Friday, July 26, 2024

Books: "The Situation Room" By George Stephanopoulos

 



The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis

By George Stephanopoulos; with Lisa Dickey

Grand Central Publishing; hardcover, 368 pages; $35.00

George Stephanopoulos is a co-anchor of ABC's Good Morning America and the host of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. He garnered a lot of attention earlier this month for his interview with President Biden. He has been with ABC News since 1997 when he became an analyst for This Week, at that time hosted by Sam Donaldson. He made the transition to the media side of things after serving in the Clinton administration as the senior advisor to the president for policy and strategy.

While he was known for being part of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign War Room, which was made into a movie of the same name, in this engrossing new book, he writes about the White House's Situation Room.

It is secluded in the White House basement, and it is the place where twelve Presidents have made their highest-pressure decisions. It was created by President John F. Kennedy, and has been the epicenter of crisis management for over six decades. 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first to express a desire for a permanent White House crisis center, and while it only got as far a report while he was in office, it was Kennedy who saw the need for it after the Bay of Pigs and the Cold War was ramping up.

There is an incredible minute-by-minute transcript of what went on in there when President Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963, as well as when there was an attempt on President Ronald Reagan's life in March 1981.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was the first President to use it often, to the point he had a chair moved from the Oval Office down there so he would be more comfortable. The impetus for it was to get updates on the progress in the Vietnam War. In 1965, there also were numerous conversations recorded in the middle of the night, at 1:25 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 2:43 a.m., 3:27 a.m., 4:45 a.m., and 5:52 a.m. Most of the calls were right to the point about what was happening, including which aircraft returned to their carriers from missions in North Vietnam.

Stephanopoulos details many shocking moments, such as when Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon, raised the military alert level to DEFCON III while Nixon was drunk in the White House residence, and when President Jimmy Carter asked for help from secret government psychics to rescue American hostages in Iran.

There is also a vivid retelling of what went on there in the harrowing hours after the September 11th attacks. National Security Adviser Condi Rice was in the Situation Room complex when the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and she was asking NSC staff for updates from around the world. She went to a back room to make calls to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was in Peru, and CIA Director George Tenet, who was already in a bunker. At that time, she also was trying to reach Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when she saw a plane went into the Pentagon. While all this was unfolding, the Situation Room staff stayed at their posts, "managing the incoming," as Stephanopoulos termed it. That is just the tip of the iceberg of the gripping account he delivers of that horrific day.

Obama administration officials gave Stephanopoulos new information on the days leading up to the killing of Osama Bin Laden on May 1, 2011. President Barack Obama chaired five NSC meetings in the days leading up the raid. In addition, instead of the NSC gathering in the larger main conference room, everyone was crammed into the smaller Situation Room because there was an audiovisual link between the complex and teams in the field, as well as a live feed from Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Bin Laden was found. In the midst of it was the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which Stephanopoulos writes about attending and seeing White House officials shuffling in and out of all night, obvious that something massive was going on. 

The Situation Room was where  President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other officials gathered the next day as the mission was completed, with a well-known picture taken, and President Obama declared "We got him." The President remained in the Sit Room to call U.S. political leaders, international heads of state, and anyone he felt it necessary to hear the news, as he wanted them to hear it from them and not the news media.

Stephanopoulos also received the first-ever account of January 6, 2021, when supporters pf President Donald J. Trump stormed the U.S. Capital to prevent the certification of the election.

In this excerpt from the Prologue, Stephanopoulos writes about how it didn't take long for that day to feel abnormal, "Dawn had not yet broken when Mike Stiegler steered his blue Toyota Camry toward the White House on January 6, 2001. It was 4:20 a.m., and Stiegler was arriving early for his twelve-hour shift as a desk officer in the White House Situation Room.

Normally at this hour, downtown Washington, D.C., was deserted, its monuments and office buildings silent under the black night sky. But when Stiegler stepped out of his car, he sensed something strange. 'All these people on the street that you don't normally see, and a bunch of cars parked,' he told me. 'I've tried to describe this many times to many people, but it just felt different.'

That afternoon, Congress was scheduled to certify the election of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States. But the incumbent he defeated was doing everything he could to block the transfer of power. Thousands of his followers had come to Washington at his request to stop the certification, and no one knew for sure how the day would play out. The Situation Room staff was on alert, monitoring events, synthesizing public information and private intelligence, and preparing to report to the president - as they did with all crises, domestic or foreign, that might require his attention. But on this day, they never called him. He didn't call them. The president himself was the cause of the crisis.

This doesn't feel right, Stiegler thought as he began his shift. An intelligence analyst in this thirties, he had been thrilled in the summer of 2019 to get the call to serve in the Situation Room - a plum assignment for any intelligence professional. In the eighteen months since then, 'I witnessed two impeachments. I went through Covid. I went through the Black Lives Matter protests and the riots,' he told me. 'It was just one thing after another.' Now, as the sun rose, he steeled himself for what might come.

All morning, protesters flocked to the Ellipse, the grassy oval expanse just south of the White House. At noon, President Donald Trump stood in front of his edgy and excited supporters and called on Vice President Mike Pence to send the vote back to the streets. He claimed that 'radical-left Democrats' had stolen the election. He urged the crowd to 'fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.' And then he told them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol.

Trump wanted to join them, but his Secret Service detail refused to take him, because pandemonium had erupted on the Capitol grounds. Protestors stormed police barriers, attacking multiple officers. 'We have been flanked, and we've lost the line!' shouted D.C. police commander Robert Glover as the mob surged forward, smashing windows and flooding into the building. Secret Service agents hustled Vice President Pence to a secure location, and lawmakers huddled in terror as mobs charged the hallways, breaching the U.S. Senate chamber. Rioters emptied cabinets and upended furniture. Gunshots echoed through the hallowed corridors in the 228-year-old seat of our nation's legislature.

Back in the Oval Office, President Trump sipped Diet Coke as he watched the spectacle on television. Aides and allies implored him to condemn the riot and call off the mob. Instead, at 2:24, with the violence raging, he sent out a tweet calling out Mike Pence for lacking 'the courage to do what should have been done.'

With reports coming in from the Secret Service and other officials on Capitol Hill, the Situation Room scrambled into action. 'Things got very chaotic,' Stiegler told me. 'We went into a continuity-of-government situation.'

Stop there. Take that phrase in: 'Continuity-of-government situation.' That bland bit of bureaucratic jargon masks a deadly serious set of policies and actions first ordered by President Eisenhower at the height of the Cold War. 'COG' was designed to ensure the government would still function after a disaster such as nuclear war. It involves secret command centers - the Sit Room being a critical one - elaborate chains of command, the relocation of Congress and the replacement of executive branch officials killed in attacks. It had been activated only once before, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The situation was 'surreal,' said Stiegler. But he was wary of disclosing more. 'I have to be careful,' he told me. 'I have been giving a lot of testimony, and I don't know where the lines quite are.' I ventured that one of his points of contact must have been the Secret Service. He paused, then said, 'That's fair.' Which meant that he was getting real-time updates directly from the chaos in the Capitol building, as the mobs surged through the halls.

The most harrowing part?

'How close we came to losing the Vice President,' he told me. He paused, then looked up at the ceiling, struggling to compose himself. 'The screams, the yelling. The different things that we heard that day.' Stiegler is a young man with a cheerful disposition, but when he talked about January 6 he seemed to age before my eyes.

'It was horrific,' he said quietly. 'There's a group of us that were on duty that day, and we don't know how to process it still... We don't know how to talk about it. And we don't know who to talk about it with. There are a lot of things we witnessed that day that we can't talk about. And how do we deal with that?'

In the six decades since the creation of the Situation Room, it has been the crisis center during America's catastrophes. The men and women of the Sit Room have dealt with nuclear scares, the assassination of a president and attempts on two others. They stayed at their posts on 9/11, when the White House itself was the target of terrorists. And they tracked and analyzed American wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions upon billions of dollars. But never before had they dealt with an insurrection against our own government, inspired by the president of the United States.

If the election certification hadn't gone through, Stiegler told me, 'I think we would have possibly seen an institution just crack, crumble. I think a lot of us would have walked out.' These staffers serve the person who lives in the White House, but they work for the presidency, not the president. 'Your allegiance to your country supercedes your allegiance to your role,' said Stiegler. Those dueling loyalties had never been tested like this."




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