Inside the Situation Room
BOOK REVIEW: THE SITUATION ROOM: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis
By George Stephanopoulos / Grand Central Publishing
Reviewed by: Larry Pfeiffer
The Reviewer — Larry Pfeiffer is the Executive Director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. A 32-year veteran of the US Intelligence Community, Pfeiffer served at the National Security Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Central Intelligence Agency. At the latter, he served as Chief of Staff to Director Hayden and Chief for Policy and Coordination for Director Leon Panetta. He served as Senior Director of the White House Situation Room from September 2011 to October 2013.
REVIEW — Truth in lending—I participated in the early development of this book and am quoted on several pages. I had the privilege of serving as Senior Director of the White House Situation Room (WHSR) during the Obama administration, one of the best jobs of my 32-year career in the US Intelligence Community. I walked away from the position in 2013 with the view that the public should know more about this national treasure that had figured prominently in national security crises over the previous five decades and harbored dreams of writing a book about it someday. One false start and nine years later, I was approached by ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos in 2022 with his plans to write a book about the Situation Room, who shared my view that not enough was known about the role it played in supporting Presidents in their toughest decisions.
I told Stephanopoulos I had intended to write a book that met three objectives—explain the WHSR’s functions and capabilities, introduce the national treasure that are the men and women who have served silently there, and demonstrate these through a historical survey of crises since its creation in the Kennedy administration. I planned to interview Presidents, National Security Advisors, Cabinet secretaries and agency heads, National Security Council staff, and WHSR employees.
Stephanopoulos spent the past two years doing just that and debuts his book, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis, this week. He presents a compelling 329-page walk through crises from the Bay of Pigs to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, organized in twelve chapters devoted to each President served by WHSR. Although not a scholarly tome, replete with extensive footnotes, the book is well-researched and written in an accessible style that should grab a broad audience interested in Presidential history and national security and attracted to insider perspectives. Stephanopoulos’s position as one of America’s leading news personalities, and the network he’s developed over decades in public service and the newsroom, afforded him easy access to the over 100 people he interviewed, from Presidents to WHSR duty officers. He was supported by a research team and co-author Lisa Dickey, who collaborated on New York Times best-selling books by First Lady Jill Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and actor Patrick Swayze, among others.
The book opens in its prologue with a dramatic retelling of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol—for the first time told from the perspective of a Sit Room duty officer, Mike Stiegler. I won’t ruin it for you, but it gave me goosebumps. It pivots quickly in the first chapter to the origin story for WHSR: President John F. Kennedy’s dissatisfaction with the distribution of information to the White House during the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Ten days before the failed invasion his US Air Force aide, then-Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, had forwarded the President a USAF study that called for “the establishment of a National Daily Situation Room” to serve the Executive. Following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy complained to his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, that he had operated at a disadvantage, not having the same information his subordinate Cabinet secretaries and intelligence agency heads had at critical times during the crisis. Bundy’s solution was to follow that USAF recommendation and a command center was quickly established in the basement of the White House. Manned by military aides working a rotating 24-hour shift, followed by 2 days off, it had a rudimentary conference room, communications center, and clanking teleprinter machines spewing volumes of cables from the Intelligence Community, State Department, and the Defense Department. The aides needed to decide quickly who needed what information and get it to them. The conference room soon became a place where the most sensitive conversations in the White House could be held. The book outlines how this new element had an immediate positive effect in the ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis.
Fast forward 60 years and those basic functions still exist. WHSR today receives and distributes information from those organizations, serving as the “nerve center” for the White House and National Security Council and its staff. Presidents and national security advisors still lead meetings, now in five conference rooms, where the hardest decisions get made. Over time, the size of the staff grows at times to over 100 officers, and the shifts thankfully become a more reasonable 12 hours!
Technological developments play a critical role in WHSR’s evolution. You’ll meet Gary Bresnahan, a technical innovator who rose from Air Force enlisted to Sit Room deputy director for systems and introduced leading-edge capabilities like secure video teleconferencing, email, voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) telephones that revolutionized crisis management and today still give our national leaders a decision advantage. You’ll also hear about an unusual mission Bresnahan performed at the specific request of President Bill Clinton, because he was someone the President felt he could trust.
You will also witness the patriotism of the men and women of the Sit Room when you read about their decision to stay in the White House on 9/11 despite an ordered evacuation out of fear the White House was a target. A Secret Service officer even asked them to write their names and Social Security numbers on a legal pad as a “dead list” in case they perished in a further attack.
You will also learn about the critical role the Sit Room duty officers play in connecting and memorializing telephone calls and video teleconferences the President has with foreign heads of state, as well as some of the techniques used to ensure the foreign leader is the one waiting for our President, and not the other way around! Sneak peek: you’ll have another reason not to like Vladimir Putin.
The book also provides compelling narratives and inside-the-room perspectives on several national security crises. You will agonize with President Lyndon Johnson as he monitors and micromanages the Vietnam War from the Sit Room, sometimes joining duty officers in the wee hours. Stephanopoulos describes how at a critical juncture during the Yom Kippur War, as the Russians threatened to intervene directly, Kissinger ordered an escalation of US military forces to DEFCON 3 without consulting with a drunk President Nixon. You’ll follow the moment-by-moment updates about the release of the US hostages in Iran provided to President Jimmy Carter by NSC officer Gary Sick from the Sit Room during President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. You will also join the Biden national security team as it learns of the terrorist bombing of Abbey Gate outside the Kabul airport and how that tragedy informed how it approached the impending invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
The book also describes the dysfunction in the NSC interagency process during the Trump administration, which included a dramatic decline in the use of the Situation Room. Sadly, Stephanopoulos relates one of the Situation Room’s darker days, when Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly used its conference room to fire Omarosa Newman, a member of the President’s Office of Public Liaison most famous for her participation as a competitor in Trump’s television game show, The Apprentice. Omarosa surreptitiously brought a recording device into this most secure environment and recorded the conversation, later making it public.
Lastly, Stephanopoulos makes a great case for the men and women who staff the Situation Room and the NSC, the expertise they provide national leaders, the apolitical way in which they do their work, and the continuity they afford across Presidential administrations. At a book preview I attended last week hosted by the current WSHR senior director, Stephanopoulos said that was a conclusion he was not expecting but the one that resonated most deeply for him.
The Situation Room makes for an easy read—I was able to whip through it in just a few days as I prepared this review. The episodic nature of its telling allows the reader to jump around in the book if they have a greater interest in one President or another without losing continuity. Stephanopoulos’s writing style is compelling: you will feel like you are in the room. I am grateful that someone with Stephanopoulos’s experiences and celebrity wrote the book. knowing in his telling a greater number of my fellow citizens will gain an appreciation for the institution.
The Situation Room earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats
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