Late Calls Rarely Merit Snap Decisions

While he notified Vice President Bush and other members of the National Security Council, Meese waited for more than five hours before waking the president, who "listened to the news approvingly, then went back to sleep," Cannon wrote in "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime." The episode exposed Reagan to a barrage of criticism for being out of touch and damaged Meese's standing in the administration.

The episode also made future presidential advisers more sensitive to the public-relations dimensions of middle-of-the-night "crises." When Brent Scowcroft became national security adviser for the second time in 1989, he remembers, the first thing the media wanted to know was under what circumstances would he wake up the president.

"I had a very simple formula: If it affected the life of a U.S. citizen, you woke the president," said Kenneth M. Duberstein, Reagan's last chief of staff. But he said: "At 3 o'clock in the morning, unless there is a nuclear holocaust coming, there is not much the president has to decide. What you are doing is starting to put into gear the response of the U.S. government on behalf of the president, not necessarily by the president."

Kissinger pointed to public perceptions in explaining why, as national security adviser, he woke Richard M. Nixon in 1970 to tell him the Apollo 13 spacecraft had been crippled. (This came after a brief "jurisdictional" dispute with Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman over which of them was the right person to call the president, Kissinger wryly recalls.)

"The question was: What could the president do about it? The answer was: Nothing," Kissinger said. But, he added: "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."

President Bush has rarely been disturbed while asleep, according to current and former White House officials -- largely, they say, because events have not merited it. One exception came on the night following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, after Bush had returned to the White House and he and the first lady were roused by Secret Service agents alarmed by reports of an unidentified plane in the area. The Bushes were moved to a secure location before the incident was found to be a false alarm.

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tells of another episode when the president was awakened unexpectedly, this time when Reagan died in 2004 while Bush was traveling in Paris. Bush had gone to bed knowing that the former president had died, and planned to make a statement in the morning.

But Fleischer, who had left his White House job by then, was watching the television coverage of Reagan's death -- it was late in the day on the East Coast -- and called then-Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. to suggest that the president might want to say something sooner. And that is what happened: Bush got out of bed, dressed and made a statement after midnight in Europe, Fleischer recalled.

Bush's generally more laid-back posture appears to contrast with that of some of his predecessors, especially Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton, both night owls who seemed to invite interaction with their aides long past midnight. John Podesta, one of Clinton's chiefs of staff, recalls waking up his boss on several occasions.

But just as often the communication went the other way: "I would get calls at 2 o'clock in the morning," Podesta said. "The phone would ring, the White House operator would say the president is calling, and I would be stone asleep. . . . He would be watching C-SPAN in the middle of the night, and he would say, 'I think we ought to make this argument.' "

Presidential historian Robert Dallek raised a different issue posed by nighttime decision-making -- the role of unelected advisers -- in his volume last year on the partnership between Kissinger and Nixon, which made use of thousands of pages of previously inaccessible transcripts of Kissinger's phone calls.

During the 1973 Middle East war, a time when Nixon was under intense stress over Watergate, Kissinger and other senior aides agreed to raise the level of readiness of U.S. military forces in the middle of the night -- while Nixon was sleeping, according to Dallek. It was part of an ultimately successful effort to get the Soviet Union to back off threats to get involved militarily in the conflict.

In interviews, Kissinger and then-White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig denied the account. "It was the right decision, and it was approved by the president beforehand," said Haig, who says he always alerted the president to questions of war and peace. Otherwise, he said, "you are taking responsibility for something you are not entitled to."

But Dallek said in an interview: "The only conclusion you can draw is we were lucky things came out all right. They did not act in an . . . unwise manner. But it does raise concerns that unelected officials would bypass the elected president."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.