Nancy Gibbs and Dan Gerstein are our guests this week. Show produced by Katherine Caperton. Original Air Date: May 19, 2012 on SiriusXM Satellite Radio "POTUS" Channel 124. Polioptics airs regularly on POTUS on Saturdays at 6:00 am, 12 noon and 6:00 pm. Follow us on Twitter @PoliopticsListen to the show by clicking on the bar above. Show also available for download on Apple iTunes by clicking here.
On this week's episode: The President’s Club, and the Vice President’s Waiting Room.
We’re going inside the most exclusive members-only institution in the United States, a fraternity with only five living members. It’s got its own clubhouse, on Jackson Place overlooking Lafayette Square, and now it’s got its own book. Nancy Gibbs, deputy managing editor of TIME Magazine, joined us for an extended conversation. Along with Michael Duffy, she’s written The President's Club, a definitive chronicle of the unique relationship among ex-Presidents and the sitting occupants of the Oval Office.
I was thrilled to have Nancy Gibbs on the broadcast this week.
Gibbs is Deputy Managing Editor of TIME Magazine and author, along with Michael Duffy, of The President’s Club, Simon & Schuster’s latest contribution to the non-fiction bestseller lists. Nancy’s been with Time since 1985 with over 140 cover stories to her credit, joining the magazine staff after graduating from Yale with some extra time at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. She’s also the author (again, with Duffy) of The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House.
As I wrote in Part IV of the 10-part Story of Polioptics, the covers of TIME Magazine had a profound effect on me as I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, telling a story in visual terms of the evolution of America's political psyche. Even though the covers and content of TIME are well preserved in the magazine's electronic archive, I haven't been able to bring myself to recycle the several large file boxes of magazines I still keep from that era (my wife is not pleased, but I maintain, someday, I'll make a killing on eBay).
The covers, many of which were shot by Walker and my other friend from the White House press briefing room, Dirck Halstead, and the columns by Hugh Sidey, gave a teenager from Boston the closest proximity he could hope to have to the West Wing. Understanding how Ronald Reagan became such a great communicator -- often through the visual, often with the help of Michael Deaver -- also gave that same kid his own road map to an eventual job in the White House. It doesn't hurt, either, to look through some of those old ads in the magazines and wonder if the likes of Don and his creative team at Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce might still have been at work, a decade after Mad Men's current season, coming up with campaigns for Brut After Shave or Hennessy Cognac.
I sometimes lament the trajectory the news business has taken, from the handful of newspapers, news magzines and evening news shows that shaped opinion in the 1980s to the multi-media web that we now have to navigate. But Nancy was quick to remind me in our conversation that those same digital channels now allow many more readers from all over the world to enjoy the writing and photojournalism -- and covers -- of TIME than Henry Luce could ever have imagined when subscriptions and newsstand sales were the only way to see its pages. That's a good thing, too, given that the art department at TIME has never been more provocative, as it proved with the publication of the "Are You Mom Enough" cover of the May 21 issue.
Some of the reviews of Gibbs & Duffy's The Presidents Club, notably by Janet Maslin of the New York Times or David Greenberg of the Washington Post, have pointed out some of the book's perceived shortcomings, but I think they miss the enormous contribution of TIME and other news magazine writers over the decades to our collective understanding of how Washington works and the presidency in particular. I am currently making my way, slowly, through Robert Caro's magnificent, new 736-page The Passage of Power, but the thing only covers a span of six years, or an average of 122 pages per year. Who doesn't adore Caro's work, but there's only so much time in the easy chair every day to consume presidential history. By contrast, The President's Club clocks in at 656 pages and begins in 1953, at the Inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower, and continues to the present day, offering an average of 11 pages per year in the study of life at, and after, the White House. For some readers, even those who can't get enough of presidential arcana, that's a sufficient sweep of history.
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Dan Gerstein
As Robert Caro made clear in the opening pages of The Passage of Power, fourteen of the 44 U.S. Presidents, or 33%, have ascended from the Number Two slot, 25% through inheritance of the office. As much as we may ridicule the job, Al Gore, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden have proven that it has never mattered more. That's why Mitt Romney has entrusted one of his closest aides, Beth Meyers, to vet the possibilities. Four years ago, the task fell to A.B. Culvahouse, whose list included Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, a process that he wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal was "rigorous, just compressed."
As those of us who read or watched GAME CHANGE by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (two previous Polioptics guests), Culvahouse advised Senator John McCain that a Palin pick was "high risk, high reward," an analysis which he stands behind. The beginning of the vetting process, which is now underway in Boston, probably follows the same pattern Culvahouse followed in 2008:
One man, outgoing Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, was on the shortlist twice, in 2000, as a potential vice presidential nominee for Al Gore, a Democrat, and in 2008, for John McCain, a Republican. In both cases, Lieberman was anything but "an incredibly boring white guy." In 2008, neither was Sarah Palin, and she got the nod. High risk, high reward. In 2000, Lieberman passed through the gantlet.
Gore and Lieberman after "The Pick" in 2000
Lying in bed at 6:30 on the morning that Gore's announcement was revealed, Dan Gerstein, then Senator Lieberman's communications director, had gone to sleep the previous evening thinking that his man was passed over. As Dan recounts the moment with me, 12 years later, he had succumbed to the same head fake that many campaigns employ to throw off the scent of the probing media looking for one of the major scoops of any election year. The press calls that Dan started receiving early that morning were the first he knew that his boss was destined to join Al Gore on the ticket.
The vetting process is one thing: secretive, discreet. While the process is underway, a vice presidential campaign staff-in-waiting is assembled, ready for a shotgun marriage with the nominee. But after the pick is made, the lights go on, and stay focused on the running mate until Election Day. What happens to a person, and his or her closest aides, when they go to bed doing one job -- in Lieberman's case, serving in the U.S. Senate -- and wake up as one of the party's standard-bearers? What happens next?
Lieberman's Announcement of Candidacy, Stamford, 2003
That's the crux of our conversation with Gerstein, an old friend from a few critical junctures over the past 10 years. He grew up in Hartford, where I once lived, and wrote for the Courant after college at Harvard. When I met Dan in 2003, as he was helping to launch Lieberman’s 2004 presidential campaign, I was dispatched to create the launch event visual at his high school in Stamford, Connecticut. Dan was, at the time, a Lieberman veteran, working in the Senator’s office since 1995. Since leaving government, Dan has grown Gotham Ghostwriters into a leading consulting firm providing speechwriting, ghostwriting and editorial help to a range of corporate, non-profit and individual clients.
Keep your eye on what's happening in Boston during the vetting process, but the real drama, whether there's genuine chemistry on the ticket -- as there was between Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992, less so between John McCain and Sarah Palin -- begins after the pick is made.
Michael Feldman, Chip Smith, Ben LaBolt and Arnette Heintze are our guests this week. Show produced by Katherine Caperton. Original Air Date: May 11, 2012 on SiriusXM Satellite Radio "POTUS" Channel 124. Polioptics airs regularly on POTUS on Saturdays at 6:00 am, 12 noon and 6:00 pm. Follow us on Twitter @PoliopticsListen to the show by clicking on the bar above. Show also available for download on Apple iTunes by clicking here.
When we learned through our grapevine that the brain trust of Washington, D.C. uber strategy firm Glover Park Group would be taking the shuttle up to Manhattan for a salon evening with their friends, clients and clients-in-waiting at the ultra-swanky Electric Room and Dream Downtown, we were eager have them carve out time for a quick visit to Polioptics' NYC studios to remind our listeners about the moment the firm began to take shape.
Chip Smith, Glover Park Group
Feldman!
It was November 7, 2000, the election night that saw Vice President Al Gore concede defeat to Governor George W. Bush, then retract his concession when Gore/Lieberman field boss Michael Whouley called our guest, Glover Park's Michael Feldman, to tell him to hold his horses. The races was too close to call. As history would eventually recall, Gore lost the race on a 5-4 decision of the United States Supreme Court, but not before Feldman, Whouley, Chip Smith, Bill Daley, Warren Christopher, David Morehouse David Boies, Jeremy Bash and a host of others played pivotal roles in one of the most arresting six week dramas in American History.
Someone had to lose. Those who lost, who thought they might be helping to form a Gore Administration and Inaugural in transition from the Clinton Years, instead had to manage a transition in their own lives. The drama in which they starred was extended by popular demand for an additional six weeks, but eventually they had to plot their next move.
Thus, the Glover Park Group was born, the brainchild of Feldman, Chip Smith, Carter Eskew and Joe Lockhart. Over time, the firm has burgeoned, providing a home to many of the shrewdest minds in Washington who have had GPG on their business cards over the last decade. As watchers of the firm will note, GPG was sold in late 2011 to giant PR aggregator WPP Group, though our guests Feldman and Smith remain with the firm to guide its continued growth.
In their conversation with Adam Belmar and me, Chip and Mike acknowledged that the unpredictable path of events on that night in Nashville nearly 12 years ago might qualify them for therapy. Watching a few minutes of the cable news coverage that night, it's easy to understand why.
* * *
Where the Gore Campaign stumbled at the finish line in 2000, the Obama Campaign stormed over it eight years later. Under the leadership of David Axelrod and David Plouffe, the "Change We Can Believe In" effort avoided many of the mistakes of 2000 and 2004, riding an impeccable political performer in Senator Barack Obama into the White House in 2009.
In Part 7 of The Story of Polioptics, we examined a number of the sophisticated marketing techniques that contributed to the Obama 2008 victory.
What we largely omitted in our technical appraisal of the campaign's marketing was the contribution of a team of loyal aides like Ben LaBolt who signed on to Senator Obama's longshot campaign early in the process and provided the tireless energy that all winning campaigns need. It's one thing to stage strong images and write good speeches; it's another thing entirely to have the steel spine necessary to push back on the range of incoming attacks that every national campaign receives. LaBolt's spine is one of the steeliest.
In this episode of Polioptics, Adam Belmar and I caught up with Ben for a few minutes on the phone from Obama 2012 headquarters in Chicago.
* * *
Speaking of Chicago, Mayor Emanuel and his city are getting ready to host one of the largest international summits on the perennial roster of major events: the gathering of heads of state and government of the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which begins on May 20 at McCormick Place.
Arnette Heintze
With institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations housed within their municipalities, cites like Washington, D.C. and New York are used to erecting barricades and clearing the streets for motorcades when dozens of delegations arrive to practice diplomacy. For them, it's all in a year's work.
But for cities like Miami, Seattle and Denver, which hosted the Summit of the Americas, the APEC Summit and the Summit of the 8 during the Clinton Years, the arrival of world leaders turned out to be a financial, logistical and security challenge that required the collective teamwork of governmental, civic and law enforcement organizations to make everything tick.
With the clock ticking down to the beginning of the NATO Summit, Arnette took a few minutes with Adam Belmar and me to discuss the preparations that are being put in place.
Tammy Hadded, Mark Katz and Mary Phillips-Sandy are our guests this week. Show produced by Katherine Caperton. Original Air Date: April 28, 2012 on SiriusXM Satellite Radio "POTUS" Channel 124. Polioptics airs regularly on POTUS on Saturdays at 6:00 am, 12 noon and 6:00 pm. Follow us on Twitter @PoliopticsListen to the show by clicking on the bar above. Show also available for download on Apple iTunes by clicking here.
Episode 54, where are you?
Okay, so not every week is so weighty in the world of Polioptics. This is one of those occasions. On a week when we heard whispers that Governor Romney may soon do a sketch on Saturday Night Live and President Obama Slow-Jammed the news on Stafford Loan interest rates with Jimmy Fallon as he barnstormed this nation of college towns, this was Seven Days In April in which humor took brief hold of an otherwise serious narrative.
Tammy Haddad
For Washington, D.C., this is Silly Season -- the culmination of the Big Three black tie dinners that begins with the Gridiron Club, continues with the Radio & TV Correpondents' Association dinner and concludes, this weekend, with the White House Correspondents Association dinner.
Yeah, I'm going, sitting at the SiriusXM Satellite Radio Table (Thank you, Tim Farley) at an event that brings back memories of a continuous string of dinners during the Clinton Years when the West Wing and the Family Theater of the White House briefly took on the aura of a comedy show writer's room.
But this weekend in Washington -- on the Twitters they're using the hashtag #nerdprom -- has now become much more than that, in large part due to our first guest on Episode 54, Tammy Haddad. Read a profile of Tammy here.
Back in the Spring of 1993, my first in Washington as a member of the White House Staff, Tammy Haddad, who had surfed a wave of relative Capitol fame as the executive producer of Larry King Live, held her first annual Garden Brunch. The brunch took its august place in the Saturday midday hours preceding the dinner. Then, later in the afternoon, when the 2,500 or so invitees to the WHCA dinner convened on the patio of the Washington Hilton, the evening began its forward march of banquet food and ever more opulent after-parties. The early years of Mike Bloomberg's party at the Russian Legation will never be forgotten, but for Washington insiders whose energy level is highest during daylight hours and prefer to actually hear the person you're talking to, Tammy's Brunch never yielded its status as the most sought-after ticket in town.
On Episode 54, you'll hear Tammy offer Brunch access to Adam Belmar and me -- in fact, you'll hear her demand our attendance -- and, well, with Tammy's persistence and the force of nature that she is, it's pretty tough to turn down, especially on live-to-tape radio.
* * *
My memory of Tammy goes back even further, to the final month of Campaign '92.
Paul Meyer and me in Ocala, Florida, October 1992
My advance pal Paul Meyer and I were assigned to produce a Clinton/Gore site at a stop along the Florida Bus Tour. Our assignment was Ocala, the GOP-dominated heart of Florida horse country. Little Rock wanted us to find a small, indoor venue, something that wouldn't look embarrassing on national TV when a paltry crowd showed up to greet the Democratic ticket.
But Paul and I, knowing we were in the midst of our final few events of the campaign -- perhaps our last campaign ever as advance men -- were disinclined to following the edicts of headquarters, not when there was a crowd to raise. So we found and old-fashioned rodeo arena, the Southeastern Livestock Pavilion, and conscripted the leading local Democratic families to help us fill it.
Even better, we conspired with our Secret Service advance team to do something rare in presidential campaign event production: roll the candidate's busses right into the rodeo arena in the midst of thousands of screaming fans. We used barricades to build an avenue through the crowd just large enough to accommodate the lead busses of the motorcade. When the busses arrived, coming off Interstate 75, we cued he music and started the show.
The bus carrying Governor Clinton, Senator Gore and their wives drove right toward the stage, stopping to form the middle ground of the visual composition. In front was the placard-waiving crowd. In the middle were the Clintons and Gores on stage in clear focus, their bus as the immediate backdrop. And in gauzy relief in the far background another few hundred young Floridians in the Livestock Pavilion's bunting-festooned bleachers.
The lead bus in the motorcade makes its way into the Southeastern Livestock Pavilion, Ocala, Florida
The Clintons and Gores alighted from their bus and were ushered stage right to the beginning of an elevated walkway that we constructed that would give them a second grand entrance. Once the candidates were in position, we cued the country band and the future president and vice president walked toward the stage, 18 inches higher than the rest of the crowd, as if elevated above a Bruce Springsteen mosh pit to a platform set in the middle of the rodeo arena.
“But it was Ocala that stuck with me the most. That crowd hooted and hollered and jumped like nothing else I’ve seen, and as I sat there, the thought that I had been pushing aside for days finally fought its way out into the open: He’s going to win, isn’t he? He’s going to win Florida, and he is going to be president.”
Howard Troxler Column St. Petersburg Times
October 7, 1992
After the event, the real benefit of holding the rally at the Livestock Pavilion kicked in. Tammy Haddad had flown in a day earlier with a production crew from CNN to set up a 90-minute interview for Clinton and Gore with Larry King. Ninety minutes on CNN in a custom-produced remote location was, at the time, pure gold in the calculus of free media that inure to a campaign. And to have Larry bring his entire production to what amounted to a horse stall in the middle of the Livestock Pavilion paddocks was pure Tammy Haddad.
Paul and I watched from the fringe as the Larry King Show, lit spectacularly on a warm fall Florida evening, brought a relaxed and casually-dressed Bill Clinton and Al Gore into hundreds of thousands of living rooms across America. It would have been a shame if the interview happened in a stale classroom at a local high school, which is where the even may have ended up if Paul and I hadn't pressed for an outdoor rally. In fact, if we weren't able to sell the charm of the rodeo arena to Tammy, the show may not have happened at all.
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For some on WHCA dinner weekend, life is a lot more strenuous and stressful than socializing. At the White House, the president and his regular speechwriters along, perhaps, with some outside comedy hands and acting coaches, are busy at work, prepping the guy who serves as Commander-in-Chief to do something not entirely natural: to be laugh-out loud funny with 10-15 minutes of schtick in front of 2,500 dinner guests.
Remember the stakes last year: with Donald Trump, who had been hinting at a presidential run of his own in prior weeks, sitting in front of him, President Obama dressed down the host of the Apprentice to point where Trump may have felt like the smallest guy in the room. All this while, across the globe, the President know that SEAL operators were about to take out Osama bin Laden in Abbotobad, Pakistan.
As Mark Katz, our second guest on Episode 54 observes, sometimes Obama's heart doesn't always seem to be in it. He doesn't, according to Katz, own the material. It's more like humorous stuff his staff wrote for him that the President, sorta, gets a kick out of delivering, reserving a chuckle now and then whenever he's even moved to laugh at the bits.
Katz knows of what he speaks. As the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Soundbite Institute, Katz has made a career out of his simple approach to using humor as strategy. We worked together on a number of Clinton WHCA dinner speeches, including the legendary one in which the President employed an egg timer to track his progress. Katz documents that effort, and my role in it, in his book, Clinton & Me, still available at Amazon.
In my memory, the best material ever used during a WHCA dinner came in the 2000 affair while Vice President Gore and First Lady Hillary Clinton where both out on the campaign trail, leaving President Clinton "home alone" at the White House. It's still a classic. Have a watch:
Adam Belmar and I were thrilled to have Mark back on our program to help listeners get a better understanding of what goes on behind the scenes as the President prepares for his night of stand-up. As we're seeing this week, every time that Barack Obama does anything now that isn't straight-down-the-line presidential, he's getting tagged by the Romney machine as a man more known for his celebrity status than his accomplishments.
Obama may prefer to spend his Saturday night at home with Michelle and the girls, watching a movie, and instead has to go out in front of the lights and try to kill it in front of a national audience, and then get tagged for it by his political opponents, no matter how well he does. This is a nasty business, and tonight, the stakes are, in fact, very high, even in the middle of Silly Season.
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Mary Phillips-Sandy
At Comedy Central's Indecision, it's always Silly Season, and that's why we wanted to welcome Mary Phillips-Sandy, editorial producer of Comedy Central's Indecision, to our microphones to shed light on how Comedy Central plans to cover the campaign down the final stretch.
The fun and popular photo galleries (I particularly like the gallery about Mitt Romney and "Cookiegate" in which the governor is bubble-thoughted saying "these cookies aren't marvelous enough."
And, one reason I wondered if Indecision may soon be lacking new material, there is also recurring Ask Rick Santorum series (Mary insists that she expects Santorum to continue giving her fodder from now until November, and beyond.
Mary goes into detail with Adam and me about the process by which Comedy Central goes about pumping new material onto the web (hint: it involves a team of freelance writers that start around 6:00 in the morning, presumably jacked up on Starbucks).
You sometimes wonder where they get comedy writers for this type of work. Stephen Colbert, as we know, is the youngest of 11 children from Charleston, South Carolina. Jon Stewart was born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz in New York City. Mary Phillips-Sandy, it turns out, is the pride of Waterville, Maine and, given my many connections to the Pine Tree State, that makes her tops in my book. Not since Tim Sample has someone been able to find so much humor in a people with such long faces.
Mary has a serious streak, too, exemplified in her long-form journalism that often focuses on her home state. I found particularly poignant her piece in the Awl about Maine's dying paper industry and the fate of two mills in Millinocket that were once the flagship operations of the Great Northern Paper Company.
The towns and rivers around Millinocket and the vast expanse of Aroostook County are places well worth the visit, but be prepared to step into a time warp. My seven-year-old son, Toby, and I are prepping for our next trip by watching marathon sessions of North Woods Law on Animal Planet On Demand. He is now convinced he wants to become a game warden. He'd better dress warmly.
See you next week for another episode of Polioptics.
David Almacy, Dan Emmett and Michael Shaw are our guests this week Show produced by Katherine Caperton. Original Air Date: April 21, 2012 on SiriusXM Satellite Radio "POTUS" Channel 124. Polioptics airs regularly on POTUS on Saturdays at 6:00 am, 12 noon and 6:00 pm. Follow us on Twitter @Polioptics Listen to the show by clicking on the bar above. Show also available for download on Apple iTunes by clicking here.
On this episode, we look at "The Optics of Cartagena" with Dan Emmett, retired Special Agent of the U.S. Secret Service. Josh King and I had Dan on our show a few weeks ago, but my, how things have changed for our old friends in the USSS.
Turning to the political digital world, past, present and future, we're then joined by David Almacy, former White House Internet Director, on the President's secret surrogate in an election year: the White House Website.
And to wrap things up for the week, Josh and I are joined for a roundtable conversation with Arun Chaudhary, former White House videographer, and Michael Shaw of BagNewsNotes.
Ned Martel, Ashley Parker and Stephen Goodin are our guests this week Show produced by Katherine Caperton. Original Air Date: April 14, 2012 on SiriusXM Satellite Radio "POTUS" Channel 124. Polioptics airs regularly on POTUS on Saturdays at 6:00 am, 12 noon and 6:00 pm. Follow us on Twitter @Polioptics Listen to the show by clicking on the bar above. Show also available for download on Apple iTunes by clicking here.
This was a week in which "the narrative" of Campaign 2012, which Adam Belmar and I so enjoy tracking, lost the last compelling thing it had left to narrate. At least for a while. Rick Santorum bowed out of the race after a noble but Quixotic battle against Mitt Romney, clearing the way for the former Massachusetts Governor to assume his long sought mantle of presumptive nominee.
A campaign that was thus in danger of entering a quadrennial lull as the Romney and Obama organizations, and their respective super-PACs, began to husband and then regenerate their funds for their fall offensives, suddenly found a new narrative in the form of the presumptive nominee's spouse, Ann Romney, and Hilary Rosen, a Democratic strategist well known within the Beltway, but with a low Q rating beyond it.
Here's how Rosen's comments went down with Anderson Cooper, in case you missed it:
The ensuing drama enveloped the DC and cable news chattering class for several days. It was all a bit silly. Even those opinionators who used the lengths of their columns to declare it silly were a bit silly. It has ended, for now, with Rosen at first accepting, and then contritely canceling, an appearance on Meet the Press scheduled for April 15. But with the Romney/Santorum opus taking its final curtain, it set up a really fun episode of Polioptics that pondered the existential question -- who is Ann Romney -- with one of her shrewdest observers, Ned Martel of the Washington Post.
Ned is an old friend who accepted with good humor and perseverance the task of reigning me in when Men's Vogue gave me the assignment of going to Iowa analyzing the stagecraft of the 2008 campaign and he was the magazine's Deputy Editor. As a person who relishes the chance to wax on about the finer points of hay bales for use in rural political rallies, my initial 7,000-word draft for a 3,500 word article put Ned's editing skills to the test, but I always appreciated how he nursed the piece to a respectable final outcome.
So we begin our consideration of Mrs. Romney with this odd pre-interview conversation between Governor Romney and Sean Hannity of Fox News in which the Governor is pressed, somewhat uncomfortably, to my eye, to discuss some of the finer points of dressage -- an equestrian sport in which he and his wife are involved -- and horse ownership before his interview is officially set to begin.
This is one of those mic-should-have-been-killed moments that's not nearly as memorable as Ronald Reagan's "we begin bombing in five minutes" quip before his radio address taping or John Edwards extended self-coiffing session, but it's nevertheless another one of those awkward pieces of Romney video that Jim Margolis may have a field day with in the fall.
In the seemingly off-camera conversation with Hannity, Romney reveals in a subtle and, to my ear, tender way as he can, his wife's intense interest in, and reliance on, dressage horses as a way of balancing some of the effects on her body from her multiple sclerosis, now in remission. In fact, Ned Martel explored this issue in great detail about a month ago in the Post. Here's a quick excerpt from the article:
She had loved horses as a girl in Michigan, and she didn’t return to them until she turned 50. “It’s when I was diagnosed with M.S.,” she said. “And I was losing most of the function of my right side. And I decided I needed to go back and do what I loved, before I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Martel's more recent piece for the Post -- "Cable talkers’ latest status symbol: A studio at home" -- is what connects his profile of Ann Romney the equestrienne with the woman who, Hilary Rosen asserted, "hasn't worked a day in her life."
In the Carville-Matalin house, CNN’s team of techies mounted a smallish camera — called a Cisco link — that gets steered and focused by engineers in D.C. or Atlanta or Hong Kong or whichever CNN nerve center has booked either half of the power couple.
It’s also awesome, and “inexpressibly gratifying,” Matalin said in an e-mail. Then she found some words to express it: “For us personally, the system allows us to be available when CNN needs us without having to miss out on our kid’s many happenings.” On that day, for example, she had her daughter Matty’s induction into the National Honor Society to attend. And on that weekend, she had a school dance to chaperone. The work-family balance, thus, can finally teeter in the family direction.
So what happened on April 12 when Hilary Rosen filled a pundit box on Anderson Cooper's show on CNN and touched off a firestorm? She did a segment on AC 360 -- the kind of segment you see played out in every daypart on every cable news network each and every day. The segment was put together by a booker and a producer working to fill airtime with conversation manufactured to match the temperament of the viewing niche on that station at that hour. Booking guests and firing up remote cameras of the type about which Martel wrote is a lot easier and faster to produce than reported, shot, written, edited and packaged news.
And that's how this transitional week on the campaign -- when Rick Santorum bowed out and the narrative pivoted to the 'war on women' -- became instead an extended conversation about who is Ann Romney? A few things I conclude, having watched the Rosen-fueled chatter, and reading Martel's piece, is that she's an excellent mother of five boys, devoted wife one polioptically-challenged former governor, and an intensely competitive sportswoman. And for now, I don't feel a driving need to know much more than that.
When we asked Stephen Goodin, a close friend from the Clinton years, to join us in an extended conversation about the role of the personal aide to the President, we couldn't resist inviting the New York Times' Ashley R. Parker back to our air to offer a curtain-raiser.
A.R. Parker of The Times, back for her second visit to Polioptics
Once the presidential candidate's "body man" gets to the White House and receives his first set of engraved business cards, his title assumes the loftier rank of "Personal Aide to the President." But some of the more jaded observers of the presidency (and a few insider friends) will still refer to the job as being "the butt boy," as in 'the person who stay's closest to the President's butt at all times.' It's a pejorative descriptor that never did justice to supreme endurance, rarefied judgment, diplomatic skill and round-the-clock sense of humor that the job required.
Stephen Goodin
I worked with with, and maintain friendships with, the four Clinton personal aides -- Andrew Friendly, Goodin, Kris Engskov and Doug Band -- each of whom continue to do great things since leaving the White House. Staying close on Bill Clinton's heels throughout the day was just the first job requirement. To truly succeed in the role requires a whole lot more, in particular a calm under pressure in classified situations when you're the only one in earshot of the President's voice.
Stephen Goodin, now president of DC-based Red River Strategies, proved his mettle many times. He was on post at his small desk outside the Oval Office during some of the most pressure-filled moments of the Clinton Presidency. As he says to Adam and me in this week's episode, all of the other support roles around the President -- Secret Service, President's physician, Military Aide, Chief of Staff, National Security Adviser -- have build-in redundancy and relief pitchers. There is only one personal aide.
To get a sense of what Garrett Jackson may be in for should Mitt Romney become the 45th President of the United States, listen to our conversation with Stephen on the 52nd episode of Polioptics.
Dan Emmett is our guest this week Show produced by Katherine Caperton. Original Air Date: March 31, 2012 on SiriusXM Satellite Radio "POTUS" Channel 124. Polioptics airs regularly on POTUS on Saturdays at 6:00 am, 12 noon and 6:00 pm. Follow us on Twitter @Polioptics Listen to the show by clicking on the bar above. Show also available for download on Apple iTunes by clicking here.
When I learned that Dan Emmett had written a book, Within Arm's Length: The Extraordinary Life and Career of a Special Agent of the United States Secret Service, I was eager to have him on the show. Last week, we welcomed Pete Souza, the Chief White House Photographer, to our program. Last year, we brought Josh Bolton, former Chief of Staff to President Bush, on the broadcast. When Adam Belmar and I complete episodes with the Chief White House Physician and one of the President's Military Aides, and maybe a POTUS or two, we will have full representation of what constitutes the major components of the President's "secure package" in the motorcade. (Dr. Connie, Major Mudd, President Clinton: we'll be in touch...)
To make the institution of the presidency function, survive and continue, even after a security calamity, all of these people need to work closely together and cooperate even amid competing agendas. The Chief of Staff, and those who work for him, lay out the political and policy strategy of the President, often manifested in the things POTUS does or the places he goes. The Chief White House Photographer creates a visual record of each of those moments. The President's Military Aide carries "the football," a satchel containing the codes and protocols for initiating a launch of U.S. nuclear weapons. The President's Physician is constantly "on call" should the President need medical assistance. And the working shift of the Presidential Protection Detail (PPD) provides 24/7 watch over the President's security.
Even when the President and his family are sleeping on the second floor of the White House, the working shift of the PPD are deployed at key points of the Executive Residence and the 18 acres of the White House grounds to guard their constant safety. Other assets of the PPD, such as the Counter Assault Team (CAT) are standing by in rooms with cryptic names like "W-16" to deploy if needed. On Page 93 of Dan Emmett's book, which offers not so much an inside dissection of how the Secret Service does its job, but rather a chronicle of a typical career of an agent that could span 20 years or more, Dan expresses little doubt that such a scenario may, someday, be necessary.
"When the day comes for CAT to deploy in a live-fire situation to save the life of a president -- and that day will come -- I have total faith they will carry the day."
If you've ever seen CAT up close, you know this isn't a situation in which you want to be in close proximity. This is a team of heavily armed and armored Secret Service Agents that, in Emmett's era, carried M-16 assault rifles and Sig Saur P226 9MM pistols, in addition to an array of other lethal equipment that rightly remains classified. Should they actually deploy, it would mean that bullets would soon be flying and the only place of possible survival would be prone, face down, in the dirt, and even that's not guaranteed.
It's been some time since I lingered around the CAT vehicle in a staged motorcade awaiting a POTUS departure from the White House or other event site, but the mere intimidating presence of the imposing tactical-uniformed squad, compared to the more common mufti of the business-suited agent with PPD lapel pin and earpiece emerging from his or her shirt collar, served as a strong deterrent to all but the most determined and suicidal assailants.
From early 1993 until late 1997, I was a member of the White House staff who regularly worked closely with Secret Service agents like Dan Emmett to plan and execute events that helped the President convey his message in public and simultaneously kept him safe. Indeed, Dan's tenure and mine overlapped directly for two years, and we worked on, and witnessed, many of the same events, a number of which are in his book.
The two jobs were often at odds, and in his book Dan doesn't hide his exasperation, at least initially, in how we, trying to do our jobs, made his job more difficult. Consider the situation: the Secret Service has been in existence since 1865 and has evolved its approach and training for the worst case scenario since it began actually protecting presidents in 1901, after the assassination of William McKinley. By contrast, a new White House staff is an organization that only really begins working together at noon on Inauguration Day, and frequently includes people outside the government who serve the President temporarily, either as "detailees" from other cabinet departments or volunteers from the private sector. Within that vast gulf of experience and perspective -- the trepidation grown over decades on behalf of the Service vs. the exuberance of often young White House aides who helped to win the presidency in part by making their candidate accessible to the public -- there are bound to be conflicts.
The question is, how can both groups co-exist and accomplish their respective goals without completely alienating each other, resulting in a climactic situation that could be severely embarrassing for the President, or much, much worse?
Reading Dan's book, I got the impression (and he subsequently agreed in his conversation with Adam and me) that this old-school, hard-edged agent, a former captain in the United States Marine Corps, learned by necessity how to roll with the punches working with an Administration whose makeup, from the President on down, was vastly different from the prior 12 years of Presidents Reagan and Bush. Dan entered the Secret Service in 1983, was assigned, as is typical, to investigative duty a field office, frequently "standing post" at many events for President Reagan before coming to the White House as a member of the Counter Assault Team in 1989, which would soon be subsumed into the Presidential Protection Division.
Similarly, the advance men and women supporting the President's staff with whom I worked also came to appreciate much more, and worked in greater harmony with, the Secret Service Agents who operate with the sole mission of keeping the President alive. We thrived in the 1992 campaign by helping Bill Clinton connect with the masses, whether that meant massive outdoor rallies or midnight rope lines on bus tours across the United States and their seemingly endless impromptu stops to greet gaggles of onlookers who implored Governor Clinton to alight from his vehicle to shake a few hands and, perhaps, say a few words into a hastily configured sound system. The conversation Adam and I had with legendary advance man Mort Engelberg last year recalled the unforgettable thrill of those moments.
In the end, agents with at least a grudging understanding of the political communications imperatives of the White House staff, and advance people with a well-honed appreciation of the threats against the President and the complexities of mitigating them, often developed a rapport that allowed both missions to succeed. I know that was my experience. I thoroughly enjoyed, and deeply respected, many of the agents with whom I worked. Receiving from and collaborating with SAICS like Rich Miller, Dave Carpenter, Lew Merletti, Larry Cockell and Brian Stafford, and the PPD shift members, CAT teams, ID, TSD and CS specialists that worked for them, you could almost always arrive at a compromise that allowed "the shot" to come off as planned, but in the safest way possible. I talk about one such situation on Omaha Beach in Normandy in the 10-part series "The Story of Polioptics."
Contrary to some of the early reporting on Dan's book, it's not a "tell all" about his assignments or the people he protected. In fact, he tells very little, except about himself. Despite some thinly-veiled disdain for political correctness, some people on the White House staff or even within his own agency, he doesn't spill secrets or compromise methods and tactics used in protection. The stuff of which Dan speaks is pretty much in the public domain, but rolled into one 21-year career that was exposed to just about everything, warts and all.
In the larger sense, I found Within Arm's Length to be an honest window into the long, at times exuberant and often difficult career of a Secret Service Agent. He talks of the byzantine process of getting hired, the futility of some of the investigative work, the tension that comes from some moments when an agent thinks violence may be at hand, the long hours of sleep and nutrition deprivation (which we, too, experienced) and the frank fact of burnout that often sets in after three or four years on the shift.
Dan does not welcome the kind of window on the Secret Service that has been opened by the competing documentary works of cable networks such as Discovery and the National Geographic Channel, believing that these visual presentations expose too much operational intelligence to potential enemies of the state.
Somewhere woven into Dan's experience is the joy and love that comes with being an agent and the situations that a career in the service allows you to experience, but you only really appreciate it when Dan talks about meeting his wife, Donnelle, also a 21-year veteran of the USSS and an Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the PPD. In this regard, Within Arm's Length is a 200-page recruiting poster for the Secret Service, a career not for the faint of heart.
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Cecil Stoughton's photo of the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One, November 22, 1963
An excellent companion to this week's show and our conversation with Dan Emmett is found in the April 2 edition of The New Yorker in Robert Caro's stunning piece, "The Transition," about how November 22, 1963 transformed the life of Lyndon B. Johnson.
I am wholly incapable of doing justice to Mr. Caro's work, but if you don't subscribe to the magazine, this issue is entirely worth your buying at the newsstand, if only to better appreciate the world that Dan Emmett and Pete Souza inherited.
In retelling the day of the assassination of John F. Kennedy from the perspective of his Vice President, Caro paints a fascinating picture of his lead Secret Service Agent, Rufus Youngblood, who enveloped Johnson with his body in the seconds after Lee Harvey Oswald began firing on the President, and the White House photographer, Captain Cecil Stoughton, who shot the iconic photo of Johnson taking the oath of office in the hours after the President was declared dead.
You're far better advised to read Mr. Caro's words than suffice with this synopsis, but as Dan Emmett told us, Rufus Youngblood "was on top of his game" on November 22, in what is a dramatic understatement of the day's events. Youngblood smothered Johnson on the floor of his limousine as shots rang out and stayed there until the motorcade arrived at Parkland Hospital. Once there, Youngblood guided the man who was then, in effect, the new President, through a labyrinthine series of hospital corridors, arriving at a semi-secure room but taking additional measures to guard against what many on the scene thought could be a vast conspiracy to decapitate the government. The decisions Youngblood made at that moment, as what then amounted to the VPPD became the PPD, and the actions he then took to convey Johnson safely back to Love Field and the Boeing 707 with tail number 26000 that served as Air Force One are, through Mr. Caro's words, one of the greatest feats of fast thinking in the annals of the U.S. Secret Service.
Once on board the plane, the contribution to history of Cecil Stoughton comes into sharp focus, as it were, and Johnson is portrayed as the key orchestrator in what should be considered the most significant moments of Polioptics of the Twentieth Century. Again, just read the piece. It will lay bare how Johnson imagined the import of the world seeing him assume the Presidency through the lens of a camera. He fills the cabin of Air Force One with as many witnesses as will fit in the room, and surrounds himself with three women critical to the drama and the unfolding life of the 36th President: Jacqueline Kennedy, the slain President's widow; Lady Bird Johnson, his wife; and Judge Sarah Hughes, who administered the Oath (the particular role of Hughes, brought into stark relief by Caro, reveals volumes about Johnson himself). As the congregation gathered, Johnson arrayed the participants in a perfect tableau for Stoughton, who readied himself to take the picture and achieved a level of immortality in the annals of photojournalism (and some would say, propaganda).
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In our recurring segment on Polioptics, "Reading the Pictures," we are joined in this episode, as we are frequently, by Michael Shaw, founder, editor and publisher of BagNewsNotes.
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Remember the stakes last year: with Donald Trump, who had been hinting at a presidential run of his own in prior weeks, sitting in front of him, President Obama dressed down the host of the Apprentice to point where Trump may have felt like the smallest guy in the room. All this while, across the globe, the President know that SEAL operators were about to take out Osama bin Laden in Abbotobad, Pakistan.
