The Gatekeepers

The White House chief of staff is unelected, never goes through Senate confirmation, and yet holds what is widely regarded as the second most powerful job in the federal government. Presidents have always leaned on trusted advisers, but the role of chief of staff only took firm shape in the twentieth century. When a president faces a decision of life and death, the chief is often the only other person present. Chris Whipple, an award-winning journalist, built this book on long, candid interviews with eighteen former chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus among them, along with two former presidents. Their accounts open up a small and little-seen fraternity whose members have quietly steered national events from just outside the Oval Office. Whipple uses those conversations to challenge the standard telling of presidential history. He argues that one chief laid the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution, and that a stronger chief might have kept the country from the disasters of Watergate and the Iraq War. The case he makes is that how well a president's gatekeeper does the job can shape an entire administration. This edition adds a chapter written specifically for it, taking readers inside the first Trump White House and revealing striking details of the dysfunction there.