And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

Had a really fun chat last weekend with George Stephanopoulos at the Chicago Humanities Festival. We spoke about life in the White House and his excellent new book, "The Situation Room," which is chock filled with great new stories about presidents and times of challenge and crisis. I enjoyed the conversation. I hope you will, too. And here it is. And you got a lot of fans. It's a big room.

Yeah, it's Chicago, it's for you.

Thank you. Those are my two. Welcome to Chicago.

Great to be back.

The convention city. God help us. George, we've known each other for a long time. I remember. I actually remember the first time I saw you. You were a kid.

The Navy pier.

With, thick glasses and thick hair, which you still have, which I deeply resent. But the thing that I remember is you were carrying a raft of papers and trailing behind Bill Clinton. And I know that in those papers were policy stuff. And you have always been, like, someone who understood the intersection between policy and politics and thought politics had meaning. And so this book kind of reflects who you are.

That's's very kind. But before you go on with that, I should say that I actually owe it to David Axelrod that I'm here today. Because what he didn't just say there is that this was the very beginning of the Clinton campaign. Is that when I just started getting in on the ground floor of the campaign, probably a couple of weeks later, you were offered a big job in the campaign. And had you taken it, I would not have had the chance to grow into the job I had. So thank you very much.

It was all my plan, George. No one, no one could do the things that you've done as well as you've done them. I really believe that. But. But I want, I want. This is really, if you love history, this is a great book. And if you've ever worked in the White House, it's an even better book. The Situation Room. It's not about Wolf Blitzer. It's actually about the, but, would, explain how and why you decided to write this book.

'I've been wanting to do another book for a long time. I wrote my first book, "All Too Human," coming out of the Clinton White House. And the truth was and part of it was, you know, I'm I'm fairly busy, but, I never came upon the idea that I felt I could bring something new to it and I felt I could do it well enough that it would be a book I'd want to read. And a couple of years ago, some people came to me and said, how about the Situation Room? And as soon as I heard it, I knew it could be a vehicle for a really interesting book, because the Situation Room is the nerve center of the White House. Telling the story of the Situation Room, created by John F Kennedy through President Biden would be a way to tell the story of the last 60 years, one way, to tell the story of the last 60 years in American politics and the way the presidents dealt with crises during that time. What I didn't realize when I started and what I've taken away since then, is it would also give me the opportunity to meet a generation of people who have been serving their country so well for so long. I did about 100 interviews for the book and my favorite interviews, several dozen of them, were were these White House duty officers who served in the Situation Room. They're the best of the best. They come from all across the government. CIA, DEA, NSA, State Department, Homeland Security, Pentagon, every branch of the military. And for most of them, this is the opportunity of a lifetime, the opportunity to come to the White House on the front lines of the highest pressure situations and serve not the president, because they are the most apolitical people you'll ever meet, but to serve the presidency and to serve their country. You know, in the last few years, we've heard a lot about the so-called deep state. These people are the deep state. And what I learned.

Don't tell them.

No. What I learned is the deep state is packed with patriots who go to work and serve their country every day.

Yes. Before we get into it, I also, we do share this experience of having worked in the White House. I think we had the same office in the White House.

We did. It's a tiny little office, but it's in a very good neighborhood.

Good real estate. Good real estate.

It's actually connected to the Oval Office, so it's pretty great.

But I'm sure. I know yo,. And I know that you felt what I felt. Every single day that I walked into that building, whether it was a bad day or a good day, I thought two things. One is, this is an awesome, awesome privilege to be here. And the second is, I'm going to learn something today that I never would have learned before.

Well, there's a third thing. And the third thing is there's a chance, a chance that no matter how hard today is, I'm going to have the chance to be part of some decision or some action that is going to change people's lives. And it's just incredible. You know, I had the chance to go back to the White House last week, to speak with the White House Situation Room Alumni Association. But at the time I stopped in and met with Jeff Zients, the president's chief of staff, as well. And listen, I wrote about it when I was there. I had a lot of hard times in the White House. It's a high pressure situation. I was probably too young in some ways to handle the pressure.

Hence All Too Human.

Hence All Too Human. But every single day you learn something. You have the chance at these staff meetings and the chief of staff's office to be surrounded by the smartest people you'll ever work with, getting all the information you could possibly want at any time, and having the chance to deliberate what to do about it. What a gift. I mean, it's just such a privilege.

You once said to me along the way, you were already a TV star, that you would go back to the White House. You would work in the White House again. That was unusual to me, because a lot of people that I know, I mean, there are lifers. Our friend Gene Sperling and others who go back and like Talleyrand generation after generation. But it's so hard. And I thought, I don't know, I think it's greatest job I ever had. Never do it again.

'Well, I, I guess now to the point where I never will do it. But the one part of me. I went into the White House when I guess I was 31. I always envied, you know, when I was in the White House, Bob Rubin was the head of the National Economic Council, and he was the, then went on to become Treasury secretary. And watching him, he was probably my age now then, when he was at the White House. And watching someone who came into the White House with independent stature, he'd been the co-CEO of Goldman Sachs, didn't need the job, but wanted the job and wanted to serve his country. And having the chance, I think, to serve at a different time of life when you have that kind of independent stature, when you have nothing to lose, you know, when you're a relative kid, you're certain that any moment you're going to lose the job and you can convince yourself in the craziness of the moment that you're going to go from being in the office to the president to being homeless out on the street if things go, go badly.

A little extreme, but I get it.

Yeah, but but yeah, you, you you can you can spin out and watching someone handle the job in a very different way with that kind of independence, you know, I think would be a different experience, but an interesting one.

To your point before, and I've said this on my podcast before, but the night that the Affordable Care Act passed, it meant so much to me because I have a child with a chronic illness, went through all the horror of being stuck in a health care system that wouldn't allow someone with a preexisting condition to get the coverage that she needed, and so on. And I wept the night that passed. I wept. I went into my, our old office, closed the door, heard them cheering next door because the bill had passed, and I wept. And I went and saw the president, cleaned myself up, and went and saw the president. And I said, I want to thank you on behalf of my family and all the families like mine who won't have to go through what.

And how about a decade later, knowing how many people it has saved.

It's it is it is humbling when you meet people and realize you had a small part in doing something that was so meaningful. But I said to the president that night what I said, and he just put his hand on my shoulder, he said, that's why we do the work.

Exactly.

And I, I, you know, so. Let's talk about let's talk about the stories that you share in this book and talk a little bit about the Situation Room, because you would think that in the modern era that it's a no brainer that there'd be a situation room. But you describe the fact that it took the Bay of Pigs to alert John F Kennedy to the fact that, I need a nerve center here. I need to know what's happening.

President's had had war rooms before. I mean, FDR famously used the Map Room where he set up his war room in the White House. But they were always dismantled after whatever war we were in was it was completed. John F Kennedy came into office. In the first few months, he has the Bay of Pigs disaster, and he was really pissed off about how it went down. He publicly took responsibility, which was a brilliant move to completely take responsibility, not blame anybody for it. But privately, he was absolutely fuming. He felt that he had been misled by the CIA. He felt he had been misled by the Joint Chiefs, and he wanted his own information flow of intelligence and public information to come into the White House, because he knew that kind of information would be a source of his power.

And that experience, ultimately, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, led him to take a much different approach.

Even though he didn't use the Situation Room for that, he was using the information coming through the Situation Room for that. I, you know, interestingly, the he had actually had the proposal come to him two weeks before the Bay of Pigs. One of the people we we came across in our research is a larger than life figure named Godfrey McHugh. They called him God. His actualy nickname was God.

Which is good if you can get it.

Which is not bad if you can get it. And he was an amazing character. He was, he was an Air Force general. He spoke English with a French accent because he grew up in Paris, the son of an American industrialist. And he's one of these people that come along, I guess, once in a generation who just seemed to know everybody. As a teenager, he had dined with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the White House. He sailed on Harry Truman's yacht in his 20s. He dated Jackie Kennedy before John Kennedy married her, and he was very close to John Kennedy. He Was one of his. He was the military aide, but he was kind of his personal aide as well. And in fact, Godfrey McHugh actually sent a paper, a memorandum, into John F Kennedy two weeks before the Bay of Pigs, which we believe is the first time the term Situation Room was ever used. Set up a watch center in the White House to fight the Cold War, so you have independent flows of information. Kennedy acted on it after the Bay of Pigs. They ended up building it very quickly. $30,000, two weeks. It was not much to look at. It was down in the White House basement. Low ceilings, lots of smoke. Kennedy ended up, ironically, not going down there all that much. He called it a pigpen and didn't want to go down, but he did use the information that came through it.

One of the things that was so poignant that you describe in the book is that it was through the Situation Room that information was being transmitted to a plane on which Pierre Salinger, the president's press secretary, was traveling to Asia with a group.

A group of cabinet officials. Yeah. And we were able to to come across the tapes, and in the audio book you actually hear the tapes and even now.

Around the assassination.

Around the assassination. Even now, all these years later, it still breaks your heart when you hear Oliver Hallett in his very monotone, airline pilot like voice call the plane, Air Force One. Ask for Air Force One. Ask for Pierre Salinger and give him the news that the president has been shot. Over. You know, five minutes later, a little more information. He's been hit in the head. Connally was hit as well. Serious situation. Over. And then finally, 5 or 10 minutes later, they call back with the news that 35 minutes ago, President Kennedy died. And even in it's even in that sanitized language that people use on phone lines like that, all of the import, all the consequences of that day, you could hear it in their voices.

Yeah. I mean, I couldn't help but think. And you must have, too. We've experienced traveling with the president through a campaign, working for them in the White House, young presidents, young, vibrant presidents. I just couldn't help thinking about what Salinger must have been. What must have felt.

Absolute shock. Absolute shock. And Godfrey McHugh, who ended up, he was in the, the plane with Jackie that day. And she had him, you know, she had to go up to the front of the plane for when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in, and she asked Godfrey McHugh to stay back with the casket of Kennedy.

Didn't want to leave it alone, in his casket alone.

Didn't want to leave him alone. Yeah.

Lyndon Johnson then. She went to the front of the plane to watch Lyndon Johnson get sworn in as president. He had an obsessive relationship with the Situation Room because of the war in Vietnam. Talk about that.

Constant. I mean, had he been president for eight years, he would have probably spent more time in the Situation Room than any other president. I think that President Biden will beat it because he's got four, eight years as vice president and at least four as president. But he was obsessed. He moved his favorite chair down from the Oval Office down to the Situation Room. He was calling the Situation Room. We include these tapes as well in the audio book in the transcripts, in the book, almost every night through 1965, late into the night, looking for any scrap of information from the duty officers about combat, about battle plans, about casualties. And as you're listening to these tapes, many years later, knowing what was happening in Vietnam, if Kennedy believed information is power, and it is, one of the things you learn from Johnson is that information isn't necessarily insight. You know, all that data he was getting was never going to tell him how to win the war. It was an unwinnable war, and deep down he really knew it. But because of his experience in the Senate, because of the way he had come up in politics for for Johnson, you know, the telephone was his best friend and it's been his biggest political tool. He had 72 phones at his ranch in Texas. He had phones in every other room of the White House. He taped a lot of these phone calls. For him, that was the way he got stuff done. But in Vietnam, it shows that even though it worked so masterfully for him and its domestic agenda, like in that same year, in 1965, he passed more legislation than any president could pass.

Amazing.

But that tool did not work to win a war.

Yeah, made him a tragic figure.

Very tragic.

One other vignette about that period I loved as an old reporter was the Helen Thomas story that you. Because we're building up the Situation Room to be the all knowing, all seeing, you know, eyes and ears of the president.

And she, and Helen Thomas, the famous UPI reporter. Remember Helen Thomas? She's about this tall.

She's got three people here, too.

Boy, she used to give me a hard time, but I loved her. I loved her, and she. Tom Johnson, who was a press aide to Lyndon Johnson, I interviewed him for the book. He tells the story about he was home in Alexandria, Virginia, and she got the word the war had broken out. And he said, no, no, we haven't heard anything like that. And then he calls back the Situation Room. And it turns out that Helen Thomas did break the news. She was five minutes ahead of the White House Situation Room.

Yeah, that's a phenomenal. Did anybody ever find out how? Didn't want to betray her sources?

Well, no. She you know, she was part of UPI. They had people all over the world.

Yeah, yeah. So, one of those sort of chilling but fascinating episodes in this, chapters in this book, has to do with Richard Nixon and the Yom Kippur War.

First Yom Kippur war, right.

Yes, yes, the first Yom Kippur War, sadly. And you, you you can set it up. But he was going through a terrible. He was at the end of this.

This is October. It's October 1973. And Nixon is. He's going to last in office for several more months, but he's starting to spiral downward. And that month alone, Agnew resigned. The tapes were released. They started drafting articles of impeachment. The famous Saturday night massacre where we got rid of the entire top level of the Justice Department. As that's happening, Israel is attacked in the Yom Kippur War, and the Soviet Union starts to.

You know, let me ask you a question, now that you mention it. I don't think you covered this. Do you think that was an impetus for the attack that America was?

I don't, I think.

Weak and distracted?

I think it was the impetus for Russia, Soviet Union trying to take advantage of the moment. And we actually include Kissinger and Haig talking about that, Kissinger saying, why? Why wouldn't they go in now with a cripple in the White House? But I don't think that was the reason for Egypt to attack. You know, it was there was a great analogy to what happened just this past October. The intelligence was actually there. People, there were indications that Egypt was preparing for attack, but neither the Israelis nor the United States actually believed they were going to go, they were going to go through with it.

One of the reasons Golda Meir was dispatched after the war as prime minister.

Exactly.

Maybe that will happen again.

We will. We'll see. But at this moment, Nixon starts to lose control of himself. He he hardly ever went to the Situation Room anyway. And at this point, he's not even going to the Oval Office. He's spending most of his time up in his hideaway office in the old executive office building, drinking Ballantine Scotch. No. Seriously. And and listening to Victory at Sea. He's. He's holing up.

That's where he met Elvis.

Exactly. And meantime, Henry Kissinger is managing this war. And one of, what we describe in the book is this episode where Kissinger basically on his own raised the nuclear alert level to Defcon three, which is two steps from war, which had never been done. It had only been done once before in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It turned out to have worked. And, you know, Kissinger had an extraordinary amount of confidence in himself as well. But the idea that someone would do this.

Even thought he was going to live to 100.

It turned out. What we also found out, what has been revealed since then is that not only was Nixon drunk, unconscious, you know, and out of control up in the old Executive Office building, but Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, was at his dacha outside of Moscow during the same period, drunk and passed out on vodka and sleeping pills. So you have this massive game of superpower chicken, and neither leader is in charge.

Yeah. Both in command of nuclear arsenals.

Yes.

Yeah, it's funny, but it's chilling.

It's chilling. Yeah, yeah.

It's also amazing, honestly.

I think we're probably happy that neither one of them, given the state they were in.

Yes, exactly. No. Exactly. Yeah. Have another drink, Mr. President. Yeah, but. But it's all it is phenomenal that Henry Kissinger arrogated to himself the powers that he did there.

And it hasn't happened since.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now back to the show. I want to skip ahead to Jimmy Carter, because it's a prelude to a later episode that I'm a little more familiar with. But I mean, I remember and we all remember the disastrous, mission to try and free the Iranian, the hostages in Iran. Talk about that and what what happened, what transpired? You know, there's a weird wrinkle to it.

Yeah. This is a reporter story. David is a, you know, legendary reporter before he became a political analyst. And for me, this was my, most fun reporting experience. As we were doing the preliminary research for the book, we were going through presidential memoirs and diaries and things like that, and we were trying to figure out. We knew, because it was the most consequential episode in the Carter presidency, we would do the Iran hostage crisis. But we didn't have the angle. And I came upon one line in the Carter Diary from May 8th, 1980, and said, we had a meeting in this situation room on parapsychology, longitude, latitude, etc.. Now, I saw parapsychology in the Situation Room and, you know, I said, well, yeah, there's there's a story here. But we could not find anything written about it anywhere. And we went down to the presidential library, the Carter Presidential Library. There were no memos filed about the meeting. No one had any information with the exception of someone just told us that, you know, you might want to talk to the president's naval aide at the time, Jake Stewart. So I start writing Jake Stewart letters, sending him emails, calling him. He was very reluctant to talk. He, asked questions back to me. I sent question, I sent the answers back to him. Finally, after about 35 days of coaxing, he agreed to do a zoom with me and my team. And for me. And you've had a million of them. But for me, it was just the most fun reporters moment. He got up on the zoom. He's about 85 years old now, and I pull out the line from the diary and said, can you tell us about this meeting? And he just he leaned back, and this was a guy who had been ghosting me for a month. He leaned back, got a big smile on his face and said, so you found out about that? And he proceeded to tell the story, which is amazing. To set the scene. This is May 8th, 1980. This is two weeks after the failed rescue mission in the desert. Reagan is starting to come on against Carter. His career, his presidency has been crippled by this disaster. The economy is flatlining. Jimmy Carter is desperate, so he calls Jake Stewart into a meeting in the Situation Room, along with the first lady, Rosalynn Carter, which was something also very unusual. We couldn't find any other example other of a Situation Room meeting with the first lady participated. Lady Bird Johnson, who once brought scrambled eggs down for for a meeting. And of course, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton participated later, but we couldn't find any there incidences of a the first lady there. And why they called Jake Stewart in, because he had become the White House expert in a project called Operation Grill Flame. Operation Grill Flame was a program run by the CIA and the DIA in the 1970s and 1980s, where they actually spent millions of dollars on psychics, literally psychics, people who would go sit in dark rooms and try to imagine what was happening around the world at any moment. They had some, the proponents of the plan of the program said that they had some successes. One of the stories told was of one of these remote viewers who, on the day the helicopters went down in the desert, had been doing a remote viewing, I think, at Fort Meade in Maryland. And all of a sudden, she said, she imagined explosions and she broke down in tears and couldn't go on any longer. And they say that she believed she had seen something like that. Regardless.

Could have been something she ate.

Right? Regardless of whether you were a what you think about the program now, at the time, it was being taken seriously, and President Carter was so desperate that he was taking seriously. He went through this entire briefing. At the end of 45, 50 minutes, he hadn't said a word. He didn't say a word. He took out his notepad. Wrote one word on it. I guess, you can probably guess what the word was. Hostages. Can you do anything? And he sent Jake Stewart out, who spent the next couple of months putting the psychics on this case because the hostages had been dispersed. They say that they believe the remote viewers helped identify where one of the hostages, Richard Queen, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis, was, was located. And he was actually released early. But of course, the rest of the hostages were not released until Ronald Reagan took the oath of office on January 20th as the Iranians had one more chance to stick it to Jimmy Carter. And they did.

Yeah. The stories are also compellingly told of that disastrous mission and that, as you point out, would haunt some of the participants.

Haunt and inform. I mean, one of the things that I liked most about doing the book is learning about how administrations go to school on one another, and there's no better example of how an entire generation of national security professionals, but then, of course, the Obama administration went to school on the failed Desert One mission as they were preparing to take out Osama bin laden. You have people like Robert Gates, who was a CIA analyst during the Carter administration, had been very scarred by the Desert One experience. And he actually went to President Obama when he was serving as secretary of defense. Because of the senior officials on his team, he was probably the most reluctant to approve of the rescue mission in the first round of, in the Situation Room. He he said he was against it.

Because, as many of you may remember or have read, the Carter mission ended in catastrophe in the desert when helicopters failed in, you know, confronted climate issues that downed them.

And the man who planned the takedown of Osama bin laden, Admiral William McRaven, went to school on that, and through his whole career had been studying that failed mission. And he knew exactly the mistakes he was going to avoid. He wanted to make sure there's communications, constant communication between the people on the mission and mission control. He wanted to make sure they had, and we have better tools for this now that they had, complete control over the timing to deal with any weather problems. He wanted to make sure they had plenty of backup helicopters, which led to the most heartstopping moment of the Osama bin lade, raid. And as they're all sitting in that room watching it happen, sure enough, one of the helicopters goes down, a hard landing. And I know you had left the White House by that point, but imagine, imagine being in the White House, being part of that team after the presidents approve this, being steeped in the history of the Carter administration, and hearing a helicopter has gone down. Thinking that's going to bring down the Obama presidency.

Yes. I mean, this was the spring of 2011. The presidents fortunes didn't look great at that point. So talk about in that context, talk about the decision that he made, because this does underscore the incredible weight of that office and the consequential decisions that only the president of the United States can make, unless they're loaded and upstairs and their secretary of staet is usurping their authority.

'Well, generally, I mean, almost almost. So it's a rule, basically. If if the president is in a decision making meeting in the Situation Room, that means that no one else could solve it, right? I mean, you know, because that's actually the day to day work of so many of the deputies in the Situation Room is to have people from all parts of the government meet and grind through problems and solve them before they get to the president. If it makes it up to the president's level, it means it's at best a 60-40 decision, often much worse than that. You're almost always dealing with not necessarily good options, but which options are the least worse or the least risky possible options. And, you know, they had spent months trying to determine whether or not this gentleman, the pacer they had seen in Abbottabad, Pakistan, this very tall man who they only knew was pacing on the rooftop of this huge compound in the suburbs of Islamabad, whether it was Osama bin laden. And the best they could come up with, even right before the final meeting was, you know, one team thought it was about 40%, one thought it may have been 60%. The president finally said, listen, guys, this is just a 50-50 decision. That is as good as it's going to get. That isn't, you know, not very good odds when you're risking your entire presidency on that decision. But, you know, and I write this in the book, I think the two best examples of the way the Situation Room worked at the highest levels and presidential administrations worked at highest levels were President Obama and his team during that crisis, and President George H.W. Bush and his team during the first desert war and also managing the entire fall of the Berlin Wall, revolutions sweeping across Europe at the time, because of the way they were decisive, but also always open to hearing every possible point of view on an issue, stress testing it beyond any measure. And then finally just making the call, which is what presidents are paid to do.

As I told you, I was in the white House on April 30th.

The day before.

2011, the day before the bin laden mission. I didn't know. We were, I was here for the White House Correspondents Dinner, and I worked with the speechwriters on jokes. And the president invited me to lunch in his, you know, the little dining room there. And, he had just been down to Cape Canaveral to see Mark Kelly, then an astronaut.

And he'd already made the decision.

To take off. He had already made the decision. But he wanted to keep his schedule completely. Talked about seeing Gabby Giffords, Kelly's wife, who the last time he had seen, he'd come back from her assassination, the assassination attempt and thinking that she was never going to recover, that she might, that she wouldn't survive. And he was so buoyant about havingm how cheered he was by seeing. A completely normal conversation. And then a guy came in from the NSC saying, Mr. President, can I speak with you? I'd left the White House to go back to Chicago to work on the campaign. And I left, and I came back in, and then we went over the jokes. One of the jokes was a joke about Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, who was running at that time. And the joke was. And It was really a joke about Obama. It was, you know, Tim Pawlenty, he's so promising. But he'll never get elected with that middle name, bin laden. So, he gets to that joke and he says, oh, bin laden, bin laden. That's so yesterday. And we're like, yesterday? What are you talking about? And then the next night, I was at the end of these the. And that was, by the way, the White House Correspondents Dinner, in which Obama made sport of Donald Trump, which was fun.

I only found out about the jokes later, but, I was at that White House Correspondents Dinner as well with Bill Daley, who was the chief of staff at the time, and Tom Donilon, who is national security adviser. And I had a direct line on Trump at the table right across. So that was the fun part. But what was happening during that entire dinner is that Daley was never got off his phone. Tom Donilon was popping up and down the whole night and and my wife was sitting between them. My wife is, you know, really fun, really funny, really pretty. She's a good dinner partner. And they were being so rude. And she finally called Bill Daley out and said, well, come on, put your phone away. Talk to me. And he just said, something's going on. And Eric Stonestreet, one of the stars of Modern Family, was also at the table. That's the White House Correspondents Dinner in a nutshell right there, by the way. And he's complaining. He can't get off the topic. He's complaining about how his tour of the White House the next day had been canceled. And he's really, really upset about it. And Bill Daley mutters something about the plumbing being broken or whatever. So we kind of knew something was going on, but not until 24 hours later.

I went to sleep early the next night and my wife woke me up, said you better get up. I think something's going on. And I looked at my phone and all these messages from the White House. Turn on your TV, turn on your TV. And the president announces this. And I thought back to the day before, and I thought, wow, that was quite something.

Didn't give anything away.

Didn't give anything away, not anything. So, it takes a special quality to do the hardest job on the planet. And, he certainly showed it there. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now, back to the show. How? I want to move forward to the two guys who are now, two presidents, who are now contending for the, the the presidency. And I want to start with, actually Joe Biden, because there are a couple of relevant stories here that you tell. One is of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I think just as a, from an analytical standpoint, I think if you look at sort of his the arc of his polling and so on, that that was a watershed event.

Well, it was the worst day of the Biden presidency. I think, to this day, it probably still is. You know, President Biden, going back to his time with with President Obama as vice president, had been advocating for pulling out of Afghanistan for years. And his hands, by the time he became president, Donald Trump had already made the deal for for that. So so it was going to happen regardless. But that summer, they were preparing, starting to prepare for the withdrawal, but just simply not doing it well enough. And it led to that horrible disaster at the at the Kabul gates, when, when so many American service people were killed by the suicide bomber. And we tell the story of being in the Situation Room at that moment and getting the reports that were getting worse and worse and worse with each passing 20 minutes. And what made it even worse than that is that several weeks before I had done one interview with the president where he was just insisting, this is going to be nothing like, you know, the withdrawal from Vietnam, the helicopters. And it turned out to, in some ways be their worst nightmare.

Right, right. But then you write about how Ukraine was handled.

They learned the lessons from Ukraine. And they, they they spent months, they set up what is called a Tiger Team, to, to work through every possible scenario of what could happen when the Russians went in, which was being telegraphed in plain sight. But he and one of the things that the team decided to do, was a pretty unusual move, was to preemptively release all this intelligence about how the Russians were going in so that either it would deter the Russians from doing it, or they wouldn't be able to have the deniability that they had when they went into Crimea in 2014. And that turned out to be a shrewd move.

It did. The question, the Ukrainians, it was interesting at that time.

That they didn't believe it.

They didn't believe it.

Zelensky didn't believe it, didn't want to believe it.

And he was worried that it would hurt his economy if this rumor, what he considered to be a rumor, persisted. But, so let's turn to Donald Trump. They've been waiting for it. I mean, he gets. What's interesting about your book is it's sequential, except for I guess the forward is where you, you write about the people in the Situation Room the day of the insurrection, January 6th, 2021. Talk a little bit about that, because it was almost unthinkable. They could not communicate with the commander in chief.

They could. He wouldn't. I mean, I, I open the book with this, this, incident for reason one, there's someone else who's also quite reluctant to speak, but. Came upon a man named Mike Stiegler, who is just as impressive a young man as you want to meet. In his late 30s right now, an intelligence analyst. It had been on his bucket list for his entire life to work in the White House. And he got the call to start in the summer of 2020, which he later said, be careful what you wish for. But he was on duty on January 6th, and he said from the minute he started to walk in, drive into work at around 4 a.m. that day, he knew something was off. But then he proceeded to tell the story of what it was like as, you know, the noon hour approached and the Capitol was breached, and he was the officer who was in direct contact with the Secret Service and others on Capitol Hill who were dealing with the chaos and who were dealing with Vice President Mike Pence at that time. And I asked him, what's the most harrowing part of that day? And he said, you know, his his whole face fell, his voice got very soft. And he said, how close we came to losing the vice president. So he's in contact with the Secret Service, who they believe is, who they believe the vice president could be getting murdered at any moment. Because of that, they are starting to implement what is called the continuity of government orders. And for context, you have to understand what the continuity of government orders are. These were ordered by Dwight Eisenhower at the height of the Cold War to figure out how the United States government would survive a nuclear attack. Setting up separate Situation Rooms. Setting up separate command centers. Dealing with the line of succession. And in the course of the 60 plus years of the Situation Room, they had dealt with assassinations. They had dealt with scares of nuclear attacks. They had dealt with the terror attacks of 911. They had dealt with attempted assassination. They had dealt with three wars, including the longest war in American history. But on this day, Mike Stiegler and the duty officers in the room are dealing with an insurrection against our own government, inspired by the man who's sitting upstairs in a study off the Oval Office, sipping Diet Coke and kind of cheering everybody on on TV and sending out tweets attacking Mike Pence. It's an unimaginable situation, absolutely unimaginable. And not once, I asked Mike Siegler this many times. Not once on that day did Donald Trump call down and say, what's happening down on the Capitol? What's going on with my vice president? What can I do to stop this? I mean, we've all learned that since then, but think how used to that we've all gotten. That fact alone is disqualifying. Should be, you would believe.

So, George. You have famously made a decision on your Sunday show "This Week: that you would not interview people who deny the results of the last election and so on.

Yeah. And if they come on, if someone has endorsed the former president, I then, the first question is always about the lies in the last election. How do you how do you square that with endorsing again? You know, but think about that. More and more of them, even those who were quite critical on January 6th, even some who, you know, they they did not vote to convict him. It could have all ended on that day. But it is it is astonishing to me. And it sounds as, it kind of, it says a lot about where our society is right now, but that the fiction, the lie that the election was somehow illegitimate, could have taken hold now with, what, 60, 70%.

Of Republican.

Of Republican voters and you have a whole series of elected officials who certainly know better, who now decide to come on and either say it's not important or it didn't happen and will not even pledge to accept the results of the next election.

And yet, I think if you ask a lot of people in politics, they would say if the election were held today, he would be president again.

What does that say about our system?

Well, I'm I'm asking the question.

You know, I know I've obviously thought a lot about it. Struggle with all this. Listen, we. I've. I worked in politics. I worked on Capitol Hill. I worked in the White House. I've covered all the presidents since President Clinton. I've done a Sunday morning show since 1997 where the whole idea of that show is to bring people from both parties together, have a civil discussion so people can make up their minds based on the facts. That's not what's happening right now.

So there's a there's someone here, someone named Neil Warner who asked, who sent a question, and it was, can the media, you're not platforming these election deniers. Can the media apply a similar strategy in its coverage of Donald Trump, or does his candidacy for president make that impractical?

Everyone in the media is is is struggling with this. For me, and I've said this on my on my program, I think it's important to provide the context. I mean, we've never not once before in American history have we had a president indicted or impeached for trying to overturn election, not once, not once in our have we had a president who refuses to accept the results of the next election. That's before we get to all of the other legal issues, all the other civil suits, everything else. Just focus on that right there. Right. And I think what our job is to not lose sight of that, because the peaceful transfer of power is fundamental.

Fundamental, yes. But so too is covering a major party candidate who could be the next president.

And I just think what we have to make sure is that we don't equate trying to overturn an election with tax policy. You can't pretend they're just, they exist on the same level. You have to cover it all. I agree with all that. But within, especially when you, when you have limited time, I think you have to make sure you're putting things in context and emphasizing the priority of the various issues.

I. Maybe I, I don't know if you answered the question, why do you think that he is in the position that he's in?

Oh, a million reasons.

Give me the top hundred.

We've become ever more polarized. This has been going on for probably 30, 40 years. It's been getting progressively worse every year. So people are locked into their positions and and simply process information through a partisan prism. I think that's part of it right there. Then you add to that that people now increasingly receive information only in ways that reinforce what they already believe. I mean, I guarantee there are people if, when I question a Republican officeholder about the election, I know that 20, 30% of the country, if they were watching that day would say, I'm the one who's lying and firmly believe it, you know? And so I think that's a real problem. I think the third and, it is the way that Republican officeholders have become enablers of this behavior, even those the ones that know better.

So, let's let's stipulate these things. It's also true that people are very jaundiced about the direction of the country.

And don't mind somebody coming in to blow it all up.

Well, I mean, yes, that these are the kinds of environments in which the self proclaimed strongman, and we've seen it elsewhere in the world, and concerns about Biden. And his presentation.

His. No question. He an, He's an old man. That that's a that's a fact. Inflation, even though it's been getting better, is is a fact and people are.

And it's cumulative.

And it's, and it's cumulative, as well. And you're also dealing with the fact that most, you know, whole elections can be fought over who actually gets out and votes. But you know this, I mean, most people have already made up their minds. And this election is going to be fought over, what, half a million people in six states, at most.

The but the concern is, of course, in those from a Biden standpoint is right now those states.

He's behind.

Right. Yeah. So what will what do you think will prove decisive in this election?

You and I agree on this. Never make any predictions anymore. Who knows?

I was thinking I could trick you into it.

I think on the margins, the trial in Manhattan will matter. I think a conviction will probably take a couple points from Donald Trump. A hung jury could really help him in the short run.

Oh for sure.

Yeah.

In fact, I think a hung jury may have more of an impact than a conviction at this time because so much is baked in the cake.

Well, yeah. Yeah, I think that I think that's probably true. I think the debates, if they happen, will have could have a significant impact. I guess the other thing I'm wondering about. I mean, obviously, if either one of them had a health incident between now and the election, that would have a huge, huge impact. I think watching how if the, on the margins, if the inflation numbers improve in the coming months, as much as they seem to have improved last month, that probably helps Biden to some to some degree.

Well, I think the other thing that you've left out in it, it probably is the appropriate place to end, is we don't know what's going to happen in the world. And presidential campaigns often turn on things that you don't even know are going to happen. We've got two wars going. We don't know what's going to happen there. There are other things that can happen in the world. There are natural disasters that can play. And that is one of the things that keeps strategiest. I used to have here before I became a presidential strategist.

And especially in an election where again, it's going to be close, almost no matter what, it's going to be decided by a handful of voters. Any one of these things can make all the difference in the end.

And I think we should note as we go out that you read this book, and you should, "The Situation Room," and what you walk away from is the thing that you learn when you work in the White House, and that is just how consequential that job is and how much is at stake. And hopefully people will focus on that as they make their decision, because lives will depend on it.

I hope people will focus on that, and I hope they'll be inspired by the stories of the people who are taking on that duty every day.

And in that spirit, let me thank you not just for a great book, but for your service both in government and in journalism. You are a great American.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Axe Files, brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Sarlena Berry, Jeff Fox, and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Lickteig and Haley Thomas. For more programing from the IOP, visit politics dot uChicago dot edu.