The Situation Room Quotes

“This book examines crisis management in the modern presidency. During the Trump administration, the president was the crisis to be managed.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“If any problem is easy to solve, somebody at a lower level will solve it and take credit for it… and so almost every decision the president makes is selecting the least bad option.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“The Achilles heel of any autocracy is that you don’t have people who are willing or able to speak truth to power,” Tony Blinken told me. “That’s incredibly dangerous.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“But the discussion about how to respond was quickly sidetracked when one participant offered Trump’s take on the situation: “When I have bad debt, I just get rid of bad debt. Can we trade Puerto Rico for Greenland?”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“The following day, Trump backtracked, telling a group of journalists that “I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters just like you, just to see what would happen.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“Wearing a mask anywhere outside the Sit Room itself was cause for dismissal.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“It was a classic example of Trump’s acting on the advice of whoever was the last person in his ear.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“Bolton contrasted Trump with George W. Bush, under whom he served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Bush 43 “was not a foreign policy hand like his father had been,” Bolton says. “He knew he had a lot to learn and he learned it. Trump had a lot to learn and he didn’t bother.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“James Mattis, the former Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, described him as a threat to the Constitution “who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“Almost nothing about it was normal. This book examines crisis management in the modern presidency. During the Trump administration, the president was the crisis to be managed.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“And it reveals a larger truth about the Trump presidency: Almost nothing about it was normal. This book examines crisis management in the modern presidency. During the”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“So, how do you spend the most stressful ninety minutes of your life, when there’s absolutely nothing you can do about the events to come? President Obama went upstairs to play Spades with several aides and photographer Pete Souza.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“Mike Vickers,”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, had fed so many documents into the CMC shredder that they broke it; after that, they came down to the Situation Room to finish the job.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“This decision allowed Poindexter to circumvent normal security controls. He opened backdoor communications with an NSC aide named Oliver North, which was the beginning of the scandal that nearly brought down Ronald Reagan’s presidency: the Iran-Contra affair.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“Reagan was the type of man who was comfortable in any room he entered.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“midnight.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“November 20, 1983. That was the date ABC aired a movie called The Day After.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“Has anyone considered that this might be the act of a local Cambodian commander who has just taken it into his own hands to halt any ship that comes by?” Heads swiveled to look. Who on earth was talking? It was David Hume Kennerly, the twenty-eight-year-old White House photographer. White House photographers, who attend nearly every presidential meeting, are supposed to be flies on the wall. They snap and don’t speak—but not this time. What was the photographer doing injecting his views into a top secret NSC meeting? The people in the Cabinet Room were among the most powerful in the world. No outsider would dare interrupt them, particularly as they debated U.S. military action. The absolute chutzpah of this young man was stunning. And then he went on. “Has anyone stopped to think that he might not have gotten his orders from Phnom Penh?” Kennerly asked. “If that’s what has happened, you know, you can blow the whole place away and it’s not gonna make any difference. Everyone here has been talking about Cambodia as if it were a traditional government, like France. We have trouble with France, we just pick up the telephone and call. We know who to talk to. But I was in Cambodia just two weeks ago, and it’s not that kind of government at all. We don’t even know who the leadership is. Has anyone considered that?”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“He does it, so he assumed everybody was that way,” Bossert says. “His paranoia was in part because he assumes everyone else acts like he acts.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“The ghosts of history—from LBJ’s micromanaging to Nixon’s absence, to the mad scrambling after Reagan was shot to the chaos of the Trump administration—hover over the Situation Room.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“Ford set the standard for a calm and rational approach to the presidency. “I think it was in his DNA,” Richard Norton Smith told me. “He just shied away instinctively from a somewhat artificial, media-fed crisis atmosphere that is so much a part of life in Washington.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“And as Cox himself declared on the night he was fired, “Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people” to decide.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“During the call, Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky provided damaging information on Hunter Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“Khrushchev put it very well one time,” he noted, “when he said that in the case of nuclear war, the living will envy the dead.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“Former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes confirmed that the rumors were at least partly true, revealing that he had accompanied former governor John Connally on secret missions across the Middle East to persuade the Iranians to wait until Reagan was sworn in.”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

“I’ve never really been seized by being the first, because there were many women who contributed great things who were just never heard of,”
― George Stephanopoulos, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis