RECENTLY PUBLISHED:
The Gatekeepers How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency AUTHOR :
Chris Whipple ’71
Crown / 2017
REVIEWED BY:
Jessica Day
EXCERPT: Rahm Emanuel was so cold he could see his breath as he crossed the White House parking lot and entered the West Wing lobby. It was December 5, 2008, an unusually frigid morning in Washington, DC. But it wasn’t the weather that sent a chill through Emanuel; it wasthe unbelievably daunting challenge that lay ahead. In just six weeks Emanuel would become White House chief of staff to Barack Obama, the forty-fourth president of the United States. But for more than a month, he had watched in astonishment as the world they were about to inherit was turned upside down. The US economy was teetering on the edge of another Great Depression. Credit—the lifeblood of the world economy— was frozen. The entire auto industry was on the brink of collapse. Two bloody wars were mired in stalemate. There was more than a little truth, Emanuel thought, to the headline in The Onion: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.” The stiletto-tongued infighter, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton, and congressman from Illinois felt apprehensive. “I brought my pillow and my blankie,” he would later joke, looking back at that dark morning when the fate of the new administration seemed to hang in the balance. The truth was, Rahm Emanuel was scared. The unannounced gathering at the White House that morning looked like a Cold War-era national security crisis. Black sedans and SUVs rolled up; men in dark suits clambered into the Executive Mansion. Emanuel thought about the elite fraternity that was assembling here: Donald Rumsfeld. Dick Cheney. Leon Panetta. Howard Baker Jr. Jack Watson. Ken Duberstein. John Sununu. Sam Skinner. Mack McLarty. John Podesta. Andrew Card. Joshua Bolten. They were among Washington’s most powerful figures of the last half century: secretaries of defense, OMB directors, governor, CIA director, majority leader, and vice president. But they had one thing above all in common. It was a special bond, a shared trial by fire that transcended their political differences: Every one of them had served as White House chief of staff.
60 | THE COMMON ROOM
Since George Washington, presidents have depended on the advice of key confidants. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that the White House chief of staff became the second most powerful job in government. Unelected and unconfirmed, the chief serves at the whim of the president, hired and fired by him (or her) alone. He is the president’s closest adviser and the person he depends on to turn his agenda into reality. The Gatekeepers, available nationwide beginning on April 4, is being billed as the first in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at how the American Presidency has hinged on the effectiveness of the White House chiefs of staff—those confidants who often make the difference between success and failure. It is a book years in the making, starting when Chris Whipple began to conduct research for his acclaimed 2013 documentary film The Presidents’ Gatekeepers; it is the result of dozens of interviews with all seventeen living chiefs of staff and two former presidents—Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush—as well as cabinet officers, congressmen, staffers, historians, fellow journalists, and others. Whipple, a filmmaker, writer, journalist, and speaker who won multiple Peabody and Emmy Awards as a producer at CBS’ 60 Minutes and ABC’s Primetime, was most recently executive producer and writer of Showtime’s The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs; an interview in the Fall ’16 issue of Deerfield Magazine focused on The Spymasters. Now, at the start of a new administration, all eyes are on the men and women in President Trump’s inner circle, including White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. While Priebus’ legacy obviously has yet to unfold, Whipple has effectively and intriguingly pulled back the curtain on this unique fraternity (currently all chiefs of staff have been men), providing the reader with a unique perspective, shrewd analysis of events and decisions, and singular details of the last eight administrations. For instance: Richard Nixon’s infamous chief, H.R. Haldeman, often blamed for Watergate, actually tempered Nixon’s self-destructive instincts and wrote the template for the modern White House chief of staff; two ambitious chiefs, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, brought Gerald Ford back from political disaster to the brink of victory over Jimmy Carter (and forged a political alliance that would take them to the pinnacle of power decades later); Leon Panetta, along with his deputies Erskine Bowles and John Podesta and with strong input from First Lady Hillary Clinton, resurrected Bill Clinton’s crippled presidency, fixing a dysfunctional White House and setting the stage for his reelection, and more . . . A granular, compelling story that is rich in details and points of historical fact yet entirely accessible and appealing to a broad spectrum of readers, The Gatekeepers may just have the power to revise our understanding of presidential history and the men who shaped it. As historian Richard Norton Smith said: “Every president reveals himself by the presidential portraits he hangs in the Roosevelt Room, and by the person he picks as his chief of staff;” The Gatekeepers reveals the chiefs of staff. //