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White House Chief of Staff

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Based on Wikipedia: White House Chief of Staff

H. R. Haldeman called himself "the president's son-of-a-bitch." It wasn't false modesty. As Richard Nixon's chief of staff, he wielded such fearsome power that sources speaking to journalist Bob Woodward—including the legendary "Deep Throat"—expressed genuine terror at the mention of his name. Haldeman decided who got into the Oval Office and who didn't. He met with cabinet secretaries so the president wouldn't have to, then reported their concerns to Nixon in his own words, with his own spin.

This is the strange reality of the White House chief of staff: a position that isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, doesn't require Senate confirmation, and technically didn't even exist until 1953. Yet it may be the second most powerful job in American government.

A Position Born from Chaos

For most of American history, presidents managed without a chief of staff. They had private secretaries—trusted aides who handled correspondence, managed schedules, and served as gatekeepers to the president's time and attention. These were often brilliant operators. George Cortelyou served Theodore Roosevelt. Joseph Tumulty worked for Woodrow Wilson. Louis McHenry Howe was Franklin Roosevelt's indispensable right hand.

But these men drew no official White House salary. There was no budget for presidential staff, no formal structure at all. When Franklin Roosevelt needed advisers to help him combat the Great Depression, he had to get creative. His famous "Brain Trust"—the academics and policy experts who shaped the New Deal—were technically employed by various federal agencies. They just happened to spend most of their time working directly for the president.

The absurdity of this arrangement became impossible to ignore. In 1939, Roosevelt finally persuaded Congress to create the Executive Office of the President, establishing for the first time that the president could have a real staff answering directly to him. It was a revolution in how the presidency functioned, though few Americans noticed at the time.

World War II accelerated everything. Roosevelt created a "Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief" for military matters, appointing Fleet Admiral William Leahy. The logic was obvious: the president couldn't personally coordinate a global war. He needed someone to synthesize information, manage competing priorities, and ensure his decisions actually got implemented.

After the war, the civilian equivalent emerged. In 1946, the government created the position of "Assistant to the President," charged with running White House affairs. Seven years later, Dwight Eisenhower—a man who understood military organization better than anyone—renamed it "White House Chief of Staff."

The Job Nobody Wanted

Eisenhower's innovation didn't immediately catch on. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson preferred the old way, relying on their appointments secretaries to manage access and keep the trains running. The chief of staff title existed, but the role hadn't yet become the power center it would become.

That changed under Nixon.

Nixon's White House concentrated authority in the chief of staff to an unprecedented degree. Haldeman didn't just manage the president's schedule—he controlled who spoke to Nixon, what information reached him, and how his decisions were communicated outward. Cabinet secretaries found themselves frozen out, unable to get meetings with the president they ostensibly served. Everything flowed through Haldeman.

This concentration of power continued under Gerald Ford, whose final chief of staff was a young Dick Cheney—who would later become the most powerful vice president in American history. The pattern was set: the chief of staff wasn't just an administrator. The chief of staff was the president's enforcer, gatekeeper, and often the person making dozens of crucial decisions that never reached the president's desk at all.

Jimmy Carter saw this and recoiled. Running for president in 1976, he promised he would never appoint a chief of staff. The Nixon years had revealed how the position could be abused, how it could isolate a president from the information and perspectives he needed. Carter would be different. He would run an open White House, accessible to his cabinet and advisers.

It didn't work.

For two and a half years, Carter tried to manage the White House without a chief of staff. The result was chaos—competing advisers, unclear lines of authority, a president drowning in details he should never have seen. Eventually, Carter surrendered to reality and appointed Hamilton Jordan to the role. Every president since has had a chief of staff from day one.

Grunt Work and Power

What does the chief of staff actually do? Barack Obama put it plainly near the end of his presidency: "One of the things I've learned is that the big breakthroughs are typically the result of a lot of grunt work—just a whole lot of blocking and tackling." Grunt work, as Chris Whipple observed in his book about the position, is what chiefs of staff do.

But that undersells it. The chief of staff's responsibilities are staggering in their breadth:

Hiring and supervising all senior White House staff
Designing the organizational structure of the entire White House operation
Controlling physical access to the Oval Office—literally deciding who walks through the door
Managing the flow of information to and from the president's desk
Overseeing all policy development across every issue area
Protecting the president's political interests
Negotiating with Congress, cabinet secretaries, and outside groups to advance the president's agenda

That last responsibility reveals the true nature of the job. The chief of staff must simultaneously look inward—managing a White House staff of hundreds—and outward, representing the president in the bare-knuckle negotiations that determine whether legislation passes or dies. It requires being a skilled manager, a shrewd political operative, and a trusted adviser all at once.

Few people can do all three. The average tenure is just over eighteen months. Many burn out. Some get fired. A few become liabilities.

Firing and Being Fired

The chief of staff can terminate senior White House officials. This was demonstrated dramatically when John Kelly, Donald Trump's second chief of staff, fired Omarosa Manigault Newman. She secretly recorded the conversation—allegedly in the Situation Room, one of the most secure spaces in the American government. When the recording became public, Kelly's words were revealing: "The staff and everyone on the staff works for me and not the president."

This was technically true and also obviously false. The staff serves at the pleasure of the president, but on a day-to-day basis, they answer to the chief of staff. It's a distinction that matters enormously in practice. A cabinet secretary who can't get past the chief of staff effectively can't reach the president. A policy proposal that the chief of staff buries never gets debated.

The relationship between president and chief of staff is therefore one of the most delicate in government. The chief needs enough authority to actually run the White House, but not so much that the president becomes isolated. Haldeman crossed that line, creating a bubble around Nixon that contributed to the paranoia and bunker mentality of Watergate. Other chiefs of staff have been too weak, unable to impose discipline on warring factions within an administration.

The Current Moment

On January 20, 2025, Susie Wiles became chief of staff to President Donald Trump, succeeding Joe Biden's chief of staff Jeff Zients. Wiles made history as the first woman to hold the position—a remarkable fact given that the job has existed for over seventy years.

James Baker remains the only person to serve as chief of staff twice, and under two different presidents: Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. It's a testament to his unusual skills that both men wanted him in the role. Most presidents prefer to choose their own person, someone with absolute loyalty and no competing obligations.

A few chiefs of staff have served unusually long tenures. Andrew Card ran George W. Bush's White House for the entire first term and into the second. Denis McDonough did the same for Barack Obama. Both presidents valued stability and trusted these men implicitly. But such longevity is rare. The job is simply too demanding, too political, and too exposed.

Power Without Portfolio

There's something almost un-American about the chief of staff. The position has no constitutional basis, no statutory authority, no confirmation process. A president could theoretically abolish it tomorrow (though Carter's experience suggests that would be foolish). Yet the person who holds this job shapes the presidency more than any cabinet secretary, any elected official besides the president himself.

The chief of staff is, in a sense, the president's alter ego—making hundreds of decisions the president never sees, speaking with the president's authority, protecting the president from problems and sometimes from the president's own worst instincts. When it works, the relationship is symbiotic. When it fails, the results can be catastrophic.

Every morning, the chief of staff walks into the West Wing knowing that the day will bring crises no one anticipated, decisions that can't be delegated, and conflicts that have no good resolution. They will be blamed for failures and rarely credited for successes. They will make enemies in proportion to their effectiveness.