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

by Chris Whipple

“With President Clinton those calls didn’t always require an answer. What he was doing was thinking through a problem and he wanted somebody he trusted who wouldn’t go blab about it. Just listen.”

“Working for Bill Clinton is a very special experience because you’re dealing with somebody who’s extremely bright, who’s got a mind like a steel trap, gathers all the facts, doesn’t forget a thing, and at the same time wants to be able to get input from everybody. And then when he makes a decision, his mind doesn’t stop. It keeps churning. He keeps working it, and the toughest part of dealing with him was to say, ‘You’ve made a decision. Now we’ve got to move on. We’ve got other decisions to make.’ ”

Bowles refused. “I told him, ‘Hell no, I wasn’t going to fire him,’ ” he says. “The president would say, ‘Why not?’ And I’d say, ‘Because every time you come out of that Oval Office and you’ve got some new thing you want us to do, and I can’t get the bureaucracy to do it, you know what I do? I give it to Rahm. And two days later he comes back and it’s done! There are twenty dead people back there—but it’s done!’

“Rahm is a doer, and he gets it done come hell or high water, and sometimes he steps on a lot of people to get it done. But he’s gonna take the hill. And that’s a good quality,” says Panetta, “but the best way to deal with that is to make sure that you keep your arms around him, so that he doesn’t just feel that he can do anything he wants on his own.” Panetta also persuaded Clinton to keep Stephanopoulos. “I saw in George the ability to provide some really good political advice.”

Panetta knew how to motivate his troops. “Leon is not a bully,” says Reich. “He’s not an attack dog. He’s really a very sweet man. What Leon proves is you don’t have to be a bully or an attack dog to be an effective chief of staff. You just have to be very smart. You have to know when to be tough, and also when to let the reins be a little looser. Because the people around you have to have some degree of autonomy or else they’re not going to do well.”

“The president made a lot of gutsy calls—and that’s what I liked about him,” says Bowles. “Lots of people thought, ‘God, you know, it may take him a while.’ But I thought that was a strength. He wanted to hear all sides of the argument. He didn’t subscribe to the ‘ready, fire, aim’ school. He was ‘ready, aim, aim’—and then he fired.”

Serbian dictator was at first defiant. “Milošević didn’t back down as many of his [Clinton’s] advisers told him they thought he would,” recalls John Podesta, the White House staff secretary. “And I remember distinctly his key security advisers were nervous: Will this work? Did we do it right? Will it succeed? The president was the calmest person in the group. The decision was on him. He knew that if it was wrong, he’d bear the burden, but he was confident that he had made the right decision.”

That same month, with Panetta’s help, Clinton prepared for a showdown with his domestic enemies in the House. As budget negotiations approached, the president thought he could persuade Newt Gingrich to see things his way. Panetta wasn’t so sure. “The president always feels that he can convince anybody, anywhere, anytime, what the right thing is to do,” he says. “And he felt he could convince Newt Gingrich.”

Bowles was impressed by the way Panetta lowered the boom on Morris. “Leon had such presence, and he has physical strength, mental strength, a likability and humanity that’s contagious,” he says. “But you know when you’re around Leon that he is the boss.”

“Leon put the Clinton presidency back on track,” says Reich. “I think the most effective chiefs are self-effacing like Leon. They know that all of their power and authority derive from the president. They’re not there to make headlines. They’re not there to assert their own will. They are instruments by which a president can be more effective. And to that extent they are a rarity.” When he became Obama’s first chief, Emanuel set out to emulate Panetta. “If you ask me who I tried to model myself after, it would be Leon,” he says. “I loved Leon. I loved his humanity and his ability to be frank with the president and then execute what the president wanted.”

You’re like a racehorse in the chief of staff’s job—you’re constantly up, you’re constantly wired, you’re constantly running hard. And then suddenly the race is over.”

Bowles had left the White House before the reelection to return to North Carolina. Since then he had pitched in part-time, helping Clinton prepare for his debates and plan for a second term. But he was not eager to come back. “I flat said no a couple of times,” says Bowles. “And I went back for three reasons. One, I really cared deeply about the president. Two, I knew his number one agenda in his second term was to balance the federal budget. I felt he needed somebody to drive it through. And three, he leaned on me really hard.”

“I always thought of the president as the CEO,” he says. “He’s the one that sets the agenda. It’s his presidency, not yours. And the job of the chief of staff is to be the chief operating officer—to make sure that if he sets the goals, you set the objectives, the timelines, and the accountability to make sure that what he wants done is done, when he wants it done, and is done right.”

Bowles carried around a card with the president’s top priorities written on it—and rebelled when Clinton tried to go off script. “One day the president came out of his office and he had another one of his great ideas,” he recalls. “And believe me, they were unbelievably great ideas. And I turned to him and said, ‘Mr. President, you have got to go back into that Oval Office, right now! You’ve got to look at this list of things that you and I agreed you wanted to get done. Not that I wanted to get done, but you wanted to get done. If you will stay focused on those three or four things, I can set up the organization and the structure and the focus to make ’em real. But you can’t do a thousand things.’

Don Rumsfeld told me, ‘You’ve got to be prepared to be fired,’ ” Bowles says. “ ‘Because if you’re not, then you’re not going to give him the right advice. And the right advice is not always yes.’

“The power of the chief of staff is derived,” says Bowles. “If you have the trust and the confidence of the president, you have all the power you need to get what you need done. If you’ve lost the confidence of a president, people smell it, feel it, know it within seconds—and you become an overblown scheduler.”

Podesta and Bowles also had to shore up their troops. “It was critical to keep the staff from feeling like the bottom was falling out,” says Podesta. “At some level that’s being a battlefield commander. You’ve just got to keep your troops focused on what the goal is on a day-to-day basis. Keep the discipline strong, intimidate when you need to—and let somebody cry on your shoulder when that’s appropriate.”

“He had the right personal qualities,” wrote Clinton. “A fine mind, a tough hide, a dry wit, and he was a better hearts player than Erskine Bowles.”

Podesta convened his own version of Baker’s Legislative Strategy Group, bringing together top advisers to address key challenges: “If there was a bottleneck in Congress, how do we move past that? If there was legislation headed at us that we needed to veto, how do we deal with that? If there were economic crises globally in Asia and other places, you know, how do we manage those big initiatives?”

Clinton understood that these cultural things, these smaller things, added up to momentum that created a sense of opportunity in the country. Where there was an opportunity to make someone’s life a little bit better, we took it.”

“People always ask me if the TV show The West Wing was real; and I always say the set wasn’t really like the West Wing”—the actual West Wing is much less grand, the offices smaller. “But the interesting thing is what the show got right: The people there aren’t cynical. They’re actually trying to do a good job for the country. And they thought they could do it better than the other guys could. John Spencer, the actor who played Leo, the chief of staff, and I became friends—and I always said that to him, you know, these people are not cynical.”

Clinton appeared to be promising greater things than he could ever deliver—in fact, nothing less than a political renaissance, a return to the days when public affairs seemed central to the life of the republic, when government was seen as a moral force, when politicians were seen to be wise rather than corrupt. If Ronald Reagan had challenged the pessimism of the post-Vietnam era, liberals hoped that Bill Clinton would challenge the cynicism. In the end, cynicism won—with a major assist from Clinton himself. But amid the dashed hopes and the scandals and the bitterness, a great deal of real work was done.

‘Mr. President, this is your decision. It’s not our decision. It’s your decision. And I’m going to leave you to your decision.’ And he turned and walked out of the room and everybody left with him.”

Card was suddenly alone with George H. W. Bush. “And the president was left with a great burden. He went behind his desk, sat down in the chair, and I was folding up the easel when I watched the president fold his hands. I honestly believe that he was praying. And he looked right at me, but the truth is he was looking through me. And he said, ‘I’m making a decision that will cost young men their lives.’ And he got up from the chair and he walked out the door to the Rose Garden. I folded up the easel, walked out of the Oval Office, and I was shaking.”

Card, who had watched five previous chiefs in action, had a couple of conditions for accepting the job. “ ‘First,’ ” he told Bush, “ ‘we have to have a very candid relationship. You have to be comfortable with me saying anything to you—and I will be comfortable with you saying anything to me.’ The second thing was, ‘As long as I’m your chief of staff I can’t be your friend.’ And then I said, ‘If you’re looking for more than one chief of staff at the same time, I don’t want to be one of them.’ ”

“I broke the job down into the care and feeding of the president; policy formulation; and marketing and selling,” recalls Card. “You have to make sure that the president is never hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, and that they’re well prepared to make decisions that they never thought they’d have to make. You have to manage the policy process and make sure no one is gaming the president. And the last category is marketing and selling. If the president makes a decision and nobody knows about it, did the president make a decision?”

Bush was also looking for something else in his VP: someone as seasoned in national security matters as Bush himself was unprepared. “If there was a hole in the operation, it was in national security,” says Cheney. “And not only did I work for Ford, but I’d been in Congress, I’d been on the Intelligence Committee, I’d run the Defense Department successfully. I fit the mold of what he was looking for.” Although the popular perception of Cheney calling all the shots for Bush was untrue, theirs was an unprecedented sharing of power—almost like the “copresidency” that Ronald Reagan had dangled in front of Gerald Ford at the convention in 1980.

Cheney had always believed that “the chief of staff has more power, if you want to put it in those terms, than the vice president.” But that wouldn’t be true in George W. Bush’s administration. “We had a different kind of arrangement,” Cheney admits. “I think it was unique. I don’t think it’s ever been like that.” Cheney would be a primary voice on national security affairs—and many other policy issues. That was the way Bush wanted it. “There was never a contract, and I didn’t have to really ask him for anything,” says Cheney. “I was going to have the opportunity to get involved in anything I wanted to get involved in.”

“Cheney had a big role from the beginning that no previous vice president had,” says Peter Baker. “I think Card understood that was the dynamic he was coming into. Cheney had been chief of staff. He knew how to run a White House. So I think he was respectful of Andy Card, but just by dint of his own experience and the force ...

Erskine Bowles watched the Cheney-Card dynamic with amazement. In the Clinton White House, he says, “the vice president was fighting his way in to have lunch!” But with Bush, “the decisions flowed through Cheney, and I think Andy was okay with that. He’s a really nice guy. But Cheney had the president’s ear. Cheney had a ton of power and influence, he had knowledge and experience, he had the total trust of the president, and he was the last guy in the room. In...

Can the chief of staff do his job when the vice president wields such power? I asked Cheney about that at his house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the spring of 2015. “Yeah, well, I don’t think of it as a zero-sum game where there’s only so much power,” he says. “I think when the two of them are working together, it’s more effective. Because Andy’s doing X and I’m doing Y. Or Andy’s involved in what I’m doing. I liked the way he operated, obviously. Andy and I were...

“Cheney understood the job I had, and his office was right next door—and he was terrific at making sure I knew what he was up to. Yes, he had strong opinions and very erudite views on policy, but I was never blindsided by the vice president.”

Even-keeled and steady-tempered, Card seemed well equipped to juggle all those egos. “The president wanted a guy who could deal with strong personalities like Karen and Karl and Cheney and all the rest of us,” says Mary Matalin, Cheney’s counselor, “and who could deal with people who wanted to wield power. The more power everybody had, the more effective everybody would be. The Bush model was, ‘We’re all on the same team and we all need to perform at our highest level.’ And he was prescient to choose people who didn’t promote their own agendas.”

Card continues: “And then a nanosecond later, that same person came to me and said, ‘Oh, my gosh. Another plane hit the other tower at the World Trade Center.’ I stood at the door and my first thought was actually, ‘UBL.’ Usama bin Laden. That’s what we called him.” He goes on: “I knew I faced a test that chiefs of staff have to perform: Does the president need to know? Yes. And I made a decision that I would pass on two facts and make one editorial comment, and that I would do nothing to invite a question or start a dialogue.” Card walked up to the president, leaned over, and whispered into his right ear, “ ‘A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.’

Powell met with George W. Bush and Condi Rice upstairs in the White House residence. “I said, ‘I want to make sure you understand some of the consequences of this,’ ” Powell told the president. “ ‘Once you take out a regime, you become governor. You’re in charge. If you break it, you’re the one that’s got to put it back together. And if you are going to have to do military action, you need to gather support for that, and identify those who will not support you. So if you’re thinking about this, you have to take into consideration a lot of issues besides just the military plan.’ And the president said, ‘What do you recommend we do?’ I said, ‘I recommend that we take it to the United Nations. That not only gives you United Nations authority, but it also shows you’ve made an effort to avoid war.’ ” Before invading, Bush promised Powell he would go to the UN for a resolution authorizing force.

Brent Scowcroft. No one was more respected for geopolitical expertise, or for impeccable judgment, than Bush Sr.’s former national security adviser. Back in the Gulf War days, Cheney had described his colleague to George H. W. Bush: “Scowcroft gets it right. He’s absolutely totally loyal to you. He doesn’t have any ego. He’s an honest broker for all the rest of us to deal with.”

“Hindsight is always better than foresight and we’re now debating the hindsight.”

Bolten continues: “I told the president I thought his apparatus was not serving him as well as it should, because he wasn’t being given alternatives. I rarely intervened in national security meetings, but I viewed it as my job as chief of staff to be the one to say, ‘Why aren’t you giving the president better options? Why aren’t you letting him decide, other than having to go along with the military strategy as it’s presented to him? The president was elected to make these decisions.’ And the product of that work was the surge.”

“You know, one always wants things to work out better than they can work out.”

“You can say the chief should have been more powerful,” says Powell, “Condi should have done it differently, Colin should have marched in and done this, Rumsfeld should have done whatever it is Rumsfeld should do. But the president was the president. And as he liked to say, he was the decider.”

Panetta weighed in. “I said, ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to have a chief of staff who can be your son of a bitch when tough decisions need to be made,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘You’ve got to be the good guy. That person has to take the heat for it. And that should not be one of your pals—who might share the same concern that you have about getting rid of somebody.’

Podesta stressed the interaction of the chief and staff. “These are the people you are going to spend all day with,” he said. “These are the people who are going to guide your strategy, who are going to tell you when you’re doing something right, tell you when you’re doing something wrong. And you’ve got to have someone who manages that team, who has your respect and their respect. It has to go up and down.”

“I think the reason he picked Rahm, and really wanted Rahm from the get-go,” says Podesta, “is that he saw that moment as a time to expend all your energy passing stuff. Rahm had the experience under President Clinton but also had been elected to the House and moved up through the leadership.” Faced with a global financial crisis—with credit frozen, banks failing, and the auto industry on the verge of collapse—Obama needed someone who could pass legislation on Capitol Hill. Fast.

Emanuel and Obama would be an odd couple: the brash, profane Washington insider and the cool, cerebral outsider who vowed to change the way the game is played.

The president-to-be was confident about his ability to govern, but he was also a student of history. “He wanted to do it right,” says Bowles. “He didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past. And he certainly wasn’t afraid to surround himself with strong people. I left there more impressed than I was when I went in.”

Emanuel’s upbringing had taught him that “when the president asks you to do something, you had two answers which are yes or yes sir. And I kept, for about twenty-four to forty-eight hours, trying to figure out if there was a ‘none of the above’ answer. And I knew there wasn’t.”

On his desk was a nameplate, a present from his brother Ari: It read, “Undersecretary for Go F*ck Yourself.”

“Rahm really believed that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, which was one of his famous lines early on,”

“Rahm is about points on the board and winning the news cycle. There weren’t that many huge strategic differences of opinion between Rahm and others in the administration. But on specifics, there was a lot of friction.”

Emanuel’s focus was laser-like. With subordinates, the chief did not suffer fools and pounced when he sensed weakness. When one young aide stammered while giving an answer, Rahm snapped: “Take your f*cking tampon out of your mouth and tell me what you have to say.” The “undersecretary for go f*ck yourself” lived up to his billing. “The Rahm freak-outs, the yelling—that stuff’s all real,” says a former senior adviser. But the act was so famous by now that it was almost like theater. “It was hard for anyone to be very afraid because they sort of knew that was his style. It was like, ‘There’s Rahm.’