The 'longest 40 minutes' of Obama's life

In an interview broadcast Sunday, President Obama compared the anxiety-provoking Osama bin Laden raid with the time his daughter Sasha contracted meningitis as an infant.

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last updated 8 January 2015

The video: CBS' Sunday night broadcast of 60 Minutes was dominated by an interview with President Obama, most of which focused on the May 1 killing of Osama bin Laden. (Watch clips below.) Obama said that before the commando raid, he'd estimated there was a 45 percent chance the U.S. had incorrectly identified bin Laden's location. So watching the operation unfold in real time was perhaps "the longest 40 minutes of my life." The president didn't lose any sleep over the al Qaeda leader's death, though. Anyone who thinks bin Laden "didn't deserve what he got needs to have their head examined," he said.

The reaction: The whole interview is "pretty dramatic," says Sam Thielman at Variety. And when Obama compared the emotional experience of watching the raid to the time he grappled with his daughter's infant meningitis scare, he "manages to come off as cuddly even when he's talking about sending two dozen battle-hardened megaspies... to shoot the boogeyman in the face." Indeed, Obama gave us a few new details in a story we can't get enough of, says Ken Tucker at Entertainment Weekly. But it wasn't exactly a hard-hitting interview. 60 Minutes is a great "safe haven" for big-time politicians to get their "message across with the maximum audience and the minimum of reportorial interference." Watch highlights from the interview: