This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. In today's world of endless scrolling and twenty four hour news cycles, it's rare for any one piece of journalism to become culturally relevant. But that is precisely what happened to a piece written by my guests today. Chris Whipple's groundbreaking profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles became one of Vanity Fair's most
read stories of twenty twenty five. The piece was debated constantly on TV news, and photos of Wiles and her staff from the article were shared across the Internet for weeks. Along with his work for Vanity Fair, Chris Whipple is an Emmy Award winning journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker described as quote an indispensable observer of American power quote. Whipple has written for publications such as Police and The Daily Beast.
He is also authored for nonfiction books on American politics and government. Working in so many different mediums, I wanted to know what Whipple considers himself to be.
A little bit of all of the above. I guess I have. Clearly, I've got some kind of identity crisis going on, I stumbled into this latest phase of my career writing books about political history. And it happened with a phone call out of the blue from a couple of French brothers named Jules and judion Naude, who had done the iconic documentary nine to eleven. They almost died that day. They said, Chris, we have this crazy idea. We want to do a documentary about White House chiefs
of staff. And I thought about that for about thirty seconds and I said, I'm in.
So they produced the documentary, which you did for Discovery.
We did it together, the three of us. I did the interviewing, we all did the producing and editing together. They directed, you wrote it. Yeah.
So before we get into any details about the Wiles piece for Vanity Fair, I think it's safe to say, and you wrote a book about these folks. That was she. Perhaps I didn't really see Wiles on the scene very much in the first administration. Was she there with him in the first administration?
She would not.
Who was the chief of staff then?
So he went through four chiefs of staff, beginning with the Wrights previous, followed by John Kelly, General John Kelly, followed by Mick Mulvaney, followed by the ultimate sycophant, Mark Meadows. I wrote a piece about Meadows, calling him the worst chief of staff in history, and there was stiff competition for that, and.
He qualified as worst.
Why because he was the ultimate? He was the guy Donald Trump was desperately wanted, namely, somebody who would just refuse to push back in any way and say yes, boss and salute every time Trump came up with coca made the idea, he just rubber stamped everything. Yeah, exactly. He was the ultimate sycophant.
But is in this second term she started the second term? Correct, she'd been with them throughout this past year or so. That's right, that's right. And Wiles I don't really read very much about her. I didn't really have much of a sense of her until this piece came out in Vanity Pain.
Yeah, listen. I think Susie Wiles, in my view, was maybe the most fascinating person in American politics, and partly because she engineered this unbelievable, against all odds twenty twenty four presidential campaign for Donald Trump. Donald Trump would not be president without her, in my view, So for openers, she had that going for her. Beyond that, she has
this fascinating story. You know, the daughter of Pat Summerle, the famous sportscaster who was an alcoholic, and she came up through the traditional GOP as a kind of Reagan Republican, became disillusioned with that. Then she found Donald Trump and along the way she got Ron DeSantis elected. That's another wild story. Desanta's turned on her and threw her under the bus and tried to destroy her career.
She's a Floridian.
She's a Floridian. She's been through the wars, and she was rewarded after having won this against a lad's campaign in twenty twenty four, for Trump, she was rewarded with the job of White House chief the first woman ever to serve as White House Chief of staff.
What do you think was her contribution to the campaign? How did she help them get elected?
Well? In many ways? I mean she first of all, she has a kind of magic with Trump that none of her predecessors had, either campaign managers or White House chiefs of staff for that matter. He trusts her in a way that he never trusted anyone else. She's, without a doubt, the second most powerful person in the Trump White House
and she earned it the hard way. There's a great story that I tell in the Vanity Fair piece about the time that Trump in twenty sixteen into his golf club and in front of a bunch of cronies, proceeded to just take her apart over abuse her verbally over a pole that he didn't like that showed him losing in Florida. While she sat there, she said she didn't know whether to flee or a bit. What she really
wanted to do was cry. But instead she steeled herself and she said, mister Trump, if you want somebody to set her hair on fire, I'm not your girl. But if you want somebody to win Florida, I am. And she turned on her heel and walked out. And she says that every day thereafter Trump was on the phone calling her for help.
Now I don't know as much about this, obviously as you do, but sometimes I wonder where someone who has this privileged position, someone who's worked their magic with Trump and it's working. She has his ear all the time and is an important figure in that administration. Then she does an interview with you, and I think to myself, do you catch some of these people on a day they're just fed up and they really decided they want to talk.
Well, in this case, it would have to be eleven days over eleven while to talk. She really wanted to talk. You know, I've read all the stories, the speculation that this was a Machiavellian maneuver on her part to take jd Vance down a notch and elevate Rubio and position herself and distance herself from some of the problems, the pardons and all the rest of it. And I think it's a lot simpler than that. I think that number one.
I ran into Walter Isaacson the week that the story dropped, and Walter came up and gave me a big hug, and he said, you know what, Chris, people just like to talk. People want to tell their story, especially if they think they're going to get a fair hearing. So that was part of it. I think I came with a reputation for being nonpartisan. You know, I'd praised some Republican White House chiefs. She knew i'd written. She'd read my book about the White House chiefs of staff, the gatekeepers,
so that helped. But the other thing that I think is really key here is that every white House Chief. Every White House staffer lives in a bubble. They work in a bubble called the West Wing. And it's exponentially more so in the Trump White House, where you're sitting around talking to acolytes, all of them reading from the same playbook. And I think at a certain point you forget that all this crazy stuff you're talking about sounds insane on planet Earth. And I think at a certain
point she thinks she's talking to Stephen Miller. And when the whole thing landed a couple of weeks ago, it was a problem.
Now, what was your journalistic DNA when you were a kid? What's your dad?
Now? My dad was a journalist, So that's how it started. So I caught the bug.
Who do you write for?
He was an editor of the Weekly Life magazine back in the glory days in the sixties, And so I caught the bug around the dinner table. His friends were writers like Walter Lord. Rachel Carson came over for dinner at Washington in Knowing in Connecticut. Oh well, he commuted to New York where he worked, so you know, Alfred Eisenstadt, the photographer, would come over, you know. So I caught that bug early on. This is pretty exciting stuff, just covering the world.
So your home and journalism affects you like you're meeting the New York Times when you're ten years old. How does it start for you? Your curiosity?
It started again around the dinner table. This just seemed like a pretty exciting way to have a career covering stories, you know, all over the world. And again, those were the glory days of life and Look and Saturday Evening Post.
And seven newspapers in New York the day.
Yeah, exactly, So that was pretty exciting. And I so right out of college, I got a job working for Foreign Policy magazine. Dick Holbrook was my boss. I want to get to And then I went to the monthly Life magazine, which made a run around nineteen seventy eight to the late eighties. And so for eight years I traveled all over the world. I mean I went to South Africa and lived with Winnie Mendela for a while.
I want to ask you about that.
I went from there to waiting my notes here. I went to the Philippines and you know, met Ferdinand and Melda Marco.
Back in the day when journalists like that were traveling a great deal they don't do this right anymore.
We'd go for weeks sometimes you have kids. Sometimes months of time you have children. I didn't at that point, but I do well. I mean that's you probably didn't have any time. Yeah, yeah, probably wise if you.
Not to have children when you're flying all over the world. Right now, talk about Mendela for example, I remember when you were with her, was this before, after, during they will wear our necklaces stuff and.
Great during during Right at that moment, I mean, she was lionized, she was idolized. She was the so called mother of the nation. Mama'll wait too. You'd hear the people chant when she walked through the streets of Cueto. At one point, David Turnley, the photographer for Life, and I were surrounded by an angry group of kids, and we thought we might be next to be necklaced, as
they called it necklacing. The necklacing was the practice of if they thought you were a police informer, and we were a couple of white guys in the middle of Cueto, they would pour gasoline over a tire, put it around your neck and set it on fire.
I remember she said in that speech, they will wear on necklaces. He's condemning somebody at that speech.
So we you know, at one point we were surrounded by these kids and they were suspicious, and suddenly we saw the crowd part and we saw Winny Mendela coming through and she said, these are my friends, and she led us back to her house just in time.
What did you talk to her about?
Well, mostly about the struggle as they put it. Nelson Mandela was still in prison at that point. He was actually in Pollsmoor Prison at that point. He'd been moved from Robin Islanery spent most of those years to a place called Pollsmore. We actually went into the waiting room with Winnie posing as a couple of her lawyers, hoping to get a glimpse of Nelson, and nobody had seen him since you early sixties, since the Ravonia trial, and we were hoping that Winnie would take a miniature camera
in and get a picture for her. Wouldn't do it for life? Well, she said she couldn't. She said she tried anyway. Winnie was a absolutely fascinating, charismatic and really complicated, ultimately tragic character.
I think tragic.
Why tragic because I think that she as she would be the first to admit she was much more radical than her husband Nelson. She was much less prepared to forgive. And I think she also thought, and you could argue, maybe rightly, that having spent all those years struggling to advance the.
The revolution in his absence.
In his absence, that she was owed something. I think in her mind. Again, I mean, there were certainly, you know, allegations of corruption and all of that was sort of after the time I spent with her, but we could see there was a kind of megalomania. I think that she was prey to.
Well. I think that that's also very you know, the potential for that is high because of the stakes and the whole flavor of the whole thing. You know, your husband's in prison for the rest of his life, presumably he's a political prisoner. You're there and that I mean, my ex wife made a film there. We went to South Africa after they had bombed Planet Hollywood in Cape
Town and the US embassy in Nairobi. So the film was supposed to be in Kenya and it was moved to South Africa and she went there and it was like roadblock, highway robberies. My ex wife had to have a driver, a lead car armed, the driver with her armed, a bodyguard armed. They were pulling people over and raping and robbing people right before we got there. So South Africa was not Disneyland, you know, No, it was not.
But imagine being there during the state of emergency, you know, before Mandela was released from prison. It was just, I mean, absolutely extraordinary experience.
You go from Life and you're there for a while. You didn't pop in and out of these places quickly. You were there at Life for eight years, for eight years, and when you leave Life you go to ABC.
Actually CBS first.
So you did. You were at sixty minutes that was before ABC. Yeah, and you had sixty Minutes for how many years?
What happened was I met Diane Sawyer who was in her second year at sixty minutes and in need of a associate producer, and I went to work for sixty minutes.
And you were there from eighty six to ninety one, that's right, ninety when you go to ABC. Now, what was your experience like at sixty minutes. And we're going to get into just a little bit about whither CBS News.
Was it was?
It was?
It was just phenomenal. I mean it was. It was really an exciting period of my life. And the very first thing I did was I said to Diane Sawyer, you know what, give me a plane ticket to Honolulu and let me see if I can get Amelda Marcos Amel de Marcos and her husband, Ferdinand, the dictator of the Philippines had fled, had just fled the Philippines. They were in Honolulu, they were holed up in a bunker there.
The entire World Press Corps was trying to get to him, and I liked my chances of getting him, so I jumped on a plane, flew out there, called Diane from the compound, said how soon can you get here, because I've got emel de Marcos ready to go, and she couldn't make it. And so the next thing I knew on my first day, at sixty minutes, two camera crews were flying in and I was interviewing Emelda Marcos and Ferdinand for sixty minutes, which I did. We sent the
transcripts back, sent the tapes back to New York. They were transcribed. Don Ewett, the legendary executive producer, read the transcripts before I flew back and I walked in the door and you It is standing there with Mike Wallace, the famous star of sixty Minutes, and he looks at me. He goes way to go kid, And I'm feeling pretty heady at this point, and I go, well, you know,
don there's a moment. You may not be able to see it in the transcript, but there's a moment where Emmelda doesn't quite lose it, but she gets all misty eyed, and you It looks at Wallace and looks at me and says, kid, if you were any good, she would a cry. That was my introduction to network.
Tell her. Now, let me ask you this. In the sixty Minutes period, you interview John Connolly. I'm assuming that's the governor of Texas.
That's right. So Connolly was really fascinating, kind of larger than life character. He had been Treasury secretary under Richard Nixon. He was at one point considered a real possibility as president. He ran, he tried to become resident, he won one delegate, spent a fortune. But we went and saw him right after he had this real fall from grace. I mean,
he declared bankruptcy. He lost everything he had. This was in the mid eighties eighty seven, I guess around the recession of that time, but the real estate market collapsed and took all of Connolly's into possessions with him. And he's sitting in a ranch house with all the furniture removed and talking about that fall from grace, but also talking about being in the limousine. JFK and he and Nelly told us that story, you know, moment by moment
that was just absolutely rivetting. Connolly barely survived it, and obviously JFK did not.
What did he say about that that you can be called anything, because I mean, I'm a conspiracy nut. I'm not going to lie.
Yeah, he was not a believer in a conspiracy. He believed that that bullet really was magical. You know that that bullet zigzagged and came out of his wrist or wherever it was I forgotten now. But the other fascinating thing was climbing into his pickup truck. I'll never forget it. Man. John Connelly's driving and Diane Sawyer is in the passenger seat, and I'm in the back with a with a cameraman, and we drive to his old homestead where Connelly and Diane Sawyer started talking.
About Richard Nixon, who Diane had worked for.
Who Diane had worked for. Those two maybe knew Nixon better than anyone well you could think of, So it was it was amazing. And of course he pointed out the homestead where he said, I used to walk barefoot behind a mule over here, and he said, and one day I saw a fancy car go by, and I said, someday I'm going to be driving that car. So it was some pretty amazing experiences.
Diane Sawyer, who of course enjoyed a great career, then she left for ABC as well. Correct, did you connect with her again at ABC? Did so? She was happy to see you when you should.
I don't know about that, okay. I was happy to be welcomed there.
She was great on that show. People forget how wonderful she wasn't she was a really good tell journal Well.
She and Sam Donaldson launched a show called Primetime Live. Primetime Live as Sam was said rune Arledge at that point was held bent on trying to compete with sixty Minutes, and lured her over and brought Sam Donaldson out of the White House and put them together as a team, and for a while we had the resources to do a lot of pretty serious investigative hidden camera stuff, which
we did for a number of years. It didn't last forever, but you know, at one point, I literally set up a phony medical clinic in Las downtown Los Angeles and hung up a shingle and rigged the place with hidden cameras, and we advertised ourselves as a general practitioner doctor's office, and we watched and rolled tape as crooked doctors and brokers beat a path to our door offering us illegal kickbacks for our patient referrals.
That's so forth.
Yeah, And after four or five months of running this phony clinic, you know, we invited them all back and Diane confronted them, and anyway, we won an Emmy for that, but it was those are the days when Network's really had. We're throwing money at pretty serious investigative journalists.
Exactly, exactly journalist and author Chris Whipple. If you enjoy conversations about the inner workings of important magazines, check out my episode with former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown.
Well. I think I'm a compulsive reporter. Actually, I mean I have what I think of as observation greed right. Most of the time, I'm propelled to go out, not because I actually want to go out, but I think I got to see that. You know, I need to see that. Curious, I'm really curious, and I have a great desire to report on the action.
To hear more of my conversation with Tina Brown, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Chris Whipple details one piece of advice former White House Chief of Staff Right's Prebus gave to Susie Wiles. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. In nineteen seventy eight, Chris Whipple began his reporting career at Life magazine, where he covered countless historic events and interviewed many significant figures
such as Winnie Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Ted Kennedy. Whipple secured an interview with Ted Kennedy during the nineteen eighty presidential election, but his interview did not quite go as planned.
Absolutely amazing story. A sorry that didn't appear in Life because for reasons you'll wander in a second. But what happened was I was at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport the day Roger Mud did that infamous.
Interview why do you want to be President?
Ted kenn Why do you want to be president? And it was produced by Howard Stringer and Andy Lack, two guys you never heard of, and they were chasing me around the law and trying to because they thought this was their exclusive And so all of a sudden, this kid from Life magazine is there with a photographer, and we stood our ground. Anyway, we watched this thing happen and Roger Mud asks the famous question and Kennedy is utterly inarticulate, cannot complete this, can barely complete the sentence,
couldn't answer the question, why do you want to be present? Afterwards, Mud takes off his microphone and walks down to the sea wall, and I walked down behind him and I congratulated him. I said, Roger, I am Chris Whipple. That was amazing. He goes, really you think I got anything? He had no idea what he had. It was pretty clear to everybody else who was watching it. I mean, we didn't know it would end his campaign, which essentially it did. But Mud didn't realize what he had. That
was the modesty of the man. I thereupon had my ten minutes or fifteen minutes with Kennedy riding in the limousine from the compound down to the dock where Patrick his son was waiting on the sailboat to go for a sale, and Kennedy had he was catatonic. He had this like thousand yards stare, and I would ask him questions and get no response. And to this day, I don't know what was going on. Whatever happened, Boy, he didn't have it that day, and I think it ended his campaign.
So tell me about CBS and what you think has happened there. Does do you think that this is going to wind up happening everywhere?
Wow, it's painful to watch. I mean for those of us who were there during the glory days. I'm not always the hair on fire guy when it comes to what's going on at CBS right now, because I can remember. Let's take for example, what happened recently with Barry Weiss spiking or at least delaying that story about that terrible
prison in Nel Salvador Seacott. I'm old enough to remember, even though it was after I left sixty minutes when Don yu At, the executive producer, spiked the story about Big Tobacco, and it was later turned into.
A movie, as you know, the.
The Insider with al Pacino, and that story eventually ran, and it ran to devastating effect, I mean, really changed everything. Lowel Bergman was the producer, but I knew Lowell when he was there, So I don't think it's the end of the story. And I think I think that Seacut story will run. I mean a lot of people have seen it, because there was a bootleg version of it that the CANADIENC has put out. A lot of people saw it. But boy, they're going through a rough period.
But I wonder if the other networks as well, that the news which was an edict from the FCC. If I recall, these are public airwaves and you have to have some news program. I mean they ordered that and eventually tried to turn it, you know, away from a lost leader with you will or whatever comparison you want to make. And they you know, the news is big business. But I wonder if it's not big business anymore and they all want to get rid of it in some way or just cut the costs of nothing.
Yeah, I think you may be right, and nobody under seventy five is watching the Network news broadcast. I spoke to a twelfth grade class, really bright kids in Greenwich, Connecticut, affluent kids, and they're getting their news from TikTok and dinner with their parents. It's not a pretty picture.
I'm at a party once at John Eastman's house, McCartney's brother in law, Linda Eastman's brother. And I'm there and John Eastman and his wife would have these fabulous parties in the summertime at their house, and all these people there that you admired, And I'm sitting down with the Holberg, who was the loveliest guy on earth and the most charming man on her And hollbrook sits there and says, to me, read the forty pages in Halberston, and that'll
tell you everything about me. You know, don't even bother anything else. That's Maclamara, and I want you to read it and then call me and we'll have dinner. He was very kind to me, he said, let's have dinner or lunch. And then he died two weeks later or something like that, right on the heels of that. Wow, what was your relationship with him?
Like Holbrick was an unbelievable character. I mean, I was a kid at a college, you know, with hair down to my shoulders, and completely out of my depth as his assistant at foreign policy. But I must have done something right because he just became a mentor and a great friend and the reason I wound up at sixty minutes.
One day I was back from an assignment for Life, was walking through the lobby of the Jefferson Hotel in Washington and Hobrook comes out of the dining room and we bump into each other and he goes, congratulations, Listen, I just read your piece on Marcos. You got the quote of the Year from Marcos. Of course he'd read Life magazine, he read everything. And he goes, listen, you
gotta have lunch with me and Diane. Well, Diane was his then girlfriend, Diane Sawyer, and that was how I met Diane and wound up eventually at sixty minutes.
So let's talk about what's your relationship with Vanity Fair. The peace goes because you had an ongoing relationship with them and written for them before I have when you first started writing, who was in charge? Graydon?
So, Graydon Carter was in charge when I began writing for Vanity Fair. I did a number of pieces, including the first interview with Ryan's prebus after he was shown the doors on the tarmac. He was literally on a rain soaked tarmac under Air Force one when Trump tweeted that his services were no longer needed. That was the way Trump rolled during the first term with White House chiefs. But anyway, I got to know Ryance interviewed him. The very first thing he said to me, I'll never forget.
I met him at a bar in Georgetown and he came over to me and he said, take everything you've heard and multiplied by fifty and we were off to the races. And I did a piece of vanity fair after that. The irony here is that fast forward now eight years there was a gathering for Susie Wiles before she became White House Chief of Staff. Jeff Science, the outgoing White House chief for Joe Biden, invited a bunch
of chiefs to come and give Wiles some advice. They went around the table and they got to Ryan's previous and Breevous looked at Wiles and said, one thing, don't talk to Whipple.
Interesting.
She evidently didn't take it to heart. So every once in a while on a reporter's career lightning strikes, and this was one of those cases. White House chiefs of staff never talked to reporters on the record.
Very rarely, not for that length of time either.
You know, I wrote a book on the Biden White House in the first two years of Biden White House got to know rhyme claim pretty well, interviewed him multiple times, always on so called deep background with quotation approval required before you publish. None of that was Susie Wiles.
So they came to you. You pitched them. What did the Wiles thing come up?
Oo?
Who originated that idea?
So I did. What happened was I was writing, and I still am writing a book on a history of presidential campaign managers from nineteen sixty eight to the president. It's a rogues gallery of great characters, from John Mitchell to Lee Atwater, to James Carville to Susie Wiles, who ran Trump's campaign. So I called up Wiles. She was driving ten days before she became White House chief. She's driving from mar A Lago to her place in Ponavidra, about four hours north in Florida. And we started talking
and I can't believe it. She is open and unguarded and on the record and smart and funny and charming. And I got off the phone and I said to my wife, you're not going to believe this, and she didn't, but it was true. She was on the record during that first conversation except when we mutually agreed to go off very briefly, and for the next eleven months we just kept talking. Now, I should say that what happened was initially she knew I was writing a book about
presidential campaign managers. That's why she was talking to me. I quickly realized that what she really wanted to talk about was Trump two point oh. And she she told me I just got off the phone with Hakim Jeffreys, and I told him, you're going to see a whole new Trump. Trust me anyway. So a couple of interviews into this process, I said to her, well, listen, Susie Vandy Fair wants to do a big piece on Trump two point oh. And she said great. Congratually, she was all in.
Wow, that's amazing to me looking back at your books, because you mentioned the Biden book. This is not a serious question, obviously, but I guess I can't help, But should we have an age limit for the president of the United States. I mean, we got two guys that are round in the corner at eighty and both of them have serious issues, maybe neurologically, who knows or whatever, And I wonder should we go that you can't be present to you pass a certain physical.
Maybe they should be Yeah, maybe there should be. Look, I think that it was Joe Biden's eleventh hour abdication from the race, which left Kamala Harris with two shorter runways.
That's what I said. I used that phase to a runway.
To mount a serious race against Trump. Was a scandal and a tragedy. A tragedy for Biden obviously, but also for the Democratic Party and arguably the country. There's no question about it. Now. I don't agree with Jake Tapper that Biden was Woodrow Wilson non compass, meant to over in the corner while everybody else was governing by auto pen. I think that was nonsense. I think Biden was actually making decisions behind closed doors. What he couldn't do was campaign.
He couldn't do anything, as we all saw in that infamous debate.
I wonder if we're married now to this kind of hawkish or semi hawkish presidential figure, whether he didn't have to talk tough. You never hear anybody talk about peace anymore. Never nobody talks about peace in the Middle East or in Ukraine. It's all war.
Yeah, No, you really wonder was I was joking with somebody earlier today that you know, rama Manuel, if he wants to make a run, doesn't even have to clean up his language after Trump.
Can you believe this?
I believe the bomb, you know, every other sentence, But no, I mean, seriously, you really do have to wonder whether we've turned some kind of corner where politics will be coarse and nasty, brutish and short.
You've pro filed in terms of the chiefs of staff and so forth, but beyond that, you've been around these people forever. The one thing that I was the most surprised by in the first term and especially now in the second term, I didn't know there were that many people who were like minded with Trump. I didn't know there were that many people to staff a White House and there and their other offices to come to And I'm appalled by how many I don't want to say evil,
but hardline, vicious, non empathetic people are in Washington. Hundreds of them showed up there to work. Did that surprise you or did you know they were always there waiting for their moments?
It surprised me too. You know, the difference between Trump one point oh and two point oh, there are a number of differences, and one of them is Susie Wiles. She runs a tighter ship. But a major difference is that everybody's reading from exactly the same playbook. We had certain, you know, minor exceptions. I mean Susie in the Vanity Fair piece, Susie Wiles told me there was real disagreement, a real battle over tariffs. But you know, other than that,
they're essentially all reading from the same playbook. And you don't have obviously, as everybody's pointed out, you don't have a Gym Madison, you don't have a Rex Tillerson, you don't have people who were trying to.
Quit opinions of their own.
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why there's been a lot of speculation about why Susie talked to me, why Susie Wells would do this, And again, I think it's I think it's pretty simple. At the end of the day, which is that they're in this bubble and they forget that. A lot of the crazy stuff that they're saying to each other all day long sounds insane un planet Earth, but they're not on planet Earth. They're in this bubble exponentially more so in the Trump White
House than in any other White House. And I think that when the Vanity Fair piece landed, they were surprised.
Journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker Chris Whipple. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Chris Whipple talks about why Bill Clinton might have been a one term president or it not for his chief of staff Leon Panetta. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. In twenty thirteen, Chris Whipple wrote and produced the documentary
series titled The President's Gatekeepers for Discovery Channel. The series spanned nine presidential administrations and featured interviews with all nine chiefs of staff. After the series, Whipple continued his research his book The Gatekeepers, How the White House Chiefs of Staff to Define Every Presidency was a New York Times bestseller. The book was the first of its kind giving a behind the scenes look into White House chiefs of staff.
Most recently, Whipple profiled the current White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, for Vanity Fair in twenty twenty five. Out of all the chiefs of staff Whipple had interviewed and researched over the years, I was curious which he admired the most.
James A. Baker the third, from Ronald Reagan, Leon Panetta for Bill Clinton. I think you can make a really strong case that there would have been no Reagan Revolution without Jim Baker. And I'll give you an example. Ronald Reagan, when he came into office, was hell bent on tackling social security cutting. Jim Baker Sadam Dann and explained, Look, social security is the third rail of American politics. You touch it, you get electrocuted. You need let's put that off.
And the result was that Reagan pivoted to tax cuts and was re elected in one of the largest landslides in the history.
Yeah.
Now, Baker did it with help from Nancy Reagan, but he was smart enough to round up the allies he knew he needed to do that. Bill Clinton might have been a one term president if not for Leon Panetta. Eighteen months into Clinton's presidency, he was dead in the water, paralyzed with all kinds of many rich scandals, Gingrich Travelgate, Whitewater, you know, crazy little scannals that we've almost forgotten by now.
But he was in deep trouble and the White House was really ineffective, and Leon Panetta came in and just turned it around. He imposed real discipline on a guy who was pretty hard to discipline, but Panetta did it. Panetta was kind of guy who could walk into the Oval office, close the door and tell Bill Clinton what he didn't want here. There's nobody who can do that
with Donald Trump. Even though Susie Wiles. Here's the thing about Susie Wiles, we'll never know what might have been in a sense, because Susie Wiles has a kind of magic with Trump. He trusts her, he pays attention to her when she speaks. And yet it's clear, and I document this over the course of eleven months of talking to her, it's just clear that she has chosen not
to tell him hard truths. You know, she said I've had white House chiefs tell me, some of my predecessors say they have these seminal moments when they have to confront the president about a constitutional issue. I don't have that. Well, an empowered white House chief, an effective White House chief has to have that. You have to be able to tell the president what he doesn't want to hear.
I wonder sometimes you know who goes into that job, and when you get the president's here, there's a lot, there's a volume of people who could take that job, and it want that job. But is that part of it where they realize they can depend on you to tell them the truth? Who was Obama chief of staff that.
You absolutely so? Obama had four? Ram Emmanuel was his first, Dennis McDonough was his last, Bill Daly was his second, and Jack Lou was his third. And not easy. I mean it's it's they have his ear believably difficult jump. I think Rom got true to him, Bill Daily not so much. They just didn't click. And I think Lou more so. And Dennis McDonald was the most successful.
Really for yeah, because Obama seems so inscrutable. He doesn't seem like you have to really drill down to get down to the real Obama. He's only going to share anything. He only shared on an as needed basis with people. That's where whereas Clinton always seemed to be more evuncular than that. Now the spy masters have the CIA director shape history and the future. What do you think about the intelligence apparatus we have in place now?
Well, it's a really good question because, on the one hand, the thing that, very much like a White House Chief of staff, a CIA director has to be able to tell the president heart truths, and it's not at all clear to me that John Ratcliffe is the guy to
do that. I mean, Ratcliffe is famously partisan. And the danger of that is that, you know, the CIA director is the guy we count on to prevent another nine to eleven or worldwide pandemic, all kinds of terrible things, and if you can't count on that guy to tell you hard truths, you're in trouble. Having said that, look, I mean, clearly, we've had a couple of operations that
have been very successful in the short term. I mean, the bunker busting operation in Iran, the snatching of Maduro, whatever you may think of that idea was pretty effectively executed. So the CIA is doing something right, but we're just gonna have to see all how all of this plays out, because these are a long way from over.
I've always maintained when I was more involved in politics and candidateseas per se, I always used to say that the former director of the CIA or the Energy Department were automatically disqualified from being president, but they woke up every morning. He had to lie to the American people for a living. When I said that to Bill Ridge, and Negolands looked me like, you can leave now, you know what I mean. But he was about to run
for something out of coming out of New Mexico. Ye, what are you working on now?
Actually, I've gone back to the book that I was working on when I first started talking to Susie Wilds for Vanity Fair, for the piece that became a Vanity Fair piece, And that is the history of Presidential campaign Managers, the working titles the Kingmakers, and it's a really fascinating cast of characters. Right sixty eight an unbelievable campaign. You know,
two assassinations, at least two more than that. MLK, Bobby Kennan, the Hubert Humphrey almost caught Nixon in a photo finish because interestingly, he really broke with LBJ on the conduct of the Vietnam War. I always thought Kamala Harris should have taken a page from Hubert Humphrey and distanced herself from Biden, But that's another story. In twenty twenty.
Four, Mitchell was his campaign manage.
John Mitchell campaign manager. In sixty eight, hr Haldeman was sort of his deputy.
There's such a flurry of facts in All the President's Men. I participated in a staged reading of the screenplay of All the Presidents Men, and Carl and Bob came.
My favorite story about tell me if this is true. My favorite story is that the screenplay was a mess to the late William Goldman, who was a terrific screenwrin. But the screenplay was a mess. Carl Bernstein took it home one night and Nora efren rewrote it overnight.
Well that may be, so, can't roll that out. He was married to her for that period of time. It's amazing the facts that come flying. But I forgot that Mitchell was his campaign manager. That's sixty eight campaign.
Absolutely and then became his attorney general and ended up in prison along.
With a bunch of others Christ before those were the days when they ended up in prison.
So anyway, sixty eight is the beginning, and when I'm done, I'm going to bring it all the way up to the present. But it's been amazing. Gary Hart. I was talking to Gary Hart, who lives on a road called Troublesome Gulch in Colorado.
I saw that big article in the Times about him years ago.
Gary Hart famously his campaign fell apart after a scandal with a girl named donnad Rice. Of course, but boy does Heart have some story.
Monkey Business was the name of the.
Name of the boat. But boy does Gary Hart still have some stories to tell.
I want to say, thank you. What an amazing career you've had. What a great career you've had to do journalism and do television news and then do these books. It's just amazing. I hope you're happy that's your career, even an amazing career.
Oh thanks for having me.
My thanks to journalist and author Chris Whipple. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Isaac Kaplan Woolner. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio