What It Takes to Be White House Chief of Staff
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2023
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
The White House chief-of-staff role is the hardest gig in Washington, D.C. Dick Cheney blamed the job for giving him his first heart attack, during the Ford Administration. A hapless chief of staff can break a Presidency; an effective one was nicknamed the Velvet Hammer. In January, Joe Biden’s first chief of staff, Ron Klain, was replaced by Jeffrey Zients. In a conversation from last winter, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos use Klain’s departure as a jumping-off point to discuss what it’s actually like to run a White House.
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| 0:53.3 | Welcome to the political scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. |
| 0:59.7 | I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser. |
| 1:04.7 | Hi, Evan. |
| 1:05.6 | Hey there. |
| 1:10.5 | It's the toughest job in government, Tim, and it's probably the worst job in government. |
| 1:13.6 | And it's probably the worst job in government. |
| 1:17.6 | And I can speak with some authority because I have held a job longer than anybody in history |
| 1:24.6 | except two people, and those two people went to jail. So you can see... |
| 1:30.3 | That's Jim Baker, the Velvet Hammer, as he was known. It's a nickname which perfectly |
| 1:36.7 | encapsulates his time as a very effective chief of staff to both Ronald Reagan and then George |
| 1:41.8 | H.W. Bush. That job, the White House Chief of Staff, |
| 1:45.5 | is sometimes called the second most powerful position in Washington because it can make or break |
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