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

by Chris Whipple

As chief of staff, Baker had been emphatic: “The most important word in the title is staff.” Regan had other ideas. “He wanted the job because he thought it would serve him well: that he would be the star,” recalls Tom Brokaw. “He was frustrated [at Treasury] because he was on the outside looking in. And he didn’t appreciate that the reason Jim was so successful was the discretion he used in how he ran the White House. It was a complete misreading on Regan’s part of what the chief of staff’s job meant.” Ideally, the chief is the COO to the president’s CEO. “Regan thought he was the CEO,” says Duberstein, “and Ronald Reagan was the retired chairman of the board.”

Nancy Reagan was aghast. “If Ronnie was incredulous, I was furious,” she recalled. “I called Don Regan from my office to let him know how upset I was. I felt very strongly that Ronnie had been badly served, and I wanted Don to know….He was chief of staff, and if he didn’t know, he should have. A good chief of staff has sources everywhere. He should practically be able to smell what’s going on.”

“We became convinced that Reagan was absolutely telling the truth,” says Duberstein, “and wouldn’t have known Ollie North but for photographs he saw in the newspapers. And what we realized was that under Regan nobody was minding the store. It was a bunch of cowboys out there.”

“You can’t be a president’s chief of staff if you think you are president consciously or unconsciously,” he said. “You’ve got to realize, as much as it bruises your ego perhaps, that you’re working for him, and carrying out his policies. You’re free to argue with him, to debate with him, to disagree with him—but you can’t ever substitute your judgment for his.”

By the time you reach my age, you’ve made plenty of mistakes. And if you’ve lived your life properly—so, you learn. You put things in perspective. You pull your energies together. You change. You go forward. My fellow Americans, I have a great deal that I want to accomplish with you and for you over the next two years. And the Lord willing, that’s exactly what I intend to do.

Duberstein was now a virtual co–chief of staff. With her friend Deaver gone, Nancy dealt directly with Duberstein. “Reagan was always in the Oval at 9 a.m.,” he says. “She would call me at five minutes of nine and give me a heads-up about something they had just talked about, or they had read in the newspaper that morning. It was so I could start my mind thinking, or people working—so that I could anticipate and help him out and guide him. If he didn’t sleep well the night before, sometimes she would tell me that—so that I could adjust his calendar a little bit. ‘Did he need all of those meetings?’ Or ‘Give Ronnie a little bit of a break here.’

“One of the problems with Don Regan was that he shut the door to the Oval Office. My attitude was, instead of having Reagan reading all the material, open the door and let him see people. He’s an actor. He likes to look at people. He learns that way—whether it was congressmen or White House staff or cabinet officers.”

Reagan’s overriding goal was to defeat Communism. “With welfare, taxation, and everything else he went through the motions,” says Spencer. “What Ronald Reagan ate, slept, and breathed was what to do about the Soviet Union.”

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,”

I asked him how he would grade his good friend Jim Baker as Reagan’s chief. “I would give him an A-1,” he said. “He did what Reagan wanted but he also was not afraid to lead or just say, ‘Mr. President, let’s try this.’ He was outstanding. Outstanding in every way.”

Kinder and gentler did not, however, describe the new White House chief of staff. “John would be characterized as irascible: ‘Oh my God, what shit storm are we going to walk into today?’ ” says McBride. “He was tough—‘You’d better have your arguments lined up, you’d better be well prepared.’ Could that hurt someone’s feelings if they weren’t prepared? Probably.”

“because we all liked Andy. He was always in a good mood.” Sununu was unrepentant. He was fond of saying, “If people don’t like you—and love your boss—then you’ve done your job.”

Dick Cheney says his advice for Sununu fell on deaf ears. “Sununu comes over to my office and as I was talking, he sat back, looked at the ceiling, and twirled his thumbs,” Cheney says. “He wasn’t the least bit interested. I think somebody told him he should do it.”

“President Bush was smart enough to understand that the right thing for America and the world was to show a little bit of discipline.”

Sununu brought his own discipline when it came to pushing the president’s domestic agenda. “He is an incredibly quick study, an extremely smart guy; and one of the prerequisites for that job is to know politics and policy,” says Bates. “To be able to size up an issue quickly. He was able to do that and understood the political ramifications. Something may be a good policy but does it have a chance of passing? He had a good grasp of that. He seemed loyal to the president. I saw him go toe to toe with some greats from industry and he would defend the president vocally and adamantly and seemed to enjoy sparring with them.”

“This was a very involved president, a very agenda-driven president, a very goal-oriented president,”

“We had done acid rain legislation in New Hampshire when I was governor,” he says. “The president felt very comfortable letting us push that approach for the legislation. It turned out to be one of George Bush’s great accomplishments—major environmental legislation that defined the way you can deal with complicated problems and still come up with a package that had great bipartisan support.”

“That was a textbook case of how you fight a war,” says Baker. “You get in, you do what you said you’re going to do, and you get out. And you have overwhelming force to get the job done.”

Sununu cited them as proof of his managerial genius. “I guarantee you that contrary to the legend, any strong statements on my part are both controlled, deliberate and designed to achieve an effect,” he boasted. “There is no random outburst. It is all designed for a purpose.”

“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 President’s Chief of Staff: Lessons Learned,” James Pfiffner put Sununu in the company of Sherman Adams, H. R. Haldeman, and Donald Regan—each of them proof that “a domineering chief of staff will almost certainly lead to trouble”: …strong chiefs have learned the hard way that serving the president means being able to cultivate other constituencies for his use. Sununu did not recognize this, and thus felt free to alienate Congress, the Cabinet, the press, and interest groups as well as his White House subordinates. It is as if his attitude were “I am so powerful that I do not have to be nice, or even minimally civil, to other people.” In this he was ignoring the old Lebanese proverb that holds, “one kisses the hand that one cannot yet bite.” When Sununu got into trouble those who previously had to kiss his hand turned to bite it.

Sununu had commandeered a White House limousine to attend a stamp auction in New York City. “It was clear it was going to be an embarrassment,” says Cheney, “because he couldn’t justify what was being done. He was the chief of staff, kind of arrogant, didn’t take advice kindly. And there were people who were eager to take a shot at him. If he continued down this road, he was going to get in trouble.”

Sununu conceded that he had made mistakes. “If I had to do things over as chief of staff,” he says, “I might have given a lot more focus to trying to get the president to take the credit for what he accomplished.” Another error, he says, “was thinking that not talking to the press was a strong plus, and I did that out of loyalty to the president. I didn’t realize that maintaining a better relationship with the press would have been of value to the president.”

“The people who don’t succeed as White House chief of staff are people who like the chief part of the job and not the staff part of the job,” says Baker. “You’ve got to remember that you’re staff even though you’re powerful.”

‘I want to try a system where politics will be outside and the government will be inside—you and Teeter will work together and if there are any problems we will work to resolve them.’ ”

Bush was disillusioned with Skinner. He noted in his diary: “I must confess, I miss Sununu and his brilliance and his ability to put things into perspective, and to get up and browbeat the Hill. Yes, there was a lot of china broken, but I’m wondering if we don’t need the Chief of Staff to step up his activities, and get control of more.”

“Bill is going to be president,” he had written in his diary. “If the times call for a strong president, he will govern much as Franklin Roosevelt governed—with boundless energy, great charm, and bold initiative….But I worry that his leadership may fail. He’ll become unfocused and too eager to please.”

Clinton—brilliant, undisciplined, and indefatigable—who truly called the shots.

Reich, who would become Clinton’s secretary of labor, sensed trouble. “The chief of staff cannot be a dear old friend,” he remembers thinking when McLarty accepted the job. “It’s too difficult for the chief to tell the president no. It’s also difficult for the chief of staff and his boss to see and understand clearly their respective roles and not to let the past intrude on the present.”

“It was a mess. I mean, really a total mess,” he says, shaking his head. “People would wander in and out of the Oval Office, the president would get a little bit of information here, a little bit of information there. And so it took him more time to make worse decisions.”

Bowles noted, that Hillary Clinton would come down the hall from her West Wing office and try to impose order. “There were plenty of good people, but no accountability,” he says. “It drove the first lady crazy; so she would come in and take over meetings.”

McLarty admits the transition from campaigning to governing was a steep learning curve. “I think that President Clinton’s greatest strengths were in some ways his weaknesses as well,” he says. “The fact that on the campaign trail he would linger with people, listen to them attentively, remember what they said—the great empathy, I-feel-your-pain—was absolutely true. But in trying to manage the White House, stay on schedule, move things forward, it may not serve quite so well.”

Labor secretary Reich was alarmed but more forgiving toward McLarty. “Mack got a bad rap because the chaos was blamed on him,” he says. “He could have been a stronger chief of staff, but Bill Clinton didn’t necessarily want a strong chief of staff. Bill Clinton put him in that place because Bill Clinton wanted to run the White House himself and didn’t want to be disciplined.” Podesta says the president did not fully grasp that the chief of staff is a gatekeeper—and honest broker of his cabinet’s views. “He’s a governor. His staff were these guys that ran the Highway Department, right? So I think he thought he was going to interact more with his cabinet than you ever do.”

“The White House chief of staff, a good one, is everywhere. He’s in all the meetings; he has his finger on everything. Mack had no idea what goes on in the White House—he didn’t know where to go, who to see. And Mack’s not good at reading people. He can’t look at anybody and tell who’s trouble, who to keep a finger on.”

Emanuel, just thirty-three, was already a legend for his rich vocabulary of four-letter words, and for his willingness to walk over hot coals, broken glass, or worse to get a job done. People who disappointed him could expect the unexpected: like a dead fish, which Emanuel famously sent in a box to a pollster who betrayed him. The Luca-Brasi-sleeps-with-the-fishes treatment was just for openers. Bob McNeely, the White House photographer, marveled at his modus operandi: “He twisted arms. He threatened people. He called ’em names. There was a little bit of the Lyndon Johnson treatment: ‘We’ll close every post office in your district.’

Hillary was at the end of her rope. As Bob Woodward wrote in The Agenda: Over the last months she had reached some conclusions. The burden of carrying out the administration policies was too much on her husband. He was the chief congressional lobbyist, the chief message person, the policy designer, the spokesman—he carried out all the functions. Too many senior people in the administration and on the staff were stopping short of full preparation.

The first lady’s frustrations finally came to a head at a meeting ostensibly called to discuss a gas tax. Instead, it became a day of reckoning. With lawyerly precision, Hillary Clinton delivered a brutal critique of White House management. The economic team and the political team were not communicating. The communications team was ineffective. She was furious. “This is unacceptable and unfair to Bill,” she said, according to Woodward: The president had become the “mechanic-in-chief,” put in the position of tinkering instead of being the president who had a moral voice, who had a vision, who was going to lead them on this journey. The economic plan wasn’t about budgets and numbers, she said. It was a values document. It was to help working people and small businesses….That’s what we should be talking about, she added. “I want to see a plan.” She wanted everybody involved. “As we develop these policies, we have to decide how to explain them.”

“Bill Clinton was doing everything, and trying to be everything to everybody. His tendency toward lack of discipline was overwhelming him and overwhelming the White House staff. There was no coordination to speak of, there was no overall control. There was a lot of wasted time and wasted motion.”

“The president basically said, ‘What would need to be done in order to make the chief of staff job respond in an effective way?’ ” recalls Panetta. “ ‘How do I better organize the office?’ ” He did not immediately realize the president was dangling the chief of staff’s job. But, Panetta says, “the fact that he wasn’t asking me a budget question kind of rang a bell that something was going on.”

Blunt and grounded, Panetta was a hawk on the budget but liberal on social issues, and he rarely pulled his punches.

From now on, Haldeman is the Lord High Executioner. Don’t you come whining to me when he tells you to do something. He will do it because I asked him to and you’re to carry it out….I want discipline. It’s up to Haldeman to police it….When he talks, it’s me talking, and don’t think it’ll do you any good to come and talk to me, because I’ll be tougher than he is. That’s the way it’s going to be.

“You need a broader mandate than Mack’s,” Stephanopoulos told him. “You need the power not to be overridden, not to have to deal with three different White Houses. You need to be a dictator.” Panetta thanked him for the advice and took the book.

“I said, ‘I’m really valuable to you as OMB director. We’ve got your economic plan in place.’ And the president told me something that I’ll never forget. He said, ‘Leon, you can be the greatest OMB director in the history of the country, but if the White House is falling apart, nobody will remember you.’

Panetta accepted the job—with a few conditions. “I said it’s important (1) that I have the trust of you and the first lady; (2) that you give me the authority to do some reorganization if I think it’s necessary in order to make the place work. And (3) that we really be honest with each other—that we tell each other what we feel and what we’re thinking.”

Panetta knew the White House was run informally, but he had no idea how informally. “I went to Mack and said, ‘I’d like to see your organizational chart for the White House staff.’ And he said, ‘You know, Leon, I don’t believe we have one of those.’ And I said, ‘Oh, shit.’ That’s when I knew I was in deep trouble! I had to basically organize the White House using little boxes. My army training helped me well because I basically established a kind of chain of command on the staff, who reported to who, and built the staff based on that organization chart.”

Bowles. “So what we had to do was make it simple.” Mild-mannered and businesslike, the North Carolina–born Bowles had a missionary zeal for management: His first three commandments were “organization, structure, and focus.” Although he had not known Bowles before he became his deputy, Panetta would come to rely heavily on him during the difficult budget negotiations ahead.

’em Phi Beta Kappa, smart women out of the same class. But I knew I worked for him, and that’s the relationship you can’t lose. I don’t think it’s critical to be the president’s friend, or even important, but you have to know him. You have to know what he’s good at, what he’s not good at, where he needs help—and then your job is to do that.”

Bowles’s first goal as deputy chief was to take control of Clinton himself. “The biggest asset you have is your president’s time,” he says. To figure out how that asset was being used, Bowles conducted a “time and motion” study of the president. “We went back and took all of the president’s old schedules and then we got the reality—because people record what the president actually does. We color-coded it: Foreign policy was red, economic policy was blue, and so on. The president wanted to focus on X, Y, and Z. By color-coding just what they had laid out, you could see that he wasn’t focusing on X, Y, and Z. And since there was a whole rainbow of colors every day, you could say: ‘Hey, how are you going to get a single message out when you’re doing six messages every day—or three messages every day? That’s crazy.’ ”

And he read like that old Evelyn Wood [speed-reading] course. He could take a page and read it just like that and he retains everything in it—and have a full discussion with me at the same time. And how he does it, I’ll never know.”

“Leon has an iron fist in a velvet glove,” says Reich. “He’s not a disciplinarian for the sake of being a disciplinarian; he’s actually a very gentle soul, but he knows when discipline is necessary.”