president ford lost to president carter and then president carter loses to reagan. so we had five presidents in 20 years. there was an op-ed, loyd cutler, white house council for jimmy carter wrote a piece in the washington post saying the presidency was now too complicated for any one person and then along came ronald reagan. you can disagree with him, but he certainly proved that the office itself in the right hands could be a force for good. the speech that night remarkably 30 years ago, we re now as separated as far from that speech as he was eisenhower leaving washington, which makes us all field oleel old, i think. that night it was seen as a grace note. the old boy was having one more turn on stage and that in the paper, though, in the new york times that day, bill sapphire, a conservative, had a column saying reagan had had a good first term but we wish he hadn t
later cost did say yes. don mcgahn is a john dean, entered as a john dean, and hoping to become a lloyd cutler by strategically leaking along the way. the question we re going to discover is which of those identities is the more true to what really happened. it s fascinating when you put it like that. i think you re in agreement with rachel maddow s analysis as well. let s take a listen to that for joyce. don mcgahn all of a sudden is the subject of a lot of news stories in terms of him having restrained the president from his worst or potentially most unconstitutional impulses around the russia investigation, and obstruction of justice. makes don mcgahn, like, the picture of heroic self-sacrifice here, right? joyce, your take? it s interesting to see the president go through lawyers faster than a chain smoker goes through cigarettes. i mean, mcgahn is just leading the steady drum beat of lawyers departing. this one, ari, you re right
that the wrong person to ask? has john kelly never had control of the situation? i think at times he has and he s certainly tried to gain some order, establish some order in the white house. that seemed to be working for a while. but we seem to have he seems to have lost some momentum or grip on that process. he s trying to get it back. but there are some substantive issues that this white house needs to talk about, but i think in the clinton administration when he lloyd cutler, a very seasoned white house counsel with joel fein as his deputy. i asked john podesta to kpesk specifically handle the controversy and that helped too i think. as we look at the video replaying it now of the president and his chief of staff boarding air force one, i think a lot of us were struck over the last couple hours he had no idea that rudy giuliani was about to go on tv and it would blow this thing up. the president s reblowing it up again today.
it is not a good thing for the president to take the fifth amendment but he probably should have deny it. what do you think of that. it s absurd. what you have to understand is you have to have a strategy and a he will goal. our goal i was working closely with white house counsel, lloyd cutler, a great, great legendary lawyer, was to win the 1996 re-election and keep the president in office so he could fulfill his term. and by every analysis, we concluded that if the president refused to testify, that would be very harmful and would put ate risk our strategy. and what happened? sure, there were some scars. no question about it. but the president was reelected. the president served his term. and if he ran again today, he would be reelected.
according to the fbi? andrea, i would hope not and i do not believe we would. i do think a chief of staff has to rely on his staff. the general counsel, that was our point person with lloyd cutler and joel klein who got that backlog of security clearances cleared up but when someone doesn t have a security clearance in a critical position like staff secretary that is controlling all of the paperwork going to the president and seeing the most sensitive material, i don t think there s any question that would have been brought to my attention if i would not been aware of it. theed have demanded my immediate attention and i believe we would have taken action. joining us as well, ruth marcus, washington post deputy editorial page editor. ruth, the fact of keeping him on the job, don mcgahn must have told kelly, kelly had to know he didn t have a full clearance