Tevi Troy writes for Politico about concerns involving the presidential “3 a.m. phone call.”
Widespread concern over Donald Trump’s readiness to be president has revived memories of Hillary Clinton’s most lasting contribution to political advertising, her famous 2008 spot that depicted children sleeping soundly in their beds late at night with a voiceover saying that, at that moment, “something is happening in the world.” “Your vote will decide who answers that call,” the stentorian voice intones. Though Clinton lost that race, the meme lived on: Even a recent episode of the Simpsons did a hilarious bit on the ad, with the Trump character taking so long to primp himself for a national security meeting (including placing a little dog on his head for hair) after his 3 a.m. phone call that he misses the crisis.
Few ads have ever so successfully distilled the responsibilities of the president in a time of “clear and present danger.” Yet as a former White House aide and presidential historian, I have to say that it’s mostly myth to think that any president is ever asked to make such critical decisions in the middle of the night. First, even if there is a crisis, the wakeups are often unnecessary. A national security adviser may feel obligated to wake a president with bad or unexpected news, but there is usually little that can or must be done by the president that would warrant awakening the commander in chief.
Indeed, most of the awakenings these days are about political optics: Since an infamous incident in 1981, when Ronald Reagan’s staff caused consternation by choosing not to awaken the president after two U.S. F-14 Tomcat fighters shot down two Libyan MIGs, presidents and their staffs have erred on the side of rousting their bosses rather than letting them sleep.
As Henry Kissinger once put it after the Apollo 13 spacecraft crisis of 1970, when as national security advisor he recognized that there was literally nothing President Nixon could do about it but he woke him up anyway for PR reasons: “We couldn’t tell the public that we had not alerted the president. … It is important the public has a sense that the president is on top of the situation.”
But actual necessity? Those incidents have been few and far between. Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski almost woke Carter in response to a reported Soviet missile strike, but hesitated just long enough to be notified that it was a false alarm. Even Kissinger, who had the opportunity to wake two different presidents, retained a healthy skepticism of what could be accomplished in the middle of the night. As he put it to a Washington Post reporter, “In my experience, I cannot think, off the top of my head, of a snap decision that had to be made in the middle of the night.” This was not a bad thing, Kissinger noted, as he thought “that one should reduce the number of snap decisions to be made.”
