“The rewards are few,” he says of being chief of staff. “The pains are magnified. You get all the blame and never any of the credit. You are in the cockpit seat. And when anybody gives you advice about, ‘Oh, you should do this. You should do that’—unless they’ve sat in that cockpit seat and been strafed by friendly fire as well as enemy fire, they don’t know anything about the job. Is it miserable going through it? Are you getting wind shear, whiplash, can’t tell vertical from horizontal—up from down? Yeah! But I guarantee you, if you ask every one of the chiefs, ‘Would you have traded it to
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