Business & Government

Miller Center presidential panels say success comes from creating the right team and listening

Assembling a team of experts and setting a procedure to foster integrity and accountability are important first steps for U.S. presidents promoting personal projects, members of two presidential administrations told an audience hosted by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs this week.

Key players in the George W. Bush administration’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, which addressed the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and the Barack Obama administration’s search for and elimination of al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden made that case Wednesday night during the Miller Center program “Presidential Leadership: Two Case Studies.”

The event, held in the Dome Room of the Rotunda, was part of the center’s 50th anniversary celebration and the “2025 Conference on the American Presidency: Toward a More Responsible and Effective Presidency.”

The panelists said that, whether the president is supportive of a project from the get-go or comes around to it later, the first step is to be committed to it. The second is to build a team that can be trusted to give honest feedback and work on his behalf.

Peter Wehner speaking in the UVA Rotunda Dome Room

Peter Wehner, who served as deputy assistant to Bush and director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, tells the Miller Center audience how the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief came to be. (Photo by Tom Cogill)

“I would say that one of the things that is true for everybody in every administration, is to ask the hard questions, insist on metrics and be willing to evaluate what people in your administration are saying,” said Peter Wehner, who served as deputy assistant to Bush, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives and deputy director of speechwriting. “Ask questions. Be accountable, resist happy talk and make sure that you’re rigorously empirical.”

“This was a president very committed to this mission,” Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s head of the CIA and secretary of defense, told the Rotunda audience of a three-year effort to find and eliminate bin Laden. “This was a daily affair where you’re meeting other officials in the White House. It was a tight group because we didn’t want it to get out. It was very classified what we were doing.”

Dr. Mark Dybul and Joshua Bolton, who served as policy director for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, joined Wehner on the Miller Center panel. Dybul is a professor in the Department of Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center and cofounder and chief strategy officer of the Center for Global Health Practice and Impact. He designed the anti-AIDS program.

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Panetta was joined by Thomas Donilon, then Obama’s national security adviser and now the chair of BlackRock Investment Institute, and retired U.S. Navy Adm. William H. McRaven, who served both the Bush and Obama administrations and was head of U.S. Special Operations.

Although the two cases – battling AIDS and bin Laden – may not seem that similar, both teams kept the processes close to their vests. The Obama team worked with congressional leaders when it became clear that the mission would go forward, but the nearly three-year effort was otherwise kept quiet and within the team.

For PEPFAR, the three-year effort that began after his first election, was announced at the January 2003 State of the Union address. Until then, it had been downplayed through the White House interagency budget process.

“The reason was intentional, to let the president speak for himself, but I think there was also concern that (the PEPFAR team) didn’t want to get into a turf war with other agencies before the team had decided what needed to be done,” Wehner said.

William H. McRaven, Dasha Burns, Thomas Donilon and Leon Panetta speaking in the UVA Rotunda Dome Room

Retired U.S. Navy Adm. William H. McRaven, right, discusses the preparations for the raid in Pakistan that resulted in the death of al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden. Joining him on the panel are, from left, moderator Dasha Burns; Thomas Donilon, former national security adviser and former Secretary of State and CIA Director Leon Panetta. (Photo by Tom Cogill)

Panetta said that a president needs to be directly involved in projects to fully understand the process and to elicit open and differing opinions from the team he has put together.

“Obama was a president who was deeply involved in the briefings and in all of the sessions,” he said. “The president wanted to know what everyone thought and went around the table. Everybody gave their view, and there were very different views in that room.”

Although Obama said during his 2008 election campaign that he was committed to finding and killing bin Laden, fighting the AIDS epidemic was not on Bush’s radar during the election.

Bolton said the Bush team assembled advisers who looked at issues foreign, domestic, economic and social. One issue that kept coming up on their radar was the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

“President Bush was always operating from principle, and he still does. And one of his, one of the principles, is aligned with Scripture: ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.’ And he would repeat that often. This was a place where the president put that principle into action,” Bolton said.