The Gatekeepers Quotes

“It has the most awesome responsibilities of any corporation in the world, the largest budget of any corporation in the world, and the largest number of employees. Yet the entire senior management structure and team have to be formed in a period of seventy-five days.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“People ask me if it's like that television show The West Wing," says Erskine Bowles, Bill Clinton's second chief. "But that doesn't begin to capture the velocity. In an average day you would deal with Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the budget, taxation, the environment-and then you'd have lunch! And then on Friday you would say, 'Thank God-only two more working days until Monday.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“Our job is not to do the work of government, but to get the work out to where it belongs—out to the Departments,” Haldeman began. He continued: “Nothing goes to the president that is not completely staffed out first, for accuracy and form, for lateral coordination, checked for related material, reviewed by competent staff concerned with that area—and all that is essential for Presidential attention.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“And Haldeman, the consummate advance man, would take an important lesson to the White House: The president’s time is his most valuable asset.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“When government works, it is usually because the chief understands the fabric of power, threading the needle where policy and politics converge.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“Regan lost his job after he hung up the phone on the first lady. “That’s not just a firing offense,” said James Baker. “That may be a hanging offense!” Photo”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“By contrast, Cheney reveled in it. He’d made the most of a second chance. “I found myself going from the Rock Springs Jail to White House chief of staff,” he reflects.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“And finally Ford asks me, ‘Well, why not?’ And I said, ‘Because you’re a lousy f*cking candidate.’ Well, Cheney quits breathing and the old man looks at me like this,” Spencer says, grimacing. “ ‘And then he says ‘Oh, okay.’ ”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“One of their biggest challenges was the cartoonish public image of Gerald Ford. Arriving in Austria for a state visit, Ford had slipped on the rain-soaked steps of Air Force One and fallen in a heap on the tarmac; ever since, he had been skewered mercilessly on a new television program, Saturday Night Live. Ford had been an All-American football player at Michigan; but in the public mind, he was a pratfalling clown who, reaching for the phone, would staple his ear to his head. The president’s homespun amiability was interpreted as stupidity; he could not “walk and chew gum at the same time.” Lyndon Johnson quipped that he had played too much football without a helmet.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“There was just one problem: Cheney’s background check. Rumsfeld was aware of his protégé’s less-than-stellar academic record. Admitted to Yale on a scholarship, Cheney had distinguished himself as a first-class partier and a fourth-rate student. After three failed semesters, the university told him to take a year off; Cheney went back to Wyoming, where he got a job on a road crew stringing power cables. But upon his return to New Haven, Cheney recalls, “frankly, my attitude really hadn’t changed at all.” After another dismal academic performance, he was told to leave Yale for good. There was worse to”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“Among Nixon’s major domestic achievements, denounced by the Republican Party ever since, was the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“(End running, as Haldeman defined it, is what happens when someone with his own agenda meets privately with the president without going through the chief of staff. The result? All too often, a presidential edict that has not been thought through—with unintended consequences.)”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and Richard M. Nixon were an odd couple, bound by politics and expedience yet worlds apart socially. Haldeman, an advertising agency executive in Los Angeles, was an unlikely candidate for the president’s consigliere. “Bob Haldeman would have been a superstar had he never gone to the White House,” recalls Larry Higby, who followed him from J. Walter Thompson to the White House at the age of twenty-three. Indeed, Haldeman in the early 1960s was Southern California royalty: regent of the University of California; president of the UCLA alumni association; founding chairman of the California Institute of the Arts:”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“In the winter of 1968, after one of the most bitterly contested election campaigns in American history, Richard Nixon hunkered down in a hotel suite in New York City. He had gone there to plan his presidency, and to get even with his enemies. With him was a man Nixon called his pluperfect son of a bitch, and Lord High Executioner: the man who would become the first truly modern White House chief of staff.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency

“At a farewell party, his staff presented him with a gift: a beaten-up car seat—a nod to his Secret Service code name.”
― Chris Whipple, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency