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.
Related - Episodes
How is it that Donald Trump, who won the Presidency with racist rhetoric and a promise to build a wall along the southern border, has managed to make gains in the Latino community with each election cycle since 2016? Geraldo…
For months, the House Select Committee on January 6th has examined Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and cling to power. Roughly a thousand witnesses have been interviewed—including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Tens of…
Merrick Garland made his legal reputation as a temperate moderate dedicated to keeping politics out of the justice system. Yet in the past few years, he has found himself at the center of two of the most fiercely partisan episodes in…
