>> welcome to the program. happy fourth of july. charlie is away. i'm jeff glor of cbs news. we begin with a look back at charlie's conversation with author and historian david mccullough. >> you get to know these people better than you know them in real life. the letters are so revealing and they're so often touching and eloquent and the relationship between bess and harry truman found in those letters, between abigail and john adams is found in those letters. there are over a thousand letters between abigail adams and john adams. and neither of them was capable of writing a boring letter or a

short one. >> we conclude with andy card, jack watson and john podesta, three former white house chief of staff. they join chris whipple to talk about his new book "the gatekeepers: how the white house chiefs of staff define every presidency." >> one of the roles of the chief of staff is the president is hearing all the voices that he needs to hear. >> rose: 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. >> historian david mccullough and a look into the job of white house chief chief of staff whene continue. >> 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 from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: i'm pleased to have david mccullough back at this table, welcome. >> thank you, charlie, grad to be back. >> rose: very good to see you. before we talk about this book, you have been outspoken about

president trump. >> i have along with a great many other historians and that was last summer. >> rose: i think you and ken burns formed a group. >> yes, we did. we were all saying pretty much the same thing, and it was concern for the country. >> rose: yeah. and concern about values and behavior, belief in the truth. >> rose: right. belief in tolerance, kindness, empathy and -- >> rose: these are all things that you think should be presidential qualities? >> yes, i do, and i think that a certain confidence is essential and that you don't base your campaign or your attacks on your opponents using fear and smear

and unkind actions and words, and i think that what disturbed all of us who did that -- made that effort, the historians and biographers is that a sense of history and understanding of history is essential in leadership, leadership of all kinds, and that our most effective, most conscientious presidents, not always the most talented or eloquent, have been students of history. >> rose: including those who have not been like -- who have not been university presidents. >> harry truman. >> rose: harry truman being the one you know well. >> who never went to college but who never stopped reading history. he said wonderful things about it. he said the only new thing in the world is the history you don't know.

now with our 45th president, we have a leader who doesn't know much of anything in the way of history and who has said so. >> rose: and he says i don't read biographies. >> he dismisses biographies, books, reading and history. but my feelings about the importance of history, as you said, go back several decades and that's what this book is a collection of. i think we must encourage, stimulate and bring history back to its importance in the whole system of education. >> rose: a couple of things. when eisenhower said there are four key qualities you measure a leader by, character, ability, responsibility, experience. >> right. and dwight eisenhower wrote one of the very best books ever written about the second world war. >> rose: let's talk about that.

i don't have any reason to be able to contradict that, but i'm surprised. >> no, he did, and he wrote every word himself. >> rose: better than what winston churchill wrote? >> it's a crew said in europe, from his military point of view. no, you can't compare anybody to churchill. >> rose: but you said it's one of the best books ever written about it. >> it is, it's superb. i only know this because his editor told me, he wrote every word of that book. kennedy was a great student of history. >> rose: "profiles in courage." >> yes. on the mantelpiece in h the state dining room in the white house, there is a quotation first car evidence into the mantelpiece by franklin roosevelt from a letter john adams wrote to his wife abigail the first night he, john adams, stayed in the white house, he was the first president to spend the night there.

and he -- roosevelt thought it was so important to be there forever. when the white house had to be rebuilt during truman's presidency, truman made sure it went back into the mantelpiece. then when kennedy was president, he had it carved into the marble part of the mantelpiece rather than wood, which would have been prior to that. what adams wrote to abigail was, "none but honest and wise men rule under this roof." he put honest first. strength of character is what matters in that job, strength of character and confidence that the american spirit is enduring and that the american spirit -- >> rose: which is the title of the book. >> yes. and i have spent a lot of time

with john i a dams and harry truman and theodore roosevelt, and i feel often, and lots of other biographers and historians have expressed the psalm thought, that you -- have expressed the same thought, that you get to know these people better than in real life. >> rose: because you read the letters. >> exactly. the letters are so revealing and often touching and eloquent. and the relationship wean bess and harry truman as found in those letters, the relationship between abigail and john adams as was found in those letters, and there are over a thousand letters between abigail adams and john adams, and neither of them was capable of writing a boring letter or a short one.

and you're reminded that history is human. history is not about memorizing dates and statistics and quo tags. it's about human beings and that's why it's so important. jefferson said, any nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects what never was and never can be. and, of course, he said, when, in the course of human events -- and the operative word there is human -- none of these people who have occupied our highest office has ever been perfect. >> rose: remind me, jefferson didn't write books. >> no. >> rose: did he write letters? oh, yes, indeed. >> rose: lots of letters. yes. >> rose: but as many as adams? no. the main thing with jefferson is he destroyed every letter he

wrote to his wife or she wrote to him. he would write to friends of theirs and say if you have any correspondence from my wife would you please return it to me because i would like to have it, then destroyed it. >> rose: why did he do that? nobody really knows. >> rose: what do you think? i think he felt his private life must remain private. >> rose: why didn't you write about jefferson and why didn't you write about washington? >> i like to write about people i feel deserve more attention and credit. i like to bring them front and center stage. i like to write about the wives of these people. i like to write about people you've never heard of because why should they remain in the shadows or the wings as it were? >> rose: yeah. and i'm drawn to people who set out to accomplish something worthy, noble, even, that they knew would be difficult which turned out to be even more difficult than anyone imagined,

and they succeeded. but i have written about washington, charlie. my book 1776 is about washington. >> rose: i know. but not in the same way as a full biography, right. and was washington the greatest man to have the founding fathers? -- man of the founding fathers? >> yes. >> rose: no question? no question. >> rose: in ever every way. not in tabulating i.q. >> rose: character, ability, responsibility, experience. >> all there. >> rose: right. and he should always be -- it should always be remembered, he was the leader of our country 16 years, not eight years because he was commander-in-chief all the throughout the war when we had no president, then became president. so he was at the helm and in charge for 16 years, and he was setting examples of behavior, of courage, of perseverance. that's -- the perseverance can

accomplish all kinds of things. spirit and perseverance is what he says in the quote that i use for the start of this book. >> rose: i know you have been asked this one million times. what about alexander hamilton? >> well, alexander hamilton is a subject that i ran into in writing about adams and writing about jefferson, to a degree, and washington, and i know that he's very much in vogue right now. >> rose: yes. and i have not seen the show. >> rose: why not? i guess because i have been too busy. yes, i have. and i'll probably see it some day, but i'm not against it. anything that will get him into the tent, i'm all for. >> rose: the tent of history. i thought ron churno's book

is wonderful. we're living in a time when wonderful biographers and historians are writing books. never in my life have there been so many good writers and historians working hard as hell to produce marvelous books. >> rose: hamilton, great man? yes. >> rose: brilliant? brilliant, great, had numerous human flaws. >> rose: mainly women or other than that? >> well, i don't think he had to go the way what it is. that i do know something about. hamilton's in vogue right now. >> rose: right. and fine, fine. we can never know enough about that founding era, not just

because it's the revolutionary war, but because it's the american revolution which is still going on. the political revolution. benjamin rush said it will keep going on forever. we're still working on it. that's our advantage. we're constantly trying to make life better, our system better and we've had good people who are willing to give that every effort. imagine john kennedy saying we will go to the moon. >> rose: yeah. and we did. >> rose: took ten years. and we did. and kennedy almost never talked about himself. it's really interesting. there is a lot to be learned from each of these people. i also feel very strongly, as i try to stress in this book, that it's not just the presidency that matters, it's congress, and we've had very great people in

congress, and congress has accomplished many worthy achievements that we should never take for granted. >> rose: you actually make that point well that we sort of tend to have congress in contempt because even a lot of -- president obama said to me -- i said to him you think america has the strongest military, you think america has the best technology, you think america has the strongest financial system, you think america has the best rule of law. i said, what could go wrong? he said, our politics. i said, what do you mean? he said, we've got gridlock in washington within congress, factions within the parties. >> one of the clearest lessons of history is that very lit of consequence is ever accomplished alone. it's a joint effort. as soon as congress recovers from this spasm of not working together to accomplish essential

objectives -- >> rose: common ground. -- exactly, and you have to work across the aisle, you have to accept that the other individual can have a very different opinion without you attacking him or her in unfair and unkind ways. you can't do that. >> rose: yeah. because you're going to need that somebody on some other project or some other mission later on. i think that what ted kennedy's death was a serious blow to that kind of across-the-aisle camaraderie and working together in the congress. >> rose: he worked with the bush administration on education. >> he was constantly working with people of the other party. >> rose: in fact, trent lott wrote him a note which ted kennedy had on the wall saying if they only knew, meaning if they knew how hard you worked

for -- >> that's right. >> rose: but do you think we've lost a sense of purpose. >> no. >> rose: and lost the narrative -- >> absolutely not. we have been through worse times by far. we have had serious obstacles in our path over and over, but we've always come through. >> rose: things like mccarthy and all that. >> oh, civil war. >> rose: right. influenza epidemic, the american revolution. most people don't understand that at the time of the american revolution, one-third of the country was for it, one-third of the wasn't was absolutely against it, and the remaining third were waiting to see how it came out. it wasn't as though the whole country wanted this to happen. and these problems created suffering and denial of fairness and denial of equality and life and death in a way that we're not used to and, in m,ny ways,

we are spoiled by all that we have been given by our predecessors, not just in material wealth, but in the way of opportunity. think of our education system. yes, it's gotten much too expensive, yes it has its flaws and problems, but we have created the greatest universities in the world. >> rose: some have said 18 of the top 20 universities around the world are american. >> yes, and why do all these young people from abroad want to come here? because they know this is where it is. and we just take it for granted. we've worked medical miracles in your and my lifetime of the kind nobody would ever believe possible. >> rose: smart people think that curing cancer is within sight. >> oh, yeah, very big things are coming. >> but you write about politics and not about -- well, you wrote about the bridge, the brooklyn bridge, that was your first book. >> but i wrote a book about americans who went to paris.

>> rose: you were interviewed. i don't think politics should be seen as the whole of history. it can be the art, the poetry, the music will last uplongest by far and we have to include that because that's part of being human. >> rose: what's the responsibility of government when it comes to culture and science and supporting those very important sectors? >> very important that government support is there. >> rose: n.a.h. and pbs, the humanities, arts, science. if anything, it should be more. i'm all for it. i've worked hard to keep those institutions going and believe in them fervently. >> rose: something i know about you that fits the conversation we had, you think there's a great book to be

written about gerald ford. >> i do. >> rose: because we don't really know, do we? >> no. truman said you have to wait 50 years for the dust to settle. that was very wise. so i said, i think these presidents look very different after a while. this is my own personal feeling, and some marvelous books have been written about leading political fecial within the 50-year lineup, but if you're working in this field, there is always something new to discover. i have never embarked on a project wherein i didn't find something nobody knew about. that's the wonder and excitement about it. >> rose: you always find something somebody knows about. >> and sometimes it can be big and exciting, and that's why i think how we teach history is --

ought to be more in the spirit of the lab technique, that you don't just tell the student all about what happened and who did it and why and what it cost and so forth. you give them a project to work on where they are digging and figuring out the story. i've done that when i've taught at universities and it works, and give you a photograph, the graduating class, tuskegee university of 1912, that's all you've got, and you have the credit for that photograph and it's up to you to write a paper on that subject. and i tell you, young charlie rose, you're going to be the leading expert in the country on the graduating class of tuskegee university 1912, and it happens. they did it. the sinking of an american oil

tanker off the coast of florida by german submarine in 1942, terrific subject, and they get into it and they really care about it. >> rose: yeah. i had a fellow, i gave him a picture of sergeant york, the famous hero of world war i, and i asked him -- he was very befuddled about it because he'd never heard of this man, and i said, how much do you know about world war i? he said, i know nothing about world war i. i know there had to have been a world war i because there's a world war 2. he not to work and wrote a superb paper on sergeant york. ten or 20 years later i ran into him on the streets of washington and he said i was in your class in cornell.

he said i had a paper on sergeant york. i said, your paper could have been published. it was superb. he said, world war i has been my hobby ever since. >> rose: one thing can stimulate a life-long curiosity. >> right. >> rose: i think you said nothing ever happened the way it happened. >> well, nothing ever happened -- nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. >> rose: ah, right. so often it seems it was always on a track, never on a track. and none of our predecessors knew how it was going to turn out anymore than we do. no such thing as a self-made man or woman, never was, never will be. >> rose: because there is always circumstances and timing and -- >> and influence and help -- >> rose: and education. and your rival, your enemy can be the spur that makes you do what you do. >> rose: john, i'm all over

the play, but curious to me, john adams, did he have people who really didn't like him and it was because of his personality? >> he was very well liked, that's a misnomer. people found him irritable because he spoke the truth all the time, it can be painful for people, but he was admirable in so many ways. he's that said washington should be in command and jefferson should write this declaration of independence. he's the only founding father who became president who never owned a slave as a matter of principal, and the next president to come along who never owned a slave as a matter of principle was his son because abigail was adamant on the subject, and we can never fully understand the insurance of the women that have been part of this story from the beginning, and there's a whole field that needs more exploration. >> rose: you have said, too,

the best presidents were historians. >> yes. >> rose: woodrow wilson was an historian. was he considered a best president? from princeton. >> was he a best president? >> rose: yes. certainly one of the top presidents, no question. was he perfect? by no means. >> rose: was he in the top ten, wilson? >> i never ranked presidents, but, yes, i would say he was, yeah. certainly washington was a great reader of history, so was, obviously, adams and jefferson and theodore roosevelt began quite good naval history of the war of 1812 when he was still a student at harvard. franklin roosevelt was a reader of history, eisenhower, truman, kennedy. barack obama, great reader of history. >> rose: do you consider yourself a man of massachusetts? >> no, i'm a man of

pennsylvania, massachusetts, connecticut. >> rose: you live in -- we will you have in massachusetts. i grew up in pittsburgh, pennsylvania, which had a great influence on me. >> rose: how so? well, for one thing, it was a city full of history and there was a lot of histare you talked about and it was during the second world war when i was in grade school and we were very much involved in spirit and attitude and the reality of the war, and we in pittsburgh were helping to win the war. we were the arsenal of at the -- we were the arsenal of democracy and so on. the conversations at the dinner table were about the fires, the floods, the strikes, the history of our own family. i think what your parents and grandparents talk about has great influence on one's interest in history. i think one of the best things that parents can do for their

children or their grandchildren to encourage an interest in history is to take them to historic sites. take them to washington, take them to williamsburg, take them to the historic site within your own neck of the woods, take them to famous battlefields, and take them to the new american revolution museum that's just opened in philadelphia. absolutely phenomenal, and there is never been a great hummes about the american revolution until now. >> rose: two things before we close here. where do you put the presidential medal of honor? >> the highest i could have received. if i had to tally up what

matters most of me is none of my books has ever been out of print in 50 years. >> rose: people are still reading every one of them? >> yes. >> rose: it's great to have you here. >> thank you, charlie. >> rose: to be reminded. i consider it a privilege to be your guest. you're tops. >> rose: thank you. the book is called "the american spirit: who we are and what we stand for." >> rose: the position of white house chief of staff has been called the toughest job in washington. the man currently holding the job the former republican party clear reince priebus. getting the lions share for the chaotic trump white house and slow pace of the agenda and personnel. joining me to put it into context are three men who have held the job, jack watson from june '80 to 1981 as jimmy

carter's chief of staff. john podesta president clinton's chief of staff, and andy card president obama's chief of staff. and chris whipple, the author of the new book "the gatekeepers: how the white house chiefs of staff define every presidency." question, 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 u actually have to make surely that the president is served with the challenge in time to meet the challenge so that when a decision is made, it's relevant and not irrelevant.

>> 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 he needs to hear, that he's getting all the input -- >> rose: to be an honest broker. >> to be an honest broker, to be a very honest broker. 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 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 take and compromise of the political world. >> right. well, also, i think reince also comes out of politics. all of us had some experience in doing some policy. but it's -- it can be brutal, but it's also a tremendous honor to do it. and having, you know, 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. >> i was going to say what i learned from talking to these guys and interviewing all 17 living white house chiefs of staff for "the gatekeepers" is presidents can't govern effectively without impouring a white house chief of staff as equals in the white house to help their agenda and tell them what they need to hear. the chief of staff is a gatekeeper and officer sees the office, makes sure every decision is teed up with all the information on every side.

he helps the president prioritize the agenda and is in charge of the administration's message. 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: right now. yeah. in 1986, before these gentlemen -- i'm the oldest here. >> rose: maybe second. they have a wonderful symposium with john chancellor as the moderator of all the chiefs of staff at that time and somebody who had been key to the administration but not chief of staff like ted sorenson. at the symposium, it was a public event, and we all got a question, in what athletic terms would you compare the chief of staff job to? what came to me was blocking back, some would say quarterback, some would say

goalie to keep the other side from scoring too much, but the one role that comes to my mind immediately is javelin catcher. ( laughter ) >> rose: no one catches the javelin. >> yeah. >> rose: i guess this came -- haroldman said get me a tough s.o.b. do you have to be an s.o.b. to be good? >> it depends on the president's personality. one thing the chief of staff cannot do is be inconsistent with the way the president runs the white house. so, no, i don't think you have to be an s.o.b. >> you have to be tough sometimes. you have to make the hard decision and be able to either fire someone or reassign someone from one position to another position. that's not easy because you know these people, you're working with these people. so toughness, yes. >> there are three functions that any chief of staff has to meet. first is the care and feeding of the president, and that's a logistical challenge.

it's also paying attention to the state of mind of the president and the emotional rollercoaster that the president might be on, and that is a very large job people don't pay attention, to but is all consuming for a chief of staff. then you have the policy debate, the chief of staff manages the policy debate, not necessarily the policy but the process so that there are fewer unintended consequences to the policy, which means you have to have lots of views and people speak truth to power, that's the honest broker. >> i think they're being modest about the importance of the white house chief of staff's role. if you go back to h.r. haroldman from watergate, the iran contra scandal, the iraq car, the monica lewinsky scandal, to the failed rollout of obamacare, to the botched executive orders on immigration, the white house chief of staff often makes the difference between success and disaster. it's really that critical.

think about when jim baker who was everybody's choice -- >> the gold standard. -- when jim baker swapped jobs with don reagan, the treasury secretary, reagan came in, completely ill suited for the job and, the next thing you know, no coincidence a hair-brained scheme was cooked up in the white house basement and became the iran contra scandal. never would have happened on james baker's watch. so i think these guys are typically being a little modest. >> 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 and is executive branch of government, congress

and the world, and, so, i would want discipline around the words that are spoken by the president and subordinately by anybody at the white house staff which actually gives more discipline over don't leak. >> i think probably the first thing i would like is to take his phone away from him. i think this is a chaotic structure. it has been from the very beginning. i think reince priebus went into the white house knowing it would be somewhat chaotic because you had steve bannon coming off the campaign, jared kushner his son-in-law coming into the white house and playing an important role, went into a succession of national security advisor. i think 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 it remains to be seen if you could be athas effective as president, certainly he's having challenges on capitol hill -- >> rose: so take his phone away -- >> well, think about trying to -- 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 backdrop and the backup so that people feel that they can stick with you, and every day the story is changing. you know, 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 conducted himself on the campaign trail. so it may be a tall order to get any chief of staff to have the authority to discipline the process. i 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 advisors coming and going and not a chain of command and not somebody empowered to execute the agenda and as john said this is a white house that's broken, may be broken beyond repair because, ultimately, it's not reince priebus' 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 agenda and also tell donald trump what he does not want to hear. and does anybody imagining that happening anytime soon? >> rose: nor can anyone point out to you somebody that says no to him.

i've asked that question all the time. when i say who says no to the president, no one stepped forward with a candidate. >> charlie, there's another really important point to all this discipline, this white house is lacking a disciplined message, disciplined process, the tweeting constantly, daily, morning, noon and night is not helping because it's putting out inconsistent and indeed contradictory messages where the president is not only disagreeing with himself, what he said earlier, but the secretary of state or someone else. >> rose: the secretary of state is trying to mediate between a deal between qatar and the -- >> if you were to ask me the central problem, an unalterable problem, there is an insufficient respect for the

truth. falsehoods are being stated or 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 sent out day after day after day to defend a statement which is not true, and if -- >> rose: and you assume, by what you're saying, that they know it's not true? >> well, i can't get into the minds of the people who are saying these things and certainly can't get into the mind of the president, but think about this -- if there is not a respect for the truth, if there is not a respect for the importance and the 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 somewhere, some time, which i have low expectations for it happening. >> rose: do you agree, andy? i think 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 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 more media outlets were

covering everything, but, yes, i think they are sometimes challenged by the reality that they want to deny. >> rose: what's the perfect qualification for being a chief oftaff? >> i really don't think you can define it that way because the person is, in essence, a partner with the president. so different presidents are going to want different kind of people. in clinton's case, he loved a lot of input. the title the gatekeeper, 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 brings lots of voices to the table, he invites

people in. sometimes that can be madaning, but often it's quite creative. 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 wand to see a lot of information so you had to make sure he saw a lot of people. >> and talked to people. cabinet secretaries used to call me up all the time and say i have to see the president, i have to have a conversation face to face. i would say 202-456-1414. he stays up all night. call the operator. they will put you through to the president, if you have something to say to him. >> did it work out that way? some people were intimidated by that which usually meant 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 every night because i saw the log of his phone calls.

( laughter ) >> the discipline is not to prevent the president from getting information. the discipline is to make sure that, when the president gets information, somebody else knows about it beside the two people 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 complier 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 tinted tell you about it, go see him. >> having said that, i don't think any of the guys at this table would have allowed donald trump to be alone in a room with his f.b.i. director, given the circumstances at the time. >> rose: it was donald trump who wanted to be alone. >> no competent chief of staff would have permitted that to happen. >> no empowered chief of staff. >> rose: yeah. and one of the things about the qualities of great chief of staff and i think all these guys share this, temperament.

halderman was famously the s.o.b. but you don't have to be. leon panetta and james baker were grounded, comfortable in their own skin, been around the blocks they could walk into the oval office, close the door and tell president what he did not want to hear. as dick cheney put it to me, terrific chief of staff with gerry ford, he said you can't tell a tough thing you have to tell the president, have eight or nine guys sitting around saying, no, it's your turn, it wants your turn, it's got to be one person to do it and, unfortunately, 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? >> well, you know, esometimes wonder if donald trump could find the civilian equivalent of jim mattis, who evidently has the gravidas to change the

president's mind -- >> rose: or tell him no. -- on torture, for example, and tell him no. >> mcmaster. he needs to find somebody like that because history is littered with the wreckage of presidencies that tried to govern this way, including gerry 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 unalike in the delegation department than president reagan and president carter. president carter, like president clinton, was a man, was a president who wanted the information, who could assimilate, absorbed and organize in his own mind, 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 though the minds of each other and they trust each other. 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 reagan as 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 i think that was reagan's downfall. you have to be -- you have to be like a sports manager, you have tremendous talent in the white house and you have to be able to, you know, build a team that is going to be cohesive and work together as opposed to just, you know, operate by dictate from the chief of staff, and i think that's what reagan tried to do. it broke down, down the hall, with the national security advisor, and that led -- >> rose: broke down the hall with the first lady. >> she finally stepped in and solved the problem, and he was no longer. >> he liked the chief part of title a lot. he didn't like the staff part. >> the verb that hasn't been used by us in terms of the role

of chief of staff was we would agree on is the really effective chief is also going to be very good at enabling people to do their jobs. the chief doesn't try to do it all himself in the same way that the president can't, so cannot the chief. so the chief has to identify people that he or she, that time will come when we have one chief off-- when we have a woman chief of staff. 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. one of the things that it seems to me gives the chief o chief of staff a lot of power is often you're the last sound in the president's ear before he makes a decision. it is sometimes said, when you had dick cheney and colin powell around, who prevail --

>> first of all, the chief of staff has to have peripheral vision and know where all the people with great tunnel vision are. ( laughter ) 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. strong personalities in the white house, it's a team of rivals in every white house because they are very competent staffers legitimately hired because they have great expertise, many have type a personalities and they think they're the only person with great expertise, and you have to manage that process and make sure the playing field is in fact level and not skewed one way because a dominant staffer is bullying the process. so -- 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. 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 was intimidated by sally, you might want to call jane. >> rose: that's good. mcdonough tells the story in the book about the walk they used to take. >> rose: i was thinking about that when i raised the question. >> at the end of the day, 5:00 or later, they would take a walk around the south lawn. on a bad day would be a lot of laps. but when obama was confronted with the decision about whether to retaliate against syria when he had drawn his famous red line and then decided ultimately not to retaliate -- >> rose: and still thinks -- concede to congressional approval before you get it. >> decided to seek congressional approval. >> rose: after the brits decided not to.

>> he came back from the walk and shocked his national security team when he told them what he decided. the speculation was perhaps mcdonough had really had the last word in his ear and pushed him in that direction, and i asked dennis about that. he said, no, absolutely not. he said, i always felt that was an unfair advantage. they would be, as andy says, talking about the proseth, talking about how they got to that point and being a sounding board for the president and the honest broker, as he should be. >> you want the president to have the whole story. this is andy's point of a moment ago. you want the president to have the whole story before he makes the decision and try to protect him against the voices that are the loudest but not necessarily the truest and best. >> rose: it is sometimes said that, for example, with donald trump, i mean, he's 71 years old and people say he's not going to change. bill clinton was in his 40s. barack obama was in his 40s. jimmy carter was in his --

>> early 50s. >> rose: did they change before your very eyes while they were president or did they essentially remain the same person? >> i think every person changes as they serve. >> rose: because they see experiences they had not had. >> i mentioned at the beginning the president should never make an easy decision. the president only makes the toughest of the decisions, and sometimes there is no good answer. it's eight bad options, pick one. and you own it. >> rose: sounds like north korea. >> but you have to make the decision with such great optimism that the bureaucracy will say, the president wants this done, i am with it. congress will say, we will follow. other world lourdes like tony blair will say i'm standing with you. but they're brutally tough decisions. you want an optimist as president, you certainly don't want a press mist. if someone walks into the oval office and says i'm going to

make a bad decision today, they shouldn't be president. it will be a tough decision but they have to make it. >> we see examples where people mature in office and the question is out on that. one of the things that i think is true of most of the modern presidents is they have been curious people. they wanted to learn. they wanted to consume a lot of information as we've all talked about and through the weight of the decisions, through putting people -- you know, men and women in uniform, into harm's way from understanding the collateral damage of decisions, they mature, that's why their hair turns grey, that's why all of our hair turned grey, but i think they make at th -- but i k they make better decisions, you know, if they've learned to assume that burden but also maintain that sense of both

optimism and i think a sense of ambition. so you need to keep that ambition throughout the presidency, i think. >> rose: thank you all. pleasure. >> thank you. , charlie. >> rose: the book is called "the american spirit: who we are and what we stan the book is called "the gatekeepers: how the white house chiefs of staff define every esidency." chris whipple. for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. >> you're watching pbs.

this is "nightly business report" is tyler mathisen . >> the president leaves on a a high stake foreign policy trip one day after north korea tests a missile that could carry out a nuclear warhead into u.s. territory. the markets kept cool, but the next few days could provide stern tests. as tensions rise around the globe, why americans defense companies may with an excellent place for your capital. looking for a mortgage? why they could soon be easier to get for millions of americans. those stories and more tonight .n night ly business report for >> good evening and welcome. international tensions ran high as investors returned to the