The Situation Room by George Stephanopoulos

(New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024), 346

This read like a thriller, looking at the history of the recent presidencies through the crises managed in the Situation Room. It is striking to think about how sophisticated (or not) some of these decisions were, and the communications challenges on 9/11 illustrate how even at the heights of government it is just real people making decisions. I gained respect for Obama and McRaven reading about their leadership of the Bin Laden raid, and lost some for Trump. Having read this just before the 2025 inauguration, it makes me curious—and perhaps anxious—thinking about the crises we are to face next.

Chapter 1: AT THE CREATION

President Kennedy didn’t want some CIA officer’s description of a situation; he wanted the same raw intel the officer had, so he could make up his own mind. Kennedy had taken a speed-reading course with his brother Bobby in 1954 and claimed he could read 1,200 words per minute. While some people prefer oral presentations, he vastly preferred the written word. He read fast, and he retained what he read. (loc 330)
A good Sit Room officer must be focused, organized, intelligent, judicious, apolitical, a fast reader, a critical thinker and cool under pressure. These skills are as disparate as they are valuable, and it’s the rare person who possesses them all. (loc 457)

Chapter 2: ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT

The Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link, a clunky typewriter-style machine connected to Moscow via thousands of miles of underground cables, went live on August 30, 1963, (loc 786)
The hotline became “a kind of minicultural exchange,” Lieutenant Colonel June Crutchfield told the New York Times in 1973, with each side choosing literary passages to send their counterparts. (loc 792)
The pace was hectic and the room was the heartbeat of the Johnson administration—which, when it came to Vietnam, might have been part of the problem. No information the Sit Room could provide would salvage a flawed strategy. Data was not a substitute for judgment. It could not tell us who exactly we were fighting, how to win, or even why we needed to defeat them. (loc 859)

Chapter 3: “ALL HELL HAS BROKEN LOOSE”

LBJ’s obsession with the Sit Room had ultimately done more harm than good. So Nixon went in the opposite direction. (loc 927)
Nixon may be the most introverted man ever to win the White House—most comfortable alone, jotting his thoughts on a legal pad while sitting in the favorite chair he’d moved down from New York. (loc 963)
THE DEFCON 3 gambit worked. Less than twenty-four hours after news of it leaked, the Yom Kippur War ended. Remarkably, the process led by Henry Kissinger in the Situation Room succeeded despite the president, not because of him. (loc 1,083)

Chapter 4: S.O.S.

Deciding when to alert the president and other top officials to unfolding events is a crucial Sit Room function. (loc 1,125)
Marc Gustafson, senior director of the Sit Room under President Biden, says that deciding when to wake your principals is “where (loc 1,175)
This was an extraordinary moment—and a whole new level of micromanagement. Thanks to satellite communications, a pilot in midair, nine thousand miles away from the White House, could ask the president more or less directly what to do. (loc 1,246)
a new voice piped up. “Has anyone considered that this might be the act of a local Cambodian commander who has just taken it into his own hands to halt any ship that comes by?” Heads swiveled to look. Who on earth was talking? It was David Hume Kennerly, the twenty-eight-year-old White House photographer. (loc 1,273)
Believing he had knowledge that the NSC members did not, he felt a moral imperative to speak up. (loc 1,288)
Thirty-eight Marines died during the assault. Three others were captured or left behind on Koh Tang, and their exact fate remains unknown. The names of these forty-one men are etched into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall, considered the final casualties of the Vietnam War. (loc 1,360)

Chapter 5: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

Launched in October 1978, Grill Flame, later known as Stargate, was a U.S. Army program that explored the use of parapsychology to gather intelligence. (loc 1,386)
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were extremely open to the idea of the paranormal. (loc 1,407)
that. I calculated at one time that, at least one day that I was operating, I got ten thousand pages of stuff in my office. And obviously, you can’t read ten thousand pages in a day. But I could skim it.” (loc 1,470)
THE FAILURE OF Desert One effectively ended Carter’s presidency. It would also haunt the Situation Room for decades to come, hovering like a specter over planning sessions for later military missions. Several people who would go on to play major roles in future administrations had formative experiences during the hostage crisis, and they would never forget the pall that the failed mission cast over the administration and the country. Bob Gates, who would go on to spend time in the Sit Room under seven presidents, was CIA head Stan Turner’s executive assistant during Desert One. “I wasn’t involved in the preparation,” he told me, “but I was a witness to it all.” Years later, when Gates was involved in planning the raid that took out Osama bin Laden, he remembered keenly the lessons of the earlier mission. “All I could think about as we were planning and thinking about bin Laden was those helicopters going down, and the disaster in the desert, because it started with a helicopter crash.” Gates would join several others in arguing successfully for the addition of more helicopters in the Abbottabad raid—an inclusion that would prove extremely fortuitous when one of the helicopters went down during that mission. (loc 1,644)
Whether you believe that parapsychology is real or imagined, there’s no debating the fact that the U.S. government invested real resources into it for many years. (loc 1,709)

Chapter 6: THE HELM IS RIGHT HERE

When officials ordered retaliatory missile strikes, “killing” millions of Soviet citizens, Reagan’s perception of nuclear weapons changed forever. The consequences of decisions he might one day be forced to make became all too real. Reagan was “a very intuitive learner, he learned by experience, and by these firsthand encounters that really terrified him,” (loc 1,983)
“Whatever happens now,” he wrote, “I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.” The specter of nuclear conflict terrified him, but to Reagan, the battle against Communism was more than simply an effort to avoid war. It was a holy battle of a God-fearing nation versus a godless one. (loc 1,996)
And Americans’ fears of a Soviet attack reached their frenzied peak on November 20, 1983. That was the date ABC aired a movie called The Day After. (loc 2,017)
Each president’s attitude toward the Sit Room reflected his personality. Johnson was a control freak, so he wanted to be in the place where things happened. Nixon was paranoid, so he disliked being in the NSC’s domain. Reagan was the type of man who was comfortable in any room he entered. (loc 2,034)
The Sit Room became a place where the best and brightest from across the government were chosen to serve. (loc 2,042)
Reagan’s team didn’t understand the Sit Room’s core function. “They thought it was a… command center set up to facilitate high-level decision-making,” Poindexter later recalled. “It was really more of a switching center where duty officers routed incoming information.” Poindexter then recommended building an actual command center. (loc 2,058)
Because email technology was so new, no one was sure how to categorize it for purposes of recordkeeping. As Martin recalls: All paper goes through the executive secretary. And so we had a discussion: What is an email? Is it a piece of paper? Is it a telephone call? How do you handle this new means of communicating? And so basically the guidance was: It’s just a little message. It’s not a formal paper which required concurrences and everything else you have to go through. This decision allowed Poindexter to circumvent normal security controls. He opened backdoor communications with an NSC aide named Oliver North, which was the beginning of the scandal that nearly brought down Ronald Reagan’s presidency: the Iran-Contra affair. (loc 2,076)
An evangelical Christian who, like Reagan, characterized the Cold War as good versus evil, North was willing to break the law to further his vision of the United States’ standing in the world. (loc 2,090)
It will be an interesting trip, but as the monkey said when he was shot into outer space, “It beats the hell out of the cancer research lab.” (loc 2,151)

Chapter 7: RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY

“One of Bush 41’s triumphs was the way he handled the Berlin Wall, which was at some level the art of doing nothing,” (loc 2,262)
“George Bush was so knowledgeable about China, and so hands-on in managing most aspects of our policy, that even some of our leading Sinologists began referring to him as the government’s desk officer for China.” (loc 2,288)
“The most brilliant move we made was to run up there and buy a detailed tourist map of downtown Beijing, because it enabled us to be quasi-intelligent in speaking to the president.” (loc 2,295)
As the group discovered, there were substantial benefits to running Sit Room meetings by SVTS. Instead of everyone having to rush to the White House, they could simply connect via video from their own offices. And being in their own offices meant they had instant access to all the information from their departments. (loc 2,371)
The Philippines coup attempt marked the beginning of regular use of the SVTS room. (loc 2,381)
The benefit, as he saw it, was the savings in travel time. “How many hours would have been consumed with people traveling to and from the White House?” he asked. “Even just a half mile away at the State Department, it makes a lot of difference than having to drive over, go through the security to get in—I mean, hours are being wasted fooling around with that.” (loc 2,387)
There was another, more subtle strategic benefit: keeping a lid on crisis events. As Dave Radi put it, “Instead of all the black limousines coming in when there’s a crisis, let’s start using technology, and let’s not have [everyone gathering] in the West Wing. (loc 2,390)
“They kept feeding me the cables,” he said. “The only thing I didn’t have time to check was my email. So about a month into the crisis, I realized I had something like ten thousand unopened, unread emails.” He deleted them all in a single stroke, without even bothering to read them. (loc 2,434)
Decisions got made. And then that information started flowing out, going back to the departments and agencies. It was like an hourglass, I ventured. “It is an hourglass,” Kimmitt agreed. “And the center of the hourglass was the Oval Office. But just above it and below it was the Sit Room.” (loc 2,460)
Bush’s team worked together incredibly well. The Situation Room functioned at peak performance. The decision-making process was efficient and professional. It’s difficult to find anyone who has a bad recollection of working in the first Bush administration. According to Richard Haass, it all flowed from the top. “This worked well,” he told me, “because Bush 41 assembled really good people who got along.” (loc 2,464)
A World Transformed by Bush and Scowcroft (loc 2,588)

Chapter 8: PLEASE HOLD FOR THE PRESIDENT

During the transition, I went to the West Wing to meet with President Bush’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, who handed me a bulletproof vest that had been passed down by presidential press secretaries since the 1970s—an ironic nod to the flak we take at the podium. (loc 2,599)
I said, ‘How big is a brigade?’” The aide couldn’t answer. Lute and others referred to this as “the brigade test”—a pretty reliable indicator of who doesn’t know what they’re talking about with regard to military intervention. (loc 2,639)
“Because that’s one of the things the Situation Room does, we set up the calls for heads of state.” In fact, this is one of the most important tasks the Sit Room team takes on—and it’s much more complicated, and more diplomatically fraught, than most outside the room realize. (loc 2,818)
Putin “always made Obama wait, and I’m gonna tell you, time travels very differently when you’re standing in the Situation Room” trying unsuccessfully to get the president connected, recalls Pfeiffer. “There was one time we must have waited, it felt like twenty minutes. It was probably five,” he went on. “And I finally looked at President Obama and said, ‘Sir, if you would like, we can disconnect. I’ll go downstairs and we’ll get this call connected again.’ And he laughed. He said, ‘Nah, it’s fine. Gives me time to play Words with Friends.’ And he’d have his iPad up and be playing Words with Friends with God knows who. I think he actually enjoyed being put on hold by Putin, because it gave him a few minutes of time just to chill.” Occasionally, the Sit Room staff turned the tables on the Russians. A duty officer who could do a passable impression of the president would get on the line and imitate his “hello.” The U.S. side would then hear a click, followed by Putin’s voice. “And then you heard a Sit Room duty officer break in and go, ‘President Putin, please hold for the president of the United States.’ Then boom, you have the U.S. president come on,” says Hargis. Mission accomplished, though Hargis always felt a little bad about the ruse. “You had to think, Oh, I bet someone is on their way to Siberia right now. I got someone in trouble.” (loc 2,841)

Chapter 9: “THIS IS WHERE WE FIGHT FROM”

Padinske raced to the White House, which had been evacuated at 9:45 a.m. (The Capitol would receive the order within the next half hour.) But down in the Sit Room, a stalwart group of duty officers and other staff refused to leave. (loc 3,046)
Like the firefighters in New York who rushed toward the burning towers, Sit Room staffers raced toward the White House. (loc 3,054)
“Presidential communications were set up to support the president wherever he was, and the Sit Room was the node for that… (loc 3,065)
No one had imagined the scenario that arose on 9/11, with President Bush on Air Force One and many of his closest advisers in the PEOC: Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, counselor Karen Hughes and many others. If the Sit Room shut down, there would be no direct line between them. (loc 3,070)
Finally realizing that none of the twenty-odd people in the complex were budging, Miller changed tack. “Great,” he said. “Give me your names and Social Security numbers, because we want to know what bodies to look for.” He handed Hargis a pad and pen, and one by one, every person there jotted down their vital information. (loc 3,081)
The images of Card whispering to the president became famous, as did the words he said: “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” What most people don’t realize, though, is that those words originated in the Situation Room, coming from Rob Hargis, through Deb Loewer, to Andy Card, to the president. (loc 3,137)
“I picked it up and said, ‘This is Rob.’ He said, ‘Rob, it’s Nick at 10 Downing.’ I said, ‘Does the prime minister want to speak with the president? We’re not putting those calls through.’ And he said, ‘No. We’re sitting here at 10 Downing and watching this go on. And we just wanted to call you guys and tell you we’re with you.’” (loc 3,259)
The most remarkable conversation, however, took place between Condi Rice and Vladimir Putin. Ensconced in the PEOC, Rice realized it would be a good idea to call the Russians. "People talk about the spiral of alerts," she told me. "Our forces go up, theirs go up" —an escalation in threat preparation that unintentionally creates a volatile situation. Rice wanted to head this off. She expected to speak to an aide, but Putin himself got on the phone. He told Rice that he'd been trying to reach President Bush, and she replied that he was being moved to a safe location. "And then I said, Mr. President, our forces are going up on alert. He said, I know. I'm bringing ours down and canceling our [military] exercises," she told me. Unlike the day of the Reagan assassination attempt, when the Soviets took advantage of the chaos to move their submarines closer to U.S. shores, the Russians were purposefully backing off. "They knew what was going on, and he wanted to reassure us that they were not going to go up," Rice said. Putin's response was so measured, calm and helpful that Rice—an expert on Russia who speaks the language fluently—was struck by a comforting thought: The Cold War really is over. She couldn't have imagined then that two decades later, the United States and Russia would come full circle, adversaries once again. (loc 3,308, pg 219-220)
FIVE YEARS AFTER the 9/11 attacks, the Situation Room finally got a desperately needed renovation. While the communications failures of that day were the catalyst, President Bush had made it clear from the very beginning of his first term that he wanted upgrades to the complex. (loc 3,372)
Bush pulled Josh Bolten aside and said, “This transition has to be top-notch. This is the first presidential transition in modern history where the country is under threat.” (loc 3,449)
And it led to remarkable scenes of cooperation between the outgoing and incoming administrations—all the more notable since they were of different political parties. (loc 3,453)

Chapter 10: THE PACER

Obama gave them a directive. “I want to make the hunt for bin Laden a top priority,” he told them. “I want a report on my desk every thirty days describing our progress.” (loc 3,536)
McRaven exuded a calm confidence that was fueled by more than just his decades of experience. His level of preparation was off the charts. “I had made a decision matrix,” he told me. “I sat down with the guys and said, ‘What I don’t want to do is have to make a decision in the heat of the moment. So we are gonna plan out all the potential options. So, if we launch and we cross the border and the Pakistanis pick us up and we’re compromised, do we keep going? Yes or no?’ These were binary decisions.” (loc 3,634)
At least one person in the room was acutely aware of the impact paperless meetings might have on history. As Rasmussen recalls, “Literally, one of the first things Tom Donilon did after the raid was successfully carried out was tell us, ‘Quickly, write everything down from all of those meetings, as much as you can remember.’ Because… in the aftermath, we do want to have a historical record as much as possible.” (loc 3,650)
Contrast this with Desert One. President Carter had not met the mission’s commander, Charlie Beckwith, until eight days before the mission launched. Obama and McRaven knew each other well, and the teams involved in planning the operation had been working closely together for three years. It was like a football team playing together an entire season, then rolling into the Super Bowl at peak performance. There was a shared language, a familiarity and trust that helped the process run smoothly, and the experience of being in the Sit Room helped strengthen the decision-making muscle. (loc 3,664)
Gates told me that “the one actual contribution I made for the planning in the bin Laden raid was, I told them, ‘Take a couple of extra helicopters.’” (loc 3,696)
McRaven was determined to rehearse the entire mission—not once, not twice, but multiple times. “I had written a thesis in the Naval Postgraduate School about a number of missions,” he told me. “And the full-dress rehearsal was something that, every time that people failed to conduct a part of a mission in the rehearsal, invariably that failed on the actual mission.” (loc 3,707)
As President Obama recounted in his memoir A Promised Land, “Leon [Panetta], John Brennan and [JCS chair] Mike Mullen favored the raid. (loc 3,742)
When the principals had finished giving their opinions, President Obama took an unusual step. “After working his way around the room, he then did something that I had never seen in the Situation Room before,” Nick Rasmussen told me. He turned to the people ringing the wall—the advisers and aides who normally sat silent except when whispering in their principals’ ears—and asked them what they thought. (loc 3,779)
Then Flournoy said something that floored me. “George,” she said, “you have a footnote in here. You won’t remember this, but back in the Clinton administration, you were working for President Clinton and I was working on this very controversial Somalia-lessons-learned report that would be telling people some very ugly facts and lessons. And I remember talking to you and saying, ‘I’m really worried that people are just not gonna want to hear this and I’m going to get fired.’ “And you said to me, ‘Michèle, you know, civil servants are trying to protect their careers. Military, they’re thinking about their next [posting]. The job of a political appointee is to tell the boss what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.’ And I remember thinking of that when we approached Gates.” It was, she said, her “truth to power” moment. She knew Gates wasn’t going to like what she and Vickers were telling him. “[But] you told me, ‘Look, I get yelled at by the president of the United States every day. That’s my job. And so you can risk getting yelled at by people. It’s OK.’” It would never have occurred to me that a conversation I had in the White House almost two decades earlier might have influenced the bin Laden raid. But this is the beauty and the benefit of having dedicated public servants working across multiple administrations. Men and women like Bob Gates and Michèle Flournoy carry their knowledge forward through the years, bringing their own special set of experiences to bear on current situations. That continuity is often the key to effective decision-making. (loc 3,822)
On the morning of Friday, April 29, President Obama made his decision. (loc 3,835)
Watching the helicopter go down on the live feed, the group in the small room froze. This was a disaster in the making—the event they had all feared, the ghost of Desert One descending. And then, Admiral McRaven’s calm, steady voice came over the feed. “As you can see, the helicopter is down,” he said, as if narrating a nature documentary. “We’re going to Plan B,” he said—“just like calling a cab, just as calm and cool as he could be,” as James Clapper told Garrett Graff. Remember McRaven’s decision matrix? He had gamed out every possible scenario, including this one. (loc 3,927)
“Presidents never get to make easy decisions,” he went on. “If any problem is easy to solve, somebody at a lower level will solve it and take credit for it… and so almost every decision the president makes is selecting the least bad option.” (loc 3,982)
Having recounted the processes followed for the bin Laden raid, my conclusion is: Whatever you think about Barack Obama, it’s difficult to dispute that he did the job the right way. On the big questions, he was methodical and he was prepared. And with regard to the Situation Room, he utilized it in the most efficient, productive way possible. He respected history, he took all viewpoints into account, and he acted decisively. (loc 3,984)
OSAMA BIN LADEN’S body was flown to the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier in the northern Arabian Sea. (loc 3,990)

Chapter 11: POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE

When it came to the Trump administration, it was often difficult to know what was true and what was not. (loc 4,041)
“Security is sort of like an onion,” Fowler told me, with layers of protection, from physical security to background investigations. But “the thing that is most critical of all is trust,” he says. “The worst thing you can have is an insider who breaks trust. It breaks faith.” (loc 4,058)
This book examines crisis management in the modern presidency. During the Trump administration, the president was the crisis to be managed. It took a toll on those who had to do it. (loc 4,067)
“HE WAS THE least disciplined, least organized human I ever met in my life,” homeland security adviser Tom Bossert told me. (loc 4,077)
“The tempo of the White House Situation Room meetings went way, way down in the Trump administration,” he recalls. “In the Obama years, I would have been to the White House three, four, five times a week” for meetings at all levels. “In the Trump administration, it could be weeks and weeks without any involvement or meetings.” (loc 4,084)
“He just thought the Situation Room was the source of many of his problems. And it just drove him crazy… It fed the conspiracy that the whole deep state was watching everything that he did.” (loc 4,243)
Vindman’s pique was not simply because President Trump was wasting people’s time. He draws a direct line from the Trump-Zelensky call to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the profound global instability that has followed. (loc 4,302)
we find ourselves here in large part because of the Ukraine scandal. Because that is what, in my mind, planted the seeds for Vladimir Putin that U.S. support for Ukraine was not ironclad.” (loc 4,306)
The Trump administration “lacked a gravitas or seriousness,” she says. (loc 4,333)

Chapter 12: TIGER TEAM

President Biden was right to argue that there was “no good time” to exit Afghanistan, and his administration was hamstrung by the Trump administration’s pledge to exit without a plan for how to do so. It’s also true, however, that Biden’s team shares the blame for a catastrophic withdrawal. (loc 4,514)
Henry Kissinger told me that Putin has become a “character out of Dostoevsky”—a ruler inspired by a mystic vision of a Russian empire surrounded by enemies. (loc 4,528)
Chastened by the Kabul disaster, Sullivan says he zeroed in on the question “When the invasion happens, what will we wish we had done that we haven’t done? Let’s do it now.” (loc 4,572)
the technology is obviously superior, with secure phone lines and crisp real-time video bringing the world’s leaders together at the push of a button. But the basics of person-to-person communication are, in many ways, unchanged. The core of any successful collaborative endeavor, from a summit of the most powerful people on earth to a tabletop exercise to a simple staff meeting, is the ability of humans to connect. (loc 4,685)
Epilogue WHSR (loc 4,711)
“The Achilles heel of any autocracy is that you don’t have people who are willing or able to speak truth to power,” Tony Blinken told me. “That’s incredibly dangerous.” The Sit Room’s strength—more broadly, our strength as a democracy—depends upon having that give-and-take. The best decisions are made when all possible scenarios are considered and discussed, even if they are uncomfortable for the commander in chief. (loc 4,753)
The decisions presidents make in the Situation Room are by definition the hardest ones to make, because anything easy will have already been solved by someone at a lower level. (loc 4,756)
Finally, it’s crucial to have a sense of history. Remembering the mistakes of the 1980 Desert One debacle was vital in planning the 2011 bin Laden raid. (loc 4,761)

Topic: History

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Created: 2025-01-06-Mon
Updated: 2025-01-29-Wed