Inside the Situation Room: George Stephanopoulos on Presidents in Crisis

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, next to the situation room, the one in the White House, where generations of presidents have sat with their advisers to deal with all kinds of crises, from important military calls to the aftermath of natural disasters. In his new book, also called “The Situation Room,” TV host and former White House communications director George Stephanopoulos details the countless dilemmas the nation’s past leaders have reckoned with in that space. And he joins Walter Isaacson to recount some of those stories.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Bianna. George Stephanopoulos, welcome to the show.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, AUTHOR, “THE SITUATION ROOM”, HOST, THIS WEEK WITH GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS AND CO-ANCHOR, AND GOOD MORNING AMERICA: Great to be with you, Walter. It’s a treat, my first time on the show.

ISAACSON: You know, this book, “The Situation Room,” is actually a book about how decisions are made in times of crisis. How people do it right, how they do it wrong, how they can, you know, challenge and share information. And yet, you did it through the concept of a room. Why did you pick the situation room as the framing device for this book?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Because the situation room is the nerve center of the White House, the place where you have these duty officers coming from all across the government who, for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, track everything that’s happening all around the world in order to keep the White House and the president and his top national security advisers informed. It’s also that room where the president and his top advisers meet to make the most consequential national security decisions and where their deputies meet to try to frame the options before they get to that point. So, it really is the heart of national security decision-making at the White House. What helped me frame how did — I approach the book was something that came from Ambassador Doug Lute who served for both President Obama and President George W. Bush chiefly on Afghanistan. He said, when you think of the situation room, it’s really three things the three P’s. It’s a place, the room, it’s the people who work there, and it’s the process by which the principals reach these decisions. And I tried to use that frame as we looked at each president.

ISAACSON: You got many chances when you worked for President Clinton to go see the room, and I was amused in the book, you said, you don’t even remember your first time in the situation room. And that’s partly because, I remember too, when I saw it, it’s like, this is all it is? I mean, you’d think it’s like a Dr. Strangelove movie. And so, I think — explain that to me.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, no, for the longest time, it was not much to look at at all. In fact, John F. Kennedy, who insisted the situation room be built after the Bay of Pigs disaster, they did build it very quickly, $30,000, two weeks. By the time it was done, he went down there once, said it looked like a pig pen. It really didn’t go back much at all. He would take the information from the room, wouldn’t go down there. And for the longest time, certainly through my time, in the Clinton administration it was a pretty unremarkable physical space. Just — you know, like a — I would say, it looked like a conference room in the Poconos. Not particularly impressive, not particularly high tech, certainly behind the private sector for the longest period of time. That has changed now. I was able to go back to the situation room last August, just before the new room was unveiled to the world. And now it does look like 24 or whatever, you know, pick your movie. It is super high-tech, super luxe, mahogany, marble, screens everywhere and it meets now what you would imagine in your mind’s eye.

ISAACSON: You say that it was built after the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy ordered it up, but he never went there, as you mentioned. Lyndon Johnson was there. all the time. Explain the difference.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Between the two of them, it was night and day. I mean, Johnson moved his favorite chair from the Oval Office down into the situation room. He was on the phone with situation room duty officers all through 1965, looking all through the night, looking for any scraps of information about what was going on in Vietnam. And they include those — the tapes of several of those phone calls in the audio book. But, you know, he was obsessed, and you know this from his time in the Senate, with using the telephone, scooping up information in a way, that was his tool of power. That was his implement of choice. It didn’t work for him in Vietnam.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LYNDON B. JOHNSON, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: What’s happening in Vietnam this morning?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President, nothing since the report we sent up to you at approximately 11:00 last night, sir. We do have some reports on rolling thunder. We have some buildings damaged and destroyed. But otherwise, it’s been fairly quiet.

JOHNSON: That 172nd outfit never did get into action?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, sir, they haven’t. It’s been quiet in that Dong Zhuo area all night, sir.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: No matter how much information he got about casualties, what was happening in particular battles, that wasn’t going to solve the strategic problem he had. He was trapped and he knew it. So, while Kennedy created the situation room because he believed that information was power, Johnson — we learned from the experience of Johnson that information, all the information in the world, doesn’t necessarily give you the insight you need to solve problems.

ISAACSON: You know, Nixon didn’t use the room that much, but he had a phrase that sort of explained it, and I think there’s a kernel of truth to it. He said that Lyndon Johnson succumbed to the situation room syndrome.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes.

ISAACSON: What’s the downside?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, that — and that phrase actually comes from his alter ego at the time, Henry Kissinger, of course, you — you’ve written so much about Henry Kissinger. And he says — and his definition of that syndrome was the illusion that you can somehow control the world from this windowless room in the basement of the White House. Now, policymakers, including Henry Kissinger, have to act as if they can control the world from that room, but you have to know at the same time that, you know, the world may have other plans. I think you could almost argue that Nixon and Kissinger overreacted to Johnson’s obsession with the situation room and went very much in the other direction. But, you know, the episode I write most about in the book, and it’s one you know well, is that time during the first Yom Kippur War in October 1973 when Nixon was so out of commission, you know, drinking scotch up in his hideaway in the old executive office building that Henry Kissinger managed the crisis on his own, and in a remarkable move, basically on his own, ordered the United States nuclear alert up to DEFCON 3, which had only been done once before during the Cuban Missile Crisis because of fear that the Soviets were trying to exploit that war in the Middle East.

ISAACSON: One of the coolest scenes in your book, or strangest scenes maybe, is when Jimmy Carter is getting a briefing, I think Rosalynn is there with him, on paranormal, parapsychology, sort of ESP things. But something weird happens. He puts a slip of paper on the paper and hands it to somebody and says, the hostages. Explain that scene.

STEPHANOPOULOS: This scene was sparked by a one line in Jimmy Carter’s diary that I came upon as I was doing the preliminary research for the book, and it was May 8, 1980. And it said, I had a meeting in the situation room on parapsychology, longitude, latitude, et cetera. I saw parapsychology in the situation room and wanted to learn an awful lot more. It was very hard. There hadn’t been anything written about it. We went to the presidential libraries. We scoured all the memoirs. We couldn’t find anything. Finally, we came upon a man named Jake Stewart, who was Jimmy Carter’s naval aide at the time. He was also the aide who had become the expert on something that was called Operation Grill Flame. You probably remember what it was. In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. government, through the CIA and the DIA., was spending millions upon millions of dollars hiring psychics. People who would actually sit in a dark room and imagine the world. They called them remote viewers. Imagine things that were happening all around the world. Jake Stewart was the expert on this in the White House. Both Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter had been attracted to the paranormal. But of course, the most salient fact about that meeting was the date, May 8, 1980. That was two weeks after the helicopters went down in the desert, effectively ending the Carter presidency. He was absolutely desperate. So, he was looking for anything that might help him find a way outside of the hostage crisis. So, he brought in Jake Stewart, asked for a briefing on whether the psychics could figure out, because the hostages had been dispersed, where they might be located at any time. Jake Stewart worked on it. He did say that they helped find one of the hostages named Richard Queen, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis and was released, but of course, all the others we’re not released until inauguration day when Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, which is the Iranians final jab at Jimmy Carter.

ISAACSON: I guess the most famous picture of the old situation room is the day of the bin Laden raid. Everybody remembers that. Pete Souza, I think, was the White House photographer. And they’re all sitting around the table in the situation room. Tell me about how the situation room was actually a player in this, and how you got that — you reconstructed that whole scene.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the key decision-making meeting was in the situation room, it was on the Thursday before the raid, and that was the meeting where the president called in all of his top advisers, the principals, who each brought a plus one, a deputy into the meeting as well. And at this point, you know, they had gone through all the intelligence five ways to Sunday. They had a final, you know, analysis, testing it one more time. And they had reached the conclusion that there was about somewhere between a 40 to 60 percent chance that this pacer that we’d all seen in the compound in Abbottabad was actually Osama bin Laden. And as the meeting began, Obama says, listen, it’s just not going to get much better than 50 percent. We have to make the decision based on that knowledge. He pulled the whole room, almost all of the principles from Secretary Clinton through Leon Panetta, the director of National Intelligence, of course, Admiral McRaven, who was running the mission were for it. Gates was the most reluctant. Of course, he was haunted by the memory of Jimmy Carter’s failed mission. He was a deputy to Stan Turner at the time. And he — he’d always remember —

ISAACSON: When the helicopters in the desert crash.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Went down in the desert.

ISAACSON: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Exactly.

ISAACSON: In the Iran desert. Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, he was the only principal who at first had advocated going for a drone strike and said, the problem with the drone strike is you would never — especially in this world where information is so — it’s so hard for people to come together and agree on a set of facts, you would never be 1,000 percent sure it was Osama Bin Laden. The place would just be reduced to rubble. So, Obama polled the room. He also polled — and this was what was unusual. He asked all the plus ones for their opinion as well, polled the room one more time and then took left and said, I’ll give you the decision in the morning and made it overnight. It went off on Sunday. That famous picture almost didn’t happen. That room is actually a little ante room off the situation room. And it was meant to be the place where the military leaders were going to be in contact with Admiral McRaven, but it wasn’t supposed to be the place where everybody was gathering. But once someone found out, you could actually see the raid in more or less real- time. Everybody drifted into the room and it created that incredibly close, close feeling. At one point, Tom Donilon, the next security adviser, asked, my favorite character in the book, a guy named Gary Bresnahan, who’s a combination of the MacGyver and the Zelig of the sit room. He set up the communications for every president from Reagan through Obama. Gary said he told a white lie at that point. He said, I can’t move it into the other room. He now tells me, he said, I probably could have, but I was just so afraid to take any chance that we would lose the feed in the — in those final moments. Said, I didn’t want to do it. And that’s a good thing because we did get that incredibly iconic photo. It’s a good thing for Gary Bresnahan as well, because he was just outside of the room. So, after it all went down, he got the first fist bump from President Obama, which was fitting tribute to all of his work for so many presidents over so many years.

ISAACSON: The odd scenes in the situation room, a lot of them, are during the Trump presidency. And he doesn’t seem to either care about the place, as you call it, the situation room, or the people, or the process. And he barely goes in and lets it work, especially during COVID, when the room was used to coordinate the response to the coronavirus epidemic.

STEPHANOPOULOS: He hardly ever went there. And his reason was not unlike that of Richard Nixon. In some ways, this was not his place and he was actually very suspicious of those who worked in the situation room. He famously called those people the deep state, and he was a little paranoid about it. So, he didn’t use it that much at all and didn’t draw that much on the information from the situation room. One of the odd things he had, situation room duty officers collect were the banners from news programs, not even the recordings of what was being said in the news programs, just the banners of what was going on below the screen. I end up titling that chapter “Postcards from the Edge.” It’s really just a series of oral histories from the people who served in top national security positions in the Trump White House. And I think that’s one of the most chilling conclusions about the Trump experience in the situation room. Those who had the highest, most sensitive national security positions from his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to his defense secretary, James Mattis, to his White House chief of staff, John Kelly, to his national security adviser, John Bolton, are the ones who have the most damning critiques of his competence and character.

ISAACSON: When we talk about the situation room and you write about it, you talk about the unsung heroes of the situation room, which are actually sort of the permanent — the bureaucrats and the people we don’t know that well.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, for me, the best part of doing this book was every afternoon, having the chance to talk to these duty officers. I spoke with more than a hundred of them who served across administrations, who come from every part of the government to serve one to three years in the situation room, tracking information, synthesizing intelligence, setting up communications for the White House. These are the best of the best from the government. And their sense of duty, their sense of patriotism, their rigorous ethic of being a political, serving the presidency, not the president, was so impressive to me at a time when, you know, so many are deriding the so- called deep state. You know, I was talking to people from the deep state every single day, and the biggest thing I learned is that they are the most patriotic people in the government, out there serving their country every single day to the best of their ability, and making it work in the highest-pressure situation in the White House.

ISAACSON: You talk about people deriding the deep state, of course the person doing that the most, or most prominently, is Donald Trump, as he’s running for re-election. And he says he’ll get rid of the civil service protections. He’ll try to just root out this entire group of people who serve different presidents. How dangerous do you think that is?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Huge, huge. And we came close. I talked to one duty officer, Mike Stigler (ph), who was actually serving inside the situation room on January 6th. When he was in contact with the Secret Service on Capitol Hill, worried that they were losing the vice president and explaining to me that most people don’t know how close we came to losing the vice president that day. He and his fellow duty officers that day did worry that our institutions were crumbling. And, you know, they even started to implement these continuity of government procedures, which were designed to ensure that the government survived an attack like a nuclear war was being implemented on January 6th. Thank goodness. The republic did stand that day, the institutions didn’t crumble. But Mike Stigler (ph), and he’s talked to several of his colleagues, is deeply worried to see — knowing what he had seen inside the situation room and inside the national security decision-making process during those years, that if — in a second term, we wouldn’t have that kind of guarantee.

ISAACSON: You’ve been very eloquent about what’s at stake in this election, and you’ve talked about the concept of the peaceful transfer of power being at the total core of what a democracy is about. What are you worried about and what do you think journalists should be doing in covering this?

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m most worried about how, what is shameful and unconstitutional becoming normalized. I mean, for me, I think it’s very possible to just say that the beginning and end of the conversation should be looking back at what happened on January 6th. You know, never before in American history has a former president incited an insurrection instead of handing over the reins of power. Never before in American history has a president continued to lie about that election after being both indicted and impeached. And also, never before has a candidate for president refused going in to say, I’m not going to accept the results basically if I lose. The peaceful transfer of power is what’s — you know, is fundamental to our democracy. And what I’m concerned about as we all try to figure out how to cover this race every single day is how that just becomes one more issue to be discussed, you know, on a par with tax policy or environmental regulations when it’s a wholly another character. It’s very difficult to keep that in context. And I think to keep the focus on how dangerous that is.

ISAACSON: George Stephanopoulos, thank you so much for joining the show.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Thank you, Walter.