Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Unexpected Presidential Advisors - with Gary Ginsberg

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Who do presidents, prime ministers and business leaders listen to in the midst of managing a crisis? It’s a question that’s always interested me, from my time in government and business and also as a moon-lighting student of history. I thought about that a lot during the covid pandemic. On this podcast series, we’ve talked about how the formal channels in our governments performed these past 18 months. But how about those unofficial channels from outside the government that wind up shaping our leaders' thinking and approach to world-changing events. Think about the number of informed practitioners that government leaders had access to during Covid, outside the regular bureaucracy of government. Practitioners in everything from the markets, to experience with supply chains, to the front lines of medicines. How many of these people had relationships with our leaders from a previous time in their lives, that could or should have made their mark during this moment? We are talking about a different category of presidential advisor. It’s what Gary Ginsberg calls “First Friends”, the title of his new book - the subtitle is “The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents” Gary has a fascinating background, having advised Governor Bill Clinton in his selection of Al Gore as vice-president, and served in the Clinton White House and Justice Department. He also worked for Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bewkes at Time Warner, Masa Son at Softbank and Mike Bloomberg. He informally advised Israel’s former prime minister during a tumultuous time in US-Israel relations. He’s worked with a lot of leaders up close and observed how they make decisions. Gary’s book is a compelling history of the way US presidents have relied on outside counsel in the midst of chaos. He gives us plenty to think about how our current and future leaders will navigate the next crisis, and who they should rely on.

I wanted to write about Trump, ultimately concluded that there was no first friend. The more I kind of delved into it, the more I realized, I think his first friend was just the adoration of the masses. And if you shorthand it, it's really the Twitter feed. And he certainly didn't need the blunt truth from anybody. Didn't seek it, didn't want it. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Who do presidents, prime ministers, and business leaders listen to in the midst of managing a crisis? It's a question that's always interested me from my time in government and business, and also as a moonlighting student of history. I thought about that a lot

during the COVID pandemic. On this podcast series, we've talked about how the formal channels in our governments performed, but how about those unofficial channels from outside the government that wind up shaping our leaders' thinking and approach to world-changing events. Think about this during COVID, the number of informed practitioners that government leaders had access to outside the regular bureaucracy of government. Practitioners in everything from the markets to experience with supply chains to the front lines of medicines. How many of these people had relationships with our leaders from a previous time in their lives that could or should have made their mark during this moment.

We're talking about a different category of presidential advisor. It's what Gary Ginsburg calls First Friends. That's the title of his new book. The subtitle is The Powerful, Unsung, and Unelected People Who Shape shape our presidents. Gary has a fascinating background, having advised Governor Bill Clinton in his selection of Al Gore as vice president, and having served in the Clinton White House and Justice Department. He also worked for Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bukas at Time Warner, Masa Son at SoftBank, and Mike Bloomberg. And he formally advised Israel's former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Gary has worked with a lot of leaders up close and observed how they make decisions.

His book is a compelling history of the way U.S. presidents relied on outside counsel in the midst of chaos. He gives us plenty to think about our current and future leaders and how they will navigate the next crisis and who they should rely on. This is Post-Corona. And I am pleased to welcome my old pal, Gary Ginsberg, to the conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Gary. Thank you, Dan.

It's nice to be here. Great to be with you. There's a lot I want to cover in this conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Gary. Thank you, Dan. It's nice to be here. Great to be with you. There's a lot I want to cover in this conversation, but before we do, just for our listeners, as I went through in the introduction, you've had a series of extraordinary jobs and had a front row seat to a lot in the political world, in the government world, in the business world. You've advised a lot of interesting leaders in government and in business. So how did you wind up on the Clinton campaign in 92 vetting Clinton's, then Governor Clinton's, you know, short list for his vice presidential pick? Well, I was in my fourth year as a litigation associate at Simpson Thatcher, toiling away at this large Wall Street law firm and really not liking it,

to be honest with you. I was, you know, I recognized that my skill sets were probably not being exploited to their fullest. And I got a call out of the blue from the new scheduler for the two-month-old Bill Clinton for President campaign. It was in January of 92. And she said, come on down and become my first advance director. Now, I had done advance for Gary Hart's campaign in 1984 and got my first taste of presidential campaigning. And I said, sure, I was the first person in the 150 year history of Simpson Thatcher to be granted a leave of absence. I think they were probably just as happy for me to take the leave as I was to leave. I went down to Little Rock. I created the first advance staff for Bill Clinton.

And then I was asked if I would go to Washington and join five other lawyers in an unmarked office in Washington, D.C. and vet vice presidential candidates. It was in late March, it was clear that Bill Clinton had secured the nomination. And no one, of course, wanted it known that we were already starting to look at vice presidential nominees because it would look a little presumptuous. But the six of us then started this very arduous process of calling through upwards of 40 names to get to a final five that Clinton would interview. But meanwhile, as I write in my book, there was this totally separate list of three candidates who Clinton had already decided he wanted.

And I didn't learn this until I wrote the book and talked to both Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan about that. And so you worked through the Clinton campaign, then you joined the Clinton White House once he's elected, right? In the counsel's office? Correct. And then from there, Department of Justice? Correct.

And what did you do at the Department of Justice? I was kind of a political lawyer. I did a lot. I had worked for Vince Foster, who unfortunately decided to leave work one day in June of 1992 and go and kill himself in a park. And I had been wanting to go to the Justice Department to get that experience. And I went and worked for his sister, who ran legislative affairs. I had done a lot of antitrust law at Simpson. I took a real interest in the antitrust head, a woman named Ann Bingaman, who was running it.

She was the wife of Senator Jeff Bingaman. I ended up doing mainly antitrust work, as well as some legislative affairs there. And you leave government and go where? I go back to New York, and I go to help start George Magazine. My friend John Kennedy had decided in the summer of 94, having watched the Clinton campaign and seen how members of the Clinton staff had become kind of national celebrities, in particular, George Stephanopoulos, James Carville. And he was fascinated by it. And it reminded him of all the stories he had heard from 1960 when his father had gotten the

nomination in Los Angeles and that kind of confluence of popular culture and politics had taken hold. You remember the Rat Pack, Marilyn Monroe. There was kind of this convergence of Hollywood and Washington in a way that politics had never seen before. And he saw it again in 92. And he thought, hey, there's a magazine here to be done that doesn't approach politics from an ideological standpoint. All the political magazines in the 90s were ideological, The Nation, The New Republic. You're either right or left, always black and white, standpoint all the political magazines in the 90s were ideological the nation the new republic you know you're either right or left always black and white catered mainly to men and he had the genius idea let's do it in four colors post-partisan and look at politics through people and process as

opposed to issues and it kind of fit my my mindset in the moment so I came back up to New York. And you knew John Kennedy Jr. from college? You went to Brown together? We did. And then it fit your mindset and how so? Well, I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I knew I didn't want to go back to the law. And I thought the chance to start this little business that could become a big business would be a lot of fun. Plus, you know, the chance to work with John was appealing on a variety of levels. There was a lot of buzz around the magazine.

I had this insights from having worked in the campaign and in the administration, and obviously had a lot of contacts that would be useful to the magazine. So I just put on a completely new hat. I was a senior editor, and I was John's counsel to the magazine. And I spent two years in probably the most fun job I've certainly, I had had to that point in

my career. And if I look back on it now, almost 30 years later, it was really truly one of the most remarkable couple of years I could have spent just because of the, just the energy of starting a new magazine and having a catch hold as it did in those first couple of months was a really thrilling experience and you were with him soon before the accident that took his life right i was yeah i uh i spent the last night of his life with him at yankee stadium and do you think the magazine ultimately could not have survived without his leadership or there were just macro secular forces going on in the medium publishing world that would have you know made a magazine like that ultimately yeah not competitive i think the magazine could

not have survived without john although he was in the process that night or during that day of trying to figure out an exit whereby he could leave it in the hands of somebody else but it was so tied to him and his persona but to your larger question the magazine never quite took hold after its initial few issues because advertisers couldn't categorize it they didn't know is it vanity fair is it the new republic it kind of fell in between and ultimately it just couldn't categorize it. They didn't know, is it Vanity Fair? Is it the New Republic? It kind of fell in between. And ultimately, it just couldn't attract the kind of advertising revenue that it needed to support the content. So you leave George and go where? I went to a consulting firm, a small kind of boutique consulting slash communications firm. And one of our clients was Seagram,

and Seagram had bought Universal. We were doing a lot of advising of how to communicate this old line, Spirits Company, becoming an entertainment company. And they were looking to replace their head of corporate communications. And they took an interest in me replacing him even though i'd only done communications for essentially a year and uh and i got put into the the competition i wanted uh things didn't quite work out because somebody decided at the last second to join the competition and took the job for me but there was another position opening up at news corp at the very moment through the same headhunter.

And she called me up. She said, I have good news and bad news. Bad news is you're not going to get the Seagram job. The good news is News Corp is really interested in you. So go visit. Go meet Peter Chernin and Rupert Murdoch. And within a month, I had secured that job. And that's how I ended up in media. And you go from Murdoch and News Corp to working for Jeff Bukas and Time Warner.

Correct. And you talk about the centerpiece project you helped oversee during that time, which was the big merger. Yeah, well, when I called Rupert to tell him that I was going to go to Time Warner about two months after I left in 2010. He was delighted because when we were at News Corp, one of the acquisitions he was desperate to make was to buy Time Warner. And he thought with me now in that corporate suite that I would help facilitate that deal. And about three and a half years later, sure enough, he comes to us with a hostile bid and thinking that I'm going to somehow facilitate it. Obviously, I had to follow my fiduciary interest to the company and we turned it down quite emphatically and defeated it. And then two years later, we got this offer from AT&T to merge the two companies, which we obviously were

quite excited about because it was a 40% premium to our share price and it made complete sense. Unfortunately, now as history has proven, it was almost as bad a deal as the AOL-Time Warner deal of 2020 and is now being unwound so that WarnerMedia can merge with Discovery. So it was not a particularly good history in the M&A sense, I think, for people who are certainly there right now who have to live through a second integration, second transition. But yeah, at the time in 2016, we really did have to sell the business. It was very hard for an entertainment company, even of the size of Time Warner, to compete with the Amazons and googles

and netflix of the world we had really kind of lost our way um in being able to establish direct to consumer relationships which is increasingly necessary for entertainment companies to survive so you go from there to masa sone uh at softbankank and to Mike Bloomberg and his presidential campaign and, you know, various, you know, zigs and zags through your career. But at some point along the way, you decide you want to write a book. So when did you decide you want to write the book, which is First Friends, which I talked about in the intro, and why? Well, I've always been fascinated with the American presidency, really, since I was in the third grade. And I have wanted to write a book my whole life. I guess

in my 50s, I had two goals. One was to play on the senior PGA tour, and the other was to write a book. I'm clearly not going to plan the senior PGA tour and the other was to write a book. I'm clearly not going to plan the senior PGA tour. And so I had this idea to write a book about chiefs of staff in the early part of the decade. I spent about a half a year doing research. I realized there was a great book there, but I was too immersed in my job at Time Warner and I gave it up. And then of course, Chris Whipple wrote this great book that reinforced to me that I really do want to write a book and I want to find an area that has never been covered. And I was watching the Trump administration in 16 and 17.

And I realized that here was a guy who did not have a close friend. And I was thinking about my own experiences. Trump, the president did not have a close friend. President Trump. Yes, President Trump did not have a close friend. It was clear right from the start. And I started thinking about the close friends that I had observed in my own career in politics. And I was, I hearkened back to Warren Beatty during the Gary Hart 1984 campaign.

And watching- Which you worked on. You worked on the Hart campaign. I did. I did. I was, I had graduated from Brown early and I went and spent six months traveling around the country for Hart doing advance, which is how I ended up, as I said, on the Clinton campaign. But I saw Warren Beatty, who was a great friend of Gary Hart's that went back to 1972 in the McGovern campaign. And he'd come in for the most important events. And he alone could speak to Hart in a way nobody else could. He'd say, stop talking and acting like a politician. He'd say it constantly to to heart and heart would kind of just get jolted and say you know would listen to him and change the way he talked because he had such respect for him and they could speak so frankly to each other but at the same time he

could also provide this respite you know they'd stay up all night just eating drinking laughing and so i saw these kind of two sides to this friendship that I thought was fascinating. And then I saw the same dynamic again in 92. I worked for Vernon Jordan during the VP selection process. He was a vice chair and I saw how he interacted with Clinton. It was during the Clinton campaign. Vernon Jordan was a top advisor to informal advisor to the president or to the candidate at the time. And you watched that relationship blossom between Jordan and Clinton. Correct. I saw it during the VP process. And then I saw it during the transition. I saw it in the early parts of the administration. And I got to know Vernon pretty well. And I just thought, wow, what an interesting role to play as first friend.

And I knew that Vernon had been offered the attorney generalship because I vetted him very quickly when we got a call saying Vernon's going down to the mansion and we want to pre-clear him. Clinton needs to know, can we get him through Senate confirmation? So this is during the transition in 92. Clinton is at the governor's mansion in Little Rock. He's meeting with prospective cabinet nominees or interviewing them. So you're saying Vernon is headed, Jordan is heading down to Little Rock for his big meeting. And the Clinton transition team says, Gary, quick,

let's vet him because the president elect wants to offer him AG. Correct. Attorney general. Correct. Exactly right. You know, there had been 77 attorneys general before Clinton had the chance to name the 78th. They were all white men. And I think Hillary and book, because I spoke to both Clinton and Jordan about that pivotal meeting at the mansion on the patio. And Clinton says, I really want you. I need you.

You're the only guy for this job. And Vernon really interestingly says, uh-uh, I don't want it. I'm having too much fun as a lawyer. I'm making too much money. But more importantly, I can do more for you as your first friend. He says that to him. Because I won't be burdened by administrative duties. I won't be burdened by the specific issues of a department. I can be there for when you need me, both on a substantive level as well as on a personal level. And I will do more good for you as a friend.

And in fact, he did. Before we get back to some of these examples in the book, because I think they're very instructive to some understanding the current dynamic going on in various relationships between our leaders and their informal networks. I often ask our guests on this podcast, what changed about their work lives or their lives generally outside of any health risks, physical health risks, due to the pandemic. And your story is particularly interesting because you chose to write a book long before you knew there was going to be a pandemic and a government imposed quarantine. So how did the practical reality of researching and writing this book

while we were all in lockdown, how was that practical reality different than it would have otherwise? I mean, I assume you had to do a lot of research. You had to visit the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. You would normally travel around to all these different libraries to research and interview people about the presidents you were writing about, and then suddenly you're locked in your apartment. Yes, well, yeah. Well, it was both a blessing and a curse. It was a curse in the sense that, as you say,

the libraries that I had imagined going to were all closed, every one of them. But it was a blessing in that I was able to really turn inward for the first time in my life. I, you know, have been in external relations effectively for 20 some years and lived to write for others, to write narratives under other people's names, prep them for appearances and spin narratives that I hope the world would buy on behalf of the company or the individual. Now I'm turned totally inward, writing for myself, hoping that eventually whatever I produce, the world will accept under my name. So it was a totally different experience from what I had been used to in my life, just ground to a halt, but I loved it. I loved kind of delving into these

heroes from my past and spending weeks, months on end just learning about their lives. Unfortunately not in the libraries of where their papers were, but just spending, getting, using every resource I could get through the phone and through my computer. And I was actually able to use a fair amount of just relationships and wiliness, I guess, to get all the material I needed. And I had, you know, I had a lot of help from friends who had access to friends and to papers and to diaries. So I think ultimately it was a blessing because everything slowed down. I didn't have to do things other than I still had my job at SoftBank, albeit I had a great deputy and I'm forever grateful to her for basically stepping up for a year

and effectively doing my job. Well, I just wrote. And I was far more productive than I ever thought I would be. And I think in part of it, it was just the passion I brought to this thing. Do you think that this changes the way you think about how to balance your life professionally is like creating space this was almost like space mandated by governments around the world you have to create literally you have to create physical space around you so you can't go anywhere which what you're saying in turn lets you kind of go deep on topics that you wouldn't have had the bandwidth or focus to be able to do and you know no distractions and the time but do you now think whatever you do next

in life, you want to integrate that kind of space in your life and schedule going forward? Yeah, well put. I mean, I had always just assumed I was innately an extrovert and I had to live in an external fashion to drive happiness. And what I learned in COVID is that I was, in fact, far more, I was more comfortable and more satisfied living a more introverted life than I ever thought possible. And that I liked being able at the end of the day to actually look at something on a piece of paper and say, this is what I did for the day. It wasn't talking on the phone and spinning people all day and then seeing it, you know, up on a screen because it was posted or next morning's newspaper but it was mine it was work product that i was

able to to produce and and feel proud of in my own name and i it was just a completely new experience for me and one as i say that i found far more to my liking than I ever thought. Okay, so now let's talk about some of these characters you write about. And I thought one of the most powerful chapters was your chapter on President Kennedy because we hear about informal advisors to presidents and prime ministers and business leaders. But it's hard to imagine someone who's outside the formal bureaucracy having real influence on a president's decision-making during a national security crisis. I mean, that's pretty extraordinary.

And the Kennedy story and his relationship with David Ormsby-Gore is, I thought, one of the most powerful chapters in the book. So, I mean, to be clear, Kennedy had a whole, you know, to our listeners, well-known names of, you know, advisors. There was Robert F. Kennedy, who was the president's brother and attorney general. There was McGeorge Bundy, his national security advisor. There was Robert McNamara, his defense secretary. I mean, these are all names that are well known in the history books. But then there's David Ormsby-Gore. So tell us about who David Ormsby-Gore is and what is the origin of his relationship with, before he was even a president, before he was a senator, before he was a congressman,

just with a young John Kennedy. Yeah. Well, let me just go back even a further step, because I knew I wanted to write about Kennedy because he had such an enormous capacity for friendship, and his friendships have been chronicled before. And I just assumed I would write about Lem Billings. Lem Billings was his best friend from Choate. Lem Billings had his own room on the third floor of the White House and gave 14 hours of very rich oral history to the Kennedy Library. So, you know, there was a great story to be told there. I could have easily written it. But I called Kennedy's daughter, Caroline, who I went to law school with,

who was, you know was obviously familiar with. We have been friends for a long time. And I said, look, I'm tempted to write about Len Billings. What do you think? She said, don't do that. It's so done. You won't tell your readers anything new about my father. There's a far more interesting person that no one's written about. And you're probably not going to be able to figure it out quickly, but I promise you it's there because I know how close my dad was and I know how close my mom was to him. And she said, it's David Ormsby Gore. And she said, take 48 hours and come back to me and tell me if you think I'm not right.

And it took about 40 hours to figure it out. But as soon as I kind of found, discovered this world of Kennedy and Gore, I was just enamored of it. I just fell in love with the story. They met in 1938, pre-war London. Kennedy is a total anglophile at this point. He's 21 years old. Ormsby-Gore is 20. They're both second sons of powerful fathers. They're both going to great schools, but have no idea what they want to do in life. And Kennedy's father, Joe Kennedy, is FDR's ambassador to London, to the UK at that time. Correct. Correct. And his sisters are there. His sister,

Kick, in particular, is there. And she is kind of floundering in her first six months. And she meets David Ormsby-Gore, and they hit it off. And so when Jack shows up a couple of months later, she says, you got to meet my buddy, David. And so Kennedy meets him and they hit it off instantly. They both talk fast. They love to play golf.

They love to go to the horse races and they love to argue about politics, even though neither has any idea what they want to do in their lives. And they start going to the house of commons and they start debating what is the role of a leader in a democracy? And just to be clear, they go to the House of Commons as observers. They're just sitting in the gallery. Yes, yes. They're watching debates.

And by the way, that was a pretty tumultuous time, right? The late 30s, you know, the debates on the House of Commons are what to do about this rising power, Germany, that was on the move. Correct. And that's why this debate takes hold. Churchill writes a book called Arms and the Covenant, which is a series of his speeches in the 30s where he is saying, hey, listen, guys, wake up. The Germans are rearming and we're asleep. And Stanley Baldwin and then Neville Chamberlain basically said, well, the public doesn't want

us to rearm. They're still tired from the Great War 20 years ago, and we're not going to do it. We're going to find a way to appease. And Churchill says, we're making an existential mistake here. And so Kennedy's father was basically part of the Baldwin-Chamberlain wing. Ormsby-Gore and his friends were all part of the Churchill wing. So they debated, should you be bold and do what is right as opposed to what the electorate wants? And Kennedy was equivocating because his father was equivocating. His father was basically, as I say, much more on the side of Chamberlain. And so they start this debate in 1938.

And there's a through line that goes right to 1963 when this thing plays out with Ormsby-Gore, and I'm somewhat jumping the gun here, where Ormsby-Gore is the intellectual catalyst for Kennedy signing the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which I think is the beginning of the end of the Cold War. It's a relationship that sees each rise in their respective political hierarchies. Kennedy becomes a senator. Ormsby-Gore becomes a member of the House of Commons. He's a lord-in-waiting. He's so smart that he's immediately kind of plucked to serve in the Ministry of State as a negotiator to the UN on behalf of Britain to try to get the Soviets to start disarming. So he becomes an expert at that. And Kennedy not only has this close personal friendship with Ormsby-Gore, but he starts to really pick Ormsby-Gore's brain about nuclear disarmament. He starts to recognize

that this is a path to getting to a more peaceful world. And so the two of them spend inordinate amounts of time in 55, 56, 58 during Kennedy's campaign for the Senate. Wormsby-Gore is kind of the foreign policy advisor who's shaping his worldview for the Senate race in Massachusetts and then in preparation for the 1960 campaign, which he knows he's going to actually get into. In 60, Kennedy makes this discovery. He doesn't like any of his foreign policy advisors. And the one person he turns to in the 1960 campaign is Ormsby Gore. Why doesn't he like his foreign policy advisors?

Because he's a new frontier guy. He's thinking, I got to come up with a new way of talking about how we're going to confront the Soviets. I don't want to just take the conventional path. And Ormsby Gore has really resonated with him on this idea of disarmament. And disarmament was not a big issue in the United States in 58, 59, 60. But he's really the guy who sparks it. So in 60, he spends hours and hours closeted. Hugh Seide from Time says the two would spend up to six hours at a time talking about foreign policy during the campaign. Then Kennedy gets elected and Ormsby Gore finds himself now with this friend from 1938 who's the

most powerful man on earth. It's kind of hard for him to believe because he knows him from being this chucklehead back in London. But he's basically the number two foreign policy advisor in the British government at this point. And Kennedy immediately brings him into his orbit. Within a month, they have a three-hour dinner in the White House at the end of January of 61. He goes through all of his foreign policy issues, but he can't mention the Cuban Missile Crisis because it's top secret. He doesn't

have a clearance. He can't tell a British citizen. And he doesn't have an ambassadorial post yet. He's just simply part of the Ministry of State. And I think if he had talked to Ormsby-Gore, who could speak to him in a way that none of his other advisors could have, it's quite possible Ormsby-Gore would have talked him out of it. And Kennedy – He talked him out of Bay of Pigs. Bay of Pigs, yes. Right. And Eisenhower asks Kennedy after the debacle, he says, did you have anybody good to talk to?

And Kennedy said, no, I didn't. And so Ormsby-Gore a few months later is named uh the british ambassador to the united states and kennedy is delighted because now he has him in washington in this official capacity and they have dinners routinely one-on-one dinners didn't kennedy actually sort of informally choose he did or because because he did the prime minister asked the uk the british prime minister sort of informally choose Orange v. Gore? He did. The British Prime Minister asked Kennedy who would be your preference for our ambassador, which is also sort of unheard of

these days. A head of government would ask another head of government, who would you like to have as our ambassador? Kennedy said Orange v. Gore. He says, who would you like? He says, who would you like? And Kennedy said, I would like David. And he said it with this big smile on his face, which Harold McMillan relayed later.

And they both recognize that, you know, he was the obvious and only choice for that job. And Kennedy delighted in it. They had dinners all the time. One time Ormsby Court comes to dinner. He says, look, my government's going to fall unless we get these sanctions lifted from the UN. And the US had been supporting the sanctions. And Kennedy just, without any consultation, just calls up Adlai Stevenson and says, hey, Adlai, I've got David Ormsby-Gore here. He needs this to get done, get it done. And the next day, the US made sure the sanctions were lifted and the government held. I mean,

that's the kind of friendship that they had. And they also spent an inordinate amount of personal time together as couples. So now fast forward to October 1962. The U.S. is in the throes of this fast-moving Cuban Missile Crisis, which at that point, the president has not yet made it, you know, briefed the American public on what was going on. And so tell us what was happening during the Cuban Missile Crisis when Ormsby-Gore comes into the picture. So Ormsby-Gore comes into the picture on day six. Kennedy's come back from Chicago. He's alerted that he has to make a decision on whether to blockade or bomb Cuba in response

to the discovery of Soviet missiles on the island. And he makes four decisions, the last of which is, I want David Ormsby Gore to come to the White House Sunday morning. He went back to the White House on Saturday afternoon, and he instructed him to, quote, come unseen into the White House because he needed his counsel. He has an all-night session with the EXCOMM on Saturday night. They decide they're going to blockade,

but Kennedy still needs to stress test it. And the one person he wants to stress test it with is Gore. So he comes in unseen. No one can see him come through the gates. He comes through a back entrance. He goes upstairs into the residence and they spend an hour and a half debating the merits of a blockade versus bombing. And Ormsby-Gore really strengthens his resolve to choose the blockade. They then have dinner that night, and they spend hours discussing how is he going to describe this to the United States the next night in the nationally televised address. And Ormsby-Gore goes through great, great

efforts to make sure that Kennedy uses the right language that next night. And the reason why Ormsby-Gore is read into this so fully is because Macmillan had already been read into it. And Macmillan had already been talking to the president about it. And so Ormsby-Gore had had some inkling of what was going on from his conversations with the prime minister. So Kennedy gives the address on Monday, and then he's back, Ormsby-Gore is back at the White House on Tuesday for day, it's now day eight, when the public now knows and the stakes have risen, the blockade has been set, or is about to get set, and the ships are approaching. And what happens next? So there had been a long scheduled dinner planned for Kennedy with Ormsby Gore and all the friends that he had made over the years in Britain.

So now they are up in the White House residence. And the irony is not lost on any of them because they're now wondering, are they going to be subjected to the same fears of a war like they were back in 38 and 39 when they had all first met. So they have dinner and then Kennedy says to Ormsby Gore at the end of dinner, I need you to come down to the end of the lawn gallery at the end of the second floor. And the two of them then spend about four hours in the Long Gallery debating everything. And Ormsby-Gore's first piece of advice, because he said that your address the night before did not work. Nobody in Europe believes that these missiles are real. So Ormsby-Gore says, you need to release pictures of these missile sites so that the world can see it for themselves. So Kennedy calls down and says,

bring up the pictures. So Ormsby, Gore, and Kennedy get on the floor. They're literally seated on the floor looking at pictures of missile sites and choosing which ones to release to the public to calm the skepticism that they didn't really exist. And Ormsby, Gore says, but don't just release the photos, put captions so that people can understand them because these pictures are hard to decipher. So Kennedy does that. Then Kennedy says, all right, let's talk about the perimeter. The perimeter is set at 800 miles.

What do you think? And Ormsby-Gore says, I think it's foolhardy. You got to change the perimeter. Got to be moved into 500. You got to give the Soviet ships more time to decide whether to turn around or not. And Kennedy says, well, you know, the reason why we're setting at 800 is that the Cuban planes can't reach our ships. And Ornish-Gore says, I think that that is not enough of a reason. So Kennedy calls up McNamara and says, you know, I'm not sure that this perimeter is right.

I like what David is suggesting. Let's move it to 500 miles, which they do. And it does, in fact, I mean, it's extraordinary that without any instructions from his own government, he unilaterally gets the United States government to move it to 500 miles. And then that kind of sets the stage for the next seven days or next six days where Ormsby-Gore continues to provide that kind of minute advice on how to handle it. And at one point in an EXCOMM meeting, Ormsby-Gore is seated next to the president and Lyndon Johnson's at the end of the table. And the door is banging on Lyndon Johnson's

chair as people are coming in and out. He basically blurts out, I'm sitting here at the end of the table while that limey is sitting next to the president. It was really galling to him to see him relegated at the expense of this British ambassador, quote, friend, who really had no business being in these meetings. And I think Rusk also felt that he had been sidelined a bit. McGeorge Bundy just flat out recognized that. He said he was by far the most intellectually compelling thinker around Kennedy during those years. And most people thought it was Bundy himself. And I think those 13 days reflected for a lot of people the centrality of Ormsby-Gore's role in Kennedy's life, certainly when it came to foreign policy.

Another relationship from your book that you highlight, which is one of my favorites, both from your book and just having read about it independently, is the relationship between Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson. So quickly, just the history of Jacobson, Jacobson's relationship from, you know, Truman's early years, and then how it how it wound it up at a critical decision point in the Truman presidency. They met when Eddie was 16, making bank deposits on behalf of a company he worked for, and Truman was a bank teller at 23. They then re-meet in 1917 when they're both assigned to a unit in preparation for war.

They both go in to serve in the military for the First World War. And they end up basically doing business together. They run a canteen. And A. Jacobson has a really good gift for how to make money. He's clever. He brings a certain kind of professionalism to Truman's leadership of the canteen in a way that they make a lot of money. So after the war, they come back. They're great friends by now, and they decide to go into business.

And they open a haberdashery in 1919 in downtown Kansas City. And it lasts about a year and a half. The store did really well until commodity prices dropped, and they ended up having to close it in 1922. And they don't declare bankruptcy, but they ultimately repay all their debts. They stay friends throughout Truman's rise to become vice president and then president. Eddie just stays as a haberdasher, sells shirts and men's clothing for a living. But the reason why it's the most consequential friendship in the entire book is because of the role that Eddie played in getting Harry Truman to recognize an independent state of Israel.

So talk about that, because Truman has to make this decision about whether or not to recognize Israel's declaration of independence. His own top advisors are largely against it. I mean, George Marshall, Secretary of State, didn't he basically threaten to resign over it? He did. He did. He said, it's flat out. I will quit. I will leave. I will quit if you miss the president. I won't vote for you. What he says, I won't vote for you. That was the line that stunned Truman the most. I won't vote for you for reelection, for election.

In 48. If you support the partition plan and thus the recognition of a Jewish state. So explain how Jacobson intervened and literally changed the course of history. He did. He had never really gotten involved in any issue with Truman. He never neither needed nor wanted anything from the president and made that kind of a practice and everybody knew it. But he got interested in the issue of Jewish refugees in the mid 40s. And a number of leaders of the Zionist movement kind of figured out that Eddie was the key to Truman. So they start lobbying him in 45, 46, 47. He actually makes a couple of trips to the White House to bring rabbis like Lollifeld and others to the White House to meet with Truman to kind of explain the refugee problem, explain the need for a homeland.

But the kind of the denouement comes in March of 48. Truman is really wavering. He's sick of the hectoring from Zionist leaders. He says, Jesus Christ couldn't please the Jews when he was alive. How am I going to please the Jews? And he's basically shut down. He's got pressure from Marshall, as you say, at state. The Defense Department doesn't want to see a Jewish state. They think the Soviets will come in. A war will start. Oil will be shut off. And no good will come from it.

They just want a UN trusteeship to continue indefinitely, leave the status quo. It's a safer route for state and defense. And Truman, he sympathizes with the refugees. He sympathizes with the Jewish people needing a homeland. But he's not ready to pull the trigger. And by March, he says, I ain't seen Chaim Weizmann. I know he's needing a homeland but he's not ready to pull the trigger and it by march he says i ain't seen chaim weitzman i know he's here i know he's sick um but i'm not going to see him and so eddie flies white man is sitting in new york trying to get a meeting with the president to to weigh in right and so eddie says eddie writes a note to truman and says you got to see weitzman. And Truman writes back and says, I ain't seeing him. So now Eddie has to make a decision. How far do I go? He gets on a plane,

flies halfway across the country, walks up the North driveway, walks into the office of Matt Conley, the appointment secretary, and says, I got to go see the president right now. And he says, well, he's in there and he'll see you, of course, because you're his closest friend, but you can't bring up Palestine. He doesn't want to talk about it. And Eddie says, well, I'm going in to see him. So he walks in. They make small talk. Then Truman says, well, what are you doing here, Eddie? Why did you fly across the country to see me this time? And then Eddie brings up the subject. And Truman says, I'm done with this issue. I'm sick of it. He starts a harangue, saying how aggrieved he is that he's been insulted by these Jewish leaders. They're treating him disrespectfully.

And at this point, Eddie invokes all the years of friendship. And this is the key moment when only a friend can speak to a head of state in the way that Eddie did. No cabinet secretary could have done it. No aide could have done it. And he basically says, you've got to appeal to your better angels harry i've known you all your life i know you have a hero in andrew jackson and he points to a little miniature statue that's sitting in the oval office and he said all your life you

wanted to be like andrew jackson what would andrew jackson have done in this moment and you've got to get over yourself and kind of man up and look at the larger issue and do what you know is right, which is to see Chaim Weizmann and to ultimately recognize a Jewish state. So Truman turns back around, he drums his fingers against the desk. At that moment, you know, Eddie thinks the guy's an anti-Semite. He said, you know, he's really afraid that this is going to be a rupture. But then Truman turns around and he says, all right, you goddamn son of a bitch. You win.

I'll see him. And he calls him Matt Conley. He says, I want to see Chaim Weizmann immediately. I don't want the press to see him, but I will see Chaim Weitzman. And in that moment, Eddie Jacobson knew that he had accomplished his purpose because he knew that once Weitzman came into that Oval Office, that he alone would be able to break this logjam. And sure enough, a few days later, Chaim Weitzman comes down. They have a late night meeting. No one knows he comes into the White House. Chaim Weitzman makes the final pitch truman gives him his word which was a hugely important moment and he memorializes that by telling eddie that later um and he says i will i will do what

is right i will support an independent state and that i, helps Ben-Gurion make the decision to recognize the state two months later. This is in March, remember, and the mandate runs out on May 14th. So a lot has to happen between then and the State Department tries to undermine that decision. They basically, actually, the UN ambassador goes to the UN the day after he makes this pledge to Weizmann and says, we're going to support a UN trusteeship. And everybody calls Eddie and says, what the hell happened? And Eddie calls Truman and says, how could you backtrack?

And Truman says, I didn't even know he was going to do it. I gave my word and I'm going to keep my word. And 11 minutes after the state was declared in Tel Aviv, Truman was the first foreign leader to recognize the state. So it's an incredible story. Before I joined the Bush administration, which was during the lead-up actually to the Iraq war, I remember Dick Darman, Richard Darman, who I had worked with at the time in business, who worked obviously in senior positions in the Bush 41 administration,

the Reagan administration, said to me, because I commented that President George W. Bush had this incredible broader network of friendships throughout the U.S. and alumni from previous administrations that may not be currently serving in government but had relationships with him. So he probably had, and obviously he had a father who had been president, who had fought a war in Iraq. He was dealing with, he had access to all these relationships and all these people who had access to him that would try to shape him. And I remember Darman saying to me, yes, but all those people right now do not have access to the information that the president has. The sophistication of the intelligence dissemination process, once you are in the executive branch,

is like nothing that anyone on the outside could ever have access to, so that if you're in the administration, you're basically in this day and age, not in the 60s or not in the 40s, as you read about with Kennedy and Truman, but this is in the early 2000s. The sophistication of the information collection and dissemination, it's like another language. So people outside may have random inputs. They may be reading a lot from public sources, but they're not seeing what the president and the people around the president are seeing, particularly after a major terrorist attack on the homeland. So he says they're going to be – all these outside people are going to be irrelevant. Do you think Darman was wrong or do you think things have just changed? Well, let me just punctuate that point, because I think it's an important point. I talked to Ted

Kaufman at some length. Explain who Ted Kaufman is. Ted Kaufman is Joe Biden's first friend. The White House. Okay, so he's Biden's first friend, oldest. Oldest friend. He met him in 1972, right after Biden loses his wife and his daughter he becomes his chief of staff basically 1973 and stays for 22 years as his chief of staff and travels with him back and forth to wilmington so it they forge a bond unlike any chief of staff so so biden while he's senator is going back to wilmington on the Amtrak train almost every night. Correct. And Kauffman travels with him.

Correct. So they spend tons of downtime. Tons and tons of downtime. So they forged not just an intensely professional relationship, but a personal relationship. So I asked him this question and I said, do you advise the president? Does he call you and say, you know, this was a guy who replaced him as senator, if you remember, in 2008, when he became vice president, he was he served for two years. So he's not an unsophisticated man. And he knows politics at a very high level.

Yet he said, most interestingly, no, to your point, these issues are so complex now and I don't have access to that kind of information. So why would I possibly deign to offer my opinion when it is so ill-informed or unformed relative to the people who are around him? And I thought that was a very interesting comment that just kind of punctuates what Darman said to you. I think you're right. It's gotten so much more complex today. I think Jordan, who was the most recent friend, could play that role because he was in that world. He was the consummate fixer. He lived at the intersection of business and politics and law. And so he had, as many people said to me, the best political intelligence of anybody in the White House, even so he had, as many people said to me, the best political intelligence of

anybody in the White House, even though he wasn't on staff. So when Clinton goes to him and says, should I appoint an independent counsel? His knowledge base is not inferior to George Stephanopoulos' or to Bernie Nussbaum's. He can read that question as well as anybody can. And that's why I think he was uniquely powerful as the first friend, because he had that intrinsic access by virtue of who he was. How did you choose? I was curious when I was reading the book, like how you chose who not to write about. I mean, like, did Reagan have a first friend? No. Right.

They were all Nancy's friends. Edmund Morris said about Reagan, he was like an enigma to him. He couldn't understand how he managed relationships. That's why he needed the alter ego. That's why he needed the third person to write that book. In his book, in the biography of Reagan. Right. He created this fly on the wall.

Right. I wanted to write about Trump, and I spoke to somebody very close. We went around and around on who that friend would be. Ultimately concluded that there was no first friend, that he constitutionally doesn't need a first friend. And that... Because every relationship is what, transactional? Yeah. Yeah. And he, the way this person described it, he described him as so independent. But the more I kind of delved into it, the more I realized, I think his first friend was just the adoration of the masses.

And if you shorthand it, it's really the Twitter feed. And that he would talk to people at night. He would call around. But it wasn't the kind of call with a friend that you and I might have to share the day, share frustrations, share observations. It was more like, how do you think I'm doing? As opposed to anything on a deeper level. He'd go up to Camp David on weekends and he'd bring family and friends and he would just sit in the cabin by himself and call around to supporters all day. He just didn't have the need for friends.

When he went out and played golf, it was all about business. It wasn't to relax. So he didn't need rest, but he didn't need solace. And he certainly didn't need the blunt truth from anybody. Didn't seek it, didn't want it. You know, you talked about Trump and Biden, because both have had to deal with the global pandemic. On the one hand, during a national security crisis, the system around the president is so sophisticated that, as we said, it's almost like a different

language from what an outsider would have. Not necessarily during a public health crisis, though. In a public health crisis, you have, I mean, I was speaking to lots of people who were outside the system who were medical professionals who knew a lot. It was like talking to a soldier on the front line of a battle in the theater of war during a major war, except they were working in a hospital in New York City. Or business leaders that were dealing with trying to accumulate PPE or business leaders trying to deal with supply chain disruptions. I mean, these were business leaders who knew a lot. Do you feel that either of these presidents, Trump or Biden, even though these people may

not be personal friends, rely on this informal external expertise? Yeah, well, I think there is no question that Trump benefited greatly from it. I got a call from somebody in the White House asking me to help, you know, secure a better relationship with the city government here in New York. I think that the White House recognized that they were overwhelmed and needed help wherever they could get it because of the enormity of the crisis and their relative lack of resources against the threat that the virus posed. But look, I think there was a downside to it, right? I think it was a friend of a friend that got to Atlas at Stanford, and they just bring him in kind of willy-nilly outside the chain of who was there. And he kind of comes in as this external force and one could argue whether that was ultimately uh the right move for the trump administration or the wrong move sometimes you can take it too far i guess is what i'm saying

last question uh you write about political leaders and leaders in government, but business leaders often, and you've worked for some pretty important, almost historic actually, business leaders, and they have their own elaborate bureaucracies and systems of stakeholders around them, all of whom, not all of whom, many of whom in those systems, like in government,

all because of where they sit in the bureaucracy, have their own angle, have their own agenda, have their own turf to protect, have their own ambition. So for a variety of reasons, they all work in a similar ecosystem as, I mean, different but similarly structured to what a president has, which like a president, often the CEOs of these major enterprises become very lonely. Do you see business leaders developing these informal first friend relationships that leaders of government have? Yes and no. With Rupert Murdoch, his business, senior business colleagues were his friends. He ran the business as a family business

and everybody who was brought into his inner sanctum in effect became a member of the family. So when he would go outside, it didn't really extend anywhere beyond his 20 to 30 most trusted lieutenants who were scattered around the world. And I found that really interesting that his closest friends were the people that had helped him become who he was over. When I got there, he was just turning 80. So he'd been in business for 55 years. He literally had people who had been working for him for 50 years, literally 50 years.

They were his friends. I didn't see with Rupert the impact of any friends. He had outside friends, but never really would consult them on any substantive level about business decisions. With Jeff Bukas, he too had a lot of friends, but he was of the mind that these issues were so complex, going back to the issues we talked about with Biden and Richard Darman, that he didn't think that a friend could really give him any kind of advice that would be useful because the issues were so specific and so complex and would require too much explanation to get them to a level where it could be useful information.

So he really relied, again, on his eight direct reports more than he did anybody externally. But I do think, just to your point, being a CEO can be a very lonely job. Rupert Murdoch did not allow himself ever to be lonely because he just wanted at all times to have touch points. So every morning he would call every editor, important editor. He would call every important business leader. He was on the phone probably 10 hours a day just accumulating information. He was the most curious man I ever met. So he didn't let loneliness in any way intrude on his conduct of the job. Before we wrap, has this whole experience,

I mean, because you had this whole career, and then later in your career, you decide to do something completely different, as we talked about, which is write a book. Does this whole experience say to you, inform you that, okay, that's over, and now back to what I was doing? Or now that's over, and I want to do it again, whether it's a standalone project, whether it's something that, you know, is integrated into whatever I'm doing else in life professionally. But are we going to see more books from Gary Ginsberg? I hope so. As I said to you earlier, I loved it. And I just love taking ownership for the first time in my life of what I was doing, you know, and putting my name on it and kind of living and dying by my own words. So I hope so. I hope I have another idea that resonates. I'm looking at it right now and hopefully I'll have something to show for it in a

few years. Well, first, friends, the book is an important contribution to not just history, our study of history, but also to kind of thinking about how leaders make decisions and who they rely on in this current moment. And I sadly say it's probably not the last, you know, history changing global crisis our leaders have to deal with. So it will help inform, I think, how people who observe these events and people who have to navigate, manage them, think about relationships. So like I said, a very important contribution and certainly original. Gary, thanks for joining us today. Yeah, well, thank you very much for having me.

I really enjoyed the conversation. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Gary's work, you can follow him on Twitter at Gary Lee Ginsberg. That's Gary L-E-E Ginsberg. Or you can go to GaryLeeGinsberg.com. And if you want to purchase his book, First Friends, which I highly recommend, you can go to BarnesandNoble.com or your favorite independent bookstores or that other e-commerce site. I think they call it Amazon. Post Corona is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.