The Unsung People Who Made Presidential History with Jean Becker & Tom Collamore

They never appear in the photo. They never take the credit. But without them, there’s no flyover, no Brandenburg Gate speech, no “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” For sixty years, the people behind every presidential moment have operated under one unwritten rule: what happens on the road stays on the road. Jean Becker and Tom Collamore have finally convinced 96 of them to break it.

Jean and Tom join me to discuss their new book Don’t Tell the President, a bipartisan collection of stories spanning LBJ through Obama. We get into the bicycle bell phone trick that conjured a fake presidential call, how Chelsea Clinton ended up chasing Air Force One through Moscow in a laundry van, what really went into making Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech historic, and why Bob Dole ended up being greeted by Daffy Duck and Frankenstein at what was supposed to be a campaign event.

We also go to the serious side — 9/11, Sandy Hook, assassination attempts on Ford and Reagan — and what it means to be the person who has to put a president in the right place on the worst days in American history.

Jean Becker served as Chief of Staff to President George H.W. Bush is the author of The Man I Knew and Character Matters. Tom Collamore is a senior advisor to the George and Barbara Bush Foundation, was Chief of Staff and assistant Secretary of Commerce in the George H W Bush Administration senior fellow at the Bush Presidential Library and a veteran of multiple presidential trips.

(00:00:03) Introduction
(00:01:50) How the book came to be
(00:06:31) What does a presidential advance person actually do?
(00:08:46) John the Baptist: the first advance person
(00:10:43) The bicycle bell phone trick
(00:13:00) Chelsea Clinton and the Moscow laundry van
(00:15:27) How advance changed after the Reagan assassination attempt
(00:17:44) The Secret Service relationship
(00:20:08) Robert Gates as a pre-advance person
(00:22:28) The nude beach in Martinique
(00:24:48) George W. Bush, a safari, and elephant mating season
(00:27:10) The Vatican vs. the Bush team over a backdrop
(00:29:31) Two Clinton staffers, a locksmith, and a Texas standoff
(00:31:48) The president as comforter in chief
(00:34:12) 9/11 and the shoes Brian Montgomery still can't clean
(00:36:39) Reagan's Berlin Wall speech almost happened inside
(00:39:00) Obama at Sandy Hook
(00:41:25) Bob Dole, Daffy Duck, and the campaign event from hell
(00:45:59) Outro

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