The Oval Office is an intimidating area. More than once, I heard President George W. Bush talk about people waiting in the West Wing welcome location who he knew were gnashing their teeth and waiting to give him a piece of their head. But once they were ushered into the Oval Office, he said, they do look around the area, at the floor, and up at the ceiling and stumble something like, “N-n-nice link, Mr. President”.
Bush was on to something. When coming face-to-face with the U. S.commander in captain, at the very chair of political power, most individuals choose to avoid fight, whether out of judgment, politeness, senses, or some combination of the three.
But as the unexpected shouting fit between President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Vice President JD Vance shows, this is not always the case. The Oval Office is a place of high-stakes meetings among people with strongly held beliefs, so it’s not astonishing that tempers flare often.
Oval Office conflicts tend to arrive from those with emotions, and physiques, who have the willingness to take on the leader on his house turf. For the most part, these conflicts have been between leaders and business leaders, assistants, and additional political leaders. All provide interesting example of these types of squabbles.
In 1915, Henry Ford went to the White House to push President Woodrow Wilson to preserve America out of World War I. Although the gathering started Okay, with Ford telling Wilson a Henry Ford prank, Ford wore out his encouraged by threatening to go public with his problems. Wilson got tired of the conference and had Ford escorted off the White House grounds, which is something leaders have the capacity to perform. Ford made great on his danger, but his condemnation backfired and ended up more destructive to Ford than to Wilson. Wilson won election the next year, and then America entered the war.
Nearly 70 years afterward, President Ronald Reagan was challenged in the Oval Office by a different vehicle professional, Lee Iacocca. Iacocca, who was the brain of Chrysler and very much a star Director, pressed Reagan to recommend a fuel taxes. Reagan did not much like fees, and he certainly did not like a gas taxes. He said,” Lee, you’re a wise man, but my researcher tells me I’d commit social death if I raised the oil tax”. Reagan also took advantage of the home area setting, telling Iacocca,” That’s why you’re sitting on that side of the desk, and I’m the leader”.
White House advisers may also sometimes raise their voices around the chairman over policy or personnel issues. One of the most famous Oval Office clashes took location in 1947, when President Harry Truman gathered assistants to question whether the United States does recognize Israel. Secretary of State George Marshall was against reputation and was annoyed when young White House staffer Clark Clifford started to make the situation for it. Marshall told the senator,” I don’t even know why Clifford is around. He is a regional director, and this is a foreign legislation problem”. Truman defended Clifford, saying,” Well, General, he’s ok because I asked him to be”. The government’s defence of Clifford did not deter Marshall, who next added,” I fear that the only cause Clifford is here is so that he can push for a political solution of this problem. I do no think that politicians may play any role in our selection”. Marshall kept pressing the place beyond the limitations of decorum. According to Marshall’s memory,” I said plainly that if the president were to adopt Mr. Clifford’s suggestions and if in the elections I were to vote, I had voting against the leader”. Clifford recalled that this speech “was so surprising that it just kind of lay it for 15 or 20 hours and nothing moved”. Eventually, Truman told Clifford:” Well, that was hard as a cob”. It may have been difficult, but Clifford won the battle, as Truman agreed to acknowledge Israel.
In the Ford administration, a pretty confused speechwriting procedure led to one rebellious Oval Office position. During a tough financial time, President Gerald Ford’s workers had serious disputes over the form and content of the 1975 State of the Union address, his first one to the country. The Ford team prepared two versions but could not agree on which one to give, which led to what Ford aide David Gergen called” a showdown meeting in the Oval Office …]with ] like 16 of us in the room in a big circle”. They read the two types, and 14 of the 16 voted for the more conceptual type. The other one, which Gergen called more of” a cleaning list”, got two seats, that of Robert Hartmann, the grumpy staffer who wrote it, and Ford. The entire approach did not serve Ford also, and he got just three hours of sleep and had little time to prepare for one of the most critical remarks of his presidency.
Another fascinating Reagan administration fight took position on the staff before. In 1983, a group of major advisers conspired to push out Judge William Clark, an ancient Reagan relate, as national security adviser. Under the program, chief of staff Jim Baker would get the regional security adviser work, and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver would move into Baker’s shoes. When CIA Director William Casey objected to the widely suspected motif Baker moving to the National Security Council, the prepare fell off, enraging Deaver. Deaver yet shouted at Reagan,” You don’t have much trust in me to make me chief of staff”. Reagan, who did not like fight, was unimpressed, and Deaver always became chief of staff.
The second type of fight takes place among democratic leaders, become they domestic or foreign. President Lyndon B. Johnson did lots of yelling at people in the Oval Office, but he was unaccustomed to people shouting back. One man who was willing to push back against Johnson was his tormentor, Robert F. Kennedy, who disagreed with Johnson over the Vietnam War. Kennedy visited Europe in early 1967 in his power as legislator, which led to a tale in Newsweek saying that Kennedy received a proffer of peace from the North Vietnamese on his journey. Johnson was angry.  ,
Kennedy denied the account in a Feb. 6, 1967, Oval Office conference, adding that the hole had come “from your State Department”. Johnson responded,” It’s not my State Department. It’s your goddamn State Department”! He therefore began to chide Kennedy, intimidating, “I’ll destroy you and every one of your bird friends. You’ll be socially dying in six month”. Kennedy pushed up, suggesting,” State you’ll prevent the bombing if they’ll come to the negotiating stand”. Johnson blew up suddenly, saying,” There just isn’t a chance in hell that I will do that. Certainly the slightest chance in the world”. The appointment lasted an hour and 20 hours, with Johnson spending most of the time yelling at Kennedy. According to Kennedy secretary Peter Edelman, who saw Kennedy afterwards,” I seldom saw him shaken, but he came up shaken from that gathering”.
All of the above happenings took place behind closed doors, and we only know about them from succeeding accounts. But in 2011, in a televised Oval Office meet, Jewish leader Benjamin Netanyahu pushed up on then-President Barack Obama’s pressure to move to peace talks based on Israel’s 1967 edges, telling Obama several occasions,” It’s not gonna happen”. Obama was reportedly furious afterward. His adviser Ben Rhodes said of the incident,” I have never seen a foreign leader speak to the president like that, and certainly not in public, and I’ve never — certainly never seen it happen in the Oval Office” . ,
The incident was in keeping with Netanyahu’s philosophy, derived from his mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky, to appeal directly to the citizens in democratic countries, even if it means going over the heads of their elected leaders. Netanyahu did something similar at a joint press conference with then-President Bill Clinton in 1996, although not in the Oval Office. Clinton was also angry over the incident, later fuming,” Who’s the f***ing leader of the free world”? Bibi felt that he might have overstepped in that instance, writing in his 2022 memoir that he “may have overreacted in my tone to the White House campaign of political pressure that preceded and accompanied the visit”.
In both the Clinton and Obama incidents, Netanyahu got to make his case, but at the cost of alienating the American president. For their parts, each president got a measure of revenge. Clinton sent some of his political aides to help Ehud Barak defeat Netanyahu in his 1999 reelection effort.  ,
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Obama, on his way out the door in 2016, allowed the United Nations to pass an anti-Israel resolution that had Obama’s fingerprints on it. Netanyahu, for his part, managed to survive beyond both of those presidencies and is still very much on the political scene today.
These incidents show that taking on the president in the Oval Office is a high-stakes gamble. There can be political benefits to standing up to the president, and if televised, it can allow one to get a message to a wide audience. At the same time, the Oval Office is very much the president’s home turf, which makes the endeavor a tough one for the challengers.
Washington Examiner contributing writer Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a former White House aide for George W. Bush. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including, most recently, The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.
