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

by Chris Whipple

Duberstein spoke first. “Always remember,” he said, looking at Emanuel, “that when you open your mouth, it is not you but the president who is speaking.”

Watson earned the respect of his peers for his keen grasp of the position—a job he likened to a “javelin catcher.”

“Never forget the extraordinary opportunity you’ve been given to serve, and the privilege and responsibility that it represents,” he said. “You are sitting next to the most powerful person in the world. Remember to value and appreciate that fact every single day you’re here.”

“You’ve got to slow down, and listen,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of smart people who are in that building with you. And you’ve got to resist the temptation to always have the answer. Slow down, listen. You’ll learn a lot and you’ll make better decisions.”

“Try to keep some perspective about what you’re doing and try to maintain your humanity,” he told Rahm. “You don’t always succeed. We’re all human and we make mistakes. It starts with recognizing what a privilege it is to serve the president of the United States, but more importantly, the people of this country. Keep that in perspective and don’t let it get out of proportion with this regal title of ‘chief of staff.’ ”

“You have to create a firewall between the president and those who are clawing to see the president,” he told Rahm. “Even if it creates problems for the chief of staff. I was very good at creating problems for the chief of staff.”

“Always, always, be straight and honest with the president of the United States,” he said. “Always tell him what he may not want to hear—because frankly, a lot of people in the White House will always tell the president what he wants to hear.”

Immediately pick your successor,” he told him. “And always remember: You are not indispensable.”

The White House chief translates the president’s agenda into reality. When government works, it is usually because the chief understands the fabric of power, threading the needle where policy and politics converge.

“One of the things I’ve learned is that the big breakthroughs are typically the result of a lot of grunt work—just a whole lot of blocking and tackling.” Grunt work is what chiefs of staff do.

Paying hush money to burglars to cover up the Watergate break-in, trading weapons to Iran for hostages, launching the Iraq War on dubious evidence, even bungling the online rollout of health care—all might have been avoided if the chiefs of staff had put these decisions through the rigors of a system designed to avoid disasters.

“The executive branch of the United States is the largest corporation in the world,” the adviser, H. R. Haldeman, would reflect years later. “It has the most awesome responsibilities of any corporation in the world, the largest budget of any corporation in the world, and the largest number of employees. Yet the entire senior management structure and team have to be formed in a period of seventy-five days.”

Adams was more than a gatekeeper; he was the White House version of Ike’s army chief of staff: funneling information, framing decisions, and acting as broker among quarreling cabinet members. He was the first chief—though not the last—who was thought to wield nearly as much power as his boss.

Kennedy concluded that he needed someone he could trust to help him with the big decisions (and to filter conflicting advice).

“Eisenhower had told Nixon that every president has to have his own ‘SOB.’ Nixon had looked over everyone in his entourage and decided that Haldeman was a pluperfect SOB. And because of that somewhat unflattering appraisal, my career took a rise.”

Haldeman reveled in the discipline of presidential campaign work: “It turned out, somewhat to my surprise, that I was a born advance man. This is one of the most demanding jobs in politics. It needs organizational ability, a passion for predictability and punctuality, and a strong enough character to counterbalance the demands of different political groups and personalities.”

Haldeman continued: “He has no time to think. To study his opponent’s strategy and statements, to develop his own strategy and statements. No wonder the almost inevitable campaign dialogue borders so near the idiot level.”

Haldeman read everything he could find on how to organize the White House. He devised what he called a staff system, a model and template of White House governance that almost every subsequent administration would follow.

William Safire took notes as Nixon’s newly anointed chief addressed the troops: “Our job is not to do the work of government, but to get the work out to where it belongs—out to the Departments,” Haldeman began. He continued: “Nothing goes to the president that is not completely staffed out first, for accuracy and form, for lateral coordination, checked for related material, reviewed by competent staff concerned with that area—and all that is essential for Presidential attention.”

“The key staff can always communicate with and see the President when necessary. The priorities will be weighed on the basis of what visit will accomplish most. We’ve got to preserve his time for the things that matter. Now, that does not mean that everything will be reduced for him to the lowest common denominator. The President wants to make decisions himself, not preside over decisions made by the staff. How we decide what is major and what is minor is the key to whether this is a good White House staff or a lousy one.”

Brownlow Committee Report to FDR, describing the ideal qualities of a White House aide. He (or she) “would remain in the background, issue no orders, make no decisions, emit no public statements…should be possessed of a high competence, great physical vigor and a passion for anonymity.”

“The most important thing the president has is time,” says Bull. “And the chief’s job is to reserve as much of it for him as he can—even if it’s just for going over to the Old Executive Office Building to sit there and think and make notes on a yellow pad.”

Haldeman as chief operating officer. “Policy was going to be decided in the White House,” says Higby. “And it was the job of the cabinet to execute. And there were mechanisms put in place to make sure that follow-up and execution did take place.”

Haldeman was better at reading other outsized personalities and egos.

Haldeman often acted as a brake on presidential orders he considered unwise or even illegal. “Presidents are like everybody else,” explains Higby. “They have moments of pique—moments when they’re really furious or really upset. Not only would Haldeman talk Nixon out of crazy ideas, but they had an understanding that the stuff he [Haldeman] felt was really bad and really wrong, he wouldn’t do.”

‘Remember you wanted me to do that? I didn’t do that. Here’s why.’

“Haldeman is more important to me than Adams was to Ike,” the president told Ehrlichman. “For example, the K [Kissinger] situation, which only he can handle. I can handle the rest, probably, but I can’t do that. So protecting Haldeman…is a major consideration. He is the P’s closest confidant…and we can’t let him be tarred as a dirty SOB.”

At the conference, Nixon’s ex-chief was asked how the Watergate scandal had come about. “The thing that went wrong is that the system was not followed,” Haldeman replied. “Had we dealt with [Watergate] in the way we set up from the outset…we would have resolved that matter satisfactorily, probably unfortunately for some people, but that was necessary and should have been done. It wasn’t done, and that was what led to the ultimate crisis.”

Rumsfeld stood out; on the Oval Office tapes, the president had called him, in Nixon’s highest form of flattery, “a ruthless little bastard.” Whip-smart, combative, and politically savvy, Rumsfeld was known for his organizational skill and his suffer-no-fools discipline. He had been a college wrestler, a naval aviator, four-term

Rumsfeld and Cheney had much in common—politically, intuitively, and geographically. “He came from the West, I came from the Midwest,” says Rumsfeld. “Our high school and college circumstances were not dissimilar. I liked to work hard, he liked to work hard. He has a nice, quiet sense of humor and the tougher things got, the better he got.”

Rumsfeld warned Ford that governing without a chief “is your quickest way to lose your credibility because even though you are honest the fact that you don’t know what you are doing misleads people and once you lose your credibility, you can’t govern, so there has to be order, and…I would consider it my job to see that there was order.”

Ford wrote later: “I concluded he was right. The ‘spokes of the wheel’ approach wasn’t working. Without a strong decision-maker who could help me set my priorities, I’d be hounded to death by gnats and fleas. I wouldn’t have time to reflect on basic strategy or the fundamental direction of my presidency.”

Donald Rumsfeld was a man in a hurry: all throttle, no brake.

“The workload was horrendous,” Rumsfeld recalls. “There was the struggle to get a Ford presidency moving and the continuing drumbeat of Watergate.” Rumsfeld needed a deputy, and he had someone in mind. “I had tested Dick Cheney in a dozen ways, over the better part of three years, and I knew exactly what I was getting. I had seen him do all kinds of tough jobs and handle them with great skill and sensitivity. And the tougher the job was, the better he got.”

“There was no reason in the world,” Cheney recalled, “why he should reach down and take this guy with a quasi-sordid past and who’s been kicked out of Yale and pull me up by my bootstraps and give me a job that a lot of people would have killed for.” Of all the presidents Cheney would serve, none could match this gracious gesture by Ford. “When you get that kind of response from somebody, when they are willing to stand up and take the heat during a controversy, rather than chuck you over the side and go with someone less controversial, you never forget that.”

Ford’s new chief set out to execute the president’s agenda. In Rumsfeld’s view, decisions were dead on arrival unless they were translated to every relevant department. “There are very few problems in the federal government that are solely the jurisdiction of a single department,” he explains. “They almost always have legal implications, so the justice system has to be involved. They almost always have congressional implications, so that part has to be connected. They almost always are blurred between defense and intelligence and diplomacy, so that has to be done. “Well, who does all of that connecting? It has to be the chief of staff.”

It was the chief’s job to make sure that every cabinet member got a hearing.

Cabinet members, senior advisers—even friends—could be influential with the president, but Rumsfeld believed the chief of staff was unique. “You’ve got other people who see the president once a week, once a month, once a year,” he explains. “Even though they may have been good friends before, they don’t have the ability to pick the right moment to talk to him and tell him what he does not want to hear. Because the chief of staff is with him day in and day out, he has the ability to select moments when he can look at a president and tell him something with the bark off. He is the one person besides his wife who can do that—who can look him right in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down that road. Believe me, it’s not going to work, it’s a mistake.’

Rumsfeld was firm and did not mince words. That was what Ford needed and he delivered it.”

Rumsfeld was also skilled at delivering bad news to cabinet members, a task he described as being the president’s “heat shield.”

“The vice president got it in his mind that Henry Kissinger was in charge of foreign policy and Nelson Rockefeller was in charge of domestic policy, which means we didn’t need the president,” Rumsfeld recalls. “I can remember explaining to him that ‘heading up’ domestic policy did not mean overriding cabinet officers who had statutory responsibilities on those subjects. And in that stage of his career he didn’t take advice—or no—graciously.”

He comes in, has his business to talk about, talks about it, and gets out. And goes about it and takes care of the business. He’s a fine person and I’m happy to work with him, so rotate him in whenever you want.’

“The difference between Rumsfeld and Cheney was the difference between night and day. Cheney was very relaxed, not uptight, not overbearing. His attitude was ‘We all have to pull together to make the presidency work.’

He understood what our needs were. He also had a wonderful, kind of quirky sense of humor.”

One hundred days into his term, with Rumsfeld and Cheney blocking and tackling, Ford, the ex–college football player, was gaining confidence and running room. “He was just absorbing information and becoming better as president every day,” says Terry O’Donnell. “We got it down to a schedule and we got time for him to think, and do some of the things that Haldeman found so very important. Papers were organized, scheduling issues were carefully thought out before they were put on his plate. Rumsfeld and Cheney strengthened that framework, making sure that the president was well served by the staff.”

describes this era’s Cheney as “relaxed, low-key, trying to get the job done, trying to get things to work smoothly, not let things fall between the cracks. He was just a very regular, down-to-earth guy.” Bob Schieffer, the CBS News correspondent, thought Cheney was superb. “He was the best staff man I ever dealt with,” he says. “Totally straight. Totally nonpartisan. He clearly knew what was going on, and he never told you any dirty laundry, but he would tell you, ‘No, that’s not right; that is right—or that’s something I can’t talk to you about.’

“Cheney was every bit as firm as Don,” says Terry O’Donnell, “but he was not as curt, or short. His was a softer management style. They were both equally committed to getting the result—but Cheney would approach it with a little more sugar.”

“Dick not only won his confidence, but the president realized ‘I’ve got to have a strong chief of staff to make this work.’ And he gave Dick a lot more authority. And Dick Cheney, in those days, was a very substantial chief of staff. There were a number of us who thought he’d be a great national candidate one day.”

The spokes of the wheel, a rare form of management artistry as conceived by Gerald Ford and modified by Dick Cheney.

Watson began furiously drafting memos to Carter, posing questions he would face as president-elect. “What decisions are going to be forced upon him, what decisions is he going to inherit that he needs to be informed about, what initiatives does he want to take right out of the batter’s box—and in order to do that, what does he need to know? What information does he need to have?”

Great format for briefings