♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein and we're gonna be in conversation today with John Dickerson who is a correspondent for "60 Minutes" and also the author of a new book, "The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency".

John, welcome to our show.

DICKERSON: Thank you, David.

It's great to be with you.

RUBENSTEIN: So John, uh, you have a background in, uh, politics in some respects.

You grew up in Washington, you've been around the White House for some time and now you work for, uh, CBS, uh, as a correspondent.

How do you have time to write a book when you're a correspondent?

Because it's not that easy to write a book, and this is a very comprehensive book about the presidency.

So how did you actually have time to do this?

DICKERSON: Well, I started a long time ago and I got lucky at the end.

So I started really, the, the genesis of this book started in 2004 in the President Bush's driveway, driveway in Crawford, Texas.

I'd been there to interview him for "Time Magazine" and he said, "You know if you wanna know what a president does, ask anybody running for president how they make decisions."

And what struck me at that time was the disconnect between what we talk about in campaigns and what the job actually requires.

And then I wrote a series of articles for "Slate Magazine" about this set of questions.

I wrote a cover story for "The Atlantic".

And when I was at "Face the Nation", a lot of the times when I'd do interviews and special shows, I would talk to CEOs and other leaders about how they did the job.

So I've been gathering string on this for, you know, 16 years.

RUBENSTEIN: So I should also tell people your background a bit, uh, your mother Nancy Dickerson was the, the first female correspondent for a network, is that correct?

DICKERSON: That's right.

For CBS news.

RUBENSTEIN: And, uh, that was a time when all the correspondents were men, otherwise.

DICKERSON: They, yes, they were.

I mean, it seems everybody, everybody was a man.

I mean, she started on the Hill as a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Um, and basically women on the Hill were basically clerks they called them, they were secretaries.

Um, she went from there to be a, a Booker for CBS.

And in fact, the very first show she worked on booking guests was "Face the Nation" when it started.

Um, so when I, uh, became host of "Face the Nation", that was a nice circularity there.

Um, she booked Joe McCarthy she was from Wisconsin, he was from Wisconsin, on the very first "Face the Nation" show in which he talked about the Senate "Lynch Bee", he called it.

And that was actually part of what initiated the centure in the Senate of, of, um, uh, the Senator, because he basically said his colleagues were lynching him and that was included in their charges, uh, against him for his, uh, for his poor conduct.

Um, so that was her.

And then she was a correspondent in Washington later for, for "NBC News" and then for "PBS".

RUBENSTEIN: And at one point it was said that she had a date with somebody named John F. Kennedy when he was a, I guess, a Congressman or maybe a Senator... DICKERSON: Congressman... RUBENSTEIN: Um, what was, did she ever tell you what that was like?

DICKERSON: Well, she, it was very strange.

So one of the things I learned, I wrote a book about her life because, um, she had me when she was, uh, 42 years old.

And so when she passed away at age 70, I had, I had talked to her about her career, but, you know, I was still in my 20's.

Um, I hadn't interrogated her about things the way I would certainly now.

But she left me everything she had, including her journals when she was six years old all the way through elementary school and college and the rest.

Um, and so I wrote a book about her life and the dating that went on in the fifties, uh, and sixties.

She was dating constantly as a young woman in Washington.

And so as I talked to her colleagues at the time were all the other women.

So it was hard to tell exactly what a date meant.

Having said that, she went on a couple of dates, uh, with the congressmen.

And then later she finds herself in a lot of Kennedy biographies having said, um, that, that, "Sex for Jack Kennedy was like having a cup of coffee."

This has been repeated a lot, um, from her.

And I never had a chance to ask her about that quote.

And I'm not quite sure where she came up with that but anyway that's, uh, she-she was friendly with him and also of course when, um, she was part of the Georgetown set at that time and he was an Irish Catholic, she was an Irish Catholic.

So her career sort of paralleled the rise of the Irish Catholic in Washington.

So there were lots of dimensions of her, of her friendship and-and her relationship with Kennedy.

RUBENSTEIN: So the basic premise of your book, was that the presidency was, uh, not an easy job a long time ago but it wasn't as hard as it is now.

In fact, today it's almost an impossible job because so many expectations are now descended upon the president.

So is that essentially right?

DICKERSON: Right.

And, and, you know, when I started working on the book, the idea was basically to go to the blueprint of the office to-to tear the thing down to its studs and say, how was it built?

Why was it built?

And how has the mansion that is... that the presidency has now gained all these strange new wings.

And it's got a cupola and all kinds of odd appendages to this building.

Where did these all come from?

And presidents have been complaining about, uh, the presidency since the beginning, but what's happened is of course you've, you've seen Congress, uh, shrink in size which has increased the number of things on the presidential plate.

And then of course the national security state after the Second World War, well, the Second World War, Cold War, now War on Terror has brought so much of the national security operation inside the White House.

In addition to the ceremonial roles we ask of a president and it's just blossomed all the things we ask a president to do and all those expectations we have of them.

Uh, so yes, that's a, that's the essential thesis of the job with a little wrinkle which is, we ask presidents to do all these things and then we have a hiring process for them that is disconnected from the actual attributes you need to do the job.

RUBENSTEIN: You pointed out in your book that, uh, I think it was John Kennedy who said, "While, I spent all my career trying to figure how to get this job but I never spent any time figuring out how, how to do the job."

Is that essentially right?

DICKERSON: Exactly.

And that goes to this, this thing I've discovered both in history but then also in talking to, uh, presidents and President Trump said a version of the same thing, about the disconnect between what the job is and, and, and the way you talk about it, the way we talk about it in campaigns.

Kennedy was one of the first, if not the first president to kind of bring his campaign team in with him, um, which is a real tension in the job.

Because people who have helped you get to the, through the campaign, they're loyal, you wanna reward them.

But most of the people who've studied good presidential management say, maybe they're not the ones you bring in, because they have a different skill set than, than is required for the job.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's talk about the modern presidency.

Let's for the purposes of this discussion let's begin with, let's say Dwight Eisenhower.

So when Dwight Eisenhower became president, I would like to point out to the people that are watching this, I was a young boy when he was president of the United States.

And I thought, boy, he is an old, old man.

He really is old.

I was probably eight or nine or so.

And I looked it up recently and he was 62.

A teenager to today, he was only 62.

He left the presidency when he was 70.

So, um, when he became president, he had been obviously a supreme allied commander, uh, president of Columbia is used to being executive.

How did he change the presidency or the White House?

Did he expand it?

Did he shrink it?

What did he do?

DICKERSON: What I found in studying Eisenhower that I found so appealing about him is he thought a lot about how to manage different kinds of organizations.

And there's a wonderful letter he writes in which he breaks down, why Patton is a great action commander but would never be any good running anything.

So that you would always have to have somebody above George Patton in order to use his skill.

Uh, but you, it would be just too chaotic if he were the top leader in an organization.

So he thought a lot about how leadership should work and the different ways in which leadership should work, which is amusing.

Because of course, there's a quote from Truman who was no fan of Ike's.

Who said, "You know, poor Ike, he's gonna come into the presidency, he's gonna tell people, go do this and go do that.

And he's used to people answering orders and they won't do it."

Of course, he had dealt with the bureaucracy of the army, um, throughout his career.

So he knew a lot about the sluggishness of the bureaucracy.

Um, and, and what he brought to the White House was a sense of priorities, a sense of, um, delegation that he didn't have to be involved in every little thing.

And he brought that kind of organizational discipline.

Um, and particularly in terms of prioritization, his quote, uh, which has been repeated and turned into a kind of management, uh, maxim, "never let the urgent crowd out the important."

And the idea was that you can always spend your day being barraged by the urgent matters of the presidency.

But if you don't spend time on the important, you'll be overwhelmed soon enough.

RUBENSTEIN: He more or less invented two things I think that we still have, which is a White House chief of staff.

There really hadn't been such a person before and secondly, a White House National Security Advisor.

Because there really hadn't been one before like that, is that right?

DICKERSON: Right.

In part because, um, the National Security State really gets, um, locked in place by Truman in the post, uh, Second World War or Cold War era.

So, you have, you have the national security state in, inside the White House or inside the executive branch now in a way that you didn't, uh, in previous presidencies.

But it also was a part of his view of, you know, you have this thing, you have a White House that is staffed up.

Um, and, and that if people have their roles and you, um, and you assign them their roles and, and, uh, you hold them to account and it's sort of the way we run corporations now today.

Um, and which is funny because Johnson and Kennedy, you would think well, they would take the things that Ike knew and did and just improve on them.

They ran their, their White Houses totally differently, far more improvisational than Eisenhower.

RUBENSTEIN: So John Kennedy becomes president, as I mentioned earlier at the age of 43, hard to believe you could be president that young.

And, um, he brings in lots of people who would helped him in his campaign but he comes up with an innovation which is holding a, I guess, every other week press conference, where he actually fields questions that he doesn't know the, uh, what they're gonna be in advance.

Why was that such an innovation and why was it so popular?

DICKERSON: Well, it was, it was popular with everybody but the print reporters, because they were furious that he was showing up on television.

And this of course was this great clash in the, the history of American press, where, um, and you see it in Ben Bradley's accounts with Kennedy and his conversations with Kennedy.

That the, the print guys are irritated that he's using television as he did in the campaign, the first real glamour president.

Um, and, and we have a lot perhaps to, um, uh, admire about that.

But also a lot of people would think it was the beginning of a lot of our current woes about turning the president into this mega celebrity.

Other people start that back with Teddy Roosevelt but that's a bit of a diversion.

So your point though is why was this important?

Is because it allowed him to control the narrative, control the public, um, conversation about his policies and also he loved the give and take with reporters.

Um, he, he both print reporters and television reporters, lots of friends of his were reporters not just Ben Bradley but Charlie Bartlett.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, it's often said, I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, that sometimes when a story would come out and he didn't like a story and he didn't know who leaked it, he would ask his press secretary Pierre Salinger to find out who leaked it and Pierre would come back and say, "Well, Mr. President, you were the source."

DICKERSON: You did.

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

he kind of thought he knew the press game.

I mean, so he, he thought he knew the motivations of the individual members of the press.

He thought he knew the internal, um, uh, politics of each press organization and kind of felt like he was, at times he would kind of pretend he was one of the boys.

Um, but also that he could shape and manipulate this and was furious when he couldn't.

And, um, you know, canceling subscriptions, Hugh Sidey told stories about how he would stop talking to Hugh.

Hugh Sidey of, of "Time Magazine" who covered the, the Kennedy White House.

Ben Bradley, uh, his conversations with Kennedy has a big block where they don't talk because Kennedy was so angry.

And, um, and... RUBENSTEIN: He didn't have a chief of staff.

DICKERSON: No, he didn't.

He thought he could do it, which is one of the great, we've seen this, this mistake repeated both in the Johnson era, then with Carter, then with Ford, the kind of hub and spokes model of a White House where the president is the hub and-and-and president Trump ran his White House this way too.

The president is the hub and everybody comes in at the president.

Kennedy wanted a more loose organization than, than what Eisenhower had and that was overwhelming.

And he ultimately, after the Bay of Pigs essentially makes Bobby kind of chief of staff.

RUBENSTEIN: So for those who are young, they may not remember this, but in those days there was no Internet, there was no cable TV, there was no social media.

So when you worried about the press, you only worried about the "New York Times" and "Washington Post", more or less the next day and 15 minutes of evening news.

That was it.

DICKERSON: That's right.

It was a, it was a much slower.

I mean, I, so, so just a much more enjoyable time because everybody also knew at 6:00 you were done for the day.

RUBENSTEIN: What did Lyndon Johnson bring as an innovation to the White House?

Uh, what did he do that was different than Kennedy?

DICKERSON: Well, he had that same improvisational, feature.

Of course he had the added challenge of, he had a lot of he... Kennedy holdovers.

And so he had this very tense dance between the people he brought, uh, and then those who were still there from the Kennedy administration.

Um, what he brought of course was his relationships on the, on, on the Hill.

Um, the big downside for, for Johnson of course was his ego, his, um, his incredibly thin skin, his desire to kind of dominate, um, friends and foes alike, um, and his volcanic, um, temper.

And he brought a work ethic that was, you know, started at six in the morning and went till midnight.

Um, so he brought a harder charging, uh, White House.

And he brought basically the legislative muscle, uh, and relationships and constant working, uh, that helped him turn, uh, the President Kennedy's program into a martyrs cause by, you know, using the moment that he had and basically ramming through, uh, the legislation.

The downside of course, was, was, was his, uh, inescapable, uh, challenges with Vietnam, which were, uh, you know, that was a national security challenge, but also a result of his, um, uh, his own kind of demons in terms of managing that issue.

RUBENSTEIN: So Nixon is next as the president, what did he do to change the way the White House was run?

He had a much more systematic way of doing it, is that right?

DICKERSON: He sure did, they called it the-the corporate, uh, presidency.

And so he returns and this makes perfect sense, of course, since he'd been vice president under Eisenhower.

You have Eisenhower with a system and then you have two improvisational presidents and now you have Nixon who brings in its, it's fascinating because he brings in H. R. Haldeman, who had been an advertising executive.

And he brings him in for two reasons.

One, because Haldeman was a systems, um, expert, or he, he believed very much in setting up a way of doing things and sticking to it.

And his memos about how you run a White House and the way in which you order information, um, are, are incredibly powerful and had been, and had been really referred to by presidencies ever since, which is kind of funny given the fact that the, the, the Nixon White House is the, um, greatest example of a White House that went wrong.

And one of the things that Haldeman obsessed about was what he called end runs.

And an end run essentially is anybody who chooses to be improvisational, um, outside of the structure.

Because while they think what they're doing is the greatest and most necessary thing, they don't know everything else that's going on in the White House.

And so they clang against other people who are doing similar things or who ha... who have other priorities.

The biggest problem though, is when the end runs were done by the president and that's of course well ultimately happened with, with Watergate.

But what Haldeman brought was this systemic way of doing things.

Mitt Romney, when I interviewed him for the book, told me a story about his dad who went into the president, had a conversation, Nixon said, "Great, that's a great thing to do."

Haldeman, called him five minutes later and said, "Mr. Secretary, I know the president just told you this but he doesn't like to disappoint people.

We're not gonna do it your way.

We're gonna do it this way, and that's the way to go."

Um, and that was, that was kind of the way the, uh, the Nixon White House operated.

RUBENSTEIN: How about Ford?

What did President Ford do in his rela-relative limited time he was there?

How did he change the White House?

DICKERSON: Well, he went back to the hub and spokes model.

Um, he thought Nixon had been too regimented and too cut off from the White House staff and from his cabinet secretary.

So he said, "I'm gonna, um, be much more accessible."

Um, and that collapsed as it always does because the president is busy and everybody can't have the ability to walk into the office.

Dick Cheney, who was his, um, who was the chief of staff learned this.

And, um, in fact it was, uh, such a, a, um, uh, such an item of conversation inside the White House under Ford.

They gave Cheney when he, when the, um, uh, Ford Administration was over, they gave him a wheel, um, on a plaque with all of the spokes broken but one of them.

Um, and that, of course the one spoke is the chief of staff to the president.

Um, so Ford, lowered the temperature in the White House, uh, sort of the whole building but also sort of reaffirmed the need to have a, a, a chief of staff and, and an orderly way of doing things.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, I worked in the White House for President Carter what would you say he brought to the presidency, or how did he change the White House?

DICKERSON: What struck me about Carter when I spent, um, time studying him was, A, he worked, started working on the transition before he'd even gotten the nomination which is, which is brilliant.

And we should allow every candidate to do this because the transitions are so short.

They're really, they're 70 some odd days between when an election happens and the inauguration.

And even though now it's congressionally mandated that, that candidates who get the party nomination work on their transition six months before the election, they don't have the full access to all the information they need.

And also, it seems still as a little bit hubristic to be working on your administration when you haven't even got the job yet, the problem is if you don't, you get absolutely overloaded with the task because you've gotta hire 4,000 people, 1,500 of them, uh, have to be Senate confirmed.

Um, and you're taking on an organizational chart that you basically have to start from scratch because every White House arranges itself differently.

So President Carter had that smart innovation.

The challenge though, is the one I mentioned earlier with Kennedy.

When you, when you task a group of people to come in and run your White House, the people who brought you to the dance, the ones who were involved in your campaign say, "No, no, we're gonna be the ones in charge when we get to the White House."

And there was a famous clash between those two groups the-the campaign team winning out.

But it was a smart innovation that just kind of failed.

Second innovation that we... that failed as well was the, the, the attempted cabinet government, um, which was a big, uh, booming theory in Washington at the time in part as a result of the, the Nixon years.

But the idea was, give your cabinet secretaries lots of free reign, give them lots of power, let them do things.

The problem is that, um, once you push power outside the White House, the president gets blamed anyway and you start having cabinet secretaries who are freelancing, creating their own news which then splashes back on the president and it's basically out of control.

So it sounds good in theory, it was very hard to do in practice.

RUBENSTEIN: Jimmy Carter's successor was Ronald Reagan.

Um, he served eight years.

What innovation did he bring to the presidency?

DICKERSON: Two from Reagan that, that, that I-I found interesting when I was doing my work.

One was that, um, the minute he wins the presidency, he calls Jim Baker, who he would have every reason to not like.

Baker had fought against him, uh, on Ford's side in 1976 when Reagan and Ford ran against each other in the Republican primary and they had a, uh, a bitter battle to the end.

And basically Baker helped Ford beat Reagan.

Then Baker worked for George Herbert Walker Bush, in his, uh, race, race against Ronald Reagan.

So he would have every reason not to like Jim Baker.

He called him right away and said, I want you to come work for me as chief of staff.

Why?

Because Baker knew how to work in Washington.

He knew, Reagan knew.

And even though he was coming to Washington as a revolutionary, the only way he would be able to do the things he wanted to do was if he had somebody who could help him work through the Washington system that was a smart innovation.

And that he had to, he had to settle down a lot of his California core who thought, "Wait a minute, Jim Baker is not a revolutionary like us, why are you bringing him inside?"

Um, the second thing Reagan did was something that was told to me by an Obama staffer.

And he said, "Basically, when you worked for Ronald Reagan, you knew he wanted to cut taxes, beat the communists and shrink the size of government.

If you never talked to Ronald Reagan again, you knew that's what your marching orders were."

And that clear set of priorities that kind of always, um, came through from President Reagan had an organizing benefit for all the people who worked for him.

Lots of other presidents, President Obama, for example, had lots of ideas, was highly improvisational and, and knowledgeable about everything.

But those who worked for him didn't necessarily have that three clear ideas in their head.

RUBENSTEIN: So what about, uh, George Herbert Walker Bush?

What did he bring to the presidency that was novel or different?

DICKERSON: Well he brought relationships of course, with all of those foreign leaders and the benefits of, um, knowing a lot about foreign policy and it's, and it's more subtle aspects.

One of the things that I've found in, in working on the book was, was Condoleezza Rice said, "You know, you come to the White House and every president says on day one, I will do this."

And she said, "On day one, they will not", because they're absolutely overwhelmed by all the things that come in and all the things they learn about covert programs, about the hand holding that's required to p... to be commander in chief with foreign leaders and, and all of the just, um, part of your agenda that's taken up by foreign policy, which isn't something that's very much discussed in presidential campaigns.

George Herbert Walker Bush had all of that knowledge.

And it was the perfect thing to have when you're managing the end of the Cold War.

And so he brought not only those relationships but an understanding of why they're important.

And then when the wall fell, he brought something that nobody, um, talks much about in campaigns but he brought restraint.

When the wall fell he didn't di... had to do an end zone dance, because he knew that would put Gorbachev in a tough spot.

So he had a sense of restraint and a kind of fingertip feel for international relations.

RUBENSTEIN: So, I'll let, the readers of your book figure out, uh, about some of the subsequent presidents, what they did, because I wanna wrap up with two or three questions.

If you could have your way and change the presidency to make it more manageable so people can do the job they're supposed to do without having to do so many other things, what would you do that would realistically change the presidency and make it more realistic job that somebody can do?

DICKERSON: I think I would try and change the expectations we have for the president.

Um, and then I would force Congress to do more work again.

I mean, part of the reason the presidency is overwhelmed is that Congress no longer does the work that it used to do.

When Woodrow Wilson was writing about the presidency and Congress, before he became president, he describes senators as kind of amusingly looking at the new president as amateurs.

Um, you know, who kind of come in, they breeze in and then they breeze out.

But it was the senators who had the wisdom and had the institutional knowledge and, and therefore, and also represented a more diverse part of America.

And therefore they were really the, the heavy weight of, uh, American political life, that's of course changed dramatically.

Um, so I would say two, I would say stop, we should stop focusing on the president as the only actor in American life, which would maybe get Congress to do more but also it would, it would stop us from thinking of the presidency as a single person, it's an organization.

And so if we think about the presidency as an organization, then we should think about how they pick... who's their top person gonna be and what-what's their theory of management?

Um, so those are a few, as you know, I go rather into, at some length in the book on all that.

RUBENSTEIN: So the cover of your book has a picture of Lyndon Johnson kind of leaning into the cabinet table, basically saying, "Oh, woe is me."

This is a big challenge I have."

Um, do you think that the, that the people who get this job actually age dramatically or just, they're just aging normally?

We just happen to see them age.

Are they aging more rapidly than they otherwise would?

What do you think?

DICKERSON: Right.

I think, I think right, because we're watching them every single day.

I, I think they age in the office.

Um, uh, although President Trump didn't age in the, in the physical way that you see the others.

The way in which they age may be actually, we can't see, which is to say the psychological pressure of the presidency.

And I don't mean just how hard the job is.

I mean, you can't take a walk, you can't just go outside and take a walk anymore.

You're everybody wants a piece of something from you.

You can't walk up Air Force One without everybody waving to you and expecting that you'll wave back.

And if you don't wave back, somebody will write that you're, you know, you're upset that day.

So I think they age psychologically, perhaps, maybe even more than they do physically.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, John, thank you.

We'll leave it there.

I wanna thank you very much.

We've been in conversation with John Dickerson about his book, "The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency".

Thank you very much, John.

DICKERSON: Thank you, David.

It was a pleasure.

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