American History Hit - The White House Chief of Staff

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

While the President of the United States is often seen as the most powerful person in the world, the vastness of the Federal government is too much for just one person to oversee. The president needs someone to control events, run the White House, respond to challenges and handle emergencies. That person is the Chief of Staff. Chris Whipple, author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, tells Don how the Chiefs of Staff have impacted the 8 most recent presidents.Warning: There is explicit language in this episode.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you’d like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. On the morning of September 11, 2001, before it became the most iconic date in modern world history, President George W. Bush was making an appearance at Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida,

promoting his signature educational reform program No Child Left Behind. In the minutes leading up to the president's arrival at the school, his staff learned that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. While this was alarming news, rumor had it, it was a small plane, and after checking in with the White House, the president proceeded with his event. But 18 minutes later, a second plane struck. And in now legendary video, a man leans into the president's ear and whispers the fateful news. America is under attack. That man was the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., who, at the time of the 9-11

attacks had served for less than a year in the still young Bush presidency. But his job was about to be changed, suddenly, inexorably, as his boss pivoted to put the nation on a war footing and forever alter the course of global events. So everyone, I'm Don Wildman. Welcome to American History Hip. Nice of you to join us. Every four years in this country, a U.S. president is elected or reelected. It's an all-consuming affair that ultimately defines an era of American history, and potentially the world, the office of the American presidency being that powerful and that influential. And yet, of course, this power and influence is as much a result of management as it is of any one president's talents or acumen.

The vastness of the federal government is too much for any one human being to handle alone. Indeed, so are day-to-day operations of the White House, never mind pursuing its greater goals and policy objectives. Someone needs to control the events. Respond to challenges, handle emergencies, skipper the ship. In the modern era of the American presidency, that job belongs to the White House chief of staff. This is a territory of an important book that came out just a few years ago called The Gatekeepers that charts the histories of eight presidencies in terms of their chiefs of staff. And we're privileged to have the author of this book, Chris Whipple, with us today. Hello, sir. Welcome to American History of it.

Good to be with you. Chris, you cover eight presidencies, so many presidencies, so little time. From Nixon to Obama, eight presidents, 24 chiefs of staff. Is that rate of turnover inevitable? Well, yeah, it is, as we've learned over the years, Donald Trump had four White House chiefs of staff, although arguably they never functioned as White House chiefs during his one-term presidency. Barack Obama had four, five, if you count one, de facto chief. So it's a job that is absolutely relentless, 24-7. You cannot really function effectively for more than a couple of years in that job. and the average tenure is 18 months. That's how relentless and taxing it is. The general theme of the book is that any presidency will rise or fall,

depending, of course, on how events are managed. That's how any organization succeeds or fails. But in the case of the presidency, it's so much about people and egos, constantly the best and the brightest in one room packed together, and events that are totally unpredictable. And somehow one person has to field all this, and it's not the president. Yeah, it's hard to overstate. the importance of the White House Chief of Staff. Dick Cheney, who ought to know, famously told me in the

gatekeepers that the White House Chief of Staff has more power than the Vice President. That's true, except when Dick Cheney was Vice President. There would have been no Reagan Revolution without James A. Baker the Third, his quintessential chief of staff who made all the difference. And arguably, Bill Clinton might have been a one-term president if Leon Panetta hadn't come in after about 18 months as his White House chief, his second chief, and turned that White House around. So that's how significant the job is. Bad things can happen when presidents switch White House Chiefs of Staff in midstream, and all you need to do is look at the most disastrous job swap in American history. That was when Jim Baker, the aforementioned quintessential chief for Ronald Reagan, swap jobs with Don Regan,

the Treasury Secretary. It was no coincidence, in my view, that only a few months later, the Iran-Contra scandal was born. That's the kind of thing that a chief of staff like Jim Baker would have driven a stake through the moment he saw it. But on Don Reagan's watch, it was alive and well. Chris, the chief of staff is equal parts, prime minister, human resources manager, lawyer, psychologist, Lord High Existner, and any one of these guys by virtue of their personality, really, never mind their skill set, fits into those categories. Yeah, you know, the White House Chief of Staff is many things. I mean, he's the president's most important confidant. He's famously the gatekeeper who gives the president time and space to think. He's in charge of the administration's communication, making sure. everybody is on the same page every day. But most importantly, the White House chief is in charge of executing the president's agenda and telling him what he doesn't want to hear. And that last part is

the most important responsibility of any chief of staff. And presidents who have chiefs who can tell them hard truths tend to do well. And those who don't suffer the consequences. In my book, Harry Truman's really the first modern president. He renovates the White House for one thing. But Eisenhower is the first to use a chief of staff per se. This was based on his military years as a general, I suppose, staff of officers and so forth. Yeah, you know, Harry Truman had an aide named John Steelman, who called himself White House Chief of Staff. But I really think it began with Eisenhower. Sherman Adams was his famously gruff, tough White House Chief of Staff. They called him the abominable no man because he had to use that word a hell of a lot. There was a joke back during those years,

during the Eisenhower administration that went like this, wouldn't it be terrible if Eisenhower died and Nixon became president? And the response was, what happens if Sherman Adams dies and Eisenhower becomes president? So he was the first to have that kind of power. But of course, the guy who really created the template for the modern empowered White House chief of staff was H.R. Bob Holdeman under Richard Nixon. It's, as you say, a thankless position in so many ways. You're almost bound to fail, it seems to cleave down the seam of presidents who want to manage and those who are willing to be managed. The simple reality is there's going to be as many failures as there are successes. For me, the beauty of your book, and let's talk about how it's organized, it basically is taking

us through groupings of chiefs of staff under each presidency. And as I said before, about eight presidencies are covered in the book. The beauty of it is as much its analysis of the various chiefs of staff and their effectiveness as it is a rundown of these great political events of the past 50 I mean, it's a buffet of my life, for me, being a 60-year-old guy, it goes back to this time. And man, you get a sense of what a mill we've all been through from the 60s onwards. It's incredible. And here are these people managing these events. It's astonishing, really.

Well, thanks. I like to think it's a political thriller. It takes you behind closed doors and shows you decisions that we all remember very well, but perhaps never really understood how they came about. because, again, I really do think that White House Chiefs of Staff make the difference between success and failure for every presidency. I can give you a couple of examples, very different presidents who never understood the importance of a White House chief and paid the price. Jimmy Carter was arguably the most intelligent president of the 20th century. He was trained

as a nuclear physicist. He had an amazing ability to absorb information and synthesize it and turn it into policy. He wasn't so good at politics. He never understood that he needed an empowered White House chief of staff to make his White House execute his agenda. And it wasn't until the last year of his presidency that he finally got it. And he appointed an excellent, really smart chief named Jack Watson. Prior to that, Ham Jordan was his hapless, really incompetent White House chief of staff. So you have Carter on the one hand. And then, of course, the most recent example of somebody who just was clueless about this is Donald Trump. Donald Trump never understood that you need a White House chief to tell you what you don't want to hear. We all know that by now. And he never

understood that you need to have a White House chief to execute your agenda. The result was four years of absolute chaos and his inability to govern. And he never understood the difference between campaigning and governing, which a good chief of staff might have helped him with. So presidents have often paid the price. Let's go back to H.R. Haldeman. I think he, as you say, in some ways, a consummate gatekeeper. You cite a quote from the Newsweek article there. Harry Robbins-Holdeman is Richard Nixon's son of a bitch glowering out at the world under a crew cut that would flatter a drill instructor with a gaze that would freeze Medusa. Fantastic, quote. And I remember that cover as a kid. I remember that Newsweek cover when Newsweek really mattered in those days. But that was the image he

wanted to project because he was an advertising guy, wasn't he? Yeah, that's the irony here. And of course, those were the good old days when Newsweek and Time had some terrific writers. But the irony about H.R. Holdeman is that he obviously became the poster boy for the biggest political scandal in American history up to that time, the Watergate scandal. And yet, the irony is that Holderman really created the template for the modern, empowered White House Chief of Staff. And it's a template that presidents have followed ever since or paid the price when they haven't. If you talk to all the living White House Chiefs of Staff, as I have, with the exception of Mark Meadows and John Kelly, they will tell you to a person that Holderman really wrote the book on how to be a chief of staff.

He thought obsessively about how the White House ought to function. Of course, he was Nixon's quote unquote plup perfect son of a bitch. And you don't have to be to be a good chief. In fact, that's actually a mistake. But Haldeman created that model that presidents have followed more or less successfully since. There's a pit bull quality to this, especially Haldeman guy, as in guarding the president from undue access and so forth. But they're also really responsible for guiding policy, for really shepherding, you know, major legislative efforts and so forth. And Nixon White House is often forgotten. They got a lot done. EPA being one of those things.

They did. They did get a lot done. And of course, there was the opening to China and other accomplishments as well. But of course, it all came crashing down on the shoals of the Watergate scandal. And that was a time when Haldeman failed to do the most important thing a chief does, which is tell the president hard truths. Haldeman couldn't bring himself to do that. And perhaps because Nixon was so mired in that scandal and so involved from the get-go that there was no salvaging that situation. But I mentioned the PluPerfect son of a bitch, the quote from Nixon. The truth is that Chiefs of Staff since Holdeman have shown that that's really a fallacy. In fact, the best White House chiefs have been people with a very even temperament who treat

the staff with respect and engender loyalty. And Leon Panetta, was certainly one of those. Ron Clayne, until very recently, Joe Biden's White House Chief of Staff is also a great example of somebody who proves that you don't have to be a son of a bitch to be a terrific chief. It was surprising to me that Haldeman did not know about the plumbers. He did not know about a lot of what was going on here. Well, I think a lot of this was surprising to Haldeman when the scandal really erupted in full. And others, including Chuck Colson, the president's other aides, were up to their eyeballs in it. And Haldeman not so much until the cover-up.

But Haldeman was certainly the orchestrator of the cover-up, and as a result, he wound up in prison. He goes the distance with him, making his boss happy, all the way to jail. I thought we moved to Ford's White House. We'd see more of a reflection of what Nixon was with his cabinet holdovers, and a lot of that White House came with him, but it was quite the opposite from a management standpoint. Mostly because Nixon resigns,

and there's no traditional transition, really, you have Al Haig. This guy was such a big part of life back then, and a real mercurial fellow. He's the acting chief of staff. And Ford is a guy who wants a kind of open-door policy like he had in Congress. It doesn't work.

You call it a spokes of the wheel. Yeah, it was a complete disaster. What happened was that Jerry Ford was thrust into the presidency. Famously, he was the accidental president, suddenly having to get up to speed very quickly. Al Haig, Nixon's final chief of staff, was still there. Ford had this notion that he could have a White House based on this model called the Spokes of the Wheel, meaning with Ford at the center and eight or nine senior

aides coming and going willy-nilly whenever they felt like it, having equal access to the president, well, it was just a complete fiasco from the beginning. And Ford, within about a month, felt overwhelmed. Nobody was in charge. He felt that he was governing by fire hose. So he brought in his old friend, a young guy named Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld had been ambassador to NATO. He came in, said, I'll do it, but only if I'm empowered, forget about spokes of the wheel. I'm going to be a gatekeeper, and I'm going to organize this place. And Ford gave him that authority. And he ran a tight ship. He was succeeded by a kid named Dick Cheney, who was 34 years old. When Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney became Ford's chief of staff.

And at that point, the notion of the spokes of the wheel had become such a joke. within the White House that when Ford lost to Jimmy Carter and Cheney was in the White House for his last day, the staff gave him a present. And it was a mangled bicycle wheel with every spoke broken, which Cheney thought was hilarious. And instead of taking it home and putting in the garage, he left it on his desk and wrote a note to his successor, Hamilton, Jordan. And the note read, dear Hamilton, beware the spokes of the wheel, Dick Cheney. Interesting. This is the first time I ever heard that phrase reading your book.

I had not read this book when I should have, which is when it came out in 2017, and I kicked myself because certainly going through all the Trump years and all the rest of it, it gives that perspective over what really makes an effective White House. We're going to get onto the current White House pretty soon here. But you spent a lot of time with James Baker in this book. He in so many ways hits the right note. Why is that? Yeah, James A. Baker the third, I really consider the gold standard as White House chief, along with Leon Panetta.

He's right up there in his company as the best. Here's the thing about the great White House chiefs. I think it's a rare skill set. You have to have White House experience, knowledge of Capitol Hill, deep political savvy, a world-class temperament, and maybe most important of all, a good working relationship with the boss. James A. Baker the 3rd had all of those attributes. So did Leon Panetta, and so did Ron Clayne, whom I write about in my new book, The Fight of His Life, inside Joe Biden's White House. But Baker, he was a pragmatist. He was not an ideologue. He was interested in getting things done. And very early on, just to give you an example, Ronald Reagan was hell bent on tackling Social Security as the first thing he did as president. Jim Baker sat him down as only a White House chief. can and said, Mr. President, Social Security is a third rail of American politics. You touch it. You'll be electrocuted. Let's save that for the second term. And Reagan went on, moved on to focus on the economy, and the rest is history. So that's the kind of thing Jim Baker could do. He could walk into the

Oval Office, close the door and tell the president hard truths. That's something Panetta could do with Bill Clinton. And I think it's something Ron Klein could do with Joe Biden, as I write about in my new book. I mean, Reagan was an actor. He could take direction. People who don't do that for a living don't understand what a interesting dynamic that is. To many people, it just sounds like a follower, but it's not. It's a really interesting collaborative process that is kind of a beautiful thing. So when you have that kind of relationship, as Baker had with Reagan, you're seeing Reagan's willingness to collaborate. It's that unique quality that defined Reagan's presidency in many ways. And Reagan, of course, really was an actor, as we know, but he as president functioned like an actor.

He needed his script. As long as you showed him his mark, he would hit it. And so to some extent, Reagan was the actor and Jim Baker was the director. Of course, it was a troika. Jim Baker was the chief of staff. Ed Meese was his closest presidential counselor. And Michael Deaver was the impresario who managed his appearances. But here's the important thing. Baker was first among equals, and everyone understood that. And that's important in every White House. And we see how effective he really was when, as you mentioned, it switches to Donald Reagan. So Don Reagan is fascinating to me because I hadn't spent much time thinking about him in life, incredibly accomplished man, and totally wrong for the job, which is so fascinating. Completely wrong. And in part, this is one of Jim Baker's theories about White House chiefs, which I find persuasive. And that is. as he said, people who have been principles, people who have been the chairman of Merrill Lynch,

as Don Reagan had been, they have a hard time understanding the staff part of the title, chief of staff. You are chief, but you are also staff. Don Reagan was imperial. He was arrogant. He thought he knew everything. He considered himself the president and considered Reagan, the retired chairman of the board. He was completely wrong. for the job, he was so arrogant that he liked to be announced before he walked into a room. Ladies and gentlemen, the White House Chief of Staff. It was just preposterous, and he met his untimely end when he hung up the phone on Nancy Reagan. That's rule number one for every White House Chief of Staff. Do not hang up on the First Lady. Regan didn't understand this,

and he was gone about a week later. It's plausible to consider that should a man like James Baker have been in the office and not Don Regan, we could have avoided the entire Iran-Contra debacle. Fair? I believe that's true. I've talked to Jim Baker about it. And I think that when that disastrous job swap took place, Don Reagan came in and he just didn't have any of Baker's political savvy. And when the Iran-Contra-Kakamemi scheme came bubbling up from the White House basement from the

NSC, Reagan was just dumb enough to allow it to proceed. Jim Baker told me that he would have killed it in a heartbeat. And I believe that's true. At that point, Baker was at Treasury and it wasn't in his wheelhouse. And it nearly brought down the Reagan presidency, as we know. I mean, Reagan became very close to being impeached. That's again a story that involves another chief of staff, Ken Doberstein, who became Reagan's fourth chief of staff. When Doberstein got the job, he sat Reagan down and said, look, you really need to give a speech.

and in effect, apologize for Iran-Contra. And it wasn't easy bringing Reagan around, and Doberstein had to bring in Stu Spencer, his old campaign manager, to talk the president into it. But Reagan ultimately gave that speech, which was a kind of mea culpa, and it was smooth sailing ever after.

I'll be back with more from Chris Whipple after this short break. On Gone Medieval from History Head, we set out to solve the biggest mysteries of the Middle Ages. So many of these travelers who went out looking for press to John, what did they think they? were hearing. We explore cutting-edge research. Genetic signatures found in present-day Jewish

population was shared by the genetic ancestries we found. From everyday life to dynasty-shattering events. It's a time when all the major Viking raids have started, which as Christians they think of as vengeance from heaven. And reveal the answers to centuries-old riddles. I stand up straight in a bed, I'm hairy at my base and I make the ladies cry. The solution is an onion. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. And I'm Matt Lewis. Tuesday on Saturday, we'll explore some of the biggest stories, the greatest mysteries, and latest research. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We need to talk about Jimmy Carter. The poor man is not with us many days longer. That presidency is an irony, because you have a man coming off of the mess that is the Watergate scandal, the pardoning of Nixon. Now the slate is clean. We're going to come down with this common man from the South who's going to help us back to being normal Americans again. And he ends up kind of botching it because he's such a control freak in a way.

I mean, he's brilliant beyond belief and thinks that by opening up the doors and allowing people, this sort of wheels of spoke, he just sort of repeats Ford's early mistake over again, doesn't he? Yeah, he thought he was smart enough to run the White House on his own and took him a long time to learn the hard way that he really couldn't. And, of course, first he didn't have a chief of staff, didn't think he needed one. Ham Jordan was sort of the brilliant political strategist, the one who more than anyone else really got Jimmy Carter elected. He wrote a famous memo about how to win the presidency. But he was utterly unsuited to be chief of staff. And Carter made him chief of staff a couple of years in, and it was a disaster.

And it wasn't until the final year of his presidency that Carter realized that he needed a good manager. And he found that person in the form of Jack Watson, who was a really brilliant lawyer and manager, who ran a tight show. for the last year of the Carter presidency, but it was too late to save that presidency. Have modern presidents, and I'm speaking of Obama, Biden now, have they learned these lessons finally? I mean, we have your book. We have a team of rivals and all these books that talk about the dynamics of the cabinet, et cetera, and the necessary chief of staff. Has this lesson finally been learned? Well, yes and no. Trump is the classic example of a lesson unlearned. Trump is not a reader. Trump has no historical knowledge or interest in American political history. So that was no surprise. He thought he could run the White House like the Trump organization with people coming and going and it was a disaster. But other presidents have learned. And I think Joe Biden is a perfect example of somebody who has been around for a long time. He's seen the great chiefs of staff come and go. He's seen the not so great ones. And I think he understood exactly what was needed and found that person in the form of Ron Klan. And

Plain really had all of those qualities I referred to earlier. And most importantly, I think he had that 36-year relationship with the boss. What that kind of relationship enables a chief to do is to tell him what he doesn't want to hear. And a classic example of that was the November 2020 midterms. You may recall that everybody thought that Joe Biden should be talking about inflation. That was the number one issue. Biden wanted to go everywhere and talk about everything. He wanted to brag about all of his accomplishments.

Ron Clayne sat him down as only a White House chief can do and said, Mr. President, you're going to go to the states where we think you can make a positive difference and only those states. And you're going to talk about women's reproductive rights and the threat to democracy from MAGA. Well, Joe Biden followed that script. And the rest is history, as we know, because the Democrats defied all expectations in the 2022 elections. So that's an example of the kind of difference a politically savvy chief of staff can make. Did Biden serve as vice president in order to be president? I mean, that really was the

plan, right? Well, for every four years of his life, Joe Biden has either thought about running for president or run for president. He's always wanted to be president. And that, of course, is one of the reasons why I say that he's running, almost certainly running in 2024. This is always a been something he wanted. And presidents do not give up power voluntarily very often. The last time it happened was Lyndon Johnson in 1968. So Biden is no exception. And I think he also feels that he has unfinished business. So it's fair to say that his time in the Obama White House, the time as vice president, was this sort of, I mean, he must have been sitting back and watching and taking notes. And in Obama's time, he has four different chiefs of staff to watch and learn from. How much of those lessons did he

take into his presidency? Well, I think he certainly observed Obama's White House chiefs very closely. I mean, first there was Rahm Emanuel, the hard charging taskmaster. He was followed by Bill Daly, who was not so successful, who was followed by Jack Liu, the former Treasury Secretary, and then finally Dennis McDonough for Obama's second term. So he certainly observed those guys, But Panetta's been around for so long that he's seen them all. He saw Jim Baker. He saw Leon Panetta. He's observed this for a long time. And I think he took those lessons to heart. Which I guess is the story of any successful person, the ability to incorporate what you've learned and so forth. But to be a president is this amazing ego trip. It's an insane job. And so you must be tempted being the kind of character that is to wipe the slate clean and think, oh, I can do. this differently than everybody else can. The difference is those who learn from the past versus not. Yeah, there's no question about it. Every president comes into office full of eubris, thinking he's the smartest person in the room. But I think most of them learn sometimes the hard way

that you cannot govern effectively without empowering a White House chief of staff as first among equals to execute your agenda and tell you hard truths. It's just a lesson that's been learned repeatedly since the Nixon era. And I think so far the evidence suggests that Biden learned that lesson. Why so many men? I mean, why no women? It's really long, long overdue. I mean, a woman really should have been Chief of Staff long before now. There was one candidate during the Obama years, Nancy Ann DeParl, who almost became Chief of Staff. It's going to happen sooner or later. And interestingly, when Ron Claim told me he was thinking about resigning. This was nine months into Joe Biden's That's how taxing and exhausting this job is.

He said he thought Joe Biden might choose a woman as his second chief. Well, that didn't happen. He wound up choosing Jeff Zyitz. The book was reissued in 2018 with a chapter about Trump and Rince Priebus. What did we not see about that guy that you learned about? Was he trying harder than we thought? Well, for openers, I'll never forget going to see Rides Prebus for the first time we met at a restaurant. really hadn't done any interviews up to that time.

And the first thing he said to me, and of course, that was all off the record at that point, was, Chris, take everything you've heard and multiply it by 50. Wow. He wanted me to know that it was worse than I could possibly imagine inside the Trump White House. And, of course, Oceans of Inc have been written about Trump's final days. So now we know. But Wright's Prebus knew from the get-go that it was Mission Impossible. I'm not sure why he took the job, but maybe that's a job that hardly anyone can resist when it's offered.

Brebus suffered from the same delusion that every other Trump chief has probably had, which is that the job would somehow change the man. That never happened. Half of America felt that way, too. Before we get on to Joe Biden, I just want to talk about the epilogue of the book. I mean, as it said, it was written in 2016. What a more innocent time. I mean, Trump had not yet arrived in the White House. There had been no Russian meddling, no impeachments, January 6th.

I mean, God, it's amazing what happened over that period of time. And you write, hopefully, kind of in the spirit of Ronald Reagan, where a decent actor has a chance of being a great president if he has the likes of a James Baker running the office. The ineffectiveness of Trump's first two years when he had both houses of Congress, that blame sits with Trump or previous, do you think? It's hits with Trump, ultimately, because Trump, of course, had no intention of empowering a White House chief of staff, and he had absolutely no ability to govern whatsoever. I mean, he never understood the difference between campaigning and governing. I wrote in the epilogue, if Donald Trump wants to have any chance of governing effectively, he will stop listening to the conspiracy theorists, and he'll empower a White House chief of staff

and take his advice. That never happened. And it ultimately culminated in a chief of staff named Mark Meadows. And there used to be stiff competition for the title of worst chief of staff in modern history. Don Reagan was a contender. Ham Jordan was a contender. But that title is owned lock, stock, and barrel by Mark Meadows. He's left them all in the dust. He's the chief of staff that Trump always wanted but never could find until the end. A complete sycophants. I described MetaSews. He's left them all in the dust. He's the chief of staff that Trump always wanted, but never could find until the end. a complete sycophant. I described Meadows as not so much a chief of staff as a glad-handing matri-D. There was no presidential command, no matter how sketchy or illegal, that Meadows wouldn't happily carry out. So he owns the title. So the new book, Joe Biden, The Fight of His Life, What's the Fight? Why That in the Title? Well, I think you could describe Joe Biden's entire life as a fight against adversity, tragedy, bad luck.

He lost his wife and infant daughter in a car crash. He lost his son to a brain tumor. He lost two presidential campaigns. His father always said, get up. And he did. And he ultimately finally won the presidency, facing the most daunting challenges really since FDR's presidency, only then to be confronted by a Russian tyrant invading a democracy in the heart of Europe,

thereby threatening Western democracy and raising, the prospect of nuclear war, that, I argue, is the fight of Joe Biden's life. I think he sees himself as the carryover or the link to a old style of governing, you know, a traditional style of governing in the White House and hoping to bring that back and sort of reprofessionalize the whole business. Well, he certainly wanted to restore the soul of America, as he put it, and some normalcy after the Trump chaos. I really see his presidency as a political thriller in three acts. The first act is the unbelievably fraught transition from Trump to Biden, which of course

was the bloodiest since the Civil War and almost didn't happen. And I have the untold story in my book about just how close that transition came to not happening and how it depended on one obscure Trump staffer, a deputy White House chief who kept the wheels of the transition turning against all odds. The second act of the Biden presidency I really see as the first year, which we're going to was overshadowed by the debacle of the bungled evacuation from Afghanistan, which triggered a slow decline in Biden's approval rating. And there was real question as to whether this would be a failed presidency during that first year when he couldn't get the buildback better bill passed or any of his major legislation. And then I think the third act began on February 24,

2012 when Putin invaded Ukraine, Joe Biden rose to meet that moment in a way that I think almost no one else could have. He had trained his whole life and career for that moment. He rallied NATO and the West in a way that I'm not sure anybody else could have done as effectively. And there followed a period of real legislative success at home, bipartisan legislation that nobody thought he could pass. and then the Inflation Reduction Act, and then, of course, defying the expectations in the 2022 midterms. People forget that he was Senate Foreign Relations. You know, I remember watching him on the news.

And he was always that guy that would be on talking about things. I thought, oh, that guy's going to be president someday. But that's why he had such connections to fall back to in this crisis. Yeah, well, he was, again, I think uniquely prepared to face that threat from Putin. The walk-up to the war was full of dramatic moments that haven't been written about before, including a meeting at the Munich Security Conference where Vice President Harris met privately with Zelensky, who at that time was still skeptical that the invasion was going to happen. It was the eve of the invasion. He wasn't buying it. She sat him down and said, look, not only are the Russians coming for

Ukraine, they're coming for you and your wife and your family. And he was still skeptical. and when he left, Harris turned to one of her aides and said, I wonder if that's the last time we see him alive. Wow. There was a lot of drama in the walk up to the invasion, but it was the CIA's finest hour. The CIA's had a lot of really bad hours as well, as we know in our history. But this was one of its finest. I think right up there with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, they had Vladimir Putin dead to rights. They had his war plan.

Bill Burns was the CIA director, was able to meet with Zalien. Zelensky and brief him on exactly what the plan was to encircle Keeve. And as a result, Zelensky was on a front foot and they turned the Russians back. How much has the chief of staff had to do with this success of his? Well, I think the chief of staff has a lot to do with it. And I think that Clayne, again, had very good relationship with Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor and with the NSC and with Tony Blinken. And that's important because to have that kind of seamless response to a crisis, you all need to be on the same page. How do you write a book in the middle of a presidency?

Everything's moving so fast. My first book, The Gatekeepers, the White House chiefs, and my second book, The Spymasters on the CIA directors, covered cumulatively something like 100 years of history. This book covers two, and yet this one was more difficult. Because when you're trying to write about a White House in real time, it's like designing an airplane in mid-flight. You know, you're getting hit by a COVID variant from one side and then an invasion of Ukraine from the other. You don't know what's coming. You don't know where you're going to land the plane. You just hope you can do it somewhere. And compounding that challenge was the fact that

this White House is the most battened down, disciplined, on-script, leak-proof White House, I think in recent memory. Luckily, I was able to get inside and get access to almost all of Joe Biden's inner circle. Let me say a word about Jeff Zinitz, the new chief of staff. He is a managerial genius. He's certainly regarded as a guy who can fix almost anything. Obama calls him his BFD for big blanking deal because he's the guy who fixed the Affordable Care website when nobody else could way back in the day.

Then he ran the coronavirus response team. I think that he shares the traits of most of the great chiefs, including having a really world-class temperament. He's liked within the White House. I think what he lacks is Ron Plain's deep political savvy and that long relationship with the boss. So it'll be interesting to see how he compensates for that. But I think he has a good chance of succeeding.

Well, in U.S. politics is access accounts most in the books of Chris Whipple are a great entry point for anyone. The Spy Masters, How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, examines the covert work of our national intelligence community, the gatekeepers, as we've been discussing, the history of eight presidencies, and now the fight of his life inside Joe Biden's White House, telling the story of the first two years, let alone what's to come, I suppose. Chris, it was a long time coming, and we skipped over massive amounts of history here.

Another reason for people to get this book and read it. I hope they enjoyed as much as I have. Thanks for joining us on American History hit, Chris. Don, thanks so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History, It. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.

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