Oh, well, then i am preaching to the choir. I was going to tell you, i was looking at the Pulitzer Prize winners announced and there are five books nominated or that won Pulitzer Prizes. I was talking to frank reese, our partner in this, and i understand you know frank, we only have three of those five to show. And one of those was poetry and we dont do a whole lot of poetry. I told him we better do better this next year and get all five. Chris whipple is no stranger to awards. He is a filmmaker, writer, journalist. He started his career in washington d. C. With richard hol brook at Foreign Policy magazine. A correspondent for life magazine and the thing i am very envious of is 20 years at 60 minutes and at abc news and won multiple emmy and pea body awards. He won a columbia du pont journalism award. He is the executive producer of programs like spy faster, the cia, and the cross hairs. And the the gatekeepers how the white house chiefs of staff define every presidency which lefthand to this book. It is interesting that one of the chiefs of staff that has been raided one of the three best chiefs of staff of modern history is that gentlemen right over there. Jack watson. Jack served in governor jimmy carters administration and went to washington with him after the 76 election and served as second of the cabinet before being named chief of staff during the reagan presidency. Chris, you call the chief of staff the second most powerful person in washington. It is a person not elected and most people dont know that individuals name. How does it get to be the second most powerful person in washington . There is nothing in the constitution about a chief of staff. It was really the invention of eisenhower. He appointed a guy name Sherman Adams who was famously tough and they called him the abominal no man. I started with h. R haldeman who was nixons chief of staff and he was the face of watergate and yet i think jack would tell you and many successors that he created the template for the modern white house chief. The empowered white house chief who is the president s ga gatekeeper, he is the honest broker of information we hope that flows to the president and at the end of the day he executes the president s agenda. That has been true since haldeman. It is back at the Carter Library where i spent days in the archiv archives. That is largely because of this guy right here. I tried to focus and be their honest chronicler. Jack, what is a chiefs day like . It is never the same. Jimmy carter was a very early riser and i made it a point to be in my office if he was in his office which meant i was frequently in my office by 6 00 a. M. Not necessarily meeting with him but there for him, briefing papers that would later be discussed with him. What white house chief of staff does every day on Different Things is paying attention and following it up with the implementation of policy, checking what is going on on the hill, you is a subgroup of people on the white house staff who are responsible for congressional relations but in our case we had a little group that would discuss issues on the hill, what is coming up, who is for something, who is against something, what we have to trade to get someones vote, that kind of thing. The difference between then and now is a chasm of almost immeasurable magnitude. One of the things that president elect carter had you do before he assumed office was kind of map out a strategy, a structure for the white house staff. What were you trying how do you try and make it work . Well, when anyone in the pennsylvania primary on april 30th, frank more and others, charley and many others, have been working hard of course, but when jimmy won the pennsylvania prima primary and he was very poplar with labor, i had an epiphany and i thought my goodness, this man is actually going to be president. He suggested for passing on to governor carter, forgive me for calling him jimmy, and i was saying we need to be a National Figure and governor carter did not is a national network. He was building it day by day literally from scratch. Everyone in this room will remember the joke of the day was jimmy who . Running for what . Kind of thing. Approved my suggestion and asked me to flesh it out more and i did. On june the 9th after the june 8th primary when he loed the number of delegates he needed to win the nomination he called me from plains and said i will be up in atlanta tomorrow at the built more hotel will you guy to the plains with me. They were flying in this little tiny engine plane, almost knee to knee, and he said we will do what you outlined and i was thrilled. Really thrilled about it. I thought it was a man with natural stature and he was former governor and author and Everything Else and he said no, you are going to do it. I said, oh, no. That is a big mistake. I said no, that is a very bad idea. He said i know you, you know me, and i trust you and you trust me. So you are going to do it. I said dont worry about not knowing you. Anybody, when you call, once they know what you are doing they will return your phone call. Not only did they return this phone calls but when jack, as president carts emissary to official washington, started meeting with the clarkcliffords and the powers that be in washington he charmed them. Jack can charm the birds out of the trees as you know. Here they come shoeless rubes from george. From georgia. As i learned, there is always this tension between the true believers and the staffers. It is not new. Jack experienced it. What happened was the campaigners jody powell and others who were staying and working around the clock in campaigning from motel to motel. They got wind of the fact that somebodies was putting together this transition and hiring people. There was a revolt. And, you know, what happened at that point was i think very telling and very formative for the carter presidency because ham, who famously said that if we hire vans as secretary of state and shing ski for secretary advisor we will have failed. What happened was jimmy carter really cast his lot with ham and the campaigners at that point. It is not that jack wasnt doing phenomenal work and probably the best transition preparation in history. What happened at that point is carter came in with ham as the de facto chief of staff. I think a lot of people thought jack would be the logical choice as white house chief. Ham became the de facto chief and it wasnt a job ham was suited for. Ham was the most brilliant political strategist who came down the pipe but he should have been the karl rove, in my humble opinion, in that white house instead of the chief of staff. Two and a half years in, jimmy carter realized he had to appoint a chief of staff and appointed ham as you know, long story, but ultimately appointed jack for the last year of the presidency and that was when jack showed as you mentioned at the outset that he was an outstanding white house chief. Yeah, i think jack in your transition planning, you had a smaller role for hamalson the transition materials were covering National Security and environmental and governmental reorganization and Economic Policy and develop policy and so forth. He wrote well. He was a savvy thinker in the political realm. He had written that iconic memorandum for governor carter two years before he ran. Ham was the closest to the president. Ham and joedy. Jody. I think ham is one of the best. In my opinion there has never been a better press secretary than jody powell. I dont say they lightly. I remember it was going to be an Important Role in the white house. Political and tactical advisor. What ham himself, if ham were sitting on this stage with us as i wish he were, he would say i dont want to be chief of staff, i wasnt cut out for it, it didnt play to my strengths, it took us a while. More fundamentally jimmy carter didnt want a white house chief of staff and correct me if i am wrong jack but i think it was the example of holdeman. He personified watergate and the corruption of the Nixon White House and wanted nothing to do with it. I think he thought he would run the white house himself. Jerry ford had model he called the spokes of the wheel where you would have five or seven advisors with equal access coming and going. For ford, it was a disaster. Within a month, ford realized this was dysfunctiodysfunctiona had no time to think. It was like drinking from a fire hose. He reached out to Don Rumsfield and powered him as a chief. That was a month in. But they warned him it doesnt work. Dick cheney was telling jack every day. When we moved into the west wing, there was a broken bicycle wheel and he said this is what the spokes of the wheel looks like. People wrote dear ham, be aware of the spokes of the wheel. Dick cheney. There is another reason in my opinion president carter was among to have first among equals chief of stat designated. That was he had and had for some time very close and professional relationships with about six or seven of us. Stew and ham and jody and myself and frank moore and bob lip shoots who was White House Council to begin with. He did not want to interpose any one of us between that group of people and a factor for jimmy carter. I think it was not a good decision in my opinion. Chris, you write the president signed off on everything from typos to memos to request to play on the white house tennis court. Carter could not perform president ial duties and run the white house staff. He famously hated typos and sent memos back with corruptions on everything. And jack and i havent talked about this in a long time but you said jack, he didnt schedule the white house tennis court. I thought you just schedule time on the white house tennis court. He could consume amazing quanties of information. He could simulate and use them. I was having a conversation with brad skoe cough at one point. Bush 41s amazing nationalal security advisor. He said big and i were talking one day and he said i love this guy and i can give him a 50 page memo. Jimmy carter, i think, got balked down in the minutia. There is chapter and verse on all the legislation passed and more legislation than any president since lbj but we couldnt prioritize. You need a chief of staff to prioritize and make sure that the narrative is consistent. Make sure everybody is on the same page. None of that is happening current day. He suffered from not having a white house chief from day one and in my opinion jack would have been a great one. One of the things when you start out your book you talk about what seems like just the most logical. That is bringing former chiefs of staff together. Jack, you were there, what was it like and what was it meaning . We just went around the table and each one of us made a brief statement on a piece of advice we thought was helpful or would give guidance. He was the chief of staff that i met when we were elected. It got around to dick who was at the end of the table, almost at the very end, dick is an interesting man. He leaned ford like this and he said i have one piece of advice, keep the Vice President under control. He looked very gravely at rom and said never forget when you open your mouth it is you who is speaking but the president of the United States to which rob said oh, blank and brought down the house. There was serious advice also. He did the same thing in september and all of us gathered at the invitation of president obamas last chief. It was a luncheon. Similar format. And and Reince Priebus was there. He came to the meeting intending to listen and ask questions which he did. I will also say i think i can speak for every one of the former chiefs in the room when i say all of us knew, given the nature and the character and the piblth personality of the president he was about to serve is he was going to have a herculean chief of staff because in order to operate effectively, in order for him or her at sometime in the future, to do the job the president has the empower the chief to do it. He has to make it clear the authority and responsibility delegated to the chief are clear and unequivical and getting that kind of delegation from President Trump to his chief obvio obviously hasnt happened yet. And i think in some of the comments that have been made about the book and following that the sorts of things that chiefs of staff looking at executive orders, vetting them ahead of time, and that sort of thing that would be normal process. No competent white house chief would allow executive order on immigration which was a key Campaign Pledge to go out in the world scrawled on the back of an envelope and not vetted by the department in charge of enforcing it. It has been rookie mistake after rookie mistake. Jack i am sure will be a diplomat but i have to say this is the most dysfunctional white house in modern history hands down. An epitude just off the chart. But ultimately, donald trump has to decide whether he wants it have a grownup in the room. You know . We have seen, it seems to me we have seen white houses that this as a whole new level but we have seen white houses torned by struggles. Torn. The reagan white house, jim baker really faced, you know, he was under attack from the socalled true believers and hard right idealogs in that administration. He had family. Nancy reagan was famously the personnel director. Michael deagar the deputy chief was practically family. Baker was savvy enough to form a allianc alliances with nancy and mike beaver. When the hard right came after him, she was fine and able to be dealt with. It is not as if this is Mission Impossible in Trump White House necessarily. It might be. But there are not a lot of jimp bakers or leon pineta or jack watsons around who can walk into a white house and make it work. No matter how skillful the white house chief of staff is all of that goes for nothing if the president does not empower the person to do the job. If the president is not going to listen, if the president is going to change his mind every time someone new comes into the room and makes a new argument, if there is not as chris was saying a moment ago, if there is not proper vetting going on, all the time that is one of the most important rolls of the chief of staff. Vet everything before it gets to the president. Dont let anything get to the president that hasnt had inputs from the pros, cons and yeses and noes. The white house chief of staff uses a phrase chris used a minute ago. Honest broker. The white house chief of staff needs to be an honest broker. What does that mean . It means even if the chief himself has a particular point of view, he lets other point of views get expressed to the president that he believes the president needs to hear. You know, that meeting that you had in december, the one before two get from rom emanuel. Is there a trait. If you look around the table from former chiefs of staff is there a particular trait they all share. Let me answer that because jack is too modest. He shares it. I think the temperament has a lot to do with being a white house chief of staff. I think that James A Baker the third who was, i think, the Gold Standard and a guy comfortable in his own skin. He was a 50yearold soothe as silk texas lawyer who didnt have anything to prove and wasnt afraid to walk into the oval office and tell Ronald Reagan what you want to hear. You dont have to be, i dont think, jack is proof you dont have to be the president s son of a bitch or lord high executioner. Leon panetta was described as a guy with an iron first inside a velvet glove. He was gregarious and everybody loved leon but he could lower the boom when he had to. That is a rare combination. But it is something that jim baker had as chief, it is something panetta had, i think jack shares that. You have to be the grownup in the room. It helps obviously to know the hill and you have to be organized and you have to be disciplined and all those things but i think temperament is a big part. What about the relationship with the president . Do you have to be the president s friend . No. Denis mcdonough was president obamas last white house chief of staff, very smart, very well educated, soft demeanor. He said to me one time the president and are are not pals. We dont go out and have beers together. I work for him. That was the relationship that i had with president carter. We were friends, yes, but i was serving him. In some respects, the white house chief of staff has a constiuency of one and that is the president. It is the white house chiefs duty dont forget the first lady. And the first lady too. My relationship with rose was warm and wonderful and not a problem at all. In fact, it was one of my assets. But the relationship between the president and his chief is going to vary from president to president and chief to chief. There was almost a peer relationship between bill clinton and North Carolina Erskine Bowles. I would probably bowles and clinton being more peer like than anyone else in the room. Can it be harmful to a chief and a president if their relationship is too close . Too old time . Yes. It is hard for a good friend, a close friend of the president , to speak truth to power. It is hard to close the door and say you cant go down this road. Here is why bill clintons First White House chief, bill clinton spent all of this time preparing his cabinet and none of the time picking the white house staff which is more important. At the very last minute, he picked his good friend mack mclarty who he had known since kindergarten, no enemies, wonderful human being. But mack had a hard time disciplining bill clinton. It is a tall order for anybody especially if you are his kindergarten buddy. They went you may remember the famous socalled war room that was the incredibly disciplined Campaign Operation they ran. Well the joke is they went from war room to dorm room in the west wing. There were people in every meeting who didnt belong there and panetta and erskine were appalled. What happened was a year and a half it wasnt that bill clinton didnt have a chief of staff but he had a guy who wasnt empowered. A, was a close friend and b, wasnt empowered by clinton to run a tight ship. And a year and half in, bill clinton was really dead in the w water consumed by the silly scandals like the travel gate and white water going on and all those thing and there was almost an intervention by it was Hillary Clinton and al gore and robert rice and they convinced him he had to shake things up. They practically kidnapped leon panetta and took him to camp david and locked him in a cabin and he said i find myself in a cabin with bill clinton, Hillary Clinton, al gore, and tipper gore and i knew it wouldnt be a fair fight. By the time he left camp david he was the chief of staff. He with Erskine Bowles turned the white house around. They whipped it into shape. One of my favorite stories was erskine decided to do a time and motion study of bill clinton. They took his schedule and compared it to what he was actually doing and they color coded it. Red was international affairs, blue was domestic policy and yellow was smoozing on the rope line and they took this and broad it to clinton and bowles was able to show bill clinton he was wasting his time and all over the map. The most valuable asset in any white house is the president s time. The president s time and attention. The president s time and attention has to be carefully guarded. The white house chief of staff and others on the staff are stewa stewards of the president s time and attention with the ultimate responsibility for that job resting with the chief. Back to the president carter, he has and still has at the age of soon to be 93, the most he has the ability to absorb and assimila assimilate, and if somebody protects him he is getting too much information of too much of the time. Now, what i was doing with president carter went in cycles. One thing people learned and i say that with conviction. I say that because i watched it. I observed it. Not only over a period of four years in the white house but when he was governor of georgia same thing. He amazed me and one of things he would do on a very complicated subject, a lot of parts and subparts, goals, objectives, he would take all this, and he would reduce it to three 3by5 cards. That kind of president with that kind of discipline, that kind of intellectual capacity, that kind of laserlike focus is a wonderful thing to have but you have to protect him from himself in some ways. And you need a chief to prioritize. Bill clinton, Erskine Bowles told me a story about bill clinton would have a thousand great ideas every day. He would come out of there with all these ideas and i would grab him and say mr. President , i told you, you and i agreed we would do these three or four things. You have a thousand great ideas but you cant do a thousand things. A guy with a thousand ideas is no better than a dummy like me with no ideas. You have got to focus. And i think that president carter wanted to do it all. Just a quick word of adding on to that point. One of the remarkable things about president carter which was a remarkable thing about governor carter too is that he would repeatedly say dont come to me and water down the recommendation of what needs to be done, what ought to be done, because you are factoring in all the political aspects of it. Dont do that. I want to know what is the best solution to the problem, what is the best answer to the question, what is the best path to take on the merits. We will worry about the politics later. That too is an admirable trait. It is what you want your president s to be like and how you want them to think. But again you have to protect the president against himself sometimes because there are some things that had such brave, in some cases dire, political consequences that no matter how worthy the goal was or the objective you ought not to do it now. There was always that tension with president carter perfect example is panama canal. Every president knew and recognized we need do something about the panama canal. We need to give it back. He took it from them, violated their sovereignty and need to give it back. No president had wanted to undertake it because the political cost of doing it was too high. The Political Capital required to pull that off domestically, politically, was too great. Carter did it. He paid for it. He paid dearly for it. President carter said he gave it away. There is a story we bought it we paid for it. Wish we hadnt. There is a story about jim baker and Ronald Reagan about saying no because the political costs are going to be and he was being driven someplace. Baker said, mr. President , you cant youre talking about giving a polygraph to Vice President of United States, the constitutional officer. You cant he explained george schultz, then piped up and said, you know, mr. President , ill take the Lie Detector Test and it will be the last thing i will do for you. Reagan pulled out a pen and it up the executive order and mr. Baker said, as he should have done. Another more substantive policy example, reagan was hell bent on going to capitol hill and doing Social Security reform as his first major initiative. Jim baker had been around long enough to know that Social Security, as he put it, was the their rail of american politics. Touch and it you get electrokraout tanned and the went into electrocuted. And reagan didnt want to hear that advice but he took it, with help from baker got some help from nancy reagan and others on it. He changed course and decided to pursue tax cuts instead. Tax reform. The rest is history. Another wonderful example, in the book, is not of something that jim did, because he left and was secretary of treasury, but chris says in his book, and i happen to share the opinion, that if jim baker had been reagans chief of staff when the whole irancontra episode began percolating, it never would have happened. It would not have happened. On jims watch. This was i think probably the most disastrous job swap in american political history. When jim baker was burned out, after four years plus, and most chief of staffs last a year or so. Yeah. The average tenure is less than two years, and anyway, baker was burned out. He walks into secretary don treasury secretary don diggans office and regan says why dont we just swap jobs. And baker thought about and it said, thought about it for a day or two and said, why dont we do that. This is a rare case where Nancy Reagans usually infallible antenna for personnel decisions failed her. Don regan was an imperial, arrogant, former chairman of merrill lynch, he was a guy who liked to have himself announced when he entered the room. Ladies and gentlemen, the chief of staff of the United States he was clueless when it came to being white house chief, and as nancy reagan famously said later, he loved the chief part of the title but not the staff part so much. Jack will tell you that the staff is the most important word of the title. But anyway, regan took over and regan famously said, if a spare row lands on the white house lawn, i will know about it. Thats how on top of things im going to be and didnt notice this come scheme being hatched in the white house base. Which became irancontra, selling arms to iran for hostages, which also nearly ended reagans president simple. When regan was fired after he hung up the phone on nancy reagan, howard baker came in and rescued helped to rescue regan from that scandal. That whole attitude of a chief you mentioned it in terms of john sununu, forgetting who is the president and the chief of staff. That can be the undoing of a chief of staff. Absolutely. John sununu another game of rumfelds rules. One of jim bakers rules that he explained to me is that people who have been principals, have been ceos or governors, tend not to be the best fit as white house chief. Staff being being staff is so important and not thinking, as somebody said about don regan, youre the ceo and regan is the retired chairman of the board. Sununu had a similar problem. Liability be like to be the guy charge. He managed and managed george h. W. Bush pretty well, didnt manage down very well. He terrorized the staff and ultimately made very few friends and got caught up in a scandal involving using military transportation to go do personal things, and it caught up with him. I want to take some questions from the audience in just a minute. One thing that was very interesting was your description of dick cheney and there are two dick cheneys. Let me just tell a quick story about that. Early on we had a major breakthrough in the research of this book. I had left abc news. Had really no political unit or role low desk to row low desk d rolodex and my beautiful wife carey started to dig on the internet. We were looking for an address for dick cheney and she said ive got it. I said where . She said i found it on war criminals. Com. So we were off to the races. So, anyway, i entered viewed resumesfeld and cheney, the great untold story about dick cheney is that when he was gerald fords 34yearold white house chief of staff, he was believe it or not the most popular guy in town. He was a charger, selfefacing, he had a terrific sense of humor, he loved to pull practical jokes on the press corps. They loved him. Everybody of capitol hill loved him. He was the guy you want in the room to bring about consensus, and ever since the chiefs have been saying to one another what happened to that guy . I think this is a personal unsubstantiated opinion, but circles back a little bit to what chris said a moment ago. I was a practicing lawyer for many years and i dealt up close and personal with a lot of ceos, chairmans, ceos of major corporations in the country and around the world, and that is a rarefied atmosphere. There are planes at your disposal and youre making tens of millions of dollars a year, and youre running these multinational big corporations, and theres an aura of sort of permanence, and infallibility that begins to shroud the person that hold that job. The person that can avoid falling into that trap is a very good, strong person. Most dont, think in my opinion. In my experience. I think that, again, unsubstantiated personal opinion. Think that dick, who is a very, very talented, smart man, as chairman and ceo of halliburton, and living in that world and then coming back into the government, from those that exalted position, having been also secretary of defense before, of course, he became Vice President , creates a kind of sense of imperial sense of infallibility, and a certainty about your opinion that you shouldnt have. Commenteys views under gerald ford were very rightwing. He was always calls. Always an extreme conservative. Also true when he became excuse me when he became Vice President , he wasnt run he had nothing to lose. He was not running for office again. And thats one of the reasons george w. Bush chose him. And so he was free to tell people exactly what he thought. Before we good to question, i may i just make one point . I make it sincerely with everybody here. This book that Chris Whipple has written is one of the best books of its kind that i have ever read. He has done exhaustive research. He has talked to all these people, all the former chiefs two president s, countless other senior officials in all of the administrations, and has then brought all of those stories together in the most eloquent and interesting and engaging way. Go buy that book. Absolutely. Lets take some questions. If you have a question, wait for the microphone to get to you. Talk about andy card for a little bit because he really bucked the average and stayed on as george w. Bushs chief of staff for a very long time, but pretty much to everyones detriment. Well, i dont know about that. He did set the modern record for longevity. Andy is a really able guy and he had been around the white house for a long, long time, really knew how it worked. He was great in my opinion, at what he called making sure the president is never hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. That was a principal Job Description he gave me. But on the larger picture of the bush white house, i think andy id be tour use to see what jack thinked i think andy practically cad Mission Impossible for a couple of reasons. George w. Bush did not empower him, jack talked about how important that is really didnt empower him in the way that Ronald Reagan empowered jim baker. He george w. Gave all kinds of car and authority to dick cheney, especially National Secure affairs. Don rumsfeld was a shrewd man. And secretary of state colin powell a great untold story is that james baker, the former chief and george bush 41, the president s father, were so worried so concerned, so alarmed by the way the secretary of state, colin powell, was being cut out by the other guys that baker went privately to Collin Powell with bush 41s blessing and said you need to go into the president ask tell him this is not what you signed up for. You need to fall an your sword. And as baker put it to me, he never did that. He has never talk about that before. But andy card had made it extremely difficult for card to perform the role as the honest broker. I think he has outmatched at every turn by cheney and rumsfeld and some of the others in the white house. And the president , president george w. Bush, i know this not of my own personal observation but having talked to a lot of people and having read a lot about it, president george w. Bush had a very close professional relationship with condoleezza rice, his National Security adviser. That another side bar conversation that was going on in the white house that wasnt flowing through the chief of staff, i think. Again, an opinion, an observation. This is why one of the chief lessons to me from having spent so much time i with these guys, all 17 living chiefs, ion come vinceed that from watergate to irancontra to the iraq war to the rollout of obamacare to the botched executive order on immigration, the white house chief can make the difference between success and disaster. I really do. Theres an example i forget which president it was but there was an aide who had it was a friend of the president , his office was right off the oval office, and you described the chief saying, i know you and the president are good friends but you dont go in there until i say you can go in. Happened with bob hartman, the speech writer for gerry ford, and cheny had to take the stuff and roll it down the hall. And i happened with rahm emanuel. They tried to fire rahm four our five time us be a was constantly pissing everybody off, important people on capitol hill, and rahm just refueled to go. Just refused to go and just stayed in the office and finally leon panetta said youre not going into the oval without coming through me. Right down here in friend. Chris, you have done a great job describing jack carter, but he is a very modest map. Surely is. A very young lawyer. He went to plains, he was asked to go down there and he said, mr. Carter asked him jack said, yes, jack, ive been expecting you. So, he knew who jack watson was before he went to plains and thin he asked him to serve on a very Important Mission for him when he was in the Governors Office on the goals for georgia when he was in the white house, before he was chief of staff, he was the man that was on the phone constantly, talking to the mayors in this country, the governors in this country, the people who really countered. He paved the way for the panama canal treaties and would never say that. Im supposed to ask a question, and jack, did you realize how important and how valuable that you were that time . I just realized how much love you. [applause] other questions . Yes. Oh. Okay. Over here. Thank you, mr. Jack. I want to have you the time you were chief of staff, was there a time when you disagree with president jimmy carter and the time jimmy carter disagree with you and the time you still remember . Yes, i do. Two quick examples. When we first went in to the administration this is shortly after january 20th of 1977 governor carter had been very, very strict on budget issues. He was a social liberal as we all know, but in terms of Budget Expenditures he was very tightfisted, and he discovered, after a short analysis, that a lot of the big water projects in the west were boondoggles. They were private projects government funded projects but they didnt make sense from an overall analytical point of view, and so he started cutting out all these very politically important water projects that were very important to the western governors and the western senators and the western congressmen, and i said to the president , mr. President , understand why you want to cut back for budget reasons, budget deficit reasons, but lets pull back. Lets dont cut so many out. Lets compromise. And the president said, no, were Going Forward with it. Ultimately we compromised. But that was the way that the president , president carter, approached almost everything. I respectfully, very respectfully, disagreed with the president about staying in the white house during the whole span of the hostage taking. He had said to the country that as long as our americans are held captive, held hostage, by the iranians, im not going to campaign. Im going to stay here and do the business of the presidency and the boston of the people and the business of the government. Again, thats the kind of thing that its admirable whenown president but i thought it was a mistake said so. Thought he needed to be out campaigning, and many of you here are too young to know this but most of you but every single night on cbs evening news, Walter Cronkite would say, its day 77, day 105, every single day. So those were two times i disagreed what if the president did. There were others. Chris, didnt hr haldeman sometimes simply ignore things that he did president nixon would say were going to do something. Yeah, a lot of bad things happened in the Nixon White House but could have been even worse. And hr haldeman would occasionally talk nixon off the ledge when he had some crazy off the wall idea. Nixon was absolutely convinced that everybody was out to get him. The media was out to get him and he was convinced there was a safe in the brookings institution, some documents that would prove its unclear whether they were documents that would show that lbj had rigged the peace talks for humphreys reelection of what it was but he told haldeman to fire bomb the safe go in and just get it. Just get those documents. Well, haldeman just went away and came back a day or two later, and he said, did you do that . He said. No well, didnt think you would do that. There was another case where he wanted to put lie detectors on everybody in the state department. That was a few more people than you could really do that with. So that was an easy one for him to just ignore. Lets do just a couple more questions. Gentleman right joe. I have a question really for you both. Given the combination of hubris, intellect, passion, and insanity it takes to run the president of the United States, is it really structurally possible to have somebody take on a role like the chief of staff . It seems to me to be a real challenge and given all the tensions and pressures on tout really think you can bring things to a fulcrum point . And i know that it depends a great deal on the personality of the people involved, and frankly, the maturity of the person who happens to be president , but structurally, is this a doable job . Well, the bad news, as you have described, is that i think so many president s come into office with that kind of hubris, and as dick cheney put it to me, you get there and your predecessors are trying to tell you that you should do this and do that, and the response is, well, if you guys were so smart how come we beat you . So you have that psychology issue think, with a lot of president s, but what i learned over the course of researching this book is that every president eventually learns sometimes the hard way that you cant govern effectively without empowering a white house chief of staff to do these things. And it took bill clinton a year and a half to figure that out but he did. Leon panetta came in and turned the white house around, and i think clinton would have been a oneterm president if he hadnt. Took chime cart twoand a half years to jimmy cart twoand a half heres figure it out he needed to have a formal white house chief of staff. Was doing an event yesterday in chicago with bill daly, obamas second chief, and george w. Bushs second white house chief, sam skinner. Skinner said something that i thought was vivid about all this. He said, you know, its like alcoholism. Every president has to hit rock bottom. And they do. The question is, right now would donald trump recognize rock bottom if he hit it . Let me answer joes question quickly. Yes, joe, its doable because it has to be done. Ill always remember one very early in the administration, president was having a meeting with some of the most distinguished senators in the United States senate. I wont name names here. But both democrat and republican. These were all men. And they were all men whose names and reputations i knew, of course, as a student of government. Id read about them, followed the news. The came there were stenof them. Every one of the names in the room you would recognize. And they started arguing a picker case that was being discussed, and they didnt know as much as we did. They didnt know they hadnt done the homework as well, as thoroughly as he had, and the president as we had and the president s position on the subject was right and it had been vetted so thoroughly that everything that any one of the senators brought up could be met with facts and argument that were persuasive, and i realized then, joe, the only reason i tell the story, i realized then, just do your homework. Dont take anything for granted. Dont think youre the smartest guy in the room. Be the best informed guy in the room. And a newt senator, again, respectfully, is subject to sense of selfimportance after a while. And you got to guard against that. Jack, who was it that dish think at the time president electricity reagan president elect reagan said to you at a party . Well, jack, too modest to tell the story but i will tell you the story i heard. And the story was that on his first visit to washington, having won the election, he was being feted at catherine grahams place, and there was a receiving line, and reagan arrived jack happened to be there and reagan name and he was talking to kay gray command he looked 0 over and saw jack watson, and he made a beeline over to jack, the story i heard said jack, its to good to to see you. My people tell me if you had been chief of star from the beginning issue wouldnt be here. A story of extreme exaggeration. I think theres a little bit of truth to it. He did say it but he was also one of the most charming men of that ever drew a breath. I want you to have a chance to ask some questions outside. Want you to have a chance to if you dont already have this book, and chris is going to be signing copies of it. It is, as jack said, fascinating story that you just you get to know not only the chiefs of staff but the president s they served and the people around. It is hard to put down, this book. Its just really good. Encourage you to get it. Please join me in thanking chris and jack for just a wonderful [applause] join news lobby. Thank you very much foring here tonight. [inaudible conversations] next, on after words, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, helene cooper, report odd then life and president sive of liberias first
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