It has the most powerful readership in the world: the President’s Daily Briefing, or PDB, the first thing given each morning to every commander in chief since John F. Kennedy. Until recently, it was produced wholly by the CIA, and all copies remain so top-secret that very few pieces have ever been declassified.
“It’s like trying to discover what’s in a black hole,” says David Priess, author of “The President’s Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America’s Presidents from Kennedy to Obama” (Public Affairs). “It’s hard to even say how many people are working on it.”
Priess, 44, is a former CIA analyst and intelligence briefer during George W. Bush’s administration. His biography of the PDB is less about what it’s contained than what it’s revealed about each president who’s received it.
Every president, Priess says, quickly determines the editorial content, the time and method of delivery, the scope of readership — even the format and font size.
“It’s not the CIA’s book,” Priess says. “It’s the president’s book.”
‘Do I have to read it all?’
Shortly after his inauguration in January 1961, Kennedy asked how many people worked at the State Department. The answer did not please him. “Hell, they’ve got their own damned government over there,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to change their thinking.”
By comparison, the CIA was smaller and more nimble — a better, faster source for intelligence. He wanted a constant stream of information fed to him directly.
“I don’t care what it is,” he told National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. “CIA is the place I have to go. The State Department is four or five days to answer a simple yes or no.”
It was on Kennedy’s advisers, and the CIA, to figure out the best way to brief the president. As it was, Kennedy was a voracious reader, beginning each day with five or six newspapers in bed.
He wanted all his information reduced in a similar way, and when an assistant handed the president a heavy packet of briefing papers, Kennedy — just one week on the job — balked. “Look,” he said, “I’ve only got a half-hour today. Do I have to read it all?”
The CIA adjusted, distilling the president’s briefings on any given matter to two pages, double-spaced. But after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, the chastened young president realized he was out of his depth and needed a wider, deeper daily briefing on foreign affairs and national security.
“Domestic policy can only defeat us,” Kennedy said. “Foreign policy can kill us.”
This was the birth of the PDB, though not as we know it today. Initially the CIA tried to adapt to the way Kennedy worked: Daily briefing papers were still voluminous, but they added verbal briefings to the president’s schedule. It didn’t help; Kennedy had a short attention span, and advisers never knew when he’d get up and walk out.
It fell on Bundy to get Kennedy in line. He listed his suggestions and frustrations in a memo.
“First: you should set aside a real and regular time each day for national-security discussion and action,” he wrote. “Truman and Eisenhower did their daily dozen in foreign affairs the first thing in the morning, and a couple of weeks ago you asked me to begin to meet you on this basis. I have succeeded in catching you on three mornings for a total of about eight minutes . . .
“Right now it is so hard to get to you with anything not urgent and immediate that about half the papers and reports you personally ask for are never shown to you because by the time you are available you clearly have lost interest in them.”
Two months later Maj. Gen. Chester “Ted” Clifton, Kennedy’s equally frustrated military aide, instructed the CIA to come up with a brief document, plainly written, that would contain everything the CIA thought the president should know. It would be so succinct that Kennedy could carry it in his pocket and read between meetings.
And so the President’s Intelligence Checklist was born: an 8½-by-8½-inch packet, 14 two-line items, six longer paragraphs and some maps.
The Checklist worked perfectly with Kennedy’s daily rhythm: waking at 7:30 a.m., he’d read the newspapers in bed, make some calls, take a bath, shave, have breakfast, then go down to the Oval Office at about 9:30. If there was time, Kennedy would sit with Clifton and go over the Checklist; if not, Kennedy would read it over a day or two and talk it over with Clifton, who relayed the president’s feedback to the CIA.
A real dialogue had begun. The Checklist, however, focused on foreign affairs, not domestic, and wasn’t meant to predict specific events.
The first time Lee Harvey Oswald’s name appeared in the President’s Intelligence Checklist was one week after Kennedy’s assassination. “Press stories to the effect that Lee Harvey Oswald recently visited Mexico City are true, according to our information,” it read.
A cow’s tail
Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, had been kept so out of the loop that he didn’t know the Checklist existed until he took office. He did not care for the lengthier items nor the attendant briefings. In fact, Johnson didn’t care much for intelligence officers at all, and told future CIA Director Robert Gates they all reminded him of a cow he’d had growing up.
“In the 1960s, the PDB was produced overnight, probably by fewer than five people. That’s the kind of bureaucracy people would kill for today.”
“One day I’d worked hard and gotten a pail full of milk,” Johnson said, “but I wasn’t paying attention and old Bessie swung her s–t-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that’s what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a s–t-smeared tail through it.”
Johnson had been so slighted by JFK that he wanted nothing to do with his predecessor, and it took a year before the CIA came up with a solution: They killed the Checklist and created something that looked like an actual book — Johnson was a “painfully slow” reader who preferred to pore over documents at night, in bed — which widely covered world events, but in much briefer descriptions.
The cover had a small CIA seal on top, and was stamped “Top Secret” on the lower right, beneath the date. In the center was its new name: “The President’s Daily Brief.”
Johnson loved it so much, he asked for a PDB seven days a week, instead of the usual six.
“In the 1960s, the PDB was produced overnight, probably by fewer than five people,” Priess says. “That’s the kind of bureaucracy people would kill for today.”
Bureaucracy, of course, extends to the Oval Office itself, and though the PDB is meant to be a clear line of communication between the CIA, the president and his or her most trusted advisers, that’s not always the case.
It’s no surprise to learn that Richard Nixon had the most cloistered and paranoid view of American intelligence officials. He considered CIA agents “elite Ivy League liberals,” and was happy to hand over control of the PDB to his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.
“[He] spoke for the president on who should receive the PDB, when they should see it and what the book should look like,” Priess writes. Kissinger also edited the PDB before Nixon saw it and dictated to the CIA what it should contain.
It remains unknown how much Nixon ever read the PDB, and his isolation from it gave Kissinger more power than he should have had. Priess notes that Nixon never mentioned the PDB in his memoirs, his recorded White House talks or any interview he gave after resigning.
According to Kissinger, Nixon “frequently ignored it.”
Message to Reagan
Much about the production of the PDB remains top-secret: the number of analysts writing and editing it, the size of the budget, who the editor-in-chief is — even the hours of production, though there are analysts who still work overnight and who will jump out of bed when news breaks.
“When Indira Ghandi was assassinated [on Oct. 31, 1984], that news came over the wires at midnight,” Priess says. “An analyst came in and wrote that up in the middle of the night.”
Most of the production of the PDB remains top-secret: the number of analysts writing and editing it, the size of the budget, who the editor-in-chief is, and the hours of production.
Ronald Reagan was four years into his presidency, and when his CIA Director William Casey got a look at that morning’s PDB, “it surprised him,” Priess says. “There was a full report on the attack.”
Reagan was primarily a visual person, and so the CIA added new materials to his PDB: short films. The former actor took to these more than any printed material, which aide Ed Meese described as “more ‘Reader’s Digest’ than ‘War and Peace.’ ”
The CIA and its analysts were primarily focused on the Cold War and historically did not share information with the FBI, which handled domestic threats. And so, again, the PDB was devoid of any intel on a man named John Hinkley Jr., who attempted to assassinate Reagan on March 30, 1981.
Reagan spent two weeks in the hospital — the longest any sitting president had gone without receiving the PDB. Not long after his return to the White House on April 11, his national security adviser, Dick Allen, gave Reagan a light briefing. He placed the PDB in front of the president, who opened it and sighed.
Allen could tell that Reagan didn’t have the energy yet. He gingerly closed the book and took it back. “Thank you, Mr. President,” he said.
As he walked away, something slipped out. “What’s that?” Reagan said.
“Nothing,” Allen said.
“Dick,” Reagan said. “What is it?”
Allen had been too embarrassed to tell Reagan that his 5-year-old daughter had asked her kindergarten class to write get-well cards to the president and that he’d promised to take them to the White House.
“Let me see them,” Reagan said. “Which one is your daughter’s?”
“It’s in there somewhere, Mr. President,” Allen said. “I’ll tell her you asked about it.”
“Which one is your daughter’s, Dick?”
Allen fished it out, and Reagan wrote a note on Kim Allen’s card. He signed it, “Love, Ronald Reagan.”
One declassified page
The first look the world got at a PDB was after 9/11. The congressional committee investigating the attacks and the nation’s preparedness — or lack thereof — requested PDB documents from January 1998 through Sept. 20, 2001.
The CIA and the Bush administration pushed back hard. The contents of the PDB were “the family jewels,” according to Vice President Dick Cheney.
In the end, the commission was granted summaries of about 100 pieces and a word-for-word reprint of a memo dated Aug. 6, 2001, though the one made public has redactions.
“Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” was the headline. Priess says that was one of about 40 warnings about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in PBDs that year. The author of that memo, Priess says, had called a contact at the FBI for input.
It was a document meant to set off alarms, and that it didn’t, Priess says, left the analyst blaming herself. “She regrets not hitting the main point harder,” he says. “Saying something like, ‘All the threats we’ve been seeing all summer could be in the United States’ instead. Something with lights blinking red.”
That failure led to reform legislation that took the PDB out of the CIA’s hands. The book is now under the purview of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, which answers to the president.
Obama has been receiving the PDB since the day after his election, as is common practice. His PDB is a reflection of his style and the times: After his first month in office, he asked for an addition, a new product called the Economic Intelligence Brief.
He prefers reading the PDB alone and takes fewer briefings. In many ways, it resembles the book his predecessors consulted, with one core distinction: On Feb. 15, 2014, right before the PDB turned 50, its last issue went through the CIA’s printers.
Today, Obama gets his PDB on his iPad, and is, absurdly, waiting for the PDB to resemble the Internet itself — “from a once-a-day production-and-brief-engagement model,” Priess writes, “to continuous, near-real-time virtual support.”