On May 1, 2011, President Obama, his staff, and military leaders were huddled together in the Situation Room, a quarantine facility in the basement of the White House, as they witnessed Osama bin Laden’s attack on his compound in Pakistan.
Official White House photographer Pete Souza captured the iconic moment, but it was made possible due to technical issues.
During the mission, President Obama was initially alone in a large conference room getting updates. Although the Situation Room has a single name, it actually consists of multiple conference rooms and offices.
However, the technical staff could not figure out how to patch the mission’s live video feed to that particular room, so the President watched history unfold with the rest of the assembled members.
Mike, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, says, “This way you end up with footage that looks like a clown car where everyone is crammed into a small room, and no one is completely sure how to move the video into a larger room.” Because I don’t understand it,” he said. Reiter tells George Stephanopoulos in his fascinating new book, “The Situation Room: The Inside Story of a President in Crisis” (Grand Central Publishing), out May 14th.
When most people think of a situation room, they imagine something full of grandeur and mystery, like the grand war rooms depicted in movies like Dr. Martin. “Strange Love,” but Stephanopoulos reveals that’s a contradiction.
It was “the epicenter of the crisis during the American catastrophe,” and some of the world’s most “sensitive and sometimes terrifying information” has been shared, he writes. But the 5,500-square-foot Situation Room is also a “mundane place” that goes beyond the physical technicalities.
The idea for the Situation Room was first proposed to President Eisenhower in the 1950s, but it was John F. Kennedy who put it into action less than two weeks after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
A location was chosen, an old bowling alley under the West Wing, and several names were suggested, ranging from “Nervous Center” to “Executive Coordination Center.” Kennedy ultimately chose the nickname coined by a military researcher who submitted a report recommending the creation of a “National Daily Situation Room” on Cold War issues.
Less than a year later, the Situation Control Room proved indispensable during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to remove the missiles, he announced the plan on Radio Moscow, but the message was intercepted by Situation Room staff and quickly relayed to Kennedy.
“If ‘Shit Room’ had not yet existed, Khrushchev’s preface might have taken longer to arrive and the Cuban Missile Crisis might have taken a much darker turn,” Stephanopoulos wrote. There is.
Twelve administrations have used the Situation Room, and each president’s attitude toward it “reflected his personality,” he said.
Some, like Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, “wanted to be where it happened.” People like Richard Nixon and Donald Trump hated being in the realm of the National Security Council.
Ford preferred the Oval Office to the sitting room because, as Ford biographer Richard Norton Smith surmised, it was “a way to establish presidential legitimacy.”
Kissinger believed that Nixon hated the Situation Room because “Johnson suffered from ‘Situation Room Syndrome,'” Stephanopoulos writes.
His predecessor, LBJ, often spent sleepless nights trying to get regular updates on the Vietnam War. According to his diary, Johnson once told his wife, “I want you to call me every time someone dies.” (It didn’t help that both of his sons-in-law were in the war.)
But Nixon, too, avoided the sit-room as he struggled with his own demons. In October 1973, as Kissinger and other White House advisers were trying to decide how to respond to the Yom Kippur War, Nixon was “incapacitated by Scotch, sleeping pills, and depression, holed up in the official residence,” according to Stefano. Pross writes.
The Situation Room’s colorful historical stories range from the heroic to the silly.
On 9/11, Stephanopoulos writes, “just as New York’s firefighters rushed toward the burning towers, so did the Sit Room staff rush toward the White House.” When the White House was ordered to evacuate, staffers refused to leave due to concerns that terrorists were targeting the building.
Frank Miller, senior director of defense policy, asked everyone to write down their names and Social Security numbers. “We want to know which bodies to search for,” he explained. Even the gruesome demands weren’t enough to make the staff quit the job.
Some stories are like sitcoms. Although Mr. Ford rarely visited the Sit Room on official business, Mr. Stephanopoulos said he often went there “in his bathing suit” with First Lady Betty “on their way to the White House’s new outdoor pool.” is writing.
Jimmy Carter noticed that one of his colonels had a distinctive Georgian accent during a situation room meeting to discuss Desert First, the ultimately doomed mission to rescue hostages from Iran. .
“You’re my neighbor!” Carter yelled, realizing they probably lived in the same town. “Who are you guys?”
He also participated in a conference about using “remote observers,” better known as psychics, to gather intelligence and support military operations. During a discussion with U.S. Navy Captain Jake Stewart, Carter asked if psychic powers could be used to locate the hostages.
“I don’t know,” Stewart told him. “Would you like to try it?” Carter just nodded.
In 2012, President Obama tried to contact a Saudi prince being treated at the Cleveland Clinic, but calls from the Situation Room were repeatedly ignored as pranks.
“They said, ‘Sure, dude!’ And they hung up,” former sit-room caller Drew Roberts told Stephanopoulos. “We called five more times and got hung up on five more times with various ‘No, wait! I’m serious!’ tactics.”
Security in the Situation Room is tight, the use of mobile phones of any kind is prohibited, and to this day no calls between heads of state have been recorded. Instead, three staff members listen on headsets, write everything down by hand, and compare versions later.
Only a few conversations inside the room were recorded. One of them was in March 1981 after Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington, DC.
National Security Adviser Richard Allen brought in a small tape recorder to “record the scene for posterity,” Stephanopoulos wrote. The situation erupted into a frenzy, with White House Chief of Staff Al Haig demanding, “Let’s discuss it at this table!” before anything was revealed to the world.
The other recording, made in 2017, made Omarosa, a Trump aide, the first person to be fired from the Situation Room. She smuggled the recorder.
As Obama-era Sitroom director Larry Pfeiffer told Stephanopoulos, it’s because “nobody’s freaking out when they walk in the door.” It’s an honor system…most of the people who come and go there tend to be very high level, very important people. Certain assumptions are made that they will do the right thing. ”
The shadow of history is difficult to ignore in the Situation Room. While planning the 2011 bin Laden attack, then-Secretary of Defense Bob Gates couldn’t help but think back to the failed attempt to free hostages under the Carter administration in 1980.
“You could feel this ghost coming into the room saying, ‘That’s what I’m here for,'” Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told Stephanopoulos.
Gates voted against the raid, noting too many similarities to Carter’s failed mission. Mr. Obama listened to his concerns, and the attack went ahead anyway, succeeding in part because it relied on Mr. Gates’ experience.
“It was like a football team playing together all season and reaching the Super Bowl with their best performance,” Stephanopoulos wrote.
A lot has changed since The Situation Room’s debut. Last year’s $50 million upgrade with faster servers and new technology to detect rogue mobile devices has brought it full circle.
“Once again, the United States and Russia are adversaries,” Stephanopoulos wrote. “History repeats itself in a sense.”
And the shit room remains at the heart of it all. Except now, the young staff calls it by her initials, WHSR (pronounced “wither”).
NSC spokeswoman Emily Horn told Stephanopoulos that she was as surprised as anyone by the change.
“I don’t think I’m one of the cool kids,” she told him. “Because I don’t feel like calling it that yet.”
