Barack Obama’s third memoir weighs in at 751 pages of text. The man likes to talk. The book sounds like him. You don’t wonder, as you’re reading, whether this is the product of a ghostwriter. And for fans and historians, there is presumably much more to come, as this volume takes us only up to May 2011.

Obama aimed to help readers understand what it’s actually like to be president, and in that, he succeeded pretty well. He waxes lyrical about the beauty of the Rose Garden (and the dedication of its gardeners), he raises an eyebrow at the lavish gifts some foreign leaders (unfamiliar with American law) think they can offer. He relates that the president travels with his own ambulance, helicopters, and SUVs. Here’s his account of his first night as commander in chief, surveying his surroundings: “For a moment I just stood there, looking up and down the enormous central hall, not yet certain of where each of the many doors led.”

The book closes with one of President Obama’s finest moments — the raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, that took out Osama bin Laden. His storytelling skills, quick character sketches, and evaluation of the possible risks are all on display. Describing Admiral Bill McRaven, Obama writes:

If I’d had to pick one person to represent everything right about our military, Bill McRaven might have been that person. In his mid-fifties, with a friendly, open face, a deadpan sense of humor, and a plainspoken, can-do demeanor, he re­minded me of a sandy-haired Tom Hanks — if Tom Hanks had been a career Navy SEAL. . . .
He had personally commanded or carried out more than a thousand special ops.

It doesn’t hurt that the account of Osama bin Laden’s end is inherently interesting, with the tension built in. Obama does it justice, right down to the details of the operation. His awe at the skill and professionalism of our armed forces, along with gratitude for their heroism, shines through.

During his presidency, many on the right, myself included, cast doubt on Obama’s patriotism, which, in retrospect, was unfair. Again and again in this memoir, he expresses his love for the country — and not just because it elevated him. He hails the “symbolic power of a country built upon the ideals of freedom,” and recalls being a boy of seven or eight living in Indonesia,

sitting on the cool floor tiles of our house, . . . proudly showing my friends a picture book of Honolulu with its highrises and city lights and wide, paved roads. I would never forget the wonder in their faces as I answered their questions about life in America, explaining how everybody got to go to school with plenty of books, and there were no beggars because most everyone had a job and enough to eat.

Obama is not and never was the secret-Muslim/pacifist/Marxist/fanatic of right-wing fever dreams. On economics, he’s a liberal Democrat, which means he credits the government as much as or more than private entrepreneurship for economic progress. He is cool toward businessmen, bankers, and investors, whom he tends to characterize as self-interested rather than public-spirited. On the other hand, he is no bomb-thrower. Justifying his choice not to prosecute bankers who contributed to the financial crisis or to use the occasion of the financial meltdown to alter our capitalist system, he explains:

Someone with a more revolutionary soul might respond that [the consequences] would have been worth it, that you have to break eggs to make an omelet. But as willing as I had always been to disrupt my own life in pursuit of an idea, I wasn’t willing to take the same risks with the well-being of millions of people.

Fairness requires Obama’s critics to reconsider their hysterical overreactions to his candidacy and presidency. Though he soft-pedals it in this memoir, it seems clear that racism played a bigger role in those reactions than was evident to some of us at the time. It’s also fair to note that Obama too could profit from some reflection about his tone. When it comes to Republicans or others who differ with him, Obama has a tendency to caricature the other side; to lapse into disdain, and sometimes mockery. His discussion of the Dodd-Frank bill is typical. After a too-glib description of what had gone wrong with America’s financial system — a narrative that fails to account for the role of poorly de­signed government incentives — he concludes that Republicans opposed his reform as “another step toward socialism.” While some may have made such lazy arguments, others had substantive objections to the legislation, including its lack of legislative oversight and what many saw as unconstitutional limits on the president’s authority to remove the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency established by the law. In fact, in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the removal section of the law did violate the Consti­tution. Obama doesn’t grapple with the best arguments from the other side, preferring to snipe at the worst.

In a particularly unbecoming passage, Obama suggests that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell were hardly distinguishable from Donald Trump. “They, too, understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true. They didn’t have to actually believe that I was bankrupting the country or that Obama­care promoted euthanasia. In fact, the only difference between Trump’s style of politics and theirs was Trump’s lack of inhibition.”

That is a gross overstatement. Trump is in a category all his own. Boehner and McConnell lie no more or less than other ordinary politicians — the way Obama himself stretched the truth.

Along the same lines, the book is marred by Obama’s gratuitous swipes at his predecessor. George W. Bush has been off the national stage for twelve years and has never breathed a word of criticism of his successor. A little corresponding graciousness would be fitting. Yet Obama cannot resist a number of digs. “For all their tough talk,” he writes, “Bush administration hawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld had been surprisingly bad at backing up their rhetoric with coherent, effective strategies.” He then quotes aide Denis McDonough: “Open any White House drawer and you’ll find another turd sandwich.” A presidential trip to Latin America is characterized as an effort to repair America’s image: “The Iraq War, as well as the Bush administration’s drug interdiction and Cuba policies, hadn’t played well there.” He claims that “we also made a point of visiting parts of the world that had been neglected by the Bush administration, with its all-consuming focus on terrorism and the Middle East.” Obama spares not a word for Bush’s huge PEPFAR initiative, an AIDS-treatment, -prevention, and -research program for Africa that rock star and activist Bono, among others, credited with saving 11 million lives.

In a book that benefited from so many fact-checkers, documentary sources, and editors, it’s surprising to find some glaring factual errors. Perhaps when you’re the ex-president, they don’t correct you? In his overview of Israel’s history, for example, Obama writes that “the conflict . . . had been an open sore on the region for almost a century dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British, who were then occupying Palestine, committed to create a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs.”

Great Britain was not an “occupying” power in the Middle East in 1917. The region was still under Ottoman rule. Nor is it true, as Obama writes, that “over the next 20 years or so, Zionist leaders mobilized a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine and organized highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements.” Jews had lived in Jerusalem and the surrounding area continuously since ancient times, and the modern Zionist movement and immigration to Palestine began in the 1880s, not in the 20th century (though the rise of Nazism in the 1930s did provide another spur to immigration). Later, Obama writes that the Palestinian Libera­tion Organization arose out of Arab frustration with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. But the PLO was founded in 1964, three years before the Six-Day War that gave Israel control of the territories. Since Obama began from a false reading of history, it’s little wonder that Israelis were wary of his intentions.

Obama muses often about whether his efforts were commensurate with his lofty goals. He’s honest enough to acknowledge that he did permit expectations to waft unrealistically. “It felt sometimes as if I’d been caught in a tide, carried along by the current of other people’s expectations.” But the book would have been stronger if he’d limited his repetitive reflections. He’s an interesting guy, but not as interesting as he seems to think. It’s one thing to offer an inside look at the family quarters, but did we need a description of his doodles? About attending a long series of meetings on Afghanistan, he writes:

I felt the weight of the office more than at any time since I’d been sworn in. I tried not to let it show, keeping my expressions neutral as I asked questions, took notes, and occasionally doodled on the margin of the pad the staff had set out before me (abstract patterns, mostly, sometimes people’s faces or beach scenes — a seagull flying over a palm tree and ocean waves).

Despite his weakness for prolixity and occasional self-absorption, Obama can be thoughtful and open-minded, and his invitation to the reader to share his doubts is refreshing. He was the target of much misplaced vitriol. If we’re going to dig ourselves out of the awful polarization vortex we currently inhabit, reconsidering Obama could be a good place to start. And he could help by acknowledging, and transcending, his own haughty dismissal of his opposition.