Reggie Jackson vs. Billie Martin, the self-assured New York Yankees slugger and headstrong manager who in 1977 nearly came to blows in the Fenway Park visitors’ dugout.
Guys and Dolls co-stars Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, whose rivalry on the 1955 film set of the musical quickly divided the cast and crew into warring camps.
The highest levels the U.S. government, too, is home to plenty of rivalries between White House staff members who are ostensibly part of the same “team,” but in many cases could barely stand to be in the same room with each other.
“Staff members” isn’t actually a full description of the trend, as described expertly in Tevi Troy’s Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump. Many of these squabbles involve Cabinet officers and occasionally a vice president, such as Nelson Rockefeller, a target of much opprobrium by conservatives who President Gerald Ford dropped as his 1976 running mate at the urging of his chief of staff and deputy chief of staff — Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
Sometimes the internal White House rivalries are petty, over office size or parking spaces, which have long made for political gossip fodder, writes Troy, a presidential scholar who has written three previous books on aspects of White House life. Yet the rivalries can have real-world consequences, notes Troy, who served in a number of positions during President George W. Bush’s administration, finishing as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services.
That administration featured famous factional fights among the president’s foreign policy team in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Most prominently between Rumsfeld, in his second turn as defense secretary, against Secretary of State Collin Powell, with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice left relatively helpless to mediate.
“The strange thing about internal rivalries is that they take place among people who nominally are on the same team. Disagreements, even if intense, should theoretically never get too personal,” Troy writes. In prior administrations, “most seek each other on a day to day basis and tend to have relatively pleasant interactions face to face. This changed in the Bush administration, as the rivalries intensified and the stakes behind the disputes became higher than ever.”
That’s not to say earlier White House rivals always took a forgive-and-forget approach. Rivalries recounts hard feelings that lingered long beyond Democratic President Harry Truman’s administration between Secretary of State George Marshall and special counsel Clark Clifford, over the recognition of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948. Marshall sided with the State Department’s largely pro-Arab state bureaucracy in warning against recognition, while Clifford was a stalwart supporter. The latter’s view won out, but at the expense of his relationship with Marshall, who stopped speaking to him for the rest of his life.
The television era only magnified many of these rivalries, with top presidential staff aides preening for favorable coverage and more than willing to (anonymously) criticize competitors in order to sink their standing with their boss, the president.
Sometimes it’s a matter of ego. Troy recounts White House resentment during President George H.W. Bush’s administration at chief of staff John Sununu’s frequent and loud reminders of his genius-level 180 IQ, while Office of Management and Budget Director Richard Darman often boasted of his perfect SAT scores in high school.
The book makes a crucial point that White House staff tension is not necessarily bad. Competing points of view, as long as they’re expressed respectively, are vital in giving presidents a range of options to confront intractable problems. The most successful Oval Office presidents, of both parties, have welcomed a certain level of internal staff disagreement, as long as it didn’t descend into juvenile bickering.
This makes the present administration stand out so much, even though there’s limited utility in writing a historical account of ongoing events. Even of the Obama administration, more than three years in the past, Troy writes, “official oral histories do not yet exist, and staff memoirs and other histories are only now starting to trickle out.”
President Trump’s administration, though, has been marked by unusually high staff turnover and tales of profanity-laced tirades between members of the same team that prior commander in chiefs would have sought to tamp down. In Trump’s case, the drama is the point, as advisers are encouraged to mix it up.
Troy recounts “many cases in which White House players cut each other off and refused to speak. In the Trump world, communications aide Hope Hicks and strategist Steve Bannon halted person exchanged after they disagreed on the statement President Trump made about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russians.”
Still, it’s entirely possible the public in November 2020 will reward Trump with a second term, effectively validating a Lord of the Flies-type approach to staff management. One that over the weekend saw the emergence of the president’s fourth chief of staff during his four-year term, Republican North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, replacing Mick Mulvaney.
Troy’s portrait of White House rivalries is essential reading for political junkies and lay readers alike. The writing is vibrant, characters bold, and the turf fights familiar to anybody who follows Washington politics even casually. It’s also an important reminder that whatever chaos seems to emanate from the Trump White House on a given day, some of it amplified and egged on by Twitter and other social media, most of it is not particularly new.
Troy recounts advice he got from a Clinton administration official upon being asked to work on the White House Domestic Policy Council team. That element of the Bush 43 White House ran relatively collegially, based on shared policy priorities and relatively smooth personal relations. So, the author did not have to implement it. But the suggestion about White House rivals, present and future, still holds.
“Watch your back.”
