Mona Sutphen Oral History

We will begin with a little bit of autobiography, and we’re interested in your [William Jefferson] Clinton experience. We don’t want to park a long time there, but because we did a project on Clinton, it would be helpful to mine that a little bit. But part of my responsibility is to be watching the clock and to keep us on track, because we’re supposed to be done here around 5:30 to get you back on a plane to go to New York. So I’ll try to watch the pacing. Given the length of your service in the administration, we’re probably going to be OK on time, but you also have—It’s your interview, so we want to hear what you think is important, and if we’re parked on something and you want to talk about it for a while, just go with it.

OK, yes, that’s helpful.

And I’ll pull us here or there or make suggestions here or there. Again, my goal is to try to get us done today. If you are enjoying this and you think, Oh, gosh, I want to stay with this for a while—

[laughter] I can always come back.

—and you need to come back, you can come back, or we can come to New York and finish it, if that’s necessary. I’m starting with that in mind.

As the going part, yes, OK, that’s fine.

Right, but that’s it.

That’s good.

We are good to go. We’re rolling.

All right, you’re good to go. The only other thing that I should say is my colleague Barbara Perry sends her regrets. Leaving you here with an all-male panel is not something that we would normally do—

These things happen. [laughter] It’s all good.

—but I’m assuming that in politics you’ve experienced such things before.

Correct. I was in the Foreign Service, so I—

So you know.

At one point a woman Foreign Service officer remarked to me, early on, in 1991, that I was really breaking ground at the State Department, and I was just walking through the hallway. I said, “What do you mean?” She pulled me aside and said, “I’m really, really proud that you’re breaking ground.” And I was thinking to myself, What ground? [laughter] And she said, “You’re wearing pants.”

Oh, yes?

It was 20 degrees. I said, “Yes, because it’s freezing outside.” And then I walked around the whole day and I realized, Oh my God, she’s right; I’m the only woman who’s wearing pants in this entire place! I can’t believe this!

Where were you?

State Department.

In D.C. [District of Columbia]?

Yes.

Oh, I thought you were at an embassy or something. Wow.

Yes, you would think, right?

Nineteen ninety-one, so—

Hillary [Rodham] Clinton was very controversial for wearing pants.

Correct, and it’s one of those things where you realize, Wow, OK, I didn’t realize I was making history here, but I’m glad I’m breaking through barriers I didn’t realize I was breaking.

Well, I hope that the recorder was on for this, [laughter] because if not, we’re going to have to get you to repeat it, because that’s a really interesting data point—

That’s pretty funny, right?

—about where things are.

Oh, yes, things have changed so much.

It is true that we so often forget how profound the changes have been in our culture in so many different dimensions.

Oh, yes. Yes, definitely. I could talk about that in the context of the Obama thing. We can get to that, because it’s pretty amusing.

Exactly. All right. Terrific. You ready to go then?

Sure, yes.

All right. And your last name is pronounced Sutphen?

Yes, correct.

OK, so it’s an F.

Yes, it’s an F.

OK, very good, Sutphen. This is the Mona Sutphen interview, as a part of our Obama Oral History Project. Thank you so much for being here.

Good to be here.

As a housekeeping matter for the transcriber, particularly since we’re going to have three male voices, we need to start off by identifying ourselves. So I’m Russell Riley, and I’m the cochair of the Oral History Program here.

I’m Charles Walcott, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech, in political science.

I’m Kerry Haynie, associate professor of political science at Duke University.

And a colleague from Penn from long ago.

Colleague here from a while ago.

Nice.

Exactly.

That’s great.

And you’re the victim today.

I’m the victim. [laughter]

Thanks for being here, Mona.

Yes.

We always like to begin by asking some questions about your upbringing, to figure out who you are as a person, because no place else has recorded the sociology of the people who congregate around a particular political figure. So tell us a little bit about your upbringing, particularly as it relates to politics. Was your family a politically active family, or not?

Yes. So I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, middle-class family. Grew up in the city. My parents were an interracial couple: father African American; my mother was Jewish American. We were very active in local politics in Milwaukee. My father worked for the National Labor Relations Board. My mother was a public defender. We practiced politics actively, but at the really micro, local level, so we’re talking aldermen races, and we knew all the local judges, and we had a community association, and my parents were always involved in some political activism thing. Very progressive at the time.

I was born in ’67. We grew up in the height of the 1970s, super liberal. I had literally not met a Republican until I went to Mount Holyoke, so I couldn’t understand—Ronald Reagan got elected; I was super confused by that. I thought, How is this possible? [laughter] My parents said, “Well, there are a lot of other people out here that you might meet in the world.” And I said, “What do you mean? There aren’t tons of interracial families running around with kids all over the place?” We lived in a very progressive place at the time—even multicultural, relative to today’s standards. So that was my upbringing in a nutshell.

Did your family have long roots in Milwaukee?

No, my father was originally from Marshall, Texas. My mother—

Huh, Marshall.

Yes, Marshall, Texas. My mother was originally from St. Louis, University City. They met in Kansas City. They both worked for the Social Security Administration, so they met working there. She was a secretary; he was working for the feds. They got married at a time when it was still illegal for blacks and whites to get married, so they had to cross the bridge from Kansas City, Missouri, to Kansas City, Kansas, to get married at lunchtime. And then my father took the exam—They were opening up an NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] office in Milwaukee, and he took the exam for it and ended up getting the job. That’s how they ended up in Milwaukee. So they had no ties to Milwaukee at all whatsoever.

And Marshall was famous for an integration case, right?

Yes, yes, exactly, yes.

This was where [Dwight] Eisenhower refused to do what he did in Little Rock later.

Yes, exactly, yes, for Marshall—I’m trying to think of where it was exactly, but, yes, there was a movie made about the whole thing back in the day, and I can’t remember whether or not—He may have already been gone from Marshall by then, but yes.

OK. That was the reason for the question. OK.

So very liberal background. And were you destined, then, to become involved in politics, or—?

It’s funny: I had no interest, really, in politics growing up. We were politically active, but I definitely did not think of it as my career path. I left Milwaukee. I went to Mount Holyoke for college.

Why Mount Holyoke?

Curiously, because I really wanted to leave the Midwest. My father had somebody in his office who was a law intern who had gone to Mount Holyoke, and she offered to write me a letter, and that was the extent of my [laughter] due diligence about Mount Holyoke. I was one of five people in my class to leave Wisconsin for college. I went to a big public high school, 3,000 people. We had 27 people graduate and go to college in my graduating class of 450 students, and five of us left the state, maybe even fewer than that, actually. I was the only person to go out East, so I kind of took the plunge.

I was totally interested in international affairs, really fascinated with Asia, so I studied Chinese. I was an international relations major. I ended up working for [William Anthony] Tony Lake, so that’s going to be my circuitous route back to—I was his research assistant. He’s one of the people who encouraged me to take the Foreign Service exam. I had no interest in going into the Foreign Service or anything related to public service. I was totally determined to go into the movie business and go into advertising. So that’s what my goal was; [laughter] that’s what I was doing, and that was that. And, in fact—

Any regrets?

Many days. [laughter] It’s a long story, but I actually am now involved in movie production, all full circle. So it’s always been an interest.

Oh, yes?

Yes. I actually went to an advertising agency when I graduated from college, Leo Burnett, which is a big agency in Chicago. I did take the Foreign Service exam my senior year in college, really because Tony Lake kept bugging me, and frankly I didn’t have a good excuse as to why not to take it. He kept on saying, “Well, take the exam; you don’t have to join. Just see how it goes.” I studied Chinese. I went to Taiwan my junior year, so I was still interested in international stuff, but I didn’t really want to serve in public service, definitely not for the federal government.

I got to Leo Burnett. I was working on the Pert Plus hair shampoo brand, [laughter] buying and selling media in Midwestern markets. I’ll never forget: it was about three o’clock in the morning. I was working for the up-front ad buys—This is where you go and buy ad time once a year—and I accidentally deleted my spreadsheet while I was trying to import some figures. I remember sitting there thinking, OK, now I’m pulling an all-nighter. And I just thought to myself, There must be more to life than Pert Plus shampoo, [laughter] and I’m just not sure if this is really for me. So I was dusting off—Maybe I should apply to film school, not really sure—and, lo and behold, I got a call from the Foreign Service offering me a slot in a class literally two weeks later, so I said, OK, that’s what I’m going to do.

So that was my entry back into public service. I never would have thought I would stay in it. It was a great run. I had really no particular—I was political, but I was not involved in politics at all. I had not worked on any campaigns; I hadn’t been involved in anything that you would consider actively partisan political, and, as you know, the Foreign Service is decidedly not the case.

My first tour was in Bangkok. Then I left, and came back to the Department. I worked on human rights policy in Eastern and Southern Africa, Southeast Asia. My boss at the time, John Shattuck, then sent me to the Balkans to work on implementation of Dayton [General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina], something I knew nothing about, but I got there right after the signing of the peace agreement. I worked there through the first election, then I went to graduate school at LSE [London School of Economics].

Then I ended up working for Bill Richardson [III]. Now, Bill Richardson I’d met when I was a junior officer in Bangkok; he had come out. He’d worked on the Burma issues at the time. This is when Aung San Suu Kyi was still a positive figure that everybody loved. She had just won the Nobel Prize. I was working on human rights there. He came out several times to do trips, and I staffed him there. He had been appointed UN [United Nations] Ambassador for Clinton, and I was home for the holidays in D.C., visiting friends. I went to congratulate him on his job, and he said, “I’ve been trying to find you. Where have you been? I want you to come work for me in New York.” I was still doing my graduate degree. I said, “I can’t. I’m not leaving this master’s program.”

This is in ’92?

No, this is later than that. I joined the Foreign Service in ’91, so this was ’97.

He was, I guess, Energy Secretary before—

He was after that.

OK, yes.

After that. So he was ambassador in ’97–’98. Then, when he left to become Energy Secretary, I worked with him on the transition. But that’s the moment where I really did not want to go to the Energy Department. I learned through Tony Lake and Nancy Soderberg, people I’d gotten to know from my UN experience, that there was a job open working for [Samuel] Sandy Berger, so I threw my hat in the ring for that, as a detailee from the State Department. I became his Special Assistant for the last two years of the Clinton administration.

What did a Special Assistant do?

[laughs] We had a front office of three people, so I did all the policy-related stuff. Things would come to me before they would go to him. I did a lot of prep. I worked for the whole National Security Council. At that time we were still dealing with paper. He didn’t use computers yet, so I would read and prioritize his emails. I would do his take in the morning. We’d get 10,000 pages of raw intelligence, so I would sift through that. I would help coordinate what the meeting schedules were going to be, basically things that were going on to President Clinton. I usually was the last person to see and edit that and make sure it was right before it went in to the Staff Secretary. And I was a liaison to the front office of the White House at the time, John Podesta [Jr.]—well, first Erskine [Bowles] was Chief of Staff, so I was overlapping with Erskine, but mainly with John. That’s really where I first got to know the intersection between domestic politics and national security in a really profound way. So—

Can I ask you to back up for me?

Yes.

When you joined the Foreign Service, you said in ’91, it was the [George H. W.] Bush administration—

Correct.

—and it was a nonpolitical job.

Right.

Was there a change in your experience working in government, then, when you shifted to a new administration?

Oh, yes, by the time I came back into—Well, the shift from going from being just a career Foreign Service officer out in the field—where you literally barely had any idea there was an election going on, barely knew that Clinton might win, for example, it was so far away—to being in the White House with Clinton, to the change with being in with Obama—Fundamentally different experience.

Some of it’s because of where I was in my career. I was a junior officer at 24; by the time I was working in the White House, I was closer to 30, 32. By the time I came back, I was in my early 40s. It’s a step change both in career level as well as access and understanding about how politics and policy come together. And my job was fundamentally different.

I went from being, obviously, all foreign policy—My only interactions with political figures were when we’d have congressional delegations come because the weather was warm, and I was in charge of helping the wives shop for stuff in Thailand, right? [laughter] All the way to then being in the Clinton White House, where it’s the first beginnings of seeing how these things come together. At the time we were working on WTO [World Trade Organization] accession for China, for example. As a foreign policy person, you’re thinking, Well, trade is great. Then for the first time you’re trying to see—Oh, wait a minute, there’s actually a lot of opposition to this. Why? Where is it coming from?

Same on the Middle East, right? We had a lot going on at that time, even with the Iran/Middle East peace. We were working on the Wye River Summit. I started to get a sense of, OK, this is where there’s interplay here, and you can see that in real time, and you can feel the pushback and all the rest. You also understand how power flows inside the White House. Bob Rubin was Treasury Secretary then. Totally different time. We were dealing with [Osama] bin Laden then, obviously.

Yes, so it was a noticeable difference—I’m trying to get at the politics of it, right? So you had a Republican administration, a particular kind of Republican. Could you sense that in your job, even though it was a non—? Was it Bush policy or American foreign policy that you were—?

When I was in the field, it was American foreign policy, so I literally could not tell the difference. I was back in the Department a little bit at the beginning of Clinton, but the difference between the end of Bush Sr. and Clinton? Barely noticeable, at least on the issues that I was working on. The only place, in retrospect, that you could see it is the desire to deal with the Balkans conflict in a really active way that may not have been there otherwise, but I wasn’t aware of that at my level. People were totally professional, no real sense of the politics. When you get to Washington, working in Washington, you start to see it, because, of course, you’re hearing about all the domestic things that are different, but overseas you wouldn’t notice it so much.

Again, what was the date of your arrival in Washington to work with—

With Sandy?

Yes.

Let’s see here. You can check this—I forget the date exactly—because I arrived the week that the Monica Lewinsky papers were going up onto the Hill.

That was the basis of my question, was—

Yes, so I was there for the—and you can look at the [Kenneth] Starr Report, because I interviewed Monica Lewinsky for a job when I was in the [laughs] Clinton administration, so I’m in the Starr Report. You can look at the video, if you’d like.

This is from when they were talking about putting her with Richardson, is that correct?

Correct, yes, so I interviewed her for the job. I offered her that job at Richardson’s office. I was involved in talking to her multiple times, because she had a job offer at Revlon, and she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, and she wasn’t making any quick decision, so we basically said, “You’ve got to make a decision one way or another.” She said no; we hired somebody else. And then, lo and behold, a year later we’re saying, “Ah, OK, I guess this was more involved than we realized at the time.” [laughs]

But was she a memorable person before this?

Very.

Is it possible for you to recall what it was like before all the news broke around—

Oh, yes, totally, because I remembered her. At the time we were trying to get the UN arrears paid, and Richardson had this view that the problem with getting the arrears paid is that nobody in Congress really understood what the UN did, and that one of the things we needed to do was to do a better job of bringing people to New York and giving them a dog-and-pony show about what does the UN really do, and why it’s a good bang for the buck, right? He said, “I need somebody who’s a staffer, who’s going to work”—it’s a full-time job—“I need someone who can basically figure out how to talk Washington talk, but kind of intersect with the UN, and basically take people around.”

Totally independently—We would get résumés all the time from the White House, from people wanting to be hired, and her résumé popped up. I remember looking at it and thinking, Wow, she’s actually quite qualified, because usually you’d get a résumé and it was somebody who worked in the fashion industry, and then they decided maybe they wanted to be a diplomat, and you’re thinking, OK, there’s just no way this is ever going to fly, right? I remember looking at her résumé and saying, “Wow.” OK, she’s worked at the Defense Department. She’s worked at the White House. She did Leg [Legislative] Affairs. She’s got the kind of résumé that would be perfect for this. Political appointee, comfortable, obviously, dealing with Congress, junior enough that she’s not going to be upset that the job paid, I think, $30,000 a year with no benefits.

In New York. [laughter]

In New York, right, exactly. So I remember we tried to interview her multiple times, and we kept canceling on her. I’ll never forget, I called her at 11:00 at night, because we were coming to Washington for a meeting, and I said, “I hate to do this, but is it at all possible if you could come for an interview tomorrow at 6:30 in the morning, before we go to the White House to have meetings?” We had a deputies meeting. And I said, “We’re staying at the Watergate Hotel, if you could make it.” And she said, “Oh, that’s perfect because I live in the Watergate.” I said, “Oh, well, that’s convenient, then.” Right? And so she came. She was very personable, very professional, very memorable, very outgoing. And I remember saying, “You understand this job pays like $30,000, there’s no benefits,” et cetera. She said, “Well, my parents have an apartment in New York. It’s perfectly fine.”

I remember her leaving, and Richardson saying, “What do you think?” I said, “I think she’s fine. She’s way overqualified for this job, but if she wants to come to New York—” [laughter] She said, “Oh, I want to come to New York.” Well, great, sounds good, right? So we offered her the job. She kind of went silent for a little while, and then he said, “Well, why don’t you call her and find out: is she taking this job, or is she not?” So I called her and I said, “What’s the deal?” And she said, “Well, I got this other job from Revlon. What do you think?” I said, “Well, it’s comparing apples and oranges.” [laughter] “It depends a little bit on what do you want to do with your life.” And all of that.

Yes, she was very memorable, but in a way also totally forgettable because she said no to the job and we offered it to somebody else. A year later, I had gone for a run. I came back to my apartment. My roommate, who later—long story, but she clerked for the Supreme Court, so she was involved also in the Lewinsky case for that reason—I came back from a run and she said, “Oh, boy, things have really—The shit has hit the fan now.” I said, “What happened?” And so she tells me.

“He’s had an affair with an intern named Monica Lewinsky.” And I thought, Monica Lewinsky. [laughter] And I said, “Monica Lewinsky.” And she said, “Do you know her?” And I said, “I think I offered her a job like a year ago.” And she said, “I think you’re going to have a subpoena on your desk by the time you get to work.” I said, “Come on. I offered her a job. I’m sure nobody even knows that.” Sure enough, by the time I got to the office, my computer was seized, all the data, files taken, all of that, right? Everything sealed up, so—

Did you feel like you needed a lawyer at that point?

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At your expense, attorney at your own expense?

Yes. Because I wasn’t a target, I had to pay for it. In any case, that’s an exciting story.

How much did you have to pay for your lawyer? Do you remember?

He was kind enough to charge me his hourly rate per day, because I was a career person, and he said, “I have a lot of people kind of like you, who are caught up in this thing.” I was making $50,000 a year, and I had no—How am I going to pay for this? It’s going to be $20,000 or something. I remember it being about $15K by the time I was done, because I had to do several hours of prep, and then we had a whole back-and-forth with the Starr team about our interviews, and then I think I did about five or six hours with them, so—

I appreciate your answering the question, because we did probably 140 interviews on the Clinton project, and talked to a lot of people who were obviously more deeply implicated in various dimensions than you were, and I’ve gotten that story before, but they were all at a very prominent, public level. You’re the first person I’ve talked with who would sort of fit in a lower dimension. I remember a lot of people talking about how concerned they were for people like you.

Like me. Yes. Oh, yes, people were really—We’ve gotten to know [Margaret] Maggie Williams really well, so as we got more political in our lives, we’ve gotten to know many people who, of course, had unbelievable amounts of financial stress as a result of that. I remember saying, “Well, how is it possible? I’m a federal government employee. How is it possible that I’m responsible for this thing that I didn’t have anything to do with, and I have to pay it back personally? That doesn’t make any sense to me.” Obviously, I was not senior enough to even have a friends-of kind of fund or whatever, so thank God for that lawyer, whose name I don’t remember. But he was like—

You can add it. [laughs]

—“I totally get it.” And he said, “By the way, you’re not the only one, and it’s not like it’s going to take tons of time, because you didn’t have anything to do with it, really, so it’s just prep time and getting stuff together.” So that was my drama. Yes, you like that? [laughter]

Yes, thank you. Well, that’s the subtext: you’re having to deal with this at the same time that you’re dealing with some very important issues at the office, right?

Sure, yes.

OK.

To be fair, a lot of people, obviously—I remember the Lewinsky moments very well, and, in an odd confluence of events, my brother was working on the Hill at the time, in the House; my best friend was clerking for the Supreme Court. So we had windows into this at a working level that a lot of other people didn’t have. I was on the floor of the State of the Union that year, when he was under impeachment. So, yes, all great, interesting, fascinating. Yes, we were trying to keep up a good face.

In the national security realm, it’s slightly different in that, obviously, the world continues. It was one of the few things where there was a sense that we could pick up the pieces. Clearly, all of our foreign interlocutors were completely confused about impeachment. They were saying, “Wait, so he’s impeached, but he’s still in office? What does this mean? Wait, is it illegal to have an affair? Presidents can’t have affairs?” I was saying, “Well, that’s not really it.” We had an FAQ [frequently asked questions] for people. Literally. [laughter] You know what I mean? The President of France said, “I’m totally confused now. I don’t understand. What’s going on? What is this story?” It was very confusing at the time, so we spent a lot of time just trying to keep business as usual going, recognizing that there was this subtext. And, yes, at the time bin Laden was still floating around underneath. We had a lot of stuff going on.

So you were paying attention to bin Laden at the time?

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Did you get the sense when the Bush administration came in—I know you were moving out—

Yes, I was already gone by the time—

Yes, you were already gone, but—

I left a year before the transition, but I know about the transition.

Is that right?

Was there any sense that the Bush people weren’t very interested in the whole terrorism thing?

They were not very interested in this. And I remember Sandy feeling very frustrated, because he said, “I don’t know how to convey this with more intensity,” where they had—

“He” being Sandy?

Sandy, yes. They spent a lot of time, obviously—He was close to Condi [Condoleezza Rice]. They spent a lot of time together. They knew each other really well. And he kept saying, “Well, listen, you’re going to spend a lot of time on this,” and they were focused on other stuff. They were trying to pick up the pieces from where they left off on Russia and Europe and all the rest of it, so he said, “Yes, I’m guaranteeing you that that is not what your agenda is going to be.” And he said they kind of were listening, but not in a really profound way. Yes, there was, I would say, high, high frustration on his part about that. Yes.

And, Mona, you said you’d left a year before then?

Yes. I left in May of 2000.

OK, so you were working with Sandy until that point?

Yes.

And where did you go from there?

I went to an internet startup called Currenex, which is the first internet-backed foreign currency exchange platform, in Silicon Valley. I split my time between there and New York and London for about a year. The dotcom bubble was going bust—well, went bust soon after I made the transition. But part of the reason I wanted to do that is I was really interested—There was this thing called the internet that arrived while I was busy off in the Balkans or whatever, and I was totally fascinated by it.

You and [Albert] Al Gore [Jr.]. [laughter]

Yes, exactly, me and Al Gore, right. He had invented it, and I was kind of like, I need to know what this is about. Yes, so that’s what I went to go do. I was the 30th employee at this startup, classic kind of Silicon Valley thing. It was great, really interesting. I thought I wanted to go into banking. This seemed like an interesting mix of areas, and I really wanted something small after being in the federal government—this big, sprawling, annoying bureaucracy, driving me crazy. I thought that was the end of my federal career, and I was just going to go off and do tech banking; I wasn’t sure exactly what.

But one of the things you should know is I met my husband in the Situation Room in the Clinton administration, which is, by the way, how I ended up being more political, so that becomes more relevant over time. [laughs]

All right, well, tell us the story.

As many people have said, we have one of the best meet-cutes in the world, which is that we met in the Situation Room when we were planning the Wye River Summit. The way the Clinton administration travel office worked was that we had a team of people who did trip advance planning dedicated to the National Security Council, because most of our trips are overseas. Obviously, moving the President overseas is a much different undertaking than if you’re going to Iowa or whatever. So we had a dedicated team of people, and those were the only people, really, from the domestic scheduling advance trip office we ever dealt with. Because the Wye River Summit was happening on U.S. ground, they gave us a domestic team.

I would typically go to these meetings, but I was late to this one in particular. I had my seat in the Situation Room for our meetings, and I went and sat down. And across from Sandy was my future husband. Sandy was busy yelling at him about the setup of the tables or something, and I remember thinking, Oh, he’s pretty attractive. [laughter] African American man. I was thinking, There aren’t that many of us. Never seen him before. Who is he?

In the Situation Room, of all places.

I wonder who he is. He’s, meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, thinking the same thing: Who is that? How come I’ve never seen her before? I know all the black people who are in the White House. How is it possible? At the end of the meeting we say hello, but that’s basically it, because it’s a big, crowded room, and I was going off to another meeting, and my husband said—Clyde [Williams]—he said later, “I turned around after chatting with some people to go look for you and you were gone.”

About three weeks later, a friend of ours hosted a Super Bowl party; I walked in the door, and he was there. And I thought, That’s the person who I just met in the Situation Room a couple of weeks ago. And then it turned out we, of course, knew everybody in common, because we were right that we should have known each other, and we realized that friends of ours had been telling us about the other for a while.

Is that right?

Yes.

And what was his background?

Clyde’s was all domestic politics, really. He worked in the D.C. City Council, for the chair of the City Council, for many years.

Was he a D.C. native?

He was a D.C. native, born and raised, southeast D.C. in Anacostia. Got involved in local politics. Got involved in campaigns. A friend of his had been volunteering as an advance person for the second Clinton Presidential campaign. Clyde was one of these people who said, “I’ll go anywhere or do anything,” so they deployed him all over the country, going to random places during the campaign. Then, at the end, they offered him a job at the Agriculture Department. He was there for a little while, in the Press Office, and then he got a promotion into the Advance Office in the White House. We overlapped only for about four months, because then he became deputy chief of staff for Agriculture, and he was there until the end of the Clinton administration.

OK, so he was out in the Ag Department. OK.

Until the end, and then he became Clinton’s domestic policy advisor in New York. That’s how we ended up in New York.

OK, and how long did he do that?

He worked for the foundation for the first four years, and so was his righthand person.

All in New York.

All in New York, yes. So he worked for the foundation there. We used to laugh and say he was really working for Hillary, because she was a Senator then. So he was dealing with the policy and politics of New York City, dealing with the African American politics there, dealing with the policy stuff. He came up with the first what became CGI [Clinton Global Initiative]. He came up with the Small Business Initiative that Clinton developed. He came up with most of the programming that they did early on, and then he left. He did some consulting. He worked for the Center for American Progress. And then that takes us to Obama, if you want to talk about Obama.

Sure. Well, we’re headed that direction.

Yes, I figured you were.

We’re making good time.

Yes, OK.

All right, so, just to bridge, you do the dotcom thing. Take us on the trajectory from there to—

Two thousand seven?

Yes.

Yes, I went to a dotcom startup. That lasted for about a year until the dotcom bubble went bust, and I thought, OK, am I going to stay in Silicon Valley? Am I going to go into foreign exchange? No to both of those. And Sandy was starting his consulting firm, Stonebridge. So I went there. I was the fourth or fifth employee there, and then ultimately became a managing director there. So I worked for Sandy’s firm; this is before it became Albright Stonebridge. Worked for Stonebridge basically from 2001 until I went into the Obama administration, first in D.C., then in New York, when Clyde was in New York, and then he and I did this ridiculous commute back and forth between D.C. and New York for the last couple of years.

We got married along the way. We had our first child, our daughter. Still going back and forth, which was completely ridiculous, through the [John] Kerry election. After Kerry lost, we were thinking, OK, we ought to just settle down. We bought an apartment in New York. We were perfectly settled, planning on staying in New York. Clyde had left the Clinton Foundation, was doing his own consulting work, bought a company with some friends. I was working for Stonebridge. I wrote a book in the interim. Perfectly happy, doing my thing, all of that.

Then, lo and behold, there’s this guy Barack Obama. Obviously, we’d seen his speech in 2004. He was running for the Senate, and a friend of ours, who I had worked with years earlier, a partner at a law firm in Chicago, calls me—We were some of the few political people he knew. He called and said, “I’m going to quit my job to go work for Barack Obama, his Senate campaign.” And I said, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life.” [laughter] And he said, “Why?” And I said, “Well, isn’t that the guy who lost to Bobby [Lee] Rush like 90-10?” And he said, “Yes, yes. But have you met him?” I said, “I don’t need to meet him, OK? His name is Barack Obama. He lost to Bobby Rush. He’s not going to be Senator.” [laughter]

Check.

Yes. “I don’t need to see him, I don’t need to talk to him, I don’t need anything, because that is a crazy idea.” He did it anyway. He was right, we were wrong, whatever. I remember Clyde and me saying, “Yes, he’s super talented, but way early,” like everybody was saying, “way early,” et cetera.

Way early for—?

For him to have any national, real profile or anything, right? So he wins, obviously, and like many things with Obama, there’s a lot of luck involved in that, as we all know. So he arrives in Washington. Clyde and I had not yet met him, but we had a mutual friend named Cassandra [Quin] Butts, who probably has come up in your research. But we knew Cassandra from CAP [Center for American Progress]. She’d worked for [Richard] Gephardt. She knew Obama.

He was very interested in having a diverse staff in his Senate office, and she knew that we knew Pete Rouse really well. Tom Daschle had lost. Pete was planning on retiring. We were a small handful of people who called Pete and said, “Pete, why don’t you just volunteer with this guy Barack Obama, to help him out? You don’t have to stay very long. We know you don’t want to work anymore in the Senate. You’ve been serving a long time.” He said, “I don’t think I want to do it.” We said, “Come on, help him get his committee assignments, get him his staff, get his feet wet,” et cetera. Needless to say, [laughs] he said yes, stayed on much longer than he thought he would. And we got other people involved in the office, as well. A bunch of the people early on are friends of friends of ours, or people that we vetted on behalf of the team there, so we had ties to him, but we still hadn’t actually met him.

Let me ask this: so why would he trust your vetting without some personal tie and connection?

I think what was happening, really, is that he trusted Cassandra and a couple of other people to vet people, and they didn’t have connections with the people they were trying to get to—

And you did.

—and they trusted us.

And they trusted you, right.

Yes. And they weren’t interviewing the people, but they were interested in a person’s reputation, how are they going to get along with people. At the time—I think it’s still probably the case—people thought we knew a lot of people, which we did, domestic and international.

And when you say “they,” is this now the Senator—Was it the Senator and Michelle [Obama], as well?

No, this is still Cassandra, because this is in his transition, really. I think because we were helpful with the Pete Rouse thing is part of the reason why—

Right, you got some credibility.

—they would come back and say, “Well, now, what about this?” And Pete had always worked with Clyde a lot on African American politics when it came to Daschle.

Oh, is that right?

He was a trusted person in the Clinton White House for dealing with ag [agriculture]-related issues, which is how he and Pete got to know each other. They had a long relationship on dealing with political issues, and Clyde knew a lot of folks from his time. Clyde had been involved in every Presidential campaign since Jesse Jackson [Sr.], so he knew a lot of national African American figures, as well. He was a source of relationships and that kind of thing for lots of folks, including Pete and Cassandra. That’s kind of how we got into the Obama orbit a little bit.

So Obama arrived in town. The first time I met him was at a fundraiser at some apartment up on Capitol Hill. Somebody said, “Do you want to come?” and I said, “Not really, because I don’t really want to donate any money, and I feel like I’ve helped him already.” [laughter] They said, “Oh, you can come as my guest. We’re just trying to fill the room,” et cetera. It was really small, probably 20 people.

And the year?

This was right after he arrived, so the fall—I remember it being cold, so maybe right after he was sworn in. It might have even been before he was sworn in and he was already raising money, but it was—

Oh, so he was raising money for the next campaign already?

Well, he had a PAC [political action committee], like a lot of leadership people. It might have been for his leadership PAC. He had already had a federal fundraising thing going at that point. So I remember going. It was really small. He started talking. I remember getting incredibly bored. [laughter]

Wow.

And I thought, This guy delivers a great speech, but wow, talk about underwhelming. And I sat down with another friend in another room, and we started chatting. He was answering questions. Oh my God, how long is this going to go? [laughter] is what I remember thinking. But we went to a lot of events like that, with a lot of Members of Congress. He wasn’t any worse than anyone else, but you have high expectations because my only interaction before that had been watching his 2004 speech. I realized that lots of people had that reaction, because of course you’re not bringing it like that in a room with 25 people, right?

Fast-forward into—We were some of the first people, I think, to learn that maybe he was thinking about running for President. We got together with Pete for dinner at one point, and he said, “Obama’s thinking about making a run for office, between us,” this small group of people. Clyde and I laughed and said, “Yes, right, whatever.” Maybe about a couple of months later—Actually, he called to have Clyde come over to his office, and I wish I could remember the exact day—I have it in here, the timeline of when he actually announced. But this is well before there were rumors. I mean, there were rumors in Washington that he was thinking about running, but there was no real evidence yet that that was actually happening. At one point it started to leak that he was thinking about it seriously and that Michelle Obama was resisting. This was well before that. But he called Clyde over to the Senate office—

“He” being Pete?

Well, to see the Senator. And Clyde had to bring my daughter, because he was with her, and so she was playing on the rug. [laughter] He said Obama comes in, and he said, “Well, Pete thinks really highly of you, and I just wanted to let you know I’m going to run for President.” And my husband said, “President of what?” [laughter] Obama said, “President of the United States.” And Clyde thought, OK.

Clyde said, “Well, that’s kind of the worst news I’ve ever heard.” And Obama said, “Why do you say that?” And Clyde said, “Because I’ve been really loyal to the Clintons all of this time. I know she’s going to run. This would be just the worst thing for me personally, but thanks for letting me know.” Obama said, “I knew you were going to say that. Pete told me that’s basically what you would likely say.” And he said, “But when I win the nomination, I’m going to need your help, and I hope I can count on that.” And my husband said, “Oh, yes, of course, sure, right, absolutely, right.”

He leaves the meeting and he calls me and he says, [whispers] “He has a drug problem.” [laughter] OK, he’s 30 percent down in the polls. Yes, he’s raising money, but he’s got no shot at all whatsoever. It wasn’t “if I’m the nominee;” it was “when I’m the nominee.” And Clyde said, “So I said yes, but of course I didn’t believe it at all.” And I said, “Well, it’s interesting you say that, because I had a conversation with Pete literally this afternoon, and he said, ‘Would you consider joining a little group on foreign policy?’”

Pete was pulling a small group of people together. It was going to be Susan [Elizabeth Rice] and Samantha [Jane Power], who I knew from the Balkans, and Denis [McDonough], who I knew. So it was this little small group of people—Tony Lake, Brooke Anderson, Greg Craig—and I remember thinking, If you could have picked my favorite people to work with, of all the people that I worked with, this is a really great group of people. This was a very self-selecting group at the time, because I think there was a chill factor when it came to the Clintons, right? So it was perceived to be “risky” to be joining the Obama team that early on, for people who were like me.

Can I ask a question? It was reported in the press at some point, where Senator Daschle played some role in Obama deciding to run. Is that true? Was Pete the go-between that led to the speculation that Daschle did this, or was it actually—?

Yes, Pete was definitely somebody instrumental in building a relationship between Daschle and Obama, as somebody who could say, “This is how the Senate works.” The thing that Pete did the best for Obama ever is just teaching him how to be a Senator, and to understand how the Senate actually works, and how to plot his course and his path and use the leverage that he had appropriately for somebody who’s a junior Senator. One of the things was to build relationships with people who could be really helpful as a sounding board. Yes, my understanding is that—I wasn’t there, obviously, but among many people—that Obama did his quiet soundings with people about “What do you think?” and Daschle was one of these people. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

What Obama knew is that when you can see the clouds forming on the horizon but the storm cloud hasn’t come yet, that’s when you can capture the moment. Obviously, he was able to do that; [Donald] Trump was able to do that—when you can see that forming. And so he had that skill. A lot of people could see that he was going to be a formidable national politician, and there were a few people saying, “Why wait? Because, yes, you’re already a national politician, but when you lose, you’re fine. You’re running again, then you’re great for the next round. But what if you actually can pull this off now? There’s really no downside to you.” It’s not like he was going to be loving the Senate. That was pretty clear from the very beginning. That that was not his long-term resting place.

Well, there’s no downside to you if you think there’s ever going to be an opportunity for you to be elected President of the United States, right? That’s, in some respects, the most audacious—

Oh, yes. I don’t know if you guys are going to talk to David Axelrod, but he tells a great story about that in his book.

We certainly hope so, but—

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But I wasn’t aware of that dynamic necessarily at that moment. The way I saw it at the time, very simply, was here’s a person who I think is great, I think has zero shot at being President of the United States, but I’m always complaining that no compelling people get into politics. Here’s somebody who’s willing to wreck his life. I’ve already seen what this is like, so if you’re willing to do this, the least I can do is help you along with the foreign policy bits, and there’s actually something to do. So I said yes immediately. Didn’t talk to Clyde, didn’t talk to anybody else.

You’re talking about yes to the group, the small group?

Yes, to this foreign policy group. I said, “Absolutely. I’m happy to do whatever.” And I remember then telling my boss at the time, Sandy, who I was working for, and he said, “You can’t do that.” I said, “Why not?” And he said, “Because we’re helping Hillary.” I said, “No, no, no, you’re helping Hillary. I’m just—” And he said, “But you’re not a Hillary person?” I said, “Well, Hillary doesn’t need me. She needs you. If she’s got a question about North Korea, she’s not calling me; she’s calling you.” [laughter] “And by the way, she already knows everything about North Korea. He actually has views that are still being formed. It’s actually fun and interesting.”

Sandy said, “Well, they’re really going to look at this negatively.” And I said, “I don’t really care, because I’m not planning on going back into federal government anyway. In fact, if they hate me that’s even better, because then I really don’t have to go back into government, [laughter] and I’m perfectly happy to stay out here in the consulting world.” That’s kind of how that unfolded. And then our firm, because our firm was a snapshot of the dynamics at the time. Warren Rudman was our vice chair at the time. He was [John] McCain’s [III] finance chair. We had a bunch of Hillary people; we had McCain people; we had Obama people. In our staff meetings, people were barely on speaking terms at various points as things unfolded and it got heated. It was very funny.

Can I ask you to elaborate on that a little more? It’s a fascinating problem, because Hillary has an existing community of people she’s going to rely on. Was that a surmountable problem for her? Could she have been more inclusive, or sought out new voices in a way that might have forestalled some of this movement in other directions? Or is it just in the nature of the business that if you develop these long-standing relationships over time, you’re just going to rely on them?

A little bit of both. I’d say my husband helped her during the race, so we had a little split household; we had a cone of silence in the middle. I remember him watching the campaign unfold, and him saying, “You guys are running a much better campaign.” It was just really clear, almost from the beginning. The way you saw it in foreign policy was exactly as you suggested, which is everybody has their brain trust of people that they rely on. In Obama’s case, it was a smaller core group, and a lot of it was really Tony Lake, because Tony was the only one who had really been at the intersection of everything, at that level. I’m not sure that the Clintons have reconciled since.

Is that right?

Yes, it was very ugly at the time, because they saw it as a betrayal. He had worked with them for a long time, and he was a magnet for other people. It gave Obama’s campaign credibility at a time when he really needed it on foreign policy.

But, yes, they started off with a theory—You saw this also on the fundraising—that they basically had a platform, which was true. They controlled the party; they controlled the party apparatus; they controlled the donors; and they controlled the elite policy thinkers in Washington. And anybody, myself included, who had been nestled in politics and policy—If you had served at all, you probably served in the Clinton administration, some people going back to Carter, but most people in Clinton. So they came into it saying, “We basically have everybody we need.”

Obama had the complete opposite view. At the very beginning, when we started these policy councils, I worked with Jeff Bader on the Asia one, and I worked with Bruce Riedel on the South Asia one. The way I got those is because I said, “I’ll do whatever,” and they said, “OK, we have Asia, South Asia,” and I said, “OK, fine, I’ll take that.”

I remember our first calls with him, so early on that he used to hop on our policy calls, and say just, “Guys, I’m really glad everybody’s doing this. Thanks for your help.” At this point, I think there were only four people working on all of South Asia, including Afghanistan, and five people working on East Asia, including China. It was a ridiculously small group of people, but he would hop on the phone, “Oh, guys, it’s so great. Thanks for taking the time,” blah, blah, blah. I remember afterward he’d say, “You have to figure out something for people to feel like they’re contributing.”

So we created a system; at the beginning it was really easy, because there was a lot of work to do. But as he gained momentum, it got harder and harder, and I remember at one point telling him, “This Asia policy group is now like a hundred people. These calls are too large and I have no idea who these people are.” Our only rule was you can’t speak for the campaign. We did have to fire a couple of people because they went out to the press and said things. We said, “You have no authorization to have said that,” and then we had to say, “Sorry. You just have to go elsewhere.” But for the most part, Obama’s view was “It’s on you to figure out how to get people to feel like they’re contributing, but I want it to be an open tent. I want everybody who wants to contribute to have something to do.” So I said, “OK, we’ll figure it out.” [laughter] So we figured it out.

Why did you do this? Because you said earlier, right, the Clinton side, they sort of controlled the Democratic apparatus, and even a lot of the folks who you would go to, the go-to folks, to start a Democratic campaign at that time. You were experienced somewhat, and you knew, looking at this, as you said, this guy’s on something if he thinks he’s going to be President, then why would you join the effort—

I just really liked him. I’ve felt like, over the years—I still feel this way—other people see him as this very inscrutable figure, and I don’t know if it’s because we’re both biracial kids or in the same general—I mean, I’m a little younger than him, but we come in a similar demographic band, or whatever, but we always just connected somehow. I always understood where he was coming from. I even understood his interest, his fascination with Asia. There are so many common views about how we saw the world, how we saw the U.S. place in the world, how we saw our place in society together, that there were lots of things—We just really didn’t have to talk that way.

I just felt a connection with him, and I thought he was really compelling. People would say, “Why are you doing this?” I got the question all the time. They would say, “You realize you could be Deputy National Security Advisor in the Clinton administration, and you’re throwing all that away for this guy who’s not going to be President of the United States.” And I would say, “Yes, but I don’t really care that much. I want to help this person because I actually think he’s really great. And I know the Washington thing is what people want, but that’s not really what’s motivating me, so—”

You mentioned in passing that this was an opportunity to educate Obama about foreign policy, because that wasn’t what he knew a lot about coming in.

Yes.

Is there kind of a trajectory to that? Are there points where you can really make a difference in how he’s thinking, and points when maybe he’s too busy with everything else?

Yes. The best thing about getting into a campaign like that early on, when nobody thinks you have a shot, is that you can sit down and just have a baseline conversation, like, “What do you think about the relationship with the U.S. and China? Have you ever thought, really, about what you would do on North Korea? Do you come into this with strong views about certain things—trade, the hot-button issues that are likely to be on a campaign?” Most issues aren’t going to touch the campaign, so I didn’t think we were going to get deep into a lot of nuanced whatever, but just the high-level, “Do you come at this with a really strong view about the U.S. in the world?” And he had a very strong view about the U.S. projection of power, very thoughtful about those things. But as a policy matter, our main goal was to get him on the record on some things.

We did a little analysis. For example, he had never uttered the words “Japan–U.S. alliance.” He had never talked publicly about our military bases in South Korea, so we spent time building a public record, to just put him on the record on little, simple things, and putting things in the Congressional Record. You can do that any time, putting statements in, so we had a very clear plan to just lay the breadcrumbs. Then as the campaign went forward, we were really focused more with the guts of the campaign on places where his background would intersect very nicely with the electoral push, a place like Virginia, for example. We spent a lot of time with the South Asian and East Asian communities in Northern Virginia. We deployed people to the Midwest to focus on the Southeast Asian population. We deployed people to Nevada, because who knew that the largest growing Filipino population in the country at that point was in Reno, because there were Filipino card dealers there. We had a whole outreach of people; if you can speak Tagalog, we want you on the local Filipino radio station. We were connecting foreign policy people who came with expertise to the campaign.

So, yes, he had a very strong view about the diversity of the United States, and how all those voices needed to be in the campaign. We said, “You don’t have anything against Japan.” He said, “No, I love Japan.” We said, “OK, well, we’re going to put it on the record, then, that you love Japan, because that’s a good thing to have if you’re going to be President of the United States.”

I got a very good sense of how he liked to be briefed, because we were doing briefing books for trips. We staffed the trip to Afghanistan that he went on as—He hadn’t been looking Commander-in-Chief-like, so one of the things we had to have him do, in his first trip to Germany as a candidate, very intentional, to make him look Presidential. One of the things we realized, he could look more Presidential outside the United States than in, so being on Black Hawk helicopters, and landing in a military base. There’s nothing in the U.S. like Afghanistan that’ll give you those images coming back.

So, yes, I would say we had a pretty clear sense of how he thought about the world, what he wanted to accomplish. But even then, he also let people do their thing.

During this process, and even after, how much did things that were written in the press and things like pundits, like myself and others, might say did you all follow and respond to along the way? Did that stuff matter? Was someone paying attention to—

Yes, it mattered. We had a pretty good operation—I mainly saw it from the foreign policy end. I’d say the way it started to happen initially was very ad hoc, and it would literally be there would be some press story and there’d be a little bit of a tizzy, but eventually they had a system where Denis and Mark [Lippert] were in the campaign, technically. We were outside the campaign. We had a daily operation that was almost like a press operation, where we would get questions that we would have to do a book by 10:00 and get responses in. Volunteers would basically write those, and I would vet them, along with Jeff or with Bruce Riedel, and then send them forward. If there was something really controversial that somebody had written, or people felt like, “Yes, we’ve really got to push back on that; how are we going to do it? When are we going to do it? Where are we going to do it?”—I’d say kind of midway in the campaign it got to be much more structured. So, yes, they paid attention to that, but there’s a limit to that, too, and obviously as it went on, it got more and more political and less substantive.

Well, I want to go back and ask a question about Tony Lake, who is critical to your own journey; you’ve already talked about that. It is striking that he sort of becomes the core figure, it seems, in the development of a foreign policy team, because this is a guy who had known the Clintons for some time, didn’t have really deep roots with them. But do you know why he felt compelled, if that’s the right word, to move to work with Barack Obama, and to take that step away from the Clintons?

Yes. I remember talking to him over the years about various nominees or whatever, and when I’d come to Washington we’d get together, and he would give me career advice and such. I remember at one point saying, even when—I had written him a note, or I’d seen him—This is before Clinton had gotten elected—and I said, “So what do you think of this race? You’re involved with Clinton.” And he said, “Yes, he’s the one.” He said, “My nose tells me he’s the one.” And he said he’d been involved in politics all along.

So when Obama emerged—He must have realized I was going to get involved in this, but I remember him saying at one point, “Oh, yes, that’s great. It was great to see your name on the list.” So that suggests to me that he hadn’t really been consulted. And I said, “Yes, how did you get involved with him?” He said, “He’s just the one.”

So you didn’t get the sense there was any particular alienation from Hillary’s network.

No.

OK. Here’s what I—

I mean, there could have been.

Right, but it was not something that was—

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That’s very illuminating, and that gets to what I was wanting to inquire about, because we spent a lot of time talking with Clinton people, and the two interviews that we did with Tony Lake are some of the most memorable ones. At some point you should go back and read—You probably already know them anyway, but they were just fascinating accounts of his experience with the Clintons. I had wondered, because there was a sort of foul-up with the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] appointment—

Oh, yes, I totally forgot about that. Yes.

—whether that might have soured one or the other of the parties. But then the other thing that is always a bit impenetrable to those of us on the outside, even those of us who’ve spent a lot of time on the close periphery, is I’m never quite sure I know where the fissures are between Bill world and Hillary world, particularly when it comes to senior people in the orbits. Who is it that bridges between Bill and Hillary land, or who is it that’s in Bill world but is persona non grata in Hillary land?

Yes. I could tell you, if you really want. [laughter] I could get into it.

Well, OK, well, I don’t know that—

Yes, but you’re right, though, that there are people who are bridges, and that’s—The way I always called the Clintons is that it’s onion layers, right? You just peel the onion, and at the core, core group there always have been just a handful of people who are trusted in the two worlds. And then, yes, some people are bridges between the two, and then there are people who are only in the one, yes.

Right.

But I always felt like Tony tried to stay out of that a little bit more. Sandy was definitely in the inner core.

Of course.

And Sandy had worked for Tony, which is how Tony got in. Tony was always a little bit like, “That’s not really my thing. I’m here to do a job, and that’s somebody else’s thing.”

Exactly. So there’s that piece of it, which is that there are these two universes, and then there’s the other piece that you’ve touched on, which is a sort of presumptiveness about loyalty. I’m trying to be careful, because I don’t want to impute any bad motives to anybody, but there’s a sense that you’re going to be on the team unless you’re dismissed. And that presumptiveness seems to have created problems for the Clintons, as it related to recruitment of a younger generation of people in the foreign policy community. The best evidence of this is Sandy’s own lack of awareness that people like yourself might be eager to get involved in something in a substantial way, right? I’m sort of throwing that out there, trying to get you to help illuminate this riddle for me.

The way to think about it is that for most people who are creatures of Washington—We’re talking about that rarefied group of people who are political appointees who are also national security people—but political appointees generally, there is a caution about who you get involved with. You’re seeing it in this cycle, which is part of the reason why a lot of people haven’t gotten behind anybody. People want to be with who they think the winner is going to be. They don’t want to expose themselves too early.

There’s a natural, I’d say, conservatism and hesitancy. I had lots of people saying, “Oh my God, I love Obama! I would love to work for Obama, but I really want to serve, and I’m worried that I will be perceived as being disloyal.” REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Regardless of who the person is—People feel that way now about Obama, too—there is a sense that you really should stick with this person. The reason I didn’t feel it at that same level, I was not a political appointee; I was a career Foreign Service officer. I was on a career trajectory that was actually fine [laughs] beforehand. Yes, I know them, but it’s not like my whole career was tied to them, so I don’t feel that same level of connection. And I assume, but I don’t know for sure, that Tony Lake was probably feeling like he had already been a senior State Department official as a career; he had already worked for another President. He was in the Foreign Service during the [Richard] Nixon years. He’d already been, in the Carter administration, a prominent person. You only have so much of your career that you really owe to the Clintons, so I suspect that that is actually a lot of what is in people’s psychology.

Now, the Clintons, I’m sure, felt like everybody who touched the Clinton administration in any way, shape, or form, well, must be loyal.

That’s the point, yes.

So, yes.

Were there instances of retaliation against people who showed disloyalty?

Oh, yes, sure. Of course, yes. Always in politics, yes.

So it wasn’t just suspected—

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But a part of this, I suppose, is inevitable if you unexpectedly have a source of competition within the party that nobody saw coming.

Yes. Think about it: at the time, my husband was literally saying, “Your middle name is ‘Hussein,’ OK. You got to D.C. five minutes ago. You, yes, had a great speech, and you can fill up a stadium or whatever, but she has raised ten times more money than you. She’s 30 points ahead of you. They control the party apparatus, so every state party chair, every delegate, everybody in the DNC [Democratic National Committee], all of the apparatus of Democratic politics, every single mayor, is beholden to this family, and you think you’re going to come from nowhere and not only challenge but topple the whole enterprise.” It’s just a level of a kind of hubris that, as you saw, with the Clintons, they’re like, “Are you kidding? This is definitely not happening.”

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One lesson you could draw from that, then, is that there was some complacency?

Oh, yes. They relied too heavily on the presumption that their power base, which was very strong, but also had atrophied in eight years—Times change, the demographics change. You have a whole group of voters who have never heard of them. We were meeting people who would say, “Who’s Bill Clinton?” Literally, “Who’s Bill Clinton?” There was a certain amount of thinking that you could pick up where you left off, and that’s always really dangerous in politics, because you can never go back. You always have to go forward. In retrospect, had they taken him a lot more seriously at the beginning, she probably would have been the nominee. By the time they realized, it was too hard. David Plouffe ran such an interesting campaign at the time.

A friend of ours interviewed to be their delegate counter, an African American guy. He had been on the southern desk for the DNC, a classic kind of person who becomes a delegate math person. He went for his interview. We kind of teed him up, and we thought, He’s a good person, because he knows a bunch of the different desks, and he’ll know how to do the delegate math. We called him after the interview and we said, “How did it go?” He said, “It didn’t go very well.” And we said, “Really? That’s interesting, because you’re one of the most senior people who’s done this.” And he said, “Yes, they were asking me about all these byzantine rules on Nevada, and how they allocate delegates; Nebraska 1, and how these all work.” And he said, “I haven’t actually done the math. I mainly do the state-level stuff. I haven’t actually done the math in a really long time.”

They hired somebody who was much junior to this person, who used to work for this person. He was stunned, but it was because they were actually doing delegate math all the way along. By the time she realized that she was in trouble, the math was kind of a fait accompli. And some of the things they had done to change the order of the states—You remember all the delegate rules they tried to go back and change, because they realized the math was already baked, and it was too late at that point.

I have a question about this notion that, for lack of a better word, campaigns hold grudges if you become disloyal. So it’s certainly not just the Clintons.

No.

Did President Obama, in his campaign—If someone left, or you didn’t get someone, was that also the case, where that person becomes someone who—? I ask because as one who teaches young students who think, OK, maybe you come together for the good of policy; you’re on the same team—

No.

—and so these people would go over. You would then leave. Obama, had he also said, “Sure, come on, we need you, we want you, your expertise,” and that’s not the case in how it works?

It depends. It can work that way, and sometimes it does work that way. For the policy wonk people—I’d put myself in the policy wonk world, more than the Tammany Hall world—In the policy wonk world, that is more likely to work, and that’s mainly because there are only so many nonproliferation experts running around, [laughter] or counterterrorism, and we’ve all worked together. We all know and love each other, or sometimes hate each other, but we all know each other. When I get together for conferences with people, literally some of these people I’ve been working with for 30 years. They’re like friends and family almost, so it’s easier to get over the pain and the ugliness of the campaign. Part of it is we are less political to begin with, and part of it is because we have long-standing relationships. We actually care about the policy.

For the political people, those grudges can last a long time. The grudge between the Clinton and the Obama factions, elements of it lasted the entire time we were there. It just did, because the campaign was very ugly, because campaigns can get very ugly, and they can get very nasty behind the scenes, and people get very emotional about it, and very committed to their candidate, and they’re devastated when they lose. There’s nothing like a losing campaign. It’s like nothing you’ve ever felt in terms of elation and defeat. Maybe being at the Olympics, I guess. I don’t know, but so it’s very difficult to not hold a grudge. People do stitch back together, but sometimes it’s kind of halfhearted at that. Sometimes campaigns are better at stitching it together than others, and it just depends on how it goes. Obviously, in this last election, the Clinton/Bernie [Sanders] thing, they never really healed it, never really got it together. The Clinton/Obama people did better, but it wasn’t great.

I have to imagine that if you were in a reelect situation and your senior campaign people then went to go work for your competitor, that that would be the kiss of death for you. Obviously, Obama didn’t have that. I don’t know who that would have—People, I guess, who worked for [Edward] Ted Kennedy against Carter. If you had Carter people leave to go work for Ted Kennedy, that would have been the kiss of death, I’m sure, with the Carter people.

Let me ask one more question on this, and then—Are you OK? You need to take a break for a second?

No, I’m good for now.

OK. It also strikes me that maybe the Clintons felt like they had kind of wrapped up Chicago. Is that a factor? Did they overestimate their ability to manage things because of the friends that they had in the area where Obama’s coming out of?

I do think there was not a clear appreciation, I suppose, of the power of the Obama connections in the Chicagoland space. Part of that is, yes, Hillary’s got long-standing ties in Illinois, but I wouldn’t say that it was really their strength. They’d really spent most of their time in Arkansas and Washington and elsewhere. So Ax and, by that time, Valerie Jarrett, people that now seem like household names but were already kind of powerhouse figures in Chicago politics—I’m not sure how aware they were of that.

They knew a lot of the House Members quite well. As you recall, lots of House Members, including the CBC, the Congressional Black Caucus, were not huge fans of Obama, so to the extent they were asking, they were probably getting, “Eh, don’t worry about him, he’s not a factor,” et cetera. They were probably getting mixed signals.

I was going to be on a book tour. I was having a second baby. “This is going to be great. I’m going to volunteer for you. You’ll be out by February. My book tour’s going to start, and then we’re all going to go on.” And he’d say, “You have no faith in me at all.” And I said, “Your middle name’s ‘Hussein,’ for God’s sake!” [laughter] I said, “It’s not you. I have faith in you; I just don’t have faith in all these other people, OK?”

I was kind of with the most affirmative of people, but still highly skeptical. How could you not be? Everybody else, I would say, was that much more skeptical, really until South Carolina. It was understandable why they’re getting signals from everybody saying, “Yes, don’t worry about him. Yes, he’s a flash in the pan. Yes, he’s good.” If anything, they probably thought, at the beginning at least, maybe he could be good, because he’s good at getting crowds—

Motivating people.

—he could be a great VP [Vice President] candidate. I’m sure you guys remember the little outreach, “Maybe we should have a joint ticket and you could be the Vice President.” And he was, of course, like, “Oh, you mean you want to be my Vice President? Of course.” There was this feeling, OK, he could be good, because he’s motivating people. He’s bringing all these people into the party. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, until you’re actually winning, obviously.

Gotcha. All right, terrific. So tell us what you’re doing during the campaign, then.

During the campaign I had a day job. I was still working my day job. [laughs]

Yes?

And the campaign’s unpaid?

Yes, unpaid. This is all as a volunteer. We created these little policy councils. There was this little senior leadership group that was maybe 15 people, and then we had these policy working groups underneath. I was nominally “running” the two policy working groups—South Asia, East Asia—with Jeff Bader and Bruce Riedel. We each had a volunteer staffer, and then we built out these teams of people. This included everything from a daily press briefing, if he was doing a trip or a meeting or whatever, and then later intersecting with the campaign. I was trying to come up with what I would call “the illusion of inclusion”—As these groups got bigger, what are we going to tell people to do where they feel like they’re contributing, but there’s really nothing to contribute to, because really what we need you to do is go knock on doors? Eventually we told people, “What we really need you to do is go knock on doors. If you speak a foreign language, let us know which one it is, and we’re deploying you to Wisconsin or whatever state it is that has that population. That’s the most valuable thing you can do.”

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Nope, nope. Yes. So, like most campaigns, they start slowly realizing, if we actually win this thing, what are we going to do?

Was there a sense that if you were open about having a transition team, that was either bad luck or would somehow—

Correct.

—play into the hands of the other team?

That it was presumptuous, potentially fatal to the campaign, that it seemed bad luck. It seemed like a bad idea all the way around. At the time, obviously, it’s the financial crisis. You can feel that coming. What would we do if we actually win? This is going to be a significant undertaking. And people were starting to have a “Ruh-roh” kind of feeling. So right after Labor Day—This is a very—

The transcriber may have a little trouble with that. [laughs]

Ruh-roh? Ruh-roh, yes, exactly. That’s a Scooby-Doo reference, for everybody who doesn’t get that.

Right, I understood it, but—[laughter]

OK, all right, yes. Be careful. Talk about the dog catching the bus. There was also starting to be a tremendous amount of outside interest in our meetings, as foreign policy types. Suddenly foreign officials were wanting to sit down for coffee; OK, how are we going to handle that? A lot of chatter, but nothing really formed. Then right after Labor Day, I got a call from Jim Steinberg, and I can’t remember who else—I don’t think it was Susan, but it might have been Susan—saying, “Would you be willing to join this little group to talk about what the transition is going to look like?”

We were tasked with pulling together what was an early briefing book of what a transition is about: first foreign calls, what do you do in the first couple of days, that kind of thing. How did all the other transitions work? Who did what? Now the Partnership for Public Service does a lot of this, and the laws obviously changed, but at the time we were flying blind a little bit. How did it work in the previous transition? Somebody, luckily, had a memo from back in the Clinton era of how they had done it, and we said, “Wow, OK.” But people knew that the Clinton transition in ’92 had fallen apart, so there was a little bit of, “OK, how do we think about all of this?” All the issues that we really needed to get our arms around. This is on the foreign policy side only.

We had a bunch of our senior people draft memos on the top issues that are going to need attention: Troop levels in Afghanistan. What are we going to do about trade in Asia? What are we going to do on the U.S.-China relationship? All the threshold issues that you would have to contemplate on a Middle East peace process, all in a memo. I don’t remember exactly who that went to, to be honest. I think it just went to Jim. Jim Steinberg and I think Susan were working on that together, and then ultimately it went to John Podesta, I think, and then to Obama.

This is all before the election. And then that started to get a little bit more real, all of it. At one point we had clean computers to be able to work on memos, because we were all being infiltrated. We were having a hard time emailing stuff around. Everybody’s email was infected constantly, so we were constantly trying to figure out how to get around stuff and communicate with each other as this inner core group.

Now, you know it’s infected how?

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Let me also ask this question. When you say that the campaign began to get calls from foreign leaders who were reading tea leaves and other kinds of—Who was managing the process on the campaign? Was it an open, anyone could go and talk—

No.

I’m asking that now in a contemporary sense, right, that when the campaign gets approached, what are the limits of what you do—

We were really, really—We were still in this strict rule-abiding mode, so that seems quaint and cute, [laughter] but Obama would say, “We have one government at a time,” and Tony Lake would say, “One government at a time.” On the other hand, we don’t want to stiff people and make people feel bad, either. So at some point—This was actually in the transition—Before the actual election, we were not meeting with anybody. In the transition, we had a one-government rule. Tony Lake did a lot of those meetings, so I went to some of them, with ambassadors or Foreign Ministers visiting. We were in listening mode, essentially.

With any approval of the government—?

No, we had a really good working relationship with the Bush people. I don’t remember if we told them, but we probably did: “This is who we’ve been approached by.” But we told them really honestly, openly, “We’re not engaging. We’re really listening. Your top-ten list, we’re happy to take it under advisement and call us in three months” or whatever. We were just being nice, basically. I forget who came to town, the Indians, maybe, and maybe the Pakistanis were there because the Indians were there. We were getting a lot of that—if the, whatever, Japanese came, then the Chinese came—kind of thing. So we had to deal with all of that. Once we said yes to a couple of people—I think we wanted to stop it at Canada and Mexico, and then, of course, the Europeans show up, so it was a whole thing. Tony, I think, was doing the bulk of that, so I was in a few of those.

Can I stop you and ask about the election itself?

Yes, sure.

Where were you?

[laughs] I was in D.C. I didn’t go to Grant Park. I was sick. We had moved from—In fact, I probably would not have gotten involved in the transition if we hadn’t actually moved to D.C. in the summer. I still was in this mode of I’m not going into the administration, because I had, at the time, a year-old child and a three-and-a-half-year-old child. I was like, I just don’t see going into the government, because I’ve already done this once, and, by the way, the world is ten times worse than it was when I was—We were dealing with little issues like Kosovo. How cute was that? So I can’t even imagine what the government would be like. I can’t have one of those 24/7 national security jobs, and I can’t think of anything else I would do.

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We were in the middle of moving into our house on election night, and I had gotten sick. I was literally in bed. I was watching it. I had to bring myself down. I had worked myself—By the end, of course, we were working pretty intensively, and because the quiet transition was really up and running in a pretty serious way, so I was already working ten-hour days. I was still technically at my firm, but I had stopped doing firm work a long time earlier. I was deep into it, I was exhausted, and we were in the middle of a move, so I got sick. I thought, OK, I get to watch all this on television, which is kind of a bummer, but such is life. That’s that.

All right.

Yes.

Well, let’s take a quick break. We’re probably coming up on lunch pretty soon anyway, but I’ve kept you at it for a while.

[BREAK]

All right, we got you past Election Day. You actually are with the formal transition.

Yes.

Paid basis, or still volunteer?

Paid.

You’re paid. All right, so how does that come about, and what are your formal responsibilities in the transition?

During the transition, I was on it really early. I was the first person to walk down the hall in the transition office with the guy who was the admin person, trying to figure out—

Oh, yes?

—what our real estate was going to be—Yes—for the national security team. I started off as the national security staffer person. It was Susan, Jim Steinberg, and me, I think, and then we had a small group of people, maybe ten of us, doing a mix of policy things. We were basically taking the memos, some of the stuff that we had done in the pretransition about the transition, and turning them into a briefing book for the actual transition for governing. That was our task from John. I was doing that for, I forget exactly, a couple of weeks.

Then we stood up what they called agency teams. Gayle Smith had been doing foreign policy personnel, and she got tapped to run the agency team for USAID [United States Agency for International Development], and they asked me if I would step into the role to do foreign policy personnel stuff. So I moved from my national security thing to the floor of people who were doing personnel. That was under Mike Froman, who was running personnel.

OK. Well, let me interrupt you, just to make sure I understand. When you said that you were on that first team, you said “National Security Council team,” I thought was what—Does that mean that there were other foreign policy teams that were doing similar work toward—

No.

OK. So it was actually a broader national security team—

Correct.

—that was you and Susan and Steinberg?

Yes. It was the beginning of what the NSC [National Security Council]—Well, the NSC and then the agency teams, right? It started off small, and then—yes.

OK, but the seat of action for all the foreign policy stuff is right there?

Correct.

OK. And then it transforms into the—

Personnel.

—the personnel piece for foreign policy that you’re doing.

For me, yes, right.

OK.

Can I also ask about this? At this time we have a Vice President—

Correct.

—who was an old foreign policy expert, had a lot of experience. Was that playing out in the work that you were doing? Was there—? One transition team, right, was—

Yes, one transition. I’m trying to think where the [Joseph R.] Biden [Jr.] people were. I don’t remember them having a huge presence in the transition in that way, in a palpable way, although his folks were around. So I don’t remember; you’re going to have to ask—

And he himself was not—?

Well, at that point the Obamas had not moved to D.C. yet, and then, you remember, they moved into Blair House at some point. I don’t remember seeing the Biden people around, and I know them all, so that’s why I’m saying—But they must have been floating around somewhere. At the very beginning, probably not, and then at some point yes, right? But I don’t remember when they surfaced.

But this activity that you’re involved with is all in Washington?

Yes, this is all in Washington. At that point we were going to Chicago a lot, for all the announcements of—We were having meetings in Chicago with him in the office there. He would come to Washington. If he came to Washington, then we would do meetings in the transition office, but basically my “office” and the whole office was the transition office that the GSA [General Services Administration] was running.

Security, in this sense, the personal security of the now President-elect, and—Do you have to go through security clearance? You had these people who were working and volunteers, and now you have the President-elect, so—

Yes. If I recall correctly, we did have to have some kind of clearance to become official transition personnel, because we were federal government employees at that point, but I don’t remember getting a security clearance until we got into the—We did the regular federal—

Background checks.

—background checks, but not security clearances until we got actually into the government. I think that’s right. But I take that back; we probably did get a few. Maybe we got upgraded when we got into the White House. I don’t remember, but—

Did you maintain a security clearance during—

Between? I did not. I had to go back and get—

Is that commonplace? Is it normal for you not to, or—

It’s normal for them to lapse in between. Sometimes people can figure out a tether, so if you’re on a federal advisory board of some sort, that maintains your clearance. Defense Department has a bunch; intelligence agencies have them. They’ll keep them active for you, which is ideal, because then you don’t have to fill out all their paperwork again, but in my absences, I haven’t had anything that would be a tether. And somebody’s got to do it for you; they’ve got to agree to do it for you.

OK. I got you off track—

No, no, that’s OK.

Tell us about your work during the transition.

Yes, personnel—So I started off in this little national security group, and that grew. All the groups were growing in leaps and bounds, so it was literally like a coronavirus kind of thing. The first day it was two people; then it was four people; the next thing you know you’re like, wow, there are so many people. You go from having nobody in any of the offices, and it’s kind of creepy, to a week later and every office is filled.

There was a row that was kind of senior staff—That’s where Pete and John Podesta were—and then there was a floor for the national economic team, and then there was a floor for the national security team, et cetera. Everybody’s kind of rolling around there. Then I moved up to the personnel floor, and I was handling the national security transition personnel. All we were doing was Cabinet-level, sub-Cabinet—so Cabinet Secretaries, Deputy Secretaries. I think we were doing chiefs of staff, general counsel, White House liaison, and that was it. We were instructed early on, don’t try to staff up the whole government, right? We’re just trying to get enough people to get into these agencies, so I worked on Clinton becoming Secretary of State, all that negotiation, that kind of thing.

We did that, and then I forget what day I was named the Deputy Chief of Staff, but I had gotten wind of—All along during the transition, and in everything I had been doing up until the election, people kept on asking me, “Well, what do you want—?” It’s obvious I’m in the inner circle, as it were, but I was not a campaign staffer; I was just a volunteer. But people knew that we knew Pete and all of that, so people were asking me, “Well, what are you going to do in the administration?”

Then I was doing personnel, so people were saying, “Well, obviously you’re penciling yourself in for something.” I said, “Actually, I’m not, [laughter] because I have a 12-month-old”—at this point a 14-month-old—“at home,” and everybody knew my spiel. But a mutual friend of ours who was close to John Podesta, who knew Pete Rouse really well, called me at one point and said, “Your name has come up for a job in the White House, but we understand if—We don’t want to put your—Everybody just wants to know would you even talk about it, because everybody knows your shtick about how you’re not coming into the government.” And I said, “Well, it would have to be so compelling—It has to be like The Godfather, an offer I can’t refuse kind of thing. It can’t be in the international realm, because I’m not getting up at three o’clock in the morning like the old days, and I don’t want to be too far away, because if I’m going to do this, I want to do something in and around the White House. If it hits all of those markers, then I’m intrigued.” And I said, “Does it?” And she said, “Yes, it really does.” So it was like, Oh, wow, OK.

Radio silence for a couple days, and then she calls me back and says, “Well, I think they’re going to have you sit down and interview with Rahm [Emanuel] and Pete in a couple of days.” And I said, “OK. But you have to tell me what this job is, because I can’t go into this flying blind.” Because I cannot, for the life of myself, [laughs] figure out what job this is. I know what all the jobs are, right? So I’m going through it in my mind. They tell me it’s the Deputy Chief of Staff job, and I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I was floored. I said, “There’s no way.” And Clyde was figuratively kicking me, going, “What are you talking about? The answer is yes.” And I said, “How would I ever pull this job off?” We had two young kids. I said, “It’s 24/7.” He said, “Who cares? It’s history-making. You absolutely have to do it.” I said, “Well, what are we going to do with our kids?” He said, “I’ll figure it out. It’s fine. You should do it, no question. Absolutely, the answer is yes.” He said, “At the very least, you’ve got to interview for it. Who knows? Maybe you won’t get it.”

So I spent time talking to people about the job—I had worked, in my Clinton years, with the Deputy Chiefs of Staff, so I knew people who were formers, and I knew some people who were former heads of DPC [Domestic Policy Council], so I was calling around, saying, “So what do you think?” I talked to Bruce Reed, who had been DPC under Clinton. I remember talking to Bruce and saying, “What do you think about this Deputy Chief of Staff job?” And he says, “Well, it’s a horrific job.” He said, “Let me just tell you. I can’t figure out if it has tons of power and no authority or tons of authority and no power.” [laughter] He said, “But it’s a disaster, because all you do is spend your time brokering between people, and people resent you because you have more access to the President than they do,” and so on. And I said, “Oh, OK, well, I’m interviewing for it [laughter] in a couple days.” He said, “You’re going to be fantastic at it!” [laughter] I said, “OK, that’s really encouraging, Bruce.”

I was talking to people, and I realized by the time I was sitting down with them—The day before, I called another mutual friend, and he said, “Oh, yes, I talked to Rahm about you last week.” So I said, “So everybody basically knows this except for me.” They said, “Yes, basically.” So my interview was literally—I had known Pete for a long time already, and Rahm I knew from the Clinton White House, but not very well, so my interview went something like Rahm saying, “You know what this job is by now.” I said yes. And he said, “So do you want it or not?”

I said, “Why do you want me?” And he said, “I need somebody who feels comfortable in the national security arena, sitting in the Situation Room, and with deputies, because we’ve got a lot of these issues. But this job is like 75 percent domestic, so I need somebody who isn’t so much of a white-glove foreign policy wonk that they’re willing to get their hands dirty and do some politics, and everybody tells me you’re up for that.” And I said, “That actually sounds really interesting.” He said, “So do you want the job or not?” I said, “Well, can I talk to my husband and my business partners?” And he said, “Yes, but you have four hours, because we’re announcing it tonight.” [laughter] I said OK.

So I got out of that meeting, called my business partner, Sandy Berger, and Sandy said, “You were the only one who didn’t think you were going into this administration, by the way. [laughter] We’ve already made all kinds of contingency plans, because you’re literally—”I’d been telling people, “There’s no way,” and then people were saying, “Seriously? I literally saw you yesterday and you said there was no way you were going into the government, and five hours later it’s on CNN [Cable News Network].” I said, “I don’t know what to tell you. Things happen.” [laughter] So, yes.

Something that we skipped over but you mentioned in your comments—You mentioned that your husband said it was historic. This was a historic election. How did that play into particularly the transition period and the first days? You had this first African American elected President. Did you feel the sense of that history in doing the transition work, and getting up to speed to take over? Was that a burden? Opportunity? The expectations were high? How did that come into play in terms of the work you all were doing?

I’d say it was so much like drinking from a firehose, because of what was going on at the time, particularly with the economy. But even beyond that, this sense of burden and expectation that he never communicated with me personally, but I’m sure he felt, because we all felt it, like we were carrying literally the weight of the world on our shoulders, and people’s incredibly way-too-high expectations for him to change things with the snap of a finger, and a desire to advance things and bring about change. It was obviously a really exciting time, but it was also—People felt under an incredible amount of pressure.

I used to say the thing about my job—and we can get into it at some point—is that when you’re in the inner circle, and you hear what everybody is doing in their day, you feel a little bit of their stress every day. You’re always feeling the burden for the whole world. I used to wake up to NPR [National Public Radio], and I had to stop waking up to NPR, because the stress—I could feel the tension going up my neck as I realized that whatever news story it was at the beginning of NPR, that’s my job today. Whether it was or wasn’t, it felt like it was. I knew that from the Clinton administration, but this was different because I was at a much more senior level. So the sense of obligation, and then also everybody wanted to do a good job for him, and have it go well, and all of that.

I’d say yes, everybody knew that it was historic in a lot of different ways, and you could tell that just from the crowds at the inaugural. It’s just overwhelming in some respects, but on the other hand, I remember Rahm was actually very good about this. He’d say, “You can’t get distracted by that, because it can be paralyzing. So you just have to execute and do your day job, and get over whatever that mountain is, get your plastic spoon out and start chipping away [laughter] with your plastic spoon, and hope it doesn’t break.” So, yes, I would say it was pretty daunting.

I can tell you my funny story that I tell people about. Oh, wow, this is definitely very historic. There was a moment early on—At the very beginning, I’d say there were a lot of little mishaps as everybody got to know each other. Every President is different in terms of style: do they like to read, do they want to be briefed orally, do they want a mix, how much depth, and, frankly, when do they want to make a decision, and when do they not want to make a decision. So early on we had a lot of small missteps, where we would make a decision and he would say, “I wanted to decide that. I’m President.” And we’d say, “OK, but you’re so busy, and we know what you think.” And he’d say, “Yes, but I wanted to have a meeting about it.” We said, “Really? OK. [laughter] All right, well, next time we’ll know. Sorry. We’re just trying to clear out your calendar.”

We were having meetings on a series of things that we had made commitments on, or issues that we weren’t sure about, and one of them was about the fate of the Office of Religious Affairs. I don’t know if you remember this from the Bush administration. It was a very controversial office, under Karl Rove. We basically, during the transition, had no idea really what it was up to. The transition was very forthcoming on lots of things, but not about that, so it was one of these things; you have to get there and talk to people and try to find out what is going on in this office, how much money is running through there, and what are they doing. Is it legal—because it had been challenged legally—and that kind of thing.

We had this meeting, me and Melody Barnes and a guy who worked for Valerie Jarrett, and somebody from the White House counsel’s office, and another press person, and our office, a religious affairs outreach person. And Obama walks in, he sits down, and he looks around, and he says, “OK, well, we know this is a historic first,” because everybody sitting around the room was African American.

Wow.

We were all like, Wow, OK, that is pretty amazing. Then David Axelrod walked in and we all went, “Oh!” [laughter] He ruined it! And he said, “What?” And we told him, and he said, “Do you want me to leave?” We said, “No, it’s OK.” [laughter] So, in any case, yes, once in a while you’d be like, OK, well, this is definitely a first.

How much contact did you personally have with the Bush people during the transition?

Quite a bit, actually. They were really helpful. My counterpart, Joel Kaplan—We had a series of meetings once I got tapped as Deputy Chief of Staff in the transition. That’s when we were dealing with the auto bailout and some of these other things, in collaboration with the Bush folks. I think if we hadn’t had the question of the second TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program], the auto bailout, those kinds of things, I’m not sure how close it would have been, but they were really good about consulting with us.

Josh Bolten was really good about consulting with us, so we got to know them pretty well. And, yes, we went over there periodically for meetings. They gave us a laydown of—We had ambassador requests, extension requests to deal with. There were lots of loose ends that get handed over where they were quite collaborative, but then there were some things where they just left little things sitting in a little box, ticktock, little timebombs sitting for us, like they always do, which I’m sure we left for the Trump people, as well.

Yes, the cooperation from the Bush people, any sense was that directed from the President himself, or was it just staff who were professional—?

I think it was directed from the President, by all accounts. Josh made it clear—Well, two things. One, Josh made it clear that it probably would have been George W. Bush’s inclination anyway. He and Obama got along, actually, pretty well, but there was also the sense that this was a really historic moment because of what was going on with the financial crisis, and that we really had an obligation to make sure that we were being as collaborative as possible, both for confidence in markets and just generally, not to drop the ball on anything major. So the word came down from on high that basically whatever we wanted, we could have. So that was on the one hand.

On the other hand, it was very clear to us that they were exhausted. When we would do meetings with them—auto bailout, whatever—and they would put forward something, from Larry [Summers] or whoever, we would look at it and go, “OK, I’m not sure we really would approach it this way.” They’d say, “OK, so you want to take this from here?” We’d say, “Yes, we’ll figure it out from here.” They’d say, “Great.” [laughter] You could just tell they were kind of on fumes, ready to leave, feeling the pressure of what had happened in the economy, knowing that there was going to be a huge stimulus. We were going to have to figure out what we were doing with the auto companies—Everybody knew that that was what was going to happen. People knew unemployment was going to skyrocket. And I think they just did not have the bandwidth or the wherewithal, really, to deal with it. So I think they felt a little bit relieved that we were kind of eager beaver, “Oh, we’re going to get this task force on the auto bailout.” And they said, “Great, take that, too!” [laughter]

I think there was value in this, and correct me if I’m wrong—

It was in the transition, yes.

—that here you have a new administration coming, different party, different agenda, different values, maybe, but the other side working with you all in the interest of the country to—They could very easily have said, “You want it, you got it, it’s yours.”

Oh, yes, yes.

“Yes, you can. Go at it.” I mean—

Yes. Oh, yes. It could have been a total disaster, because if there had not been communication, my guess is they would have done some things that—We had them do the second TARP. They probably would have left that for us, which was just politically a stinker. That would have probably limited our ability to do a stimulus coming out of the box, which would have meant instead of having 15 percent unemployment, we would have had 20, 20-plus. We didn’t love their auto bailout. Maybe it would have worked out OK, but I’m not sure it necessarily would have. So, obviously, if we’d had a collapse of a major auto manufacturer, we would have had 30 percent unemployment, and it would have been too late to do anything about it.

And they were quite good about letting us run with the ball on a stimulus act and get out of the way on it, when they could have completely skunk-worked the whole thing. That would have slowed us down, and it was probably not big enough, as it was. So there were a lot of things, yes, that they were either by not acting, not putting their finger on it, in it, or by encouraging things to make it smoother—But Josh is a great, stand-up guy that way, and the Bushes.

There was also this sense—I guess if I’d been in their shoes I’d be thinking, If we don’t collaborate with them, then it’s all going to be on us, and history is not going to be kind.

Do you remember any specific cases where you were at odds with them over policy areas during the transition, particularly as it related to the economy?

We definitely were not on the same page of the auto bailout, for sure. I don’t think they loved the fact that they had to do the second tranche of TARP. I’m not sure that they agreed with us that a bank bailout might be necessary or that kind of thing. What are we going to do on housing? I think they were a little bit like, It’s going to be fine, so they were a little bit more hands-off. But some of that was also they were literally handing off, so I don’t think they felt as much of an obligation, frankly, to figure out what the fix was going to be.

Because they wouldn’t be around to deal with the consequences one way or the other.

And not even the implementation, because anything that you would come up with, really other than TARP, between October and the end of the year was only going to get implemented in our term, right? So even if they had come up with something together, they were going to be long gone by the time it would actually manifest itself, so—

Yes. The portrait you paint sounds very familiar, because we’ve talked with a lot of the Bush people about the outgoing, including Josh and [Henry] Paulson [Jr.] and those folks. Was there any anxiety about keeping Tim Geithner on? Do you remember?

No. The sense I got was always, What role for Tim? Tim and Obama were like two peas in a pod. They always got along really well, of everyone—Interestingly, he and Hillary had the most alignment of view, because she came into it with—She always had, obviously, the political cut on things. They could see things coming in a way that maybe other Cabinet members just weren’t that focused on. So I always thought they had the most alignment, oddly. But he and Tim, I think—just personality-wise, style-wise, his calmness, his thoughtfulness—He always felt like, I need people who know what’s going on here, and I can’t really risk not having that. The big tension was between Larry and Tim about who was going to be Treasury Secretary, and Tim was very clear: “I’m only going to do one job.”

OK. Could you walk us through a little bit—? We sort of moved beyond your transition portfolio on foreign policy personnel. Were there some important decisions you helped to broker on that, in terms of building the foreign policy team, or were the big pieces of that pretty much a fait accompli by the time they come to you?

No, no. The Hillary thing, we had to negotiate with her people, and over terms of her arrival, and all the drama associated with that, which I’m sure was in the press at the time, so you will have seen that. There was a really strong view that we did not want her in the Senate, ideally.

And why was that?

Because you always have to worry that somebody might decide they want to challenge you. And I think her people around her also felt like it was better for her to be doing the Secretary of State job, that it would give her a new lease on life, essentially. I’m not sure she was really convinced, to be honest, but everybody convinced her, so she did it. We worked on a bunch of Ambassadorships. Similarly, our ambassador to China, who ultimately decided to try to run for President, we could definitely see that he potentially was somebody who might contest—who might run for President—and having him far away in China was not necessarily a bad thing.

[Jon] Huntsman [Jr.]?

Yes, thank you, Huntsman. We put the Cabinet together. We had to deal with the whole question around Richardson, and Ron Kirk, and all of that—All that happened while I was—

OK. Were there any surprises in that, to you, in terms of placement or absences, or the people that you thought would have been well placed that—?

There were some people who definitely thought that they should be Cabinet-level people, who went for jobs that it became clear to us—to me, at least—that they were not going to get, and when you would tell them that, “You’re not going to get this job,” they were determined to continue to fight for whatever it was. You have to be honest with people, and tell them this is a game of musical chairs and if you’re not careful, there’s not going to be a chair left for you, and there weren’t for some people.

I’m sorry to—

I won’t name names of who, [laughter] but there were people who were involved in the campaign who definitely felt like—and they probably were—Cabinet-level material, who had a particular job that they had in mind, and only that job. Most people come into this with, “I would be happy to serve. Here are some things I would love to do. Why don’t you tell me what it is you want me to do, and hopefully there’s a Venn diagram there?” [laughter] Right? “But I’m happy to do what you want me to do.” Susan is a perfect example. Did Susan really want to go to the UN right away? Probably not. Was she willing to go to the UN right away? Yes, she was. Was it a huge sacrifice? Yes, it was. Did it pay off in the end for her? Yes, it did, right?

You can do it that way, or you can do, “It’s my way or the highway.” And a lot of people said, “Well, I only want to do certain job,” so I had to have a lot of conversations with a lot of senior people, both in the NSC and at the Cabinet level, saying, “Listen, I understand that this is what you want, but you need to understand if you say no to this, we’re not coming around to you for seconds, OK? Maybe we’ll get back to you, but we might not, and if you don’t want to go in, that’s absolutely fine.” A lot of people said, “No, I’d like to take my chances, and run my campaigns, and have people lobby.” I was just honest with people: “You’re not going to get this job,” particularly people I knew and liked. I said, “You’re wasting your time, because you are not going to get the job. But it’s fine. If you want to keep pushing, you can keep pushing, but I’m just telling you right now we’re not coming back around, OK?”

So how does this work? Let me apologize in advance, but here you are, this young [laughter] woman in a foreign policy arena, in particular, which is unusual, and a person of color, right? And you’re telling these people who normally are offered to be whatever it is they want, and you’re going to tell me? I mean, so—

But I would always do it in a nice way. [laughter] You’ll get to this when I’m in the White House, because I always do the same thing. People would call, or come find me, because they thought that I’m the decider. I’d say, “Listen, I’m not the decider, OK?”—We’re talking about Cabinet-level and deputy Cabinet-level. The President’s the decider, and Rahm obviously has a huge influence, and he may ask my views on the briefing thing. “This is a much bigger picture, and you need to understand we have a slate of people. We’re putting together the whole Cabinet. My only job is to tell you this is how he’s thinking about it. He loves you, but he wants to put together a team that’s going to work, not only that you’re in it but that it all works well together and that the pieces fit. It’s a puzzle for him, right? And you’re not the only candidate.”

Obviously, people know who they’re competing against, so word gets out, because it’s a small group of people, and people are friends with Senators, and they’re calling: “I’m the one who can get confirmed,” and it needs to be diverse and all of that. So people kind of know what the deal is going into it.

When we held over the Defense Secretary, that dashed a lot of hopes, because there were a lot of people who were angling to be Defense Secretary. We said, “Well, you could be Deputy. This arrangement isn’t going to last forever.” “No, I don’t want to be Deputy.” So you get people who feel really strongly, like, “I want the job that I want, and I’m not willing to do another role.”

You just have to be honest, which is, “I’m trying to help you [laughs] with what it is you want to achieve, because obviously we would love to have you in the leadership team, broadly defined, in the Cabinet, but there are only so many slots.” I was always really honest with people: “Listen, yes, you have great access, and people are lobbying, but so does everybody else who’s on this list. Everybody who is angling for a job has people calling on their behalf, so that’s not unique. Everybody’s trying to angle to everybody they can get to: Valerie, Pete—” I would say, “That is the base level assumption of what everybody is doing, so you just need to know that going into it.”

I was always the same, in part because I wasn’t interested in a job, so people knew that I was being an honest broker because, literally, I couldn’t care less, OK? [laughs] It doesn’t have anything to do with me; I’m not even going to be here, all right? I’m just going along with this. That’s why it was amusing when I end up getting a job. People said, “Oh, so you did slot yourself in after all.” [laughter] I’d say, “I swear I didn’t, really.” I kept on saying, “You wouldn’t want to work for Rahm, doing domestic policy hacky stuff.” And they’d say, “You know what? You’re right.” I said, “Right.” [laughter] So, OK, yes, so I got my job first, but it’s a job you would never want, so everybody’s happy.

Can you shed a little bit of light for us on your working relationship with the President-elect at this point? How often are you seeing him? How are those conversations going? Can you remember any illuminating aspects of what it is that you’re talking with us about?

Yes.

Is he showing to you that he’s tough enough to do this job of telling people no, and—?

My theory about Presidents generally is that they get to not have to say no. That’s the brilliance of the job. He was better at saying no than Clinton, actually. Clinton’s horrible at saying no, always says yes and then other people have to unwind it. I would say at this point he had some pretty strong views about people that he wanted in particular places, and less-strong views about others. He was thinking much more of a puzzle, “I want the collective to have this mix of skills and background and perspective and all that, so if you’re telling me it’s better to move this person in this job versus that job, I’m open to that.” But to the extent he had relationships with people, he would say, “No, no, this has to be that.” You’ve got to remember, there’s a lot of drama going on among the White House appointments, as well, at the same time, right?

Exactly.

I was staying out of it, because I was assuming I wasn’t going in, so it wasn’t an issue.

Right, right. But what I’m trying to elicit from you is a sense about how all of this is settling out. What are the venues for the debates, and who’s in which meetings? I know the President ultimately has to make the decisions. The decision to make Rahm the Chief was made fairly early?

Yes, yes.

And that being so, he’s a central actor in this or not?

Yes, Rahm was a central—Pete and Rahm and the President were the top three people, at the end—and then Tom Donilon, once Tom got into the mix.

Biden?

Biden, not so much, on the core group, right away.

Interesting.

At least, I don’t think so. I don’t recall that.

OK.

He had his own drama to deal with, because he had his own people who were angling for stuff. But I don’t remember Ron Klain being around so much, really, at the beginning. Maybe he was, but if he was, on personnel, I don’t remember that. There’s, I’d say, some jockeying among people who had been in the transition, and then when the Chicago people show up. Not unlike the [Christopher] Christie situation with the Trump people, but there is a group of people who are working in Washington who probably all assumed they were getting maybe not Cabinet-level jobs, but some senior-level jobs. Then these people descend from Chicago—Valerie, Axelrod—and they have other ideas, so there was all of that going on. There’s a lot of swirl, and there’s nothing worse in Washington than having type-A, really talented people not certain about their future. It brings out a lot of bad behavior in people. [laughter]

I would often tee up people for a slate for a role, with three or four candidates, and maybe three or four roles altogether. I may or may not be in the conversation with the President when it was happening, definitely not so much in the Cabinet deliberations, other than the Hillary thing, which I was involved in pretty heavily because I knew her people, and some of the things with Janet.—a couple of the appointments, right? And Richardson—the ones where I had a close relationship with the people and with their staffs. But with a lot of them, the memo would come in and the decision would come out, so I kind of knew about the whole Larry and Tim and the NEC [National Economic Council] and Treasury, but I was not part of that conversation. And I knew about Susan and Tom’s shared interest in the NSC, but I didn’t know how it was going to end up until it happened.

Gotcha, OK. And you’ve made reference a couple of times to Hillary negotiations, and I’d like to get you to elaborate on that just a little bit, because there may be things that weren’t in the press, and as closely as I’ve followed these things, I’m not sure that I recall much of—Were there active negotiations about what her portfolio would be, or—?

No, it was mainly about team members, and who she could bring, because we had a very strong view that we wanted—And she was not the only one to negotiate this, by the way; there were other Cabinet members who figured this out. We were insisting that the chief of staff be our appointment, and the deputy be our appointment, and the head of Leg. [Legislative] Affairs, and general counsel, and White House liaison. Some Cabinet members said, “Absolutely not.” And there were some who said, “OK, but—”We had already named Jim Steinberg the deputy, so that was already taken, but there was a back-and-forth about personnel, and—

That’s at State.

—how much control over the front office, and that kind of thing.

Right. Sid Blumenthal came up someplace.

Yes, like that, for example. And we had a really strict thing: obviously, no lobbyists. That axed a couple of people that she really wanted. I think she wanted more voice on ambassadors, but we had already appointed some of the key ones, so, yes.

Oh, OK. And is there a policy dimension to these discussions, too, or—?

Sure, yes.

OK.

Yes. Perfect example is Janet Napolitano, who was in play, for sure. She and the President-elect knew each other, and he really liked her a lot. She could have slotted in a lot of different places. DHS [Department of Homeland Security] was kind of known to be a mess, and really complicated to run. I’m not so sure she was that thrilled with it, but she came from Arizona. We said, “It’s actually perfect because most of what you’re dealing with is the border, and related issues, and the politics associated with that, right?” It’s a perfect example of where you were going, yes, this really makes sense. And there were some places where people slotted in and then later we thought, Hmm, maybe that wasn’t such a good alignment, but it’s fine. Everybody seemed to be happy with what they got in the end.

OK. All right. Let’s see. Are we missing anything on the transition that we should cover?

Not that I can think of. The Obama transition went relatively smoothly, given transitions. Who would you credit for that?

The person who was the brains behind the transition, really, was John Podesta, because John early on—I’ll never forget the first transition meeting we had with not the whole staff, but 40 or 50 people, and I remember him saying, “I need a raise of hands of people who are going to be here on the very last day, on January 20th.” Because the specter of a collapsing transition from the Clinton era was the thing that everybody was trying to avoid. The handoff is always awkward. There was a weird moment where once Rahm became tapped as Chief of Staff and John was technically still running the transition, you had these parallel sets of meetings going on, and nobody really knew what was going on, but that was much better than what happened in the Clinton era.

So he had this very strong view—Of course, I raised my hand; that was wrong, [laughter] but I did raise my hand at the time—to say, we need some people who are going to take this to the very end, and aren’t expecting that they’re going to get tapped for something, and leave two days later, because we’ve got to keep this all the way through to the bitter end. There are going to be Executive orders to write; there are going to be a bunch of things that need to happen; and we need to know that some percentage of this team is going to be here, knowing that that means you’re not going in probably right away, or if you are, you’re not going into something that needs confirmation or anything that you would be “transitioning” to immediately. He had, from the experience of the Clinton one, a really strong sense of how to run things, and that held everybody in good stead.

And then I’d say the blessing of having the financial crisis, and the President feeling really strongly that he didn’t just want to do financial bailout—He wanted to also have his affirmative agenda lined up—meant that Rahm was pretty focused on the hundred-days agenda, on what are we going to do legislatively. So there was a ton of work and workstreams going on. I always tell people it was actually the best work experience in the federal government I’ve ever had, in that you’re working with your brain trust of people at the most creative moment in the Presidency, where you have a blank slate. You can decide to do anything you want—not anything, but anything you want at that time. You’ve got tough decisions to make. It’s where your teams are starting to gel. It’s where everything gets down on paper, and you’re forging your blueprint for later, and you start planting seeds for things that might flourish years down the road. A lot of the stuff we did early on actually ended up flourishing three, four, five years later. It’s nice to watch. So very collaborative in the scheme of things.

So where was the First Lady, I guess First Lady in waiting, during this transition—?

She had her own—

—because she’s an accomplished person in her own right—

Yes.

—someone who could contribute to some of these discussions. Did she participate? Did she stay on the sidelines? Was she—?

I never had any visible sense of her fingerprints on things in the transition. Later, all First Ladies you can feel and see, so she was definitely present, in a different way from the others. But she had her own transition people, and Melody and I met with her, and her team. She would call people over and talk about her own agenda. Lots of people had lots of ideas of things that she should work on.

She felt pretty passionately about her food and healthy living agenda, and we said, “We should build something that works for you on that issue,” so we forged some early ideas of things that she wanted to do. That was kind of running in parallel. I literally had not met her in Chicago; I met her only when she got to Washington. She called people over. She wanted to talk about stuff, and she had ideas, and she had a team of people who were working, similarly, but teeny, right? Two, three, four people.

A question about trust, because some of what you described, where you’re negotiating with this person—Senator Clinton to become Secretary of State—and in this sort of dance that you do, how do you know who you can trust and not trust? And you’re doing all this—Because you have people who are rivals, you send them to China and other places. You’re putting this team together. The issue of trust, and whether or not they’re team players, how does that work, and how do you process that? What are you thinking when you’re doing this?

You get to change how you govern, really, and are you going to have a team of rivals kind of thing or not? Obama had a very strong view: I want really smart, really good people, which means that it’s going to be potentially competitive. And you can choose something else. You can choose loyalists and it’ll be much smoother. He affirmatively was like, Yes, the world’s on fire; we need the best people around the table. One of the things about having Hillary out as Secretary of State, she had huge star power in her own right, so it takes some burden off. It was great to have people like that, who could just pick up the baton and run with it and you didn’t have to do a lot. That is actually really powerful, to have that.

You can’t really super trust anyone, but you have to understand what motivates people. Some people are more transactional; some people are more loyalists. You have to understand why people are coming to the table, how desperate are they to be in the administration, how much they bring to the table, or don’t, for what the agenda might be. That was all kind of above my paygrade in some ways, because that’s really a Rahm/Pete/President kind of thing, a Valerie thing, which is how much inner circle and how much outer circle. A people know pretty well, we held our counsel pretty close, so we were not a leaky group. We didn’t have a lot of overt—We can get into the whole drama of backstabbing or front-stabbing in politics. We had that, but it was contained inside the family, as it were.

And Rahm, early on, had a very strong view that our meetings were very open compared to the way they were when I was in the Clinton administration. We would go into meetings, and it would be Sandy and John and maybe two staffers, and you very rarely had President Clinton opine on something in a room with people in it. He would ask questions, take in information, and then decisions would be made later.

At the beginning, when we would first have Obama meetings, they were much bigger, and it always made me nervous, because I was thinking, Who are these people? I don’t even know who these people are around the table. We were talking about something really sensitive, how we’re going to move health care or whatever. Rahm would always say, “He wants it to be somewhat open. We’re going to keep it somewhat open, but if we start having leaks, it’s going to get closed.” And we didn’t have leaks for a while, and then we did on things like health care, and it got closed. There was a sense that leaking was not something you were supposed to do, and you were supposed to hold close counsel. Because people want access to him, and they want access to the Oval Office, and all the rest of it, you govern that way.

Later, after I left, my sense of things is the circle gets smaller and smaller. I have a whole theory that the circle starts big and it gets small. It starts big because the President doesn’t really know the job, and over time gets to know it better than everybody else, so he doesn’t need the big room. Also, the loyal factor: you start with your most loyal group; it gets more disloyal over time, or less known to you over time—particularly with Obama, because he didn’t come with a large circle—so there’s a natural tendency to make it smaller and smaller as time goes on.

One question before we break for lunch.

Yes.

Did you go to the inaugural?

I didn’t. Oh, no. Did I go to the—? Yes. Well, kind of, yes. [laughter] I went to the ceremony, but I didn’t go to the parties.

No dances?

Isn’t that so sad? I didn’t tell you that my husband, during the transition, became political director at the DNC in this thing. He had worked on a bunch of the inaugurals, and so ended up on the inaugural staff, because he’d worked for the D.C. City Council, so he could deal with permits and that kind of thing. So he ended up working on the inaugural. I was in the transition. We literally had our dining room table stacked with inaugural and ball tickets—

Wish I had known that. [laughter]

I know. Literally, because I was working a 16-hour day, I said, “What are we going to do with all these tickets?” We were actually putting them behind people’s doors, saying, “I hope you can go to the party.” So the night of the inaugural balls we had a bunch of people come into town, we gave people multiple ball tickets, whatever. But I was like, I’m so exhausted, because literally the minute after he got sworn in, we got on a bus, we went to the White House, we did all those Executive orders. I think I got home at 11:15, 11:30. I said, “I’m so exhausted.” Rahm’s like, “Six o’clock tomorrow morning,” and I said, “I just don’t think I can pull an all-nighter.” I hadn’t seen the kids in two days. I was like, I just want to go to sleep, so Clyde and I stayed home [laughter] and everybody else had a great time. I know that’s bad, but I have a long history of not doing the glam thing that I probably should’ve done because it would have been a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but—

No, that’s a terrific story, and I’m glad you—

Other people enjoyed everything. People were coming by for the tickets and I was thinking, People are going to think we’re dealing drugs. [laughter] I was calling people, saying, “You want some ball tickets? They’re on the living room table—” The packets all had little stickies for different people and that kind of thing, so—

There was a story about the ball with Cornel West being angry, and turned against the administration—

Oh, because he didn’t get the right ball tickets or something?

Or didn’t get any—Is that real? There was a story out there, and that sort of led to this tension that—

I’d be surprised if it’s that petty, but—

Because obviously you had all these tickets on your table. [laughter]

Yes, but I don’t—I only got my own—Part of the reason we had so many tickets is everybody gets an allocation. Nobody seemed to know what anybody’s allocation was, so two days before, or a day before, whatever it is, I get this stack of tickets, and it’s much bigger than I thought. It’s like 30 tickets, a bunch of balls and a bunch of inaugural tickets, including the platinum ones. I thought, OK, I thought I was going to get ten—People said, “Don’t assume you’re going to get more than ten tickets,” and I end up getting 30 or 40 tickets, right? And Clyde, because he was there, said, “I don’t know if I’m going to get any,” but they gave him an allocation, as well.

Oh, gosh.

We knew we were going to have some tickets; we just didn’t know we were going to have [laughter] double the allotment. But Cornel would not have been in my stack of people. That’s probably a Valerie Jarrett question, because he would have been in her group.

All right, we’ll think to ask her, if we get an audience with her.

Is that why Cornel—? That’s kind of a sad commentary, but it probably is true.

We’ll also all know to go ask the Deputy White House Chief of Staff for ball tickets next time—

Yes.

—because that’s where they all aggregate.

Well, it’s because you’re clueless at how many you’re going to get, and then you get a bunch, and then you don’t know how to allocate them, because you didn’t know you were going to—If your Chief of Staff, Rahm, knew, he said, “Oh, I’m getting a bunch of tickets,” [laughter] right? He had them all stacked up and was allocating them out to people. H said, “I have a plan.” He had a whole team staffing out and parties and all the rest of it that he had planned, so—

We know the logic now. All right, let’s take a break, go get some lunch, and we’ll get started back in just a little bit.

OK, sounds good.

[BREAK]

Afternoon Session

OK. The next question is about your expectations as Deputy Chief of Staff. What were your understandings about the particular aspects of your role, the division of labor with the other two people in the office? How did that division of labor—? How was it established? Was it based on existing practices? Modifications? A whole range of questions related to that job.

Yes. We definitely didn’t keep the Bush administration setup. We did ask them about how they were doing it. And I don’t think I ever had, really, an explicit conversation about the division of labor, other than with Rahm. Very clearly I was doing foreign policy, to the extent it intersected with domestic. I can get into that if you’re interested in that, but it was because it was clear I was the only person who had that in my DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid].

The way the things broke out is that—Very clearly [Jim] Messina had responsibility for operations, so scheduling, movement of the President, and all that. Those two bits of the portfolios, as it were, were very clear from the very beginning, even when we came in. I was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, and he was for Operations, so I guess we knew that Policy was going to be Policy, and Operations was going to be Operations.

That said, we also had—For the first time Pete Rouse was in the front office. Senior Advisor was a role that had not been there before, in that senior way. Obviously, Rahm has really strong policy views, too, so there were a bunch of us who had—And Messina, as well, was dealing with politics and policy, so, in a way, you were always dealing with something or another.

The way that division of labor divided up is I was mainly doing regulatory and national security, and if you had to cut between urban and rural, Rahm and I were doing urban and Messina and Pete were doing rural. This all reflected our relative backgrounds: the wonkier and more technical it was, and the less political, the more likely it was going to end up being in my ambit, all the way across to the most political being with Messina and/or Rahm. That’s kind of how the arc of things evolved.

You’re probably going to ask me when issues arose, how did we end up dealing with them, but it was a little bit of whatever meets the eye, more or less. We would be in meetings, and somebody would start off. John Holdren would start off with, “Well, we’re having an issue in NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] because of the satellite, the cost of the satellite system, and revisiting whatever.” Rahm would look at me and say, “OK, Mona.” [laughter] “Yes, yes, I know.” So I was part of the Deputies Committee for National Security for the front office, the Chief of Staff’s representative, and the Deputy.

I was clearly doing foreign policy. And then I had, yes, a big responsibility for a bunch of the regulatory stuff, and I also did State of the Union policy stuff, and I did the budget. My main day-to-day thing was to work with the policy councils and OMB [Office of Management and Budget] and OIRA [Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs] on stuff, usually before it went to the President, and sometimes when it was coming back out. I can give you tons of examples, but something like what we were going to do for—Do you remember the HAMP [Home Affordable Modification Program] and HARP [Home Affordable Refinance Program] home mortgage assistance programs? We obviously had a big issue of deciding what to do.

The way I saw my role, which was not well-defined, as you heard earlier, was to try to be the honest broker with everybody, particularly where issues got contentious. And, as is well documented, there were lots of tensions inside the economic team, but also inside the domestic team. Frankly, inside any White House there’s just tons of differences of view, differences of agenda. You get the Cabinet involved. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. And I always used to say that by the time it gets to my office, it means that if it was easy, somebody else would have taken the credit a long time ago. By the time it gets to the White House, it means somebody’s going to lose, somebody’s going to win; there’s going to be a cost, political or otherwise, and somebody’s got to make that judgment call.

A lot of it was just teeing things up and trying to be relatively fair with everybody to figure out what it was, how to square the circle with what the President wanted, and what we were doing. So the way I interpreted my job—and other people did it differently than I did—was I always had a pretty clear sense of what it was that he wanted, and I would—

“He” being the President.

“He” being the President, what he wanted on something. And I would then be part of the council meetings, so the NEC or DPC conversations, because I saw him every day, and lots of other people didn’t see him every day.

DPC?

Oh, Domestic Policy Council, so Mel, Melody, yes. I would see him every day for 15, 20 minutes, so I could always interact with him, and I had the sense of when the policy council would start to deviate from what he was expecting. I would often say, “Guys, I just want you to know, what you are teeing up for him is not what he is expecting to hear from you. That’s fine, but you should know that that’s not what he’s expecting to hear from you, so you need to be able to explain why you’ve gone way off of where he is.” Or, “You kind of told him X. It now seems like we’re headed toward Y. You should just know that this isn’t going to be an easy meeting, because he’s thinking it’s going to be X and not Y. That’s all I can tell you; just account for that.”

Or, “Looking at this memo or where this process is going, it doesn’t have enough of other people’s voices in it. He’s going to ask Melody, or somebody at Treasury, ‘What do you think?’ And we all know that they don’t agree with this, so you just need to know when we have this meeting, there’s going to be a food fight at the table, because people aren’t in the same place. We can either resolve it before we take it to him, or we can have a big, giant fight in front of him, but that’s kind of where we are, right?” That was more or less my job, trying to—

So in these meetings you were, in a sense, first among equals, because you could speak for the President more clearly than anyone else.

Often. Not always, because lots of people are also having interactions with him. I had the benefit of being in both regular interaction with him all the time, not just when he was doing a policy meeting, and also having a good sense of where Rahm was on things. We would always laugh that I was the soft touch and he was kind of the hammer. [laughter] He would always say, “Go see your friends up in the Aspen Institute,” as he called the policy councils. He’d say, “Go see your friends up in the Aspen Institute and tell them we’re not doing that.” [laughter] I’d say OK. And he’d say, “We’re in Tammany Hall. We’re not doing that.” He’d say, “These do-gooder, crazy people coming up with these ideas! We’re not doing any of this stuff!” So he’s saying, “Go tell your friends.”

Having that perch, yes, was very valuable. As I learned, the job has lots of power, but no authority, so I’d often be dealing with people who are actually very powerful and had lots of authority, and I would say, “Listen, you can go into the Oval and say whatever you want. It’s up to you. If I were you, I would not fall on my sword for issue X. If you want to go into the buzz saw, be my guest, but I’m not sure I would use my political capital for this fight. But it’s your judgment; you should do what you want.”

I found, at least in the way I did it, that if you can be an honest broker, people will come to you and ask for advice on how to get things through, and once people come to you and ask for advice on how to position something or how to deal with somebody, then you actually have some currency to be able to navigate around and try to bridge differences. And sometimes they’re just not bridgeable, right? So we’re going to have a big fight, and that’s going to be that, and then he’s going to decide what to do.

Right. You painted a portrait of a very engaged and informed President. Was that true across a wide range of issues? Was he more or less engaged and informed on some issues that he really cared about? Or did he study and read and do—

Yes. I mean, there were certainly some issues he cared about a lot more, and felt that they were more signature, either for the reelect or felt like it was something he promised to do and so he cared about it a lot. A perfect example is there was this PCAST [President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology], the Presidential Council on Science and Technology or whatever. He just loved this advisory board because it was all these leading wonk technologists, and they would come in and talk about nanotech and stuff like that. You could just see he was loving that like no tomorrow. But I have to say, he was just generally a very good study, and not dissimilar from Clinton. They both had this ability to compartmentalize information and then recall it later.

A good example is when we were negotiating the START II [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] treaty. The team comes in when they’re getting ready to go for another round of negotiations, and it’s getting to what the final sticking points are. At various points they come in and brief him and get guidance on where to go from here, and how far to go on particular things. I’ll never forget: we were in a meeting as they were getting ready to go for the final set of negotiations, and there were these redline issues, like six to ten of them, whatever. And he said, “OK, let’s go through all these.”

They got to one related to telemetry, and somebody explained the proposed position and he said, “But in the last meeting you said that we couldn’t do more than X, and now it looks like that’s what we’re doing. What gives?” And I thought, OK, you remember this telemetry, but the last time they showed up was six months ago. [laughter] Literally, months and months ago, and it’s not in the briefing thing. They said, “Oh, yes, that’s because they gave us this, and—” He said, “Oh, OK, all right. I just want to make sure that we weren’t giving away the store somehow.” So I’m just thinking, Wow.

The ability to compartmentalize, remember something, and then pick it up cold, three, four, five, six months later, is a skill that is very difficult. I’ve seen very few people pull that off really, really well. Yes. And it’s actually really essential to having good, at least, Presidential decision making.

He also had pretty firm views about things that he was not going to do, so at various points—There’s always that moment where there’s something that’s the right thing to do substantively but the wrong thing to do politically. I don’t even remember what the issue was now, but we were sitting in a meeting—I remember an issue got teed up, and it was very clearly something that was the right thing to do, but politically really, really tough. And I remember sitting there thinking, OK, now this is the real test. [laughs] What’s going to happen here? This is the moment where it’s all clear. Sometimes it’s not so clear; there are lots of different ways you can pull it.

He ended up saying, “I totally understand why you want me to do this, because it’s totally in my interest, and I completely see that.” He said, “I just don’t think I can pull that kind of thing off because it’s not me, and I won’t be able to be true to that because it’s not the right thing and I can’t absorb it and live with that. So we’re just going to have to say no and take the cost of” whatever it was. And I remember thinking, OK, well, that’s good to know, since I’ve not seen my 14-month-old [laughter] while working for you. That’s a good ethical moment to have, so that’s good.

Was that pretty much his pattern? If it was that close, he would go with what’s right?

The thing that used to drive him crazy, and I used to tell people, particularly if they weren’t with him a lot, was not to start with what’s possible politically. That used to drive him absolutely bonkers. He would say, “I do not want anybody coming to me and starting a briefing on solving a problem with what politically works. I want to understand what the problem is, what the actual answer is, what the range of possibilities of response are, and then let’s discuss which one is viable and which one isn’t. It might be that we decide not to do it, or it might be that we decide to do the politically viable thing, but I don’t want to start with the small ball—” That’s how we ended up with health care. “I don’t want to start with the small ball of what’s the fastest or easiest way to do something. That’s what I get paid for. That’s what our senior team gets paid for. That’s what we get paid to do, so don’t make those decisions for me. That’s the conversation that I want to have.”

He doesn’t have a ton of temper, but I wouldn’t say that he’s the easiest-going person, either, so there were many times where he would pull me aside and say, “I never want to have a meeting like that again. You have to tell people to get it together.” He would get up out of meetings and say, “This is not a good use of my time; you’re wasting my time,” and get up and walk out of the room. You say to yourself, “OK, well, I guess we won’t be doing that again,” right? He’s like, “I know everybody wants to sit around because it’s neat to come into the Oval Office, but I have things to do.” He’d say, “Are we making a decision here or are we just chatting? Because I don’t have time for that.” We’re like, “OK, well—” [laughs]

Just to be clear, your original point was that he didn’t want people to come present him political options; he wanted to know what the policy options were, and then he would concern himself with policy.

He wanted to know both. He would say, “Let’s not start with the politics; let’s start with the issue. We have a housing problem. Don’t start with how many votes we have in the Senate for a housing bill. You’re leaping way forward. What would actually solve the problem? Is there anything that can solve this problem that’s in our wheelhouse to be able to impact?”

Gotcha. So my question was about the second point that you made, which was “We’re wasting my time in this meeting.” Was that response typically because somebody had laid out something political, or was it because you’re having a meeting where you haven’t teed an option up for him; you’re just jawing a problem in front of him to see the reaction?

Correct, a little bit of both—particularly people who hadn’t been in front of him. They want to take time to present, but you do it too long, and he might say, “I read the briefing materials. You don’t need to go through the dog-and-pony show. Are we making a decision? What is the point of this meeting?” You only have to have that happen once and then you know—

Of course.

—but people don’t listen, really. So I would tell folks, “This is how he likes the conversation to go. You have to assume he’s read everything. You have to assume he’s going to come with some substantive questions. You ought to be able to answer those, and try not to start with the politics of what it is.”

Sometimes it was because they came in and wanted to go through their soliloquy of the briefing paper, and he would cut them off after five minutes and say, “Assume I’ve read everything that you wrote down on the piece of paper.”

Oops.

Or he would cut them off and say, “I already read everything. Here are my three questions.” And then sometimes it was because he might say, “This is not crystalized enough for me.” Sometimes there are disputes, where there’s actual, substantive, real dispute on what to do, and the moral hazard of certain actions, or whatever it is you’re doing. And then he would say, “I want to hear the views.” He was pretty good about [laughs] detecting false consensus.

Sometimes we would tell him, [whispers] “There’s not really a consensus here,” and he would know to say, “Austan [Goolsbee], are you sure you really agree with this? Because everybody says that blah-de-blah, and I know that you’ve always believed blah-bitty-blah.” And Austan would say, “Yes, you’re right!” [laughter] And then it was a whole free-for-all. Sometimes he would say, “I’m detecting a false consensus here, because this is a really controversial decision and it just seems too placid.”

This was in my era, when you had lots of very strong views. Rahm had strong views, Tim, Larry, Austan, Cece [Cecilia Rouse]. Everybody had a strong view. I’m not sure how it played out later, as people got a little bit more aligned in terms of philosophy, or otherwise, but we had a broad range of just philosophically different views, and some of the things we were moving had quite high stakes, so there were a lot of disagreements, fundamental ones. So in that context he wanted to hear the conversation. And then oftentimes he would say, “You know, I really want to think about it,” which later I would always say, “I think that’s a cue for ‘I really want to talk to Michelle about it,’” [laughter] but I was never quite sure.

Let me ask you: so in this whole trying to determine what to do and how to do it, what was the relationship with leaders in Congress, and Democratic leaders, and how did he negotiate the pressures and the concerns and the requests coming from Capitol Hill?

If you read the record, his relationship with Congress was just OK. He respected a lot of the Members individually. I think he thought that the process and some of the gamesmanship and all the rest of it was just—I think he felt kind of intellectually lonely sometimes, like I’m trying to solve some really difficult problems; I’ve got very few people who can meet me halfway in that conversation who are speaking for anybody other than themselves, which is not that helpful, frankly. And Rahm did a lot of that, too, to spare him from the—I think he found it very frustrating to sit down with somebody who’s really just thinking about their own political interest when he’s trying to—It’s like, We have this major problem over here and you’re worried about whether or not you’re going to get extra congressional barbecue tickets? This conversation isn’t really that productive.

Did he lose something by not being a schmoozer like that?

Yes, definitely. It comes with the job, for better or for worse. You don’t have to love it, and you can outsource a fair amount of it. One of the benefits/weaknesses of having Rahm in that job early on meant that you had somebody who could actually do it pretty effectively. If Rahm hadn’t been there, it would have fallen to him a lot more early on to figure that out, because Rahm came in knowing all the Members, and kind of knowing Nancy Pelosi. He knew the whole leadership structure. Between him and Pete, they had the whole thing covered. I’m not sure if they hadn’t been in the White House if the whole thing may have played out differently as a result of that.

Yes, but he selected them for that very reason, right?

He selected them, yes, exactly, and part of it was because he knew—He was very good about I don’t actually know this that well, and it’s not my sweet spot, either. Over time I think he got to know it better, because you just have to, but he had to learn it that way. It was hard for him to not show—Some people love the gamesmanship of the Hill. That’s just not who he is, right? You hear about Presidents who just love the back-and-forth—LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson], the horse trading—and that’s just not the guy he is.

If he had loved that, he would have stayed in the Senate.

Right, exactly. Clinton loved that. That didn’t bother him at all. He loved schmoozing with people, having people over all the time, that kind of thing.

You had mentioned that you saw him 15 or 20 minutes every day. Was this one-on-one—

No.

—or you were in the general—

Senior staff meeting.

The senior staff meeting.

Yes.

So you were in his company in a group of other people?

Yes, there were ten of us, I think, or 12 of us, or whatever, who met with him every day. We’d have a Chief of Staff’s office meeting, and then a senior staff office meeting, and then a meeting with the President pretty much every morning.

OK. Earlier, when you were talking about first meeting him, you said one of the things you discover over time is how people like to be briefed. You’ve touched on this a little bit already, but let me just pose the question to you that way: how do you explain to us his preferences for being briefed? He wants to see things in writing? Does he like voluminous stuff? Does he want a two-paragraph cover memo? If you’re telling people on the outside how to prepare to brief this President, what are your instructions to those people?

He liked reading. He was a big reader, but didn’t like poorly written materials.

Well, that rules me out; I don’t know about you. [laughter]

It rules out a lot of people. If you handed him 50-page briefing memo for a meeting that he thought was only marginally important, it was kind of like, Really? Fifty pages? Couldn’t this be ten? Five? Whatever? He would always complain that the briefing material—because people write too long—it’s too big, it’s too much, whatever—and complained about the book—it’s too thick, too much of it, blah, blah, blah—but he would read everything. So I thought, OK, you say that, but it all comes back, and you read everything.

Like a lot of Presidents, they would read things and then not make a decision. If it was something where it was like an authorization that’s a rote thing that he has to check the box or say personnel, we might put six or seven things to decide all at once so he could just do it relatively quickly. But for longer, more—I don’t know if important, but—contextual pieces, so an economic policy choice or domestic policy choice, it might run to a 25-page memo with some data or whatever. He always seemed fine with all of that, and to me at least, always seemed like that made the meeting more efficient, to get really deep into things, particularly the more complex it was. He was fine, and in fact preferred that, because it was something that he could refer back to, and he didn’t have to waste time listening to people just go on about the details of it.

So, yes, he was a pretty good reader, and briefing-wise, other than these places where he was encouraging the dissent, for the most part he really focused on efficiency of meetings. There were only a few times where something would be teed up to make a decision and he would say, “I just don’t feel ready to make a decision yet.” And one of the things I respected about him is that he was willing to—When people are feeling like you need to decide, he would say, “I’m not ready to decide. Sorry.” And that was that.

Most Presidents, you start to feel a lot of pressure. There’s time pressure, whatever it is. And I remember talking to him after the Presidency. He was saying that one of his advisors on something or other, related to the book or something, was saying, “We really need to do a meeting with you. It’s getting somewhat urgent, because the publishers want to talk to you about it, and we’ve got to do a meeting right away.” He said, “Oh, OK. Well, Thursday I could move some things around.” And they said, “Oh, no, no, over the next couple of weeks.” He said, “OK, when I hear ‘urgent’ I’m thinking [laughter] bombs are dropping in ten minutes. To me, ‘urgent’ means I’ve got to do this now.” He said, “This is real-world urgent. It could be next week.” So, yes, I’d say he was pretty good that way. Clinton, by the way, was very similar, I have to say.

OK. And he liked to have things disputed in front of him, or did he prefer—

When it was consequential, yes. When it was less consequential, meaning that it felt like the whole package was relatively baked, he might press a little bit here and there, “Why are we doing this? Why can’t we—?” He had this whole thing when we were doing health care, “I don’t understand why we can’t do Medicaid reform at the same time. We’re doing 80 percent of health care and we’re leaving this important program over here, but we’re expanding it? Why can’t we tweak it at the same time? It seems like a logical—” And everybody kept on going through the same thing. Every meeting he would raise that, and every meeting people would say, “You’re already trying to move the tectonic plates of politics, and now you want to—We’re barely getting this thing over the finish line as it is. It’s not going to fly if we take that on.” Every meeting he would come back, “But I still don’t understand, why can’t we—?” [laughter] There were certain things that would get into his craw, “I just don’t get it. Why can’t we—? It’s the same thing. If we could just tweak—” They’d say, “Stop, OK? We can’t do it. That’s it.”

He’d get frustrated sometimes, but for the most part, other than the really contentious things, when it was a “big” decision, we’d test around the margins. Why can’t we do this this way? Or can’t we do more of this, or less of that? That kind of thing. Is this going to solve our problems? Are we going to be back at this in six months?

Some of the issues that you all would present to him and he had to decide, it’s not hyperbole or cliché to say they were life-and-death issues, and quite serious. How did he approach those? What did he rely on to have to be the one to be the decider, and how did he come up with those decisions? Did you witness that?

Yes, there were some really, really tough decisions to make, and he—He often relied on all of us—not necessarily me, per se, although on some things, yes. He was pretty good about getting people’s views, what does everybody think. With something really serious, he would take time. And he was really thoughtful, particularly where he was throwing something over the side of the ship that wasn’t going to fly, something that he felt pretty strongly about, emotionally strongly about, like, “I’m going to have to abandon this thing.” And there were some tough calls, like deciding not to do immigration reform at the end, which is something he was really passionate about. There were moments where you can’t have all the things that you want, despite the fact that you want them all. They’re just not going to line up the way you want it. And so that was always a really tough time, and you could see that wear and tear on his face.

There’s a reason why all these Presidents end up gray over time, because of the pressure and the intensity. I always used to say, “I feel this intensity. I have no idea how you do this all day, because I’ve had two or three or four meetings in a row with you, but I’m going back to my office now for the rest of the day. You’ve got now six or seven more of these, and every single one of them feels like it’s life or death.” Particularly at the beginning it felt like life or death, because it was troop levels and stuff like that, the economy, and you’re sitting there. There are just really tough moments. If we don’t get this right, people aren’t going to be able to use their ATM [automated teller machine] cards tomorrow. We’re going to have a run on—We’re going to have 50 percent unemployment. You’re feeling like—And he would ask, “Is this going to work?” And everybody would go, “We’re not really sure.” He’d say, “OK, well, if I make this decision and then it turns out to be wrong, can we take the other path?” And they’re saying, “Pretty much no, because then we’re dead in the water.” He’d say, “Wow! OK, well, I hope this works, then.” They’d say, “Yes, we hope so.”

One of the things that is commonly observed about Presidents in the Oval Office is that people’s knees turn to jelly when they go in there.

Yes. [laughs]

And then they come back out and say, “I really told him.” Was that the case with Obama?

Oh, yes. I used to tell people—When people would be complaining and complaining, I would sometimes tell people, “You need to share your view. We’ve teed up for you the fact that you feel strongly about something, or that there’s something you have on your mind.” Inevitably they would walk out, and they’d say, “Yeah, yeah, raised it.” I’d follow up and I’d say, “Did So-and-So raise—?” He’d say, “No, they didn’t mention anything.” [laughter] I’m thinking, Cry me a river, OK? I’m done with you. We teed up your moment. You didn’t take it. It’s all on you from here. It’s not my problem anymore.

You find that a lot with people, particularly people who aren’t in there all the time. He would come into my office—I never decorated the office, so I had one thing on the wall. I had the windowless office on the inside, next to the Roosevelt Room. It used to be a storage closet, teeny, teeny, tiny, enough room for a fold-down chair. And I had nothing on the walls, no pictures, no nothing. It was a box, right? Across the hall was Ax, and he had doilies [laughter] and a nice tea set, and he had window treatments and all this.

Obama would come in, and say, “Do you like working here? Because it always feels to me like you’re one foot out the door.” [laughter] He’d say, “It’s like your stuff is already packed in a box, like tomorrow you’re going to be gone.” And I’d say, “You ought to be nervous about all these people moving in, OK?” I’d say, “You need fresh ideas. Trust me; I’m not your problem. Your problem is all these people who are moving in permanently, because they’re not going to serve you very well.” I’d say, “You ought to be encouraging people not to get as comfy as they are getting, by the way, as they order new furniture.” So, yes, get the designer in to worry about their color scheme.

I’m puzzled. [laughter] I’m puzzled about the organizational structure still, and that’s the division of labor, because you’re the Deputy for Policy—

Yes.

—with a foreign policy aspect of your portfolio. Does that mean that the National Security Advisor reports to the President through you?

No.

OK.

None of them “reported” to me at all. I’d say where the intersection would happen is—You have the policy councils running their show, and they’re running their own teams of people. There were particular issues that I had involvement in that were particularly either important to him or politically sensitive. So in the context of the NEC, for example, I was really focused on the tech policy stuff, and net neutrality and that kind of thing, which was a very important constituency for him; housing, because that was important politically. There were issues that had a really strong political crosscut.

Likewise in the National Security Council. I would have loved to have been in every Deputies Committee about North Korea, but I didn’t have time for that, so I had a tendency to deal with stuff like trade, which has, obviously, a huge political spillover effect. Southern border–related issues—huge. Immigration. All the policy councils had issues, and I would take the cut across them that were the ones that I knew when they got to the President’s desk were going to be contentious. Same with on the regulatory side if there’s a huge regulatory truck coming through, but there are only certain regs that are the ones that are really important.

So I would not say that anybody reported to me. The only thing they knew was that I participated in any of those meetings, so I would go as a deputy to those meetings, not as a principal. Rahm would go if it was a principals meeting. On the deputies level, which is where you’re kind of constructing all the policy, I would go, often, maybe only to one meeting, and say, “Let me give you the lowdown of what the President is interested in.” I’d say, “Call me if it goes off course,” and I would leave.

Or people would come to me—If there was a memo going through to the President, where there were multiple views from different offices coming together, let’s say on the budget, State of the Union, those kinds of things, or just something that touched more than one council, all the memos that had policy would go through me before they went to the Staff Secretary and on to him. I could kind of grab anything that I thought Rahm or I or Messina or Pete were interested in. People couldn’t get around me, really, because I could stop everything. If we were unhappy with something, Rahm would say, “I don’t want this memo on blah-bitty-blah going through without me getting a chance to look and see what’s in it,” kind of thing.—

To what extent did you act as a gatekeeper and decide what gets to the President and what doesn’t?

Indirectly, kind of, right? It’s not that I could stop it forever, although some things I did kind of stop forever because I could say, “This isn’t ready,” or “We just don’t want this teed up at this time for him to decide, so we’re pulling it. We’re not doing this now.” People would come to me with initiatives, and they would come and brief me, “We want to do this thing. We’ve been having these interagency meetings on this.” And I would say, “We’re not having this conversation now. I’m sorry you wasted 18 months on this, but we’re not doing it. And it’s over. You can bring it up next term if you want, but there’s no room for that now.” Oftentimes people would say, “But we’ve been working on this forever.” I would say, “Great, you can go talk to Rahm if you want and get the same answer, but in a little louder voice, if that’s your choice.” I’d say, “Or you can go on to the President, who we’ve already talked to about this, and you can get shot down by him. Those are your choices.”

People would tee up things up though, and a lot of times that’s really what the Chief of Staff’s office does. We look at the reality—We do not have the political capital to move this initiative today, in its current form, because we have other priorities; we have an election coming up; we don’t want this controversy; we don’t want to deal with this issue right now. So we’d say, “We decided we’re going to prioritize X, and as laudable as your goal is, it’s off the back of the truck, and you can resurrect it a year from now, if you want.” Or sometimes, “Just kill it, because we’re never doing this. [laughs] This just isn’t something we want to do.”

What I’m trying to develop a picture of is what the contours of the job are. And, by the way, when we were off tape, as we were walking to lunch, you made a comment about your press profile that I think I had noted in the—

Not found, intentionally.

Not found. I had noted in the cover letter of the briefing book that we were looking forward to the interview because there’s much to be said about your job, since a lot of it didn’t show up in the newspapers.

Correct. Intentionally so, yes.

Intentionally so. You tried to keep a low press profile.

Yes, definitely. The only thing that was really annoying is my colleague—and I know who it is—who leaked our memos to the New Yorker, who I will never forgive for that. [laughter] The reason I know it, the reason I know exactly who did this, is because I know, based on the timing of it who it was, who had their access to the memos. That’s the only time that something of any substance was actually leaked of mine.

I gotcha. And, of course, our fine researchers managed to find that article and put it in the briefing book for anybody [laughter]—

Yes, I noticed. I was like, Oh, yes.

—in the future who wants to look at—

I found that very annoying, by the way, but yes.

Well, but it does help us, so—[laughs]

I know. And people found it really interesting at the time. They said, “Oh, very interesting.” I said, “Yes, great, OK.” But—

You don’t want it in the newspaper.

Yes. My theory is that no good comes from talking to the press.

And we hope all good comes from talking with us. [laughter]

Yes, of course.

That’s the operating theory.

Of course.

But in any event, the job description, as you’re providing it, seems to have a fairly high level of ad hoc—

[laughs] [nods head]

—components to it. You’re nodding yes.

Yes.

In effect, it sounds like you’re kind of an extension of the Chief in the policy area, to maybe try to be a traffic cop for the kinds of things that the Chief, through conversation with the President, knows he will have a special interest in, in the policy area. You said you don’t have line authority for people reporting to you.

Correct, reporting. I guess the question is do you feel like—I think if you talk to Larry Summers, he would say he didn’t report to Rahm, either. He would have said he reported directly to the President.

Exactly.

Rahm might have said, “Well, [laughter] let’s discus that.”

We’d love to have a conversation with both of those at the same time—

Correct, so you—

—because that’s two shrinking violets. [laughs]

It gets to be a little bit of a gray area on some level, because people would argue that, implicitly, they all report up through the Chief of Staff, in that nothing really was going to go to the President or get approved if Rahm was really, really firmly opposed to it, that wouldn’t get rolled back.

Gotcha.

It was impossible, really, for you to end-run around the Chief of Staff’s office.

Gotcha.

That’s why I was saying you have lots of power and no authority, or lots of authority and no power.

Right. That’s what I’m trying to flesh out. My colleagues, who spend a lot of time writing—

About this problem. [laughs]

—about the problems of—

Power.

—White House organization, particularly Chiefs of Staff—It’s fascinating, because the first thing that we do when we’re dissecting these White Houses is you start developing internal organizational charts in your mind. You’re trying to figure out, OK, which line is where? And in this particular White House, it’s still sort of puzzling to me. We’ve done maybe a dozen interviews before yours. In all of these projects we’re learning as we do each interview, and we’re, with the accumulation of these things, trying to figure out what are we able to piece together. So I have a White House organization with a very strong personality as the Chief of Staff, who then has two of you with portfolios that I’m still sort of trying to figure out, and then some powerful people in various positions—

Yes.

—as well, that are important, either formally or informally.

Correct.

I’m trying to get, to the extent that I can, trying to get you to draw me a picture of what the org chart looks like here.

[laughter] Yes. I don’t know if you’ve talked to all first-term people, but the Rahm era and the rest of the era, from my sense, based on my observation of it going later, even though I wasn’t working there, is very different.

Very different, OK.

Unlike, I think, a lot of White Houses that start with an organizational model and then the people just change, I actually think the organizational model changed over time, and—

Rahm didn’t really have a strong sense of org chart, right?

Correct. So Rahm was, I’d say, pretty rare for a Chief of Staff. Most Chiefs of Staff hold their counsel with the President very close, meaning you’re not going to have an Oval Office meeting without him—or hopefully one day it’ll be “her”—there. And Rahm was really different. If I said, “I really need to talk to him about this meeting before,” he would say, “OK, great. If you guys make any decisions, let me know.”

So he didn’t want to be in the room all the time?

He’d say, “I’m just busy.” In the front office, at least—me; Messina; Pete; certainly, Rahm—people were in and out regularly, talking to him one-on-one. And Rahm’s only thing was, “Just tell me what you guys talked about—If there’s anything major that comes out, then let me know.” He was, I’d say, pretty confident as a Chief of Staff that his source of power didn’t come from having to be with the President all the time, in every substantive meeting. They had their one-on-one time, and they had an alignment of what they were going to get done. They knew what they were doing, and they had their own relationship. They had their own time together, and they had alignment on what their priorities were. I don’t think he felt the need to birddog everything and control things as much as many of the other folks, unless things were going off course, unless the process was getting out of control.

One of the benefits/weaknesses of having such strong personalities at the outset is it would have been really, really difficult for any Chief of Staff to demand, the way some other Chiefs of Staff had, this thing all the way through, in part because Obama himself would just reach out and say, “I wanted to know what Tim thought,” or “I wanted to know what Larry thought.” He was very loose about who he wanted to talk to. He kind of knew what people were responsible for: I’m not calling Rahm if I’m interested in what Tom Donilon thinks. I’m not going to do that. I always think the organization of the Oval Office reflects the personality of the person in the chair, and in Obama’s case, he had in his mind, This is what I rely on various people for, and if I have a question, that’s who I’m going to go to. I don’t even know if Rahm would want it to be any different, if it would have happened any differently.

Sometimes it was totally clear when the issue came up whose issue it was, and in part because I was dealing with a lot of the policy councils, people, at least at first blush, would come to me if it wasn’t legislative. If it was legislative, then it probably wasn’t going to be me at the first blush, because I didn’t come from the Hill, and Messina and Pete and Rahm all did. I was not the logical first choice to birddog something if it was ultimately going to be a major legislative package, but I was if it was going to be a regulatory foreign policy thing. That’s why I say the wonky stuff—The wonkier it was, the less legislative, the more likely it was like, OK, that must be Mona’s thing.

But see, it’s striking. Please don’t lose your train of thought on it, because this I find fascinating.

No, no.

It’s striking that you say if it’s a legislative thing, and then you mention three names, none of which was Phil Schiliro, who is technically the—

But I meant in the front office, yes.

Right, so “the front office.” You’ve used that phrase now twice, and that’s not, I think, a term of art for us.

Oh, that’s the Chief of Staff’s suite.

So the Chief of Staff’s suite is the front—Do you use that term?

I hadn’t heard it before.

Oh, OK. [laughs]

No.

OK, yes, we used to use that.

OK. The three, again, were—

The four of us who were doing substantive stuff. Pete was in the front office—

OK, and his title?

He was the Senior Advisor.

Senior Advisor.

So Rahm, Pete, Jim Messina, and me.

OK, so the Chief of Staff—

And we had staff, obviously.

—the Chief’s two deputies, and then—

And Pete.

—a Senior Advisor who has—

A roaming portfolio.

—a roaming portfolio. He’s the Wizard of Oz, so to speak.

Correct.

All right.

He could get in on anything he wanted to get in on?

Yes, but that’s not Pete’s style. Pete was affirmatively, “Don’t call me if I don’t call you.” And the President would do things like say, “Let’s get Pete in here,” and Pete would say, “I don’t want to go into the meeting; do I have to?” Yes, Pete had a slightly different—

He’s sort of mystical. Pete was mystical when you introduced him earlier, because he—

Yes, Pete is a very important figure, because he was a source of, I would say, a kind of ground truth and stability in the swirl, and he’s curious because he had 100 percent loyalty to Obama but not a lot of tolerance for all the craziness that goes on. At one point we had what we call meeting “mission creep,” where the meetings were getting to be too big, and everybody was lobbying to be in the meetings. At one point the President said, “The meetings are getting to be too big. We need to whittle back the list. People are sitting on desks, leaning against bookshelves, all that.” So we said, “OK, we’ll narrow it.” I said, “But this is like a wedding, so we’re either going to go small or we’re going to end up with mission creep.” So Pete said, “Yes, OK, I’m going to deal with the meeting manifests.” I said, “OK, are you going to be at your desk after you do this?” And he said yes. I said, “Good.”

So he cuts the meeting back. Sure enough, the phone starts ringing five minutes later. Everybody’s lobbying, “Why did you cut me? What did I do?” Blah, blah, blah. So he calls me in, and he says, “I think the only thing people care about is going to meetings with the President in the Oval Office.” [laughter] I said, “Pete, how long have you been here?” I said, “We’re two years into this and you’re just realizing this now? Of course that’s the only thing that people care about!” He said, “This is ridiculous! All these people—! I don’t even want to go to a meeting.” I said, “Right, that’s why he wants you in the meeting: because you’re the only one who doesn’t want to be in the meeting. Duh.”

I love that. That’s the true definition of a grown-up in the White House.

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She was the next on my list to come to.

I’ll come back to her in a sec. But Pete had been with Obama since his arrival in Washington. He’d been through the whole campaign. He was an adult. He had dealt with the Senate. He knew Biden really well from that. So he was a sense of glue. And because he didn’t have his own agenda, and wasn’t playing in the press, he wasn’t trying to play for profile. He didn’t want any other job; he knew he was going to retire from government out of that job. So he had a different mindset from a lot of the other senior people, who are still all contesting and potentially going on to do other things. That’s why when I say, “the front office,” there was really no issue that was going to go directly into the Oval Office, even though some of the policy councils probably believed that was the case. In reality, that wasn’t the case.

Who had walk-in privileges with Obama? Who could just go there without an appointment?

The four of us. Tim had a standing one-on-one meeting with him. And that’s basically it. Valerie, I guess.

Everybody else had to go through the Chief of Staff and the Staff Secretary?

Yes. People would come through, and scheduling was in our ambit, too, so Alyssa [Mende Mastromonaco]. You could probably get away with going up there once or twice, if you really had something urgent, without scheduling time. People who had known him for a really long time, and people had been on a campaign that was pretty loose, so it was a little bit of a culture shock to suddenly be told, “You can’t just show up.” We had to train the people in the front to say, “He’s scheduled today, so you have to talk to Alyssa if you want some time with him.” This was pretty hard for people. They’d say, “But we’re friends. We see each other on the weekends.” We’d say, “Well, that’s great—” We had to create some sense of structure and formality that didn’t exist beforehand.

Right, OK. That’s really, extremely helpful. Valerie’s name has come up, and—

Oh, Denis McDonough had walk-in privileges, too.

OK.

Yes, Denis.

But you see, all of a sudden, we start populating the field with these other actors, so it’s a little difficult to figure out—We go back to the classic political science structure here, which is that there are two models of behavior, right? There’s a strong Chief of Staff, where everything gets funneled through, and you think with Rahm, because of his personality, and because the org chart would seem to suggest that, that—You’re shaking your head no.

Yes.

Then the other traditional model has been a spokes-to-the-wheel, with—

Spokes-to-the-wheel, where the President does that job.

Yes.

It’s a little more spoke-y/wheel-y. The way I always thought about it is there’s an inner circle and there’s a slightly outer circle, and the inner circle—the senior staff, senior advisors, which were all the people who were in the daily meeting. We essentially had a privileged perch in the conversation, and were able—not necessarily full walk-in privileges, but had a lot of throw-weight. And there was an inner circle of people who were not in that daily meeting, Mike Froman, for example, who had gone to law school with him. They were very close, and he was known to have a lot of access to the President, and he had his role accordingly. He had a lot of running room, because people knew, ultimately, that he had a close relationship. So there is a certain personal proximity that gave you power as a result of that, and so people treated people accordingly.

OK. So let me ask you this question: what was your relationship—? Tom was the first National Security—

No, the general was, General [James L., Jr.] Jones, but Tom was the Deputy, so I dealt with him.

Then what was your—

The general didn’t last very long. He wasn’t there very long, and then Tom became National Security Advisor, yes.

Right. I guess my question is this: typically, if you’re on the outside, and you’re formally trained in these things, the expectation is that the National Security Advisor—in recent administrations, anyway—has had a direct line to the President. It would be modestly mediated through the Chief of Staff, but normally there would be a higher level of independence. Did you have a very close working relationship with the National Security Advisors, or was there a sense, on their part, “Excuse me, ma’am, I’m the National Security Advisor, and therefore I have—”

Yes, I think they felt pretty independent, and they always have been, relative to the other policy councils, more powerful than the other policy councils, with more throw-weight, obviously, given what they’re up to. I did know Tom pretty well, and, yes, we did have a good working relationship, and because he was the Deputy before he was National Security Advisor—I was in the deputies, so we did a lot of meetings together.

But he also has a great domestic policy ear, so he was actually in our Chief of Staff meeting every day, which is pretty rare, in the scheme of things, because that’s really a political meeting more than anything else, and he had an equal voice, just as much as anybody else. Ron Klain was also in that. That was our “What are we doing today, what’s going on politically?” kind of thing. Tom was an equal participant in that. There were, again, certain issues that he knew were politically sensitive, and in those he expected me to be around, and on the other ones he didn’t expect for me to be around—You know what I mean? If it wasn’t that, then he didn’t expect for me to be around.

OK. So this was sort of—“negotiated” may be too strong a word, but there was a sense of cooperation between you and the Domestic Policy Advisor—

Policy councils, yes.

—the National Security Advisor—Larry is National Economic Council—

Yes.

—or is he his own creature?

He was his own creature, but I would say over time, really, in part because, as everybody well knows from the press, there’s so much contention inside the Economic Council, that we had to spend a fair amount of time trying to keep everybody on the same page. So over time I spent a disproportionate amount of time with that policy team, I guess both because of the consequences of what we were up to but also just to understand where they were going and where all the spillover effects were, and who was upset about what. As the things spilled out into the open, it became much more of a focus of everybody to make sure that everybody was on the same page.

When I went into it, I thought I’d be spending maybe 30 percent of my time on national security, and then equally 30 and 30 on domestic and economic policy. I ended up spending the bulk of my time on NEC-related business, and then all the other councils. So I did a ton with the science people, and the science and tech and energy and those folks, as well, surprisingly to me. But a lot of it was just because that’s where the drama was, and every meeting there was something going on, and we were making a lot of consequential decisions, as well. That’s where the locus of activity was, so that’s where I played.

I see.

And your role was, again, sort of representing the President’s point of view?

Yes, or Rahm’s, a little bit of both. In all of those meetings I would typically—Again, if I thought the process was going to be OK, I might go to the first one or two meetings and say, “Let me give you a laydown of where this is going, both timing-wise and outcomes-wise. This is what’s on his mind about why we’re all here, what we’re trying to accomplish.” Then I would basically tell whoever it was, whichever policy council was chairing the meeting, “If it goes off course, then let me know.” And people would call and say, “It’s off course.”

If I knew it was going to be complicated or contentious, then I would stay in it the whole time, and I would try to go to most deputies meetings, if not all of them. But I did have a staff, so I had somebody who was working for me. For example, health care—When we were moving the health care bill, I said, “I cannot go to every single deputies meeting.” They were meeting three, four hours a day, at one point. I said, “I don’t have time to do that.” So she was my eyes and ears, and she would come tell me at the end of the day, “Today we talked about reimbursement rates, and this is all the people who came in and chatted,” whatever. And I’d say, “Just keep me posted if the things are going awry, because Rahm would want to know where are we on the internal deliberations on what to put forward, and how it’s all going to play itself out,” even though we had a team of people working on that basically full time.

That was kind of the blocking and tackling of my day, how much time to spend on stuff, because I was also spending time on space stuff, and food safety, and all these other ancillary issues that come in over the transom, so—

One of the other things that Chiefs of Staff have often been involved in is implementation, following up. The President makes decisions, but does anybody carry them out? So what—

I did a lot of that.

You did a lot of that.

Yes.

OK.

Here’s a decision; what process are we going to put in to implement this? Obviously, it’s easy if it’s one agency, because then you just give it to them and then say, “Call me and tell me how it’s going.” But everything from the Stimulus Act [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009]—We had some particular milestones in projects and programs that the President was super interested in, community health center stuff, whatever it was, education related, and he would say, “I really want to know how this is going,” so it was on my list of things, and I would check in: “I want to know how this is going. Call me in three months. Tell me when you get ready to move to the next stage. The President’s really interested in this.” Sometimes I’d call people over. We’d do a briefing or whatever, so I could figure out what was actually going on.

Were you and Jim Messina mainly responsible for that kind of thing? Did Rahm get involved?

Sometimes Rahm got involved if it was either moving really fast or had, I’d say, a lot of politics in it, meaning the President made a really tough decision and it’s not going to go down well with whoever it was who’s going to be unhappy about that, whether it’s an outside group or some Members of Congress or whatever. Rahm would say, “OK, this is how we’re going to handle the decision making and the alerting of people,” et cetera. So, yes, I had a tendency to get involved more in the stuff that was a little bit more structural, so it might be involving multiple agencies, or a working group on trying to figure out some something or another, and dealing with some issue that was moving through the system. But then there were also emergencies like H1N1 or whatever, issues like that.

Can I ask a question? Earlier you said that you would brief folks who were going to meet with the President, and say, “This is what he’s thinking. This is what he wants to know.” How would you know how to tee up what they should present? Did that come out of the meetings you had, those 15-minute-a-day meetings, or—?

Yes. Let’s say there was a new issue that would pop up. We might do an initial meeting with the President where the Cabinet folks and the internal folks would be there, and he would make some comment like, “Yes, I like that direction; let’s go down that path.” Housing is a good example. There are tons of different examples, small business or whatever. And he might either pull me aside afterward and say, “I really, really want it to be X,” or I might, just by knowing what his mindset was from the overall, know he’s thinking, This is a big fix.

The reason I use housing is because in his mind it was, I want to fix the housing problem. The solution we came up with felt kind of small, relative to the problem, so there’s a little bit of his thinking, I’m going to get a housing ‘solution,’ and I’m saying, [laughter] “I’m not sure that that’s exactly what we’re going to tee up, but we’re going to do our best.” And he would say, “But it’s coming along, right?” I’d say, “Yes, yes. We’ll have some options for you to chew over. I just don’t know if it’s going to ‘fix the housing problem,’ as you define it. I don’t know how big you think that is, but they’ve been doing a lot of work, and we’ll be ready to come talk to you in a couple of weeks.”

He might be anxious about that, because that was driving the headlines at the time, and there was this sense that we’ve got to come up with something. It’s got to be real; it’s got to be this; it’s got to be that. And you might be meeting two times a day, or once a day, to try to tee something up, get it ready for his consideration, and then get it decided and out. Throughout a process like that, you might be going, “Well, how many homeowners is this going to impact? Is it too generous for people who are about to default, for all the people who are paying their mortgage? What about people who haven’t defaulted yet, or aren’t at risk of default, but have lost their job?” There are all these side effects, have we really thought through everything, and are we going to stand back at it and go, “This isn’t exactly what we had in mind”?

And there were different senses of appetite for how to deal with that problem. There were lots of people who thought, Well, this a market that will take care of itself, and other people thought, No, no, we really need to step in and do something more affirmative. There were a lot of philosophical differences and that kind of thing in that.

And a question: you also mentioned about there being an inner circle and then a sort of outer inner circle. So it wasn’t just by your job description or the line that you were in those or the other.

[shakes head no]

It could be partly that.

[nods head yes]

It could be partly—

Just relationships going back to whenever. There were people who had worked for him when he was in the State Assembly in Chicago—

That far back.

—that far back—who were young, who were in their 20s, who might be working somewhere in the White House. I’ll never forget what one of the guys—I forget his name now, but he was a really young guy. He worked in the political office. He was younger than me, but he came from Chicago with him. He may have worked in the Senate office, but I don’t think he did. I think he came from Illinois politics, worked on the campaign. At one point way down—I always wondered how Obama always seemed to know what was going on in the White House. [laughter] He would come in and say stuff like, “Oh, I heard you and Larry had a big fight about something.” And I’d say, “Oh, yes, but it’s fine, whatever.”

At one point this guy was saying something about how they had been over for movie night at the White House, and I said, “Oh, that’s interesting. So do you guys get—?” He said, “Oh, yes, every Sunday we go over there, me and” whoever it was. “We go. It’s a whole little group of people.” I said, “Ah.” [laughter] OK, that’s actually very good to know.

Now that I’m almost out the door, it’s very good to know, because I was always wondering, how do you keep abreast of what’s going on underneath the surface? Because it’s all formal, and people present, and yet somehow you know the mood music. “Tell me about what happened in the meeting on energy policy, and what Carol [Browner] said to Larry,” and that kind of thing. I said, “How do you even know that meeting happened, because it’s not on your calendar?” Then I realized that’s how.

Any sense of the extent to which that shaped his thinking on things?

I assume it did, and it definitely had the impact of having a sense of people who felt like there were folks who were really, really loyal to Obama, and people who had an agenda. Those folks who were observers of the process—And I think they were pretty decisive in shaping the views of who fell into which buckets. That’s always the case, by the way. Clinton had the same thing. There were people all over the place who were reporting back through various channels.

Michelle Obama: any sense of the role she played in this? I think about Nancy Reagan, who was very protective of President Reagan, sort of hovered over and made sure that people were not going to do anything that was not in his interest. Did Michelle play that kind of—?

Her presence was definitely felt, and I always felt like Valerie was a little bit of a Michelle proxy, to some degree, although also not really; she kind of sat in the middle a little bit. I always got the feeling, when we came under tremendous criticism and pressure, if he was off his message or off core values or whatever, that often she would be in his ear, “What is this about? What are you doing here?”

She, Michelle?

She, Michelle. “What is this?” Having that insider but objective, not part of the machine, and to look at the output and go, “Is that really what you had intended to do? Because it just doesn’t look very good right now,” [laughs] was a helpful thing. But it wasn’t like it was with Hillary when she was First Lady, which was much more Nancy Reagan–esque, and it felt more present, meaning people got called over to the East Wing for meetings and that kind of thing, and it was a nerve-racking moment. People were much more nervous about going to see Hillary Clinton than Bill Clinton. Let’s just put it that way.

Wow.

If Michelle had meetings, people probably would have felt the same, [laughter] but as far as I know, she wasn’t calling people over. She never called me over, or anybody else I know over, to have a conversation. That would have been a little scary.

Your sense, though, was that she was sort of the keeper of the flame, in terms of why are we here in the first place. Were there others in the White House who played that role? “Let’s get back to why we ran for President.”

Yes, there were a fair number of people who were early on—Ax felt that way. I think Valerie felt that way, [Michael] Strautmanis. There was a group of people who I think had been with him from the very beginning who were saying, “Don’t get too caught up in all of the machinations of Washington, and keep your eye on the ball, as it were, to get these things that are your vision.” And the President was like, “I don’t want to just do whatever comes in over the transom and clean up the previous guy’s mess. I actually do want to do some affirmative things.”

You could easily get absorbed just cleaning up the previous mess. How do we strike the right balance between mess cleanup and affirmative going forward? And, at least when I was there, Rahm was always saying, “Yes, yes, but the outcomes to actually do these things—The process is messier than you guys might like, because that’s the reality of it. Either you want to win or you want to fight, so you decide which one you want to do, and we’ll lay the groundwork either way.” There were many times when Obama would say, “I really want to fight this. I really want to duke this out. I’m really upset about—” whatever.

Then Phil would say, “OK, but you also asked us to pass these 20 bills in these 20 legislative days,” literally, it felt like, sometimes. And he’d say, “We’re backed up against a wall here. We can stop here and have a huge knock-down fight, and define this for the American people, and if you want to do that, that’s fine; I want you to take three things off of this legislative list that you’d like to accomplish this year so we can take the time to have that fight.”

It would, of course, drive Obama crazy, Why can’t I have both? That’s just the reality, because if we stop here and we have a big fight—a legit thing to want to do, because we’ve got to define what we’re doing in the minds of the people—you just need to know every single day is precious for these outcomes that you’ve also told me are a top priority for you. You’ve got to decide which one you want to do, and why.

You’ve mentioned Valerie several times. Could we get a more elaborate explanation for where she fit into this universe and what her role was?

Yes. Obviously, she’s very close to them, personally and otherwise. Unlike Pete, she sat on top of the Office of Political Engagement, and had a pretty big—a much bigger voice than her office empire would suggest, obviously. She was not in our office, so it was always one of these things that she had a lot of outside voice, because she was responsible, really, for a lot of that external voice about what’s going on. I’d say a little bit like me, in some respects, she had certain issues that she really cared a lot about, and that she had to deal with a lot, and other things that she just was not that interested in. Our lives didn’t intersect that much, really, substantively. I think it’s because a lot of what I was working on was in the realm of things that were too wonky and too international for what would be in the main for her, in her day-to-day world, other than in our Senior Advisory kind of office—

Who did she interact with?

Well, she worked on a lot of the domestic issues that were the key—She worked a lot with Melody. She worked a lot with Larry. But it was on the kind of, I would say, core domestic agenda: civil rights and women’s groups and LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning] and the Native American, so really core domestic political groups that came through her ambit. I was dealing with things like Frankenfish, and are we going to allow GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in the fish, a really, really deep-in-the-wonk-world thing, and very little of that spilled over into her world.

She’d say, “Why are people phone-banking me about this Frankenfish?” [laughter] which was one of the few things. They were asking her, “What is a Frankenfish?” And I said, “Wow. You’re getting a lot of calls?” And she said, “Yes, it’s going crazy! Everybody’s—What is a Frankenfish?” I said, “It’s GMO-related fish.” Valerie said, “What’s a GMO fish?” [laughter] I said, “It’s like a fish with GMO—” She said, “Oh my God.” I said yes. And she said, “But it’s a big deal?” I said, “Yes, it’s a big deal. People care a lot about fish.”

What about Axelrod’s portfolio? Was it bigger than it would seem on paper?

Yes. There’s always that person, and in this case it was Ax, who is your bridge to the polling operation and your data operation, and whatever’s going to happen, starting to think early about message and stuff like that. And Obama was very actively—I’m sure you’ll end up talking to a bunch of the speechwriters—very strong on editing his own speeches. He had a very strong view about what he wanted to say, and how he wanted to say it.

Ax was doing focus groups and polling throughout. He was a really important voice. He would often say, “This outcome might be the right outcome, but boy, does it seem way off what your values are about. We’re doing it for the right reasons, because that’s the decision you’ve made, but I’ve got to say, it just doesn’t sound right.” Things like bonuses for Wall Street executives, right? AIG [American International Group], that kind of thing. We said, “Seriously? This is the best we can do? This is not exactly what we were talking about when we were running, and this is a problem.” And he said, “I understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, but this is not going to be pretty.” Obviously, as we got close to the midterm elections, his voice became more and more important, because people are hearing, “OK, we’re going to get killed in the midterm elections,” which we did.

Let me ask you a very broad question. We’ll get started and maybe give you a break in a few minutes, unless you—

No, I’m fine. I’m good.

OK. You said that you would have figured maybe a third, a third, a third for these policy areas, and that the principal focus was on the economic area, for obvious reasons. Could you give us your own narrative account of the trajectory of that? What is it you confront when you first take office? What are the three or four big policy matters that you’re wrestling with? And how did they get resolved? What was your role in helping to bring about a resolution?

The first big one was the stimulus, part of the debate about the size. That was really between the CEA [Chief Economic Adviser] and Rahm over the size of it, the construction of it. And then the deployment of it is where I got involved in it. We created an implementation office, and Biden really ran the oversight of it. But there were 1,001 tentacles that flowed from it. We had policies like Race to the Top, which was the education reform; clean energy, which basically is the only reason we have a renewable industry. We took some of the existing authorities and added more money into it. So that was super important. We had a health-care-related component. Beacon communities, the community health care centers, and all that. It was really important for a lot of those to be successful programs, and they were signature initiatives within the broader pool of money, much of which was going to build bridges and roads and tunnels and that kind of thing.

Within the Recovery Act, there were pots that were deemed to be very important. Rahm—As we all know, the highspeed rail was his thing, really only Rahm’s thing. There were elements that were really important to a lot of people for different reasons. Jill Biden cared a lot about community schools. Some people cared a lot about K-12. There was the higher education, bailing out the HBCUs [historically black colleges and universities].

There were pots of money and new program authority in the Recovery Act that needed to be deployed for the first time at speed and in a way that was cogent and made sense, so we worked a lot on trying to get those programs to the point that they were conceived of and get them off the starting block. First, get the agencies focused on it; let’s conceive of what we’re doing here, take this authority, then get something out to market, get people bidding on it, get the foods out the door. So I worked a lot on that, and it was [laughs] actually a ton of work. It was such a pain. But in any case, I worked on that.

Then housing came soon after that—again, a big dispute about how big the housing response should be. Many of us were worried about people getting their mortgages restructured and then re-defaulting, because we weren’t dealing with the household debt that people had—the actual affordability of the mortgage—relative to how much income people had. If you’re unemployed and your mortgage gets cut, if it’s not cut enough and you don’t deal with the underlying debt situation, you’re going to be back at square one. Got a lot of pushback on that, and there was money in the Recovery Act for housing, as well. So we spent a lot of time working the structure related to that.

Then I had a little bit to do with the auto bailout, not so much the bailout but the follow-on, which had a lot to do with the tax credits and other things flowing to the automakers, in particular Chrysler. I don’t know if you remember “Cash for Clunkers” [Car Allowance Rebate System]; I worked on that. I worked on the tax credit structure for the automakers, the ones that did survive. What else? Then we got into small business, which was a huge problem, obviously, and we ended up passing a small-business bill well down the road, but initially it was about getting access to credit for small businesses. Huge knock-down drag-out over that. Then we got into the budget and tax reform, so we had Making Work Pay, which was a big internal fight in the tax bill, because it was super expensive.

When you say “fights” and “battles,” is that internal to the White House—

Internal. Internal to the White House.

—and not with Members of Congress?

Well, agency and/or—Internal to the executive branch, and sometimes internal to the White House, too, but—

And were they ideological, in terms of—?

Often. Sometimes ideological. Sometimes cost. Sometimes just—

Sometimes turf?

Sometimes turf. I spent a lot of time on the tech stuff, the early days of net neutrality. We had a couple of cases that were going to the Supreme Court. We had to deal with that. And he cared a lot about tech policy. The net neutrality sets of issues were really roiled at that point, so we were trying to deal with the settlement. I spent a lot of time on that. Thanks to Verizon, which sued us later, it all fell apart, but that’s neither here nor there. Yes, so I’d say that was all on the economic policy stuff. It took us all the way through, in a way, the whole time, basically. We had to deal with GSE [government-sponsored enterprises] reform toward the end, because people wanted us to come back and fix one of the last legacy leftover things. It still hasn’t been dealt with. And then we had two budgets that I had to work on, State of the Union and a middle-class agenda. Were we going to have anything tax credit-wise in that? So, yes.

OK. You came in anticipating that you’d be able to continue in the foreign policy area, so where—

What did I work on in that?

Yes, what did you work on in that?

As you guys saw in the press, initially the release of these CIA torture memos. I worked on the Gitmo [Guantanamo Bay detention camp]—pain in the butt that it was—for better or for worse. We bought a prison in Illinois [laughs] for Guantanamo. I worked on the release of Guantanamo prisoners, with Palau as a good place to release people, before that got shut down. I worked on the Korea Free Trade Agreement, getting that settled, the initial stages of TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership], some of his early work on the Egypt trip, his first Middle East trip. I worked on START II [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty], to try to get that, and get the ratification of that, because nobody had really done ratification of a treaty in so many years, so we had to create a little team to do that, and to help deal with the outside groups, to just get the muscle memory for “What’s a treaty?” [laughter] How many votes do you need for that, and what do we do kind of thing. So I worked on that. What else? I can’t remember. Other things. [laughs]

H1N1, which was cross-border. Mexico, we had a bunch of issues, including at one point deploying National Guard to the southwest border. We’re already dealing with immigration-related politics.

Yes. The torture memos, can you go back to that?

Yes.

Can you tell us a little bit more about how that presents itself to you, and how you end up getting a piece of the action on it, and what you can about what you’re finding out and the kinds of recommendations you’re making to the President on these things?

Yes. I don’t remember why this issue came up, to be honest. I think either somebody sued us or there was a—

Yes, I think there was a federal—

—lawsuit, right? Against the CIA, if I’m not mistaken.

My recollection is that that’s correct, but I’m not—

Yes, I have to go back. But in any case, we were presented with this question of whether or not we should declassify the memos related to torture, and then, as a follow-on from that, should the people who were involved in the program be held criminally liable for their actions.

Right. And had the President taken a position on that during the campaign?

I believe that he had, about declassification, if I’m not mistaken, but I don’t remember—And I don’t remember how prominent—Gitmo was ten times more prominent than that, right?

OK. We’ll come back to that.

But there was a question about responsibility, and obviously we signed an antitorture Executive order at the very beginning, and that kind of thing. We were already on the other side of it, for the purposes of our administration, but there was a question of responsibility, so we ended up, if I recall, with a group of people in the National Security Council, obviously, and the legal advisor’s office, both domestic and the national security legal advisor’s office, on where the four corners were, the famous four corners of where you might have culpability and where you might not.

One of the questions was “Should we declassify these memos?” And we had a lot of meetings with people, including in the Oval Office, about what are the ideas on both sides about whether that was a good idea or a bad idea. I was firmly on it’s a bad idea, because the memos—They’d already been leaked, if you recall. I think the New Yorker had them. Some outlet had already had them. So I thought, They’re already actually public, significantly, so declassifying them, to the extent the agency already feels like they’re the ones being thrown under the bus from the previous administration, you’re not really adding to that, right? So that was my argument.

He decided in the end to release them, but there were a wide range of views, and I’d say not strong views. I can’t say that I had a strong view about it, but it was one of the first times where we had to wrestle with something where I think he was on record as wanting to declassify them, but realized that it might come at the cost of his relationship with the intelligence community, and their feeling like we’re always the one who gets left holding the bag here. Meanwhile, you’re not going after former Justice Department officials or anybody who ordered us to do any of this, so why us? And now these people work for you. So it’s a little hard.

Right. And [Leon] Panetta was the head of the agency at that point?

I believe so, right? Wasn’t he?

Yes, I think so.

Yes, he was the first CIA—Yes.

And how was the relationship between Panetta and the President?

Oh, good, I thought. Yes, pretty good. My thing about Leon, because he’s such a pro—He’d been in a bunch of these roles, so he could appreciate the President’s constraints, and why he was doing what he was doing. And he, I think, just wanted him to understand where the people in the community were coming from, that they’d been left holding the bag a zillion and one times, and over time it just erodes the ability to govern with this group of people because they’re kind of out here. Obviously, there were people at the time—You remember the whole tapes debacle and all the rest of it. There was a big question about whether or not people were outside the four corners of the program. And everybody agreed—Well, people who were doing stuff they shouldn’t have been doing, that’s a totally different story, right?

For the President, it was one of the first times he had to decide how much backward looking do you want to do versus forward looking. How much of the previous administration do you really want to delve into, and how much do you want to just turn the page and move forward? I think early on he believed “We could go back, and keep going back, and keep going back, but that comes at a cost of everything we want to do going forward.” So I think he had a sense of I just don’t think it’s a good use of our time here, policy and politics, to spend that much time digging through what happened, and we’re not going to get very far anyway, so—

Did that occasion much resistance within the administration?

Yes. There were different views from people who thought we’ve got to have full accountability here, and we should do whatever it takes to kind of grind this down to the very end of what the story was. And people on both sides of it, people you would think would be in favor of moving on, weren’t in favor—It didn’t line up with where you thought people would line up, because people had different views.

Were there long-term consequences, in terms of Obama’s relationship with the intelligence community?

I don’t think so. That’s what I was worried about going into it, because I thought, This is the first thing you’re doing? To that’s where I was coming from. Really? If the memos weren’t out already it’d be a different matter, but because they’re already public—They’ve already been published. Later I was on the Intelligence Advisory Board, and I think he handled himself really well with the IC [intelligence community] over the years. They came to get to know him and understand where he came from and that kind of thing. I never encountered anything other than people feeling like, yes, he’s a pretty straight guy, and—I’m sure there were some ruffled feathers right away, and there were some people who left early on who were really unhappy, and probably would have left anyway, but retired.

Who felt like he was not pushing far enough?

No, I mean people who were upset at his decisions around the memos and the Gitmo stuff and all the rest of it, who said, “I’m out,” of the intelligence community. Maybe they would have retired anyway, but—

Gotcha, OK. What about the Gitmo piece of it? Tell us about—[laughter] Do you need a break before we get into that?

No, I guess not. It’s just such a sad, sad scenario.

How does the problem present itself to you when—?

Well, on the campaign Gitmo was a big deal, closing Gitmo was a big deal. So we decided to sign the Executive order coming in, realizing that we probably would not meet our one-year deadline, but also deciding that having a deadline was really important, because moving with some alacrity, with some time pressure, was our best bet to try to close it. What we had not anticipated was the messiness about who was there. I’ll just leave it at that. Or lack of clarity about who was there, why they were there, the ability to prosecute people. We thought the things were more robust than they actually were.

In any case, as we got into it, we realized, Hmm, this is going to be very challenging, to say it mildly, to figure out a way forward, but the President was pretty determined to still try to close it. And so we tried, in a bunch of different constellations, to get to a formulation that would work, but the politics really moved away from us, almost from the beginning. First, mainly on the left, folks who were really in favor of closing Gitmo, suddenly weren’t in favor of closing Gitmo, because there was really no way you could do it without taking people into the United States. Because the Europeans had taken a ton of people, the Middle East had taken a ton of people, and our allies were saying, “OK, but you’re not willing to take anyone?” And there were people you couldn’t return home, because of the torture ban—

Did you think about boats?

What?

Were boats considered at this time or not? I know at one point there were ships, shipboard. Was that still an active option?

We considered so many options, you wouldn’t even—everything under the sun. Third-country, fourth-country. The Bush administration had released people in all kinds of constellations, so we went back and looked at all of that. And obviously we were also moving at the same time the idea of trying people in the military commissions, which we had to pass that law, et cetera. It was one thing after the other.

It became really clear at some point that we’re going to lose this, so we have to decide—do we want to lose it entirely, or do we want to pull back and leave open the possibility that he might be able to close it at the end of year eight, We just decided to take the loss but not have a law passed against closing it, in the hopes that the politics of it would change, and that it could somehow deal with it on the back end.

Was this a place where the President felt like he had options, or was this a place where he feels like the politics have to prevail in the end because he doesn’t have the votes to do anything else?

Exactly. If we had it to do over again, we would have conceived of the U.S. settlement part differently. We would have surfaced it differently, and we would have also gone about it differently. But you only can know that with hindsight. At least I would have approached it totally differently, had I known what I knew after we went into it a little while.

As time went on, his option set narrowed, and some early decisions are the ones that narrowed that option set pretty quickly. A lot of it had to do with U.S. resettlement. And part of the reason you had to do that is because we’re trying to get others to take prisoners, and they wouldn’t take them unless we were willing to take people. So we said we were, even though we really may not have been willing to do so. But we said we were, [laughter] which then created a whole bunch of drama.

The theory was if you get the population down to ten, it’s a different story from the population being at 250. So a lot of the desire was nothing’s going to happen when the population’s 250; we’ve got to get this population down to its core, so let’s start slotting people into different categories. We did, obviously, crunch it down.

So it was 250 when you inherited it?

Yes, something like that.

And how was it when you left?

I don’t remember. We cut it significantly, and we had people in categories, and a whole process for clearing people. I was in that part of the process, as well. That was a multiagency process for teeing up files, trying to decide: is this person such a risk that they can’t be here? Where are they going back to? Is there a risk they’re going to be back on the battlefield, or are they actually from some third country, or now they’re 70 years old and they’re more likely to just go home kind of thing?

OK. And at this stage you have a very high level security clearance?

Yes.

Is your clearance whatever the maximum is, or—?

Well, you get to a certain point when you have Signals Intelligence, and then after that there are programmatic intelligence read-ins that you have for various programs. So, yes, I had some of those, but not all of them.

OK, some of those, but on a case-by-case basis—

You have them, yes, based on whenever you need them.

—should we get read into certain things.

Yes.

You’re coming into the federal government after a period of enormous turmoil and change in the government, and in the society’s relationship. Do you remember anything that surprised you when you’re getting read into these programs, or anything that just shocked you, in terms of its intensity, or the—?

Yes. When I left the NSC in Clinton, it was a little, sleepy, pretty small place of 150 staff, I think. We could fit the whole senior staff around the Situation Room table. And I came back to find an NSC of 500 people, with Homeland Security—which John Brennan ran at the beginning. None of that was there before. The depth of the infrastructure and bureaucratic infrastructure that was a function from 9/11 [September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks] was very palpable.

The security around the President—Some of that is just because he’s an African American President—but I could tell it even with the Bush briefings. Clinton had relatively little security. We used to go on what they call OTR, off the record, trips. We’d go on a trip and want to stop for barbecue, and we’d just hop out of the car and go. None of that ever happened anymore. The bubble factor had gotten much less permeable by the time we got to Obama. That was very noticeable.

The intensity of the focus on the counterterrorism mandate had absorbed a huge swath of the entire national security infrastructure. On the one hand, when we left Clinton, we could see that starting to happen, because we were already focused on bin Laden, so you could feel that this was taking more and more activity all the way to Energy Department, Agriculture Department. So I was starting to see the tentacles of this spilling out all over the place. But by the time I came back after 9/11, and eight years later, it’s all in its fulsome version. It was, as they used to say, the Global War on Terrorism. It had a global feel to it. That was definitely not the case before; it was a very Middle East–driven kind of issue.

Did you have a sense that maybe the emphasis there was driving out other things that should’ve gotten more attention?

Sure, yes. That’s always the case, though. Every administration comes in saying, “We’re going to spend less time on the Middle East, because we have to, because of strategic U.S. national security interests. We have Asia. We have a rising China. We have issues in the Americas—an area of opportunity that we need to develop, because it’s our nearest neighbor. It’s a way to grow our economy and we have so many linkages. We don’t spend enough time there. We’re neglecting the continent, sub-Saharan Africa. Our transatlantic ties have withered because of our focus on the Middle East.”

And everybody falls back into the same thing: they get sucked back in, whether you want to or not. So, yes, I think everybody starts with a more global approach. I have yet to see an administration that doesn’t say that at the beginning, and they all get sucked back in. That said, I think times are now actually changing a little bit more.

I think Obama felt very strongly about the China relationship, getting our arms around it quickly, feeling frustrated at the lack of tools to deal with the complexities and nuances of the U.S.-China relationship. He was disappointed, I think, that all we have is literally the equivalent of nuclear explosion when it comes to the relationship. We don’t have enough ways to affect the relationship in a nuanced way. That came through very clearly. He, obviously, came in feeling like I just don’t want to be a President that gets sucked back into doing Middle East all the time, but still, yes, the footprint of the government was still very focused on that, and it does crowd out a lot of other stuff.

But we planted the seeds on Cuba, which he felt really strongly about, so that got planted early on. That took a long time to fix. He felt really strongly about TPP, as a way to kind of force a conversation around U.S. engagement or footprint in Asia. He said, “We have to have something that isn’t security-related that binds us more closely to Asia.” TPP, for him, was it. So there were some things that, early on, he said, “This is really important; we have to do this.” But yes, it crowds out everything.

Did you get the sense that it was manageable?

[laughs]

Had it grown so big that it was literally unmanageable?

There’s a priority-setting exercise that the intelligence community uses for how you allocate resources across various threats, and too much of it was in the top bucket. But I was always a little bit sympathetic to that, because in reality threats to the continental United States and to military and civilian personnel working abroad is really the highest-priority use of U.S. government funds. Did we overdo it? Yes, probably, but you can understand why people make that decision, relative to other priorities, so I didn’t feel like it was out of whack, really.

The thing that was really, to me, out of whack was the internal Washington bureaucracy’s ability to manage—Still, what I think is a challenge—the Homeland Security mandate. Who’s got responsibility? You see this now in the cyber realm; back then it was a little bit of who’s managing the border, but now it’s in the cyber realm. Who’s got responsibility for cyberattacks in the United States? Is it the FBI? Is it DHS? What’s the role of the NSA [National Security Agency]? What’s the role of the Defense Department? Who’s supposed to respond when Sony gets hacked? Who’s supposed to respond when a bank gets hacked, or the energy grid? Who’s responsible for that? [laughs] And we were already struggling with that, whether it was a virus outbreak, or a major hurricane relief. The fundamental question of what’s “Homeland Security,” and where do those lines stop, and turf battles wasn’t really resolved.

Gotcha.

It’s gotten worse, probably.

Let’s take a break.

OK.

[BREAK]

All right, we’re ready to go. We spent a lot of time talking about White House staff and less about the Cabinet, so let me turn to that, and ask you: give us an assessment, if you will, of how well the departmental or Cabinet structure worked under this President. And in particular, if you wouldn’t mind going through and picking out some folks that you feel were really critical to what you were doing. And if you’ve got observations, either pro or con, about individuals that served well, or that maybe were problematic, recognizing, again, that it will be helpful for history purposes to know these things, and if some of this is delicate and you feel like you want to hold onto it for a while, we can certainly do that.

Yes. Yes, I probably will. [laughter]

You’re a young professional, so—

I’m young, right, exactly. The relationship with the Cabinet, when you interview Cabinet Secretaries, I assume they’re going to express some frustration with the Obama administration, because we were pretty controlling of the Cabinet, relative to past Cabinets, and certainly relative to anybody who had expectations of some level of independence.

And based on your experience with the Clinton [administration], you detected a difference.

Oh, definitely, yes. With the Clinton administration, I’d say the way you governed was still in the more traditional way, and by that, I mean agencies, Cabinet Secretaries still had significant power. The White House was still, I would say, more in a coordinating role and less of a deciding role then. My lens was through Sandy Berger, and I would say Sandy was probably one of the more powerful people in the Clinton White House, relative to his counterparts, because the NEC at that point and DPC were less developed than the NSC. But even then, Sandy was very much of, I’d say, an honest broker among the core group, spent a lot of time cultivating key Cabinet members to develop consensus. But the agencies themselves were still very powerful, and they kind of ran their fiefdoms as a fiefdom, and they had a lot of independent relationship with the Hill, et cetera.

Both Rahm and Podesta, from their experience in the Clinton administration—One of the things they concluded is Cabinet Secretaries and Cabinet agencies can become powerhouses in their own right, and one of the key things of governing is to make sure you can observe and influence what your agencies are up to. One way you do that is what I was talking about early on, which is you control the deputies; you control the chiefs of staff; you control the White House liaison councils; you basically control the agency, or at least you have your people around. And that, I think, was the right theory, but it actually created all kinds of problems. On the one hand it was good, because we did always know what was going on. [laughs] On the other hand, it was bad because it meant that there were tensions that sometimes crept up inside agencies, where there was misalignment of view, or internal strife that limited people’s ability to act with one voice.

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Were there any Cabinet Secretaries who fought back and got to appoint some of their own people?

Yes, and that gets to their effectiveness. There were a few who were like, “I see you coming on this and absolutely not,” Hillary Clinton being one of them, Tom Vilsack being another one of those. Hillary was really effective in some respects and less in others. We can get into that if you want. But Vilsack, I thought, was particularly adept, in part because he, unlike a lot of Cabinet Secretaries, knew what he wanted to accomplish when he got there. Forced us—

To me, the measure of a great Cabinet Secretary is can they figure out a way to box the White House into doing stuff that the White House doesn’t want to do. [laughter] He was very good at that. I was constantly saying, “Wow, you’re pretty good at that.” And he’d say, “Yes, you’re forcing us to get into all this stuff that we don’t really want to get into.”

The way you do that is by speaking with a consistent voice on the thing that you want, and you do it over and over and over again. You don’t have 25 priorities; you have one priority. Every time you see anybody, there’s a number-one priority, and you just keep going at it and at it and at it. You create an echo chamber of groups that are rowing in the same boat. You get some people on the Hill who are complaining about the same thing, and the next thing you know, the President. Rahm would say, “We’ve got to deal with Tom Vilsack on this,” whatever it was. You’re saying, “OK, all right, I guess we’re going to have to do so.”

Was he also powerful given the state from which he came, and thinking about the reelection campaign, representing a particular political—

Not really, because I think there was a feeling—Iowa was really important in 2008, but it wasn’t going to be as important in 2012, because we didn’t think we were going to have anybody contest the nomination, so there wasn’t going to be an Iowa. At least, that was our going-in assumption, that we could forestall that. That constituency was important, but it’s not as if Obama campaigned on a rural/agriculture constituency particularly. So it was, OK, yes, we care about it, but it would not be way up at the top—school, education reform—way, way up at the top of the list. Health care. Immigration.

But he was pretty good. Most of it, to his credit, redounded to his benefit and not the White House’s, so even better, [laughter] from his perspective. H was a standout winner. Now, part of it, I think, is because he was kind of on the sidelines, his issues. He could just drive them on his own, and we really didn’t have any idea what was going on, because we were too busy focused on other things.

Hillary was good in a different way, in that she had star power in her own right, and she figured out pretty quickly how to grab the limelight on issues that she wanted to grab, and leave the dregs [laughter] to the White House to deal with. She could position it as though we didn’t want to give up control over the bad things. [laughs] But whatever. She was good at that, so that’s good. And she managed to keep her star power up, and keep herself in the news cycle enough that you had this sense that maybe one day she might want to run, and she was really good at keeping her—So she was also very good, really good, in the Cabinet dynamic.

Janet was really good. Actually, Secretary [Steven] Chu ended up being really great. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT He singlehandedly figured out this Deepwater Horizon oil spill thing, because he’s the one who designed the valve they needed to go to stop the leak, because none of the hydraulic engineers could figure it out. We sent him down to Houston to meet with all the energy executives; they kept on saying, “Oh, we have a solution,” and then no solution would appear. “Oh, give us 24 hours. The solution will appear.” So we sent him down there, and apparently, he drew something on a napkin. He said, “Well, how about if we did this?” And they said, “Huh. [laughter] That could work.”

That’s the way it works in Hollywood, right?

Right?

That’s the Hollywood way a Cabinet officer—

He said, “Well, I think if we did it this way,” and they said yes. So he came back and he was like a star. Everybody said, “Seriously? [laughter] You don’t know anything about the oil industry.” He said, “Yes, but it’s pressure. I’m a physicist. This is really just about pressure and water. I figured it out, what can I say?” He ended up having his own cult following, and I guess maybe the Energy Department doesn’t really require that much anyway, so he was not that political.

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[Robert] Gates?

No, after Gates. Because he only stayed for a year.

Was Panetta there and then he went to CIA, or did—?

Was Panetta at Defense before CIA? Well, in any case, I don’t remember. [laughs]

I bet it’s in the timeline.

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Yes. But did Gates—?

Gates was a tough customer, too.

That’s not an obvious appointment. So you say Gates was a tough customer.

Well, he was a little bit like Vilsack. I remember having a meeting with him at one point about something that we wanted, and he was just saying, “Mm-hmm.” And I said, “So does ‘Uh-huh’ mean yes?” And he said, “Let me think about it.” I forget what it was exactly, but about a week later we had like four resolutions opposing whatever it was we had mentioned in the meeting. [laughter]

Yes, it was Panetta.

Oh, it was Panetta? Yes, OK.

Panetta replaces Gates as Defense Secretary—

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—July of 2011, after you left, so—

Oh, OK. All right, so maybe—So then I guess Gates was there the whole time I was there.

Gates was there the entire time you were there, yes.

Oh, OK. All right. Well, Gates was definitely a tough customer in that he had been there for a long time. He knew the Hill really well. Where you mainly saw that was on the budget, because we would propose a budget; it would have Defense cuts, not shockingly; the cuts would all get restored; he would say, “Oh, yes, I don’t know how that happened. [laughter] I don’t know. Yes, I’m totally with you on that. Yes, 100 percent, completely with you.”

We said, “Really? Because it doesn’t seem like you are, because we’re hearing from people on the Hill that your staff is opposing all the cuts.” He said, “Oh, no, no, we’re totally good with that.” We said, “Mm-hmm, OK. But you’re not going to lobby behind the scenes, are you?” “No, no, of course not.” Right, and all the cuts are restored. We’re like, OK, all right, well, it is what it is.

Although, to his credit, he was a person who was in huge favor of getting out of this congressional district spending on things that the Defense Department didn’t want, and we backed him on that, and he really tried hard and wasn’t able to get very far on that. He would say, “I respect the fact that you guys are willing to go with me, because most people don’t bother, but this is a total waste of money to get stuff allocated that we don’t actually need.”

He didn’t really want to do Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, although we got him to go along with it. There were things—Gitmo he agreed with, but said, “This is never going to happen.” He was very practical. They got along incredibly well. They were very close, actually, and he really trusted his counsel really implicitly, more than I think people realized at the time.

Were there any of the opposite sort that he didn’t get along with?

I think he thought some of them were kind of—I can’t think of who, necessarily. He and Tim were very close. He didn’t spend that much time with a bunch of them, so like Locke and Kathleen and Tom Vilsack. I probably spent more time with Tom Vilsack than he did, really. And sometimes he was kind of—I’m trying to think of who—Yes, like Lisa Jackson, EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]; he didn’t really do that much with EPA. We’d do a meeting once in a while, but he would say, “Yes, OK, fine, whatever.” He had a generally positive view, but wasn’t interacting with them all the time. The people he was interacting with all the time—and less so with Hillary, too. It was really Gates a lot, Tim a ton, not shockingly. Those two by far and away the most, and everybody else I would say less so. We spent a lot of time with them: Rahm, me, Pete.

Could you elaborate a little bit more about the working relationship with Hillary? I’m interested in how that plays out on a day-to-day basis, because it seems from the outside that there was some natural tension there—

Yes.

—but it’s hard to know how that gets operationalized, and how does it show up. Is it just eye rolling at the staff meeting because you’re seeing a front-page story in the New York Times where she’s claiming credit for something that the President ought to get credit for, or how does this show up?

There was a core group in her front office, basically campaign-type people who were in her staff and on our staff, who basically were still not really getting along that well. Sometimes things would pop up on my radar, and I knew them, and Rahm knew them, so people would come to us and go, “There’s some huge food fight over some secondary-level political appointment where staff are arguing about it.” And I knew Cheryl [Mills] well, and the people in the front office, and Huma [Mahmood Abedin] really well, so at one point I had lunch with them and I said, “We just need to have some kind of—If there are things that are bubbling up, try to nip those things in the bud before they become a big deal.” But inevitably there were a bunch of disputes—usually on personnel stuff, sometimes on travel, sometimes on policy stuff.

Oftentimes you would hear about some ridiculous—Yes, a third-level appointment where our people were holding it up for whatever reason, or her people wouldn’t agree to something that our folks wanted, and it would bubble up to the surface to the point that I would say, “You realize that Hillary Clinton is about to raise this in the Oval Office with Obama. It’s kind of embarrassing. [laughs] I hope people can work this out. I don’t really care that much, so it’s up to you guys, if you want to put her in this thing. But I think he’s going to be saying, ‘Why are we talking about this? This doesn’t seem like a good use of our time.’”

Nine times out of ten that would get things to resolve, but everything was a negotiation, whereas with a lot of the other agencies—The White House has a certain amount of influence on how things flow out, everything from foreign visitors coming to how the lunch was going to get designed, and with them it was thing after thing after thing.

I didn’t have to deal with it that much, but once in a while things would come to me and I’d say, “Why are you calling me about this? Literally, this is a problem for other people to deal with. If you guys have an issue, you should raise it with the President. I’m not getting in the middle of all the drama.”

Did the two principals get along OK?

[laughs] Yes, they got along fine. I said to the staffers, “You guys realize that these guys get along fine, and they’re going to be wondering, ‘Why are our staffs—? We’re over it, so you should be over it.’” I’m not sure they were really over it. I’m not sure she was over it. He was definitely over it, but, as you know, most winners are like that: “I don’t know why you’re upset. [laughter] Everything’s good.”

Well, they did get along eventually and she was fine.

Yes, they did get along. Yes, they got along really well, and part of the reason they got along is because she understood this intersection of policy and politics in a way that—really, at the Presidential level—that nobody else in the room literally understood. On things like health care, when we’d have Cabinet meetings, she would chime in on whatever it was, and he would say, “You’re right. This is really helpful.” She just had this perspective, and a little bit of objectivity from it, and she understood it really, really well. There were limits to that, obviously, of course. But I suspect that a lot of the kind of lingering feelings of negativity really were more on her side than on the Obama side.

Right. Yes, it would make sense, and it would make sense that it would be staff-generated, too—

Correct, yes.

—because staff tends to harbor those resentments longer.

Definitely. Yes. And the more directly you were involved in the campaign, the more likely you were to have those resentments, so the people who came in who were political appointees—We knew lots of people at the State Department who were early-on political appointees of hers, but they weren’t on the campaign, and they would say, “I don’t understand what’s going on here. Why are we arguing about this?” [laughs]

And with the Vice President, right, because he was a rival early on. It didn’t last that long, but he was—

Yes, but because he was out so early, I think he was a little bit more, “I’m thrilled to be here” kind of thing. And part of it was also because Mike—Mike Donilon, that is, his political person—and Tom are brothers, so there was a family connection—

Oh, I didn’t—

—and Tom Donilon’s wife worked in the White House, too, and Ron Klain had worked with all this before. There was a coziness with their staff, so we were really well integrated. We knew their policy people really well, so they really became part of the White House. It’s not like in the Gore era, where there were two of everything, and the Gore people did their thing and the Clinton people did their thing. With Obama and Biden, it was much more integrated.

Is that right?

Yes.

And how did that work? You said it’s much more integrated, because he had his people deployed places?

Yes, they participated. It wasn’t like in the Clinton/Gore era; Gore had a mini version of everything that the Clinton people had. He had an Asia person, and a this, and a that, and had a team, obviously smaller, but they would run their own process for stuff. The division of labor was much more these are the things that Gore is going to work on, and these are the things that Clinton is going to work on.

With Biden, it was much more like, “Here are all the things we have to do together—Recovery Act; I think, Joe, it would be great if you guys ran that.” But we were all involved. I was involved in it. His team was involved. OK, how are we going to staff and execute on this collectively? And he didn’t have staff for every single little thing. His guy, Brian McKeon, who was one of his senior people who came off the Hill, we made him the lead for START II ratification because he had worked on ratification of a treaty before. Most White Houses would not give that to somebody who was a staffer of the Vice President to run that process, but it made sense because it was his background. We kind of put people where they needed to be, based on what their—

But with Biden there was no hiving off of policy areas to give to him as the Vice Presidential portfolio. What you seem to be suggesting is that he knitted into virtually everything that’s going on.

Yes, he had a view—He wasn’t in everything, because he didn’t have an interest in some things; he wasn’t heavily involved in the tech stuff, for example. But there was a set of issues that he was really well known for, labor-related issues, the middle-class agenda, community colleges, those kinds of issues that Jill felt really strongly about. Their staffers were very present in the conversation and were part of the policy dialogue, like anybody else, and he would be part of the State of the Union meetings, or the budget meetings, or whatever, and opine. And, yes, he was given some things, like this Recovery Act thing, to run—

Oh, OK. All right.

—and he was dealing, as we now know, with the Ukraine stuff. So there were certain issues where he had a long-standing background and relationships as a result of his time on the Hill or whatever, and he was the logical person to run that. That was actually, super helpful, because we were so busy. He could go off and run the stuff, but his staff was really integrated, so it was really different from the Gore setup, for sure.

Gotcha. OK. We’ve talked a little bit about the Hill, but who on the Hill did he most rely on for guidance and intelligence and so forth?

Pelosi was his main cohort at the time. He relied on Pete a lot, because at the time—Well, when we first started, obviously, we had a veto-proof majority, but it was a veto-proof majority in name only because we had Senators who were very conservative, who were, you could argue, not—We weren’t really getting to 60. Pete was really the go-between. He knew all of those people very well. He was very close to the more conservative side of the Democratic caucus.

Right. And was Pete spending a lot of time on the Hill, or—?

No, just chatting. He just knew them. He and Biden were really the two people who were able, if we’re going to get to the point where we need 60 votes, to understand where that little cohort, two or three Senators, really are, because that tells you what the limits are of what we’re going to move, and what’s going to be possible. We saw that play out in health care. They became the key folks early on, and later on, part of the reason we didn’t do immigration. There are limits of what, politically, we were able to get going on the table as a result of those politics. I don’t recall him having tons of interaction with other Senators, because they knew what they needed.

And on the House, Rahm was saying, “You have to rely on Pelosi, because she’s got a better whip count than the whip. She’s always got extra votes in her back pocket.” Rahm was running his own whip operation, because we had somebody in our office who used to be his floor manager, and we had a couple of whip people who had come out of Rahm’s office. So we were whipping our own votes, and we would compare notes on things with her staff. It was a pretty tight circle.

On some of the really tight stuff, very consequential bills, like some of the tax policy, deficit-reduction, and the commission that we had, and all of that, those bills, when they get down to it, end up being a very small group of people. It’s literally maybe five people from the White House, and maybe a couple of people in the Senate, and a couple of people in the House, and that’s it, who are kind of trying to do those deals at the end—bipartisan, as well. Once we lost control of the Senate, then Pete became even more important, because he and [Addison Mitchell] McConnell [Jr.] had a good relationship. So did Biden and McConnell.

I was going to ask you: Obama, at least at first, wanted to be bipartisan, wanted to have an awful lot of bipartisan this and that. Didn’t work.

Right.

Why did it not work? Is there any reason, other than sheer Republican intransigence? And how did the administration react to that?

It definitely didn’t work, and I’d say yes, it was intransigence, and it was a very slow-moving realization that there was basically no formula that would break out of that intransigence. He was patient longer than many people would have suggested, were recommending. There were people right away saying, “This is a lost cause.” The first vote on the stimulus—where I think we only got one Republican vote or whatever to bail out—was the first sign; this is the beginning. “You’re never going to get votes for anything. It’s over. Yes, you picked up a Republican-based bill for health care, but you’re never going to get any [laughs] Republicans to vote for this. You should just know this.” Other people were saying, “Let’s not say that, because some of these bills have been introduced by Republicans in the past, so it’s worth it, because even if we only get one or two, it’s better than nothing, and we want to be showing that we’re trying,” and blah, blah, blah. It was an active debate the whole time.

Health care really kind of sealed the deal a little bit, where people were saying, “OK, this is a waste of time.” We could have done what we were doing a long time ago if we had just bailed on trying to make it bipartisan. We would have been finished and done with this. It took a huge toll politically, and we could have been well on our way at this point. And we would have changed—The bill would have been different. Same on the stimulus: a third of it was tax cuts in the hopes of attracting Republicans. We probably wouldn’t have done that. We still would have done some tax cuts, but not that much. The lessons learned from both of those were, OK, there’s just a limit of how much you can do here, and we just need to move and try to go forward.

With Democrats, at least, not unlike the dynamic with Trump now, which is Obama was always more popular than they were with their own base. People would complain that he wouldn’t spend enough time on the Hill or whatever, but everybody would look at the numbers and go, “You don’t really have any choice but to go along with us, because we’re 15 points, 25 points more popular than you are, so we don’t really need to bother with what you think, because we know you’re going to vote with us,” and they all did. In a way it was just a little bit brass tacks; it was really only these couple of people in the Senate that we really had to deal with.

Then, obviously, once we lost the House, then there was a whole ’nother drama with [John] Boehner and that. Boehner and he, as I think is well documented, got along quite well, and I think Boehner was the kind of politician who would have been willing to do deals, and even big things; he just couldn’t bring the caucus along with him. That also became clear over time.

It took a couple of instances where we thought, OK, this looks like it can go, and then him realizing he doesn’t have the votes. Even then there were people inside going, “He’s not going to be able to deliver all these people. The traditional Republican Party, they lost the core to the Tea Party. He’s not going to be able to get all these people on board.” And other people saying, “Well, you’ve got to give it a shot, because if not, then we have no legislative agenda, basically. Let’s just test and see, because maybe they can rally the votes,” et cetera. So after you lose or you can’t get things over the finish line a couple times, you realize, OK, that tells us all we need to know, and then you have to plan accordingly.

So, yes, I’d say he, in his desire to be bipartisan, was more patient than many other people were counseling. Lots of people were saying, “Come on. We can see where this is going. How many times do you have to be beaten upon the head and shoulders before you realize you’re giving in on policy for a bunch of people who aren’t going to vote with you? It makes no sense. We ought to just do what we’re doing and call it a day.”

Was Pete Rouse counseling him to stay the course, or did he bail early?

It depended. He was somebody who really thought, initially, going in, that there could be bipartisanship, but he was also one of the first people to say, “I just don’t think we’re going to get anything meaningful.” And the people who are left, who are supposedly “bipartisan,” like the Susan Collinses of the world, he said, “They don’t have the backbone to stick their neck out. We can’t hold our hopes on that. That is not a strategy, because they’re only going to move in a group, so if you can’t get four or five, you’ve got zero.” It’s just the psychology of it.

And McConnell, everybody respected his ability. He was always very clear about what was going to happen, and nine times out of ten he was right about that. The good thing about him is that he’s very transactional, so if he says it’s going to be OK, it would be OK. I don’t think that’s working now, by the way, [laughter] but back then it did.

Let me ask you, along these lines, whether or not race was a factor in the response to the President on the Hill, in the sense that these Senators—He put in tax cuts in a stimulus bill. You’d think they would go for that. But there might have been some pressure from home, in the districts. That was at least a common refrain throughout, that it was a race—People responded to this black President, and pressure on Members of Congress not to go along with this guy. Even when they had reasons to play ball, they wouldn’t.

Yes, I’m sure it was, and obviously at the time there was tons of response—Some of the stuff that was floating around, whether it was pictures or images or stuff on memes—

Was that discussed internally in the White House? Did you all discuss that, in terms of how to—

Not really, because everybody knew it was there, so it was not something we discussed. There’s nothing that he could do about it, particularly, so we have a tendency to just focus on the stuff that we could control. But I do think you used to hear this all the time from people: “You’ve had enough victories.” So there was already this sense that just by him getting elected, he was already an historical figure.

What people? When you say you hear from people—

On the Hill, from Republicans in particular, you would hear, “You’ve already had enough victory. You’ve already gotten enough done.” Obviously, he’s a historic figure from Day One, so he was going to be written about in the history books. And the benefit of coming in in a crisis is that the stimulus package had a bunch of signature things in it. As one person recounted to us, we probably had a year lead on a budget, because we basically had a budget with stimulus in it at the very beginning. We probably had six years’ worth of energy policy in that bill. We probably had four years’ worth of education policy in that bill. So we were far, far ahead on executing on a strategy, and we passed a bunch of legislation really early on, now taken for granted.

There was an FDA [Food and Drug Administration] tobacco bill, and there was the Lilly Ledbetter [Fair Pay] Act [of 2009], and we set aside more land than anybody since Teddy Roosevelt for preservation, and we probably passed, I don’t know, ten bills in the first hundred days, or first three months, four months. We passed the children’s health insurance thing; we passed something on credit cards. We passed bills so quickly that one of our colleagues—Phil Schiliro—was literally saying, “This FDA tobacco bill, I’ve been working on this bill for 15 years. It’s failed every single time. We passed it, and it got this much [gestures with fingers] newsprint.”

There was a feeling on the Hill that we rammed through 20 years’ worth of legislation in four months, on things that people thought were never going to pass, and we were just teeing them up like this. [snaps] And then you’re doing health care, too, and then you want to do Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and you want to do immigration, you want to do energy, and you want to do this, and you want to do that. We’re done, right? We’re done with you. You’ve already had enough wins. We’re over. That’s it. So there was a sense that we’ve got to slow the roll, because success begets more success, and the more you pass legislation, and big legislation, the more people realize, OK, we’ve got to play ball. Because once it becomes clear to people, vested interests and others, that these guys might have a path on something, then everybody wants to glom onto it, right?

So, yes, I do think there was a sense of we’ve got to stop him, and, yes, some of it was probably race-related, but it was also this sense of, you’ve done way too much. You’ve raised taxes on people. Who does that? So there was definitely a lot of pushback of you’ve kind of “gotten your limit.”

Pushback from Republicans, or also Democrats?

Both, I think. There was a sense of how much do you think you’re going to get here; you’re two years into this. We’re going to make sure that you get slowed down. And he got way slowed down. At the beginning we were literally saying, “OK, which bill? It’s Tuesday. We could pass this by Thursday. [laughter] Oh, if we introduce—” That’s why I say when Phil was saying, “Well, which ones do you want off the back of the truck here? Because we could pass all of these. You want the treaty, and you want Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and we may even get immigration done. You want to do all that, or you want to fight over here about something or another?” And Obama said, “OK, I kind of want to get it all done.” We said, “OK, well, then we’ve got to just keep going at this pace, and try to get as much as we possibly can, because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the election.” Or we did know what was going to happen in the election: we’re going to lose control of the House, so this may be the last gasp right here. It may be that we never pass another bill after this, so whatever it is you want to get done, we’d better get it on the table now and get it through.

Did you ever have conversations with the President about race?

No, not explicitly, really.

Would you think that’s because of the nature of your relationship, or was it because of the nature of the issue, and it just wasn’t something that he was reflecting about?

I kind of felt like it was always something that everybody kind of knew was an angle upon which everything would be seen through that lens, that there was always a sensitivity that you’re doing “favors” for African Americans. Everybody knew going into it that that was a factor that people would believe and perceive, whether or not it was true. There was definitely a sense among the senior staff that the level of scrutiny was much, much higher.

So all the hijinks you’re seeing now in this administration—or even, frankly, in the Clinton administration—he would have been impeached and removed in a week. So none of the things that happen in White Houses—There was always a sense that none of it is going to him. He’s in a box by himself all alone over here, and the rest of us are just going to have to deal with all the swirl of stuff that goes along with being the President, all the vested interests and all the other dynamics that come flowing through, because everybody knew he was under incredible scrutiny in that way. That was all race-driven.

And then there was, obviously, the safety challenge. It was always there—wearing a bulletproof vest or whatever. But it was just the level of threat was really noticeable, and significant, and really strongly felt, and you just knew that from getting the briefings and stuff every week, and the security details, and all the rest of it. You just kind of knew. It was always there.

I’m surprised, though—So I grew up—and maybe you heard this growing up—where my mother would say I couldn’t get away with the same thing a white guy could get away with. So there was no conscious talk about that in the White House, that we want to be—? Because you hear now there were no scandals. You went through—

That’s why.

—eight years, and no scandals. Was it conscious, or was it people just sort of did it, or what was driving—

It was conscious, but it was also not articulated. It was just known, somehow, in the DNA. Rahm really started with that. Early on, just in our early briefings, he would say, “People are going to come after this President in ways—” And although a bunch of us had gone through Clinton, Rahm said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, OK? This is going to be a whole ’nother level, and the whole country is at stake, and we’ve got 200,000 people on the ground in the Middle East. This is really serious, and the only people who are here to defend him are all of us, so this is really important that we make sure that we don’t give any easy shots.” Right? That people are going to come after him. There are things that are going to happen that are going to be bad, but the unforced errors—We just needed to keep as much of the political back-and-forth scrum away from him as possible. If he hadn’t started that then, maybe it wouldn’t have started that way, but that’s the way it started, and so that’s the way it was.

Are there things that happened that we didn’t hear about, where people just sort of disappeared because there was some scandal or something, that you dealt with it internally and the person disappeared, and we didn’t—?

Yes, there were definitely situations and people who were doing stuff where we were thinking, OK, this is just not good. And people were just kind of told—We had to have people leave because it turned out their background was more controversial than we realized, and it was spilling over to the President. There were lots of things like that that happened, particularly early on, because the vetting operation from the transition into the White House was not as clean, so there were people who came in where we said, “Whoa, OK, who knew that they were—?”

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But it sounds like there was a heightened level of vigilance that probably embodied that.

Yes, but it started in the campaign, too, you’ve got to remember, because people already knew the level of scrutiny on him—We’re going to see in this election, just like we saw in the last election—Obama rarely made mistakes speaking. Rarely. Most people cannot be that precise and that on message that much of the time. It’s a level of internal discipline and ability to articulate your point of view in a noncontroversial way that literally very few people can do.

The times on the campaign when he did, it was just an uproar, right? So you already knew from the campaign that this heightened race-related sensitivity was going to carry us into the White House. Anybody who touched it knew that from the beginning of his rise. I guess it was just already in the DNA.

Let me shift slightly, then, and ask the question this way: was there any sense, on your part, that there were gender issues within this White House that perhaps adversely affected your ability to perform, or other women in the White House?

Yes, there’s been lots of press about the [laughs] gender-related issues in the White House; it actually goes back to my State Department days. I remember a fair number of my women colleagues feeling like there was a club of guys around the President who were his guys. And he’s quite sporty, so obviously they talked athletics at the beginning of the meeting. Obama loves sports, so anything that was a sporting—It could be ice fishing and he would want to talk about it. [laughter]

But not ice skating.

Not ice skating Only ice fishing. Although not Rahm, because Rahm was not a sports guy, particularly. But Ax really was, and [Robert] Gibbs, so there’s a small group around him that was really considered to be guys’ guys, and they want to talk sports all the time, and that kind of thing. I remember a couple of my female colleagues saying, “It’s really annoying, because only they really can participate. They’re talking about the game, and this and that, and he invites them to play basketball, or he invites them to play golf,” et cetera. Little by little this started to creep into the news cycle, that there was this gender thing. I remember thinking it was kind of strange. Then Melody got invited to play golf, and she said, “I don’t know that I necessarily want to play golf, but since I got invited, I feel like I have to go.”

You could start to feel that there was this gender story line going on. To this day I’m not really sure exactly where it was coming from. I remember talking to a reporter at one point, and they were asking me about this. And I said, “I don’t really—” Maybe it’s just because since I was in the State Department, I had never been in a meeting with another woman principal the entire time I was in the State Department.

When I look at this, I see the woman who’s running our health care initiative, who was my successor, is amazing, and running the whole health care thing basically singlehandedly. There’s a woman, Carol Browner, running all the energy initiatives. Diana [Farrell] was running the financial bill. And you have Valerie Jarrett, you have me, you have Melody, you have Alyssa. I said, “The way I look at it is actually the entire Obama agenda is being run by women, and all of the senior people around him, more than half of them, are women. It’s a breath of fresh air, because I’ve never actually worked with women before, so I’m not the one to ask [laughter] because I’m actually very happy. This is a brilliant, wonderful moment for me, so I’m clearly the wrong person to ask. You need to go talk to somebody else.”

So I personally never felt that way, really, but I can definitely understand why people felt that way. And the dominance—Some of the personalities were really strong and that kind of thing, and there was definitely a kind of desire from the guys to keep Obama, to have this kind of personal relationship going. At one point we started a women’s dinner with us in the White House, just the women getting together. It was Alyssa’s idea. And we got together for drinks, and we did it once every quarter or whatever. The guys in the White House had a panic attack.

Really? [laughter]

Yes. They said, “So I heard you guys had drinks last night.” I said yes. They said, “What did you talk about?” I said, “Stuff.” They said, “Like what? Did you talk about us?” I said, “Maybe.” [laughter] Then we had another one, and Michelle came. Oh my God, it was like the end of the Earth. We had a little drinks thing, and they said, “I heard Michelle was at the thing last night.” [laughter] I said, “Yes, she was there.” “Well, what did you guys talk about?” I said, “Everything.” They said, “Everything what?”

“Ask her. Just go ask her.”

I said, “It’s fine.” And our only thing was we’re not going to tell the guys anything; we’re just going to drive them absolutely crazy. Meanwhile, they’re all getting together all the time. Do we even ask them what they’re doing? No. They’re all going out for drinks or whatever. Who cares, right? So it was very funny.

Did the President ever inquire about this, to your knowledge?

No, but he hosted a dinner for us in the family dining room, which got some press. I don’t know if that was intentional or not. I think it was to try to tamp this down, and he said, “I want everybody—” And at various times he would say, “Don’t be shy.” I remember some of it was just the dynamic with Rahm. He would say, “You should feel comfortable shouting over Rahm if you feel the need to do that [laughter] in a meeting.” And I would say, “Don’t worry. I feel fine.” And he’d say, “Are you sure?” I’d say, “Yes, yes, I’m fine.” And he’d say, “OK, because it’s really good for me that you’re here. I know it can be tough.” I’d say, “Yes, it is what it is.” You have to grow a thick skin with Rahm.

This poor guy was living with three women, so he probably—[laughter]

Yes, getting their input. Yes, exactly, and I’m sure he heard, “You need to be treating the women properly in your team, and everybody needs—” And Rahm was definitely a very tough guy, so—

Did you have a sense that Rahm treated people differently?

Rahm was equal opportunity in every way, shape, or form. Now, people may not have taken it that way, but he literally unleashed on every single person at some point, and many of us more than once. Those of us in the inner circle, he would go nuts on all of us all the time. But you get used to it; you’re just thinking, OK, it is what it is. Other people would say, “Oh my God, I can’t believe he just did that.” I’d say, “Don’t worry about it. It went in one ear and out the other. I wasn’t even listening to him after the first two minutes.” So—

It comes back to something you were talking about earlier: after Rahm left, the White House took on a different characteristic. If he had stayed, would he have worn out his welcome?

Probably. Because the level of intensity—At one point there was—At the beginning we were having meetings [laughs] on Saturday, and they were Saturday from like 10:00 to 4:00. And everybody’s working until 11:00 or whatever every night, and if you have a meeting that’s starting at 10:00, you really need to come in at 9:00, because you need to figure out what’s going on, and then by the time you leave, you get home at 5:00, so it’s basically a full day on Saturday.

It was actually a very productive time, because there were no phones ringing, no meetings. It was a chance for everybody to get together, not just at 7:00 in the morning for the daily meeting, but a real time to dig into stuff, think about what are we going to do on the midterms, State of the Union, budget, whatever; how do we block and tackle going forward. But there was a rump pushback on that, and eventually word came down from on high that it’s too much time, because basically nobody’s seeing their families; everybody’s going to burn out.

There was a burnout factor about the intensity, but, to be fair, it wasn’t all Rahm, either; it’s because we also had really intense people: Peter Orszag, and Larry Summers, these are really intense people, right? Melody is really intense; she’s very calm, but she’s also really intense. We had a quite intense group of people around everything all the time, so the level of X factor was very high. Had he stayed once we had lost control of the House, it would have been a different level of pressure, maybe, too, because the dynamics changed fundamentally. So I’m not sure—It might have naturally calmed itself down.

But I do think at the beginning it was like, “I need somebody who’s kind of a bulldog.” I think, yes, he had kind of rubbed people in enough wrong ways that it was, OK, this is a problem. And I spent a lot of time smoothing people over—Cabinet people, senior staff people—saying, “It’s going to be OK; it’s fine.” And he would always say, “It’s really good that you’re here, because you’re the calm face of things.” And I’d say, “I don’t know.” And he said, “Yes, but you’re kind of harsh, because you’re also saying, ‘We’re not doing that.’ But at least you apologize to people and say, [laughter] ‘I’m really sorry that you wasted a year on that and we can’t do it.’ You’re not yelling at them.”

There was a sense that it was eroding a little bit of the dynamic inside the White House, and as you know there was “no drama Obama,” and so he really noticed when there was drama. Rahm, personality-wise, was definitely an outlier on the base kind of mood of the White House, so that definitely took its toll, for sure. And it was way out of the norm of what was expected. Still cutthroat, by the way, but just different than the White House was.

[William] Daley [Jr.] was better on that count?

Daley was better, but I think Daley came in—We overlapped for only a little while, but I remember the first couple of meetings I sat down with him and with Gene Sperling, who came in as the head of the NEC when Larry left. I didn’t know Daley as well; I knew Gene really well—I basically told them a version of the same thing, because they had both worked for the Clintons. I said, “Let me tell you how these guys are different from the Clintons. This is really important for you.” [laughs] And Gene said OK.

I said, “The Clintons, their theory of governing was to put a controversial thing down on the table—Everybody wrestles for that piece of red meat, and whichever dog emerges with the red meat is the winner. And it’s a frontal assault. You always knew—” There used to be chitchat in the White House that your stock was up or your stock was down. [laughter] And people would tell you, “Oh, that was great this week. Your stock is really up.” In the Clinton White House—Yes, and when your stock was down, it was like your stock was down. When your stock was up, you got invited to things, and when your stock was down, you were not.

Oh, really?

There was a very direct response to your relative power, a power to get on the meeting schedule. So Sandy’s stock was always up, so we had carte blanche to get on the Presidential calendar. Lots of other people did not have the power to get on Bill Clinton’s calendar, because their stock wasn’t high enough to do so. And they were very clear about that: you don’t have enough power, basically, to get onto the calendar. It was all very open, and as a result people took their disputes outside, so you saw lots of leaking, and lots of backstabbing, and people screaming in meetings. The number of meetings that we had where people were yelling at each other inside the NSC and inside the Chief of Staff’s office, it was notorious. People throwing things at each other. It was always drama, always, always loud.

You get to Obama, it’s literally the inverse. So I said, “You know how it was with the Clintons?” They said yes. I said, “OK, see, this is the thing about the Clintons: when you had people coming against you, you could see them coming with the knife for your chest. The difference with the Obama team is the knife is in your back and you’re wondering what that blood is dripping on the floor, [laughter] and by the time you realize it, the knife’s already in your back.”

I said, “You need to know that that’s the way they operate.” It was just as cutthroat; it’s just one of them you could see it coming and the other one you can’t. Later Gene said, “Best advice I ever got, [laughter] ever.” I said, “And part of the reason is because—You just need to know there are people watching you all around, 180, all the 360 around everything you do, all the time. And you’ll be watched for not just what you’re doing but how you’re doing it and with whom. So you just need to know that you’re being scrutinized all the time, and there’s a certain level of expectation about how you’re going to deal with your colleagues and all the rest.”

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He was going to be that strong—

I think a lot of people assumed that Rahm was that centralized thing, and so they wanted to replicate the Rahm power structure, and Rahm conveyed the sense that he was the central person, but he wasn’t, really. A lot of people came into the role subsequent thinking, Well, I’m going to do that, when, in fact, that’s not what he was doing at all.

You’re going to have to account for this in your models now, Chuck. [laughter]

The Potemkin Chief of Staff.

There are as many models as there—

[laughter] The illusion of things to know. Yes, so I was thinking, Hmm, I don’t know how this is going to go, but I was already on my way out, and that was that, so—

Now, why did Pete Rouse not want to be Chief of Staff?

One, I think Pete, even from the first day he worked with Obama, was a little bit, “I’m retiring.” So [laughter] every six months he would say, “I’m retiring,” and I’d say, “OK, Pete.” “No, I’m really retiring.” I’d say, “Mm-hmm, OK, Pete.”

He didn’t have the fire in the belly.

He didn’t have the fire in the belly on the one hand, and on the other hand he said, “This is an unfamiliar beast to me, the executive branch.”

Gotcha. OK. That’s admirable.

“I know the Hill. I kind of know how to do that.” He was not significantly older, but older than the rest of them. He had been on the Hill forever, right? So he was a little bit like, “I just don’t know that I have the gumption to deal with brokering all the divisions and discussions on the substantive things, other than the issues that I really care about personally,” which he then would have a view on. But for the most part he would say, “I don’t really care what’s in the tax bill, and I don’t want to get into a big, huge fight about it, because I don’t know that I really care that much.” [laughs]

That’s a rare level of self-awareness from somebody at that level.

It really is.

When you think of all the Chiefs of Staff who’ve come through the pipeline—

It’s a burnout job. Everybody knows it. You have to be very ambitious to want to be the Chief of Staff.

Correct. Now, if Pete hadn’t been in the Chief of Staff’s office at the beginning, he might have wanted to be Chief of Staff, but part of it is because he was in the Chief of Staff’s office, he saw everything that Rahm was going through. I’d say the further you are away from it, the more you’re saying, “Oh, that looks like a good job.” If he had been in Leg. Affairs, for example, he might have ended up wanting to be Chief of Staff.

Interesting. OK.

It seems like it’s glamorous: you’re riding on Air Force One all the time; you’re getting invited into the inner circle; you’re spending a lot of time one-on-one; you can observe the outcomes of that. There are all the luxuries associated with it: your car and driver, all that stuff. So you could see why people might go, “Oh, yes—” And the office itself, and you have access to the pool, and all that stuff, so you’re saying, “OK, yes, this is pretty good,” but when you see it up close, you might go, Hmm, maybe not, right?

Exactly. You haven’t given us your version of the health care story.

Yes, because—[laughs]

Is that—? Uh-oh. Am I going to have to pull the plug on the clock like we do in the legislature?

No, no. You should definitely ask other people, like Nancy-Ann [DeParle], when you talk to her, because I was only marginally involved in it, mainly because everybody else was so heavily involved in it. One of the things early on, other than—We had two phases of health care: there was a phase that was about what we’re going to do; and then there was a phase about how we’re going to do it. I was more heavily involved in the what we’re going to do than the how we’re going to do it. And the what we’re going to do I also offloaded to my colleague [Ruchi Bhowmik?] because I was too busy for it, and, frankly, not that interested in it, really.

Early on there was just a lot of how ambitious we’re going to be—This is well documented—with Rahm wanting it to be skinny, the President wanting it to be big. A decision early on what model were we going to pick—We picked the Massachusetts one—and how were we going to conceive of all of the elements of it. I was involved in that, and kind of interested in it, but I didn’t—I kind of had my two cents in it, but not very much, because it’s technical. One of the things I learned [laughs] early on was it’s super complicated, actually, and I thought, We have really good people working on it, and it’s not my highest and best use.

I could see it was going to be a huge amount of time. One of the things early on—Rahm was saying, “Actually, we have all these other things going. It’s going to eventually suck in everything else, everybody’s time, so we should have other people working on—” So Pete and I, in particular, were not involved in health care, and Rahm really wasn’t, either, until it got down to the 11th hour.

Then at the 11th hour, everybody got on board. I was assigned some House Members to cajole into voting for it and that kind of thing. We were all deployed to different offices to help with wayward House Members and that kind of thing, and everybody was deployed in different ways. I was at the early end and at the very end of the process. When it looked uncertain, like we were actually going to get the bill to pass, I was involved in the conversation, although it was really Phil who came up with the idea of the strategy of passing health care the way we did. He likened it to The Last Jedi, where Luke Skywalker turns the plane like this, and the thing is closing, and he’s got two seconds. Phil said, “Well, the only way—” We said, “We’ve been working on this now for a year and a half. What are we going to do now, shelve it and pretend like we didn’t do it for a year and a half? We’ve got to bring this to a conclusion. We can either shelve it and do nothing, or we could fall back and do something skinny,” which is what Rahm wanted to do.

But the President was still really keen to do it, and Phil said, “Well, there’s one path, but it’s a high-wire act. It’s like this, and all these things have to come in line, and we have to pass the House version of the bill with no changes, and we have to do—” And the President said, “Well, let’s try that. What’s the likelihood of success?” Phil said, “Like 20 percent.” And he’s like, “OK, that sounds pretty good.” [laughter]

We’re saying, “That’s not good.” And Rahm, of course, is tearing his hair out. He’s saying, “It’s the end of your Presidency if we fail!” It’s the fourth quarter, two seconds left on the shot clock, trying to take the three-point shot.” Obama says, “I love it when we’re under pressure. That makes it fun.” And we’re saying, “Nobody wants to have that kind of fun but you. [laughter] It’s crazy!” He’s saying, “This is the moment. This is a clutch moment. This is what we’re here for.” We’re saying, “No!”

But he did assign me and one other person to think through how much of the Affordable Care Act we could actually implement through regulatory if we had to, if this fails. Are there elements of this that we could pick up, and what would that look like? How much china would we have to break in order to implement some of it by a regulatory path instead?

So they were thinking of regulatory means of enacting policy even then, even when they—

Oh, yes, the whole time.

Even when they still had Congress?

Oh, yes. No, this was after we lost Congress. This is after Martha Coakley—When we come back after that loss, and it’s clear to us that we have reconciliation, so we’re in the 11th hour. What are we going to do to get this thing through? And we had to do it before Congress changed hands, so we have this really narrow path. He was very determined to go. But yes, all along we had—

A lot of our hundred-days agenda was only regulatory; a lot of our energy and environment stuff was regulatory; we did a ton of stuff on food safety. We always had a regulatory component that was moving in parallel to the legislative path, and the regulatory stuff takes ten times longer, because you have to do notice and comments and all the rest of it, so that was kind of always moving in train.

People knew going into it the chances of us holding on to the Senate were zero. We always knew that the second half of the first term, politically, was likely to be less hospitable than what we had, so we knew that was coming. That’s part of the reason why there was so much pressure to get stuff done: because we knew it was going to slow down.

I was just going to clarify: you weren’t going to lose the Senate; the chances of your keeping a supermajority in the Senate—

Yes, correct.

OK. I just want to make sure I heard that correctly.

Yes. But when you’re going to pass legislation, you’re kind of thinking, OK, this is—

Right, of course. Is there anything useful you can tell us about the decision to go with the Massachusetts model?

Not really, because I wasn’t involved in the health care transition, but a lot of conversation had gone into different ways to approach health care. And I’d say one of the most interesting—There seemed to be a pretty good consensus going in that the Massachusetts model was the one that made sense, in part because it had already been implemented successfully. It was really the only thing that had a bipartisan feel to it, that had been successfully implemented, that led to higher coverage and lower cost. It was a demonstration model, as it were, of what it would look like. Granted, Massachusetts is not the rest of the country, but we went into it thinking at the time that we would create, essentially, the database—

Part of the reason the Republican opposition to this is people could see what was going to ultimately happen. If you think about who’s uninsured in the United States, it’s basically big urban areas in big states. If you count the top six states, it probably accounts for 65 percent of the uninsured. Many of those states, like New York and California, already had a children’s health insurance program, so extending it to adults was actually—and they already had a big Medicaid program—so it was not going to make it that much more impactful, financially, and they already had the infrastructure to do that.

Then you have the red states, where, essentially, you knew that there wasn’t enough of a health care market to actually create a market for health insurance, a Wyoming, for example, or a Montana. There are just not enough people for an insurer to come in and competitively price—or West Virginia, a population that’s older, sicker, whatever.

So everybody kind of knew that was really the laydown. The public option would end up being the option that would work for these rural areas, where there wasn’t enough of an insurance market, because no private sector insurer was going to go in, and over time the public market would be like when it was still Blue Cross and Blue Shield; Blue Shield was a nonprofit insurer. It would undercut everybody on price, and eventually you’d have single-payer coverage. That’s where the whole system was headed. People kind of knew that that was the game plan, hence strong opposition to that idea for a variety of reasons.

A couple of things that crept up really quickly were, first, states being really opposed to this idea—Republican states—totally opposed to the idea of the Obama administration having the data on all the insured. The states wanted to control their own health care systems. They were OK with us building the infrastructure—We said, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper if we manage the whole system, since it kind of ties to Medicare in the end, and then you build the interface, and you can control who comes to your marketplace? But it’s cheaper and easier for us to do that.” But they didn’t want it, because that would advance this idea of a national health care system, so we had to bail on that idea.

Now you fast-forward to, well, maybe not today, per se, because they’re busy trying to tear it down. But most of the states that built their own systems have since come to the federal government, saying, “It’s too expensive to manage all this data. [laughter] Won’t you take it over from us? We just want to manage the interface with our state, and name it, and—” I’ve been watching this behind the scenes. So that was one thing.

Sure enough, all these rural areas have no insurer, or maybe one insurer, with no competition, and there’s price gouging. Suddenly those states are saying, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a nonprofit insurer? Yes, interesting. [laughter] Very interesting that you say that. So there’s a reason why right now, with all these Presidential candidates, people are talking about a public option again: it’s because most of the country, the states that have healthy insurance—California, New York—New York has 14 providers; California has 15 providers; Texas has 10 providers. These states have tons of providers because they have tons of people, and they’re covering most of the uninsured. It’s all these other places that don’t have enough of a population to have enough of a functioning health care system.

So that’s my soliloquy on the health care industry. But that was part of the reason why I stayed away from it, because I thought, Wow, this is way too complicated, OK? [laughter]

But it’s fascinating and a—

Who knew, right? The politics of health care.

—wonderful, short portrait—Well, it’s sort of remarkable: people from the outside who don’t pay much attention to these things don’t understand that you basically went with a Republican—

Yes.

—plan, which then became not a Republican plan for things that historians will dissect for a very long period of time.

Well, yes. In these days, one thing I’ve learned about the American electorate is they have grooves in their mind about what the parties believe, and when you do something that doesn’t fit with the groove, they don’t believe it.

So Republicans cut taxes, and Democrats raise taxes.

There were easy slogans on this: Democrats want the government to run your life.

Correct. So of course they’re going to have a big health care plan that they force you into, right? And so, yes—

And you can blame [Willard] Mitt Romney all you want, but it’s not real.

Blame socialism.

Correct. I feel like those grooves are very deep, so to jump out of the groove, you’ve got to move mountains to change people’s mindset about where people start.

Gotcha. Are there big pieces of your portfolio that we have omitted? Is there something we haven’t dealt with? Because we’ve got about half an hour before we’ve got to let you go, and I want to make sure that—

I’m trying to think if there’s anything major that I worked on that I haven’t mentioned.

I have a sort of lightning round with all kinds of notes—

I know, lightning round of all kinds of crap. I shouldn’t say “crap”; that’s not nice. But, no, I think we—

If you had a job, there was crap involved, I’m sure.

Yes. Oh my God, yes. We didn’t talk about space that much. I had to deal with space a lot.

Space?

Yes, our satellite architecture.

Oh, outer space. [laughter]

Outer space, yes.

I thought you were talking about office space.

No, outer space.

Well, that’s the academic thing, on academic campuses. The biggest fights are on—[laughter]

Yes.

And we have a wonderful building here, so we don’t fuss about space.

Don’t have to fight on space.

There’s also parking space. [laughter]

There’s also parking space. Yes.

Where did you park?

Yes, exactly. I was on the—[gestures with hand]

West Executive?

West Exec, yes.

All right, something to say about space?

I spent a lot of time on outer space. I spent a lot of time on tech generally, but our satellite architecture, the deep space satellite architecture for the intelligence community, and what our posture was going to be with the space program—the moon, Mars, whatever—that kind of thing, the money associated with that, the decision to allow Elon Musk, for example, SpaceX, to compete for government contracts, which was a big, painful thing. That Orion spacecraft thing that Lockheed’s building, we helped to broker that deal in exchange for letting some of the competition go forward with space programs, with NASA and that kind of thing. So I spent a lot of time on space. Kind of a pain.

We haven’t dealt that much with the foreign policy component. Did you spend much time on Asia?

Not really, no. I spent a fair amount of time on Korea, because we—

North or South?

South. The trade agreement, really. Because you remember we reopened it and had to slightly renegotiate it, and then get it over the finish line, which was a little bit of a challenge, and then try to get TPP going on the back end of that. So I worked on that. But the core kind of U.S./China stuff, not really, because I didn’t really have time for it. I had to start to pick and choose. At one point I had to leave all my favorite foreign policy issues aside because of, really, the crush of time, limits of time. I really tried to pick the foreign policy issues that were the most likely to create a domestic political headache. It was really trade stuff, southern border, immigration, Gitmo.

Got it. You’ve mentioned immigration several times, but not in any organized way. Were there opportunities to do things there that were lost, or was it just too vexing to deal with it?

At that time, everybody still thought comprehensive immigration reform was going to be a possibility, for the 11th—I don’t know how many times we’ve gotten close but no cigar. We were trying to, at the same time, get pro-migration groups organized—really, that was under Melody’s ambit—around what a bill might look like. At the same time, we were trying to figure out what would a more muscular kind of border posture look like. And at various points we deployed the National Guard to the southern border.

We were trying to get the politics of it and the policy of it to align at the same time, and it never really was able to come together. It became pretty clear early on we were not going to have the votes to—We knew if we did it, we would have to do it early, because if we lost our 60-vote majority there was just no way it was going to get through. It wasn’t a reconciliation-related bill, so it needed 60 votes. And it became pretty clear, at least to me, early on that that wasn’t really going to happen.

The energy stuff we talked about a little bit. I worked on Deepwater Horizon, and put together the post–Deepwater Horizon commission and that kind of thing, which was also not fun. We had a lot of not-fun stuff. The Haiti earthquake I worked on a fair amount.

Yes, my next question was going to be about natural disasters.

Yes. Afghanistan troop levels. All those meetings that Dick Holbrooke wrote about, that are in George [Packer]’s book. I was in favor of really light and getting out earlier.

And how did that portfolio come to you?

Because I had worked on South Asia in the transition, it was one of the first decisions he had to make, so right at the beginning there was a little bit of spillover from stuff that we had been working on in the transition that just naturally came in. And we brought in Bruce Riedel to help with a little, short task force, looking at what our various options were for what our posture was going to be in Afghanistan. I was in there just because I was part of the deputies at that point, so it was a process that Tom Donilon was running, teeing up for the President, basically. Dick Holbrooke was a special rapporteur, so it was those meetings where we kind of sat down and tried to hash out how we were going to do it.

You’d worked with Holbrooke before.

Yes, I had, yes.

Where? I’m trying to remember.

He was in the Balkans. He was the U.S. negotiator for Dayton [Accords], and I was deployed to Sarajevo after. Dick asked me to stay in New York and work for him.

You didn’t do it?

No, I didn’t do it, but he tried to convince me to. I decided to go down to D.C.

Would that have been a hard job?

Well, I’d already been at the UN for a couple of years, and I was thinking, I know why this is good for you, but I only have one shot to go to D.C. I already kind of knew I might be in play for this NSC job, and I thought, If I can go to the White House, this is a no-brainer. But in the world of foreign policy, there were really two wings: there’s the Tony Lake wing and the Dick Holbrooke wing, and I was in the Tony Lake wing. So I was always a little bit like, it’s not really my people, you know what I mean? So, yes.

I see. Holbrooke is somebody I never met in doing 20 years of interviews. Tony I knew. He’s a bit of a mystery because of that.

Oh, brilliant. You have to read the George Packer book, if you haven’t read it.

Yes. [Samuel] Nelson Drew, who was one of the people killed in the accident, was a PhD [doctor of philosophy] student here, and we knew Nelson. Anyway. And Packer tells a different version of that story than has been published—

Published, yes.

—which does not make Holbrooke look very good, by the way.

Yes, well—Yes.

I’m opening it up, again, to specific questions. I have some things flagged here that I thought I would just ask about, and if it is worth talking about, fine; if not—

Supreme Court nominations.

Oh, yes, I forgot about that. I tried not to get involved in that. We had a whole team of people who were just doing SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] prep work. The only way I got involved in it was the crush of people who wanted to get involved in it, who were lobbying me to get involved in it. [laughter] I’m not a lawyer by training, so I felt I had no stake in this at all whatsoever. But obviously people were killing themselves to try to get on to the vetting team, the briefing team, the prep team, the this, the that. I was part of the conversation with the President about the pros and cons, but it’s not as if he was looking to me for any advice, particularly, on any of that. I was just there to watch the scrum unfold as everybody—

And were there ever any turf battles between you and your other—

Oh, Messina?

Yes.

Not really. Actually, maybe a year into it we had a meeting about something—It probably was H1N1-related because it had something to do with health care and safety for nurses and doctors—so the nurses’ and physicians’ unions were there in this meeting. I was there for the health care part of it, the H1N1 response. I’m assuming that’s what it was. Messina was there because the unions were there, and he did more of the political stuff. We sat down and we were saying, “I think this is the first meeting we’ve ever been in together.” [laughter] It was. And it was the last meeting we were ever in together.

Is that right?

Yes, because he was dealing with a lot of operational stuff. Obviously, we were in tons of meetings together, but substantively our worlds rarely collided. A lot of times they were more of a handoff, where I’d work on something, and then it would get picked up because it was going into legislative mode, and then he would be working on it, or it was political, and it would go from there. Sometimes stuff would flow to me from him, but it was because something had been decided, and it was going to be more of a policy thing, so it was more of a handoff than an overlap.

And how did that work as well as it did? We’re always thinking about successful practices in Presidential politics, and this strikes me as being a successful way of doing business. Is it replicable, or is it dependent on the personal relationship and capacities of the two people who were in the job?

It’s highly personality- and interest- and capability-driven, because if we had had more overlap in terms of interest and focus and background, I think it would have been naturally more competitive, but we really didn’t. We came from totally different ends of the Earth into this together, and we each had different strengths. It was similar with Rahm and Pete.

Rahm and I were the two people in the front office who had spent time in the White House before, so we had kind of a leg up on how the executive branch works. Pete had been on the Hill for 30 years, but had never been in the executive branch, so he knew a lot about government; but he knew nothing about this beast. I think it worked for that reason, and from the front-office perspective the jobs are very poorly defined, more poorly defined than all the other jobs. As a result of that, it can create some serious insecurity and bad behavior that creeps up if people feel competitive with each other.

We would get together, I don’t know, maybe once a week. He would come across to my office; we were right next door to each other. He’d come in and he’d say, “I’ve got something for you. It’s coming your way.” And I would say, “Seriously? What is it?” And he’d say, “I’ll tell you tomorrow, but it’s this and that.” And I would go in and say, “Ha, ha. [laughter] So, by the way, I just want to tell you this thing,” or whatever, right?

Every office was kind of like that. There’d be a moment at the end of the day—It was like eight o’clock at night—where everybody was saying, “Oh my God.” And sometimes we’d pile into Pete’s office and just unload, or in Rahm’s office, and everybody would just talk about what was going on. Sometimes Rahm had some very strong views, like, “I really want you to take this over, because whoever it was came to see me and this thing seems like it’s a total mess. I don’t know what’s going on.” Rahm always used to say, “Somewhere, while you’re sleeping, somebody in the Eisenhower Office Building, or somebody out there in the Cabinet agencies, is creating a major problem [laughter] that’s going to be a Mack truck that’s going to hit us smack dab in the face. Our job is to find it before the bomb goes off in the truck.” He would say, “Something tells me that this thing is totally messed up, so you need to go figure out what it is.”

He did not say “messed up.”

He did not say “messed up.” We all had our individual, and then mixed-group, interactions. It’s really hard to describe.

I have never met Jim. What’s he like?

Jim—[laughs] He’s really funny. He’s kind of political. He’s a little bit—He’s like a friendly version of Rahm.

That’s an oxymoron.

Does that mean anything? [laughter] Yes. You know how Rahm is very high-energy, and likes to hop from thing to thing. Jim is very similar—

The same, OK.

—but very easygoing, right? He’s from Montana, so he likes to shoot the shit a little bit. He’s more easygoing, really interested in politics, so much more political, thinks in that way, and cares about that kind of thing. He used to come in and say, “I don’t know anything about this, what this policy thing is. You’re going to have to tell me, because this thing has come across my desk and I have no—Frankenfish, what is a Frankenfish? You’ve got to tell me what this is.” He’d say, “I’m having a meeting tomorrow about Frankenfish, because these groups are going nuts. What is this?” And I’d explain.

Rahm, similarly, by the way, who had the attention span of a tsetse fly, so I’d say, “Rahm, I need you to focus for 15 seconds. [laughter] Fifteen seconds, for this super-complicated thing that’s worth $20 billion in the budget, but 15 seconds. Do I have you?” He would say yes, and five seconds later I’d say, “I’ve lost you, so forget it. I’ll grab you later when you’re focusing.” And he’d say, “Just make a decision.” I would say, “I just don’t feel comfortable making the decision,” but after a while I realized I had to make decisions, because I knew if it’s not Rahm making a decision, my only alternative is to go to the President. He’s kind of busy, so—

After a while did you learn which decisions you didn’t need to bother him with?

Yes. And sometimes I’d make a mistake, and I’d realize, I guess you kind of wanted to make that decision, because that was kind of a big decision, but I already made it, so sorry. [laughter] Hope it was the right decision. One of the things I realized early on in order to move the ball down the field, was that I had to be willing to make decisions. White Houses do get gummed up if people are afraid to be wrong and people are afraid to make decisions.

Rahm was always somebody, for all of his ups and downs, who would say, “Everybody, if you made a mistake, you made a decision, it was the wrong thing, just come clean and we’ll try to fix it, because nobody’s perfect, and everybody’s making stupid decisions all day every day. Our whole job is to try to get this stuff out, and half the time we’re flying blind anyway, so it is what it is.” It lowered the bar for being “wrong,” as it were. Of course, then when you were wrong, then he was screaming at you, but that’s neither here nor there.

I have a question. Something you said earlier, maybe in jest: you said that no good things can come from talking to the press.

Yes. [laughs]

What is this antagonism-with-the-press thing that administrations have? I’m curious about that.

Well, when you’re in the government and you read the newspaper, every story you read, I used to say, was somewhere between 45 and 65 percent accurate. You read it and it looks so decisive, and you’re thinking, No idea. It’s unbelievably off-base of what’s actually going on, or what the debate’s about, or what actually happened, or anything else. And the press likes to be right. They have very strong views about things, so they write with a decisive kind of tone.

When you start off with them, when you talk to reporters, they’ll say, “Well, we think it’s this, this, and this,” and when you say, “Well, that’s not actually what’s happening,” what you find, particularly nowadays—The best reporters are not like this. The best reporters draw you out, and it’s very hard to resist telling them things, so you don’t like talking to them, either, because they’re going to get you to reveal stuff that you don’t want to reveal. But most of them—I’d say the vast majority, 80 percent—have a narrative in their minds already and they want you to confirm it.

I just thought it was a total waste of time, because they’re not really interested in telling the story; they’re interested in telling the story that they want to tell. Then you tell them, “Well, actually, unfortunately, this is not at all what’s going on; the meeting that you think happened actually never happened, and the people you think are lobbying us aren’t actually lobbying us, and we haven’t had any conversations about this, and, in fact, no decisions have been made.” But people have decided that that is what’s happening, because they’ve been told by somebody else, so you say, “OK. We’re there every day, but if you want to write it, write what you want to write.” You realize early on it’s just not worth the time.

And once you get into—I mean some people play that game in Washington, because your press coverage gets you coverage. It raises your profile, and then you get more coverage. So we have lots of people—Rahm is a notorious press leaker to shape the stories, and all the rest of it. I saw it as a job, if you want to get into that. But I always felt it came at the cost of seeing my kids, so it was an easy thing. The same reason I decided I’m not doing TV. I still don’t really do very much TV. I don’t do a lot of press. I don’t engage with them very much.

That doesn’t show up in the briefing book.

Doesn’t show up in the briefing book. I didn’t talk to any of the books, other than George Packer, whom I knew. He said, “You’re one of the few people who knew Dick Holbrooke all the way through, from the Foreign Service all the way till his death.” He said, “Very few people know him through—so I really want to talk to you. And you’re in his notes.” So I said, “OK, I’ll talk to you.” But all the books, all those reporters who wrote all those books, I said, “I’m not interested.” And most of the reporters would say, “You hold your cards very close,” so—

That’s interesting. So there’s nothing that can be done, from the administration’s point of view, in terms of making what’s written more accurate?

Well, we had a whole press operation. So if—

But is it press or is it PR [public relations]? If you play that spin game—

Right, exactly. So the press operation, I would say, was two-headed, in that part of it was just accuracy, pushing back on stories that were affirmatively inaccurate, and/or getting people to print retractions, and/or getting the facts right, and/or getting people on the record for the thing that we actually were doing. Then half of it was also this is our spin on what’s going on. There was a whole team of people doing that.

Rahm was heavily involved in kibitzing with the press. Obviously, Gibbs and Ax and other people were doing that all the time as well, and then we had a whole press team that was doing it. You kind of felt like there were enough cooks in that kitchen. It’s not as if I come with any particular relationships that were especially relevant, so the only people I would really talk to were people who had preexisting relationships. I did talk to [David] Remnick about his book on Obama, because he’s a friend, but other than people who are known to me, who I know are straight shooters, who aren’t going to burn you, it just didn’t seem like it was worth it.

Was there ever a program developed to try to find leakers and plug leaks?

Yes.

Talk about that a little bit.

Rahm was very—which is highly ironic, since he was a big leaker [laughter]—anti-leaking. We were kind of thinking, I don’t know if you’re the most effective [laughter] emissary for the “anti-leaking program.” But he used to say about this leaking thing—and it was true—He’d say, “There are people who are authorized to leak for this administration, and unless you know you’re one of them, you’re not one of them,” [laughter] “so don’t leak, because if you leak, we’re going to have to shrink meetings,” et cetera.

In health care, we had a leak early on about our health care plan that was pretty devastating—It wasn’t devastating in the end, but it did frame things in a way before we were ready for it. Rahm was totally convinced he knew who it was, and went on a tear. I won’t say who it was, but he was firm in saying, “They can’t be in this meeting anymore. We’re done.” We felt it was kind of awkward, because this person was heavily involved in designing the health care thing, so how can we have meetings without this person?

Was he right?

He was right. Because he said, “This is what we’re going to do: we’re going to cut this person out; we’re going to have several weeks’ worth of meetings; and we’ll see if there are additional leaks.” And there were no additional leaks, so he said, “I guess we were right,” and, sure enough, we were right. That person was never let back into the meetings, and we never had any other leaks.

Similarly, with our Econ team—I think this is pretty well known, that Austan Goolsbee was accused of being the leaker in the Econ team. He was vociferous about not being the leaker, but everybody believed that he was the leaker, in part because he had a really good relationship with the press, still does. He would say, “I’m not the leaker! Nobody believes me!” And I’d say, “Austan, I believe you.” And he’d say, “You’re the only one! Nobody believes me! Everybody thinks I’m the leaker.” And then two people left the administration—not Austan—and the leaking stopped, so we said, “Austan, you’re not the leaker.” [laughter] He said, “I’ve been saying the whole time I’m not the leaker and nobody believed me.” People were cutting him out of meetings. He said, “Can I come into the meetings now?”

The two people we thought were leakers were both leakers, but in different ways. We realized that based on books that emerged, then, after the fact, and some things that were leaked here and there. So we were like, Wow, OK, turns out we had two leakers.

So, yes, there was a desire, and there was a little bit more on the national security side, to get to people who were leaking, much like the Trump administration is trying to do. We squeezed pretty hard. I don’t know that any of it led to anything major, but there was this sense of you can become persona non grata pretty quickly if you’re caught leaking. I don’t know how it was handled toward the end of the administration, if it got looser, but no leaks. [laughs]

I’m just looking through my notes here. Nobel Peace Prize? You have any—

Oh, my gosh, I totally forgot about that. Well, that was funny because—I remember waking up in the morning, and before I got to the office, the news that he had won the Nobel Prize was out. I think this is also in the press, that Gibbs woke the President up and said, “You’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize,” and we hadn’t done anything yet, so we were thinking, What? How is that possible? We’re at war! [laughter] This is ridiculous. We’ve done nothing yet. It’s embarrassing. It’s crazy. What are we going to do?

There was actually an affirmative, should we accept this? It seems like all we could do is drop the ball here, and we’re authorizing troops in Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem like we’re really “peace-ing,” if you know what I mean. [laughter] What are we doing here? So there was a whole conversation about that. It was actually amusing, and then got quite serious; obviously, we have to say yes. It was a very short conversation about—

The President was involved in these discussions?

Yes, yes. In the office meeting he said, “OK, talk about something that was unexpected.” [laughter] And then he and the speechwriters worked out a very thoughtful—One of his best speeches, actually, is that speech about being a wartime President, and peace, and what war and peace are about. It got very little play, because I think it was at a weird time of day or whatever, but—And I remember it messing up our schedules significantly. That’s one of the things I remember, because he had to go to receive the award, and we said, “But we were just in Europe. That’s going to ruin our whole plan.” [laughter] I remember I was upset. I don’t remember what it was, but we had something that I had been planning, and I was saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me; these Peace Prize people ruining our schedule.”

Copenhagen, I think, the climate change meeting—

Happened, but then we had to go back. It was right afterward.

Yes, yes, it was right before or right after.

We were saying, “We just came here! We’ve got to go back again? Can’t we do it remotely?” And people said, “You can’t do it remotely! You’ve got to be there!” [laughter] So it was a big deal.

Speaking of speeches, what role, if any, did you have in the crafting of speeches, including, but not limited to, the State of the Union?

I had very little on the actual crafting. So [Jonathan] Favreau’s—I’m sure you’ll talk to Jon—I would read them for content purposes, and for accuracy, and a lot of times the policy slug would come from our office, so we would send him—There might be placeholders in his speech for what we were announcing or whatever, and I would send him that, and then they would craft it, and then I would look at the “flowery” language to make sure it actually still said the same thing. [laughs]

Sometimes I’d say, “Actually, you took out the most important three words that you didn’t realize were the important three words, because they’re buried in that paragraph. You took them out because they didn’t sound right, but that’s actually the only important thing in that whole speech.” I would do for content, but not for writing, other than the State of the Union, which is a whole, long, six-, seven-month process, that was ideas from agencies, refining things, and message testing, all that.

You were helping to drive that process?

I was in charge of that process, yes.

Right. Anything in particular you could tell us about that?

Kind of an annoying vestige of why do we do this speech every year, but agencies love it, and everybody’s breathlessly waiting for it; I don’t know why. But, yes, it was actually a good process, because it aligns with the budget process. I don’t know if other people did it the same way or not, but I would kind of tee up any and all ideas. Whatever pie-in-the-sky idea you can think of, send it forward.

We had what I’d call a racking and stacking exercise, where we would basically take everything in different categories. I’d run them by Rahm and Ax and other people, and we’d soft-circle some highlight things that we thought might fit with whatever the theme of the speech was going to be, and then we would flesh those things out, and ultimately take them to the President. If he decided to do them, they would then have to be in the budget, priced in as something we were going to run in terms of legislation. Sometimes we knew we weren’t going to get it done, and sometimes we thought we might actually get it done, and so how much work we did would depend on how serious we thought it was.

The one other piece that we haven’t asked you about was the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which comes—

Oh, yes. After I left.

It used to be PFIAB [President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board], but do they call it PIAB [President’s Intelligence Advisory Board] now?

Yes, President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. We dropped the “Foreign.”

OK. I wondered where that—Do you know why they dropped the “Foreign”?

Yes, because we thought it was—Well, we had to redo the Executive order anyway; I forget why. There was some reason why we had to redo the Executive order.

It may have been dated.

It was dated, but we also wanted to do cochairs. There had just been a chair before. I think we wanted to change the Intelligence Oversight mandate. So when we redid the EO [Executive order] we said, “Why is ‘Foreign’ in there?” Isn’t it by definition the foreign intelligence? It seemed unnecessary, so we dropped the F. [laughs]

OK. So you were involved in the—

EO writing, and the first—I did a lot of personnel along the way, so ambassadors, and the PIAB, and PCOLB [Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board], and a bunch of the other advisory boards along the way.

And tell us, what did that job entail as a member when you were on it?

We had a couple of mandates that we were looking at. When I joined it in 2013, I think, after I left the White House—

Right.

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Right. Do you get paid as a member of that board?

No, it’s unpaid. I forget what it’s—a Schedule B. You’re technically a federal government contractor—I don’t think you’re an employee at that point, but you’re a contractor of some sort. But you get your security clearances; there’s a staff and all that. It’s meetings every six weeks or so. Sometimes it’s the National Security Advisor who will task you with something, and bring back recommendations. Sometimes it’s the President.

In the case of Snowden, it was the second time we’d had a pretty devastating breach. What is going on? The Intelligence Oversight Board is when there are breaches of intelligence that don’t really hit the press, and there are a bunch of them. It’s an internal review body, like is there self-dealing, essentially, inside the intelligence agencies. It’s just an outside, objective review of how people are dealing with problems.

Did you get a sense if your recommendations were effective, and were they taken seriously and implemented?

Yes, but—like with most of them—we knew that a lot of our recommendations were encouraging of where people wanted to go anyway. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT

Everybody’s realistic; it’s an outside advisory board, et cetera. But some of the stuff we came up with, in our memos on the way forward for the transition, people thought were actually quite helpful. I’m sure the Trump people didn’t read it at all, but other people were saying, “This is really helpful. If we were you, this is where we would pick up where we left off on some of these issues,” that naturally drop when a new person comes in.

Mona, you’ve done us a wonderful favor.

OK, great.

Thank you so much. This has been—

Done the historians a wonderful favor?

I always say at this point, we never exhaust all the possible avenues of conversation, but we do a pretty good job of exhausting the person we’re interviewing. [laughter] So, thank you.

Sure.

It’s been fascinating. We have learned an enormous amount. This is a terrific interview, and we’re so grateful for your time and your contribution.

Absolutely. Happy to do it.

We’ll be in touch.

I’m glad you found it useful. I’m sorry we didn’t fit into any good models. [laughter]

Oh, no, it’s fantastic.

We’re actually moving a bit beyond the binary ideas, so this helps.

Well, in this day and age it’s going to get really—I don’t know what’s going to happen. [laughter]

I was curious. One of the things—You’ve had a little bit of experience with both, right? You’ve studied this, and you’ve actually done it. The difference between what the books say, what our models say, and what actually happens, I was fascinated with that.

People have asked me a lot, academics who write about organizational design. I taught a course at Princeton, at Woodrow Wilson, about federalism, and the budget and things like that, but a lot of people would just ask about the governance models and that kind of thing. I’d say, “You realize if you raised some of the academic literature models in a conversation with Rahm Emanuel, you’d probably get fired on the spot.” [laughter] He’d be like, “What are you talking about? What are you talking about?” That would be the kind of thing that would live on, and you would get teased about for the rest of time.

Exactly.

I thought, Nobody has any idea. It’s a bunch of people who are super smart, super ambitious, super competitive, who are thrown into a soupy stew with no job description and no sense of what success is, and all the hijinks ensue from that. [laughs] Everybody’s flying blind, and most people, because they’ve never worked in a White House before, have no idea what they’re doing, including the President of the United States, by the way. Everybody’s saying, “OK, I guess this is what we’re doing.”

Well, this is why we do this. This is very low-to-the-ground evidence about what life is actually like, and our colleagues in the profession take advantage of it and try to refine our models. But the important thing is to download this very important, invaluable information from memory about how things actually work so that we can create a more realistic portrait, and you’ve done us a terrific favor. It’s been a lot of fun just to have done it.

OK, well, good. I’m glad. I was happy to do it.

If we can ever return the favor, you will let us know.

All right, well, yes, [laughs] you never know.

[END OF INTERVIEW]