>> stewart: welcome to "charlie rose: the week." charlie is on assignment this week. i'm alison stuart. just ahead, three former white house chiefs of staff weigh in on what's going on in president trump's west wing. >> jack watson: >> this white house is lacking a disciplined message, a disciplined process, the tweeting constantly, daily, morning, noon and night is not helping because it's putting out innocent and, indeed, contradictory messages, with the president disagreeing not only with himself, something he said earlier, or the secretary of state or someone else. >> stewart: andy card. >> the president has to invite others and build bridges and invite people to be part of the success or share the blame for

failure. and we haven't seen as much of that out of this white house as other presidents have done. >> stewart: and john podesta. >> at some level i think that president trump's success has been in sowing chaos, and i think he thought that would work for him as president. >> stewart: we'll have that story and more of what happened and what might happen. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the following: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications >> rose: and so you began how? >> format team. >> rose: is it luck or something else? >> not out of context. >> rose: what's the object lesson here? >> tole the president no. >> rose: tell me the significance of the moment. >> stewart: we begin this week with a look at the news of the

week. here are the sights and sounds of the past seven days. >> rose: the white house issues a stern warning to syria. >> an ominous warning concerning another possible chemical weapons attack. >> a stolen police helicopter fired grenades at the supreme court. >> the deadly oil tanker explosion in eastern pakistan. >> it exploded as people tried to collect the leaking oil. >> we will destroy radical islamic terrorism. >> after months of starts and stops and court battles, president trump's revised travel ban is now officially in expeect. >> low i.q. crazy mika came to marmar-a-lago on christmas eve d insisted on joining me. >> security experts are trielg to contan a damaging cyber attack that crippled computers across the road. >> what happened when both men

met for the first time? they huck out. >> president trump has been on plerchty of magazine covers, they don't need fake ones. >> if you're going to faulk a magazine cover put yourself on the cover of "o." >> you need a drink after something like that. >> president trump appears to have been caught flirting with an irish reporter. ♪ you're the one that i want >> katrina perry. she has a nice smile on her face. >> cheesy. >> ailing little bit. he's got all the moves. >> the republicans' seven-year effort to repeal and replace obamacare has hit a roadblock. >> the bill is as mean as the house bill. >> why does it have to be mean spirited. >> president obama said it will harm americans and be mean. >> he actually used my term "mean." >> former president obama and his family were spotted cooling down on a river rafting trip during their vacation in

indonesia. ♪ i'm the man, i'm the none, i'm the man ♪ >> stewart: the position of white house chief of staff has been called "the toughest job in washington." the man currently holding the job is former republican party chair reince preibus. he's been getting much of the blame for the chaotic nature of the trump white house. is that criticism fair? charlie rose with some people who should know. jack watson was chief staff. john podest afs president clinton's chief of staff. and joining them was chris whipple. he's the author of a new history of the chiefs. it's called "the gate keepers: how the white house chief of staff define every presidency." >> rose: is it the toughest job second to the presidency in washington? andy? >> it's the toughest job because you're helping the president do

the real toughest job. which means you have to have discipline and bring order to chaos and you also have to pay attention to what's happening outside the white house, as well as inside the white house. and you actually have to make sure that the president is served with the challenge in time to meet the challenge so that when a decision is made, it is relevant and not irrelevant. >> charlie, it's also-- it's also tough because one of the chief roles of the chief of staff is to make sure that the president is hearing all the voices that he needs to hear, that he-- that he's getting all the -- >> to be an honest broker. >> to be an honest broker, to be a very honest broker. and also, as part of that role, honestly, to tell the president no when he needs to be told no, and that's not easy. >> rose: that's not easy for anybody, is it? >> for anybody. >> particularly in this white house. ( laughter ) with a president who doesn't like to be told no. >> rose: and a person who

didn't come up in the political give-and-cake and compromise of the political world. >> also reince comes out of pol fingz all of us had some experience in doing some policy. but it can be brutal, but it's also a tremendous honor to do it. and having done a lot of different jobs over the course of my life, it's the one where you have the most impact most immediately. you see it the most. and as andy noted, you're really helping the president achieve his vision for the direction of the country. >> you serve at the pleasure of the president but your job is not to try to please him. >> what i learned from talking to these guys and having interviewed all 17 living white house chiefs of staff for "the gate keepers" presidents cannot govern effectively without empowering the chief of staff as first among equals in the white house to execute the agenda, and to tell them what they don't

want to hear. it's almost impossible to overstate the importance of having a chief of staff who is a gatekeeper-- meaning he controls access to the oval office and gives the president time and space to think. he's the honest broker, as jack just mentioned, making sure that every decision is teed up with all the information on every side. he prioritizes-- helps the president prioritize the agenda, and he is in charge of the administration's message. now, none of that may sound familiar at the moment because, in my opinion, we don't have a white house chief of staff who has been empowered. >> rose: but oftentimes, somebodiesomebody has to come im thinking of pa98, when there was chaos, and organize the place. >> yes. >> one former chief told me for some presidents it's a little like alcoholism-- you have to hit rock bottom to recognize that you need to change. and i think there's no question about it, in bill clinton's case, it took him a year and a half to figure out that he had to empower eye white house chief

to really organize and make that white house run. it was not mack mclarty's fault. there was an intervention by hillary clinton and al gore and tipper gore. and they flew lepanetta to camp david and basically locked him in a cabin until he agreed-- until he said yes. jimmy carter, jimmy carter really thought he could rup the white house by himself. it took him two and a half years to timely give jordan the title. presidents come in full of hubris, intoxicated by having won the election. they think they can run the white house-- sounds familiar? it never ends well. >> rose: here's the money question: what would you change if you were now chief of staff for donald trump? >> i would try to enforce a rule for the president and everyone else in the white house-- taste your words before you spit them out-- or tweet them out. because the president's words

make a big difference. they make a difference on the white house staff, the bureaucracy in the executive branch of government; congress, and the world. so i would want discipline around the word that are spoken by the president and subordinately, anybody by the white house staff which actually gives more discipline over "don't leak. of. >> i think probably the first thing i'd like would be to take his phone away from him. so he can't-- yeah, look, i think this is a chaotic structure. it has been from the very beginning. i think that reince preibus went into the white house knowing that it would be somewhat chaotic, because you had steve bannon coming off the campaign. you had jared kushner, his son-in-law coming into the white house playing an important role. you went through a succession with the national security adviser within a month of the administration. but i think at some level that

president trump's success has been in sowing chaos, and i think he thought that would work for him as president. i think at this point, you know, it remains to be seen whether you can be effective as president-- certainly he's having his challenges on capitol hill. >> rose: so you take his woan awayor whatever-- >> just think about trying-- just-- if you have the strategic job of setting an agenda to work with the hill, for example, on policy, and you're trying to message around that and create the backdrop com and the backupo people feel they can stick with you, and every day the story's changing. you know, he just-- they make plans, and they're blown up virtually every day. that in part i think is the result of the investigation and the president's inability to stay away from it. but i think it's also just the nature of the way he's always, i

think, conducted himself in business, and certainly the way he conduct himself on the campaign trail. so it may be a tall order to get any chief of staff to have the authority to discipline that process, to do-- i fundamentally agree with what andy is saying. but i think it's a tremendous challenge in this context. >> you can't run the white house the way you run a family manhattan real estate firm with equally empowered advisers coming and going -- >> and not a public firm but a private firm. >> and not a chain of command and not somebody empowered to execute the agenda. as john said, this is a white house that is broken. it may be broken beyond repair because ultimately it's not reince preibus' fault, necessarily. he's made a lot of rookie mistakes. but at the end of the day, only donald trump can decide to empower his white house chief of staff to execute his aegd agendd also tell donald trump something he does not want to hear. does anybody see that happening

any time soon. >> rose: nor can you point out somebody who can say no to him. i have asked that question all the time when i say, "who says no to the president" nobody has stepped forward. >> there's another word in this-- discipline. this white house is lacking a disciplined message, a disciplined process, the tweeting constantly, daily-- morning, noon and night-- is not helping because it's putting out inconsistent, and, indeed, contradictory messages, with the president disagreeing not only with himself-- something he said earlier but with his secretary of state or someone else -- >> the secretary of state is trying to mediate the deal it's conflict between-- >> qatar and the others. >> rose: and the arab states and the president has taken sides. >> here, i think, if you were to ask me, "what is the central problem, the most important sor sort of unalterable problem?" it would appear there's an

insufficient respect for the truth. falsehooded are being stated, are being given almost every day in one way or another. statements are being made that are, on their face, untrue, that can be shown to be, proved to be-- immediately-- untrue. that puts your staff-- whether it's your chief of staff or your press secretary-- god love him-- in an impossible position. because you're sending out day after day after day to defend a statement which is not true. and if -- >> and you assume, are you, by what are you saying, that they know it's not true? >> well, that's a-- i can't get into the mind of the people saying these things and i certainly can't get into the mind of president. but think about this-- if there's not a respect for the truth, if there's not a respect for the importance and legitimacy of fact, how can you

have a rational debate? how can you have rational debates about what policy should be if no one cares what the truth is, what the realities are? you can't. and that's why there has to be-- there has to be a "come to jesus" meeting here somewhere, some time, which i have low expectation for it happening. >> rose: do you agree with this, andy? >> first, i think the president has so many different responsibilities. some of them are to make decisions and order that they be implemented. the governing responsibilities are actually paramount to that because they have to-- the president has to invite others to be part other solution and build bridges and invite people to be part of the success or share the blame for failure. and we haven't seen as much of that out of this white house as other presidents have done. it's the invitation to be part

of a solution that compels a bureaucracy to want to work hard for you -- >> i was asking about the question about truth. >> and be a partner in the solution. >> rose: i was asking about the question about truth. do you believe what jack just said about-- >> there are some things that are so obviously true that the president said were not, like day one, how many people attended the inauguration. i mean that was-- a bizarre thing to ask your press secretary to go out and claim it was the biggest crowd ever on the the mall, when it was demonstrably not the biggest crowd ever. but he probably had more eyeballs and ears paying attention because of media, and the fact that more media outlets are covering everything. but, yes, i think sometimes challenged by the reality that they want to deny. >> rose: what's the perfect qualification for being a chief of staff? >> i don't-- i really don't think you can -- >> define it. >> define it that way because

the person is, in essence, a partner with the president. so different presidents are going toment different kinds of people. in clinton's case, he loved a lot of input. the title "the gatekeeper," request if i really tried to be the gatekeeper with bill clinton, i think he would have just gone crazy. you have to work-- the care and feeding in part is to work and be understanding of the way the president works. he's a tremendous thinker. he-- you know, he bridges lots of voices to the table. he invites people in. sometimes that can be maddening, but often it's quite creative. and, you know, he's a policy guy. so i had to find ways to feed that so that he didn't feel cut off from the people he wanted to talk to. >> rose: he wanted to see a

lot of information so you had to make sure you got a lot of information. >> and talk to people. cabinet secretaries used to call me up all the same timeand say, "i have to see the president. i have to see the president face to face. of and i would say 202-256-1414. he stays up all night. call the white house operator, and if you have something that need to say to hip-- >> did it work out that way? >> some people were intimidated die bye that, which means they didn't really have to talk to the president. others took advantage of that. i had the advantage of knowing who he talked to because i saw the log of the phone calls. >> the discipline is not to prevent the president from getting information. the discipline is to make sure when the president gets information, somebody else knows about it besides the two people who were in the oval office. so the discipline i had was i want to know before, during, or after you have visited with the president.

and the best complyir to that rule was actually the president. at the end of the day, he would say, "you might want to talk to so-and-so. he came to see me. if he didn't tell buit, go see himment. >> having said, that i don't think any of the guys at this table would have allowed donald trump to be alone nay room with his f.b.i. director given--ive again the circumstances at the time. >> rose: it was donald trump that wanted to be alone. >> yeah, but no competent chief of staff would have permitted that to happen. >> no empowered chief of staff. >> an empowered chief of staff. one other thing about the qualities for a great chief of staff-- and i think all of these guys share this-- i think temperament. if you think about halder man was family the son of a bitch. but you don't have to be. jim baker and leon panetta i think shared something these guys also have, which is they were grounded. they were comfortable in their own skin. they'd been around the block. they can walk into the oval

office, close the door, and tell the president what he did not want to hear. as dick cheney put it to me when he was jerry ford's-- a terrific chief staff for jerry ford-- he said you can't have a tough thing you have to tell the president and have eight or nine guys sitting around saying, "it's your turn to tell him." you have to have one person to do it. we do not have a chief of staff as we speak in the white house who can tell the president no. >> . >> rose: is there anybody in the white house who can tell the president no? >> i sometimes wonder if donald trump could find the civilian equivalent of jim mattis, who evidently has the gravitas to change the president's mind-- >> or tell him no. >> on torture, for example-- >> general mcmaster. >> he needs to find somebody like that because history is littered with the wreckage of presidencies that tried to govern this way-- including jerry ford's. >> back to your first question,

what makes a good chief of staff. i completely agree with john. the role of the chief of staff is going to vary from president to president. and vary drastically. it would be hard to imagine two presidents more unlike in the delegation department than president reagan and president carter. carter, like president clinton, was a president who wanted the informations, who could assimilate and absorb and organize in his own meend and in his own way vast amounts of information. i knew that about him. the essential criterion for the chief and the president is mutual trust. they know each other. they sort of know the minds of each other. and they trust each other. the-- for the chief of staff, i would say, it's important for him to admire and respect the president as not just a leader, which he clearly is a leader by

role and definition-- but a moral leader. and conversely, the president needs to know that his chief of staff is not there self-serving himself, that he is there to execute the role for the president in the best possible way he can, given the president's personality, given the president's priorities, given the president's goals. >> chris mentioned don regan as kind of a model of failure who had been successful, successful in business, arguably successful treasury secretary. i think you can't be imperial if you're the chief of staff. and that was-- i think that was regan's downfall. you have to be like a sports manager. you have tremendous talent in the white house, and you have to bibltotobe able to build a teams going to be cohesive and work together as opposed to operate

by dictate from the chief of staff. i think that's what regan tried to do. it broke down, down the hall with the national security adviser, and that led to iran-contra. nancy finally stepped in and solved the problem. he was no locker >> he liked the "chief" part of the title a lot. it was the staff part he didn't like so much. >> you know, charlie, a verb that has not been used by any of us in terms of the role of the chief of staff-- which i think we would all agree on-- is the really effective chief is going to be really good at enabling people to do their jobs. the chief doesn't try to do it all himself. in the same wait president can't, so cannot the chief. the chief has to identify people that he or she-- that time come when he have a woman chief of staff-- form the team, form the team that you know and that you

have confidence in, that you trust, and enable them to do their jobs. >> rose: back to the power thing. i mean, one of the things it seems to me gives the chief of staff a lot of power is often you have the last word with the president. you're the last sound in his ear before he makes a decision. i mean, that came up i think-- it is sometimes said when you had dick cheney around and colin powell around, who prevailed meeive who-- >> first of all, the chief of staff has to have peripheral vision and know where all the people with great tunnel vision are. ( laughter ) and that helps to make sure that any word to the president is not out of context. because you want the words to be within context. and strong personalities in the white house, it's a team, and it's a team of rivals in every

white house because they're very competent staffers who are legitimately hired because they have great expertise. many of them have type "a" personality, and they think they're the only person with great expertise, and you have to manage that process and make sure that the playing field is in fact level and not skewed one way because a dominant staffer is bullying the process. but the last word i found the president would frequently seek me out as the last word but it wasn't so much about the decision. it was the process by way the decision was being made by the president. and i would be able to say, "sally, may have been a little too aggressive in that meeting, and jane was ready to speak up but she was intimidated by sally. you might want to call jane." >> thank you, all, a pleasure. the book is called "the great keepers: how the white house

chiefs of staff define every presidency," chris whipple. >> here's what's new for your weekend. the animated comedy "despicable me 3" is released in theaters nationwide. >> ha-aa! >> what about that? >> what! >> the two-week montrow jazz festival opens in montrow, switzerland. and the beach boys release a new archival collection, "sunshine tomorrow." ♪ good, good, good vibrations and here's a look at the week ahead: sunday is the start of paris fashion week. monday is the first day of the wimbledon tennis championships. tuesday is independence day. wednesday is the day president trump travels to poland. thursday is the first day of the

running of the bulls in pam ploan poloniuma, spain. friday is the start of the g-20 summit in hamburg, germany. saturday is the qualifying ground of the austrian grand prix in spielberg, austria. >> stewart: that's "charlie rose: the week" for this week. from all of us here, enjoy the holiday weekend. i'm alison stewart. charlie will be back here again next time. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

>> glor: welcome to the program. i'm jeff glor filling in for charlie rose. we begin this evening with politics and talk to julie hirschfield-davis of the "new york times" and philip rucker of the "the washington post." >> this is the third week in a row where they've had like a themed week. it was infrastructure weeks then it was technology week, now it's energy week. there is so little talk of the subject at hand. the media is partially responsible for that but the president is getting in the way of his own message with these tweets and the other fights and the focus on an adversarial relationship with the media. it's tough to get the band width to cover what they say is the subjects of the day. >> glor: we conclude with architect norman foster. >> the best art to me