Judy Smith Quotes

If a senator calls me up and asks me what should we do in Iraq, I'm happy to talk to him.

So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.

I'd worked at the White House for two years, and I'd read a bunch of White House memoirs because everybody who works at the White House, even for five minutes, writes a memoir usually not less than 600 pages long - and never without the word 'power' in the title.

Working in the White House is a relentlessly demanding responsibility.

My own appraisal of him as a man is somewhat mixed. The one fact we can be sure of is that he has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. Whatever we may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly Latin American affairs generally. He seems to be sincere, he is either incredibly naïve about Communism or under Communist discipline—my guess is the former and as I have already implied, his ideas as to how to run a government or an economy are less developed than those of almost any world figure I have met in fifty countries. But because he has the power to lead to which I have referred we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction.

When I worked in the Obama White House, people in national security positions had been uneasy making broad public arguments, particularly about political matters.

My experience at the White House was invaluable.

That is simple my friend. Because politics is more complicated than physics.

That man in the White House

Congress cannot—nor should it—run foreign policy on a day-to-day basis. That is a truism.

The press conference is as much a White House fixture as the cabinet meeting.

In the White House there is always struggle and contention.

The White House is another world. Expediency is everything.

My God. What is there about this place [the White House] that a man should ever want to get into it?

One of these days I’m going to blast President Truman’s State Department wide open.

The roots of power in the White House are often bourbon and branch water taken with the President at the end of the day.

What happens in the White House stays in the White House.

I promise you the country would be in real trouble if I were really in the White House.

I see the White House as like a subway. You have to put coins in to open the gates.

I was asked to write a press briefing emphasizing the positive steps the administration had taken in the area and minimizing the negative ones. I was an Assistant to the President. I have done that for several Presidents. When you’re on the staff of the President of the United States you try and make things look as good as possible.

Politics is fate.

I was deputy assistant to the president. My job was strategist in the office of the chief strategist, Stephen Bannon. Somebody once described me as the president's national security utility infielder.

I got to meet one Chief of Staff: Sam Skinner. He was Chief of Staff at the end of George Sr.'s White House.

I'm not going to comment on White House personnel selections.

I think the White House is a better place for not having a Steve Bannon in it.