red flags about what they deemed to be suspicious transactions involving trump and kushner accounts including in the kushner case of money going to russians where their concerns were overruled and according to the government and in one casethe employee was fired about after speaking out about it .>> .. >> bipar san policy center, and thank you for joining us in a virtual event where we are here for an important reason, the release of a new book. the book is "fight house: rivalries in the white house from truman to trump." and the author, tevi troy. we'll be joined by tevi e as well as kiron skinner to make commentary on this book. let me start by introducing our

guests, and then we're going to talk a little bit, and we're looking forward to having some of you ask questions as well. the reason i'm very excited about this book but also about our guests is it's a rare thing to be good at public service, to be a person of action, and it's also a rare thing to be a scholar and to be excellent at the study of something. and tevi troy and kiron skinner, both bring that to the table. tevi was someone who worked in many places in public service from the congress to several departments, at the department of labor and department of hhs, but also, very importantly, at the white house which is what these books are about or this book and several of his other books. he's also, again, an accomplished author who's written in addition to this piece on the white house about intellectuals in the white house as well as emergency preparedness in the white house and the use of social media by presidents. so i hope you will take the time

to listen but also to think about buying this book, "fight house." we've got fourth of july coming up, we have some more obscure events in the summer. anytime is a good time to learn more about the white house and presidency. kiron skinner or is also a person of action and scholarly repute. she is someone who's worked most recently in the white house, or in the state department as director of policy, served in a number of other administrations in the advisory and other roles as well as some presidential campaigns. but she's also the toby professor and director of the institute of politics and strategy at carnegie mellon university. there she's written books on ronald reagan and on foreign policy as well. so we really have a great lineup

today. what we're going to do is jump into the meat of the book. we want you to get a little sense from tevi as to what's in the book, what are the key points, and then i want to turn to kiron to hear her thoughts, and then we'll going to have a conversation. when i do come to you for questions, you have a number of ways of getting in touch with us. one is to submit questions in the comment section at facebook and also with the youtube chat function and, finally, on twitter at hashtag bpc live. so we'll look for your questions. but let's begin. tevi, or this is a book, and you've written extensively on the white house, but what i like about the book is, of course, it's about personalities and conflicts of important advisers in the white house, but it's also a book about the presidency and the white house itself and how that institution has grown. my first question really is you point out that over the period you're talking about, start after fdr, the white house has

really become a much bigger institution. it has more staff, it's more prominent. and yet advisers there are often maybe younger than cabinet secretaries, but they often have the ear of the president. tell us about the growth of the white house, its relation to the cabinet. and then, if you can, with the many examples you have in the book, a few of them just to give us a little sense of what some of those conflicts in that area were. >> well, thanks, john. thanks, kiron, for doing this. the book is, as you said, about the growth of the white house staff, the growth of the executive office of the president. many people don't realize this, but before the fdr administration we really didn't have a white house staff, per se. people sometimes say, well, what about -- [inaudible] the truth is presidents may have had a secretary or two, but in roosevelt you have something called the brown lowe

commission, and the conclusion led to the creation of the executive office of the president which now has about 1800 people. most of those 1800 are career staffers who serve administration in, administration out. but there's somewhere between 3-400 who are what we would traditionally think of as white house staff. sometimes a little younger. they have the advantage of what i call proximity. they're close to the president, but they're not necessarily the person with the delegated authority to run an issue. however, their closeness to the president often creates channels for the cabinet secretary -- challenges for the cabinet secretary who is in charge and this idea of fighting for the white house. the first two presidents i look at are truman and eisenhower. these guys are the first two presidents to start with the white house staff. they had to think about how they wanted to create their white house staff, how they wanted it to be structured. and both of them, for the most part, were believers in cabinet

government. the idea of cabinet government is that the cabinet officers are in charge of the respective areas, and the white house staff can help the president, can help guide, but really it's the cabinet officers who are setting policy. and, in fact, eisenhower was known to tell cabinet officers who came to him with problems, he'd say this is your area, you handle it, you work it out. that said, i do highlight a couple of instances where you did have cabinet secretaries kind of butting heads with white house staffers or people who seemed to be delegated by the president in a way that's different from what the cabinet government would seem to entail. in the truman administration, he was faced with the issue of whether to recognize -- [inaudible] today that's not such a political proposition, but at the time it was a big question mark for u.s. policy. most of the establishment was against it including george marshall who was not only a war hero, but he was also the

secretary of state and someone who truman revered more than anyone else in public life. truman knew that he wanted to hear the other side of the issue, so he assigned clark clifford, relatively junior white house aide, to make the case for recognizing israel in a white house meaning where he would be joining up with marshall. marshall was not interested and let the president knew it, he even said what's clifford doing here. but he's here, general, because i asked him to be here. the u.s. obviously does recognize israel, but marshall was so angry that he lost this argument that he never again spoke to clifford or uttered his name for the rest of his like. real quick story in the eisenhower administration is john foster dulles was the secretary of state, again, we have -- this is a frequent tension between secretary of state and white house people, and eisenhower decided to bring in harold stanton, former minnesota governor, to be

negotiator on an arms deal specifically with the soviets. and "the new york times" had a laudatory ed editorial when he came on board. this really -- [inaudible] foster dulles, and he was constantly trying to undercut him and managed to get rid of him. even though these two prime ministers believe -- presidents believed in cabinet government, it can sometimes run afoul of the cabinet secretary and create some tension. >> great. so another theme that you address is how a president has centralized authority or not within his white house. some presidents wanted to have a chief of staff the, a strong chief of staff, a gatekeeper who all things would go through that person, others didn't want a chief of staff at all or wanted a very loose operation, sometimes referred to as the

spoke on the wheel theory where many people have access to the president. tell us a little bit about that organization in the white house and how it affected some of the conflicts you highlighted in the book. >> yeah, i'm glad you mentioned the chief of staff. people assume the chief of staff was always there, and that is not the case. the first one is under eisenhower, but they have this back and forth under the next three or four administrations where it wasn't clear if the chief of staff was going to be a recurring position in the white house hierarchy. after white house you had kennedy who did not have a chief of staff, and then nixon had very prominently h.r. haldeman as chief of staff who was a kind of imperious fellow. and in the subsequent administration, kind of reacted against nixon and the imperial presidency, and ford, who had a chief of staff -- it was don rumsfeld -- but he called him staff coordinator. and jimmy carter, he didn't want

to have a chief of staff, and that led to all kinds of challenges. so the carter administration starts without a chief of staff, reluctantly they come around to bringing in jordan who was strategist, that doesn't work out well, and then eventually you have jack lawson who had butted heads during the campaign of 1976 because watson was in charge of the transition, and all the campaign people like you see today, the transition people were going to take their jobs while they are working to get the president elected. so watson eventually becomes chief of staff and is pretty good at it, so much so that when ronald reagan wins, he moves jack watson and says from what i hear, if you had had this position earlier, i might not be in this position right now, meaning if carter that had gone with him early on, he wouldn't have had lost the presidency and may have won a second term. so the chief of staff is an important role.

under the reagan administration you have jim baker who is widely regarded as the best chief of staff ever. and once he comes in and he does a really good job and you see what a good chief of staff can do, you basically had one consecutively in every administration. that doesn't mean that there respect problem -- aren't problems. jim baker's replacement did not get along are nearly as well with mrs. reagan and, in fact, during the iran contra scandal, hangs up on mrs. reagan when she is telling him to do something he doesn't want to do. that's not just a firing offense, that's a hanging offense, said jim baker. he was fired, he didn't last much longer after that. but the chief of staff is an important position, can help control conflict, but at the same time sometimes they get involved in conflict as well. >> great. so i asked you to give you

advice to a president, an incoming president, and especially with respect to how you deal with conflict in the white house, is it a thing that's necessary? do you need to manage it? is it good to have a let? what would you say? does out it depend on who -- what's your big -- [inaudible] knowing potentially very strong conflicts that, again, some examples from the book would be great. >> yeah, sure. so, look, there's a continuum. on one side you have absolutely no conflict and that leads to group think. you saw in the johnson administration johnson didn't want to hear opposing voices on vietnam. in fact, there were some people at the state department who were uncomfortable with the vietnam policy, and thaw formed a little group -- they formed a little group to discuss alternative policy options, but they were so nervous that johnson might find

out about in that they called themselves the non-group, and they met secretly so johnson wouldn't be aware of it and take revenge on them. that is way too much conflict aversion. on the other hand, in this i often -- [inaudible] before the administration, then you have kind of a wild, uncontrolled white house, and you have people leaking to the press, you have people not able to trust one another. and the current administration was like this because everyone thinks gerry ford, what a nice guy, but i think his niceness precolluded him from taking tough steps. a friend of ford who knew hum before he became president who was a very thin-skinned and i go centric fellow. his nickname in the white house was s.o.b.,.

[inaudible] he used to joke that it stands for sweet old bob, but with we know that it didn't stand for that and he did, i think, as well. and ford was very reluctant to control hartley, and hartley would control the presidential inbox from his office which is the anteroom to the oval. is so he even shared a bathroom with ford, which is unusual. what he would do by controlling the inboxes, if he saw something he didn't like, he would pull it out, and he would slip are it to political columnists. and then if he wrote something that he wanted to get to the president, he would ship it in without going through the staff secretary process. this was untenable, not manageable and, in fact, they decided they had to do something about out. gerald ford was close to hartley, he didn't want to do anything about it, but the deputy chief of staff was a guy

named dick cheney, who later became the youngest chief of staff in presidential history, but he was assigned a way to deal with the hartley problem, and one thing he did was booted hartley out of that anteroom next to the oval. he knew that he couldn't go to ford and say can we we get rid of your friend, he said, prime minister, you need -- mr. president, you need a room for quiet contemplation, ford agreed, and they needed that anteroom and hartley found that he was out of the office. so hartley didn't stay in the white house orbit, but he -- did stay in the orbit, but he no longer had that office where he was so problematic. sometimes you need to take steps that are not necessarily what the president is able to articulate what he wants. i would say from group faith to extreme chaos, somewhere in the middle is a comfort zone. sometimes you have a president who's willing to survive a little chaos or engender a little chaos in order to get

better results. and this payment story is -- famous story is of bill clinton who loses the midterm election in 1994 because his taffe had drifted too far to the left. he knows he needs alternative voices. he secretly brings an adviser nicknamed charlie -- we found out later it was dick morris who was a longtime consultant to -- [inaudible] and charlie brings in these memos that are trying to drift clinton back towards the center. clinton's aides eventually e find out, they leak it to the new yorker that dick morris is advising the president, and people like stephanopoulos, george stephanopoulos and harold ickes, among the more liberal white house aides, are -- [inaudible] morris the entire time he's in the white house. and stephanopoulos whose memoir -- an excellent book, by the way -- he talks about how much he dislikes morris. but at the end he even notes

that clinton, by bringing in this outside force, got better results from his staff. sometimes the president recognizes there are benefits in fostering a little bit of chaos in order to get better -- [inaudible] >> thanks, tevi. i think you've given a pretty good sense of some of what's in the book. there's a lot more for the audience with, so there's certainly more reason to go out and buy that book. i'm going to do two things. i'm going to turn to kiron in one second, but i want to remind you as the audience that we're going to be coming to you for questions, submit in the comment section of facebook, the youtube chat function and through twitter at the handle hashtag bpc live. so, kiron, you have all sorts of experience and scholarly work in this lawyer. first, some -- in this area. first, some broad thoughts for tevi about the book, and then if you want to share some of your experiences in the trump or reagan administrations, we'll

love to have that -- we'd love to have that. >> first of all, i'd like to thank you for the work that you do across the political divide to bring us together to talk about these policy tissue issues -- policy issues. and tevi's book, to me, is just a great demonstration of what you stand for and believe in. he's looking at democrats and republicans in the white house, how they addressed in a scholarly way, not making judgments along ideological lines. that being said, i would like to ask tevi about his, and comment on, the model that he is sets up for his analysis. he talks about three big factors that govern his work as he looked at the white house. one, he a talked about ideological fighting. he was interested also, second, in administrative and decision making process. and then, finally, he talked

about just the broader category of in-fighting. i'm interested, tevi, if you could take a higher altitude to look and say which variable do you think has the best outcome for public policy in the white house? i'd like to start there. i think that's a fascinating way of looking and framing what goes on in the white house. relatedly, i'm interested -- since you mentioned evans and novack -- many of us are old enough to remember those amazing columns, and we waits for what they were going to say next and the scoop. but when you think about the role of leakers in the public policy process, do they do something that's important for outcomes? or are they just a nuisance, and do they corrupt and corrode and destroy the democratic process? those are two big areas i'd like

to have a conversation about. >> that's great. thank you for your careful read, kiron, and for your scholarship which i've enjoyed over the years. so i think you correctly note that i have three levers in the book that presidents have in their purview to address. comity. if you have a team that get along ideologically, you are going to see less fighting because they generally -- [inaudible] number two is process. if you have a process whereby people can get their voices heard and is have their thoughts expressed to the president even if they don't win at the end of the day, they have a fair process, they're more likely to lock arms at the end of the discussion and say, okay, the president decided, i had my chance and we're going to accept this as the president's policy judgment. and the third is presidential tolerance.

if the president is tolerant of in-fighting, then you're going to have more of it. if the president doesn't want to see it -- [inaudible] obama had the famous no drama obama, he made it clear he did not want to see in-fighting in the white house, and there's a great story i have in the book of melissa -- [inaudible] he didn't like something he'd written about her, and he wrote a blistering e-mail to many of the white house staff complaining about the way she was treated, and she thought that somebody leak ared on her. and obama calls her in to the oval office which isn't that unusual because she's deputy chief of staff, but she doesn't know why. he says to her that was quite an e-mail you sent. and she was shocked that the president even bothered knowing about e-mails, but it sent a very clear signal, i don't want to see these kind of shenanigans in the white house. so those three are the levers that a president has to control if they so desire. now, in terms of which one has the best policy results, i think

it's hard to say. i think ideological alignment is helpful because then you know where the president wants to go with them. reagan, for example, peggy noonan said even though there was fighting in the reagan white house, the idea of reagan rule -- a great phrase -- end meaning that people knew generally where reagan wants to go, and so even though depeople might have fought over titles or stature, the fact of where they were going in a general policy direction was clear. i think the process one is extremely important, the administration -- [inaudible] was the george w. bush administration. and process was extremely are important and anybody who committed what was known as a process foul, that was somebody who went around the process, circumvented the process. process is important. but presidential tolerance also sets a tone. i would put the process first, but i think all three are important. and with respect to your second question about the press, look,

i think the press plays an important role. i think we need to have a press that lets us know what's going on, and i think we know more about fighting in the white house today than we did in previous eras because in part of the press. you correctly mentioned e evans and novack, you know, with each fight that i looked at in the book "fight house," i went and hooked to see if evans and novack wrote an columns, and they invariably did, and they were a great source for me. i thought they were very helpful. and, indeed, the publisher of this book is a man named alex novack from regularrer regnery,e liked the fact that i was looking at his father's column finish. [inaudible] so i think it plays an important role, but i think there are people who take advantage of the press, and they will leak against their colleagues. they may lose a policy fight, and then they'll leak to the president, well, -- meek to the

press. the president decided to do policy x. in the bush administration or which i worked, i was on the domestic e side of the house, and not only was it a relative lu e leak-free administration, the reason i say it was a leak-free administration is because the reporters complained that there are not enough leak ares coming from the administration. and i have a whole stream of quotes in the book, in "fight house," of reporters complaining about this administration. and i think that can lead to cooperating better if they don't feel like every utterance will show up in "the new york times"es or washington post. >> great. kiron, could i maybe get you to ask some more, maybe tempt you to talk a little bit about either your time in the trump administration or your studies of the reagan administration? tevi's written about both. the book obviously doesn't cover as much about trump as it's new, but some of your thoughts on that, and maybe tevi can interis

act with what you're -- interact with what you're thinking along those lines. >> absolutely. tevi, you talk about peggy noonan saying, you know, we understood reagan was in charge from an i'd lodge call and policy standpoint, but you also know he had numerous national security advisers. there was a turn in the white house, every 14 years or so over -- 14 months or so, there was a new national security adviser. so there was a tension between his ideology which he was committed to and everyone knew what his north star was and his ability to have the process of a white house -- [inaudible] identify studied -- i've studied reagan and found that fascinating and have often wondered how did a president who had that many national security add advisers have the historic breakthroughs in the cold war that he did. for example, in december 1987

the washington summit led to the first nuclear discuss armament treaty of -- disarmament tree -- treaty. can you speak to how he got something that historic done in the midst of having new faces, not just the national security adviser, but downstream, the people underneath each man coming in and coming out. how did that happen from the work that you did? >> [audio difficulty] national security adviser position, stability at the secretary of state position. i have a wonderful story in the book about hague because jim baker was the chief of staff and mike dever, who was deputy chief of staff, didn't like hague. they tried to keep him off motorcades and out of the hotel the president was staying in, and hague said, what am i, a leper?

and so the 42-year-old deputy chief of staff dresses up in a gorilla costume saying i'm baker -- [inaudible] which is just astounding to me. i could not imagine in an era of cell phones and twitter that somebody would do something like that, but obviously this was before that. so hague goes relatively quickly, but george shultz comes in who is, i think, an excellent secretary of state. i know he's a colleague of yours at hoover. and i think the stability there really helped. and the other thing is the idea of reagan rule. if you have a sense of what the president wants, then you are more likely to have aides, even if they interchange, know the direction the president is trying to go. and the person who succeeded reagan was george h.w. bush, and there you had the more conservative staffers and the more moderate staffers because push and shove was a little less cheer -- bush himself was a little less clear.

he said he had trouble with the, quote, vision thing. you're really not clear on where they're going to go, it's hard to -- [inaudible] >> related to that, john, if you don't mind -- >> please. >> i'd like to say that sometimes it's difficult, and you've already referred to this, but i'd like to draw you out more, tevi, on this point. it's often difficult for a white houses that is largely cohesive on the three big variables that you mentioned to get the work that they want done when there's chaos in the agencies going on. related to that, powerful cabinet secretary who happened to disagree with the president. i think we've seen that in the trump administration, and that may, in fact, be much of the trump -- [inaudible] story so far. can you give us some historical examples that may help be a corrective to what the trump

administration has experienced in, indeed, you agree with what i've just described. >> well, it's certainly clear that some of my best stories about in-fighting are between the national security adviser and the secretary of state. in the nixon administration, for example, you had henry kissinger who was the national security adviser, and it's hard to remember now because we see him as this kind of aged few -- guru, spouting wisdom on foreign policy. then he was very young, very aggressive, brilliant, to be sure, and he was constantly threatened by william rogers who was the secretary of state in the nixon administration who also knew nixon going back to the eisenhower administration, and they were close personal friends, and yet kissinger ran rings around -- partly because nixon recognized kissinger's

brilliance. so sometimes you have a situation where the national security adviser can kind of run rings around the secretary of state. similarly are, you had this issue a bit in the carter administration where there was constant fighting between brzezinski and cy vance who was the secretary of state. these guys knew each other before the administration, they even had dinner the night of the election and talked about how the prospects of them working together. and in the first day of the carter administration, brzezinski is briefed on his communications -- [inaudible] and he's told this phone rings from the president, and this phone rings from the sec -- secretary of state, and bear zip key says yank it out, i work for the president, not vance. so he was already laying out the marker that he wasn't going to be beholden at all to the is secretary of state. and sometimes you can have a relationship that works better. so in the nixon administration,

i talk about how james schlessinger was the secretary of defense, and he wouldn't put up with kissinger's shenanigans, and he actually had the bureaucratic standing to push back against kissinger, and he was much more effective as secretary of defense than rogers was able to be as secretary of state because he kind of scared off kissinger. kissinger was a bit of a bureaucratic bully, and he knew he couldn't bully schlesinger. so i think people -- anyway, it's a verial that male/alpha female environment, people are really pushing to see the limits of what they can accomplish, and if you can stand your ground and not necessarily be a j about it, but you can snow that -- be a jerk about it, but you can show that you're not going to be cowed by someone -- [inaudible] so that would be my advice. >> great. well, i think we want to go to your audience questions. i'm going to remind you again in case some more are coming in you

could mitt them in the comment -- submit them in the comment section of facebook or with hash tag bpc live. i'm going to start with a question from e.j. fagin, and that question is what role do presidents play in creating -- vice presidents play in -- beginning with al gore. >> great. well, e.j., thank you for the question, and thank you for your excellent baseball podcast, which i listen to regularly. the vice president does play an important role, but he doesn't necessarily have to play an important role because the vice president really acts in some ways at the pleasure of the president. he gets as much power as the president grants him. and we have this very interesting circumstance in the lb j&j f -- lbj and jfk

administrations. robert f. kennedy hates -- [inaudible] robert f. kennedy is constantly are trying to demean lyndon johnson and weaken his role, and he was the most powerful person in the kennedy administration for those first thousand days. but then you have this terrible tragic circumstance where kennedy is assassinated, and suddenly the vice president is elevated to the presidency, and now rfk is working for a president who hates him and, in fact, there's a big screaming fight that they have in the oval office shortly after johnson is inaugurated right after the first cabinet meeting, and they don't, they don't talk for two months after that. everybody in the audience people they haven't talked to in two months in this weird coronavirus period. but think about it, rfk was the sitting attorney general in the period where he's not talking to

the president for two months. that is unusual. so sometimes you have a president giving certain powers to a vice president that they may have in one administration and they don't in another. it's interesting in the book, i also point out that hubert humphrey was lbj's vice president, and you would think he might have learned to be nicer to his vice president, and in fact the opposite was the case. he was as belittling of humphrey as the kennedy people were of johnson. then in later years, the vice president has become more powerful, and if you look at my chapter on the bush 43 administration, obviously, dick cheney -- who i mentioned earlier, deputy chief of staff -- he was very involved in the clash of the titans between secretary rice, first national security adviser, and then you have colin powell at the state department, don rumsfeld and cheney as vice president. and i mentioned earlier that the bush domestic team got along

pretty well and was relatively leak-free. the bush foreign policy team was rife with leaks and with in-fighting x. the vice president was an important part of that. so i think that the vice president, i've not really seen anything link ared to e.j.'s question with, a situation where the vice president was able to tamp down conflict, but i think the vice presidents sometimes are involved with ramping them up. >> great. we have a lot of questions coming in, so is i'll try to get to as many as we can, maybe we can keep i it short so we can get to some more of them. also i'm going to invite kiron to weigh in. if tevi answers a question, if you have something to say, we're happy to have you share your wisdom as well. i have another question here from gabby g. which is which white house had the biggest fights that actually impacted execution of policy. >> yeah, i like to go with the ford administration on that.

the ford administration was really paralyzed by in-fighting. i mentioned some of the instances with robert hartley, but you had presidential addresses that would not get resolved because of some of the in-fighting. there was one instance where it was the night before the state of the union, ford is yelling at his staff because they still haven't resolved all the conflicts in the state of the union. there's also a great story where they're thinking of ways to celebrate the biwith centennial because ford was president in 1976, and hartley is afraid that the other staffers are working against him. and so they get a bunch of ideas from the outside world and by various intellectuals, and hartley -- afraid of what the other staffers will pick, he comes up with some kind of code so that you don't know the individual of name, and he would like do you like person a, person b or person c.

but then in this pre-computer era, he ends up not knowing whose paper belongs to -- [inaudible] so sometimes these things cannot only paralyze you because you're fighting with others,, but the tactics you're using to protect yourself can rebound. >> i actually would like to jump in with a question before, john, you move on. and this is a little bit of a different question, but it relates to the issue of leaking. when you think of evans and novack, that was -- they were the high water mark of -- [inaudible] but in this era, we have technology and social media where many people are weighing in who have limited, if any, journalistic background. but we have also government officials going to these various individuals and leaking important information.

what do you think about that, tevi? you're seeing it especially in the trump administration where there's the attempt to smear and destroy people who are serving admirably, and it's leading to a lot of turnover. >> yeah, that's a good question about leaking. what i found in the book there's a constant race of technologies. so as the technologies improve for leaking, so do the technologies improve for chasing down the leaks. and in the johnson administration, for example, lyndon johnson asks the white house operators to report to him on who white house staffers were calling. similarly, the white house motor pool to report to him on where white house staffers were being taken by the army drivers who drive around white house staffers. so presidents are always trying to get a handle on leaks. in fact, the nixon administration it was a

plumbers' unit that led to watergate, the reason they were called the plumbers is they were designed to stop leaks. they ended up breaking into the watergate hotel, but the reason they started and had that nickname was because they were -- [inaudible] so i think there's a bit of a cat and mouse game between administrations and staffers on the leaking issue, and i think that there's always going to be technologies for leaking, there's always going to be technologies for identifying who the leakers are. and i really think the best way to address it is to have the president set a standard and make it clear that he doesn't tolerate -- in bringing in people who are willing to not be leaking against one another. and that said, i don't want to suggest that all leaking is evil because sometimes a president or an administration will put out a trial balloon. they will talk about a certain policy that they're thinking about or a personnel -- a leak isn't necessarily designed to destroy. sometimes it's designed to get a

policy some sunshine and air so that you can a assess whether the policy would be treated well or reacted to well by the american people. the word leak has these negative connotations and in many cases it is, but it's not -- [inaudible] >> we're going to turn to another audience question. i will note if you look carefully at tevi's screen, you'll see his other book, intellectuals of the white house displayed behind him. so feel, you may feel the need to buy more than one of these books. but i'm going to turn to a question from russell newsom. that question guns with a comment i agree with, or "fight house" a truly great book about the modern presidency. i'd like to hear the author discuss whether these rivalries emanate more from personality or from policy. >> yeah, it's a great question, and russ himself is a former

white house staffer, so he knows whereof he speaks. personality is, obviously, an issue. a guy like kissinger is a sharp-skinned fellow, he's going to get in fights with people no matter what. a person like robert hartley from the ford administration, also a guy who i can't imagine being in an environment where he's not going to get in a fight. but sometimes the people try to put the policy above the fighting. so in the reagan administration you had ed meese, and he was kind of the true conservative adviser to reagan and very close to reagan, but he didn't get the chief of staff job. he didn't get it in part because he was disorganized, and this is a great story that his briefcase was known as a place where papers go in and never come out, they even called it the black hole. a lot of nicknames in the book, but the only object nickname is the meese case. but ed meese was fighting in a way with james baker, but he also unilaterally stepped out of

the fighting in that he said i'm not going to leak because looking against -- [inaudible] would not only hurt baker potentially, but also hurt the president. so sometimes people have kind of a higher sense of what they're trying to accomplish from the policy perspective, and they say i'm going to not necessarily are leak to advance myself, but i will do what i can to kind of help the administration by being silent and the -- [inaudible] so i think personality really drives it. you can't -- [inaudible] but then on the policy side, if you have strong disagreement about policy or the policy direction, you are going to have some fights. personality is a constant where policy is a variable. >> great. we have another question and, actually, i think certainly tevi should answer this, but maybe kiron will want to weigh in as well. this is from herbert, and the question is what are factors that have contributed to successful relationships between

a given chief of staff and cabinet secretaries? >> yeah, it's a good question because the chief of staff on one level is, sees himself as above everybody else, but at the same time, he's not cabinet secretary. he doesn't necessarily have cabinet secretary, although presidents let the chief of staff go to cabinet meetings. sometimes the chief of staff get a bit ahead of themselves, so don regan, who i mentioned earlier, nancy reagan said he's good at the -- [inaudible] but he doesn't really get the -- [inaudible] so i think a way to insure they get along is to try to inculcate the sense that they're all on the president's team and that they have equivalent ability to access the president. one of the reasons that don regan wanted to become chief of staff was because when he was treasury secretary, he never had a one-on-one time alone with president reagan. so if you keep a cabinet

secretary isolate from the president, i think that will hurt you as the chief of staff because there's a feeling that you are ice liting -- isolating the president and not letting them have the face time that thaw need in order to get a sense of policies, in order to get the stuff done. but i think the chief of staff needs to be an inclusive player. i saw this with andy card when he and i worked in the bush white house, really recognized the importance of the cabinet secretaries. i think that's a good model. it probably helped that secretary card himself had been a cabinet secretary of transportation previously, so he knew about -- [inaudible] >> let me speak on that question based on what tevi just said from the standpoint of the trump administration. again, an administration that's had a lot of churn in the white house not just at the national security council, but also in the role of chief of staff. what i've been able to observe

is that both in the chief of staff role which is, has become so critical for the modern american presidency, i don't see how a president would survive without a chief of staff given the sheer amount of operational activity that the white house is responsible for on any given day. but the common factor that i think that leads to a great chief of staff that may have been missing in the trump administration has been the prior relationship, if any, that that individual has with the commander in chief. and a lot of what we're seeing in the trump administration is that it's a collection of people who really didn't know donald trump when they came to serve him. either in the cabinet or as chief of staff or as national security adviser. that's a hard place to be. it's hard to build a relationship in realtime, or and

up when you're that close to the president the more that you have some prior history, the more i think the trust is there. and if you've been in the trenches before either in a campaign or in some other phase of life. and so we're seeing in this period a collection of people who are serving the president where they really don't know him very well, and he doesn't know them very well. tevi, i don't know if you want to respond to that based on your research. >> yeah, look, i think kiron's raising a really important point which is the sense that the president has the most trust in the people that are with him and you often have this -- [inaudible] attached, bill clinton had the arkansas mafia or carter had the georgia or mafia. t not necessarily mafia in the mob sense, but people who were with him before. and if you're president,

inherently you have to have some level of distrust of because they want to kiss up to you because you are president. and what would they have thought of you before you were president, and i think people who knew you when really have a closeness to you that has value to it. and that's why i talked earlier about bob hartley. he was close to ford before ford was not only president, but before ford was vice president. and the honesty that comes inherent in that relationship, i think, extremely important to the level of trust a president can put in a person. >> okay. i'm going to remind the audience we still have a little more time, and so if you'd like to submit a question, you can do so in the comments section of facebook, on the youtube chat function or on twitter at hashtag bpc live. another question here coming from peter angood, and that is proper structure is and process usually provide the outcomes desired. when a president does not care

about either, what are the alternatives for better -- [inaudible] >> well, look, as i said earlier, process and structure are extremely important, so it's hard to beat that. you're going to have some problematic outcome. that said, if you have a clear direction, you can overcome some positive problems potentially by everybody knowing where you're trying to go. the question is if you don't have a good process and you don't have clarity of direction, that's really what can lead to chaos and cause problems. i think it's a really good question, but it's boring, process is boring and dull, but it's incredible important for getting things done. and it's also, it's not a partisan thing. the white house policy process is a honored, tried and true tradition that goes the from administration to administration. you know, it's perfectly in line with the theme and the theory of the bipartisan policy center that there are certain structures of government that we

should maintain and adhere to regardless of the ideology or the nature of the administration if in power. so let me just -- it's not the most exciting thing, but met me say -- [inaudible] >> can i follow up and get you to talk more about the reagan administration. again, maybe kiron also wants to weigh in on this. reagan administration famously had a trium rerate, and as described out seemed like it could have been very chaotic. it wasn't necessarily something you would recommend just that model on paper to other presidents, but there was a way in which it settled in and was successful even though there was a lot of conflict. maybe you could say a little bit more about the reagan triumph rate, that process which may not have operated the way it looks like on paper. >> yeah, or well, i think the reason it worked, and so people know, jim baker chief of staff, and then you have ed meese as

counsel to the president and mike dever at deputy chief of staff, and the three of them worked well together because each of them had specific roles to mayful jim baker was the operator. he made the trains run on time and this famous piece of paper that divvied up to the roles -- up the roles between meese and baker. baker took all of the kind of lo logistical pieces that sounded less sexy, but helped him run it effectively. meese was the keeper of the ideological flame, he was the outreach to -- [inaudible] which was so important in the reagan administration, and he kind of made sure they didn't go off the rails ideologically each though baker was more moderate than meese and dever didn't care about id ideology at all. dever was an image guy, and he was really good at making reagan look good. so because each of them had a specific role and even though they might have fought, they didn't really step on each

other's toes, and that was important. the other thing is the extent to which they distrusted the other, to they always stuck together as a group, and the other staffers knew that they could get a lot done without those three senior people bothering them if they were all going -- because nobody wanted to have a meeting with reagan without one of the three members because reagan could say something that was detrimental to the missing member. when reagan's in the hospital, the three of them visit him at the hospital all together. and reagan had a joke when they showed up, gee, fellas, i didn't know we were in a staff meeting. so i think that was one of the instances in which a tension-filled triumvirate was able to work because of reagan's clear ideological guidance, but also because the three of them each had their specific --

>> i could add to that, that it wasn't clear coming in to the white house that these three men would emerge as the ones that could really work together and help organize the president. but what made the critical difference in the first couple of months of the administration was the fact that reagan was shot and how they performed during that presidential crisis. remember, al haig ended up being outside of the community surrounding the president because of his performance especially before the press when he said i'm in charge. but these men comported themselves in way that got reported back to the president that they were respectful and dignified and collaborative. and i think that presidential crisis also helped the framework of the administration. and it also made george h.w. bush a trusted aide in the way

that i think may not have happened with the speed that it did. but on the other side, even with them in place it couldn't stop the chaos around the national security council which ultimately got us the iran contra scandal which almost toppled the reagan presidency. i think that, you know, sometimes leaders are great with a vision, and that was reagan. but even nancy reagan said that her husband was no manager. and you really need the president to have both, i think, the ideological or policy direction with some ability -- not complete ability, but some serious ability -- to manage. reagan was better at one than the other. >> yeah, i think that, those are excellent points, and that initial crisis of reagan being shot was very interested and informative. you mentioned george h.w. bush, and one of the things he did was

he was effective lu acting president, but he refused to have his helicopter land on the white house lawn during that period, and i thought that was an important symbolic step so reagan later saw that bush wasn't trying to acrete power to himself in the circumstance and also -- [inaudible] david gergen was in the situation room, he kept excusing himself, up clear why, but richard allen didn't structures him and -- trust him and thought he kept going out to leak to the press and that's why he had him named professor leaky. >> so we're coming to the end of our hour, and so maybe i can ask kiron to, if you have a last thought that you want to put on the table about the book, and then i'm going to ask tevi to close it out with a final summation of whatever else hasn't been said. >> what i liked about the book in particular is that it is, it fills a void in presidential

history. we often think of in-fighting in the context of just scandal after scandal, and we read these books looking for some, you know, information about a particular person that we didn't know. but that's not what tevi did. he took it seriously as an intellectual exercise. and as i've said to him the other day, this is a book i will use with my students as i teach american politics. it really helps us understand the american form of government and what in the federalist papers they were concerned about and what they were predicting. much of it is, occurs on the pages of tevi 's book. we always is have to worry about factionalism, we always are to worry about each particular individuals -- even particular individuals who can corrupt. the process. but tevi 's book gives us hope because even though we have to worry about the potential to

destroy the democratic process, somehow in the american system of government we keep recovering, we keep course correcting and get really big policy outcomes. remember, over the time that tevi writes the united states is the predominant power on earth and has, and for each president increasing amounts of responsibility for the globe and for domestic policy as more people push for rights, from racial rights to gender, to disability. that's a lot to do in a relatively small white house with a relatively small staff. and despite the leaking and despite the in-fighting and the ideological battles and varying levels of presidential tolerance for all of this, we still get the outcomes that make us the world's most fully functioning, multi-ethnic democracy. thank you, tevi, for this

important work. >> thank you, kiro finish -- >> final thoughts. >> thank you, kiron, for participating in which and also your kind words. i so admire your scholarship and your service to this great nation. and i really think you cap cloud what i'm trying to get at in this book, in "fight house," because these people are human, right? you may look at democrat or republican administrations, i don't like them, but these are humans, and they've got families, and they've got spouses, and they're got challenges, and they've got career concerns, and they worry a what's going to happen after the administration. i was really trying to capture the human element in this book because you have so many instances where people, you know, you think of them as this all-powerful person you read about in "the new york times" or washington post, but these are a actual real people with real lives, and there's a great story i want to mention in the book. in the reagan campaign in 1980. there was a lot of full multi. there was a guy who was -- few mental cruelty. this was a guy who was

systematically going after the californians and getting rudd of them. i talk in the book about a confrontation at ronald reagan's house that led to mike dever being accused of financial improprieties. mike dever was very close to the reagans. jim baker said to him i'm able to go to the bedroom to brief the reagans, but he's allowed to go in the bathroom. and dever, when he's accused of these improprieties, he storms out of the house and says if you don't want me, i i quit. and in the next m. minute, he sheepishly walks back in and says, you know, in these pre-uber days, i forgot my wife drop me off here, i don't have a car. can i borrow nancy's station wagon? here's a guy who indignantly resigned from the campaign, and yet at the same moment that he recognizes his friendship with nancy would allow him to borrow her station wagon and he sheepishly comes back.

i've got all kinds of human moments in the book because, again, it's important that these personalities, they really shape policy. they shape the direction of this great country, and i recognize that each president has an ideological predilection and knows a way to some degree, and they do help shape the direction they're going, but also who the people are and what they're trying to accomplish and what their own concerns are. in the clinton and obama administrations, there's a story about melissa -- [inaudible] who i mentioned earlier, the deputy chief of staff, and she is frustrated there aren't sufficient feminine products in the white house oval offices, in the west wing bathrooms. she goes and makes an announcement that i got this fixed, and he talked about the blank stares she got from the obama -- that was important to her, and that was kind of the reality that she brought to the world. so, again, the human element is incredibly important in the white house. i appreciate everybody calling in, i appreciate the bpc doing which. i hope people will purchase the

book, and i look forward to engaging with people in the future and i'll leave the last few seconds to john. >> thank you to our audience, thank you to kiron skinner of carnegie mellon university, thank you presidential historian tevi troy and author of the book we've been discussing today, "fight house: rivalries in the white house from true iman to trump. -- truman to trump." ♪ ♪ ..