“The Deep State Is Packed With Patriots”: George Stephanopoulos Goes Inside the Situation Room

A few weeks back, George Stephanopoulos, the longtime host of ABC’s This Week, explained to viewers how the 2024 election is unlike any other. “Until now, no American presidential race had been more defined by what’s happening in courtrooms than what’s happening on the campaign trail,” he said. “The scale of the abnormality is so staggering that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But that is not what’s happening this election year.”

This strikingly blunt commentary on the state of American democracy was informed by Stephanopoulos’s two decades working in politics—on Capitol Hill, the campaign trail, and in Bill Clinton’s White House—as well as his two and a half decades as a political analyst and anchor at ABC News. “It is, to me, still mind-boggling that you can have a situation where a presidential candidate has been charged with inspiring an insurrection against the government and it seems like it’s absorbed into the daily grind of politics,” Stephanopoulos tells Vanity Fair.

Read the Book HereBuy on Amazon Buy on Bookshop

For his new book, The Situation Room, Stephanopoulos breaks from the daily political churn to explore the history of a windowless White House facility that has been the setting for strategization about some of the most consequential national security decisions of the last 60-plus years—from the Cuban Missile Crisis, during the Kennedy administration, to the US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan under Joe Biden.

Stephanopoulos takes readers inside both the botched raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and the operation, under Barack Obama, that took down Osama bin Laden decades later. He also reveals what January 6 looked like through the eyes of Situation Room staffers—the subject of a Vanity Fair excerpt—and writes how “almost nothing” about Donald Trump’s presidency “was normal.” (Speaking of Trump, the former president filed a defamation suit in March against ABC News and Stephanopoulos over the anchor’s description of the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll case; a network spokesperson declined to comment.)

In an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Stephanopoulos talks about how conducting interviews for the book, written with Lisa Dickey, left him feeling inspired in a political climate that often doesn’t leave much room for optimism. “I would do my job in the morning, and in the afternoon, talk with these patriots who have served for the last 60 years,” he said. “It was a tonic for me.”

Vanity Fair: Why did you start out focusing on the Situation Room and kind of telling the last 60-plus years of US history through the prism of [it]?

George Stephanopoulos: I haven’t done a book since All Too Human, which came out in 1999, and I’ve actually turned down several book ideas, and started one book, and then realized that [I] couldn’t do it justice. I sort of had a test for myself. Could I bring something new to the subject? And would it be a book I would want to read? Somebody had mentioned to me the idea of writing about the Situation Room, and what struck me was—and what was most remarkable to me was—a popular history has never been written of the Situation Room. There was a book by a former Sit Room staffer named Michael Bohn that came out in the early 2000s, but that was almost 20 years ago now.

I think we were able to illuminate how decisions have been made in the most crucial points in modern history, but also shine a light on kind of what I consider the unsung heroes of the Situation Room—those professional staffers, the Sit Room duty officers, Sit room directors, who have served for the last 60-plus years. And to me, they are the heroes of the book and patriots that I think everybody should meet. We’ve heard a lot about the deep state in recent years, and what I come away from after talking to more than a hundred people for this is the deep state is packed with patriots. These people who come from the NSA, NSC, the DIA, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, State Department, Homeland Security—all devoted to serving their country, rigorously apolitical, exceptionally competent, and professional. It was a real privilege to be able to tell their stories.

I was struck sometimes with how professional. There’s a moment where Richard Nixon is resigning—a momentous time in US history—Gerald Ford’s getting sworn in, and they kind of just go back to work.

I love that scene. Sally Botsai is one of those great characters. The first woman, probably, from the NSA to work in the Situation Room—may have been the first woman in the Situation Room. Couldn’t quite pin that down. She was very modest about it…I have no idea what her politics were. The way she tells that story of the White House getting closed down so that Richard Nixon could get a final walk alone through the halls, and then the moment after he waves goodbye and gives that tearful speech, [deputy national security adviser] Brent Scowcroft comes down to the Situation Room and says, let’s get back to work, and they all just do. For them, that’s such an important ethic—that they served the presidency, not the president. They take it to heart. They do everything they can to put politics aside so they can serve the country.

Even though you are covering the unsung heroes, you’re also covering the presidents, the people who held this office. One thing that jumped out to me was the different levels of engagement of presidents. You go from Lyndon Johnson, who is poring over every detail over Vietnam, to Richard Nixon, who doesn’t want to set foot in there. You have Bill Clinton, someone you know well, who is focused on every issue at hand. Donald Trump’s presidency, quite different. We’ll get to that maybe in a little bit.

I think that is one of the things you learn, how differently the presidents did use the Situation Room. Probably nobody used it more than LBJ. He moved his chair down there. He was calling at all hours of the night. He wanted every scrap of information that he could possibly get. One of the things I took away from that, and I think probably Nixon and [Henry] Kissinger took away from that: Information isn’t insight. All the information in the world wasn’t going to really help him solve Vietnam because it didn’t really speak to the dilemma at hand. I had that quote from Kissinger in the book calling it the “Situation Room syndrome,” the idea that you could control the world from that tiny windowless room in the basement of the White House, which is, of course, untrue, even though you have to believe it while you’re there.

To me, it’s almost as if Nixon overcorrected. I mean, because Johnson used it so much, Nixon wasn’t going to use it at all. He was also quite suspicious of what’s going on in the Situation Room…To me, that was one of the things that ties together Nixon and Trump. I think those two presidents were the most suspicious of the deep state, [the] national security professionals who work in the Situation Room. They’re probably the two presidents who used it the least. Trump had a couple of show photos there, but he really didn’t go down there and work there much at all.

On the other side you had people like Obama, who made a regular habit of going down there and engaging in that room, and with those professionals. And I think that was one of those things that helped that team come together for the takedown of Osama bin Laden. They had learned to work together through what they called Counterterror Tuesdays, when all the principals would meet every Tuesday in the Situation Room to deal with the war on terror. In some ways, George H.W. Bush and [Joe] Biden also had parallel paths. Both served as vice president. Both were incredibly comfortable with the Situation Room because of the time they spent there as vice president and their experience with national security issues.

How did your experience working in the White House inform the book?

In many different ways. Working in the White House, working on Capitol Hill, covering five presidents…I’ve studied the presidency since high school. I think, because of the experience I had, I was able to bring my knowledge of—not just the room, but of the way White Houses work and of these moments in history. I think it helped inform the interviews and get a little bit more out of the interviews.

[Former deputy national security adviser] Doug Lute clarified what the book could be when he described…the Situation Room as three things: the people, the place, and the process. When you look at it in that way, that’s what I tried to bring to the whole book.

I was thinking about the choices you made in the book, of which stories to tell. For instance, the botched operation around the Iran hostage crisis, and later on we get to the successful operation to get bin Laden. I feel like there were real parallels in those two stories. Was that something you were thinking about?

That was one of the big lessons to me of the book—how White Houses have gone to school on previous White Houses. There’s just no question that the failed operation in 1980 influenced an entire generation of policymakers…You can even see it in that iconic photo. [Former White House photographer] Pete Souza is pretty sure that that image is of the moment when the helicopter had the hard landing in Abbottabad. That split second. You can see it on [Hillary Clinton’s] face. You know that just about everybody in that room is thinking, Oh my god, has it happened again? Has a helicopter gone down on a rescue operation?

Yeah, it’s a sort of shuddering or sort of jumping-back.

Yes. And the history is infused in that moment because every single person in that room has studied what happened before and knows what the impact was on the Carter presidency.

Back to Obama’s successor. You wrote here that “almost nothing about it was normal. This book examines crisis management in the modern presidency. During the Trump administration, the president was the crisis to be managed.” Tell me about that: The president was a crisis to be managed. It just seems like such a radical break.

This is not a partisan book in any way, shape, or form. As I write in the book, probably—and this was coming from Democrats, Republicans alike—the model of the national security adviser, of all the people I interviewed, was Brent Scowcroft. The team, the way he worked with President Bush and the team he put together in the early 1990s. You see across the administrations. Obviously, there are differences in emphasis, differences in policy. But you see the basic process of how national security decision-making works and how the Situation Room works. There’s a line of continuity from all the presidents, from all the presidents from Kennedy to Biden, with a radical exception in President Trump. I decided to do that chapter sort of as a series of oral histories from the people who worked for him. They’re the ones who worked in previous administrations and were telling me that nothing about this is normal. It’s not normal to talk about selling Greenland or trading it for Puerto Rico. That’s just not normal. It’s not normal to call down to the Situation Room and ask them to give you the chyrons running on Fox News.

That was unbelievable.

It’s not normal. This wasn’t Trump, per se, but it’s not normal to bring a domestic policy staffer and fire them in the Situation Room. Nothing about the way the processes worked inside that White House was in keeping with the way other White Houses, Republican and Democrat, had worked over the previous 60 years.

When I read that line, I saw a parallel between something you said this past week on the show, on your commentary about what is normal in politics and what is not normal. In talking about the 2024 election, you mentioned the criminal cases against Donald Trump, the first time a former president has been charged criminally, as well as the civil cases against Trump. You said, “The scale of the abnormality is so staggering that it can actually become numbing.”

That distills what I think about this. I think that we in—I’ve grown up in this. I’ve done this for a long time. On Capitol Hill and the White House for 20 years, and I’ve been doing this for 25. I’ve been struck by how we have all reflexively become numb to the scale of the abnormality. That’s what I said on Sunday. It is, to me, still mind-boggling that you can have a situation where a presidential candidate has been charged with inspiring an insurrection against the government and it seems like it’s absorbed into the daily grind of politics. I think that that says something profoundly disturbing about how deeply polarized our society is right now, how much of a challenge the pervasiveness of disinformation is to the way our democracy functions. I’m just determined to do what I can to, at least, be clear about what the stakes are and, again, not from a partisan perspective, but just how this is not in keeping with anything we’ve known in the entire experience of our democratic experiment. There’s no comparison to any campaigns we’ve ever faced before, yet it’s all too easy just to get into the day-to-day back-and-forth of who said what and what are the polls.

I’ve made a practice to—if someone who has endorsed President Trump wants to come on, I push them on explaining how they justify that support with what they’ve said before, with what he’s done, whether it’s Chris Sununu or Steve Scalise or Nancy Mace or any of the others who’ve come on recently. I just think that that’s part of my job [in] trying to be a journalist and holding policymakers and politicians accountable.

I feel like we have been talking since the Trump era about the guardrails of democracy and the government. You’re showing the real people who are assessing threats and putting themselves at risk on a daily basis. Do you see a book like this as able to remedy some of the more ominous views of what the government is and does?

It’s one of my hopes for those who read the book because I know it was my experience in researching and writing the book. I go into work every morning, on Good Morning America, and Sundays on This Week, and it’s been an alarming time to be a journalist. And it’s been a difficult challenge to try to figure out how to cover that in a way that is fair and perceived as fair, and in a way that serves our viewers and serves our democracy. It’s an often depressing and enraging process. I would do my job in the morning, and in the afternoon, talk with these patriots who have served for the last 60 years, and it was a tonic for me. It inspired me. And I hope that, you know, when people read their stories, they’re inspired by it as well and do have some faith…It’s easy to malign politics and government, but I always have believed, and still believe, that most people who go into government, most of the time, do so for the right reasons and try to do their best. None of us are perfect. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody’s a mix of good and bad. But I think that, fundamentally, has been true. That belief has been tested for me over the last several years. Working on this book has helped me believe in that again.