Ember by Brian Andrews & Jeffrey Wilson

Author:Brian Andrews & Jeffrey Wilson [Andrews, Brian & Wilson, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2024-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

cabinet room

the white house west wing

washington, dc

0958 local time

During his tenure as Vice President, Jarvis had attended many Cabinet meetings.

This was the first one he was expected to lead.

The massive, oval, mahogany table dominating the Cabinet Room had been a gift from Richard Nixon and used by every administration after. As there was no “head of the table” position for an ellipse, Jarvis’s chair was situated on the middle of the table’s east side. Per tradition, his chair was two inches higher than the rest and had an engraved brass plaque on the back that simply read “the president.” Every other chair was fitted with a similar brass plate listing the occupant’s title.

The Cabinet consisted of twenty-five members—fifteen executive department heads and ten Cabinet-level officials—plus the VP. Of the twenty-six highest-ranking officials in the executive branch of the United States, Jarvis had picked only one of them himself—Margaret Whalen, who he had appointed as Vice President. Everyone else in the room was a Warner appointee, nearly half of whom had two-term tenure. And the only person at this table with less experience than Jarvis was Margaret, so it wasn’t like he could count on her for backup.

Jarvis had always admired how smooth and effectively Warner had run Cabinet meetings.

If he had to give a name to Warner’s approach, he’d call it the hub-and-spoke method—with Warner at the hub and all the principals on spokes. Warner had never explicitly made a procedural rule that he directed all the conversational traffic, but the protocol was obvious to Jarvis within the first ten minutes of his first Cabinet meeting. Warner would open each meeting with a quick overview, prioritizing the agenda items. Then with each topic, he would lead the discussion like an orchestra conductor, calling on the relevant Cabinet members to speak, using hierarchy and topical relevance to guide the discussion. If someone got too long-winded or decided to use their opportunity to preach from the pulpit, Warner would cut them off midspeech with a by-name thank-you—a smackdown that was known at the White House as the “Warner whack.” By managing the conversations in this way, Warner’s Cabinet meetings tended to flow in an orderly, timely manner.

Prior to this morning’s Cabinet meeting, Jarvis had caucused with Andy—his chief of staff—about protocol and procedure. In that conversation, he’d learned Warner’s predecessor had been famous among the White House staffers for his “free for all” approach to Cabinet meetings, which often resulted in heated and protracted debates with multiple speakers talking at the same time. Clearly that method wasn’t going to fly, so Jarvis decided he’d use Warner’s method.

Besides, everyone in the room has already been trained in it.

When he’d entered the room, he had, for a moment, felt the enormous weight of his new position, made heavier still by his visceral belief that this might be the one position he was ill-suited for. But the moment he took a seat, all those emotions faded away. He was in mission mode. As a SEAL

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