After John McCain and Hillary Clinton both ran campaign ads touting their abilities to answer the White House phone at 3 a.m. and deal with an unknown crisis, it’s become one of the more talked about facets of the campaign. But exactly how often does a president get a 3 a.m. call, and what’s expected of them when they do?
The WaPo’s Michael Abramowitz had an interesting front-page item on the subject today.
There is no dispute, as a dramatic campaign ad from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign suggests, that presidents get plenty of phone calls at 3 a.m.
A sleeping Ronald Reagan was alerted early in the morning to what turned out to be the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian passenger plane. George H.W. Bush was informed after he went to bed of an apparent coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Bill Clinton received word in the middle of the night that negotiations had broken down in the case of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy whose relatives were battling the federal government to prevent him from returning home.
But in none of these cases were presidents asked to make major decisions. Instead, former White House advisers say, these calls — and countless others like them — were largely aimed at keeping the president informed of critical developments, particularly ones that might cause embarrassment if the public learned that a commander in chief had slept through the episode undisturbed.
“In my experience, I cannot think, off the top of my head, of a snap decision that had to be made in the middle of the night,” said Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state and national security adviser. In fact, he said in an interview, “I think that one should reduce the number of snap decisions to be made.”
That’s really the point that seems to have been lost in all the fuss about the 3 a.m. discussion. The point isn’t who’ll have the snap judgment to deal with a breaking crisis in the middle of the night; the point should be who’s worked to ensure that there won’t be a breaking crisis that requires a snap judgment.
While the scenario is not inconceivable, former presidential advisers and historians say that it misses the point that good presidential decision-making plays out over time, and in more mundane ways.
“It’s a bit of a specious issue, somehow implying you need better judgment in the middle of the night,” said onetime Clinton administration official David Rothkopf, author of a book on the National Security Council, and who describes himself as a Hillary Clinton supporter.
The recollections of Kissinger, senior advisers in both parties and presidential historians offer an interesting counterpoint to the suggestion by the Clinton ad that critical decisions are often made in the dead of night.
In most instances, there just isn’t much a president can do anyway. “I had a very simple formula: If it affected the life of a U.S. citizen, you woke the president,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, Reagan’s last chief of staff. But he said: “At 3 o’clock in the morning, unless there is a nuclear holocaust coming, there is not much the president has to decide. What you are doing is starting to put into gear the response of the U.S. government on behalf of the president, not necessarily by the president.”
Based on Abramowitz’s report, it appears that none of the last four president has been woken in the middle of the night to give an order in the midst of a crisis. (In my favorite anecdote, it appears that Clinton was usually the one making, not getting the calls at 3 a.m. John Podesta, one of Clinton’s chiefs of staff, said, “I would get calls at 2 o’clock in the morning. The phone would ring, the White House operator would say the president is calling, and I would be stone asleep…. He would be watching C-SPAN in the middle of the night, and he would say, ‘I think we ought to make this argument.'”)
I doubt it’s going to happen, but we should probably put all this 3 a.m. talk to rest. As an argument about presidential abilities, it doesn’t appear to make a lot of sense.