Barack Obama, that even though he was President United States at the behest of a five year old kid, he would go ahead and bend over and let this kid touch his head. That he didn't take himself that seriously. I'm not sure that that would happen for instance today.
- [17:11]
A
Right. Well, that hair is more complicated for one thing on the next president than the previous as artistic composition. I'm curious to know. I mean, there's that photograph I love. I happened to be there. So it really resonated with me at Yad Vashem where I was in the pool that day when they were Standing out over the hills of Jerusalem, there's an Air Force One that's haunting. But let me ask it this way again. I'm not going to ask you to name your favorite photograph here, but I want to ask you about the photograph you're most proud of. For aesthetic reasons, something that represents the highest form of your art. Of all these 350 or so photographs.
- [17:57]
B
That'S sort of like asking someone, okay, you got five kids. Which is your favorite? That's so hard for me to choose. I did.
- [18:10]
A
Okay, give me the top three.
- [18:11]
B
Okay, so this is just a guess because I don't know if I can remember all the ones in the book, but the one of Air Force One leaving Seattle one early morning in the fog. And I saw the picture happen as we were arriving in that, you know, I was in the motorcade and it was just this magical, foggy morning. And as soon as the motorcade stopped, I ran to the front of the plane as far away as I could get, because I knew you needed to be far away to get the effect of the fog. So I love that picture because I think it says something not about President Obama directly, but it says something about the presidency. You see the motorcade, you see him at the top of the stairs waving. So that would be one. Another one is. You mentioned this one from Israel. They were overlooking the city, I believe, right?
- [19:12]
A
I think so.
- [19:13]
B
And it's taken from behind. There's a whole group of people, including Netanyahu and Peres, I believe.
- [19:19]
A
Yeah. Shimon Peres and Netanyahu, the Chief rabbi, I think.
- [19:22]
B
Yeah. And at one point the President just sort of like raised his hands to say something and the light just happened to magically fall on his hands. And I saw it happen. I think I have one frame of that happen so quick. But aesthetically, I love that picture too. Another one that maybe I'm drawn more to the circumstance than the actual picture is the day that Supreme Court upheld same sex marriage. And we, meaning the White House, lit up the north side of the White House in rainbow colors. It was on a Friday night and the staff did not want to go home. So everybody was just outside the North Portico, just kind of taking it all in. I think some people had champagne out there and the light had just gone down for the evening, so there was still a little blue in the sky and then all these rainbow colors around the White House. So those are three that come to mind. Off the top of my head, the.
- [20:30]
A
Presidency is fairly impossible job. The emotional bandwidth, forget the intellectual bandwidth that One needs to be president, but the emotional bandwidth. You went with the president to Newtown. He had to come for 26 separate families, give a talk. He missed, I think, one of his daughter's performances at school in order to do this. Talk about a moment that might have been too much for anyone to bear and how you bear those things. You're documenting moments of extreme trauma. You're in Walter Reed with the families of extremely wounded, terribly wounded soldiers. Talk about that.
- [21:11]
B
Yeah. I mean, most of the time I can keep my emotions together in the moment because I'm worrying about so many things technically and compositionally and so on and so forth. Newtown, and not the day of the shootings, but two days later when we did go to Connecticut and he did meet with all these families. I have to say that was probably the one time where I had a hard time keeping my emotions in check. You mentioned that Sasha's annual dance recital was that night, and he could not go because it was on a Saturday night. But he went to the dress rehearsal in the afternoon and sat in the auditorium. He was the only parent watching the dress rehearsal. At one point, this young dance troupe had just finished their performance, and they filed into the auditorium, which was essentially empty. And I was down front taking pictures of Sasha because she was dancing. And these young little kids came in and sat, like, right in one row, right in front of me. There were about 20 or 25 of them. And I'm looking at these kids, and I finally tapped this one little girl on the shoulder, and I said, how old are you guys? And she looked up at me and she said, we're six. And that's when I lost it, because I was thinking to myself, this whole row is what just got wiped out in Newtown. And then later, a few hours later, as he's meeting with these families privately in Newtown was just. It was. It was just too much to bear. You've got the worst possible thing that ever happened in each of these families lives, and two days later, they're meeting the President of the United States in just the worst circumstance.
- [23:12]
A
Yeah. Go to the bin Laden photo for a minute. Address the one quote, unquote, old controversy in that photo, what Hillary Clinton was doing with her hand at that moment. And if you knew when you released that photograph that people would interpret it the way it was interpreted, which is that she was shocked by something she was seeing on the screen.
- [23:34]
B
You know, I talked to Hillary about this a couple days later when they were trying to determine why she was reacting the way she did. You know, first it was that she had a cold, she had a sneeze, she couldn't really remember. She didn't even know that I was in the room, which is meaning I was doing a pretty good job of, you know, being quiet and unobtrusive. But so as an exercise, I went back, I shot 102 pictures during the actual raid because we were in that room for, I don't know, 30 or 40 minutes. And through looking at the pictures, Hillary had her hand up to her face. And about, like 15 of the pictures Bob Gates had his hand up to his face. And about 10, the VP had his hand up to his face and a few. And it was sort of like that with everybody because there was so much anxiety and tension in that room. And in editing a picture, you're always trying to find what's the best frame. And when you have that many people in a room, inevitably somebody's going to be blinking or looking away for an instant. And I chose what I thought was the best frame, had not even thought about that. People were going to make a big deal out of Hillary. Having her hand to her face kind.
- [24:58]
A
Of presaged the way she was interpreted generally.
- [25:02]
B
But I think that people unfairly made that a big deal. I don't think that was a big deal.
- [25:11]
A
The most remarkable aspect of that photograph to me. Well, there's two. The second, which I'll get to, is the fact that you were in the room at all. And I wanna talk about that in a minute. But the first is the position of the president and the body language of the president. He's off to the side, he's in a chair. He's not standing there, Teddy Roosevelt style, ordering the raid. He's very receding in a way, talk about that. I think that's the quality that makes the photograph memorable, that the President did not put himself in the center of the action, even though he was the action.
- [25:48]
B
You know, the situation room is comprised of three conference rooms. Most of his meetings were held in the big conference room, which was across the hall. They had the communications link to the raid set up in this tiny little conference room. And they were afraid to switch the link to the big conference room because they thought they might lose the signal. So everybody piled into that little room. They didn't know the president was going to be there while the raid was taking place. That was not something they had expected, and he wanted to be there. General Webb, the guy that you see seated at the head of the table, was on a laptop, I believe he was in direct communication with Bill McRaven, who was running the raid from Afghanistan. And he stood up when he saw the President walk in to give up his chair. And the President said, you stay right where you are. I'll just pull up a chair next to you. So that's how it happened, that he was seated next to General Webb and not at the head of the table.
- [26:52]
A
Nobody in that room besides General Webb was discomfited by the fact that the President was so off to the side?
- [27:01]
B
No, I don't think so at all.
- [27:05]
A
It's unusual presidential behavior. This is not a criticism. It might be a compliment, which is to say the man is comfortable in his own skin and comfortable in the hierarchy and comfortable doing what he did.
- [27:15]
B
Well, I think everybody in that room, except for General Webb, was not a participant in what was taking place. They were observers. Their decisions had already been made, and now all they could do was observe. I think that for President Obama, that was a human decision. It wasn't a presidential decision on where to sit. That's just his decision as a human being.
- [27:46]
A
There's one participant and a bunch of observers. And you were observing the observers. This struck me soon after I saw the photograph, that there were Deputy Secretaries of Defense, there were people in the CIA, there were a bunch of people across the national security complex who had no idea what was going on. But you knew what was going on. Did that ever strike you as kind of an oddity of your job, that your forced proximity to the President meant that you were cleared for the highest level secrets?
- [28:17]
B
Yeah, I have to admit that that day, it was, you know, I was pretty awed by what was taking place. Knowing that this is a huge day in American history and it could have gone the other way, it could have gone south. I mean, they didn't know for sure if bin Laden was there. The helicopter did crash coming in. But there are other times, too. I mean, the news of that raid became public, what, eight hours later or something like that, and everybody knew what had happened. So I would know before most people did. But there are times too, like when before we open relations with Cuba, I mean, I covered multiple meetings in the Situation Room, I think, going back almost a year. So I knew a year in advance that we were trying to do this with Cuba. So those are the kind of things that you just. The reason why you're given Top Secret clearance is so you can be there when they're discussing meetings like that.
- [29:30]
A
Right, right. Talk about photographing Joe Biden for a minute. There's a wonderful Sequence of photographs in this book of the president and the vice president talking. And it reminded me of that LBJ series with Richard Russell, or as Mansfield, I think, where LBJ is histrionic and leaning in and leaning out and doubled over. Joe Biden in that sequence is playing the LBJ role. What was it like to work with the two of them? I mean, one was ebullient and one was self contained.
- [30:04]
B
I love Joe Biden. He was another great subject to photograph because of the things you just said. And he was also kind of a close talker and was very energetic with his hands and his emotions. But he was just one of the most hardworking and sincere guys you'll ever meet in politics. I just think the world of him.
- [30:36]
A
So when he's president, you'll go back to the White House.
- [30:39]
B
I think I've, you know, I think eight years was enough.
- [30:44]
A
Talk a little bit about how you portray. I'm looking at it right now, a wonderful photograph of Donald Trump. The only reason, you know, it's Trump, apart from the caption, obviously, is the back of his head and a little bit of hair that you can tell is genuinely his. Tell me about that day. Donald Trump comes into the White House.
- [31:05]
B
Yeah, it was pretty surreal. You know, the election didn't go the way we wanted. It didn't go the way the vast majority of the American people expected. And yet people spoke and he was duly elected to be the next president, United States. The challenge in terms of my book was this is obviously a book that most people that buy it, purchase it are going to be Obama fans. And so I was debating whether to even include a picture of the incoming president. And I actually consulted a couple of my predecessors who had also done photo books. Eric Draper, who had done Bush's photo book, and David Kennerley, who had done Ford's. And in both instances, they had included a picture of the incoming president. So I felt that I needed to, too. Except I didn't go with the traditional photo. I went with one that was a little more subtle.
- [32:24]
A
Subtle, but also suggesting a kind of interloper in the Oval Office.
- [32:31]
B
No, the great thing about photography is that everybody looks at a photograph a different way.
- [32:39]
A
We could end it right there, actually. That's our show for this week. My thanks again to Pete Souza. His book is called An Intimate Portrait. We'll share all of the photos we mentioned on the show on our website. Just go to theatlantic.com interview. This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend, the executive producer of Atlantic podcast is Katherine Wells. If you like the show, rate it and share it with friends. Thanks very much for listening and we'll see you again soon.