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 âhead of the tableâ position for an ellipse, Jarvisâs chair was situated on the middle of the tableâs 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 âthe president.â Every other chair was fitted with a similar brass plate listing the occupantâs title.
The Cabinet consisted of twenty-five membersâfifteen executive department heads and ten Cabinet-level officialsâplus the VP. Of the twenty-six highest-ranking officials in the executive branch of the United States, Jarvis had picked only one of them himselfâMargaret 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 wasnât 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 Warnerâs approach, heâd call it the hub-and-spoke methodâwith 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-youâa smackdown that was known at the White House as the âWarner whack.â By managing the conversations in this way, Warnerâs Cabinet meetings tended to flow in an orderly, timely manner.
Prior to this morningâs Cabinet meeting, Jarvis had caucused with Andyâhis chief of staffâabout protocol and procedure. In that conversation, heâd learned Warnerâs predecessor had been famous among the White House staffers for his âfree for allâ approach to Cabinet meetings, which often resulted in heated and protracted debates with multiple speakers talking at the same time. Clearly that method wasnât going to fly, so Jarvis decided heâd use Warnerâs method.
Besides, everyone in the room has already been trained in it.
When heâd 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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