The Discovery Channel last week aired an awesome documentary called “The President’s Gatekeepers” that focused on the men who have served as White House chief of staff, the most senior adviser to the president.
All 20 living alumni of the job sat down with the film’s makers to discuss their experiences.
Here are 10 things we learned:
1. The White House Chief of Staff is more powerful than the Vice President
Anyone who has ever watched an episode of The West Wing probably could have told you this, but hearing it from someone who has actually held both jobs gives it a little more credibility.
“The White House chief of staff has more authority and more power than the vice president,” Dick Cheney said. That’s saying a lot, considering Cheney is often called the most powerful Veep in U.S. history.
And wielding all of that power ain’t easy. “Being White House chief of staff was unquestionably the toughest job I ever had,” quipped Donald Rumsfeld, another guy who knows a thing or two about tough jobs (U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Secretary of Defense, U.S. Congressman, etc.).
The office weighs so heavily on its occupants that they don’t tend to last very long. The average tenure for a White House chief of staff is about a year and a half. Andy Card, Bush’s first chief, lasted the longest — five years.
2. There really is a list, and the chief of staff is on it
I suppose it’s reassuring that our national leaders have a plan for every doomsday scenario, but nobody wants to be the guy game-planning for nuclear holocaust.
In the event that the U.S. is pelted with hundreds of nukes, or an EMP blast knocks out all of our electricity, or the Chinese HALO drop into D.C. Red Dawn-style, there is a very short list of people who either get to go down to the President’s Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) or get on Marine 1 (the presidential helicopter) with the president. The chief of staff is on the list.
3. The “nuclear football” gets passed at high noon on inauguration day
The nuclear football is a 45-pound modified Zero Halliburton briefcase containing whatever James Bond-type apparatus the president uses to launch nuclear weapons. It travels with him everywhere he goes.
New presidents are inaugurated at noon on Jan. 20. At that exact moment, the nuclear football is transferred behind-the-scenes from one administration to the next.
“The passing of the football takes place at high noon,” Dick Cheney explained. “Nobody says a word.”
4. Bill Clinton had an insane temper
Before serving as Director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta was President Clinton’s White House chief of staff for about two and a half years.
Panetta was brought in to replace Mack McLarty, who apparently ran the joint like a frat house. As Clinton’s enforcer, Panetta ran a tight ship and oversaw some of the 42nd president’s biggest accomplishments.
But not every memory of his time in the White House is a positive one.
Panetta says Clinton’s fits of anger were so nuts that they were given a special name by the White House staff: “purple rages.”
[Side note: during Panetta’s tenure as chief of staff, Monica Lewinksy claims to have had nine “encounters” with the president.]
5. Reagan’s Chief of Staff Jim Baker is the gold standard
Before Jim A. Baker III was U.S. Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State, he was President Reagan’s chief of staff.
Baker was George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager when he was running against Reagan for the GOP nomination. Bush ultimately joined the Reagan ticket, and The Gipper was so impressed by Baker that he asked him to be his chief of staff after they defeated Carter in the general election. Reagan’s crew from California knew how to win the campaign, but Reagan said he needed Baker’s knowledge of Washington to help them govern.
Baker became Reagan’s closest adviser.
While being rolled into the hospital minutes after being shot, Reagan looked up at Baker and his deputy and asked, “Fellas, who’s minding the store?”
Baker convened a meeting in a hospital closet to discuss invoking the 25th amendment and transferring power to Vice President Bush. They decided against it, but Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig grabbed a mic at the White House and told the press he had constitutional authority to be in charge.
“Constitutionally you have the president, vice president, and secretary of state in that order,” Haig said. With Bush on a plane coming back from Texas, Haig said he was “in control here in the White House.”
Except he wasn’t.
According to that pesky document known as the U.S. Constitution, Haig was actually fifth in the line of succession, behind the president, vice president, speaker of the house and president pro tempore of the senate.
In reality, Baker was in charge, everyone knew it, and that’s how Reagan liked it.
“After the assassination attempt, President Reagan felt very viscerally that his life had been spared by God,” Baker said. “He had been spared for a reason, and that reason was to do God’s will.”
Being chief of staff for a man of Reagan’s caliber was “the most amazing thing that ever happened to me in my life,” Baker says now. His fellow chiefs of staff unanimously view him as the best man to ever hold the job.
6. Rumsfeld and Cheney have been running the show for decades
The Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney partnership began way back in the Nixon White House. After Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford stepped in and initially tried to make the White House run without a chief of staff. It didn’t work.
Ford then appointed Donald Rumsfeld, who Nixon called “ruthless,” chief of staff, and Dick Cheney, who was only 33 years old, became his deputy.
Cheney was only 12 years removed from sitting in a jail cell after being arrested for driving under the influence, but he went on to be Ford’s chief of staff 15 months later when Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defense for the first time.
The two were still working together 30 years later as the most powerful figures in the George W. Bush administration.
7. First Lady > Chief of Staff
Being chief of staff might make you the second most powerful person in the country, but you’re still only the third most powerful person in the White House. First ladies are running the show, and you better not forget it.
Barbara Bush said she never once called any of George H.W. Bush’s chiefs of staff. “If I had something to say, I said it to George Bush,” she said.
Usually that’s not a problem, but every now and then even a chief of staff can get a little too big for his britches.
Don Regan succeeded James Baker as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff in 1985 after serving as Treasury Secretary during Reagan’s first term. He lasted two years, then royally screwed up.
“He ended up getting fired by the president when he hung up the telephone on the first lady,” James Baker recalls.
Regan didn’t like being fired, so he leaked to the press that Nancy Reagan would occasionally consult an astrologer when considering the president’s travel schedule.
8. Bill Daley got right to making history on his first day
Bill Daley was Barack Obama’s second chief of staff. On his first day on the job, in his very first intelligence briefing, national security advisers told him and the president they were keeping a close eye on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Less than four months later, Navy Seals raided the compound and killed Osama Bin Laden.
9. Carter couldn’t even run the White House, much less the country
When Jimmy Carter became president, he insisted on being his own chief of staff. Rather than working in the Oval Office, he set up shop in a tiny office in the West Wing. He surrounded himself with a team of advisers, but said he didn’t trust anyone else to run the White House.
As with most other decisions Carter made while in office, it didn’t work.
Carter antagonized the legislative branch. He even had a veto overturned by his own party. He came under attack from fellow Democrats who pointed out how poorly the White House was being run. Then OPEC jacked up oil prices over 100% and inflation spun completely out of control. Carter even had a lower approval rating than Nixon did at rock bottom.
He finally relented and hired a chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan. Unsurprisingly, Jordan was a poor choice, even by Carter’s own admission.
Things never really improved, and the country voted out the Georgia peanut farmer the first chance they got.
10. The State Department almost screwed up history
President Ronald Reagan was in Germany on June 12, 1987 to deliver a speech at the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall.
“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace,” Reagan’s prepared remarks read.
The U.S. State Department was cool with that. But then Reagan kept going.
“There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace,” Reagan’s prepared speech continued. “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
The State Department wasn’t on board with that. They wanted him to remove all that “tear down this wall” business.
Reagan was conflicted.
“It’s going to drive the state department boys crazy, but I’m going to leave in the line,” he finally told his chief of staff on the car ride over to the speech.
Good call, sir.
Follow Cliff on Twitter @Cliff_Sims
