The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

by Chris Whipple

internecine

Watson, Carter’s emissary to Washington’s elite, was thought by the campaign staff to be too cozy with the status quo. “The

You have to be willing to speak truth to power.”

And you’re wondering, this is the beginning, but is it also the end?”

sacrosanct entitlement

the mistake was the fault of a president who had blundered off script had to be corrected by Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater. “Sununu just didn’t know how to play the role,” says Reagan’s old friend Stu Spencer. “He didn’t know when to come forward and when to stay in the background—like Jimmy [Baker] did and Cheney did and Ken [Duberstein] did.”

the old Lebanese proverb that holds, “one kisses the hand that one cannot yet bite.”

“There’s a lot of moments where you’re suspended in thin air, there’s no net, there’s no safety. There’s nobody that’s grabbing you and you’re all out there.”

in a world of limited resources—what are the things you’re going to double down on, and what are the things you’re going to do less of.”

“The most important thing a chief can do, and I learned this from Jim Baker’s book,” he says, “is establish clear lines of responsibility. As a result, you get clear accountability. There’s no accountability without clear responsibility.”

They procure by piece. And each piece, or each step, has to prove itself; otherwise, it doesn’t get paid.

The sum of the parts was a disaster.

And you can’t just kind of turn your head and cross your fingers and hope that everything’s going to be okay.”