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

by Chris Whipple

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.’ ”