Obama speechwriter’s memoir ‘Grace’ to come out in 2022 By HILLEL ITALIE February 2, 2021 NEW YORK (AP) — The White House speechwriter who helped President Barack Obama work on his response to the Charleston church massacre in June 2015 has a book deal.

1. Finally, after four years of waiting, we can start to answer that question by reading Barack Obama’s 768-page doorstop, A Promised Land, the first of a planned two-volume memoir for which the president received a $65 million advance, far eclipsing Bill Clinton’s.
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• Former President Barack Obama has written about how his administration developed a pandemic response strategy, in a memoir excerpt published by The New Yorker.
• In 2009 he pulled together an inter-agency team in response to the H1N1 swine flu that killed 12,469 Americans, he recalled.
• The approach to communication, preparedness and distribution of supplies was markedly different to President Donald Trump's coronavirus pandemic response.
• The playbook produced by the Obama administration in the swine flu outbreak went on to be ignored by the Trump administration, Politico reported.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Former President Barack Obama described how he developed a pandemic response strategy in his time in office — one that would go on to be ignored by the Trump administration during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

In an extract of his new memoir, 'A Promised Land,' published Monday by The New Yorker, Obama wrote about the playbook he developed when a new strain of H1N1 — better known as swine flu — threatened the US.

The virus would become a pandemic and go on to kill 12,469 Americans. It was a topic Obama was already familiar with, he wrote, since he worked on pandemic preparedness as a senator. 'What I knew scared the hell out of me,' he said.

Obama explained how the deadly outbreak hit the US in the Spring, just as he was grappling with what would become the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

'Within weeks, people in the United States were falling ill with the virus: one in Ohio, two in Kansas, eight in a single high school in New York City,' he wrote.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic in June 2009.

'It was too early to tell how deadly this new virus would be,' wrote the former president. 'But I wasn't interested in taking any chances.'

He described how he flew the new Health and Human Services Director, Kathleen Sebelius, into the Oval Office the same day she was confirmed. He also put together a team to assess how ready the US was for a worst-case scenario.

'The answer was that we weren't at all ready,' he wrote. Existing flu vaccines were mostly ineffective against swine flu, and there was little capacity to produce new ones, according to Obama.

'Then, we faced questions of how to distribute antiviral medicines, what guidelines hospitals used in treating cases of the flu, and even how we'd handle the possibility of closing schools and imposing quarantines if things got significantly worse,' he wrote.

He recalled being advised to let medical experts run the show.

'My instructions to the public-health team were simple: decisions would be made based on the best available science, and we were going to explain to the public each step of our response — including detailing what we did and didn't know,' he wrote. 'Over the course of the next six months, we did exactly that.'

The former president noted that the H1N1 strain did not turn out to be as deadly as feared, and that this was largely the reason the US was not overwhelmed by the virus.

Memoir Of Barack Obama

A very different response

Like the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed in response to the coronavirus, Obama wrote that he too created incentives for vaccine production.

But many of the actions Obama describes taking in the memoir are markedly different to the pandemic response of the Trump era.

Obama said his administration prioritized transparent communication. In contrast, President Donald Trump repeatedly downplayed the virus in public but acknowledged its danger to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

While the Trump administration left the sourcing of key medical supplies such as PPE to individual states — producing competition between them — medical supplies were 'pre-positioned' across regions, Obama wrote.

He said his team considered closing schools, but didn't opt for it in the end.

Obama wrote that it was this planning that 'would make all the difference' during the panic of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, which made limited inroads into the US before being stopped.

Obama's National Security Council produced a 70-page pandemic playbook from the experience, Politico reported.

It never became part of official White House policy, but addressed many of the questions faced by the Trump administration amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to the outlet.

However, the Trump administration ignored it. Obama officials held a pandemic training for incoming Trump officials in January 2017, but it was attended unenthusiastically, Politico reported.

'There were people who were there who said, 'This is really stupid and why do we need to be here,' an Obama source told Politico. One cabinet member, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, reportedly fell asleep.

Obama has also privately ripped into the Trump administration's response, telling former members of his administration it was an 'absolute chaotic disaster' in a recording obtained by Yahoo News in May.

Read the full extract here.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama on October 29, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. Scott Olson/Getty Images

Barack Obama 2020 Memoir

In a year that’s rife with newly-released books packed with political journalism and insider information about the catastrophic Trump presidency, it can be hard to get people to pay attention to yet another upcoming memoir. However, commanding attention has never been an issue for Barack and Michelle Obama. Michelle’s memoir Becoming has moved more than 8.1 million units since it was first released in 2018, and now, the New York Timesis reporting that former President Barack Obama’s new memoir, his third, will be published in November by Penguin Random House shortly after the general election. Pertinently, the memoir, entitled A Promised Land, apparently clocks in at 768 pages and is the first of two volumes.

This massive, epic novel-like length raises questions about whether Obama, already a prolific writer, employed the expertise of a ghostwriter to help flesh out the turbulent years between his political campaign in 2008 and the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. In a piece in the Atlantic from May of 2019, sources close to Obama said that he occasionally drops in conversation that he’s writing the book himself, whereas Michelle used a ghostwriter in order to finish Becoming. In the acknowledgements of Becoming, it does indeed state that a team of people had a hand in finishing the book, but unless the former president has changed course since, May, it appears A Promised Land will be all his own words.

Barack Memoir

But like his wife’s recent release, it seems to be certain that this latest memoir is going to be a huge hit. The New York Times reported that Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House, has already planned for a first printing of 3 million copies of the U.S. edition of the book; this amounts to so much production that some of it has been outsourced to Germany. From there, the books will be transported back to North America in 112 shipping containers. Despite the continual unraveling of America, the Obamas are still enjoying massive personal success.