Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from producer Raymond Rapada. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren One of the most immediate fallouts of the LLOYD AUSTIN saga will come tomorrow, when all Cabinet agencies are required to send the White House their procedures for delegating authority. They will do so in response to an order from chief of staff JEFF ZIENTS, who demanded as much after the defense secretary’s secret hospitalization sparked questions about transparency and ensuring lines of succession. To break down this particular element of an ever-expanding story, West Wing Playbook called LEON PANETTA, who served both as White House chief of staff under BILL CLINTON and secretary of defense under BARACK OBAMA. This conversation has been edited for length. What’s gone through your mind has you’ve followed this story? He’s accepted responsibility and said he’s going to do a better job. Look, I’ve been in and out of Washington for over 50 years. There’s a lesson that is always very hard to learn in Washington, which is that you're always better off telling the truth. And if you in any way try to avoid it, the truth is eventually going to come out. And you’ll pay a price. How did this communication work for you when you were in these roles? When I was chief of staff, it was the case that people in the Cabinet called me and gave me a heads up if they were either going to be gone, leave town for a while or be hospitalized. We had a policy that that should be the case. And when I was in the Obama administration, I would stay in pretty regular touch with Rahm Emmanuel, who was chief of staff, both with regards to where I was going, but also the operations I was involved with. So there wasn’t a handbook on your first day laying out those expectations on the delegation of power and communication? It’s more of an understanding? There’s been a gradual deterioration here with regards to the role of the Cabinet. Because so much authority is centralized in the White House these days, the Cabinet really only comes together usually for a press briefing by the president. Normally, what should be the case is there’s a secretary to the Cabinet, and there should be regular meetings with the Cabinet to not only inform them about issues going on but also to stay in touch with them, so that they feel like they’re part of the team. As that relationship generally has been strained in the last number of years, I think everybody kind of operates on their own. You saw a little bit of that happen here. Do you believe Zients needed this review to ensure there’s formal policy in place? Absolutely. It’s one of those things that I’m sure a lot of people take for granted, but you really do need to have a formal policy. As chief of staff, how did you ensure your expectations for Cabinet members were clear? In many ways, what I did was to try to become a surrogate for the president in dealing with the Cabinet. You have to go out of your way to maintain that kind of relationship. I can only imagine remote capabilities and technological advances make that more challenging. Oh yeah, everybody’s on Zoom. Everybody’s on a laptop. And you avoid that personal touch, which I think it’s true in government and in business. So how would you handle the fallout from all of this? This is a case where it seems that responsibility falls on a number of shoulders, and so you can’t very well clean house going up to the president. But at the very least you could try — and I think Austin did that to some extent, by accepting responsibility for the screw up and making it clear that he could’ve done a better job. Let’s face it, they dodged a bullet because if something had happened in that gap that was created, that could’ve been a serious event. Does this alter his relationship with the White House? Because it’s a personal matter, obviously related to cancer, I don’t think so. I think if it were a difference on a major policy decision, national security, then it becomes a different matter. But these kinds of things — no matter how big or small — they are always going to have some impact on the relationship because the White House is going to wonder in the future whether they’re getting the full truth. MESSAGE US — Are you AVIVA FEUERSTEIN, senior presidential speechwriter? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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