of course, the one everybody knows about is the pdb, the presidents' daily brief, which is a took with a series of intelligence pieces that a briefer comes in, hands to the president of the united states, and walks the president through piece by piece. some presidents get the briefing book before and dispense meeting with the briefer. some presidents get the briefing book before, and then talk about it with the briefer. president bush was someone who could actually read and listen at the same time. i have trouble doing either one, but certainly have trouble doing both at the same time. he could both listen and read at the same time. and he started his day six days a week with that briefing. consuming intelligence pleemean that you are not necessarily passive. but he would ask questions, and he would push, and he would many times say, now i'm not pressing you to change your opinions, i'm not pressing you to change your opinions, but i want to test you, because i want to know what you know, and i want to know how confident you are in what you're telling me. because that allows a presiden

briefers ofwhen the the various principles who take the pdb, the president's daily brief to brief the president and vice president and others, i am told that at the end of the day, they all get together and they and about what they learned what questions were raised by the president and vice president and various principles. presumably, that causes them to do more digging. secondly, president can ask for information. i remember one instance when a briefers said -- in iran there are 80 families that control everything and make all of the decisions. and the president said -- oh really? so bring me a list. it took a couple of weeks and a list came back and there were 86. and the president said great. now coming if me a list of all of the contacts of these families in the united states. i want to know where their children are going to college. i want to know what real estate a have here. because he was thinking about potential pressure points. it was a big list. the intelligence community never came back with that list. one of the things the president can do is task. thinks --when people

administration was trying to get -- usually a president has a briefer that briefs all the elements in the pdb, but they are written by other analysts. we would try to get the analysts to brief the president and the vice president and the rest of us so that the analysts could hear firsthand what was of interest to the ultimate consumer of that intelligence. mr. stimson: i'm sure that was somewhat unnerving for some of these first-time analysts. mr. hadley: it was unnerving, but the blowback we got from it was that they loved it. and it really showed them in vivid terms the value of what they were doing. that's what we really are like. we like being valued for what we do. that was a real affirmation. we did a couple other things. there is a tendency when you brief the president on intelligence, the president would then say, what are we doing about it? let's talk about policy initiatives. the problem is, he's talking policy without any of his national security principles who are supposedly is policy advisers sitting in the room. one of the things we started to do is, those intelligence pieces th