Leave no high-ranking official unscathed appears to be Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s mission in a just-published Rolling Stone article. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, and his aides slagged off on the bosses in Washington and nearby Kabul. National Security Adviser Jim Jones is called a “clown” by one aide. Another aide joked that Vice President Biden’s nickname should be “Bite Me.” McChrystal complained to his staff that his first meeting with the president was little more than a “10-minute photo-op.” “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him,” a McChrystal adviser told Rolling Stone. This isn’t the first time McChrystal’s friction with the administration has found its way into public view. In the fall, his call for an influx of troops was leaked to The Washington Post. The general was summoned to the White House and promptly fired.
Charles Dharapak / AP Photo
One of the leading disciples of Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics gospel, David Stockman fell out of favor with the White House when an Atlantic Monthly article hit the newsstands in December 1981. The Office of Management and Budget director described Reagan’s budget as a “Trojan horse to bring down the top rate. ... It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down.' So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory." Words perhaps never to be uttered again by a president’s budget chief: "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," Stockman said. Stockman later recounted that Reagan told him Stockman was “a victim of sabotage by the press.” It turns out that accounts that Stockman had been taken to the “woodshed” by the Gipper were pure Washington lore.
Al Stephenson / Newscom
In his 1999 memoir All Too Human, Stephanopoulos presents himself as the person who provided entry to Bob Woodward into the Clinton White House, giving the veteran reporter all the rope he needed to hang the administration. “Chaos. Absolute chaos,” was Woodward’s rendering of Clinton’s economic and domestic policy program in 1994. According to Stephanopoulos, Hillary Clinton blamed the Clinton administration’s doldrums on the book and the access which allowed it. “The whole problem with this administration is the Woodward book,” she said, according to Stephanopoulos.
Charles Sykes / AP Photo
The Second Lady dropped a whooper during an interview with Oprah Winfrey around Inauguration Day last year. Biden told the Queen of Talk that her husband had been offered the job of Secretary of State but turned it down in favor of becoming the president’s No. 2. Mrs. Biden said she told her husband, “Joe, if you are Secretary of State you will be away, I'll never see you. We will see you at a state dinner once in a while. But I said if you are vice president, the entire family, because they worked so hard for the election, they can be involved. ... They can come to our home, they can go to events, they can be with us, and that is what is important to us." The comment couldn’t have helped improve the already tense feelings between Obama and his actual pick for Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
Denis Poroy / AP Photo
The McCain-Palin campaign of 2008 didn’t seem to leave many of its participants with the warm and fuzzies. Take Randy Scheunemann, a foreign policy adviser, who was said to have lost his phone privileges for leaking stories about campaign in-fighting to William Kristol of The Weekly Standard. McCainiacs continued to exchange insults well after the presidential contest was put to rest.
Mary Altaffer / AP Photo
McChrystal isn’t the first major American military leader caught out talking ill of the boss, as Harold Evans recalls in The Daily Beast. In 1951, MacArthur chafed at President Truman’s order to keep his troops out of China. “There is no substitute for victory,” the general wrote in a testy note that found its way into the public eye. MacArthur was given a hero’s welcome back in D.C. but Truman made sure to fire him. It may prove a precedent for McChrystal.
Getty Images
So prominent are confrontations between presidents and their staff over press leaks that one such act of insubordination was dramatized in Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Toby Ziegler, the senior adviser played by Richard Schiff, was canned by his president Jed Bartlet for passing along information on a top-secret military space shuttle to The New York Times.
Everett Collection
