Here before . I am preaching to the choir. I was going to tell you i was looking, the Pulitzer Prize winners were recently announced. There were five books nominated for a pulitzer or won Pulitzer Prizes. I was talking to frank reese, our partner in this and i said i dont know. We must be slipping. We only have three of those five to show and one of those was poetry and we dont do a lot of poetry. I told him we better do well this next year and get all five. Chris whipple is no stranger to awards. Hes a filmmaker, writer, journalist, he started his career in washington dc with richard holbrook, Foreign Policy magazine. He was a correspondent for life magazine. I am very envious. He spent 20 years at 60 minutes, he was that abc news, won multiple emmy awards and peabodys, an investigative journalist, the journalism award, he is executive producer of programs like spymaster, cia and crosshairs and the gatekeepers how the white house chiefs of staff define every presidency which led to this book. One of the chiefs of staff that has been rated one of the three best chief of staff in modern history is that gentleman right over there, jack watson. [applause] jack served in governor jimmy carters administration and went to washington with him, he served as the president ial assistance for intergovernmental relations, secretary of the cabinet before being named chief of staff during the carter presidency and he was in charge of the transition to the reagan presidency so thank you both. You call the chief of staff the second most powerful person in washington but it is a person that is not elected. People dont know the individuals name. How did he get to be the second most powerful person in washington . There is nothing in the constitution about a chief of staff. It was the invention of dwight eisenhower. He appointed a guy named Sherman Adams who was so famously gruff and tough that they called him the abominable knowman. I started with hr haldeman who was nixons white house chief, nixon is a fascinating character because as you know, he became the poster boy for watergate, the worst scandal in American History and jack would tell you and many of his successors would tell you that he really created the template for the modern white house chief, the empowered white house chief who is the president s gatekeeper, the honest broker, we hope, of information that flows to the president and at the end of today he executes the president s agenda. That has been true since haldeman and also been true that every president who strays too far from that template regret it. We can talk about that. Let me add that what a delight it is to be here at the Carter Library where i spent many days digging through the archives and reading jacks memos to the president and reading resident jimmy carter here as well but if the book sheds light on the white house chiefs, that is because of this guy and 16 other living white house chiefs who i tried to channel them and they are honest brokers and i tried to be what is the chiefs day like . It is never the same. Jimmy carter was a very early riser and i always made it a point to be in my office if he was in his office which meant that i was frequently in my office by 6 00 am. Not necessarily meeting with him but there for him, reading briefing papers that would later be discussed with him but white house chief of staff, every day on different things, Pay Attention to how things are getting done following up with the implementation of policy, checking what is going on on the hill, you have a subgroup of people in the white house staff who are responsible for congressional relations, but in our case and some other chiefs cases, we had a little group that would discuss issues on the hill, what is coming up, who is for something and who is against, what do we have to trade to get someones vote, that kind of thing. The difference between then and now is a chasm. It is a chasm of immeasurable magnitude. One of the things president elect carter had you do was map out a strategy, a structure for the white house staff. What were you trying to but it how do you make it work . Let me step back a halfstep and be quick about this. When jimmy won the primary on april 30, 1976, all of us, frank more and i and others had been working very hard throughout the democratic primaries but when jimmy won the pennsylvania primary, Scoop Jackson was very popular with labor, i had a kind of the tiffany and i thought my goodness, this man is actually going to be president , goodness gracious. I wrote him the middle of the address and suggested for passing on to governor carter forgive me for calling him jimmy and i was saying we need to do some transition planning. You have never been in the federal government except as a naval officer, never been in the cabinet, never been in congress, have not been a national figure. Governor carter did not have a national network. He was building it day by day literally from scratch and as many of you in this room will remember, the joke of the day was jimmy who, running for what . He approved of my suggestion. He asked me to start fleshing that out more and i did flesh it out more and on june 9th after the june 8th primaries when he locked the number of delegates he needed to win the nomination he called me from the plane and said i am going to be in atlanta tomorrow at the Biltmore Hotel giving a speech at lunch. Will you fly down with me . I want to talk about the transition planning, that group came to be called the Carter Mondale policy planning group. Preelection transition planning. Charlie brown airport, single engine plane, chris knows the story. We were sitting in a tiny single engine plane almost need to knee wondering if we would do what you outlined. I was really thrilled about it. I had in mind that i would assist whoever prominent person he was going to appoint as head of the transition. I thought it to be a man of National Stature like john gardner. Jimmy said no, you are going to do it. I said oh no, no. That is a big mistake. Nobody knows me. I dont know anybody. No. That is a very bad idea. He said i know you, you know me. I trust you and you trust me so you are going to do it. He said dont worry about not knowing anybody or being known. Anybody, when you call, once they know what you are doing, will return your phone call. That is how it worked. That didnt sit well with the rest of the campaign. Not only did they return his phone calls but when jack as president carters emissary to official washington started meeting with the Clark Cliffords and the powers that be in washington, he charmed them. Jack can charm the birds out of the trees and you know. Everybody was thinking as one person put it, here they come, shoeless rubes from georgia, Andrew Jackson all over again. Jack watson was there to reassure them if they are like this guy we are fine. Interestingly as you say, theres always as i learned in doing this research from haldeman to the present, theres always this tension between the true believers, the Campaign Staffers and people who are trying to figure out how to govern and we see it time and time and time again and we see it at the present day. It is not new. Jack experienced it. These campaigners, jody powell and others who were working around the clock campaigning from motel to motel, they got wind of the fact that somebody was putting together this transition and hiring people and there was a revolt. What happened at that point was, i think, very telling and very formative for the carter presidency because ham, who famously said if we hire fire ants as secretary of state we will have failed. What happened was jimmy carter really cast his lot with him and the campaigners at that point and it is not that jack was doing phenomenal work preparing the transition, probably the best transition preparation in history and yet what happened at that point was carter came in with ham as the chief of staff, a lot of people thought jack would be the logical choice as the chief and ham became the they facto chief and it wasnt the job ham was suited for. Ham was the most brilliant political strategist who ever came down the pike but he should have in my humble opinion been the karl rove in that white house instead of the chief of staff and 21 2 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. As part of the transition materials, the transition materials were covering National Security and environmental and government reorganization and economic policy, Development Policy and so forth. The piece i wrote what the organization of the executive office of the president. A word about him. Chris is absolutely right when he says that ham was a brilliant strategist. 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, for outlining how he would do it. So, ham was the closest person to the president among all of us, ham and jody. Jody was the best White House Press secretary, i think, that a president has ever had, and i dont say that lightly and dont say it because i have not looked at others or because there werent other good ones. In my opinion, there has never been a better press secretary than jody powell. I knew that hams role with the president was going to be an Important Role in the house, strategic adviser, political adviser, tactical adviser. With wham with ham himself, if he were sitting on his stage with us, as i wish he were, he would say i didnt want to be chief of staff. I was not cut out for it. Didnt play to my strengths. And it took us a while to sort of work our way through that. For the first twoplus years of the administration there was not a formal white house chief of staff. And more fundamentally, jimmy carter didnt want a white house chief of staff, and correct me if im wrong but i think it was the example of haldeman, haldeman had become haldeman somehow in jimmy carters mind personifyied watergate and the corruption of the Nixon White House, and he wanted nothing to do with that, and i think he also thought he was he could run the white house himself. He wanted to do what jerry gerry ford had done. Gerry ford had the model of the spokes of the. We five or six or seven advisers with equal access, coming and going, and for ford it was a disaster. Within a month ford realized this was chaotic, dysfunctional. He had no time to think. It was like learning drinking from a fire hose, and he reached out to don rumsfeld and powered him as chief, and that was a month in. But in jimmy carters case it was two and a half years. I agree. The Carter Administration was really warned that spokes of the wheel doesnt work. Dick cheny was telling jack almost every day. He was. And he left when he actually took over and moved in on january 20th, when we moved into the west wing, there was a broken bicycle wheel that the spokes were broken and it was twisted and y she said this is what the spokes of the wheel look is like. He wrote a note dear ham, beware the spokes of the wheel. Dick cheney. Another reason that president carter was reluctant to have a first among equals of chief of staff designated, and that was that he had had for some time very close and personal and professional more professional relationships with about six of us, seven of us. Stew and ham and jody and myself and frank moore, bob, white House Counsel to begin with. And he did not want to interpose any one of us between that group of people and himself. Think that was a factor for president carter. I think that it was not a good decision in my opinion, but it was a decision the president made and it was his to make. But he also is a very detailed person. He wanted to be involved in everything, and in fact, chris, you write the president personally signed off on everything from typos in memos to requests to play on the White House Tennis Court. Carter could not perform his president ial duties and also run the white house staff. He famously hated typos. He famously sent memos back with corrections on everything. Jack and i had have what talk about this a long time but you said to me, the didnt schedule the White House Tennis Court . Host i believed him until i found the memo. I was digging in the archives and there it was, you must consult personally with the from schedule time on the White House Tennis Court. So but anyway, at one point, as jack said, to me, jimmy carter was the most intelligent profit the 20th century. Craig ran graham said so. Tip oneill said he was the most intelligence president. Jack he could consume amazing quantities of information and assimilate them and use them. But i was having a conversation with Brent Scowcroft at one point, bush 41s amazing National Security adviser, and he said, you know, zbiey and i were talking and he said, love this guy. Can give him a 50page memo in the afternoon and i get it back the next morning with notes in the margins on every page. And scowcroft said, thats the worst thing you can possibly do. He done have time for that. Jimmy carter, i think, got bogged down in the minutiae. In fairness, as stu will give you chapter and verse and im sure jack could, too, on all the legislation that was passed early in the carter more legislation than any president since lbj, but he couldnt prioritize. You need a chief of staff to prioritize, to make sure that the narrative is consistent, make sure that everybody is on the same page. None of that is happening clearly in the present day, but 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 kind of meeting in advance of an administration taking office, and that is bringing former chiefs of staff together and in this case it was to get rahm emanuel. Yeah to bring him up to speed and had most of the chiefs of staff there to give him advice. Jack, you were there what was it like, the meeting . It was funny. December 5, 2008, josh bolton, who was the president s chief of staff, outgoing president chief of staff, george w. , gathered the group and maybe 13 or 14 of thus, i think, sat around the table in the chief of staffs office, having breakfast and talking. Rahm was sitting next to me at the meeting. We just went around the table and each one of us made a brief, very brief, statement of some little piece of advice that we thought was helpful or that would give some guidance, some of it humorous, a lot of it humorous. An example, when it got around to dick cheney, you will remember he was the Vice President and in and a hell of a chief of staff for gerry ford. For gerry ford. The chief of staff i meant when we were elected. When it got around to dick, who was at the end of the table, almost the very end, dick is an interesting man. He leaned forward like this and he said, i have one piece of advice. Keep your Vice President under control. [laughter] the other piece of advice i loved was kens he was reagans final chief, and he is a great storyteller. And anyway, he looked very gravely at rahm and said, never forget that when you open your mouth its not you who is speaking but the president of the United States to which rahm said, oh, blank, and brought down the house. But there was some serious advice. We did the same thing, incidentally, in december just this past december, and all of us had gathered at the invitation of dennis mcdonagh, president obamas laster chief and it was a luncheon meeting, a similar format, and Reince Priebus was there as the chief designate and all of us he was serious him had thought about it. Had some questions he brought to ask us. So this was a meeting he was not doing as a pro forma thing. He obviously came to the meeting intending to listen and to ask some questions, which he did. I will also say that 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 personality of the president that he was about to serve, that he was going to have a Herculean Task as chief of staff because issue in order for the chief of staff to operate effectively, in order for him or her, as some time in the future, to do the job, the president has to empower the chief to do it. He has to make clear to everyone that the authority and responsibility delegated to the chief are clear and unequivocal, and getting that kind of delegation from president trump, to his chief, obviously hasnt happened yet. Well in fact i think in some of the comments that have been made about the book and following that, the sorts of things of 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 an executive order on immigration, which was a key Campaign Pledge to go out into the world scrawled on the back of an envelope and not vetted by the departments in charge of enforcement. But so its been rookie mistake after rookie mistake. Jack, im sure, will be a diplomat but i have to say that this is the most dysfunctional white house in modern history, hands down. Ineptitude that is off the charts. And but as jack says, ultimately donald trump has to decide whether he wants to have a grownup in the room. We have seen seems to me we have seen white houses that this is a whole new level but we have seen white houses torn by struggles. The Reagan White House jim baker really faced he was under attack from the socalled true believers, the hard right ideologies in that administration. He had family to deal with. Nancy reagan was famously the personnel director. Michael devery, dep the chief deputy chief was packly family. Baker was savvy enough for form alliances with nancy and mike deaver and then when the hard right came after him he was fine, able to deal with it. So its not as though this is Mission Impossible in the Trump White House necessarily. It might be. It might be. But there arent a lot of jim bakers or leon panettas or jack watsons around who can walk into a white house like that and make it work. As i say, no matter how good, how strong, how capable, how skillful, the person is who is the white house chief of staff, all of that goes for naught basically if the president does not empower the person to do the job. If the president is not going to listen, is going to change his mind every time someone knew comes into the room and makes a new argument, if theres not as chris was saying, not proper vetting going on all the time, thats one of the most Important Roles of the chief of staff. Vet everything before it gets to the president. Dont let anything get to the president that hasnt had input from the pros and the cons and the yeses and the nos. The white house chief of staff is a a phrase chris used honest broker. He 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 to get rahm emanuel, is there a trait disif you look around the table of former chiefs of staff there is a particular trait that they all share . Let me answer that because jack is too modest to answer it. He shared that its, i think, temperment has a lot to do with being a white house chief of staff. I mean, i think that james a. Baker iii, who is almost everybody would agree the gold standard, is a guy who was comfortable in his own skin. He was a 50yearold smooth as silk texas lawyer who didnt have anything to prove and wasnt afraid to walk into the oval office and close the door and tell reagan what he didnt want to hear. You dont have to be jack is proof you dont have to be the president s son of a bitch, his lord high executioner as haldeman was called. Leon panetta, who i would put right up there with james baker, under bill clinton, was described to me as a guy with an iron fist inside a velvet glove. He was gregarious. Everybody loves leon. But leon could really lower the boom when he had to. And that is a rare combination but its something that jim baker had as chief and something that panetta hat and jack shares that. You have to be the grownup in the room. It helps obviously to know the hill and you have to berg ode and disciplined and all of those things. Think temperment is a big part of it. What about the relationship with the president . Do you have to be the president s friend . No. Dennis mcdonagh, a really fine white house chief of staff in my estimation, president obamas last chief, is a softspoken, man of modest sort of demeanor, very smart, very welleducated. He said to me one time, the president and i are not pals. We dont go out and havebers together. Have beers together itch work for him. That was the relationship i had with president carter. We were friends, yes, but i was serving him. In some respect the white house chief of staff, though you have to explain this a little bit, has a constituency of one, and that is the president. Its the white house chiefs duty dont forget the first lady. And the first lady, too. My relationship with roslyn had been and always was warm and wonderful. That wasnt a problem. In fact 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 irskinbowls. He was not say he was not serving the president as his staff, as ive just said, but if i had to sort of scan the group, id probably pick irskin and bill clinton as being more peerlike than anybody else in the room. But can it be harmful to a chief and a president if their relationship is too close, too oldtime . Yes. Yes. And good to know. Its hard for a friend, a good friend, a close friend of the president , to speak truth to power. Its hard to say its hard to close the door and say, mr. President , you cant go downing this road and heres why. Mac mccharty was bill clintons First White House chief. Bill clinton spent all of his time preparing, choosing his cabinet, and almost none of his time picking his white house staff, which is more important. At the very last minute he picked this good friend, mac mcmclarty whom he had known since kindergarten, really smart, bright, able, successful businessman. Wonderful human being, but mac had a hard time disciplining bill clinton. Thats a tall order for anybody, but especially if youre his kindergarten buddy, and they went you may remember the famous socalled war room that was the incredibly disciplined Campaign Operation that they ran. Well, the joke was that they went from war room to dormroom in the west wing. There were people in every meeting who didnt belong there, and leon panetta, the omb director at the time, and irstin who was running the Small Business administration, were walking in and out and just appalled by this. Couldnt believe it. What happened was that a year and a half so it wasnt that become been 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 shipment. A year and a half in bill clinton was dead in the water. Consumed by remember the silly scandals, the travelgate and. White water still going on. There was almost an intervention by Hillary Clinton and al gore and robert reich and they convinced him he had to shake things up, and so they practically kidnapped leann leon panetta and he said he found himself in a cabin with bill clinton, Hillary Clinton, al gore, tipper gore. I knew this wasnt going to be a fair fight. He wanted to be he wanted to stay at home. By the time he left camp david he was the chief of staff, and he, with erstiy bowles, turn the white house around. They whipped it into shape. One of my favorite stories was irstin decided decided to do a e 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, and blue was domestic policy, and yellow was schmoozing on the rope line and they took this and brought it to clinton and bowles was able to show bill clinton he ways wasting his time. All over the map. All over the map. The most valuable thing, asset, of in any white house is the president s time. The time and attention. The president s time and attention have to be carefully guarded. They have to be the white house chief of staff and others on the staff are stewards of the president s time and attention. With the ultimate responsibility for that job resting with the chief. Back to president carter. He had and still has at the age of soon to be 93, the most amazing man ive ever known, actually. He has the ability to absorb, as chris said, and assimilate and organize and reduce to essential points enormous amounts of information. That is both a blessing and a curse. Its a blessing for the obvious ropes. Its a curse because if somebody doesnt protect him, he is going to be getting too much information, too much of the time, and what i was doing with president carter, it went in cycles. He would come to me, wed give him too much and he would say, jack, you got to cut back. I was up until midnight last night reading stuff. Id cut it back. Three days later hed say issue didnt get enough on this. You didnt give me enough on this. One thing that people learned did not take them long to learn it in the Carter Administration is that if you are going to have a meeting with the president , you better come prepared because he is going to be likely the most prepared person in the room. And i say that with conviction. I say that because i watched it and observed. Not only over a period of fewer years in the white house but when she was governor of georgia, same thing. He amatessed me in many ways. One thing he would do a very complicated subject, a lot of parts parts and subparts, goals, objectives. He would take all this and he would reduce it to threebyfive cards with just key notes. Key words. And thats all he would need. And 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. You need chief to prioritize. Bill Clinton Bowles toll me a great story how bill clinton he would have a thousand prettieds. Every day. And he would come out and he would come out of there with all these ideas and i would grab him and turn him around and walk him back into the oval and say, mr. President , i told you, you cant you and i agreed we were going to do these three or four things, and i know you have a thousand prettieds but you cant do a thousand things and a guy with a thousand ideas is no better than dummy like me with no ideas. You have to focus. Think that president carter wanted to do it all. Well, just a quick word of adding on to that point. Run of the remarkable thing busy president cart, a remarkable thing about governor carter, too he would repeatedly say dont come to me and water doubt whatnot need toes to be done because youre factors in the political aspects. Dont too that. 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. Well worry about the politics later. Well, that, too, is a very admirable trait. Its what you want your president s to be like. Its 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 grave, some cases dire, political consequences that no matter how worthy the goal was or the objective was, you ought not to do it or ought not do it now. Do it later. And there was always that tension with president carter because, perfect example was the panama canal, every president since eisenhower has known and said in his papers, we need to do something about the panama cal. Give it back to panama. We took it from them, basically, and violated their sovereignty and we need to give it back. No president since eisenhower, though all of the acknowledged that, wanted to untake it because the political cost of doing it was too high. The Political Capital required to pull to that off, domestically, politically, was too great. Carter did it. He paid for it. He paid dearly for it. Governor reagan when he was running against carter in the 80 election said he gave it away and it was ours. Theres a story bought is, we paid for it. Its ours. We hadnt. Theres a story that chris tells about jim baker and Ronald Reagan about saying, no, because the political costs are going to be he was driving being drivensomeplace this is juan case dramatic case when jim baker was on his way to in a car on his way to lunch at the Madison Hotel and got word that the president had somehow signed an order that would have the entire everyone in the cabinet strapped up to a polygraph and they would have to take a Lie Detector Test about a leak. Said turn the car around. He drove straight back to the white house, went bursting into the oval office. Reagan was having lynch with secretary of state george schultz, and baker said, mr. President , you cant youre talking about giving a polygraph to the Vice President of the United States. He is a constitutional officer. You cant he proceeds to explain and george schultz, then pipeed up and said, you know, mr. President , ill take a Lie Detector Test and it will be the last thing i do for you in this administration. Well, reagan pulled out a pen and ripped up the executive order, and mr. Baker says,s a he should have done. Another more substantive policy example, reagan was hellbent on going 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 third rail of american poll ticked. You touch it you get electrocuted and he went into the president and told him that. Reagan didnt want to hear that advice but ultimately 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. That another wonderful example in chris 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. John jims watch. This was i think probably the most disastrous job swap in american political history. When jim baker was burned out after four yearsplus, and most most chief of staff last a year or so. The average tenure is less than two years. And anyway, baker was burned out. He walks into to secretary dunn treasury secretary don regans Office One Day 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 was a rare case where Nancy Reagans usually infallible antenna far personnel decisions fail her. Don regan was an imperial, air grant, former chairman of merrill lynch, a guy who like 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 the staff is the most important word of the it title. But regan took over and famously sid, if a sparrow 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 cockamamie scheme being hatched in the white house basement which became irancontra, selling arms to iran for hostages which nearly ended reagans presidency and that is another for how regan was fired after he hung up the phone of nancy reagan. Ken and howard baker name and rescued help to rescue reagan from that scandal. That whole attitude of the chief you mentioned in terms of john sununu. Forgetting who is the president and who is the chief of staff. That can really be the undoing of a chief of staff. Absolutely. Absolutely. John sununu, another example of a guy who everybody sort of probably resumesfields rules. Well, one of jim bakers rules he explained to me is that people who have been a principle, ceos or governors tend not to be the best fit as white house chief. Again, staff being staff is so important and not being not thinking, as somebody said about don regan, youre the ceo and reagan is the retired chairman of the board. Sununu had a similar problem. Sununu really liked to be the guy in charge. He was arrogant. He managed george h. W. Bush pretty well. He 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 to good do personal things and its 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 tale 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 rolodex to find these guys so my beautiful wife, kerry, started digging around on the internet and came back we were looking for andres for dick cheney and she said, ive got it. Said where diyou get it . She said i found it on warcriminals. Com. [laughter] so we were off to the races. So, interview rumsfeld. The great untold story about dick cheney is when he was gerald fords white house chief of staff he was, believe it or not, the most popular guy in town. He was a charmer, he was selfefacing, he had a terrific sense of humor, he loved to pull practical jokes on the press corps. The press corps loved him. He was the guy you wanted in the room to bring about consensus, and ever since creque me. Im wrong dirk the chiefs have been saying to one another, what happened to that. I think this is the personal unsubstantiated opinion, but circles back a little bit to what chris said just a moment ago. I was a practicing lawyer for many years and i get up close and personal with a lot of crowes, chairmans, ceos of major corporations in the country and around the world, and that is a rarefied atmosphere. There are planes a 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 permeance, and infall ability that gains to shroud the person that holds the job. The person that can avoid falling into that trap is a very good, strong person, most dont, i think in my experience. I think that again, unsubstantiated personal opinion i 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 exalted that exalted position, having been also secretary of defense before, of course, he became Vice President , creates a kind of a sense of imperial sense of infallibility and a certainty about your opinion that you shouldnt have. Chenys views under gerald ford were very right, wing. He was always always an extreme conservative. And also true when he became excuse me [coughing] when he became Vice President [coughing] he has nothing to lose. 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 of them. Before we go for question, may i just make one point, and 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 of 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. [laughter] absolutely. Lets take some questions. Just 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. I dont know about that but 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 work. 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 push white bush white house,i think andy had practically Mission Impossible for a couple of reasons. George w. Bush did not empower him jack talked but how important that is really didnt empower him in the way that Ronald Reagan empowered jim bake. Er george w. Bush gave all kind of powers to dick cheney. Don resumes fueled was a shrewd bureaucratic infighter if there ever was one. You had this conflict between those guys and secretary of state colin powell. One of the great Untold Stories in that chapter of my book 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 colin powell with bush 41s blessing and said you need to good into the president and tell him this not what you signed up for. You need to fall on your sword. And as baker put it to me, he never did that. He has never talked about that before. But andy card had it made it extremely difficult for card to perform the role as the honest broker. I think that he was outmatched at every turn by cheney and rumsfeld and some of the others in the white house. What do you think . And at the president , george h. W. President bush, i know this of my having read a lot about it, do president george w. Bush had a very close professional relationship with condoleezza rice, and that was another sort of 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 wife these time with these guys, all living chiefs im really convinced that from watergate to irancontra to the iraq war to the roleout 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 but an aide who had 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 there. Happened with bob hartman, the speech writer for gerry ford. Cheney took him out of the office and happened with rahm emanuel. They tried to fire rahm four or five times because rahm was constantly pissing everybody off, important people on capitol hill, and rahm just refused to go. Just stayed in the office and they finally leon panetta just said, youre not going into the oval without coming through me. Yes. Right down here in front. Chris, i know you have done a great job with describing jack carter not jack Carter Jack Watson theyre very close. But he is a very modest man, and truly is. A very young lawyer elm went to plains and he said, mr. Carter asked him to come down, jack watson him said, yes, jack, ive been expecting you. So, he knew who jack watson was before he went to plains and then asked him to serve on a very Important Mission for him, when he was in the governors office, on the goals to 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 jack watson did that and would never say that. Im supposed to ask a question. Jack, did you realize how important and how valuable that you were at that time . I just realized how much i love you. [applause] other questions . Yes. Oh. Okay. Over here. Just a second. Thank you, mr. Jack. I want to have you the time you were chief of staff, was there a time you disagree with the president jimmy carter and a time jimmy carter disagree with you, and the time you still remember . Yes, i do. Two quick examples. When we first went into 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 bug expenditures he was very tightfisted, and he discovered after a short analysis that a lot of the big Water Projects in the west were boondoggled. 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 Project that were very fortunate the western governorrer ands the western senators and the western congressmen, and i said to the president , mr. President , i understand why you want to cut back budget 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. 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 business of the people and the business of the government. Again, that is the kind of thing that is admirable in your president but i thought it was mistake said so. Thought he needed to be out campaigning, and every many of you here are too young to even know this, but most of you but every single night on the cbs evening news, Walter Cronkite would say, its day 77. Day 105. Every single day. And so those were two times i disagreed with what the president there others. Chris, didnt h. R. Hall diman simply ignore things that president nixon would say, were going to do something and yet. A lot of bad things happened in the Nixon White House but could have been even worse. And h. R. Haldeman would occasionally talk nixon off the ledge when he had some crazy off the wall idea. Nixon was absolutely convinced this may sound familiar. Pair need, absolutely convinced everybody was out to get him. The media. S and he was convince thread was a safe in the brookings institute, some documentses that would prove its unclear whether they were documents that would show that lbj had rigged the peace talks for humphreys reelection or what it was about 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 . I didnt think you would do that. Another case where he wanted to put lie detectors on everybody in the state department. That was a few more people than you can do that with. That was an easy one for haldeman to just ignore. Lets do just a couple more questions. Gentleman right there. 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 it to really think you can bring things to a fulcrum point, and i know that it depends a great deal on the personalities of the people involved, and frankly, the maturity of the person happens to be the president , but structurally is this a doable job . Well, the bad news is 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 pred are sos are trying to tell you, you should do this or that and the response is, well, if you guys were so smart, how come we beat you . So you have that psychology, i 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. It took bill clinton a year and a half to figure that out but he did. Leon panetta came in and turned that white house around, and i think clinton would have been a oneterm president if he hadnt. Took jimmy cart twoand a half years to figure it out, that eneedded to have a formal white house chief of staff. I was doing an event yesterday in chicago with bill daly, obamas second chief, and george w. Bushs second white house chief, sam skinner, and skinner said something that i thought was vivid about all this. He said its like alcoholism. Every president has to hit rock bottom. And they do. The question is, right now i wouldnt 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 of very early in the administration the president was having a meeting with some of to the most distinguished senators in the out senate. I wont name names here. But both democrat and republican. 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. And they came there were seven of them. Every one of the names in that room you would recognize. And they started arguing that particular case that was being discussed, and they didnt know as much as we did. They didnt know the hadnt done the homework as well, as thoroughly 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 thief every one of the senators brought up could be met with facts and argumented that were pear persuasive. I realized then, just do your homework. Dont take anything for granted. Didnt think youre the smartest guy in the room. Be the best informed guy in the room. And United States senator, again respect flexor respectfully, is subject to a sense of selfimportance and you have to guard against that. Jack, who was is at the time president elect reagan said to you, came up to you at a party . Well, jack its 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 fetted at Katherine Grahams place and there was a receiving line and reagan arrived. Jack happened to be there. And reagan came in and he was talking to kay gray lamb and looked over and saw jack watson, and he made a beine over to jack. The story i heard, and said, jack, its so good to see you. You know, my people tell me that if you had been chief of staff from the beginning, i wouldnt be here. A story of extreme exaggeration. [laughter] i think its a little bit of truth to it. He did say it but he was also one of the most charming men that ever drew a breath. I want you to have a chance youll have a chance to ask 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, it is a fascinating story that you get to know not only the chiefs of staff but the president s they served and the people around. It is just its hard to put down, this book. Really good i encourage you to get it. Please join me in thanking chris and jack for just a wonderful [applause] president. [silence]
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