43 pages • 1 hour read
The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis
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Chapter 10-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Pacer”
In Chapter 10, Stephanopoulos examines the Situation Room during the presidency of Barack Obama, with a focus on Osama bin Laden’s assassination. Shortly after the terror attacks of 2001, President George W. Bush vowed to find Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader and man responsible for the attack, dead or alive. Seven years later, however, Bush left office without having fulfilled his promise. Running for president in 2008, Obama made the capture or killing of bin Laden “the core of his foreign policy argument” and immediately stepped up the search upon winning the election (238).
In the summer of 2010, the CIA began tracking a man they believed to be a courier for bin Laden, which eventually led to the discovery of a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden was believed to be. CIA surveillance found that a man, whom they dubbed “The Pacer,” would regularly come outside and walk in circles in the yard.
Extraordinary measures were taken in Sit Room meetings from that point on due to Obama’s concern that information would leak, and the opportunity would be lost. Once a degree of confidence emerged that The Pacer was bin Laden, Vice Admiral William McRaven, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, was brought in to discuss options. Stephanopoulos explains that “the Situation Room became a hive of activity, setting up the most perilous decision of Obama’s presidency” (243). Rather than using a drone strike or bombing the entire compound, McRaven’s opinion was simply that he would lead a team in with helicopters “get the bad guy” and leave (244).
The failed Desert One mission in 1980 haunted not only Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had been a top CIA aide at the time, but also McRaven, who had studied it. McRaven thought that Desert One had two major flaws: a lack of communication and the lack of a full dress rehearsal. Obama gave McRaven three weeks to prepare, during which time he ran full dress rehearsals with his Seal team multiple times.
Once McRaven had his team ready, Obama had to make his ultimate decision about going through with the raid. In his final Sit Room meeting with the NSC before rendering his decision, Obama took the extraordinary steps of seeking out everyone’s opinion because the best intelligence said that there was a 40 to 80% chance that The Pacer was indeed bin Laden. Stephanopoulos writes that “the men and women in the room that day understood their roles and appreciated the gravity of what they were being asked to decide” (255).
Obama made his decision the following morning and the raid took place on May 1st, 2011. The original plan in the White House was for Obama and his top advisors to get updates from CIA director Leon Panetta, but when they learned that a live feed from Pakistan was available in the smaller conference room, they moved there. This unique circumstance led to the now-iconic photo taken by White House photographer Pete Souza, of Obama and his team watching the raid unfold.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Postcards from the Edge”
In Chapter 11, Stephanopoulos argues that his book examines crisis management in the modern presidency, but during the Trump administration, “the president was the crisis to be managed” (274).
He begins with an anecdote concerning the firing of Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman. Manigault Newman, who had become an aide based on her many appearances on Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice, broke all Sit Room protocols to secretly carry a recording device into the Sit Room to tape her firing. During Trump’s one term as president, “he tore through and wore out his national security team” (274), hiring and firing multiple people for the most important security positions, with most of those having very negative things to say about his leadership. Trump did not just ignore security norms that had long prevailed, he destroyed them. Stephanopoulos includes anecdotes about Trump inviting random people into sensitive meetings because he liked having them there, purposely leaking sensitive information, and using non-secured phones to discuss international security matters.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, “safety protocols were complicated by the president’s attitude” (281). While masks were mandatory inside the White House, Trump demanded that staff take them off in public because he thought they “projected weakness.” According to Stephanopoulos, “wearing a mask anywhere outside the Sit Room itself was cause for dismissal” (281). Trump also took information about sunlight and disinfectant killing the coronavirus on surfaces out of context, suggesting in a press briefing that it might be a good idea to inject the human body with such things.
In the summer of 2019, the NSC’s director for European affairs, Alexander Vindman, filed a whistleblower complaint because he had heard Trump attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on a call. During the call, Trump threatened to withhold congressionally-approved aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky provided damaging information about his upcoming political opponent’s son. This “act of extortion unparalleled in the history of American presidents” led to the first of Donald Trump’s two impeachments (289).
Chapter 12 Summary: "Tiger Team”
Stephanopoulos examines the presidency of Joe Biden. The first major crisis that Biden faced stemmed from the fact that his predecessor, Donald Trump, had made an agreement with the Taliban that all US forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by May 1st, 2021. While Biden was able to extend the deadline until September, he intended to stick to the agreement and leave no troops in the country. This led to a disastrous evacuation in which a suicide bomber killed nearly 200 people, including 13 US servicemembers.
This crisis strongly influenced Biden’s thinking and planning in his next major crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Working with intelligence that suggested Russia was planning to invade, Biden assembled a “Tiger Team” to do three major things: ensure a sovereign, independent Ukraine; maintain NATO unity; and avoid sending ground troops. Biden then decided on an unusual and highly strategic move: to declassify some of the intelligence so that it could be shared with NATO allies, and obviously with Ukraine.
Epilogue Summary: “WHSR”
In the Epilogue to his work, Stephanopoulos describes the drastic physical changes that have taken place in the Situation Room, which is now referred to simply as WHSR (pronounced “whizzer”), since he was last there during the Clinton administration. He begins the Epilogue writing, “[W]ow. It finally looks like it does in the movies” (319), referencing back to earlier in the work when he wrote that the Sit Room initially looked nothing like it had been depicted as in movies.
According to Stephanopoulos, extraordinary trust is needed for the Sit Room to function best because it allows people to express dissent. He argues that “the Sit Room’s strength—more broadly our strength as a democracy—depends upon that give and take” (322). He also explains that a sense of history is needed. Knowing about the Desert One debacle in 1980 helped the bin Laden raid take shape in 2011, and understanding how rogue operator Oliver North “coopted the Sit Room for his own purposes” helps prevent abuses in the future (322).
Chapter 10-Epilogue Analysis
In the final section of his work, Stephanopoulos looks at the Situation Room in the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. In this final section, Stephanopoulos more closely examines the overall functionality of the complex and how it has served the purpose that it was designed for.
In Chapter 10, the theme of The Nature of Presidential Decision-Making is a major focus. When Barack Obama took office in 2009, he inherited the search for Osama bin Laden. In 2010, when a bin Laden courier was uncovered, American intelligence discovered a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in which bin Laden was believed to be hiding. Over the next several months, a series of top-secret Situation Room meetings took place in which Obama and his team mulled over their options, which included a targeted drone strike, bombing the entire compound, or conducting a raid with a small number of special forces. Intelligence could not confirm that bin Laden was at the compound with more than an 80% certainty, so Obama was forced to make a tough decision. Ultimately, he came down on the side of a nighttime raid on the compound to capture or kill bin Laden.
In the final meeting before making a final decision of whether to go through with the raid or not, Obama went around the table and got the opinions of all the principals, primarily NSC members. He also did something that no one “had ever seen in the Situation Room”: He solicited the opinions of “the advisors and aides who normally sat silent in meetings” (255). Stephanopoulos argues that “the give-and-take in the room was genuine, and the scale of it—specifically, the inclusion of the non-principals—unprecedented” (256). Stephanopoulos contrasts Obama’s inclusive behavior with his critical portrait of Trump, whom he depicts as lacking professionalism and discretion in his handling of sensitive intelligence. He presents Trump’s administration as more disorganized and Trump’s decision-making as less methodical.
In Chapter 12, Stephanopoulos looks at the theme of presidential decision-making again during the presidency of Joe Biden. Acting on intelligence in 2001 that Russian troops were massing on the Ukrainian border and could invade at any time, Biden hatched a plan in the Sit Room which included similar extraordinary steps. After assembling a team, Biden laid out goals and decided to downgrade some of the intelligence so that Ukraine and other allies would understand the situation. Stephanopoulos describes Biden’s decision as “unusual and highly strategic” (312). In ending his book with an analysis of the sitting president at the time of the book’s publication, Stephanopoulos presents The Situation Room as an ongoing, integral part of any US presidential administration.
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