by Doug Wead
During the 2016 election campaign, Trump had promised to crush the terrorist group ISIS. They had built a 35,000-square-mile caliphate across a large swath of the Middle East. Now they were all but vanquished, holding on to their last few square miles of territory.
That very morning, during a television appearance, I had been shown a clip of President Lyndon Johnson’s famous State of the Union address of 1965. He had declared a war “on poverty and unemployment.”
It was stunning. For sixty years, everything that Republican and Democratic presidents had ever wanted for the poor, the disenfranchised, African Americans, Hispanics, and women was now happening under the leadership of a businessman with no prior political experience. “LBJ gave them food stamps and welfare,” I pointed out in my television interview. “Donald Trump is giving them jobs.”3
GETTING THE ASSIGNMENT
The president was in a good mood. His expansive personality filled the Oval Office and had everyone else in the room smiling and laughing. They were all waiting for what he would say next. Bill Shine, the deputy chief of staff, was there, along with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. All three were smiling broadly at me when I walked in. This meeting had been delayed far too long
I had been in the Oval Office many times over the years. I had met other presidents in this room. But this would be more than a sit-down interview. This time, I was being given the nod to write an official history of a presidency. And significantly, just that morning, I had been given permission to record my interviews. Considering all the investigations and controversies surrounding this president and how badly he had been burned by outside writers, this was a practice that was becoming less common for this White House.
I had the impression that my project represented some sort of internal staff breakthrough. Bill and Sarah were both beaming with pride. And while I was, apparently, the direct beneficiary of this project, I got the impression that this team and the many assistants who had been helping me, emailing me, and setting up interviews had won something too. Whatever victory it might have been would have involved the arcane and unfathomable world of White House politics, and was, therefore, beyond my own understanding. Still, I was humbled and grateful. If the door to the Oval Office was open, I would step inside.
“Did you see my tweet?” the president asked. He had commented on my television appearance.
“Thank you, Mr. President.” I laughed. “Yes, I saw that.” It is pretty hard to miss a Trump tweet when you are the target. He has millions of Twitter followers. Every person I knew and many I didn’t had been texting me all morning.
The president waved a small handful of papers above his head, as if he were teasing a child with candy. “So, we’ve agreed to show you everything.”
He waved the papers. “Nobody’s seen this. My people don’t want me to give these to you. But I want you to read them. If you are going to do this book, you need to read this.
“These are private. These are the personal letters exchanged between me and Kim Jong-un. You can’t keep them, but I’m going to let you read them. These are amazing. This is history. I want to know what you think.”
Donald Trump had obviously signed on to the idea of this book, because without any prompting from me, or without a single question, he was now waving these letters—the crown jewels—before me.
“Right there, right over there,” he said, pointing to the two chairs in front of the fireplace, “is where Barack Obama told me that my greatest problem, when I became president, was the possibility of war with North Korea. In fact, privately, he said, ‘You will have a war with North Korea on your watch.’”
The president dramatically lowered his voice, continuing his story, “And I said to Obama, ‘Well, Mr. President, have you called him?’
“And Obama said, ‘No, he’s a dictator.’” As if that, in itself, explained everything.
Then the president paused, letting those words sink in. “No, he hadn’t called him because he’s a dictator?”
Now, two years later, Donald Trump was still amazed by that conversation. And then he concluded, out loud, to all of us in the room: “Stupid.”
I was riveted.
“So, they don’t want me to let you see these letters, but I think you should,” he said. “I think you should. This is my personal correspondence with Kim Jong-un. I want you to read it.”
I didn’t know who he meant by “they,” the people who had told him not to show me the documents, but I assumed it wasn’t Bill or Sarah, the only others in the room. It was more likely NSA advisers, or State Department folks or intelligence experts. And they would all have good reasons to tell him not to let a writer see them. But that, of course, meant that my project was known to them, as well, and that it had been discussed.
“You can’t photograph these or copy them in anyway,” the president said. I imagined he was passing on protocols to which he had agreed.
And then he added, “Nobody will ever know how close we came to war.”
This was the president outlining his own history book. He was starting with North Korea, which even during the campaign he had realized was the single greatest strategic problem facing the United States. He wanted me to see that. His predecessor, President Obama, had agreed and had come to the same conclusion. Indeed, so had most of the nation’s top policy thinkers.
Beyond the great economic numbers he had achieved, beyond the defeat of ISIS, the single most important thing that had happened, in the president’s mind, had been that a nuclear threat had been averted and tensions with North Korea had been reduced. Later on, when we had lunch together, the president drove home this point. It wasn’t just the nuclear weapons themselves; many nations now had nuclear weapons. Russia was obviously far more powerful than North Korea. The danger came from the likelihood that such weapons would be used by one nation more than another. Or that they would be passed into the hands of others who would use them.
Of course, most writers and pundits and journalists understood that. They also understood how horrific a nuclear war would be. And yet, in the president’s mind, they didn’t fully understand. It took more than a two-hour seminar or ten good books to get it to sink in. You had to live with it, day by day, with modern, relevant models of what would actually happen. You had to understand it, step by step, nation by nation, city by city. It took days to fully comprehend. It would be clear in our conversations that Donald Trump had been living with it. North Korea was a problem that had been put off far too long by too many presidents, and that neglect had allowed a crisis to reach a very dangerous temperature.
THE VICE PRESIDENT’S EMERGENCY INTERRUPTION
The Oval Office has two main doors. If you sit at the president’s desk, the Resolute desk, a priceless gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, you face the fireplace on the east wall. The portrait of Washington is just above it, and flanking both sides are the two chairs that Trump had just pointed out. To the left of the fireplace is the main door, the traditional entrance to the Oval Office. To the right of the fireplace is a door that leads to the president’s secretaries and personal assistants.
Most heads of state and officials come through the main door. There is a Secret Service agent sitting just outside. If you leave the Oval Office through this door you enter a hallway with a thick, deep carpet. The hallway splits to the left and the right. To the left it passes doors opening into the Roosevelt Room, where the senior staff meets and where many of the group meetings with the president take place. It passes Jared Kushner’s office, finally ending at the chief of staff’s corner of the West Wing.
If you leave the Oval Office through the main door, and head out to the right instead, the hallway passes the Cabinet Room and eventually leads into the maze of White House press offices and the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.
Meanwhile, to the right of the fireplace in the Oval Office is the second door. The door that leads to the president’s secretaries’ o
ffices, and a niche for the president’s personal assistant. This is the young man who carries the nuclear codes (in a briefcase known as “the football”) and who keeps the president functioning day to day. This office has a direct door into the Cabinet Room and backs out into the same hallway that fronts the main door.
Most guests enter the Oval Office through this secretaries’ office. That’s how I’d come in only minutes earlier. The secretaries and the president’s personal assistant had stood and smiled and greeted me kindly. They would have seen me on the official schedule for lunch with the president that day. When I had served on senior staff at the White House and was the action officer for an Oval Office event, I knew everything about that person down to his shoelaces. And I usually knew all of it weeks before the visit. My staff and I would see the name on the calendar and watch it grow closer. We would even create the dialogue, what the visitor was likely to say and how the president should respond. I shuddered to think about what they had learned about me.
It was though this door, the secretaries’ door, that suddenly, unexpectedly, the vice president of the United States, Mike Pence, came bounding into the Oval Office, interrupting our meeting.
The president was on the other side of the room, talking to us about Kim Jong-un and North Korea, his booming voice and colorful personality dominating the room. Now we were suddenly distracted by a softer, younger, female voice, struggling bravely to find the volume to be heard from her doorway across the Oval Office. It was like two competing televisions in the same room. But her announcement was too faint and the vice president was moving so fast that he was already in the middle of the room before she could finish announcing him.
“Excuse me, Mr. President.” Mike Pence was huffing and puffing. “This can’t wait. I’ve got to speak with you, sir,” he said urgently. “And I’m sorry, sir, but I’m afraid that I need to speak to you alone.”
I was ready to leave, but the president, hardly flinching, only joked good-naturedly, saying something to the effect that well, after all, he was just showing Doug Wead his secret communications with Kim Jong-un so, whatever it was, it couldn’t be any more secret than that. “Well, Doug here is writing a history of this White House,” the president said. “He can hear anything.”
The vice president laughed, came over and shook my hand, “Hi, Doug, good to see you, sir.” He smiled broadly.
“Hi, Mr. Vice President.” And then I added softly, “I promise I won’t tell, at least until the book is published, which is probably much more than a year away.”
There was more laughter.
Pence turned back to the president, face-to-face, speaking quietly, affording a bit more privacy, “Well, sir, the senators just want you to know that they are behind you.”
That explained the interruption. And it explained why the vice president was huffing and puffing. He had just come from Capitol Hill, where he presides over the Senate, and he wanted the president to know that the Republican senators would support him if he wanted to give his State of the Union speech at another location, such as the Senate chamber. They would be there, wherever it might be, and they would lend dignity to this event that was mandated by the US Constitution. The State of the Union speech was scheduled for the following Tuesday, January 29, 2019, so the country was waiting for news. Would it still happen? And, if so, where?
The president turned to me, the outsider, to offer a little explanation, “You see, Doug, to do this right we need for the Senate to be unanimous, and the Democrats aren’t going help us with that, it just ain’t gonna happen.”
Then he turned back to Pence, “No, no, tell them thanks so much.”
“They support you, sir.”
“I know that.”
“And they want you to know that they are behind you, sir.”
“Yes, and I want you to thank them,” the president said. “But I’ve already decided, we will do it later. So, we are going to postpone it. I’ve just decided.”
And that was that. The vice president would take the news back to the Senate, and it would be announced to the public that very day.
Two days later, on January 26, 2019, the Republicans and Democrats would agree on a spending bill, and the longest government shutdown in American history would come to an end. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump would deliver his State of the Union address, in the House chamber, on February 5, 2019. And as Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi would give her famous, sarcastic applause.
LUNCH WITH THE PRESIDENT
There are other doors in the Oval Office that I didn’t mention. To the president’s right as he sits at his desk is a whole wall of French doors that open out onto a small portico. The manicured grass stretches out to the South Lawn. To the immediate right, just outside those French doors, is a little trail that leads to the president’s private garden. It is a secluded spot where he can take a Diet Coke and read newspapers and memos when the weather is nice. And then there is a branch off that trail that leads, almost unseen, down to the White House swimming pool. The tennis courts, surrounded by towering trees, are deeper into the South Lawn and hidden from view until you are upon them.
The secretaries’ offices also have a wall of French doors, along the east side of their room. These doors open out onto a portico that overlooks the Rose Garden.
Finally, there is one more door that I haven’t mentioned.
As the president sits at the Resolute desk, to his extreme left, curving along the wall that stretches behind him, in the closest place you can find that might qualify as a corner in an oval room, is one more door. It is this door that leads to an inner sanctum of privacy. This door opens into the narrow “Monica Lewinsky hallway.” Of course, that is not what the White House Historical Association calls it, but it is a name that, nonetheless, comes to mind for most visitors. It was in this narrow hallway that President Bill Clinton and his twenty-two-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky were able to achieve some degree of private, sexual intimacy. It was in this hallway that Kathleen Willey, a White House volunteer and longtime Clinton fundraiser, says she had been pinned against the wall and sexually abused.
To the right of this narrow hallway is the presidential toilet. To the left is the “real office” of the president, where he works. It is how he keeps the Oval Office so tidy. It is how he keeps the Resolute desk so empty. That famous desk, by the way, was built from the English oak timbers of the HMS Resolute, and it has served FDR, JFK, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and many other presidents.
Straight ahead, down to the end of this short hallway, is the private presidential dining room. At this small table President Ronald Reagan had a weekly lunch with his vice president, George H. W. Bush. And this is where President Donald Trump invited me to begin interviewing him for this book.
“Where do you want me to sit, Mr. President?”
He took a seat at the head of the table. There was a white, starched tablecloth, heavy silverware, and White House bone china.
“Sit right here.” He motioned to the seat to his right. Bill Shine and Sarah Sanders took seats on the other side of the table.
The president had a Diet Coke. Some joked that, for a man who didn’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, it was his only sin. I took a water. And then they served us a salad. In fact, it was just a lettuce salad, its pieces cut to bite size. There were no tomatoes, or olives, or onions, but the dressing reminded me of the tasty house dressing at Carrabba’s Italian Grill.
We all waited for the president to take the first bite. And when he did we began eating our lunch.
“We were talking about Kim Jong-un, Mr. President.”
“So Kim and I started off very rough,” the president said, picking up where he had left the story. “Because this country was ready to go to war with North Korea. Under President Obama, I really believe we would have had a war had he stayed longer. And I also think that thirty to one hundred million people could have been killed. When I saw predictions by experts on television that said one hundred
thousand people, two hundred thousand people would die.” He shook his head at the absurdity.
“That’s almost the population of a small town or a village in Korea. Imagine that? Some experts on television were saying that a nuclear war would wipe out the equivalent of a village. At first, this was what some television networks were telling their audiences.
“Well, as you know, Seoul, the capital city, is right by the so-called border. And that is a tough border by the way. An impenetrable border. And Seoul has a population of thirty million people. Kim has ten thousand guns, artillery, they call them cannons. He doesn’t even need a nuclear weapon to create one of the greatest calamities in history.
“But a nuclear war? I see these people on television talking about it so casually. They have no idea. They give it a few days’ thought and talk like experts. Or they say that some other country has more nuclear weapons than North Korea and is therefore more dangerous. But it doesn’t take a hundred nuclear missiles to really hurt a country, even destroy a country. One nuclear device can do that. Which city in America would you be willing to give up? As far as I’m concerned? Not one. Not one.
“So when I came into office the rhetoric with Kim became extremely tough, extremely tough. And if it weren’t so tough, we would have gotten something going immediately. Because this was the biggest problem I faced.”
THE WORD THAT KIM HATES
The president was interrupted by a phone call. “Excuse me just a second.” He took the call from a phone that was on a small table behind him. As you look toward that table, just beyond are two windows behind it, opening up on the president’s private garden.
I used the moment to finish my salad and study the letters from Kim Jong-un. Somehow they had finally been passed over to me, although, even now, thinking back on this experience, I can’t remember exactly when that had happened. I suspect it was while we were still in the Oval Office, which meant that I had actually carried them into the president’s private dining room. In any case, I was conscious that I now had this stack of papers. The letters on top were in the Korean language and were on the official, embossed stationary of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with fancy ink signatures at the bottom. There were English translations right underneath, probably prepared by our own intelligence services.