The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency
History of every President's most important aide by Chris Whipple
Chris Whipple’s The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency was one of my favorite recent reads. Whipple explains just how pivotal the chief of staff is to any presidency, with clear examples like how Carter’s not picking a chief drove his administration’s ineffectiveness and how Reagan’s first chief was crucial to his success.
There ends up being underlying keys for an effective chief. The chief has to already know the mechanics of the White House and Washington. In the stories Whipple retells, no matter how adept the outsider was, they failed to execute where an insider was able to flourish. Some other keys:
A good chief never forgets he is not the president, that though he is important all his power flows from the president, which can be cut off in an instant.
A good chief has to have a nose for character. So much of the internal conflict and disaster can be avoided by removing anyone with a hair of vice/lack of character. The chief of staff has to be the filter for the whole staff of selecting people in both circles of extreme intelligence and extreme integrity.
A good chief is the “honest broker.” They need to be the primary individual responsible for telling the president what he needs to hear whether or not it’s what he’d like to hear.
The chief needs to manage all the ego and personalities of a cabinet and staff. And often it’s these personalities clashing or usurping presidential power that leads to the bad decisions that lead to the disasters.
The chapters hum along, tell a great story, and provide plenty material for further reading.
My 10 favorite highlights from the book:
“Every president reveals himself,” says historian Richard Norton Smith, “by the presidential portraits he hangs in the Roosevelt Room, and by the person he picks as his chief of staff.”
Holed up at their transition headquarters, Haldeman read everything he could find on how to organize the White House. He devised what he called a staff system, a model and template of White House governance that almost every subsequent administration would follow.
In Rumsfeld’s view, decisions were dead on arrival unless they were translated to every relevant department. “There are very few problems in the federal government that are solely the jurisdiction of a single department,” he explains… “Well, who does all of that connecting? It has to be the chief of staff.”
Baker prided himself on telling Reagan the unvarnished truth. “You have to be able to tell the president what he does not want to hear.”
Carter was arguably the most intelligent president of the twentieth century, whereas Reagan had once been called, unfairly, “an amiable dunce.” Yet in choosing Baker, Reagan had intuited something his predecessor did not grasp. As Reagan’s biographer Lou Cannon wrote: “He did not know one missile system from another and could not explain the simplest procedures of the federal government, but he understood that the political process of his presidency would be closely linked to his acceptance in Washington. In this he was the opposite of Jimmy Carter, who knew far more and understood far less.”
“Clinton spent an enormous amount of time picking his cabinet,” recalls John Podesta. “And no time picking his White House staff.”
“I broke the job down into the care and feeding of the president; policy formulation; and marketing and selling,” recalls Card… “that they’re well prepared to make decisions that they never thought they’d have to make. You have to manage the policy process and make sure no one is gaming the president. And the last category is marketing and selling. If the president makes a decision and nobody knows about it, did the president make a decision?”
A few days later, as he boarded Marine One, Duberstein noticed that Obama was carrying a copy of Lou Cannon’s book, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.
McDonough formed small teams dedicated to big projects: the global climate accords; the Iran nuclear deal; the diplomatic opening to Cuba. McDonough’s obsession with process paid off.
Obama’s staff had spent months preparing voluminous transition briefs, thick binders designed to help the next administration get up to speed on subjects ranging from Iran to Cuba to health care to climate change. Every previous incoming team had studied such volumes with care. But as the inauguration drew near, McDonough realized that the binders had not even been opened: “All the paperwork, all the briefings that had been prepared for their transition team went unused,” he said. “Unread. Unreviewed.”