E-book Overview: Nameless public servants are the guts of George Stephanopoulos’ ‘Scenario Room’

 E-book Overview: Nameless public servants are the guts of George Stephanopoulos’ ‘Scenario Room’


The largest problem for an creator tackling the historical past of the Scenario Room, the basement room of the White Home the place a number of the greatest intelligence crises have been dealt with in current many years, is the room itself. As a setting, it is fairly underwhelming.

In “The Scenario Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Disaster,” George Stephanopoulos describes how the room — truly a sequence of rooms — for a lot of its historical past did not reside as much as its fame in well-liked creativeness or media. The centerpiece of it, as Stephanopoulos writes, had “all of the attraction of a cardboard field.”

However what retains readers engaged in Stephanopoulos’ historical past is not any behind the scenes schematics or expertise. This is not a Tom Clancy novel, although it strikes alongside as briskly as one. As an alternative, it is the tales Stephanopoulos and Lisa Dickey share of the usually anonymous and faceless public servants, the responsibility officers who’ve staffed the middle since its inception throughout John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

Stephanopoulos, a political commentator and ABC anchor who labored within the Clinton White Home, correctly zeroes in on a single disaster throughout every of 12 presidencies through the Scenario Room’s historical past. Alongside the way in which, he reveals a lot in regards to the differing administration kinds of the nation’s presidents and affords loads of fascinating items of historical past.

This contains the granular degree of element Lyndon B. Johnson sought in common calls to the Scenario Room late at evening or early within the morning. The e book affords a glimpse on the frenzied conversations that passed off following Ronald Reagan’s capturing in 1981.

It ought to come as no shock that essentially the most riveting chapter facilities across the second that led to essentially the most extensively seen photograph of the “Sit Room” — the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Stephanopoulos reveals that the photograph — which confirmed former President Barack Obama in a cramped convention room receiving updates on the raid on the terrorist chief’s compound — may have seemed lots completely different. A bigger room was out there, however officers had been apprehensive about dropping the audiovisual hyperlink in the event that they tried shifting it from the cramped room.

The responsibility officers whose tales are on the coronary heart of the e book are portrayed as apolitical figures, with one saying they “serve in silence.” Stephanopoulos’ e book is a becoming tribute to them.

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AP e book evaluations: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews



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