The former secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize committee admitted in his forthcoming memoir that President Obama weighed not traveling to Oslo, Norway, to collect his Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
The Associated Press reported that Geir Lundestad, who retired from his post on the Norwegian Nobel Committee in 2014 after 25 years, confesses in his book Secretary of Peace that the award did not, as the panel anticipated, provide a positive boost for Obama during his first year in the White House.
"Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake," Lundestad writes in his memoir. "In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for."
At the time, critics said that Obama had not been in the White House long enough to warrant the prize. Obama was selected as the 2009 recipient for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," according to the press release announcing the prize. The committee particularly recognized the president for his "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons."
Lundestad reveals in the book, out Thursday, that members of Obama’s staff probed whether past honorees had ever declined to attend the ceremony to accept the award in Oslo, indicating that the president contemplated not attending.
"In the White House they quickly realized that they needed to travel to Oslo," Lundestad explains.
In an interview Wednesday, the former Nobel committee secretary said that he did not oppose the decision to give Obama the prize but admitted the committee "thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have this effect."
The revelations in Lundestad’s book represent a break with tradition, as Nobel officials do not typically publicly disclose the secretive committee’s proceedings.