Jonathan McBride Oral History, interview 1

I’m Barbara Perry, and I chair the oral history program at the Miller Center and head up our presidential studies unit. I’m joined today by Nancy Kassop, a political scientist at SUNY New Paltz; [James P.] Jim Pfiffner, another political scientist, from George Mason [University]; and [Kathryn] Katie Dunn Tenpas, who is, first of all, a fellow political scientist, but also a fellow here at the Miller Center and at Brookings [Institution]. We’re delighted to have you. We wish we could be seeing you in person, in Charlottesville [Virginia] or in Washington [D.C.], or wherever you may be, but thank you for joining us. For the record, this is the Jonathan McBride oral history interview for the Barack Obama Oral History Project.

You have an interesting biographical origin, and we always like to begin with biography because it’s meaningful to us. It’s also meaningful to the vast audiences who read these, particularly students and teachers who want to know how you got to where you got in working throughout your life: your private enterprise work, obviously your government work, and your work for Barack Obama. Can we start at the beginning for you?

Yes. Do you want me to begin with my first role, or where would you like me to start?

Go all the way back to your literal beginning.

My literal beginning. OK, great. So why don’t I give you the high level, and then you can ask whatever questions you want if I’m not giving the right level of detail?

OK.

I was born in Montana and raised in Wisconsin. By birth I’m half black and half Syrian. My parents were college students at the University of Montana. I was put up for adoption and was adopted by two white Americans who already had two daughters, so my older sisters are white, as are my parents. We promptly moved to Wisconsin, where I was raised in and around Milwaukee. A couple of years later my parents adopted my brother, who’s half black and half Korean, from an orphanage in Korea. He had been left at the doorstep at about six months, and two years later we adopted him.

I grew up in Milwaukee in the ’70s and ’80s during a period of time—This is going to be relevant to my role and a lot of the work that I did, because your life tends to lead up to these types of jobs, and you bring your entire life to them. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in the Midwest, there are a couple of defining characteristics of growing up in Milwaukee in particular. The first is that Milwaukee is, and always has been, one of the most hypersegregated cities in the United States, and we’re not talking about black and white; we’re talking about Poles, Croats, Serbs—very specifically neighborhood-y.

The second thing is that obviously being in my family—I grew up in a very diverse neighborhood but in a city that was hypersegregated, which created interesting tensions. When you look like our family did getting out of a car, in a diner, whatever the case may be, there was always a reaction. From a very young age I remember being very cognizant of always being different from everybody just about everywhere I went.

You say that when you get out of a car there were reactions. What were the reactions?

Let me give you a very concrete example that I just learned during COVID [Coronavirus disease]. I vividly remember driving across the top of the United States to the West most summers to visit relatives in Montana, Colorado, Utah, and Nebraska. I was probably five or six the first time I remember stopping at our first diner midway through, in North Dakota at the time. We just crossed the border, and we got out of the car and walked to the diner, and back when they had records, it was like the record skipped. Everybody turned around and stared at us as we walked in, and they kept staring at us. The place was quiet. We sat down in a booth, and it went on for some time. I remember that being the experience.

What I didn’t remember is what I’m about to tell you that my parents told me, because we spent an ungodly amount of time together in COVID, so we’ve had a chance to go back over a lot of stories. My mother asked me, “Do you remember what you did the next summer when we had that same experience?”

For three days in every single town it would happen, all the way across the top of the United States. We’d get to Montana and we’d be walking down Main Street in Helena, and people would say, “You must be Howard’s grandchildren,” because my brother and I were the only two who looked like us in the whole city.

This I did not remember, but it tells you a lot about how I’m wired, either predispositionally or through experience: The next summer, at the first diner we walked into—I would have been probably seven—the record skipped. I got in the booth, I ordered whatever my breakfast was going to be, and then, apparently, I jumped out of the booth and introduced myself to every table in the diner. [laughter] People were laughing.

We used to call these “blue-hair” diners. Remember back in the day when people used to dye their hair and it would turn blue? By midway through people were squeezing my cheeks. I remember vividly people squeezing my cheeks, saying to me that I look just like Johnny Mathis. But I walked around the diner and did that, and apparently I did that all summer, all the way out and all the way back, every time.

And people were friendly to you when you went up to them to say, “Hi, I’m Jonathan.”

Michelle [Robinson Obama] had a phrase that she used in her book tour a lot, which is, “hard to hate up close.” It’s the basic underpinning of one of the reasons Brian Chesky started Airbnb, the open-door moments where people can be introduced to each other. It’s hard to deny that once you learn something about people, it’s hard to unlearn it.

My parents were raised, one in a very racist household and one in very isolated household, who, when they went to basic training in Germany straight out of college and were in barracks with other officers in training who looked like everybody from across the United States, came back a couple of years later realizing they had been sold a bag of goods. Just from the lived-experience back-and-forth. That’s important to me because my parents built a very diverse neighborhood around us, so those were our experiences. We could have had a very different experience in Milwaukee.

Did your parents talk to you during this time? From the moment you’re just describing, did they take you, and all of your siblings, aside to say, “This is why this is happening,” and, “Don’t worry about it,” or “Here’s how you can behave to make people understand”?

It varied, but they would tell you—because they’ve told me this earlier—that they felt like we were ahead of them. The way my brother and I reacted—my brother did not react. He was just very calm about it. I’m more of an activist. I tended to go do something about it, or engage people, or confront whatever was going on. They were marveling at us a lot of the time, but I will tell you that there wasn’t a point in my life where I didn’t know that I was adopted and didn’t remember the story, or had dreamt of the story. So it wasn’t like, Oh my God, I’m so different. It wasn’t a surprise that I was different; it was just part of what was true.

One of the things I remember a friend and I talked about when we first read Obama’s book—In the middle he’s talking about how for whatever reason his grandparents mainly had given him this optimistic view that he could see his difference as an asset. It wasn’t a liability or something he was carrying around. He wasn’t coming at it from a deficit mindset. My friend and I were talking on the phone. We said, “That’s exactly right for us too.”

He thought it meant he could go between and among different worlds and navigate, and I felt that way my whole life too, but that’s different than thinking you totally belong. Those are two separate things. I felt equipped to navigate many different situations and scenarios—and probably felt irrationally confident in a lot of those situations, probably too much so—but that also leads to thinking you could start a magazine company when you’ve only read magazines and so on.

All these things are seminal in my experience, because we’re going to be talking about a role where you are the personal embodiment of a President who is the first black President, so the subcontext of everything is going to be around diversity, equity, and inclusion, right? Even if we didn’t talk about it in exactly those words all the time, it was the subcontext of everything, so you needed a certain higher sensibility about it, probably, than you would have if you were in another White House. I can’t say that for sure, because I wasn’t in another White House; I just know that it was a very significant subcontext to everything we were doing and had us accountable to a lot of people, especially—We’ll talk about this—after the reelection. There was an even greater heightened sense of accountability to certain populations who came knocking on our door after helping us get reelected, so it became pretty acute.

At any rate, I went off to college at Connecticut College, a small liberal arts college. I was a U.S. history and economics major. Again, being less of a bystander and more of a participant—I was in student government, I was the captain of the soccer team, and was an all-American, but I also helped form the first diversity office at Connecticut College with a woman named Judith Kirmmse, who was an associate dean at the time. I don’t think she was the provost.

I was a work-study student in the president’s office and overheard her talking about it, and I said, “Well, I can help you do that.” I had no idea how to do it, but I just said it anyway—and I jumped in to start what became the first diversity office, called the Affirmative Action Office. It was called the Affirmative Action Office at the time, but it was focusing not on admissions but on student experience.

What year would that have been?

That would have been 1990 or ’91, because I graduated in ’92. I can’t remember if it was my sophomore or my junior year. But that would have been right around that time.

What was the makeup of the student population at Connecticut College?

At that time it was about 1,600 students. It’s about 2,000 now. In terms of ethnic diversity, we collected some data back then. I don’t know that it actually even got to hard numbers at any point, but I would say that we were probably roughly in the neighborhood of about 18 to 20 percent identifying as some version of ethnic diversity.

That number’s up probably another 10 percentage points since then, give or take, right now. But it was a predominantly white school. It was a very affluent school. There were more women than men, because it had been an all-women’s college until 1969. It still is about 60 percent women. In the application pools, per annum, more women applied than men for sure.

It had a certain zeitgeist. They were never going to have a football team, never going to have fraternities or sororities. There were a lot of decisions made informally early on about the way the culture would be, so it’s a residential school on a hill, with a small wall around it, that could be eight feet tall. The local police have to check with campus safety to come onto the campus. There’s a shared-governance model, where if I ran afoul of the honor code or anything else I went before students, not faculty or administrators. So there’s this very intensive shared-governance model with students, faculty, and administrators all in it together, which was a key part of my experience, because I was the kind of person who, rather than complain about things, jumped in.

I didn’t tell my parents I was going to walk around the diner. I didn’t even remember walking around the diner, but apparently I did it. That gives you a sense of, whether it was learned as a child or whether it was prewired, a predisposition to act when something is going wrong or needs to be fixed or improved or whatever the case may be, rather than just observe. Again it goes way back. I didn’t know that story until just a year ago.

Well, we’re glad to have captured that. What did you do in working in affirmative action at the college, to try to—

The first thing was trying to come up with what should this office be, what should it be principally focused on, and what’s its structure. We ended up creating a committee of sorts to get people around a table and let the group decide among themselves the types of things that we would do. As you might imagine, programming almost always comes first, so there’s basic infrastructure, a little bit of governance, but never enough; we should spend more time on governance up front, frankly.

In my current work we talk about going from head to heart to guts to hands. Most people go ahead with hands, right? They go straight to the action. We immediately started thinking about some roundtable discussions, topics we could explore, and speakers we could bring in, which is a very common first step. If I were to do it today, I would do it a little bit differently, but that’s a common first step.

My memories of the year and a half that I would have been doing this were around that. There was a gentleman—I haven’t thought about it since—named Dr. Charles King, who was a very provocative public speaker, who had authored a book on race relations. He would do this thing where he would come in, and in the discussion with a whole auditorium of people, as white men and women would stand up and talk, he would treat them in a certain way, using his power of being on the stage. It would start to build over time, and people would think, What’s going on here? And then he would basically weave that into the everyday experience of people of color in the United States, and how it feels like that on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis. He would talk about that in some detail. So you created an experiential discussion.

We brought people like that in to stir the pot a bit. I remember that because it really stirred the pot. [laughter] There were people walking out. There were letters, and people would protest, and all that kind of stuff, which college students are wont to do, but it was a fruitful discussion. We were not yet at a point, as I recall, where we saw ourselves as an office to be thinking about from an accountability standpoint, because we weren’t talking about admissions and data and student composition. We were talking about student experience and how to create a more inclusive environment, although we weren’t using that word. We kept using the word “affirmative action” and “diversity,” but what we were really talking about was culture. That’s what we were talking about. Today we would probably be talking about equity, inclusion, and belonging.

My colleagues, any other questions along these lines?

What were you thinking you were going to do after graduation?

I had planned to go to Spain for a year and learn to speak Spanish, because I hadn’t studied abroad at school, and I thought that was a misstep. It was the summer of the Olympics in Barcelona, so a buddy of mine and I were going to go at the end of the summer. I went down to Washington, D.C., to try out for a semi-pro soccer team and hang out for the summer—true story.

Then on—I’ll call it a Tuesday—I walked into Senator Herb Kohl’s office to see a friend I had grown up with who was a legislative aide to him. While sitting there the Senator walked in, so he introduced me, and it turns out I had gone to high school with some of his nieces and nephews. We talked about that for a while in the lobby. He asked me what I was doing, and he said, “Why don’t you come back tomorrow and talk to our chief of staff. Maybe we can set you up with an internship while you’re here. Maybe you can work in the mailroom.” I didn’t have a job, so I said, “OK. That sounds great.”

I went to try out that night, and I rebroke my leg. I had broken my leg my senior year toward the end of the season, and I broke the same leg in the same spot that night at 11:00 p.m. It was so hot in D.C. in the summers the tryouts had to be at night. I was in the emergency room all night, and then crutched to the Hill, which I found is really a hill, because you notice when you’re on crutches that you are going up the whole time.

I arrived in the Senator’s office the next morning at 9:00 a.m., not having slept, having sweated through the only suit I had with me, and, lo and behold, the Senator walked in. He looked at me, having just met me the day before, and I know he’s thinking to himself, This looks like the guy I met yesterday, but he has a cast from his hip to his toe, and he’s sweaty and disheveled, so I said out loud, “I’m the same guy, Senator. You met me yesterday.” He was dumbfounded.

We started talking, and he invited me back to his office. We ended up having this hour-and-a-half-long conversation about politics in the state and all kinds of stuff. At the end he said, “Well, you’re probably not going to Spain, and you’re definitely not going to be playing soccer. We have an empty spot we’ve been trying to fill among the legislative correspondents. How about I put you through the paces, and if it works out you work here?” So a week later I had a job on the Hill.

My issue areas were agriculture, which was a big boost to the state of Wisconsin, so it was cool; economics—obviously, I had an independent interest in that; transportation; innovation; energy. Having been in a family that was extremely active in community engagement, from a service standpoint, and being reasonably political, that was unbelievable.

For a young person 22 years of age who thinks he’s somewhat smart, to be put in an office where it’s run by a guy who keeps the office very small, very flat, and doesn’t have to raise money because he’s self-financed—He was one of the first candidates to do that—the amount of time you had with him back then was twice as much, but now it would probably be four times as much—was an incredible experience. I spent two and a half years on his staff, with the last portion going back to Wisconsin and running part of the get-out-the-vote effort in Milwaukee for his reelection campaign in 1994, which was an interesting experience.

This happened a couple of times, because I went back for the reelect with Obama, as well, being on the ground in a different capacity in a city that I’d grown up in. There’s a materiality to it that’s hard to explain. When you’re going door to door, and you’re knocking on doors, and you recognize a person went to middle school with you, or that’s someone’s parent that you met before, it makes what is kind of a broader, somewhat amorphous thing extremely specific and real to you. That was a really exciting thing at a young age to be doing that.

I recruited one of my best friends to come back and work with me on the team. But at the same time I was applying to business school because I always wanted to go into business. This had been a detour. When he won, we were back in D.C. driving around together, and I explained to the Senator that I thought I was going to go to business school. He’s a Harvard Business MBA [master of business administration]. Kohl is from Kohl’s food stores, which were all over Wisconsin, so everybody had shopped or worked in one of them. He took it over from his father, who grew it, sold it to a group of investors who launched Kohl’s department stores, K-O-H-L, which is part of the same business but was not his innovation. That was the group that came after.

At any rate, we were driving, and I remember saying to him that I thought I was going to go to business school. He asked the driver to pull over, and he looked me straight in the face, and said, “I will help you get into business school if you promise me one thing.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “If you do not come right back here. If you’re going to go to business school, I want you to go out and work for a great company so you can see what a great company looks like, maybe go start something on your own, and then come back here when you have something to add, because there are not enough people with that work experience.”

Quickly, do you know what my career path was? Wharton for a finance degree, Goldman Sachs for three years, I started a media company, started an employment branding company for our acquirers, because we sold it to somebody, and then the Obama White House. I wasn’t intentionally following what he told me in a two-sentence comment in the back of the car, but when I was coming back to D.C. I remembered that conversation. That’s the path that I followed, which is just remarkable. He was still in office, and I met him on West Exec [Executive] Drive in my month two in the White House. He was walking across and he was looking at me. I said, “Yes, still the same guy, just don’t have a broken leg.” He started laughing, and then we ended up having a good, long conversation.

At any rate I worked for him, finally went to South America, learned Spanish, and then went to Wharton Business School. I split my time in the summers working for an asset manager who wanted to go into venture capital, and then also Goldman Sachs as a summer associate. Then I went there full-time in the equities division, not necessarily believing that I wanted to be on Wall Street my whole life, but went to business school partially to run in the language of business, but in particular the language of money.

My family’s all educators, psychologists, artists, so it was a foreign world to me, but I knew I wanted to understand it better, and Goldman Sachs seemed like a great place to go. It also has a great reputation, so I knew that if I was going to be someplace for a short while I could probably get a good job afterward as long as I did well.

I went there for roughly three years, but over that period of time I was living with a classmate of mine who I had co-authored a paper with for a class in our second year of Wharton, which was called “MBA”—master of business administration—“dot Mag,” the dot because we were so internet-focused in 1999, which is a joke now when I think about it, because we barely understood it.

But the point is that in business school, as voracious consumers of content, and people spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about your path in life, we noticed that the business publications at the time—Forbes, Fortune, et cetera—were written for our parents. They were all about having gotten to a certain level of success, and we’re in our late 20s, early 30s. We’ve taken on this debt where we’re going to double our earnings in one year. We’re going to move three times in the next four years; we’re going to change jobs four times. Who’s telling us how to do all that? Because that was not part of your MBA education. Your education was more about Xs and Os.

We had written a business plan in business school, and almost started it coming out of business school, to launch a publication with this magazine website, event business, and online recruiting application just for MBAs. We went out into the world and worked for a while. We saw how much energy was being put into hiring lawyers and doctors and all kinds of people, so we realized the publication could be many publications across many populations that you could kind of wrap into one media company. We acquired people in what we called “finishing school.” We’d acquire them in graduate school, with partnerships with graduate schools around the globe, and then we owned them for two to three years after. That was the idea.

We quit our jobs in December and January, right as Y2K [anticipated problems with computers as the year 2000 began] wasn’t happening. We closed our first round of financing in May, and we closed our financing a week after the market had crested. We didn’t know it had crested, but the internet bubble had just burst. Our early investor left. We raised about $2.4 million, if I remember correctly, in that first round of financing.

We launched MBA Vertical and MBA Jungle. Jungle was the media company, Jungle being a metaphor for this time in your life. And MBA Jungle, which was the first one we launched, got a lot of attention that fall, so we accelerated plans to launch JD [Juris Doctor] Jungle for young lawyers and law students the following year. In the category of better lucky than smart, which I’ll probably say four times, we raised the second round of financing in June of 2001, so it was late enough that we hadn’t spent it, but before a plane crashed into a building two months later. Had that not happened, we never would have survived. The math would not have worked. And we raised about another $9 million.

So we launched the JD publication and grew the company, despite the incredible headwinds, over the next five years. We had a product for MBAs, for JDs, and undergraduate students. Then we launched, co-published, and eventually took over a younger, hipper, black enterprise for black professionals called Savoy Professional. Savoy was like the Vanity Fair for black America at the time. We went into that name with Vanguard Media. We then launched Hispanic Professional, which we did in concert with the Hispanic MBA Association. We launched a travel magazine with STA Travel for college students about those first experiences in life of independence, where you travel abroad or study abroad, mainly. And we had a couple of other custom publishing products.

We grew that over the next number of years, despite how difficult it was, and then in 2007 sold it to a company called Universum, which was a databased analytics company that studied places to work, but not among broad populations. They just surveyed graduate students and undergraduates all around the world and used that to help employers understand their employment brand, which was then a new topic to talk about.

Their employment value proposition was also somewhat new to talk about. They bought our media company because we were a solutions business, so imagine they had a diagnostics business, and then they bought us as the pharmaceutical company, but what they were missing was the physicians. I started a job in the middle, which was to be a consulting firm, to take all the data and turn it into plans on how to use the tools to build your brand or attract and retain good people, and so on.

I was doing that for about two years. I was the chief strategy officer for Universum globally, and then again, in the category of better lucky than smart, had a series of friends who had stayed in and around D.C. and had made their way up to quite senior levels in the domestic and foreign policy world. Even though they had come out of the [William J.] Clinton administration, they happened to choose a self-described skinny guy with big ears as a candidate very early on as he was announcing his candidacy and eventually became senior advisors to him in the policy making process of the campaign.

When he won, I had been talking with them about it. I’d sold my company and I was able to get my résumé to the right people and say, “Listen, I’ll drop everything and lick stamps. I don’t mind.” I got a phone call in March, after the inauguration, from a friend asking me a couple of questions.

Then I got another phone call saying, “Can you come down and interview?” I came back and forth I think three or four times between March and mid-May, each meeting with a more senior person. The last group was Jim Messina, Pete Rouse, and Rahm Emanuel for about five minutes, and there might have been one other person in the room, after which they explained to me that they were considering me for this office called Presidential Personnel.

There had been a meeting a couple of months earlier where they had said, “For this next wave of people coming in, we should have somebody who’s spent some time in a startup, understands politics ideally, but knows something about how to attract and retain good people.” I had to be the only person in America with that résumé, and somebody in that room knew me. That’s how just luck happens, right? So that’s how my name got in front of the right people and how I went through this interview process.

This says a lot about the man, and I have deep and abiding respect for him—I’ll never forget what Pete Rouse said to me, because he was the last person I was talking to, “We want to hire you for this job, but I’m going to send you through to meet key people in this office who have bled for this man over two years in a campaign. If they don’t like you, I’m not going to hire you,” something like that.

“They’ve got to respect you, because you’re coming from the outside. You weren’t part of that world, and they’re all from that world.” And it was prescient because if you didn’t figure out that dynamic really quickly as someone who wasn’t on the campaign, you were going to have a real problem. I respected the fact that he respected them so much to say that to me to my face, and gave them veto power over my hiring, even though technically I’d be above them, which is kind of tricky and interesting.

It was the first of many times Pete Rouse earned my respect beyond measure, because it was very humane of him. What I realized later is that that’s the role he ended up playing for the President. The President talked about it in the dinner we had for him when Pete was leaving. He talked about how he always wanted to be a great boss, but later he realized he was only going to be a good boss because Pete Rouse worked with him.

When you said that there was someone in the room who knew you, from the video interview of you that I watched, you knew Mona Sutphen when you were growing up? Is that correct? And was she your contact?

Yes. Mona Sutphen’s brother, who’s younger than she, was a year older than me, has been my best friend on and off since I was four. She was basically my older sister. But I also knew Melody Barnes reasonably well through our connections and family, and Heather Higginbottom, as well as some others, but those were the three key players, because Melody ran DPC [Domestic Policy Council], Heather was her deputy, and then you had Mona, who became the Deputy Chief of Staff for all of Policy, as you know. So I had a bunch of people who could validate and say, “Oh, yes, I know him,” Mona knew me really well.

Katie?

I’m really curious: had you not had that sort of happenstance meeting with Senator Kohl and his willingness to take you on, it strikes me that your career path could have gone in a completely different direction.

One thousand percent.

OK. But because of your interest in the Diversity Office at Connecticut College and things like that, were you paying attention to politics? Were you somebody who liked to read the newspaper to find out what was happening? Did you care about the Presidential election? Or did this particular experience on Capitol Hill—which it does for many people—really transform you and make you interested and intrigued with this whole universe of national politics?

I’ll give you a roundabout answer, but the short answer is because of my parents—I’ll explain that in a second—I always cared about the communities we lived in and had a view of politics. I don’t think I was super political, per se, but I cared about politics, definitely, and had a view on things. I ran for student government in high school and became a prefect, and in college was in the student government association, so I had a view of it, and my family sat around and talked about issues, but it wasn’t from a political lens; it was more from a civil lens, if that makes sense.

But I’ll tell you: growing up in my house, from a very early age you were licking stamps for the local aldermen and doing fundraisers every other week it seemed like. I actually almost did a documentary on this. I wanted to figure out why this Sherman Park neighborhood—which is the neighborhood I grew up in, which is somewhat famous in Milwaukee for this period of time, only lasted a generation and a half.

This neighborhood had openly gay couples in the ’70s, interracial adopted families, interracial couples, a lot of Orthodox Jews, because we had two synagogues, the Jewish deli, and Yeshiva school within walking distance. We had people who had absolutely been part of the trucking boycott. Across the street was a big trucker who had very conservative political views—and everybody in between, against the backdrop of the most hypersegregated city in the United States.

This neighborhood was like an island, and it was always curious to me how it got started, because I had this romantic view of my parents moving into the neighborhood with a bunch of other people who had grown up with the civil rights movement. They wanted to start this neighborhood and create a neighborhood association, and do it because they wanted to create an environment for the kids. That’s not the story.

What the story is—which I found out later when I was working on a possible documentary—was that this was a neighborhood that experienced white flight, or middle-class flight, in the ’70s, so you had all these great old homes that people had moved out of because they’d moved to the suburbs, because their jobs had followed, and young people like my parents could move in and buy a four-bedroom house with a yard and all that stuff for $40,000 bucks and put a little work into it. A bunch of people from all different backgrounds who weren’t really talking to each other all did that.

Then the city decided to put a highway spur through the neighborhood, so David [Sutphen] and Mona Sutphen’s father, Cecil Sutphen, got people together in the basement of a church and said, “We need to fight this.” And so a lot of people that knew each other a little bit through soccer and other things, organized and fought against the highway spur, and won.

After that they said, “Well, what else can we do?” The Sherman Park Neighborhood Association was formed that day with parents across the whole neighborhood. We got people elected to the school board. It was the center of the desegregation busing movement in the late ’70s in Milwaukee. We had a rule that people didn’t buy their kids plastic guns when they were young. No one had guns. Everyone played a different way. Backdoors were open. You could walk into someone’s house and get a glass of water. We had a neighborhood watch association.

The lesson for me in that process was that you don’t move into neighborhoods like that; you build them. But you need a burning platform, and there’s nothing better than our property value might be halved if this happens. [laughs] You had a whole bunch of people who didn’t agree on most stuff, probably, beginning—I don’t remember them later in life as being totally mobbed up and working together on everything, because that was my adolescent view of it, but it had started on a more basic, elemental thing, which is we’ve got to stop this highway spur.

So that’s the neighborhood I grew up in. We were at potlucks and fundraisers and helping people run for Governor and mayor and school board and all kinds of stuff from a very young age. It’s intertwined in everything that I did, so the fact that I got to go to D.C. was interesting intellectually. It wouldn’t have been something I would have thought about. And Katie, to your comment, I probably would have ended up at a business school and gotten an MBA, and I very likely might have ended up on Wall Street for a period of time. I would like to think that I would have been some kind of entrepreneur at some stage of my life.

I know for a fact that I would have spent so much time thinking about the people who were doing all the work that at some point I would have detoured off strategy and marketing and all the things I was good at into probably the people’s side of things. All those things would probably have happened in some version of itself.

Would I have ever been in a White House? Probably not. Would I have ever worked in D.C. at all? Probably not. Would I be the same person? No way. Breaking my leg that night and happening to walk into the Senator’s office the next day changed the trajectory of my life noticeably. I don’t even think I could enumerate all the different ways, but as a result, I would like to think—

When I was at the White House, one of the many things that I helped start was something that was actually research that was being done by McKinsey called the Tri-Sector Leadership Project, which was all about this idea. We were starting something called Select U.S.A., which was helping get foreign direct investment in the United States. The problem was Korea, Germany, all these other places worked well together with a single point of contact, looking for companies to invest in building plants and manufacturing facilities and so on in their countries, and we have states fighting with each other.

Not only does the country not work well together but the sectors don’t work together, and the states were fighting with each other. We needed to think about that. But it raised an issue, from my perspective, which is I noticed that one of the biggest divides is just the people and the way they talk to each other and the predisposition they have toward people from different groups, even at a very high level.

Along with a couple of people at McKinsey at the time who had authored a paper on the topic, we pushed and created something called the Tri-Sector Leadership Initiative, which was simply about getting people midcareer together across a bunch of different sectors, having them as fellows, working on programs together, to make them converse in each other’s language and understand each other’s equities, so that later on—because we thought it was a people-driven problem, or the solution was a people-driven one—they would have a network and cohort of people in different sectors they could call upon. They would have a greater sensitivity across these divides that normally only get crossed after you have a flood in New Orleans, and suddenly everyone comes together and says, “for Pete’s sake, let’s work together.” It’s usually in response to some crisis. It’s not used strategically.

That’s just one example. My worldview is horizontal. You could say it’s from growing up different my whole life, reading rooms and reading people and seeing where the overlap is in the Venn diagram, because that’s where you can live comfortably and where you can operate in the given setting and so on and so forth. From a career perspective, going to D.C. first definitely changed my mind, just like having a media company for seven years and having to think about content all the time, you see the world through content lenses, and that’s a different way to think about things.

That’s a long way to answer, but all of those things were very fortunate. We give too little credence to luck in our lives. We look back on the things that worked, and we always say, well, that’s because I’m so smart, but the reality is I’ve been very lucky, starting with my adoption [laughter] actually, starting with my birth, because I could have been aborted. My mom was 19. My dad was 20. They were dating on the down low in college. I could have easily ended up being aborted. So I have been lucky many times after that, but it started very early.

If I can stay in that period that you’re working for Senator Kohl, you’re also in Washington, on the Hill, at a very interesting time in American politics. It just occurred to me I was on the Hill, as well, in ’94–95. I remember walking out and seeing Newt [Newton L.] Gingrich proclaiming and declaiming on the “Contract with America,” and remember the day after the midterms of 1994 and just what that was like. You’re still very young, but are you thinking about how things are changing in our politics?

I remember after the election in November, because I was already on the ground—I started in the summer of ’92. Clinton was elected four months later. I remember leaving my home in Adams Morgan, walking down to in front of the Capitol Hilton, the main drag, and there were people filling the streets as far as the eye could see. There were “Now” signs everywhere. It wasn’t until the Obama election that I remembered what that felt like, but at the age of 22 I remember feeling like the rest of the world that’s older than me is acting like something very big just happened. There was a new era in government and it was going to be governed by people with a different sensibility, and all those things.

I was there for Obama’s Inauguration, as well, a freezing cold day. Obviously, that was another level of gravity, but the Clinton thing was really big at the time. I had forgotten how significant—I remember my parents being hugely excited about it. I just remember that sense of incredible optimism. But the thing I remember most was that we had Dianne Feinstein on one side of it, in the Senate Hart Office Building, on the fourth floor, and we had Pete Domenici on the right.

Herb and Pete used to go out and have dinner all the time and just talk, because they liked each other. As a legislative correspondent, legislative aide, when I was going to try and author an amendment or something, the very first thing I did was call a Republican office that I thought had similar values on the topic and I would get a co-author. We would each call the people on the spectrums within our respective states, on both sides of it, and invite them in on separate days, listen to them intently, and then get together and say, “OK, where’s the middle?” That was the road map.

Every single time we authored even the simplest little thing, it was call someone from the other side, pair up, then get people who totally don’t agree to get into a room to make yourself smart, and then start crafting something that could be amenable to both sides. We could give it to our Members to go talk to whomever, because they’re going to have dinner together that night, or whatever the case may be.

There was a lot of time back then, and you knew which places to go to find which Members, because they were habitual. A lot of the time people were spending with each other across the aisle talking and debating. Even as young staffers we would go to parties and have these intense debates with people who didn’t agree with us, but it was all super respectful. I remember thinking that was the coolest thing ever because I love intellectual debate. We were sitting and having these conversations.

Coming back to D.C. many years later, it was a stark realization of how bad it had gotten. I had a sense of it from outside D.C., but until I was there on the ground—and you know who it was? It was when [Eric I.] Cantor got primaried. That was the moment I thought, Holy—and remembered what it was about: proximity, which we now know can kill you, photographed with somebody. Even the word “compromise” can cause a primary challenge. That was when I was very concerned about the political system. That was just such a stark contrast from what I knew when I was younger.

I had some lingering view of that in the back of my mind as I went off and did other things, that D.C. was so much still like that, and then when I talked to people it sounded a little bit still like that, and then I got there and realized it’s really not. Even now I’m surprised over the years at how polarized it has become, and that it continues to be.

I would say that was the low-water mark for me, and the other was Sandy Hook. The fact that we could not—ninety-something percent of Americans agreed on some version of gun control after that incident. Ninety percent of Americans don’t agree on anything, definitely now, but definitely not then. And it wasn’t that we didn’t get comprehensive legislation and an assault weapons ban; it was that we couldn’t get a hearing in a committee.

You say to yourself, if children are slain in a school by an assassin with an automatic weapon and we can’t get a committee hearing based on an organization that believes it has 1 percent of Americans in it, and we found out that half those people are not even alive. It’s a very small, fringe organization that’s able to outmaneuver politically and own the words “freedom” and “liberty.” Our system—on both sides, by the way; I was just as angry at Democrats as I was with Republicans in this, and just as frustrated. The fact that the system had ground to a halt at that moment, and we couldn’t even get a hearing—I was forever changed a little bit after that.

In 2008 you gave us the overview of people calling who were for Obama getting in touch with you. Did you have any sense at all about Hillary [Rodham] Clinton, or were you just all in for Obama in 2008?

I’m no longer married, but I got married in May 2008. My wife was 100 percent Syrian. She was raised in the United States but her parents were both Syrian, going all the way back many generations. She had been a civil rights attorney in the Justice Department, and was very much an advocate. For the time that we were married she never let me forget this: the day that Obama announced his candidacy, she said, “He’s going to win,” and I said, “No, he’s not.” [laughter] We were both for him, but you could not tell her he wasn’t going to win from the first day he was a candidate.

She didn’t think he’d even get the nomination?

No, she was sure he was going to win. I just didn’t think America was ready. I kept thinking that somebody was going to emerge. I thought Obama and Clinton were going to battle it out and a third person was going to emerge and pull past them, which you see a lot, because they were just going to hammer each other out. But my interactions with Obama started much earlier. I told you we had a publication called Savoy Professional. In the downturn in 2005, when the media company that owned all those magazines got in trouble, we bought them all, so we bought Savoy, Heart & Soul, all these magazines. Then we took Savoy, which was the gemstone publication, and sold it to an investor in Chicago, a black woman, Hermene Hartman, who did a publication inside the Trib [Chicago Tribune]. They were moving the black Vanity Fair from New York to Chicago.

In Chicago that was very big news, so I had to go and represent the sellers ourselves at this big event on Michigan Avenue. Mona Sutphen’s brother, David, my best friend, calls me up and says, “Hey, I know you’re going to this event tomorrow in Chicago. There’s a guy who’s going to walk in the room and it’s going to remind you of when Clinton walks in a room. You’re just going to know that someone just walked in, and it’s going to be this guy Barack Obama. I know you’re going to think it’s crazy, but you should meet him, because he might be the first black President.” [laughter]

What year was this?

This would have been 2005, something like that, 2004. I’m sitting in the balcony, kind of getting away from the crowd, because the crowd was super Chicago, and they were just all there to see each other. I took a break standing up in the balcony, and sure enough—I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a room when Bill Clinton walks in, but I remember vividly being at a birthday for a famous person and feeling the air shift, and I thought, Oh, Clinton’s here, turned around, and there he was. [laughter] By the way, the only person that he runs after to talk to is Michael Jordan, so if Michael Jordan’s in the room, Clinton runs across the room, and everybody else comes to Clinton, but if Michael Jordan’s in the room he comes running.

Anyway, I’m out on the balcony and all of a sudden the same thing happens: from the balcony I could tell something under the balcony just happened, and sure enough this skinny guy walks out. I didn’t go and introduce myself, but that was my first introduction to him, which was years earlier. He’d been in the back of my mind, so I started following him after that, just reading about him and following him, and obviously the [Democratic National] Convention speech and everything else. But I just didn’t think the country was ready. I was a supporter of his, but I didn’t think he was going to win, whereas my ex-wife was absolutely certain of it from Day One.

But the bigger thing was that the people I just mentioned to you were pretty big Clinton people. They had been in the Clinton administration. Mona had served in a bunch of different capacities at the National Security Council, and she was at USUN [United States Mission to the United Nations] with Bill Richardson and all this stuff. Her husband, Clyde [Williams], had worked in Department of Agriculture and in the White House in Engagement, and then he was the first chief of staff who stood up the Harlem office for Clinton, so he goes way back, and he’s very tight with them.

I remember vividly when I got the phone call that Mona was backing Barack and Clyde was backing Hillary. I just remember Mona’s probably the person with the greatest judgment I’ve ever met in my life, and I remember hearing that and being like, Hmm, because but for my friends choosing that path I also wouldn’t have ended up there.

Anybody want to ask any other questions before we get Jonathan to the Obama White House?

I’m curious what it looked like when you got there, in particular the Office of Presidential Personnel. What was your impression of the office when you got to the White House and when you ended up in OPP?

I got there in August. So to finish the story, I had my last interview in May and went and met with some people. Then I heard nothing for two months. This is what I call my “nuclear summer.” When you get told you have a job at the White House and then no one calls you for 60 days, that is the longest 60 days of your entire life. Every day you wake up wondering if today’s going to be the day. That became important when I took the job, and I’ll explain why, but the point is I got a call on a Thursday saying, “Hey, can you be in D.C. on Monday?” I was flying to South America.

I left my family and flew back with a bag, not 100 percent certain that I was really getting hired. I thought they’re maybe bringing me back for another round after all this time. I walked in, was interviewed by people, had to go do a drug test, and I walked out saying, “I think I just got hired by the White House.” I had to call somebody I had just been two weeks with in Europe outlining a company we were going to start and tell him I wasn’t going to be working with him, which was an interesting call. I remember he hung up on me. [laughter]

I got there in August, and August recess was just starting on the Hill. It was the first time the President was going to go away. He was going to Hawaii. The team, which had been there since January 20th, had not been sleeping, because when you get into a personnel office, as you well know—back then it was, I think, 5,382 appointments, or something like that—I might be off by 20 or 40 or 50, something like that, but it was a bigger population—two thirds were full-time and a third were part-time, so boards and commissions.

Some of them were termed, but most were not. As you well know, somebody blows the whistle on the morning of January 20th and says, “Everybody out of the pool,” and then a new CEO [chief executive officer] comes in and hires a new head of HR [human resources], and they start building in real time. Your metrics in the first hundred days are just more people is better. It’s simple, because you’re just filling so quickly, and we had a thousand people hired within a hundred days. That predates me. We got a thousand people. By the way, [Joseph R.] Biden [Jr.] swore in a thousand people on Day One, just for the record. So we got a thousand people in the first hundred days.

I came in in August, which was after Don Gips had been confirmed as the Ambassador to South Africa, and Nancy Hogan, who had been the chief of staff for him, was elevated to the top job. I was hired for a couple of reasons at the time, or so I believed. The first was, again, bringing some expertise, having spent the last, at that point, ten years working in employment branding.

Half of our revenues in the magazine company came from heads of HR in employment branding ads, so I was working with heads of HR for several years, and then spent two years being an advisor to them, so I knew something about recruitment and branding and all these other things, from an employment standpoint, or I had a view on all of that, had built systems around recruiting applications, and stuff like that—not me personally, but I had teams doing it. I had all those viewpoints.

In the second round of hiring into the PPO [Presidential Personnel Office], usually the summer after the inauguration—A lot of times either that summer or the following summer someone from a research background or something comes in, because they realize, Wait a minute, we populated the office with a lot of people, but nobody’s ever recruited anybody before, not formally.

We have people who were military officers, and we’ve got lawyers, and we’ve got all these people who are tied from a political perspective to content, or from a practical perspective to the administration, to the campaign, and the network of people that we know. Those content or policy and political vectors dominate the first round of hiring. Then there’s usually someone who comes in who’s coming in to know a little bit about how to actually run an office like this when you have no budget. I was going to be that person, as the deputy.

Since we’re talking in complete confidence, there was something else that was going on in subcontext, which is Nancy, who is relatively junior—had been a [Thomas A.] Daschle staffer, and she’d started off on the front desk and worked her way up, and then was a battleground state lead during the campaign. She’s very political, very smart, one of the most organized people you will ever meet. Nothing drops with that woman. She can keep 9,000 plates spinning, and she’s hyperpolitical, which is really helpful in a White House, because that’s just the reality of it.

They were debating whether to move her up to the top job, but she was younger and junior to all of the Special Assistants to the President, who ran all of the different teams. We called them cohorts. But all of those Special Assistants to the President were technically more senior to her, and a lot of them were more experienced than she. She was getting elevated above them, and some of them wanted the job.

Unbeknownst to me, Pete Rouse apparently was telling everybody in the office who had come to complain to him, “There’s this guy Jonathan McBride coming. He’s going to solve it. Don’t worry about it. He’s from private sector. He knows how to do things. He’s going to run the thing well. He’s going to make it work.” Pete neglected to tell me that, so when I showed up, it was an interesting dynamic.

The other thing that was immediately apparent was that they had over 6,000 paid people on the campaign. There was apparently a famous moment right after the election where the President got on the phone, on one of David Plouffe’s calls with the whole campaign infrastructure, and said, “You’re all getting jobs.” The math wasn’t going to work there, but he said it, nonetheless. Now you have probably four and a half of the six and a half thousand people showing up in D.C. wanting jobs on January 20th.

You might imagine the first waves of people are all from the campaign. When somebody who wasn’t on the campaign pops up in a job that seems like a lot of people could do it, it’s highly political. That’s a thing, because one of their friends didn’t get it, so if you can’t figure out quickly how to ingratiate yourself and build yourself into—and this isn’t a good person/bad person thing; it’s a human thing. They had a well-grooved neural network of all their brains because they’d been working in such intense conditions, and they had ways of validating people and getting things done. If you came in from the outside and didn’t fit into that team—That was the structural dynamic of coming into the office.

But the biggest thing for me was, as I was coming through the door, I had a conversation with Jeff Zients, who was, I think, in the process of being nominated or being confirmed for the Deputy Director of Management, OMB [Office of Management and Budget], after Nancy Killefer had fallen out of vetting a couple of months earlier. I sat and talked with him, and I had had this nagging thing, but he and I talked about the fact that the average tenure of an appointee is really short.

What was nagging me was the fact that these people must not know what they’re doing when they first get there, so not only is it short, but the first six months are just trying to figure out the agency and stuff. If you imagine them getting more and more productive over time—We couldn’t get hard numbers on this at the time, which was interesting—but if you assume someone’s going to stay two years in the White House and maybe two to three at an agency, but that last 12 months they’re way more productive than the first 12 months—If you could keep them for 18 more months, the return to the American public would be staggering, because they’ve just figured it out, right?

I walked into an office that was hiring people, then hiring someone to replace them. It was a hiring/vetting political machine, and it had always been that. When I asked OPM [Office of Personnel Management] for the retention data and they didn’t have it and no one had ever asked, I thought, Aha! I might be on to something.

When I came into the office, that was one overwhelming feeling that I had. Jeff Zients had observed the same thing, but he’s much more eloquent and smarter than I am, so when he said it back to me I thought, OK, this is really something we should do, so I rolled out, first to Nancy and then to the staff within a couple of months, a plan. I drew this on the wall, and everybody was like, “Why are you drawing? [laughs] Couldn’t you write a memo?” I said, “Well, no, this is how people talk to each other, with charts.” They said, “I don’t know what you’re doing right now.” But I drew the line out and filled the space underneath, and said, “This is all the stuff that we’re leaving on the table. If we can just figure out how to get people to stay around—”

I got everyone to agree to an idea, which is that we’re going to spend 50 percent of our time hiring people and 50 percent keeping the people who are good, which means we’re going to be doing less of the first, because we don’t have a bigger staff. But we are going to start from the very early stage in that first year engaging people, onboarding them, because all the data shows if you onboard somebody well, first impressions matter and they stay longer. But it’s also that you’re at a point in the hourglass where listening, you tend to get to know people. Cabinet secretaries going appointee by appointee, every single quarter, so we knew who was good, who was not good, who should be retained in the agency or in the administration or whether it would be fine if they left, a whole series of things—the appointee development program, the President’s appointee leadership program.

All these things companies are doing almost all the time now but were novel at the time, which were about staying close to people who were connected to the President, making sure they stayed close and connected with him, because as soon as you get into an agency you feel very far away. We used all the assets that we had, and knowing who was good and who wasn’t good, so we could go to them before they started thinking about leaving, talk to them, and move them into another job and get them for a while longer.

We thought that one of the best things we could do was to retain the good people and keep them around longer, so you have lower churn, higher productivity, and more months and more years worked, et cetera. Rudy Mehrbani, who was the last head of Presidential Personnel who had worked for me in the White House, testified—I think right after he left, because he was the last head of Personnel—a couple of months later. This is available on the record. That was the only time that people put our public data out.

We had two goals: one, to be the most diverse administration in history, and we also wanted to retain the people longer. He gave a testimony in, I think, a Senate committee hearing, saying, “We’ve been the most diverse administration.” But that’s a little bit funky because the population gets more diverse over time, so you would have to be paying no attention to it to not have that be very possible for you.

But we also retained people for a lot longer, and not just Senate-confirmed people, Senate-confirmed SES [Senior Executive Service] and Schedule Cs, for a significantly longer time than prior administrations in history. That’s more applicable data because that’s apples to apples. You either retain people or you don’t, and nothing changes about the workforce to make that happen. There wasn’t something unique about us that would have described that. That was basically the effort that we had, so that part worked.

I was coming into an office of people who hadn’t slept at all, who were going through this hurried pace in the first wave. It was going to be the first moment where they could stop and think a bit, and I had a chance to sit and interview them and talk to them and pull stuff out of their heads on all they had just done, and why we might turn into something that we actually do intentionally, because they’d been learning all these things. They had three databases that didn’t really talk to each other, so a lot of it was coming up with a way to talk about the office and a strategy for making it more of a strategic function that drove part of the policy process.

To that end, we adopted a mantra, which had been said in different ways, in different times, from different people I had heard, or would pop up periodically, but we made it our tagline: people are policy. That was the mantra for our office and people in it. The whole point was you’re going to hear all these political debates around policy, and all these aspirations around policy, but we needed to give our people a reason for being, a purpose. And the point is that none of that policy happens until you hire the person. In fact you’re hiring people who specifically drive those things. We’re the tip of the spear. You should see yourself in every political debate because it’s not going to happen unless you do your job well. Nobody will ever know who you are, you’ll be really anonymous, but if you do your job really well, we’ll achieve all these other things.

That became our rallying cry and purpose in the office. All of that rolled out in fall of 2009, and we had our first appointee engagement development program the following Q1 [first quarter], where we started putting all of the appointees through an onboarding in the first two months that they were there and talked about diversity, equity, and inclusion, how to work with the civil service, and other things. We had the Harvard Negotiations Project come in and talk about how to do difficult conversations.

We started a program to track when everybody got invited to the White House for something, and for people who were higher performing in succession planning we made sure that they got to come back to the White House more frequently and regularly over the course of the year, using Marine One landings, holiday parties, all kinds of things to keep them tied back to the President. We launched all-appointee calls with the President once a year. We changed it up and did it in different ways. We started something called the Innovation Cohort, which was taking all the people we were bringing in who were innovators from different sectors and in different agencies, and put them around a table, first to try to just keep them, because I knew they would be very lonely and isolated and it would be hard.

Year one was about commiserating; year two was about starting to help each other solve problems. Then year three they became an advisory group, and I took them around to different Cabinet members. We’d do an intentional, designed conversation with a Cabinet member who put a problem statement on table, people would ask questions, then we’d go through a very designed process in front of them to brainstorm ideas to give back to them and their chief of staff. We did one for Michelle Obama, and there were others.

A lot of things happened as a result of it, but the main thing was coming in and seeing my job as taking an office that had been scrambling, and I thought the first thing was we’ll turn it into a slightly more professional-looking recruitment engine. But within, I would say, 30 days that shifted to Wait a minute, we’ve got to be keeping people, not just bringing them through the door.

The last thing was in the conversation with Pete, diversity was in my portfolio from Day One, so they said, “You’ve got to be worried about diversity and demographics of the workforce from Day One, whatever that means.” They didn’t have a view of exactly what that should mean, but they were clear that, as a deputy, that was going to be in my remit.

Did you handle both—Go ahead, Katie.

You talked about the importance of retention and drew attention to the importance of retaining people, because if you could reduce turnover then you reduce the load of the Personnel Office. But in regard to that, did you have a hierarchy—?

It’s a productivity thing. A person’s ramp, in terms of when you figure out how to operate effectively in an agency—It takes months to figure that out, to gain the trust of people, and figure out how to inspire them. If you’re just finishing that out, and you’re going to be gone the next six to seven months, that’s a wasted investment in you. We need to keep you around longer to amortize that initial startup cost, so it was also about productivity, not just reducing the amount of churn and the amount of burden on us.

We became a central clearinghouse for people moving around. We ran the reappointment process through our office, and with current appointees. We had an active conversation and proactively reached out to people and moved them around. That was part of our retention strategy. We ended up having a similar workload; it just shifted to different things if that makes sense.

OK. I was wondering if part of the strategy also was to create a hierarchy of positions, such that really what you wanted to focus most on retention were the people that were Senate-confirmed, because going through that whole process is so resource-intense that it’s better for the White House to get those people to stay the longest because of how much effort you’re devoting to get them confirmed. Maybe there wasn’t an emphasis on that, but I was just curious: did you care most about Schedule Cs? Did you care most about Senate-confirmed? Was there any thought at all, or was it just retention across the board?

Retention writ large was the thought. We knew that Schedule Cs did a shorter period of time, and Senate-confirmed stayed longer. Our ability to move Senate-confirmed people around was more limited, for obvious reasons, and they only made up about—These are round numbers; I can go back and find exact numbers. Senate-confirmed, if I remember correctly, made up about 15 percent of the appointments that we made. Presidential appointments were between the two, which mainly were part-time boards where you had a certain amount of vetting but not Senate confirmation. Then you had SESs and Schedule Cs, and the SESs and Schedule Cs were like 75 percent of the number. That was the biggest number of people, where you actually had the most fungibility or flexibility, so you could move people around.

We tried to prioritize—and we did this over and over—where we were spending our time just generally, because you had to do that, because you had more stuff going through the pipe than you could ever handle, and most administrations don’t even fill all their positions in the first full year. It’s just too much work. You had to be pretty maniacal about prioritization within each cluster or cohort, so the economics cluster and national security cluster, they could kind of prioritize and reprioritize things that mattered. There was priority in that, but from a retention standpoint, we worked at it pretty evenly. There was more we could do for SESs and Schedule Cs than we could do for Senate-confirmed people.

Could you talk a little bit about the organization of the office? You did talk about cohorts. Were they organized according to topics like economics, national security? Is that how you did it?

My understanding is that this is a model that got started in the early stages of Clinton and has been replicated ever since. Before that, I’m not sure how it was organized. But you have a head of the office, Director of Presidential Personnel, a Deputy, and then underneath that, usually Assistant to the President, a Deputy Assistant to the President, and you had Special Assistants to the President who were people that sat on clusters, that were organized by policy areas: a national security cluster, an economics cluster.

The energy and environment cluster—we’re talking about USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] or Ag [agriculture] and Energy and a lot of other things. The domestic cluster was DOJ [Department of Justice] and the like. You had a series of these clusters, and you had a boards and commissions group that just dealt with the part-time boards and commissions.

These series of clusters were run by a Special Assistant to the President and an agency/Senate director, and then almost like an analyst-level person on the team, sometimes more. In addition to that, sometimes you’d have a vetting operation that sits in Personnel, but those are lawyers that are taken from the White House counsel’s Office. In other instances, the vetting process, the vetting attorneys, sit in the White House counsel’s office, but are really a dotted line into head of personnel, so that depends.

With us, we had a team of IT [information technology] and technology people, because we were starting to use technology, like databases, and using client relationship management tools to track processes. We were starting to use more tech or software and things like that, so we had a team working on that. Then the last bucket, other than just general administrative, was what we called our engagement. This was the partner organization to what would have been the Office of Public Engagement, which was run by Valerie [Jarrett].

The Office of Public Engagement deals with all these constituencies around the country, for both political- and policy-based perspectives. But those same people advocated on the people side, for obvious reasons, because people are policy. So we needed to have a group. But that office couldn’t handle that, so we had our own group of people who were squaring off against different populations. One was Governors and mayors. One was campaign staff as a constituency, because there were thousands of them. Another you’d think of as the identity-related groups, and so forth.

You had people squaring off, and then somebody managed all the Hill relationships, Senate and House. Those people faced off against key constituencies, engaged them actively, went out to them to get recommendations and ideas for candidates. It was something engagement, but I can’t remember what it was. But that was a separate group. That organization—

Was that an idea, to reach out to these various constituents to make them feel like they’re part of the process, and then to have more of a consensus-oriented approach to determine who should be nominated or appointed?

Yes. Not on who should be nominated—well, a little bit. What ended up happening, which predates me, a guy named Mark Perriello, who had been on the campaign, was put in this office because he had done a lot of work in disability and a couple of other areas, and he had been doing some work with different groups in the campaign. He was then put in this position—Jim Messina did a really good job of choosing all these people—and he went out to the different populations. He kind of picked a leader. It was Tony Coelho when it came to disability; it was Irene Natividad when it came to women’s issues. The ethnicity or race-based groups were broken up. Business [unclear] was for black professionals. The Latinx group had different people at the time; I can’t remember who.

The point is finding a narrow point in the hourglass and running everything through that narrow point outside the office. HRC [Human Rights Campaign] became the narrow point in the hourglass for all LGBTQ+ [Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, plus] applicants. They staffed two people on it. Everybody sent their résumés to them. They would prescreen them, and you would talk to people, and then they would come to a meeting once a week with us and pitch us people, and we would talk to them about jobs where we needed people.

We created this narrow point in the hourglass that allowed people on the outside to get lots of access and reach, because in D.C. one of the biggest challenges you have is that you’re working so fast and with so many sensitive issues, and if you don’t find a way to get outside the bubble, you will constantly hire the people who’ve already done the job. You just will. Your system’s going to overreward certainty, speed, your ability to triangulate on the person to get to know them better through connections. Not bad people/good people, just people. That will be a mistake you’ll make over and over again as you’ll constantly go to people whose résumé looks like the last person, because they were the last person in your party to do something like that, or they worked for them.

From very early days it was clear that the President did not want that to happen. He was clear with Nancy and then directly with me about the need to bring in more people who had not served before, based on their expertise and their capability, and you saw that a little bit in the research. The [George W.] Bush administration had a high degree of political affiliation in picking out their folks. When it came to peer expertise and so on, we were a little bit higher. We also had a high number of people who actually had served, but it was a very conscious decision.

When we controlled for diversity of a slate, one of the things we controlled for was, are there other new people on there who haven’t served before? You need to have a network of people that can go get those folks for you, because you’re too small. You don’t have a recruiting mechanism, and you can’t hire a search firm, so you have to come up with ways to do that, and that’s what this group did. They leveraged all these groups that cared about policy. You go find us people, and then we’ll look at them. That allowed us to cast a wider net. You’re still dealing with spheres of influence and scope challenges because you’re still only going so far. We later came up with another way to go even broader.

Jim, you had a question a while back.

Did you handle people in the White House office, recruiting or nominating them, or just people in the rest of the executive branch?

The remit for PPO is all of the agencies, so everybody outside the White House complex. OMB and things like that, depending on where they land, people make decisions about that. But there’s an Office of Administration in the White House that also has a political appointee at the top, and that’s for hiring into the White House. But practically what ends up happening is anyone’s guess. Every White House is a little bit different. We had this database of people—and to put it into perspective, in the two days after the election, there were 253,000 people in the database for the Obama administration, and when I went through it seven months later, I found CEOs I knew by name who clearly didn’t have any way to get in.

Think about this: in 2009, they went online and added their résumé to a database, which is just unbelievable. They probably had someone do it for them. But the point is we had this database, and then all this outreach. We worked closely with the administration, and a lot of times people in different offices would come to us and say, “Hey, I need to hire someone in my office. Do you have someone who does this or does that?” whatever the case may be. But it wasn’t technically our remit; it was technically the Office of Administration. It’s just that we would pitch in a fair amount.

The way the agency worked, just to be clear—You all did a lot of writing on it in your work, but it’s from research, you said—The appointment process, setting Senate-confirmed aside for a second, is one where the balance between the agencies and the White House is different in every administration. It’s like a spectrum of control, and you want to figure out where people are. People view it as confederated states or a house branch, meaning I’m a CEO and I’m running this big thing called the government, but I’ve got other CEOs running these different subbusinesses. I’ve got somebody running my beverage business and my Frito-Lay business, and this business. I’m going to let those CEOs hire their own people, except for the Senate-confirmed, where obviously I have a particular direct interest. So they pushed it out.

Most of the White Houses are like, every single person who goes into every single job is going to come through this office, and I’m going to put them there, whether you like it or not, and then some White Houses are in the middle. I would say we were definitely in the middle. But technically the process is the person who gets onboarded and processed at the agency, even if they’re Senate-confirmed, has appointment papers that are signed by the President, so they technically work at the discretion of the head of the agency, but they’re Presidential appointees when push comes to shove.

That creates a little bit of an interesting gray area, which obviously people love, [laughter] exactly where these things reside. But because we have to sign the paper, at the end the White House can assert itself if it wants on these types of things, so while I had about 53 people in my office, I actually had a couple of people in each agency called White House liaisons who were hired from the very earliest days. They were the interlocutors between the agency and all their processes and people, and the chief human resource officer and everything else, and for the White House on appointments. They specifically work on the appointments.

Those White House liaison officers become really important political offices. You need really, really talented people there to do those jobs, and they become very powerful because they are helping the nominees go through the process. They become a lifeline to the new Secretary as they come in, so they’re really influential. Sorry, Katie, you were going to ask a question.

Yes. This is just to make sure I have this right. Presidential Personnel only did all of the Presidential appointments, and the Office of Administration did the Executive Office of the President appointments, like to OMB, NSC [National Security Council], the White House?

The gray area is this: Is it an Executive Office of the President structural thing, like OMB, where we did the OMB appointments through our office? We treated OMB like an agency. We didn’t treat Public Engagement, Leg. [Legislative] Affairs, Office of Engagement—all of those things were all White House. But when you had CEQ [Council on Environmental Quality] or OMB or USTR [United States Trade Representative], we all treated those as agencies, and that’s a judgment call—

So everything but White House staff.

Everything but White House staff, correct.

OK. Got it, thank you. That helps.

You mentioned a bit ago, Jonathan, a message that was communicated to you by the President, so I just wanted to delve into that a little bit. How often did you communicate with the President and vice versa, and by what mechanism?

It changes over time. Traditionally, the first head of personnel is somebody who’s very close to the President, and a lot of times their office is in the West Wing, because they’re just going back and forth. All they’re talking about is people in the first 60, 90 days. Don Gips intentionally put his office, by the way, in the EOB [Executive Office Building]. I don’t know if he had some better reason. The funny answer is, I don’t want to be in that mess; I want to be over here. [laughter]. But he intentionally put his office there.

He was very close to the President, and the reason why that is is because, one, you’re having a high degree of interaction on people, and the people matters are sensitive, but also you need to move so fast as the head of that office in the early days, and you need to get people who don’t agree to decide, so you need to be speaking for the President, and they need to know you’re speaking for the President. Otherwise you’re going to have to invoke him too much.

You need somebody who walks in and everybody knows, if I cross this person I’m going to have a problem, just pragmatically. You just need that in the earliest days, when personnel is so central to the startup of the administration. That usually gives way to somebody who’s kind of in the mix and knows people, but oftentimes is not as close or might be a little bit further away. Nancy knew the President reasonably well from the campaign and everything else, but she wasn’t Don Gips. Don Gips was one of the earliest people in on the process. He’s one of the people that the President met along the way, who then sent him a famous letter saying, “I don’t know if you can do this or not” kind of thing, much like David Axelrod. So they had a close working relationship that went back some days.

In those early stages, the head of Personnel talks to the President quite a bit, and usually is going back and forth to the Oval Office all the time. The next stage was in some normal world where personnel is one of many processes, and you’re doing paperwork through the executive secretary. Then you might have regular meetings, but it varies quite a bit.

George Bush started, and always had, a weekly meeting for an hour. He would meet with the head of the office and all the secretaries. They would all come over to the Oval Office; they would all walk in there with their papers, and pitch him ideas of people and recommendations directly.

Our process fell into one where that was all done via memos, unless it got to a certain level, and then it would be done first by a senior group and then engaging the President on the biggest things. That happened relatively soon. It moved. By the time Nancy was taking over, she was still going over there and meeting with him quite often, especially for some of the bigger things, but it had already dropped down into a more regular rhythm, whereas Don had been one of the people probably in the Oval Office most in those first six months.

As a deputy I didn’t meet with him on personnel issues. I did start meeting with him when I started doing all these other things: the innovation cohort and the retention strategy and the engagement strategy. We designed stuff. But I started working on things for the people, then I was engaging with him quite a bit, because he was coming to the things, and we were briefing him and preparing him, and so on. But as somebody who both had responsibility for the economics cluster and then was Deputy Director of the office, I was not in his office meeting with him very much at all.

When I became the head of the office, obviously that changed. I started meeting with him more, but we’d also devised a pretty good process, I think, where we had a standing personnel meeting with all the key players in the Chief of Staff’s office once a week for that hour to 90 minutes. That was really important, because if you try to do this by show of diplomacy, you start becoming the person who’s delivering—You’re in the middle of everyone’s policy debate, and you just don’t want to be there because it’s untenable. Pete Rouse saw this with Nancy. He called the meeting the first time and set it up, and then she ran it from there on out, but he used his influence, which was a huge help.

There’s a standing time to debate, and then we opted to send our memo in to the President once a week rather than every single time we had something to write. We’d write one on Fridays and send it in. He would read it over the weekend. We’d get a decision on Monday. It just allowed us—Because we’re running a machine and we needed to be predictable, that was a better way for us to go. But we would sit in with him when I was doing part of the second Cabinet, so it was Jeh Johnson and Penny Pritzker, and I was still the deputy. I was really involved, because I was in the economics cluster—Janet Yellen for Fed [Federal Reserve Board] chair, stuff like that, those started with us meeting with him, and saying “OK.”

He would usually say one of the three following things. One was: “What do you all think?” which means he’s open; this is going to be a wide-open conversation, and we’re going to go away a while. Then he would say something like, “You know, what I think should be really important—” and now you’re going to get a description of a prototype of a person. With Jeh Johnson, the first thing he said was “systems.” “This is a massive system. We need somebody who can run a system, or run it the way we want it to be run.” That was his first comment.

So now you know, OK, I’m operating within something more narrow than, “What do you think?” Then the really narrow one was, “You know who’d be good for this?” Those were the first three things, and depending on that first opening salvo, you were in one of those three spots. Even if you were in the third one, you always put together a slate, and you always went through a bunch of different people. You gave him many different views or possibilities of people who could do it. But for those big ones, that would be the type of decision that he would have.

He was engaged earlier on for lots of reasons. One, you’re doing more appointments for the first time, and you’re learning it all. Two, in those early days the White House is run a little bit differently, as you might imagine. It changes over time. I have a couple of quick systems where—one was very early on, where you have like 30 people in the Oval, and you could tell everyone’s just having a big debate right in front of him.

I have a picture of me doing the Janet Yellen thing, where there’s like four people. If you want to know the difference between a first term and a second term, early days and middle days, it’s that. The world shrinks more around him or her over that period of time. That’s also part of it; there are just more layers that get built up, so you have to go through more to get to him, because the time becomes more and more precious, and there’s more and more fighting over who gets onto his schedule.

I had much more interaction with him as a head of the office, and then I had a fair amount of interaction with him on all this stuff I was doing, including this President’s Appointee Leadership Program, which is an interesting anecdote. When Barack Obama went to Harvard, a famous black law professor invited him to something called Saturday School, held by a black professor for black and brown students who were newly admitted to Harvard Law School and had matriculated.

It wasn’t about black-letter law; it was about the world you just entered. You’d go there, and there would be bagels and schmear. You’d sit there and have coffee, and you’d have this conversation. They would talk about the cultural dynamics of being at Harvard and the practical implications of whatever. This was a conversation about the world, the soft things around you that had just changed. As adept as he was and as sophisticated as he was, Obama talked about that being a hugely important thing for him to get through that period of time in his life, and it was always great.

He tasked us in the second term—When I was going from deputy to head of the office, I had designed a program, which was to come up with a leadership program for somebody else’s Cabinet. There would be people midway through their work experience, probably in their early 30s. There might be a senior Schedule C, or someone becoming an SES, or at an agency or someplace else, who in the next Democratic administration—four years, eight years, whatever—was going to be a potential Senate-confirmed or even Cabinet member down the road. Who are the rising stars in the middle of the organization? And how do we actively invest in their capabilities?

When we did something like that we met with them quite a bit, or we did a recruitment program with historically black colleges and universities, things like that. He’d also attend things, because we’d be able to get his time on these things pretty easily. He was very game when I needed him. In 2012 we were trying to keep everybody around, because everybody was worried about the reelect. We started bringing everybody to the White House, all the Senate-confirmed people, because one of the things you hear more often than not is “I don’t get to see the President anymore. I’ve been here three years. I never see him anymore.” Which is true, so we started bringing people through. Getting time for him was relatively easy. I got a lot of time with him on those types of things, less about the personnel part, because we had this well-grooved machine, and only when it was above a certain level did he really get involved.

And what was your perception of him in those earliest times that you met with him? Because you’ve explained you didn’t know him; you hadn’t worked on the campaign. You had only seen the room change in the Chicago meeting from the balcony when he entered a room. What were your perceptions of him as you started to meet with him?

A couple of things you recognize. He’s slighter than you think. He was very much a listener. He was the kind of person who would sit back and let people debate in front of him quite a bit, and prod the conversation, but you didn’t always know which direction he was going.

He would routinely lean to the back benchers, because all the people at the table are the people who were there to speak, and all the people who did all the work were on the back benches, as you know. We’re not in the room. He would routinely lean back and turn to somebody—and I used to tell people when they’re coming to a meeting, “Be ready. He’s going to ask you a question,” and they’d be like, “Nah.” And then he would lean back and say, “What do you think?” And the person would throw up on the floor. [laughter] But he would routinely do that back then. He was really careful to get a lot of views on the table, and would actually take the time to do that. That was pretty clear.

His tone and his approach was just so even, but you knew when his version of upset was, because he’d ask you a question a second time but with a slightly harder edge to it, which was not even asking the question. It was basically saying, “Fix this.”

He had such control over his emotions and his energy, although you would see him conserving it. That’s one thing you would notice. At certain meetings at certain times of the day, he’d get quieter and a little more sunken into his seat, and you knew he was conserving energy, because something might be coming up, and it might require more of it. He was utterly disciplined about when they woke up, working out, having food at exactly the right time. And as somebody who he would describe was not very disciplined when he was younger, whereas Michelle was always very disciplined, he was incredibly disciplined about how he lived his life. They rarely slept away. I don’t know if you know this, but the President a lot of times would fly, and they’d stay overnight at a place. Go back and look at it: they very rarely stayed overnight. They came back, because if they couldn’t have dinner the night before they wanted to have breakfast in the morning.

The kids were a really big part of their life, and it was something that was very clear. I can tell you that because I was there five and a half years and I saw them twice. Think about that. One was just walking in the building. They somehow, despite the fact that we’re all yards away from each other, kept a bubble that was something that they kept normal, as much as they could, and for those two girls that was staggering. The most under-talked-about thing about Michelle and Barack is them as parents.

We could get into reasons why that is, but firsthand the ability for them—and it was really Michelle’s mom who played a huge role in this—to raise those girls the way they did in the middle of all that, with all of us around, was just an incredible thing. And they were extremely religious. He would leave the Oval at 7:00 every night and go back and have dinner, and then he worked from the Presidential office until late.

All of those things were noticeable. The “no drama” thing was real. I realize I’m a high-energy person, and I talk fast, and I quickly realized I needed to stop that, because in an environment led by a guy like that, if you come in and you get asked a question and you have a quick answer and you’re talking really fast, someone’s like, “That guy’s going to blow up. He’s going to make a mistake.” If I’m asking you a question, it was probably a hard question, and the world’s gray, so you can’t be that confident. You can’t know the answer right away.

I had to very quickly bring my energy way down, especially in the West Wing, slow down my rate of talking, and even if I thought I had an answer I’d ask more questions up-front just as a hedge to be careful. And that stems from him. That emanates from him. I have friends who’ve worked in other White Houses and they have very different descriptions of how it all worked, and it all emanated from the top person.

I feel like I took a lot of direction from him indirectly on how he wanted things to run, but I think it was also Pete. Pete and Valerie played really big roles in making sure that there was a human side to what we were doing. I apologize; I’m getting pinged regularly. I’m going to have to jump off early.

Do you just need a break?

No, let’s just keep going, because I’m not going to give you the time on the back end. I don’t know how much you like stories, but I can give you the story that personifies him as a manager in my mind.

Yes.

OK. Let me give you two stories. One is the first time I had to go over and brief him on something that was not super substantive, was pretty basic. We used to bring people, you might imagine, appointees and other people, through the Oval periodically for one reason or another. A lot of times there were people who had been affected by something, or had some connection or whatever, and you’re bringing them in.

As a staffer, you come in, you get there a little bit ahead of the families, you meet with him in the Oval Office for about ten minutes and you brief him on the families, the context, everything else, so he can kind of get his head in the right place and he has some grounding for when he talks to them. Then when he meets them he’s more familiar and he can be more natural because you don’t know what he just came out of. It could have been absolutely anything. But this is going to be their one time, so you want to get him to the right place. It’s a very common thing to do.

The first time I had to do that for families we were bringing through, I don’t remember what the main underlying issue was, but all you had to do was memorize six paragraphs for six different families, just context. We were walking across the West Exec [Executive] Drive. I had prepared this a couple of days in advance, and I had read it the night before and read it when I got up, which is my memorization practice. Usually I can give a speech impromptu for an hour without even thinking about it.

We’re walking across West Exec Drive, and all of a sudden I can’t remember a thing. I couldn’t even remember the name of one of the people. I’ve got this piece of paper and I’m walking across West Exec Drive, and my anxiety starts going up, because I’m thinking, Wait a minute. “Danger, Will Robinson!” This never happens. Why can’t you remember?

I’m passing through the door from West Exec, which is on the basement level, and I still can’t remember, so I started looking at the papers and bumping into people, because of the very narrow passageways. I’m going up that back stairwell, and I’m trying to look at the paper, and trying to remember it, and I look at it, and I read it, and I think of it in my head, and I can’t remember what I just read. Now I’m getting a full-on panic as I’m walking through the reception area, going down the back hallway, to the reception area outside the Outer Oval, and I can’t remember anything. I walk in there, and I’m now in complete panic mode. Reggie [Reginald L.] Love, the body man, who knew me a little bit already, said, “McBride! What’s up!” He’s just a huge personality. He pops out of his teeny office. He’s this former basketball player. He slaps me on the back, and he’s like, whatever.

I can’t remember a thing, and I’m sitting there. I think he was talking to me. I’m not even sure if I responded to him, because I’m in an outright panic, because the first time I meet the President my brain is—If this were a cartoon, there’d be a scribble above my head. The Oval door opens, and you can hear his voice bouncing around the circle of the oval room. “Who’s next?” Ugh. [laughter]

I walk in, and I’m in the doorway. The families are all now outside, and you hear them behind me gathering outside the outer Oval. He says, “What do you got? Who am I going to meet?” I’m sitting there, and I’m looking at him, and he’s looking at me, and we’re just staring at each other, because I can’t remember anything. So I pick up this piece of paper, and I look down. He snatches the piece of paper, walks around the Oval once, hands it back to me, and then says, “Bring them in one at a time.”

As I bring in every family, he remembers every word on the page. Every time he’s done with the next family, he looks over at me like, Hmm-hmm. I’m just sitting there, trying to find the corner in an oval room so I can just shrink into it, because I feel this big. It’s my first interaction with him and I couldn’t remember six paragraphs of content, which is about two pages. He just keeps looking at me every time, and I’m getting smaller and smaller, and we get to the final group. I try to slide out with them because I don’t want to talk to him. I just want this day to end, come up tomorrow, and start over. All of a sudden I get this hand on my shoulder as if pulling me close, and he’s got his arm around me. He was walking over to Reggie. He’s like, “Hey, Reggie. Look at this guy. He’s really well dressed. I think we overpay people. He can’t remember anything, but he is quite well dressed.”

He starts just giving me the business like we’re college friends. He’s talking to the secretary, everybody, just giving me the business, and I am this small. He walks out to the next room. Now we’re outside in the hallway, and he turns around and says, “Well, we know that’s not going to happen again, right?” I said, “Yes.” Then he says, “Welcome to the team. I have your back.”

He did all of that to make a genteel point about you’ve got to bring your A game, but he made sure I didn’t leave with that being the last thing, because that would have ruined my week, maybe my month if I left with this idea that—But what he basically said was “No big deal. Just don’t do it again.” And that is everything you need to know about the guy. [laughs]

He is incredibly aware, for somebody who’s got all these things going on, of exactly what’s going on around him. People don’t always get that sense from him. Sometimes they feel like he’s a little—Basically, he’s picking up on everything. The fact that he put himself in my shoes, used it to his advantage to have a little bit of fun and entertain himself for about 15 minutes, but then make sure that I didn’t leave that way, because that was in nobody’s interest, was a very thoughtful thing to do.

The second story I’ll tell you is when we were bringing all the Senate-confirmed people to the White House to spend time with them. Jack [Jacob J.] Lew was the Chief of Staff at the time. He and I worked very closely trying to keep people engaged, because people wanted to go back to work on the reelection campaign. We’re trying to make the point that we’re getting reelected based on our governing, so we need to keep people here and focused, and everybody was very distracted. We started bringing people through, and people were very direct. They’d ask him point-blank questions, like, “Well, I have a family. People are calling me. I can make this much money. Are you telling me not to go?” That was how direct the conversation was once everybody was behind closed doors, which was very healthy.

Then, in the second meeting of all those appointees meetings, which we had to do all year, he said something, and repeated it over and over again, that I thought was really clever. A woman was telling him that story. She was super honest with him and laid the whole thing out with the President in front of 12 other people. It was super personal; it was a remarkable moment, and it just came out of nowhere.

He said, “I have a couple of reactions to that. I’ll tell you how I’m thinking about this, but the first thing is”—and he just looked at everybody with this look. It was the first time I’d seen it. And he said, “I’m going to win this race.” He said it in a way that was so utterly confidence inspiring that it was a good setup for the following. “But then let’s assume I didn’t. Let’s assume that we have seven months left. You, like me, spent your whole life coming to this point and being here, and you have seven months left. Isn’t it the most important seven months you have? Isn’t it impossible to think about why you would leave and give seven months back when you only have seven more months out of four years? Doesn’t it make this time the most valuable time?”

He just turned the whole thing around on them, and their argument, because they’re all thinking about their families and everything else, and what he was saying is if we lose we should leave on the morning of the 21st with people pulling memos out of our hands, right? It was just a very clever way of getting people to back up all—and at the end of that, that’s when he agreed to see everybody, so we platooned everybody through the White House in 2012 multiple times, to constantly be talking to him, and he would go in there with no notes and just have it out with people. By that point in the administration, that was not a normal thing, but he was extremely attentive to it once he saw the need for it.

And did it work?

I don’t have a point of comparison, but I can tell you that we’ve got lots of stories about the various things we did, because Jack Lew then went agency by agency at the same time. We got lots of stories, because you just get so much intelligence. We got plenty of stories of people who said, “I actually had a job offer that I had accepted, and then that thing happened, and I called the employer and said I’m not coming.”

We got those stories quite often, because you had everybody being told you guys might not win this. Don’t be résumé number 4,000 on the street in three days. Be early. People were getting a lot of intel [intelligence] from people who knew, who’d been there before, so the distraction level was very high. There were a lot of people considering. I don’t know statistically whether we had better retention in that period of time than others. I do know that we got lots of anecdotes like that. And you could also see it. I don’t know if this worked for the whole period of time, but you could see the way people walked in the meeting and the way people left the meeting, and you knew you had bought yourself a couple of months. You could just tell. They were reminded—

My big thing was when I was doing appointee meetings—We all developed our own way. I had people close their eyes when we’d be in South Court Auditorium. I’d be doing something that whole year, and I’d ask for a point of privilege because I have the microphone. It’s my meeting; I get to do this, and I’d have 200-whatever people close their eyes. I’d say, “Remember when you first figured out that you were going to be able to apply for a job in this administration, and you were in the process of going through that. Remember your interviews, and remember where you were when you got the call.” I could see everyone’s faces, and you would see everybody smile. Their eyes were closed, but they’d all smile.

My whole point was you’re really tired, you’re really worried about everything moving on, but that job that you were so excited to have that day, that’s the job you have now, so think very carefully before you leave, because you’re tired. All of us had our go-to thing like that that was all about just getting people to stay and reorient to their cost/benefit analysis.

Back to the gray area in dealing with Cabinet secretaries, how active were you in selecting noncareer SES and Schedule C, and—

[INTERRUPTION IN TRANSMISSION—01:57:02]

In dealing with the gray area of Cabinet secretaries, how active was the Office of Presidential Personnel in specifying noncareer SES and Schedule C? Who made the calls on those?

It varied, and over time your philosophy changes a bit, because over time you start to trust more agencies and more teams to do some of their own work. You are so busy trying to keep people and everything else that you start to have less capacity to do these things, and you just get wiser, so over time we probably had less of a strong opinion on Schedule Cs.

SESs are very senior people. They tend to run budgets, people, process, so you care a lot about them, if you’re really thinking about it. People get really stuck on the Senate-confirmed, and it’s not that those aren’t important, but SESs are super important, so we tried to take a very engaged view on that, but it varied agency by agency.

It’s absolutely the case that Hillary Clinton chose her own agency. It’s 100 percent the case. And not for nothing, but if you look at it carefully, there are Senate PAs [Presidential appointments with Senate confirmation], Senate-confirmed PAs, which are heavily vetted and have ethics but not the full confirmation, noncareer SESs, and then Schedule Cs, but there are intergovernmental personnel agreements and a series of other temporary, shorter-term hiring authorities that allow you to bring in experts or other people in an exempt status.

It might be the case if you counted the hiring in the State Department in those first couple years you would find as many people were hired under those temporary agreements in a very short period of time as were hired appointees. In other words, Hillary Clinton’s appointee pool was twice as big as the allotted number, just to be clear. She worked the system very smartly.

And that was part of her deal, right? With the incoming President, that—

It was very well known—

—the team of rivals, that’s what she asked for.

It was very well known that that conversation had—and it was so well known that you didn’t even try to go there. If you were going to go there, you were going to be dealing with Cheryl Mills. I don’t know if you guys know Cheryl Mills, but you do not want to cross that woman. [laughter] She’s no joke. She’s a board member at BlackRock, so I got to spend time with her later in life.

Tell us what you mean, because that’s obviously an important thing to know about Hillary Clinton and the State Department.

So here are different types of Chiefs of Staff. There are different versions of that role. One of the things about a Chief of Staff, as an interlocutor with the White House, they could play a bunch of different roles in doing that. They could be kind of a force multiplier from a policy perspective, from a politics perspective, from a mechanics or administration, running the place perspective, all these different things. Cheryl’s job was a bunch of things, but one of the things that she did is everybody in the White House just knew if you were going to try to take on the State Department you were going to first talk to her, and that wasn’t going to go so well, because she was very tough. They protected the freedom and the prerogative and the privilege of that Cabinet Secretary over others.

Now there are other Cabinet Secretaries who had similar privilege. Arne Duncan was so close to the President, and managed an issue that the First Lady and the President cared a lot about, but they had such utter confidence in him. He didn’t have complete autonomy when it came to appointees, but he had a lot of autonomy. But he played it differently. He was smart. He was like, “I don’t want to be in touch with the White House at all. When the White House is calling me that means I’ve got to get on the phone and do something. I’m going to try to stay off the White House radar screen and do my thing.” He had a different version, but had a fair amount of autonomy.

Tim Geithner at Treasury, again, we got very involved, but he had a lot of power. He was one of the only Cabinet Secretaries who would wander right into the White House and right into the Oval Office regularly. He and Hillary were the unequals among equals, because when he came in obviously he was dealing with this intense crisis and the President was relying on him very heavily. If you’ve ever met Tim, that’s just how Tim operates.

I would say [Eric H.] Holder had a fair amount of discretion over at DOJ, again, because they were really close. I would say State, DOJ, and Treasury all have a different—whether true or not, those agencies, are destinations for the talent that works there, and the civil servants in those agencies are particularly strong, or at least that’s the perception. Those agencies run pretty well. There’s a bunch of trust that probably starts there because of who those agencies are and the people we inherit when we take over a new administration. You rarely see this massive change agenda with Treasury. [laughs] That’s not a thing. But also those personalities were such that they were more powerful.

Now, the funny thing is—and this is what you deal with when you’re the second term head of personnel—everybody tried to act like they had had that conversation with the President. Every single person tried to say, “Yes, well, the President talked about it,” like Hillary Clinton. “No, he didn’t. [laughter] He really did not. I can tell you did not.” But everybody took a run at it, even John Kerry, who didn’t have the same privileges.

All of these Cabinet officers were saying to you, “Oh, yes, I had the Hillary-type conversation going into the second term, so I have autonomy over my hires”?

Yes. Many people would try to slip that in and say, “Well, I had this conversation.” And they might have said something like this, but I knew the President had not agreed, because he would never agree to that, and it was a good thing to know that for sure. You have to remember that the way these things happen is you don’t want to invoke the President unless you actually have to, but you have to know where, if push came to shove, he would back you 100 percent, where you have no uncertainty, and then you can lean in, because your job is to lean in so he doesn’t have to. That came up quite a bit.

Can I presume that he didn’t say that to anybody coming into the second term?

I’m sure the only person he talked to about that was Hillary, and then Shaun Donovan, I think, pushed a bit hard going into OMB. They were very close. There are a couple of people when I saw the President talking about them in an appointment process, when he was nominating them, or they were moving from one position to another, where I saw him get visibly emotional just talking about the person. Jack Lew was one, going from Chief of Staff to Treasury.

Obama cries like this. That’s his cry. For some reason, his tear ducts produce something on the outside of his eye, and he does that when he’s trying to control his emotions. When he was talking about Pete Rouse coming in temporarily and Jack Lew moving over to Treasury, he had a physiological response. When he talked about Shaun Donovan and all he had done in the first term around housing, in these critical situations around these crises, and he started talking about that during his nomination announcement to OMB, he also got emotionally overwhelmed. He does that when there are people that he cares a great deal about, but it has to be admiration too.

With Jack Lew it’s like he was such a decent human being. I personally believe that; he’s one of the most decent human beings you’ll meet—but in particular Obama felt that way. And when Obama was talking about Shaun Donovan, he really was talking about how hard this guy worked, and all the stuff that he did, and the pressures on his family. He was doing it in service to him, and that stuff overwhelms him.

So those types of people would try to pull it off, and they would usually have a little more influence.

I’d like to go back—In terms of the sequence of your interactions with the White House counsel’s office, regarding the vetting of candidates, what’s the chronology in terms of what happens first and what happens next?

We had people coming in and expressing interest in their role. Over time we got smarter, which was to say to people, “Hey, if you really want to go after this job, as soon as you’re thinking about becoming a candidate, or we’re making you someone who’s in the consideration set, start working on your paperwork. You don’t have to, because you might say, ‘I don’t want to waste the time if I’m not going to do it.’ You can say that, but this is the only way you can speed your process. The one thing you can do is work on your paperwork, because you’re going to have to call a bunch of accountants and lawyers and everybody else. It’s going to take you months if you have complex transactions. It also helps us identify things that are problems.”

We had pushed more of that out to the individuals. We had our own lawyers on staff, a team of lawyers who were carved out of the original allocation of the White House counsel’s office, who were the vetting attorneys in our office who reported up through a principal vetting attorney, who was a Special Assistant to the President. I didn’t mention that earlier, but that was in essence another cluster, those vetting attorneys. And that was replete with a Special Assistant to the President, a series of attorneys that usually came in for two or three years and then went to an agency.

They could avail themselves of associates, people who were coming in as experienced interns, but for a longer, unspecified period of time, for free. You could go on loan from your law office, or whatever the case may be, and be unpaid as an associate in the White House. You’d do that in hopes that you’d meet people. They had a legion of those people, as well. That was the vetting attorney operation.

Then there was a White House Office of Ethics, and that was a separate group. Our attorneys and their attorneys talked all the time. The White House Ethics Office was looking at ethics from a White House perspective. The vetting attorneys were thinking about ethics and optics from an all-over-the-world perspective. Then you had on top of that an agency ethics and legal team looking at the issues that pertained to that agency, because any one of these things could trip you, and they were not all the same. You needed to vet somebody for the agency, for the White House, and then for being the face of the administration and the President; you needed three sets of conversations going on. Those were all the different groups, with the last one being our lawyers, but everything funneled up through them, so we were also the arbiter.

Then you would have the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] doing all the tax research, and you’d have the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] doing what would usually take about two and a half to three months for the average human being, which is a pyramid game of cascading questions and knocking on doors and checking former neighbors and all that kind of stuff. And then there are some specialties; if you’re going to State Department they have a diplomatic service vetting of their own and things like that. But generally, that was the process for all the Senate-confirmed folks.

Our process was to over time try to pre-vet people a little bit, so you’d do an initial check. Once you would come to a final group that you like, you might do an initial check on them. Once you got to a point where you were actually putting in a memo for a President, you would definitely do a quick check to make sure there wasn’t anything easily disqualifying.

We got in the habit of also asking candidates as they came through the process a series of very basic vetting questions that were the 20 percent of questions that are going to knock out 80 percent of the people. Do you pay your taxes regularly? Have you always paid your taxes regularly? Is there any irregularity? Do you have domestic help at home? Is that person a full-time employee of yours? Do they work for a service? Do you know if they’re a naturalized citizen? Do you pay their taxes?

Then the catch-all was: is there anything else that you could think about that if someone else wanted to they could use to embarrass you or the President, anything at all? You’d ask those types of questions, because that knocks out a lot of people who are going to have those issues, and you don’t have to do it later. I’ll give you an example. I was interviewing someone for Tax Court. She’s a Tax Court judge. I’ve got to go through my regular questions. So I ask, “Do you pay your taxes?” She says, “Yes.” But then there’s something in her voice that made me ask, “On time?” She says, “Oh.” That was it. You can’t be a Tax Court judge and then pay your taxes late for years and years. [laughter]

That’s the vetting process. Think of these as all independent things that are operating independently. We wouldn’t be giving them similar direction on things to think about, but they’re going through these independent processes, and then you get an IRS report, an FBI report, a diplomatic service report, the ethics input, and then our lawyers, all putting something together, and then a vetting attorney assigned to that person, who then interviews the person and spends a lot of time getting to know them and kicking tires. They’ll probably be previewing with me periodically as we’re working up to this person being the potential actual nominee.

Once we get to the end of that process, there’s a decision meeting that happens once a week, either in the head of Personnel’s office, or we eventually switched to a room with no windows in the bottom of the White House, for obvious reasons. In that meeting, each attorney is bringing up people and laying out their issues, and it was a cross-functional meeting: you would have me, one of the Deputy Chiefs of Staff, someone from Leg. Affairs, who had to confirm these people, and then, depending on the issue, maybe someone else. We’d all listen to this and then make determinations about go, no go, go back and do more work. That was your funneling process for the Senate-confirmed people.

Once you get through all that, you get to a final decision meeting with the senior staff. You’ve been updating them along the way, and you say, “Here’s where we are. Here are the remaining issues.” And you talk through some political stuff, things like that. If everybody was good then you would put the person back in a memo saying, “We’re ready to go with the President,” and then we’d roll them out and announce them.

When you look at that timeline, the single largest thing the candidate could control is the amount of time that they have turning in their paperwork and all their financial dealings and everything else, and their ability to identify issues on their side that are very identifiable early, because sometimes you can resolve them before you foresee the process, and then they’re not an issue. A candidate filling out paperwork, talking to lawyers, everything else, in a process that averaged somewhere between maybe five months on the early end and I’m guessing seven or nine to ten months on the back end, with obviously a wide distribution, you could take 30 days out for most human beings, because it just took them a while to get all this stuff down on paper, and the accountants, and everything else. That’s a big chunk of it, if you can do that.

You could reduce a little bit of the time in the back-and-forth names process. We put in a lot of ways to speed that along. The part that got worse and worse was once you nominated. Well, two things: one was once you nominated them they would sit on the Hill, because they were doing the deals, and the time would get stretched out. But the second thing is our vetting process didn’t change all that much over the eight years, other than the political bit; the ethics part and legal part stayed somewhat static.

We got smarter about how we did it, how we prioritized it, and worked ahead. But what telescoped the time was trying to figure out all the ways a person could be taken down for political reasons, and having to pre-vet all those and talk through those, and have a story and a strategy before you announce them, that component—political vetting—got bigger and bigger and bigger in terms of how much time you spent on it. You saw that just eat up more and more time. Then, obviously, you also saw people sitting on the Hill for longer and longer periods of time not being acted upon. That was a whole separate thing.

That political vetting is what changed most from year one to year eight, and yet people would come back through the process after three years in for a new position. They’d say, “What’s up with this process? This has totally changed in three years.” Well, no, it’s actually only one component, but that’s such a big component of it now that you’re feeling it, because we’re coming back to you and asking you all these questions, and running all these things into the ground, even though we confirmed you three years ago. You feel like we’re going back and retreading stuff, but it’s because the world’s changed.

In what direction did it change?

We went from substantive debates on things, and then there wasn’t all that. Nancy Killefer didn’t make it because she didn’t pay something like $4,000 in taxes, which, if she had been nominated a year or two later, she would have been in, but when your first group of people are going through you’re really sensitive about anybody getting held up, because then everybody gets held up, and you can’t get your first team in place. Little did we know that 30 months later Tim Geithner was going to have a tax problem.

It’s a sliding scale, but in the early days you’re doing more of a pure vet on the ethics and the substantive issues, on policy matters, and then some issues that the Hill was going to bring up around competence, which can be a little bit silly, but it’s more substance based. But over time you get to a place where you have to think of anything that someone could use to weaponize a movement against somebody. You have to take any individual piece.

I remember, for instance, Debo Adegbile was our nominee for Secretary of Civil Rights [unclear]. He was the deputy at the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] Legal Defense Fund for a number of years. He had successfully argued four cases before the Supreme Court, including the New Haven firefighters’ case, which was a central case, and was a total stud, half Nigerian, half Korean, raised by a single mom in New York, put himself through college. He was just an unbelievable candidate, great for the job, and we were super excited about him, a person who obviously had a lot of trials in their back pocket.

A Senator in Pennsylvania got activated with the Fraternal Order of Police in Pennsylvania, because Debo had successfully negotiated the last phase of early release for someone who had shot a cop in Pennsylvania. When the person shot the cop, Debo, I think, was six years old. The person then was found guilty and appealed a bunch of times. He goes all the way through this story, and at the tail end the person appeals a matter in their case something like 20 years later, and Debo’s the deputy at NAACP that happened to get the case. He was involved in that last piece of it, so had nothing to do with the person, and they took that one fact and weaponized it. There’s a reason why you don’t know him as an Assistant Secretary for DOJ for Civil Rights under the law. We went all the way to the floor; we made everybody speak out loud about it, which we didn’t do a lot, and we lost. They took that one piece.

You have to look at absolutely everything. I sat in the back of a room where a guy was defending—Everybody would walk in and ask the same questions. They wouldn’t stay in the room, so everybody was asking the same question. They probably would have done it anyway. They kept bringing up the fact that he had a vacation home in Canada, and that he would loan it out to friends.

They’d asked some questions about it, and he’d explain that—This was for a position in Treasury—yes, he would loan it out to friends, and all he would charge them was clean-up fees to have someone come clean the place afterward. He’d done this for many years, and he and his wife weren’t sure about the recognition of such revenue coming out of Canada, living in the United States, Vermont or wherever he was. You know what they did? They claimed it on their taxes. You know what they realized in the vetting process? They didn’t need to, so they were overpaying their taxes for plenty of years.

You know what the political debate in the room was? Why did you overpay your taxes? Should we trust you in the U.S. government if you can’t figure out how to pay your taxes? [laughter] And this was an esteemed guy who had overpaid by—I think he charged $300 a couple of times a year. We’re talking about de minimis amount of money, and he did the right thing as a good citizen. He overpaid his taxes out of an abundance of caution. This was one of the most elegant guys, and when the last Senator asked him a question, he leaned into the mic and said, “Fine, write me a check.” [laughter] It was so intense, but they made the whole hearing about this overpaying of taxes, as if he was delinquent and somehow unequipped for the job. That’s how crazily—

And this is not a one-party thing; both sides are equally guilty of being problematic for the other side. This was just our version of it. But it got really involved, and you had to think through all of those things, because you always had to think through once someone gets stuck then you have a whole cascading effect with other people, especially in that committee. Then they start horse-trading you, and now you’re in a different posture, and you’re having to do deals to get bundles through. You never want to be in that position because that’s not a substance-based conversation anymore.

I’m really curious: Did you have people in Leg. Affairs that worked with you to help you bundle these various appointments?

Yes, there was always somebody—The people I worked most closely with were Jon Samuels on the House side and Anne Wall on the Senate side. They were the main interlocutors with those two houses, but they also had the confirmation’s remit in their bucket, so that was their portfolio. They worked on confirmations. Once we got through that and the person was nominated, there was a whole strategy built up about how to take them to the Hill and get them through. They ran that, and we worked for them.

I would go up to the Hill and meet with Senators sometimes and talk with certain candidates, or sometimes go out there to request and meet with certain Senators to talk about jobs they care about, something like Tennessee Valley Authority, political, mired in rotating positions in different roles, and a huge platform in the local community.

People have long, hard views about who should get it and who shouldn’t. So I’d go up and meet with the Senators, but they would send all that up and they’d manage it on a day-to-day basis. They would run the murder boards for the Senate-confirmed people to prepare them for their hearings, and then they’d go take them door-to-door with the Senators behind the scenes, and then take them and be there with their hearing until they got confirmed. That team took over from us, and we worked for them once people got nominated.

Can you talk about any nomination withdrawals and how the office handled the withdrawals?

There are a lot of different versions of withdrawals. There’s a candidate withdrawing, which could happen for any number of reasons, and the mechanics of it were very simple. Both for resignations and withdrawals we’d ask someone to write us a note so we’d have a paper trail, and it was very short. We asked for no political statements, no nothing, just to have a paper trail, so we’d have a note from an individual that they were technically withdrawing, and even if we had to push them to do it, we usually let them to do it to control the narrative. It was the same with resignations. Then we would file that with the clerk in the White House as a matter of public record. They’d officially be withdrawn, and there would be a little bit of a paper trail.

In the practical nature of it there were all different stages at which people pulled out. There are people who pulled out while they were in the vetting process because they got fed up, or something came up in the vetting process so they hadn’t been nominated, but we took a step back. People wouldn’t have known about them, other than there was a memo saying we’re putting the person into vet, but only the people close to us would know. Then there are people who withdrew once they got out of the process, because they got mired in something, got fed up, had a life circumstance change, whatever the case may be. There are a bunch of reasons why they might withdraw in those instances.

It was rarely the case—in fact, I can’t think of a time—where we had a fundamentally different view of the job and five or six months had gone by and we needed a person. I can’t remember ever doing that. There was always some other kind of animating factor, but it almost always came off as—in fact, it always looked to the outside world like—the candidate withdrawing, whether that was the truth or not.

To give you a sense of the relative scale, on ten people that we nominated—I can’t even venture a guess, but I could say directionally out of ten people we nominated that we’d have to nominate 0.5 or something like that. I don’t know. It was a relatively small number. The thing that became more painful was people just sitting as nominees for a year or two, something like that. Remember, when you get nominated the whole world knows you’re nominated, so your law firm knows you’re nominated, so you stop getting cases, and you stop being put on stuff, because they don’t know when you’re going to be confirmed. It could be one day, it could be in a couple of months, but on the front end everybody thinks it’s going to be a couple of months.

The whole world knows you’re seeking another job, and you actually have another job, and you’re waiting just to hear about the other job, while you’re doing a job. And your kids think they’re going to move from wherever they are to a new school. All that stuff’s going on, and then you’re just sitting there in limbo, and this is going on and on. If you’re unlucky, the debate about you becomes public, what’s going to happen, right? So for all those reasons, there’s no more than a handful of people at one point who just said, “I’m out.”

There was also a technical matter, which is that at the end of a Congress they return all the nominees and they have to be renominated. It’s normally done in a pro forma renominate way, but not always, and as you get into the second term you’ll start to see the numbers shifting around a lot, because when you go back to candidates some of them say, “No.” Or at this point you have to say to them, “Listen, we could renominate you, but we just don’t see a path.”

At the end of a Congress there’s always a plan for a couple of weeks, which is heavy outreach to all the sitting candidates, and then a scoring system to know where they are, then be able to deal with that, triage things up-front. You all found, which I totally forgot I had done, an email that I had sent out to a bunch of people because I was feeling so crappy about it. We did a bunch of other things, but we felt it was particularly important—that was right around one of those times where we’re starting to look at a bunch of people, and we’re just getting concerned because the time was getting so telescoped and our lives were being put on hold.

Just out of curiosity, were you there when Dawn Johnsen was being nominated for OLC [Office of Legal Counsel]? Eventually she pulled out because it took so long. They were putting all sorts of roadblocks in her way.

I don’t remember her pulling out. I remember the Debo process like it was yesterday. I was there for Shirley [unclear]. I was there for a bunch of different things. I’m trying to think of other well-known people who ended up not going forward.

There was a Ninth Circuit judge—I’m forgetting his name.

We should talk about this. The judges are almost always handled out of the White House counsel’s office, so attorneys, judges, and marshals are almost always handled out of WHC [White House counsel] and they have a whole team that does them. As you well know, they start right away and start moving through it very quickly. The woman who ran our domestic cluster, which had DOJ in it and had all the lawyers in it, she would interact with them quite a bit, but that was a pretty independent operation, running at a different rhythm, a machine of sorts.

I was not involved with the vetting of those people. I didn’t weigh in on them. The only time they would cross over is if it was a big political issue that would somehow connect into other things, so we’d all be sitting around a table, trying to figure it out, but that was extremely rare, if it happened. It was just its own separate thing.

Going back to the weaponizing of anything political against some of these nominees, first of all, we haven’t talked about—the President’s term—the “shellacking” of the midterms in 2010, impacts of that on what you’re doing, and then, I presume—I don’t know whether it’s normal or abnormal—the change and churn in the political world. But I’d like you to talk about what we know as the rise of the Tea Party, and the Birther movement, and the implications about race.

Yes. How do I explain that in the context of what my day-to-day job was for a person who’s—? Well, obviously, confirmations are always tough, and they get harder and harder over the course of your time there. I don’t think our data proves out that we had a so much more difficult time than other people have had since. When you really look at the data, it’s pretty bad for a lot of people as you go through the process. It just slows down quite a bit. I couldn’t say that there was something unusual going on, other than for the high-profile stuff, like the Supreme Court nominee, where the gamesmanship was at an unbelievable level, and there were extraordinary things going on that you’d see happen.

Beyond that, it was more business as usual; it just was like there was more of an edge to it, and a default assumption that you were going to have problems. Not that it was going to be easy. There are always staffers who will sit down and do a deal if you can sit down, or there used to be. I don’t know if there are anymore, but you kind of make deals with people. The system allowed for a lot of these part-time boards, in particular, as Republican and Democratic nominees, there were always deals to be done in there that would be helpful to people.

I would say, just from a Personnel Office perspective, it probably didn’t have as many concrete manifestations as it would have for Public Engagement or Leg. Affairs or certainly in the political office, or whatever the case may be. Did we get a slightly harder time? And was there more sensitivity around certain types of people going through the process based on their history? Yes, but I think that’s either a degenerative or a progressive thing, depending upon how you look at it over time, with all such things, right?

The instrumentation or the sensitivity goes up around all these different things, right? I’m working right now with Zoë Baird, for instance, on a project. Everything builds off of the last version, and it keeps going in one direction. I wouldn’t say that we experienced that a lot on a day-to-day basis.

When we started going out and being more visible to the outside world, it was noticeable to me that if you showed up in D.C. when I was in my 20s, and you were working for one party or another or whatever, you showed up in a room, most people from both sides of the party wanted to talk to you. They were just curious, right? In the second term, when we started going out and raising our profile a little bit more, and saying we want people who’ve never served before to raise their hand and stuff like that, because we were just trying to keep finding ways to get more people, you felt a third of the room walk out. As soon as people knew who you were and where you were from, there was more of an immediate reaction to that.

I can’t tell you whether this was true or not: it would be very interesting to look at a number of Republican nominees and compare administration to administration, to see if we had more registered Republicans or Independents. It would be interesting to know. We certainly made very clear to people up-front it doesn’t matter what party you’re in. We tried to make that very clear.

We also had very clear conversations with ourselves and applied the standard very evenly, that you can absolutely disagree with the President in writing or whatever, in your life. It’s not dispositive. If you hadn’t voted for him, or you didn’t agree with absolutely everything, that wasn’t going to be an immediate no. But if you disagree with him and it’s on a matter that you’ve been hired to do, that would be a problem, right?

So from a vetting perspective and communication with candidates—and I could tell you in a good-faith behind-the-scenes perspective, we did not let those things be immediate noes. There had to be something substantive that somebody was arguing that was problematic, or if it was a matter of judgment, like reading through your things—this person does not have good judgment; they are a broader risk to us. Those were the things that we tried to stick to.

I can’t think of anything else. If you’re wondering about a specific thing, feel free to ask me, but I can’t think of ways in which it happened or it mattered in my day-to-day life. It mattered a lot in my life life, but not as much.

Right. Well, this is a specific example, more related to the policy than what I was raising about party politics, less so race, and that would be Elizabeth Warren and this movement toward czarism. Political scientists are always intrigued by that.

My czar thing was Van [Anthony K.] Jones. I had been in the office for exactly two weeks at that point. It was August recess and Nancy said, “I need to take a three-day weekend. Can I please? I need to take a break.” She left me with the keys to the castle two weeks in, and that Friday was Van Jones. Val Green, who was running the energy and environment cluster—she was still a vetting attorney at that point—and I were stuck in the office, trying to solve that problem all day and into the night. Actually, it started on Thursday if I remember correctly. But that was the first czar experience I had, and then there were others after that.

With Warren, she’d already come down to D.C. with the Treasury, and it was a pure political calculation of can we get her through. This is a hugely important thing. Rarely as a President do you get an opportunity to stand up an agency from scratch, and this idea of saying, “OK, if we want to pile all of our thinking into a new agency—” It was a very exciting proposition, never mind what it was doing, which made it exciting enough, but there was this opportunity to stand something up to represent something, but also with more modern thinking around hiring processes and culture and all that. All that was being talked about.

It became a matter of a basic calculus of what’s viable. It went on for a while because people were really reticent. She was the best person for the job on a lot of levels—She had dreamed the thing up—but the opposition was pretty strong, so it was pretty clear. Everybody probably came to this at different stages, but it felt relatively clear pretty soon that this was probably not going to entirely happen. So we dealt with it a lot. She’s extraordinary on a lot of levels, and that process was extraordinary for all the reasons, because of what it was addressing, because of her very outspoken views, who she is as a person, her relationship with him.

For all those reasons, there were layers and layers to that, which was different than the Van Jones thing, which was he got shot down for political reasons really fast, and the story got ahead of us, and once we got a plan from behind we couldn’t get back on top of it. We had the call really early, because it was early and he was the first one through, and early on you get really gun-shy about having big old fights in the media about people. Later on you get used to it, but early on you’re thinking, I’ve got all these other people to go through. I could fight over this person for all this time and probably lose, or I can get ten more people through next week. Remember, in year one, more people is more. You’re having to make very tough, rather quick decisions with Tom Daschle. People had to have real discipline.

I’ll often look and say maybe we should have done it differently—woulda, coulda, shoulda—but in those early days you have this sense, and it’s not entirely wrong, that every second has to be falling forward; you have to be making progress. It serves the greater interest.

Would you tell us a little bit about the decision making that went into the declaration of the recess appointments in January of 2012? Were you involved in that? How was it set up? What were the dynamics with the Hill and so forth?

I’m going to give you my answer now, and then, if you’re OK with it, I’m going to call up somebody I trust really well, who I worked side by side with, who was running—Anne Wall. We can do this in round two of our conversation. I can give you a better answer. Because she, one, has a photographic memory; and, two, she was involved in every conversation, as well, so she will help my memory quite a bit.

We had been talking for a long time about a bunch of different things. There had been ongoing debate that started out first about how you swore people into agencies, then bring in the agency heads over time, and they reconfigure them in the way they want, but you put your own people in first. That was the first debate early on in the first year. Then it became as people are getting stuck on all these processes, should you bring them in as advisors? Then under the Vacancy Reform Act and everything else, what are the restrictions and what might we do with them that might allow them to be helpful but not put their actual confirmation at risk?

We started being more aggressive and leaning into that, and oftentimes we went to the Hill and quietly checked, and said, “Hey, we’re going to put this person in as senior advisor. They’re going to use this stuff according to the format. They may not use the title, they may not take actions that are like this, and so on. They can’t start doing the job, so we’re going to have them over here, but we just want to check with you. If we come back later, you’re not going to ding the person for this, right?” We get an agreement, so we start moving people in.

My recollection about the recess appointments—I want to talk to Anne more about the piece-by-piece decision of it—was everybody’s just getting so frustrated, and there was such a big backlog. When I took over the office my big thing was to try to clear the backlog that was in process. If you look at August and September of 2012 you see a lot of people getting nominated.

If you look at this relative to any month period, we did about five times as many nominations in a 40-day period because we wanted to get everybody up on the Hill and just stop. We had so many people in process, and they were getting caught in different stages for a bunch of reasons. I just prioritized getting everybody through the process as fast as possible and put more pressure on the Hill to have more nominees sitting there so we could make more of a story around it.

My recollection was just as you would expect: there was a great deal of frustration about it. And this is what I want to get from Anne, because she’s going to have a more nuanced view, because my view is more about—I wouldn’t have been involved in the legislative conversations at the micro level, which she would have been involved in, where there was a ton of debate about the implications of this and how it’s going to play out. With all such things there was this big, heavy debate about bird in the hand, two in the bush. If we do this, we get something, but what’s going to be the cost?

Here’s what I will tell you about all such things: you overweight the political cost up-front. You just do. You always overweight. Oh, if we do this they’re going to be so mad, they’re going to burn the house down. Listen, if they’re going to burn the house down, it’s going to be somewhere between day 70 and day 200. It’s just how this stuff goes.

If I were there again and was part of Biden’s policy process—Over the summer prior to the election I was co-chair of the talent policy process. It was new. We thought, Just put people in the agencies as soon as you walk in. Forget all the perfect—just get the person in. They hire their own people and do all that stuff like that.

Get people in. Use temporary hiring authorities. Get people physically into the agency, because there’s going to be so much work to be done, and you can’t be precious about this. Once we started putting people in temporary hiring authorities and checking with the Hill, you know what happened? The Hill didn’t care at all. It took us a year to get comfortable doing that, maybe two years, and we’re kvetching and kvetching, and then we went up to the Hill and they were like, “Yeah, it’s cool.”

We overweighted it, and I think you do that a lot. You do it either because you’re just hypersensitive, and the near-term costs are more dear, which is the human condition, or you’re unwilling to just engage the other side to mitigate the risks. Once we got over that fear and just went and talked to them about it, we found out that we could do it and it was a lot easier than we thought. It wasn’t that big a deal and you could structure something that was safe, so we started doing that quite a bit, putting people in temporarily. We obviously did the recess appointments.

There was something about the recess appointments on the back end. I can’t remember this, and I have to call someone and ask them. There was something funky about the recess appointments on the back end in terms of whether they were—There was a debate about the appointments. I can’t remember what it was. This was off the record, but there was something that came up on the back end of the recess appointments that I remember was a little bit problematic on some level, but I have to remember what that is. I’ll find out and come back to you.

I’ll give you a more nuanced response, but my interaction with it was a growing conversation on all the things we could do to push more people into the agencies, of which this was a pretty big step after us scaling into what we thought was a riskier posture and setting off the Hill. But I couldn’t tell you the costs that actually came out on this, because I couldn’t feel them. I felt like the costs kept going up for everything, and it was really hard to find a causal link between things. I felt like that was all overdone, but I can get you a better answer.

Wasn’t the issue on recess appointments, which I think even went before the courts, an interpretation of when Congress is in recess?

Yes, that was the debate at the time. The attempt to keep it from happening became about when they were in and weren’t in. But I was thinking about something like a year later. I just remember there being something that came up, and there was an issue around the appointments themselves. But yes, the debate about when they’re in or when they’re out became huge.

Yes. And Jim, you were going to add?

The Court of Appeals was going to really narrow down the possibility of being able to make any recess appointments, and then the Supreme Court came back and said, “You can do it, but we’ve never found an example where it’s been less than ten days recess,” and this was a three-day recess, so Obama couldn’t do that.

Well, one of the interesting things is that when you get to the minutiae around a lot of these things, there’s precedent in all this paperwork, but there’s a lot of gray area. There are a lot of things that you can interpret in a bunch of different ways, and that goes back to how aggressive you want to be in trying to get your people in as fast as you can into the position they’re best suited for. There are a lot of people who were in on that discussion. You’re not just thinking about it from a personal perspective, but everything you’re doing. You’re thinking about its knock-on effects to everything else everybody else is doing.

I can just speak for us. We were just too worried about everything. I had a lawyer from the White House counsel’s office drafting emails for me probably every day because I was so worried about every email reply and all these other things. We went through this every month or two or something like that. We were so worried about every little thing, and it felt very real at the time.

It’s hard to prove the counterfactual, but we did have a very scandal-free vetting process for eight years. John [Morrell] Berry, who’s one of those institutionalists who’s been in many administrations, every time he sees me he’s like, “This guy! This guy!” It wasn’t me, but he loves talking about that, because the first time he served in D.C. I think he was like 21. He served in multiple administrations, but he was saying he had never seen something where you go that long where nominations and vettings are not the main story with scandals. There’s other stuff, but not issues.

But there’s not a person I talked to a couple of summers ago, in the run-up to the election, that wouldn’t go back and do it more aggressively. We were overly cautious. We didn’t go up to the line and cross over the line enough. You don’t know where the line is until you cross it more often, and then you’re going to be pretty sure, and we were too conservative, in hindsight, in a lot of things.

We’re coming toward our stopping point, but Katie, did you have a question?

Yes. It’s an unusual one. It’s sort of a macro question, and also a mechanical question, very much from an outsider looking in, trying to figure out how you manage all of these appointments: There are roughly 4,000, 1,200 of which are Senate-confirmed, and my hunch was that during the transition at the beginning of the Obama administration they would think about what are their priorities, policy-wise, and then try to get those Senate-confirmed slots done more quickly than others. Or maybe they would prioritize national security or the Treasury Department, given where we were financially.

At what point do you stop worrying about all the backlog of appointments that you need to fill? Because now you have to worry about the fact that people have left, and it’s the Deputy Attorney General who’s left; it’s not some low-level position. So it seems to me that that person’s nomination would then jump the line. Is there a computer-program way that you keep track of all this—

[laughs] No.

—when someone resigns? Does that immediately come up and say, “OK, here we have a vacancy; we have to find somebody for this”? It just seems like there’s so many moving parts you can’t even get through the initial set of 4,000 appointments, let alone then dealing with all the turnover. How do you do it? And how does it change from year one through the course of the first term, and then to the second? Are there macro kinds of—

Yes, that’s where the succession planning discipline—which we didn’t do with absolutely every agency; some agencies were just less inclined to do it, but we got it for many of the agencies—became hugely important, because every quarter you’re having a conversation about how long-tenure do you think people are, and what job they’re doing, and everything else. It allows you to start working ahead a little bit, which was one of our reasons for it.

We wanted to be able to start thinking about things as they were coming up. You’re constantly reprioritizing, and you kind of let it happen first, at the agency and the cluster level, right? So the agency’s worrying about this, and they have some early warning signals. There’s worry about somebody turning over, or an issue coming up, or something you need to fill because of something that’s going to change. They’re talking to the cluster head and their team back and forth about those things, weekly conversations, and then they’ll be boiling up to someone in my position at some point, when they say, “We might want to move these things up on the list,” or whatever the case may be. I would let them make a lot of those decisions, and then the things would go into a memo.

You would just have to decide—and this was the main piece—when you’re putting people in a memo, and then they’re going in to vet, that’s when you need to think about priority, because you have a machine that can only push through so many people and get them out the other side. Vetting is this narrow point in the hourglass where you start to get very concerned about priority, and you will call an agency ethics officer and say, “This person’s coming through and they’re a top priority, so when you get an email from us, somebody has to open it and solve it right then, not put it in the bottom of the pile and get to it in three days,” because back and forth ten times is 30 extra days. You would do things like that where you’re prioritizing stuff because it’s super important for one reason or another, but the list of what’s important changes all the time.

The only part of the whole apparatus that has a somewhat static list—and I’d say only somewhat—is the boards of commissions. You’ve got all these boards of commissions. They’re part-time in term, and they could say, “OK, let’s do this, in this sequence generally.” Then things will pop up; they’ll create a jobs council or whatever.

With boards of commissions you can create a little bit of a plan and work against a little bit of a plan because there are so many things there that aren’t urgent at any time, so you work them over time. They might tie into policy initiatives you have. You might use them as a way to signal interest in something. By nominating certain people you can get a news story out for a couple of cycles. All those things are affecting it, but my job, both as a cluster lead and then as a head of the office, was to constantly be reprioritizing, along with senior staff, on things. It’s a constant process. It never ends.

There are many things you need to understand about working in the White House. The first is, fatigue is a huge variable, and you need to be very disciplined about your time, and the things that keep you balanced. The other thing is you need to give up the sense at any point in time that you’re ever going to feel caught up, because most achievement-oriented people get really unhappy when they end their day and they haven’t achieved much on their list, and that is going to be counterproductive.

You need to drill into people they will always be behind, and the standard is: Given what came across my screen today, did I use my time in the wisest way possible today? And then I’ll pick it up again tomorrow. That’s the standard. It can’t be Did I get everything done? That’s never going to happen, but Did I use my time as wisely as humanly possible? And Am I giving myself enough charge so that I can come back tomorrow and use more of it? Because I could work around the clock and still not get caught up. Anyway, I don’t know if that answered your question, but it’s just a concept—

It sounds a little like chaos theory. [laughs]

Yes, it’s chaos theory, in which you try to create—I have a really big debate the whole time as somebody who thinks a little bit about businesses and structures. If you have this many people doing this much work and it’s changing that dynamically, and it’s a four-dimensional, complex challenge, do you need really great process? Because it’s the only way to get order in this and make things right. Or will process be too rigid and break under the pressure of the thing, and you need to have a much looser process?

I debated that in my own head, and debated it with certain people who were similar-minded, over the course my time at the White House. Where I landed is that you have to have great process in certain places, like the Executive Secretary’s Office, where everybody gets to come and voice their opinions before a final recommendation goes to the President. That has to be a pristine process, because that’s where you have huge fights that would slow everything down. But beyond that, you’ve got to let it run.

The simplest thing you could do is have a standing meeting every morning, where everybody goes around and says in one second, “Here’s what I’m working on today,” so people can say, “I’ve got to call that person, and I can grab that person. I can do that.” It’s the most simple way of managing, but actually that’s the thing you need to do, just a stand-up meeting with senior staff, and everybody goes through the day. Maybe they talk about the week ahead, a couple of people, but mainly you’re just thinking in short-term increments. And then smart people will know who to go talk to, to make sure that they’re talking to them before a decision’s made. That’s the main organizing tool beyond a couple of other things.

Well, we know you have to jump off, Jonathan, and we thank you for your time today. You did mention a round two. I know we have a few more questions for you. If that would be OK, we’ll have our scheduler be in touch with your folks, and we’ll set up another time.

Yes, and if there are a couple of things where you really want to go into the weeds a bit, like Jim’s question, and you want to send me a note ahead of time, to say, “Hey, we’re going to want to ask about a couple of these topics” or if you don’t feel like you’re in the weeds, “Can you refresh and make sure you’re coming into the conversation with a more detailed answer?” Because I gave Jim a very superficial answer. Just let me know, and then I can poke around with people who would know what was going on. It’s no big deal. And I can check my memory against people who were involved to give you more of a rounded view.

That sounds perfect. We’ll see you again soon, we hope.

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