THE WHITE HOUSE SURVIVAL GUIDE

THE PLAYERS

YOHANNES ABRAHAM

Deputy assistant to the President for the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs

LISA BROWN

Former staff secretary

BRIAN DEESE

Senior adviser to the President

JOSH EARNEST

Press secretary

RAHM EMANUEL

Former chief of staff

JASON FURMAN

Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers

VALERIE JARRETT

Senior adviser to the President

CODY KEENAN

Director of speechwriting

KATIE LILLIE

Former director of press advance

KATIE MCCORMICK LELYVELD

Former press secretary for First Lady Michelle Obama

DAN PFEIFFER

Former senior adviser to the President

MACON PHILLIPS

Former director of digital strategy

JEN PSAKI

Communications director

BEN RHODES

Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting

KORI SCHULMAN

Deputy chief digital officer

MONA SUTPHEN

Former deputy chief of staff

TOMMY VIETOR

Former national security spokesman

MELISSA WINTER

Deputy chief of staff and senior adviser to the First Lady

THE FIRST DAYS

PFEIFFER: Most people don’t understand how the actual handover of power works. We all sit in the freezing cold. We watch the final culmination of years of effort to see our friend and boss become President of the United States. Then for the senior team, you get on a bus and they take you to the White House. They drop you off, and someone shows you your office. You walk in and there’s a computer there with a Post-it note with your password, and you’re in charge of the government. Full stop.

EARNEST: You literally don’t know how anything works. At the night after the second full day, the President and First Lady hosted a staff party for people who had worked on the transition, the campaign and the Inaugural Committee. I missed almost the entire party because I was still in the Lower Press Office figuring out how the next day we were going to send a video link to the weekly address.

PSAKI: None of us knew where the bathroom was. I still didn’t know there was one on the first floor until probably the second year I was here. It may have been the first day, when the President came out of the Oval and walked over into the Upper Press area to see Robert Gibbs in the press secretary’s office, and a number of reporters were streaming out. He said, “Oh wait, they can come over here?” He wasn’t aware of how everything was set up.

VIETOR: For the communications team, especially the staff in Lower Press, you realize that you’re basically going to be working inside the White House press corps’ newsroom. The briefing-room door is almost always open. It’s hard to have a confidential conversation when there are a dozen reporters standing in your office. But ultimately this is a good thing. Dealing with reporters face-to-face will lead to better relationships. You’ll better understand each other as human beings.

BROWN: I remember the President, by accident, walking into my office on Day Two, because he didn’t even know his way around yet.

ABRAHAM: You watch depictions of the building in TV or movies, and one notable TV show in particular. There are these long, winding conversations over long hallways. You get in the building and it’s actually pretty small, pretty crowded. You can’t really say much more than your name and where you’re from before you hit a door.

FURMAN: In terms of figuring out who would be in what office, we looked at the floor plan, and we had a plan to put both of National Economic Council director Larry Summers’ domestic deputies in the West Wing. Then we actually got to the West Wing, looked around and discovered that one of the two rooms we had thought was an office was actually a foyer to the women’s bathroom. That particular seating arrangement ended up not surviving.

DEESE: For the first couple of days, I was literally squatting in a hallway in the second floor of the West Wing.

FURMAN: We also saw that people’s names were taped to the doors. There was a brief moment when the offices right across the hall from ours looked a lot better than ours, and we thought maybe we would just move the taped names and see if we could get away with it. But we decided that that probably wouldn’t be the best way to ingratiate ourselves with our new colleagues.

MCCORMICK LELYVELD: We got