Have You Been in the Room Where it Happens? With George Stephanopoulos

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:48The Situation Room, an infamous place in presidential history. Twelve administrations have used it and each president's attitude towards it has reflected their personality. That's what my guest George Stephanopoulos notes in his brand new book. We've all seen it in the movies, but what's it really like and what crucial decisions have really been made within those walls? George is here to tell us.

1:19joining us now on open book is george stephanopoulos he's the host of abc's this week with george stephanopoulos he's also the co-anchor of good morning america but so many other things george the first time i met you and you're not going to remember this because you were famous at the time i was not a gentleman by the name of ram emmanuel introduced me to you in the roosevelt room. And this was maybe the first or second month of the Clinton administration. And so I'll tell you what happened to me. My roommate, I don't know if you would remember Rick Lerner or Jen Scully, but my roommate worked for a guy named Kenneth Brody.

1:54Yeah, he was one of President Clinton's earliest supporters in the campaign. Exactly. And so he worked for Ken Brody, who unfortunately is now deceased, but he took me on tour in the White House. He was working for Rahm Emanuel at the time you walked in looking exactly the way you do now, except with a little bit of gray hair, and you introduced yourself. And of course, that was the first time I met you. And then, unfortunately for me, after I got fired, you were my first interview. I remember that. But you were very nice to me, which I'll always be grateful for. And you are the author of this very, very terrific, insightful insider's view of things.

2:33The title of the book is The Situation Room, the inside story of presidents in crisis. You know, when I'm reading the book, I'm thinking of people like McGeorge Bundy. You know, I'm thinking of Bobby Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 13 Days. I'm thinking of the situation back in 61. That's when it was first set up right after the Bay of Pigs. Yep. I'm thinking of Graham Allison, who wrote Essence of decision. Okay, so you're in the genre of this is why the American people, among many other reasons, have the American presidency. A crisis comes, the president of those three branches of government, the president is the one that is perhaps the most flexible, that can move the most quickly.

3:16And of course, he or she, it'll eventually be a she, is the commander in chief and has to make Johnny on the spot decisions in the situation room. So I've been in the situation room. You've been in the Situation Room. Before we get into the book, tell us a little bit about the Situation Room and what should the American people know about it that, of course, isn't classified? Well, it's an incredible spot. You've been there. It's in the basement of the White House. For the longest time, it was the most nondescript room in the world. As I said, it was set up right after the Bay of Pigs by John F.

3:51Kennedy because he was pissed off after the Bay of Pigs. He felt misled by the CIA. He felt misled by the generals. And he wanted to have his own information stream coming into the government. It's kind of amazing that there had never been a situation room in the White House before that. I mean, you'd had Roosevelt had the map room during World War II. Of course, Lincoln famously went down to the Telegraph Office during the Civil War, but there had never been a permanent situation room in the White House until John F. Kennedy set it up in 1961. You know, it was actually, there's a fascinating side story on that.

4:21The guy who first mentioned the idea of a Situation Room to Kennedy was a man named Godfrey McHugh, who was just a larger-than-life character, French-speaking, French-accented American Air Force general, who had the most amazing life. He had lunch with Churchill and Roosevelt at the White House when he was basically a teenager. He dated Jackie Kennedy before he dated John F. Kennedy, and he became Kennedy's closest military aide. He's the one that sent him the paper saying, we need a situation to deal with the Cold War. Kennedy did not act on it at first, but he did act on it after the Bay of Pigs.

4:53They built it in like two weeks. Ironically, and you mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis up at the start. Ironically, once it was built, Kennedy didn't go there all that much. He actually ran the Cuban Missile Crisis mostly from the cabinet room. He took the information from the Situation Room, but he didn't go there that much because for most of its history, up until really this year, the Situation Room was just this tiny windowless conference room that looked like a Poconos conference room in the basement of the White House. And Kennedy even at one point said it was a pig pen. So he didn't go in there that much, but he did draw on the information that was being gleaned by all the professionals who serve in that room.

5:30Well, I mean, it is a lasting legacy of that administration, right? Because we're talking 60 plus years later, and I think it's become more important. And of course, President Biden, it was scheduled. So whether, no matter who won the presidency in 2020, it was scheduled for refurbishment and it got a refurbishment, a multimillion dollar refurbishment. Have you been in it since it's been refurbished? It's incredible. You know, when I was interviewing people for this book, I interviewed over a hundred people. My first question in the interview, just to break the ice, was always, do you remember your first time in the Situation Room?

6:04I actually didn't. I couldn't remember the pinpoint my first exact day. And a lot of people didn't either in part because it was so unremarkable. But my impression when I walked in last August, which was just as the renovation was being done, is, wow, it finally looks like it's supposed to look in the movies. It finally looks like it's coming out of 24 Dr. Strangelove. It is super high tech right now. It's actually now a series of conference rooms, including the famous Kennedy Conference Rooms, a watch center where the professionals who keep an eye on all the information streams coming into the government is manned 24-7.

6:36It's kind of got stadium-style seating. The director sits behind them, behind a glass wall that can go dark whenever he or she wants privacy. There's screens on every wall they can actually have. And you'll appreciate this from your time in the White House. They can actually now have G8 meetings of foreign leaders. And they did it after the Ukraine war, live in the Situation Room. They can bring in eight to 10 foreign leaders and have a virtual meeting. at this point in a way they never could before. But now when somebody walks into the room, they can also wipe the screens immediately of all classified information.

7:11It is high tech. He had a couple of the GA people in there talking and you could see them on the screens. I'm going to read you a quote from Jack Kennedy. I want you to respond to it. And then I want to talk a little bit about the current state of affairs in the Situation Room. This is a direct quote from Jack Kennedy. And he says, and I quote, these brass hats have one great advantage in their favor, he said. If we, if we do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong. And he was specifically talking about Curtis LeMay. Do you remember Curtis LeMay?

7:49Of course. So tell us, Jack Kennedy had a distrust of the American military. He certainly, one of the reasons he set up the Situation Room, he felt that they were often putting him in a corner. And Bobby Kennedy reinforced that view. He didn't want to be pushed into that corner at all. You know, it's interesting, you say, aligned it to current events. Interestingly, the role that Joe Biden, President Biden, played in the Obama White House was to push back on President Obama's behalf against those brass hats, against the generals who he felt were pushing for a longer commitment and a higher commitment to the war in Afghanistan than was wise.

8:23And he would often run point for the president in pushing back against the generals. But the whole idea of the Situation Room was to give the president independent control over the various information and intelligence streams coming into the entire government so he wouldn't be beholden to his cabinet secretaries, to the military. And, you know, in that sense, and you made the point, the Situation Room has only gotten more important with every passing year. And it's contributed to the centralization of power inside the White House and probably the expansion of the power of the presidency over the last 60 years.

8:56OK, well, the book is fantastic. It goes into a lot of stories. I want to delve into them with you. But before I delve into them with you, tell us firsthand experience, Clinton administration, something obviously long ago, hopefully declassified. Tell us a Situation Room story from your time in the White House. I'll tell you one funny one, one serious. The most serious one was, of course, was actually after Oklahoma City, you know, when the courthouse was bombed in Oklahoma City. And we were at that point concerned in the immediate hours after the bombing that, you know, perhaps this was part of a series of bombings that might be taking place across the country.

9:35So that was one of the most high tension moments that I experienced in the Situation Room. And in fact, I was finally able to find a picture. It's hard to get pictures from inside the Situation Room. I was finally able to find a picture from that day that we were able to put on the back cover of the book, showing me deliberating with Clinton and Leon Panetta and a couple of others on that day. Sandy Berger as well. My hair was a little bit longer at that point. You know, I'm at our age. OK, the fact that we're keeping our hair is a great blessing. OK, Stephanopoulos, it's a mitzvah from God. Both of us are still right.

10:08Because, you know, we got a lot of bald friends, you and me, Stephanopoulos, a lot of bald friends. We certainly do. But let me just give the lighthearted story as well. This was actually right in the end of the Situation Room, which was right next to the White House mess. And that is where I met Robin Williams, who had just come back from looking at the Situation Room. I was down there getting a cup of coffee. And it was so interesting because, you know, he's a comic genius. But, you know, we all have our insecurities. He was incredibly socially anxious. So instead of having a conversation, he just did bits there for three minutes right there at the White House mess on the threshold of the Situation Room.

10:43And it just always stuck in my mind watching this genius so uncomfortable that really all he could ever do was perform. Well, listen, an amazing guy. And that's a great biography, by the way, on him shortly after his death. It was published. But just for our viewers and listeners that are young, what George is referring to, the White House mess, also located in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, is staffed by the U.S. Navy. And so they have chefs in there. And you can go in there if you work for the president. You have an account. It's usually tied to your personal credit card. And you go in there, you can have a meal, you get a takeout, you can get a hamburger, or you can sit down in the mess and have lunch.

11:25And although I was in the White House for a short period of time, I did that almost every day because it gave me the opportunity to see other staff members down there. And I was able to have some conversations and push along some projects that we were working on. I want to go to President Nixon for a second. I wasn't a lover of the Situation Room. He already, according to the book, he already set foot in the Situation Room. have. And Henry Kissinger said that Nixon was convinced that President Johnson had suffered from situation room syndrome. Tell us what that is and tell us whether or not you agree with Dr.

12:01Kissinger. It's a great quote. And Johnson probably used the situation room more than any other president. He was there all the time. He moved his seat from the Oval Office, his favorite chair from the Oval Office down there. He even had Lady Bird serve breakfast to the staff every once in a while. And he was calling them all hours of the day, night, almost always about Vietnam. But one of the things you saw there is that Johnson, who was a master of domestic politics and his vacuum cleaner for information, he had 70 phones at his ranch in Texas. He had TVs and phones in every room of the White House.

12:36He always wanted to be in contact and he wanted every piece of information coming out of Vietnam. But one of things I learned from researching that experience is that, you know, information isn't always insight. The information that he was getting couldn't tell him how to win the war because it was a war that was unwinnable. And he had sensed that, but he just felt trapped by it all. Nixon was determined and Kissinger were determined not to get caught in that same trap. And what Kissinger meant by the situation room syndrome was this idea that you could control the world from that windowless room in the White House, which you can't, but you can do an awful lot, make a lot of consequential decisions in there.

13:14There was a different reason, though, an additional reason why Nixon did not go to the Situation Room. He didn't trust the Situation Room. He didn't trust the foreign policy professionals. Remember, he and Kissinger famously tapped the phones of many of their national security staff. And in that way, I think he shared something with the president you served for a short period of time, Donald Trump. Donald Trump didn't trust the Situation Room either. He considered it the home of the deep state. He hardly ever used it as well. Well, I mean, it's a funny story about Kissinger and Donald Trump. And so now Trump has won the election.

13:44It's December of 2016. And I had the opportunity to escort Dr. Kissinger into President-elect Trump's office, 26th floor Trump Tower. And Dr. Kissinger, he must have spent 15 minutes with Trump, which is a long time for Donald Trump, particularly at that time. And watch me, George. Ready? And so Trump looks over at me. He's like, what is he saying? And I said, well, I got to get a little closer. So his accent was such that Donald Trump stopped listening after like three minutes. But what he was saying, and I want you to react to it. OK, what Dr. Kissinger was saying is that we needed to pay more attention to Russia and we needed to be more wary of Russia.

14:29but to treat them like a respectful adversary. He said that the wound that Obama inflicted, calling Putin a regional power, which was blasted all over the press, had hurt President Putin's standing in Russia. And he was seeking retribution for that. Anyway, it was a memorable moment for me because I hadn't spent much time in my life with Dr. Kissinger. That was probably the second or third time I had met him. But he moved the White House. And you write about it in the book, Dr. Kissinger, in the Situation Room, moved the military alert level to DEFCON 3. Tell us a little bit about that. Tell us why.

15:07This is October 73. It's the Yom Kippur War, the first Yom Kippur War in Israel. Israel has been attacked. And it's the height of the Cold War as well. It's also the height of Watergate. In that same month, Vice President Agnew had resigned under indictment. The tapes had been released. The articles of impeachment have been drawn up. Nixon is under siege and he is basically holed up in his private office in the old executive office building, drinking scotch late into the night and, you know, listening to Broadway tunes on his record player while this crisis is playing out across the Middle East, a crisis which threatens to go nuclear.

15:48And the concern of Henry Kissinger at the time is that Russia was going to get involved on behalf of the Egyptians and Israel's other adversaries. And so on his own, without the involvement of the president at all, there's no evidence at all the president was involved in the decision making that night. Henry Kissinger raised the alert level of our nuclear forces at DEFCON 3, which had only been done once before during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was extraordinary that a national security advisor would do that on his own. What I love about it, we learn about this from a memo that was written by someone in the room, one of his military aides, Admiral Moore, who called it a piss swisher of a meeting.

16:27I never heard that word before. And then one of the other things I learned as I was researching this book, not only did Henry Kissinger make this move, which, by the way, did work by putting the forces on DEFCON 3. It did sort of back the Russians off a little bit. But what I also learned, and it came out many years later from the Russian, the Soviet archives, is that not only was Nixon incapacitated at that time, drunk, depressed, concerned he was losing his presence. He was losing his presence. Brezhnev was kind of in the same state. Brezhnev was in his Dachau outside of Moscow on sleeping pills and vodka.

17:05And it was, you know, the superpowers were kind of acting on automatic pilot. with the staffers at the helm while both presidents were incapacitated.

17:39Minimum monthly payments required. Minimum purchase required. See store for details. You know, it's a, it's a, I mean, when I read it, I was alarmed by it, but then I was also weirdly comforted by it. Yeah, what you're saying? Because, you know, you, the world's moving and it's not, and what did Charles de Gaulle say? There's a graveyards filled with men. Indispensable men. Right. Once thought they were indispensable. So, so we did a little research on you. You're born on February the 10th. I won't give the year of your birth because you and I, we look so good, Stephanopoulos, that we should be lying about our age at this point in our lives.

18:15But you were born on February the 10th, which makes you an Aquarius. I am. And I'm a lot older than you. You're not that much older than me, believe it or not. Okay. But I don't know. I just turned 60. So I'm getting up there, my friend. But in any event, you're an Aquarius. There are four presidents that are Aquarians of significance. I'm going to tell you who they are. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, who was born two days after you on February 12th, Ronald Reagan on February 6th, and of course, there's FDR born on January 30th, 1882. Oh, wow. And so that's the horoscope moment for open book.

18:50Now let's go to the psychic moment. We're going to go to the psychic moment of open book. There's a story in the book. Okay. And this is a story that surprised you the most, and it obviously surprised me, Jimmy Carter used psychics during the Iran hostage crisis. So tell us what you uncovered there. Incredible story, which I had never heard before. I was, you know, we were doing our research and I came across a single line in Jimmy Carter's presidential diary. It was from May 1980. And it said, had a meeting in the Situation Room on parapsychology, longitude, latitude, et cetera. And in one line, but it obviously piqued my interest because it had parapsychology and situation room in the same sentence.

19:32And I'm writing a book about the situation room. This meeting had never been written before. My team and I looked through all the published materials, couldn't find anything written about this meeting. But working through the Carter Library, we were able to figure out who might still be alive, who would know something about that meeting. Because one of the other people in the meeting was Big Niamh Brzezinski. Of course, he's passed away. But I was able to find a man named Jake Stewart, who was President Carter's naval aide. And we found out that he might have been in that meeting. So I emailed him, I called him, he was very reluctant to speak.

20:04Finally, after about three emails and several conversations, he finally agreed to do the Zoom. And we set up the Zoom, we start the interview. And I said, this May 1980 meeting, tell me about this meeting. And he just sat back, smiled and laughed and said, you found out about that, huh? And proceeded to tell me the most incredible story. This is May 1980. This is two weeks after the failed rescue mission of the Iran hostages, which basically crippled the Carter presidency. Carter is desperate. He's probably finished it. Yep. Yeah. He's running against Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is doing well in the polls.

20:39Inflation is high. The economy is stuck in the mud. He needs to do something and his rescue Commission has failed. So he's desperate times call for desperate measures, right? He's willing to consider anything. It turns out that Jake Stewart was the expert in the White House on something I didn't know much about. There is a whole group of psychics being run by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. They called them remote viewers. And these were people who would sit in dark rooms and theoretically use ESP to get to the bottom of international crises. It was called Operation Grill Flame.

21:16Some people swear that it had some reasonable success, you know, would be right 30 to 40 percent of the time that they were able to call the, that they were able to find out about a plane crash in Africa where several were killed. According to one report, one of the remote viewers had had a vision of helicopters crashing in the desert on the same day that the helicopters did indeed crash in the desert. So anyway, Anyway, Jake Stewart goes to the Situation Room. It's just him, the president, speaking of Brzezinski. And interestingly, Rosalind Carter, the first lady. You don't hear about first ladies in the Situation Room at all.

21:50But that was because she was kind of a big believer in psychics and ESP. She had become a friend of, remember Uri Geller? Yeah, sure. Of course. He could bend the spoons. Yeah, of course. She had had a several hours long meeting with him. She believed in it. So they call Jake Stewart in. He gives them an entire briefing on the work of government psychics in the CIA. in the intelligence community. Carter doesn't say a word. And at the end of this briefing, he takes out his notepad and simply writes one word on it and pushes it across the table to Stuart. You can guess what the word was. Hostages.

22:24Figure out where the hostages might be. Stuart took it on. He maintains that through the work of the psychics, they were able to locate one of the hostages, Richard McQueen, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis. And figure out where he was and that he was actually taken out later that summer. Of course, the rest of the hostages were not released until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated several months later. What an incredible story. And I'm so glad that you were able to regale it here. We're coming to the last few minutes of this podcast. I want to just ask you one quick question about the 6th of January, 2021, which happens to be my birthday, George.

23:00So for the first 50, for the first 57 years of my life, I was enjoying that birthday. Now it's Trump Insurrection Day. And January 6th has become kind of a swear word. Yeah, exactly. So it's happened to be my birthday. I think there's a lot of irony in that, right? So it's also Eric Trump's birthday, by the way. Mike Stigler, tell us what he said, and then we'll go to the famous five words and we'll have you blocked out of the podcast. Michael Stigler, amazing guy. It had been on his bucket list to work in the White House, intelligence analyst. He was finally assigned to the White House with about 18 months to go in the Trump administration.