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

by Chris Whipple

“If Obama didn’t go to his fiftieth birthday party, it’d kill him.” The ruthless, take-the-hill persona also masked a true believer’s passion for progressive policy. In that sense, the ultimate Clintonista was also an Obamian. “You wouldn’t think this from his reputation but he believes deeply,” says Favreau. “He’s so passionate and angry sometimes because he believes in all of the issues. And he’ll fight for the stuff—he’ll get angry because none of it’s bullshit to him.”

As chief, Emanuel tried to emulate his other old boss Panetta. “I think he had a perfect balance of politics, humanity, and interest in public policy and giving the president unvarnished truth,”

“The president had three major initiatives: health care, energy, financial regulation of Wall Street,” says Emanuel. Obama would have to decide which was the most urgent priority and whether it was politically palatable on Capitol Hill.

Emanuel was convinced that health-care reform should wait; it was too heavy a lift after the big stimulus package. “It was my belief that we should go first with financial reform and get it done,” he says. “I gave the reasons why politically and policy-wise.” But Obama was unmoved. What was his political capital for, if not passing the most important part of his domestic agenda? “I didn’t come here to put my popularity up on a shelf and admire it,” the president said. And then he told them, “Come on, isn’t anybody else feeling lucky? I’m feeling lucky.” Emanuel got the message. “The president made his call, he went with health care first. And I made my argument why I would do it differently. I had been through some health-care battles of my own. And he listened to them, asked me again, and made his judgment.” Emanuel still carried scars from the fiery crash of Hillary Clinton’s bill twenty years earlier. But like a good soldier, he saluted—and prepared to carry out the president’s agenda. “I executed his wishes because I even came in from my son’s bar mitzvah to round up votes on that weekend.”

“He can be very persuasive and very charming,” she says. “Rahm looked me in the eye and he said, ‘We’ll do this.’ We did a pinky finger clasp on it. And we promised each other, ‘Let’s not come away with nothing.’ ”

Podesta was amazed by Emanuel’s single-minded focus on the Hill. “They literally operated on a congressional calendar,” he says. “They thought about their work in congressional work periods. Whereas that wouldn’t cross my mind!” He laughs. “But that’s because I lived on the other side of a hostile Congress, and they were living with a very substantial Democratic majority.”

“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 do something else?’ to a person, they would say, ‘I’m glad I did it.’

Obama appreciated how much Emanuel had helped to make it all possible. But his high-wattage act was wearing thin, tiring people out. When Emanuel made it clear that he was serious about leaving, Obama did not offer much resistance.

Daley was a bad fit from the start; to the president’s true believers, his arrival felt like a hostile takeover. The chief made it painfully clear that there was a new CEO in town. He canceled the traditional 8:30 a.m. staff meeting, leaving people out of the loop, and barred key aides from others. “The doors to the chief of staff office were shut all the time—that’s never the way it was with Rahm,” says a former senior staffer. “Daley looked at all of the young Obama people like we were part of the problem,” says another former aide. “We were enablers—there were very few advisers that he found common cause with.”

This close Obama friend continues: “If you look at Rahm and Denis McDonough, the two attributes that they share that led them to be able to counterbalance the Chicago crowd is they delve deep into details. They get granular. And that makes it hard for someone who’s kind of floating up here to compete. Rahm was an expert in policy and communications and strategy. And Bill Daley was an expert at none of those things.”

“The key to success as chief of staff is being empowered by the president,” says Daley’s old friend Bowles. “When people saw that Bill Daley wasn’t empowered, he was dead. You have zero power then, and you might as well just pick yourself up and go home.”

In November 2011, the White House announced publicly that Daley would share some of his managerial responsibilities with Pete Rouse, Obama’s old confidant, who continued to enjoy the president’s trust. Panetta, by then Obama’s secretary of defense, saw the writing on the wall. “I called Daley, and I said, ‘Bill, the president just cut your legs out from under you.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m hoping that’s not the case.’ I said, ‘Bill, let me tell you something. When the president goes public saying that the chief of staff is just going to be in charge of these elements, you are going to find your authority undermined. You’re going to have to think long and hard about whether you want to stay in that position.’

In all things, but especially foreign affairs, he is a fanatical believer in process.

‘If you’re looking for a domestic policy adviser like Jack or like Rahm, I’m not your guy,’ ” says McDonough. “ ‘If you’re looking for someone who will get you something square, honestly arrived at, transparently developed, then I’m your guy.’ So the way I see it, I’m a keeper of a process that gets things to the president.”

Square is a favorite McDonough word: it means “honest,” but it also describes the man who would become Obama’s alter ego for the next four years. If Emanuel, with his dramatic flair, was well suited to the crises of the first term, McDonough—wiry, intense, and a workaholic—seemed tailor-made for the heavy lifting of the next four years. But McDonough’s “no-drama” discipline concealed a ferocious competitive drive.

What Obama and his chief did play—with fierce intensity—was policy and politics, and increasingly, the art of governing by executive order.

“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.”

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Tom Daschle, a friend of both the president and McDonough for twenty years, believes they were a perfect fit. “I think Denis’s style and approach is exactly what the president needed and wanted. Denis’s style is really the president’s style. They give each other strength. President Obama really benefited from Denis’s common sense and judgment and ability to manage all the egos that exist in any administration.”

Even some Democrats thought Obama had something in common with Jimmy Carter: They were the smartest guys in the room, but also the least social.

Panetta, recently retired as Obama’s defense secretary, watched with growing concern. “I mean, look: As smart as Obama is, he doesn’t like politics, he doesn’t like the give-and-take that it takes to get things done,” he says. “Therefore, you need to delegate that to a tough chief of staff or to somebody else who can get that done. Quite frankly, I don’t understand this sense of giving up on key legislation on the Hill. I know they’ve had tough times, and it’s tough politics. But the sense that somehow they’re not going to push either a budget deal or immigration reform or infrastructure funding or trade legislation—because the politics are just too tough. I cannot accept that. You cannot give up.”

McDonough is just getting wound up. “I have a rule. Every day, I have to touch ten members of Congress. Phone call. Letter. E-mail. Text. And if people can’t at the end of the day get to yes on something, and they need to blame it on us, so be it. That’s what happens with presidents. John [Podesta] used to laugh in here all the time about this nostalgia for congressional relations under the Clinton administration. He said, ‘These guys—they hated us!’ Right? But this is just the way it works. And that’s okay. Leon…I’ve got my views on Leon. So be it. I wish him well.”

“Among the many strengths of this president, he is very self-aware. And he is aware of the times when he is less sharp—and the times he is away from Mrs. Obama and the girls is one of those times. And so he’s going to be very aggressive about protecting that. And it’s my job to do that for him as well.”

“We just didn’t test the system, right?” says McDonough. “That’s management failure one. Management failure two is that the way the government procures technology is to say, ‘This is what we need. Go build it.’ They procure by piece. And each piece, or each step, has to prove itself; otherwise, it doesn’t get paid. And so what we had in the Affordable Care Act was, there’s no general contractor, there’s nobody proofing the whole system. Everybody has their individual piece. The thing turns out to be a piece of shit. And everybody’s saying, ‘Well, what? My thing works.’ Right? And then this guy says, “Well, my thing works—so it must be him or him.’ Right?” The sum of the parts was a disaster. “And I’ll never forget that day, having to explain to the president that the problem is not because so many people want health care, it’s because the site is fundamentally flawed,” says McDonough. It was his lowest moment as chief. “Definitely. Walking down the hallway to tell the president, and not knowing whether I’d be coming back the next day. Yeah.”

“The chief of staff has got to say to the president of the United States, ‘You cannot do that,’ ” says McDonough’s old critic, Panetta. “Because you’re going to put yourself in a hole and it’s going to be embarrassing to you and could undermine the very plan that you’re trying to put in place. The role of the chief of staff has to be the flashing red light when you anticipate that the president may be doing the wrong thing, or that he’s not being well served. And you can’t just kind of turn your head and cross your fingers and hope that everything’s going to be okay.”

“I cannot imagine as chief of staff not being damned sure that the Affordable Care Act is going to work. Because you bear a lot of that responsibility—to ensure that the staff has got their act together. I would have developed a task force and met with that task force in my office every damn day to make sure that the president’s most important legacy was going to be working well.”

McDonough is very much an extension of the president. And I think in many ways you pay a price for that because sometimes you can have so much loyalty to the president that you don’t want to confront him. And as chief of staff you’ve got to be the person who can tell the president what he may not want to hear.”

“As the president says, ‘Plan beats no plan.’ And so we got together—a small group. What were the weapons, and how would we deploy them? On immigration. Cuba. Iran. Climate. Clean Power Plan. Executive action. And we just said, ‘This is going to be our plan.’

Obama called up Podesta. “His pitch to me was, ‘I need you to come back here,’ ” he recalls. “Everyone else was trying to fix health care. ‘So you need to come back here while everyone else is attending to the forest fire.’ ” Obama wanted Podesta to take charge of climate change. “He said, ‘I want to make sure the stuff I promised gets done. And you can mess around in everything else too. But this is the thing I really need you to do.’ ”

of The Presidents’ Gatekeepers, a documentary about the White House chiefs. “There are a couple of things you learn when you get here,” the president said. “Number one, the bubble is even worse than you thought. Number two, the Truman Balcony is pretty cool.”

Obama nodded toward them. “Every one of these guys at different times told me something that pissed me off,” Obama said, flashing his familiar grin. “They weren’t always right; sometimes I was. But they were right to do that because they knew they had to tell me what I needed to hear rather than what I wanted to hear.” Obama looked at Priebus. “That’s the most important function of a chief of staff. Presidents need that. And I hope you will do that for President Trump.” With that, Obama said his good-byes and exited.

McDonough realized that the binders had not even been opened: “All the paperwork, all the briefings that had been prepared for their transition team went unused,” he said. “Unread. Unreviewed.”

Andrew Card watched with a sinking feeling: “I said to myself, ‘They don’t know what they’re doing. They have no process. And they don’t have discipline. You must taste your words before you spit them out!’” Panetta thought the Trump presidency’s first forty-eight hours spoke volumes. “When the staff is spending half of its time defending the lies the president makes,” Clinton’s ex-chief told me, “and digging that hole even deeper, then you know that it’s a prescription not just for chaos but for a failed presidency.”

Working for Trump, said Priebus, “is like riding the strongest and most independent horse—tougher and more complicated than any politician. And there is absolutely nothing he’s intimidated by. He’s a man that fears no one and nothing. And that’s very rare in politics. Most people in politics are people who have sort of an approval addiction. Now, granted, President Trump does, too, but he’s willing to weather one storm after the next to get to an end result that most people are not willing to weather. He will. And he will get through anything. He doesn’t mind the craziness, the drama, or the difficulty as long as an end goal is in sight. He will endure it.” Drama and craziness would be the norm on Priebus’s watch. In a functioning White House, decisions flow from an empowered chief with clear lines of authority; Trump’s West Wing looked like the House of Borgia, with Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka scheming for a place near the throne. With equal access to the Oval, they were in the thick of everything. Priebus had little authority, and everyone knew it.

The Trump presidency’s first six months were the most dysfunctional and least accomplished in modern history: its major executive orders were unenforceable, its legislation dead on arrival; its communications dishonest; its assaults on the judiciary, the intelligence community, and the press unprecedented; its future clouded by scandal. Moreover, if Donald Trump had learned the first lesson of White House governance—that presidents cannot succeed without an empowered chief of staff—he had not grasped the second: that governing is different from campaigning. Instead of wooing his opponents and building coalitions that might get things done, Trump continued to divide, disrupt, and demonize.

Ultimately, in the view of Washington insiders, Priebus couldn’t win the respect of the president or his staff. “He was younger than Trump, he didn’t command the room,” said Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent of the New York Times. “Nobody was afraid of him. Nobody had any compunction about going around him, about crossing him. Reince had never been in government, didn’t really seem to understand how to make it work, and never gained the respect of his president in a way that would allow him to be an effective chief of staff.”

He was Trump’s idealized version of a military man—the kind of person Trump’s father had tried to mold when he sent his wayward son to a military academy. “Kelly is Fred Trump talking from beyond the grave to his son,” Bannon told me. “John Kelly is the man Fred Trump always wanted Donald Trump to be. Gary Cooper—no brag, just the facts, no self-promotion, an American hero.”

told him, ‘You have to be the son of a bitch who is honest with the president when mistakes are being made. You’ve got to have that relationship where you can speak the truth to the president and he can speak the truth to you. Because, frankly, my impression is there’s nobody in that White House that’s doing that.’”

Kelly himself dismissed the notion that he would discipline the president. “I was not brought into this job to control anything but the flow of information to our president so that he can make the best decisions,” he said in the White House press room. “I was not brought in to control him.” The remark betrayed Kelly’s ignorance of the chief’s most important duty: telling the president what he does not want to hear.

Working for Trump is a Faustian bargain. “What happens is, publicly there are some things that you must do to preserve your ability to get things done privately,” says a White House adviser who knows both Priebus and Kelly well. “You want to prove your value on those battles that aren’t that important so that you can show the president you’re a hard-ass SOB.”

“This guy’s modus operandi is to pull the pin on a grenade,” said Leon Panetta, “and roll it into a room, have it go off, and when the smoke clears, hope that somehow things will be okay. It doesn’t work that way in foreign affairs. You’re dealing with leaders like Kim Jong-un who says, ‘The hell with you.’” Panetta paused. “This is a president, in a word, that—like North Korea—has to be contained. You’ve got to find ways to put your arms around the situation and make sure that, despite his own instincts, you move him in the right direction in terms of the interests of the country.”

“If you have people like Kelly and others around the president,” Panetta observed, “chances are they can keep a handle on it. But if this president suddenly kicks Kelly out of the room, kicks McMaster out of the room, and says, ‘I don’t give a damn. This is what I’m going to do!’”—Panetta paused—“that could be a very dangerous moment for the future of this country. I would not be surprised if Kelly and Mattis and McMaster have talked about: ‘What do we do if…’” “Would you be talking about it if you were in Kelly’s shoes?” I asked Panetta. “Absolutely,” he said. “Absolutely. It’s only the fate of the country that’s at stake.”