Good Morning, Mr President! A Peek Inside the President's Daily Brief

good evening everyone i'm mark rozelle and i serve as dean of the char school of policy and government here at george mason university and we host the michael v hayden center for intelligence security and public policy and we're absolutely delighted to be hosting tonight the first of the academic calendar year many events that we will be having in the hayden center over over the next academic calendar year tonight promises to be a really special kickoff to the academic year with this program and i noticed earlier we had i think a record number of uh participants sign up for this program so there's obviously a lot of interest in what's going on right now and the discussion where we're just about to have the char school of policy and government is one of ten schools or colleges at george mason university and we focus on public policy public administration political science international security uh international commerce and policy organizational development knowledge management and transportation policy we have a host of different academic degree programs bachelor's degree through master's professional programs and also three phd programs including by the way our biodefense program which studies public policy issues during pandemics for example and has achieved a remarkable increase in interest just in the past several months as you might understand but our international security studies master's degree program is one of the most highly ranked in the country year after year it's been in the top 10 in u.s news and world report and it has been our fastest growing program in enrollments over the past several years and we're very proud to have on our faculty michael v hayden michael morrell who will be with us tonight the former two-time acting director of the cia the director of the michael hayden center larry pfeiffer who was the director of the white house situation room and i'll be introducing him in just a moment and a number of very distinguished academics and other practitioners in the field of security policy studies so this is something we're very proud of and of course we're especially proud to host the hayden center and so i will begin now by introducing my colleague the executive director of the michael hayden center larry pfeiffer and larry is going to introduce tonight's program thank you for attending thank you very much mark i appreciate the introduction and the kind words um the uh just want to take a moment to welcome everybody and uh i want to especially welcome the returning students of the char school as well as uh our many new students uh mark uh mentioned uh we had uh uh despite the pandemic we had quite a quite a turnout of students actually increasing enrollment uh which is remarkable um i think we all need to acknowledge what's going on in the country briefly we've got a horrible hurricane that has hit our gulf coast and we have a lot of people in some serious trouble down there in louisiana and so i think uh just a moment of acknowledgement of the pain and suffering of our fellow countrymen is is appropriate uh mark mentioned uh general hayden uh general hayden is in the audience he is uh listening in very closely i'm sure he'll be giving us a grade when it's all finished uh he sends his greetings and uh wishes everybody very well uh the hayden center is committed to conducting a dialogue with all of you on intelligence um we want to remove the mystery we want to dispel the myths we do this by holding a series of events we also have fairly robust presence in social media particularly on twitter and uh we also uh have a youtube channel where you can view this presentation again later or the many presentations that we've done over the last three years uh tonight's event is co-hosted by the law fair institute law fair institute is familiar to many of you as the purveyor of the law fair blog as well as a series of podcasts that keep you informed about difficult national security concerns that we face as a nation so if you're not familiar with law fair i highly encourage you to go check out their website at lawfare blog we have a great audience tonight uh right now we're pushing 500 people we had over 900 register uh they come from all over the united states north to canada south to mexico and from far as way as far away as new zealand and australia we'd also like to welcome our bulgarian guest as many of you may know general hayden served as a defense attache in bulgaria so happy to welcome a member of the country of bulgaria we have some special guests in the audience too many to name but two worth noting are general james clapper the former director of national intelligence as well as ms sue gordon the former principal deputy director of national intelligence um general clapper has assured me that if we start getting things wrong that he will be more than happy to become a panelist and set us straight so i'm hoping we don't have to drag him into the mix because he's been kind enough to do this twice before but uh he has made the offer um audience size is large we are live streaming on youtube if you prefer to watch us there go check it out at our youtube channel we're going to go about 45 minutes of moderated discussion and then we'll have some questions and answer the way we're going to handle q a you'll find a q a panel in zoom depending upon whether you're on a laptop a desktop or a uh or a phone or a pad the question and answer link is in a different location so hunt around and find that early in the event so you can be ready to ask your questions uh we're not going to be looking at the chat panel so please don't send us questions in the chat panel uh if you're watching on youtube uh there is a comments area and you can feel free to provide us some questions there and we'll uh take a look in there as well as we proceed um start thinking your questions now uh so that when we get to the q a session we'll be ready to roll the uh um ask you to keep your questions brief uh please don't give us any lectures we want questions if you have an affiliation you'd like us to mention please please type that into the into the question field um by way of introductions uh our moderator is david pries david priest is the chief operating officer at the law fair institute but he's most known for writing the seminal discussion of the president's daily brief the president's book of secrets you can find that at amazon or anywhere else that you can buy books i highly recommended david was also a guest of the hayden center uh last uh about about a year and a half ago now i guess david uh where uh he discussed a more recent book he wrote about how to get rid of a president um and it discussed more than just the election we faced or the impeachment we just went through as ways to to remove the president so highly recommend you check out that book and go look at the video that promoted the book on our youtube channel as our panelists we have michael morell a former acting director deputy director of cia we have robert cardillo former director of the national geospatial ins uh intelligence agency nga and we have leslie ireland a former assistant secretary of the treasury for intel and analysis but more importantly what all of these people are they're intelligence analysts that's what they are at heart it's what they were at the start and uh they carried the ethos of intelligence analysis uh analysis integrity all the way through their career the intelligence analysis for those who aren't aware is the nonpartisan presentation of information to policymakers that help them in their work and with the president's daily brief they're aiding the president who's making the hardest decisions anyone has to make in the world so tonight we're going to explore that process so with that i will turn the festivities over to david and i'll see you all later in the program thank you larry and general hayden at the hayden center and dean rozelle and the char school for joining uh law fair to present this event and thanks to all of you who are tuning in good to see you general uh it's a pleasure to talk with this distinguished panel a unique group of people to talk about briefing the president and the pdb's role in that and how it has evolved over time and even within the arc of the single administration it's fitting that we're having this conversation today this is after all the birthday of president lyndon johnson who was the first president to receive something called the president's daily brief in 1964 building on a personalized tailored intelligence product created for his predecessor john f kennedy but it's important to note for our conversation here tonight that those presidents did not receive daily in-person briefings from intelligence officers that really started in the mid-1970s with gerald ford and then soon to follow with george h.w bush being the first president to take daily in-person briefings for the entire course of his presidency on every working day in washington and i think that's where we'll we'll start here we're going to spend most of our time talking about the experiences of all of you briefing the president but to build the foundation for that we want to understand how each of you got there because you had different paths to get to the oval office and the various other places that you would brief your presidents so let's start with you michael let's talk first about the building blocks and the the ethos of your career at the central intelligence agency as an analyst writing for presidents as a manager coaching and guiding analysts doing the same um take us up until and and stop just short of when you were actually a pdb briefer but how did the pdb inform your experience as an intelligence officer during that part of your career um david thank you um and it's great it's great to be here tonight with everybody and and certainly um with all of my panelists um it's a pleasure to be with you guys i'm a pleasure to see you um it's interesting because when i was an analyst so i was an analyst for nine years from 1980 to 1989 before i became a manager of analysts and during that nine year period you did not write for the president um you wrote for something called the national intelligence daily the nid and when you dropped off your mid-draft you would drop a copy at the president's daily brief staff and they would decide if they wanted to turn it into a pdb um and that lasted that approach lasted until the mid um 1990s when we as you all know went through something called the first customer program where we turned everything on its head and we said you know it doesn't make any sense not to write with the president in mind right we should think about the president when we put pen to paper and when we ask the questions we're going to ask so during my entire analytic career i never wrote with the president in mind isn't that interesting um and when i was a first line supervisor and even a second line supervisor um we were still just writing those nids and not writing the pdbs so what i remember most about about writing for the pdb as an analyst was the next morning you know after the piece ran you would get a copy back um you didn't see the whole book right nobody in the agency saw the whole book except the seniors um but you would get the copy of your piece back and at the bottom it would say for the president only and that always i always got a shiver out of that um whenever i wrote something that ended up in the pdb it was pretty special moment thank you leslie you next um compare and contrast what was your experience like and how did knowing that some of your efforts as an analyst and a manager ultimately made it to the president inform you up until the george w bush years sure so thank you for including me tonight um and like michael and i'm honored to be here with people that i know have done a tremendous amount of work um providing intelligence and helping inform policy as they go um so like michael i started at the point when you wrote for the national intelligence daily or the ned and i still remember walking upstairs and looking at the menu and uh if if you didn't make it into the pdb it said bt below threshold and so you either walk back to your office buoyant or you walk back and said i have been bt'ed you also had a complete editorial staff that would work through your material and you it really was quite it was quite a process and like michael i think it was later in my career as an analyst when i did finally start writing specifically for the president and then leading people to write specifically for the president and i think the one of the biggest challenges i think i faced or that analysts faced was identifying what the policy so what is in a piece it's easy to figure out the analytical so what or the intelligence so what but understanding what a policymaker really needs to know to do their job and how do you bring those points up to the top and so as a manager that was something that i saw as an important part of my job was helping analysts develop that skill and you know it's a skill that you just had to keep working on both as an analyst and as a manager robert let me turn to you certainly your experience at the defense intelligence agency for much of your career was was a different bureaucracy but you you were still serving national level customers so share with us what were your uh perceptions of the president's daily brief and the president as an intelligence customer um up until you were an executive um i'm happy to david and again like my colleagues it's just good to be here with old friends uh i think my story might frighten some and give others hope um i was welcomed despite the color of my hair i was welcomed to the government 1983 so much younger than michael and i was assigned as a photographic interpreter it's a term of art we don't even use anymore so i i wrote a light table and squinted through a microscope into the soviet step to understand how their signal units were going to support their general staff during their exercises in the middle of the trans caucuses military district you i know the audience is excited just by the thought of such uh illuminating intelligence but what i do share with michael and michelle is it was a craft and again i was i was in the imagery community because there was no agency at the time this is uh so we were in dia and i spent about the same amount of time learning my craft which was fundamental to everything else i did i will admit for two reasons one because i was pretty junior i didn't have a high profile account you notice i haven't mentioned missiles or tanks or planes yet and two dia had a different focus frankly not that we wouldn't of course support the president but quite frankly the pinnacle in our world at that time was the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff that was our pdb and it was in the form of a slide deck that the j-2 for the chairman a job i held later uh would create and so but but hearing michael and leslie talk about the oh did you get in the chairman's brief or did you not get in felt the same way you know did you make it or not and uh so again came from a different perspective grew up in the imagery community um certainly went back to dia as the head of all source analysis and had a different view then because then we are in fact competing for and fighting for to get some space into the book but i will tell you as i conclude that in september of 2010 when director clapper invited me to join him as as he was resetting the dni uh being out at liberty crossing that night and somebody drove over from langley with a triple lock bag took out two big binders put it on both of our desks and said okay you need to review this for tomorrow's book and i remember general clapper and i looking at each other we're going oh my lord what have we gotten ourselves into so i did not have the kind of prep that michael and leslie did i mean i had a different experiential base uh but it was a daunting uh transition from being you know if you will going from that small corner of our uh of our community to oh my goodness this is going to be in front of the president in 12 hours let's um let's bring it to that moment where you are with the president so michael back to you first you started doing the pdb briefing job very early in george w bush's administration at the start and there's a process of both getting to know the president of helping the president get to know intelligence hopefully the transition does some of that and that transition was remarkable but you still had a process to do of learning even as you're trying to communicate the bottom lines of the analytic pieces that are printed in the book but are being emphasized because of george w bush's style so if you can walk through a little bit of that style what was george w bush like as a customer how did that affect the way you prepared to brief him and what did you learn in those early days weeks months that helped you get better at the job to help prepare him for his job i think you're still on mute great question so i started um i started briefing him on january 4th 2001. a couple of other senior cia officers had briefed him from the time that he um was declared the winner until the fourth of january when i got to austin um but i saw it exactly i saw my job exactly as you said david so on the one hand i was trying to get to know him as a person because i thought that was incredibly important to have some sort of bond between us for those difficult moments ahead um when i knew there would be moments um when he wouldn't be a happy customer um and i wanted to be some there to be some basis of a relationship there that went beyond the book that was sitting between us um so i worked really hard at that um i discovered very early that we both loved baseball um and so we would talk about baseball a lot um in fact sometimes we would uh at the ranch in texas we would go over the baseball scores from the night before before we got to the pdb um so i worked really hard at that personal piece of it um and then secondarily i worked really hard at educating him about what is intelligence um what is this thing that we're putting in front of you how should you think about it how how does it compare to the other information that you're receiving from the defense department and the state department um you know how does it compare to the raw intelligence that you're getting from the situation room every day so a real effort to try to teach him about the strengths and weaknesses of intelligence um you know how we how we how we try to come to judgments how we think about confidence levels you know all of that i tried to walk him through and as part of that really really important piece was this speak truth to power thing um that it was our job sometimes to make his job difficult um and that you know it was our job to be the umpire and call balls and strikes it was our job to um you know free of politics and policy bias to tell him what we thought and that there would be moments where he wouldn't like what he was hearing and you know i i think we did that well enough so that those mornings when i had something in the book that i knew um you know was going to cut against what he thought or was going to tell him that one of his policies was not you know was not heading in particularly um productive way you know i would tell him mr president this is going to be one of those mornings we talked about um and i think that made it a lot easier um to speak truth to power um and then the third piece of that preparation was the substantive preparation so for anybody who's actually seen the pdb um when you pick it up you're coming in in the middle of a story right and if you don't know what's come before it's really hard to understand what you're looking at so for president bush he came in you know he came in what was the end of eight years of the clinton administration and these pdbs were focused on the needs of president clinton so one of the things i had to do was not only explain the piece but explain the entire history of the issue of how we got to that moment in the piece so that was what those 20-some days were like and even the the the first the first couple weeks of his administration you know continued with this trying to get to know him and trying to teach him um and trying to bring him up to speed part of it the most important thing i learned which is a great question it goes back to something i think larry said or somebody said which is um how do you it was leslie how do you bring value to the customer it's really easy to look at a pdb and say mr president here's the bottom line on this but here's what it means for you is the really hard part and i was lucky enough to have george tenet with me and president bush was lucky enough to have kept george tenet so george tenet knew how to interact with the president and he knew what the clinton administration's policies were and what they had tried and what worked and what failed and so i saw george tenet put the pdb into that policy context for the president and i learned from that let me just give you one really quick example the one morning we showed the president some intelligence on the palestinians and i outlined what the intelligence said and it was george tenet who put it in context by saying mr president the reason you need to know this is because the israelis have this same intelligence and the israeli prime minister is going to raise this with you at some point so this is why you need to know that and here's what you should say when he raises it with you so that was invaluable for me to have george tenet there let me follow up on that with something that's actually come in in a question already michael which is you talk about preparing for the president and answering questions and get getting him to where he needs to be on all these issues but we want to make clear your adjustments as a briefer aren't based on the politics of the president right they're based on what the president needs to to prepare for national security challenges and to anticipate national security threats and opportunities hopefully but how do the politics of the president affect the way you perform as a briefer michael first so i lost the last part of your question you broke up yeah how do the politics of the president um affect the way you brief uh if at all not at all not not in any way whatsoever um they don't affect what you brief or they don't affect how you brief or they shouldn't put it that way right um and you know i think all of us analysts grew up in a culture um where it was speak truth to power from the day you walked in the door right in every training class you ever had in every conversation you ever had with a manager right in every brown bag you ever had as a team or a branch right this this is the ethos of the place no politics no policy just the facts and what you think about them right thanks leslie i'm gonna ask you to follow up on that because uh you have attention there right on the one hand you have to know enough about the policy to know how the intelligence can be useful for the policy but you are not there to argue policy you're not there to play politics you're there to inform the national security decision making you came into this process when michael was briefing as eventually the iran mission manager eventually the person overseeing all of uh iranian analysis among other things you had to go and brief the president on a very contentious issue as it has been for every president for several decades how did you manage with the president that that tension of knowing where the policy landmines are but trying to get messages across without triggering any of them well um that's a great question david and i agree completely with michael that it is in the ethos that you are if you aren't objective the policy maker is going to stop listening to you you can't be seen as coming in with a perspective on one side or the other you have to be an honest broker of the information and i think it was general hayden i've heard say there's a dynamic tension between intelligence and policy because policy sees the world as the way it should be and intelligence sees the world the way it is and so there are times when we're delivering a very negative message so what i tried to do with president george w bush particularly on iran was to serve as a middleman if you will between policy and intelligence to understand enough about where policy was going then i could help or where they wanted to take it that i could help with the prioritization of collection and analysis within the intelligence community and that didn't mean turning anything off that wasn't still important but to make sure that when the policymaker was making decisions when the president was making decisions he had the best and the most timely information in front of him that he possibly could we did end up doing what were called deep dives and this was something that i think michael can correct me if i'm wrong i think george w bush started but taking a a group of analyst analysts and collectors would have you to come into the oval office he would sit there with other members of his policy team and it was just a chance for him to dig deep and get in onto a subject and i will tell you this much you know michael said people are coming in midstream on an issue i have never failed to be impressed with the policymaker and their ability to remember what you wrote you know what the intelligence was because they're watching that very carefully and they're looking for any kinds of changes so the final thing i would say is i thought it was very important and whenever presenting information to the president to be clear this is a change in our analysis this is a changing collection this is this is has uh is not what we've been telling you or the nuances here or there and this is why it's important i love that point leslie it reminds me of one of the favorite stories i had from the briefing team that we had early in the george w bush years and the briefer who was working with vice president cheney brought back the story uh probably michael when you were still in the the presidential briefing job and said you're not going to believe what he asked me today and he asked about something he had read in the pdb or behind the tab as he called it the extra material that was provided to the vice president because it related to a topic that he knew he had read about years ago in an intelligence document and he made reference to it and said something like you know this this reminds me of this paper and i think the analytic line has changed quite a bit i think maybe it was in spring of 1990 maybe maybe summer of 1990 and it was on this topic can you find that paper for me and the poor briefer is thinking that's right you you were secretary of defense back then and you read intelligence carefully but your memory is such that you can remember and i think it was down to the the month or the week of when this report that he had read some 10 years earlier that puts a lot of burden on the briefer to be up to speed on these issues as well leslie follow up on that a little bit with um kind of a parallel to what michael talked about which is your experience then early on in the obama administration and how it was you came to brief intelligence to president obama so i was wrapping up my three years as iran mission manager and i wanted to do something different and i understood that they were looking for briefers for president the incoming president and at that point we didn't know who it was and it didn't matter who it was so i went to then dna mike mcconnell and i said i don't know if michael morale knows the story i went to michael mcconnell and i said i would like my name to be put forward and he said no um or not no but gee i really need you to stay where you are iran's too important it would be too difficult to have you change midstream well then i got word from a friend back at cia that they were looking and credit to michael morale they were looking for a woman they wanted a woman candidate and so i called michael and i said i would like to be considered so when michael michael mike mcconnell went out to cia and said give me another name mine was the name that went back and then he came to me and he came to me and he said well i guess you really want to do this i said yeah i do i mean this is something and it's binary i really believe it's binary analysts either really want to be the pdb brief for and they really don't want to be the pdb briefer so um something that started in a george w bush we had a pair of briefers at one time so it was andrew hallman and me and we started with each of us had an airline ticket one to chicago one to phoenix and then we both had an airline ticket to the other city depending upon what happened at the election and i remember i started in that job less than a week uh before the election and i got down to cia headquarters and they were having a meeting and they were debating about what to do about me since i hadn't had as much time to read in as andrew had and someone said well we'll send andrew out to chicago and leslie can stay back here and i said guys if john mccain wins and finds out that we only sent a briefer out to chicago you can believe that the relationship with the intelligence community is gone for the next four years at least so i was off on a plane to uh phoenix uh we started a briefing right after the election not the day after uh but the second day after and continued up through the transition and i think part of for me it was trying to understand how president-elect obama ingested information everybody takes information indifferently and a really important part of conveying your message is figuring out how your customer wants it and can receive it best and we had learned that with george w bush in spades um but we were trying to learn that with president-elect obama so that was part of it like what michael said part of it was introducing him to intelligence what we could do what we couldn't do and i felt it was also important to say if you've got questions bring them to us and uh you know help us help us help you in essence and then i think the last thing i would say i noticed was um i agree he would flip through the binder that he was getting from george w bush's pdb and i could see sometimes puzzlement as to why is this in here but i saw over time leading up to the inauguration there was a sense where i'm reading about someone else's issues to a sense of these are my issues now and i own these and i'm the one who's going to have to deal with these for the next four years at least yeah thank you for that um of course by that time the pdb landscape had changed a bit the for the first 40 years of its existence the president's daily brief was managed controlled by the cia but starting in 2004 it it started shifting and the office of the director of national intelligence took over and it started becoming a intelligence community document uh writ large and robert this is a good place for you to come in because by that point you've you've moved up you're you're managing at a senior level and eventually as you mentioned you get pulled into the pdb process not long after where leslie left off the story so tell us how that role in the office of the director of national intelligence led to you being a briefer to the president and especially how those briefings differed from what you've just heard described about president bush um so yes i even though we all had the same job title and even though leslie and i served the same president um we all had very different jobs so i'm going to move 18 months forward from leslie so this is the summer now of 2010. uh mike mcconnell's successor was admiral blair so he was the fourth director of national intelligence admiral blair left the position in may um quite abruptly um so there was a gap before jim clapper came out in august he was sworn in in august of that summer so when i showed up i told you that night and they brought over the pdb and they said here this needs to be edited for the morning it wasn't brief it i mean briefing was the outcome but you need to be the uh overall threshold guy now is this the energy out if it's in we had to edit it so it was it was managing the pdb process um doing the final editing the night before and then depending on the day presenting it in the morning and to leslie's point too president obama had evolved in a year and a half too and so he was owning more and more and he was demanding more and more and so uh with jim clapper in the lead we really had to reinvent i'll say the briefing but it wasn't exactly a briefing it was more of an experience because of the way president obama learned and digested he was a reader and he liked to do that alone in the residence ahead of time and so he got the book early and did that and so by the time that we saw him 9 30 was the general rule could have been a little later the book had been read and digested and he was now ready for everything that michael mentioned give me the connective tissue how how is this you know what different from what you wrote and what are you doing about you know creating a nuke collection angle etc he would he wanted to act already on what he had read so so we we ended up calling it a walk-on brief which sounds a little ad hoc because it was you really just had to be on your toes and adjust to his question about i got what you wrote now i need to think about policy implications or next steps or visits or calls etc so it was a much more action oriented on the end of it we still did deep dives as leslie spoke about at different times but it was much more of a what do i do about this book that you gave me uh and that was uh that was a pickup game to be sure thanks um for everyone out there listening feel free to pop some questions in we know with many hundreds of participants we won't get to all questions but we're going to see if we can get to to quite a few um let me loop back to each of you for some thoughts uh to expand on what robert said about the evolution of a a president's thinking and how the book itself that is the written document but also the oral briefings need to change to adjust to the arc of an administration um michael you you not only were the briefer but then you were managing the pdb process through the george w bush administration in large part how did you see that arc going and do you think that we continued to give the president help on some of his thorniest problems by by adapting during that time frame so i think what happens the fundamental thing that happens david is that they get smarter on the issues and not only do they get smarter on the issues but the number of people in the world who they're talking to directly about these things grows over time so in the beginning you know in that first year i had it pretty easy and i think in you know most first-year briefers have it pretty easy because you're educating you're telling them about things that they really don't know about but by the time you get you know well into a presidency um they know all the basics um they just got off the phone with the prime minister today and yesterday they got off the phone with the president of another country um and information is coming at them from all different directions they're assembling it much better than they did that first year so i think that um the evolution that has to happen is the questions that you answer in the pdb so every every piece of analysis is the answer to a question right and i think what has to happen um and what does happen in the evolution is those questions become have to become more sophisticated and so the intelligence community in every presidency gets challenged that first year the first year and a half first two years is pretty easy and then it starts getting a little tougher um getting that value every day so it's a real important job for the senior management of analysts not only at cia but at dia and in the dni and everywhere right to understand how that evolution has to take place and really to drive it and to help help pose those more sophisticated questions that sounds like a tough process but you you also make it sound somewhat easy as well that's just what we do we adapt but i'll use this as an opportunity to ask a question from uh sue gordon and leslie and robert you have heads up you have more time to think about this because you're going to get the same question she wanted to know was there ever a day when you wanted a do-over of your briefing with the president the day that just didn't go well what was that day and what can you tell us about it uh michael you get no time to prepare the others get minutes look the truth of the matter is that the quality of the pieces vary um every day the quality of the pieces vary um and you know some days you're really proud of the book that you walk in with and there's some days where you wonder whether the new york times might be a better value and help us understand michael roughly how many pieces on an average day were you briefing president bush in that time frame so um for president bush there were four or five pdb pieces pieces that were produced by the intelligence community for him and for the purpose of going to him and then i added to that other analytic pieces that i thought he should see and i added to that um raw intelligence whether it be human or signed or even imagery that i thought he needed to see so in in an average book for me briefing the president there were probably 11 12 different items but but only five or six right that were that were actual pdb pieces right um so the my worst day and and and what i tried to do was start with a really good piece and end with a really good piece and put the not so good stuff in the middle that's what i tried to do and i remember that one day i went in and the whole book was um was not that great and george tennant was with me and as we're walking in the oval office george tenet says to me today we're gonna have to dance and um literally we we carried on a conversation with the president for a half hour and he never opened up the book and we picked up the books and we walked out and that was that was uh that was that day but probably the worst day now that i'm thinking about it is i used to meet with george tenet in his old executive office building office before when we walked across west executive avenue to see the president and um we would talk about how to tee up the pieces we would talk about what i was going to say and we'd have a conversation about that and one morning george picked up the president's book and he was flipping through it and he wrote on on one of the pieces this sucks and i didn't know that he did that so i hand this book to the president and he's reading the pieces and he comes to the piece and which george tenon has written this sucks and the president says michael what is this written up here in the corner and i had no idea and i said mr president what and he said it says this sucks and i said um and i kind of peered over and it was george tennant's writing and i said um that's the director's writing so that was a really bad day i don't think i handled that very well there's no good way to handle that um leslie what was your worst day or your worst moment in a briefing um well let me back up a bit and say i know what michael means when he says maybe the substance is easier in the first year of briefing a president but it's really kind of a shakeout cruise you're trying to figure them out they're trying to figure you out and uh when we started with president obama we didn't do the drop-off in the morning so that he had a chance to read it we all sat there and watched him read it okay and and the thing is there is a piece of machinery that exists in the intelligence community that prepares this briefing and you get used to the way a president digests it and george w bush was much more conversational the briefer would tee up the material you know give the 30 second elevator speech what have you 90 second elevator speech and then there would be a discussion we were all somewhat prepared for that we didn't get that with president obama so it was a matter of working through what he needed what how could we change it what should be different and there were times when i just didn't feel like i was giving him what he needed and that was very frustrating i would say the worst day for me unfortunately landed in andrew hallman's lap because i had a question and i sent it back and uh it was very time sensitive and the analyst prepared the answer and a reviewer in the od and i who shall remain unnamed said it's not necessary it doesn't need to go and sent it down the day later and uh they're sitting there in the oval office and they said this meeting happened yesterday why are we hearing about it today so that is a bad day for everyone it's a bad day yeah yeah um robert yeah whether it had to do with one of those walk-ons you mentioned or another case uh tell us about a briefing that didn't go well and what you learned from it um it was a walk-on and i'm going to say it was worse than michael's or leslie's although the audience can be a judge so it's december 17th of 2010. it's a friday and the president is leaving that afternoon for his hawaiian christmas vacation and i'm in the same office michael was in in the old executive office building prepping my briefing and we're going through it okay i've got my items and whatnot and i look up at cnn or bbc and i see that the riots in tunisia have not gotten any better overnight and i look at my team and i go you know we we don't have anything on this i mean we're covering it but you know what if he asks about you know what's happening or what we think so i said make some calls you know let me at least address it because we're not you know he'll keep getting the book but we're uh president obama did not have a travel briefer so he he got the book by himself on vacation so i said i feel like we should say something so called out to langley got a few calls and and and um i waited to the end of the the meeting and by the way too i should just say that you know presidents are human um i know you know that but you could feel it was vacation day i mean it was just kind of a lift in the room everybody had kind of a jump in their step they're going oh you know we're going on vacation so you know i came in and obviously gave all the bad news you know and all that and kind of bring everybody down and then at the end i said mr president you've probably noticed you know the ongoing riots in tunisia ben ali uh has been in charge for a number of years he has these issues with these riots he knows how to handle them mr president uh we think it likely you know that that he will be able to manage this one as well now the audience will know that on the evening of the 17th of december ben ali left the country and went to saudi arabia so not only was i wrong completely wrong but i was wrong within hours now um uh suffice to say you know that was the the tipping point into what became the arab spring tahrir square and everything and um you can imagine i'm going hmm that's that's not going to go very well for us now obviously we're in forming and updating whatnot president obama comes back two weeks later he's tanned he's rested right he's got the bounce to step in his minification i of course am greeting him in the oval on that monday and i said something like mr president you might recall that i mentioned something about ben ali on your way out the door and he interrupted me and he said yeah robert how's that going for you meaning he realized and he thankfully just cut me off before i could go through full protestation but um look um [Music] that was a that was a very bad moment and uh and again the community pivoted quite quickly and served him well but uh not not my best moment let me uh let me start turning to some questions from our audience and uh audience members you will be glad to know that i have covertly communicated with our panelists and we will not be ending this event at eight o'clock we will be extending for another half hour to get to more of your questions and i'll direct these to to individuals if there's something urgent from someone else please please jump in um one of the axioms of intelligence is if you're getting every intelligence judgment right you're not dealing with the hardest problems because we're never going to get everything right on the things with the greatest uncertainty and the greatest impact on u.s interests in that vein steve franklin asks and michael i think i'll give this one to you first um what's the time that your president that you were briefing disagreed with the intelligence and and how did you handle it when they simply did not take on board the message you were trying to communicate so one of the it's a great it is a great question um i think in the in the current environment where um president trump has publicly disagreed with intelligence that there's this there's this kind of myth that's been created that and presidents shouldn't do that right um and presidents disagree with their intelligence all the time um i'd say you know once or twice a week president bush would say to me michael i'm not buying what you're selling here um now we would have we would have an intellectual conversation there was an intellectual basis for him um disagreeing and he would say here's why i disagree you know so and so told me this or you told me two months ago the you know something else what are you telling me this today for um um or he just made a phone call or what have you there there was an intellectual basis for the disagreement and then we would have a discussion about it um you know it just wouldn't it just wouldn't end there um i would get an opportunity to to come back at him right and there'd be a back and forth um and that's the way it should be you know you want your intelligence consumer to question and probe um so there is absolutely nothing wrong with that um in fact that's what that's what you want and sometimes i think that the current situation has has blurred what is a really important um aspect of the pdb process is there should be a give and take and then there there can be differences of opinion let me add to that one of the greatest stories in presidential briefing history before our time being pdb briefers was when a briefer went in to see president george h.w bush who was a very interactive customer and briefed on the situation in nicaragua where there was an election for the first time in many years and the sandinistas were actually opening up an election and the bottom line of the piece going to the president of the united states was there's too many tools in the incumbent's toolkit and we think that they're going to win the election and president bush looked at the intelligence listened to the arguments just shook his head and said i don't agree with you i think chamorro is going to win the opposition candidate and the briefer stood by the analytic line in the piece defending the logic the argumentation and the evidence the president said no i really think that she's going to win i'll make a bet with you i'll bet you an ice cream cone that tomorrow wins and as you're you're a briefer what are you going to do you you take the bet and sure enough the briefer had to bring an ice cream cone into the oval office because the analysis was wrong and the president was right uh leslie let me turn to another question this one from an anonymous attendee but very useful i think for many in the audience who are students at the char school or other elements what do you feel helped you the most at the beginning of your career to achieve your goals in your career was it extra study and analysis was it practice on your writing skills your interpersonal communication what was it that you did that worked well and what would you advise students to emphasize now to prepare for a career in intelligence so the first thing i would say you have to be able to write you do you do just because a large proportion of what the intelligence community conveys to policymakers is in writing and let's face it i remember writing papers lengthy papers and then i would be asked to create a distribution list and i would put all these important people on the distribution list and i would pat myself on the back because my gosh my paper went to this under secretary or this deputy secretary and it wasn't until i did a policy job for 18 months in dod that i realized a desk officer read all of those things and they were the ones who decided whether or not it went on to the senior policy maker and chances were pretty good the paper didn't go because if that policy maker only has 5 10 30 minutes they aren't going to digest your paper so you've got to have the ability to number one think critically to be able to express your ideas clearly succinctly and in a short space of time you need to do this verbally too because more and more analysts are being asked to um go down and give a briefing well being a pdb briefer part of it had to be that you had some experience actually presenting in person and then the third thing i would say is be willing to adapt to change i can look back on my career and some very specific decisions that i made to change the position i was in and i honestly can draw a straight line between what i did then and frankly what i'm doing now here in retirement and it was because i was willing to change jobs i was willing to take on different experiences i was willing to expand the breadth of what i knew as well as the depth robert i'm going to double barrel to you two different questions that relate really well to your experience during the obama administration uh one of them from nick dumavich who understands the history of intelligence quite well himself he's asking about the distribution of the pdb over the years and across all administrations it has gone down to a distribution of just a couple of people to the widest distribution in its history during the obama administration when the pdb did go to quite a few other senior national security officers so the first question to you is how do you feel about the distribution of the pdb is there an ideal number it should go to or does it depend on a different factor than just a raw number uh the answer to that question is the p it's up to the president and it's his to share or not and uh so no i i didn't feel one way or the other um i felt like uh and by the way you know leslie would have worked this in the beginning with the initial distribution because president probably didn't know the answer to that question when he first started getting the book and then i have a jim clapper inherited that and it was managed and you know true truth be known it was generally managed by the national security advisor and so you would go to them and say hey look we think somebody should be pulled in i will say though that even if there is quite a master pdb list there then are sub lists um that is to say uh you know there are depending there were items that were so sensitive uh for particular reasons or particular classification levels that didn't go to the whole list and i don't know if i'm breaking news to the poor outside ring pdb readers but but they were oval onlys meaning this would only be spoken about in the oval office period and now that's not just the president but it's the smallest group um and then of course it could expand from there another one for you uh we have pg asking and uh this one's a good one because it relates only to what you saw in your time there the president's daily brief traditionally was ink on paper it was a physical book but there was a transition during the obama administration to presenting it on a very special tablet talk about that and how you think the introduction of the ipad affected it both for the customer but also for the intelligence community to prepare for these briefings um we look jim clapper and i pushed hard to move to digital for a couple of reasons mainly we thought we could bring more flexibility to the storytelling now obviously you can bring in images you can bring in maps you can you could even bring in videos if you wanted uh to a pdp but if you've got a tablet uh then it would it would make that easier interestingly i don't know that we used it and of course i don't know what the art form is these days since i've been away from it for a few years uh as much as we could have i think we were pretty cautious you know we we you know look we we're carrying 50 years of tradition you know we didn't want to uh you know throw that out the window so it was predominantly what leslie said it was it was written driven and and and obviously central analytic lines were all written down i will i do remember when um susan rice was the national security adviser she approved with the president's okay the move to the to the tablet and so first thing is you have to buy a bunch of tablets and then you basically have to kill them no bluetooth no communication no nothing because you don't want it going anywhere so you did all that and then um i would depending on the day i would go in there and obviously the president got his ahead of time but if some some pdb recipients wanted the book the old book and so we would print the book for them uh that was their choice but i remember sometimes going into the oval office like a pizza delivery guy because i had a stack of eight you know pads or something because i wanted to show a video to everyone and one that i can talk about is that when kim jong-un came into power as the new leader in in north korea we wanted to show him that he was less like his father and more like his grandfather uh kim il-jong and we used it by showing an old speech that the grandfather had done early in his presidency uh or leadership and we contrasted it with a speech and both were unclassified but just through the mannerisms you could see oh my goodness he's he's modeling his his his grandfather well what i didn't remember though is that i had the audio up on every ipad and so as everyone hit it yeah yeah it just got the whole room you know applause was here and then it would go around the room and i finally turned to everybody else but customer number one i said turn it off okay i want one person to be able to watch this by himself so we we did learn over time that there's a little orchestration that it went with the ipad as well i think any of you could answer this one but michael i'll turn to you uh both from a briefer's perspective but then also as the manager of the analytic process at cia um brigham bechtel is in the audience and he asks that the intelligence community is tasked both to talk about current problems what's what's going to hit your desk tomorrow mr president but also to look at longer-term trends and the things looming on the horizon so how do you balance looking into the future at the the coming storm that the president will face versus using your limited time with the president to give insight on the most pressing concerns perhaps even this hour that the president is facing um sure you know your job is to tell the president what he or she needs to know right in order to protect the country um and that may be things that are right around the corner um it may be things that are a year out it may be things that are four or five years out it may be warning of a pandemic at some point in the future um where you don't know exactly when it's going to happen you just know it is going to happen um and so i think you just try to make sure that that you do all of those things right and don't focus just on the right around the corner or just the today you have to work hard at that um but i never struggled as a as the head of the di at cia for example getting a long-term uh view piece in the pdb there's there's enough space in order to do that um so i never i never struggled with that the the bigger struggle was the analyst time you know did we give the analysts the time to do that as opposed to did we find room in the pdb for it i think those are two different things hey david can i jump on that because please do let me give a little insight because i again had a slightly different job in that we were editing the book the night before and then delivering it in the morning and you know in 2010 the art form that went with a draft so you would get a draft pdb a page page and a half sometimes longer but that was generally the sweet spot and it would come with what's called a background note meaning you've got the main draft and then you've got an attachment that includes all of the underlying intelligence all the other you know the coordination that occurred throughout the community any issues with any of the uh and then it also had some key questions that had to be answered to decide threshold or not to your question is is this the right time to bring this to present and the first two questions were pretty straightforward but they were profound the first one is why does the president need to know this to michael's point but it's got a security implication it's it's an impending threat or an opportunity right so that one was kind of sort of easy to answer given the president's job there's a lot of things in the world that he or she could benefit from knowing but the second one is why does the president need to know this now that's harder on a pandemic right because we don't have a now it's easier when he's about to host an important meeting or attend an important negotiation or dealing with a big uh troop deployment issue etc that's pending um but oftentimes in in to leslie's disappointment sometimes when she was bt'ed you know you would just have to convey no no that was that was a great analysis it just isn't ready for the president now and that was a tougher call let me uh let me throw out a related question to that um several questions have got at this general idea but it's the idea of how do you manage that without politicizing because for for many analysts writing this intelligence if if you as a briefer or as a manager choose not to brief a message you're politicizing you you've you've somehow come under the sway of that policy maker and you're not telling them a message they need to hear when in fact there are many good reasons that it may not be briefed that day on the other hand if you brief the same message to the customer without significant new information you're just beating them over the head with something and you're not actually helping them in the job so but for each of you just give us a few words on your thoughts about politicization uh overall but specifically in the pdb process when is it worth for example uh in a hypothetical telling a president who has said i don't want to hear more intelligence about this country i just don't want to hear it when is it worth going to that president and saying i'm sorry mr president but we really need to tell you this perhaps about a country putting bounties on u.s soldiers if it's a message you know will not be received well and you only have a few chances to get that in how does politicization and the potential for politicization play into that um mike i'll start with you and we'll go around so i don't think a briefer a briefer does not have a choice about whether to brief something or not um if the intelligence community and the leadership of the intelligence community has decided that the president needs to see this it's your job to brief it let me point out that the national security adviser now disagrees with you on that because he has said publicly that the briefer who goes to the president uh chose not to highlight a piece for the president um that sounds a little i disagree i disagree with with with the national security adviser in fact in my view in that particular case if it played out the way the media has talked about it playing out if the briefer didn't raise it then it was the job of the dni to raise it or the job of the director of cia to raise it and if they didn't raise it it was the national security advisor's job to raise it so i completely disagree right so i think it's the job of the briefer to raise it and i go back to where we started this conversation which is about you have to have you know you have to have a relationship with the president where they understand what your job is and they respect that you know one of the one of the things that really impressed me about the obama administration in general and it included the president and the vice president and the the whole senior team is that they understood the what intelligence was what policy was where the line was what our job was um to tell them bad news if we needed to do it and they respected that and i never felt during the obama administration any pushback so i worked for six different presidents um and you know multiple administrations in those six presidents and all but the obama administration there were attempts to politicize intelligence only in the obama administration did i never feel any pressure whatsoever but even if there is pressure you can't succumb to it you know you just cannot succumb to it if you're going to succumb to it you're not doing your job and you need to step away from it leslie your thoughts on the politicization question sure so let me flip this a little bit on its head because there are times when for analysts it's very hard to write on a topic and if they disagree with the direction of u.s policy it can definitely show up in their analysis i did a stint in the shop that did arab israeli analysis as a manager and i remember there were times michael and i crossed paths on this and there were several analysts who felt passionately about how the u.s should pursue a relationship between the israelis and the palestinians and it would come through in spades in their analysis and i'd have to go back and say no you can't call the settlers rabble rousers well that's what the newspaper said okay but when you say that it's cia saying that if you want to quote the newspaper quote the newspaper but that's got to come out and i was often accused of politicizing and i wasn't and part of it too is you need to understand that policymakers human and the way you convey your message can impact their receptivity to it and it's not politicizing but it's making sure that you're presenting in a way that will not um i want to say offend them but won't hit them between the eyes as being very negative or critical of their of their policy robert your reflections on the politicization question yeah and and again because i did make calls as to what would go in the book or not i did sit closer to the accusation as you described it david you know oh you didn't run my piece because you know you you know you don't want the president to see this for some policy reason um i won't say that never happened it never came to my desk i won't you know i can't say that it didn't obviously happen somewhere up or down the chain but uh certainly didn't happen at my desk or jim clapper's desk i will tell you though that we had a different kind of tension that i experienced i don't know if michael and leslie had the same one and it was a temporal tension meaning and and by the way i i can't think of a time that i got it from president obama but i'm thinking about his team chief of staff national security advisor deputy national security advisor when they thought something went into the book and thus in front of the president before it was ready for a decision or jeez you guys could have collected more on this it's too you know sketchy right now you're trying to jam the president meaning you're trying to make him make a decision before it's time and we're still you know cartila we're still working this and if you now you forced it now i'm cartooning nobody actually said those words to me but it was like you know you're you're not helping us by bringing this to them because once you bring it to them now it's an issue that we have to deal with and you know machinery starts to go and i will say even though a different semi-related topic was the dni just like the director of cia when when he ran the community had a responsibility to inform the hill on significant intelligence activities now that's a pretty general term what does that mean significant to whom well again dni clapper had to make those calls often and there were some pretty sensitive issues and if if any pressure i felt it was really you had to go tell the senate that well guess what they're now calling going what are you doing about this and and you know what i mean so it was more of a time phased pressure than it was i can't believe you brought it up at all right right um michael kathy fearson asks the question about warning versus opportunities analysis pointing out that generally the intelligence community has done well sometimes better than others at warning analysis but how open generally and at the level of the president are policy makers to opportunities analysis so that's something that grew over time you know when i when i was um when i was a junior analyst there was no such thing as opportunity analysis um it you know probably started in the late 80s early 90s um and became became you know more of a thing that we did regularly it's still it's still not a huge part of of what the intelligence community does because it does start to run up against policy suggestions so usually hidden in opportunity analysis is a suggestion about what you should be doing um and you know we just shouldn't go there so it it it has to be used extraordinarily carefully and i think um you know before it gets put in front of the president that's something that the dni needs to pay a lot of attention to i'll make a comment about about warning sandy berger um when he was national security advisor came to cia to speak to the troops and we were all in uh the auditorium you know so-called bubble um i don't know if you guys were there but um one of the things he said which i'll never forget is is is i really want somebody to tell me what i don't have to worry about because boy do you guys tell me about a lot of stuff that i have to worry about and i really need somebody to say you don't need to worry about this thing over here that's okay uh and i really understood where he was coming from because if there's a bias in the intelligence community it's to overwarn right you'd rather warn about something that didn't happen then not warn about something that did happen so there is a definite bias in favor of warning and um it's probably something that needs to be thought about sure lastly um we have a question about what is loosely called technical analysis and i don't care whether it's iranian centrifuges or what we now call cyber or issues related to the tactics of a terrorist device sometimes you have to brief something that is highly technical in nature when many of our senior customers including the president that you briefed often are more generalists than experts in a particular technology so how is an intelligence storyteller tim bettis asks do you keep a president up to speed on highly technical matters without oversimplifying the analysis in the process a really good question um you know i talked in the beginning about being willing to accept change in your career my master's degree is in russian studies my first job at cia i was a ballistic missile development analyst a flaming liberal arts major was a ballistic missile development analyst but i got to know and understand enough of the technical to be able to explain it and i think what you need to do is work with the people who are really technical and you can find them there are people who can really put it in terms that you can understand and that you can explain but there are going to be some things that you have to convey and i can't really get into them here as i think about the iranian centrifuge program or things like that but there are going to be some technical facts that are going to be important whether it's related to a treaty or an agreement or negotiations or something that the president and his team really needs to know about and you need to work with the analysts to discern that now when i did this briefing we first off let me take a step back and give a shout out to everybody who was working 24 7 to prepare these briefings for us because we all went in and we delivered a product but we really weren't the ones that were preparing it we started very early in the morning reefers would come in around the people who wrote the pieces will come in around five in the morning and that was your chance to quiz them this is the time to take that technical person aside and say tell me exactly how i need to be presenting this to make it digestible and important for the policy maker robert we have a question that relates to how you as a briefer related differences between intelligence agencies and intelligence analysts so would you acknowledge differences in the briefings and the walk-ons with the president that you know cia dia nsa inr felt differently on an issue or did they have no interest in that kind of inside baseball no absolutely and it's a great question to both explain the tradecraft and at least explain how president obama uh dealt with such a dissent so you mentioned the change over to the dni um and i'll say the broadening you know of the community that contributed uh i think most people know it is still predominantly a cia driven uh product but even all the cia pieces are coordinated as they head into the book and then if they're approved but when when i was getting the items the night before and and i recall distinctly having one pretty early in my tenure and it was a very significant issue it had to do with north korea and i'll just leave it at that but it was a very important piece and and uh as i recall it was uh it was written uh the primary office off authors were cia and it was a strong case you know strong case strong collection strong calls it was well at the end of the piece the analytic element of the department of energy uh had a strong descent and i stared at it and i went wow this makes a very compelling case you know with this you know uh these pieces of evidence and this chain of logic you can get to this outcome and then i've got over here mr president if you just take this a little differently or if you add more weight on this piece you get quite a different outcome and i struggled with it i didn't know whether or not it would be helpful to him or not to to say and on the one hand and on the other hand you know and i decided to go with it um i mean trust me i made a few calls that night uh to make sure that it was the right thing so i got some people that with some more expertise that leslie and michael will know that i leaned on for help so we go in the next morning and remember what i said you don't brief the book you brief the walk-on uh unless he has a question about the book get through my brief um finishes he does not have a question about it and i said mr president you know i'm packing up the leave and i said uh can i ask you a question which was odd and he said sure and i said i gotta tell you and i gave him the story i said i struggled with putting that piece in this morning or whatnot and i just need to know was it useful or not and he said no no it was very useful for the following reason um i read the the main piece and i understood it and i understood the logic but when i read the descending piece it helped me understand the main piece better strengths and weaknesses so i now feel like i've got a better view on this problem set by the way this was a problem set that he carried all the way through so i really you know breathe the sigh of relief and then to michael's point earlier that was wonderful feedback then for the community yeah you know we don't need to put a descending opinion on every piece just because you know he liked it for that example but it was very healthy for the community to hear i welcome descending views because it helps me think through what you know what you don't know and that that does work with a customer who has a process for for reading the intelligence for incorporating the intelligence and we'll take the time to do it but michael let me turn to you with a related question from lourdes venice who asks given the increased threats over the last two decades who fills the void if a policymaker doesn't read the pdb or doesn't take regular briefings on its content so let me just add something um on the the descent piece um because i think it's extraordinarily important function in the intelligence community to tell the president when there's a difference um but i also think it's extraordinarily important that when you do tell the president about a difference that you tell him why it matters to him why does it matter to his policy right i don't know if this was was what robert was talking about i don't think so but and this is public information so i can say this but different agencies have different views about how many nuclear devices north korea has um and you know the question is um does it matter whether they have 50 70 or 90 at the end of the day what difference does that difference make to the president and as a briefer and as an intelligence community you got to be able to explain why that difference matters to them if you're going to bring it to their attention whose job is it to uh inform the president if the president isn't paying attention to the intelligence community um it's a national security advisor's job right i i think that's where it falls and um um i don't think it falls anywhere else after the intelligence community has fully done its job the briefer the head of the agencies the dni uh after they've given their best try and tried everything they can possibly do i think it's that becomes the national security advisor's job to help try to fix it yeah leslie a question about the lifestyle of a pdb briefer how much did you sleep when you were in this role because for most of its time the pdb has been delivered in the morning usually to start the customer's day so the process is not really aligned with the normal work day how did it work for you and how did you adjust um blackout curtains and earplugs um pretty much i would start as i said i would probably get up around midnight 12 30 get in prep the briefing come back to the building give any feedback help analysts as i could craft pieces for the next day um go to the gym have something to eat go to sleep start all over again um so it is definitely a commitment i remember michael saying to me you just get used to being tired and uh he was right i did to a degree get used to being tired um but i realize i'm saying this to 413 people at least i met my current husband well my only husband i met i met my husband i got to clarify that i met my husband doing throughout this whole process and i will tell you this much i'll tell you two things on that um number one if he could put up with me with this kooky schedule um when when our dates for movies were matinees um the fact is if you could put up with that he could put up with anything so he was a keeper the second one was there are some certain calling cards you get when you're pdb briefer i made a lot of phone calls to him from an air force one i can tell you that went over really well too nice uh we'll close out the questions with one to you robert with the wide distribution of the pdb during the years that you were working with it in the obama administration this probably applies more to you than anyone homer pointer asks if you ever had a senior cabinet official or another recipient of the pdb be it a the vice president or a deputy national security adviser or a deputy secretary um how did their criticisms of analysis or how did their attempts to help the analysis affect how you would brief the president in theory some of them got to know the president on on some issues better than than you would in the oval office so how did you incorporate their criticisms and their ideas into the pdb editing and briefing process um very carefully because remember the p stands for the president and so it's his book um and so in no offense mr vice president biden but you're the vice president okay so uh so you you obviously you were listening to the vice president and secretaries and national security advisors but now if what they were bringing up was an issue of you know what you guys aren't writing enough about something that i'm bringing to the president or that he's confronting obviously that can help because for some reason we had we had a uh some sort of uh blockage in our view about what was on or near his desk but i also will tell you without naming a name a very humbling experience i had with the secretary um you might be able to guess who it was and we were i was doing basically a you know mid-term customer survey so i was going around to the pdb principal readers and just saying hey how's the book going for you you know and and what's working and what's not and uh this secretary who had a whole lot of experience uh in and around the book said you know what robert i don't really care that much what you write in the book i just need to know what the president's reading every morning and i don't know that he meant it as harshly as it just sounded but what his point was is it since i have to know what the president's reading because it's my job to support him and quite frankly i know what questions i'm gonna get from him so i mean quite frankly he he was telling me he says uh you know the fact that you wrote it is critically important to me because it's gonna it's gonna drive my day um uh what you write uh i you know that i can deal with later but uh now i'll circle back to the beginning i used to tell everyone don't forget the most important letter in pdb it is the p uh and uh don't lose your focus on that yep thank you all right that was fantastic thank you very much uh first i want to thank david for taking the time away from his law fair duties to come and participate in this event and co-host it with us i think you brought an audience to the hayden center that we uh had not had before and you brought exceptional knowledge about the pdb to this forum so thank you very much i want to thank our panelists none of them will probably ever talk to me again for having put them through this but uh i know our audience has walked away with a much more uh informed opinion and viewpoint on the pdb and so when they watch the news uh or for our students when they're doing you know their scholarly endeavors they're going to walk away from this event much more well informed um want to again thank special audience members dna clapper and pdd and i sue gordon uh for spending time uh listening to us today i'll i'll let you know if uh if they think we went astray uh we could not obviously do our events without general hayden so thank you very much to general hayden for being uh the leader of this center but uh also the uh uh the guy that we all love to go work for and continue to like to work with also we couldn't do these events without the support of george mason university um i want to particularly thank our new george mason university president gregory washington who i was informed during this event was watching and enjoying uh hearing what we had to say uh this is a man who's you know came into the job in the middle of this pandemic he's got a lot of things to focus on so the fact that he took time to listen to us today means a lot um can't do this also without dwight shar he's the benefactor for the char school and the benefactor for the hayden center so thanks to dwight shar if you want to see more of our events um when this event concludes most of you should get a pop-up on your browser at the hayden center page scroll to the bottom there's a little block you type your email address in hit send and you will be on our mailing list and i promise you we're not one of those organizations that sends a lot of emails you're going to get emails about primarily about our events so with that unless mark has anything else to say i just want to say thank you that was just a terrific panel a great way to start out the new academic year for the hayden center and i hope you all come back again i know this is your second david price but uh and mike morello michael morell of course is one of us all the time so robert and leslie that was just terrific so we we hope you see see you again at future hayden center events thank you thanks everybody and with that we'll conclude you can go turn the tv on watch the republican convention have a great time have a great night thanks [Music] you

Channel: The Hayden Center

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Id: dgdgOMuZc7w

Length: 90min 47sec (5447 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020